Bill Gates takes week-long reading retreats in a cabin to think deeply. The speaker tried a similar intensive reading retreat in Indonesia, then compared it to a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat with monks: 3 AM wake-ups, no eye contact, rice meals, breath focus. He connects the discipline from both to how he leads teams.
Bill Gates, he had this thing called Think Week where he just goes to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and he just reads for a week. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. I just took loads of books and I found this place in Indonesia and it's just totally different to silent meditation. So if someone says they've done a silent retreat, often they're talking about this thing called vipassana. It's really extreme approach to switching off and feeling burned out. You go for 10 days, right? It's run by monks. It doesn't cost any money. You're not allowed to make eye contact with any other person there. Your meals are like rice. You wake up at something like 3 AM, and the first 2 to 3 days, the only instruction they give you is, hey, feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out. Okay, see you in 3 days. This is my management style too.
