Keeping a calm & collected mind is way harder than keeping a fit body. It needs multiple times the training volume. Main difference is that once you have it, it's easier to maintain and harder to lose.
Think of your temper like a pendulum made of stone. The more momentum it builds during oscillating, the harder it is to stop and stay still. Once it's still, it'd be hard for anything to move it.
Most people don't realize they are constantly oscillating. And that most of their judgements and presumptions are impaired because of it.
My experience with a noisy mind
Having a noisy mind & a loud mouth makes you appear & feel weak. We trust our intuition, but intuition becomes far less accurate when our minds are noisy. I can only despise it because it made me lose things & rights. It made me suffer & it made some irreversible changes to my life.
Growing up I struggled with anger management, I was that kid with a hot temper & loud voice. I was easily engaged and I was always rushing to prove my shallow point of views right. It was around the first years of college when I started paying attention to this, then things eventually started getting better in recent few years.
Having a noisy mind results in unbalanced reactions & decisions. Almost every time I did an unbalanced reaction in the past I knew I was thinking right to some extent, but didn't quite know how to express my thoughts. I wasn't sure how to best put it and I'd end up missing points and throw off unstructured bits of information when I should've really shut up. Little did I know about when to suppress emotions & not push it. I didn't know that timing plays an important role in what to say & what not to say. And I was very bad with timings.
Every time I blame myself about this, it is because of me thinking I could do better. I am 25 and I am positive this has caused >70% of my overthinking since I was 20. And I am writing this in order to remind myself of it.
Attaining a calm mind is a goal like any other. It requires a system & a process. Every time it slips I feel I returned back to the starting point, I'm still oscillating, there gotta be more focus.
We're spending more energy than we need to
From my experience there are 3 forms of energy drainage that directly affect a calm mind:
1. Draining energy in dead conversations
People normally get triggered when a conversation overlaps with a topic in their knowledge base, they want to hop on because they believe they can add value. And that's normal. But the problem is they often do it without thinking and they end up adding nothing. We subconsciously want to show off knowledge, although knowledge isn't sexy.
Consider you spent lots of energy trying to build upon an already-dead conversation just to prove you have some related knowledge and that your beliefs due to this knowledge SHOULD be right, is it really worth it?
For example, we sometimes meet with people who just want to deliver their point and have no room for accepting it might be wrong. They're not doing it to exchange knowledge as much as they're doing it to say they HAVE the knowledge. So it's a compromise: Would you want to modify/add to this type of conversation in exchange for a chunk of your energy? Is the goal from building upon this exact conversation important enough?
Another example is online meetings. I catch myself spending lots of energy during online meetings and I seldom think: Oh, that was worth it. Almost every time I regret doing it. Because by the time I get to doing the important things, I am already mentally bankrupt. I can't concentrate and I have no energy.
2. Draining energy thinking about what people are thinking
Another form of energy drainage is thinking about what people are thinking of you. This is a snippet from a great essay called writing as a distinct form of consciousness:
Your view of others & your view of the world are inevitably distorted by your view of yourself. If you’re socially anxious, it would be almost impossible for you to accurately observe a conversation you’re having with someone else, because you’re too focused on neurotically trying to monitor the other person’s reaction to really pay attention to them.
While the original context of the above snippet is different, I'd argue that constantly thinking of what other people are thinking is a form of social anxiety. Another energy waster that disables the mind from being calm & clear. Instead, focus on treating everyone right and forget about what they think of you.
3. Draining energy thinking about a problem
For every problem or uncertainty you deal with, you always know more truth to it after some time. The way I think about is: If everything is obvious in hindsight, isn't this enough feedback to shut up when things feel uncertain? If we know for sure we can't connect dots looking forward but can only connect them looking backward, isn't this a reason not to spend more energy than we should?
The solution to the 3 problems is less talk & less thought.
The paradox of a calm mind
In fact, I thought I knew & worked through enough to have a taste of a real calm mind. But I don't. Whenever I lose my temper I realize how far I am from getting there. I blame myself, I get hard on it, then I overthink it all. I look over how many times I promised myself I won't do it & then didn't stand up to the promise I made to myself.
Many people go in life believing they have their tempers tamed & under control at all times, but seldom is this the truth. You are only as cool as the smallest situation that makes you lose your temper. Think about it.
See we transact thoughts with people in little windows. You only have one window of time to express what you're thinking regarding a specific problem before you either feel good about what you said & how you said it or blame yourself for missing the window & not getting to do it again.
Many men think of themselves as immovable alpha stones: hard to convince, easy to let go & silent in battles. But very few have this. The more they try to force it the more fake their calm is. A real calm mind shouldn't be doing any work in the background trying to suppress emotions. A real calm mind should've trained their way up to just do it naturally.
Another aspect to the paradox of a calm mind is when you get mad over the way you dealt with a problem not the problem itself. I'd reckon that going through the same problem but reacting a bit differently can make it much less of a problem. See the pattern?
Most unhappy people are too busy in their minds. A depressed person thinks too much. Their mind is constantly working in overdrive mode. Most successful people are free. A peaceful person will make better decisions.If you want to be effective in business, or anything, you need a clear, calm, cool, and collected mind. A calm mind leads to better judgment and better outcomes. If you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind.
We live in an age of infinite leverage, and because of that, the impacts of good decision-making are much higher than they used to be. You can now influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions ––Naval on Joe Rogan's podcast
The goal
A quiet mind should be able to:
- Process more inputs with less thought
- Pack more meaning in less words
- Pack more intention in less actions
This is one of my current biggest concerns and I want to keep this as an evergreen topic to modify & add upon moving forward. I am also sure my kids will find this useful at some point.