Matters of the Mind | JK's Journal Entry
TQD: Issue 09
Welcome to The Quest Digest 👋🏼
Read the thoughts of Justin Kan, the co-founder of Twitch 🧠, scout opportunities to work with us 📣 , access episode summaries, and connect with our amazing and driven community 🌎
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In this issue:
You guys have been asking for it … Quest University is back! 🏫
Justin’s advice on meditation, and why YOU should try it 🧠 🍃
An exclusive sneak peek: A short journal entry from JK circa 2015 👀
🏫 The Quest University #2: The Hedonic Treadmill
We are back with another episode of the highly requested Quest University miniseries! In QU, JK shares some quick nuggets of old-guy (sorry Justin) wisdom and knowledge - the stuff they don’t teach you at school.
This week, Justin imparts his thoughts about The Hedonic Treadmill, and how it led him down a dangerous path chasing material possessions and peer approval. Unsurprisingly, this only made him feel perpetually dissatisfied and unhappy.
If this sounds familiar, we previously covered this topic in Issue 06 of TQD. Looking for a write-up? You can read it here!
Catch the full episode:
🧠 Matters of the Mind - Meditation
When you think of meditation, what comes to mind?
My friend and the co-founder of The Quest, Brent, once described it to me as “a shower for the mind.”
I often see advertisements for the meditation app, Calm. A deep soothing ASMR voice that I can only imagine belongs in movie trailers asks me,
“When was the last time you did nothing? When I say ‘nothing’, I actually mean nothing.”
All the time, I thought to myself. But how true is this really?
Even when I’m relaxing (a fancy word for procrastinating), I’m not really doing nothing. I scroll through social media, I try to come up with ideas, I fantasize about alternative pasts and potential futures. I am not present.
As the world becomes a more complex and hectic place, our minds are adaptively hardwired for constant stimulation and reward. It is easy to become detached from our mental and emotional clarity. Meditation, once thought of as an obscure spiritual practice in some exotic distant culture, is now becoming increasingly prominent and necessary in the mainstream.
Why meditation has become the most important skill Justin has learned in his entire life.
Meditation is about training your mind and awareness through sensory clarity, concentration and equanimity. These terms (in order) mean:
Tracking what’s in your focus space
Staying with one point of focus
Allowing things to happen, without needing something to be different
Benefits of meditating:
Becoming more presently aligned with your thoughts, feelings and senses.
Being more calm and less stressed (more deliberative instead of getting swept away)
There is no right way to meditate - the key is finding something that works for you. When Justin started, even the idea of sitting completely still for more than two minutes seemed like an incredibly intimidating challenge. So how do you start progressing your meditation practice?
Here’s what worked for Justin:
Start with an App (and stay consistent)
Apps like Headspace offer great introductory courses to breathing practices and the basics. This is a great option to start building accountability and habits, which is the most important part of meditation.
Try out different practices
There are many different avenues of meditation out there. If something isn’t working for you, try something else! Exploring different avenues that you’ll enjoy and stick with is much better than forcing yourself on the first thing that you come across.
Find a teacher
Like any other skill in life, improving requires learning from those who have experience. Finding someone to help you will advance your meditative practice and keeps you accountable!
Check out Justin’s full video on meditation here:
📖 JK’s Journal: The 99% (of startups)
December 2, 2015
Little known secret: nine months before we sold Twitch for $970m, I tried to sell some of my shares in a secondary transaction at less than a fifth of that price — and I was turned down by every VC I asked.
This is for all the founders who know they have built something that people want, but the rest of the world hasn’t recognized it yet. There is a tremendous amount of excitement about the top 1% of startups, but there are hundreds if not thousands more startups that will make their founders and investors rich. Sometimes the startup ecosystem can seem like it is entirely Uber and Airbnb, but there are lots of great businesses and lots of big waves that are just getting started. Press stories and mega-rounds of funding are lagging indicators; trust your numbers and growth to give yourself confidence in the face of rejection.
“Watching people play video games is a niche” is now “I’m in charge of our consumer, marketplace and e-sports investing.”
Fuck them. Build your business.
👀 Coming up next…
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Nasty Gal and GirlBoss Media founder, Sophia Amoruso, joins Justin for a candid chat about failures, challenges and learnings from being a CEO. Her autobiography #GIRLBOSS has been adapted into a Netflix series - check it out!
Episode drops Tuesday 16th March @ 9AM PST. See you there 👋🏼
