Eric-Jorgenson The-Almanack-of-Naval-Ravikant indd

Do you have a current meditation practice?
I think meditation is like dieting, where everyone is supposedly 
following a regimen. Everyone says they do it, but nobody actu-
ally does it. The real set of people who meditate on a regular 
basis, I’ve found, are pretty rare. I’ve identified and tried at 
least four different forms of meditation.
The one I found works best for me is called Choiceless Aware-
ness, or Nonjudgmental Awareness. As you’re going about your 
daily business (hopefully, there’s some nature) and you’re not 
talking to anybody else, you practice learning to accept the 
moment you’re in without making judgments. You don’t think, 
“Oh, there’s a homeless guy over there, better cross the street” 

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or look at someone running by and say, “He’s out of shape, and 
I’m in better shape than him.”
If I saw a guy with a bad hair day, I would at first think “Haha, 
he has a bad hair day.” Well, why am I laughing at him to make 
me feel better about myself? And why am I trying to make me 
feel better about my own hair? Because I’m losing my hair, and 
I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I find is 90 percent of 
thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be 
desire-based.
You don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You 
just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fifteen minutes 
while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. 
Choiceless Awareness works well for me. [6]
You could also do transcendental meditation, which is where 
you’re using repetitive chanting to create a white noise in your 
head to bury your thoughts. Or, you can just very keenly and 
very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. As you 
watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fear-
based. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying 
it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets.
When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you 
for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, 
I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, 
and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime. Look at 
these people—each one has a perfectly valid and complete life 
going on in their own heads.”
It pops us out of the story we’re constantly telling ourselves. If 
you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes, if you stop 

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obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far 
up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good. [6]
Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a 
deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close 
your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to what-
ever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no 
effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. 
If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the 
thoughts run.
For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some 
good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dis-
solved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more 
stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles 
stuck to you.
You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present 
and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up 
this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires 
that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles.
How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in 
meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. 
These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of 
unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will 
come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take 

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any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with 
some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you 
can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about 
how you view them.
Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unre-
solved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, 
there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll 
hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” 
and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.
It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you 
don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every 
morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its 
weight in gold. It will change your life.
I recommend meditating one hour each morning because any-
thing less is not enough time to really get deep into it. I would 
recommend if you really want to try meditation, try sixty days 
of one hour a day, first thing in the morning. After about sixty 
days, you will be tired of listening to your own mind. You will 
have resolved a lot of issues, or you have heard them enough 
to see through those fears and issues.
Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do 
nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, “I’m just going 
to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. 
This is the hour I’m not going to do anything.
“If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. 
I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder 
about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to 
sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do 

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nothing.” How hard is that? Why can you not do anything for 
an hour? What’s so hard about giving yourself an hour-long 
break? [74]