Russell Simmons: 3 Simple Ways Meditation Will Make You a Better Entrepreneur

Meditation is going to make you happier and more connected to the world. That’s what it’s done for me and that makes it the most beautiful gift that I could share with any of you.

It’s also the most effective tool to help you achieve your goals. I’ve been starting companies, rehabilitating brands and promoting artists for over 30 years now and I can promise you that no tool has made me a smarter, more focused and clearer thinking entrepreneur than meditation. I would not be living in my incredible home, surrounded by fun toys, if it were not for meditation.

That’s the message I share with Hollywood hustlers and it’s the message I want to share with you now: meditation is the greatest tool that I know of to help you both harness and maximize your entrepreneurial spirit.

And here are three ways it will do it:

It makes you more focused. Meditation is going to allow you to accomplish twice as much in half the time. If you take anything away from this article, let it be that. By helping you let go of the distractions that have been clouding your mind, meditation will sharpen your focus to levels you didn’t think possible. I know this from personal experience and recent research backs it up too.

People have this misconception that meditation will chill you out and make you soft, but the opposite is true. I meditate every morning when I wake up and almost the second my session is over I’m eager to tackle whatever is on my plate for that day. Forget about a cup of coffee or even going to the gym -- meditation is all you need to get your mind sharpened and ready to go!

Imagine if I had developed a new technology to help you double your productivity in half the time. Every entrepreneur in the world would want to get down with it. Well, that "new technology" is actually a tool that smart people have been using for thousands and thousands of years.

It gets you past "success" and "failure." Let’s keep it real: most us, especially most of us entrepreneurs, get caught up in what we perceive to be the highs and lows of our professional lives. We pop champagne, buy fancy toys and celebrate when it seems like one of our ideas has "won," but we become dark and depressed when it seems like an idea has "lost" or "failed."

The truth is that neither reaction is sustainable. Being an entrepreneur or a business person is a journey that will have inevitable highs and lows, but will never actually end. So if you get too "high" the first time something seems to break right for you, or get too low the first time something doesn’t seem to work, you’re going to flame out pretty quickly.

I’ve had plenty of companies that the world was quick to label as "success" that never actually did much, just as I’ve had companies even my friends told me I should abandon, that took years to turn a profit, but now are some of my strongest assets.

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, then you already know that one of my favorite quotes from the Bhagavad-Gita (the main religious scripture of Hinduism), is "You have control over your work alone, never the fruit."

To me, that means stop worrying about how much success you have (the fruit) and instead just stay focused on your work itself. Because when you embrace the process of your work, instead of focusing on the results, you’ll be much happier and do a much better job.

It lets you be more creative. Every entrepreneur or business person wants to be more creative, right? Meditation is a guaranteed way to not only dip into, but stay connected with, your creative spirit.

When you sit quietly and let your mind settle, all the innovative, inventive and inspired ideas that have been hiding out in the depths of your mind are going to begin to bubble to the surface.

You might not associate them with stillness, but one group of people that I always noticed almost instinctively understood the connection between stillness and creativity were the great rappers I worked with. From Jay Z to Chuck D to the late Biggie Smalls, no matter how crazy things were getting in the studio around them, those guys were able to shut out the distractions around them and tap into their inner stillness. Which is why they always managed to create such innovative and timeless music.

If, like most of us, you haven’t been blessed with the same gift for connecting with that creativity, you can use meditation to get there. I promise that if you meditate twice a day for 20 minutes for just six weeks, you will see incredible returns on that investment!

You will find yourself becoming much more focused, balanced and creative. Traits that will transform you not only internally but also transform your relationship with the world.

And if you then decide to make meditation a permanent part of your life, as I suspect you will, you will start to benefit from all its’ tremendous health benefits, which include lowered stress, reduced blood pressure and improved diet, areas many of us need help with. That is to say nothing of what I consider to be meditation’s greatest gift: having an increased sense of connection with and compassion for the rest of the world!

So are you sold yet?

If the answer is not quite, then I suspect your hesitation has something to do with not having enough time to meditate. Well, I’ve heard that from plenty of folks before. And when I hear that, I always come back at them with that old saying about meditation: "If you don’t have 20 minutes to delve into your self through meditation, then that means you really need two hours."

No matter what you do, or no matter how busy you perceive yourself to be, carve out 40 minutes a day for meditation. I promise you it will not only make you a better entrepreneur, but a better and healthier person as well.

Russell Simmons Master entrepreneur and visionary Russell Simmons has influenced virtually all aspects of business and media: in music with the co-founding of the immensely successful original Def Jam Recordings, in the fashion industry with the trail-blazing Phat Farm, and numerous other ventures in the financial services industry, mobile communications and philanthropy. He is most recently the author of Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple.




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