Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Back in 2006, I wrote an e-mail (more of a mini manifesto) to my meditating friends, explaining that meditation needs to become scientific and inviting all to initiate an effort to make meditation training “data driven.” The response I got back was completely underwhelming. People generally liked the idea, but nobody was particularly excited by it.

I finally found one person excited by it. My friend Tenzin Tethong forwarded my e-mail to Dr. B. Alan Wallace. Alan replied to me immediately and told me excitedly that he had been working on a similar effort for the past six years. Why? Because the Dalai Lama told him to! I was amazed. None of my meditating friends (many of them men and women of science) were excited by the marriage of meditation and science, but the Dalai Lama was. It was then that I knew I was on the right track. Surely His Holiness and I cannot both be wrong at the same time.

Alan and I became good friends very quickly. After a while, through learning more about Alan’s work and related research by other scientists, I concluded that given the Dalai Lama’s enthusiastic support, this effort was going to move forward with or without me. I did a few other things on this front, including becoming a founding patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) with the Dalai Lama and my friends Jim Doty and Wayne Wu. Ultimately, though, I decided this movement was in good hands and that I would instead focus my personal energy on Step 3.

Align Meditation with Real Life

For the benefits of meditation to become widely accessible to humanity, it cannot just be the domain of bald people in funny robes living in mountains, or small groups of New Age folks in San Francisco. Meditation needs to become “real.” It needs to align with the lives and interests of real people, the average Joes of the world. This, I suspect, is the most important of the three steps, and the one where I can make the most impact. But how?

The historical precedence for this is exercise. In 1927, a group of scientists started the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory (HFL) to study the physiology of fatigue. Their pioneering work created the field of exercise physiology. One of their most important findings was that a fit person becomes physiologically different from an unfit person. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that their work has changed the world.

Today, thanks to the contribution of those pioneers and others, exercise has acquired at least four important features:

1. Everybody knows that “Exercise is good for me.” There is no more debate. While it is true that not everybody takes the trouble to work out, even those who don’t work out know that they should and that it would be good for them.

2. Anyone who wants to exercise can learn how to do it. The information is widely available, trainers are readily accessible if you want one, and many people have friends who work out who can show them how to exercise.

3. Companies understand that healthy and physically fit workers are good for business. Many companies even have gyms or provide subsidies for gym memberships.

4. Exercise is taken for granted. Exercise is so taken for granted today that when you tell your friends you are going to the gym to work out, nobody looks at you funny and thinks you are some New Age crank from San Francisco. In fact, it is now the reverse. If you, for example, argue that a pious American should never exercise, people look at you funny.

In other words, exercise has now perfectly aligned with the modern lives of real people. It has become fully accessible to all, and humanity benefits from it. I aspire to do the same with meditation. I want to create a world where meditation is widely treated like exercise for the mind, possessing all four features of exercise discussed above:

1. Everybody knows that “Meditation is good for me.”

2. Anyone who wants to meditate can learn how to do it.

3. Companies understand that meditation is good for business, and some even incentivize it.

4. Meditation is taken for granted. Everybody thinks, “Of course you should meditate, duh.”

Once again, we return to the same question: how? How do I create a world where meditation is taken for granted like exercise is? After a few months of working on the problem, I found the answer, almost by accident.

The answer came when I read Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence . My friend Dr. Larry Brilliant, who was then the executive director of Google’s philanthropic arm, had been a close friend of Daniel Goleman for a very long time. Dan was visiting Google to speak. Larry took the opportunity to hang out with him and invited me to come along. Out of courtesy to Dan, I decided to read Emotional Intelligence before meeting him. Reading that book gave me another epiphany. I had found my vehicle for aligning meditation with real life, and that vehicle is emotional intelligence (EI, sometimes known as EQ).

You see, everybody already has a rough idea of what emotional intelligence is. More importantly, everybody knows that emotional intelligence is very useful for us. Even without fully understanding EI, many people know or suspect that EI will help them fulfill their worldly goals in life, such as becoming more effective at work, getting promotions, earning more money, working more effectively with other people, being admired, having fulfilling relationships, and so on. In other words, EI aligns perfectly with the needs and desires of modern people.

EI has two more important features. First, beyond helping you succeed, the greatest side effect of EI is increased inner happiness, empathy, and compassion for people, precisely what we need for world peace. Second, a very good way (and I suspect the only way) to truly develop EI is with contemplative practices starting with Mindfulness Meditation.

Eureka! I found it!

The way to create the conditions for world peace is to create a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum, perfect it within Google, and then give it away as one of Google’s gifts to the world. The alignment is perfect. Everybody already wants EI, businesses already want EI, and we can help them achieve it. They can then become more effective at achieving their own goals and at the same time create the foundations for world peace.

When I finally met Dan, I could hardly contain myself. I was passionately explaining my world peace plan to him, almost banging on the table. I said, “This is world peace we’re talking about, Danny, world peace!” Dan was visibly a little uncomfortable. There he was, coming to Google and meeting a bunch of Larry’s friends and co-workers for the first time, and then there’s this crazy young guy with a funny job title wanting to create world peace. The scene was a bit comical. Yes, the road to changing the world is often paved with moments of comic absurdity.

Dan and I subsequently became friends. Through Dan’s and Larry’s connections, I got to know two more amazing people, Mirabai Bush and Norman Fischer. Mirabai was the executive director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a very compassionate woman who was a very close friend of both Dan and Larry and who, like Larry, gave her adult life to the service of humanity. Norman is one of the most famous Zen masters in America today. I was especially impressed by Norman. He is very wise, intelligent, and knowledgeable; deeply spiritual yet grounded in worldly reality; and very good at applying deep practices to daily life. With Dan, Mirabai, and Norman, I now had people with curriculum expertise. All I needed was to convince somebody in Google to sponsor this course, and Google University (the internal employee education program now called GoogleEDU) eventually did.