PNTV: Success Through Stillness by Russell Simmons (#308)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, Success Through Stillness by Russell Simmons with Chris Morrow. Success Through Stillness Subtitle Meditation Made Simple Russell Simmons, as you may know, is a hip hop mogul known as the godfather of hip hop who's also done a ton of other things entrepreneurially. He's a best selling author of two other books that we've featured. Do you and Super Rich and he's just a funny guy. This book is kind of like sitting down with a super intense, funny, wise friend as he tells you about why meditation rocks. Philosopher's Notes Bunch of my favorite big ideas. Five of them here. If you're looking to start your meditation practice and you're into hip hop and stuff, this is a perfect place to start. First, big idea. There's five sections in the book. The second one is on why you think you can't meditate. He goes through a number of reasons why you think you can't meditate. He basically proves you wrong. The first excuse that people give him, that people usually give for why they can't meditate, is because they just don't have any time. I'm way too busy. So people come up to Russell and they say, hey, I want to make it. What do you think I should do? And he tells him, meditate. And they tell him, russell, come on, I don't have any time for that. And be real. Tell me something serious about how I can get ahead. He's like, I am being real. The most important thing you can do is to get your mind right. And meditation is the most powerful way to do that. So go meditate. Most people don't want to hear that. And then they pretend like they're too busy. I just don't have time to do it. And he says, look, you spend so much time doing so many other things to take care of your life, right? Whether it's brushing your teeth or exercising or washing your car and all the other mundane things you need to do. And the most important thing you have in your whole life is your mind, yet you spend no time deliberately training your mind and washing it and brushing it. He says you need to. Then he says, look, if you tell me you don't even have 20 minutes to meditate, then I'll go back to the old saying that if you don't have 20 minutes, you need to spend two hours meditating. That's how badly you need it. You can't even see how you can find 20 minutes. And then you really really, really need it. Get to work. So if you don't have time, and that's been your excuse, check in, you do have time. There's all the things you do to maintain your life, then there's all the things you do to entertain yourself. We can find 20 minutes. His approach is based on transcendental meditation, which has two 20 minute segments, one in the AM, one in the PM. I've done a ton of different things over the last 10 years. I started with an hour of meditation a day, plus some guided meditations when I was in Bali. First getting into this, and then I kind of tried different things, did Transcendental meditation and their practice for a while, 20 minutes and 20 minutes. And now for the last several years, I've just been doing 20 minutes in the morning and then a little napitation on most days. But reading this inspired me to find the time. I've got 20 minutes in the PM. There's no question I can benefit from slowing down after having an intense day. I really excited to integrate 20 minutes in the PM in a more rigorous way and I've been doing so since reading this book. So check in on your own schedule if you've been saying you don't have the time. He says very clearly, make the time you have the time. Second big idea is another one of the reasons why we think we can't meditate. He says we judge our meditation way too much. One of the first rules of meditation that I actually learned, studying Transcendental Meditation with a woman who was the right hand, kind of lady of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, right, Was don't judge your meditation. Do not judge your meditation. We have this idea that we should be able to turn off our brains, that if we can't just shut off all thoughts and levitate to another dimension, that we're not doing it right. He dispels a lot of these myths and say, look, that's just not what meditation is all about. You're not supposed to get into a trance and not be aware of anything that's going on and all that other stuff. It's simply training for the rest of your life. And in that moment and in those moments and minutes while you're meditating, you will of course have thoughts come in. That's not the point to get rid of the thoughts. The point is to recover your equanimity and to come back to, in his case, the mantra or whatever other anchor you've chosen. We talk about a lot of this stuff as well in meditation. 101, by the way. You can check out that class. But don't judge your meditation. That's rule number one. Do not judge your meditation. Because the worst meditation in quotes. What you think is the worst meditation may actually be your best meditation. Let's say you sit down and you're just super stressed. You've got a ton of stuff going on in your life and you just can't seem to quiet your mind. You sit down and the whole 20 minutes, it's just your brain's going nuts on you. That little drunk monkey is crazy and doing weird things, right? You keep on bringing it back and it keeps on swinging away. Or maybe minutes go by, or the whole session goes by and you barely even focus on your mantra or your anchor, right? You may not know, but that meditation might actually be the best meditation you've had. Why? Because sitting down in the heat of that stress, you were able to cool off your brain just a little bit more than you would have if you just went straight into your day. Imagine if you couldn't even cool it down in those 20 minutes. But you did a little bit and you dedicated yourself to the practice. You had a little bit more grace or poise and poise than you would have if you didn't take the time to sit down. And even more importantly, you kept your streak alive. You kept on showing up consistently, which we're going to talk about in the fifth big idea. So don't judge your meditation. I talk about Herbert Benson, the Harvard researcher who studied transcendental meditators and other Mind body practitioners. He wrote a book called the Relaxation Response and the Relaxation Revolution, which we've covered notes on both of those. He doesn't call it meditation. He calls it the relaxation response. Right? And he says, again, echoing Russell's wisdom, that the common complaint, most common complaint, is I'm not doing it right. I'm not a good meditator. He says, what are you talking about? Don't worry about that. Approach it like you're brushing your teeth. You just brush your teeth. You've been convinced that meditation is important. I'm sorry, that brushing your teeth is important. So you brush your teeth. It's not a big deal. You're not sitting there. Oh, man. Did I get that right? Am I doing that one? Okay, that was a good brush or that was a horrible brush. You don't do that. You just brush your teeth in the same manner. We need to sit down and just brush our brains. Just show up, focus on the process rather than the levitation or whatever. We think we need to get out of meditation. Quit judging your meditation. Third big idea is a really cool one. Russell has a bunch of awesome metaphors. This is one of the benefits of meditation. He talks about the fact that our limbic system is kind of where our most basic emotions exist, where our fight or flight response stirs up in the limbic brain. Right? And he says that basically the amygdala kind of guards the limbic brain and is on alert all the time to see if you are threatened and if you should trigger a fight or flight response. And he says that the amygdala is kind of like a car alarm, and your limbic brain is kind of like the owner of the car. Right? So your amygdala is like a car alarm, kind of always sensing and on the guard for anybody that might want to start to steal the car. Right. They might want to threaten our lives, the limbic brain, et cetera. And he says having a really sensitive amygdala that perceives every single little thing in your world as threatening and triggers a fight or flight response is kind of like having an alarm system that goes off when a car drives by or a breeze kicks up strongly. All of a sudden your alarm's going off. Boom. Limbic system, you need to decide what you're going to do right? Now, that's annoying and enervating for the car owner and for everyone around that car owner. Right? So what meditation does, one of the many benefits is it helps train your amygdala to identify what's a real threat and what's not. And you can see that that little slight at work or the person cutting you off on the way home from work or whatever, right. Isn't a big deal. You don't need to set off the alarm and, and have your limbic system go into high alert, fight or flight, release toxic energy, et cetera. Right? So think about that, your amygdala as an alarm system for your limbic system, and see if you are being triggered by little things all the time and your alarm's constantly going off. If so, then know that meditation can help dampen that. We're all going to be triggered by different things, but meditation will help cool that response in a really cool way. Another really cool metaphor is our fourth big idea, a snow globe. Russell talks about the benefits of meditation on creativity. He talks about all the people who meditate from Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, David lynch, all these extraordinarily creative people who look to meditation as one of their core practices. And he says a calm mind is a creative mind. He says, imagine when you were a kid and you had those little snow globes, right? Those little globes that you could shake up and all the snow would come up and you couldn't even see what was inside the globe. He says our minds are like that. And if you're constantly shaking up your consciousness and never taking any time to be still, you can never see what's inside the globe, what's inside your mind. And you have extraordinary ideas within your mind. You just need to slow down long enough and be still long enough to actually see it. Joseph Campbell talks about the same thing. He says, you need to have a place you go that's quiet and you go there all the time, consistently, day in and day out. Nothing may happen in the beginning, but you go there long enough and you're going to see these ideas bubble up. We need to create stillness if we want to have the success we aspire to have. A calm mind is a creative mind. If you're constantly stimulating yourself with internal chatter, Internet, in external stimulation, then you're never going to tap into the deepest, best ideas that are waiting for your inner consciousness. So remember, slow down. And again. Meditation, of course, 20 minutes in this context in the morning and in the evening is a great way to slow down and let the globe reveal itself, what's inside it, right? Fifth big idea is soaking your soul in this one. Russell. This is toward the end of the book in how to Meditate. So he walks us through some of the mechanics and one of the ideas is to be consistent. And the final idea is to be patient. You need to show up, you're diligent, you're patient, you're persistent, you show up day in and day out. You can't do this once in a while and expect benefits. He says, you don't get strong doing one pushup. You don't optimize your weight by changing one meal, right? You're not going to experience the well being that you could experience with one meditation session. Matthieu Ricard in his great book why Meditate? He says, look, it's kind of like your meditation practice is kind of like a plant. You can't just cruise in and dump a bucket of water on it and then a month later dump another bucket of water on it. You're going to kill it, you're going to die in between. You need to water just a little bit, but every day just give it a little bit of attention, a little bit of attention. And it's way better to meditate for a few minutes a day every day than it is to meditate for an hour and then three weeks later, meditate for another hour. Consistency is key, and the metaphor that he uses in this context is soaking your consciousness, your soul, in a dye. And he uses Maharishi as another wisdom from Maharishi again, where he says that imagine soaking, putting a cloth into a yellow dye. You put cloth into a yellow dye, you take it out and you put it in the sun and it fades. You put it back, and then you put it back and you put it back, and then you put it out and out and out. It fades and fades and fades. But you keep on doing that, right, again and again and again, and eventually the cloth will become that particular color yellow in this case, right? Marcus Rayleigh says the same exact thing. He says, soak your mind in good thoughts, for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. What you're thinking about on a daily basis is who you are. It's how your soul has been colored. So choose wise thoughts and choose deep meditation so you can connect to something bigger than yourself and have that pure consciousness and your soul soaked in the good stuff, such that you show up in the rest of your life in a magical way. And again, that doesn't happen in one soaking session. It happens over an extended period of time. You aggregate and compound the benefits of your meditation over a long period of time, and. And you experience success through that stillness. Remember the snow globe. Quit shaking your mind up. Another way to think about it is Stephen King. He talked about how in his early days when he was a teacher, it was really hard to write because it was as if he had jumper cables on his brain. It's hard to write when you got jumper cables on your brain. It's hard to see good ideas when the snow's flying everywhere. You have to turn off external stimulation and internal stimulation in order to plug into something bigger than yourself. Remember that alarm system. If you're getting annoyed by every little thing and you get super stressed about all little things, your amygdala is way too hot. You need to cool it off. Dial in, calibrate that alarm system so you don't find everything quite so annoying. Meditation, again, is one of the ways we can do that. Quit judging your meditation. We're not expecting you to levitate. Just bring your mind back to your anchor and sit. Focus on the process rather than the outcome of any given session. And then if you think you don't have time, then you really need to meditate. Make the time as Russell says, and figure out when you're going to make that. Research shows best time is to be consistent with it. First thing in the morning is a great time. Again, we talk about all these ideas a lot more and all the different books that I've looked at on Meditation in Meditation 101 how to Meditate Without Moving to the Himalayas. If you haven't seen that yet, check it out. And thank you Russell for the awesome book and your passionate approach to life. I hope you enjoyed and what was the big idea that jumped out? How can you make that a bigger part of your life starting today? Get on that and make today an awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. Ten bucks a month. Join the Optimal Living Membership program. You get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. Old school classics, positive psychology, Modern stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, Purpose, Neuroscience, wealth, et cetera. And what you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again. We have 250 of these on all these different great books and then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes you get access to Optimal Living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from Habits101, Confidence101, Getting Stuff Done101 Meditation101, instant access to all those classes. 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