In the past three years, meditation has taken the business world by storm, with countless articles about larger-than-life successes practicing it daily and large companies starting to offer training and dedicated mindfulness rooms. It’s tempting to conclude that meditation will make your more productive, but here at Irrational Minds our favorite saying is “Correlation does not imply causation.”

It’s easy to see why meditation could help, though. Listen to those businesspeople who can’t even sleep at night because they’re still crunching numbers and preparing for meetings. Once they started meditating, all those worries just drifted away. But do you have that same problem stopping you from sleeping?

There are more differences between you and Jeff Bezos than the fact that he meditates (if Jeff is reading this, then sorry, this paragraph doesn’t apply to you. Hi Jeff!). He has about a thousand more problems to resolve each day, and his problems are at least a billion times bigger. Maybe meditation is a tool that only helps once you’re at that overwhelming level. This doesn’t seem likely, though, since you and I still have plenty of problems to put in place.

Bezos and most other CEOs of large companies are set apart by their personalities, Type A on top of Type A. They’re already driven to achieve non-stop. Meditation helps them take the edge off after their exhausting days of achievement, but it’s not the reason for their success. Personality type is the intervening variable here, and it’s important not to conflate the symptom (meditation) to be the cause of the other symptom (success). If you want to be successful, focus first on accomplishing more every day, not on copying the remedy for already-successful people.