A twenty-two-year-old reader messaged me yesterday morning.
My mind is the biggest thing in my way. Otherwise the opportunity is right there. I just need to focus and shut down the negative thoughts.
He is just getting going, and is a software developer, recent comp sci grad from U BC. About the only thing going against him is being twenty-two and not yet having had time for the work to compound. Meditation for founders is the thread he wants to pull on, the same thread I have been pulling on for thirty months, since the last day of my Vipassana retreat in November 2023.
About a month ago he reached out asking if I would consider mentoring him. About ten years ago I tried being a paid coach. I took on a few clients who'd approached me, reluctantly went into the sessions, tested concepts, gave each one a plan. Nearly every one of them agreed on a monthly call at a rate that would keep my attention, signed up, and then would not do the things they had agreed to do. I get that being a coach is part accountability. After the third or fourth person sat across from me and committed to a thing on the call and then did not do the thing, I lost the patience for it. I stopped taking paid coaching clients and promised myself I would not do it again.
So I had ten years of refusing other people asking for paid advice. Then this person asked about mentoring, which is a different conversation. Mentoring sounds like something I could do, slightly bending my rule to not take these types of tasks. For myself, I have been on the lookout for a good mentor for ages and I have not really found one. My son Somers is on the same lookout in the commodities trading space, and a friend of mine in that world has agreed to gently guide him on the moves to make to get into the space. I am so grateful for that. I am a big believer in karma. So sure, let us see how this plays out.
I took the call. Almost immediately I could see this guy was a superstar in his own right. He is also one of the few followers I have on Substack and he had applied for the Vipassana retreat offer I posted about a month ago. The grant programme runs through the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund, aimed at under-resourced young people anywhere in the world. Since I put up the offer, not a single person has taken me up on it, which is fine. I had taken his application with a bit of side-eye. This guy is making money. He does not need rescuing. If he were serious about Vipassana he could make it happen himself, because the retreats are free, and a uni grad from Vancouver is not the standard profile we wrote the grant for.
Then yesterday morning, this came in.
My mind is the biggest thing in my way. Otherwise the opportunity is right there. I just need to focus and shut down the negative thoughts.
The journaling helped a bit. The thoughts don't go away no matter how hard I try.
I'm not going to give up. I want to build a mind that can handle all this. Hardest thing I'm doing right now.
I wrote back: Vipassana, if you applied, I will run it past the selection committee. I would love to change someone's life through this. You will have a tool to combat these thoughts for the rest of your life.
He came back fast.
I will. I must. My head keeps getting in my way and I know I have way more potential than this. I have to blast past my own limits. I know I can hit six figures a month.
I sent: I can wake up at 4am because my mind is racing, confidence low, then meditate for forty minutes and I am calm and confidence is back even stronger.
Ok f it, I'll try. Vipassana.
Hang on, I told him. Let me check the application process.
6 figures a month? This is something that I myself am trying for but in a year. I don't expect that to come next month.
The recommendation about the Vipassana was real. I can wake up with my head on fire, thoughts racing, confidence down, doubts, imposter syndrome, the full set. I also know I have a massive tool at my disposal. I sit up, right in my bed. Two in the morning, four in the morning, before the Patrouille des Glaciers, before a big call. Most of the time I still try to stretch the meditation to sixty minutes. At this point, I've trained myself to recognise that when my limbs get to a certain point of soreness my time is probably up. Not the girdle of liquid fire type pain I spoke about in my Vipassana series, the band of burning that wraps the hip and the groin in a Day 4 long sit. That one you do not get out of by stretching. You sit with it, observe it, watch it intensify, watch it pass. Anicca, impermanence, is the only technique on offer.
My meditations nearly always start the same way. Racing thoughts, images, monkey mind on five cups of coffee. I picture the level meters on a mixing board. When the mind is on fire, the meters are pinned in the red, clipping, distortion, no clarity, too much bass, all noise. I let the thoughts flash, ugly, crazy, the usual run. We have all been there and we all know what that feels like. Frankly, it's not fun, and it keeps us up a night. When I feel these, immediately, I know what needs to be done.
Then I try to separate them. One trick I like: I picture a yellow leaf floating down a river or stream. For some reason the leaf is always a yellow heart-shaped aspen, the kind that catches light through a stand of trees in the autumn. The river, is not a violent rushing torrent, the kind of snow-melt run-off that tears through the Swiss Alps in May. A gentle, clear stream, and that one leaf flowing down it. I imagine each of my thoughts loaded onto the leaf, floating away. It works, and it is really just a matter of time before I can step back and watch the thoughts float by without grabbing onto them. That alone has a hugely calming effect.
The mixing board meters have come down through the red into the yellow, with the occasional spike when the leaf gets caught and a thought pulls me back in. Once I notice that I am trying to control them, I let go again, and the levels drop back into the high greens. The act of regonising that my thoughts and brain have merged, is enough to separate them. As the meditation progresses, usually after at least thirty minutes, the meters are sitting low in the green, barely moving. Peace. Silence. A returned calmness which I now refer to as my ground zero, a thing I noticed for the first time on the last day of my Vipassana retreat in November 2023.
Ground zero has become one of the strongest tools I have. For the hardest moments of grief. For the stress of starting a fresh business on a whim. For the pull, when the funds start running thin, to dust off the CV and go look for a job. No matter what is going on, I can find ground zero. Once I am there, the confidence comes back. Of course I can do this. In fact, this is in the bag. All I need to do is slow down, trust the process, and follow the plan.
This is what I want to pass on to my young padawan. (For the non-Star Wars folks, padawan is the Star Wars term for a Jedi apprentice. The kid who hangs around the master, watches, and learns the moves before they earn the lightsaber.) If this obviously talented twenty-two-year-old is serious about the retreat, I am going to pitch the selection committee on why he should be allowed to go, despite not being the standard profile we built the grant around. He is a uni grad from Vancouver, not a South African aspiring adventure grantee growing up in a township wracked by gun violence and extreme poverty. If he applied, and he wants to go, and he will actually go, he deserves his case heard.
I need to check the form to see if it broke somewhere along the way, fix it, and ask him to apply again. That is another gauge to test his resolve. If he commits to filling it out a second time, I think that is also useful feedback on the grant idea itself. I guarantee a Vipassana will change things for him.
Will it solve all his problems? Absolutely not.
Will it give him a tool he can call back on whenever he wants?
I am betting yes.
That is a gift I would be happy to help sponsor. Time to go check that form.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects 1 (will book once closed) | Employees: me
Day 39 of 365.