Chade-Meng Tan: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success

for those who do not know me my name is Ming for those who know me my name is steel Ming it turns out that my name is invariant to whether or not you know me right strange but true so those of you who study math math in high school and he studied the concept of invariance and always wondered hmm when in my life I ever use the word invariance so now you know so as this is my job tighter I am the jolly good fellow of Google which nobody can deny do you know the story behind this by doing the story the story was when I joined Google we use a startup company right so all the engineers had the same job title which was software engineer and then later on we had a career ladder and as you know people in yeah we make fun of HR folks all the time right those of us in engineering so I made a joke so the highest ranking engineer is called Google fellow and I made a joke hey why be a Google fellow but he can be I don't know a jolly good fellow right people laugh and and my philosophy is if everybody laughs it must be the right thing to do so I send this for printing without telling if I'm asking for any permission by the way or approver yeah this was my default board always asked for forgiveness never asked for permission and you know the song right answer wish nobody can deny right right so so I put with nobody can deny and the reason is because since I didn't ask for approval I I thought they're going to deny this and if and when they deny this I have a joke hotel so either way I win so they did not deny this they had they had a good humor to like approve this and funny thing I know I knew they had to think about it because it usually is approved like we've been like go to ours but this one took like five days so I'm sure they were debating nobody's but you proved it and then you go on the front page on the New York Times and I got stuck this the thing I'm most proud about about the book search inside yourself is as you mentioned it's been endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter and others which is how you know it's a good book because the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter cannot both be wrong at the same time so the story of such inside yourself begins with Zen parable and it's a parable of the men on the horse and a parable of goes like this a man was riding a horse and it was like moving slowly by slowly passing by a road and you're passing by this guy standing along the road so the passerby asks the guy on the horse hey Ryder where are you going and the writer says I don't know why are you asking me you should be asking the horse like that of course this is absurd and we know that however funny thing is that all of us engages in this all the time right the horse represents our emotional life the men the rider represents our thinking mind the horse presents our emotion in mind and we had this idea or we assumed that the horse leaves us right we have no control of the emotional life it takes us where he wants to go however usually gets worse usually like this horse dragging us around everywhere so it's the idea idea is what if we can go from here which is skew lessness to skillfulness with the horse which is this wouldn't that be cool right won't you be cool to be this guy I think so so that's the good news and the better news yeah there's no bad news right with me that's only good and better which is why people love me in addition to my good looks of course the good news is you can do this the better news is that you can go beyond this you can go from skillfulness to mastery what does master really look like in it when it comes to emotions in the context of look so emotional mastery manifests itself in a type of statements we make about ourselves in relationship to emotional skills and success so some example one example is we tell ourselves I say if I have strong self-awareness I will be so successful if I can remain calm and confident in a crisis I'll be successful if I can create optimism and resilience I'll be successful if I can understand people if I can instinctively love people and I can somehow help people love me back I'll be successful so these are emotional skills so again the good news is this the good news is that all these qualities come under the umbrella of emotion intelligence so these are all well known and emotion intelligence is defined as this it's defined as the ability to monitors one's own and others feelings and emotions not just a monetary to discriminate among them and most importantly to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions right this is emotion intelligence so the good news is this qualities are skills this another way to see emotion intelligence is that emotion that this CI is a collection of emotional skills and like any other skill emotional skills are trainable so therefore you can train yourself to have to be like this like to be the to basically be like this so that's the good news again it's better news the better news is in our experience it doesn't take forever it takes seven weeks seven weeks my blog seven ways you can train your mind or your your emotional skills to a meaningful enough degree to change your life and I'll tell you what I mean by changing your life but first so search inside yourself is an emotional intelligence curriculum for adults in the workplace and even for engineers so when and you just come to my class this is what I feel like how do you learn he I emotion you cannot learn AI by just reading a book you can learn about emotion intelligence however to acquire emotion intelligence you really have no no choice but to train emotional skills require training right and it's a it's a building emotional masters like this so when you read a book you can learn about emotional intelligence the same way you can learn about fitness but you cannot really get fit just by reading unless your book is very heavy of course but besides that right that sounds like a business idea but besides that you cannot really get fit just by reading a book you have to train so this is what this is what we're gonna do what are we training specifically we are training the brain right and we can do that because of something called neuroplasticity which is this which is the idea that what we think what we do and most importantly what we pay attention to changes the structure and function of the brain even for adults and even for engineers and this is actually very powerful insight because it is inside and leads to that leads to the possibility that even that all of us can acquire emotional skills but even me right so how do you do this how do you train emotional skills we can do it in three easy steps step one is attention training step two is self-knowledge and mastery and step three is creating useful mental habits and I'll give you some idea what they mean so step one attention training when we talk about attention training the first question you might ask is what has attention got to do with emotion intelligence doesn't seem to make a lot of sense specifically the specific kind of attention I'm talking about is the attention where something allows you to bring your mind to a state that's come and clear on demand as represented by this lake which is calm and it's clear on demand what does that mean it means when things are falling apart right your customers are shouting at you you have deadlines you are speaking in front of a distinguished professor you can stay calm right so it's the ability this ability if you this skill if you acquire this skill that this alone could be life-changing you could be career changing for example like in a crisis right everybody likes a deadline or customer shouting you everybody's panicking and you alone you're calm and people are going to notice so why is it no a Margaret is the only person who is always calm something about her so tensou is a trainable quality so how do you train this very simple the technical training this is something called mindfulness and mindfulness is defined as below is defined as okay now I distracted there goes my attention and ask a mindfulness is defined as this as paying attention but not just paying attention paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and most importantly non-judgmentally or another way to look at it is moment to moment non-judgmental that's mindfulness very easy shall we do as anybody we need to do a 10 second practice just again idea what mindfulness is okay so okay I'll stay yeah yeah the advantage of me being here is you see less of me and every time you see that for me is an improvement if you don't believe me you can ask my wife so so how do you practice mindfulness so first that's the easy way or that's the easier way yeah the easy way is to bring a very gentle attention to the process of breathing whatever those was mean to you and every time your attention wanders away bring it back that's an easy way the easier way is just reverse sit without agenda or if that feels too many for you because you're engineer towards just sit and why just sit why is that why is that useful so the idea here is moving from doing to being whatever those words mean to you okay so you can choose one or two if if you cannot make a choice I recommend the easy way right bring attention to the breath once you come back okay ten seconds is it okay for everybody and your objections okay ten seconds beginning now let's bring a very gentle attention to the process of breeding and when your mind wanders bring it back and there is ten seconds thank you thank you for your attention how was this experience kind of nice right coming okay besides kind of coming you might ask there's a very important question that you should be asking and you are not asking some Engineer should be asking which is and and the the courteous version of this of the question is what good does this do I mean there's a less courteous version the TF question basically so what good does this do right I mean it's sounds so simple you bring tension to the breathing wonderful bring back like like there how can this possibly do me any good right so here's his answer here's the energy an energy pretend that I just show you how to do one bicep curl okay and if I do that and assume you know nothing about fitness if I do that you should be asking the same question will you lift a heavy object you let it go let's supposed to do me some good like WTF right and we know the answer we know the answer anybody knows there are some people who didn't know why what that meant and he had asked a neighbor and they just found out sorry I see new person knowledge dumbbells okay so we know the answer which is that every time we do this with a dumbbell we are strengthening the masses a little bit more right and then if we do a lot of this what happens we gain a quality known as strength and then once you have a quality known as strength you can do things that you never imagined could do before right and if you do other practices similar to this right you can do like this and then you do like running around a track simple things like that simple things you do repeatedly then you develop all these other qualities you develop quality of fitness fitness the health and then that leads you to and you have more energy if you great about yourself your confidence you get you get stuff done so something as simple as this has implications that leads all the way to productivity success wellness self confidence feeling great about yourself right fascinating right I mean we know but we take it for granted now but pretend is the first time you hear about this that's fascinating and this is the same at the mind it's the same at the practice of mindfulness every time your attention wanders away and you bring it back it is as if you are doing this once for the Masters of attention and you do this a lot right then the masses of attention becomes very strong and every time the attention wanders away you can bring you back quickly and there is how you can create a very strong quality of attention that leads to a calm and clear mind okay so this is the secret all about the signs so the signs are you just give you one example this was a early study done on explained meditators and this was a study done on the structure of the bread called mcdhh Allah is anybody familiar with the Minghella yeah her name is Amy that's kidding and as you know the amygdala is it's a very privileged part of the brain I mean so the medulla is related to memories like emotional memories specifically memory creating to fear so the mickeleh is triggered when there's a perception of threat okay so what examples of perception or threat when you see a saber-tooth Tiger running at you or the boss comes to you and say Ming We Need to Talk yeah it's almost the same as a stable - tiger run yummy kind of scary especially the Bonus Time so when when you feel threatened whether or not the threat is real or imagined when you feel threatened the mcdhh Allah gets activated and the amygdala has a very privileged position in brain which is if it gets activated it takes over and the way it takes over is by shutting down this part of brain called the prefrontal cortex the PFC the executive power brain the thinking part of the brain and therefore you might suffer something called a middle hijack right which is you say or do something that you will regret later so I don't believe I just shot at a CEO right and in retrospect I don't know why I did that I wasn't thinking it turns out neurologically you were right you were not thinking because the PFC got shut down so the research question was this given a structure of the brain as primitive and as privileged as the Megillah can you consciously voluntarily down-regulate and answer is yes so in this research it shows that the more hours of meditation you have the more you are able to down regulate your amygdala in the distressing situation so for those of you who are looking closely at the graph it says 10 to 50,000 hours of training please don't worry about that the reason is 10 to 50,000 hours was because this was like maybe the one of the first studies ever done on and meditators and the idea was let's do a study on the experts right people who have 10 to 10 50,000 hours because if we cannot find any difference in in their brains relative to ours then the whole meditation is just waste of time right or just go home so that's why and they found something which is why I'm still here which wise do you have a job so happily the latest study shows that the amount of meditation practice it takes to begin to have a measurable effect on the brain and on on your physiological health and so on any guesses how many how long it takes how many hours 7 weeks any other guesses that's good good guess one week ok good any others let's do this too optimistic about ok yeah cause that was my answer so so so when I was speculated when I was asked this question my speculation was one Harris and then somebody asked the poor I click the poor woman asked the Dalai Lama the same question and the Dalai Lama says pity always so so that's why I had to adjust my answer by a factor of 2 and the latest are the latest research shows it doesn't even take 50 hours it takes 100 minutes that's less than two hours and I said two hours and you can begin to feel something's different right so so if you're doing 10 minutes a day there's 10 days so so try that out yeah it's good for you it's good for your health it's just a vegetable except better so mindfulness you can see at this mindfulness can be represented as in this picture that the wind here represents emotions so in this case is turbulence fluttering and then the mind is represented by the flag and mindfulness is the flagpole like in this case literally grounding the mind so when you practice mindfulness you will create the ability to ground the mind in this way oh by the way all these cartoons are from the book and when I when I wrote the book I I told myself since it's a serious important book have to have cartoons I mean whoever heard of serious we got cartoons right ok tell a joke about this nobody minds slightly off topic so the joke was like a Zen lecture and and a lot people dare to listen to the lecture and as they were listening some people got distracted by a flag fluttering in the wind so the first guy says look flag is moving second guy wiser than the first guy say no my friend wind is moving that guy wisest man in the audience know my friends mind mine is moving fourth guy getting very annoyed mouths are moving hello so this is sounds cool right but it's only step one step two step two is self-knowledge that leads to self mastery when we talk about mindfulness remember I say come and clear state I have talked about calmness there is however a very important state there's something else mindfulness does for you which is to make your mind your mind clear specifically what it does is it increases the resolution and vividness but mostly the resolution of your perception of the process of thoughts emotion and the process of being what does that mean I'll give you an example oh but before that when we say increasing the resolution increases resolution on two dimensions the spatial dimension and the temporal dimension and let me give you an example what it means so even when it comes to the perception of the process of emotion for example increasing the spatial resolution means the ability to see an emotion the moment it is arising and the moment it is go on going away and all the subtle changes in between right so the ability to perceive subtle changes increases so there's I mean by increase of resolution of perception the increase of temporal resolution is the ability to see them happening in real time or in thin slices of time right and so you put together it means like I said the ability to see an emotion the moment it is arising and so as illustrated by this coming right so this is a picture with low resolution and low vividness is vividness here represented by contrast brightness and contrast when you have high resolution and high vividness you begin to see what the picture is about you get information and so of course in this case you see a chicken recipe if not for that guy you get very nice chicken recipe they guy trying to hide so so why is this important the first application of this I assume immediately guessed right the ability to see the moment and emotions are rising there is always very powerful because between as Victor Franco said between stimulus and response there's a space and in that space is the power to choose and freedom the freedom of choice so imagine you can see emotions as they are arising and then you have a choice should I feel angry or should I not and because when your mind a resolution of mind is so so refined you can see the space so one way to look at it is when we're looking at look at is the space looks bigger to you you can abide in it you can make choices so for example like it doesn't mean that you always never get angry because there are situations where is the right thing to do and I've been in their situation so I was at a rental car counter and and the person was trying to rip me off yeah and I could see the anger welling up I know I was me rethought even though I was peculiar accent but I'm but I know what's tripping rip off and I can see angular rising and I had a moment of choice high-resolution perception thing and I was at that moment where I told myself this I know like a switch is off right now if I wanted to however if I do that it's wrong right so so there has to be justice especially to protect those people behind me and so I allow the anger to well up and then I was shouting at the guy and and the manager to come up and say I'm sorry it is a mistake you know and so yeah right but you see taste choice there is no longer a horse dragging you around now you right the horse that's very powerful so this ability alone like life-changing imagine that not even every single time let's say you can do this only half the time imagine half the time you do not shout at your mother-in-law anymore let alone it's life-changing in fact it's one of the my success stories really one guy in my class he a very big man he was a former Marine and that's why he told me there was in a situation where he realized he did not share his mother-in-law all he did was automatically went to his brain bring attention to the breath yeah and there was a tree of obviously in the class so life changing and they live happily ever after so it's useful in this way however it turns out again it gets better there are other ways where this this knowledge self-knowledge can be profoundly life-changing and interestingly is profoundly life-changing in very subtle ways yet very profound ways and I'll give an example as you watch our emotions you might discover something you might discover that our experience of the emotional process is existential what does that mean and any reflects is reflecting the way we use language for example we say I am angry I am said I am happy so the emotion is me I am there is no separation between the emotion and and my being right as your perception into the process or emotion gets refined you might discover something you might discover a subtle shift in the way thing about it and the subtle shift is you no longer think of I am this emotion you think I'm experiencing this emotion it goes from existential to experiential and then what that does once you make a shift what that does is you get into the possibility of what the Zen force called the big sky mind which is the idea that the mind is on the sky and emotions are like clouds in the sky and therefore emotions are merely phenomena in the mind they are not the mind and they're definitely not me right and that gives you freedom you are free from your emotion you are not your emotions profound however again good news and better news it gets better than that no but wait there's more if you call now and why it's more if SEO attention gets even more refined and as you observe this process of emotion you might discover another softer but profound shift which is the insight that emotion the experience of emotion is depending on who you talk to either mostly or entirely a physiological experience it's experience in the body why is that profound because assuming like so I'm talking to you and because I'm an excitable Chinese guy you know I gotta hit this I'm gonna hurt my head right you guys feel painful and it's unpleasant however I know this is this experience is simply a sensation or experience in my body it's purely physiological and because of that I have options right I can ice my hand I can put bandages I can rub ointment no Chinese or whatever right I can ignore it I can distract by having ice cream oh I can do what a min guy says experiencing mindfully whatever it means I have options I have options because this is just an experience in the body therefore once you are able in your mind to put the process or the experience of emotion at the same level as this experience the pain in my hand no difference it's just just a body experience that is the beginning of mastery over emotions it is that profound so self-knowledge can lead to self mastery and again as a convict to reinforce the idea so pretty good right profound right life-changing right but hey there's more this is one step two step three is creating mental habits so as you see which step is huge well the first day was huge if you just do the first step alone that's huge if you do the second step in addition is huge yeah we do Autry is huge a huge eres creating useful mental habits specifically the Thai or mental habits I'm talking about a pro-social mental habits kindness kindness compassion appreciative joy things are dead it turns out that it is very easy to train those those things the way to train what we call the qualities of the heart the kindness and compassion qualities is simply to create mentor habits let me give an illustration say the mental habit of kindness right which is the habit of looking at a random human being and the first thought is I wish for this person to be happy right effortless instinctive habit sure that's the first time that's the first thing imagine that first thing that comes to mind I wish for this human me to be happy changes everything right imagine walking into a meeting room with that frame of mind I wish for these people to be happy what happens what happens is that your thoughts is unconsciously reflected on your body your body language and then it's unconsciously picked up by other people and they have a positive feeling towards you and they like you and then they don't really know why they just think because they're very good looking see but it changes everything just this one simple habit changes everything how do you trainees habit then sound very simple a habit how do you get a habit you do something or not it becomes a habit right and the train heavier kindness is just randomly look at human beings and just think I wish for this person to be happy that's all so we try an experiment ten-second experiment so don't say anything don't do anything just randomly identify two human beings in this room and in ten seconds just wish for this person to be happy and that person to be happy ok let's try 10 seconds thank you how was this experience very nice right you notice that you're all smiling right and that is a profound realization because it turns out and now you explains for yourself it turns out that being on the giving end of kindness is intrinsically rewarding it creates happiness and if that's true then kindness may be an infinite source of happiness like profound profound discovery couple weeks ago I thought I thought the meditation class with Jack Canfield not too far from here and I suggested this exercise so we did a ten-second thing everybody smiling like okay so I said tomorrow when you start when you go to work every hour look at your office right randomly secretly identify two human beings and think I wish for this person to be happy with what that person is be happy that's all don't say or don't do just think just that alone and and the idea is that if it doesn't work it doesn't you know embarrass okay just thinking so okay I give a suggestion there was a Monday on Wednesday I will see the email and this person email me she say I hate my job I hate going to work every day but I did what you suggested ten seconds every hour I did that and my happiest day in seven years yeah one practice ten seconds and our happiest day in seven years so so when we're talking about mental habits we are going going in a way we're going from intrapersonal intelligence to interpersonal intelligence true positive pro-social emotions and they're all highly trainable so that's the good news that's something else is fairly profound let me see which is this idea that being left is good for your career and don't just take it from me this is research behind this so in this study these people study a company they window company they figure out who are the top managers and who are the bottom managers and they tried to figure out what is the differentiating factors what I'll difference in factors between these two groups the best and the worst managers in this company and they found surprisingly only one difference one difference and that one difference is affection right the managers at the top the best performing managers they love people and maybe surprisingly and they want to be loved yeah for so surprising because I mean in being a corporate world you think that you get to get okay I'm being recorded so have you be careful if I say to forget things done you have to be not a pleasant person right that's why you think that's a default look however it turns out that's not true it turns out that of course you can get things done being unpleasant however if you are a good person you're even more successful and it turns out there's a very simple reason according the risk research and it's intuitive obvious attractively which is that the more your people love you the harder for you it's as simple as that and how did they work for you the more you reflect on your success right it's that simple so being loved is good for your career especially your main leader and you might ask yeah yeah yeah sure there must be exceptions right okay like what how about a navy so there's the studies we done the Navy so there was a study done on what makes the most effective naval commanders versus the average naval commanders and the study shows that the best commanders are described in these words positive outgoing emotional dramatic warm sociable appreciative trustful gender Navy offices and and they start that the title of this study was nice guys finish first and I have a friend I know somebody who is a Navy SEAL and I know somebody who's a Top Gun pilot and ask both of them is this true and they both say yes even for the Top Gun even for Navy SEALs the toughest soldiers that I know this is true so it's kind of mind-blowing so oh yeah nice guys in the military so my friends is actually very easy how to train emotional intelligence three easy steps right attention training self-knowledge leading to mastery and useful mental habits pro-social mental habits so everything else in the book are cartoons and and details so this is it right this is how I train emotional intelligence and if you do read a book I hope you'll help you I hope your training will help you and I hope you will lead you to success know and profits any becoming great as a leader really does ship in you however there's something even more important which is happiness happiness is defined by this guy met you and I'll tell you who he is he's defined as this a deep sense of flourishing that arises from exceptionally healthy mind not a mere pleasurable feeling of fleeting emotion or you know even a mood but an optimal state of being and there's a way to understand this which is again to look at the physical analogue right which is fitness if you're healthy and you're fit and you're free from physical afflictions you don't have back pain you're not sick and so on I mean if you're not human if you're like observing it from from a objective perspective you say that sounds like a neutral mode that you're unaffected right however you know that if you're experiencing that the lack of affliction is a highly positive mode was a feeling that you feel great about self all the time right and it's the same in the mentally as well right if your mind if your mind is free of affliction and it's flourishing you feel great about yourself all the time and even more so even more so than having a healthy and fit body this is fascinating stuff and the person this guy who recorded this who wrote is his niece Matthew and he is single he's to me the singularly most suited person to talk about happiness because he's the happiest man in the world yeah how do you get to be the happiest man in the world I know ladies a lot of men when they try marry you this area typically be happiest man in the world this guy so it turns out that happiness can be measured in the brain and the way to do that is to measure the left prefrontal cortex that the activation and measuring versus the right prefrontal cortex over here and if the left is more than a right the more left tilt is the more the person say I'm feeling happy and feeling excited joyful and so on and vice versa and and this research has been around long enough there's a normal curve so some people are multiplying the meters I'm a little bit happy and Olivia unhappy and met you a standard deviations on happiness side of course and and yeah and then for dead reason when his name was leaked to the public he was he the press called him the happiest man in the world yeah and he wasn't very happy about that so does the irony you might ask when he was being probed and when he was measured as a happiest man in the world what was he thinking monks and the monkey monkey business way fascinatingly he was meditating on compassion and it turns out I mean he's first person experience compassion is a happiest date ever you cannot get happier than compassion I mean the the the booth man said it all the time yeah yeah yeah sure and now we know he did they're not just saying it because they're nice now there's neurological evidence to back that up Oh anybody who is who a medicated by the way okay most of you so it happened so so I asked I asked Matthew the most natural question that engineer was happiest man in the world which is was a second happiest day ever Happy's compassion so what's number two and the answer surprised me he says the second happiest day ever is open awareness and for those of you meditators we especially those who made it to some depth I mean to me that was mind-blowing as metadata because when we practice meditation or at least when I did I thought that calmness and peace and the ultimate peace is the ultimate autumn ago it turns out ultimate peace is only number two number one is compassion so it turns out the maharani's were right for those who know what it means so we've been running this class in google for a couple years since 2007 we got a lot of very nice feedback some people say I got promotions because of this class I never got any promotion if not for this I see myself kinda set of eyes right my marriage the quality my marriage is different my marriage change so guys who take this class they can claim my wife says I'm a new man sounds like a viagra ad right but most importantly to me like the best feedback I've gotten over and over again was this this cause changed my life which is to me mind-blowing like like you come to work on a Monday you take a class and it changes your life so so this is what we've been able to do and the last part of this my talk is I want to talk about why why I started such inside yourself and quite embarrassing ly I started as I why because I wanted to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime which is by the way my job right now my job description is to enlighten Minds open huts and create world peace I know I wrote a Job Description I go approved I was I really okay I'll take it so the story behind it was this was you know that there's a moment your life I don't know if it happens to all of you but that's from some of us that's a moment in our life where we suddenly realize what we want to do for the rest of our lives sunday becomes very clear and I had that moment in 2003 and what was I doing I was taking a walk so which is why I should take more walks I I was taking a walk and then Saturday I know I know what I want to do for as my life well rest of my life under created conditions for world peace in my lifetime and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace inner happiness and compassion on the global scale that was willing to do all rest of my life and then eventually I figured out how how do you scale inner peace in happiness and compassion worldwide simple align those qualities with personal success and business profits right because if I go around trying to talk about goodness what reaction do I get good boy now leaving so I can do some work done right however if I go around saying this is the path towards your personal success your career you can get your promotions you can earn more money and you benefit your business and oh by the way it's going to create world peace sure sign me up right so what if in a piece in happiness and compassion are the necessary and unavoidable side-effect of a training program that helps people succeed and work in a way the benefits business that was create a condition for world peace and the way I so to make a long story short the way I did it was creating such inside yourself and the idea is let's try to perfect it in Google and if even when your works will be nice out to the world and we have all piece and all I have to do is to I didn't live very long or work very fast or both so the story of such inside yourself started we have the story of one funny engineer and his pursuit of world peace that is all and and I hope this story will have a happy ending and I I set out to write a book which I hope will be funny and practical and useful to you at the same time and I hope you like the book and hoping I hope that you change your lives and I hope that you took together we can all create the conditions for world peace thank you one of the things that I loved about search inside yourself is the social dimension and for those of you when you read it there they're really wonderful exercises about having really complicated conversations with people and setting intentions and sort of approaching them with compassion and mindfulness and and I know I suspect that came out of your relationship with Danny Goldman and sort of your collaboration with him and I'd love to hear your thoughts about that relationship and the work you're doing with Danny Danny I can tell you the story of the first time we met actually quite funny so just before meeting him I would so I went too many months or trying to figure out how to you know create the conditions for a little piece right and the breakthrough came when I was reading Danny's book emotional intelligence and I had a not so good reason for reading his book which was our common friend Larry brilliant Larry invited Danny to come hang out with us and Larry invited a few of his friends in Google and I was one of them to come hang out with Danny and I figured the courteous thing to do for Larry's Fred at least as a real part of his book before I meet him right I mean this other curtis thing and i was reading his book and i had my eye oh my god i found it the eureka moment because Danny's book wrote about emotional intelligence and his description for example my first insight was that his description of self-awareness is identical to the description of mindfulness he says self-awareness is in the mode where you can remain calm in in terms of tourbillon emotions and say this is it and then I finished reading this book in a real life that he wrote a book about emotional intelligence but he didn't see how to do this and I'm a practitioner I know how to do this right I know so this is it right so once I because I know how and emotional intelligence is already pre marketed because everybody knows this is before my career these are from a company bottom line so therefore if I can just tell them this is how to do it then we can have no peace I mean there are some stuffs in between but but this is it so so the first time and Danny went when he came to Google so imagine this scene so that's Larry and then he and a few of Larry's friends and I was like I keep the host ID the host pew right potentially between his work and emotional intelligence and mindfulness and world peace I was at Danny this this is low Peter talking about this is world peace yeah and then he was like okay who's that guy awkward and half of greatness is few awkward moments of this but interestingly when I got to know Danny later as a friend I realized what use why he was so uncomfortable in during the conversation because they only agreed with everything I said because it turns out he was already a meditator he agree with everything and he at that time he wasn't willing to say in public which is why you're so uncomfortable and then fortunately he's now ready to come out of the closet which is why you wrote a foreword for the book nice nice to see if you're out so I guess I'm a little bit upset because I've been teaching all I'm sorry but uh you know I've it I teach a human emotion class and and I love your observations about emotions as embodied phenomenon and we're just learning so much more about where emotions are in the nervous system and maybe I've been approaching it in the wrong manner but I've always taught my students that you are your emotions so where do I get it wrong what if we're not our emotions what are we we are our emotions and at the same time we're not at the same time the emotions are just a physiological experience and I think you can hold both thoughts at once at the same time maybe it's important to hold both of us because when it's painful is really painful right because and then you do only one of the two thoughts it's incomplete it will only IMI emotion is you software there's no way out if I hold the other side only like I'm normally this is purely a body incision then there's something that's incomplete because it's only my body why am I feeling horrible as a whole as a human being right and the answer is both both contradictory points of view are right at the same time which reminds me of a joke so the dog is as two people went to this argument and they have like diametrically opposite points of view and they could not agree right so they went to the Guru and the first guy presentes argument a guru or great guru this white thing and guru Singh you're right and second guy said no no guru that's my point of view any presenter his point of view a guru said mmm you're right third guy watching this exchange got very frustrated say wait great guru guru gee how can they both be right at the same time makes no sense and Guruji said yes you are right that's my students that's all they'll be happy to hear that so I wanted to I suspect a lot of people in the room have questions about Google too and and your experience is bringing s value YT goggle but I but I had a kind of a broader cultural question about the nature of Google's so psychologists are often interested in what technological forums do to societies and children and individuals and I think we've all had you know deep moments of of curiosity with Google and search and and all the wonders that it brings so imagine you were to do what some psychologists have done which is to give Google to a community that never had it before I mean it means to introduce it into their daily life oh you mean the search engine yeah the company right so now they're using so how would you make it as mindful and as compassionate as possible I don't know here's a tomato here's Google I don't really understand the question are there ways in which so other ways in which you can build mindfulness into Google searches and into how we learn about the world through Google I know but I do think that the original design of the Google interface was actually an expression of mindfulness specifically use expression of simplicity and to some degree I will use all compassion because I saw so strong but the way was design was optimized for the user but the user experience and here's here's why I mean in the old days if you remember like like five years ago back when I was young climate the Hugo quiz you not even remember that back then like every page you went to Yahoo everything their loss of clutter and also ads everywhere right lots of data and back then there was the idea called stickiness which is the idea that once your your user come you want them to stick like flies to flypaper you don't leave and Google had a completely radical idea which at that time was yeah now we take of a concept is completely radical which is we don't want stickiness all we want to do is together they come here they get what they need from us as quickly as we can give them and then they're on their way we let them go right and of course back then from the business perspective we said this business is going to fail there's no stickiness but we will focus on serving the user as long as they assert eventually we make money we don't know how yeah it's true it sounds I drop out so we didn't know how about let's just let the user so there's an element of simplicity and element of of service and I think that example of being good and being profitable in time so I thought I would close which is a little statement that Meg made and one of his websites many hopes to see every workplace in the world becoming drinking from happiness and enlightenment when men grows up he wants to save the world and have lots of fun and laughter doing it he feels it's if something is no laughing matter it's probably not worth doing thank you very much thank you

Channel: Greater Good Science Center

Views: 23,485

Keywords: success, business, happiness, Chade-Meng Tan, greater Good Science Center, World Peace (Belief)

Id: FA4QiBDZI3o

Length: 59min 30sec (3570 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2013