Businesses Thrive on Harmony, Not Competition
Lessons from my 10-day meditation retreat
I’m back. I’ve experienced the perhaps calmest and most serene moments I’ve ever had in my life during a 10-day meditation retreat. It was a Vipassana retreat, a practice taught in the tradition of the Buddha.
It has a way of calming the mind and allowing deep ideas to bubble up to the surface.
Vipassana means “seeing things as they really are.” Basically you just sit and you observe your body and mind without reacting, for long periods at a time.
When your ear itches, you don’t scratch; you just say “there’s an itch” and let it be. When you leg starts hurting, you keep sitting and just say “here’s a painful sensation, let’s see how long it lasts.”
Over the hours of meditation you realize: Automatic reactions often just keep you agitated without helping dissolve the problem. The itch doesn’t go away because you scratch it, and your legs actually don’t stop hurting when you start moving them.
And then you realize something else: Peace of mind is always available to you. No matter how uncomfortable your body and the outside reality seem to be. You just need to stop agonizing and running after every thing you like and dislike. Just… be.
Having realized this—experientially, not intellectually—as a normal person, I now wonder: How might this translate to businesses? Can businesses, too, thrive and be happy no matter how uncomfortable the external circumstances may be? No matter how bad the macroeconomic outlook is or how strong the competition?
Awakening the business sense
Vipassana taught me that observing reality exactly as it is in the present moment—without making it worse with all my automatic reactions—naturally brings me happiness, joy, and compassion.
It was pretty amazing to see how all my senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, even my mind—got at least 25 percent more powerful after having sat through hours which I spent just observing an itch, an ache, a sense of pressure, or even a pleasurable sensation on my body.
What if businesses, too, could enhance their senses—and ultimately their performance—by just observing the difficulties of daily operations or how the competition is currently beating them, without immediately trying to fix anything that seems off or promptly making plans to take a competitor down?
The sources of all misery
Vipassana teaches you how to get out of your own misery. It says that misery comes from three sources: Craving, aversion, and ignorance.
Craving, on a personal level, goes like this: When I eat a piece of good chocolate, I enjoy it—and then I want more, and at some point I can’t wait to have the next piece, and the next. Not only does this make me go on a chocolate binge, it also makes me miserable when there’s no chocolate within reach because I want it so much all the time.
On a business level, it might mean that you’re mindlessly chasing better profits or being number one in the market, no matter what. Soon enough, you’ve either gotten that market share—but possibly by using unethical shortcuts such as sabotaging competitors or treating your own workers badly—or you’ve driven yourself mad about still only being number two.
Aversion, on a personal level, is this: When I experience some kind of pain, I dislike it—and then I desperately want it to go away, so I start running around, checking for treatments, and tunnel-visioning on my pain.
On a business level, this might mean zooming in on one particular worker who always seems to cause trouble, while not caring for all the other workers. Or trying to optimize that one growth metric that seems off even when all other metrics are doing fine. Or, again, trying to kick the number one in the market off their throne at all costs because you can’t stand being number two.
Ignorance, on a personal level, is not even knowing how I feel. (This I can personally relate to.) But how am I supposed to feed my body, move it, care for it properly if I don’t even know what it needs in the first place? How am I supposed to give my mind the right information and stimulation if I don’t know what’s good for it and what isn’t, and at which time of the day it’s most receptive to some information or rather needs some rest?
Ignorance, on a business level, is not collecting your data, or siloing it so that it’s not available across departments. It’s also about not properly evaluating and analyzing the data that you have collected. And it’s about looking the other way when things are going wrong, assigning blame, not taking responsibility, et cetera.
The misery of competition
I’m not writing this easily, because I have a rather competitive streak myself. I love trying to beat somebody else at their game.
I joined the lifesavers’ swimming club at age 7—by age 13 I was swimming faster, longer, harder than all the 18-year-olds. I didn’t have any special physical advantage; I just had the determination to be better than them. Which is great, but it made me quit swimming by the time I was 15, because there was nobody else to compete against and in my drive to outcompete everyone I’d lost the sense of joy I’d once had in gliding effortlessly through the water.
It can be similar for businesses: By focusing too hard on their outside ecosystem, and on trying to be better than everybody else, they forget why they are in business in the first place. They forget why their products and services are so valuable, and they lose the sense of purpose and joy they once had in producing them.
It’s a law of nature that you can’t sustain what you don’t enjoy. You can do it for some time—but just like me who held through another two years of being the miserable number one in the swimming pool, you’ll get bored and feel aimless. I believe this is why many formerly fantastic businesses lost their number one spot—it’s not that they didn’t have the resources to maintain it; it’s just that they’d gotten too determined to remain number one instead of applying that determination to, you know, being a good business no matter what the competition does.
Thriving beyond competition
One thing that Vipassana teaches you is equanimity. You don’t run after pleasurable sensations (such as being number one in the market) and you don’t try to avoid unpleasurable ones (such as being number two). You just accept the reality as it is in this very moment and realize that it’s actually quite awesome, despite the pleasure and pain on the surface. And you don’t turn away from any sensation or information—you just take it all in, non-judgementally.
Businesses, I believe, can do the same. A happy business is one that understands deeply what it produces, why it produces that, and what market it operates in. And then… it doesn’t try to change anything at all. It doesn’t react to new information, it just accepts. When it does take action, it’s no longer an automatic reaction but a well thought-out and wholesome plan.
Instead of sabotaging number one in the market—which is not only unethical and perhaps illegal but brings a whole lot of other problems with it in the long run—a happy business might concentrate on making its customer service even better. This may or may not attract new customers or encourage existing customers to buy more—but it sure is going to spread good vibes inside and outside the business.
And isn’t good vibes all we want at the end of the day? What if, with good (business and personal) vibes, we could not only be happy in the moment but actually create a better future than we could ever dream of in the past? What if bad vibes, while paying the bills in the moment, actually destroyed more futures than they created—and if good vibes paid off both in the long run but also in the immediate moment?
I hope this doesn’t sound too hipster, too utopian, too hopey-changey (I know I have such tendencies at times). But even if you have doubts, I want to read them. I think that such discussions can deepen our understanding of reality.
My takeaway from this retreat is this: As Ari and as the CEO of Wangari, no matter what I sense or feel, I’ll accept it as part of this present moment—and choose to be happy anyway. I’ll keep choosing wholesome actions over knee-jerk reactions whenever I can, and I’ll keep rooting out the knee-jerk reactions that I still very much have in my subconscious.
I’ll do this for myself as a person, and as cofounder of my company. Because I know that if I don’t, I’ll remain trapped in misery—and no matter the competition, the markets, and the uncertainty of it all, I want to contribute to a better present and future for myself and everyone around me.
Reads of the Week
If you’ve ever been curious—or skeptical—about silent meditation retreats, Larissa Mansur’s raw, witty account of Vipassana is worth your time. She doesn’t romanticize the 10-day experience; instead, she lays out the intense emotional and mental labor required, while showing how powerful it can be when you need a deep mental reset. For Wangari readers navigating burnout, constant noise, or just the ache of disconnection, this piece might plant a quiet seed of something life-changing.
Jason Rosander cuts through the mystique of meditation to show how Vipassana is less about spiritual escape and more about emotional precision. His essay is a grounded, practical guide for anyone struggling with reactivity, anxiety, or just the overwhelm of modern life—something many Wangari readers can likely relate to. By learning to simply observe without reacting, Rosander argues, we can reclaim agency over our inner world, one unflinching breath at a time.
In this quietly luminous essay, Manoj Shetty traces the fading of his inner mental chatter after years of Vipassana meditation—not into silence, but into something more tender: a watchful, kind presence. This piece gently suggests that peace doesn’t arrive with fireworks, but with a shift so subtle you might miss it unless you’re paying close attention. It’s a beautiful meditation on becoming more than the voice in your head.
Appreciate it.