There is one habit that stands over-and-above the others when it comes to the commonalities of the world’s most successful, i.e. dominant in their respective domain, people. Over a whopping three quarters of the world’s most successful people do this habit on a daily basis, do you know what it is? Exercise? Fasting? Gratitude? I’m going to challenge you to leave behind your preconceived notions about this habit because its easy to get discouraged when starting out. Since you have probably managed to read the title, I’m going to guess you already know by now: the habit is meditation.
Meditation is a deeply misunderstood practice and its true power has been overlooked by our materialistic society with its attempts to demystify and reduce into a materialistic paradigm that which ultimately cannot be. It is true that meditation offers peace of mind and is great for generally improving your mental health, this however, should be viewed as a great perk, rather than one of the main attractions.
If you hadn’t noticed, we are living in an attention economy in which everyone is essentially competing for your time and attention. Others are incentivised to grab your attention in every-which-way – be it on social media, TV, radio, ads in real life, basically any business has a major component of attracting more customers, and that means grabbing YOUR attention. This is why exposure is so crucial to more easily creating a profitable business, as once you have captured the interest of a large number of people one need only find a way to monetize that attention, if that is your aim.
This is where meditation comes in with its first, powerful attraction. Why is it that most not just successful, but the world’s most successful people have incorporated the habit of meditation into their daily routine? One of the main factors is focus. Think about it: one must only stay focussed on their goals and be diligently consistent in order to bring that goal either into reality or much closer to reality. It is increasingly difficult to remain focused when those competing for your attention are essentially hacking your fear or reward system to be drawn to them – be it a colourful, happy thumbnail, clickbait fear-mongering news headlines, an attractive woman on an ad, or picture-perfect fast-food. If you don’t take countermeasures to be sufficiently disciplined to stay on the correct path, you will waste your life making very little progress in any meaningful way. As the move forward into the future, this addictive, attention-diverting pressure will only get stronger and stronger as technology gets a tighter grip over our primal base physiology. With current trends, the future will contain a divide between those distracted and compulsive, and those successful that stay focused and delay gratification. The very practise of meditation is a practice of becoming aware of when you’re distracted, and then bringing your attention back to pure, thoughtless awareness; the perfect countermeasure to an unnaturally addictive technological world.
A lovely additional perk is that by continually training your mind to consciously bring your attention away from distractions back to what you should be doing, you are strengthening the connections in your prefrontal cortex and by decreasing serotonin gating, which I’ll explain shortly, increasing neuroplasticity. In doing so, meditation can be thought of as the means by which we can access our higher selves by increasing our behavioural flexibility and willpower to incorporate new productive behaviours, rather than getting unnecessarily carried away with our primal impulses into a downward spiral of compulsive behaviours. It is for this reason that meditation should be considered a synergistic, keystone habit that not only makes other productive habits far easier to establish, but has a powerfully supportive effect on our daily lives by giving us control over self-destructive emotions and behaviours like hatred, envy, fear, pride, pornography addiction, fast-food addiction, social media addiction, and so on.
Yet another of its astounding benefits that virtually no one knows about is its effect on serotonin gating in the brain. Serotonin gating can be conceptualised as the amount to which external data is filtered out by the brain specific to the serotonergic system – this is an evolved mechanism to conserve resources. Essentially, serotonin is responsible for modulating many of the body’s systems so that the organism is better adapted to the environment. To make it as simple as possible: meditation opens the gates in the brain of the serotonin system so that not only does life feel more mysterious, magical and colourful like when your gates were open when you were young, but your brain actually processes more data from the environment and produces moments of what most people would perceive as genius, greater intelligence, or insight, dependent on the individual. This same mechanism can give athletes or gamers the edge over-and-above the rest, as the increased unconscious and conscious sensory processing allows them to make precise, often brilliant actions based on a wealth of data processing.
Finally, and this is probably the most powerful benefit of meditation: meditation provides the means to develop so-called spiritually. This can also be conceptualised as evolving and developing yourself toward higher-order awareness, greater empathy and compassion for others. Essentially, meditation is the means by which you can evolve your paradigm of reality toward greater levels of metacognition, wisdom, and understanding of all aspects of reality. When we were young, we would believe in superstitions like Santa Claus, perhaps ghosts, monsters, or the Tooth Fairy. We evolved out of that as we gained a greater rational understanding of the way reality works. Just as we have evolved out of superstitions, becoming aware of the nature of the ego, consciousness, anthropocentrism, inherent interconnectedness, the limits of culture, and integrating aspects of reality that aren’t purely intellectual leads to a higher-order understanding of reality wherein such a person has evolved from purely rational materialism. Such a person can be distinguished by their pioneering originality, their necessary divergence from culture, their complex interrelated understanding of many domains of reality, and their deep, insightful paradigm that can make what appears as the complex, simple and elegant. There may be a poetry to their being that comes from the increased integration of their mind, body, and spirit over and above the vast majority of others. A few western examples of such people would be: Alan Watts (profound spiritual teacher and master of MANY aspects of reality), Ken Wilber, and the relatively unknown, Stephen Buhner (awareness of the deep interconnectedness and metaphysical background of the world in which culture is nested); and eastern examples would be: Jiddu Krishnamurti, Osho, and Lao Tzu. By no means am I placing all of these individuals automatically on the same level, nor am I even saying they can be compared on such a level.
Truth is what propels you toward a higher-order understanding of reality, and meditation is the means by which you can more easily perceive and pursue truth given it is usually veiled and distorted by the egoic mind for the purpose of survival. Therefore, meditation can help us avoid so-called “spiritual” stagnation, and to propel us toward new heights that leave us far more fulfilled than our atomised, materialist society currently does.
A note on efficiency for the more pragmatic of you: it was Abraham Lincoln that said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
Therefore, if you’re a high-performance individual, here is a great simple reason to convince yourself its necessity: if you’re looking for the highest return on investment for a given short period of time – be it 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes – then the productivity from the decrease in mind-wandering you will gain will vastly outweigh the short period of time it takes to practise in your daily routine. Not only this, but you will reap all of its subtle rewards that I mentioned before that come along cumulatively as days go by.
There you go! I think that adequately explains why so many of the world’s most successful people meditate every day. Whether this is correlation or causation, you can be the judge – my guess is that it’s a good portion of both. This is by no means an exhaustive list of benefits as there are far more like increased happiness, creativity, memory, increased EQ and IQ, and much more. I should mention that what I have written to you today is from my understanding of the practice from roughly 10 years of experience and various books and other resources. If you want to establish the habit, start small, be consistent, and make sure you have an excellent teacher to give you a great structure to follow if you’re a beginner. Results will not come instantly, but if you’re consistent and you’re disciplined enough to get over the initial hurdle, it’s coasting from there, and you will reap the rewards in no time.