Do you agree with Paul Graham?

I do not. It's pretty easy to see the slant most of his essays have, although I do like reading them since he's incredibly articulate and writes in an intelligent yet plain style.

His essays and opinions generally seek to aggrandize what I like to call the "startup industry". Getting young people to take huge risks they can't even start to gauge so that the startup industry (vc) benefits. My personal favorite is when he makes the claim that "working on side projects for money isn't worth it, you should just commit to your employer and try to get a raise". However, I can't agree more with his views on why Cambridge MA is by far the best place to study and think deeply. His essay, in which he visually recants a walk in Cambridge brings back so many memories of my college days in Boston, it's one of my favorite things to read.

The problem is that my fierce sharpness cuts people around me. Some of those people are close to me. And even those who aren't, they are still human beings and deserve to be treated as such. They often don't deserve to be hurt.

When your daughter tells you to your face not to do to her sister what you did to her, it brings home that you are at least using the sharpness wrong. (It wasn't abuse per se - it was mostly treating them as things that I wanted to get to shut up so that I could get on with what I wanted to do. Kids should not be treated like an interruption to your agenda.)

For the record, meditation isn't my answer. Prayer is - though there are those who will say that it's the same thing. The difference is whether God is really there or not.

> for me it only helps me focus better and work on more hard problems

Ok great, then keep doing it! How on earth could it be a waste of time for you?! You seem to have a misconception that there's a single objective answer for this kind of thing, "X is good/X is bad", true for everyone. Everyone's different. Let them be different. Do what works for you.

Spending a lot of time worrying about what works for other people, and reading a lot of papers trying to get the elusive single objective answer, are possibly wastes of time.

In a sense he's correct: meditation teaches one non-attachment as a byproduct of the practice. In business, status and wealth can be powerful creative tools. The longer you meditate, the less these two things matter, and the less other peoples opinions matter. It's simple. You meditate to let go. If you keep at it you might just gain peace of mind, and that peace of mind might actually make you a better business person in the ways that matter most.

I tend to feel this isn't really optional short of medication. Successful founders I know are neurotic messes. Nothing short of second line anxiety medication seems to make a dent in the existential drive forward. So it does feel like self awareness loop leads to a lot more internalizing behavior, but it does feel impossible to turn the switch off.

I have hard time to study what meditation is and what isn't. It is like doing nothing but not kind of having a rest because sleep is definitely not a meditation. As far as I understand, it is maybe having a rest but with special conditions like no think and possibly no interrupts on something like phone calls. Please correct me where I am wrong.

He is just thinking out loud. He is not saying that meditation will dull your fierceness, just that he doesn't think you should go looking for something to deliberately dull your firecness.

I don't know about meditation, but I like going for long walks.

I understand this isn't a "one size fits all" statement he's making. I just think meditation can make people sharper for the most part vs. dull. I wanna be as sharp as possible so I'm looking for the opposing views :-)

Counterintuitively mindfulness in general detaches you from things which lets you see them objectively as they are.

"Maybe that's the right answer for some people" Maybe you're one of those "some people".

brain waves. Depends on what you are going for.

If you meditate to separate yourself from the material world then paul graham may be right.

But if you meditate to clear your mind and solve problems then I would think paul is wrong.

PG and all investors are incentivized to create environments that produce extreme results. So it makes sense that they want 100 sharp knives knowing that the 10 that succeed will far outweigh the loss on the 90 that don’t.

I agree that meditation makes you sharper, but it does also give you the tools to keep your fire from turning into an inferno. PG wants an inferno because he doesn’t have to deal with the damage afterwards. His losses are limited to his investment. Your losses are unlimited.

If you want to play the odds, meditate and strive for average or above average while being decent to yourself and others. If you want to swing for the billionaire fences then I’m guessing a little extra fire in your belly might help from time to time, but I wouldn’t know, I meditate and am not a billionaire.