Joy on Demand

Chade-Meng Tan

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062378941
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

A long-awaited follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Search Inside Yourself shows us how to cultivate joy within the context of our fast-paced lives and explains why it is critical to creativity, innovation, confidence, and ultimately success in every arena.

In Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan shows that you don't need to meditate for hours, days, months or years to achieve lasting joy—you can actually get consistent access to it in as little as fifteen seconds. Explaining joy and meditation as complementary things that naturally reinforce each other, Meng explains how these two skills form a virtuous cycle, and once put into motion, become a solid practice that can be sustained in daily life.

For many years, meditation has been taught and practiced in cultures where almost all meditators practice full-time for years, resulting in training programs optimized for practitioners with lots of free time and not much else to do but develop profound mastery over the mind. Seeing a disconnect between the traditional practice and the modern world, the bestselling author and Google's "Jolly Good Fellow" has developed a program, through "wise laziness, " to help readers meditate more efficiently and effectively. Meng shares the three pillars of joy (inner peace, insight, and happiness), why joy is the secret is to success, and demonstrates the practical tools anyone can use to cultivate it on demand.

CHAPTER ONE

Joy Becomes You

Surprising (and Not-So-Surprising) Benefits of Mind Training

Confucius said, “If you cannot choose between one of many good options, just choose them all.” No, Confucius didn’t say that either—I made it up, but once again, he could have said it because he is so wise and all. It is a common misperception that certain good things are mutually exclusive. For example, you might think that in order to be successful, you cannot be compassionate, because everybody on Wall Street knows that compassion is for chumps. Or some people believe calm and charisma don’t go together. They assume charisma depends on wild enthusiasm and manic smiles, and being calm is boring. In fact, as we will see in this chapter, compassion and success, calm and charisma, and many other good things in life from creativity to resilience, are mutually reinforcing.

And they all come from joy. Or if not directly from joy, they turn out to be side effects of the training that enables us to access joy. For when you learn to access joy on demand (see: this book) the effects go far beyond isolated moments of joy. Joy can improve every aspect of life. It resets happiness set points, turning miserable people into jolly ones. With practice, joy can become your personality and your whole life. As if that wasn’t enough, it also makes you more attractive. Joy becomes you, in every sense of becoming. Joy is very much a package deal. Confucius would approve. Welcome to the whole enchilada, with extra sauce and a free toy.

Even the Basic Benefits of Mind Training Are Life Changing

Reliable access to joy begins with mind training. In the beginning, meditation was very difficult for me. (Remember, meditation is mind training. When I am referring to specific meditation practices like sitting meditation, I will say so.) It didn’t seem to have anything to do with joy. Happily, once I figured out how to do it, it wasn’t long—a few short months—before it started to change my life. And now I see mind training has everything to do with joy. With this book, you get the benefit of my experience of learning the hard way so you can expect things to get better for you in even less time, and with less difficulty and more joy, than I had. You’re welcome.

The first, most basic and possibly most important benefit of mind training is the ability to calm the mind on demand. Eventually, with practice, you will find yourself able to abide in a calm mind during most sitting meditations. Better still, you will also find yourself increasingly able to apply this skill in “real life” outside of sitting meditation. This one skill alone may be life changing. For example, one student in my class, after just a few weeks of training, found himself able to refrain from saying something nasty to his mother-in-law. That changed his life, no doubt.

The ability to calm the mind on demand also has profound implications for leadership. Imagine you’re in a meeting room with your coworkers in the middle of a crisis. Everybody is frazzled, but you alone can calm down and think, because you alone have developed the skill to calm the mind on demand. What happens? Everybody in the room is going to look at you and say to himself or herself, “Wow, this person is a leader.” And they would be right, because that is leadership. A key part of leadership is precisely the ability to think calmly and clearly under fire. Hence, by training yourself in calming the mind, you become a more effective leader.

The second basic benefit of mind training is clarity of mind. With calmness of mind comes clarity. Actually, no, for many beginners, with calmness of mind comes sleepiness, but once you develop the ability to remain calm without necessarily being sleepy, then you get to abide in a delicious state of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. It is like a pot of sediment-filled water left undisturbed for a while—when the water is calm over a period of time, the sediment settles to the bottom and the water becomes clear. Similarly, when the mind is calm over a period of time, some of the noisy mental activity quiets down and the mind becomes clear.

The obvious effect of this clarity is increased self-awareness. As the mind clears, so does our perception into the process of emotion, the process of cognition, and the process of self. This strengthens at least two aspects of self-awareness: emotional awareness, where the subtleties of our moment-to-moment experience of emotion become increasingly discernible; and self-assessment, where we consider our own identity, inclinations, resources, and weaknesses with more objectivity.

The third basic benefit of mind training is emotional resilience, especially in response to emotional pain. As we will see in Chapter 6, emotional resilience works in three steps: attentional, affective, and cognitive. When hit by an episode of emotional pain, first we apply an attentional strategy, temporarily redirecting attention to the breath and the body, and by doing that, calming the mind. By itself, calming the mind solves half the problem on the spot, but that’s only the first step. In the second step, the affective step, we manage the emotionality involved. Here, we mindfully and objectively perceive the emotions as they happen in the body. After a while, we may recognize that even these afflictive emotions are merely sensations in the body and that they are constantly changing, arising and ceasing over time. We then manage the feelings by treating them with kind friendliness if possible, or if not possible, at least sitting with them in equanimity. At this point, we arrive at some degree of composure. With the third, cognitive step, we gain a broader, wiser, and more compassionate perspective. With a composed mind, we are able to see things in a different light. For example, we take this opportunity to understand ourselves and to grow. If the emotional pain arises from a situation involving other people, we can take this opportunity to understand them and their suffering. If the emotional pain arises from failure, we can figure out how to use it as building blocks for future success, remembering that the Chinese word for crisis suggests both danger and opportunity. In other words, we apply the cognitive step to increasing our wisdom and compassion, and in doing so, reducing the causes of our own future suffering.

Mind training enables emotional resilience. In mind training, we practice calming the mind in difficult situations, perceiving the process of emotion at high resolution, and cultivating compassion and objectivity, thereby strengthening our ability to take all three steps when we’re faced with emotional pain.

Any one of the three basic benefits of mind training—mental calm, mental clarity, and emotional resilience—is, by itself, life changing, and with practice all meditators can acquire all three. Without a doubt, meditation changed my life (for the better, in case you need to ask). With increasing calmness, clarity, and resilience, I became increasingly capable of overcoming the suffering in my life. Meditation turned out to be the solution to my misery. Honestly, that doesn’t suck. And I know it isn’t just me. For example, looking back on the time when she ran a startup called Locket, founder and CEO Yunha Kim describes how the basic benefits of mind training have made a difference for her:

I was under a lot of pressure. The more money we raised, the more pressure I felt—not just for my company’s success but also for my performance as a young, first-time entrepreneur and leader. Later, we had to pivot our product and lay off half of the team, many of which I worked and lived with. I can’t really describe how stressed and miserable I was during that time. I wasn’t sleeping or eating enough, and the uncertainty of the company’s future really consumed me. Yet, I had to put on my happy and confident CEO face for others.

I decided to see a therapist, who introduced me to mindfulness and meditation. I was skeptical at first, because I thought it was something only hippies and monks do. I was raised as a Christian, and I hesitated to try anything associated with other religions. But after trying meditation a few times, I was surprised to find clarity, both in my heart and in my mind. So I began to meditate every morning for ten minutes. It’s been a couple years now since I started, and it’s made a difference in my life. At first, I enjoyed the clarity it brought to my thoughts. But over time, I came to appreciate the calmness of mind.

There are times when I am restless and cranky but without an obvious reason. I feel it in my body—my breath is shorter and shallower, my hands and feet fidget. Meditation helps me identify the source. For instance, I once discovered my restlessness at work resulted from an unresolved argument with my mother the night before. In another instance, I was anxious at a dinner with friends but observed that I was restless over a promised e-mail I was expecting from a colleague. It’s been fascinating to me how my mind snowballs a small argument or a missed e-mail into something ominously bigger. Meditation hasn’t solved everything for me, but the daily practice has often helped me simplify my life by untangling some of my mind’s complexity, both big and small.¹

But wait, there is more still. Beyond calmness, clarity, and resilience, there are other compelling benefits that I was not expecting when I started.

Creativity: It’s Not a Bug—It’s a Feature!

The calm and clear mind is alert and relaxed, especially when suffused with inner joy. And I have found the alert and relaxed mind to be highly conducive to creativity.

I initially made this discovery in an annoying sort of way: a lot of good ideas and insights came to me while I was meditating. If I had a problem I couldn’t solve, or I got invited to give a speech where I didn’t have the slightest idea what to talk about, the answers would come to me while I was meditating. At first, I found it really irritating. Here I was, trying my best to focus attention gently on my breath, and then a great idea would arise, and I would get all excited, but my formal meditation would effectively be over. It always used to end with me scolding myself, “Oh, great job. Now see what you’ve screwed up this time.” Over time, though, I learned to accept this as a natural process of the mind and to take advantage of it. The mind that is alert and relaxed sometimes gets creative, and when that happens, I’ll invite it to calm down so I can get back to my object of meditation, but if it doesn’t, I’ll just allow the creativity to run its full course while I observe the experience with equanimity. I’ll come out of it with some new ideas and some practice of equanimity in the midst of excitement.

Or as a good software engineer would say, “That’s not a bug—that’s a feature!”

In fact, both the idea for writing this book and the entire framework of the book arose in my mind during meditation. Months had passed after I promised a second book to my agent, Stephanie, and still there was no book proposal. In fact, there was not a single word from me (no pun intended). When Stephanie started calling me about it, I told her that I was still waiting for the book to write itself. I said there were two things I knew about this book: First, it had to write itself. And second, when the book was ready to write itself, I would know. That assurance did not improve the quality or quantity of Stephanie’s sleep—I don’t know why.

Then, one day, during my daily meditation, my mind went into a state of deep calmness, and suddenly, out of nowhere, two thoughts arose. The first thought was, “The book is now ready to be written.” The second thought, which arose immediately after the first but took the next two or three minutes to fully form, was the entire framework of this book. Ta-da!

When I realized how conducive the alert and relaxed mind was to creativity, the first question I asked myself was, “Is it just me?” Maybe I was the only person who became creative during meditation, maybe because I’m weird or something. I certainly haven’t seen a Zen master jumping up in the middle of sitting meditation and wildly shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” But over time, the evidence I’ve seen convinced me that this effect is highly replicable. The first pieces of evidence came from some of the students in my own class, the early participants of the Search Inside Yourself course at Google. Several students reported becoming more creative at solving problems, especially during or immediately after their sitting meditation. One engineer even told me that the solutions to the two most difficult engineering problems he had to solve both came to him during mindfulness practice, and because of that, he got promoted.

How does this work? From a first-person perspective, I can describe it with a pebble analogy. If you come to a lake where the wind is strong and the water is choppy, and then if you drop a pebble into that lake, it will cause a ripple, but because the water is choppy, you can’t see the ripple clearly. Drop a pebble into a calm lake, however, and it makes a beautiful, circular ripple that you can clearly see. Creativity seems to happen when random ideas arise and the mind perceives them clearly and, more important, captures the novel, remote, or unexpected associations between these ideas. If the mind is cluttered, noisy, or agitated, it is like dropping pebbles into turbulent water—you don’t see a lot of nice ripples, and you can’t see how the ripples form patterns with each other. However, when the mind is alert and relaxed at the same time, relaxation gives random ideas space to arise and play, and alertness lets us see them and their connections, just like dropping pebbles into a placid lake.

Beyond my own first-person experience, I later learned that the relationship between relaxed attention and creativity is well-known among people who rely on creativity for a living. Steve Jobs, for example, famously said:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.²

Another example comes from David Kelley and Tom Kelley, who strongly advocate what they call “relaxed attention” as a foundation of creativity. I would think the Kelleys know something about the topic. David and Tom are, respectively, founder and partner of IDEO, the global design company renowned internationally for creativity and innovation.

This topic has also been studied scientifically. For example, th...