I’m often slightly irritated by essays on meditation that describe it as a kind of brain exercise– a spiritual life hacking, like learning how to overclock your PC– but I quite liked this Harvard Business Review piece that lays out a business case of meditation:

Our ability to resist an impulse determines our success in learning a new behavior or changing an old habit. It’s probably the single most important skill for our growth and development.

As it turns out, that’s one of the things meditation teaches us. It’s also one of the hardest to learn….

Sometimes, not following through on something you want to do is a problem, like not writing that proposal you’ve been procrastinating on or not having that difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.

But other times, the problem is that you do follow through on something you don’t want to do. Like speaking instead of listening or playing politics instead of rising above them.

Meditation teaches us to resist the urge of that counterproductive follow through.

I really became convinced of the value of meditation when I found that if I can think about nothing for even a second, I can focus on one thing for a really long time. Of course there are other benefits; but that was the one that really clinched it for me.