10% Happier with Dan Harris

She's the author of the book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive.

She's the author of a book called Self-Compassion and the follow up book, Fear Self-Compassion.

I'm actually writing a book about kindness right now and I want to do a chapter about Self-Compassion.

She's the author of the book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive.

She's the author of a book called Self-compassion and the follow up book, Fear Self-compassion.

my next book is actually I'm gonna be called fierce compassion for women

You are actually a wee so can you just unpack that a little bit before we dive back into the practical stuff?

I feel that the book I'm just finished which is called Altered Traits. Science reveals how meditation transforms mind body and brain is going to revive interest in that other book so I better update it because it's very embarrassing here.

She hosts a podcast called Choiceology and has written a book called How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

The very first study I really did on behavior change was motivated by some of my own experiences in graduate school...

The book that I wrote summarizing my life's work on behavior change and the work of the people I most admire in the field it's called How to Change the Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

He is also the author of How to Be Perfect, the correct answer to every moral question which is a phenomenal title.

And the first one is on the far absurd end of the spectrum which is, is it kosher to punch my best friend in the face right now?

And I was like, no, I'm asking it because of how absurd it is. Because it's so obviously the answer is no.

In the first four chapters I ask silly questions like that because I'm trying to just get out the basic nuts and bolts of the big picture theory.

The next question in the book How to Be Perfect one of the great book names of all time is about returning your shopping cart in the parking lot because it would be a pain to walk across the parking lot and put it back yeah that has been a question of I've had ever since I first encountered this problem.

And he's got a new book called Soul Boom in which he cracks a lot of jokes, it also makes a dead serious case for a spiritual revolution.

I have a section in Soul Boom Dan Harris oh look I happen to have a copy right here I have a section about religion in here I have a chapter called hey kids let's build the perfect religion

but before that I have a chapter called the fabulous foundations of faith where I discuss the universalities of religion

The book is called Soul Boom why we need a spiritual revolution

Even better news one of the finest journalists of our age Charles do Hig is now out with a whole book where he dives into said research and describes in very lucid terms how to deploy it in your life how to become what he calls a super communicator.

And his latest book is called super communicators.

You mentioned super communicator, I want to get to that term in a second but since we're on the matching principle, is it just about picking up on the words people use or can it be something about body language?

So it sounds like she's a super communicator not just with you but with other people.

Super communicators are people who consistently can do this because they've thought about how conversations work.

The difference is that there are some people who have thought about this a little bit more deeply, who have practiced it a little bit more and they can be super communicators whenever they want to be because oftentimes when it happens in our life it just sort of it feels like chance right like either we know someone so well or we walk into a meeting and we know exactly what to say but then we walk into another meeting and we can't persuade anyone.

And the way that they work in real life is to usually ask a simple question and then follow up by trying to make it deep such as what do you do for living? I'm a lawyer. Do you love practicing law? Did you always want to be a lawyer? When did you decide to go to law school?

We've talked about a bunch of really winning and scientifically validated ways to become a super communicator.

But there wasn't a big idea in the science of learning, at least not one that I could find, that had that sort of transformative power like that kind of, oh wow, this idea makes the whole world look different.

you know that Malcolm Gladwell book um Blink about the wisdom of the subconscious and at the decisions we make in a Blink of an eye etc etc are sometimes the smart one

I've been thinking about Buckminster Fuller who a long time ago who I met when I was a student at MIT and he wrote a book called Spaceship Earth a long long time ago I think in the 60s no one thought about that but you know it might have even been before we went to the moon and looked back and took the photograph of earth sitting in the blackness of space all when it's beautiful planet but we don't have a planet you know if we screw this one up and we're screwing it up because of how clever we are as human beings how industrious and how much we can heat the atmosphere and then Brazil is burning the rainforest on purpose I mean for you know sort of its own capitalist purposes which are understandable and it's like hey you want to like destroy your lungs the planets lungs so if it's true that we are on one this spaceship earth of Buckminster Fuller then maybe you know in an emergency of this magnitude we need all hands on deck all hands on deck not republicans or democrats or Americans or you know sort of anybody else but all humans need to in some sense wake up to that name we gave ourselves as a species homo sapiens sapiens which means basically the species that is aware and is aware that it is aware that gives us this kind of freedom to heal this freedom to realize what we need to do and let the doing come out of wisdom out of a kind of being that is part of our nature so that's the way I talk about it and I agree with you that it's really important

David is the author of a new book called How God Works, and he's also the host of a new podcast on PRX, also called "How God Works."

Your new book, The Subject is fascinating.

Yeah sure my book is called How God Works the science behind the benefits of religion out from Simon and Schuster

She has written such bestsellers as a history of God, The Battle for God, Islam and Buddha.

His latest book and the reason for his return is called Slow Productivity in this conversation. We talk about how we got into this mess a mess that he calls overload culture, the difference between pseudo productivity and Slow Productivity and the three tenants of Slow Productivity do fewer things work at a natural pace and obsess over quality.

You take on and this is where we're saying sort of obviously take on less take on less big projects have fewer big projects that you're trying to do better contain the small says how do you deal with all the other small stuff that's a part of life the stuff that Georgia O'Keefe and like George and after worry about the emails the meetings the HR department needs you to fill this or that out and there are all detectors I give are around containment.

The answer more generally is we need alternative definitions to pseudo productivity and I'm pretty clear in the conclusion of the book we're going to need a lot of those answers like so the important thing here is not trying to find some exact answer because as we've navigated throughout this interview a different philosophies will apply here, here, and here kind of here, not there. This philosophy will apply here, here, and here, and not there. But what we need, what everyone who's overloaded needed is a recognition that what we're doing now is not working. This implicit understanding of I don't know activity just means useful effort. That's not working. And we have to stand up and say let's be clear about what we want to do instead and let's name it and let's give principles to it and let's talk about it. And for a lot of people it might be Slow Productivity for other people. It might be a completely different thing, but clarity is what's needed here. We can no longer just sort of assume we all intuitively know what productivity means and work is just work. We have to be clear about productivity if we want to solve our issues with it. And so Slow Productivity is just as much about a particular philosophy that might help you as it is a tip of a bigger movement that hopefully will generate many more philosophies each of them much more intentional and much more humanistic than simply pseudo-productivity and effort for the sake of effort.

Well, the new book is Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout and I've also written Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, a World Without Email.

I came back to it and it really resonated and to this day I listened to it at least once a month I can almost recite it off by heart.

no one's an atheist everybody worships everybody worships something you worship your intellect you worship your body you worship money you worship power you worship something

So Good They Can't Ignore You so the the premise of that book is I went back to try to understand how do people end up loving their work and the idea that you should follow your passion is really prevalent out there but it doesn't really match the research literature or my own research on how people end up in jobs that they really love.

The formula I ended up talking about in that book the formula that came up often when I study people who love what they do is that they usually started by building up rare valuable skills they get good at something that's unobliguously valuable.

And as I was traveling around with that book, people over and over kept saying to me, yeah, yeah, all the sex science is great Emily. But you know, the one chapter that changed everything for me was that one chapter about stress and emotion processing.

And do you remember how it, you know, saved my life? She said twice.