Derek Thompson

That in a conversation with God, what we should be doing is reflecting on not fix this for me and take care of that for me, but rather how can I rise to the challenge?

What skills do I need?

What do I need to have happen in myself in order to overcome my obstacles?

To think of something bigger than just gimme, gimme, gimme.

And then I went to the Catholic priest and the father told me about the power of community.

And he said, you know, people come into the parish and they ask for different things.

They ask for prayers to be answered.

And what they don't oftentimes realize is that it doesn't come in the form of a packaged gift to get your prayers answered.

It comes oftentimes in the people around you.

That if you're looking for love, well, the person in the pew down the pew could be that person who could connect you with someone who you might fall in love with.

If you're looking for a challenge you're facing in business, well, there might be someone in the community who can help you solve that problem.

And so maybe that's how God answers prayers is through community, which is something that I think today, many of those nuns, those secular people who don't have any kind of affiliation, we are starving for.

And so I think that really stuck with me.

And then the Buddhist monk taught me about how in Buddhism, we disconnect the pain from suffering.

And this actually has very deep backing in terms of the neuroscience literature around how those are two separate things.

But I think I kind of, I think most people think that pain is also always suffering.

That anytime I'm in pain, that means I must suffer.

And that's not necessarily the case.

That in Buddhism, they in fact have practices to teach them how to overcome that pain, to see the pain as transient so they don't necessarily have to suffer.

So those were five lessons I took away.