Why I Left Finance to Start a Meditation Company

by Liam McClintock

By most traditional American measures of success I was doing well. Except for one: I wasn’t happy.

After graduating from Yale University and securing a sturdy job at a private equity firm in Boston, I faced the reckoning that many college grads seem to get blindsided by. Nothing about the late nights in college studying prepared me for the “adult world.”

When I entered my job in finance, the 60-hour weeks in a cube quickly blurred together. Even after summer internships in the working world, I didn’t quite fathom how quickly my life would become an exercise in meetings, emails and phone calls. The time in between consisted of Chipotle at my desk, commuting on a train, and occasionally meeting a friend to anesthetize ourselves with a couple of adult beverages.

The vast majority of my daily interactions were superficial, mechanical. Characters in my professional life seemed to regurgitate the same polite, stock phrases. A conversation I once overheard at the water cooler:

How was your weekend?
Good, how was yours?
Good.
That’s good.

Nothing seemed to break below a shallow layer of conformity.

At this point, upon lying in bed and looking back on my days, I couldn’t recall how this week had been any different from the last. This amnesia led me to question whether I was in fact enacting a modern Groundhog Day?

In the blink of an eye, six months slipped by. I started to ask myself, “Is this what life is all about?”

Enter Meditation

Around this time, while buried in the corporate doldrums, I found my way to a regular meditation practice. I’d discovered meditation initially as a productivity tool, learning from famed entrepreneur Tim Ferriss that 80% of the successful people he interviews have a regular meditation practice. “Cool,” I thought. “Meditation will help me be more productive, earn more money.” 20 minutes each day was a small enough commitment.

The method I practiced was Vipassana, or Insight meditation, inspired by John Yates’ extensive meditation manual The Mind Illuminated. The technique involves continually returning one’s attention to the sensations of breath at the tip of the nose. Initially, I found my mind wandering off after a mere 3-5 breaths. As someone who was diagnosed with both Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as a child, it was no surprise that Vipassana didn’t come easily to me. Slowly but surely, however, my “attention muscles” began to strengthen and I even glimpsed the rapturous feeling of concentrative absorption, or what the Buddhists call Samadhi.

The real challenge, as I found out, was to take these states of mind and carry them throughout an often hectic day. Upon getting up from my meditation seat, I’d set a firm resolve to remain mindful for the rest of the day, only to inevitably slip back into a mind-wandering state. But I recognized that this was part of the learning process, part of the arduous mental “reprogramming” that I was undertaking.

Slowly, I sensed that something profound began to shift within my mind. As I continued to meditate, I became acutely aware of many of my (previously unconscious) thoughts and habits. I began to realize the parts of my day that were causing stress and anxiety, such as the amount of time spent buried in my email inbox.

Psychologists call this metacognitive awareness, and it’s actually quite painful at first. When you don’t like the way you’re living, becoming aware of this fact on a moment-by-moment basis can cause mental distress. Your own judgment gets added on top of the initial suffering, but I think this is a necessary first step.

What I began to realize through meditation is that part of the reason I wasn’t forming memories and that time seemed to be passing so quickly is that I spent almost none of my day in the present moment. What began as a productivity tool, I realized, was suddenly giving me my life back.

Our Evolved Brains

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” – Haruki Murakami

At the same time that I was discovering the inner workings of my mind through meta awareness, I was diving down a rabbit hole reading books on psychology and neuroscience to better understand the human brain.

What I learned from two related academic fields helped me understand my own internal reckoning.
1) Evolutionary Psychology tells us that the brain evolved mental mechanisms that aided in survival and reproduction (not happiness), explaining why we suffer.
2) Neuroscience introduced me to the concept of neuroplasticity, which elucidates why meditation is such a powerful tool for alleviating this suffering.

Putting these two findings together, I began to realize why meditation is so effective.

From an evolutionary perspective, we are the only animals that have evolved a complex “virtual simulator.” This part of our brains, located primarily in the neocortex, is what has led our species to dominate the globe. But it’s also the machinery of suffering.

Without meditation, much of our living is an unconscious mental program. Since we have essentially the same mental software from the Pleistocene era (roughly 200,000 years ago when we were hunter-gatherers), yet live in a radically different world, there’s a drastic mismatch between our biological hardwiring and everyday environment. As a result, this software program can make us anxious, addicted and depressed.

Psychologists have found that 65% of the average person’s thoughts are negative. It makes sense given that anxiety (say, anticipating a lion’s attack) would have helped us survive thousands of years ago, but that makes for an unnecessarily stressful existence today. At least in the developed world, the human species has escaped daily survival threats such as hunger, disease and predation. We ought to be rejoicing!

So why aren’t we happier? Because our brains still operate with the same set of “happiness chemicals” (primarily dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and opioids) that encouraged us to survive and reproduce. I’ve written more about this here.

Meditation as Medication

But, thankfully, we’re not helpless. Thanks to a relatively recent scientific finding called neuroplasticity, we can use our minds to literally change the physiological structure of our brains, and thus the way we perceive the world. In other words, the way that you use your mind can change your brain, in a reinforcing feedback loop. Nothing about our neurophysiology is fixed – what an empowering discovery!

By developing meta awareness, learning to disconnect from the negative stories that we often tell ourselves, and cultivating positive emotions (such as through a loving-kindness meditation) we are re-wiring our brains’ circuitry for a happier life.

As I began to deepen my meditation practice, I found that my entire worldview changed. I began to appreciate the simple beauties in daily life, rather than just worrying about future scenarios. For example, my commute on the train became an opportunity to investigate the interesting variety of Bostonians, rather than become frustrated by the jostling crowd. This sounds silly, but I even became more fascinated by little bugs crawling around. The small treasures of life became more interesting because I could notice and appreciate them, as if the windshield of my life were suddenly clean from layers of dirt.

After a couple months, something unexpected happened. As my brain adjusted to the new practice (two hours per day at this point), I would occasionally feel a sensation of pure bliss. While previously I’d thought that the best feelings in the world come from external circumstances, like kissing your crush or chewing a chocolate bar, something profound became clear: true happiness lies inside of us.

Psychologists have found that 90% of our happiness comes from our worldview, or perspective. Only 10% can be predicted by our job, marital status, wealth and other factors that we spend so much time striving for. For the first time I glimpsed the magnitude and truth of this statistic.

So on July 31st, 2018, I left my job in finance. Tossing my belongings in a Jeep, I headed west to Denver, where much of my extended family resides. Along the way I meditated, wrote extensively, and devoured books on meditation and the mind. Next, I flew to Bali, Indonesia to take a month-long meditation teacher training course followed by a silent Vipassana retreat in the mountains with Buddhist monks.

My Vision: Bring a Deep Practice of Meditation to a Wider Western Audience

And so here I am in Denver, Colorado starting a meditation training company. The journey has really just begun, both for my personal practice and in my mission to bring meditation to a wider western audience. But I’ve never felt so certain that meditation is the medicine we all need.

What I realized (and I get emotional just typing this out) is that meditation is the perfect antidote to modern living. It addresses the root problems of society: social media addiction, narcissism, celebrity obsession, social isolation, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety and virtually every other corruption of the mind.

Meditation is the tool that’s available to all of us for training our minds, teaching us to live deep. It takes applied effort, but I can’t imagine a more worthwhile endeavor.

[1] (Killingsworth, Matthew A., and Daniel T. Gilbert. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Science 330.6006 (2010): 932-932.)

I run a meditation training company for individuals and corporations called FitMind. It’s my attempt to dispel misconceptions about meditation as a spiritual practice of the East or a quick-fix for stress via surface-level apps. FitMind seeks to both educate people on the inner workings of their minds and provide a step-by-step process for establishing a deep personal meditation practice.