How to Master Your Mind in 100 Minutes

Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness

Chade-Meng Tan

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007509607
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Collins Shorts – insight in an instant.

This short shares the secrets of the personal development course pioneered at Google that teaches you how to instantly relax your mind whenever you want, develop unbreakable concentration, and have complete self-control. Participants say it changed every aspect of their life - and new research shows it starts in just 100 minutes of practice.

This title is part of a series of ebooks for the wisdom-craving, time-pressured reader, who appreciates expert content but wants it in a stylish package and to the point.

This ebook will work on all e-readers but delivers its full punch on devices that support colour and animation.

Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention. Attention is something we all understand.

Let’s say you are paying attention to an object, and eventually your attention wanders away to something else. After a while, there is something in your mind that ‘clicks’ to let you know, hey, your attention has wandered. That faculty is meta-attention.

Meta-attention is also the secret to concentration. The analogy is riding a bicycle. The way you keep a bicycle balanced is with a lot of micro-recoveries. When the bike tilts a little to the left, you recover by adjusting it slightly to the right, and when it tilts a little to the right, you adjust it slightly to the left. By performing micro-recoveries quickly and often, you create the effect of continuous upright balance. It is the same with attention.

When your attention and meta-attention both become strong, something interesting happens. Your mind becomes increasingly focused and stable, but in a way that is relaxing. It is like balancing a bicycle on easy terrain. With enough practice you get the experience of moving forward and being relaxed at the same time.

When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

What does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly does not look like me. In fact, he looks like a bald French guy in Tibetan robes. His name is Matthieu Ricard.

Matthieu was born and grew up in France. In 1972, after completing his Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur, he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I tell him that the reason he became a monk is because he could not join Google back in 1972 – and the monk thing seemed like the next best career choice.

Matthieu’s career choice leads us to the story of how Matthieu became the ‘happiest man in the world’. When the Dalai Lama became interested in the science of meditation, he invited Tibetan Buddhist monks to participate in scientific studies. Matthieu was an obvious choice as a subject, as he was a bona fide scientist, understood both Western and Tibetan ways of thinking, and had decades of classical meditation training. Matthieu’s brain became the subject of numerous scientific studies.

One of many measurements conducted on Matthieu was his level of happiness. There turns out to be a way to gauge happiness in the brain: by measuring the relative activation of a certain part of your left prefrontal cortex versus your right prefrontal cortex. The stronger the re...

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