044: Calming the Voice Inside Your Head with Dan Harris

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at your Job Podcast.

Dan Harris
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to dig in a little bit and hear some of your wisdom associated with what you’ve discovered along the way of writing your book, 10% Happier, but to start off, I’d love it if maybe you could walk us through perhaps the five to ten-minute version of the adventure, the story that you lay out in the book.

Dan Harris
Sure. I had a panic attack on national television back in 2004 on ABC News on a show called Good Morning America that we do, a little show, and I was in the middle of reading the news headlines. I was, at that morning I was filling in as the guy who comes on at the top of each hour and gives the headlines, and I just froze up. My lungs froze up, my heart started racing, my mind was racing, my mouth dried up, my palms were sweating. I just, I couldn’t breathe. I had to quit right in the middle and toss it back to the main anchors of the show, and so … That’s embarrassing, but actually more embarrassing was the backstory, which was that I had spent a lot of time in war zones as a ambitious young reporter after 9/11, and really didn’t think about the psychological consequences to that. Then came home and I got depressed, and didn’t even really know I was depressed until later, and then made a very dumb decision, which is, I self-medicated with recreational drugs, including cocaine.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Dan Harris
After the panic attack, I went to a doctor, who pointed out that with my drug use, that it artificially raised the level of adrenaline in my brain and primed me to have this panic attack, so that was what I would call a case study in spiraling mindless behavior. Several years later, that kind of put me on a weird and windy path that ultimately led me to finding meditation, which … I always thought meditation was for freaks and hippies and people who live in a yurt and are really into aromatherapy or whatever, but when I did some, when I found about the scientific research, there’s been an explosion of scientific research that shows that meditation can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, literally rewire key parts of your brain, I decided to give it a shot. Really what it does… I like to say that it’s been on the receiving end of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever, but. Meditation… really what it does is change your relationship with the voice in your head.

We all have a voice in our head, and I’m not talking about schizophrenia or hearing voices, I’m talking about your inner narrator, the voice that chases you out of bed in the morning and has you yammering, and is yammering at you all day long. You’re just constantly thinking about the past, or thinking about the future, to the detriment of whatever’s happening right now. You’re wanting stuff or not wanting stuff, or judging people, or judging yourself, or comparing yourself to other people. It’s this blah blah blah all day long, and when you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation, it yanks you around. This is why you eat when you’re not hungry, or lose your temper at strategically unwise moments, or check your email in the middle of a conversation with your kid. That idea was just very compelling to me, because the voice in my head is exactly what had created that panic attack. It’s why I had gone off to war zones without thinking about it, and been, gotten depressed, and was insufficiently self-aware to know it, and then blindly self-medicated.

I found it to be very useful, not like in some mystical or magical way, but just in a really practical way of that it helps me stay more focused, and it helps me be less yanked around by my urges and impulses and emotions, and … I wrote a book about it called 10% Happier, and now I … It’s kind of turned into a mini-industry where I have the book, and I go around the country speaking about it, and I also have an app that teaches people how to meditate called 10% Happier, and all of it is really designed for people who are fidgety and skeptical, who don’t think they can do this, or don’t think it’s for them, and I am out to show that you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun, and thanks so much for developing this stuff and bringing it out there. I think that we’re a great fit here, because it sounds like you were absolutely, were an ambitious, hard-charging, motivated kind of a professional, and we’ve got many such listeners here who fall in that boat and may have similar thoughts to, “Meditation? Ah, I don’t know about that.” Could you maybe paint the picture for what was going on with that voice inside your head before, and then what encounters did you have that changed your mind to take on this practice, and now what’s the voice in your head like today?

Dan Harris
Yeah, so I was raised, my father’s a really ambitious, successful academic physician at Harvard, actually, and he had an expression that I really took to heart which was, “The price of security is insecurity.” I come from a family where worrying is venerated, and that was my M.O. for a long time. I arrived at ABC News at age twenty-eight, so sixteen years ago, and yeah, I know, I was very young to be doing this kind of work, and I was working with Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters, and I just, I was basically a workaholic. I just threw myself into the job, and I had this constant anxiety loop of like, “How good was my last story? What’s my next story going to be? Who’s getting a story that I want? What’s my relationship with the bosses right now?” Blah, blah, blah all the time. Now I’ve been meditating for seven years, and I still believe the price of security is insecurity.

I still believe that if you’re going to do anything great, which we all want to do, it’s going to involve a certain amount of plotting and planning and worrying and stress. However, what the self-awareness that is generated through mindfulness meditation has allowed me to do 10% of the time is to draw the line between useless rumination and what I call constructive anguish.

Pete Mockaitis
Constructive anguish. There’s a turn of a phrase.

Dan Harris
When you are … Thank you. We spend a lot of time … I think worrying is necessary, but I think that we waste a lot of energy worrying when we don’t need to, and I’ll just give you one little tip that was given to me by my meditation teacher, actually. In a talk one day, he was saying something about how worrying is a waste of energy, and I was like, “Well, wait a minute. If I … Let’s just say, take, for example, I have a flight to miss … That I need to take to go home. If I miss that flight, that’s going to create a lot of problems for me, so am I wrong not to worry about it?” He’s like, “Absolutely, fine, I get it. That is something to worry about, I guess,” but he’s like, “On the seventeenth time that you find yourself running through all the awful ramifications of missing that flight, maybe ask yourself one simple question: Is this useful?”

That is very good advice, because if you can figure out when to cut short your worrying and move your attention onto more constructive areas, you will be much more … You will have much more energy, and you will be much more resilient than those against whom you are competing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Now, “Is this useful,” is a powerful question, and so I’m imagining, then, you might say, “No, it’s not useful, but I can’t help myself!” Is that what you’re saying is, the meditation kind of gives you that kind of power, that mental muscle, to quiet it and put it in its place when you realize it isn’t serving you?

Dan Harris
What meditation does is help you wake up to the fact that you’re going down the rabbit hole with useless hand-wringing over something like a flight. You just wake up from the dream, the nightmare, the internal hell you’re creating for yourself, with all of these sort of, like, “Oh, I’m going to miss this flight, and then I’m going to be tired when I go into the job tomorrow, and then I’m going to then, I’m going to get fired, and then I’m going to be living on the street.” It’s like, that’s the way our minds work. We just flash onto this horrible future, because of some potential bad thing. We create these alternate universes, and we’re not even aware of it. Meditation does, first, is just wake you up to a thunderously obvious fact, which is, you have a mind and are thinking, and that these thoughts aren’t necessarily connected to reality. You have the ability to step out of the traffic of your own mind and just to view what’s happening with some non-judgmental remove.

In the moment when I’m worrying too much about missing a flight, what meditation, the first thing meditation helps me do is see that it’s happening, wake up from this little dream I’m in, or nightmare that I’m in, and then ask the question, “All right, is this useful? Have I thought this through every possible way? Do I have a plan, a contingency plan, a plan C, and should I move on to maybe getting some work done, or enjoying this coffee I’m drinking?” Any number of other things that would be a better use of my time. That’s the first thing it does, but then you correctly raise the issue of like, “Okay, what if you can’t stop worrying?” Meditation is not thought control or mind control. You can’t … We don’t actually, this is one of the mysteries of the universe. We don’t actually know where our thoughts and emotions come from. They come out of a void. I don’t think you can control what happens next.

What you can do is be more awake so that when it starts again, you can say what Ronald Reagan said to Walter Mondale in the presidential debate in 1984. There you go again. You don’t have to bite the hook and act on it every time the moron in your head offers up a terrible suggestion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very appealing to have less entertaining of the moron in my head. Could you also walk us through a little bit of the neuroscience research associated with the benefits? You recently tweeted that they’re bringing some more meditative practices into the army. What are the results that are popping up there?

Dan Harris
Yeah, so I don’t know if I could cite this with 1000% accuracy, so just let me …

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Dan Harris
Just take what I say with a grain of salt, but the neuroscience is really interesting. Before I go into it, because it’s actually really interesting, I just want to give you one more caveat, which is that really it’s in its early stages, and so I think what we can safely say is that it strongly suggests some really tantalizing benefits, but it’s going to … It’s in danger, at times, of being overly hyped by people like me, so I just want to be clear.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dan Harris
Having said that, it’s actually really awesome, so just as one example. In 2011 at Harvard, they took people who never meditated before, right, total civilians, and they scanned their brains, and then they, for eight weeks, they had them do a little bit of meditation every day. Then at the end of the eight weeks, they scanned their brains again, and what they found is that the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, the gray matter literally grew. In the area of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter literally shrank.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Dan Harris
Studies like this have resulted in meditation being adopted in some very strange places, like corporate headquarters of Google, Twitter, Aetna, Procter & Gamble, General Mills. A lot of entertainers are doing it. The lead singer of Weezer, Katy Perry, Lena Dunham, 50 Cent. As I like to point out, that dude got shot nine times, I believe he deserves some peace of mind. It’s also being done, embraced in a big way in the medical community, the legal community, the athletic community, Novak Djokovic, who just had a tough Wimbledon, but he’s a big meditator. Seattle Seahawks, the Red Sox, lots of teams are really adopting mindfulness and meditation. Then finally, as you mentioned, the U.S. Military, where I just did a podcast interview with a major general, and a neuroscientist who are working together, and they’ve been studying what happens when you teach troops to meditate, and what they found is that their attentional capacity, their ability to focus on what’s happening, even in situations of high stress, goes up.

Now, that may just sound very technical, like, “Oh, well, so they’re better able to focus on whatever they’re doing. Okay, well, that’s good, I guess, we want our soldiers to be focused,” but actually your level of focus is associated with like lots of things, like your emotional reactivity, and your overall resiliency and well-being, and so that’s really important, because we don’t want troops who are popping off and firing at people in a sensitive insurgency situation. We want them to be very mindful and effective, and we also want them to be resilient when they come home, and less prone to the scourge of PTSD. “We’re at a situation now,” this major general said, “Where we may end up in the not too distant future with a U.S. Army where meditation is part of basic training.”

Pete Mockaitis
Exciting stuff. Can we, maybe dig into the nuts and bolts a little bit here with the research there. What’s kind of the effective dosage and brass tacks? What are you doing when you’re meditating? What exactly is that practice looking like?

Dan Harris
Let me start with the first. Here’s another caveat, just briefly, that the word “meditation” is a bit like the word “sports,” so it describes a whole range of activities, but when I talk about meditation, I’m talking about mindfulness meditation, which is the kind of meditation that has been studied the most in the labs. It is derived from Buddhism, but has been thoroughly stripped of any of its religious jargon or metaphysical claims, so it’s very thoroughly secularized, and it’s really simple, as you’re about to see. It’s got three, for beginners, the first three steps are, one, to sit comfortably. You don’t have to sit cross-legged or anything like that. I sit in a chair. Many people close their eyes, although you don’t have to. You can leave them open a little bit if that’s easier. Then the second step is to just bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath. Where you feel it coming in, and going out. You pick a spot wherever it’s most prominent. Usually it’s your nose, or your chest, or your belly, and you’re just feeling your breath coming in, and going out.

Then the third step, this is the key. This is the thing most people ignore, but this is the key. As soon you try to do this, your mind’s going to go nuts. You’re going to start thinking about, “What am I going to have for lunch? Why’d I say that dumb thing to my boss? Why did Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture in 1991? Where do gerbils run wild?” Whatever, it’s just, you’re just going to go crazy. The whole game is to notice when you’ve become distracted, and to start again, and again, and again, and again, and again. That is a bicep curl for your brain. This is what shows up on the brain scans. This is just … It’s also, I should say, it’s a radical act, because you’re breaking this lifetime’s habit of walking around in a fog of rumination and projection, and you’re actually focusing on what’s happening right now, which we almost never do.

I just want to just emphasize this again, because I hear a lot of from people that they feel they cannot meditate. “I get it. I know it’s good for you, but you don’t understand. My mind is so busy, I could never do it.” This is what I hear every day. I call this the fallacy of uniqueness. The good news and the bad news is, you are not special. Welcome to the human condition. Everybody’s mind is crazy. If it weren’t that way, we wouldn’t need meditation. The goal is not to clear your mind. That is impossible unless you’re enlightened or dead. The goal is to focus your mind for nanoseconds at a time, and then every time you get lost, you start again and again and again. This, I find when I tell people, is hugely liberating and encouraging for people, that meditation is not about reaching some special state. It’s about feeling whatever you’re feeling right now, without getting carried away by it. That’s what you’re learning over time, is just to see … Again, it’s nothing magical. It’s nothing mystical.

It’s just, you’re building this telescope that goes inside, where you’re able to just see what your body and mind are doing at any given moment, so that you aren’t at the mercy of the malevolent puppeteer of your ego. Instead, you’re making, you’re able to respond wisely to the things that are happening instead of reacting blindly, and that’s exactly what I didn’t do when I went off to war zones and got depressed about it. I reacted blindly to all this stuff, and it blew up in my face, and then responding wisely would have prevented the whole cycle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so those were some great images there, building a telescope, and that gives you extra ability to see and observe. That sounds great, those three steps. Very easy and manageable. Just how much of practicing these three steps does the research suggest we need to do to really start seeing that gray matter increase those benefits?

Dan Harris
I was sitting with a neuroscientist yesterday who I asked this question too. It’s hard to answer, but there have been studies that have shown effects with as little as eight minutes a day. Another neuroscientist I’ve consulted about this said that she believes, based on her results, this is the one who works with the army, she believes that it’s around twelve minutes a day. What I tell people is, you should start with five to ten minutes a day, and then go from there. I think that if you did five to ten minutes a day of meditation, you would derive a lot of the aforementioned benefits. I mean, I think more is better, but often we don’t have time. Actually, this guy I was sitting with yesterday is really interesting. He’s really, his name is Dr. Richard Davidson, and he’s a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, and he’s the pioneer, the guy, the first guy who really started peering into the brains of meditators.

One thing he does when he does studies now of people who have never meditated before, is he asks, “What is the most you could commit to doing, but you would do it every day? Is it thirty seconds? Is it five seconds? Is it two minutes?” Then start from there, but that there’s a real power to the dailyness of it, this daily collision with what I have said before, the moron in your head, that allows you to just resist when the voice in your head says, “Oh, yeah, you should eat that forty-eighth cookie,” or, “You should say the thing that’s going to ruin the next two days of your marriage,” or whatever, and that’s where the rubber hits the road. That’s the benefit here. I think that kind of answers the question, I hope.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, so now I’m wondering a little bit about kind of pro-tips in terms of, we got the three basic steps, and the dosage there. Any thoughts in terms of time of day, or meditation cushions or gear, or where do you come out on all those matters?

Dan Harris
I mean, look, you can get the gear, the cushions, if you want. I’m not anti-cushions or whatever, but you don’t need it. In terms of time of day, sometimes people are advised to do it first thing in the morning, but I’m worried about that. I actually think if you’re not a morning person, don’t do it in the morning. Do it wherever is maximally convenient for you, where you think you’re going to be able to create an abiding habit, where it fits into your day most seamlessly. Habit creation’s really tough. I’m really learning a lot about having … I have this app now, and we’re helping people start meditating, and we have a coaching function, so we actually have real live human beings that you can text with anytime you want. The thing we hear from our customers a lot is, just getting started is really hard. We think a lot about how to help people create an abiding habit, and so I would experiment with the time of day that works best for you.

Another pro-tip is that getting started should be cheap or free. I don’t think you need to spend, this needs to be expensive. I don’t think it should be stressful. In terms of getting started, I would say there are a couple of options. One is, there are free mindfulness meditation instructions up on the web all over the place, good ones, two good places to go would be the website for UCLA. They have a place called the Mindful Awareness Research Center. It’s a bunch of scientists, and they have some very simple secular meditation instructions up there that I like. Also, there’s a meditation teacher by the name of Sharon Salzberg, who’s a really good friend of mine. She has free meditation instructions up on her site. Then there are a bunch of really good meditation apps, including 10% Happier, but we have a lot of friends who also have apps, and most of them are …

We have, and all of them have, free trials, so for us, for example, if you get seven days free, and if you like us, you can get a subscription, but frankly, if you did our seven-day free, you’ll know how to meditate by the end of that, and you’ll be able to use those meditations in perpetuity, so you could use our app forever, and you won’t pay us anything, which probably makes me the worst businessman ever, but … I really, my thing is, I do think this is the next big public health revolution, and I just want to be part of it. I think the most important thing is to get started and to know that it’s doable and it shouldn’t be taxing on your wallet. One other thing, if you really want to, I think, really a great option, especially if you live in a city where these resources are available, is to go to a class. I think being in the presence of other people who are trying this, and having access to a teacher who you can ask questions of, is really useful.

There are a lot of places, if you look up mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR, this is the secular meditation protocol, and there are teachers all over the country that run classes. If you live in New York City, there’s a place called MNDFL, which stands for Mindful, and they have classes, teachers from all sorts of traditions. Most major cities now have like … A lot of major cities now are, you’re seeing meditation so-called [try 00:24:53] bars popping up. Those are good places to learn. Anyway, those are the protips.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, so tell us, is there anything else you want to make sure you share before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things here?

Dan Harris
No, that’s good. I think you asked all the right questions. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. That means a lot from a newscaster. I’ll take it. Thank you. Start us off. Could you share a favorite quote of yours, something that you find inspiring?

Dan Harris
There are quotes sometimes attributed to Lincoln. “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” I like that. Compassion is an undervalued thing in our society, either because people feel like it’s an empty bromide or because we’re lectured about it by religious leaders who then turn out to be corrupt, or because, I don’t know, we feel like it may not be applicable in our daily lives, in our competitive jobs, etc., etc., but actually there’s a very self-interested case for not being a jerk, and that is …

Pete Mockaitis
I see.

Dan Harris
… that it feels bad to be a jerk. Whether you’re aware of it or not, even if you’re completely unselfaware, and you’re being a jerk, you will affect your mood, and so the religion that Abraham lays out, I think, is a really good way to live your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. How about a favorite study or piece of research you find yourself pointing to often?

Dan Harris
Well, the Harvard one I like a lot, but there’s another one that was done at Yale that took people, long-term meditators, and they looked at their brains, and they found that … For most of us, we have a part of our brain, a sort of an interconnected set of brain regions known as the default mode. It’s our default mode when we’re thinking about ourselves, or thinking about the future, or thinking about the past. We’re just, our mind is wandering. We live a lot of our life in our default mode, with our mind wandering. It’s actually been, as a side note, there was another study that shows that when your mind is wandering, you’re actually less happy than you are when you’re focused. What this study at Yale found is that meditators, they have a different default mode, that actually when they’re meditating, the default mode goes quiet, and that actually their default modes are quiet even when they’re not meditating. These are, again, longer-term meditators, but I think this is available to any of us who just start a habit over time.

The amount of mind wandering you do, the random sort of senseless rumination that you’re doing will go down, and you’ll be showing up for your actual life.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds very appealing. How about a favorite book?

Dan Harris
There’s a book I really, the book that, to me, that started me, that really got me interested in meditation was a book called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart by a shrink in New York City, Dr. Mark Epstein, who writes about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism, and he does it in a very sort of non-froofy, science-based, clinically based perspective, from a really smart guy. That actually was the book that was a big turnaround for me, personally, in my path, that helped me see that this meditation thing that I had always written off as ridiculous actually could be useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How about a favorite tool, whether that’s a hardware or software, a gadget, something that just makes you more effective?

Dan Harris
My wife just got me an iPad Pro, with a keyboard, that actually has been much easier to lug around than my laptop, and I found that it’s really been extremely useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and how about a favorite habit? I might know what you’re going to say to this one.

Dan Harris
Yeah, I mean, obviously, meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s number one.

Dan Harris
Yeah, but I would say, I mean, I have an eighteen-month-old kid, and just … Oh, well, let me give you two things. I was just going to say that the habit of just … I walked into the apartment a little while ago after lunch, and I had a bunch of things to do, but my kid was sitting in the stroller, getting ready to go out with his nanny, because his parents are off at work, and I was just popping in for a second. I had a pivot point there of like, “Okay. I could either kiss the baby and just go to work, or I could bring him out of the stroller and kick the ball around with him for a little bit.” My habit is, when you have a chance to play with your kid, play with your kid, and catch up on the other crap later. Time with your kid is always time well spent, I found, as a new dad. That’s one habit, and the other habit that I think may be more applicable to everybody, because not everybody has kids, or not everybody has little kids, is …

I live in New York City, and there are a lot of homeless people. When I walk to work, I pass a lot of homeless people, and it was pointed out to me by one of my teachers that ignoring them, which is what we all do, it actually takes a psychic toll. Actually, if you’re aware enough of what’s happening in the moment when you ignore a homeless person, it doesn’t feel good. I started getting ones out of the bank, like two hundred ones at once, and carrying them around with me. Just as an aside, the first time I went in to do that, the teller …

Pete Mockaitis
I know!

Dan Harris
I was like, “Hey, can I have two hundred ones?” He looked at me, and he said, “You partying tonight?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dan Harris
He thought I was going to a strip club.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve gotten that before as well.

Dan Harris
Oh, so do you do this thing with the ones?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, whenever I’ve had occasion to get a lot of ones, whether it’s for …

Dan Harris
I see.

Pete Mockaitis
… homeless folks, or just a lot of people tried to split a tab coming up soon. Everyone just infers naughty things about me.

Dan Harris
Yes. Yes, so he thought some naughty things about me, which was funny. We, my wife and I now, we have a couple stacks of ones laying around the house, and we’ve just always filled our wallet with them, and then my habit is, I just hand them out on the way to work, and you’ll notice that you’ll have thoughts like, “Is this person going to just use them for drugs, or what are they going to do with it,” but I just keep coming down to, A, they need it more than I do, and B, it feels better to give something away, there’s a little dopamine hit associated with that, than it does to ignore them. It took, I found a very life-enhancing habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. How about a favorite nugget from your work that really seems to be resonating with folks, whether it’s a quick quote or sentence that seems to get retweeted or Kindle book highlighted a lot?

Dan Harris
The thing that I say in the book that people seem to latch on to the most was actually not my idea, but it was mentioned earlier in this conversation, which is that meditation gives you the ability to respond, not react. To respond wisely to things, instead of reacting blindly. We’re just yanked around. We’re led around by our nose, by our internal narrator, by the voice in our head, and that means we’re just popping off in response to things. We’re very infrequently thoughtful about … Anger comes up, and we just act on it. What meditation does is allow you to have like an internal meteorologist that can see the storm coming before it makes landfall and you do something stupid, or you can catch it earlier than you might. Look, to quote a friend of mine, cutting down on the half-life of anger is incredibly important. The difference between the amount of damage you can do in two minutes of anger versus an hour of anger is incalculable, and having this practice in my life that helps me catch it earlier is just really, really useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. What would be the best place you’d like to point people to if they want to learn more about this stuff and you?

Dan Harris
Well, yeah, I mean, it’s a little self-promotional, but the app is …

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no. Take it.

Dan Harris
The app is really a big focus of mine now. It’s right now available on iTunes or in the App Store, or if you have an Android phone, you can get a version through 10percenthappier.com. We’ll get an Android version up soon. We’re a very young company, and still working on lots of things, but so what we have up there is really in the prototype phase, but we’re really excited about it, and I would love feedback, and anybody who wants to tell me anything, you can hit me on Twitter @danbharris, and just, I actually read all of those comments.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Do you have a favorite challenge or parting thought, call to action, for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Dan Harris
Look, on the meditation thing, what I would say is, if you challenge yourself to just a week, can you do this every day? Now, we can help you with that challenge on the app, or if you don’t want to download an app, you just want to tell yourself you’re going to do it, just say, “I’m going to do some increment, a short increment, every day for a week,” and what happens? I know very few people … I know, a lot of people starting and fall off the wagon. I don’t know anybody who’s done it, given it a consistent shot, and said, “Yeah, this is crap.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’ll do it. Well, Dan, thanks so much. This has been a real treat, and I wish you tons of luck, and that you become 10% happier, or even more, as you keep on chugging through this.

Dan Harris
I believe the 10% compounds annually.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s nice. Perfect. Thank you.

Dan Harris
Thank you.