Joy on Demand Quotes

“The greatest freedom in life is to be aware of the moments that you are free from pain”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Perhaps the most important thing is to constantly aspire to serve the greater good. If you always try to practice compassion and you are always trying to benefit the people around you and beyond, the good people around you will love you and want to help you.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“The most important time is now, because now is the only time which you have some control over. The most important person is the person you’re interacting with. The most important thing to do is to do your best to serve the person you are interacting with.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“We have a mind condition that makes us itch for two types of pleasure: pleasure of the senses and pleasure of the ego. When our senses are pleasantly stimulated, as when we eat something tasty, or our ego is pleasantly stimulated, as when we are praised for something we did, we feel joy, which is good. What is even better is if we can feel joy independent of sense or ego pleasure. For example, when we are eating chocolate, we experience joy, and when we are just sitting there not eating chocolate, we still experience joy. In order to do this, we train the mind to access joy even when it is free from stimulation. This is also the secret of raising your happiness set point.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“The more you attend to thin slices of joy, the more easily you can access them.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“first and foremost, establish relaxation, and if relaxation breaks, reestablish relaxation.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“To feel regretful, you need to be in the past, and to worry, you need to be in the future. Hence, when you are fully in the present, you are temporarily free from regret and worry.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“If you want to become an agent of change, you have to remember to keep your sense of humor.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“that physical qualities such as strength and agility are highly trainable, mental qualities such as joy and calmness are also highly trainable.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“If you want to be successful, I highly recommend learning to be happy first. It is possible to become successful without first learning to be happy, but I strongly recommend against it, because if you are unhappy before you are successful, you are likely to be even more unhappy after. For example, based on my own experience becoming financially successful and that of other wealthy people I know, I have found wealth to be a personality multiplier. If you are cruel and unkind, then being wealthy will make you even more cruel and unkind, because you don’t even have survival-related reasons to be nice to anyone anymore. If, instead, you are kind and generous, then being wealthy will make you more so, because wealth provides more opportunities for doing so. Since”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Success does not lead to happiness; instead, happiness leads to success.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“It is very important to understand that ultimately, meditation is not about getting anything—meditation is entirely about letting go. In fact, I can summarize my entire twenty-plus years of meditation practice in just two words: letting go. The entirety of my practice is learning to let go. For example, early on, I learned to let go of my addiction to constant sensory and mental stimulation. A bit later on, I learned to let go of restlessness and distraction during sitting meditation. Much later on, I learned to let go of some amount of greed, hatred, anxiety, and destructive ego. And at the current stage of my practice, I’m learning to let go of clinging, aversion, ill will, my dependence on sensory pleasure in general, and my need to fluff up my identity and ego. The entire process is nothing but letting go.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Once upon a time, a Chinese guy went to see a fortune-teller. After the fortune-teller read his palms carefully, she said to him, “You are miserable now, and you will continue to suffer misery until you turn forty.” He asked excitedly, “What happens after forty? Will my misery finally go away?” And she said, “No, after forty, you’ll get used to it.” That was not me either.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Even in a difficult situation, when someone is hurting you badly, you can see this person with some kindness and compassion. You can see his suffering, and you can see how his suffering causes his unskillful behavior. Because you are able to do that, some meaningfully large percentage of the time, you are able to use loving-kindness and compassion to resolve difficult situations.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Just because you are in pain doesn’t mean you can’t also access joy.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Remember, with practice, what is joyful will be even more joyful, what is neutral will be joyful, and what appears to be painful will be less painful.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“With inner peace, inner joy, and compassion, you get the whole enchilada: confidence and charisma, creativity and innovation, self-awareness, well-being and emotional resilience, happiness, humor, popularity, courage, and success in every arena, plus personal freedom and world peace. Joy is the wellspring of all good things, even luck.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“It is possible to become successful without first learning to be happy, but I strongly recommend against it, because if you are unhappy before you are successful, you are likely to be even more unhappy after. For example, based on my own experience becoming financially successful and that of other wealthy people I know, I have found wealth to be a personality multiplier. If you are cruel and unkind, then being wealthy will make you even more cruel and unkind, because you don’t even have survival-related reasons to be nice to anyone anymore. If, instead, you are kind and generous, then being wealthy will make you more so, because wealth provides more opportunities for doing so. Since wealth is a personality multiplier, it is also an experience multiplier. If you are miserable when you are middle class, you will likely be even more miserable when you are wealthy, because all the mental states that cause you to be miserable, such as greed, cruelty, paranoia, and inner turmoil, get multiplied. Similarly, if you’re happy when you’re middle class, you’re likely to be even happier wealthy, for the same reason; mental states that brought you happiness—such as generosity, kindness, and inner peace—multiply, thereby multiplying happiness. So it is always good to learn to be happy, and it is especially useful to do it before becoming successful. Then, it will help you become successful, and it will help you enjoy success.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“If you want to be successful, I highly recommend learning to be happy first.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“The more you incline your mind toward joy in real life, the more joyful and productive your meditations will tend to be.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“spent my life thinking of freedom as the freedom to do stuff, but that freedom turns out to be trivial compared to the much greater freedom from affliction.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“understand that we do not settle the mind—the mind settles itself. All we do is create the conditions conducive for the mind to settle. This takes unnecessary burden off us because we are not responsible for whether the mind settles; we are simply responsible for creating the conditions.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Taking advantage of major opportunities often requires completely letting go of something safe and comfortable, and venturing into a deeply uncomfortable unknown.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“To train the mind to access stimulus-free joy, we need to understand how joy arises independent of sensual stimulation and then cultivate those skills. They are three: easing, inclining, and uplifting.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Meditation is another word for mind training. It is scientifically defined as “a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Mindfulness is defined as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”8”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“I allowed my ego to simultaneously be tiny and humongous at the same time. The trick was to focus on two attitudes: service and humor. Focusing on serving the people in front of me, I allowed my ego to be any size it needed to be in order to serve, and I maintained my humor at the absurdity of the situation. Near”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Peace is the beginning of the end of all suffering.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within