“Meditation more than anything in my life was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I’ve had.”
– Ray Dalio, billionaire and founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world!
Now, do you have any questions as to why YOU should meditate too??? If you do, continue reading, if not, just jump to the last part with the action points:).
When the famous entrepreneur Tim Ferriss wrote his book: Tools of Titans where he summarized his interviews with over 200 world-class performers, the most common denominator was, you guessed it – they meditate!
Why do so many successful people meditate?
According to Ferriss, both meditation and mindfulness can be thought of as “cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive.”
The interesting question is of course why so many of the extremely successful people practice meditation or use some form of daily mindfulness and whether this is something all of us should pay attention to and why?
I would say that the more you learn about meditation (or mindfulness) the clearer it becomes as to why we all should meditate. Not only the ultra successful but everybody! Why? Because most of these people do it because they need to relax, have down time and just re-charge their brains. They all work hard, they all work long hours and they all know that the day only has 24 hours to offer. They need to be able to be on top of their game during very long days and sometimes nights with a constant flow of information and decisions.
Such busy days mean that their brains never get a chance to rest and re-charge (apart from when asleep, if they get good or great sleep that is). If they are unable to perform at their peak level, they know that there will be someone else working just as hard and as long hours BUT who manage to stay focused and alert for longer without being overwhelmed and at the risk of burn out. Mental clarity and focus is key to these people, how else do you think they will be able to constantly be making decisions and facing challenges? Oh yes, they do have hard times and they do fail at times but they are very quick to get back into the game again.
It is not random and it is not by chance that they all meditate. They all do it because they have realized the amazing benefits of spending a few minutes per day in solitude!
I also believe that it is not by chance that we hear of more and more successful people who meditate. For one it is becoming more “accepted” amongst high achievers to meditate, so more and more people are open about it and that gives it more attention and more users. The old version of the ultra “alpha male style” is out of vogue and has been for decades now (though there are still a few laggards). Secondly, with the intensity and pace of life and in particular constant, never ending flow of information, the world is very different compared to how it was a couple of decades ago. However, our bodies have not changed, we are still the “cave men” we used to be.
That is why we have to make sure we give our brains and body the nurture they need to be able to both cope and be effective for a prolonged time (competition is truly global these days) and that is why I think meditation has become so popular. We have to adapt to the best of our abilities and these highly successful individuals, are constantly learning, pushing themselves all day every day whilst being smart enough to realize that they also need both sleep and recovery for their brain and body to function optimally.
In the world we live in today where we are drowning in information but starving for wisdom, I would say most of us and regardless of age and “level” have to “cope” with the same amount (or more) of information as most CEO’s had to do a few decades back!
This is the exact reason why it is so important to make sure we all take care of our mental health and meditation is a brilliant way of doing just that! I also really recommend you to read my post on how to take control of the “chatter” that is constantly going on in your (monkey) mind, unless you already are a master of it!
Some of the benefits of meditating
- It lowers your stress level
- Improves your cognitive function (focus, processing information, decision-making etc.)
- Improves your creative thinking
- Improves your awareness
- Helps you to relax
- etcetera….
It’s pretty clear that one doesn’t have to be a genius to understand why we should all make it our priority to meditate! If you want to dig deeper into the benefits, I recommend you to have a lock at this post written by Giovanni Dienstmann.
Actions to take:
- Start meditating now – check out my post Meditation – why and how to get started!
Yepp, that’s it, no other actions to take on this topic – just get it done and get it done now!
– Jakob
Leave a Reply