10% Happier with Dan Harris

Okay so I just finished this book that was fabulous it's called The Saint of Bright Doors by Sri Lankan writer Vajra Trandra Sekara and it's a fantasy book I'm a big sci-fi fantasy junkie and I had read about it in the New York Times that the reviewer gave it a glowing review and it is one of the strangest most magical challenging transporting books that I have read in ages it's it's so unique it's so steeped in a kind of mythical South Asian view of the world yet it's intensely modern and so it's about this character Federer the protagonist who in the first page as soon as he's born his mother Garrett's his shadow and strangles his shadow and he has no shadow and and he's so he's in this sort of mythical magical space where there are devil doctors and and he goes to the big city and ends up in these weird Kafka scenarios and it's a lot about administration and the mystery of these these doors that appear in these walls and know that no one understands and he just and there's a whole scientific crew to sit and watch the door because when you look away you watch these things that are going to potentially become bright doors and as soon as you look away then suddenly there's a new door there and it's just it's so wild but it's like this overlay of the mythic and the and the modern and what I love about this book and just the larger you know genre fiction is changing it's been living in these kind of little ghettos with like a few experts and and now it's just like the especially science fiction and fantasy it's the amount of lgtbq voices and people of color and like there's so much energy and enrichment and invigoration happening and I cannot get enough of it and and it's happening across and everywhere but it's really happening in the science fiction and fantasy worlds and I just so appreciate this writer and there's like a name another dozen writers I love and that are doing really interesting things in that space but I thought I'd throw that one out there.

The Bee Sting anybody to read that no I think it's probably gonna win the pillator this year yeah I want to check that out yeah it's very stressful even though it's just the life of an Irish family but it's I found it very stressful but it's also very beautiful.

my book when the body says no the relationship between stress and illness emotional stress and physical illness

hold on to kids why parents need to matter more than peers which I really beg you to read then because it's a very important printing book and I say that without arrogance in this case because I'm not the main writer of it the rain writers a friend and colleague and mentor called Gordon Newfeld and Gordon's work showing that the kids get too connected to peers in this culture as a result parents lose their influence and that is toxic for their healthy development

a colleague and mentor and friend of mine dan seagull sakaita is just wrote a book called intra connected not even interconnected intra connected and our inner selves are themselves connected with everything in the world and dan talks about this concept of me me and we put together in one world so that a part of feeling really has to be a recognition of our sociality that we are bio-cycle social creatures

A good book on that is Shambhala the sacred path of the warrior by Chogyam Trungpa if somebody wants to get look tuned into that kind of perspective.

And in training a warrior you cultivate certain qualities which start with humility that's the first one and it's symbolized by a tiger and then the lot snow lion symbolizes a kind of perky or you know sort of game playful kind of energy and then the outrageous or daring is symbolized by a Garuda these are ancient you know symbols that are everywhere around Asia and somewhere in the West to this corollaries to it but the outrageous one is like the celestial hawk that guru doesn't need to land it's airborne though it's like refueling in the air like a 747 you know and that means it doesn't need to be confirmed all the time it doesn't need oh good boy good girl you know you did well it doesn't need confirmation now people give you confirmation you don't need that anymore and in the outrageous there's just a sense of spontaneity that is governing and you trust yourself and you trust the situation but it's it's pretty advanced in a way because most of us doubt ourselves so then you go back to the kind of trap of doubt and then if we're not paying attention you go back to the mindfulness exercise so it's a way to calibrate certain aspects of your path and you can think about this Dan I'm sure times where you just took a leap I bet you did and you just went I'm going I'm doing this I'm going here I'm doing that I'm gonna talk to this person I'm gonna start this podcast whatever it was there's a leap involved.

Didn't you write a book called the wisdom of insecurity?

If you took those three strands, those three sort of aspects of living and you developed a braid with them or attempted to integrate them into one cohesive way of being. That's what the book's about.

So it's not just how to make money teaching Dharma. It's not how to make a business more ethical and aligned. And it's not how to get your demos recorded by Taylor Swift necessarily either. But any of those could be part of it.

And what we say is they have equal weight, which is an unconventional perspective.

So Dharma Buddhism is part of it, but it's one strand among three. That's right. And what we say is they have equal weight, which is an unconventional perspective.

They don't give that a lot of weight. The spiritual practice and the business practice.

It's called Awakening from the Daydream. And it's about what karma is. But it is a cascade of causes and conditions resulting in this present moment being set up exactly the way it is. I use the analogy of a billiards game.

So there's a lay on the table when you pick up the cue, and you can't really change that unless you're cheating.

You get the other person to look the other way, you know. But now you have a shot. You have a clean shot. And you call the shot, and depending on how much skill you have, how much mental acuity you've developed, physical acuity, you can affect that shot a lot of different ways, actually. You have a lot of potency in that moment.

If you get overwhelmed by emotional upheavals that are conditioned into you, your basic habitual patterns, the shot is going to be governed by the previous conditions as opposed to having a clean shot. So that's what we're trying to get our mind clean so we can get a clean shot with the existing conditions.

So anyway, does that gumbo of words make any sense to you?

Her new book is called The Portfolio Life and her varied resume should give you an idea what she means by this in this conversation.

I wrote this book to explain to my mother what the hell I've been doing with my life.

The book is called The Portfolio Life, How To Future Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Business Card.

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.

having studied his problem for a while I wrote a whole book on it having study this problem for a while.

and I knew it wasn't going to come out my friend is a meditation teacher this is a name that will be familiar maybe not to you but a lot of people listening her name is seven a salacious great meditation teacher and one of her love languages is she will give gifts to people so she gave me a gift which was a book called the over story which is a novel by Richard powers it's a phenomenally beautiful book and I actually hadn't read novels in a long time but I read that and I was blown away and I just started looking up all the books that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and just started reading them all and I've been I read a ton of novels now and it is helped me immensely in writing my memoir which is again its nonfiction but in terms of elevating my craft sitting with these great novelists and reading them has been incredibly helpful

the traditional knowledge worker story I used to pull out this principle was actually linman well Miranda working on his first big play In the Heights which won a lot of Tony Awards before Hamilton came out and I go through the whole story he spent seven years he debuts a version of this play as a sophomore in college it's seven years later than it makes a professional stage he took his time and during this time you know he's working on it in the background often on pretty consistently some periods more intense another yes other jobs he has other initiatives he has other projects he's working on he took his time and in the end what I argue is no one knows how long he took to wrote that play we're just like wow that was a great play and then he did not another great play he's so perccious he's so productive no one thinks like man what a lazy guy he why didn't he just get this done in two years and so taking longer makes things more sustainable it improves the quality of your work I argued Miranda could not have gotten In the Heights to the level it did in just a couple years he had to get more experience with life he had the mature he had the mature as a play right he needed that time to make that play as good as it was and so just take longer on projects I mean I it's so tempting to have that optimistic scenario be true what if I could write a book in six months wouldn't that be awesome it'd be done in six months but it's a recipe for failure say no you're in a half let me give myself some time this will come together but I don't want to be frantically chasing a deadline I'm never going to meet okay so now I'm going to abuse my privilege of being the host of the show to ask you about something personal

Well it's not just an economic argument life with too much can be almost insufferable and the stories you know I was pulling some examples from British Holidays book. Overwhelmed overloaded overwork as she tells some heartbreaking stories in that book right of a period in her life where she was overloaded in her work and how this really strained her as a mother some heartbreaking examples of you know her daughter saying when I grow up I want to be a teacher so at least then I can be around my kids right all these it's heartbreak heartbreaking stuff and I don't want to get away from that emotional core of doing less as well there's a reason to do less this not just about economic instrumentalism if it's possible and you have the ability to engineer this in your life of the circumstances happen to be there it's worth doing also because it's a better life and we don't talk about enough and we're doing it more now which is good but we have an issue productivity era talked about enough the cost of overload it's not just yeah this is worked you got to get after it let's do it you know high five it's not just that there is a real there is a real cost so that interlude was a check against myself not to get too caught up in just the economic contrary and is them.

we don't think enough about the impact of our physical environment on our cognitive functioning it really does matter an interesting case study of this is that if you look at writers who are like the original work from home workers right a novelist throughout history or whatever they don't work in their houses I wrote a New Yorker piece about this because I was so interested in this idea of all these different writers who had very nice home offices and they wanted to work anywhere they could that was not their house and they would work in really weird places Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws used to live down the street from where I grew up and he had a very nice house he did not write Jaws in that house he wrote them in a furnace repair shop about a mile a mile across town in a furnace repair shop and we talked to windy bench about this he was like it was banging on metal drums that's where he would go to write my angel who would go to hotel rooms take everything off the wall and proper self up on the bed and write that way Steinbeck would take a skiff out into the middle of Sag Harbor and write on his knees you know he had a beautiful property and so I was like why do they do this right why does the writing near home but not in home and I think it's because the cognitive context of your home for example has too many salient distractions your brain associates it with look at that laundry basket I gotta do laundry look over there I have to think about dinner and your brain is constantly switching to familiar non-professional context and it's hard to focus so you go somewhere that's kind of absurd like a furnace factory none of those salient triggers are there so your brain says okay nothing's catching my attention here I mean the banging is but there's nothing here that's very familiar to me so it might as well work so context matters so avoiding the familiar matters but then also having a very consistent context that you associate just with work these things matter as well it's why David McCola at his house in Martha's Vineyard would write in a shed in his backyard unconditioned shed on a typewriter because he associated that shed with that's writing time like in that shed I write I have a home office where I do email and faxes and contracts that shed is writing time we need to care more about that in an age of knowledge work especially an age of remote knowledge work where it's not just here's your office you have to go here it's up to us to think where we're going to work context matters

the traditional knowledge worker story I used to pull out this principle was actually linman well Miranda working on his first big play In the Heights which won a lot of Tony Awards before Hamilton came out

and I go through the whole story he spent seven years he debuts a version of this play as a sophomore in college it's seven years later than it makes a professional stage he took his time and during this time you know he's working on it in the background often on

pretty consistently some periods more intense another yes other jobs he has other initiatives he has other projects he's working on he took his time and in the end what I argue is no one knows how long he took to wrote that play we're just like wow that was a great play and then he did not

another great play he's so perccious he's so productive no one thinks like man what a lazy guy he why didn't he just get this done in two years and so taking longer makes things more sustainable it improves the quality of your work I argued Miranda could not have gotten In the Heights to the level it did in just a couple years he had to get more experience with life he had the mature he had the mature as a play right he needed that time to make that play as good as it was