May 24, 2026 May 24, 2026 2026-05-24

In 2014 I reviewed The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach — a book that maps Tibetan Buddhist principles onto business management. The author ran a diamond company in New York using karma as a management philosophy. I found the ideas genuinely interesting, especially since I had the opportunity to meet the author in real life. At the time I was deep in a stressful business period and the Buddhist framing of how results come back to you felt both relevant and hopeful.

Twelve years is enough time to form relevant opinions. More businesses emerged since then. More failures, but also significant successes, and a different relationship with urgency. Here’s a candid review of how things unfolded.

The Book’s Main Claims

The Diamond Cutter works on three levels: Roach’s actual experience running a business, the Buddhist philosophy behind his decisions, and the practical techniques he derived from both. The central claim is that your mental posture toward your actions changes their results — that karma isn’t mystical in the superstitious sense but practical in the very specific sense that how you hold an intention shapes what you actually do, and what you actually do compounds over time into outcomes. He frames these actions as “seeds” which are supported by our own attention: the ones that we actually focus on are growing into majestic trees.

The secondary claim is that reality has no inherent meaning. Nothing is inherently good or bad — it’s the label you attach to events that determines how they land and what you do with them.

Both of these ideas are valid and tested in my own practice.

What Kept Growing: The Generosity Loop

The book’s karma-as-business-principle argument comes down to this: if you want loyal customers, be a loyal customer to others. If you want suppliers who treat you fairly, be a supplier who treats people fairly. The circularity of it seemed almost too simple in 2014. Twelve years later it’s the idea I return to most often — not because it’s esoteric or mystical, but because its compounding is real. Reputation is real. How you treat people in a business context has a longer memory than you expect. The person you underpay or dismiss or fail to thank tends to return in your story in some form, and rarely in a helpful one.

The 2026 version of this: I’ve been building iOS apps over the past four months with significant AI assistance. The decisions I make about pricing, about what’s free vs paid, about how clearly I communicate what the app does — all of that follows the mental guidance in the book. This is not karma in the cosmic, doom and gloom sense. It’s karma in the very practical sense that you’re always signaling something about how you want to operate, and people read those signals over time and something circles back.

What I Got Wrong: Reality Has No Meaning

The Buddhist emptiness concept — that nothing has inherent meaning, that all meaning is constructed — is both useful and misleading, if you don’t take the time to understand what “emptiness” really means. And it’s a very difficult and subtle process to get to the real meaning, that’s why you need practice. It’s like debugging spaghetti code: you hear “no meaning” and instead of digging deeper and understand the codebase, you just push forward: ok, this is how it works, it has no meaning, period. It’s not like that. No meaning doesn’t mean no responsibility.

The emptiness is real, but that just makes everything possible. If you start fooling around, because “there’s no meaning”, the emptiness follows up and fills with meaningless stuff. If you keep your affairs straight, and strive to follow a path, then emptiness follows again, and your life will take a completely different form. You’re at the helm, reality follows.

This is something worth spending time on, if you ever get interested in Buddhism. I think it’s the single most misunderstood concept, but also the most valuable one.

What’s Worth Keeping

If I had to compress twelve years of testing the book’s ideas into a single sentence, it would be this: the mental approach matters, but it matters because it shapes your actions — not because it shapes the universe’s response to you. You can’t karma your way to a good outcome without doing the work. Keeping a good, positive mental attitude without any action – or, worse, with contrasting actions – will be useless.

Thought + action is the magic combo.