According to Bill Gates, This Book Will Teach You to Stop Worrying and Start Living Anxiety-Free

Whether it’s about dating, children, our jobs, or our debt, we’re always worrying. And that’s incredibly, well, human. “The human mind wants to worry,” writes Bill Gates on his blog, Gates Notes.

But how do we stop worrying so much? Especially if we have a lot of reason, both in our personal lives and in the world around us? Terrorism, climate change, health issues, none of those are going away. Well, according to Gates, who is the legendary Microsoft co-founder, a great start is reading Noah Harari’s new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

“The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them,” Gates quotes Harari. “But his big idea boils down to this: meditate,” continues Gates, who is a fan of meditation. “Of course he isn’t suggesting that the world’s problems will vanish if enough of us start sitting in the lotus position and chanting om. But he does insist that life in the 21st century demands mindfulness — getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives.

“This is easy to mock, but as someone who’s taking a course on mindfulness and meditation, I found it compelling.”

Gates is a big fan of Harari, who also wrote the bestsellers “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus.”

“While ‘Sapiens’ and ’Homo Deus’ covered the past and future respectively, this one is all about the present, ” writes Gates. “If 2018 has left you overwhelmed by the state of the world, ’21 Lessons’ offers a helpful framework for processing the news and thinking about the challenges we face.” 

It’s worth a try, we think!