10% Happier

by Dan Harris

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

He explained that it is entirely possible to be depressed without being conscious of it. When you’re cut off from your emotions, he said, they often manifest in your body.

“Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”)

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present.

“The only way out is through.”

“How often are we waiting for the next pleasant hit of . . . whatever? The next meal or the next relationship or the next latte or the next vacation, I don’t know.

We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience.

I mean, we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’ve had in our lives. Yet when...

as Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy “before anything happens.”

We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

recalled how my dad once described undergoing a shift in his professional life where the achievements of his mentees began to mean more to him than his own.

The final pitfall to which I’d succumbed was nihilism: an occasional sense of, “Whatever, man, everything’s impermanent.”

The Sufi Muslims say, “Praise Allah, but also tie your camel to the post.”

As I mulled this advice after the fact, I suspected there might be something to it, but I couldn’t quite figure out how you could work your tail off on something and then not be attached to the outcome.

Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you

When 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, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.

“All we can do is everything we can do.”

“There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.”

People trained in self-compassion meditation are more likely to quit smoking and stick to a diet.

“The most important thing to me is probably, like, being kind and also trying to do something awesome.”