Life Articles

MDMA shows enormous promise to heal many who suffer the most trauma in our society. Yet its potential has been buried under the brutality and waste of a misguided war on drugs. Today I’m donating $300,000 toward making MDMA-assisted therapy a legal medicine for treating PTSD, to help kick off the $10M matching grant organized by Tim Ferriss.

I find that many of my habitual experiences of reality aren’t helpful, but can be made helpful through cognitive shifts. A personal intention for freedom: When I feel ANXIETY, let it become CURIOSITY about what’s going to happen next. When I feel URGENCY, let it become EXCITEMENT to try out ideas.

Last weekend, in preparation for a meditation retreat, I reflected on my personal intentions for my experience of life right now. I wrote them to myself, but thought I’d share. (They’re written in the present tense, but definitely not always true, though I find they slowly get truer the more I meditate on them.)

Each ray of our sun bursts forth into empty space, capable of giving life to plants, animals, fungi, and infinite life forms of which we’ve never dreamed. Each photon could transform into the substance of a dancer’s body, the kinetic energy of a child, the power of a genius mind, the light of a mystic’s consciousness.

This is a photo of Lorado Taft’s “The Solitude of the Soul.” I think people typically see in it forlorn individuals who, though they try to get close to each other, are ultimately separate and incapable of true connection.

I was recently asked “What is your #1 piece of advice that you would give to your younger self?”, and this was the first thing that occurred to me:

You are… reality, as one wave of its ocean. You are a piece of the surface of the ocean of infinite being.
Me too! Are the waveforms in control of the ocean, or are they at the effect of the ocean? Nope! The waves *are* the ocean. They’re just different terms describing different ways of thinking about the same great body of water as it changes and flows, wave after wave.

Don’t lose the fire you started with. If you’re going to devote the best years of your life to your work, have enough love for yourself and the world around you to work on something that matters to you deeply.

You don’t have to buy into the value of Eastern wisdom traditions or care that much about employees’ emotional well-being to think there’s something to the Asana way. Rosenstein and Moskovitz are happy to stake the company’s results as proof. “Over time, more and more companies will just start to look this way and it won’t seem unusual,” Rosenstein says. “People will discover that it’s just more effective.”

Recently I spoke at Chicago Ideas Week, where I distilled some of the best advice I have after ten years of studying and leading teams. We’re excited to share the video.

I’m a software developer, designer, and entrepreneur. I’m the co-founder of Asana, team productivity software that many great companies (e.g. Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox) use to run their companies. Back when I was an engineering manager at Facebook, I designed the internal team productivity tool that the company still relies on.