For 7 years I thought meditation meant clearing my mind.

Then I went to a Buddhist monastery to study with Sokuzan, a Zen master.

He set me straight, pulling no punches: When I explained my practice, he looked at me and said: "You're very intelligent."

I smiled.

"It's not a compliment," he added. "It'll get in your way here."

He was right...

The pressure of leadership is killing you.

CEOs die 1.5 years younger than the average person.

The relentless pursuit of success can destroy you - mentally and physically.

But there's a hidden protocol that can save your life and your business: 🧵 Let that sink in.

The relentless pressure of leadership doesn't just burn through bank accounts and relationships.

It burns through lives.

He's challenging EVERYTHING you know about success.

Meet the anti-billionaire blacksmith:

• Took acid
• Slept in a tent & worked in a tin shed
• Built his company to $3B on his own terms

The Patagonia experiment that beat the system at its own game:🧵
Most billionaires follow a familiar script:
Ivy League education, ruthless ambition, corner offices and private jets.

But Chouinard chose differently.
The French-Canadian immigrant was obsessed with climbing, not wealth.

But his incredible journey began with a problem:

Being too nice will kill you.

Dr. Gabor Maté has gone viral for exposing this CRAZY truth.

Your body starts failing. Your relationships suffer. Your career crumbles.

Here’s his proven 5-step protocol to save your life:🧵
Dr. Maté differentiates between genuine kindness and chronic people-pleasing.

One flows from authentic care. The other from fear and self-abandonment.

And that second type?

It's literally killing people...

Your anxiety isn't a mental disorder.
It's an evolutionary superpower in disguise.

Fighting it causes harm.

But it can become your secret weapon for success.
Here's what most experts never teach: 🧵
What if everything you've been told about anxiety is wrong?

It isn't your enemy; how you interact with anxiety will determine your success more than fundraising, product strategy, or operations.

Yet we train entrepreneurs on everything except handling anxiety skilfully.

Why?

Believing you're smart is holding you back.

This Stanford psychologist spent 30+ years proving it.

She uncovered the mindset illusion that silently sabotages success.

Once it clicks, you can’t unlearn it.

And it will change how you think about winning - forever: 🧵 For decades, Dweck studied why some people thrive while others crumble under pressure.

Her discovery transformed how I approach leadership:

It's not your abilities that determine success.

It's how you think about them that matters:

This man is revolutionizing how we age.

First, he mentored Airbnb's young founders to billions.

Now, he's revealing why your brain actually improves after 45.

His secret blueprint for turning age into your greatest asset:🧵
Meet Chip Conley, who spent 24 years building Joie de Vivre into America's second-largest boutique hotel company.

By traditional standards, he'd "made it."

But at 52, life threw him an unexpected curve...

Your phone is making you mediocre.

It's the largest mind control experiment ever created, engineered by addiction experts.

It's not your fault. But it's become your problem.

Here's how to get your brain back: The mind is like a garden - it grows whatever you plant in it.

When you feed it endless scrolling and dopamine hits, you get scattered thinking and anxiety.

When you cultivate space for reflection, you get clarity and insight.

Here's what's actually happening in your brain:

Brain scans show why your opinions make people get defensive right away.

A hospital team solved 83% of their problems in just two meetings with one method.

Tech companies using it doubled their innovation while competitors fell behind.

The communication secret that changes everything: The secret is speaking inarguably.

When someone says "You don't respect my time," the brain's threat response activates.

Instead: "You arrived 15 minutes late, and I told myself a story that you didn't respect my time."

One triggers defensiveness. The other maintains connection.

Djokovic's mind is 0.3 seconds faster than competitors.

That's 2.1 extra feet of court coverage on every shot.

It's not genetics. It's a trainable mental framework ANYONE can learn.

Here's how he engineered the most resilient mind in sports history: Most think athletic performance is just physical ability.

They're wrong.

At the highest levels, the differentiator isn't physical.

It's psychological.

Few understand why Djokovic's mind is different...

A $1.2 billion industry was born from Michael Jordan's "Flu Game."

While severely sick, he scored 38 points in the 1997 NBA Finals.

Phil Jackson used an ancient Eastern practice that Google and Intel now require.

The secret technique transformed sports and corporate America: June 11, 1997.

Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

Michael Jordan can barely stand upright, battling severe food poisoning.

The series is tied 2-2. This moment will define legacies.

But what happened next would change sports psychology forever:

Oracle's youngest VP chose wisdom over wealth.

Silicon Valley called him insane.

At 26, he walked away from everything he'd built.

Here's the spiritual secret that built Salesforce into a $200B giant: At 23, Benioff joined Oracle and became their youngest VP at 26.

He had everything society said would make him happy.

But something was missing. A deep emptiness gnawed at him.

I know that void - it's what made me walk away from my company after 15 years:

This therapist discovered his method in America's most dangerous prison.

Not through traditional therapy or medication.

But through a method so powerful, Hollywood's elite fought to learn it.

Here's the prison secret that's transforming minds in minutes:
His journey began in an unlikely place: Rikers Island prison.

As a young psychiatrist in the 1970s, Stutz worked with inmates facing severe mental health challenges.

He saw that traditional therapy's passive, past-focused approach wasn't working. These men needed immediate, practical tools.

But something unexpected was about to happen...

Meet Google's mindfulness pioneer:

He turned meditation into a corporate revolution.

His program reached 100,000 people across 150 cities.

But what he discovered about inner peace challenged everything: In 2000, Chade-Meng Tan joined Google as employee #107.

But he wasn't your typical engineer.

He discovered that mindfulness could transform depression into inner peace.

This revelation would reshape not just his life, but the future of corporate culture.

But here's where his journey takes an unexpected turn:

Kobe Bryant's biggest secret wasn't about basketball:

It was a 10-minute morning practice he never skipped.

As I sit here 5 weeks post-Achilles surgery, his story hits differently.

Here's the practice that changed everything: Most know about Kobe's legendary 4 AM workouts.

He'd train from 4 AM to 6 AM, before his competitors even started their day.

But what most don't know is the mental practice that preceded all of it.

A practice I'm learning to appreciate more than ever during my own recovery:

In 2017, Tiger Woods hit rock bottom.

His career was over. He could barely walk. His personal life was in shambles.

Until ONE ancient practice helped him find his way back.

Here's what the world never saw: 🧵 Since his first back surgery in 2014, he'd played just 19 worldwide events.

One top-10 finish. Seven missed cuts. Three withdrawals.

By April 2017, he underwent his fourth back surgery - a spinal fusion.

But his darkest moment was yet to come...

One way I remind myself of what I want is I send myself quotes.

Below is my favorite. I send myself this quote every month, to help me remember the life I want to live. 👣

Anyone else do this? What quotes are you sending yourself? I want to know! "The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.

I've raised $20m+ in VC.

I won what was the largest pitch competition in the world.

I've helped companies worth over $2bn raise capital, and run great board meetings.

In all that, one piece of presentation advice stands out above the rest: TL/DR: "Don't present excel-level data, if you want powerpoint-level questions."

That's it. That's the advice.

Want the whole messy ass story on how I learned this the hard way?

Here goes:

I raised VC 5x and grew a 100+ employee, market leading company.

And then I got fired from that company.

If I were talking to myself 10 years ago, here's what I'd say, to spare me some hard ass lessons. INVESTORS:
Admit that I don't know the future.

Obvious, maybe. But investors expect you to pretend to be certain.

Don't. Instead, be open about risk, even those you can't solve. Then show your work on why you're confident anyway.

More here:
leadinsideout.io/newsletter/how…

I’ve been feeling this weird sense of impending doom for the past while. Maybe a few months, maybe longer. I didn’t know what it was. I figured the economy, or my existential not-enoughness, or or or.

And today I figured it out. The feeling was one like “something bad is going to happen, and I need to somehow do something to change things or else.” Like it’s all up to me to do something unclear to solve an unclear problem, and if I don’t, the world will end or other such unpleasantness.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

You know that feeling when you're in a meeting and someone asks you a question and you have no idea how to answer it so you just sit there quietly hoping that someone else will jump in? Or when you're about to present your work and your heart is pounding so hard you're sure everyone can hear it and you just want to run out of the room?