Tan - Search inside yourself : the unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace)

The Unexpected Path to

Achieving Success, Happiness

(and World Peace)

CHADE-MENG TAN

Illustrations by Colin Goh

Once upon a time, there was a world-renowned
expert in emotional intelligence who was also a very
talented writer. He was encouraged by his friend to
write a book on mindfulness and emotional
intelligence. He felt inspired to do so but could
never find the time. So the friend wrote the book
instead. I am that friend, and this is the book.

Thank you, Danny,
for trusting me to write this book.

My first impression of Google was shaped by Chade-Meng Tan, widely known as Meng. Meng is the companys unofficial greeter, its irrepressible jolly good fellow (which nobody can deny, as his business card puts it).

As Ive gotten to know him, I have realized that Meng is someone special. One tip-off came as I went by his office and saw the bulletin board on the wall near his door: row after row of Meng in snapshots with the worlds bold-face names. Meng with Al Gore. Meng with the Dalai Lama. And with Muhammad Ali and with Gwyneth Paltrow. Later I learned, via a front-page article in the New York Times, that Meng was famous as that Google guy, the singular engineer with high enough social intelligence to make any visitor feel right at homeand pose for a photo with him.

But thats not what makes Meng so special. Rather, it is Mengs magical combination of brilliant systems analysis with a heart of gold.

First, the analysis.

I had come to give a talk on emotional intelligence as part of the Authors@Google lecture series. I felt a bit like yet another of the endless perks employees there famously enjoy, somewhere between a massage and all the soda you can drink.

In this bastion of the intellectafter all, you need top SAT scores just to be considered for a job at GoogleI anticipated that lecture with some trepidation about anyone in this hardheaded information engineering company being much interested in hearing about soft skills. So I was amazed on arriving at the room where I was to speak, the largest venue in that part of the Googleplex, to find the place overflowing, with throngs spilling into the hall. There was clearly high interest.

At Google I was talking to perhaps the highest-IQ audience Id ever addressed. But among all those big brains who heard me that day, it was Meng who had the smarts to reverse engineer emotional intelligence. Meng picked it apart and put it back together again with a brilliant insight: he saw that knowing yourself lies at the core of emotional intelligence, and that the best mental app for this can be found in the mind-training method called mindfulness.

That insight underlies the program Meng has developed. When he unveiled the course at Google University, it was called (fittingly for a company all about web search) Search Inside Yourself. As youll read here, many who have taken the course at Google have found it to be a transformative experience.

Meng was also savvy in choosing his collaborators, like Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and my longtime friend and colleague Mirabai Bush, founding director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. And Meng has drawn on the expertise of another old friend, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who pioneered the use of mindfulness in medical settings throughout the world. Meng knows quality. He didnt stop there. Meng and this team also cherry-picked the best from well-tested methods for creating a life with self-awareness and well-being, kindness, and happiness.

Now for that heart of gold.

When Meng saw that this inner search had such benefits, his instinct was to share it with anyone who might want to give it a trynot just those lucky enough to have access to a Google course. In fact, the very first time I met Meng, he was passionate in telling me that his life goal was to bring world peace through spreading inner peace and compassion. (Mengs enthusiasm for this goal, I noticed a bit uneasily, seemed to inspire him to a level of vociferousness.)

His vision, detailed in this highly enjoyable account, entails beta testing a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum at Google and then offering it to anyone who might benefitas he puts it, give it away as one of Googles gifts to the world.

As Ive gotten to know Meng better, I have come to realize that he is not your average engineer; hes a closet Bodhisattva. And with this book, Id drop the closet part.

Daniel Goleman

When I first met Meng, I thought to myself: Who is this guy, who calls himself the jolly good fellow of Google? (It is on his business card, along with the rubric which nobody can deny.)

Meng had invited me to give a tech talk on the subject of mindfulness at Google. Within a few seconds of my arrival, he was talking to me about mindfulness and world peace, while making one joke after another. His sense of humor was a bit bewildering. Meng proceeded to take me on a tour. The first stop was his photo board in the lobby of the main building of the Googleplex photos of himself together with pretty much every famous and powerful person in the world. Who is this guy who welcomes all these heads of state, Nobel laureates, and celebrities to Google? And can I take him seriously? Can I believe everything he is telling me?

He was telling me a lot, including that his ultimate aim was to create the conditions for world peace in his lifetime and that he felt the way to do that was to make the benefits of meditation accessible to humanity. And that Google could play a special role, being Google.

You can imagine what was going on in my head: Google, the quintessence of universal accessibility (except in countries that try to block or regulate access to it), is interested in playing such a role in the world!? Or at least, one visionary person at Google. Amazing. Maybe he is feigning craziness and is really the one sane person around. Because he is employee number 107, he must be very good at what he was originally hired to do; thats obvious. I doubt it was just to be a jolly good fellow while everybody else was working on writing code for the next next thing.

These were the kinds of thoughts that were going through my mind at the time of my first visit. If Meng was serious about this, beyond all the humor, the potential impact and import struck me as boundless. I was duly impressed by the graphical display he pointed out in the main lobby, which showed a rotating globe with colored lights streaming into the blackness of space from everywhere on Earth where Google searches were being conducted at that moment. The different colors represented the different languages being used, and the lengths of the lines of light were proportional to the number of searches being conducted from that part of the world. Meanwhile, the subjects of all those searches were streaming down another big screen. Together, these displays imparted a moving and very visceral sense of the interconnectedness of our worldakin to the emotional impact of seeing for the first time the image of Earth in the blackness of space, taken from the moon. They also conveyed, to use Google-speak, the power of searchand the power of Google.

I wont tell you about the talks I wound up giving at Google or about my colleagues, who Meng talks about in the book, who also gave lectures in that series. They are all on YouTube, which is part of Google. And I wont tell you about the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) classes at Google that Meng instituted there and that have been ongoing now for years. Nor will I tell you about the mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program, Search Inside Yourself, that Meng developed in parallel, with a team of remarkable people who originally came to visit because it was Google and because he was Meng. That is what this book is about.