Jack Dorsey, meditation, and a tip from Jeff Bezos
Jack Dorsey: co-founder of Twitter and Square, two of the most successful tech companies of the Internet era.
What about him?
Jack went on holiday for a bit more than two weeks in South East Asia, and attended a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat in Myanmar. Once back, he decided to tweet about it:
What happened next?
How did people react?
If you don’t know about this already, before the “reveal”, please read a few of his tweets in the thread, and try to come up with your own opinion.
Here’s a sample:
Ok, now ask yourself: what do you think about this whole thread?
Did you like it? Or didn’t?
Did it help you? Or did it irritate you?
People’s reactions
Most people on Twitter reacted very, very angrily. See the whole thread on Twitter to get an idea.
I think I can guess why. The internet is full of hate. At the same time, I think it’s incredibly stupid to react this way.
Try for a moment to read these tweets as if they were tweeted by a simple, non-Billionaire, non-famous person. Would you still be so angry at him?
I have done a 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2012, of the same type that Jack did. It has not changed my life completely, but it has certainly given me a new perspective on a few things. I also had a ton of issues with mosquito bites, like he had after the retreat.
My view is that Jack simply shared an important moment in his life, a moment where I think he likely managed to get “out” of the tech bubble in Silicon Valley, and somehow live a different perspective about life. There’s nothing wrong with it. And there’s nothing wrong with sharing some health data recorded with expensive devices.
Jack didn’t do anything wrong. Actually, the opposite: he took care of himself. Good for him.
The “best defence to speech that you don’t like” according to Jeff Bezos
I only met Jeff Bezos very briefly when I was at Amazon Web Services, and we didn’t really exchange more than a few dozen words. So, I don’t know him, and he certaintly doesn’t know or remember me.
However, I am a “student” of his leadership principles and management style, and I remembered that Jeff said something about the “best defence to speech that you don’t like” a while ago, during a conference interview. Well, I found the interview, and the exact moment when he talks about this advice:
“The best defence to speech that you don’t like about yourself as a public figure is to develop a thick skin.
It’s really the only effective defense. … If you’re doing anything interesting in the world, you’re going to have critics.”
-Jeff Bezos
I hope that Jack Dorsey will simply listen to this simple advice, and take it. Fred Wilson probably agrees.
Haters will just keep hating. And that’s okay.
