230 Minutes of Meditation Down, 670 to Go
photo credit: AlicePopkorn
Last week I posted on my new challenge for the month of April: logging 900 minutes of meditation. I thought I’d share my progress so far and also highlight a few of the great pieces of advice I received from readers.
Progress
230/900 (7 days * 30 + 20 mins this morning)
Scheduling
Doing 20 minutes in the morning and 10 before bed has worked pretty well so far. I try to get out of bed immediately upon waking and sit. Correct meditation posture involves keeping your back straight, which is great for keeping you awake when you might be a little sleepy
The Simply Being App
I am definitely enjoying the Simply Being app. Even though I think the 10 and 20 minutes of “meditation reminders” is the same every time, the instructors tone, comments and timing are just what I need to stay on track with the meditation.
Getting a Partner
right after I posted about my challenge, my friend and fellow entrepreneur Scott Allison (Teamly) hit me up about partnering for accountability. It turned out he was trying get into meditation as well. We’ve been able to kee
Challenges
Probably the biggest challenge I’ve run into is that sitting up straight for 20 minutes gets my back pretty tired. The last 5 minutes of my meditations are often a big of a struggle dealing with the back soreness. Additionally, I often get the seeds of (what I think are) really great ideas during my meditation and it’s tough to brush them away and stay in the moment – it’s something I’ll keep working on.
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How to Make the Time to Do it All (guest post)
Photo credit: Ricksflicks
It’s cliche, but I have come to appreciate the adage “Time is the great equalizer – everyone has the same amount.”
I used to beat myself up for not doing as much as the incredible people around me; people who could accomplish so much more than I seem to be able to. I would hear about their accomplishments and instead of being inspired, I would feel overwhelmed.
I talked about this on a 30 mile bike ride commute into work with a buddy of mine a few years ago. We would do this once a week at daybreak, catching the sunrise over the lake. The ride took 2 hours, plus shower and chocolate milk rehydration put me at my desk by 9am. I didn’t feel like I could balance training for a 300 mile bike ride (STP, a 1 or 2 day Seattle to Portland ride) with my tennis team upcoming season.
He said: “Lil, think about everything you are doing right now. List it out.”
So I did. And I felt pretty accomplished, actually. Because when I added everything up, I felt like I wasn’t as far off from those people I was feeling jealous of.
Thought Exercise #1:
When you feel like you’re not doing enough, consciously list out everything that is on your plate.
Then he said: “Now, if you want to ride 300 miles in a day, you’re going to have to train for at least 2 months ahead of time. That means riding every week 3-4 times to and from work, the long way. Plus a long ride every weekend, working up from 50 to 100 miles.”
“But I can’t ride that much and play tennis, I won’t have enough daylight left. And my legs will be worn out”
“That’s right, Lil. You have to choose. You can’t keep adding things to your list. If you want to do this, you definitely can. But you have to drop something else. What would you drop?”
Thought Exercise #2:
Be honest with your time. If you pick up a new activity or are working towards a new goal, evaluate how much time it will really require to do well and think about what existing activities will be affected by it.
And here’s the important part, at least for me. When I choose my activity, I actively stop doing something else. I don’t try to keep a hold on it just a little, just on weekends, just once a month. If I pick something new up, I have to commit to the new thing whole-heartedly or else it won’t really be fulfilling, worth-while, or done well.
So that helps me – it helps me say no to new random hobbies (Trapeze? Glass-blowing?). It helps me feel good about what I am doing (Look at me! I do all this stuff!). And it helps me really take on new activities without feeling like I’m going to fail because I know I’ve made the time for it.
Oh and by the way: I didn’t do the 300 mile ride. Instead I fully committed to my local tennis team season. We ended the season first in the division, won our local championship, and traveled to Portland to compete in the regional championship. So I guess I made it to Portland after all.
After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2007, Lilia Gutnik (liliagutnik.com) moved to the Pacific Northwest where she learned how to ride her bike around Lake Washington with the encouragement of her friend Matthew Pearlson. Her commute to work is now to the Bing offices, where she is a technical product manager on the monetization team. In her spare time, she still plays competitive tennis, travels to far-off countries, tells stories, and occasionally gets overwhelmed by the number of things she wants to do but doesn’t have time for.
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900 Minutes of Meditation (and a request for advice!)
Photo Credit: Beni Ishaque Luthor. via Compfight
The conundrum
One habit I’ve been wanting to add into my life is meditation. Recent research in mindfulness meditation indicates that regular practice “increases the brain’s gray in regions closely associated with memory, learning, and emotional regulation” (Greatist). Great stuff right?
I’ve had an ongoing battle with meditating since high school, when I was first introduced to it as a technique for increasing my focus and improving my ability to perform in clutch situations on pommel horse.
In college, I used an iPhone app called Habits and meditated 8 minutes in the morning and evening everyday (90% of the time) for about 6 months. Then I got some major knee surgery, throwing off my schedule and never got back in the groove of things.
The enlightenment
I recently was having a conversation with entrepreneur who is also a dedicated meditator and relayed my frustration for 1) losing this habit I had struggled to maintain for 6 months and 2) not feeling like I was getting much out of the meditation and thus having low motivation to continue my practice.
What he told me that his medication practice is one of the most important things he has in life (strong words!) and that it takes a deeper investment of time to see the returns. The longer the blocks and the more total time spent on cushion the bigger the gains.
The challenge
So I’m dedicating April 2012 to be the month where I log 900 minutes of meditation. Here are the details:
- 900 total minutes of cushion sitting
- shooting for 30 minutes a day – 20 mins in the morning, 10 mins at night
- (incidentally, this amount of meditation is right inline with that meditation study)
- using guided meditation via the Simply Being meditation app
- weekly updates on this blog about my progress
The request
So my request to you, dear reader, is to share with me your best piece of actionable advice on building a habit, based on your own experience (or the experience of someone you know well). Please share your comment below – I will repost the best ones in a follow-up blog post on building habits!
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Why We Started Ridejoy
I’ve been messing around with a site called Askolo, which allows you to ask questions of smart, interesting people like Alexis Ohanian (cofounder of Reddit), Mark Bao (creator of threewords.me) and Paul Graham (Y Combinator founder). It’s like the structure of Formspring with the content quality of Quora.
Here’s a question I was asked and then answered:
Q: What was your team’s inspiration for starting Ridejoy?
A: I’ll tell you a bit about our background because it shows what we’re trying to do with Ridejoy:
I met Kalvin in college while working on a nonprofit and later became roommates in San Francisco. We were living in a 3 bedroom and need to find a roommate, but didn’t just want a random stranger. We found our third roommate (and future cofounder) Randy via a site we had built called jasonandkalvin.com. After living together for a year and becoming good friends while working at separate startups, we felt the time was right to start something new and build something meaningful together.
We had shared passions around technology, travel and community and our backgrounds led us into rideshare. (Randy had relied numerous times on the kindness of strangers when backpacking through Europe and Asia to share food/housing/rides, Kalvin had recently experienced the unique private transportation networks of East Africa and I have a lot of great memories of long-distance roadtrips with friends: like driving down Route 1 (www.jasonshen.com/2011/road-trips-and-taking-the-long-way/)
Just as we used the web to find a roommate we could have a strong connection with, we’ve built Ridejoy to help people travel easily and affordably and with people they could share this great travel experience with. We were very fortunate to go through YC in the summer of 2011 and going to Burning Man (via our rideshare site burningmanrides.com) has certainly influenced our outlook on things as well.
We love the fact that this service helps people get where they need to go (usually to see family or friends or significant others) in a cost-effective way (the recession hurts!) while reducing CO2 emissions and creating real-life human connections.
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If you liked this and want to ask me a question or read my answers to 14 other questions, check me out on Askolo.
Photo credit by stuckincustoms
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I’m Teaching a Class on Skillshare
As the cofounder of a collaborative consumption startup, I do my best to try all kinds of “sharing economy” services like Couchsurfing, TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Vayable, Grubwithus and Skillshare. I even blogged about my experience taking a UX Design for Non-Designers Skillshare class.
But there’s of course generally two sides to these products – the consumer and the producer. In Couchsurfing, theres the host and the surfer. In Vayable there’s the guide and the explorer. And in Skillshare there is the student and the teacher. It’s important to get both perspectives when you can.
I’ve worked hard to avoid blogging about blogging here at The Art of Ass-Kicking. The vast majority of my posts are on overcoming your fears, doing great work and making epic sh*t happen.
At the same time, in building this blog up, I have learned some great lessons about creating compelling content, discovering my audience and attracting 100,000+ visits over 2011.
And I’m sharing what I’ve learned in a class.
Continue reading →