10% Happier

Recommended by Tim Ferriss to learn how to meditate, tons of his guests do it. I could give it a chance, it has good reviews for beginners. A surprising book. Extremely well written, with a story about Dan Harris’ evolution, who has a very stressful and competitive job, and over the years he felt increasingly stressed and disliked by people. Starting from a few philosophy books he happened to read, he got interested, at first completely skeptical, but he kept going. He ended up in Buddhism, started meditating, even just 5 minutes a day, and it changed his life. Fantastic story, very realistic because he also calls the spiritual elements a bunch of nonsense, and he’s super practical! And on top of that it’s seasoned with his life as a journalist, full of insights and adventures. Like with the book by the consultant of How to Make Things Faster, the mix of personal stories and practical concepts works! I’ll reread it if I keep going with meditation, which I’ve started doing again.

Notes

• Ignore fancy books and the damn gurus who promise you immediate enlightenment (is that how you say it?). Here, meditation makes you 10% happier. Not a scientific estimate, but not a bad investment.
• This book tries to demystify meditation.
• Dan felt tired and depressed without knowing why. The body senses things, even if you’re not aware of it.
• 🔑 Our lives are governed by a voice in our head. This voice is perpetually busy in a stream of thoughts, often negative and repetitive. It never stops. Meditation aims to relax it.
• First meeting: Tolle. A very serious German guy he interviews, he likes some things, but it lacks practicality! According to him, the ego is our narrator.
• Dan keeps having anxiety about losing his job, e.g. Scar the size of Omar Little’s from The Wire -> Fired from ABC News -> Seeks career in radio. But he understood they are projections of the ego, irrational and not necessarily true!
• After other gurus, more or less reliable, and various adventures he gets closer to Buddhism.
• 🔑 The Buddha’s main thesis is that the world changes constantly and we suffer because we cling to things that won’t remain.
• The Buddha does not promise salvation, but to embrace our suffering. Let go, admit we are insecure.
• 🔑 Instructions for meditating:
  1. Sit comfortably. You don’t have to be cross-legged. Plop yourself in a chair, on a cushion, on the floor—wherever. Just make sure your spine is reasonably straight.
  2. Feel the sensations of your breath as it goes in and out. Pick a spot: nostrils, chest, or gut. Focus your attention there and really try to feel the breath. If it helps to direct your attention, you can use a soft mental note, like “in” and “out.
  3. This one, according to all of the books I’d read, was the biggie. Whenever your attention wanders, just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking; that’s pretty much impossible. (True, when you are focused on the feeling of the breath, the chatter will momentarily cease, but this won’t last too long.) The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath,
• The point is to silence the voice in your head. Great the way he narrates the progress, how little by little he learns to focus despite the confusion and skepticism. It takes a lot of training!
• Advice from a seminarian: RAIN: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identify. In difficult moments, recognize what you feel, admit you feel it, and let it go. This feeling is human and does not make you a bad person. You’re not always angry or sad, just in that moment!
• 🔑 Always ask yourself if this is useful. Is it useful to think ten times about what could go wrong?
• The part about the spiritual retreat at Stone Rock is beautiful: the retreat, the initial boredom, then the fantastic “enlightenment”. What an experience.
• The catchline “10% happier” is mostly to sell meditation better, as if it were an optimization technique. People were skeptical. Now it turns out many companies and even the military are studying it anyway.
• Happiness is a skill!
• 🔑 Simple, not simpleton! A big practical point of the book is that he was becoming too zen and passive and people were walking all over him. Remember to mask your zen if the context requires it! It’s an issue I personally relate to.
• His personal list “The Way of the Worries”:
  1. Don’t Be a Jerk
  2. (And/But . . .) When Necessary, Hide the Zen
  3. Meditate
  4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful
  5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity
  6. Don’t Force It
  7. Humility Prevents Humiliation
  8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod
  9. Nonattachment to Results
  10. What Matters Most?