Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels, and sounds like a sixteenth-century version of Sigmund Freud’s last home in London’s Hampstead: a treasure-house stuffed with books, papers, statuettes, pictures, vases, amulets, and ethnographic curiosities, designed to stimulate both imagination and intellect.

The library also marked Montaigne out as a man of fashion. The trend for such retreats had been spreading slowly through France, having begun in Italy in the previous century. Well-off men filled chambers with books and reading-stands, then used them as a place to escape to on the pretext of having to work. Montaigne took the escape factor further by removing his library from the house altogether. It was both a vantage point and a cave, or, to use a phrase he himself liked, an arrière-boutique: a “room behind the shop.”

“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”

“How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.

Montaigne used his essays to learn.

Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: “a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table.” The child should learn to question everything: to “pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.” Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others. “I have seen men flee from the smell of apples more than from harquebus fire, others take fright at a mouse, others throw up at the sight of cream, and others at the plumping of a feather bed.” All this stands in the way of good relationships and of good living. It can be avoided, for young human beings are malleable.

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. 

Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. 

You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don’t have to force anything, struggle, or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change. But arriving at that initial insight is quite a task. You have to see who you are and how you are without illusion, judgment, or resistance of any kind. You have to see your place in society and your function as a social being. You have to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And finally, you have to see all of that clearly as a single unit, an irreducible whole of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it can occur in a single instant. Mental cultivation through meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding and serene happiness. 

“What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like your own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind—no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined mind brings happiness.” 

Throw a stone into a stream. The running water would smooth the stone’s surface, but the inside remains unchanged. Take that same stone and place it in the intense fires of a forge, and it all melts; the whole stone changes inside and out. Civilization changes a person on the outside. Meditation softens a person from within, through and through. 

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

Meditation deals with levels of consciousness that lie deeper than conceptual thought. Therefore, some of the experiences of meditation just won’t fit into words. That does not mean, however, that meditation cannot be understood. There are deeper ways to understand things than by the use of words. You understand how to walk. You probably can’t describe the exact order in which your nerve fibers and your muscles contract during that process. But you know how to do it. Meditation needs to be understood that same way—by doing it. It is not something that you can learn in abstract terms, or something to be  talked about. It is something to be experienced. Meditation is not a mindless formula that gives automatic and predictable results; you can never really predict exactly what will come up during any particular session. It is an investigation and an experiment, an adventure every time. In fact, this is so true that when you do reach a feeling of predictability and sameness in your practice, you can read that as an indication that you have gotten off track and are headed for stagnation. Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is essential in vipassana meditation. 

The purpose of meditation is to develop awareness. 

Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bhante Gunaratana

Whenever you get really stressed out, grab a pen and a few pieces of paper. Write down every single thing you’re currently worrying about. Don’t filter your words or resist your feelings. Be brutally honest about what you are going through. Expose your fears and insecurities so you can see them outside of yourself.

Once you’re finished, go back and read through everything you just wrote. Then take out another few sheets of paper, and write down one reason why you’re grateful for every single thing you’re worried about. It doesn’t matter how awful or irredeemable that source of stress has been; come up with one reason why you’re thankful to have experienced it. This is the best method for transforming mental poison into spiritual nourishment. Writing unlocks the gates of your mental prison, which allows your brain to decompress and breathe. And practicing gratitude for each of your stressors helps you see your life in a more positive light.

I can’t overstate how critical writing was for retaining my sanity. It was one of the few activities that calmed me down and made me feel better.

Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety

A sizable number of students seems to feel that a person should be completely moral before beginning to meditate. It is an unworkable strategy. Morality requires a certain degree of mental control as a prerequisite. You can’t follow any set of moral precepts without at least a little self-control, and if your mind is perpetually spinning like a fruit cylinder in a slot machine, self-control is highly unlikely. So mental culture has to come first. 

There are three integral factors in Buddhist meditation—morality, concentration, and wisdom. These three factors grow together as your practice deepens. Each one influences the other, so you cultivate the three of them at once, not separately.  

This level requires a bit of mind control. But if your thought pattern is chaotic, your behavior will be chaotic, too. Mental cultivation reduces mental chaos. 

Meditation teaches you how to disentangle yourself from the thought process. It is the mental art of stepping out of your own way, and that’s a pretty useful skill in everyday life.

Meditation is certainly not an irrelevant practice strictly for ascetics and hermits. It is a practical skill that focuses on everyday events and has immediate applications in everybody’s life. 

Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change. 


Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bhante Gunaratana

Most of us know exactly what we need and want to do in our lives and, in most cases, not knowing isn't the challenge at hand. 

The real challenge is usually not having enough trust and belief in ourselves to actually go out and get started.   Most people become programmed to ignore their inner knowing because they associate it with risk and potential failure. Your soul is always talking to you and guiding you, the question is whether you trust its higher wisdom or not.   Even when it comes to self-improvement we will feel more inclined to seek out the most popular methods simply because that is what everyone else is doing.   This is fine, and completely natural to begin with, but in order to fully grow into the potential that is unique to you, there comes a time where you need to surrender to your intuition and follow it wherever it takes you.   This can be very scary because most people have been programmed to do the exact opposite and follow the herd their entire lives. They have been taught that the most stable and secure way in life is to simply do what everyone else is doing.

You really need to let yourself free from the herd mentality and start disconnecting from what everyone else is doing and do what you want to do instead.   In a world where the majority of people are asleep, it is simply irresponsible to look to others for instructions on how to live your life. Sure, you should listen to as many people as you can, but in the end it is up to you and you alone to make the decisions that are best for you.   Just look around you with awareness and you will understand why.

If you are not failing, it doesn't mean you are just THAT good, it simply means you have grown stagnant and you are not pushing yourself anymore. Never failing simply means you are playing it a little too safe.   Why is it important to listen to your inner knowing?

The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai

Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall. 

Spaced repetition and reinforcement is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis. Ideas that are difficult to remember are reviewed often, while easier and older concepts are reviewed less often. Flash card software programs like Anki,1 SuperMemo,2 and Smartr3 make spaced repetition and reinforcement very simple. Spaced repetition systems rely on a “flash card” model of review, and you have to create the flash cards yourself. By creating flash cards as you’re deconstructing the skill, you’re killing two birds with one stone. 

Once you’ve created your flash cards, it only takes a few minutes each day to review them. By systematizing the review process and tracking recall, these systems can help you learn new ideas, techniques, and processes in record time. If you review the decks consistently, you’ll memorize necessary concepts and ideas extremely quickly.

Create scaffolds and checklists. 

Many skills involve some sort of routine: setting up, preparing, maintaining, putting away, et cetera. Creating a simple system is the best way to ensure these important elements happen with as little additional effort as possible. Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters. Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time. Think of the basketball player who establishes a pre–free throw routine. Wipe hands on pants, loosen the shoulders, catch the ball from the ref, bounce three times, pause for three seconds, and shoot. That’s a scaffold.

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kaufman

The brain represents only about 2 percent of most people’s body weight, yet it accounts for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy usage—about 10 times more than would be expected. When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep. In fact, the human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2 percent of its neurons at any one time. More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint.

Consider the following statistics. The three requirements for human life are food, drink, and fresh air. But their effects on survival have very different timelines. You can live for 30 days or so without food, and you can go for a week or so without drinking water. Your brain, however, is so active that it cannot go without oxygen for more than 5 minutes without risking serious and permanent damage. Toxic electrons over-accumulate because the blood can’t deliver enough oxygen sponges.

Exercise does not provide the oxygen and the food. It provides your body greater access to the oxygen and the food. How this works is easy to understand.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove. This happens all over the body. That’s why exercise improves the performance of most human functions.

The same happens in the human brain. Imaging studies have shown that exercise literally increases blood volume in a region of the brain called the dentate gyrus. That’s a big deal. The dentate gyrus is a vital constituent of the hippocampus, a region deeply involved in memory formation.

At the molecular level, early studies indicate that exercise also stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF. That stands for Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, and it aids in the development of healthy tissue. BDNF exerts a fertilizer-like growth effect on certain neurons in the brain. The protein keeps existing neurons young and healthy, rendering them much more willing to connect with one another. It also encourages neurogenesis, the formation of new cells in the brain. The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus, inside the very regions deeply involved in human cognition. Exercise increases the level of usable BDNF inside those cells. The more you exercise, the more fertilizer you create—at least, if you are a laboratory animal.

Recall that our evolutionary ancestors were used to walking up to 12 miles per day. This means that our brains were supported for most of our evolutionary history by Olympic-caliber bodies.

Exercise makes your muscles and bones stronger, for example, and improves your strength and balance. It helps regulate your appetite, changes your blood lipid profile, reduces your risk for more than a dozen types of cancer, improves the immune system, and buffers against the toxic effects of stress (see Chapter 8). By enriching your cardiovascular system, exercise decreases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

The idea of integrating exercise into the workday may sound foreign, but it’s not difficult. I put a treadmill in my own office, and I now take regular breaks filled not with coffee but with exercise. I even constructed a small structure upon which my laptop fits so I can write email while I exercise. At first, it was difficult to adapt to such a strange hybrid activity. It took a whopping 15 minutes to become fully functional typing on my laptop while walking 1.8 miles per hour.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina

You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. 

As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don’t have to force anything, struggle, or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change. But arriving at that initial insight is quite a task. You have to see who you are and how you are without illusion, judgment, or resistance of any kind. 

You have to see your place in society and your function as a social being. You have to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And finally, you have to see all of that clearly as a single unit, an irreducible whole of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it can occur in a single instant. Mental cultivation through meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding and serene happiness.

“What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now.."

Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bhante Gunaratana

6 Things to Improve Your Concentration 

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” Chinese Proverb

"The limits to multitasking are clear when one realises that learning is done by reading or listening to the information being relayed, this information then needs to be reasoned and subsequently it needs to be memorised. The ability to capture the information in the first place is directly proportional to how much attention you provided.

With constant interruptions it is simple to see that lack of attention requires the inefficient revisiting of ideas that have already been reasoned and greatly hinders any momentum in the thinking process which ends costly in terms of time.

Baldwin effect (Baldwin effect- a theory in evolutionary biology suggesting a selection process in learnt abilities that make them innate in future generations) applied to attention and memory (see “Did Meditating Make Us Human?” by Matt J.  Rossano).

The brain is believed to function on different frequencies with each corresponding to a state of mind. These are classified as follows: 
1. Delta- up to 4Hz, associated with deep sleep.
2. Theta- 4-8Hz, associated with drowsiness. 
3. Alpha- 8-13Hz, associated with relaxed awareness. 
4. Beta- 13-30Hz, associated with being alert and active. 
5. Gamma- 30-100+Hz, associated with cross modal sensory processing. 

It is the Alpha frequency that we should aim to attain for the purposes of learning.

The techniques should be practised daily, preferably 3 times a day, consisting of two long sessions and one short.

Technique 1- Mantras Mantra chanting is a very popular technique in eastern traditions which was popularised in the west during the 1960s. The idea is to repeat a phrase, prayer or syllable over and over either vocally or in one’s mind.


Technique 2- Letters Visual techniques are favoured by many, given most people’s tendency to rely on this modality (compare how much time you spend on TV or PC versus smelling flowers). However, the technique presented here relies on the ability to picture a letter with the inner eye, an ability that some find difficult at first.


Technique 3- Breathing Breathing techniques play a key role in the meditative practices of Indian Yoga and Chinese Qigong. There is a great deal of variety in the teaching approaches and some conflicts depending on the branch of the art practised. The subject is deep and the subtleties of each technique can take a long time to master. The aim of this manual is to be practical yet effective, hence the technique introduced below is the one that has shown to be the easiest to master whilst being valuable in terms of the results produced.

The technique is sometimes called “Buddhist breathing” or simply “abdominal breathing” and the procedure is as follows: 1. Set an alarm to ring after 10 minutes. 2. Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and your hands resting on your thighs, eyes closed. 3. Breathe in whilst allowing your abdominal area to expand, breathe out whilst pushing your abdominal area in. 4. The breaths should be slow and natural, you should not force your stomach in or out, the movement should be without tension.

5. Progress slowly and do not tense, begin with 5 seconds for the in breath and 5 seconds for the out breath and allow for longer if you are able to do so (7-10 seconds for in and out); the key point is not to tense and not to force it to happen. This movement is very natural (it is how one breathes as a baby until early childhood) and can be relearned with practise. Tension defeats the purpose and can have undesirable effects. 6. When thoughts intrude (and they will), just let go. When they come back, let go again and again without reacting, without analysing the reason why the thoughts recur. Just let go and focus on the abdominal area moving in and out with your breathing.

At the beginning, the physical method needs to be learnt. With 10 minutes every day, a reasonable comfort with the technique can be attained in 2-3 months, but each person is different and timelines should not be the gauge. It is whether you feel relaxed and focused that should signal whether you are progressing along the correct path.

Technique 4- Countdown We tend to use numbers frequently in our everyday life and the notion of countdown tends to solicit an expectation of an event to follow. This technique is simple to complete and involves a dynamic audio and visualisation processes which progress according to your thoughts. The procedure is as follows: 1. Set an alarm to ring after 10 minutes. 2. Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and your hands resting on your thighs, eyes closed. 3. Begin with 100 and slowly countdown to 1 waiting approximately 3 seconds between each number. Try and picture the number (black number on white background) as well as saying it in your mind (not out loud). 4. Do not count the seconds between each number, just get into a comfortable rhythm and count down. 100...99...98...97 etc

(counting in your mind and visualising at the same time). The slower you count down the better. 5. When thoughts intrude (and they will), just let go. When they come back, let go again and again without reacting, without analysing the reason why the thoughts recur. Just let go and focus on the countdown. 6. Once you reach 90, with every thought that distracts you, let go and return to 90. For example: 93...92...91...90...89...88...thought...90...89...88...87...86...thought...90... etc. 7. Do not let the fact that you are going over and over back to 90 because of repetitive thoughts, distract or disturb you. You should also avoid analysing the thoughts-- just let go. With practise, this technique will allow you to measure your progress by realising how long you can countdown without any distracting thought.

Once you have mastered the technique and can proceed to 1 easily within the 10 minutes session, begin with 200 and increase as necessary.

Technique 5- 3D objects This is another visualisation technique that builds on the previous by introducing a 3-dimensional object compared to the 2-dimensional nature of visualising a letter or a number. This practise helps the development of the inner eye, which is extremely useful for memory techniques as well as mental arithmetic. The easiest objects to begin with are items that are viewed on a daily basis,


Technique 6- Smell To the author’s knowledge, this technique has not been covered by previous work on the subject of meditation; it uses an important sense that is often neglected but whose significance in mental performance is substantial. The idea is to use the memory of a strong pleasant smell and to meditate only on it.

Technique 7- Touch This is another technique, which to the best of this author’s knowledge, has not been made available in the literature yet. The idea is to train another modality that tends to be ignored in mental activities. The sense of touch can trigger a very relaxing response and meditating on it can train the user to solicit these responses without the physical stimulus being present.

Technique 8- Relaxing scene This technique builds on the previous exercises and allows you to experience a full scene with all the feelings that your senses were able to capture. The procedure is as follows: 1. Set an alarm to ring after 10 minutes. 2. Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and your hands resting on your thighs, eyes closed. 3. Try and think of a pleasantly relaxing scene that you would like to experience; a prototypical example would be sitting on a deserted beach by the water, feeling the waves wash over your body and then recede back to the ocean and the warmth of the sun sprinkling over your body until the next wave washes to the shore with a great whooshing sound.


4. You start the exercise by focusing on each individual sensation (i.e smell, touch, sound, view and taste) just once and then let go. Spend a few seconds on each modality and then move to the next step. 5. Then feel as though you are in the scene, this is now the point of focus, do not try and focus or shift from each individual sensation, instead just focus on being in the scene and experiencing the overall scene. When you are able to just feel as though you are there, the individual sensations will creep in on their own- all you need to do is maintain the feeling of being there as your point of focus.


6. When thoughts intrude (and they will), just let go. When they come back let go again and again without reacting, without analysing the reason why the thoughts recur. Just let go and focus on the feeling of being there. 7. Essentially you are focusing your attention on one feeling here, it is just that this feeling is complex and carries several modalities within it.


Technique 9- Background Sound This technique aims to utilise noises that are present in one’s environment and demonstrates to the practitioner how such sounds, that may cause frustration at times, can be equally soothing if a different interpretation is takes place in the mind. Mastery of this technique would provide the practitioner with a substantially improved control of his environment, allowing it to affect him in the way that he chooses. This is a valuable tool for competitive performances or any pressure situations that take place in noisy environments.

It is therefore paramount to have a specific training plan in place and basic rules to enforce compliance with the training. Most importantly it is necessary to have a tool to measure progress in order to verify whether the approach taken is effective.

With concentration, measuring of progress is challenging since it is highly dependent on the environment, external factors, general mood of the day, worries/concerns recently experienced, as well as due to the difficulty in defining the unit of measurement. To achieve the task of measurement, we will use the countdown technique to plot how far down the countdown the practitioner was able to descend.  This should not be done daily since such a period does not allow sufficient time for improvement; doing so fortnightly and plotting the results may be a reasonable time period.

Rules 1. Train every day- the refined skill of concentration is built gradually on previous days’ progress. Missing a day can take you a several steps back and cause frustration due to apparent lack of progress. It is therefore paramount that the training is completed every day without fail; if urgent circumstances present themselves then the training can be reduced to just one 10 minute session.

2. Do not try to catch up- do not try to make up for a missed day by doing double the next day; this may overload your system and cause frustration and perhaps even make you feel as though this is a chore. It is certainly not a chore; these are relaxation exercises and should be viewed with anticipation just as much as one would anticipate a tasty meal or a good movie or finishing work on Friday. Regular practise is the key, do not overdo for the wrong reasons.

3. Measure your progress every two weeks using the countdown technique- As discussed above, progress can be measured using the countdown technique, i.e. by recording the lowest number the practitioner arrived at during the session once 10mins have elapsed. The training schedules below only include the countdown technique from week 5 onwards because it is advisable to have a month of training that does not involve any pressure of achievement. For some, this is a crucial component in gaining confidence with the ideas being taught.

4. Follow the training schedules and continue your practise even after mastery- below are simple training schedules that focus the first few months on the core techniques, those that are simplest to perform and most effective. Once mastery has been achieved you can design your own schedule or continue with the one suggested. The important point here is that training should not be stopped after the 12th week; to maintain the skill gained would require regular practise, and, with concentration, the level of mastery is never finite- there is always a deeper experience that one can strive towards. 5. Do not compare your progress with others- concentration and relaxation are not competitive sports, once ego begins to interfere with the training, all effort would have been wasted. Concentration is a means to an end; it is there to improve your ability to learn as well as to relax. Comparing progress is fraught with dangers since the person you are discussing with may have different views, may not be honest with his views or may discourage you altogether by suggesting something else to try.

Schedule The schedule below requires the user to set aside 20 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at lunch and 10 minutes in the evening. This may not be possible for all readers but it is encouraged for optimal results. If these three daily sessions cannot be completed on a regular basis then at the very least, practise once a day for 20 minutes. It should be noted that practising only once a day would result in a longer period before measurable progress takes place. This is not a bad situation if it is the only available choice, but the key is to be realistic with what is possible within one’s schedule and execute regularly on that basis without fail.

It is quite simple, without memory of an event or experience, no learning can take place; and if no learning takes place no growth in ones abilities can materialise: you are left in a state of stagnation and inertia."

The Manual- A guide to the Ultimate Study Method (USM); covering Speed Reading, Super Memory, Laser Concentration, Rapid Mental Arithmetic and the Ultimate Study Method (USM) by Rod Bremer

Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible.