Equanimity

This book is an attempt to distil all of the useful wisdom I’ve learned over the past few years. I wrote it for myself, but it’s really all about the search for meaning and happiness. Which seems to be a quest that most people are on.

I named this book equanimity, defined as “calmness and composure, especially in a difficult situation.” For example: she accepted both the good and the bad with equanimity. Through personal trial and error, my opinion is that’s the best way to live.

But the more I sit with the word, the more I think the dictionary undersells it. Equanimity isn’t really stillness. It’s not a person standing rigid against the wind, jaw set, refusing to be moved.

It’s closer to a surfer riding a wave. A runner finding rhythm on a long hill. A climber adjusting grip mid-move. The wave doesn’t stop. The hill doesn’t flatten. The rock face doesn’t get any less vertical. Equanimity is the constant rebalancing that keeps you upright while everything around you keeps moving.

What makes those activities feel so good, I think, is the same thing. You’re not fighting the wave, or the hill, or the rock. You’re meeting it. Moving with it. Adjusting to whatever it gives you next. The instability isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the whole point.

Equanimity, when it’s working, feels like that. Not bracing against life. Not sealing yourself off from it. Staying loose enough to ride whatever shows up. Less a noun than a verb.

The name feels more apt to me than “happiness” or “peace” because it accepts that life can feel very difficult at times, and that suffering is inevitable. With that said, it also suggests a path through those difficulties toward peace.

In 2023 I went through a stretch where I felt genuinely lost, at a point in my life where things looked, from the outside at least, to be at their pinnacle.

I had sold my business for millions and got engaged to the love of my life.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was off. But I realised the feeling had been quietly building for years.

Eventually I had to stop and look at it properly.

That was the wake-up call I needed to face reality as it is.

Ultimately, as I discovered, you can’t think your way out of a problem. You’ll just end up in a thought loop that gets worse and worse. I had to find another way.

It’s funny. I’d spent so much time trying to be successful: growing a business, meeting a wonderful woman, trying to be a good friend, brother and son. But with all that effort pushing outwards, I had never really looked deep within and examined myself.

I was stuck on the treadmill so many of us find ourselves on. Constantly trying to be busy and “productive”, making the excuse that work and money took precedence over the rest of life.

After starting to feel better, I decided I literally had no option but to look inward, start examining the root causes of my suffering, and build my own philosophy for life.

I’ve since consumed hundreds of books, podcasts and studies looking for answers. But the consumption of content itself often ends up becoming a distraction from making real improvements.

So instead of just consuming more ideas, I decided to create a book that will help you (and me) find peace and resilience in everyday life.

I’m still a thousand miles away from any sort of enlightenment. But I’m sure I’m a much stronger person than I was a couple of years ago, and sure that if I keep following the suggestions in my own book, five years from now I’ll be much happier than I am today.

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This book is split into five parts:

1. IThe Miracle of Existence. Why you being here at all is the rarest lottery ticket ever drawn.
2. IIUnderstanding Human Nature. The evolutionary inheritance that shapes every thought you’ll ever have.
3. IIIMindfulness and Practical Training. The daily practice of noticing without grabbing.
4. IVStoicism, Adversity & Resilience. What the ancient Greeks knew about suffering well.
5. VEquanimity in Daily Life. How this all lands in a 21st-century week.

Through all of our daily worries and human problems, we very rarely take stock of the sheer wonder of our existence.

Life is a profound mystery.

We are literally made of star dust. Most of the elements in our body were forged inside supernovas, when dying stars explode.

If there’s any immediate antidote I can give you for depression or hopelessness right now, it’s this: consider it a complete and utter miracle that you are here. Let alone a conscious human being with the ability to think and read.

The number of events that had to transpire, in a very specific way, for your existence to be possible is ridiculously rare.

Imagine winning the lottery every day for 10,000 days in a row.

That’s not even close to how rare it really is.

Let’s briefly discuss what had to transpire for you to exist.

1. Genetic probability

   The chance of your exact sperm meeting your exact egg is around one in four hundred trillion, according to Dr. Ali Binazir’s widely cited analysis.

2. Ancestral lineage

   The odds of your entire lineage surviving through history, meeting their specific partners, and reproducing at each generation is incalculably small.

3. Cosmic conditions

   The universe itself had to form in a way that allowed life, planets, and Earth to exist at all.

4. Life on Earth

   The emergence of life required a nearly perfect combination of environmental and chemical conditions.

5. Consciousness

   We are the only species that has existed on Earth with enough consciousness to understand the rarity of our own existence.

And for you to be here alive right now, every single one of those had to take place. Each one happening by itself is incredibly rare. For all of them to happen, and to produce you, a creature that somehow understands its place in the Universe, is very close to impossible.

The true odds of you existing are so obscenely small that you should consider yourself the ultimate lottery jackpot winner every morning you wake up.

Imagine you’re laying on a huge, sprawling beach and you grab a handful of sand. Hundreds of thousands of grains, clenched in your fist.

Now look around. Imagine that every single grain of sand on that beach represents a planet in the Universe.

That doesn’t even come close to how many planets there really are.

The observable universe contains an estimated ten sextillion planets. All of Earth’s beaches together contain perhaps seven and a half quintillion grains of sand.

Those numbers are hard to feel. Here’s the feeling:

Take every grain of sand from every beach on Earth. Pile them all together. Imagine each grain is one planet. You’d still have to multiply that pile thirteen thousand times to reach the number of planets in the observable universe.

On that scale, every grain of sand on Earth would be about a thirteen-thousandth of what’s actually out there.

And one of those grains is us.

Once we accept that a huge amount of our qualities and characteristics are genetically handed down to us, and that we have absolutely zero say in the matter, it becomes much easier to accept why humans do things in certain ways.

Why do we have the capacity to feel anxious? Why do we have the capacity to feel anger and hate, but also love and laughter?

Just having the understanding can make some of these very challenging things feel a bit more normal.

Every single life form on Earth is the result of billions of years of evolution and natural selection.

Some time billions of years ago, for some unknown reason, living organisms and genes started developing on a very small scale.

Eventually those genes discovered a pretty cool “hack” that allowed them to live indefinitely: animals. Organisms with multi-cellularity that could compete for more resources and fend off predators, because they were bigger and more complex.

By using animals as a living, moving temporary shell to store all the genes and DNA, you allow those genes to survive and pass on to the next generation, indefinitely. Genes mutate and change over time, which is why we have such diversity in living things.

Those storage shells all started from a single common ancestor, and have since branched out into the millions of animal species on Earth today. It’s crazy to think we literally share the same common ancestor as a spider or a fly.

Fast forward to today, and every living thing you see around you is an incredible survival specialist. The genes in that organism have passed down through literally billions of years, and evolved over time.

One thing humans underestimate, by and large, is the amount of luck required for us to be here at all.

The British physicist Jim Al-Khalili calls our existence “cosmic happenstance”, and proposes a thought experiment. If Earth were rebooted five billion years ago to play out again, what would Earth look like today? His answer, from a physics perspective, is that it would look completely different.

For life to evolve beyond bacteria was a slice of pure random luck, as far as we know. If an asteroid hadn’t hit Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, there’s every chance they would still be the dominant life form.

In general, we underestimate randomness and luck throughout all of our life. If you have a long-term partner, consider how you met them, and then came to be with them. In my case, I think that if I ran my life over a thousand times, this would probably be the only version where I end up with my current wife.

The same applies to many friends I’ve made, including a Spanish colleague who is now a very close friend. He was one of sixty people to apply for a job with my company, a job he randomly found online by searching within a narrow time frame. What are the chances?

There’s a strong argument that the world is deterministic, that the script of life is pre-written (more on that later). But even if that is true, very small unseen variations can cause huge changes in the future. This is chaos theory, more commonly known as “the butterfly effect”. Too many small variables, too many huge impacts.

In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Russian military officer during the Cold War, detected five incoming US nuclear missiles headed toward Russia. According to protocol he was supposed to launch a counter-attack. But he felt something was off, and decided not to act on what turned out to be a technical glitch. Imagine the devastating change to history if he had.

There are areas of life where luck plays more or less of a role. But I do think it’s exciting, even hilarious, that one of the most meaningful events in a human life (finding a romantic life partner) generally feels like an incredibly random event, with so many variables at play. Age, location, romantic history, even how those initial conversations go, and whether you feel an immediate connection.

So many of the monumental “moments” in life just seem random and unforeseen. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

All of the behaviours humans do by default occur because we are literally pre-programmed to survive and pass on our genes.

From the perspective of our pre-programmed bodies, we really only have one goal in life: to survive and to pass on our genes.

The default state of the brain prefers automatic, habitual thinking. It saves energy. But this often leads to unconscious reactions and locked-in habits.

We also have a negativity bias. And a temporal bias, a tendency to drift into the past or the future.

Our brains do of course override this in a potential life-or-death situation. Consider crossing a busy road: you subconsciously sharpen your focus to an amazing degree, and carefully scan for dangers.

The rest of the time, we are left with a mind that chatters, drifts, and treats the last hundred thousand years of safety as though a sabre-toothed tiger could still appear at any moment.

Our mind works like a web crawler. It’s constantly clicking on different thoughts, trying to assess and analyse them, deciding which ones to engage with.

These thoughts lead to feelings of fear, desire or anger. If we see someone running down the street at us with a knife, we’ll automatically feel an intense sensation of fear and panic. If we see an attractive person, we might feel a sensation of desire or attraction. If we hear a loud bang, we will automatically become alert and on edge, even if the noise isn’t immediately threatening. Sometimes we might even feel a surge of anger or frustration at a loud noise. It’s the body’s way of going into survival mode, even if the noise was just a loved one accidentally dropping a pan in the kitchen.

The key point is that this entire process is completely automatic. It’s built into our DNA, and we can’t do anything about it.

We can, however, use mindfulness to start observing this process in action. Even as a fully-grown adult well equipped with the world, it’s actually shocking when you realise the web crawler is happening, and the sheer volume of thoughts it throws across your mind each hour of the day.

Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no way to stop these thoughts arising.

But Sam Harris has a simple yet wonderful idea. You don’t have to follow the trail of these automatic thoughts. You can recognise them as temporary, passing visitors. Just observe them.

The key to mental freedom is breaking the spell of identification with thoughts.

You don’t have to believe me when I say you are not your thoughts. You can experience this for yourself.

You don’t even know where your last thought came from, or what your next thought will be, or what your dreams tonight will be. That’s evidence in itself.

Most people spend upwards of 90% of their waking life lost in thought. They’re not actively engaged in what they are currently doing. This is because a brain that is constantly throwing thoughts, ideas and possibilities at your attention is a good thing for survival. It lets you run through possible disaster scenarios very quickly, and come up with solutions to help you stay alive.

It’s also the reason so many of us feel, most of the time, that we are somehow behind our own lives.

On top of the automatic thought-crawler, there’s a disposition towards negativity.

This bias has a good evolutionary reason. People who are anxious, fearful and worry are generally more likely to survive than people who are happy-go-lucky.

Our ancestors’ survival depended on detecting threats. Often very real threats: animals trying to eat them, other humans who would kill them. When you think about how our ancestors actually lived, they were very often in immediate danger.

Just consider how most wild animals live today. They’re pretty much always in danger of being eaten by another animal, unless they’re at the top of their food chain. And even if they are (like a lion) they have to worry about hunting food and keeping their family safe every single day.

Nowadays, most of us do not live in immediate danger. We are constantly warm, constantly fed, constantly sheltered.

Consider even modern imprisonment. Those of Western countries who are imprisoned have all their basic survival needs met without having to lift a finger. This is a very, very far cry from our ancestors’ way of living.

Imagine living with your family in winter 15,000 years ago, in a cave somewhere. You’d be freezing cold all day. Who knows where you’d even find enough food to take you through to the coming spring. You’d be on edge half the day just striving to survive.

Let’s look at the history of our evolution.

We modern humans arrived on the scene around 250,000 years ago.

So 15,000 years ago, when we were sitting in caves wondering where the next meal was coming from, we had already progressed 95% of the way into the present-day evolutionary stage of our species.

Human civilisation and settlements didn’t emerge until 6,000 years ago. When we run the numbers, humans have spent 97.6% of our existence without civilisation.

We spent 97.6% of our existence hunting, gathering, and living a truly nomadic lifestyle with other small bands of human beings.

For the vast majority of that time, we were an anxious creature just like any other animal.

Evolution prefers anxiety and pessimism to some degree. The anxious pessimist is more likely to spot threats, or at least consider something a threat.

The “cost” of seeing something as a threat is low. Even if you’re wrong, it doesn’t really matter, because at least you’re still alive. But if you don’t see something as a threat, and that thing kills you, it’s game over. We’re literally coded to be risk-averse. It’s why the pain of losing usually feels more painful than the pleasure of winning.

I find this helpful to understand. We carry these complex systems and emotions that are hard to override. Just the mere fact of understanding that anxiety or stress is normal makes accepting those feelings much easier, even if they feel very stressful at the time.

When you look at it from this perspective, you see that anxiety is in fact the default state hardwired into us.

The beautiful and heartwarming thing to realise: we absolutely can overcome this.

So far, I’ve painted a bleak picture of the human condition. The hardships our ancestors had to overcome. The biases we’ve inherited.

But we all know from personal experience that being human entails far more than negative emotions. We have also evolved to develop close family ties and bonds, because humans who cooperate and live closely with each other are far more likely to survive.

I do believe we have evolved to have a real sense of care and compassion for our fellow humans.

The pessimist would point to countless wars and strife over the past few thousand years, arguing that humans are inherently violent, competitive and selfish. But history is primarily an account of wars and bad things happening. It is not a tale of the little encounters (often positive) that make up the majority of a person’s life.

From your own personal experience in a harmonious society, how do the vast majority of humans interact with each other? In my experience, if you share a smile with someone and approach them in a cooperative way, nine times out of ten you’ll get a very positive response, and a feeling of being, at least temporarily, a kindred spirit.

Think about those movies where the underdog overcomes a tough situation and ends up in a happy place, the ones that really pull at your heart strings. Think about seeing a loved one after a long time apart. Think about seeing a starry night sky on a still dark evening and having that indescribable sense of wonder.

We really do have this incredible capacity for love and compassion. That’s not wishful romantic thinking. You can literally see the evidence of it in your own life.

If we know that capacity exists, then we can consciously amplify those positive things, and start to identify the negative things and remove them.

That’s exactly what the Buddhists and the great philosophers of ancient Greece realised. We absolutely can train ourselves to be happy, and to maintain equanimity and peace even in the face of hard times.

I believe we completely underestimate our own ability to adapt to situations.

Is our movie a pre-written script? Or are we writing it as we go?

Buddhists think that free will as an absolute concept is an illusion, but that we can make mindful choices and cultivate positive habits.

Newton had a “clockwork universe” theory, where he thought absolutely every action follows mathematical laws. If we could somehow calculate all known information, you could predict the future. If Newton is correct, every single thought in your brain is just particles moving in a predictable way. It means that when you decide what to eat for dinner, that decision was already determined billions of years ago by physics.

Many physicists believe free will is indeed an illusion. They argue that there’s simply so much randomness in the Universe that, for all intents and purposes, we might as well consider that there is. Ultimately, though, randomness does not equate to choice.

As we’ve discussed, we literally cannot control our next thoughts, or what they will be.

We are no more responsible for our next thought arising than we are for being born into this Universe.

You can see this as a matter of your own experience. Spend one day considering all the thoughts that enter your mind. You really cannot control them.

Our thoughts are the result of our past experiences, our genes, the mind that the Universe gave us. It’s the same as our height or how we appear physically. We can’t determine what thoughts come in.

When we think of our minds as a system that works this way (where we can’t really dictate what comes in at any given moment), it actually makes it easier to change and work with the system that’s there.

We can mindfully choose which thoughts to work with, and mindfully make the right choices.

Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind, almost by magic, as if from nowhere. It’s really strange.

It’s fair to say that free will is an illusion in the sense that all our actions come from very complex neurological processes. However, there is no illusion of free will, because what’s happening is in plain view. We can see these thoughts appearing.

This helps to liberate us from an egocentric view of life, where we feel like we’re some special author writing everything carefully, completely responsible for absolutely everything about ourselves. That’s really not the case.

My belief is that we have the ability to act according to our motivations and desires. The science clearly shows that humans have an in-built set of motivations and desires (like any living organism), but we also have the intelligence to make conscious and mindful decisions.

What we consciously do matters, because there’s no boundary between us and others. You can’t truly be blamed for many of your flaws. But it matters that you try to correct them once you have that awareness.

Compassion, love and a commitment to wellbeing just make sense. Shame and pride don’t.

Sam Harris says it’s a fantasy to think we should be deeply responsible for our own mental operations, when those systems were designed by the Universe, by millions of years of evolution, by genes.

I don’t want to go too deep into the implications that perhaps humans do not truly have free will. But it is a thought-provoking area, one that also touches on the ultimate question of good versus evil.

There’s strong evidence to suggest humans are all capable of wonderful good (charity, kindness, care) and also terrible evil (war, killing, cruelty).

If all human behaviour really is the inevitable result of evolution, physics, biology, the energy of the Universe flowing as it naturally does from the big bang until now, then should we punish people for committing a crime? Are people good because they consciously choose to be? Or because that’s just how their brains were made?

We have decided as a society (rightfully, I think) that society must still protect itself. That is why civilisation invented the whole concept of law and order. A lion doesn’t have free will; but if it terrorises a small village in India, killing some of its inhabitants, few of us would begrudge the people of that village caging or killing the lion.

In the case of humans, the threat of repercussions also serves as a deterrent. In modern times, some countries use a more rehabilitative approach to crime instead of punishment. Most notoriously, the Scandinavian countries, which have the lowest reoffending rates in the world, focus on education and therapy to transform the criminal.

We can all agree that hunger is a very natural, in-built trait that humans have had bestowed upon them whether they like it or not. Not many of us would call it “evil” to steal food because a person is hungry. However, Britain did send over 160,000 convicts to Australia in the 1800s, often for very petty crimes like this. One famous case is that of James Oliver, a 12-year-old boy convicted in 1829 for stealing apples from a market stall in London. He was sentenced to seven years, then shipped off on a boat to Australia (a voyage which took three months). Clearly an appalling system. But at the time (two hundred years ago) it probably didn’t seem too cruel.

Another two hundred years from now, it may be that brain analysis and artificial intelligence are so good we can detect “problematic” human behaviours before they even exist. Perhaps we’ll all have brain implants that send a shock or signal the moment we think about committing a certain behaviour society has deemed a crime. What would the moral implications of such technology be?

The essence of mindfulness is literally to be aware of everything that’s happening in the present moment without judgement. Instead of going into automatic, autopilot mode.

Lots of books on the subject have a very similar explanation. Two real-life examples hopefully illustrate how mindfulness can help people who haven’t really explored it before.

One: ruminating after an argument

You’re ruminating over an argument with someone. Your mind goes into autopilot, picturing the scene as it unfolded, replaying everything that was said, bubbling up feelings of anger or frustration in your chest.

The mindful approach is literally just the realisation that all of this is taking place. You have the dawning realisation that all of this replaying just happened on autopilot. Without any judgement whatsoever you smile, you realise you’ve given yourself a little bit of distance now. Over time you see you actually have a choice: whether to place more time and effort into this internal battle, or just let the problem melt away.

Two: the rain

You’re standing indoors ready to go for a walk, and suddenly it starts pouring outside. Your mind automatically tinges with aggravation, you huff and puff, mood lowering a little because your plans were scuppered.

Again, you have the dawning realisation that you just stumbled into this automatic sequence of reactions. You smile internally. You have a choice now. Continue down the road of bad mood (if that’s your thing, no judgement), or make the very conscious decision to change your outlook.

Maybe you appreciate that without the rain we’d have no lush green world around us. Maybe you change tack and sit reading a book whilst the rain pours. Or maybe you just decide to throw caution to the wind, run outside anyway, and feel a sudden kind of hippy oneness with the natural world, letting yourself get drenched and being very happy about it.

The point is: mindfulness is giving you this choice to begin again.

The “without judgement” is a key part of mindfulness. All we want to do is acknowledge and accept what’s really happening, and then move forward accordingly.

If you find it hard to recognise everything without judgement, you can at least appreciate why your brain might be doing something. If you find yourself going down a Google rabbit hole about medical symptoms and end up with massive anxiety, the mindful person might realise this and say: “Ah, I see I’ve gone down this rabbit hole. At least my thinking mind was trying to find a solution to the problem, though I recognise this was probably the wrong approach.”

It makes perfect sense to harness the positive and dissolve the negative where possible.

If an emotion strengthens our inner peace and encourages us to seek the welfare of others, we can consider it positive or constructive. If it destroys our serenity, deeply troubles our mind, and leads us to harm others, it is negative or destructive.

We can learn to dissolve the negative emotions as they arise, and cultivate the positive.

Understand that it is the accumulation and interlocking of fleeting emotions and thoughts that create our moods. These moods can last for a few hours or a few days, and over the long term form our character tendencies and traits.

That is why, if we learn to deal with our thoughts and emotions little by little, thought after thought, emotion by emotion, day after day, in the end we will be able to transform our way of being.

This is the essence of mind-training and practice.

But it is also incredibly important to understand one key fact. We cannot block negative feelings, thoughts or emotions before they reach us. That is impossible, because we already feel them.

The goal is not to stop negative thoughts or emotions from reaching us. The goal is to realise them, and then deal with them mindfully and non-judgmentally at that moment.

This non-judgment approach helps prevent the typical reactive spiral. Instead of going into a spiral of guilt, frustration or self-criticism, you take a wildly different approach. You actually open up to the negative feeling, you accept it and explore it. The result is that it naturally softens over time and dissolves.

It might be that a very strong “negative” emotion like grief or guilt stays around for a long time. But using the acceptance approach you can eventually overcome it. Having this open acceptance is the only path that makes healing possible. The alternative (aversion and a negative reaction) is just keeping an enemy there that won’t go away.

If I feel a sudden bout of anger, I can consciously look at the emotion and decide if it’s the appropriate emotion to be useful in a positive way right now.

And sometimes it might be. If someone is harming a member of my family and I want to protect them, then anger is going to be a somewhat useful emotion for generating a fast response. But nine times out of ten, there’s going to be a better pathway forward.

If I feel a subtle rise of frustration because my wife has packed the bin bag too full, rendering it impossible for me to take outside, is maintaining that anger going to be useful for anyone at all? Of course not.

These are the silly examples that happen every day in our lives, and accumulate over time. By making good choices multiple times per day, we can really transform our lives.

When Buddhist monks (or other experienced meditators) are exposed to a simulated explosion sound, they do react. But they don’t have as much of a spike in response as non-meditators. They have a more calm, measured awareness.

Their bodies and brains register the stimulus. Yet the intensity of the emotional “blip” is significantly reduced compared to people without such training. It’s not about blocking out the world, but changing how you relate to the world in a way that brings greater clarity.

We literally cannot control our next thought. We don’t even know what it will be.

The thought of something or someone is not the actual thing itself. Spend a moment now to think of a beautiful holiday destination you’ve been to before…

That image in your mind isn’t the holiday itself. It’s just a thought, a video or image you conjured up in your head.

The ultimate way we can use mindfulness is not to engage with thoughts at all. We can decide to sit on the banks of the river and watch the thoughts drift by, without engaging in them.

It’s impossible to get rid of those thoughts, so sorry if you’re hoping for that kind of solution. But you can acknowledge their existence and let them pass to such a degree that they have absolutely no impact on your equanimity or state of mind.

I believe the desire to be a good person and take the right actions is the most important thing of all. We can be cognisant of our desires and motivations, and work towards a positive path. A path that has the attitude of treating all living things as our brothers, because I think we are all interconnected.

I have never encountered, in personal life or on the world stage, anyone I would consider 100% enlightened or perfect. Even the Dalai Lama has his critics.

I just don’t think a finite human being born from millions of years of evolution and instinct into a world that has so much going on is ever going to be absolutely perfect.

Yes, we have the capacity for reasoning beyond the level of any other animal. But we all still evolved from the same place, and we are all still emotional creatures fighting for an instinct to survive and trying to live in harmony with each other.

My personal belief is that the most important thing is that we have a conscious desire and effort to bring light and love to the world. I can’t see any different path.

Of course we’ll make mistakes along the way (we’re not machines). But having the mindset of bringing people together and trying to eliminate the mindset of dividing people apart is just about as close to perfect as we can hope for.

It’s based on real experience in the outside world. Despite what the news and social media would have us think, the vast majority of the time, if you consciously try to bring joy and connection to another person in a positive way, they will feel that energy and reciprocate.

I read a book called The Book of Happiness from the Dalai Lama, and there was one single takeaway I loved.

If you go into any encounter with another person, consciously bring a feeling of compassion and loving-kindness into the encounter.

When you do this it’s like magic. A secret door opens up.

Communication becomes easier. A feeling of warmth arises that lets people open up, and you can establish trust.

The problem is that even if we’re meeting our friends, we normally wait for the other person to be the one to establish this energy. But we can always go in and be the one to create this ourselves, every time. What a difference it makes.

Bring the feeling of compassion to someone the next time you interact with them and watch what happens. It’s the closest thing to magic.

We all have these very habitual ideas of the self. This entity which includes our ego and our opinion of ourselves.

But the truth is, really all phenomena (our thoughts, emotions, stories and labels we give ourselves) are just passing, temporary things that have no permanent substance to them.

This is incredibly liberating and freeing to recognise. It’s like breaking free from invisible chains holding you down.

1. Letting go of self-criticism

   Rather than judging your own actions or replaying past mistakes, you can observe those thoughts as temporary mental events. You can still engage with some of them to learn from events, but you now have free space to simply be present.

2. Releasing identity attachments

   I defined myself by my job and success in business. Mindfulness helps us see that those are just one part of experience. When you really break it down, why would running a successful business feed my ego compared to, say, planting a beautiful garden with my time? Why is one of those things seen as inherently better than the other?

3. Experiencing the present moment fully

   We all tell ourselves stories of how we should be and what we should be doing. But with mindfulness, we can rest more often in the present moment. There doesn’t have to be a self-centred narrative around everything.

The self is a construct. It helps us survive in the world, but it doesn’t lead to peace.

We don’t want to completely forget the past. For better or worse, we are hardwired for memory, and it’s incredibly useful for helping us learn. Without memory, we literally couldn’t function.

But in modern times we can often end up in a painful loop. Replaying, second-guessing, trying to reconstruct a moment that isn’t here anymore, looking for the version of ourselves who “should” have said something different.

The past is a file cabinet. You can open it when there’s genuinely something useful inside. You don’t have to live inside the cabinet.

Most of our guilt and shame is trying to renegotiate a moment that no longer exists.

In the last 10–15 years we’ve all heard about the importance of “being present”. But I personally found it very hard to grasp what that meant in reality, or how it felt in reality.

I think presence is really about being fully available for whatever experience is taking place. On the advice of meditation teachers, it’s helpful to tell yourself that you’ve arrived at your experience.

Too often I was guilty of treating the majority of experiences as a “stepping stone”. Something that had to be completed, something to get through in order to tick an imaginary box and then move on to the next moment of my life.

The obvious problem with that logic is that every single experience then becomes a stepping stone to the next one.

We have a tendency to constantly lean into the future, like we’re constantly in a long queue where someone comes and throws us a chocolate bar every so often.

We’re told about the next step. School, university, career, family, retirement.

The problem with this mindset of constantly looking to the future or the past is that it really does impact our life in the present.

Picture the scene. You’re sitting at the top of a beautiful hill on a gorgeous spring day, overlooking a lake below. You can feel a gentle, cool breeze. You ponder the beauty of nature and why you don’t treat yourself to these moments of clarity more often.

And then, out of nowhere, you wonder if you locked the door before you left the house. The thought takes precedence over your awareness. Instead of being present with the beautiful reality in front of you, that niggling 5% chance you forgot the back door ruins the whole experience.

To make matters worse, you start thinking about how you’ve got friends coming over later for dinner, wondering if you have enough time to go home and start preparing food.

These are the everyday pervasive thoughts that almost everyone has. As we’ve already mentioned, you can’t stop those thoughts from coming into being.

But what you can do (and what a skilled mindfulness meditator will do) is choose not to engage with the thoughts that just aren’t worth your worrying about.

Sam Harris advises asking yourself this simple question. He literally means to look for the place inside you where this voice is coming from. Is it being generated by a random thought you had no control over? Is it being generated just on the basis of past experiences? Why do we need this to change?

Once I grasped the futility of it all, it really allowed me to sink into the experience without needing it to change.

So next time I’m with a tour group and the guide is unfathomably boring, I can just sink into it and appreciate it for what it is. After all, I’m here now and this is my reality for this moment.

What we pay attention to is literally our life. It applies to absolutely everyone.

If we sit for five hours a day looking at online forums and videos containing a political viewpoint that’s trying to bash another group of people, then that will become our life. That will be our reality.

But if we spend time working on meaningful projects, playing with our children, cooking meals with our loved ones and listening to uplifting music, then all of a sudden we take on a whole new reality.

The only difference between the first and second reality is what we consciously pay attention to.

With meditation training, we can not only learn to train our attention. We can also make more skilled decisions on how we spend our attention.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to clearly understand what you want to direct your attention towards. Very few adult human beings do this on a regular basis. Instead, we let habits and automaticity take over.

There’s a famous quote from Einstein I’m going to partially disagree with: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”

This automatically creates a vision of some wonderful profound end goal, like building an incredible business or solving the climate crisis.

I don’t think Einstein intended the quote to be interpreted this way, because he also said “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

Having some goals is good. But too often we associate goals purely with the outcome. In reality, we want to focus on the process and give our full attention to the process every step of the way, without desiring the moment to change.

Because what we really want is to be satisfied right now. Not at some point in the future, after we’ve achieved our goals.

Support is one of the four pillars of meditation. The acknowledgement that we have so much support in our lives.

We have the support of so many incredible things, just by virtue of being alive.

The Earth itself literally provides us with life. We are a kindred spirit of the Earth. We are absolutely meant to be here. No matter what your situation is, no matter what any creature’s situation is, everything that is on this Earth is quite literally supposed to be here.

We have the support of the sun, oxygen, water and the habitat created by the Earth.

Think about the warmth provided by the sun, and just how nourishing that is. To feel a comfortable temperature is such an important part of our existence. Without it we would die.

One of my favourite metaphors for life is the seasons. If you look around a garden in winter, it seems like many of the plants are completely decaying or dead. You’d think their best days are past, and even the most optimistic person would be hard pressed in that moment to see a path forward.

But then fast forward to the bloom in spring. The entire garden explodes to life. Leaves that were curled and brown turn into vibrant green and colour like a scene from a fairytale.

I don’t think we can consider the sheer beauty of the seasons enough. Every year a tree loses its leaves. But it still stands strong in the cold and the wind, waiting for better days. Better days eventually come.

Without the Earth’s atmosphere (oxygen) we wouldn’t have the air we breathe. We can only survive perhaps a minute or so without the fresh inflow of oxygen generated by our atmosphere. It’s kind of scary but also beautiful that we’re hanging on by virtue of this invisible thing entering our lungs and nourishing our body.

If we just stop and hold our breath for even ten seconds, it starts to feel very uncomfortable. Even that very act brings back this incredible feeling of gratitude for the natural environment around us. Which keeps us alive, but demands nothing in return.

I absolutely love the song by Nina Simone, “I Got Life”. Probably the most uplifting song I’ve ever heard once you see it through.

That song does a far better job than any philosopher could of explaining gratitude. By absolute default of being here and being conscious, we have all of these wonderful gifts at our disposal.

What would you rather have: your eyes and your mouth, or a boat load of money?

Even if we consider ourselves a very independent person, on the next level down we have the support of civilisation, language and infrastructure that took a very, very long time to reach this stage.

The lucky of us have governments who, though imperfect, feel like a complete utopia compared to a thousand years ago.

And then just consider the everyday people who make your life function smoothly, without you even really registering it.

• The bin men who clean up all the litter and make it disappear.

• The water company workers who make sure we have clean water pumping directly into our homes, twenty-four hours a day.

• The sewage workers who make sure our human waste gets filtered out invisibly (something that only became mainstream in the last 150 years).

• The construction workers who built all our homes and pieced together all the internal pipework and heating systems.

• The researchers figuring out how to extend our life expectancy, cure diseases and discover new medicines.

• The supermarkets that ship vegetables and foods in from across the world, so that even in the freezing depths of winter in the UK, we can taste a mango from South America or Africa.

So even if you think you’re independent, you have all this support flowing through the world. Not just from other people, but by the very nature of everything around you.

Buddhists acknowledge that suffering is universal.

Look into the wild, not only at humans. Animals hunt each other relentlessly and tear each other apart.

But look at how animals in the wild react and respond after difficulties. They don’t seem to get bogged down by thoughts and emotions and let it affect them afterwards. They get back on with life and forget what happened.

So what’s the difference with humans? We end up lingering on those emotions. If we get attacked by another human (physically or verbally), it causes us distress far beyond the event itself. We end up ruminating constantly. Instead of causing us physical or mental damage for a day, it ends up causing us damage for weeks, months or years.

Suffering is caused by attachment or desire.

We suffer if we’re too attached to life, people or things. When we lose any of those things, we feel pain.

But we can have serenity and equanimity within our suffering.

A fable: the man and his wife

Remaining painfully obsessed with a situation or the memory of a departed loved one, to the point of being paralysed by grief for months or years, is evidence not of affection, but of an attachment that does no good to others or to oneself.

Much better to feel grief and pain for some time, but eventually allow that to give way to the beautiful fact of that person’s existence, and rejoice in the fact that we knew them and shared some beautiful moments.

It adds a kind of beauty to your life, acknowledging that you had something so marvellous even though it’s lost. But knowing that beauty is real, you never lose that.

I used to spend so much time trying to arrange life in order to avoid negative feelings.

But now when negative feelings arrive, I bring the darkness to the conscious, to the surface. It’s the lesser-taken path, but it removes the fear of seeing things how they are.

To avoid being bored, lonely, sad, shameful, fearful. We’re averse to taking risks because we fear failure, or fear some negative feeling in our heart or body.

Now let’s be clear. We don’t have to go looking for some great emotional storm every day. That wouldn’t be nice.

But if negative feelings arise organically, we can just open up to them. How do they feel? Let’s practice just opening to fear and negative feelings.

We can sit on the banks watching the river, watching the arising emotions or thoughts going by, without any judgement.

Eventually, over time, you can even start intentionally welcoming and turning towards whatever arises. Including inner experiences we’d normally fight or try to escape.

If you’re feeling stressed, angry, anxious, nervous, guilty, sad, any common experience we would instinctively turn away from, you’ll really be amazed at what turning into that experience can be like. The important thing is to relax.

In the beginning you have to bring effort to learning a new instrument. Eventually we stop striving and it flows naturally.

So we take some effort to become effortless. And then totally relax, and be aware of being aware. We are trying to recognise what we already have.

Fear is quite possibly the oldest survival mechanism wired into the human brain.

When you think about the feeling of fear, your heart rate spikes, adrenaline comes into your body, your pupils dilate, you physically tense up and feel on edge.

Fear is very similar to anxiety, but it’s much more immediate and instinctual, and pushes your body to changes that just don’t feel very pleasant.

But without fear, there’s no courage or bravery. Fear is a sign that you care about something. It’s your body’s natural response to make you alert and nervous in case something bad happens.

All of the best athletes in the world acknowledge that fear is universal. The best athletes even see fear as an ally that can sharpen instincts and mental clarity.

The secret is to just be the discomfort and feel it. As opposed to running from it, analysing it, thinking about it. Just feel it, rest with it. Be friendly and curious with the pain. It can begin to transform itself.

When you live with a thought on top of everything, the pain is held tight. It can’t move. When the personal desire to have it your way goes away, the pain opens up. It begins to clear, it gets quiet.

Everything is relationship. Nothing exists in and of itself.

Once this essential idea has been understood and assimilated, our erroneous perception of our ego and our world gives way to an accurate view of the nature of things.

The Rose Meditation

Imagine a large sunflower that’s blossomed in spring. It’s beautiful and colourful, and it feels like nature’s creation just for your benefit.

Now imagine you’re a tiny insect sitting inside one of its petals, nibbling its nectar. What nourishment.

Now imagine yourself as a tiger standing before the sunflower. For him, it doesn’t matter if this is a flower or a bale of hay.

Now transport yourself into the heart of the sunflower, and imagine you’re an atom in there. You’re this tiny atom of energy in this huge Universe, amid particles passing through nearly empty space. The sunflower seems to not exist at all. You can’t even comprehend any aspect of a sunflower, its colour, its appearance.

Physicists say that the particles themselves aren’t even tangible solid objects. They are “waves of probability” and energy. Does this thing exist or not?

Recognising impermanence brings poignancy and freedom.

There will be a last time for everything.

The path to equanimity: calm and composed, undisturbed by pain and emotions.

Every fear or embarrassment you ever had has passed. This next one will also pass. Even “negative” or bad feelings have a very short half-life.

I had an amazingly well-rested and peaceful day on Monday. Then Tuesday felt chaotic and out of sorts, anxious. Here I am now on Wednesday feeling sanguine and good again. How funny and fleeting.

Look at human bodies and the ageing process. We all change and die.

We don’t judge the stars as being right or wrong. Things just are as they are.

Happiness is inward. Not dependent on external things.

Happiness is not dependent on inexhaustible outward desires. That is a hedonic treadmill which will never end.

It’s folly to think that if you continuously gain money and power and fame, there will suddenly come a day when your happiness meter reaches a critical point and you are in a blissful state of nirvana.

We seek pleasure constantly and try to avoid pain, until eventually pain reaches us. But we can’t run away from pain. We have to learn to live with it; it’s part of life. We have to move beyond it.

I can see that clearly. It’s an illusion.

Happiness has to come consciously and mindfully, in how we live in each moment and day.

When we take on the suffering of others and help them, it’s the greatest antidote in the world to our own pain.

As a matter of pure experience, compassion, love and kindness are absolutely things worth exploring and cultivating within life.

My experiment

I literally did an experiment myself. I took one day and decided to be as compassionate and kind to everyone as I possibly could, using the mental imagery of bringing people together. I wanted to see the impact on the world around me, and on myself.

Then I spent another day consciously trying to be combative, cynical, hateful, argumentative and divisive. Again, to see what the impact would be.

It might seem obvious, but the first path of compassion produced an infinitely better day. I connected with friends and people on an unimaginable level, and felt an indescribable sense of oneness with others.

On the negative day, it produced feelings of anger, frustration, and to some degree even a “victim” mentality. Like the world was out to get me, despite me clearly being the one antagonising and disrupting my own day.

So far we’ve discussed some profound and philosophical areas.

Now I want to discuss some more practical life concepts, and how we can actually achieve a little more peace and equanimity in daily life when confronted with the usual challenges of the modern 21st-century lifestyle.

All of the billion-dollar technology companies are vying for your attention, and you are the product. That’s definitely the most conspiracy-theory thing I’ve ever written down. I don’t think it in any way overemphasises what’s going on.

Let me start by saying there are huge advantages to modern technology. We now have unlimited knowledge sitting in our pocket, and we can communicate with anyone across the world at any time. Clearly profound benefits for humanity. Also: internet memes definitely make life more enjoyable.

I heard about a parenting theory recently called “unschooling”, where you let kids do what they want because they’ll naturally follow their most curious interests. But surely when you have thousands of incredibly smart adults at billion-dollar companies trying to steal away all of your daily attention, that challenge becomes almost impossible? I’m a fully-grown adult with my own business, and I struggle.

There are literally well-paid attention thieves who built systems to keep you spending time on platforms. Netflix, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Google, whatever. Some of them, like Tristan Harris, a former Googler, regrets his role in helping build these systems. Infinite scrolling, likes, and algorithms are all designed to keep you not only on a platform, but to light up all of your human systems like a Christmas tree.

That’s why it’s hard to go on YouTube and just watch one video. You get fed countless more videos with incredibly appealing titles and images that sound far more interesting than whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing in real life.

And now it even messes with your real life. When you see something really cool in real life, you’ve been mind-fucked into sharing this cool situation with your social media friends, meaning you kind of miss out on it.

I saw a middle-aged woman at a zoo the other day, taking a video of a video on a screen, during the intermission of a live animal show. Surely you’re never, ever watching that video back or sharing it with a single soul on Earth? If that’s making the cut of a reasonable excuse to pull out your phone and start filming, she must have an incredibly boring video album.

Here is the only answer I have to combat this everyday challenge. You just have to acknowledge that you’re being played like a Steinway piano by Mark Zuckerberg, and then ask yourself if you can make a better decision right now.

The news is designed to feed off your innate negativity bias, to capture your attention and keep you coming back for more.

Humans are wired to react more strongly to negative stimuli. It’s an evolutionary trait for survival. Strong research shows people experience higher physiological arousal (heart rate, skin conductance) when viewing negative news vs positive news.

But the news is also incredibly uncorrelated with real life most of the time. If something is in the news, it’s very unlikely to happen. That’s why it’s on the news.

In the US, at least 60% of Americans every year since 1993 believed crime was rising, even as violent crime fell by half. This misperception was partly fuelled by relentless crime coverage and editors’ desire to lead with shocking headlines.

Twenty-five years ago you would sound like a conspiracy theorist for saying that the media has an agenda to make the news as negative as possible. But now it’s a very obvious fact. Media outlets are primarily businesses, and the statistics don’t lie about negative news. The more negative, outrageous, shocking or anger-fuelled it is, the more people stick around and watch it. The business model is obvious.

It’s an even bigger issue in social media, where the content that surfaces is down to the algorithm. A large-scale MIT study (Vosoughi et al., 2018) found negative and false stories spread up to six times faster than true or positive ones. Freedom of speech on these platforms is certainly a good thing. But the algorithms are still engineered to share the stories with the greatest emotional response: fear, anger, outrage, shock.

Online, there is utterly no doubt as to why negative and sensationalist headlines dominate. They get more clicks. In A/B tests, headlines with negative words had significantly higher click-through rates (63% higher in one analysis) than those with positive wording.

Authors like Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling have documented how people massively overestimate problems and underestimate progress. Sustained negative news makes people think everything is getting worse, and crowds out all the positive things going on.

People say “the world is so much worse now than it was before”. But by almost every factual metric imaginable, that is not true.

Let’s get positive. What follows is a list of hard truths you can easily verify, showing the amazing progress of the human race that rarely makes headlines.

The most important skill of the modern era isn’t following the news cycle. It’s knowing how to see the signal in the noise, and recognising the magnificent trajectory of human progress beneath the daily chaos.

The universe doesn’t care about your narrative. It respects only what you build. And collectively, we’ve built something extraordinary.

Our threshold is certainly much lower now for what we consider a problem. Humans have a tendency to create problems and solve them. It’s part of our makeup.

Humans do still have serious problems, but many of them are in poor countries. The really sad truth is that there are still a huge amount of problems worldwide we should be focused on solving. But our priorities are often wrong, warped by social media. The fact is that civilisation in Western countries is better than it’s ever been, and ridiculously good compared to other parts of the world.

Take the malaria problem in Africa. Malaria is one of those problems people kind of know exists, but don’t know the scale of, because it isn’t jammed down their throats on social media every day.

In 2023, there were an estimated 597,000 malaria-related deaths worldwide (according to WHO), with approximately 76% of these fatalities occurring among children under five.

That means 475,000 kids under five killed by malaria, primarily in Africa. 1,200 children every single day.

To me, that actually sounds like a very worthwhile problem to solve. Something I’d be totally OK with hearing on the news every day if it meant efforts to solve that problem would be accelerated.

This is why I always try to put problems in perspective.

The present is his eternity, and delights him. He has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What lighter? It is the virtue of wise men, and the wisdom of saints.

In modern life, we can probably appreciate this sentiment.

The paradox is that we feel there are so many tasks and options available to us, and that we should be “making the most of the time”.

But from my own experience, the most satisfying days are when you really just focus and concentrate on one or two tasks.

Enjoy the mundane. Enjoy traffic, taxes, pain, long flights.

Golden time, despite having the appearance of inactivity, allows you to fully appreciate the present moment and develop the inner qualities that will permit you to better help others.

Being contemplative and improving yourself is better than being mindlessly busy every day.

Clever chatter and mindless entertainment don’t really fulfil us.

It’s OK to have a little distraction or mindless entertainment from time to time. But can we do a little introspection as well? Let’s cultivate an altruistic thought instead, and train our mind to work in a better way.

We look for so many distractions and forms of entertainment, and despise boredom.

But boredom and moments of peace offer beautiful clarity to see the moment as it is. The wind blowing, the birds chirping, your breath keeping you alive.

We have too many distractions and not enough contemplation. Often it’s only if we experience a huge life event that we actually take some moments to reflect on what we’re doing.

Actually sit and write down the moments you genuinely cherish the most in your life.

I love walks in nature, exercising, watching great TV with my wife, and playing games or conversing with close friends and family. It’s pretty much that simple.

All of the other stuff is pretty much bullshit.

We only have around 4,500 weeks, assuming we live to 86.

As of writing this, I’ve lived 1,770 weeks, giving me 2,807 weeks left assuming I live to a ripe old age.

I’m well past a third of my way through life already. And that includes what would traditionally be called the most “playful” years of a human adult.

We have this haunting feeling (or I do) that we should be getting more things done.

But is there some day of magic when everything comes together and you complete life and become happy? That day never arrives.

We don’t need to do this great big huge thing that changes the world, or leave a lasting legacy after we die. We know from stoicism that people’s names are forgotten very quickly. People just don’t care all that much about the dead.

Consider the mindset of the entrepreneur who wants to change the world. We’re adopting a definition of meaning that’s just too big for any human to undertake.

On the other hand, look at practicing Buddhists. They don’t strive to do anything particularly groundbreaking. But they live peacefully with compassion, and I’d argue that, on human terms, they’re doing better than pretty much everybody else.

Imagine a world where everyone acted like a Buddhist monk. We’d have a beautiful, compassionate society that focuses on positivity and good.

The more experience I gain, the more I believe that ordinary experiences are the most human things of all.

Connecting with your family over a meal, or painting a bedroom in your house. These things sound mundane. But in my experience, those very simple things are the most intrinsically rewarding of all.

Osho, in his book on creativity, talks about how “don’t be concerned about whether what you create has any market value; just create for the sheer joy of it.”

Not everything has to be an earth-shattering effort to change the world.

Perspective is absolutely everything.

If you look at the world through the lens of the news, it seems like this is an absolutely awful world to live in.

But if you look at the world through the lens of history, you feel like you won the lottery by dodging all of those centuries past. It’s the greatest time to be alive.

A few easy ways you can change your perspective on things:

• Consider the past history and difficulties of other people. Torture, starvation, lack of shelter, war. It sounds a bit grim, but it does help you feel grateful for your present situation.

• Consider the vastness of the Universe. Going back to cosmic insignificance therapy.

• Consider that absolutely everyone is destined to die. We really don’t have a huge amount of time to be here. We might as well try and look at the positives and stay on the optimistic side of most situations.

I was laying in bed recently with a rather awful cold. I felt a general sense of malaise and I desperately wanted the entire experience to pass.

But then I thought about the fact that I have this very nourishing breath and influx of air available to me every second. I felt the oxygen entering my lungs, and the sweet relief it provided my body each time.

The beautiful thing about acknowledging that I had a breath was that it will never leave me. The day it leaves me, I’ll die. And I won’t know anything more about it.

Water is life.

As I’ve gotten older, I do find it hilarious that we constantly complain about the rain in the UK.

OK, of course during summer when you want to spend time outside and walk slowly in minimal light clothing, rain can be annoying. But the rain is also why you live in a green country full of rivers and gardens and forests. It’s why anything is alive around you at all.

We can even meditate to test this out.

1. First, the gloomy version

   Think about a turbulent plane that’s loud and cramped. Feel all the fear and dread on one hand. The dismay and disregard to other passengers. Feel a sense of fear about the future and what’s in store for your arrival to your destination.

2. Now, the light version

   Consider yourself taking a light-hearted, optimistic view of things. Sense the marvel that you’re actually on a vehicle flying through the sky. Sense that the people around you and the staff are doing their best given the circumstances, and that you’re all in the situation together. Even if it’s uncomfortable, consider the absolute marvel of air travel and the sky outside. It’s wonderful.

The point is: there truly are two different ways of looking at every scenario.

Be like the calm, wise owl. Not fervent and frustrated, like a mad dog.

Exercise is nature’s way of clearing stress.

If you could bottle up and sell the feeling you get from a moderate cardio exercise, it would be the best-selling product of all time. You don’t need to take my word for it. Just write down in a note on your phone exactly how you feel after you finish some exercise you enjoy doing.

It’s the glorious feeling of being one with the body, doing what it was born to do.

I have a trick. If I’m feeling in an afternoon rut and I still haven’t exercised that day, even if I’m feeling tired or groggy, I’ll force myself to go to the gym. Every single time, I come out of there feeling energised and clear-minded.

There is such a thing as overtraining and burning out. My own key is to just exercise until you feel amazing, and then for a little while (10–15 minutes) longer.

We can find flow in ironing, doing taxes, whatever mundane task.

Approach things with a curiosity of life. We have our bodies and minds in working condition only for so long. Let’s try to curate an optimistic outlook on any task we’re doing.

An open mind with new eyes

• Happiness is seeing the same thing with different eyes.

• Get off the autopilot, machine-learning treadmill of the mind.

• There’s beauty in the mundane.

• Doing something with an open mind, totally engaged, unlocks new pathways. Your state of mind when doing something is everything.

• You can pay taxes with an open mind. You can even have a confrontation with an open mind.

The joy of missing out is a real thing.