10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works

The fallout of the Hilton interview led to Harris’s response of dulling his edge at work. Further, network president David Westin’s departure meant there was a new head of ABC Television Group, Ben Sherwood. Sherwood was a hands-on boss, who heaped on praise and suggestions for change. As a result, many people began to work harder to impress him. Harris, however, decided to forgo his normal worry and remained passive, escaping into his meditation techniques. As a result, he failed to get hard-hitting assignments that went to his colleagues David Muir, Bill Weir, and Terry Moran instead.

Harris went to another retreat, this time focused on metta meditation. Another meditation teacher and friend of Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, discussed mudita, the Buddhist concept of sympathetic joy, or delighting in others’ successes, which had proved somewhat difficult for Harris, particularly at work. When Harris met Salzberg, he discussed his feelings about how he’d now become a bystander in his life at work. Salzberg noted that “[f]ear of annihilation […] can lead to great insight, because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control” (197). Harris realized he was still wrestling between the idea of finding a balance between ease and anxiety.

Back at work, Harris drifted. While he didn’t explode about not getting assignments, he did little to pitch stories or act as a leader. Eventually, he met with Sherwood to discuss the matter. Sherwood told him to up his game. Harris realized, “I had gone so far down the path of resignation and passivity that I compromised the career I had worked for decades to build” (200). In his embrace of equanimity, he seemed to have gone soft. Help came from Epstein, who explained, “There’s a certain kind of aggression in organizational behavior that doesn’t value [Zen]—that will see it as weak […] so I think it important to hide the Zen and let them think that you’re really someone they have to contend with” (201). This, he told Harris, was a common error made by practitioners who interpreted the Buddha’s dharma to take on meekness and/or weakness. Goldstein then confirmed Epstein’s view. Harris had to shift, balancing some of his old energy with his new calmness.

Bianca assisted by showing Harris how he became visibly agitated on GMA when the conversation didn’t go the way he wanted. She told him it was obvious he was trying too hard and that he needed to learn to try not to direct everything. Unlike his one-man show at Nightline, he was now part of a team. Harris realized that he should approach anchoring with meditation in mind, letting himself relax and go with the flow. Playing back a conversation taped with Epstein, Harris zeroed in on Epstein’s advice that the answer is “nonattachment to the results” (206): Life doesn’t always work out the way one hopes. Suddenly, Harris found the missing link to his long-term question regarding the balance between mindfulness and ambition. According to Epstein, “[w]hen you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient. […] That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest” (207).

Harris ends this chapter with 10 tenants for “The Way of the Worrier,” a play on Buddhism's Shambhala, or the way of the warrior. They are: 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, and 10) What matters most? This list summarizes many of Harris’s discoveries along his journey from mindlessness to mindfulness. As he told Bianca, they were “aspirational, not operational” (212) principles. Nevertheless, he tried them to some success. Finally, he met with Sherwood and asked his permission to discuss his breakdown on GMA due to drug use in his book. Sherwood gave his approval.