I used to increase my business results with a large amount of time spent on it, books read, and trainings attended. All the experience in sales and marketing that I obtained, I immediately implemented into my business and opened up new horizons. But at some point, this stopped working. The results were there, but they couldn’t be called breakthroughs. I always aimed for multiple growth, and a 10-20% increase was a failure for me. I was used to being able to increase metrics exponentially, as I did before in business. Later, I found out how to make the next breakthroughs, and the answer was not where I expected it to be. It wasn’t in another business or personal productivity book. It’s outside the realm of marketing, sales, and team building experts. Actually, it’s already hard for me to find a qualified consultant in this field for my business.
I found the answers in my practices. After Vipassana, I started meditating for an hour every morning and evening, and oh how grateful I am for my new hobby! At some point, I realized that due to my inner restlessness and irritability, I was missing out on a huge number of opportunities. After practicing every day and taming my ego, everything started to work differently. At some point, I realized that the universe was giving me lessons over and over again. I didn’t pass them and went on to the second and subsequent rounds until I understood the essence. Now, for me, my family, and my business, my inner balance and state are much more important than any specific feature on the website or automation. Because at the current level of accumulated experience, specific tools have stopped working. Only spontaneously generated solutions that come based on a huge amount of previous experience data work.
It became clear that GPT technologies are based on how we work with our experience. To make accurate decisions, we need a lot of data and a technology that can process it. For me, meditation is currently such a technology. By distancing ourselves from triggers, emotions, and joys, we can clear our minds to hear, feel, and see what really works. The main goal of meditation is to stop associating ourselves with our thoughts and feelings. We can experience distress, or we can observe how they are experienced within us in a detached way. This is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it, but it is probably the best explanation I can come up with. It’s clear that it doesn’t always work, but if you know that such a place and perspective exists, with the help of sleep and practice, you can bring yourself to such a state from which all problems are seen from a different perspective. For me, it’s a big progress just to know that such a place and perspective exists, and when you catch yourself in something, you know how to look at everything. From this perspective, areas of knowledge open up that you didn’t even know you didn’t know about. From this perspective, it’s easier to find a solution because you’re not emotionally involved, you’re an observer. You watch someone experience an emotion, see them make mistakes, and can advise them on when and how to act better. But if you’re caught up in emotions yourself, you often don’t see the way out.
When I started meditating, I realized clearly that the number of actions is not proportional to the result. You can endlessly go to meetings, overload your calendar with online calls. But a day spent in silence, observing the observer, can give insight that far surpasses the result of frantic actions. To see the world without being involved in emotion, one can only do so through the prism of unconditional love and a desire for happiness for all. The realization that everything is as it should be is the most difficult part of the practice. From time to time, people ask me for recommendations on where to start. It’s best to start with the practices themselves. You can read these books to understand the theory: “The Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom” by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius “Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day” by Jay Shetty Books by Joe Dispenza: “You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter” “Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon” “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One” To start practicing, I recommend downloading the WAKING UP app. If you use this link, you’ll get 30 days of free access. I registered through a regular link and had access for only 7 days. The app was created by Stanford professor Sam Harris. I first listened to his podcasts with Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other interviewers. Well, if you want a quick start, I highly recommend Vipassana. I wrote about it here.