How Meditation Helped Me Get Better at Learning

Learning how to learn is my most important skill.

You see that black mirror over there?

It’s talking to you. It’s calling your name. They’re calling your name.

I’m talking, of course, about push notifications on our phones.

The push notification seemed like a good invention at the time, and many in the tech industry still adore it. The utility for the push notification makes sense. Since texting, for example, is instant communication, ideally, a user (us) would want to get notified right away.

Push notifications have contributed to more stress and less joy for me. They are addictive and intoxicating: I feel rewarded for receiving a push notification (someone cares about me!) and that reward in excess has me endlessly returning to check for more.

To diminish this stress, I started to not look at my phone when I immediately get up. And more importantly, I started applying meditation in my daily life.

I’ve been experimenting with meditation over the weekend, and so far it’s working very well. On Saturday I was in the pool, and when I was in the pool I was listening to Spotify’s radio for Street Spirit. I was by myself roaming around the pool. Sometimes my eyes were opened, sometimes my eyes were closed. The pool, being in a wavy-oval shape, made me more creative. Instead of swimming to only one side or the other, there were options all around me. The wavy-oval pool is boundless! Sometimes I’m on the upper left side gazing at a plant, sometimes I’m floating in the middle staring at the sky.

Today when I was in the pool I went to the deep end, put my arms out on the ground, laid my forehead on the burning floor, and closed my eyes while listening to The Bends. What a euphoric experience. I was positioned that way a few times, at least two songs in each duration.

My mother has been sending me a lot of podcasts and articles on meditation. I try my best to see what she sends me, and I love it when she sends me it. Whenever someone sends me content that they think I might like, I view it as a gift that must be appreciated. In that moment of listening to this podcast or seeing that art, I was important enough to my mom where she thought “oh, I think Noah will like this! Send!” She is one of the only people in the world who randomly sends me content every single day.

Although I’m unable to consume everything she sends me, I did get the message: “Noah, you need to fucking relax.”

I’m the type of person who prefers to learn on the go. I mentioned this a few days ago in an essay on learning guitar. When I learn as I go, I feel a more intimate connection with the activity at hand. That includes writing. My writing is experimental — I’ve written anything from personal essays to satires to musician interviews to poetry to satirical poetry. It’s not that I view myself as “a poet” or “a satirist” in my broader identity, I view myself as a writer that likes to try a lot. Trying a lot has enabled me to identify my favorite elements in all of my writing and incorporate them into future writing. It’s like machine learning, but for humans!

I applied this method of learning to meditate. The fact that someone is telling me how to meditate makes me uneasy (sorry, meditation podcasts, and Mom!). Someone telling me what to do and when to do it is the last thing I need to relax. How is that meditation? Following instructions is more work!

In the pool, aimlessly roaming and floating while listening to Radiohead has given me the mental space to be.

That’s something I think we’re missing in our digital world: being.

When I wake up and see push notifications my mind is already cluttered. I stopped doing that on Saturday, Sunday, and today and I already feel ten million times better. I feel more relaxed. I’m not stressed about figuring out when to respond to someone’s text or comment on a Medium article. I started to only look at my notifications when I know for a fact that I’m going to respond within that moment. It’s a more efficient, and relieving, way of doing things.

Finding myself in meditation reminded me of another lesson: what works for someone else may not work for you.

The world operates on the opposite. At university, we’re taught to analyze all examples except for ourselves. We’re never encouraged to apply anything new that we discovered.

In my life, I’ve been subtly taught that it’s better to learn from the mistakes of others than your own mistakes. I think this line of thinking can be flawed. When you approach it in a nuanced way, it makes sense.

Yet a lot of the time, I find that many — including myself — are too afraid to try something new on their own. When I was trying to build my first startup in college, the advice I normally got was to network with other startup founders and investors. This is solid advice, but it’s definitely not enough to know what you’re doing. That’s because much of this networking came in the form of Meetup events and conferences, where a lot of the same stuff that I learned in books was being rehashed over and over and over again.

It’s common for founders to feel like they have to endlessly network to make it big— yet that’s exhausting. What’s really most important in a startup is building, and knowing the customer. What does your customer need that they or you don’t know about? How can you build something that would fulfill that need?

The truth is you won’t know the answers to these questions until you find the answers yourself. And finding the answers takes a lot of work. To even ask the questions, you need to get in contact with potential customers. You need to maintain relationships with them. You need to figure out how to build your thing. When you finally built your thing, you need to iterate it with constant feedback from the customer to fully serve their need.

And that’s just the beginning: now that you have a thing that works, you need to identify how many people would value your thing. That’s hella hard to find. You have to consider geography, online channels where your customers exist, etc. You also have to ask yourself how your current and future customers can create new ones for you (organic growth via word of mouth). Sometimes you can do that with existing networks. Other times you have to be the creator of that network.

What Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates did for their businesses will probably not work for yours. It’s just a fact. Many don’t realize it, but even Apple and Microsoft were at one point two very different companies. Apple was known for its hardware, Microsoft was known for its software (hence “soft” in its name). What worked for Apple in the Eighties may not have applied to Microsoft in the Eighties.

I felt like I learned more about business from doing the two following things: reading as much as possible on the stories of other founders from idea inception to company success; and applying ideas with those things in mind.

I’m still able to see the similarities between the situations of other founders and my own, in addition to specific scenarios. I find this to be a more rational approach to learning.

What I see in the real world, however, is the opposite of this: an article saying you must do this marketing tactic, an article telling you to take that approach to XYZ.

Our style of learning in the real world is patronizing, and it shouldn’t be called learning at all.

You won’t know until you try. I won’t know how you’ll react to my writing until I publish it. Even if it’s a bad reaction, at least I got my answer.

You can learn from the mistakes of others. But that knowledge comes way more in handy when you’re also learning from the mistakes you make yourself.

Now let’s get back to meditation. Did someone tell you to start meditation? Probably, it’s a buzzy topic. Did you try whatever they sent you? Maybe. And did it drastically change your life?

I don’t know, that’s for you to answer.

Not every method is going to work on everyone. Maybe you don’t like Radiohead, and maybe you despise being in the pool. There are people who like being in the pool. There are people who don’t like being in the pool.

I’m a person who likes being in the pool. And I think Thom Yorke is a genius. I didn’t need a podcast to tell me that.

❤ — Noah

P.S. If you liked my story, here are some of my favorite personal essays I’ve written!