https://www.listennotes.com/e/fec4ed2afcdd462b9ec265a64f5bac04

Hey, James here. Got some news for you. My book is now available for pre-order. That's right, in the show notes, you can go and pre-order it today. And if you do, I'm going to give you some incredible free bonuses. Head over to thehabibook.com that's thehabibook.com to pre-order yours today. Welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast. I'm James Lachlan, former seven-time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week, I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game, whether they're in Formula One, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and ticket to the top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead A life of purpose. Let's get started. What can monks teach us about distraction and focus? Well, Jamie Kreiner is gonna sit down with me today to share that with you. You're gonna love it. Enjoy the episode. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co.nz. Jamie, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'm so excited to connect today and to talk about the thing that I feel that we're manically focused on, and that is distraction. We feel now more than ever that technology, social media, the demands of people reaching us via text, DM, email, we're highly distracted and we struggle to focus. There's whole books written on stolen focus, on how to focus. But I really love what you've done. You've went back through the ages and looked at, Hey, were people back then struggling with focus? Did they have distractions? And you've went deep with this. And your book, the Wandering Mind, has got me inspired. So, just to get the ball rolling, what is mind wandering?

It is the tendency, and bear in mind, I am a historian, not a psychologist, so the definitions will be different depending on who you ask, but it's, the tendency of your thoughts to go from place to place, thing to thing, whether it's good or bad, it's kind of neutral actually. It depends on the context and that's what people in antiquity in the Middle Ages thought so too.

I love it. It's interesting this idea of mind wandering because I look at my own life and sometimes I catch myself when I've got free space, Like, without thinking, my hand goes to my phone. So, let's say I'm standing in the grocery line and there's like three people ahead of me. And so, I know I've got probably two to four minutes of time. Instead of looking around, instead of talking to someone, instead of just holding space, like subconsciously, I reach for this distraction device. It's almost like I'm uncomfortable. in my own mind. Is that normal? Is that something that many of us experience?

Yeah, I think most people do. It's true historically. I mean, before there were smartphones, there were other kinds of things people sort of did without thinking that was a kind of either distraction from what it was they were supposed to be doing or just a kind of unthinking form of thinking. So in that sense, we should go a little easy on ourselves. It's not just you in the grocery line. It's a bunch of us has been for centuries. But I think something we also have in common with people who lived a long time ago is that we don't always want to be in that mode. I mean, sometimes it's fine. Sometimes you just kind of need to be checked out, but. A lot of us don't like how it feels to be habitually that way. And people in the past struggled with that too and wanted to fix it.

Well, I want to talk about that a little bit because I feel that there's somewhat of a social obsession with the future. What's the future going to look like? What are we going to do? How are we going? Let's set big goals. Let's keep moving forward. Yet we have almost a disdain with having to look back and go, what could What could 300, 400, 700 years ago teach us? They don't know anything. We're so well equipped, but actually there's so much that they could teach us. So please tell us about the book in terms of what era you went back to and studied and why you chose to go back there.

Well, I'm a historian of late antiquity in the early Middle Ages, and the book looks at roughly the period between 400 and 900 CE in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. And I focus on a group who is probably best positioned in those centuries to teach us about thinking, which is early Christian monks, because it was a phenomenon and a problem they were fixated on. I first came across their interest in this subject when I was in grad school. And, I mean, fundamentally, the reason they were interested in it was because they had totally given up their normal lives to dedicate themselves to God, cut off friends, family, their wealth mostly, just their whole routine and their whole persona of what they had been before. And yet, after they'd made these huge sacrifices, sitting in their cells, they couldn't always concentrate on, on God, on their ethical responsibilities on the whole order of creation. And they were understandably really frustrated because of everything they'd given up and, and thought that that was sort of going to be the trick that would do it. And so they wrote to each other for advice. They gave regulations to their communities. They argued with each other about the best way to handle it. They never fully solve the problem, but they've definitely developed a set of techniques and practices and ways of thinking about thinking that got them farther than they would have otherwise gotten and definitely a more sophisticated way of approaching it than most of us are used to thinking about today. So it's both a, the book is both a history that tries to recapture this very particular subculture of the premodern world, but is also a connection to the kind of cognitive crises we experience day to day and both showing the deeper roots of the kind of thinking we have about distraction, but also maybe some fresh perspectives on how we could deal with it.

I love it. Thank you for sharing that. It gives us real context as to the depths that you went to. what do you think are some of the lessons that we can learn from these monks in terms of distraction and combating it?

Probably the most fundamental thing, and it's not even a trick or technique, it's basic but hard, is we have to decide what it is we want to pay attention to. And, you know, your example of being in the store in line, What would you have done otherwise if your phone hadn't come out? There's nothing obvious in a grocery store that you should be thinking about. It's part of the reason your mind goes to the phone because you don't have another objective. Monks at least had this leg up on us. They had decided that they wanted to concentrate on God, on scripture. They had a set of texts and a set of ethics that they knew they needed to focus on. And obviously that wasn't a guarantee they would, but it at least gave them a target and sometimes they referred to it as a measuring stick or a frame. They knew when they were going off track because they knew where it was they were aiming for. And that's a hard thing for us to decide on, but it is key.

That's massive. Because I feel like we have so many options nowadays. We have options with our hobbies, with the books that we read. There's millions of books. The podcasts that we listen to, there's like three and a half million podcasts. Then there's Netflix and there's Disney, and we flick between all the different things 'cause we can't decide what we wanna watch. Having an overarching theme to what we wanna focus on. So for them, it was God and studying and scriptures and texts. For us, what I'm hearing is that would be really valuable. So for me this year, I really want to focus on neuroscience. I'm passionate about it. I'm excited about it. So, I've created a little plan, just 30 to 60 minutes a day where I'm going to learn, read, listen, study, reflect, share. And it's quite interesting how it's giving me a bit more focus in those free spaces to go deeper. But I find that quite hard to pick something and go, oh, I'm just going to focus in on that and say, kind of say no to everything else. So for someone who wants to find the thing to focus on, what might it be? What might that look like for different people?

Yeah, I mean, this is something the monks argued about too. I mean, the example you gave, I love, because it also shows a kind of subset of this initial guideline, which is that you don't just decide what it is you want to pay attention to. You also have a kind of, you break it down into a long-term goal, like, I want to learn more about neuroscience this year. and then shorter term goals like, I'm going to do this reading this month or this week or today. And that's just as much of a challenge, right? You might have a sort of vague idea of what it is you want to do, but then how do you get there? So that's more work. In terms of how monks picked the long-term goal, it was just something that they felt a real commitment to and their stories of converting to the monastic life are usually huge ruptures for them. It's a sort of a huge decision that sometimes they're even afraid to leap into or to make for reasons that people are also intimidated by big decisions now. Their parents will be upset or their bosses won't like it or their families will have a hard time dealing with or their friends will reject them. But, you know, motivating that call to say, this is really what I want to dedicate myself to was just this sort of inner conviction. They would have called it faith of knowing this, yeah, this is just really moving me. I don't even really need to ask why. I'm just going to do it.

And when you say this to me, I feel like, I think of high performers, I think of people who are passionate about a sport, I think about people who founded their own business, their own little company, or could be a large company, and they obsess over it. They're passionate about it. They're happy to do 60-hour weeks and it doesn't feel like work. Do you think there's some similarities in terms of people's commitment to their mission, their professional mission, and what the monk's committed to with their commitment to God?

Yeah, I really like that comparison. I mean, if there's a sort of inner compulsion or fascination, that is common ground there. And for those of us who feel like maybe we don't have that, I'm a college professor, so I have lots of students who feel like, I don't know what I'm passionate about. I don't know what I'm interested in. And monks, There were plenty of monks like that too. It just involved being a little bit more self-aware and quieting yourself down enough to be like, what is it that I actually really enjoy about this thing? What did I do last week? What did I love about it? What did I hate? And then you find the moments you liked and say, well, technically, what was it? Was it that I was quiet or around people or doing a lot of writing or doing a lot of problem solving, just basically checking in with yourself over and over again to say, how is it that I'm behaving in certain moments and what is it that I enjoy doing? And so then eventually, maybe you can get yourself into the kind of situation where you're like these high-powered executives who've already figured that out for themselves and are just so driven that the question doesn't have to be posed as frequently.

I love that. And in terms of creating space for mind wandering, I kind of intentionally create think time. I just call it think time. And every day for like 30, 40 minutes, I have a block on my calendar where it's like the phone goes off, the laptop gets closed. I'll either go for a walk or I'll sit outside and listen to birds and look out at hills. But I just think, I'm literally just thinking through, well, what's coming up and why is it coming up? What can I do with that? What did I do today that I'm proud of or not proud of? And so I create this space because I feel that my pace of thinking is frenetic. It's so fast paced. And some people might say, James, that's a strength. But I feel it's a hindrance at times because I'm struggling to slow down. I'm struggling to see the forest for the trees. So is there a way that we can tap into being more mindful? And were the monks unintentionally practicing mindfulness?

I mean, even in the some of the examples you gave, it reminded me instantly of cases from late antiquity. One of them is you have a schedule and you build into the schedule things that matter. That's something monks debated endlessly, not they mostly loved schedules, but it was just what do you put in the schedule? Because you want to have a well-rounded day because if you're just doing one thing all day, you're likely to get bored and distracted. You don't want to shuffle too much between thing to thing because that transitions create their own kind of unsettled sense of being unsettled. But yeah, to have it both be structured so you become kind of habituated to just doing things in this, in this careful and regular way. Also, if there's other people, if you're in a community of monks, it helps to have people in the same schedule and they could be there for emotional support. Monks also liked them for being kind of like, you know, casual police, like so and so's not taking this time to do whatever. That's inappropriate. So. So mindfulness can be built into the day just by saying, this is the time for reading, this is the time for work, this the time for prayer, that kind of thing. Also, some monks advocated the kind of reflection you mentioned of kind of reviewing your day. For monks, it was sometimes even kind of meta, like, what was I thinking about through the day? Where did my mind go? And the more that you're checking in on yourself and how you're thinking, the more you can kind of spot those patterns as they're happening and redirect them if you think it's going in a direction it shouldn't or you don't want it to. And then more generally, just the kind of habit of mind that they were seeking in prayer especially was, I think, what we would call mindful. Although I think for them it was also tied to emotions, like your heart and your brain were really connected. And so for them, it mattered that you were really feeling or were really committed to what it was you were thinking about. You're not just sort of perfunctorily going through some kind of subject, but you really feel it, you get it, it resonates, it's a sign that you're really attentive to something, you're not just rattling through something. And that for them was a kind of place of quiet in the heart or clarity in the heart where It kind of gave you direct or expanded access to the real knowledge or truth you were seeking.

Jamie, that's so powerful. It's really interesting. Many years ago, I was told about this thing called gratitude practice. And I was like, okay, what is that? And so, like, well, you're right. I'm what you're grateful for. I was like, okay, why do I do that? Like, well, there's benefits to it. Like, it helps you perform better, it helps you connect better with your purpose, it helps you be a better person. I say, okay, so what do I do? James, just write down three things you're grateful for every morning. I say, that's easy. So for like two years, I'm just writing these three things down and then getting on with my day. I say, Cool, is this working? I'm not sure. But then someone said, actually, James, do you want to go deeper with that? Write down three things, then go back to the first one, close your eyes, and be grateful for it and appreciate it and love it and see it in your mind's eye and figure out where that emotion shows up in your body of gratitude. So, bring the thing that you're grateful for to life. And I love it. It's only a three or four minute practice in the mornings, but it's brought depth and beauty and color to a very simple practice. So, it sounds like the monks were thousands of years ahead of most of us.

Yeah, they were, you know, of course, like their sense of psychology is so different than ours and not as developed in some ways, but they were very astute to the way that the brain was connected to the body and how thinking wasn't just, I guess, what we'd call, like, rational or logical, but also rooted in emotions and rooted in the senses and rooted in the sense of place. It was just embedded in its whole environment. And so, yeah, if you want your thinking to be good, you need to calibrate it relative to all those other things.

I absolutely resonate. There's a friend in LA, in fact, you should connect with him if you haven't already. He's a former monk and wrote a book called Think Like a Monk. His name is Jay Shetty. And I was fascinated by that book. I thought about what he did and then what you're doing, and I thought there's a different lens. And that is he wrote about thinking like a monk. When I think of what you're doing, it's like, how do we focus like a monk? And so if you were to say, James, here's a few key principles to focus like a monk, what might those principles be?

I think the first one is tied to what we we're just talking about, which is think of how you're tied to all these other systems, like your environment, the people around you, your body, just like cognitive practices you already have. And so if you want to focus, it's not just a matter of recalibrating your phone so that it doesn't ding during work hours. your relationship technology is part of it, but it's not the only thing. You also need to think, how is my body affecting my mind and the other way around? How does my relationship to the people I work with and live with and see every day, how does that affect what I'm thinking? How does my job and these larger systems that I'm embedded in affect my thinking? All of that I mean, you can't change all of it, obviously. That's just like part of being a human in a world full of structures. But I think it, on the one hand, gives yourself a little bit of forgiveness and permission to not fault yourself when you slip up. But it also helps you think of more expansive and varied ways to tackle your own attentiveness. So, for example, Maybe exercising and diet for you is a key thing that you notice. You have clarity of mind if you do some things and not others. Or creating certain work patterns with a team or whatever will really clarify things for you versus muddling them. And there's, I'm sure you've had a lot of guests on your podcast who speak to this or that facet. There's a lot of really interesting work in different domains about different slices of this. And I think the only thing that's distinctive about the late antique Christian approach that monks had is that they were sort of habitually like going through all these connections of the mind all the time. 'Cause it's kind of a leaky, unstable system. So, you know, you've always got to be attending to something.

Yeah, coming back to it always. Yeah, I get that. And when I think of mind wandering, for me, it's like, okay, it's a thinking thing, but also could writing your thoughts and expressing in a written form, could that be classified as mind wandering?

I suppose it depends on what your mind is doing while you're writing. You know, one practice that monks in late antiquity in the early Middle Ages really liked engaging in was a form of meditation that involved like intentional mind wandering, where you start with a word or a concept and you start building associations to it, either because the word is etymologically linked to other words or because you have seen this particular word appear in different important writings. And so you're collating them in your mind or on the page, all these different occurrences so that then you start to see these different angles and depths to the meaning of this word, and then you shift to a related set of concepts or words and you just sort of circle this and build out ever larger circles of meaning around this initial concept. And that's a kind of good mind wandering because the goal is for you to have at the end a larger sense of a meaning of something. Like you start off small to say, what is this thing? I'm trying to unpack it. It's worth some thinking. And then at the end, you have this assortment of perspectives on this complex topic. It's not what we would call systematic thinking or the total picture of something, but they always knew meditation would be inflected with what you knew, your own personal preferences, just where your mind ended up going. On the flip side, some monks thought that that was too dangerous. It was too much mind-wandering and you know, it really was unfocused, so shouldn't do it. So I think whether you decide to write something out and, and see where it takes you or not, in part just involves a little bit of vigilance and honesty with yourself about what you'll do with it.

I love that. I've never really thought of doing that with a word and just seeing where it led me. I had a, the head of the Stanford D school, the design thinking school on the show a number of months ago. And he was talking about this principle of 52. And he says, you come up with a new idea, a solution for a company or whatever it might be. And that's iteration one. And the plan and idea is that you've got to get another 51 idea. So you have 52 ideas minimum and solutions. I'm like, who has the time for that? And he says, if you do that by 26, 27, 28 ideas in, something mind blowing will appear. that never would have been a consideration when you're at iteration one, two or three. It's just about this thinking. And to me, there's a sense of mind wandering to that in terms of expanding on a concept and expanding. And meditation for me, I want to hone in on that for a second. So, I've meditated for maybe seven or eight years. And I've got my own little way of doing it. I've tried all the different ones. But these monks, did they have any particular way of meditating? Was there a system? Was there a specific practice that they had?

There were different forms. I mean, most basically meditating could just be reciting. And usually that meant for them, the Bible, especially the Psalms, they had a more technical form, the use of a mantra. This is something that a monk in the fifth century named John Cassian advocated, which was you take one snippet of a psalm and repeat it throughout the day in every context with the idea that it would always bring you back to the core principle that God was there to help you. And you also needed God's help if you were going to get anything that it was that you wanted. and those are two very different forms than the kind of meditation we were talking about earlier. So I think rather than it being like a set of, like a strict category, it was sort of just like anything that was an intentional thinking through of something that wasn't exactly reading through a script, even though recitation of texts was part of it, I think it was more like, It's off book in the sense you're not just reading off the page. I think that for them, anything that fell into that category could be meditation. So later on there's definitely rules that come into play or more technical manuals about how you advance to this or that, but those were the basics. They distinguished it a little bit from prayer, which was they just saw as having a conversation with God. But often, you know, meditation could be kind of like the springboard for prayer. Prayer for them, the ideal, especially the Eastern Mediterranean, was that eventually you would be so locked in that you wouldn't even feel like you were doing anything anymore or even thinking through anything. It was a state of total stillness and calm. And it's just as if you were something or totally absorbed by the thing you were thinking about, so you almost couldn't distinguish between yourself and the object of your attention. And that felt to them as close to God as you could get while you were still in your body. And it couldn't last forever. And they shared all these really moving stories about how upsetting it was when you kind of fell out of that kind of intense focus.

And.

Even the experts couldn't get to it all the time. So in part, they were frustrated that there wasn't like a clear handbook for how to do that every time.

I think that's amazing. And Jamie, I don't know if you've came across Dr. Joe Dispenza's work. No. So very interesting, gentlemen. So, neuro, deeply researched neuroscientist, epigenetics, very deeply researched there, and quantum physics. And he has been able to measure this point scientifically where the brain and the mind hit that point of almost like lack of self, lack of self-awareness, that you don't know the difference between you, planet, universe. There's a oneness. And you know, he talks about this popping, the brain pops off. So he's measuring the brain waves and has all the, whatever they, how they measure the brain, but he's able to say, this is the exact point. In the next two minutes, the brain's going to pop off and they're going to come out of it saying, I could sense blackness, I could sense oneness. So definitely, I think there's a connection there with what you're talking about and Now, the science of him being able to say, this is how we get there. I've recently been looking at, okay, when I meditate, I've probably done it three or four times in my life where I've got to the point where there's that oneness. It generally never happens for me. I would love to do it daily. That'd be awesome. But I'm struggling to do it. So more and more people, and I haven't done this yet, and I don't know if I will, but more and more people are talking about plant medicine and how that can get you there very quickly. Psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca down in South America. So, from your experience and research, did the monks have any connection with plant medicine in any way? And did they use it in a positive sense for this mindfulness and mind wandering?

Psychedelics, We don't know, but plants as medicine in general, yes, all the time. For them, actually, they saw food and medicine as almost, yeah, they're on the same continuum. They're not quite interchangeable, but you need to be thinking about your diet as a kind of medicine. Anything you intake has a capacity to heal or harm you. We, I mean, part of the problem is that recovering from bioarchaeology, the kind of plant remains that we would need to know whether they were seeing something as a food or a medicine, it's just a seed. We don't know the context or how they saw it. So for example, early medieval sites sometimes have cannabis among the plant remains, but whether it was being used for fiber, or medicine or something else? We don't know. But I don't know. In the future, maybe if we were talking in a couple decades, there'd be a way to give a better answer.

I love it. That's cool. It's something I'm trying to learn more about and see where we've got this idea of plant medicine from. So the monks, when they're thinking of distraction, how serious was distraction? I mean, was this a life and death kind of thing for them? Was it a real issue that they were trying to Cure or avoid? Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses, to large corporates, to sports teams, but I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Caroline@jjlachlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

For the ones who wrote about it, you know, they don't represent all monks, but they represent the monks we can hear from. Yeah, it was life and death, and that may seem like a total exaggeration to us, but Cassian, who I mentioned earlier, he said, Think of your attention as like a tightrope walker. And if you fall off, that's death. So, I think what they meant by that was just if you're casual about what your mind is doing, then, you know, that can send you down a path where, you know, you're just sort of casual about everything, and that's, that's not going to get you salvation or on a more day-to-day basis. It just means you're not attentive to the things that matter and the things that are expected of you. And so kind of like everything else in monks' lives, like their diets and their relationships. They wanted you to make a big deal out of things that most of us take for granted. You know, you really need to think about what it is you eat and what your daily routine looks like and how you engage with people. And the same is true for your mind. You might not have thought about it a lot of it before, but this is real. The stakes are super high.

Yeah. And we can see that nowadays. I mean, we look at the issues and almost crisis we have with physical health, but also with mental health. It's a real thing. And it sounds like they understood that and obviously a very different era, but the Stoics, we look at the Stoic philosophy, they talk a lot about the simple things done well, the daily routines, your commitment to personal mastery or however you want to call it, Sounds like the monks and the Stoics had maybe some similarities in their way of thinking.

Yeah, Christian culture took up a lot from stoicism. I think what monks would tell you is that, and this is mostly probably true, is that they moralized distraction in a way that Stoics and other ancient philosophers had not. So certainly ancient philosophers complained about distraction too, but the monks kind of the first to say, you can't be, you know, it's not just that this is frustrating, it's that this is an actual crisis. This is a problem. At the same time though, they were very attentive to not overfit, they were really worried that if you made something a big deal, you'd also overly fixated on it too, and that would have caused its own mental health issues. So, there was a lot of back and forth about, you know, you really need to be attentive to X, but you don't want to take it too far because then that can send you down a spiral. So that's part of the reason they were reluctant to issue a lot of just, like, pieces of advice that would hold under every condition. It always needed to be qualified because it depended on the person and the context they were in and, you know, Maybe someone isn't thinking about something enough and maybe someone else is, you know, really needs to ease up a bit.

Do you think that they valued equanimity?

They valued moderation and a sense of perspective. So, you know, fasting was good, but you didn't want to do it so much that you couldn't celebrate holidays and the kind of liturgical moments that were a time for celebration, and you couldn't overdo it so that people started to get resentful of you or competitive. But equanimity of, I guess, the sort of moral or ethical impetus to constantly, I think equanimity in terms of motivation, I think, would have made them a little unsettled because they actually wanted to be unsettled, I guess, is the way to think about it. They always feel a little bit dissatisfied to recognize what needed improvement to be humble about your limitations. So a total even-keeled attitude where Nothing kind of itched at you. I think it's not a sort of state of mind that you see them celebrating very much.

That's so good to hear. It's interesting. I work with high performers of all shapes and sizes, athletes, CEOs, armies. And we talk about high performance. And if you want high performance results, I mean, you're constantly seeking. It's a sense of mastery that you've never reached the destination you're learning. But also, there's a constant discomfort. you're always kind of like on the edge of your seat. You're always like pushing a little bit. And when you get too comfortable, generally the performance or the outcome reflects that a bit of complacency kicks in. So it sounds like the monks were high performing monks.

Yeah, yeah. These people sound very much like monks. I mean, Cassie and compared the heart to a mill. It was always going to be grinding. You know, there wasn't, you were never in a kind of stasis, not just because the body was in flux, but so is the whole world around you. And so best to be aware of that and to just say, how am I going to make this better today? How am I going to make this work? How am I going to work on myself?

I love it. I hear people talk about work-life balance, right? And I always say, look, I don't believe in that. I don't believe in work-life balance. What I do believe in is work-life counterbalance. So when you've been working real hard and you're real passionate, you've had to launch the thing or fix the problem, and you've done 55 hour week, There's a counterbalance that's required. And it's the awareness to go, Hey, I need a break, or I need to go and walk with the dogs and the kids for two hours tomorrow morning and not think about work. So I don't believe there's a balance. So I'm really resonating with their idea of this equanimity not existing in its perfect form, but being able to be aware of where we need to move to at different times. Yeah.

I mean, they definitely shared the advice about I think they would have liked the image of counterbalance. Basically, you know, there were a lot of overachievers among them, too. And not only could you maybe create a sense of competition or Envy, but they were also just worried about you burning yourself out. The goal was not to kill yourself. It was just. It was a. Yeah, it was a long-term it was a marathon and. Sometimes you need to take a break and that might, to an outsider, look like you were being lazy in a given moment, but you really knew that it was necessary and needed to happen.

And talking about killing yourself, because they would have observed society a lot, did they ever, in your research, talk about mental illness, self-harm, killing oneself? Did that come up in any of your research?

Yeah, so the ascetic impulse to kind of restrict or train your body to help your mind was always counterbalanced with the sense that you could go overboard, that you didn't want to harm the body to the extent that the mind would be harmed. And especially with fasting, they talked about this a lot. Food was a big source of control for them because you had to eat every day. It was, you couldn't stop doing it. And so it meant like every day was an opportunity to do some kind of both self-control and self-support. But people would take it too far all the time. And there was a lot of concern, not just about, you know, how that affected the mind of the person who'd overdone it, but also the mind of people who'd become too fixated on what other people were eating. And the same is true just for more mundane stuff, not just about like extreme fasting, but just if you were sitting in a cell reading a book and you became kind of fixated on not thinking about something, it kept coming to your mind and you're like, I'm not gonna think about it, but it creates this, counterproductive thing where you're always thinking about the thing and just, there's a lot of letters that go back and forth between monks and their advisors about, about stuff like that, just really basic stuff we all go through where there's a real concern on the mentor's part to say, you know, don't go down that road. You can, you know, that can be really unhealthy long term. You know, here's, here's some other things that you can try. And then also, too, monks very much believed in demons and all of the ways that demons could interfere with our own goals and lives. And, you know, we don't want to retroactively diagnose some of their demon talk as, like, a way of expressing things about mental illness, because that's not how they would have done it. But they were at least very sensitive to the experiences that people could have of feeling like they weren't in control of their own. of their own minds. So that's a ubiquitous concern among the things they wrote.

Incredible. Thank you for sharing that. And do you feel that, even though we're thousands of years apart, do you feel that we have more in common than we have differences with monks in terms of the challenges that we feel we have in life?

That's a question I ask all the time and don't have an answer to, but it's like, yeah, you're thinking like a historian for sure, because I always feel like I seesaw back and forth. Some days it's like shocking how similar and familiar these experiences are, and then other days it's like they're just thinking in a totally different way about this that I would have never even conceived of. And, but that's, that's sort of the pleasure of looking to history, is that a kind of reminder that the reality you inhabit doesn't have to be that way, wasn't always that way. And on the other hand, there's these threads that connect us through the millennia that give us hope that there's any chance of relating to each other at all.

I love that. I love it. And in terms of writing the book and all the deep research and understanding that went into that, In what way did that impact your life and how you think and how you operate?

I, well, I was doing a lot of research for the book during COVID so a lot of, there was something really, I don't know, it was just reassuring to see monks in their, you know, distant isolated cells supporting each other, even though they didn't have much company. It was reassuring to see people who had spent a lot more time thinking about this stuff and practicing this stuff than I had or any of us had, still having bad days, still venting to their friends and their colleagues. And along the way too, I think, you know, I picked up a few, just like small practices that I hadn't really played around with before. Like one of the most basic ones that monks engaged in was a technique called discernment, which is a practice of, it's like thought detection, basically. It's just a way of identifying when something comes into your mind that you weren't expecting. And then asking yourself, is this good or this bad? Do I discard it? Do I let it stay? And then just moving on. I like that one because it, you know, this is something monks thought you could never overdo. It's worth doing all the time. It's just kind of a nice way of gently keeping a watch on yourself. It's helped me sort of not go down rabbit holes that were unnecessary, helped me also just if I was having like a confusing or overwhelming moment at work to just feel like with the distance and observing myself from a different vantage point, it was much more manageable. and could shift gears if I needed to.

I love that. That's really helpful. I want to explore that as well myself over the next week or two, this idea of discernment. Because I think Eckhart Tolle in his book, Power of Now, talks about becoming the observer and how important it is to observe thought and not be the thought. Sounds like the monks had already grasped that thousands of years earlier.

They loved to talk about thoughts as if it wasn't them, to decouple their identity from what they were thinking. It was so useful. So they often would say things like, the thought tells me that X or, you know, this thought will not become a part of me until I have decided that it needs to be in my mind. And that's in part because they thought thoughts could come from you, but also from demons and also from God. But even when they were thoughts that were just like pretty neutral, Yeah, they just sort of were around you until you decided to make them part of yourself.

That's so powerful. And when we look at, I chat to psychologists and psychiatrists, and we look at people who are really struggling with mental health, often they connect so deeply with their thoughts and they feel that they are their thoughts. And I think the practice of being able to go, Hey, I'm not my thoughts. I'm the observer of my thoughts. That's such a skill. And I think many of us struggle with that skill, but it's something I guess we can all practice.

CB: yeah. And I think it's related to this deeper monastic goal of just not centering yourself in everything. You didn't want to deny yourself so entirely that you cease to exist or have a sense of faith or identity or purpose, but it also doesn't always have to be about you all the time. And if what you're really reaching for is something beyond you, then yeah, part of the goal is to get out of your own way a lot. And definitely not saying all these things that are overwhelming me are also me and sort of throwing them further down into this dark place, they could say, Oh, yeah, I'm just going to cut that out. That doesn't have to be me. It's not going to be me. That was part of their larger project of both improving the self but also kind of getting beyond it.

Powerful. And this idea of self, I want to think about it for someone who's in a team, and that team could be their family, that team could be their work team, that could be an organization of 100,000, whatever it might be. This idea of mind wondering, how can that add value to the group, to the team? What are the benefits to others around us, not just for ourselves?

Oh, there's so many answers to this because monks loved this question. One is to recognize the impact that you have on others just by virtue of being around them. and that can be negative or positive, you know, negative. You could go in and try to chat with them when they're clearly trying to get work done or just not paying attention to what it is that is important to them in that moment. You could kind of make them co-conspirators and bad habits. And on a positive side, yeah, you could commit to things like a shared schedule or a supportive emotional community or A sense of not making everything about yourself. The community, your team reminds you that there's a larger purpose and you fit into it. It can make you really get a sense of meaning. In a more tactical way, just thinking through with your team, not just in terms of what's a good schedule that works to us, talking about these bigger things we started with at the beginning, like what's the shared goal? What's our long-term goal? What are our short-term goals to get to the long-term goal? That kind of revisiting can happen regularly, should happen regularly for the monks. It did constantly. Another practice among a team that the monks really valued was mentorship. that, you know, checking in with someone, it could be a peer, it could be someone who ranks higher than you or is older than you. Just doing it, I mean, it could be every day, it could be weekly, monthly, whatever. A kind of way of reminding you that whatever it is you're trying to improve or accomplish, you're not doing it alone. At least you shouldn't be. And you rely both on the wisdom, the guidance, and collaboration of other people.

Powerful. I love that. And can we chat about AI for a second? So, yeah, obviously it's a thing, ChatGPT, and it's growing and it's not stopping anytime soon. What do you think the monks might have said or how they might have felt regarding taking our thinking and handing it over to a ChatGPT, handing it over to something else, delegating our thinking to someone else? How might they feel about that?

I mean, I think they would have been pretty pragmatic about the fact that you're really just handing it over to like a collective repository and using a really sophisticated algorithm to sort through all the things that people had already said. So they would be, I think, wary of the data set, right? And saying, are these the kind of authoritative sources that we really want to be basing future outputs on? They were always very attentive to what it was people read or didn't read. What's feeding into what the bot eventually tells us? On the other hand, I think ancient and medieval textual culture was such that there was much less of a commitment to copyright and intellectual property. So people were constantly like doing borrowings and mashups and abridgments and just like, I mean, even the meditational practice in some way works a little bit like generative AI. You're just like pulling from all of these different texts and making new associations with them. So I think they would have been comfortable with that side of it. Like, you know, anytime you can sort of shift the kaleidoscope of the textual discourse that's been going on, that could be insightful.

That's really helpful, really, really helpful for me. And I want to think a little bit about what we're facing now in terms of what's happening in Israel and Gaza, the Ukraine, and many other places. Heavy stuff. We're gonna go there. Through the lens of the monk, When they were looking at this, and maybe they're looking at it right now, or back then, I'm sure there was unrest and war then as well. How would they have viewed mind wandering for a tool, a positive tool for the leaders? So let's say the Putins of the world, or whoever it might be, people who are leading with violence or are starting wars or engaged in wars, How might mind wandering support someone who has that kind of a lean on things? Would it be a positive thing for them to explore ideas, thoughts, emotions?

Yeah, I think they would have, for them it would be less about the techniques that any given political leader used. cognitive practice per se would matter less than the initial goal that you had set out for that practice. And for them, leading an ethical life, making morally sound decisions, had to be oriented to this kind of commitment that you were going to you were going to link it to God and to the guidance of your religious texts and interpretive traditions. I mean, obviously the catch there is that there were a lot of disagreements among monks about what was authoritative and how to interpret things. So I'm not sure necessarily that their guidance would get us that far. I mean, yeah, like you said, there's been conflict in the Levant for a long time. But yeah, from a starting place, I would say, you know, there would at least be consensus among monks regardless of their confessions or affiliations that you had to really earnestly and humbly be seeking the truth and the ethical path to reach it. And that you don't do anything quickly or rashly and you do need to consider this broader universe of which you, the individual, are imbricated.

That makes sense, Jamie. It makes total sense. I want to be mindful of your time, but a couple of questions I'd love to ask. around productivity. We are almost obsessed with productivity, not just at a personal level. If you look at a personal level, it's like, wow, we've got all these gadgets, apps, reminders, calendars, tools. We've got that. But then at a country level, at a massive organizational level, we measure productivity left, right, and center. How might mind wandering impact productivity? Because I know there'll be potentially a type A person will go, my God, I don't have time to waste on that mind wandering stuff. Every minute of my day is scheduled. I've got to do stuff. What's the message to that kind of person or that kind of thinking at an organizational level to go, actually, if you mind wander and you create space to think and challenge your thinking, here's what it might do to your outputs or your productivity.

Yeah, I mean, You really could answer it either way, right? So the person who wants to stay productive but is maybe intrigued by these practices, there's definitely a case to be made that your productivity can be boosted by engaging in some freer ranging thinking in times of structured quiet. I mean, just speaking from personal experience, some of my best ideas for the books I've written come to me just as I'm walking from work to home. And I'm not in front of a computer. I'm not even writing on, I don't have a document open. But yeah, just that 30 minutes of time can do a lot and really helps speed along the book writing process actually, even though it feels like time when I'm off work. On the flip side, you could argue that, you know, another possible outcome of these cognitive practices is reorienting your priorities so that maybe productivity isn't the main goal that you have anymore. I think one of the things that monks, the case that the monks make clear is that all of these things are very customizable and adaptable to your particular goals and circumstances. And so there's not going to be a guaranteed thing that happens one way or the other. So for the productive people, you can use these to be productive. For those of you looking to find other things to direct or organize your priorities, these could also be interesting for you.

I love it. And we were chatting about a year ago, we had the chief business officer of Google X on the show, and we're chatting about AI and how it grows. We discussed this utopia. where AI will kind of do everything. And we will have this utopia where we just wake up and AI will have created pineapples on our trees and we'll have created a new phone and updated it. And we don't need to do anything. Everything's done for us. There's no need to be industrious. And for some people, that sounds just heavenly. What would these monks have thought of a utopia where one just sat and ate and everything was produced for them.

They would have said that was totally premature. The only utopia is actual paradise. And for those of us just sort of sitting around, being lazy on Earth, that demonstrates a kind of, well, a lack of the kind of like investment of the heart and the mind that we were talking about at the beginning that you just sort of had everything given to you and there was no, you had no investment in really like using this life to demonstrate your commitment to something bigger. They were also, I mean, if for those people sitting around in the utopia looking for something to do, you can also look to monks as an example of how even in a world where, yeah, your economy and your day-to-day needs are basically taken care of. You can still find all sorts of things to keep yourself busy, even if that's just reading. Yeah. Could start doing that if your pineapples are just right outside.

I love it. And it's interesting because people talk about retirement and Working with clients, like, I want to retire at 50 or 45. And I was like, that's cool. But what are you going to do then? I don't know. I don't want to ever check. If I am able physically, mentally, emotionally, I want to keep being useful and productive, industrious. I just think there's a joy that comes with that. And the thought of waking up, having a cup of tea, looking at the sunrise, sitting on the couch all day, having another cup of, it would drive me nuts. I love in some way knowing, hey, what I do brings some value to someone. And I hope that that will always be the case. But before I've got one final last question, but before we get there, I'm going to ask that the viewer or the listener go to the show notes and order a copy of the Wandering Mind. It's an incredible book. It will shift your thinking. It will inspire you. and I challenge you to read it and implement some of the lessons and aha moments in there and just see how that unfolds. But Jamie, your work is phenomenal and I'm excited to see what you continue to do with it. I know that you've moved from Georgia, now you're at UCLA. I'm really glad that you're there. I think LA is a great city, but it's very full on. There's 10 million people there and a little bit of mind wandering would be a great thing for us busy people. So, final question. I'd like you to just pretend for a moment that we're going to fast forward into the future many, many years. You're highly aware that it's your very last day here on earth. Someone very young who you love dearly comes into the room and says, Jamie, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What might you say to them?

I think, and this is a combination just sort of my own personal experience and also the monks, is just listening to yourself carefully. You definitely don't know what's out there in the world fully, but you can at least be attentive to the things that catch your eye, that make you wonder, that you kind of fixate on. Those are all sorts of threads that you can pull on and keep you entertained and feel like you're doing something meaningful for a long time.

I absolutely love that. I love it. And I think that's interesting. Earlier we chatted about me just at the minute being interested in neuroscience, and I have no idea why, but it's It's interesting and I want to follow it. And so I'm going to take your advice and I'm going to just focus on things and challenge myself as to why I'm focused on these things and where it's taken me. It's really powerful. So thank you. Thank you so much.

This was great.

Oh, such a pleasure to have you on and wish you nothing but the best. Thanks. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co.nz. Thanks for tuning in to Lead On Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about leveling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.