Improving my mental health

I know some people don't actually like to talk about imposter syndrome. They see it more as a signal of change when you're feeling a bit unconfident or like you don't fit, or you are questioning yourself. It is a sign of change and that you're actually going through a growth period, and maybe understanding and recognize those moments of unconfidence or imposter syndrome as actually out of the end of that will come something positive.

Usually you associate therapy or psychoanalytics when you have something clinical to tackle, like when you have some issue to tackle. And that's usually when people go to therapy, like when they have something very pressing.

But I think everyone should do that because the ultimate journey that you do is understanding yourself. And what's pretty amazing is there is a lot of depth, a lot of meaning in the minor things we do. So the way I worked a lot came back to proving to other people: working or being good in engineering became a way for me to get accepted. And that was absolutely not conscious.

[Meditation is] actually incredibly important to my work. And when it has been most fruitful for me was when I did a 60 day 60 hour meditation challenge. I picked this up from Naval Ravikant who is an angel investor and very successful entrepreneur.

He espouses this ‘no-effort meditation’. And this really appealed to me because sometimes meditation for me can become a toxic productivity thing where I feel like, ‘Oh, I'm not doing it right,’ ‘Oh, I've got to keep my streak up.’ Things like that.

He espouses you just sit there with your eyes closed, but you have to do it for 60 minutes and let your thoughts flow, and you don't have any judgments about those thoughts and you're not trying to not think about something, you're not trying to think about something. And something really amazing happens right around the half hour mark. And it just changes, like this everlasting gobstopper. One of the things I discovered was that by creating that time where I'm doing nothing, those crazy ideas that I would normally just forget about, or gloss over, or not pursue, those started to take a bigger presence in my mind, to where I might have had the idea of, ‘Maybe I should write a book about Zettelkasten… No, no, that would never work because that's just too obscure. Nobody would really care about that. And I've got other things I want to do.’

When I meditated for 60 hours in 60 days, I started thinking about that more and more, and then it became that much more important where I decided, ‘Okay, I will write this book about Digital Zettelkasten.’ And it turned out to be this surprise hit book for me, where it was an 80 page book that shares this methodology that I had struggled to learn myself. And immediately was selling quite a few books. I've sold foreign rights deals for it.

And so creating that space is incredibly important. I think that's what's useful for meditation, is if you are to turn it into a productivity thing, which I know is in some ways a bastardization, or a perversion of what meditation is supposed to be about, it actually is quite productive, because it helps those ideas take presence, and being productive these days isn't so much about ‘How quickly can I do this? How many of these can I produce?’ It's more about ‘What's the quality of this idea?’

I think if you come to therapy, you've already made some choices. You've made a choice that says something like, "Life's difficult and it's hard and I'm in pain, but I'm going to do something about it and I'm going to work at it and I'm not going to give up." And that in itself is really inspiring. It's very, very cool. It certainly fulfilled my expectation. I thought working in mental health, working in therapy, working in a helping kind of field, you're going to encounter the positive side of life and I have, hence I'm happier.

At Spill as well, you're just... I don't know. You're just constantly... you see the best of humanity. I used to be more cynical about things. And for example, one of the things that really struck me working at Spill is that working with businesses to offer mental health support, and I was thinking, "Oh, there's got to be a business interest why these people buy Spill. Surely, what's the economic incentive or something?" And after dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews, it began to dawn on me. It's like, "Actually, people just care." I think they genuinely just want to help people. And yeah. I think this line of work has certainly exposed me to a positive side of humanity.