Attention is the most familiar thing in the world. Why should inner peace be elusive if it is to be found within your own attention? Not because it is far but because it is too near. There is no distance between peace and attention.

Since childhood, attention has been trained to stretch towards something: a toy, a friend, a story, a daydream. The things that attention stretches towards keep changing as we grow. My home is littered with Lego and cars that my nephew no longer fancies. His current muse is Marvel movies and video games, and I can only guess what is coming next.

Responsibilities mount as we age: a job, a mortgage, children, aging parents. There is a long line of things that demand our attention from the outside. Then there are thoughts and feelings that consume attention from the inside. Add to that the modern smartphone which gobbles up attention like a black hole. Attention is stretched to the limit. It remains full from morning to bedtime.

Have you ever arrived at work not remembering how you got there? Or sat on the toilet and pulled out your phone? These are symptoms of an attention that has been trained to be full. It doesn’t care about the actual demands of the task at hand. It just wants to stay full. Whatever fills it will colour your experience and mask attention’s own colour.

Inner peace arises naturally as we develop the capacity for free attention. When attention is not stretched towards something, it sinks back into itself without effort, and its own colour shows through.

Free attention seems difficult to cultivate only because of the decades of momentum behind keeping attention saturated. Free attention does not ask for much. It is very flexible in adapting to your circumstances. It doesn’t need to last all day long, nor does it need to be total at any given time. It is happy to live in the cracks and crevices of normal everyday life and gradually pry them open at your own pace.

As you practise freeing your attention, inner peace reveals itself in more and more places. It waits in the gap between two engaging activities, sits in the back seat of a routine drive, hums in the perforations of silence within a song, and smiles in the slowdowns of a pickleball game. The tiniest sliver of free attention breaks the spell of experience and injects peace into it.

Try this the next time you finish something absorbing, such as a workout, a lively conversation, a game, or a movie. Let the experience gather all your attention while it lasts. When it ends, don’t reach for your phone or the next thing to do. Give attention a minute to settle, and notice what’s left. It may be faint at first, or crowded out by boredom or restlessness. That’s decades of momentum at work, not a failure.

Inner peace is not new for any of us. Long before attention learned to be full of this and that, it knew how to be free. There was room for attention to be itself before it learned to dress in the colours of our thoughts, feelings, and this world.

My first glimpse of inner peace as an adult seemed so rare and spectacular. Free attention had finally leaked through the perpetual motion machinery of my mind. My senses came alive and I felt reunited with the reality around me. But this encounter also made me realize that I knew inner peace as a child. A deep mental silence would occasionally descend upon me. I remember asking my Mom what it was. But she, like most adults, was oblivious because her attention had filled up completely.

Another case in point is my nephew at age four. My favourite playmate would suddenly pause in the middle of our spontaneous games, point upward, and exclaim, “Zero!” It was a child’s way of articulating that his attention had emptied. He stopped this cute gesture around age six or seven once the habit of filling up attention had taken hold.

You may or may not remember inner peace from your childhood. It isn’t particularly memorable if it’s your natural state. It only becomes special once it has become rare, and suddenly reappears.

So what happens from age four to fourteen to forty?

A four-year-old is certainly free of concerns such as making a living or finding a partner. For a child in a stable home, survival is someone else’s job. But many adults struggle to find peace even if they have material abundance and good companionship.

Habit! Attention gets trained, year by year, to stay full. A habit that was learned can be unlearned. There are three practices that have worked well for me:

1. Gather Attention: Around the time that I co-founded 3vG, I started gathering all my attention into whatever I was doing. Walking while talking to myself turned into feeling the ground under my feet. Listening while rehearsing my reply turned into focusing on someone's voice. Dancing while wondering how I looked turned into moving to the music. It naturally spread from there because I was unlearning the habit of dividing my attention.
2. See Yourself Clearly: When I tried to keep my attention on the ground floor of my body, the penthouse would fill with plans, worries, ideas, and stories about myself and others. Some of this was useful information I could apply, but much of it was repetitive chatter. I started noticing my thoughts and feelings and separating actionable signals from noise. I was unlearning the habit of blindly trusting my mind.
3. Embrace Pain: Inner peace was now showing up regularly in my busy life. It felt like a warm hug. Unbeknownst to me, it was creating a safe space inside me where old emotions could finally surface. When a breakup stirred up my childhood trauma, I had to move closer and closer to the pain itself. Bottling up grief turned into crying it out on park benches. I was unlearning the habit of outrunning my emotions.

Each of these practices unburdened my attention in a different way, and together, they allowed inner peace to stabilize. I was exploring a path with uncertain steps, and it’s only in hindsight that I’m able to relate it to you as a practice. Today, this is just how I live. My attention is still filled with writing, dance, pickleball, and caring for my parents. I never needed to empty it, only to make room.

Peace needs free attention. The obvious way to find it is to give up all the things that command attention: quit the job, leave the city, sit still. A flood of thoughts and feelings will come first. With time, they subside and attention rests. Do nothing and find nothingness. This is the trap of passivity.

I’m lucky that I rediscovered inner peace through sprinting. It was clear to me that passivity is unnecessary. I just tried to reveal peace in my day-to-day life while pursuing my dreams. Eventually, peace started showing itself in surprising places, such as technical discussions around a whiteboard full of Greek symbols.

I must be quite the dancer to waltz right around the potholes that trip up everyone else. Not so fast! Owing to my childhood, when I had to support my Mom through her depression, intimate relationships felt all-consuming as an adult. I left both girlfriends who I dated during my twenties because I “needed space to be myself”. In my thirties, I built technology day and night, which was an excellent excuse to stay single. The truth was that my attention felt engulfed in relationships, and I was subconsciously trying to keep it free so that I could touch inner peace.

I didn't retreat from the world. I retreated from intimacy, for exactly the same reason.

Beyond passivity, a subtle trap affected me in the workplace. Inner peace made it abundantly clear to me that everyone has an innate goodness. So for a long time, I looked past bad behaviour and didn’t hold people accountable. It cost me so much time, money, and sleepless nights across three difficult employees over seven years to finally learn the lesson: I had to engage with people based on their actions and not their highest potential as human beings.

The subtlest trap was peace itself. Peace felt oh so perfect! The upsets and anxieties of life were so messy in comparison. As inner peace visited me more and more, I became keener to hold on to it. But the harder I gripped, the more it slipped through my fingers like sand. My desire for peace was filling up attention and costing me peace. At the time, I was seeing a therapist for my anxiety. One day, she said to me, “Parwant, just let yourself be human.” Her words still come back to me whenever difficult feelings arise. They remind me not to go to war with myself.

Ultimately, this world is the greatest teacher of inner peace. It forges a version of peace that is grounded, practical, and an asset for achieving your goals. Peace discovered in passivity is unlikely to hold through the trials and tribulations of life. It will wobble under a heavy load because the forces that capture attention have merely been sidestepped.

Inner peace can be mild, moderate, or total, depending on how much of your attention is at rest. Most of my attention is busy with this sentence, but some of it remains free, and a mild peace sits in the background. Between sets at the gym, there is almost nothing left to hold my attention, and peace becomes total. It feels like an intense nothingness, as if everything has been stripped away to uncover the raw nature of attention itself.

As attention learns to respect its genuine demand, we can meet situations with free attention in our back pocket. Part of attention is consumed, while the surplus rests within itself. Action and peace dovetail. When we engage with the world in this manner, attention reveals its active qualities: beauty, joy, and love.

Beauty

Do you remember my first glimpse of peace as an adult? I had just finished sprinting through my neighbourhood when everything around me suddenly seemed pristine. It was as if I were seeing with the eyes of a newborn. I was stunned to see this familiar place so transformed.

As the years rolled by, I was able to see beauty in more and more things and places, including cats, streets, server rooms, messy desks, and wrinkled faces. This type of beauty is not about the aesthetics of arranging objects to look pleasing. Rather, it arises spontaneously as free attention meets the world. It turns ordinary surroundings into art.

Beauty is perhaps the most accessible quality of attention. Most objects don't talk back to us or grip our attention the way people do. So attention can learn to be relatively free around them. When you're struck by a splendid view or the majesty of an animal, you give the credit to what you're seeing. It belongs to the noticing. The more attention there is for noticing, the more beauty you can encounter.

Joy

As I write this, I've just returned from visiting my Mom at the hospital. She’s all skin and bones, lost deep in her psychosis. At home, Dad needs a lot of help due to his dementia. His usual caregiver has resigned and there is a gap until the next one starts. Meanwhile, my girlfriend has moved far away to study, and our future is uncertain.

At times, these situations make me sad or anxious. But I still feel glad for being alive, for still having my Mom and Dad, and for the growth I experienced due to my girlfriend. Some days I wake up and say thank you to no one in particular. This is the faintest echo of what could be called joy. It is deeper than the happiness that comes from positive circumstances. It makes me smile for no reason. It is there because some attention remains untouched by the ups and downs of life.

More intense joy usually needs a vehicle: something that gathers attention, then lets it go. For me, that's dance, pickleball, working out, and playing with my nephew. These activities don't empty my attention. They crowd out whatever is weighing on it.

Yesterday, I drove to dance class feeling a bit sad. There was peace, but no joy. We started by learning the choreography in silence, then tried it with music and laughed at how absurdly wrong it went. There were little gaps in this process where some attention slipped free, and joy bubbled up. Once I had the steps memorized, I had plenty of attention to spare. I was simply enjoying the dance as it happened through me. By the time I got home, the sadness had lifted completely.

Joy is perhaps the most useful quality of attention. People often enjoy their way into excellence. The better you get at something, the less of you it takes, and the more attention is left over to enjoy it. Joy then keeps you coming back for more, which makes you better still. Long before I recognized peace, I found joy in math, then engineering, then satellites. I feel it right now in the difficulty and rapture of writing this book.

Love

Who is front and centre in your mind? The honest answer for most people is me, myself, and I. This was certainly true when I first started noticing my thoughts. Twenty years later, I still catch myself winning Olympic races in my mind even though I have no business being a pro athlete.

We all experience ourselves as a self who is separate from the world. We weave stories around this character, revel in its victories, bemoan its failures, and draw constant comparisons. My ego is the grandiose type, which says that I am the best. I had a friend whose ego always reported having been wronged by the world. No matter the shape and size of the ego, the common denominator is the almighty I.

The ego consumes a ton of attention. It floods attention with thoughts, feelings, and images around the clock. When life serves up challenges, it can go into overdrive and saturate attention. It sees relatively neutral events through a very personal lens. There is no room for love in a mind obsessed with itself.

Love shows through as attention is reclaimed from the ego. It is a progression of watching the ego operate, recognizing its half-truths, and releasing your actions from its clutches. For me, this process unfolded during the heyday of building 3vG. As my actions became decoupled from my internal storytelling, I felt relieved. I also noticed that when I wasn’t in the way, things often went better than expected. As the years rolled by, I felt more and more love for a growing number of colleagues.

But love is much more than the feeling of love. I felt compelled to take their best interests into account when making decisions. I studied each person’s strengths and matched their mind with their role in the company. I ignored whether someone liked or disliked me, basing their compensation strictly upon performance. My business partner and I were generous when allocating equity, and when 3vG was acquired, I was satisfied to see several colleagues buy a home.

Love is expensive. It requires thinking about others, acting in their interests, and setting them up for success. It’s good to be honest about who's in your circle of love. I can say that I have loved my family and colleagues. But while I do feel love towards the goat at the local petting farm, I also relish it on the dinner table, so I can’t really say that I love the goat.

Love is perhaps the most connective quality of attention. You deepen love by freeing attention from the dictates of your ego. You widen its reach by increasing your competence over time. I started my career as a junior engineer with no influence. At 3vG, I could care for fifty colleagues and many more customers. Today, through this book, I have the chance to care for an untold number of people. And I hope that's not my grandiose ego talking!

The qualities inherent in attention don’t pull you out of the world. They pull you further in. Beauty, joy, and love are an escalation of intimacy with the world around you. Beauty teases you with its everyday canvases, joy beckons you to engage with your passions, and love asks you to commit to the greatest good you are capable of.

Soon after I left my job for 3vG, I took an evening course on entrepreneurship. I had good rapport with one of the senior instructors, and perhaps confided more than just my startup ambitions. He deadpanned, “Parwant, young people who pursue enlightenment don’t build any skills in the world.”

“Inner” names where peace is felt, not where it is forged. Attention needs a challenge for habitual reactions to surface. Peace needs the test of relationships. The world provides these lessons and repeats them patiently until they change how we act. We steady peace by placing a load on attention — building a skill, doing useful work, raising a child, or caring for a parent. The skills my instructor urged me to build were not a detour from peace. They gave it a job.

“World” names where events happen, not where they are felt. Everything you experience lands in your attention and colours it. As we become attentive to these changing colours, we start to navigate them instead of sleepwalking. We make room for attention to reveal its inherent peace. And when peace goes to work, it bakes beauty, joy, and love into the job. Every job needs peace as much as peace needs a job.

Many of the stories in this book come from the jobs I’ve held: building 3vG, renovating my house, caring for my parents, tutoring my nephew, dancing, and playing pickleball. Each job claims hours of attention week after week. This repetition is necessary to gain competence and stabilize peace. Competence comes from making mistakes and refining our actions. And peace reveals itself as we learn to free attention from overconsumption within the job at hand. This handshake of competence and peace is what elevates a job.

Okay, your turn. Take a moment to identify your jobs. You probably have several. Some pay the bills, others don’t. Some are enjoyable, others merely tolerable. Does each one have a purpose? Any that you would expand or cut back? These are the frontiers available to you. Each one is an opportunity to train your attention to be both peaceful and competent.

If we add up all the jobs done by you, me, and eight billion others, we arrive at human civilization. Our world is rich in expertise, technology, culture, and systems, but also marred by distraction, loneliness, conflict, and war. What would happen if peace were put to work in the billions of jobs that occupy humanity’s attention? What kind of world would we get if beauty, joy, and love were baked into the actions of each person?

I don’t really know. The experiment has never been run at scale, only in my own life. I was already a good engineer before inner peace found me. The competence that I had built ran on several fuels: interest, ego, even trauma. At 3vG, my interest remained strong, but the other fuels slowly gave way to beauty, joy, and love. I have run on both kinds of fuel, and I much prefer peace.

Peace is as old as attention itself, but rarely is it given a job to do. It either remains undiscovered or content to rest in passivity. It is rarest in the positions of power and influence that steer the course of our civilization. Those consequential seats tend to run on the same fuels I once did.

I would love to run this experiment with you. Start with the jobs you listed. Court inner peace as you go about them. Make room for what is already there, and let its qualities show up in what you do. Grow competent with your mind and hands while part of your attention rests. I will freely provide whatever guidance I can offer and perhaps, one day, learn from your experiments with peace and the job it did in your life.