Curio #5 - Andy Puddicombe, Kazuo Ishiguro & Life on Planets
Hi everyone,
Welcome back to another edition of Curio, where every week I try to spark your curiosity by passing on a few things I find interesting and think are worth sharing.
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Oli
Andy Puddicombe
Andy Puddicombe has taken one of the more unorthodox routes to becoming a successful tech entrepreneur. On Christmas Eve of his first year of studying sports science at university, he left a party with a bunch of friends and was walking home when a drunk driver swerved off the road and plowed into them. Although he was not physically hurt, he witnessed a number of his friends be killed. Not long afterwards, his stepsister died in a bicycle accident.
These traumas took such an enormous emotional toll on Andy that about a year later he decided to quit his degree and become a Buddhist monk. For the next ten years he lived in Buddhist monasteries in Nepal, India, Burma and rural Scotland, becoming a master at the practice of mindfulness meditation. Much of this period was spent on silent retreat, including one silent retreat that lasted for an entire year.
After training briefly at a circus in Moscow, he returned to London where he completed a degree in Circus Arts while doing private meditation classes to earn money. One of his clients was Rich Pierson, a successful but anxious and burnt out advertising executive. With Rich’s background in business and Andy’s expertise in meditation, they decided to build a meditation app and Headspace was launched in 2012.
Andy now lives in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, with a wife and two young children. His morning routine involves an hour of meditation and then a surf before heading into Headspace HQ to help scale the rapidly growing company which has now been downloaded by over 50 million people.
To learn more about Andy, you can check out:
An in depth interview with him on the power of meditation
Kazuo Ishiguro on the English Countryside
Last weekend I was in London to visit family and friends. The weather was perfect - sunny but not too hot. On the train from the airport to the city I was reminded of the incredible beauty of the English countryside, with its soft light and lush rolling hills.
It made me think of a passage from The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, told from the perspective of a butler, Stevens:
“Now I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest - such as I saw it this morning - possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term ‘greatness’....
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”
Life on Planets
Baltimore based Phill Celeste produces music that goes beyond any one genre. He weaves his magnetic voice around a multi-instrumental sound that makes Life on Planets sit on the edge of RnB, reggae, bossa nova and house music. I hope you enjoy it!
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