Leave Your Ego on the Mat: What High-Risk Business Taught Me About Ambition, Stimulants and Spirituality

There is a strange contradiction I keep noticing in modern business.

At 8 a.m., someone takes something to focus.

At 10 a.m., they are already on their fourth call.

By lunchtime, there is coffee, nicotine, another energy drink, or perhaps a prescription stimulant that helps them stay sharp for another six hours.

Telegram is exploding.

A payment route has disappeared.

A client needs an answer now.

A deal that looked certain yesterday suddenly isn't.

Someone in Dubai is awake.

Someone in Asia is about to go to sleep.

Someone in Latin America has just started their day.

So work continues.

Then, in the evening, the same person opens a meditation app.

Or goes to yoga.

Or sits in silence trying to slow their breathing.

Maybe they spend the weekend at a retreat talking about presence, nervous-system regulation and letting go.

And on Monday morning, it starts again.

I don't say this with judgment.

I find it fascinating because I recognise part of this contradiction in myself.

I work in industries built around speed, risk and uncertainty.

And I also practice yoga, meditate, read about spirituality and consciously look for ways to become quieter inside.

Sometimes I wonder:

Are we actually becoming more conscious?

Or are we simply learning better techniques for surviving lifestyles that our bodies were never designed to tolerate?

High-Risk Business Has Its Own Nervous System

If you've worked around iGaming, crypto, payments, forex or other high-risk industries, you know the rhythm.

Things move quickly.

Money moves quickly.

Relationships move quickly.

And problems definitely move quickly.

A PSP can change its risk appetite.

A banking relationship can disappear.

A regulator can change the rules.

A transaction can be frozen.

A market can become attractive almost overnight and problematic just as quickly.

There is always urgency somewhere.

And urgency is addictive.

Your phone becomes a slot machine for business.

You open Telegram.

Maybe it's a problem.

Maybe it's a €100,000 opportunity.

Maybe someone wants an introduction.

Maybe a deal you've been chasing for three months finally moved.

Maybe something collapsed.

You don't know until you look.

So you look.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually, your nervous system learns that something important could happen at any moment.

Rest starts to feel unnatural.

Productivity Has Become Chemical

There is another side of modern business culture that we don't discuss very openly.

We want human beings to perform like machines.

Focus longer.

Sleep less.

Travel more.

Respond faster.

Remember everything.

Stay socially switched on at conferences until 2 a.m. and be intellectually sharp in a meeting at 8 a.m.

And when biology refuses to cooperate, modern culture has an enormous catalogue of ways to negotiate with it.

Coffee.

Energy drinks.

Nicotine.

Nootropics.

Prescription stimulants used appropriately by some people and chased as productivity tools by others.

And, in some circles, stronger substances nobody puts into their LinkedIn morning routine.

I don't think the interesting question is which substance somebody takes.

The interesting question is:

Why have we created professional environments where normal human energy sometimes feels insufficient?

We praise the output without asking what is producing it.

Someone answers messages for sixteen hours.

Incredible work ethic.

Someone sleeps four hours.

Founder mentality.

Someone cannot sit through dinner without checking Telegram.

Driven.

Someone's body is screaming for rest and they find another way to override it.

Productivity.

At what point did exhaustion become a problem to hack rather than information to listen to?

Then We Discovered Wellness

And this is where the contradiction becomes almost beautiful.

The same business culture that teaches us to accelerate has become obsessed with slowing down.

Meditation.

Yoga.

Breathwork.

Cold exposure.

Sound healing.

Digital detoxes.

Silent retreats.

Nervous-system regulation.

Spirituality.

Presence.

We spend money learning how to do something humans once did naturally:

Sit still.

I say this as someone who genuinely values these practices.

Yoga has taught me things business never could.

Meditation has shown me how noisy my own mind can be when there is nothing external demanding my attention.

Spiritual practice has made me question what achievement actually means.

But I sometimes catch myself doing something absurd.

Trying to become efficient at relaxing.

Did I meditate today?

Yes.

Yoga?

Yes.

Walk?

Yes.

Reading?

Yes.

Great.

Another completed checklist.

I had turned peace into another KPI.

And that made me laugh at myself.

Because maybe the entire point was to stop measuring for a moment.

You Can Bring Your Ego to a Yoga Mat

There is an assumption that spirituality and ambition are opposites.

I don't believe that.

You can meditate and still want to build a huge company.

You can practice yoga and love money.

You can care about spiritual development and enjoy winning.

You can believe deeply in compassion and still negotiate aggressively.

Human beings contain contradictions.

The danger begins when spirituality becomes another performance.

The founder who wants to dominate every market can also want to become the most enlightened person in the room.

The same ego simply changes clothes.

Instead of:

I made more money than you.

It becomes:

I wake up at 5 a.m.

I meditate for an hour.

I haven't had alcohol in six months.

I went to this retreat.

I understand consciousness.

I have mastered detachment.

Congratulations.

You have successfully turned enlightenment into LinkedIn.

I think genuine spiritual practice is much less glamorous.

Sometimes it's simply noticing how desperately you want to win.

Not judging it.

Not pretending you're above it.

Just seeing it clearly.

The High-Risk World Can Make Cynicism Look Like Intelligence

There is another reason I think spirituality matters in these industries.

High-risk business can make you suspicious.

You meet extraordinary people.

You also meet people who lie beautifully.

Everyone knows someone.

Everyone has a provider.

Everyone has a licence “almost ready.”

Everyone knows an investor.

Every deal is urgent.

Every opportunity is exclusive.

After enough experience, scepticism becomes self-defence.

You verify.

You ask questions.

You don't trust the first story.

That's necessary.

But if you're not careful, professional scepticism starts leaking into your understanding of people.

You begin assuming everyone wants something.

Every relationship becomes networking.

Every conversation becomes potential business.

Every introduction has a value attached to it.

And suddenly you're very successful at reading risk and very bad at experiencing human connection without calculating it.

This is perhaps where my spiritual practices matter to me most.

Not because they make me calmer in meetings.

Because they remind me that not everything has to be transactional.

What Are We Actually Chasing?

Money matters to me.

Success matters to me.

Building something meaningful matters to me.

I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.

But spirituality has forced me to ask an uncomfortable question:

How much is enough?

Business doesn't have an answer.

The market will always offer another level.

€10,000 becomes €100,000.

€100,000 becomes €1 million.

One company becomes three.

One market becomes ten.

One publication becomes a bigger publication.

Recognition creates the desire for more recognition.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of it.

But if you don't define “enough” yourself, the world will happily keep moving it for you.

The same applies to productivity.

There will always be a way to squeeze another hour from your body.

Another supplement.

Another coffee.

Another stimulant.

Another productivity system.

Another optimization.

But what exactly are we optimizing ourselves for?

To become incredibly efficient at living a life we don't have time to experience?

Maybe the Body Is Not the Enemy

This is something I'm learning.

Tiredness isn't always weakness.

Anxiety isn't always something to suppress.

The inability to focus for fourteen consecutive hours may not be a personal failure.

Sometimes the body isn't preventing us from succeeding.

Sometimes it's communicating.

And perhaps the most radical thing in a culture obsessed with optimization is occasionally listening.

Yoga taught me that you cannot force every position.

Business taught me almost the opposite.

Push.

Solve.

Continue.

Make it happen.

I need both lessons.

There are moments in business when persistence changes everything.

And there are moments in life when pushing harder is precisely the wrong answer.

Wisdom might be knowing which moment you're in.

I Don't Want to Escape the High-Risk World

Interestingly, none of this makes me want to leave it.

I like difficult industries.

I like complicated problems.

I like ambitious people.

I like the strange energy of environments where regulation, money, technology and human psychology collide.

I probably wouldn't be happy somewhere completely predictable.

But I also don't want an industry to dictate the state of my nervous system.

I don't want every Telegram notification to have access to my peace.

I don't want productivity to become my personality.

And I don't want spiritual practice to become another tool whose only purpose is making me capable of working harder.

Maybe meditation doesn't exist to turn us into better founders.

Maybe sometimes it exists to remind us that we are more than founders.

The Question I'm Left With

I look around modern business and see people doing extraordinary things.

Building companies across continents.

Moving enormous amounts of money.

Creating technology that didn't exist five years ago.

Operating at speeds previous generations could barely imagine.

And then I see many of those same people searching for silence.

Going to yoga.

Meditating.

Travelling to retreats.

Studying ancient philosophies.

Trying to breathe.

Trying to sleep.

Trying to feel present.

There is something profoundly human about that.

We built a world that allows our minds to move faster than ever.

And now we're rediscovering practices thousands of years old to teach those minds how to stop.

Maybe that's not hypocrisy.

Maybe it's evolution.

But I think we should ask ourselves one question before turning meditation, yoga and spirituality into another productivity hack:

Are these practices helping us live more consciously?

Or are they simply helping us tolerate lives that need to change?

I don't know the answer yet.

I only know that I no longer want to meditate so I can tolerate more chaos.

I want to understand why I need so much chaos in the first place.

And perhaps that is where the real practice begins.