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What what the science is telling us is that happiness is actually a skill that you can self-generate, right?
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That s huge hugely liberating and the same goes for compassion, you know Which is inextricably intertwined with happiness in my view we think of ourselves as like oh I m I m kind of like a medium nice guy or I m a very nice guy or I m like actually kind of an impatient asshole or whatever but that you can change that and
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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with Dan Harris.
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He s a co-anchor of Nightline and also the weekend edition of Good Morning America on ABC News.
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Today we re not talking about newscasting, though.
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We re talking about mindfulness, what happens when you don t do it right, and of course, what happens when you work in a super high-performing, high-stress environment like a newsroom with celebrities like Peter Jennings.
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Of course, we ll go through his journey of ridiculous amounts of anxiety all the way through to what we propose as a solution, namely mindfulness and a daily practice thereof.
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And with that, welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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I m here with my producer, Jason.
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Well, hello.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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All right, let s talk to Dan Harris.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I am a reporter and anchor at ABC News.
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I also wrote a book called 10 Percent Happier about a fidgety, skeptical newsman who reluctantly became a meditator.
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Yes, and I understand this because for me, I ve done meditation since high school with a very sketchy track record of consistency, I would say.
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And I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world and the hardest thing in the world until I started to learn how to do it correctly.
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And I agree with the initial point in your book that really struck me was that most of us are so entranced by this nonstop conversation we re having with ourselves that we don t even know that the voice that s in our head is not actually us.
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Yeah, it s like this thunderously obvious fact that you have a mind and are thinking, it s like, what could be more obvious?
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And yet most of us live our entire lives oblivious to this fact, and are therefore completely intoxicated with and enchanted by our nonstop yammering, internal yammering.
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And once you realize this really
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fundamental fact that you have these thoughts, but they re not necessarily connected to reality.
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And most of them are negative and self-referential, then you don t have to get yanked around by them.
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And it s hugely empowering.
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I m curious, though, you said that you started meditating in high school.
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How and why did you start meditating?
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And what do you mean by you finally learned how to do it correctly?
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Sure, and I love how you just took newscaster mode to control of the interview.
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That s smooth.
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But truth be told, I was in high school and I was doing martial arts and this guy was like, look, the way to get really powerful with this stuff, I can tell when you re doing a lot of the
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the training that you re kind of thinking about other things, like homework and all that other stuff.
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You need to focus on one thing at a time.
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And for me, being one of those hyperactive kids, I was like, I don t even know if it s possible for anyone to focus on one thing at a time.
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So he taught us this Zen meditation, which by the way is impossible and nobody should start with, because what that was, what they told us it was anyway, was think about nothing.
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There should be no thoughts in your mind.
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And I was like, this is impossible.
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This is completely impossible.
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And I tried and I tried and I tried, and I couldn t really get it, but what I realize now, looking back, reading things like 10% Happier, is I was doing it right when I was just going back to the breath and being aware of the thoughts and then returning.
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I was beating myself up about doing that the entire time, for years.
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Yeah, I m not a huge expert in Zen, and I don t know exactly what this guy told you, but if he told you, think about nothing.
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From my, you know, sort of only slightly educated standpoint, I would say that s bad advice, because to clear your mind is impossible unless you re enlightened or dead.
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I m neither one of those things.
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I love that.
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I love that.
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If you re dead.
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Yeah, if you re dead, your mind will be pretty clear as far as I know, although I have not experienced being dead.
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One of the reasons why people don t meditate, one of the biggest obstacles I face now as a unlikely evangelist for meditation is that people think they can t do it.
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They think it s impossible because you ve got to clear your mind.
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And I m always explaining to people, you don t have to clear your mind, you just have to focus your mind for nanoseconds at a time on your breath going in, going out.
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And then you re going to get lost a million times and that s cool.
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And the whole game is just to notice that you ve become distracted and to start over.
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So what you discovered ultimately is the right answer and anybody can do it.
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And dude, if I can do it.
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And I have the attention span of a combination of my cats and my 15 month old kid.
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I have no attention span, but it s all about persistence and just surrendering into this process.
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And it s so counterintuitive for type A people like all of us, because we do things and think we re going to win, right?
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You know, you do a certain thing and you think you re going to get an expected result and you re going to win or succeed or whatever.
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But meditation is, it s a slight variation on that because the failing, the quote unquote failing, which is getting distracted.
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is actually succeeding because as soon as you notice you become distracted and you start again, like that s meditation.
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There isn t some special state you re supposed to arrive at.
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All you re supposed to do is this bicep curl for your brain of just noticing when you become distracted, going back to your breath, ad infinitum.
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Right, it s the reps of bringing yourself back to the breath from the thought, right?
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It s just simply exercise for your brain and when you start to realize that, when you finally realize that, the process becomes a lot easier because instead of doing the perfect bench press where you don t get tired, which is impossible and doesn t exist, you stop thinking about meditation like that too.
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And it becomes a lot easier and more fun because you realize the obstacle is the way, right?
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Bingo.
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Thinking about reps is the way to go.
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I mean, the exercise analogy is pretty good.
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I mean, there s a point at which it breaks down, but for the purpose of this discussion, the exercise analogy is great.
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And you know, if you think about it like a bicep curl for your brain, every time you get lost, you start again.
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And the results of those bicep curls show up on brain scans.
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We see that when you do this exercise, your brain changes.
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That can be a little misleading because the brain changes all the time, but your brain changes in very specific and salubrious ways when you do this exercise.
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At least that s the early indication from the research we re seeing on people who meditate.
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Why is it even important to calm the voice in the first place?
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We ll go back to meditation a little bit, but you mention in the book that the voice in your head particularly, you said, is kind of an asshole.
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And in the book you state that it can be a malevolent puppeteer, which is a really cool term for your voice being kind of a dick.
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Yeah, my friend Sam Harris, we re not related, but he wrote a book about meditation, and he makes this joke that he says when he thinks about the voice in his head, it feels like he s been hijacked by the most boring person alive, who just says the same shit over and over, most of it negative, all of it self-referential, and I think that s the universal human condition.
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You know, there may be people out there whose voices are actually much more compassionate or generous or whatever,
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I haven t met that many of them.
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And I just think we evolved for threat detection.
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We evolved
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to worry about the saber-toothed tiger and to compete for scarce resources in the jungle or whatever, and therefore we have these prefrontal cortices that are constantly spinning in ways that, if you pay attention, aren t so pretty.
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Now clearly, thinking, the thinking mind, is capable of wonderful things.
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It got us skyscrapers and the iPhone and lots of creative and wonderful ideas have come from our discursive mind.
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I think if you close your eyes and look what happened, you ll see that you re pretty fucking insane.
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And the unawareness, the ignorance of the circular...
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fizzing, negative, looping nature of the mind allows it to control you.
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And when you have some mindfulness, which is the fruit of mindfulness meditation, when you have this self-awareness that allows you to just see what s happening in your head at any given moment, then you don t necessarily take the bait on and act on whatever urges and impulses and the desires and emotions are sweeping through your head.
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Now, one of the things that I think meditation really helps with, which I found surprising, and I was surprised to see this in the book as well, is that the new science challenges this sort of common assumption that our levels of happiness, resilience, kindness, shyness, outgoing sadness, whatever, tempers, things like that, are fixed immutable traits from birth.
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I didn t realize, actually, that you can change these.
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Are you saying that meditation increases plasticity in our brain?
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Is that the mechanism we re looking at here?
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So, I love talking about the science, but I always feel that it s important to issue the caveat that the science is truly in its infancy, in its early, early stages, and I think it strongly suggests some really, really interesting things, but I just don t want to ever be in the position of
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overstating it.
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But what I think we can safely say is that yes, the old dogma about the brain, which is that it s
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stops changing at a certain age, a certain young age, I believe they thought it stopped changing in like your early 20s, is wrong.
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The brain is actually like the organ of experience, that it s constantly changing based on things that you experience.
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And if you organize your experience in a certain way, like if you decide to learn the violin, certain parts of your brain will change.
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And what we re seeing based on the early neuroscience is that when you practice mindfulness,
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parts of your brain change, you can become less stressed, that the so called default mode of your brain, which is the connected regions of the brain that are lit up when you are in your default mode of just thinking about yourself or thinking about the past or thinking about the future, not focused on what s happening right now.
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In other words, when your mind is wandering, if you re a meditator, your default mode becomes quieter.
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And the same thing is true with a specific type of meditation that has to do with compassion, that the zones of the brain, the areas of the brain that light up when you are experiencing compassion and empathy become stronger, grow.
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So this is really exciting.
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I think it runs counter to this belief that we have that, as you stated earlier, that happiness is contingent upon some external factors like the quality of your childhood, the quality of
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your work life or the quality of your marriage, all of which I want to stress are very, very important.
1
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But what the science is telling us is that happiness is actually a skill that you can self-generate.
1
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And that s hugely liberating.
1
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And the same goes for compassion, you know, which is inextricably intertwined with happiness.
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In my view, we think of ourselves as like, Oh, I m kind of like a medium, nice guy, or I m a very nice guy, or I m like actually kind of an impatient asshole or whatever, but you can change that.
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It s a practice of just the way going to your gym is a practice.
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And your mind can respond and be trained just the way the body can.
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And that s really cool.
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I think it s kind of revolutionary because a lot of people, especially when we teach social skills, one of the things we do at the Art of Charm is advance social skills for
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high performers and things like that and networking and a lot of people say well I m an introvert so I can t learn this as if there s some sort of medical excuse for not being able to socialize or connect with other people and now it sounds like what we re finding out through science and as you state in the book
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since we can train the brain, since we can train these different skills, very little that you have right now that you consider to be your identity is actually immutable or something that can t be changed, trained, or worked upon to create something else that serves you better.
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You know, here we re getting beyond the range of my expertise to the extent that I have any expertise.
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But what I would say is this.
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Certainly we have personalities and we have tendencies and we have preferences.
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And I don t know that I m going to, you know, become a chocolate guy instead of a vanilla guy or a dog dude instead of a cat guy because of meditation.
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But I think that at some fundamental levels having to do with self-awareness and generosity and compassion.
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The evidence strongly seems to suggest that you can change.
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And so maybe that goes to for introverts.
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But my understanding, which is very limited when it comes to introversion, is that, you know, these are pretty deeply embedded traits and tendencies.
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I d be careful before I made very strong assertions in this area, personally.
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Yeah, I think we don t really know.
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And I m very wary of anybody who claims to do anything that s not based on science.
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And that s one of the things I really liked about your book.
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What caused you to get interested in this in the first place?
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I know you worked in a really high pressure environment.
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You worked under Peter Jennings, first of all.
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Yeah, I did.
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In many ways, my book, I wrote it, called it 10% Happier, specifically because I was trying to counter program against what I think is the reckless hope peddled by a lot of the people in the self-help community.
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And I think that it s like an $11 billion a year howling sea of bullshit, really.
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And it teaches you that you can get anything you want through the power of positive thinking, which just isn t going to happen.
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it s just ridiculous and dangerous, frankly, and irresponsible.
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And so when I heard about meditation, which has some scientific validity, and in my case, experiential validity, which is even more important.
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In other words, that I found that it actually works for me and people I know, but it s not going to change and fix everything in your life.
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You know, I m still shorter than I want to be.
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And I wish I had more hair in the back of my head.
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And just because I ve made a vision board and wish to be, you know, Dr. J, that s not going to happen.
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However, if I want to have better relationships in my life and not get so carried away by my negative emotions, that is doable.
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And that s a significant value add.
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And that is the derivation of the whole 10% happier shtick.
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But to answer your question, your actual question, how did I get into this?
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The answer is I had a panic attack.
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I had a panic attack on national television.
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in 2004, so a while ago, but... Was that back when you had hair?
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Yeah, I had more hair, that s true.
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No question about that.
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And I was a young up and coming anchor guy and I was filling in as the news reader on a little show we do at ABC News called Good Morning America.
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You can actually see clips of this, they re up on YouTube.
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Oh, I looked.
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I had done this before.
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I had been on the show filling in as the newsreader.
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That s the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the headlines.
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I ve been filling in on this job for a while.
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And on that morning, I had no reason to expect that anything bad was going to happen.
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But a few seconds into my shtick, my heart started racing.
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I had this like out of body feeling.
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My mouth dried up.
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My palms were sweating.
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My lungs seized up.
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I couldn t breathe.
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I couldn t talk.
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And I had to quit right in the middle and toss it back to the main anchors of the show, who were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson.
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And frankly, if I hadn t had that, I hadn t had that luxury of being able to kind of just toss it back to the professionals, it would have gotten really ugly.
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As it was, it just kind of looked like I got confused and ran out of breath, but it was a panic attack.
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And the backstory to the panic attack is even more embarrassing than the panic attack itself.
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The backstory is I was then and am now a very ambitious guy.
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And I had arrived at ABC news when I was like 28 years old.
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And I was working with these titans of the industry.
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People had grown up watching like Peter Jennings.
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And my way of coping with the fact that I was young and inexperienced was to become a workaholic.
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My dad had an expression, which is the price of security is insecurity.
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And I took that motto and just ran with it.
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And I just was working all the time.
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I was constantly thinking about how good is my last story?
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What s my next story going to be?
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Who s getting a story that I want?
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Blah, blah, blah, all the time.
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And then not long after I arrived, 9-11 happened and kind of swept up in ambition and idealism and believing that our job was very important at this crucial moment in the nation s history.
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I volunteered to go overseas and cover whatever happened next, and I ended up
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Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip.
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I made six trips to Iraq.
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And when I got home from a long, long trip in Iraq in the summer of 2003, I got depressed.
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And I actually didn t know I was depressed, although I was exhibiting some of the signature symptoms.
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I was having trouble getting out of bed.
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I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time.
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And at that point, I did a towering stupid thing, which is I started to self-indicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy.
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I hasten to add, it wasn t like The Wolf of Waltry, where they re popping lewds all the time or anything like that.
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It was pretty intermittent.
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And quaaludes were really hard to find at that point.
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So yeah, quaaludes are tough to come by.
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That s fair point.
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Cocaine was easier.
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No question about that.
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So then I had the panic attack.
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And after the panic attack, I went to a doctor who was an expert in panic.
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I didn t even know there was such a thing, but he asked me a bunch of questions, like diagnostic questions.
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And one of them was, do you do drugs?
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And I said, yeah.
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And he leaned back in his chair and gave me a look that communicated the following sentiment, which was, okay, asshole, mystery solved.
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And he pointed out that even though I hadn t been doing drugs that frequently or for that long, it was enough to raise the level of adrenaline in my brain and prime me to have this panic attack.
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That is kind of what set me off on the journey and that ultimately landed me on meditation.
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First of all, what is a panic attack?
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Is that just when your fight or flight is on for so long that you just fizzle out?
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Yes, it is the reflex that we developed to keep us alive in the jungles, on the tundras and on the Saharas.
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When faced with a mortal threat, your brain is just flooded with adrenaline and you either fight or run.
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And that s what happens in a panic attack.
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And you either freeze up or you leap into battle.
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And for me, it shows you what I m made of.
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I froze up and just couldn t function.
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Jason s actually surprised that I ve never had a panic attack.
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Is it normal?
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No, no, Jordan, you are one of the most stressed out guys I ve ever met in my life.
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And the fact that you ve never had a panic attack is mind boggling.
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I ve had them and they are like a heart attack.
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Basically, everything in your body shuts down and they re terrible.
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When you have a panic attack, they are terrifying because you think you re dying.
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But, you know, you come back from it.
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And from a guy who is so high stress and high maintenance, as you are, Jordan, I cannot believe you ve never had one.
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Yeah.
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I m glad you haven t.
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You describe it exactly right.
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You think you re going to die.
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People go to the hospital all the time thinking they re having heart attacks when in fact they re just having panic attacks.
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No, they re absolutely terrifying.
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They re kind of a game changer.
2
SPEAKER_02
When you have one of those, you kind of need to reassess what s going on in your life.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem is also that when you have a panic attack, you get good at having panic attack.
2
SPEAKER_01
The wiring is laid down.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so for me, you know, I ve had enough that it s like, you know, I have to treat my body and my mind differently in order not to have them again.
2
SPEAKER_01
How many did you have?
2
SPEAKER_01
I had two on the air.
2
SPEAKER_01
First one was the one that everybody s seen.
2
SPEAKER_01
The second was smaller.
2
SPEAKER_01
And actually it was the second one that sent me to the doctor.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I had the first one and then I kept partying.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then I had a second one like nine months later, and then I went to the doctor and he told me, stop doing drugs, idiot.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I stopped doing drugs.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, probably a good move.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely a good move.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
I can definitely see the temptation to self-medicate because it feels good at the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you mention in the book in 10% Happier that some of the only times you felt present were when you were high.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, it s funny, like flash forward many years when I started meditating, most of the time meditation is very hard, but there are moments when it s awesome, if you re lucky and the conditions are right.
2
SPEAKER_01
I realized that those moments were kind of like better versions of what happened when I was on drugs.
2
SPEAKER_01
The drug experiences, while I regret them because they had really bad outcomes for me, and I wouldn t recommend anybody do drugs, in some ways, you know, they did show me a little bit of like what it s like to really be happy in the moment.
2
SPEAKER_01
as opposed to just excited, you know, because I think we conflate the two.
2
SPEAKER_01
We think happiness is, you know, just wish fulfillment or, you know, slaking a thirst or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
But in fact, happiness is, for lack of a less cheesy word, but something deeper.
2
SPEAKER_00
Looking at your work and reading about what things were like back in the war zones when you were traveling, when you were deployed, even when you re working in this super high-stress environment, I want to kind of back up a little and talk about the environment that fosters this kind of anxiety and stress because I think a lot of people listening right now are working in tech, not necessarily Nightline or NBC Nightly News or ABC or some major network, but people in every
2
SPEAKER_00
Job in every profession or people that are unemployed but have a lot of stress are all dealing with this at a different level Maybe for a different reason you freak out about your hairline But for every every hair you lose somebody s freaking out about how they re gonna pay their mortgage.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah Yeah, it applies to all of us pretty equally, but I am curious though.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are you consistently paranoid about the way that you look?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean you re on TV in front of millions of people you must look at every little blackhead that you get and have some sort of miniature crisis and
2
SPEAKER_01
I ve gotten a lot better about that.
2
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And I don t know if it s meditation or marriage or maturation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I still hate the way I look.
2
SPEAKER_01
No question about that.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, I can get obsessive on a bad day, but I m not nearly as bad as I used to be.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you know, if you really have to look at your own face with regularity, it s no wonder, you know, of course I have a baseline
2
SPEAKER_01
tendency toward narcissism and anxiety anyway.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you add that all together and I think you get somebody who spends a lot of time, as I did and I talk about in my book, obsessing stupidly about his hair.
2
SPEAKER_01
But to your first point, I work in a high pressure environment where the stakes are really high and there s an enormous amount of competition and you re right.
2
SPEAKER_01
I assume a lot of people who listen to this podcast, especially in the world of tech, know what that feels like and I think
2
SPEAKER_01
they worry that if they do something like meditation that they won t be able to do what they need to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
You describe the profession as lavishly kind or capriciously cruel, and it seems like a really high-stress environment to work in, higher than most, and working with somebody like Peter Jennings, who you describe working with him like sticking your head in a lion s mouth, that sounds like something that even a normal person with normal base levels of anxiety would also get crazy amounts of stress under, and the fact is... I forgot I said that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m laughing at my own joke.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s pathetic.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think I said in the book
2
SPEAKER_01
sticking your head in a lion s mouth, thrilling but not particularly safe.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, I mean, Peter Jennings is a really complex cat.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he was brilliant.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think, in my view, the best broadcaster of his generation and also really temperamental and sometimes mean.
2
SPEAKER_01
and would pick on you for reasons known only to him.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it was a tricky situation.
2
SPEAKER_01
But to have him put his arm around me and take me under his wing and offer basically to be my mentor, and by that I mean an offer you can t refuse, it was awesome.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I kind of think of him as the sine qua non of my career.
2
SPEAKER_01
To be a 28-year-old kid who
2
SPEAKER_01
really didn t have that much experience.
2
SPEAKER_01
I had been working in local news and to arrive at the network and have Peter Jennings take an interest in you.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, without that, I don t know that I would have had the career that I ve had.
2
SPEAKER_00
What do you think he saw in you?
2
SPEAKER_01
He never said that many nice things to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
But once my mom came to visit, he said to her in front of me that he saw a younger version of himself, by which I don t think he meant like I was as good as him because I m not as good as him.
2
SPEAKER_01
but more that I had the same sort of hunger and curiosity that he did.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we shared that.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you watch tapes of Peter Jennings, he was just this like unnaturally gifted, smooth, intelligent anchorman.
2
SPEAKER_01
I do not put myself in his league.
2
SPEAKER_02
Don t tell yourself so short.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s Dan s specialty.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I don t think I suck, but I mean, you know, Peter Jennings is pretty damn good.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s Pierce Brosnan if Pierce Brosnan were a newscaster.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, that s exactly right.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m not saying Peter Throwzen isn t smart, but he s like 75 times smarter.
2
SPEAKER_01
I have some of what Peter had, which is just kind of a sensational curiosity and also a real drive.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s what I think he saw in me.
2
SPEAKER_00
So basically the amount that you beat yourself up and competed maybe in an unhealthy way with other people was somewhat on par with him.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because it seems like his insecurity fueled him as well.
2
SPEAKER_00
For as hard as he was on you, he was probably a lot harder on himself.
2
SPEAKER_01
No question about that.
2
SPEAKER_01
No question at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he beat himself up.
2
SPEAKER_01
He was really hard on himself.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think for sure we shared that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he probably saw in me this kind of relentless self-criticism.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is this environment, for one thing, it seems really masculine.
2
SPEAKER_00
You said that Cuomo emailed you when he heard you got cats and asked you if you sit down to pee, which is just like locker room talk.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it seems like other people s success in this business, even when they re working for the same network on the same team as you,
3
SPEAKER_01
Especially so is somehow whenever they re successful like that somehow becomes a personal tragedy for you That s the way it felt to me for a long time You know, I think that s natural and it is the case in many careers where it feels very zero-sum
3
SPEAKER_01
I will say that it has gotten better, and I don t know, again, if just because me and the people in my age cohort have mellowed, it has gotten better.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I don t feel the same pangs of, you ever heard that expression, every time a friend of mine succeeds, I die a little bit?
3
SPEAKER_01
I have heard that, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s funny, I don t feel that as keenly as I used to, and I don t know whether to chalk that up to meditation, which I think helps, and also just
3
SPEAKER_01
getting older and mellower, I think, which definitely helps.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, the business is tough.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s a small business.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s much smaller than like Hollywood, for example, you know, where you ve got so many actors and writers and producers and stuff like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Hollywood is super cutthroat, of course, but we re even smaller.
3
SPEAKER_01
There are fewer big jobs at the top of the pyramid.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, it s pretty damn competitive.
3
SPEAKER_00
Your career took a turn when September 11th happened, and then you got sent to Pakistan.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re this young guy, it s your first trip to the developing world, and you re hanging out with these, like, mercenary-type guys, from the sound of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It sounds like the guys you re with could strike a match on their 5 o clock shadow-type guys.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s, like, a hardcore crew, Bosnia-Rwanda newscasters in production crew.
3
SPEAKER_00
At this point, your boss is Peter Jennings, so you re sticking your head in the lion s mouth over a satellite link from a third world country, and at this point, you re still in your 20s, correct?
3
SPEAKER_01
I had just turned 30 when 9-11 happened, so I was young, but out of my 20s.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is it like to be literally in a war zone under this type of intense pressure, with all of your adrenal glands firing, and also getting pressure from your boss back home, who also happens to be a celebrity?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s incredibly intense and awesome and thrilling and really stressful and can bring out your best and your worst.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s exactly what happened.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think I did on my good days, I think I did some of the most interesting work of my career.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then on my bad days, I think I was a prick.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think in the end.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was insufficiently self-aware and mature to take it all in and re-acclimate to regular life when I got home.
3
SPEAKER_01
So when I got home, everything seemed boring and gray.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what better than a synthetic squirt of adrenaline in the form of white powder?
3
SPEAKER_00
So essentially war at this point is kind of a drug because if nothing else, just the physical repercussions of having bullets fly over your head, which actually happened to you live on TV and being around explosions and Taliban commanders whispering things in your ear and then coming home to New York, which is exciting, but still no Afghanistan.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have some sort of withdrawal.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that s exactly what it was.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think I suffered PTSD in war zones.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know people who did.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think the problem for me was that I liked it too much.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I don t mean that I liked the violence.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t even play contact sports.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s not like I had blood thirst or anything like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s more that the sheer thrill of it, the sort of illicit thrill of it, the idealistic thrill of it, the feeling that it was very important work to bear witness to the tip of the spear, it was like a drug.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think when I got home, I was just in withdrawal.
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, kind of in a cascade of mindless behavior, turn to another drug, an actual drug.
3
SPEAKER_00
One thing that sort of struck me when I look at anybody in war zones and covering things up close and when I read your book, it seemed to really jump out.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re in this part of the world or in these events and people are dying and you ve got this weird sort of off in the left field part of your brain.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re dealing with all of this stuff right in front of you, but then there s this little part of your brain going, did I look good?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did I say that right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did I stutter on that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Was I looking at the camera the whole time?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, does that,
3
SPEAKER_00
Does that feel a little strange, kind of focusing in on these almost trivial minutiae of your own performance while clearly more important things are going on around you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s, I think, a very good observation on your part, and it s true, and it does feel wrong.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yet, you know, you know, the way we watch TV, you know, we re mammals and we re interested in other mammals, you know, like we go to the zoo, we watch TV and we see human beings, we make snap judgments, like how does he look?
3
SPEAKER_01
How does she look?
3
SPEAKER_01
What is she wearing?
3
SPEAKER_01
Blah, blah, blah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so if you don t take that into account, people won t actually listen to what you re saying.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you believe that what you re saying is important, you need to take away all distractions that people might have, like, wow, that guy s hair is a mess or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I wouldn t say I spent all of my time in the war zones worrying about what I was wearing or whether my hair was in place.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the way in which you can get caught up in your own stupid story about, you know, did I
3
SPEAKER_01
get in a good question at that news conference, or one of my colleagues, is he getting on the air times with me because his story is better, or did some competitor get an interview that I didn t get?
3
SPEAKER_01
All this stuff, instead of like caring, you do care about what s happening around you, but there s a layer of self-interest there that you get swept up in entirely if you re not vigilant.
3
SPEAKER_02
When you come back to the States, how does it affect you when you get back on camera?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think consciously it didn t affect me at all, and I think
3
SPEAKER_01
That is a sign of how unselfaware I was.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just went about my business.
3
SPEAKER_01
I thought I was fine.
3
SPEAKER_01
I remember my parents voicing some concern about, you know, maybe you re going to see a shrink or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there s an interesting anecdote that s not in the book that I remember that should have been a red flag that wasn t.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was I came home at one point.
3
SPEAKER_01
In 2002, after I had been spending a lot of time in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza during the second Intifada, I was seeing some horrible stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
There were all these suicide bombings, and then the Israelis were launching these incursions into the Palestinian territories.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was very bloody and very hairy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I would come home in between these stints.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I came home at one point, and I was just kind of being irritable with my bosses.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was getting into kind of spats with my colleagues over stupid stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what was wrong.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just wasn t feeling right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I got sent back.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I remember I got in, I landed in Israel, and there was something happening in the Gaza Strip.
3
SPEAKER_01
So as soon as I landed, we went to Gaza, and we covered this big protest, and somebody got shot right in front of me.
3
SPEAKER_01
We got in the car, and we were driving back to our bureau to file the story, and I fell asleep.
3
SPEAKER_01
woke up and we re stopping on the side of the road to eat some watermelon that some farmer was selling.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was eating the watermelon and I was looking off in kind of a thousand yard stare into the landscape and I realized, oh, I feel better.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the first time I feel better in, in weeks.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t even make the connection to the fact that, oh yeah, I feel better because I just got the adrenaline.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve been so craving that I haven t been getting back in New York.
3
SPEAKER_01
And only now does that story make sense to me, but that moment really sticks out in my head.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s about adrenaline.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s about excitement.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it sounds like you don t know whether or not you re addicted to something until you take it away.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you went back to New York and you got depressed, you wouldn t think, well, it s because I m not getting all that excitement and all that adrenaline.
3
SPEAKER_00
But then when you went back and found it again, you re like, ah, the missing piece, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that s more embarrassing is that I didn t even figure it out.
3
SPEAKER_01
I only know in hindsight.
3
SPEAKER_01
I only know in hindsight that that s what was going on, because in that moment, swept up in the ambition and idealism of it all, I wasn t cognizant of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I knew I felt better, but I didn t even think that, oh, yes, I ve developed an addiction to this lifestyle.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, when you started to quote-unquote recover from all this, you found Eckhart Tolle, you started meeting with guys like Deepak Chopra, but at AOC, we re super critical of most of the spirituality, self-help stuff in general.
3
SPEAKER_00
People often email and go, oh, when are you gonna interview the guys from The Secret?
3
SPEAKER_00
And my answer is, when I ve literally interviewed everybody else on the entire planet.
3
SPEAKER_00
and I ran out of guests, because that stuff always makes us kind of throw up a little bit in our mouth, to put it grossly, because it s BS, and it s designed to con people most of the time, or much of the time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m not a fan of the secret, I ve made no secret of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
What, you don t have a dream board?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t have a vision board, I have real problems with it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, so to fill in sort of the blanks there, after I had the panic attack and stopped doing drugs,
3
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t like that happened and then I started meditating and then like everything was unicorns and rainbows for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was another like wrinkle and it involved Peter Jennings.
3
SPEAKER_01
Peter gave me an assignment.
3
SPEAKER_01
He asked me to start covering faith and spirituality for ABC News.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t want to do that because I m an atheist and was raised by a pair of scientists in the People s Republic of Massachusetts.
3
SPEAKER_01
And as I like to say, I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for the money.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I really didn t want this assignment, and Peter insisted I do it.
4
SPEAKER_03
And as a consequence of that, I then ended up meeting all of these self-help gurus.
4
SPEAKER_03
Eckhart Tolle was the first who came into my orbit.
4
SPEAKER_03
And first I thought, like, Eckhart Tolle was completely full of it, because, you know, his book is filled with all this, like, pseudoscientific language and grandiose claims about how he s going to give you a spiritual awakening or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_03
But Tolle was actually the first person who I ever heard describe the voice in the head.
4
SPEAKER_03
He says that, you know, you have this narrator.
4
SPEAKER_03
He s not talking about schizophrenia or hearing voices.
4
SPEAKER_03
He said that you have this inner narrator that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff or not wanting stuff.
4
SPEAKER_03
criticizing yourself and judging other people and comparing yourself to other people and thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever s happening right now.
4
SPEAKER_03
And when you re unaware of this nonstop chatter, then it yanks you around, like you re eating when you re not hungry or you re losing your temper when you don t need to, or you re checking your email in the middle of a conversation with another homo sapien.
4
SPEAKER_03
That was a huge aha moment for me when I read that for two reasons.
4
SPEAKER_03
One, it s just intuitively true.
4
SPEAKER_03
And two, it really explained
4
SPEAKER_03
My panic attack.
4
SPEAKER_03
The voice in the head is why I went off to war zones without thinking about the consequences, came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then blindly self-medicated.
4
SPEAKER_03
So I went off, I went to interview Tole.
4
SPEAKER_03
My hair was kind of on fire about this.
4
SPEAKER_03
I was like, this is such an interesting idea.
4
SPEAKER_03
It was so new to me.
4
SPEAKER_03
I went and interviewed him, and I asked him, I said, what do you do about the voice in the head?
4
SPEAKER_03
And he kind of took a beat, and he said, take one conscious breath.
4
SPEAKER_03
And I was like, the voice in my head was like, what the hell does that mean, man?
4
SPEAKER_03
And I kept asking him and asking him, asking him, and he didn t seem to have a cogent answer.
4
SPEAKER_02
At what point when you were interviewing Tully, what books did he have out at that point?
4
SPEAKER_02
Was this after he was like on the Oprah s bestseller list?
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh yeah, this was 2008.
4
SPEAKER_03
So this happened many years after my panic attack and many years after I started covering religion.
4
SPEAKER_03
Most of my early coverage of religion was covering evangelicals and Mormons and Muslims.
4
SPEAKER_03
I kind of meandered into self-help because one of my colleagues recommended that I read the Tully book because she had been watching him on Oprah.
4
SPEAKER_03
So he was just becoming super famous at this time.
4
SPEAKER_03
Oprah had done this big, like, 10-part web series with him, and there were reports that she had put his books in every bedroom in every house she owns, and that Paris Hilton was seen carrying his book into jail for DUI.
4
SPEAKER_03
This was, like, 2008, and he was killing it.
4
SPEAKER_03
And he really woke me up to something big, but it was like he pointed out that my hair was on fire but refused to give me a fire extinguisher.
4
SPEAKER_03
Or as another friend of mine has said, Eckhart Tolle is correct but not useful.
4
SPEAKER_03
That was my frustration.
4
SPEAKER_03
And not knowing what to do, I then threw myself into the world of self-help.
4
SPEAKER_03
That was when I started hanging out with a lot of these people from The Secret and Deepak Chopra.
4
SPEAKER_03
By the way, I would not put Deepak Chopra in the same category as the people from The Secret.
4
SPEAKER_03
I do make fun of Deepak a little bit in my book, but I like him.
4
SPEAKER_03
But the people from The Secret, that philosophy is what I find particularly noxious.
4
SPEAKER_03
I have some quibbles with Deepak, but generally, actually, Deepak is quite useful.
4
SPEAKER_03
I mean, he teaches people how to meditate, at least.
4
SPEAKER_02
What do you think that Deepak teaches that is the most useful?
4
SPEAKER_03
You know, Deepak, he s a trained physician.
4
SPEAKER_03
If you spend any time with him, he s a very charming man.
4
SPEAKER_03
He s an enjoyable human being to be around.
4
SPEAKER_03
And I don t think he s like trying to con people for money.
4
SPEAKER_03
That s personally my personal view.
4
SPEAKER_03
Whereas I ve met others who I got some bad feelings about.
4
SPEAKER_03
My quibbles with Deepak are that he talks in this way that is like impossible to understand.
4
SPEAKER_03
He s just always advancing these theories that maybe you have some connection to reality, but I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_03
And a lot of physicists I know and scientists I know
4
SPEAKER_03
think that Deepak is spouting theory.
4
SPEAKER_03
He s criticized for basically peddling pseudoscience on some level.
4
SPEAKER_02
And what do you think about his pseudoscience?
4
SPEAKER_02
Do you think it actually is pseudoscience or do you think it is science?
4
SPEAKER_03
He really gets deep into physics and quantum physics.
4
SPEAKER_03
But he s not a physicist.
4
SPEAKER_03
I know this is exactly right.
4
SPEAKER_03
And this is why he gets criticized.
4
SPEAKER_03
My friend Sam Harris, who is a neuroscientist, not a physicist,
4
SPEAKER_03
I moderated a debate, which you can also see on YouTube, in which Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, who s a well-known skeptic, yeah, so Michael s a really cool guy, and Michael and Sam were very tough in this debate on Deepak.
4
SPEAKER_03
But like, set aside, if you want, because some people can t set it aside, but just for the sake of this discussion, if you set aside what some people believe are his pseudoscientific flights of fancy,
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When the rubber hits the road, most of what he s doing with people is teaching them how to meditate, in my understanding.
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He teaches Vedic meditation, which is not the kind of meditation I do, but lots of people have been doing this kind of meditation, mantra meditation, for thousands of years, and there s a growing body of research that suggests it, too, is very good for you.
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And so, I don t know.
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It s hard for me to put Deepak in the same bucket as these self-help people who I so gleefully criticize in the book.
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So when we see things like the secret that are basically, hey, if you want something, you gotta try and get it, or visualize the Lamborghini in your driveway and it ll appear, that s the stuff that you said is noxious, correct?
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And why is it so pervasive?
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Of course, people wanna believe it, but why do you think it s so noxious aside from just being blatantly untrue?
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Well, that s why I think it s noxious.
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It drives me nuts.
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People believe it.
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I think, you know, it s lost some of its cultural capital, which is good.
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But people believe it.
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And it s obviously untrue.
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Here s the way to illustrate how untrue it is.
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Reverse the experiment.
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So if the self helpers argue that we can get good things, because we think good thoughts,
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What does that mean when bad things happen to people?
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Does that mean that every baby born in a refugee camp was thinking bad thoughts in the uterus?
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Does that mean that everybody who lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010 was thinking incorrectly and they brought that earthquake upon them?
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Look at the case of James Ray, one of the stars of The Secret.
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Not long after The Secret came out, that dude went to prison.
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because a couple of people died on one of his retreats.
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And so what does that mean that he was thinking incorrectly?
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I mean, maybe he was maybe in that case, he was thinking incorrectly.
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But clearly, the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking
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wasn t working for that dude.
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I think we can safely say that there s not much to that theory.
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I m not saying it doesn t pay to have a positive attitude, sure, but to think that you can get anything you want because you think it is crazy, and I think it leads people to do things like not go to see a doctor, or spend all their money on self-help gurus instead of an education.
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Definitely, doing a sweat lodge and trying to visualize your bills getting paid, that type of thing.
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Yeah, look, I mean, I m sure there are safe ways to do sweat lodges, but the one that James Gray held, clearly something went wrong and people died.
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Back to the show in just a minute, but before that, here s a fantastic testimonial from a recent AOC grad.
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You won t hear it from me, but you ll hear direct from him exactly how impactful this training can be.
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My name is Vincent.
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I live in New York and I work in finance.
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I took the program because I m married and have two kids.
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So my goal going into the program, into the boot camp, was different from single guys.
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I wanted to learn how to get out of my own head and do the things that I m uncomfortable with.
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This in turn will allow me to be a better husband and father.
4
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I chose the Art of Charm because I know that the best way to get over insecurities is to jump in and experience it.
4
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The AOC team has been helping guys do this for many years from the podcast, and I spoke with many people that went through AOC, so I did my homework.
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I know that AOC provides the right knowledge, guidance, and support, and just the right amount of encouragement.
4
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Of course, I was skeptical.
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I had to convince myself, but also I have to convince my wife to allow me to leave her alone with a toddler and a baby for a week.
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By the time I signed up, I was mentally prepared for the bootcamp, but really hoped that it would not be a waste of time and money.
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The bootcamp was intense and awesome.
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It gave me a giant shift in mindset.
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It s like I m still the same person, but I feel confident in my ability to handle difficulties and uncomfortable situations.
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I m more willing to engage with all kinds of people, and I m more willing to speak my mind and be vulnerable.
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So after the bootcamp, it s like a world of possibility has opened up for me.
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I m married, so I want to become a great father.
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And I know the things about fatherhood, you know, set limits and let the kids make mistakes.
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But AOC provided a certain value and very important value to become a great father.
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One thing AOC provided is that there s a direct impact and there s a subtle impact to one of my goals.
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The direct one is that I have been teaching my son eye contact and smiling and I set the tone and say more often when I m with them and I m conscious of it and the kids respond to it very well.
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impact of AOC.
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It freed me from a lot of insecurities and hesitation in my life.
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So I ll try to lead by example, and my kids eventually will pick up this better mindset from me over time, rather than absorbing an older, lower-value mindset before the boot camp.
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It s really monkey see and monkey do.
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Fantastic.
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Is it time for a big change in your life?
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Give us a call here in the office, or email me, jordanattheartofcharm.com, and we ll talk about getting you to the next level.
5
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All right, back to the show.
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Now, the power of positive thinking is sort of one side of the coin.
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In the book, you mentioned that mindfulness actually brings you a little closer to your neuroses, so it s almost like a Doppler radar.
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It s almost the power of negative thinking.
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I d like to hear about that.
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Yeah.
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So after I spent all this time looking at Eckhart Tolle and then hanging out in the self-help world and getting pretty disgusted, I then stumbled upon Buddhism.
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And I realized, this was my next big aha moment, which was, oh yeah,
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2,600 years before Tully started cashing his royalty checks, it was a guy heretofore known to me as a lawn ornament, the Buddha, who was talking about the voice in the head, and he called it the monkey mind.
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His argument is that our minds are like furry little primates just hurling through a forest of urges and impulses and desires, always latching on to things that won t last in a universe that is characterized by impermanence and
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lurching from one hit of pleasant experience, one movie, one latte, one vacation to the next, and yet never fully satisfied.
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As my meditation teacher likes to point out, how many parties have you been to?
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How many promotions have you had?
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How many checks have you cashed?
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And are you done?
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Of course not.
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You know, we re insatiable.
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And in this way, the pursuit of happiness that is enshrined in our founding documents can become the source of our unhappiness.
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And unlike Tully, the Buddha had a very specific recommendation for dealing with the monkey mind or the voice in the head, which was meditation.
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And initially, I found that idea to be repellent because I was of the view that meditation was only for people who live in a yurt and are really into aromatherapy and Cat Stevens and John Tesh and crystals and, you know, wear little finger symbols and, you know, make dream catchers.
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But then I heard about the scientific research, and that s really what turned me around.
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And mindfulness is the skill that you develop through meditation.
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It s this kind of non-judgmental self-awareness that allows you to see the voice in your head without getting carried away by it.
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And it is the power of negative thinking in some ways.
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Like that s a bit flip, but it allows you to see without running away from it, to see clearly whatever storms are brewing and to just let them pass without necessarily acting on them.
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Now sometimes,
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when you re feeling anger or sadness or whatever, it s completely legit and you do have to take action.
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And here s the one meditation cliche that I love, which is what meditation teaches you how to do is to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly.
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That is the heart of the matter, that s the game changer.
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And how do we cultivate that?
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Like you look at taking one conscious breath, like how do we get the fire extinguisher so we can put our hair out?
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Yes.
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Okay.
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So there are millions of kinds of meditation, and I m pretty much in favor of most of them.
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But the kind of meditation that I personally practice and that I like to proselytize on behalf of is called mindfulness meditation.
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The reason why I like it is because it s secular.
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And it s the kind of meditation that has been studied the most in the labs.
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It s derived from Buddhism, but it s been stripped of all the Buddhist metaphysics and language and lingo.
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And it s very, very simple.
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And the beginning instructions, there are only three steps.
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The first is to sit with your back straight.
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People often close their eyes, but you don t have to.
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The second step is you want to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.
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Pick one spot where it s most prominent, either your belly or your chest or your nose.
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You re not thinking about your breath.
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You re just doing this thing of feeling it.
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Just what does it feel like when your breath comes in and goes out?
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And then the third step is the big one, which is every time you get distracted and you re going to get distracted a million times, you re going to start thinking about what am I going to have for lunch?
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Do I need a haircut?
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Why did Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture in 1991?
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Whatever.
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You re going to go nuts.
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And that s totally fine.
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That was a travesty.
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I think we can all agree.
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Yes.
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When you get distracted, the whole game is just to notice, oh, I ve gotten distracted.
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And you start over, you go back to your breath.
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And in that moment, when you notice you become distracted, you notice you ve been carried away by thinking or planning or sadness or anger or desire or boredom.
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in that moment of recognizing it, you kind of like objectify it.
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You see that these are just passing phenomena in the mind that you don t necessarily need to get carried away by.
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And why is that useful?
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Because then when you re, as we say in the meditation world, off the cushion, when you re not meditating, when you re in the rest of your life, when you re overtaken by anger in the middle of a meeting, or you re about to say the thing that s gonna ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage,
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or you re about to eat the 18th cookie, you might notice, oh, that s just a desire that s passing through my mind.
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I don t need to take the bait and act on it.
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That is what makes you 10% happier.
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And by the way, I believe that 10% compounds annually.
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I mean, if I m going to stay with my ridiculous mathematical assertion here, I mean, this is what is a game changing proposition.
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It s not going to solve all of your problems, but I believe it mitigates them significantly.
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What about some of the thoughts that we have that are actual problems?
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I know it s like, okay, don t worry, focus on this, get the breaks, but if I ve got an overdue bill or if I miss my plane, that s a real problem that needs to be addressed in the real world off the cushion.
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Dude, I am not saying don t worry.
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I still believe that the price of security is insecurity.
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I still firmly believe that if you want to be great, you ve got to do some stressing, plotting, and planning, and I m totally down with that.
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When I asked this of my meditation teacher, who s this, like, 70-year-old Menchie Jewish guy from New York who went to Columbia, was probably gonna be a lawyer or an architect, and somehow, and he was in the Peace Corps, and somehow got wrangled into meditation and became this, like, amazing meditation teacher who s totally hilarious and incredibly smart.
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I asked him the question about missing a flight.
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I said, dude, you re telling me don t worry, you know, be in the present moment or whatever, but if I miss my flight,
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That s a real problem for me.
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And he was like, you re absolutely right.
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It is.
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But on the 17th time that you re running through all of the horrible ramifications of missing your flight, maybe ask yourself a simple question, which is, is this useful?
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Boom.
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There it is.
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The fact of the matter is we got to suffer for our art or for our careers or for our volunteer work or for our parenting work.
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But we make our suffering worse than it needs to be.
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Why?
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Because we engage in useless rumination.
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And what mindfulness, what the self-awareness helps you do is draw the line between the useless rumination and what I call constructive anguish.
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So I am not saying that you should be blissed out and non-judgmentally, you know, blobbing out on the couch and just not giving a shit about anything.
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What I m saying is that what makes you maximally effective and resilient in the face of life s many challenges in a universe where shit is out of your control is to know when you re overdoing it with the worrying so that you can give your brain a rest in that moment and you can
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be more effective and be a better competitor.
5
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Someone in your book mentions, all we can do is everything we can do, which is brilliant.
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That was David Axelrod who said that in a closed door meeting with some reporters at ABC News when he was in the middle of running President Obama s campaign.
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I agree, it s a brilliant statement.
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My boss at the time asked him, hey, how do you not freak out given all the variables out of your control?
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He was like, all we can do is everything we can do.
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And that s exactly right.
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I mean, that is so smart.
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I actually emailed Axelrod to make sure he would give me permission to use that quote in the book, and he did.
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It is the quintessence of how one is mindfully ambitious.
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Basically strive, but focus only on what we can control and let the rest go.
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You can focus to a certain extent on things you can t control.
5
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I wrote the book, 10% Happier.
5
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I desperately wanted it to succeed, but I was pretty damn convinced it wasn t going to.
5
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I thought a book about meditation by a C-level network news guy was not gonna be some big hit book.
5
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That was my first impression.
5
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I was surprised to see that.
5
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I was like, this guy from Nightline wrote a book on meditation?
5
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What the hell is he thinking?
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Yes.
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I mean, that s what everybody thought.
5
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And to boot, I admitted to having a cocaine problem in it.
5
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So like it was not like maybe the smartest career move.
5
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You know, I had this instinct that I could do some good in the world and that maybe it was the right time to talk about meditation in this way.
5
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I just I worked my ass on it for four years.
5
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I just obsessed over this thing.
5
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And I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and then worried about the title and
6
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worried about, you know, getting everything right in there.
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But at the end of the day, I had to let go release the thing into the world.
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I did as much publicity as I could do.
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But it was out of my control.
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And look, good things happen in this case.
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But many other projects in which I ve invested a lot of time and energy, it doesn t go as well.
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And how are you going to be
6
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maximally resilient in the face of setbacks over which you have minimal control, it s to realize that all you can do is everything you can do, full stop.
6
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I d like to just kind of wrap with one of my favorite quotes from the book, which is, there s no point in being unhappy about the things you can t change, and there s no point in being unhappy about the things that you can.
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And I think that sums up a lot of the practice right here.
6
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If you can change it, no point in being unhappy about it now.
6
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You can always move forward.
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And if you can t change it, there s absolutely zero return.
6
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It is not useful, as Goldstein says, to be unhappy about that either.
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I love that quote.
6
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I kind of qualify it a little bit.
6
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The Goldstein to whom you re referring is Joseph Goldstein, who was my meditation teacher, the guy who I was just raving about.
6
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And he says exactly what you just said.
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No point being unhappy about things you can t change and no point being unhappy about things you can change.
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But I still think like, look, if my mom dies tomorrow, I can t change that, but I m going to be really bummed.
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And so I think that in some ways that statement is a little cute, but the heart of it really does make sense, which is that we have to recognize that we live in a universe characterized by impermanence and entropy.
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You know, there are some things that are within our control and we should do our best to control them.
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And there are a lot of things that aren t.
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And you can t be effective if you re spending all of your time tying yourself up in knots over things that are out of your control.
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Dan Harris, thank you so much.
6
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Is there anything else that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you discuss?
6
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Obviously, we ll be linking to your book in the show notes as well.
6
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I would just say, people ask me all the time, like, okay, so you ve convinced me meditation may be worth investigating.
6
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How do I get started?
6
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We recently started a 10% Happier app, and it s actually me and Joseph Goldstein.
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So I m not a meditation teacher, I m just like a guy who talks about meditation a lot.
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So the app is built around these short little videos that you get every day, and where me and Joseph talk about meditation for a little bit, just talk about an issue related to meditation, and then he guides you through the practice.
6
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We just raised a bunch of venture capital money, and we re now building this out with a bunch of teachers,
6
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Our goal is to be like your meditation buddy.
6
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This is designed for busy people and skeptics, and we re going to help you get up and running in just a few minutes a day.
6
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You know, if you sign up and get a subscription, you get like a coach, a real human being you can text your questions to at any time.
6
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So this has really become my big focus is to move beyond just telling funny stories and embarrassing stories and getting people interested in generally in the idea of meditation to actually teaching them how to do it.
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And that s at this point how I think I can have a real impact.
6
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Great.
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Thank you.
6
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Interesting story this guy has.
6
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I mean, undoubtedly a high performer, in front of America every week slash daily, and went through trial by fire, literally, in the war zones, and of course now is dealing with almost an extreme version, but maybe not so extreme version of things that normal, quote unquote normal people put up with every single day.
6
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And the lack of mindfulness, the anxiety, and the high pressure environment.
6
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So I think,
6
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his path and his solution, or the solution, namely mindfulness and a daily practice thereof.
6
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There s a lot in that for everybody from the stressed out housewife all the way to the ridiculously stressed out CEO who just has a different variety of anxiety.
6
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I mean, not many people have had panic attacks on national TV and come back from it and actually still have a career, so it s a pretty impressive story.
6
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I kind of want to go look at those YouTube clips just to see if I can spot it, because honestly, that s the kind of thing that happens in your own head and it s much worse than it really is on TV, but his meltdown was pretty decent.
6
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Now that you know what s going on, you re like, wow, that s embarrassing.
6
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Dan on Twitter.
6
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as his book, 10% Happier.
6
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You can tap our album art and most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet for this episode, and we link to the show notes directly on your phone.
6
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
6
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You can find info on our amazing sponsors at theartofcharm.com slash advertisers, and I want to invite you to join us in our social capital challenge
6
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at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
6
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
6
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It s all about networking and improving those connection skills with people around you.
6
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that covers topics like body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
6
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And I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
6
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That s at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
6
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
6
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
6
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
6
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
6
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Go ahead and tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else either in person or shared on the web.
6
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
6
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.