Think Like a Monk

A Monk Walks Into a Business School

In 2002, a Tibetan monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche sat in a lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with more than two hundred electrodes glued to his scalp. The researchers asked him to begin a compassion meditation. Most people, even seasoned meditators, take time to warm up. The EEG output should have ramped slowly. Instead, the instruments registered a massive spike the instant Mingyur shifted attention, like flipping a switch. He had logged sixty-two thousand hours of meditation. When they scanned his brain again at forty-one, it looked ten years younger than his peers'.

That experiment is the dare at the heart of Jay Shetty's *Think Like a Monk*. If a Tibetan monk can rewire his nervous system that decisively, can the rest of us, distracted and anxious and scrolling, borrow any of the technology? Shetty argues we can. He spent three years living in an ashram outside Mumbai, sleeping on a thin mat over a stone floor packed with cow dung, waking at four to chant. Then he came back to London with twenty-five thousand dollars of college debt and the idea that what he had learned was portable. The book is his attempt to make that portability concrete: not enlightenment, not robes, but a working manual for swapping a monkey mind for a monk mind.

It is worth saying up front what the book is and isn't. Shetty did not invent any of the ideas. They come from the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist suttas, and modern psychology. Critics have flagged sloppy attribution and noted the irony of a teacher of detachment commanding six-figure speaking fees. Both points are fair. What Shetty does well is translate. He takes Sanskrit concepts that scare most Westerners off, words like dharma, sankalpa, and anartha, and lays them next to commuter problems, awkward family dinners, and the urge to check your phone before you have fully opened your eyes. Read in that spirit, it works.