YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Acton Smith

lines on the record: 105
first: 2022-01-31
most recent: 2022-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, thank you. And thank you to you for having these conversations during lockdown. I lived on the west coast of Ireland in Galway and I would run up and down the promenade by the sea. God knows how many thousand times and listen to your podcast multiple times through the rain and the wind and just been just so inspired and delighted by that and so thank you for that.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pain is horrible, no one wants it, but pain serves a very important purpose. It alerts us to Problem and without pain sensors we are Going through life blind and it's very dangerous. So pain whether it's mental or physical is horrible but it's valuable And so any type of pain rather than just ignoring it and trying to mask it, it's important to lean in and listen to it. So I could give many, many different examples. Maybe one we've talked a little bit about today is the sleepless nights. It's the pain of waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning in a cold sweat, staring at the ceiling. And being so unhappy and frustrated with that development? But recognizing that that pain, that mental pain, is there for a purpose. It's my subconscious brain telling me to pay attention and to sort out a problem that I'm not addressing during my waking hours.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, I think this could be a whole new podcast all on its own. I'll give a short answer. I think psychedelics will play an incredibly important role in solving the global mental health crisis. These compounds that have been under our nose for decades and vilified, you know, from the war on drugs back in the sixties could, and the scientific evidence is showing that they may well be able to help hundreds of millions of lives. So that to me ties into COM's mission, and I think it's incredible work that they're doing there, not just with psilocybin, but with Ketaman, with Ibergan, with MDMA, a whole range of different substances that interact on the brain in different ways. Those compounds combined with therapy in the right set and setting I think it is a golden key that can unlock so much positivity for humanity.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do, we do as a team. We have what we call the warm fuzzies channel in our slack at work and we read one out in every big meeting of how calm has changed someone's life. And whenever we're having a really tough day and we're really stressed and this helped me this difficult year is going on the app store and reading the millions, don't read all of them, but there are millions of five-star reviews covering all aspects of life. It's just the most incredible tonic to recognize the impact we've had. It's everything from little kids who are being bullied at school who find calm kind of supportive and helpful for them to couples that were on the brink of divorce doing the daily calm every day and it reuniting their love, to addicts giving up their drugs, to people who are suicidal, having their lives saved because calm and the content that we create has transformed them. It's goosebump inducing and we”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sugar helps the medicine go down, and so we have tried to respect the authentic roots of mindfulness, but also adapt it for the modern age. And so being calm isn't just about sitting in a lotus position sixty hours a day on top of a mountain, it is about weaving it thoughtfully throughout your life so you can improve your own journey through life and those of all the people around you.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah not accurate and I think that there's a little bit of that and I think we have certainly become a little more like that on this journey. But no, I think one of the reasons why calm has been successful is that that is not the brand that we have built. We've tried to help people learn this practice that is thousands of years old in a very modern way, as I mentioned earlier, made it simple, relatable, had it a bit of fun, sprinkled a bit of Hollywood stardust on top of it, you know, as Mary Poppins once wisely said, a spoonful of”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well said Esther Perel is brilliant at this. She's written some amazing books on relationships and podcasts and yeah, she understands the nuance of all this better than anyone. So if anyone's struggling with their relationship, I'd suggest doing some homework with Esther.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in short, just trying to listen and understand where someone is coming from. I think a good, whenever you're in an argument with a partner, a very good technique I've learnt is instead of just back and forth, I'm right, you're wrong, and getting nowhere is pausing and stopping and saying, letting them talk, and then instead of firing back and telling them why they're wrong, replaying what they've said and having them and seeing that light come on their eyes and going oh my god, you get it and them doing the same for you and you're like wow all right simple little breakthroughs are like that I think are very effective”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ones and zeros, it isn't right and wrong. Life is not black or white, it's beautiful shades of grey and nuance, and I think we've lost that, you know, in the culture wars and the intense political environment of today and the immediate dopamine frazzled social media world that we live in. So”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember my grandmother many years ago telling me when I was jabbering away and talking nonstop at a dinner as a young lad, she said, Michael, you have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. I was like, what are you talking about, grandma? But the penny dropped years later. And I try and listen a lot more than I talk. And I try not to do that thing that most people do is when they're talking, just not listening, just getting ready to say the next thing. And also respecting and understanding that people have different viewpoints and different life experiences. There isn't”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being more responsive instead of reactive so when you just hear better the brightness is turned up on life when you develop a meditation practice you can see these warning signs of what someone needs and then respond to them instead of just being lost in your own world so if your girlfriend is asking you for a walk or as she is saying something to you you not only hear what she's saying you can understand what's behind it as well and I think that's important again not easy to do and get right all the time but it's it's it's vital if you are to build strong healthy relationships in life”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's such an important question. I'm still trying to figure this out myself. One of the things that Developing a meditation practice has helped me do is improve my empathy and I now am better at seeing the world through other people's eyes and before that again very self-centered and self-centric I couldn't do it and I used to just assume my girlfriend's thought just the way I do that their brains were wired like mine if I thought they had a if I thought there was an area they needed some help on I'd buy a self-help book for them to sharpen them up because that's what I'd love to happen and then I realized that no our brains are wired very differently they need very different things they need that she needs her emotions validated instead of me trying to solve the problem every time she mentions something so I think that's made a massive massive shift and I think just again being”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mention those four things that are important to building that foundation, but nothing in life matters more important than our relationships that we build throughout our life. So that has been a massive learning for me. And yeah.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not just money I'm not driven by money. I think that's the byproduct of building something successful. To me, what kind of puts the blinkers on is just a big vision and just going charging through walls and making it happen. But even then, you're sacrificing a lot along the way. And so being more thoughtful and a little more mindful for this next phase, I have recognized that I need to get a little more balance in my life. I need to make sure I am when I'm in a relationship that I'm supporting and looking after and spending time with my girlfriend that I'm spending time with my family, that I'm calling my mum every day, that I'm, you know, showing up for people, you know, when I'm playing with my daughter in the playground, not feeling that urge to check my phone, but being fully, fully present. And it's not easy to do, but it's incredibly important because”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So true and not, yeah, not just romantic connections, but friendship connections, family connections. When entrepreneurs are stuck on their vision and off they go holding on to that rocket ship, you sacrifice so much.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So yeah, I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of learning over lockdown. And I think it's made me not just a better leader, but a better human being and a better person. So yeah, very excited about what comes next on that level.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, good question. I think we're similar. And I think because I've been so obsessed and focused on my business, I haven't been the best partner to my girlfriends. And they have been, you know, Kind of, I haven't been mindful and thoughtful and respectful in the way that I connect with someone on that level. So I think the last year and a half has definitely changed. Working at Calm has changed me. And I think I'm at the point now where I'm ready to finally to settle down and get married and have a wonderful family. I have a little baby girl, a daughter who I love dearly, the greatest thing that's ever happened in my life. And that shook me up massively as well. And I realized the world just isn't all about me. There's someone else now more important than me. And with my ex we're trying to be great co-parents and sort of make that work.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mind kind of calibrate with the world. You're throwing yourself into Twitter and Instagram and the news cycle and everything else. I think that's been a really, really important thing. Four areas that I really think about that are the foundations to being healthy and looking after yourself, which then enables you to look after your friends and family and your company and employees. One is nutrition, what you put into your body. Number two is exercise, how you move your body. So important. Number three is your mind taking care of that, you know, developing a practice that works for you. And number four is sleep and making sure you get that right. Sounds very simple, but you keep those things in balance. You respect them. And again, going back to this idea of a foundation, that is a very powerful foundation to stand on, to do everything else you want to do in life.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so there were a few other reasons why it was a very hard year sort of beyond work, which were compounding all the different challenges. I just think I've learned a lot about being a better leader by developing kind of a meditation practice and being more mindful of so many different things. One is just not getting sucked into the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey. You know, nothing is ever amazing or as disastrous as it seems. And I think teams want to follow calm leaders who are stable and, you know, celebrate the wins, but don't get sucked into the vortex of negativity when things go wrong. I don't go to bed anymore doing emails and waking up in the middle of the night with a phone glued to my face. I don't reach for my phone first thing in the morning anymore as something like sixty percent of people do because suddenly instead of gently coming into the day and letting your”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the company because it gave the whole company a chance to properly step away and recharge their batteries, knowing that there wasn't any calls they were missing or any important things going on. And you know what? We came back a week later and everything was fine. The business was still there. Fortunately we had a few colleagues that stayed to make sure everything stayed up and could support our audience. But yeah, that was one of the smartest things we did to support the mental health of the team.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously we are. We want to support our own team and other companies around the world. And just a few things that we've tried to do. We're still figuring this out ourselves, figuring out what the best way to work and support our teams are. So one thing is we have unlimited holiday, but teams don't take them because it's very hard to do. I've taken a few breaks during the pandemic, but I don't think I've had a single break where I wasn't on at least one Zoom call or I didn't check Slack or email at least once or twice a day. And we made the decision back in October to do a mental health week. We've done a few mental health days where everyone sort of steps away. Previously, I'd have said, what a ridiculous idea. Who on earth gives the whole company a week off? You know, we are in such a competitive space. We can't afford to do that. And we did it and we agreed it would be the right thing to do. And I think it's one of the smartest decisions we've made in the history.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beyond anything I've ever seen in my career, and so I think it is just now we've been in this situation for eighteen months and it has just gone on and on and on. It's really affected everyone. And we're seeing this now across pretty much every company. At the start of the lockdown, going back, I think what companies were seeing was a real surprise. Instead of people bunking off and taking it easy and putting their feet up and watching Netflix all day, people were working harder. We saw this at Calm. And I think many companies have. I think there was a Harvard study done recently showing that the average workday has increased by almost an hour when people are working from home. So people are working harder. They can't really switch off. There's no boundary between work and non-work. And it's creating this compounding toll on the minds and bodies of everybody. So it's a crisis. It's a very, very serious issue. We are taking this very seriously.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was a combination of things. I think it was burnout connected to chronic stress, connected to the back pain, and again, all these things start to negatively compound the lack of exercise. I was living on my own and didn't have much kind of human connection. All these things kind of came together and created a perfect storm. And we have over 300 people at Calm now and the team were going through their own versions of that. It certainly wasn't just me struggling. And we do this survey every six months called Culture Amp, where the whole team kind of answers a bunch of questions and they can leave anonymous comments with thousands of anonymous comments and the last one we just did. And we've never seen anything like it in the data that the number of people talking about stress and burnout is way.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, 2021 has been tricky. I'm in a much better place now, but it has been very, very challenging. And I'm very fortunate in that, you know, I haven't lost any loved ones. And we've got to put things in perspective. But from a health and work angle, this has, I think, been one of the toughest, if not the toughest years that I've personally been through.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think months and months and months of staring into a tiny little screen hunched over my laptop like everybody else has taken its toll, and I didn't treat my posture with respect. I didn't look after my mental health the way I should. And I started to compound and I had quite a serious back problem. I had a herniated disc because of all the hunching and that pushed on a nerve which meant I couldn't walk and I had very serious pain every day which meant I couldn't sleep very well. I saw multiple physios I started to take pains.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a Challenging time. The pandemic, as you say, has affected everybody on Earth in many, many different ways. It has been extraordinarily difficult. So my perspective is more a personal perspective, but I think stepping back a little bit, if we go back to 2020, you know, when this first hit, it was all unknown. There was a lot of anxiety. But this was, we were in this together and there was a lot of intrigue about what was going on. We didn't have to commute into the office anymore. We could work from home. Zoom was this incredible opportunity. And so 2020 for myself and the whole company, I think, generally was not too bad. You know, it was all bearable 2021 for myself personally has been pretty challenging.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, said we always look for the overcomplicated solution, don't we? We think it has to be, but fundamentally those are the basics that you just mentioned. Johan Hari talks about in his book. Lost Connections is one of my favorite books. We're disconnected from what made us human as our brains and bodies evolved over a hundred thousand plus years. And it's so basic. So sleep is one of those key things. And if we're not getting enough good sleep, if we're disrespecting it, if we're drinking alcohol before we go to bed, it affects every aspect of our life and we're more irritable. We're less creative. Our memory gets shot. We just go into a negative compounding situation. And so yeah, treating sleep with respect, I think, is one of the most important things we can do.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sleep has gone through a similar kind of metamorphosis in society as mindfulness has, you know, just a few years ago. It used to be a badge of honor to show off how little sleep you got. For something we spend a third of our life doing, people gave it very little thought and respect. And that shifted, you know, Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep has played a huge part in that. Hopefully Karmas has played some part in that as well. So I think the biggest thing is people just recognizing how important it is. Everyone needs a sort of different amount of sleep depending on our genes. Somewhere between seven and nine hours sleep every night. For me I need about eight and a quarter to feel good. I don't know if you know your level. You can probably cope on about three hours. I imagine given how much you do.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your evening routine a little more interesting and entertaining and help solve a problem Oh my goodness you can build something huge and that's what sleep stories has been for calm so that was the next massive massive growth area”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stories kind of has pioneered this. And so before you know it, you're listening, your brain is engaged instead of wandering about your to-do list or what someone said to you at work that day, you're engaged in the story. And then before you know it, we've taken you into a state where you're half awake, half asleep, that liminal mode, and then you're fast asleep. And very few people get to hear the end of the story. And this was just huge. Hundreds of millions of them have been listened to. We've had massive amounts of press, lots of celebrities have reached out to us wanting to read them. And the final thing I'll say on this is The great thing about sleep is what a market. seven point eight billion people go to sleep every single night of their life”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we'd seen something interesting in the data about eleven o'clock every night all around the world. We saw this big spike in usage, and we realized that people were listening to Tamera's voice to help them fall asleep. And we were like, what? Don't do that. That's not what's not how you meditate. And we were like, well, hang on, maybe there's something here. And so that led to sleep stories. We took this age old thing of a bedtime story, which we all love. And we kind of modernized it and we created a sleep story. And it's a mix of a beautiful, soothing voice with sound effects, with music, and it starts in a really sort of interesting, engaging way, and then gradually becomes more soporific. So instead of your traditional three arc structure of a story, we call it a story slope. Chris, who runs our sleep.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't poor Gasleen on the fire until the fire is going. You know, the gasoline is the marketing. Get to product market fit first. Kind of don't turn on those afterburners until you really understand your business. And we did. We knew we had something. It was a way. We were really, really roaring. And so a lady joined us called Dunn, who's just brilliant at user acquisition. And she understood Facebook marketing inside out.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How is that for you? We were underway there and again the business was starting. It was an extraordinary place to be because we were bringing a lot of downloads and we were generating a lot of revenue. I think we got to about 8 million downloads before spending any money on marketing. And this is an important lesson that I always say to entrepreneurs.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking off, it's going, it's happening. That was then you shift from kind of the ice cold winter to just holding on to the rocket shit for dear life.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And said, Oh, your story's fascinating. Could we make a book about calm? And I was like Well, it's not really core, it's not our key focus at the moment, but okay, could we talk about an advance? And literally our cash amounts were dwindling and she said sure and the money that came in from that offer kept the business going. So a very unusual way to keep the lights on at a startup. So we're very grateful to Venetia and the penguin team. And then we had a subscription business model. So we put the price up from $10 a year to forty dollars a year, which was a key tipping point because we didn't see any drop off in signups, which was just amazing. So we started to make more money. We realized this service that we're offering, these meditations, were valuable for people. They were really getting something out of it. And then that was where the point was like, hang on a minute.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when we were out there on our surfboards and it was freezing cold and everyone thought we were mad waiting for that wave to come Yeah, we did feel as if this wasn't working Alex and I had some very kind of difficult, stressful conversations wondering how many more years we need to wait and we couldn't we found it very difficult to raise money we were able to get some seed money in the early days but the bridge between the seed money we raised and getting to a series A took years and years and we had no choice to make the business profitable we had to have incredibly lean team it was only about six or seven of us for a long time and we were running out of money and I remember I think this is around sort of 2015 we had to get very creative with how we kept the lights on in the business and I gave a talk and there was a lady in the audience Venetia from Penguin and she emailed me after”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not all companies, but most companies are starting to recognize how important that is, and I think that is fantastic for society.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a big question. I am optimistic. I'm very, very glass half full person. And I do, despite the many, many challenges we see in the world, it feels like the world is inflamed and in crisis if we listen to the news and we look at traditional media. I think the world is actually getting better in many, many different ways. You know, there's a wonderful book, Factfulness, which talks about the data of how the world is getting better. As I say, it doesn't always seem it. So I am optimistic and I'm optimistic also because we're seeing this incredible shift in society where people are taking more care of their minds that it is okay to be vulnerable and to talk about your mental health, to your partner, to your friends, to your boss. Can you believe that a few years ago? The idea of asking your boss for a mental health day off or saying it would have been crazy. You'd probably got fired.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a way of building up the strength of your mind. It enables in its in everyday life to be more aware to improve our attention, and my goodness we need that muscle of attention in this modern age because never have we been assailed With more noise and stimulation from social media to billboards to TV, it's coming at us constantly, and one of the most valuable skills in the twenty first century is to be able to decide where and how and when we put our attention.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Respond to situations in life instead of reacting. And that seems like, what is he talking about? But when you stop and think about it, we have so much stimulation in life, so many things happen, and most of us react. You know, your first thought, someone cuts you off in traffic, you honk your horn, your partner says something slightly passive aggressive, you snap straight back at them into a big argument. What if there was a slight pause a fraction of a second where you held and you thought and you kicked in your awareness enabled you to respond to that stimulation rather than reacting? Another is a good analogy is going to the gym. We talked about the physical and the mental and our minds and our bodies are very interconnected. But we go to the gym and we lift weights and that resistance biddles up the muscle, the strength in our body. Meditation is like going to the mental gym.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so this can get quite complex, but at a sort of basic level, the amygdala, the amygdala is the oldest part of our brain, and most people operate from there. And in very, very simple terms, what building a meditation practice and becoming more mindful does is it changes our reliance from the amygdala to more prefrontal cortex thinking, where we're able to plan a little bit more to think into the future, to put things into perspective. One way of thinking about it and a real kind of key moment for me as I develop my meditation practice was I now”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Helping people not just survive, but to thrive in life. And why not? And the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. You know, ninety billion neurons, trillions of connections between them, and yet it doesn't come with an instruction, manual. We're not taught this in schools, or we certainly weren't when we were growing up. It's starting to change, thank goodness. But we're just left to get on with life, and no wonder there's so much suffering and unhappiness and mental health issues, and it doesn't need to be that way. And I think meditation and mindfulness is it's almost like a way of upgrading your OS, your mind. It enables you to see and the world differently and to think differently. And it's not a silver bullet, but it's an important starting point to then build upon.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and gratitude. So yeah, I get very passionate about this, as Alex and the team do, but we think it's a very important mission that we're working on. Thank you”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has mental health, and some days it's great, and some days it's not. Anyone who has a body has physical health, and some days you can run up a mountain, and other days you can't get out of bed. And we have to understand this, and we have to respect and learn about our minds because there is nothing more important. Solving the global mental health crisis, which is the mission of calm, I think is one of the most important challenges in the world. It's a first order problem. Because if we can end all this unnecessary suffering, if people can become masters of their mind, instead of controlled by their minds, everything starts to change. You know, we can start to tackle the climate change and inequality and racism and homelessness and all these other problems that stem from people having healthy minds with greater resilience and empathy and compassion.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People often say that there's an often quoted stat that one in four people will suffer from mental health issues in their life. It's not one in four, it's one in one. Anyone who has a mind”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you've done quite all right. There's multiple, multiple routes to huge success, but that's so interesting. You said that. Yeah, I'm thinking back now to, again, that time when it was so non-obvious, I remember the number of meetings we had with investors where they were like, well, this is so niche. You can get meditations for free on YouTube. And if no one is going to pay for this, and mental health is something that isn't talked about, mental health has stigma around it. How on earth are you going to build a business and get people to talk about the mental health? And we're like, no, the world is changing. This is important. What is more important than our minds? Look at all the people suffering, all the clinical depression, the anxiety, the PTSD, surely at some point we're going to wake up to this and the penny will flip and the light bulb will go on in society. Again, it took years, but eventually it happened. And now, thank goodness, we get it.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know what you weren't the only person? I know that. People would back away from us at parties when we said we were building a meditation company. And it was, and I remember other people like thinking I'd had a nervous breakdown because of my previous business. And now I was setting up a meditation company that they, oh, good luck with your nonprofit, mate. With all the healing and like wearing, he had such negative connotations for something that is so valuable and transformational. It's extraordinary. As an entrepreneur, you look for those moments, and we both felt society was going to shift. We didn't think it would take as long as it did, but we felt there was change coming.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, the guy that has calm dot com wants to sell it and he's willing to do a deal. We were able to buy it for much, much less. I dear marked this money to put a deposit down on a house, but thought buying carn.com might be a more sensible thing to do, even though my parents thought it was the silliest idea. But yeah, so we bought calm.com and that was kind of the starting acorn that was planted for that business.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He found A person that owned calm.com, the domain. And I remember we were playing video games in our house in Soho and he said this domain calm dot com is available. And I said, oh my God, what a great domain. What a business we could build there, helping the world become more calm. And I said, how much is the domain? And he said, it's about a million pounds. And I said, right. Yeah, we don't have money to buy that. But about a year later, we're playing video games again, a consistent theme.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“where I played tennis in the morning, I scribbled in my notebook, I read books, and I started to try to meditate because I'd heard about it. And it was just incredible. The fog started to clear. I'd had my face pushed up against the cliff and couldn't see a way out of this problem that I was facing with my business. And just taking a step back and getting perspective was hugely valuable. And I read a bunch of books and research papers. And I realized that, you know, this is science, mindfulness as a way of rewiring the human brain. What if we could make this simple and relatable and accessible to everyone? This could be one of the biggest opportunities and businesses in the world. And I came back, I remember chatting to Alex about it, and he was like, right, dude, you finally get it. Let's go. Because he'd been, he kind of knew this. And this was all around the time where we'd been talking about creating a new business.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT