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Author, podcaster, and self-help guy Dan Harris reflects on his hit meditation book, 10% Happier, 10 years after it was published
Photo illustration by Slate. Images via HarperCollins Publishers.
Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, John Dickerson talked with author and meditation expert Dan Harris about the 10th anniversary of his book, 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—a True Story. They dig into how Harris went from a “C-level anchorman” to a meditation guru, what it’s like to change lives, and more.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
John Dickerson: In doing the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier, tell me about the distance between when it was published and now as a way of just marking time—the difference between when you first published this and now, it’s 10th anniversary edition.
Dan Harris: Yeah, so it came out in 2014, and it was just an odd little side hustle on my part. I was an anchorman at ABC News and fully committed to that life. I loved it, and I had no ambivalence about it other than the fact that it made me suffer in lots of ways, and so I wrote this book.
I was hoping to try to convert a few skeptics. I didn’t think it was going to work. I remember Barbara Walters actually telling me, “Don’t quit your day job.” Those were her exact words. I was a C-level anchorman writing about what, at the time, was a pretty niche concern: meditation. So I did not think it was going to work.
But two things happened. One is it came out at the exact right moment. Meditation was just starting to get cool again after having had its moment in the ‘60s because of the science. So, it was starting to get cool, and I hit the hype cycle at the exact right moment. And I worked for the largest media conglomerate on the planet, Disney, which owns ABC News. And for reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, my bosses got behind this project in such a robust way. Maybe it was because there was video of me having a panic attack on the air that all the producers of all the shows wanted to run.
So, World News Tonight, and Nightline, and Good Morning America, they did multiple stories on it, and the book took off and really swallowed my life. For a long time, I tried to keep this job at ABC News while becoming a quasi-self-help guru who had a podcast and a meditation app, and I was giving lots of speeches and writing more books, and all this stuff. And that led to a whole bunch of fresh suffering that I’m writing about in my next book. I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but a lot of interesting things happened after that first book came out that are embarrassing in their own right.
And so then 10 years later, I put out a revised edition [of the first book]. I also quit my job a couple of years ago as a newsman, and so I do this weird thing full time.
Do people come up to you and say, essentially, “You changed my life”?
To the extent that anybody knows who I am. I spent 21 years at ABC News, and now if I’m walking through an airport, if anybody comes up to me, one out of 10 knows me from the news. It’s like that whole news thing didn’t even exist. Everybody else knows me as the “meditation guy” or the “happiness guy.” And yeah, people do say that to me, which is… that is an incredible thing to hear all the time. What I have to train myself to do is to not get numb to it. But what an awesome situation I find myself in, where people are saying that to me regularly.
One thing that struck me as something that’s always kept me going back to meditation when I fell off it is, there’s so much science backing this up—and all you’ve got to do is just sit down and do it. There are very few things where there is so much proof and evidence, personal testimony, science, and all the rest on one side—and all you have to do is just sit down and do it. You don’t have to buy anything. You don’t have to get a special CD player. It doesn’t require, as you say, any special pillows. You sit down in a chair. And that has always been so powerful to me.
I guess when I thought about you turning this into the life you now have, what I love is that, because there is so much science behind it, is it’s not a fad. It’s like you are doing this good thing out in the world, which is just… It’s really great. As somebody who is in the news business who believes in the value of news—and as you did too and as you do too—to be out there basically introducing people to this thing at this time when so many people are suffering from mental health challenges, it’s just great. And so I could imagine that they do come up to you and feel that way.
I actually have a lot to say about that. First of all, I do feel really good about it. Not that I didn’t feel good about the news. I felt great about the news, but I don’t have any existential angst about my role on the planet doing this. In some ways, I went from a newsman to a different kind of newsman. I just have one piece of news. And the piece of news that I’m spreading is that your brain and your mind are trainable. And all of the things you want—all the mental states you want, calm, equanimity, compassion, mindfulness—they’re not unalterable factory settings. They’re skills.
That’s my job. I just go around and find different ways to say that. Having said that, it’s not uncomplicated in the sense that I remain a flawed human, and it’s very easy for me to let my ambitions seep into all of this. And, “oh, how’s my podcast doing,” or “how’s my newsletter doing?” Or get focused on all of those numbers and overlook what my real job is, which is to be useful to people.
And so, I really had to build reminders into my life so that I don’t get sucked into these distractions that are necessary, but not always so helpful. I am running a business, so I do have to be aware of these things. But I don’t want to make them the stars of the show.
One little thing I’ve done is, I have a little tattoo on my wrist right next to my watch, and it’s kind of off-brand in how earnest it is, but it’s “FTBOAB.” It’s an acronym, and it’s a Buddhist phrase, “for the benefit of all beings.” And it’s just looking down at my watch during the course of the day, or sometimes while I’m exercising or whatever, and recognizing, yeah, everything I’m doing, sure, there’s crave and self-interest. I’m a human being, and like I said, I’m a businessman too. But the real job is to be useful to other people.
And honestly, when I’m in that mode, I do better work anyway. So just to be honest with you about how, yes, this situation is great. And I still have my own demons with which I wrestle. And I just try to find constructive ways to do that work.
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Source : Slate News