Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs died today.

He was one of the great visionaries of our time.  During his Stanford commencement speech, he reveals the reason why: he's focused on his own death.  Even from before he was diagnosed with cancer.

The notion of our death is one that we never think of.  Yes, we know it intellectually, but it's never in the forefront of our minds.  After all, it is likely many years away, and quite unpleasant.  But looking at our death can bring clarity. We have a limited lifespan, and time is precious.

Seneca wrote:

... you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.  What many can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?

Steve Jobs was such a man.

Ask yourself if you are also ready to stare death in the face and make the most of your time.  Starting now.

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed.

Specific meditation practice

I've been doing meditation on and off for about half a year now.  More off than on, but I've done at least a month of 10-minute daily meditation.  I think it had a beneficial effect of calmness which seems to be wearing off after many months of doing almost no meditation.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see Kamal Sarma, who gave a talk on leadership.  His talk was better than I thought, and actually had some nice insights about leadership.  Before the talk, I picked up Kamal's book, Mental Resilience, and I've read through it since then.  Overall, the book was an excellent introduction to meditation that gives just the right amount of information.  More importantly, it has a specific recommended regimen for meditation practice, along with a CD.  It's not the perfect meditation book; I'm still looking for a book on meditation that has no bullshit at all, and I'm afraid that even Kamal's book has some bullshit, but it's less than most.  I can live with it.  

That's specifically what I'll be doing for this month.  This is day 2.  I've been meditating at work, which has been challenging.  Twice, people walked in on me meditating in an empty conference room today, which threw me off a bit.  I need to find somewhere a little more out of the way.

Action for October

The Stoic philosophers could not be clearer: Stoicism is not a philosophy for analysis and debating.  It's a philosophy to be applied to life.

Partly, Stoicism is an outlook, a consistent view on life that should affect the way we respond to events, and the way we view our lives. In that sense, Stoicism is a passive philosophy.  Stoicism does have an active component, though.  Besides just waiting for events to come to you, you have to prepare.  There are things we need to do in order to keep us on a good path.

It is my intention to explore these active techniques.  So far, I haven't made a serious effort, since I'm primarily interested in Stoicism, and I do not self-identify as a Stoic.  But I think Stoicism is interesting enough to test practically, not just intellectually.

Now is the start of October, and I'd like to make a change for the next month.  I plan to meditate at least 20 minutes each day.  I know meditation is not classically Stoic, but the practice seems to align pretty well with Stoic thought, as I've written about before.  Perhaps next month I'll do a more traditionally Stoic activity such as nightly reviews, or negative visualization.

I'll write more about my meditation practice in the next entry, and I hope by the end of the month I'll have something interesting to report about the effects of meditation.