What Every Leader Can Learn from the Principles of Yoga

At Steve Jobs’s private memorial service, attendees received a mysterious box—the Apple founder’s final, handpicked gift for those closest to him. What was in the box? A cherished Apple memento? An amazing new tech-invention? Some final wise words? The answer: None of the above. The box contained a book: The Autobiography of a Yogi. It tells the first-hand story of a young man’s spiritual journey and was published long before Jobs was even born. Why would one of the all-time greatest shareholder-value creators choose an old yoga book as the last thing he wanted people to remember him by? We can’t know for certain. But it turns out that Jobs’s life and work were deeply influenced by this book and its principles. Maybe he was sending a message. Yoga is ancient, but it has arguably never been more relevant, especially in the business world. For many of us, today’s work environment feels non-stop: Constantly intense, stressful, fast-paced, and chaotic. On top of this, there is also the unrelenting rise of AI, which is raising existential questions about the very future of us humans. To understand how yoga can help, one has to appreciate its full teachings, which extend far beyond just physical poses (“asanas”). They also include meditation, breathing techniques (“pranayama”), and centering-chants (“mantras”), among other interconnected practices. Collectively, these practices provide a set of tools to help achieve mastery over one’s body, breath, and brain. Such mastery can help “level-up” one’s performance in competitive arenas and unlock uniquely human “super-powers.” In Star Wars terms, it’s like becoming a Jedi Master, who all the droids in the universe couldn’t possibly replace. My grandfather taught yoga over radio-waves in India. From childhood onward, I’ve had the privilege of interacting with many great yogis, ranging from austere Himalayan monks to cool Brooklyn hipsters. Indeed, yoga is an irreplaceable part of the toolkit I rely on for dealing with my own work life. And it also allows me to appreciate how corporate high-achievers like Steve Jobs apply yogic principles in theirs. In this article, I will illustrate four central aspects of these principles: Energy, Intuition, Simplicity, and Understanding. Energy Yoga philosophy, at its core, is about energy (“prana”). This energy powers everything we experience. And we all have stores of it that are far greater than we think. All we need to do is figure out how to make it flow, by removing physical and mental barriers. This unleashes a fierce creative power which enables us to do incredible things. Importantly, it is accompanied by the humbling—but also freeing—reminder that all individual accomplishments, whatever they may be, are relatively insignificant in the context of the vast karmic universe. That’s the theory. What about reality? To begin, I offer some very real-life examples: Steve Jobs said that once you learn how to make external expectations, pride, and fear of failure “fall away,” there is simply no reason left to not do what you love, to the fullest extent possible. Warren Buffett talks about how he enthusiastically “tap dances to work,” even at age 95. Indra Nooyi, former Pepsi CEO, told Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani that she considers her work to be a calling, one in which she is all-in with “head, heart, and hands.” Bill Gates feels blessedly lucky, because he cannot think of any better way to spend his time than absorbed in work. Both Richard Feynman and William James have observed that overcoming the dread of embarrassment and doing what you love, “to the hilt,” makes for a life worth living. In James’s words: “Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.” For leaders, yoga can help overcome self-limiting fear. Not by ignoring it, or pretending it doesn’t exist. But by observing, recognizing, and respecting it. This starts with physical preparatory steps, such as poses and breathwork, to relax one’s body and mind. It then evolves into deep meditation, which has the power to transform huge waves of crippling anxiety into gentle, manageable ripples. When that happens, the debilitating fear of failing, being judged, looking foolish, missing out, being shamed, etc. dissolves away. And an energizing love, not only for oneself but also for one’s work, people, and community, shines through. Pema Chödrön, master meditator, put it this way: We may think that brave people don’t feel fear. But what actually differentiates them from everyone else is that the brave have developed deeply “intimate” relationships with their fears. Yogic meditation is a way to achieve such intimacy. Managing fear and unleashing focused positive energy in the highest stress situations is critical for champion athletes. So, it’s no surprise that many of them use yogic tools (e.g., LeBron James, Aaron Rodgers, Novak Djokovic, Alex Morgan, Sachin Tendulkar). Business champs apply these tools too, especially the more mental ones. Ray Dalio, an all-time great investor, calls deep meditation the “single most important reason for whatever success I’ve had.” In his telling, it helps us figure out how to slow down life’s chaos, and deal with even the hardest management challenges in a clear-headed, energy-efficient, effective way. Like the business leader equivalent of “a ninja in a street fight.” Intuition “Follow your heart and intuition … Everything else is secondary,” Jobs said. Hedge fund titan Chris Hohn has spoken about the central role of intuition in his decision making, calling it “a higher level of intelligence than just intellect.” And Jeff Bezos stated: “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis.” Jobs, Hohn, Bezos, three ultra-achievers in arenas heavily dependent on hard-core, “left-brain” thinking (analysis, logic, math)—and yet they are talking about using intuition to make their most consequential decisions. Not as a replacement for analysis, which is a necessary prerequisite, but as a critical, and in some sense superior, addition to it. Examples like theirs are now increasingly being researched, understood, and appreciated. Yoga considers intuition to be one of our most important human abilities. Yogananda, author of the book gifted at Jobs’s memorial, likened it to becoming closely acquainted with deep realizations that analysis alone can only glimpse superficially, awkwardly, and from afar. Yogic intuition, to be clear, isn’t about blindly following impulsive whims. As Jobs described, it’s about learning how to calm and still the body, quiet the brain’s noisy chatter, and “feel” the question at hand. It operates like an intentional version of “let’s sleep on it,” allowing the sophisticated wisdom of our subconscious mind to work its magic. And it works best in areas where one has the domain experience necessary for pattern-recognition. When it does work, it shows up as a powerful feeling that fills one with unshakable confidence. In Gen-Alpha language: When you know, you know. Simplicity Every yogi quickly learns this: Simple does not mean easy, complex does not mean better. You may be familiar with “child’s pose” or “down-dog.” These are considered simple yoga poses. And yet nobody, including the masters, can achieve perfect posture, control, and stillness even in these most basic poses. That’s the point: Keep things simple and strive to make them perfect. Knowing with full humility that you never will. A test of this concept is the very simplest and most powerful yogic instruction ever: Just sit quietly with your thoughts; do absolutely nothing, even for a mere 15 minutes. Research shows that people would rather give themselves electric shocks than successfully accomplish it. Go ahead, try (without the shocking part, obviously). “Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.” observed Jack Dorsey, co-founder of iconic brands like Twitter (now X), Square, and CashApp. Charlie Munger has noted that simple behaviors create the most value (not the complex ones popular on Wall Street). And Steve Jobs referred to simplicity as his core “mantra,” as reflected in Apple’s deliberately clean and wildly successful device designs. We humans cannot match machines when it comes to complexity. They’re literally built for that. Fortunately for us, simple is no slouch. And simple, we can do. So, the next time you are sitting in a business meeting loaded with confoundingly complex jargon, workflows, technologies, action items, and so on, perhaps ask: Does it need to be so? Or is there a better, simpler way. Understanding Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, credits much of his creative brilliance to a formative childhood lesson: There is a huge difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing the thing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrated a similar point: Ornithologists may well write respected academic tomes about birds, but they can never really understand what, say, flying means for a bird (only birds know that, and they don’t write anything). Yoga masters would wholeheartedly agree. Here is how an ancient yogic text outlines the difference between “religion” and “spirituality”: religion is what someone else tells you, but spirituality is what you learn for yourself. The former may be a helpful guide. But the latter is the path to useful knowledge and action. To follow it, we must honestly admit what we don’t know, proudly adopt a flexible “beginner’s mind,” and try to figure things out for ourselves. Real understanding comes from first-hand experience, introspection, and self-realization. In the business world too, knowing the best buzzwords is not nearly the same thing as knowing what you’re talking about. Business icons like Jeff Bezos and Lee Iacocca have spoken about the critical, no-shortcuts importance of understanding your business inside and out. And Warren Buffett famously observed: “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” Sometimes if feels like all we hear these days is how technologies such as artificial general intelligence, quantum computing, or crypto-blockchains, are going to dramatically change everything. Do we really know what these things actually mean? Speaking for myself: Definitely not. But I do know that many executives and managers who are betting the farm on them likely don’t know nearly enough either. And that this can be a very dangerous position to be in. A better approach may be the yogic one: What we don’t know will always far exceed what we do, but this is no cause for despair. Rather, it’s a wonderful opportunity to practice humility, apply a growth mindset, and try to expand our circle of competence. . . . Yoga can make you more effective, joyful, and productive at work, perhaps to a greater degree than you can imagine. It offers a flexible toolkit of options, from which we must individually pick-and-choose the ones that best serve us. As you may have heard in yoga-class: every-body is different. The good news is that there are plenty of resources out there to help–mentors, teachers, books, classes, courses. And, once you begin the journey, the right-fit ones have an uncanny way of finding you when you are ready for them. The key: Stop thinking, start acting. As Master Yoda from Star Wars, the greatest fictional yogi I’ve come across, said: “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

What Every Leader Can Learn from the Principles of Yoga

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