My exploration into meditation continues. I started on February 5th when I wrote the post Learning To Meditate. Since then, I’ve been practicing every day, read a few books on meditation, talked to a lot of people about it, and explored several iPhone / web apps.
The impact on me has been awesome.
After talking to Jerry Colonna for a few hours about meditation on the snowy Sunday after I started, he recommended I take a look at Headspace. I signed up that night and started doing the Take10 meditations. For the first few days, I did it once a day, but then quickly starting practicing twice a day, once in the morning and once before I went to bed. Occasionally I’d toss in another session at lunch time, although sometimes I just did a silent meditation instead for 10 to 15 minutes.
After about a week I was deeply hooked. I grabbed the iPhone GetSomeHeadspace app and untethered myself from my desk. We’ve got a meditation room in our new house and even though it’s very sparse right now (just one sitting pillow), it’s a magnificent sanctuary for my meditation.
I noticed that Andy Puddicombe, the founder of Headspace, had written a book called Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day. I downloaded it and read it last night and this morning. Since I’m deep into the Headspace program, a lot of it was familiar to me. But Andy’s description of his own meditation journey is fascinating, and reinforces a lot of things he guides you through in the Headspace program.
Near the end, he has a great chapter on different forms of meditation beyond sitting. He covers walking, sleeping, eating, and running. These are forms that intrigue me, especially since I run a lot, eat too fast, and am exploring different sleep patterns.
Overall, the book is a nice addition to the Headspace program. If you are intrigued about meditation, it’s a fast, easy, helpful read. But there’s nothing like just practicing. For that, I recommend you hop on line and try the free Headspace Take10 program.
Ok, I’m digging meditation.
I started with no goal, which I quickly discovered is helpful. Rather than gear up for a class, commit to a serious amount of time, or set a goal for myself, I just started. I started small with 5 minute sessions a couple of times a day using the Calm iPhone app. Sometimes it was twice a day, sometimes it was three times a day. They have a really nice “7 Steps of Calm” which is an easy way to get into it.
To break it up, I also started using Headspace. They have a “Take10” series which are short 10 minute sessions with Andy, the founder. I’ve done a few of them and toss them in whenever I’m in front of my computer and want a 10 minute session.
Last weekend I had a long conversation with Jerry Colonna about meditation. We sat on his couch on a Sunday afternoon as the snow came down and just rolled around in the meta of mediation. Again, there was no goal, and no judgement. Just random thoughts that we shared. Very calmly.
On Wednesday, Michael Rich, one of Jerry’s partners for the CEO Bootcamp, swung by my office. We had a delightful talk and at the end sat for 10 minutes together. He introduced me to the Insight Timer app. I’ve now used it a couple of times and love it.
Yesterday, before my Startup Colorado board meeting, I was feeling tense. So I ducked into a CU Law Faculty Lounge and sat for 10 minutes with the Insight Timer app. The rest of the evening was so much calmer.
When I was with Jerry, I mentioned that I felt a significant shift in how I felt. I’ve been under a lot of stress since the beginning of the year and have been wary about it spiraling out of control. I have been a little fearful of falling into a depression like I did last year. I haven’t been fighting it, but it’s not where I want to be. When I told Jerry I didn’t care whether the meditation effect was real or a placebo effect, he snickered lovingly, in that “you have a wonderful journey in front of you my friend” kind of way. That moment was another lesson, which is that it doesn’t matter what I think, or don’t think, which is part of the point of it all.
I’m very clear that I’m not trying to be good at this. I’m not trying to be disciplined. I’m not focused on any particular outcome. I’m just practicing. And I like that a lot.
I received several powerful emails in response to yesterday’s post Sometimes You Just Want To Scream. This often happens when I post about personal / emotional stuff – some folks would rather send a private email than post a public comment. I totally respect and appreciate that.
A consistent theme in these emails was “I got through some of this by meditating.” That resonated with me as Amy and I have been talking about meditation for the past week. She’s been a long time meditator, including going on a number of Vipassana 10 day silent meditation retreats. Some of my close friends, including Ben Casnocha, meditate daily and one of my favorite posts about meditation was Ben’s Reflections and Impressions from a 10-Day Meditation Course.
So I’ve decided a new daily habit I’m going to work on developing is meditation. First thing in the morning, and last thing before I go to bed. Through the comments I discovered the Calm app which is a delightful way to get started. I did it last night and this morning and know that if I do it every morning and night for the rest of the month it’ll become a real habit for me.
I’m loading up on reading about meditating and brain plasticity, which a friend linked nicely in an email to me. If you have suggestions on reading about meditating, other online things that are helpful, or even offline things to explore, please leave them in the comments or email me as I play around with this for the next month.
Separately, but linked, I’ll end with an awesome short video from my friend Jonathan Fields of the Good Life Project. While Jonathan and I have only spent a few hours together physically, I find him wonderful to be with, incredibly thought provoking, and a huge calming influence. Take a look at his video of what 29 people (including me) say in answer to the question “What Does It Mean To Live A Good Life.”
This is a public service announcement for all entrepreneurs and investors. Remember not to take yourself too seriously. At least not all the time.
In that vein, the following Real Life Conference Call reminds of us the pain of trying too hard.
And we’ll end this morning’s video fest with my other alter-ego from Sesame Street – Animal – doing his thing on the drums, looking just like I do when I try to play them.
I changed my sleep pattern in October. Three months later, I feel like a completely different person. A much better one.
Since I was in my early 20’s, I’ve been getting up at 5am from Monday to Friday. I generally would go to sleep between 10 and 11. An alarm clock would wake me up. By Thursday or Friday I would often snooze or even reset it for 6am or 7am. But most of the time I pried myself out of bed at 5am.
This became a very rigorous routine in the last decade. I would get at most six hours of sleep each night during the week. Then I’d binge sleep on the weekend – often sleeping 12 to 14 hours. My world record is 15.5 hours – I’ve done that a few times.
When I was younger, I’d sleep through the night. Now I wake up two or three times in the night to pee. I fall back asleep immediately.
Three months ago I stopped waking up with an alarm clock. I use my Fitbit to track my sleep (and make my data public) so I noticed that my sleep pattern during the week naturally settled down at between 8 and 10 hours of sleep a night.
It took me about a month to get my mind around this, but I now go to sleep with Amy and wake up with Amy. So – there’s a triple bonus – I’m getting a lot more sleep AND I crawl into bed with my wife, and then wake up slowly with my wife. Yeah – that’s really awesome.
I had developed this attachment to the idea that I only needed six hours of sleep a night. And, given the actual time to fall asleep and the restlessness in the night, I was only getting 4 to 5.5 hours of sleep a night. I’m able to sleep on airplanes so I had rationalized that 100% of my sleep on them counted and that’s how I was catching up. I realize that’s total bullshit – while my eyes where closed, it was unlikely that I was getting deep or REM sleep on the plane, so my sleep hygiene was lousy. I knew this, but I didn’t want to deal with it.
After three months of sleeping “they way my body wants to” I feel so much better. I’m not tired all the time. I’m in a much better mood. I’m quickly adjusting to a different work style, where rather than getting up at 5am, I’m getting up between 7am and 8am. I shifted my meeting schedule from starting at 9am to starting at 11am, so I still have the four hours of “morning time” that I crave. But I feel so much better.
It took me until age 48 to figure this out. Amy has been telling me for years that I’m not getting enough sleep. She’s also been encouraging me to sleep more so that I live longer with not so subtle hints like “women live longer than men because they get more sleep.” At least she hasn’t been turning all the milk in the house pink.
Are you getting enough sleep?
“History is written by the victors” – maybe said by Winston Churchill
“History is Written By the Winners” – George Orwell
“To the victor belong the spoils” – New York Senator William L. Marcy
Yesterday I wrote a post about my first experience as a venture capitalist. I didn’t try to dramatize anything – I just wrote what I remembered. I got a handful of emails from people involved in some way.
One line that jumped out at me was “Nice to see at least one guy who is not into rewriting history.”
Another that jumped out at me from a different person was “I didn’t know the history with you and Netgen. Sorry that it was a hard experience. The ironic thing is I have always considered you one of the three fairy godfathers of Netgen.”
Today Fred Wilson wrote a fantastic post titled “My First Investment“. He bluntly referred to it “a shitshow” in a comment on my post. Joanne Wilson also wrote about her first angel investment (Curbed) which recently had a nice exit.
I love these origin stories – both the successes and the failures. While I didn’t experience Fred and Joanne’s, they both write from the heart so I expect they are their truthful stories. But as I read so many other origin stories, especially those that are presented by third parties as histories or by respected thinkers, politicians, or journalists as justification for their current position, I’m reminded of the quotes at the beginning of this post.
I ran across a great juxtaposition of this today. On Twitter, I saw a link to a NY Times OpEd from David Brooks on marijuana titled “Weed: Been There. Done That.” I normally don’t pay any attention to what Brooks writes, but I clicked since it showed up in my Twitter stream and read it. It felt like bizarre, sanctimonious bullshit, especially the punchline “In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.”
So I tweeted something about whether Brooks still drinks alcohol in an effort to be amusing. I was then pointed on Twitter to an amazing post by Gary Greenberg, who was one of the people Brooks referred to in his OpEd about the kids he used to get high with. It was titled “I smoked pot with David Brooks.” Now, I don’t know Brooks or Greenberg, nor do I really have any stake in the discussion between them, but I thought it was an amazing example of how as humans we tend to rewrite history to fit our current circumstance.
Now, I don’t really care about the legalization of marijuana. I don’t smoke pot and haven’t since the one time I tried it in college and hated it. But I also don’t care if others smoke it – I have a lot of friends who enjoy it. And since I’m ignoring politics in 2014, I’m not going to pay attention to the legalization discussion.
But I do find the dissonance in origin stories to be fascinating. Maybe Brooks is remembering things differently. Maybe he’s limited by the number of words the NY Times allows him. Maybe he cares more about making a point about society linked to the legalization of marijuana. Or maybe he was drunk when he wrote this OpEd. I don’t know – that doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is that it’s important to always remember how origin stories get rewritten by the winners, by people in power, by people trying to justify their position, or just because it’s human nature. Being TAGFEE is really, really hard.
I’m glad it’s 2014. Last year was a difficult one for me as I hit a wall of depression that completely surprised me. I was over it by mid year and, while the second half of the year was better, I still struggled with figuring a bunch of stuff out about what I cared about as I turned 48 years old.
I stopped doing a few things last year. I stopped traveling for business. I stopped working on Saturdays.
I discovered great relief, and happiness, from stopping doing these things.
As I start 2014, I’ve decided to continue to stop doing things that are neutral to negative utility to me, in an effort to spend more time on the things I want to do, and do them more deeply.
Some of the things I’m stopping are ones that down deep I know are unsatisfying to me. Interacting with government at any level – federal, state, or local – has been a huge negative emotional drain. I’ve put a lot of energy into two issues over the past seven years – startup visa/immigration reform and patent reform. There has been almost zero change in either of these and the experience has been deeply unsatisfying. I’ve been incredibly distressed and agitated by the NSA / Snowden revelations. The idea of municipalization in Boulder, and my interactions around it, bums me out. I’ve realized that it’s not a game I like at all and that whenever I spend time on it, I’m a less happy person. So I’m not going to engage in 2014 and see how that feels.
For the past 25 years, my week days have started at 5am. I started experimenting with that a few months ago and, even though I’ve had some stretches where I’ve gotten up at 5am, I realized the thing I didn’t like was the oppressive crush of scheduled stuff that started at 9am and didn’t end until 6pm. I’ve lived an adult life of “manager mode” with only a few stretches of true “maker mode” and I desperately need – and want – more maker mode. So I’m stopping doing anything scheduled before 11am. I’ll get up whenever I want and my mornings, until 11am MT, will be unscheduled for me to do whatever I want with them.
I’ve been deeply conflicted with alcohol in 2013. I grew up in a house with no alcohol – neither of my parents drank. I drank plenty in college, but limited myself to just booze – no drugs (my parents scared my brother and I straight at an early age.) Over the years, I’ve gone through dry phases – up to five years – where I didn’t drink. In other time periods, including around the Internet bubble and 2013, I found myself drinking more than I felt was ok as I used it to dull the edges of the stress and anxiety. In addition to the negative physical effects, I spent a lot of mental and emotional energy thinking about “am I drinking too much.” I’ve always struggled with abstaining vs. moderating, so 2014 will be a year of abstaining from alcohol.
Many of you out there provided great support, friendship, and advice in 2013. I treasure all of it, even when it’s hard to hear, something I disagree with, or when I am simply not in a head space to act on it. As 2014 begins, I look forward to another year that is an interesting one on this journey called life. And by doing less of the stuff I don’t want to do, I hope to have more time to go deep on the things I want to do.
Happy new year!
As 2013 comes to an end, I feel some relief that what has been a difficult and confusing year is almost behind me. I mark the year boundary with my birthday (12/1) so December is an “unwind” month for me. Amy and I are at our house in Keystone with a variety of friends swinging through, working some, reading some, exercising, and just hanging out.
The first half of this year was marked with the deepest depression I’ve had since 2001. It came out of the blue and was a total surprise to me. The depression lifted at the end of May and I’ve now had about six months to reflect on it. For a while, I put together a narrative about what happened, dug into the root causes of it, and tried to make sense of how I ended up feeling the way I did. Eventually, I stumbled upon this brilliant explanation of depression from Allie Brosh and as a result stopped trying to analyze it.
During this period I heard from hundreds of successful people who also have struggled with depression. As I synthesized these discussions, I consistently heard that people were generally deeply ashamed of their depression. They hid it. They struggled with what it meant. And they were afraid to talk about it, especially with co-workers and investors. These conversations were liberating to me, and hopefully helpful to a lot of the people I talked to, as it created a context where serious, hard working, and accomplished people could explore depression – and what it meant – in a safe (e.g. with me) environment.
Another thing that came up a number of times in these discussions is the metaphor of depression as the black dog. I heard this for the first time many years ago from my dear friend Jerry Colonna. Yesterday a blog reader sent me a link to a phenomenal short video about The Black Dog. It reminded me of an important thing that I learned this year – “don’t fight depression.”
Sometimes you have to stop doing things to make more progress.
2013 was a complicated year for me. Lots of things have gone well, but I struggled with a deep depression from January to May. My running has been erratic (no marathons this year) and I’ve struggled a lot physiologically, which at this point I think I’ve been able to determine is some version of what is called adrenal burnout or cortisol deficiency.
As part of trying to get back to a happy place, I decided to stop traveling. I haven’t been a plane for work since the middle of May. Yesterday was the first time I got on an airplane since June (when I went to visit my parents for their 50th anniversary). I’m on a two week vacation (one week completely off the grid) – something I do every year around Thanksgiving since my birthday is on December 1st.
My annual rhythm tends to run from 12/1 to 11/30 due to my birthday. It’s a much bigger marker for me than January 1st, especially since I still have some grumpy jewish kid behavior around Christmas. So – with a week to go in my version of this year, I’m starting to think about what I’m going to do differently in 2014.
I immediately flashed to no business travel. Waking up in my own bed at home for the past six months has been transformative for me. So I decided to continue to not do business travel in 2014.
But that’s an easy one, since I’m already doing (or not doing) it. So I’ve begun thinking about the next things I’m going to stop doing. Some are work related and some are personal. I’ve always been an abstainer instead of a moderator so things like “no alcohol” pop up to the top of the list quickly. But that’s less interesting to me at this point than things that are more profound in a business context, like “no travel.”
As I work on my list of things to stop doing, I’m curious about what, if anything, is on your list.