Copyright

Copyright © 2019 by Daniel John Zigmond

Interior and cover illustrations copyright © 2019 by Rosie Scott
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of
copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to
produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission

is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission
to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please
contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the
author’s rights.

Running Press
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
www.runningpress.com
@Running_Press

First Edition: December 2019

Published by Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a

subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Running Press name and logo
is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for

speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com
or call (866) 376-6591.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.

Excerpt here from Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. Copyright ©

2017 by Robert Wright. Reprinted with the permission of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944357

ISBNs: 978-0-7624-9458-3 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-9457-6 (ebook)

E3-20190927-JV-NF-ORI
 Contents
COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION:
WAKING UP AT WORK
Buddha never worked a day in his life. So why would anyone want to know what a freeloader
like that had to say about working?

PART 1: INSIGHTS

CHAPTER 1
WHY WORK?
We spend much of our adult lives working. Why? How did this happen? Buddha taught that
work can be an essential part of our path to awakening—but it doesn’t feel like that for most of
us.

CHAPTER 2
THE COST OF SUFFERING
Work has always been, well, work. In Buddha’s time, work for many meant toiling in the fields.
Today, unhappy workers cost businesses millions. It doesn’t have to be this way.

CHAPTER 3
BUDDHISM WAS A START-UP
Before Buddha, there was no Buddhism. After Buddha’s great awakening, he thought about
spreading the word. And his first reaction was: No, that seems hard. Why has it survived so
long?
 CHAPTER 4
BUDDHA’S BIG IDEA
Pain is a fact of life. But suffering is optional. The way to end suffering is to wake up.

PART 2: PRACTICES

CHAPTER 5
PAYING ATTENTION
Mindfulness is more than a buzzword, and a lot less complicated than some people think.
What it takes is paying attention to what we do.

CHAPTER 6
MEDITATE LIKE A BUDDHA
Buddha taught that the best way to develop mindfulness was through meditation. So how do
we meditate? And who has time for that?

CHAPTER 7
THE PROBLEM WITH EXPERTISE
The opposite of wisdom is not ignorance. Ignorance is a perfectly respectable state of nature.
We all start out ignorant. The opposite of wisdom is arrogance—not admitting what we don’t
know.

CHAPTER 8
WORKING WITHOUT WORKING
Listening and thinking are also work. Sometimes our most productive moments are sitting
still. Sometimes we do more by doing less.

CHAPTER 9
BUDDHA ON THE BUS
Exercise is an important aid to productivity and health. Even Buddha didn’t spend all day
sitting around.

CHAPTER 10
SLEEPING TO WAKE UP
Nothing helps our work like getting enough sleep. Even Buddha sometimes took a nap. And
he got a little defensive about it, too!
 CHAPTER 11
TELLING THE TRUTH
Buddha taught that “right speech” is essential to awakening, but sometimes office politics gets
in the way.

CHAPTER 12
BICKERING BUDDHAS
Buddha worried about how his monks and nuns would get along after he was gone, so he left
instructions for how to argue in a healthy way.

CHAPTER 13
HOW TO BE AMBITIOUS
How do we balance real-life goals with the dangers of too much striving?

CHAPTER 14
WHAT YODA GOT WRONG
Sometimes we have to try. Buddha called this “right effort.”

CHAPTER 15
REMEMBERING TO BREATHE
Our breath is an important tool for cultivating mindfulness, and one we should not leave at
home.

PART 3: HINDRANCES

CHAPTER 16
ATTACHMENT AND DETACHMENT
Relationships with coworkers can be among the great joys of work. But they can also be
fraught.

CHAPTER 17
BALANCING BETTER THAN BUDDHA
Juggling work and family has always been a challenge. Buddha ditched his family for his
newfound career. We can do better.
 CHAPTER 18
YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB
Many of us feel defined by our work. We feel validated by professional success and
devastated by career failures. “Right livelihood” is a key part of Buddha’s eightfold path to
enlightenment. But there is more to an awakened life than work.

CHAPTER 19
DEALING WITH DISTRACTIONS
Is multitasking the opposite of mindfulness? How can we focus when we’re asked to do a
dozen things at once? Also, the special challenges of working at home.

CHAPTER 20
BEGGING FOR LUNCH
Do you wolf down your lunch at your desk? There is a better way. Eating should be more than
just another distraction at work.

CHAPTER 21
WHO WOULD BUDDHA FIRE?
Sometimes work forces us to make difficult and even painful decisions. But even these can
be done with compassion and respect.

CHAPTER 22
WALKING AWAY
Most of us will work more than one job in our lives. So how do we know when it’s time to
move on?

PART 4: PERFECTIONS

CHAPTER 23
DATA-DRIVEN DHARMA
Buddha didn’t take anything on faith. He trusted data—and he wanted us to trust our own data,
too.

CHAPTER 24
LIVING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT
How can we live in the now when we’re on the clock? How can we stay in today when we
have a deadline tomorrow?

CHAPTER 25
SERVING ALL SENTIENT BEINGS
Bodhisattvas commit themselves to serving others in everything they do. How do we make
our job about more than just ourselves?

CHAPTER 26
DID YOU JUST BECOME A BUDDHIST?
If you do everything in this book, does that make you a Buddhist? Does it matter? Buddha
didn’t care if we became Buddhists. He wanted us to become Buddhas.

CHAPTER 27
FURTHER READING
If you liked this book, what should you read next?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

DISCOVER MORE

NOTES ON SOURCES

ENDNOTES
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

INTRODUCTION
 INTRODUCTION

Waking Up at Work
BUDDHA NEVER WORKED A DAY IN HIS LIFE. HE WAS BORN about 2,500 years
ago, grew up a pampered prince in ancient India, left those riches behind
to become a wandering monk, and ended his life as a revered spiritual
teacher—all without ever earning a salary.* It’s not clear that he ever even
handled money, and he forbade his closest followers from doing so.
So why would anyone want to know what a freeloader like that had to
say about work?
Let’s start by backing up a bit. A few people today still follow the
Buddha’s literal example and renounce worldly possessions, living their
lives as full-time monastics. In fact, probably more do than you think—
estimates range from a few hundred thousand to a million or more
worldwide. But if you’re reading this book, I’ll bet you’re not one of them.
You have not chosen to spend your life cloistered in a temple or
monastery, let alone wandering the rural countryside of some far-off land
without a fixed address. Neither have I. For better or worse, most of us
today do not live as Buddha and his core disciples did. One way or the
other, most of us spend much of our adult lives working.
Some of us basically hate it. It’s a rare treat these days to find anyone
who truly loves their work. Too many are working long hours at jobs they
can’t stand. The lucky ones look forward to the weekend, when they can
have two days of their real life back. But many in high-stress careers don’t
even do that, grinding through their Saturdays and Sundays, barely
slowing their pace, charging toward some hoped-for early retirement or
other future reward. Most Americans don’t even take all the vacation
they’re allowed.1
Those lucky few who do love their jobs often have their own
frustrations. Maybe it’s nonstop stress or lack of resources or miserable
behavior by colleagues or clients. Or maybe work is fine, but you just wish
there was a little less of it. It seems that everyone with a demanding career
laments their work-life balance. Does anyone really enjoy answering
emails and texts at all hours? And all of us who are racing and striving like
this may be in for a surprise. A study in 2016 found that work-related
stress was the fifth-largest cause of the death in the United States.2 Some
may not make it to retirement at all. (More on this in chapter 2.)
It doesn’t have to be this way. And Buddha knew this, 2,500 years ago,
without ever setting foot in an office.
When Buddha had his great awakening—when he literally became the
Buddha, which means the Awakened One—he listed “right livelihood”
among the eight keys to an enlightened life. He knew somehow that work
was important, and that working right was essential. As he traveled
through ancient India, spreading the word about his newfound path of
spiritual liberation, he preached not only to other wandering monks like
himself (and eventually nuns), but also to those he called “householders,”
who he encouraged to follow his teachings while remaining in the
workaday world. Even two-plus millennia ago, Buddha understood that
most of us would spend much of our waking lives working, and would
have to find our enlightenment there.
Buddha was raised among the privileged 1 percent of his day and
became an honored guest of kings and queens, but he was also surrounded
by subsistence farmers, artisans, and small-scale merchants who struggled
to survive. The Buddhist scriptures, usually called the sutras, refer to
dozens of professions already practiced in Buddha’s time, and his
audiences included everyone from royalty to slaves.3 For most people
hearing the Buddha’s words, work was a necessary and central part of their
daily lives. He couldn’t ignore it then, any more than we can ignore it now.
Enlightenment was not something just for full-time monastics, so Buddha
knew that helping ordinary people work right was essential to helping
them find their own path of awakening.
That’s what this book is about: how to make our work not just another
distraction, but an integral part of truly waking up.
This book will help you understand why Buddha—a guy who never
held a job—chose to elevate right livelihood to such importance. More
importantly, we’ll explore how to find a way of working that’s “right” in
every sense of that word: right for you, right for your health, right for your
sanity, and right for the world.
Buddha’s teachings are not complicated. He laid them all out in his
very first sermon in about 700 words—about as many as you’ve already
read in this book so far! Most of them come down to basic principles, like
honesty and balance, that help us pay closer attention to the world. But
applying those simple teachings to the complexities of daily life can be
quite a bit trickier. As Buddha elaborated on these concepts over the years,
his teachings ballooned to about 20,000–80,000 pages, depending on who’s
counting.
Despite his complete lack of job experience, Buddha actually had a lot
to say about work in all those later sermons. Some of his admonitions
were both specific and unsurprising. (He suggested that we avoid careers
in weapons, human trafficking, and drugs, for example.) But once you start
pulling on even those simple threads, it’s easy to unravel the whole
sweater. When Buddha says to avoid business in “intoxicants” and
“poison,” what does he really mean? I spent years working at Instagram
and Facebook. Are those online platforms intoxicants? Are they even
poison? I suppose some people would say so, although I disagree. Should
we consider television an intoxicant? What about video games? Are coal
miners trafficking in poison? Or car manufacturers? Some people talk
about sugar as a poison—so are ice cream shops forbidden? That’s a
depressing thought.
In any case, these specific suggestions are just the beginning. All the
same principles Buddha offered to guide us in the rest of life must also
guide us in our work. After right livelihood, the other seven elements of
the eightfold path are right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct,
right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. All of these can
help us at work—especially mindfulness and concentration, which we’ll
spend extra time discussing. Most of us know from sad experience that
there are endless ways to stray from this path in the workplace—to fall
into wrong conduct, wrong speech, and so forth; to treat our coworkers
badly; to drift mindlessly from one task to the next; even to lie, cheat, or
steal. We’ll talk about all these things, too, and how to avoid them.
 Buddha taught that life involves a lot of suffering, which many in the
working world will find very easy to believe. But he also taught that it
doesn’t have to, that suffering has a cause and a cure. That cure isn’t
necessarily easy, but it is possible. And it’s just as possible behind a desk
or at a cash register or in a factory as it is on a distant mountaintop.
You don’t have to quit your job to find enlightenment. It might not
even help. Buddha’s life was kind of an American dream in reverse:
starting in the lap of luxury and ending literally penniless.* He found all
the bliss-chasing of his youth to be a distraction. As nice as retirement
might sound right now, it isn’t any easier to wake up on a beach or on a
golf course or at a spa. Buddha would tell you it might be harder.
You don’t have to become a Buddhist, either. Buddha never used that
word, and might not be thrilled with the way people use it today. He didn’t
believe in “Buddhism” per se—he believed in paying attention, taking care
of yourself, and waking up. That’s something anyone of any faith can do.
In the end, happiness and fulfillment at work depend on many of the
same things that bring us happiness and fulfillment elsewhere. Like
anything worth doing, there are no shortcuts. There’s no pill you can take
or magic notebook you can buy or fancy exercise you can learn. But this
book will show you how Buddha’s simple instructions apply to our
everyday lives in the office or on any job. Before long, you’ll find yourself
waking up while working well.
 PART 1:

INSIGHTS
 CHAPTER 1

Why Work?
SHORTLY AFTER BUDDHA’S ENLIGHTENMENT, TWO TRAVELING merchants
named Tapussa and Bhallika were passing through a neighboring village.
It’s not entirely clear how word had already gotten around, but one of their
local relatives mentioned to them that a holy man nearby had recently
become what he called “wholly awakened.”1 Even in ancient India, where
wandering mystics were a lot more common than they are today, this was a
big deal. The two men gathered some food to bring as an offering and went
off to find this Awakened One. The story goes that they caught Buddha a
little off guard. He hadn’t started teaching yet—he hadn’t even decided to
become a teacher—and he didn’t have a bowl handy to accept their gifts of
barley and sweets. But he found something he could use and the two were
so impressed by his mere presence that they immediately converted and
became his first disciples. Then they continued on their way.
So the very first Buddhists were two ordinary people on a business
trip.2 (Keep this in mind the next time you’re killing time in an airport or
stranded at a Holiday Inn.) Many years later, when recounting a list of his
foremost disciples, Buddha still remembered their names and mentioned
them first among all the laymen he had taught.3 Think about that: Before
there were any monks or nuns shaving their heads and donning saffron
robes, there were these guys—two regular Joes, going about their daily
lives, trying to earn a decent living, yet eager for a glimpse of something
more.
Two thousand five hundred years later, the world is still full of
Tapussas and Bhallikas—spiritual seekers with a day job. And I’ll bet
you’re one of them.
Many of us wonder why we have to work at all. Wouldn’t it be easier to
find ourselves, to find our own enlightenment, if we didn’t have to? Surely
a trust fund would help.
To be clear, this is not a new problem. We’ve been working for a long
time. And I don’t just mean you and me—I mean all of us, all of humanity.
For as long as people have lived together in anything resembling a human
society, we’ve had to work.
Buddha understood this and accepted it. In fact, he was much more
likely to get the opposite question: Why stop working? In a famous
lecture, a local king asked Buddha exactly this. The king’s servants and
staff—everyone from elephant riders to weavers, soldiers to bath
attendants—produced useful things. Through their labors, the king
explained, “They bring happiness and joy to themselves, they bring
happiness and joy to their mothers and fathers, to their wives and children,
and to their friends and acquaintances.”4 Compared to all that, what good
was Buddha’s hours and hours of sitting around?
Buddha explained to the king the fruits of meditation and spiritual life,
and we’ll talk about that later in this book, too. But for now my point is
that Buddha didn’t have to explain the fruits of working life. Those
seemed obvious to everyone. He had to defend not working.
As both that ancient king and Buddha understood, there are lots of good
reasons to work. For some of us, our jobs feel like a calling. Maybe you’ve
wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a firefighter or a nurse or a teacher for
as long as you can remember. Or maybe you discovered such a passion
later in life. Maybe you’ve found some way to turn your love of art or
sports or music into a job that pays your salary, and so you work mostly
because you simply love doing what you do.
For others, work is a mission. You see a problem in the world and feel
duty-bound to solve it. The day-to-day work itself may not be particularly
exciting, but you believe in what you’re doing and you feel that you’re
making a real difference. That is enough.
Other people work simply to earn a living. Whether you’re supporting a
family or supporting yourself, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Beyond the lucky few born into riches (like Buddha) or those who choose
to live by the generosity of others (also like Buddha!), we all need a way
of paying the bills. And that’s great! It feels good to be financially
responsible and independent.
For most of us, work is probably a mix of all these things. Often, it
changes over time. When I left college, I thought I might become a
traditional Buddhist monk and live out my life in a remote temple in Asia.
And I did live in a temple in Thailand for a few months, and later in
another in San Francisco. But then I fell in love and got married, and
ended up needing a job. When I first started working, it was to earn a
living and support my new family. I counted the days until I thought I
could afford to quit and move on to something more satisfying—literally
counted, with spreadsheets and calendars and complicated formulas. Then,
over time, I realized that I liked my work, and one day, about 10 years into
my career in technology, I decided I didn’t want to do something else. I
stopped counting the days and focused on how I could do my work better.
Now, more recently, I’m focused on the difference my work makes to the
wider world, and on helping others find satisfaction and fulfillment in the
work they do.
The business executive and writer Mike Steib has described this
evolution as the three stages of “learn, earn, and return.”5 In the first stage
of our careers, we might focus on building our skills and deepening our
knowledge. In the second stage, we might focus more on reaping material
success from these early investments. And, in the end, we can dedicate
more of our energy to giving back to others—including those just starting
out and trying to learn.
Your career doesn’t have to follow Steib’s pattern—or mine. Your
motivations may be entirely different or even moving in the opposite
direction. Maybe you started out in the Peace Corps (both “learning” and
“returning”) and much later in life applied your knowledge to something
more lucrative (finally “earning” a bit). Or maybe you needed to earn at an
early age, and only had the luxury of going back to school and learning
later on.
Everyone’s career path is different. There are no bad reasons for
working. And yet many of us can’t shake the feeling that it would be better
not to.
Buddha agreed that finding enlightenment in the working world could
be difficult, that it could feel “confining” to many of us, that we could feel
“weighed down” by our worldly commitments.6 But to be clear, he was not
contrasting this with resort living. He was comparing both work and
family life to going very much the other way—giving up all possessions
and attachments. He felt enlightenment was a bit easier as a wandering
monk, but he understood that such a path wasn’t possible for everyone.
 On the other hand, Buddha thought quitting your job to follow your
bliss was a terrible idea. Sure, chasing what he called “sensual desires”
might feel good at first, but in the long run it’s more like being “pierced by
a dart.” In the end, such lives are filled with even more suffering, like
water flooding a broken boat.7
Many people find this hard to believe. If we enjoy golfing or knitting,
yoga or reading, wouldn’t we be happier doing those things all the time
instead of dragging ourselves into the shop?
Probably not. If you’ve ever eaten too much ice cream or too many
doughnuts (it’s possible!), you know you can have too much of a good
thing. The problem with lying around all day is that it makes us lazy and
restless, and these turn out to be huge obstacles to finding true
fulfillment.8 (We have a whole chapter on this coming up.) Working too
little is no better than working too much—and possibly worse. Endlessly
chasing pleasure just leads to more distractions, the exact opposite of what
we need to truly wake up. Buddha referred to “an honest occupation” as
“the highest blessing,”9 not because he wanted us to work 24/7, but
because he saw work as an integral part of a fulfilled life.
But our lives can’t be only work. In the same verse, Buddha described
learning, practicing a craft, hanging out with good people, and maintaining
a family as the highest blessing, too. So, yes, that’s a lot of highests! But
his point was that there are many important blessings in life, and the real
trick is to combine them all.
Our lives are best when they’re in balance. This is the real message of
Buddha’s middle way. Whether we work at home, in an office, or at a
factory or a store, work can contribute to that balance. There are as many
reasons to work as there are workers. Whatever our reasons, we just need
to keep that work in its place.
 CHAPTER 2

The Cost of Suffering

IF THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH WORKING, AT LEAST in theory, why is work
so hard?
In Buddha’s very first formal sermon, he espoused “Four Noble
Truths.” We’ll talk about all four of these shortly, but for now let’s focus
on the first one, which is usually translated as: “Life is suffering.”
It sounds kind of depressing, but Buddha didn’t mean it that way at all.
He was merely trying to validate a feeling all of us have at one time or
another. Life is difficult. Pain and loss are inevitable. But life is not only
suffering. There are moments of joy and happiness, too. Most of us are not
in constant agony. But all of us face difficulties at some point. And
knowing that even the most pleasurable, most rewarding experiences will
come to an end leaves them tinged with impending loss.
Some scholars aren’t even sure suffering is exactly what Buddha
meant. Buddha didn’t speak English, of course. We’re not entirely sure
what language he did speak. His teachings come to us in a few ancient
Indian languages, including one called Pali, and the word used in that
language is dukkha. One way to translate dukkha is “suffering” or even
“pain,” and that’s why the most common rendering of Buddha’s first truth
in English is what we just said: “Life is suffering.” But others have used
the word stress instead.1 So another way to think about Buddha’s first truth
might be: “Life is really stressful.”
For many of us, that’s the version that really rings true—especially
when we’re working.
Study after study confirms that our working lives are full of stress.
According to a report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health, 40 percent of US workers find their jobs “very or extremely
stressful.”2 The Washington Business Group on Health estimated that “46
percent of all employees are severely stressed to the point of burnout.”3 As
far back as 1996, surveys found that 75 percent of American workers were
experiencing high levels of job stress at least once a week,4 and things
have probably only gotten worse since.
 It’s not just Americans, either. A recent European study found that 27.5
percent of workers there suffered from increased fatigue, resulting from
workplace stress.5 A survey of women working in Sweden found that 38
percent perceived their jobs as stressful.6 Sweden! If even the Swedes
can’t chill out, we must be in real trouble.
All this stress has very real costs. Early estimates of the total societal
costs of workplace stress back in the 1990s were as much as 10 percent of
GNP.7 Today, in the United States, that would represent over $1 trillion
dollars! The direct cost in lost revenue alone from workplace stress is
estimated at $150 billion.8 Worldwide, the International Labor
Organization estimates the cost of workplace stress at 1–3.5 percent of
total world GDP.9
And it’s not just financial cost. In his book Dying for a Paycheck,
Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer explains that workplace stress probably
leads to more health issues and more avoidable deaths than secondhand
smoke. Stress in most offices is so severe that “White-collar jobs are often
as stressful and unhealthful as manual labor, [and] frequently more so.” 10
The American Institute of Stress estimates that “75 percent to 90 percent
of all doctor visits are now stress-related.”11
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Work doesn’t have to make us
miserable. And when we find ways to be happy at work, everyone benefits.
We’ve known for at least two decades that happiness increases our
productivity at work.12 One study found the volunteers whose mood was
boosted by watching a funny video performed significantly better on a
math task designed to simulate workplace thinking.13 Those same
researchers found that a “bad life event” (like a death in the family or a
serious illness) reduced people’s performance by about 10 percent—even
if it occurred two years before. It’s just hard to do good work when you’re
sad, and much easier when you’re in a cheerful mood.
A survey of many recent studies concluded that happiness improves
creativity, and that “Positive attitudes and experiences are associated with
beneficial consequences for both employees and organizations.”14 A large-
scale longitudinal study in Canada found similar results.15 As the
Canadians researcher put it quite simply: “Happy people were more
productive” and “People were more productive when they were happier.”
 We often think that career success will lead us to happiness, and many
of us tolerate bad days, bad bosses, and truly bad jobs with that hope in
mind. But we may have this backward. What if being unhappy on the job
just makes us less productive and ultimately less successful?
In an exhaustive review of the scientific literature, three California
researchers concluded exactly that: “Happy people receive higher
earnings, exhibit better performance, and obtain more favorable supervisor
evaluations than their less happy peers.”16 They came to this conclusion
after reviewing decades of “cross-sectional, longitudinal, and
experimental research”—essentially every possible way of studying the
question.
Their bottom line was very clear: “Happiness precedes and leads to
career success.” Not the other way around.
To summarize, many of us suffer on the job, and this suffering exacts
real costs—on our health and on our employers. At the same time, happy
workers are not only, well, happier, but also more productive and more
valuable to their employers. Happiness is its own reward, but it can lead us
to more success on the job, too.
So how do we become happy? Is there some magic key that can unlock
our happiness and all those benefits? That’s what Buddha set out to find.
 CHAPTER 3

Buddhism Was a Start-up

WE’VE TALKED A BIT ABOUT BUDDHA’S LIFE, BUT WE GLOSSED over some
pretty important questions: Why did Buddha start Buddhism? And why did
this particular spiritual start-up end up lasting so long?
There turns out to be a bit of controversy about exactly when Buddha
lived. No one tried to pin down the date until centuries later, and the
stories of his life don’t mention any current events that we can cross-
check. Buddhist scholars from various countries have come up with
different dates, based on the information we do have, and these vary by
over 100 years.1 To be honest, I find their arguments a bit hard to follow—
a lot apparently hinges on precisely how many years elapsed between
Buddha’s death and the rule of a certain Indian king, because that king met
some ancient Greeks who were better at calendars. But if you say he lived
around 500 BCE, no one will call you a liar, and you probably won’t be too
far off.
That’s a long time ago. A lot has changed in the last two-and-a-half
millennia, making the Buddhist community—called the sangha—the
world’s oldest surviving institution.2 No company, no university, no
government, and no standing army has survived as long. Buddha’s sangha
has outlasted them all.
Of course, before there was a sangha practicing Buddhism, there was
just Buddha. Regardless of precisely when, everyone agrees that Buddha
was born a prince in what is now Nepal, and raised nearby, probably in
northeast India. He led a highly sheltered life in a beautiful palace,
surrounded by every imaginable luxury of the era. (Think sumptuous food
and fancy clothes, but, alas, no Nintendo or Legos.) His mother died in
childbirth, but her sister stepped in and raised him as her own, as the
king’s second wife. He had a happy childhood, married young, and had a
child, all while secluded in these lavish grounds dotted with beautiful lotus
ponds. He had three mansions, one for each of the Indian seasons. He spent
the four-month rainy season, when it was too wet to go outside, holed up
with only female servants and companions.3 (Make of this what you will
—we’re told they were “musicians.”)
But then, around the time of his 29th birthday, he ran away to become a
wandering ascetic. The story is that he convinced a faithful servant to
sneak his chariot out into the surrounding village, and there he witnessed
for the first time the ravages of sickness, old age, and death.4 He realized
that life is not all fun and games and pleasure palaces, and decided to
pursue a purely spiritual life. He spent six years crisscrossing the Indian
countryside, practicing all sorts of austerities under various notable
teachers. He tried everything from fasting to self-flagellation, anything
that was the opposite of his old life of luxury, before he got fed up with
that life, too, convinced that it wasn’t bringing him answers to life’s big
questions, either.
At last he decided to just sit by himself and meditate all night, and
that’s when he had his big epiphany, his awakening. That’s when he earned
the title of Buddha, which literally means the Awakened One.
We’ll talk more about what he discovered that night in the next chapter.
But the point here is that Buddha’s first inclination was to stop right there.
He had done it. He had accomplished his great goal after all those years of
effort. He was enlightened now. He could finally cease his endless
searching.
He thought about teaching but decided, no, he was good with just being
a Buddha and not a teacher.
In a sense, his reason for not teaching was the same reason many of us
have for not trying something new: He thought he would fail.
The way Buddha himself explained it later, he felt his newfound path
was “hard to see and hard to understand,” and that “if I were to teach…,
others would not understand me, and that would be wearying and
troublesome to me.”5 In other words, teaching the dharma—his newfound
truth—would be hard, it probably wouldn’t work, and that would be a huge
bummer, even for an enlightened Buddha. “Considering thus,” he
concluded, “my mind inclined to inaction rather than to teaching.”
I think we can all understand where he was coming from. None of us
like to fail. And trying something new is always a risk.
Legend has it that it took divine intervention to change his mind. The
god Brahma descended to earth and begged Buddha to share his wisdom.
Perhaps not everyone would understand, Brahma agreed, but some would.
And those precious successes would make up for any failures. After some
pleading, Buddha was convinced.
Once Buddha started teaching, he could hardly stop. In the end he
taught for 45 years, continuing right up until his death. (His last lecture
was delivered from his deathbed.) But, like a lot of us, it just took a little
pushing to get him over his self-doubts.
So why have Buddha’s teachings survived so long, when even Buddha
himself wasn’t sure anyone would understand them?
I think there are a few reasons. First of all, Buddha was practical. He
spoke about the world as it exists around us, the world as we know it
ourselves. He tried to help people solve real-world problems that anyone
could understand. He gave very practical exercises—many of which we’ll
try here—for how to live a happier and more awakened life.
When asked more abstract questions, Buddha often brushed them aside.
For example, he refused to say whether or not he believed in an afterlife.6
It’s just not important, he argued. He compared it to a man struck by an
arrow, who won’t let a surgeon treat him until he knows the name and clan
of the one who shot it, or whether he was tall or short, or where he was
from, or what form of bow he used, and so on. These may be interesting
questions, perhaps, but the most important thing is to take out the arrow.
For all of us suffering in this world, whether or not there’s a next world is
just idle curiosity.
Second, Buddha was flexible. He tried all sorts of different approaches
before he settled on what became his path. And he studied with
contemporary masters around him and learned what he could from them
before setting off on his own.
He rejected the rigidity of India’s caste system, insisting that good and
bad qualities “are scattered indiscriminately among the four castes”7 and
that anyone could become enlightened. He welcomed “outcasts” and
“untouchables” into his community of followers, insisting that “one is not
an outcast by birth,” but only through immoral deeds.8 His path was open
to anyone, anywhere.
And although Buddha made lots of rules (that was part of being
practical), in his final sermon he suggested that future students could
abolish any of the “minor” ones, and left it up to them to decide which
were minor.9 He seemed willing to adapt his teachings to different times
and places, and to admit when he was wrong. (He first refused to ordain
women, but eventually his foster mother convinced him.) He was open to
new experiences, and kept meditating all his life, practicing what he
preached.
Third, Buddha was positive. Like any good entrepreneur, Buddha
believed in himself. He believed that he could find a path beyond
suffering. And after that first hesitancy to teach, we don’t see a lot of
prevarication or indecision on his part. Buddha also believed in us. “Dwell
with yourselves as your own island, with yourselves as your own refuge,”
he told his followers, shortly before his death.10 Trust yourself. That’s a
message many of us want—and need—to hear.
But being practical, flexible, and positive was no guarantee of success.
Lots of people have those qualities—and lots probably did 2,500 years
ago, too. Most of those people never start something nearly as successful
as Buddhism.
Like any start-up, the ultimate success of Buddhism depended on the
quality of the product. A great founder can only take you so far. More than
anything else, the success of Buddhism the start-up depended on the
product Buddha discovered. Buddha saw a problem—suffering—and he
found a solution. And that solution worked.
From that point on, it was almost easy. A product that miraculous just
about sells itself.
 CHAPTER 4

Buddha’s Big Idea

AFTER HIS GREAT AWAKENING, BUDDHA TAUGHT FOR 45 years. His lectures
covered everything from exercise and sleep to eating and mental
concentration. He probably had at least something to say on almost every
topic you can imagine. But none of that would have mattered if he hadn’t
figured out one thing that went to the heart of every human life:
Awakening is possible.
To Buddha’s mind, most of us drift through life half-asleep. We’re
going through the motions, enjoying ourselves sometimes, but we’re not
all there. We’re not really paying attention. And this is a tragedy! We’re
letting this life slip away half-lived.
Nowhere is this more apparent for most of us than at work. We
daydream at our desks. We count the minutes (or hours!) in meetings. We
make endless plans for what we’ll do next, instead of focusing on what
we’re doing now.
Buddha’s big idea was that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible
for us to wake up and live a full life right now—even on the job.
The very name Buddha means “Awakened One,” so the whole basis of
what we now call Buddhism is that at least someone once realized
awakening. What Buddhists call the “three treasures” of Buddhism are the
Buddha, the original Awakened One; the dharma, his teachings; and the
sangha, or his community of followers. Without that first experience of
awakening, there’s really nothing.
Before I explain more about what Buddha meant, I should say more
about how we know anything about what this former Indian prince did or
said 2,500 years ago. When I quote from Buddha’s words here, I’m
quoting from the written accounts of his teachings. The Buddha’s lectures
weren’t recorded, of course, and he never wrote anything down himself.
It’s not entirely clear that he was even literate.1 Writing in those days was
considered a specialized profession, and not a necessary part of a general
education, even for royalty like him. There are no accounts in the Buddhist
scriptures of him ever reading or writing.
 Months after Buddha’s death, it’s said that 500 fully enlightened
followers assembled at the invitation of a local king to discuss the
teachings and ensure consensus throughout the sangha. They took turns
reciting Buddha’s lectures and committing them to memory. They were
then passed down orally for several generations as Buddhism began to
spread. Humans are surprisingly good at this sort of memorization. (I can
still recite the Preamble to the United States Constitution, which I learned
in grade school and have only repeated maybe a dozen times in 30 years.)
These monks and nuns had special training and probably recited the texts
often to keep them fresh. There were two more of these “Buddhist
Councils,” held approximately 100 and then 200 years after Buddha’s
passing, again to ensure agreement on the teachings and to resolve any
discrepancies.2 But still—we can be pretty sure that errors crept in.
By the time anything was written down, the teachings had spread too
far for all the followers to meet. A Fourth Buddhist Council was held in
Sri Lanka, sometime around 100 CE, and here the Buddha’s words were
transcribed into Pali, an ancient Indian language, and written on palm
leaves. But the Buddha didn’t speak Pali, although whatever he spoke was
probably closely related to that language. So even this version of the
Buddhist canon was a translation. And we don’t have any of those
documents because palm leaves, as you might suspect, are pretty fragile,
so we have copies of copies of copies, and so on. The oldest copies we
have are from at least a thousand years later.3
Others elsewhere in Asia also started writing things down around the
same time, often in other ancient Indian languages. These versions were
eventually taken to China and Tibet, where they were then translated into
those languages. Based on fragments of manuscripts and even stone
carvings found around India, we know that many of the earliest
translations have been lost.* In other cases, we end up with two or three
versions of the same lecture in different languages, and can compare these
to try to discern what the original might have been.5
This is a long-winded way of saying that anything I’m quoting here in
English is at best a distant copy of a translation of a translation of a long-
ago memorization, first written down many centuries after the Buddha
lived. That’s all we have.
 But according to these writings, Buddha didn’t set out to become
“awakened” at all. Back when he was just a confused prince, what he
really wanted was to understand suffering. Specifically, from the time he
had his first exposure to sickness, old age, and death during that secret
excursion outside the palace, Buddha kept asking himself how we go on
living knowing that pain and loss are unavoidable. How can we stay sane
in a world filled with suffering?
Remember, his parents had an easy answer for him, one we’ve probably
all tried ourselves at one time or another: denial. For them, the simple way
to overcome suffering was to avoid it at all cost. That’s why they coddled
and sheltered him so much. They thought if they could fill their son’s life
with comfort and pleasure, he would never have to suffer at all.
It didn’t work, of course, just as it probably hasn’t worked for you.
Avoiding our problems doesn’t make them go away. There’s nothing wrong
with treating ourselves to something special now and then, but the effects
of even the best retail therapy or spa treatment are usually very short-
lived.
Buddha figured out why denial and avoidance don’t really work. The
problem with chasing after fun is that it never lasts. And as soon as we
realize that it won’t last, it stops being quite so much fun anymore.
On the other hand, if you surround yourself with suffering, that doesn’t
work, either. Buddha tried that, too, for six years after he left home. He
tried practices so extreme that he almost died. But all he accomplished by
beating himself up was becoming even more miserable. Wallowing in
suffering doesn’t diminish it, either.
This was the great truth Buddha awakened to, the big idea that made
him the Buddha: that the only way to overcome suffering is to find the
middle way between those extremes. Instead of running away from pain or
running toward it, you sort of accept it. And by accepting that life involves
a certain amount of pain and unpleasantness, you rob the pain of its power.
That is, it’s all about balance.
How exactly does balance beat suffering? In his first lecture, after
announcing his middle way, Buddha proceeded to describe his Four Noble
Truths. Again, we don’t know exactly how he described these at the time,
but the translations we have are roughly the following:
 Life is suffering.
The cause of suffering is desire.
The way to end suffering is to end desire.
The way to end desire is through the Noble Eightfold Path.

I’ve mentioned that last part—the eightfold path—and we’ll talk more
about it in the next chapter. For now, let’s focus on the first three.
One way to think about those first three truths is that we suffer because
we want things to be different. The cause of suffering isn’t actually pain or
bad luck—it’s dissatisfaction. It’s wanting stuff, craving stuff. We don’t
suffer because bad things happen; we suffer because we don’t get what we
want.
That’s not to say that pain is good or pleasant. It isn’t. But this
unpleasantness is not the cause of suffering. Resisting it is the cause of
suffering. And while Buddha learned that pain can never be completely
avoided, suffering can still be overcome.
You sometimes see this message summarized with the phrase Suffering
is optional.6 I think that’s a pretty good way to think about it. When
something painful happens to us, we don’t just feel the immediate pain—
we also have feelings about the pain. We’re angry about our pain, maybe
frustrated or resentful, even vengeful sometimes. So then we have two
unpleasant feelings—a physical one and a mental one. Buddha described
this as like being struck by two arrows.* The first arrow we can’t avoid—
pain hurts, whether we want it to or not. But the second arrow is our own
choice. We can duck. Even if we suffer from the pain, we don’t need to
suffer about the pain. By living a life of balance, neither fighting nor
courting pain, we avoid these second arrows.
All of this applies to us at work, too. No matter how hard we try,
obstacles will always come up at work. We may miss out on a new job or a
promotion. We may have to deal with a difficult colleague or boss or
customer. We may be up against an impossible deadline or have a terrible
shift. We don’t need to be out there looking for these difficulties, but we
can’t entirely avoid them, either.
Buddha’s advice is not that we should be happy when we run into these
problems, but just that we should accept that they happen and move on.
The key to awakening is not to avoid problems or to ignore them. Living
in denial or living in a dream is not the answer.
If all that sounds easier said than done, it is. But Buddha also found an
important technique to help us along the way. That’s what we’ll discuss
next.
 PART 2:

PRACTICES
 CHAPTER 5

Paying Attention
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO AT work is the same as the
single most important thing Buddha said you should do in life: Pay
attention. In other words, practice mindfulness.
You probably hear a lot of talk about mindfulness these days.
Mindfulness is taught in schools and companies. The National Library of
Medicine lists over 3,000 scientific publications with “mindfulness” in the
title. Although the first of these papers dates back to 1982 (and it’s a good
one!),1 2,963 of them were published in just the last 10 years.
For many people, mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism are all
synonymous. I can understand why: Buddha had his great awakening after
an all-night meditation, and you probably have the sense that mindfulness
and meditation are somehow connected. But they aren’t the same. And
understanding the difference is essential to understanding why
mindfulness is so important to work and life in the first place.
Mindfulness was part of Buddha’s teachings from the beginning. It’s
mentioned in his very first sermon, usually called the Deer Park Sermon
because, well, it was given in a deer park, at a forest clearing frequented
by deer. But mindfulness doesn’t come up right away. Buddha starts by
describing the “middle way,” which is what he calls the path of avoiding
the two extremes he had followed up until that point. As we’ve discussed,
Buddha’s life was something of a pendulum for his first 35 years. But the
key to awakening is not to try to hide from suffering, as he did as a prince
for his first 29 years, or to wallow in suffering, as he did as an ascetic for
the next 6 years, but instead to navigate in between. You can think of this
as not avoiding suffering and not courting suffering, but accepting it and
dealing with it and moving on from it.
As this first sermon continues, Buddha gets into a little more detail and
explains the eight parts to this middle-way path. We need to cultivate right
views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right
effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Buddha doesn’t go into
much detail beyond enumerating these eight things, and here at the outset
it isn’t clear that he considers mindfulness any more important than the
other parts of the path.
Then he walks us through what we now call the Four Noble Truths, that
while suffering exists and is inevitable, it is caused by our endless
striving, and there is a path to accept and ultimately overcome it. This path
is that same eightfold path we just listed.
That’s it. That’s the end of the first talk—after which, the ascetics who
heard it, every one of them, experienced awakening, by the way.
Mindfulness is mentioned twice, but only toward the end of his eight
important parts of practice. And meditation is not mentioned explicitly at
all. If all you knew about Buddhism was that first sermon, you’d know it
was about overcoming suffering, but you probably wouldn’t think
mindfulness and meditation were all that important.
But as Buddha later expounded on these initial ideas, mindfulness
started to take on a more central position. He gave several whole sermons
on mindfulness alone. He came to declare the foundations of mindfulness
to be “the direct path… for the attainment of the true way” and the
realization of nirvana.2
Why would right mindfulness be any more important than right speech
or right action? If you step outside the Buddhist context for a minute, this
isn’t obvious at all. Isn’t mindfulness a state of mind? Surely our actions
cause more suffering than our thinking. We’ve all had the experience of
causing suffering, either to ourselves or others, either intentionally or
unintentionally, with our words and actions. But can we really cause
suffering with our minds?
The answer is yes, we can. And we do. All the time.
Let’s start with what mindfulness itself even means. One modern
Buddhist scholar describes it as “the clear and single-minded awareness of
what actually happens to us in and at the successive moments of
perception.”3 A more psychological definition would be “the state of being
attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present.”4 In the
absolute simplest terms, as we said at the start of this chapter, mindfulness
means paying attention.
That attention is the linchpin for the rest of the eightfold path. There’s
no way to cultivate right speech without paying attention to how we are
speaking. There’s no way to cultivate right action without paying attention
to what we’re doing. Without mindfulness, we’re stuck. It’s like trying to
follow Buddha’s path in our sleep.
That’s the connection between mindfulness and Buddhism. Buddhism
is our modern word for Buddha’s teaching, what’s traditionally called the
dharma. Put another way, Buddhism is the articulation of Buddha’s path to
awakening. And mindfulness is what makes it possible to follow that path.
Maybe the primacy of mindfulness wasn’t obvious to Buddha when he
first started teaching. Or maybe it was so obvious that he didn’t feel the
need to explain it. But this is why we focus so much on mindfulness today
in Buddhist practice—because mindfulness is the key that unlocks his
whole path.
Mindfulness is essential at work, too. Your job may seem mindless at
times, but I assure you that if it really was, you wouldn’t be doing it.
These days, just about anything that can be automated is automated. If
you’re doing a job, it’s because someone felt we needed someone doing it
who was paying attention.
This is backed by research. Studies have shown that developing
mindfulness improves job performance across a wide range of industries
and professions, including restaurant servers, supervisors and middle
managers, nurses, psychotherapists, and even nuclear power plant
operators.5 One test that offered a one-hour-per-week mindfulness class
for eight weeks to nurses in a high-stress Intensive-Care Unit found
“engagement and resiliency increase[d] significantly” among the
participants.6 In environments like this, where employee performance has
stark real-world consequences, the authors noted that mindfulness “not
only improves the lives of individuals, but potentially the lives that they
touch through their work.” Even a study in the US Army found that
mindfulness training “may protect against functional impairments
associated with high-stress contexts.”7 (If you’re wondering whether
Buddha would approve of teaching mindfulness to soldiers, the study’s
authors also posit that mindfulness “could provide greater cognitive
resources for soldiers to act ethically and effectively in the morally
ambiguous and emotionally challenging counterinsurgency environment.”)
But mindfulness isn’t just for trauma nurses and soldiers. Even in more
typical workplaces, mindfulness has been shown to improve “creativity,
innovation, resilience, work engagement, productivity, communication
skills, reduced conflict, absenteeism, and turnover.”8 A study of 238
employees at the health insurer Aetna found that mindfulness training
improved productivity there and reduced employee-perceived stress.9
Companies as diverse as Target, General Mills, and Intel have offered
mindfulness programs to their employees and seen positive results.10
So if mindfulness is so great, where do we get it? That’s the subject of
our next chapter. It turns out you don’t have to work for a company like
Google that teaches mindfulness right there at the office. The most
important thing you can do for work may be something you can do at
home.
 CHAPTER 6

Meditate Like a Buddha

MINDFULNESS IS HARD. THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH DISTRACTIONS. How many
times have you picked up your phone since you picked up this book? How
many texts will you send or receive before you finish this chapter?
But it’s not just cell phones and screens that distract us. Mindfulness
was hard 2,500 years ago. Even then, Buddha worried that people were so
consumed with their own distractions (he called them “attachments”) that
they would never understand his teachings. “It is hard for such a
generation to see this truth,” he lamented—words likely echoed by every
teacher in every generation since.1 And keep in mind that Buddha’s
troublesome generation didn’t just live before cell phones and computers
and television and radio. They lived before paper—and still mindlessness
and distraction felt like insurmountable problems.
So how do we develop mindfulness? We know now how important it is,
but where do we get it? How do we learn to cut through all those
distractions?
Buddha had a very simple answer for this: meditation. Meditation is
the way we practice mindfulness.
I mean practice here literally. It’s the same way we might use finger
exercises to practice piano. If you ever tried learning piano as a kid—or if
you’ve had the misfortune of listening to a kid practice more recently—
you know that practicing piano is not the same as playing piano. When we
practice, we might hit the same few notes over and over again. We’re
developing muscle memory in our hands and training our minds to read
the notes. But that’s very different from playing music.
It’s the same with driving. You might practice in an empty parking lot
or try to parallel park between two cones on a quiet street. But you’re not
really driving until you go out into traffic.
So, just to be clear, real awakening doesn’t happen on a meditation
cushion. Awakening happens out here in the world. Awakening is about
how we live our lives after we get up from the cushion. We meditate to
prepare ourselves for that.
 Buddha gave very detailed instructions on how to meditate. He devoted
whole lectures to various techniques and modern teachers have written
whole books on individual lectures.2 The different schools of Buddhism
have developed slightly different styles over the centuries, but most start
with a few basic guidelines: Find a quiet place, sit in an upright posture,
and focus on your breathing.
Buddha suggests a few quiet places you could try: in the forest, at the
root of a tree, or in an empty hut.3 These days any quiet room will do. In
the Zen tradition, meditators typically sit facing a wall. The goal is to
minimize distractions. Again, it’s a bit like practicing driving in that
empty parking lot. You start by making things as easy on yourself as
possible.
The traditional posture is the lotus position, legs crossed so that each
foot rests on the opposite thigh. If you can manage that, great. (You’ve
probably been doing yoga—also, great.) If not, you can try the half lotus,
where one foot rests on your thigh and the other gets tucked in below it. If
that’s too much of a stretch, there’s the so-called Burmese posture, with
both feet crossed in front of you on the floor. All of these are easier if you
sit on a small pillow or cushion.
You can also kneel or even sit on a chair. The goal is to sit upright,
spine fairly straight, so that your body feels fully supported. A common
technique is to imagine the crown of your head being pulled toward the
ceiling, your spine gently stretched, and then released, so that each
vertebra rests comfortably on the one below it. If you’re doing it right, it
should take very little effort to keep your body upright.
Now you’re ready to start meditating. Start by setting a timer. This is
important. It’s very hard to meditate if you have to keep checking the time
to know when you’re done. You can use the timer on your phone or an old-
school kitchen timer if you have one, or you can download a specialized
app.* Whatever you choose, I suggest starting with five minutes.
Take three deep breaths. With each breath in, be aware that you’re
breathing in. With each breath out, be aware that you’re breathing out.
After these first three, just breathe normally. But keep your awareness on
your breath. Be aware of long breaths and short breaths. Try to notice each
and every one.
 One way Buddha suggested you do this is by narrating each breath to
yourself.4 Breathing in, you say (to yourself, silently), “I am breathing in.”
Breathing out, you say to yourself, “I am breathing out.” Taking a long
breath, you say, “I am taking a long breath.” Taking a short breath, you say,
“I am taking a short breath.” This helps keep your mind from wandering
and focuses your awareness.
This is not just a mental awareness. It’s a physical awareness, too. You
should feel yourself breathing. You should notice the way the breath enters
your body and leaves your body. You should feel it against your mouth or
nose. You should notice the way your chest rises and falls. You should feel
your chest rise and fall.
It’s common these days to hear people talk about how certain
seemingly physical activities—like running or tennis or golf—are, to a
large extent, mental. But the opposite is also true. We tend to think of
meditation as a purely mental exercise, a way of quieting the mind, but it
is also a physical activity. Meditation is not just some way of thinking; it
is something we do, with our bodies as much as our minds.
Why start with the breath? You can think of your breathing as a sort of
biological metronome, establishing a basic drumbeat of your existence.
You might think your heart rate could serve this function, but most of us
aren’t aware of our individual heartbeats. Our breathing seems to lie at the
sweet spot of being both ever-present and yet fully knowable, discernable,
in a way that our other bodily functions are not.
If this all sounds very easy, then you probably haven’t sat down to try it
yet. Most people find it difficult at first. The mind wanders. We start
thinking about an annoying thing that happened at work or an errand we
need to run later or an old flame from college or a new flame online.
We’re sure we just heard our phone buzz and wonder who might be texting
us. At some point we realize that we haven’t noticed our breathing in who
knows how long. We desperately want to look at the timer and see how
much longer we’re supposed to sit here.
That’s OK. When you notice that your mind has wandered, just go back
to your breath. It doesn’t matter if this happens one time or a hundred
times. Don’t beat yourself up. Just take another breath.
Once we’ve gotten comfortable watching our breath in this way,
Buddha encourages us to cultivate mindfulness of the entire body. When
we sit, we should be aware of our whole body sitting. We should feel each
point where our body touches the ground beneath us. We should feel our
legs folded against each other. We should feel our hands resting on our lap.
We should notice the air against our skin, and feel this air, warm or cold,
still or moving. Our awareness should include every part of us.
How powerful are these mindfulness meditations? Buddha thought they
were pretty powerful! In one sutra, he starts by stating that anyone who
practices these mindfulness meditation exercises for just seven years will
be guaranteed nirvana.5 That’s pretty good! I mean, think about it. Seven
years might sound long, but we spend twelve years in grade school, four
just in high school, and what do we have to show for that? (Try starting a
conversation using your high school Spanish and you’ll see what I mean.)
Many of us spend four or five or more years in college just to prepare for a
job, and still come out feeling unprepared. Buddha is saying that in just
seven years of practice, we can do so much more than that. We can unlock
the key to overcome all suffering. We can literally find nirvana.
And then here, despite his enlightened state, Buddha establishes
himself as a truly terrible negotiator. Because immediately—right in the
middle of that lecture!—he starts bargaining against himself. Maybe,
actually, six years would be enough. Or maybe five, he suggests. Or four.
And he gets all the way down to one year. A single year! And then he
decides even that is too much, and admits maybe just seven months would
be enough. Or six? And he negotiates himself all the way down to one
month, and then half a month, until finally, he settles on seven days. And
that’s it. That’s his final offer. That’s as low as he’ll go. If we can fully
practice mindfulness meditation for just seven days, we are guaranteed
awakening.
That’s a pretty awesome deal. But how is it possible? How can
practicing meditation for seven days or even seven years bring us closer to
that awakening?
Again, it’s like the analogy with the piano. All those finger exercises
may sound monotonous, but they work their magic when you move on to
real music. Similarly, over time, by practicing mindfulness this way in
meditation, we start to bring that mindfulness into our daily lives. We may
not be aware of every breath or every motion throughout the day, but we
stop sleepwalking through our days, too.
Gradually we start to take our mindfulness practice off the cushion.
Buddha says when we walk, we should be aware that we’re walking. When
we stand, we should be aware that we’re standing. When we sit again or lie
down, we should be aware of our bodies there, too—our whole bodies.
Walking, we should feel the way each part of our foot touches the earth,
the way our weight shifts with every movement, the way our body
responds to every step and every breath. The goal, Buddha said, is to
become one “who acts with full awareness when walking, standing, sitting,
falling asleep, waking up, talking, and keeping silent.”6 That awareness we
cultivate in meditation starts to manifest itself out there, in the real world.
In other words, this mindfulness begins to permeate our lives—at home, at
work, and everywhere.
That mindfulness makes the rest of Buddha’s eightfold path possible
out there, too. We start practicing right speech because we’re mindful of
the way our speech affects others. We start practicing right action because
we’re mindful of the consequences of our actions. And on and on.
Mindfulness is the key to the rest of the path. Everything good flows from
there. As Buddha taught: “Speak or act with a peaceful mind, and
happiness follows, like a never-departing shadow.”7
To experience this for yourself, commit right now to a daily meditation
practice. The most important thing is to get into a routine of meditating
every day. After you’re comfortable with the 5-minute sessions we’ve
described, I recommend that you increase to 10 minutes a day. Even on
your busiest days, you can probably wake up 10 minutes earlier or go to
bed 10 minutes later. (The average American spends over 8 minutes daily
in the shower,8 so, worst case, you could borrow a few minutes there.)
If you can work your way up to 20 minutes, that’s wonderful. That’s
what I do most days. I think 20 minutes is plenty of time to develop a
strong meditation practice. If 20 minutes is more than you can manage,
then stick with 10. Maybe you can add a 20-minute session on the
weekends or on another day off.
Is 10 minutes a day really enough? Some would say there’s no such
thing as enough! The Dalai Lama still meditates several hours each day,
and he’s been doing it his whole life.9 Lots of other less famous long-term
practitioners also meditate for long periods. But most of us would find that
pretty challenging, and most people notice real benefits from much shorter
periods. Like physical exercise, every little bit helps. (More on that soon!)
It’s much better to carve out some time to meditate every day than to
promise yourself grand plans for long meditations that never actually
happen.
To be clear, I can’t promise you any magic after just seven days. To be
honest, I never fully understood why Buddha said that. Because it isn’t
easy to bring mindfulness into our daily lives. It’s hard, and it takes both
practice and patience. But the key is that it’s possible. That’s the real
lesson of Buddha’s life story. It’s the record of one person who managed to
walk this path. He was able to develop enough mindfulness to truly wake
up. He realized enlightenment. And if he can do it, we can, too.
 CHAPTER 7

The Problem with Expertise

IF YOU’RE NEW TO MEDITATION, THE EXERCISES IN THE LAST chapter probably
felt a bit unnatural and uncomfortable. Most of us feel awkward doing
something—anything—for the first time. We worry that we’re doing it
wrong. We’re embarrassed by our ignorance. Maybe, in this case, sitting
all alone in a room, your legs folded in this unusual way, your hands in
your lap, you felt a little ridiculous.
Buddha would tell you that’s just fine.
We spend much of our lives striving to be experts—especially at work.
We like to feel competent and capable. We want respect from our
colleagues and praise from our supervisors. We don’t like making
mistakes. But it turns out there is real danger in all that apparent expertise.
Back in medieval Japan, the great Zen master Eihei Dogen had a
different view of being a beginner. He worried that what we think of as
experience and expertise often leads to carelessness and inattention. He
saw a certain power in that uncomfortable feeling we have when we’re
first starting out and have no idea what we’re doing. He called that
anxious, empty mind-set “beginner’s mind.” He went so far as to say that
sitting in meditation with beginner’s mind is sitting like a true Buddha—
and he saw great risk in losing that beginner’s mind as we continued our
meditation training.1
This idea is not unique to Buddhism. Most of the world’s religions
seem to have some similar concept, some notion of a “basic wisdom”
inherent in all of us.2 But it seems to have found its most complete and
explicit expression in the school of Zen Buddhism that master Dogen
brought to Japan. Hundreds of years later, the modern Zen master Shunryu
Suzuki expanded on and popularized Dogen’s idea in a famous series of
talks he gave to his American students in California. “The goal of
practice,” he told them, “is always to keep your beginner’s mind.”3
Basically, he taught that we should never become an expert! He explained
this odd advice like this:
 This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a
ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything;
it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many
possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.4

The most obvious time beginner’s mind comes into play at work is
when we’re starting a new assignment or embarking on a new job.
Suddenly we’re not feeling so competent any more. We’re not sure exactly
what we’re supposed to do. We’re almost guaranteed to get something
wrong. We’re tiptoeing around, certain that everyone can sense our
ignorance. We feel like the new kid in middle school who doesn’t know
where to eat lunch.
Yet we can use this nervous energy, this alertness, to our advantage.
Just because we’re uncomfortable in a novel situation, we don’t have to be
uncomfortable about being uncomfortable. Everyone you work with had a
first day, too. None of us are born experts in anything, and some of the
people around you probably know less than they think they do. The true
opposite of wisdom, after all, is not ignorance but arrogance. Ignorance is
a perfectly respectable state of being. Ignorance is the origin of all
eventual knowledge. Arrogance is where the danger lies. The wonderful
thing about being a beginner is that you know what you don’t know. The
expert has often forgotten.
Yet it’s even more important to cultivate beginner’s mind when you’re
not just starting out in something new. When you’ve worked at a job for a
long time, it can easily become rote and mechanical. We feel like we’re
just punching the clock, going through the motions. We can become one of
those arrogant experts peering skeptically at the newcomers. That’s where
carelessness seeps in, whether born of boredom or conceit. That’s when we
have to make an extra effort to regain our beginner’s mind.
One way to try to snap out of monotony is simply to take a break—and
we have a whole chapter on that coming up next. Another is to change
tasks. Many of us have different sorts of work we need to do throughout
the day, the week, or even the year. One way to cultivate beginner’s mind
is to rotate through these different tasks more frequently and give yourself
the literal experience of doing something new more often.
 On the other hand, sometimes reclaiming your beginner’s mind is as
easy as getting a change of scene. When I’m stuck on a problem or feeling
unmotivated, I sometimes take my laptop to a new part of the building and
work there. (This has the added benefit of making me harder to find, so
I’m less likely to be disturbed.) Some companies have taken this to the
extreme, eliminating assigned workspaces altogether. As with everything,
the key is balance. It’s often helpful to be in your familiar space, with
everything just the way you like it. (My desk always looks like a mess, but
I know exactly where everything is and can find it quickly.) But when your
work starts feeling stale, you can move somewhere unfamiliar to shake
things up.
Beginner’s mind is not the same as imposter’s syndrome, typically
defined as the “experience of feeling incompetent and of having deceived
others about one’s abilities.”5 That’s a terrible feeling. First observed
among female college students, it was initially assumed to affect mostly
women. Something about feeling as if you look out of place seems to bring
with it the fear that maybe you really are out of place—and will soon be
exposed as an imposter. But these days we understand that this is also
quite common among men. Many of us feel at any moment that our
colleagues will realize that we’re frauds, that we don’t really know what
we’re doing at all.
The most important thing to remember when you start having these
feelings is that they are extremely common. Almost everyone I know at
work suffers from imposter’s syndrome at times—myself certainly
included. You are not alone. Many if not most of your colleagues are
having the same doubts you are. Yet you are where you are through the
results of all your past actions—what Buddha would call karma. Luck may
have played some role, but it played a role for everyone else, too. You
deserve to be where you are as much as anyone.*
Beginner’s mind can also help you combat imposter’s syndrome.
Instead of desperately trying to hide our supposed incompetence, we
actively cultivate an openness to learning and discovery. Instead of fearing
to admit there’s anything we don’t know, we are eager to find the limits of
our knowledge. That’s the best way to learn, and to help those around us
learn, too. When we acknowledge our limits up front, we don’t have to live
in fear of later being unmasked.
We can apply the beginner’s mind approach to any field. The
University of Pennsylvania biomedical researcher Albert J. Stunkard
studied with Shunryu Suzuki early in life, and tried to bring a beginner’s
mind to his long, pioneering career investigating eating disorders. He
described the application of beginner’s mind to his research as “taking
each moment as it arises as a moment of discovery and giving [himself]
wholly to that moment.”6 Across the country in California, software
architect Arlo Belshee applied these same principles to coding. In dividing
up the work on a major software project, he found that “the optimal
worker for a task is the one who is the least skillful in that task,” because
“he tries more approaches, and tries them rapidly,” and so “is more likely
to succeed at a task than one who thinks he understands.”7 In other words,
the least skillful coder brings the most beginner’s mind to the work.
Belshee’s observation points to yet another approach we can bring to
reclaim our beginner’s mind: working with new people. If you’re an expert
in what you do, try teaming up with someone just starting out. You will
learn a lot by explaining the work to them, and seeing it through their eyes
for the first time. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of showing out-of-
town guests around your neighborhood, and suddenly seeing it in a whole
new way. I love giving tours around my office for similar reasons—I start
to notice all the little things I like about the building that I otherwise start
to take for granted. When I’m assembling a new technical team, I like to
seed it with recent college graduates because I know they’ll ask great
questions and force us to think hard about the right approach, rather than
just repeating whatever worked last time.
If you’re the novice, you can do the opposite and start collaborating
with an old-timer. You’ll learn from them, but they’ll learn from you, too.
A final approach to stay fresh at work is to force yourself to become a
beginner outside of the workplace. You can take up a new hobby or learn a
challenging new skill. For example, the highly successful English
professor Sheryl Fontaine described regaining her beginner’s mind by
studying martial arts after hours: “I left behind my identity as a full
professor, an author, and teacher,” she explained, “and signed up to study
karate.”8 Although there’s little obvious connection between martial arts
and English composition, she found that “without the monotony of well-
known situations,” she gained a fresh perspective and self-awareness that
she was then able to bring to her day job.
None of this is to say that experience doesn’t count. It does. I’m much
better at many things than I was 10 or 20 years ago, and I often learn a lot
from people who have been working in their fields for a long time. I quote
many experts in this book because I respect the wisdom they’ve gathered
over their careers. But I still learn a lot from newcomers, too, and not just
because I may have forgotten some basics over the years. The Silicon
Valley researchers Mark and Barbara Stefik interviewed dozens of
inventors and designers and came to a conclusion similar to Belshee’s: that
students and others new to a field are able to solve the most difficult
problems because they don’t know those problems are supposed to be hard
and are willing to try “unconventional ideas that an expert might say were
silly or illogical.”9 That’s why it’s often best to have the most diverse set
of colleagues you can find. We can learn from both experts and beginners,
and ideally remain both experts and beginners ourselves.
All of us act like those closed-minded experts sometimes, and all of us
can benefit from a bit more beginner’s mind. This is as true at home as it
is at work. It’s true everywhere in life. Parents can learn from their kids,
teachers from their students, and (perhaps especially) bosses from their
employees. The great Indian Buddhist teacher Santideva knew this way
back in the eighth century. He wrote: “One should be the pupil of everyone
all the time.”10
Zen master Dogen was a bit more grandiose in his wording. As he put
it, “A beginner’s wholehearted practice of the Way is exactly the totality
of original enlightenment.” In simpler terms, the path to awakening is to
approach your whole life with beginner’s mind. Awakening doesn’t mean
knowing everything. It’s much closer to knowing nothing.
 CHAPTER 8

Working without Working

AS WE DISCUSSED IN THE LAST CHAPTER, ONE RISK OF getting too narrowly
focused is to lose our beginner’s mind. Yet we usually think the best way
—maybe the only way—to get ahead in our jobs is to work harder and
harder. Stories abound of people working ever-longer hours, even taking
on multiple shifts or multiple jobs, all to get ahead.
But what if the answer is to work less?
About 20 years ago, researchers at the University of Connecticut ran an
experiment at two local insurance companies. They asked desk workers
there to take four breaks every hour: three for just 30 seconds and then one
for three full minutes. In other words, participants were asked to pause
every 15 minutes for at least a quick breather, and to take a more
substantial break each hour. All this was in addition to the longer breaks
(such as for lunch) already built into their daily schedules.
Did all these extra breaks slow things down? On the contrary, the ones
taking the breaks seemed to get more done! The researchers called this
“empirical support for the utility of frequent, short rest breaks.”1 Workers
can be more productive when they aren’t always working.
It’s easy to get sucked into the cult of busyness. We don’t feel
productive—we don’t feel useful—unless we’re doing something, and
preferably more than one thing. We want to be busy. We’re slightly
embarrassed if we don’t look busy. Even when we’re not working at our
jobs, we have to be accomplishing something. We set goals for our
exercise routines and hobbies, and even for our meditation practice. When
friends ask us how we’re doing, we often answer proudly, “Busy!”
As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, goals themselves are not necessarily
bad. But there is also real value in taking a break every now and then.
Certain kinds of thinking require not just conscious effort but also periods
of unconscious “incubation.” Many historic discoveries happened while
famous “thinkers” were not actually thinking, and even creative endeavors
seem to be aided by periods of rest.* In more technical terms, “Creative
discoveries result from a process whereby initial conscious thought is
followed by a period during which one refrains from task-related
conscious thought.”2
Taking breaks at work isn’t lazy—it’s essential. It’s not just our
creativity that needs time to take shape. Our bodies and mind are simply
not made to work nonstop. We need time to recover, and we can’t do that
without a break. Study after study has shown that taking breaks doesn’t
reduce productivity, and often increases it.3 A study of telemarketers in
Korea found that those who engaged in relaxing, social breaks during the
day had better sales.4 A study of factory workers on an assembly line in
Europe found that “frequent short breaks” improved attention levels
throughout the day—and we’ve already talked about the importance of
paying attention!5 There are even benefits to that most notorious office
time-waster: surfing the internet. Contrary to popular belief, a recent study
found that what researchers euphemistically called “workplace internet
leisure browsing” is actually “an unobtrusive interruption which enables
restoration of mental capacity and fosters feelings of autonomy.”6 So go
ahead and check your Facebook.
This may sound obvious, but working on something else doesn’t count
as a break. Research shows that breaks are only effective if you actually
stop working. (Who would have thought?) As one review of the science
notes, “Employees who engaged in work activities, such as preparing work
materials for their next meeting, during breaks experienced more negative
emotions later.”7 If you’re filling out an expense report or a time card,
sweeping the floors, or rinsing some dishes, you’re not taking a break.
This is just switching up your work tasks, and it’s not bad, but remember:
“It is precisely [the] absence of work-related demands that allows for the
process of recovery from work to occur.”
The key to a successful break is true detachment. Perhaps for this
reason, using your smartphone on a break seems to be counterproductive.
A survey of 450 office workers found that the ones who got on their
phones on their breaks reported significantly more “emotional
exhaustion,” and didn’t seem to reap the usual recovery benefits when they
got back to work.8 Why would smartphones be bad if web browsing is
good? It may come down to what these activities are replacing. When
you’re sitting at your desk, a little recreational internet might be a
welcome break from work-related tasks. But when you’re actually trying
to take a break, your phone can suck you back into the messages and
emails waiting for you.
In addition to giving yourself time to rest, it’s also important to give
yourself time to think. Back when I worked as a software engineer, I had a
boss who would get upset whenever he saw us sitting at our desks and not
typing. I tried to explain once that we also needed time to think—to solve
difficult coding problems or design the software itself. “Do that in your
car on the way home,” he answered. “No thinking at work.” This is
obviously terrible advice. I had another boss in those days who himself
spent a whole week every year away from the office doing nothing but
thinking. Guess which of these two was more successful?
If your job hasn’t been automated, it’s probably because it requires real
thought. Trust me. Make time every day for thinking.
Of course, we don’t just need breaks during the workday. We need a
break after work as well. There are lots of reasons for this, including that
there’s more to life than our jobs—or there should be! (We have a chapter
on finding the right balance coming soon.) But even from the narrow
perspective of job performance, endless hours at the office can become
counterproductive. A long-term study in Great Britain found that “long
working hours may have a negative effect on cognitive performance.”9
Men and women who worked more than 55 hours per week scored lower
on a cognitive reasoning test than those who worked 40 hours a week.
Furthermore, “Long working hours predicted decline in performance on
the reasoning test over a 5-year follow-up period,” suggesting that those
who worked more also deteriorated more over time.
Of course, deliberately working less goes against the grain of many
corporate cultures. Researchers analyzing one large global consulting firm
found that workers who were perceived as working long hours were
labeled as more successful and were more likely to be rewarded and
promoted—even if they were only pretending to embrace their firm’s
excessive work culture.10 Managers seemed unable to distinguish between
those who actually worked long hours and those who didn’t, as long as the
workers didn’t reveal their shorter hours explicitly. If you don’t make a
big deal about your breaks or your saner quitting time, your boss may not
even notice.
I knew a manager once who made a rule never to describe himself as
“busy” because he didn’t want his staff to think that busyness was the
goal. If you’re a manager yourself, try to model taking real breaks, both
throughout the day and after work. I try not to message anybody after
hours, even if I find myself working, so employees and colleagues know
it’s OK to disconnect. Give yourself permission to do this, too. An
unenlightened boss may get annoyed from time to time when you don’t
respond at all hours, but in the long run your work will only improve from
the extra time to rest.
The great modern Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates
the power of not-working with the metaphor of a glass of muddy water.11
No matter how much you shake it up, the glass will never get clear. In fact,
the more you move it, the cloudier it becomes because all that movement
just stirs up the mud. But if you leave the glass alone, if you don’t do
anything to it at all, the mud gradually settles to the bottom and the water
clears. From stillness, comes clarity.
Or as the futurist and historian Alex Pang writes: “Rest is not idleness.
It is the key to a better life.”12
 CHAPTER 9

Buddha on the Bus

WAY BACK IN THE 1950s, A DOCTOR AT ENGLAND’S MEDICAL Research Council
noticed something interesting about employees of the London transport
system. Looking at the health records of 31,000 employees on those iconic
double-decker buses, he found that the drivers had much higher rates of
coronary heart disease than the conductors working the same shifts.1 In
most other respects, the two groups were largely similar: same ages,
genders, lifestyles. But the drivers spent all day sitting, while the
conductors spent the day on their feet—and that made all the difference.
We tend to think of Buddha as a sedentary soul, sitting alone,
contemplating the universe. And he did sit and meditate, of course, as
we’ve already discussed. But the truth is, he spent a lot of time on his feet.
He crisscrossed several kingdoms spreading his teaching, almost
constantly on the move. In fact, the eventual rules he established for
monks and nuns strictly forbade those followers from spending too much
time in one place. You might imagine that the proper role for Buddha on a
bus would be as the driver, leading the way, but he actually lived his life
much more like the conductors, shuffling up and down the aisles, tirelessly
ministering to every passenger onboard.
At one time, work for all of us usually meant physical activity, whether
at a factory or on a farm or in a shop. But many of us today spend our
working days sitting still, a bit like that imaginary image of the Buddha—
but at a desk rather than on a mountaintop. By one recent estimate,
employees today spend 62 percent of their workday sitting.2 We’ve
become a nation of bus drivers, with the poor health to prove it.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that exercise is good for you,
but the deleterious effects of a sedentary life and work go way beyond our
hearts. As best as we can tell, physical inactivity is “an actual contributing
cause to at least 35 unhealthy conditions, including the majority of the 10
leading causes of death in the U.S.”3 In terms of the global impact on life
expectancy and death from noncommunicable disease, the health risks of
physical inactivity appear roughly comparable to the risks from obesity
and smoking!4
There is also good evidence that exercise improves more than your
physical health. Regular physical activity also works wonders on your
mental state, reducing both stress and depression,5 and it seems
specifically to improve our mind-set at work.6 Exercise even improves our
thinking. A single bout of exercise measurably improves cognition, and
these results hold true regardless of age.7 It doesn’t have to be a sweaty
session of Cross-Fit, either. A series of experiments at Stanford University
found that even just walking “opens up the free flow of ideas,… increasing
creativity and increasing physical activity” at the same time.8 (I try to take
a walk at work as often as I can.) The Stanford researchers found that
walking outside was best, but that even walking on a treadmill helped
stimulate creativity.
These positive effects on our minds might be part of why exercise
seems to improve our productivity at work, too. One study of several
hundred hospital workers in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Denver found that
even moderate exercise significantly improved work performance.9 A
similar study of 201 adults in Southwest England found that “exercise
improved mood and performance, leading to better concentration, work-
based relationships and heightened resilience to stress.”10
If we know that exercise is good for both our health and our
productivity, does that make sitting bad? The answer seems to be a bit
complicated. For one thing, jobs that require a lot of sitting often pay
better than jobs that require us to move around. Peek into any office
building, and you’ll probably see well-compensated executives and middle
managers parked in meetings and minimum-wage janitors and security
guards on their feet. Because those higher-paid workers can afford better
health care, this can mask the negative health effects of all that sitting.11
That said, a survey of over 200,000 adults in Australia found that
“people who sit the most and perform no weekly physical activity” had
“the highest all-cause mortality”—meaning they literally died earlier than
their less sedentary neighbors.12 In fact, this study estimated that “sitting
was responsible for 6.9% of all deaths” among these adults aged 45 and
older. And about 25 percent of those adults sat at least eight hours per day.
Knowing how important it is to keep moving, would an office-bound
Buddha use a standing or treadmill desk? There is some evidence of health
benefits to these approaches to exercise at work, but I remain skeptical.
The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found that volunteers who worked at
treadmill desks did get more physical activity than those at traditional
workstations, and that there was some increase in employee
performance.13 But that was only after an initial decrease in performance,
presumably because it is actually difficult to walk and work at the same
time. Earlier research by the same team found only “very small” impacts
on employee health from treadmill use, and no increase in supervisor-
rated performance, again after an initial decline.14 A comprehensive
survey of 23 studies of standing and treadmill desks found that typing and
mouse performance was decreased on treadmills, resulting in reduced
productivity.15
As we’ll discuss later, Buddha was not a big fan of multitasking. A day
at a standing or treadmill desk might be better than a day of unrelenting
sitting, but better still would be a day spent alternating sitting with an
occasional walk or other physical activity. This may sound like an
unimaginable luxury, but with a bit of planning, these walks can often be
incorporated into your workday. I once had a job that involved lots of one-
on-one meetings with various coworkers, and I convinced almost all of
them that we should do these while walking around the building. I would
routinely rack up 10 miles of walking on heavy meeting days! At another
job, we were in a somewhat crowded space with no obvious place to walk,
but I managed to find another floor of the building that was still under
construction and would walk there with my colleagues, doing long loops
through the empty halls. At other times, I’ve held walking meetings in the
parking lot. Most of us find walking-and-talking more natural than
treadmill-based forms of walking-while-working. I certainly do.
There seems to be a nice synergy between mindfulness and exercise,
too. When researchers from the University of Louisville surveyed
members of a local YMCA, they found that those with stronger
mindfulness were better able to stick to an exercise regimen.16 They
concluded that perhaps something about the “non-judgmental, present-
focused awareness” developed through mindfulness training helped
prevent the all-too-common exercise “relapse,” where our good intentions
fall to the wayside after a few weeks (or less!). Researchers attempting to
use mindfulness to help dieters noticed the same thing: Women who
attended mindfulness workshops found themselves exercising about three
times more per week six months later.17 It seems that practicing
mindfulness encourages us to stay active—perhaps from building a
stronger awareness of our own body and its needs. When researchers in
Eugene, Oregon tried to recruit volunteers to compare long-time
meditators who exercised with those who didn’t, they couldn’t find any
sedentary meditators at all!18 As the researchers explained: “All
meditation practitioners reported habitual participation in moderate
exercise of some kind.”
At the same time, exercise seems to improve our mindfulness, just as
mindfulness improves our exercise. A study in Finland found that
“physically active adults had better mindfulness skills compared to less
physically active adults.”19 And as we discussed in chapter 5, mindfulness
has health benefits of its own, similar and complementary to those of
exercise. This may help explain why Japanese Zen monks—who spend
countless hours sitting more perfectly still than the most dedicated office
worker—nevertheless appear to have better-than-average overall health.20
Finding a way to take an exercise break during the workday has
multiple benefits beyond the purely physical. First, it creates natural
pauses in your day—and we just discussed the importance of taking breaks
in the last chapter. Second, breaking up long sedentary periods at work
with even light exercise seems to help offset the impact of all that
sitting.21 Third, if you can find a way to exercise with your colleagues,
that seems to come with added benefits, too. When three hospitals in
Denmark instituted a workplace exercise program, they found that workers
who exercised with their colleagues had more energy and experienced
fewer aches and pains after work.22
How much should you exercise? That answer will be different for each
of us. There is risk from overexertion, from too much exercise, as well as
too little. Buddha’s advice would be to avoid either extreme. As a recent
international study concluded, “Moderate exercise appears to be the sweet
spot,” if your goal is to increase health and longevity.23 Frequent high-
intensity training can be counterproductive—but don’t let this become an
excuse for an entirely sedentary life. As the Indian Buddhist sage
Santideva warned: “The more the body is protected, the more fragile it
becomes, the more it degenerates.”24 Pushing yourself a little is a good
thing.
For most of us, research suggests that something more like “a short,
leisurely jog a few times per week is adequate.”25 Pretty much any
exercise seems to help! A study in Canada found that even employees who
just biked to work were less stressed than those who drove.26
My own routine is to run a mile, first thing in the morning. I’m not a
particularly fast runner, so this takes a little over 10 minutes, including
warming up a bit at first. I charted out a one-mile loop through my
neighborhood, so I can get up, get dressed, and get this quick bout of
exercise in before my first cup of tea—or my first email. It’s not a lot, but
I can tell it makes a difference to my mental and physical health.
Buddha made time every day for physical activity, and you should, too.
The bottom line is that it’s essential to take care of the human body. Our
physical form is precious. That monk Santideva also wrote that “The body
is like an object on loan.”27 Everything we do in this life—working,
playing, loving, even meditating—is done with this body. And the best
way to care for it is to live life like those London bus conductors—and
like Buddha himself. You have to keep moving.
Physical activity is essential to your physical health, your mental
health, and your productivity at work. Find a form of exercise that works
for you. Commit to it regularly. Do something active at work every day,
even if it’s just a walk around the office or around the block. Your body
will thank you, your mind will thank you, and, eventually, your boss will
thank you, too.
 CHAPTER 10

Sleeping to Wake Up
BUDDHA LIVED BEFORE SMARTPHONES, COMPUTERS, television, radio,
electric lights—even before books and magazines. Anything you wanted to
do after sunset had to be done by lamplight, and lamp oil was expensive. It
seems safe to assume that life after dark was pretty dull. There was little
to do between dusk and dawn except sleep.
Perhaps for this reason, Buddha worried a lot more about his disciples
sleeping too much than sleeping too little. In one lecture to laypeople, we
find this verse:

Sleeping late, adultery,

Picking quarrels, doing harm,
Evil friends, and stinginess,
These six things destroy a man.1

Believe it or not, that wasn’t even the worst of it. Elsewhere he got still
more judgy, complaining about “the sluggish and gluttonous simpleton
who sleeps and rolls around like a fat, grain-fed hog.”2 Ouch!
These days, things are pretty different. With so many distractions at
our fingertips, it’s undersleeping—not oversleeping—that’s become an
epidemic. In her book, The Sleep Revolution, the best-selling author
Arianna Huffington describes her own literal collapse from chronic lack of
sleep, her body and mind so wrecked that she recalls fainting and hitting
her head, “coming back to consciousness in a pool of blood.”3 For most of
us, the proverbial wake-up call may not be so dramatic, but her story of
living on three or four hours of sleep, fueled by near-constant infusions of
coffee, will likely ring true for many. About 6 percent of the US
population reports getting less than five hours of sleep on a typical
weeknight, and about 40 percent report getting less than six hours. Such
short sleep has been associated with everything from obesity and diabetes
to increased risk of heart disease, cancer death, and even suicide.4 Even if
we avoid the most extreme pitfalls, lack of sleep can still leave us
overweight and unhappy.*
All this sleeplessness comes at a real cost in the workplace. We may
think we’re being heroes by squeezing in an extra hour of emails and
reports when we should be in bed, but the opposite is a lot more likely. A
review of recent research into insomnia found that it is “consistently
associated with excess absenteeism” at work, as well as higher risk of
accidents and reduced productivity. Instead of turning us into office
superstars, lack of sleep can “inhibit career progression” and “degrade job
satisfaction.”5 One study found that the average US worker loses the
equivalent of 7.8 days of productivity each year due to lack of sleep, which
costs their employers roughly $2,280 per employee.6 Another study put
“fatigue-related” drops in productivity at $3,156 per employee for
insomniacs—more than twice that of employees who got good sleep.7 And
it isn’t just the cost to companies. A recent economic analysis found that a
one-hour increase in sleep “increases earnings by 1.1% in the short run
and 5% in the long run,” even though sleeping more leaves less time for
actual working.8 That’s a lot of money—and it doesn’t even count the
savings to your monthly Starbucks bill.
The cure for all of this is simple, but not easy: more sleep. So how do
you get it?
You need to start by making sleep a priority. You should be as worried
about being “late to sleep” as you are about being late to work—maybe
even more so, since losing that sleep will mess up your work the next day,
too. Decide when you need to wake up in the morning, and subtract eight
hours from that. That’s the latest you should be getting to bed, because
that’s when you should already be asleep.
Create a bedtime ritual. Some people find it helps to read, ideally on
actual paper (see more on this on the next page). Others may prefer to
write in a journal or have a cup of herbal or decaffeinated tea. Stay away
from alcohol as a sleep aid, though. While a drink or two may help you
fall asleep, it also disrupts your sleep9 (among other problems). Don’t eat
late at night and try to get some exercise during the day (as we just
discussed). Both of those help a lot.
There are a few more nonnegotiables. First, perhaps the most important
thing you can do is stop using your phone and other electronic devices at
night. About 90 percent of Americans use some electronic device in the
hour before bed,10 with “interactive” devices like smartphones and laptops
causing the most sleep disruption. Seemingly innocuous e-books and e-
readers can be problematic, too. Studies have shown that when people used
these devices, they typically “took longer to fall asleep and had reduced
evening sleepiness” as well as “reduced next-morning alertness,”
compared to when they read a printed book.11 Even the dim light of such
devices suppresses the hormone melatonin, disrupting the natural sleep
cycles. There is no substitute for just shutting off your devices well before
it’s time to go to sleep. Trust me.
Second, you need darkness. Put simply, your brain is programmed to
sleep in the dark and wake up in the light, and fighting this natural
tendency can wreak havoc on your circadian clock. A survey of recent
studies found that nighttime exposure to bright light causes all sorts of
sleep problems.12 Start lowering the lights well before your intended
bedtime, and if you can’t get your bedroom truly dark (or you sleep with a
partner who still stays up late), invest a few dollars in a decent sleep mask.
You’ll be amazed at how much of a difference this makes.
If you simply can’t get enough sleep at night, brief naps during the day
are another option. Napping has long been associated with laziness, but
this stigma is thankfully starting to fade. There is good evidence that even
a short nap can make us more productive,13 and can improve subsequent
job performance.14 The key is to find a quiet place, and not to sleep too
long. Most people find 15 to 30 minutes sufficient. That sleep mask we
just talked about can come in very handy here, too.
By the way, even Buddha had to deal with nap-shaming. There’s a story
that one of his monks once criticized him for taking a nap, saying that
some other teachers called this sort of behavior “abiding in delusion.”15
This was apparently quite an insult among ancient Indian masters and not
one Buddha took lightly. Buddha explained that it was a hot day and he had
just eaten—and anyway what mattered was who was enlightened and not
who took a nap. (And, by the way, Buddha was enlightened and the monk
wasn’t, so abide in that, buddy.)
Buddha considered restful sleep one of the many benefits of
meditation. In one story, he explains: “The peaceful one sleeps well,
having attained peace of mind.”16 Elsewhere he elaborates that after the
“liberation of the mind” through meditation, “one sleeps well, one
awakens happily, [and] one does not have bad dreams,”17 among many
other pluses—including becoming pleasing to other humans, which also
sounds pretty good.
Modern meditators often find this, too. One clinical study found that
patients in a six-week mindfulness meditation curriculum not only
improved their sleep but also had fewer symptoms of depression and
fatigue.18 Others similarly find significant improvements to “insomnia
and sleep disturbance” from mindfulness-based treatments.19
Whether or not you want to meditate just before you go to bed is up to
you. Some people find that it clears their mind and helps prepare them to
sleep. But other people get up from meditation feeling more alert and
awake. For them, mornings are a better bet. Traditional Buddhist
monasteries typically do both, with organized meditation sessions first
thing in the morning and last thing before lights out.
What if you’re lying in bed, in the dark, you’ve avoided eating late, you
stayed away from alcohol or caffeine, you exercised that day, and you still
can’t fall asleep? Even if you don’t do formal sitting meditation in the
evenings, some of the same techniques we talked about earlier can often
help you relax. Find a comfortable position in your bed, and gradually
relax every muscle, starting with your toes and working your way up to the
crown of your head. Then listen to your breath, trying your best not to
focus on anything else. Watch your thoughts come and go without letting
yourself get sucked in. Leave your phone where it is, even if you suddenly
remember a text you meant to send. Remind yourself that nothing is more
important right now than letting go and getting to sleep.
It will take some experimentation to find a routine that works for you.
Don’t stop trying. Sleep is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
You’ll work better and feel better. Just remember, you can’t wake up
without first going to sleep.
 CHAPTER 11

Telling the Truth

MANY FAITHS HAVE AN INJUNCTION AGAINST LYING. In the Old Testament, not
lying is one of God’s Ten Commandments (either eighth or ninth,
depending on who’s counting).* Islam similarly considers lying a grave
sin. Buddhism is no exception. Buddha insisted that any monk who told a
deliberate lie had to confess his misstatement.1 Elsewhere, he includes
lying with killing, stealing, and adultery as something to be avoided by all
of us—monks, nuns, and laity alike.2
But you don’t need me or Buddha to tell you not to lie in general, and
not to lie on the job in particular. You already know that. And yet much of
the time we don’t tell the truth at work—especially in difficult situations.
One study suggested that the average adult lies at least once a day!3 And
the tendency to lie at work may be even greater than in other social
settings.4 We hedge or dodge tough questions. We give vacuous answers
and tepid feedback instead of speaking our true mind. We nod in fake
agreement when our boss says something crazy. Why?
The popular author and co-founder of Radical Candor, LLC Kim Scott
suggests that this is how we’ve been taught throughout our careers to
“avoid conflict or embarrassment.”5 We think the key to job success is
getting along with everyone, not rocking the boat, and that doing this
means avoiding hard truths. Yet, in fact, Scott explains, the results of
being honest are often much more positive than we imagine, even when
we’re delivering a tough message: “You fear people will become angry or
vindictive; instead they are usually grateful for the chance to talk it
through.” In the end, no one actually likes being lied to.
But there’s nuance to being honest, and Buddha understood that, too.
Just because something is true doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to say right
now. This is something I never managed to explain to my grandmother.
She couldn’t resist sharing what she really thought about my choices—
whether in sweaters or careers. I’ve had countless colleagues who never
understood it, either. They’d take every opportunity to belittle their
coworkers, pointing out each harmless mistake in the name of candid
feedback. But being honest doesn’t have to mean being a jerk.
Buddha talked a lot about what constitutes “right speech,” which he
believed to be an integral part of the path to nirvana. Truth was just a piece
of it. Before saying anything, even if it’s true, Buddha suggests that we ask
ourselves a few more questions: Is it helpful? Is now the right time? And
is it kind?6
Let’s talk about helpful first. If a colleague shows up to work wearing
hideous shoes, you are under no obligation to point this out. If an
incompetent coworker is fired, you do not need to say, “I’m surprised you
lasted this long.” The question is not just whether these statements are
true, but also whether they are what the other person needs to hear. You
need to ask yourself if hearing these things will help them in any way.
Most of us have a limited ability to absorb criticism. If you’re asked
for feedback on a presentation or report that’s a complete disaster, it’s
often most helpful to choose one or two places where your colleague can
improve the most and save the rest of your feedback for the next round. If
a coworker asks for feedback, it’s often best to clarify up front what
exactly they are looking for from you. If they just want a high-level
thumbs-up or thumbs-down, they may not appreciate a line-by-line
markup of their grammar and style.
Similarly, nothing can get done in a workplace if we are endlessly
debating the same questions over and over again. One thing I like to
remind myself is that if I’m working with a group of smart and well-
intentioned people, the second-best decision is almost as good as the best
one.* So even if I’m sure I’m right about something, at a certain point, it’s
best to set aside my disagreement so the team can move on. Once it’s clear
that further discussion isn’t changing anyone else’s mind, it’s not helpful
to continue voicing my dissent.
Buddha also worried about the when as well as the what. As alluded to
above, if a team is struggling with a particularly contentious question, it
may be time to keep further misgivings to yourself. Many people also
respond poorly to public criticism, so a big group meeting may be the
wrong time to offer feedback on their work, no matter how well
intentioned. When someone has just gotten a thrashing from their boss, it
may be the wrong time to admit that you mostly agree. When someone has
just given a high-pressure presentation to a big client, it may be the wrong
time to tell him how badly you thought it went. They’ll figure that out
soon enough, and you can always bring it up later if they don’t.
I’m sure you can think of countless other examples. Saying even the
right thing at the wrong time is often much worse than saying nothing at
all—especially when we know the truth is going to be difficult to hear.
That’s why Buddha considered finding the right time to give feedback as
important as speaking the truth. As he put it:

“The one I consider most excellent and sublime is the one who
speaks dispraise of someone who deserves dispraise, and the
dispraise is accurate, truthful, and timely; and who also speaks
praise of someone who deserves praise, and the praise is accurate,
truthful, and timely.”7

In other words, whether we’re sharing praise or dispraise, timeliness is

key.
Buddha’s last admonition on “right speech” is perhaps the hardest, but
also indispensable: You have to be kind. This is not to say that everything
needs to be sugarcoated, but even the most direct criticism can be “spoken
gently,” as Buddha put it, “with a mind of loving-kindness.”8
The most important thing to remember is to show care for the person
and save criticism for the work. No matter how bad a job someone might
be doing, they are a human being, worthy of your respect. You need to
make this respect clear to them in all your interactions, not just when
you’re expressing criticism. You build up trust with colleagues by caring
for them every day—asking about their partners or children, checking in
after an illness or tragedy, inquiring about a recent vacation. Colleagues
want to be seen as whole people, and will be much more receptive to
criticism if they know it comes from a sincere desire to help.
The same is true when we’re on the receiving end of such feedback. Try
to accept criticism as a reflection of your work, not your self, even if your
criticizing coworker is not skilled in making that distinction. And whether
you agree with the feedback or not, don’t let the discussion become
personal. Buddha advised us not to hate the people who criticize us, no
matter how harshly. He asks us not even to hate someone who might
“sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw”9—which it can
feel like sometimes when our work is under attack.*
Another thing to keep in mind is that, for most of us, it’s much harder
to be cruel face-to-face than it is by email or text or phone. This means it’s
much safer to deliver criticism in person. I had a boss years ago who
instructed me never to say anything negative to anyone by email—advice I
routinely forget, and then instantly wish I had remembered. Not only is
our own tone hard to judge when we communicate electronically, but we
lose all the subtle signals of how our feedback is being received. When
we’re physically present, we can usually sense what the other person is
hearing, and not just what we think we’re saying. We can modulate our
tone and adjust our phrasing if we sense something isn’t landing as we
intended.
These lessons on kindness are particularly tricky if you’re a manager or
supervisor, because then it’s your job is to give honest feedback. Many
managers try too hard to be kind, resulting in what author Kim Scott calls
“ruinous empathy,” which she says, “is responsible for the vast majority of
management mistakes” she sees in the corporate world.10 The primary
goal of giving feedback at work isn’t generally to make someone feel
better;* it’s to help them work better. Delivered well, honest feedback can
often accomplish both. Again, the key is to be direct and focus any
criticism on the work, rather than the person. The great Indian Buddhist
teacher Santideva summarized Buddha’s guidance as follows: “One should
speak confident, measured words, clear in meaning, delighting the mind,
pleasing to the ear, soft and slow, and stemming from compassion.”11 If
you can deliver that kind of feedback, you’re on your way to being a very
good manager.
To be clear, Buddha didn’t consider any of these questions a license to
lie. The traditional monastic codes provide for very few exceptions to the
no-lying rule. Buddha allowed that sometimes we speak too “hurriedly”
and thus make a mistake.12 He made another exception when we simply
misspeak, saying one thing when we mean another. In both cases, we
should correct the mistake when we can, but it’s not considered a violation
of Buddha’s rules. But that’s about all the wiggle room Buddha allows. In a
lecture he gave to his own son, he says, “I will not utter a falsehood even
as a joke.”*13 Yikes!
Buddha offered all these considerations mostly to encourage us to think
before speaking at all. Remember, less is very often more. Buddha was a
big fan of silence, and of knowing when to pause. Like so much advice in
this book, the best path is one of deliberation and balance. Think before
you speak, choosing the right time and place as well as the right words. As
Buddha put it in another verse: “Bettetr than a thousand meaningless
statements is one meaningful word, which, having been heard, brings
peace.”14
 CHAPTER 12

Bickering Buddhas
GIVEN HIS LOVE OF TRUTH TELLING, YOU MAY BE SURPRISED to learn that
Buddha worried a lot about arguing. One of the gravest offenses in his
monastic code was “causing a schism” in the sangha—basically letting
arguments get out of hand. He had likely seen this doom other schools of
yoga and meditation around India in his day and didn’t want his followers
falling into the same trap. He also understood that any group of people
spending lots of time together are bound to have disagreements—
especially when they commit to telling the truth, as Buddha insisted his
followers do. When he listed the five “grave deeds” that lead to an
immediate rebirth in hell, letting arguments get so out of hand that they
created such a schism was right up there with killing your mother.1 He
thought it was that bad.
So Buddha knew that finding healthy ways to disagree would be
essential to his community’s survival. His monks and nuns would have to
learn to argue constructively and resolve disputes amicably. This is just as
true in the workplace as it is in a monastery. A certain amount of conflict
on the job may be inevitable, but unchecked it can get out of hand.
Disputes there may start with seemingly minor “task conflicts,”
essentially disagreements on how some piece of work is supposed to be
completed. But things get messy when those morph into “relationship
conflicts”—in other words, when things get personal.2
Buddha’s advice to his monks contains solid wisdom we can use at
work. Most importantly: Fight fair. As Buddha explained, if someone is
questioning you about something, it’s never the right response to “crush
him, ridicule him, and seize upon a slight error.” Basically, don’t be a
bully. Buddha called anyone who resorts to such techniques “unfit to
talk.”3 I agree.
It’s also essential to focus on ideas, not people. As we just discussed,
Buddha placed a high value on truth. It doesn’t matter who’s right—it
matters what’s right. The goal of any debate or argument at work should
never be to “win,” but to discover the truth.
 For this reason, there is no particular value in scoring rhetorical points
or exploiting some unintended misstatement. Regardless of the skill of our
opponent, we should be arguing against the best possible version of the
opposing view. When two people on my team disagree, I sometimes have
them try an exercise where they each do their best to summarize the
opposing view. Forcing yourself to think through the logic of the other
side, and trying to express that position as favorably as you can, often
helps reveal where you might find common ground. You might even
convince yourself to change your mind!
All this brings us to the topic of meetings. Almost no one looks back on
a day at work and thinks, “I wish I’d had more meetings.” Yet meetings
are a big part of how work gets done in many organizations. And meetings
are probably where most workplace arguments end up.
Like so many things in this book, it’s possible to have both too many
meetings and too few. The problem of too many meetings is obvious: No
one has time to do all the things that get decided in the meetings. Too
many meetings can also trigger a vicious cycle. I once worked at a
company where almost everyone was always in meetings. This meant you
could never catch anyone at their desks, so the only way to speak to them
was to schedule yet another meeting. The meetings multiplied and the
problem only got worse.
Too few meetings may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it
happens and also causes issues. I worked at a start-up once that had no
scheduled meetings at all, and had only a single meeting room for the
whole company. One happy result was that we all had lots of unstructured
time to do serious, thoughtful work. It was also easy to find specific
people when you needed to talk to them. But it was very hard to talk to lots
of people at once. You could try to corral everyone you needed into an
impromptu discussion, but invariably someone would be off doing
something else, unaware that they were needed for this particular
unscheduled chat. By not planning these discussions in advance (in other
words, by not scheduling a meeting), we could never be sure we’d get
everyone we needed together at once.
Most meetings fall into one of two categories: decision making or
information sharing. Decision-making meetings will generally be active
discussions involving all (or at least most) of the attendees, while
information-sharing meetings are often more passive, with perhaps even
just one person talking and the rest listening. Some people will argue that
this second category has become obsolete and that email or other
electronic means are better for one-to-many communications. I don’t
agree. There is still something unique about hearing directly from a
coworker. There is a level of nuance and emotion that can be lost in
written communication, or even in streaming videos and the like. In a
sense, every lecture the Buddha gave could be considered a meeting of this
second sort, and these were so valuable that his disciples memorized what
he said!
Meetings can also be both too large and too small. In a decision-
making meeting, the risk is usually that the meeting is too large. The rule
of thumb is that you should invite all the people needed to make the
decision, but no more than that. The reason to be strict here is that the
quality of a discussion declines quickly with lots of participants. Two-
person conversations are very efficient—each of you can make your points
and respond to the other right away. Once you have three people, the back-
and-forth is trickier, and it only gets worse from there. The more people
involved, the harder it will be to keep things on track.
You can usually tell if a decision-making meeting is too large if some
people are not participating, or if the discussion is going around in circles.
When you see this happening, it’s best to pause and propose a smaller
meeting to sort out this particular point, and then move on.
In an information-sharing meeting, the risk is usually that the meeting
is too small. Here you want to include everyone who needs to know
whatever information is being shared. Since it’s usually only one or a few
people talking anyway, adding more people just adds to the audience and
so makes the meeting more efficient, not less. In these situations, it pays
to be generous with your invitations.
A common problem is getting confused about which sort of meeting
you are trying to have, or setting up meetings that are a bit of both. You
then have to navigate the conflicting pressures of wanting to make the
meeting small and large at the same time. It’s sometimes best to split
these hybrid meetings in two: a small meeting for making the decisions,
and a larger meeting for communicating those decisions to a wider group.
Many people see meeting invitations as a source of status. After all, if
decision-making meetings are being kept as small as possible, then being
invited to one must mean you are important, even essential. I certainly felt
that way for many years. I fought to attend what I thought were the
important meetings, and resented the times I wasn’t included. This is
another reason meetings get too big—we don’t want to hurt anyone’s
feelings by leaving them out. My daughters’ preschool teacher had a
saying that “There’s always room for one more.” That’s a wonderful spirit
of inclusion for playgrounds and parties—and I try to follow it!—but it’s
terrible for many meetings.
As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve come to feel exactly the opposite
way about meeting invitations. Now any meeting I’m excluded from is a
small victory. If people are able to make a decision without me, then I
have informed and empowered them successfully. I must be doing
something right. I only want to be invited to meetings where I am truly
required and, even then, I hope to set things up so I won’t be required next
time.
In recent years, I’ve also developed a few ground rules for myself in
meetings. First, never interrupt anyone who’s speaking—or trying to
speak. This is much harder than it sounds! Many companies and teams
have a culture of interrupting, so that if you wait for a true opening before
you speak, you can’t speak at all. Even so, I try to make a conscious effort
not to interrupt people, and to find other ways to signal that I’d like to
speak next. Interrupting people in meetings is highly contagious, but
waiting your turn can be surprisingly contagious, too. When you stop
interrupting, you’ll find that others often stop as well.
Second, in decision-making meetings, I try to ensure that everyone gets
to speak and that no one monopolizes the conversation. After all, if the
meeting was correctly constructed to begin with, everyone there needs to
participate—otherwise, they wouldn’t have been invited. There should be
no pure spectators in a good decision-making meeting.
Yet oftentimes you’ll see one or two people dominating the discussion,
and several people not speaking at all. Of course, it’s possible that the
wrong people were invited—in which case you might want to propose that
the meeting be rescheduled with a smaller group, as mentioned above. But,
more often than not, the issue is that some of the necessary voices are
struggling to be heard. I try to encourage the quieter members to speak up.
“I don’t think we’ve heard from…” is a good way to create some space for
others.
Third, I try to follow the rules of disagreement we discussed at the start
of this chapter. The goal of the meeting is to make the right decision, not
to feed anyone’s ego. It doesn’t matter who turns out to be right as long as
we come to the best conclusion. Debate in meetings should never get
personal. No one should leave a meeting feeling personally attacked, and
even those on the “losing” side should leave feeling heard.
Finally, we can’t become obsessed with perfection. It is often more
beneficial to make a good decision now than to make the best decision
later. Again, in a room full of smart, well-intentioned people, even the
second-best decision is probably still quite good, and almost certainly
good enough.
Meetings, despite their much-derided reputation, can be extremely
productive. Buddha’s original sangha held meetings twice a month, on
new-moon and full-moon days, to recite the monastic rules and confess
any recent violations. All monks and nuns attended, and all participated in
the discussion.
Most of us probably can’t get by at work with just one meeting every
two weeks, but we can try to ensure that all the meetings we attend are
both necessary and efficient. We can commit ourselves to listening to
others, and not getting overly attached to our own views.
I don’t know anyone who truly enjoys fighting with their coworkers. I
certainly don’t. The Buddha believed that all “beings wish to live without
hate, hostility, or enmity,” that instead “they wish to live in peace.”4 I bet
that’s how you feel most days.
Any healthy group of dedicated people will include a variety of
opinions. Even enlightened people seem to disagree once in a while—as
you’ll see if you ever attend a meeting of Buddhist masters. Yet you can
live in peace even when you disagree with your colleagues. Just remember
these basic rules and you’ll never let your workplace arguments get out of
hand.
 CHAPTER 13

How to Be Ambitious
IF THE CAUSE OF ALL OUR SUFFERING IS OUR CONSTANT striving for more,
where does that leave our careers? Doesn’t a successful job require us to
want to be successful—specifically, to be more successful than we are
now? That would seem to require a certain level of striving. Can we truly
succeed in business without really trying?
In many respects, Buddhist monks traditionally went all-in on this lack
of ambition, and still do in the Theravada sects common in Southeast Asia.
They go out each morning to beg for food and are strictly forbidden from
saving any food from one day to the next. In a very real sense, they start
each day with literally nothing* and hope that all their needs—at least
from a nutritional perspective—will be provided by the community. They
have no reason to strive for any material possessions beyond their daily
needs because they are prohibited from accumulating any wealth. Even
extra food donations would simply have to be given away at the end of the
day, so begging longer or more effectively doesn’t accomplish anything
useful. More food on any given alms round would just be more to carry—
and potentially more to waste.
But that system only works because not everyone is or ever was a
monk. Someone had to be thinking of the future. Someone had to plant and
harvest crops according to the seasons. Someone had to plan and prepare
meals. Eventually, someone had to earn enough money to donate funds to
build monasteries where monks and nuns could live and roads where they
could walk.* Buddhists tend to view the arrangement as mutually
beneficial, with the monks and nuns spreading the dharma with the laity’s
support. But regardless of whether or not this seems fair to you, the fact
remains that the monks can only live this way because someone else is
planning ahead.
And, even beyond that, why does anyone become a monk or a nun in
the first place? Clearly not for the money, since monks and nuns are
prohibited from even handling money, and also not for any of the other
trappings of wealth and power like fancy homes (forbidden) or clothes
(forbidden) or sex and drugs (both forbidden). But it seems reasonable to
assume that many of them at least are chasing after something. It takes
effort to leave your home and live under these austere rules. There must be
some motivation behind it. Isn’t striving for awakening still a form of
striving?
Buddhists have faced this paradox from the beginning. Buddha himself
was clear that his years after leaving the palace were not aimless
wandering. He had a goal, a purpose. He was searching for something. And
eventually he found it. If he had accomplished nothing in those six years,
we wouldn’t call him the Buddha. He’d be the long-forgotten Prince
Siddhartha, just another disappearing deadbeat dad.
Mindfulness itself implies a sort of goal—the goal of bringing our full
attention to everything we do. Buddhists are firm believers in the old
adage that anything worth doing is worth doing well. You see this attitude
at play in Zen temples throughout Japan, where it applies equally to the
skilled artisans crafting pottery and paintings and to the silent monks
raking sand. There is nothing wrong with trying to do your best work,
always, regardless of what you do. And this trying is itself a goal.
Buddhists often have long-term goals, too. Big projects take time,
whether that’s building a new temple or finishing medical school, filling
out a complicated spreadsheet or closing a deal. Nothing would get done if
none of us had goals. I could never have written this book without goals.
But not all goals are created equal, and not all goals are worthy of our
efforts. Later branches of Buddhism considered the bodhisattva vow to be
the highest of goals. Bodhisattvas are fully enlightened beings—potential
Buddhas—who have nevertheless decided to delay entering complete
nirvana until they have freed all other beings from suffering, too. (We’ll
have a chapter on this goal specifically toward the end.) After that goal,
the second most noble goal would be the individual quest to discover our
own awakening. If that sounds a little selfish, the traditional reasoning
behind elevating such a goal is that we can’t truly help other people
overcome suffering until we have done it ourselves. Otherwise, we’re still
inevitably trapped in our own selfish desires—at least now and then. If we
truly want to be dedicated to taking care of others, we also have to take
care of ourselves.
Where does this leave career goals, like getting that next promotion,
landing that next client, or making that next sale? How about angling for a
raise or bonus or just applying for a better job?
Buddha taught that bad goals, unhealthy or unwholesome goals, tend to
stem from three problematic sources: greed, hate, and delusion. Any goals
motivated by one of these three is inherently tainted. Conversely, any goal
free of such taints might well be just fine.
This can be a little tricky to work out in practice. We often have to look
quite deeply at our goals to uncover our true motivations. There might be
nothing wrong with wanting a raise so that you can provide security and
comfort for your family. But more money alone won’t save a failing
marriage or nurture neglected children. That requires love, not money, and
believing otherwise is simply one of the many delusions that lead us
astray.
Similarly, wanting a promotion because you think you could do better
work with a bigger team or broader responsibilities, or wanting a new job
because you think you would be better suited to it, may be just fine. But
treating salaries or titles as a sort of scorecard for life is a manifestation of
greed.
And hate is bad, too—but you probably knew that already. Trying to get
ahead simply to get even with someone else or to have power over others
is never a good goal.
Some longtime meditators end up with the opposite problem—not too
many goals, but too few! Once they realize that a fat bank account or an
impressive resume won’t bring true happiness, how can they stay focused
on work at all? What’s the point?
At some level, they’re right: There is no point. It’s no easier to realize
awakening in a mansion than in a tiny shack. It may even be harder.
Buddha fled his life in the palace for a reason. There was something
distracting about all that luxury. But a life of pain and deprivation wasn’t
the answer, either. All that physical anguish created its own distractions.
As with everything in Buddha’s teachings, the answer seems to be
about balance, about finding that middle way. Some material success in
life can be useful and help provide a foundation for practice. And it’s all
relative. For some people, taking time off work to join a weeklong
meditation retreat sounds like an unimaginable luxury. For others, having
to work the other 50-odd weeks instead of living full time at a temple
might seem like a terrible hardship. The right balance of work and family
and practice will look different for each of us. If you want to quit your job
and move to a temple, and you can afford to do that, I certainly won’t stop
you. But if you want to keep working to support yourself and your
practice, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. As long as your goals are
pure, either path can be noble.
Keep in mind that even the most illustrious goals can sometimes
become distractions. There is a famous story about Ananda, one of
Buddha’s most accomplished disciples. Ananda attended almost every
lecture given by Buddha, and his prodigious memory meant he could
recite them all word for word. After Buddha died, his disciples decided to
assemble 500 of his fully awakened followers so they could agree on his
true teachings and ensure that they would propagate them correctly to the
next generation of students. Of course, they wanted Ananda there with
them. He knew more of the teachings than anyone! But there was a catch
—Ananda hadn’t realized awakening yet.
Bummer! Ananda was super-upset. The other students agreed to make
an exception—the meeting would now be 499 enlightened students plus
Ananda. Problem solved! You can imagine how humiliating that sounded
to him. Ananda vowed to realize awakening before the meeting. Nothing
wrong with that! In theory, that’s a perfectly noble goal. The drive to
awakening was one of Buddha’s goals, too. Yet this extreme focus on the
future and not the present got in Ananda’s way. And, in this case, there was
some basic impurity in Ananda’s motivations. He wasn’t trying to realize
awakening to end suffering or to help others—he just didn’t want to be
embarrassed at the meeting. It was all about ego, really, a form of greed.
And so Ananda meditated as hard as he could, but he still couldn’t get
there. He was stuck.
The night before the meeting, Ananda knew it was down to the wire. He
stayed up all night meditating, just as Buddha had before his own great
awakening. No luck. By morning it still wasn’t happening. He was out of
time. He would have to swallow his pride and attend the meeting as
everybody’s collective +1. He had failed. He lay down to catch some
much-needed sleep, having given up his goal of realizing awakening—and
bam! Before his head touched the ground, he had his awakening. All he
had needed to do was stop obsessing about the goal.
 Sometimes we have to do a task just to do it. We have to take pride in
our work and bring our full attention to it. There’s nothing wrong with
having wholesome goals, as long as we aren’t motivated by greed or hate
and we’re honest with ourselves about what these goals will and won’t
accomplish. But we can’t let the goals themselves become just another
distraction. We can’t let them stop us from paying attention. Sometimes
the best way—even the only way—to achieve our goals is to let them go.
 CHAPTER 14

What Yoda Got Wrong

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE GOALS. YOU ALSO HAVE TO make an effort. You
have to try.
Some people think of Buddha as a happy-go-lucky, anything -goes kind
of guy. The chubby smiling statue you see in Chinese restaurants—who is
not actually the Buddha*—reinforces this stereotype. The Buddhist beads
you see draped around hippies and Phish fans contribute to that image, too.
Depictions of the true Buddha typically show him sitting or perhaps lying
down. He tends to look peaceful and content, dignified, and wise. But he
never looks like he’s trying very hard.
In reality, Buddha was not a go-with-the-flow type at all. He did try. He
worked hard and expected his followers to work hard, too. He cared a lot
about what he called effort. Awakening isn’t just something that happens,
he explained. In order for a monk to follow the path, “he makes an effort,
arouses energy, applies his mind, and strives.”1 As the scholar-monk
Bhikkhu Bodhi summarizes, “The work of self-cultivation is not easy” and
requires “unremitting effort.” There is no substitute for doing the work,
and “there is no one who can do it for us but ourselves.”2
Buddha also worried a lot about laziness, the flip side of effort, perhaps
because it is so easy to mistake meditation for idleness. He listed laziness,
along with alcoholism and gambling, as sure ways to ruin. He got pretty
specific, too, describing these dangers of getting too lazy:

Thinking: “It’s too cold,” one does not work; thinking: “It’s too
hot,” one does not work; Thinking: “It’s too early,” one does not
work; thinking: “It’s too late,” one does not work; Thinking: “I’m
too hungry,” one does not work; Thinking: “I’m too full,” one does
not work.3

We’ve probably all had days like that, days when we can find countless
reasons to do nothing and not much reason to do anything. And you’ve
probably worked with people who seem to feel that way every day.
In the work arena, we usually call this phenomenon burnout, and it is a
real problem. As Buddha knew, anything worth doing takes effort, and that
includes everything from career advancement to spiritual awakening. You
won’t get anywhere if you can’t summon the energy to try.
The key to avoiding burnout and maintaining effort at work seems to be
doing things you enjoy and find personally fulfilling. That may seem both
intuitively obvious and occasionally impossible. But the good news is that
research in the workplace suggests you don’t have to love your job all the
time. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic surveyed hundreds of doctors on a
wide range of topics covering work characteristics and career
satisfaction.4 What they found may surprise you: “Physicians who spent at
least 20 percent of their time in the aspect of work that was most
meaningful to them had a rate of burnout roughly half that of those who
spent less than 20 percent.”
That is, spending just 20 percent of your time doing the part of your job
you truly love can be enough to keep you motivated. In the Mayo Clinic
study, spending more time than that didn’t make much of a difference.
This was true regardless of which parts of the job those doctors loved.
Some found the greatest fulfillment in caring for patients, some in
teaching other doctors, and some in running the administrative side of
things. But it didn’t matter what they found most meaningful, as long as
they spent at least 20 percent of their time doing it.
In a typical eight-hour day, 20 percent is a bit more than an hour and a
half. It’s not that much time. One approach is to make this the first thing
you do when you get to work. Another is to make it a reward for getting
other tasks done. I’ve tried both and find both strategies effective.
Sometimes it’s more a matter of pausing to realize that you’re already
doing the part of your job that brings you meaning. Maybe you’re working
in retail or the service industry, and what you really love is talking to
customers and helping them find whatever they need. That may not be
something you can schedule in advance, but you can remind yourself each
day that this is what makes your job special.
I have two other rituals that help me find this balance. First, when I get
to work, I make a list of things to do that day. Some of these will be things
I need to do, but others will be things I want to do. Writing all these down
helps a lot, both so I don’t forget anything and to keep me motivated
throughout the day. Second, before I go home in the evening, I try to look
back on my day. How did I spend my time? What did I accomplish? Did I
get to the parts of my job I love?
You can use these rituals to help make sure that you’re spending some
time each day on the things you find most rewarding. Start by including a
few of these on your list—they are just as important in the long run as that
new project your boss gave you or that deadline looming this week.
Writing these down along with your other daily priorities ensures they
won’t get lost in the hectic rush of other work.
At the end of the day, look back on how you’ve spent your time. Do you
feel good about your choices today? Did you spend at least an hour or two
doing work you love? If not, what changes can you make tomorrow to get
yourself back on track? Try to make tomorrow a little more balanced than
today.
A lot of the other techniques in this book can also help keep your
energy up—like eating well, getting enough sleep, and exercising
regularly. When you find your energy flagging badly, try to take a break
and walk around, even for just five minutes. If you can get outside, even
better—our bodies and mind are trained to wake up in the sunlight.
Another contributor to burnout is failure—or just fear of failure. It’s
hard to keep up your energy when work isn’t going well. Working on a
project that fails feels like a waste of time.
But it isn’t a waste of time. Failure is a useful signal—it tells you
you’re taking real risks. If you never fail at anything, you can’t be trying
anything very hard. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs often talk about the
virtue of “failing fast.”5 This is not to say that failure is good necessarily,
but if you are going to fail, better sooner than later.
Applying this to your own work, it’s often useful to tackle the hardest
part of a risky project first. If you fail, at least you haven’t invested too
much time yet. You can move on to the next thing. If you start with the
easy bits, you could end up working weeks or months on something before
you find out your approach isn’t going to work after all. By starting with
the most challenging parts, you also get the excitement of discovery, the
thrill of tackling the unknown. This often helps keep you motivated. Even
if it doesn’t work out, you’ll learn a lot working on something difficult.
And if you succeed, you can forge ahead to the end knowing it should be
mostly smooth sailing.
For most of us, effort and ambition often go hand in hand. You can’t
accomplish anything without effort, and it’s easier to maintain your effort
when you have a goal in mind. Your daily to-do list encompasses your
short-term goals, while your career ambitions describe your long-term
goals. You don’t want to obsess about these on a daily basis, but reflecting
on your career progression monthly or so can help keep you motivated day
by day. When you realize that one of your goals isn’t going to work out,
you cross it off and reorient yourself toward another one. You always keep
trying.
There is a story that Buddha was once residing at a monastery with
hundreds of his most devoted followers. After a brief visit to a nearby
village, many of the monks sat around making small talk instead of
meditating.6 Buddha saw them lounging around idly and admonished them
for not trying hard enough: “It’s up to you to make strong effort; teachers
only tell you how.”7
Once again, goals in themselves are not enough. You have to work hard.
The universe’s most famous fictional Zen master is probably Yoda, the
diminutive teacher who instructs Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie
series. Yoda famously told Luke, “Do or do not. There is no try.”8 Sadly,
on this particular point, Master Yoda got it wrong.
 CHAPTER 15

Remembering to Breathe
LET’S SAY YOU’RE DOING EVERYTHING WE’VE TALKED about so far. You’re
meditating. You’re paying attention. You sleep well and eat well and
exercise frequently. You tell the truth and argue honestly. You have
wholesome goals and make a healthy effort to achieve them.
And you’re still having a bad day at work.
This happens. I have bad days. You have bad days. Even the most
experienced meditators I know have bad days.
Oftentimes, bad days come down to some sort of misunderstanding,
what Buddha would call a delusion. One of Buddha’s lessons was that
things are not always what they seem. Our mind plays tricks on us.
Sometimes our mind makes things look better than they really are. At
work, I think the mind usually makes things look worse.
In my job, I try to distinguish between two kinds of problems, which I
call real problems and fake problems. A real problem, quite simply, is one
that, if not solved, will cause something bad to happen. A fake problem, on
the other hand, is one that you can ignore without any real negative
consequences.
This may sound like an obvious distinction, but once you start trying to
categorize problems at work this way, it’s amazing how many problems
turn out to be fake. For example, a common problem for many people on
the job is the hunch that a colleague or boss doesn’t like you. That never
feels good, and often causes us a lot of stress. It feels like a problem that
needs to be solved. But ask yourself: What happens if you don’t solve it?
Unless this alleged dislike is causing actual conflict and interfering with
your ability to do your work, you can probably just ignore it. You don’t
need everybody to like you, even if that might feel good.
At larger companies, you’ll sometimes hear concerns over things like
two people having the same or very similar titles or two teams have the
same or very similar missions. This can create tension, and sometimes
leaves both sides feeling threatened, even if they rarely get in each other’s
way. Another common issue is two different ways of doing a certain task,
or disagreement over the right format for some sort of meeting or report.
Surely consistency is better, right? Perhaps. But faced with such a
situation, I often ask myself what will happen if I don’t do anything about
it at all. Quite often, the answer is nothing.
People bringing fake problems to me at work will often underscore
their urgency by explaining how long the problem has persisted—perhaps
weeks or months or even years!—not realizing that this is evidence of the
absence of any real problem. If a situation has existed for months or years
without negative consequences, it’s probably not a real problem. And if the
only consequence of not solving the problem is that it will still exist a
month or even a year from now, that’s yet more reason to doubt that we
have to solve it. A problem that gets no worse in a year is probably not
much of a problem.
This philosophy admittedly runs counter to the famous aphorism,
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” It is perhaps closer
to Mark Twain’s farcical version, “Never put off till tomorrow what you
can do day after tomorrow just as well.”1 This is not to endorse laziness,
which we just discussed in the previous chapter. Work that needs to be
done should be done and should not be unnecessarily delayed. But many of
us spend our days at work faced with more problems than we can
realistically solve. That is a common source of these bad days. In such a
situation, it makes sense to focus on the ones that matter.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with solving fake problems per se.
Sometimes it’s worth solving such problems just so people will stop
talking about them. (This counts as a consequence, albeit a fairly small
one.) It’s just that your effort should be proportional to the benefits. If
people are wasting lots of time worrying about a fake problem, it’s worth a
small effort to resolve it. But you wouldn’t want to devote lots of time to
something just to pacify the worrywarts.
In other words, it’s not that fake problems aren’t problems at all.
Someone presumably thinks they are real. But you do not need to be that
someone. It’s a little like the old Zen saying: “Things are not what they
seem. Nor are they otherwise.”2 Fake problems are still problems, but they
don’t have to be your problems.
Still, there will be some days when all the real problems feel like more
than you can possibly handle. Sometimes it feels like everything is on your
shoulders—and no one else is doing anything at all!
When this happens to me, I try to ask whether I’ve brought this on
myself. Why have so many projects landed in my lap? Oftentimes, I
realize that it’s because I asked for them! Maybe I didn’t believe that
anyone else could handle them. Or worse, I was sure other people could do
them, and I was worried that my boss might realize that I wasn’t needed!
I have a few remedies for this. First, trust your colleagues. Don’t feel
that you have to do everything. It’s very rare in most companies to have a
job that only one person can possibly do. For one thing, it’s a huge risk.
What if you’re sick? Or move away? Who will do the work then? The
sooner someone else learns the ropes, the better for everyone.
Second, don’t fight for work. If someone else wants to take over a task,
I almost always let them. There are very few things that I feel I have to be
the one to do. There is almost always more than enough work to go
around. A lot more. Try not to get territorial, and accept help when it’s
offered.
Third, admit your limitations. Don’t try to hide when you have too
much to do. Tell your boss. Tell your colleagues. The worst thing you can
do is exude confidence right up until the deadline, and then let everybody
down. If you need help, ask for it—as soon as possible.
And when all else fails, don’t forget to breathe.
We’ve already discussed breathing in the context of mindfulness
meditation, and you can also use breathing throughout the day as way of
overcoming moments of stress and despair. As the Vietnamese Zen master
Thich Nhat Hanh put it, “Breathing is a means of awakening and
maintaining full attention.”3 It is a tool we carry with us constantly,
available every minute of the day. “Breath is essential to our existence,”4
the renowned yoga teacher Eddie Stern explains, and “the link between the
breath and the spirit is at the root of nearly every single contemplative and
religious practice.”5
Buddha agreed. He taught that we could achieve full awakening just
through awareness of breathing. There’s a story that Buddha was
completing a three-month retreat with some of his best students when he
decided that they still could make even more progress on their path to
awakening. He told them that he would stay an extra month to give them
additional instruction. Word of this got around, and even more monks and
nuns gathered to hear this monthlong bonus class from the Buddha. And
what Buddha taught that month was the technique he called full awareness
of breathing.
Whole books have been written on breathing meditation,6 but a fairly
simple version often works wonders on tough days at work. Start by taking
a deep breath wherever you are. Try to feel the air enter your nose or
mouth. Feel it fill your lungs. Feel your chest rise and then fall. Feel the
air returned to the wide world.
That’s all you have to do.
I find that three mindful breaths like this are often enough to calm me
down most days. Now I can go back to whatever I was working on before.
On a really bad day, I might need to do this several times—perhaps even
every hour. Luckily, that’s easy enough. A minute or two is all it takes. You
can even set an alarm to remind yourself to do this throughout the day as
needed.
Notice what your “normal” breathing is like on tough days like this.
Oftentimes, it’s short and clipped. After a few of these mindful breaths,
your breathing should become a bit more relaxed again. Your whole body
starts to relax.
Awareness of our breathing brings “great fruit and great benefit,”
according to Buddha.7 I can’t promise that breathing alone will turn your
bad day at work into complete nirvana. But I can promise that it will help.
You might try to make this a part of your routine on every day, good or
bad. But on our bad days, it’s especially important to remember to breathe.
 PART 3:

HINDRANCES
 CHAPTER 16

Attachment and Detachment

AS WE’VE DISCUSSED, MOST OF BUDDHA’S LECTURES were recalled by just
one guy: his close disciple Ananda. Ananda possessed considerable powers
of memorization and recited the vast majority of Buddha’s known
teachings to the 499 other enlightened students who had gathered at the
First Council after Buddha’s death.
But it turns out that Ananda missed a few things. Among Buddha’s
other great disciples was a woman named Khujjuttara, who worked as a
palace slave for one of the many royal families of ancient India. She
overheard the Buddha once while running errands in the local village and
became a devoted student. She would return to hear him preach as often as
she could and then repeated his teachings to the Queen and other women at
the court. Her recounted lectures always began with the same phrase,
“This was said.”1
Khujjuttara ultimately outlived her Queen and experienced
enlightenment herself. When the Buddhist scriptures were compiled, her
recollections were added to those of Ananda’s in a separate book, titled
Itivuttaka, the Pali word for that repeated phrase: This was said.
So what exactly did Khujjuttara recall? What had the Buddha said in
that village? Itivuttaka covers a lot of topics, but one of my favorite lines
is a simple one. When describing the most important factors in our path to
awakening, Buddha explained: “I do not perceive another single factor so
helpful as good friendship.”2
In other words, even awakening is easier with friends.
Two of my best friends today I met at my very first full-time job during
a summer in college. I’ve found other dear friends through work in the
decades since. On the other hand, many of the friendships I formed at
various jobs over the years have not survived the inevitable transitions
from company to company—or even team to team within the same
building. And not all work relationships are positive to begin with. The
dreaded “office politics” haunts many companies. At times I’ve left a job
with lingering resentments toward some of my former coworkers, even if
it’s now hard to recall exactly what I resented. This continuous process of
relationships good and bad, forming and fading, is woven into the fabric of
modern working life.
Many of us spend long hours at our jobs, surrounded by other people,
and it’s natural to form close relationships. For many, the personal bonds
we forge at work are much of what give our jobs meaning. I don’t need to
like everyone I work with, but if I don’t like anyone at a new job, I’m
unlikely to last long. And I’m not alone—studies of workplace friendships
find that having friends at work significantly reduces employee turnover.3
Our colleagues often bind us to the job as much as our salaries.
These workplace friendships don’t just make work more fun. As
Buddha taught, these friendships are an important source of support. One
recent study found that “positive relationships at work are energizing, both
physically and emotionally,”4 impacting not just our productivity, but also
our physical health. Almost everything about work is better if you like the
people there.
Not everyone treats their work friends the same way. Men and women,
for example, seem to avail themselves of workplace friendships somewhat
differently. In one New Zealand study, women seemed to derive “more
social and emotional support from their friends,” while men treated their
work friendships as more “functional” relationships.5 But friends are
generally considered important to employees of all genders.
Yet there can be some downsides to workplace friendships. Perhaps the
most obvious is simple distraction. Almost by definition, a work
friendship extends beyond the practical requirements of your job, and
there are times when the burden of supporting a friend can be a significant
drain on your focus.6 We’ve probably all had the experience of a friend
who wants to unload about a relationship crisis or a family problem when
we’d really like to get ahead of our next deadline.
Employee friendships can also become exclusionary and create barriers
to other employees. The dreaded “old boys’ networks,” still seen in many
companies and industries, are the most famous manifestations of this
darker side to workplace camaraderie.7 And while positive working
relationships can bring great joy and fulfillment, negative relationships
with coworkers often yield the polar opposite. One research team found
that “corrosive work relationships are like black holes that deplete
psychological resources.”8
Like so much of what we discuss in this book, the key is to pay
attention and make conscious choices. Find relationships at work that feel
supportive and nurture these friendships. Notice the relationships that feel
toxic and try your best to remove yourself from them. If your workplace
friends are a big part of what’s keeping you at a job, make sure they’re
healthy friendships. And remember that forming new bonds with new
colleagues is an inevitable part of most careers.
No discussion of work and relationships would be complete without at
least mentioning the issue of romantic relationships. I know many happy
couples who met at work, but dating colleagues is fraught, to say the least.
When you have a falling-out with a partner you meet online or in some
purely social setting, you generally have the option never to see or hear
from them again. When it happens at work, you might continue to run into
each other every day. You might have to work together on a project or a
shift. One of you might end up being the other’s supervisor down the road.
You can’t necessarily cut off contact, no matter how bad things get—and
they can’t, either. This can cause serious problems in a professional
setting, potentially ending up with someone getting transferred or even
fired. Sadly, historically, things are more likely to end badly for a woman
than a man.9
On top of that risk, there is also the long history of unwanted romantic
advances at work, primarily (though not exclusively) directed at women.
According to one study by two researchers at the Cornell University,
“Women were much more likely to report having been pursued by
someone they were not interested in than men.”10 They also found that,
regardless of gender, suitors greatly underestimated how difficult it was
for their targets to say no. Workplace dynamics are complicated, and a
proposal that might be easy to bat away at a party or a bar can feel like a
burden or a trap at the office. In part due to these very frequent
misunderstandings, the researchers found “the line between romantic
courtship and sexual harassment is not always clear.”11 And you do not
ever want to find yourself on the wrong side of that line.
So if you feel you must make romantic overtures to a colleague, please
tread carefully. Ask once, and be very clear what you’re asking. A
workplace lunch or coffee is not a date and not any indication of romantic
interest. An ambiguous suggestion to meet outside work to discuss a work-
related project or problem won’t do anyone any good, either. If you must
ask someone out whom you work with, just ask them out, with no
workplace strings attached.
The most important rule is this: You must take no for an answer. This is
easier said than done, but there is no room for romantic persistence at
work. For the avoidance of doubt, you should take anything other than a
clear yes as a no. Remember, saying no to a colleague is hard—probably
much harder than you think. Please don’t make them do it twice. If you’ve
followed my advice so far, you’ve made your interest clear. If your
colleague changes their mind one day and realizes how perfect you two are
for each other, I promise they will let you know.*
It is far safer to cultivate workplace friendships than workplace
romances—and, Buddha would say, more fulfilling in the long run. In one
of the lectures Ananda did remember, he told the Buddha that half of the
holy life came down to “good friendship, good companionship, good
comradeship.”12
“Not so, Ananda,” Buddha replied. That wasn’t quite right. “It is the
entire holy life.”
 CHAPTER 17

Balancing Better Than Buddha

BY MODERN STANDARDS, BUDDHA WAS EVEN WORSE AT relationships and
parenting than he was at holding a job. At least he never tried working life.
But he did try marriage and fatherhood, and failed pretty spectacularly at
both, abandoning his wife and infant child to follow his spiritual pursuits.
Buddha avoided the modern question of what is usually called “work-
life balance” by renouncing work and home life both. And he did this for a
very simple reason: He felt it was easier. You might think monastic life
sounds difficult, but to Buddha it was simpler than trying to juggle so
many disparate demands. As one scholar summarizes, Buddha understood
“the difficulties that anyone in the midst of everyday worries would
encounter on the path of inner progress.”1 As Buddha put it himself,
“home life is confinement,” while monastic life “is like an open space.”2
But this is one place where I’d encourage you to set your sights higher
than Buddha. You can do better.
From the very beginning of Buddhism, not everyone felt willing or able
to follow Buddha’s example in this regard. Many of the mothers and
fathers, husbands and wives he taught did not want to abandon their
families the way he did. For them, as for most of us, finding some
semblance of balance was a necessity. Abandonment was not an option.
Balancing time between work and home life isn’t easy. It involves
difficult choices. In my experience, the only way to make it work is to
accept these choices, perhaps even embrace them, rather than trying to
avoid them as Buddha did.
I don’t like framing this as finding “work-life balance,” because it
suggests a dichotomy between work and life that doesn’t really exist.
Work is a part of life—and life has many parts that need to be balanced. In
addition to our careers and our personal lives, there’s sleep and
wakefulness, activity and rest, friends and family, social connection and
solitude. Balancing the time we spend in and out of work is only one of
many trade-offs we have to make—and not necessarily the hardest or the
most important.
 These trade-offs can be difficult because life is short and how we spend
our time makes a difference. Back in college, my friend Bill and I both got
interested in Go, a board game a little like chess that was developed in
China and spread to Korea and Japan. We both bought books about it and
played a few games together. But Bill got very serious about the game very
quickly. He found a professional-level player in town and began taking
weekly lessons. He played in tournaments and even traveled to Japan to
study the game. I didn’t do any of those things. These days Bill probably
plays more games in a typical week than I’ve ever played in my life. And
now, 30-odd years after we both discovered the game, Bill is approaching
master level, while I remain firmly a novice. I don’t know if Bill is a more
naturally talented Go player than I am—it didn’t seem that way when we
were starting out—but he put in a lot more time than I did, and that made
all the difference.
Much of the challenge of balancing work and home life is that our
careers can be a lot like learning Go. How far we advance is in part a result
of how many hours we put in—at least up to a point. There are
diminishing returns sometimes (more on that soon), but there are often
real costs to spending less time working and more time doing other things,
including raising a family.
I’ve had both a job and a family for most of my adult life. When my
kids were babies, I took the first shift with them every morning. This
meant I was up as early as 4:00 a.m., seven days a week. Once they were
fed and dressed, I’d sometimes take them to a neighborhood bagel shop to
keep the house quiet, and I knew which of these opened at 6 a.m., which at
6:30, and which not until 7:00. This schedule had a real impact on my
work. I stopped working at home, mostly because I couldn’t—when I was
home, my life there needed my full attention. I never worked late at night
because I was too tired after such a long day. When my kids got older and
started school, I would drop them off every morning at 9:00 a.m. before
going to work and was home by 6:00 p.m. to join the family for dinner. I
would deviate from that schedule if I had to go out of town, but that’s
about it. This also affected my work. If someone wanted to schedule a
meeting at 8:30 a.m. or even 5:30 p.m., I politely declined. I’d be
surprised if I made many more than 10 exceptions to that rule in 10 years.
And if there was a school play or a classroom birthday party in the middle
of the day, I left work for that, too.
When I look back, these self-imposed limitations on my professional
life had a real cost. As I mentioned above, how much we accomplish at
work is partly a function of how many hours we put in, and I put in fewer
hours than some people around me. Some of those meetings I missed were
important, and my absences had consequences. But in the end I was mostly
able to compensate in other ways, and I have no real complaints with how
my career has progressed. I’m sure I made many mistakes along the way,
but by and large the trade-offs I made worked for me. I think I’m probably
not as successful in material terms as I could have been if I had spent
more time in the office. But I feel I’m successful enough.
Now my kids are both teenagers. One of them has left home for
college. They don’t need—and certainly don’t want—nearly as much
attention as before. This gives me more time to do other things on
evenings and weekends—including personal projects (like this book!), but
also sometimes a few sundry work tasks. These days I find my Fridays are
less stressful if I know I can catch up a bit on Saturday or Sunday. And I
have more time to think on the weekend than when I’m trying to squeeze
in one last email between meetings or before heading home, and that
helps. It’s easier for me to get in the office early now or stay late, too.
Overall, I’m just much more flexible about when and where I work than I
used to be when my kids were younger, and this has probably helped
accelerate my career over the last few years.
These problems are sometimes portrayed as primarily affecting
women, and especially mothers, but I haven’t found that to be true. Recent
research backs up my experience. Professor Erin Reid of the Boston
University School of Management found that “problems with demands for
work devotion are neither only a mother’s issue nor only a women’s
issue,” and that, in fact, most workers experience such conflict.3 We all
know at some level that there’s more to life than working, and everyone I
know struggles to find the right balance.
There are no easy answers. The times I’ve personally been happiest
with the balance were when I loved my work life and I loved my home life
and couldn’t get enough of either. The times I was least satisfied were
when one or the other wasn’t going particularly well. I am quite sure the
choices I’ve made now or in the past wouldn’t be exactly right for anyone
else. And I imagine that my own balance will continue to evolve in the
years to come.
As we discussed in the chapter on taking breaks, working nonstop is not
even good for our jobs. Our body and mind are like batteries, and they
become depleted during the workday.4 We need to detach in order to
restore ourselves and do our best work the next day. As one study found,
“continued thinking about work when being at home has a clear drawback”
in that it hinders our recovery from all that work stress.5
There are also diminishing returns to working longer and longer hours
each day. It can even become detrimental to both your productivity and
your health. Once, early in my career, I worked for 40 hours nonstop to
prepare for an important trade show and effectively passed out. This
wasn’t good for anyone. Yet within reason, working more can mean
accomplishing more, and those accomplishments are often rewarded.
My advice is to make conscious choices. The likelihood that you’ll
work out the perfect balance may be low, but the likelihood that you’ll
stumble on it by pure chance is probably zero. I’ve also found it helpful to
pay attention to the choices people around you are making—not to judge
them, but to ask yourself what those choices would mean for you. I’ve
learned from others’ examples, and still do. I see that many successful
people have deep and fulfilling lives outside of work, filled with interests
and experiences and relationships that they invest in heavily and greatly
enjoy. That’s encouraging to me, and I hope to you.
Healthy balance seems easier if you are pretty happy with the rest of
your life choices outside of work. If you love what you’re doing at work
and love the time you’re spending at home, then you’ll naturally want to
get this balance right. Your incentives are all aligned. If you’re miserable
and begrudge the time spent on one side or the other, it’s much harder to
think clearly about the trade-offs. Sometimes I’ve found it easier to focus
on being as happy as possible in both places, rather than on getting the
split exactly right.
We should also remember that searching for and finding this balance is
a blessing—and a privilege. For much of human history, working was a
matter of subsistence and survival. We often had little choice in the matter.
That’s still true today for many in entry-level and lower-status jobs.6 If
you’re able to exercise control over when and how much you’re working,
you’re already one of the lucky ones.
Yet how much time you devote to the various activities you care about
in life will never be an easy choice. But try to make it your choice. Decide
what’s important to you and devote yourself accordingly. Try not to let
your job—or anybody else—make this choice for you.
This advice applies to more than just work. As we discussed in the very
first chapter, Buddha described many blessings in life, things that “bring
well-being and happiness to all the world.”7 Among these were lifelong
learning, spending time with friends, finding a home, supporting a family,
helping others, and, yes, working in an honest occupation.
Sometimes the challenge of balancing work and family time, in
particular, is presented as an issue of fairness. It seems wrong that
someone who spends time raising a family should be less successful at
work than someone who doesn’t. It feels unfair. And it is unfair, in a way.
It’s also unfair that the person who doesn’t spend time with their family
doesn’t spend time with their family. That person is missing out on
countless rich and meaningful experiences, and that family is missing out
on someone who could be a vital and cherished part of their lives.
In the end, we have a limited time on this earth within which to pursue
all our passions: not only work and family, but also exercise and sleep,
hobbies and other interests, and our spiritual practice. We can’t do
everything, since whenever we spend time on one thing, we are not
spending it on something else. Juggling everything well requires not just
deliberate choices but also conscious trade-offs. But that doesn’t mean we
can’t do a lot, and can’t find the resulting mix satisfying and fulfilling. It’s
up to us to make each moment count.
A fundamental text of the Soto Zen school of Buddhism, called the
Sandokai, or “Merging of Difference and Unity,” ends with this simple
exhortation: “Do not waste time.”8 That is probably the best advice of all.
 CHAPTER 18

You Are Not Your Job

YOU MIGHT WANT TO SIT DOWN FOR THIS NEXT CHAPTER because I have some
news that may be difficult for you to hear. Among Buddha’s many insights
is one that might sound a little crazy.
You don’t exist.
To be clear, Buddha didn’t mean that nothing exists. He wasn’t saying
that the whole world is a dream or an illusion. He wasn’t claiming that
we’re all living in The Matrix. He meant something a little more subtle
than that.
The physical body most people call you is real. If a basketball is hurled
toward your head, it will bounce off and not pass right through. It’s just
that this body isn’t really yours. Neither is anything else. And if there’s
nothing that really belongs to you, then maybe there’s no you at all.
Imagine that you have a car and you replace one of the wheels. You’d
probably say it’s still your car. What if you replace all four wheels? It
probably stills feels like your car. But what if, overnight, someone
replaced every single part of your car with parts from another car. Now
what makes this car yours? Isn’t it more like a new car parked in the same
space?
But if this isn’t your car any more, when did it stop being that? When
the first part was replaced? That can’t be right—then we’d be getting a
“different” car every time we changed the oil filter. Is it when that last
piece was replaced? That can’t be right, either—then whichever car got
that final piece would have to become ours. And what if it took 10 years to
replace every single piece—how could the car magically become someone
else’s on that last day?
But if the car with new parts is not your car, and we can’t point to any
specific moment when it stopped being your car, then it must have never
really been your car to begin with. The concept of “your car” is just that—
a concept, an idea. It’s not real in the deepest sense. In reality, there is no
essential thing that constitutes your car. A Zen Buddhist would say your
car is empty—meaning not that it has no passengers, but that there is no
essential thing within it that makes it yours.
Now reflect back on yourself five or ten years ago—or even longer if
you’re old enough. Maybe you haven’t literally replaced any major parts
(although maybe you have!), but your body still isn’t what it used to be.
Individual cells have come and gone. The very atoms that make up the
physical matter of your flesh and bones have been swapped with other
atoms. Your thoughts are different, too. Your memories are different. Your
personality is probably also different. Let’s hope you’ve become more
mature over the years. Perhaps you’ve also become more patient. Or
perhaps less patient—that happens sometimes. Maybe you’re happier.
Maybe you’re angrier. But one thing is certain—you’re not the same.
Now we’re faced with the same dilemma as with that car. If so many
parts of you have changed, in what sense are you the same you? And if
you’re not the same you any more, maybe you were never quite you to
begin with.
This is the essential paradox Buddha discovered—that people are
“empty” in the same way as cars.* Everything about us is changing all the
time. And how could anything that is so subject to change constitute our
essential self?1 Yet if there is no one unchanging thing that defines our
true self, maybe there is no self at all.
So when Buddha says you don’t exist, he doesn’t mean your body
doesn’t exist or your mind doesn’t exist. They do. He just means that if
you examine them closely, there’s no you inside. And every time you look
at them, you’ll see something a little bit different.
Let’s bring this back to the working world. Many of us feel defined by
our work, by our careers. We define other people that way, too. The first
thing we ask when we meet someone is often, “What do you do?” And yet
our jobs are constantly changing, like parts of a car or cells in our body. Is
anyone really doing the same job they did ten years ago? Five years ago?
Even one year ago? How could they? The world changes so fast.
Customers change. Competitors change. Technology changes. Laws and
regulations change. Whole companies, whole industries, come and go. Is
anything really the same?
The honest answer to “What do you do?” would be different every year,
maybe every single day. Yet how could something that changes so often
possibly define us?
Maybe you don’t quite accept Buddha’s teaching that there’s no you at
all. That’s OK—it’s a strange and difficult concept, to be sure. But even if
you’re confident that there’s an essential you that is constant across all the
inevitable changes—all those swapping of parts—it can’t have anything to
do with your work. You could lose your job tomorrow. You could quit.
Your company could go under. Your boss could go crazy. These things
happen! They’ve happened to me. If whatever constitutes you can survive
years and years of physical and mental change, it can’t possibly depend on
who issues your paycheck.
You are not your job. Whatever you are—you’re definitely not that.
And if you aren’t your job, then your colleagues are not their jobs,
either. This is important to keep in mind when we find ourselves arguing at
work. Right now this coworker may seem like just another obstacle to
getting done whatever you are trying to do. But however frustrating or
incompetent they may seem right now, that’s not the real them. They aren’t
defined by their work any more than you are.
This is part of why we can never let work disputes become personal.*
Every colleague is as much a whole person as you are. Even if you know
each other pretty well, you probably have no idea what’s really going on
inside them right now. The person on the other side of this argument may
have just lost a lover or a friend. They may be caring for a sick child or
parent. Or they may just have forgotten to take a lunch break. Whatever is
going on, you can be sure it is more than you see. Their life is as
complicated and messy as yours, and this workplace is just a small piece
of that patchwork tapestry.
When we define ourselves by our jobs, we invite all manner of
suffering. We set ourselves up for countless disappointments when things
go wrong at work. We start holding on too tightly to our jobs, living in fear
of ever letting them go. The Buddha taught that the roots of suffering are
not just obvious things like greed and hate, but also delusions. And this
delusion that we are what we do is an especially dangerous one.
If we are not our jobs, what about all our other identities?
Buddhists have wrestled with this question for a long time—and still
do. As the Zen master angel Kyodo williams has written, Buddha’s
proclamation that “Every human being, irrespective of caste, race, creed,
or birth has within them the potential for waking up,” remains a truly
radical ethos.2 Awakening is in many ways the levelest of playing fields.
Yet our inherent oneness, our basic human commonality, doesn’t erase our
differences. We each carry to work a unique history of suffering—
suffering that for many is bound up within the categories of race,
sexuality, and gender. Zen master Zenju Earthlyn Manuel explains that
“oneness” does not mean “sameness.”3 The fact that all cars are empty
doesn’t make Hondas the same as Fords. We, too, have differences.
The workplace has never been equally accessible to everyone—and the
Buddhist sangha has also struggled to be truly inclusive. The emptiness of
self does not change this bitter truth. Yet the realization that we are not our
jobs can create space for all our other identities to flourish. It helps us see
those who work with us for who they truly are. It lets us acknowledge and
address all dimensions of human suffering. If you belong to a historically
marginalized group, your job does not replace that identity. You bring that
identity with you and have as much right to be at work as anyone else. If
you are among the historically privileged, you can commit yourself to
welcoming and cherishing your colleagues in the full embodiment of their
being. This is the heart of Buddha’s radical message—that all things are
possible regardless of our form.
 CHAPTER 19

Dealing with Distractions

THE WORLD IS A DISTRACTING PLACE. AND WHILE IT HAS certainly become
more and more distracting in many ways, this is not a new problem by any
means. As the futurist and best-selling author Alex Pang writes in his
masterful book The Distraction Addiction, “Humans have always had to
deal with distraction and lack of focus—and for thousands of years, they
have been cultivating techniques that effectively address them.”1
Let me confess something at the outset: I am very easily distracted. If I
sit at a restaurant with a television, I can’t help watching it. If I hear
someone talking at the next table, I lose track of my own conversation. If I
pick up my phone to check the time, I might not put it down for 10
minutes.
In other words, focus does not come easily to me. I have to work at it.
Years ago, I used to take my laptop with me to meetings, thinking I was
being efficient by checking email during the slow parts. Then I realized I
was paying no attention to the people around me, sometimes forgetting to
get up when the meeting was over. Now I leave my computer at my desk—
and try to keep my phone in my pocket.
Smartphones are, of course, a huge source of distraction. Studies find
that their use “increases reaction time, reduces focus, and lowers
performance” of anything requiring concentration.2 This is why, by one
estimate, smartphone distraction now contributes to almost a quarter of all
traffic accidents.3
The problem is that we are far, far worse at multitasking than we think.
No matter what we tell ourselves, “Only a limited amount of information
can be attended to at any given moment.”4 We may think we’re expertly
juggling half a dozen tasks at once, but we’re really just switching
between them very inefficiently, repeatedly disrupting our concentration.
Buddha placed great value on concentration, and much of his teaching
on meditation describes how to get into the deeper and deeper states of
concentration that he called “absorptions.”5 But you don’t have to be an
experienced contemplative or yogi to understand the value. We’ve all had
the experience of being fully absorbed in some activity. In popular
psychology, this total absorption is usually called “flow,” and can be
defined as that “subjective state that people report when they are
completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue,
and everything else but the activity itself.”6 It can be an exhilarating
experience—as well as an extremely productive one. But it is very fragile.
Distraction is the enemy of flow. The mere ringing of a cell phone—not
yours, but someone else’s—is sufficient to measurably disrupt
concentration. In one study, classroom students whose lecture was
interrupted by a ringing phone performed worse on a pop quiz than those
listening to the same lecture without interruption.7
Multitasking is essentially a form of intentional distraction. Switching
between multiple tasks disrupts our working memory, an effect that only
gets worse as we get older.8 In one study in Canada, students who used a
laptop during a lecture scored lower on a later test—perhaps not a huge
surprise. But even those students without a laptop who just sat near the
ones on their screens were so distracted that they scored 17 percent lower,
too.9 As the great Indian Buddhist monk Santideva put it, a distracted
mind “is not fit for any work.”10
So what do we do about all these distractions? Meditation helps. People
tend to think of the goal of meditation as clearing your mind and calming
down, but that’s not the whole story. Meditation is really about what
happens when we stop meditating. A big part of why we practice
mindfulness in a quiet room away from distractions is so we can draw on
that skill when we’re in a noisy office surrounded by chattering coworkers.
Bringing our full attention to focus on our breath in meditation strengthens
our ability to concentrate in daily life, in the same way that lifting weights
in the gym strengthens our muscles and allows us to lift heavy things
elsewhere.
You can also make things easier on yourself by cutting down on
unnecessary distractions whenever possible. Put down your phone—
preferably in a place where you can’t see it. Schedule your time checking
email or Twitter so you’re not clicking over there constantly. Close
unnecessary windows on your computer. Go fully offline even. There are
apps that will track your online time and even kick you off the local
network during certain hours—try those if you need to. Maybe get away
from your desk if people are prone to interrupt you there. Give yourself
permission to spend extended time—an hour or more—disconnected and
focused on a specific task.
Those who work at home face special challenges of distraction because
your whole life is surrounding you as you try to work. If you can, create a
space that is just for working—even if you have to set it up and take it
down each day. If you’re working at the kitchen table, only work there—sit
somewhere else to have lunch so that you’re not tempted to work and eat
at the same time. (More on that in the next chapter!) Try to keep your
work tasks and home tasks separate, and schedule time for each. When it’s
time to start work, stop doing the dishes or straightening up the living
room, just as you would if you had to rush out the door. If you have others
at home while you’re working, especially kids, it’s even more important to
try to create some separate space for yourself—and, of course, even more
difficult. Be honest with yourself about what you can accomplish, and
don’t torture yourself by trying to do many things at once when your home
life demands your attention.
There is such a thing as good multitasking.11 Because we can’t shut our
ears the way we can shut our eyes, our brains seem to have evolved to deal
with noise distractions differently than visual distraction. That’s why
many people actually find it easier to work with music playing, for
example. (My daughter used to claim she could study better with the TV
on in the background, but she would really only listen to it, not watch it.) I
myself can’t seem to work with headphones, but many of my colleagues
swear by them and wear them to listen to music much of the day. I often
like to have conversations with colleagues while walking, which I find
allows me to concentrate better on what they are saying than if we were
just sitting alone in a room. To quote Alex Pang once more, “These kinds
of multitasking encourage flow,” rather than disrupt it.12
In the end, you have to find patterns that work for you. When I’m
writing, I like to have all my books scattered around me, an arrangement
that looks chaotic and distracting to many people. (I have six books
opened within arm’s reach right now.) That’s how I concentrate best. I
prefer working in silence for most tasks, but I love music or a good
podcast while I’m doing the dishes or driving. In meetings, I try as hard as
I can not to pick up my phone—because I know that, once I start checking
it, my concentration is shot.
Your patterns of concentration will be different. Learn them. Pay
attention to your attention—when you have it and when you don’t. Notice
the things that encourage and disrupt your flow throughout the day. Try not
to switch repeatedly between tasks.
The modern Zen master Shunryu Suzuki once said to his American
students, “You have a saying, ‘to kill two birds with one stone,’ but our
way is to kill just one bird with one stone.”13 I don’t want you to kill any
birds, but I think you’ll find yourself much more productive if you focus
on one stone at a time.
 CHAPTER 20

Begging for Lunch

BUDDHA CONSIDERED FOOD AN ESSENTIAL SUSTENANCE of life,1 and I agree.
Few things are as important to your health as how and what you eat. I
cowrote a whole book on eating based on Buddha’s rules for monks and
nuns.* Countless others have written their own books on eating, dieting,
and nutrition.
But if I had to make just one rule for food and work, it would be this:
Please do not eat at your desk.
Believe it or not, Buddha was much more concerned with how and
when his students ate than what they ate. Many today assumed that Buddha
was a vegetarian, but he was not. His philosophy was basically that
beggars can’t be choosers, so he ate whatever the local villagers offered
him each day.
But one thing Buddha didn’t do was multitask his meals.
Sadly, taking a real lunch break at work is increasingly becoming a
rarity. In 2016, the New York Times estimated that 62 percent of American
professionals ate lunch at their desks.2 You should not be one of them. I
say this not because it’s messy and unsanitary, although it is. A University
of Arizona study found flu viruses on 47 percent of desktops,3 more than
in most bathrooms. You might literally be better off eating from the toilet
seat. These same researchers found desktop germs to be a major
contributor to the spread of contagious disease.4 Eating at your desk is
definitely gross, but I’m not worried about gross. That’s your prerogative.
When Buddha instructed his followers to eat “with attention focused on
the bowl,”5 it wasn’t because he was worried about sanitation. He wanted
them to pay attention to what they ate. He wanted us to practice mindful
eating, not mindless feeding. He considered meals to be a time for
meditation.
Perhaps this sounds like an unimaginable luxury to you. We’re so
conditioned to multitask that to some the idea of doing nothing but eating
for even a few minutes sounds almost lazy. But it’s not. We know that
taking an occasional break can make you more productive, not less. Lunch
is the perfect opportunity to put this into practice.
You don’t need to take a full lunch hour necessarily—although I try to
do this whenever I can. Thirty minutes is enough time for most of us to eat
a meal without wolfing it down, and even 20 will do in a pinch. (I usually
block out a full hour for lunch on my daily calendar, knowing I will likely
end up using some of that to catch up on other work, leaving me with
enough time left over to eat in peace.)
As with other breaks, the key to a truly restorative lunch is to take
control of the time yourself. If you enjoy socializing with coworkers, then,
by all means, invite someone to join you. If you find workplace small talk
draining—and many people do6—then find a quiet place to eat on your
own. If you can get outside, that’s even better.7 The only rule is that you
can’t keep working while you’re eating.
Buddha didn’t preach mindful eating only as a useful meditation tool—
he also saw it as beneficial to our health. There is a story of an overweight
king who visited Buddha after having eaten a literal bucket full of rice and
curries, “huffing and puffing” as he approached because he was so
overstuffed with food. Buddha took one look at him and recited this verse:

When a man is always mindful,

Knowing moderation in the food he eats,
His ailments then diminish:
He ages slowly, guarding his life.8

The king was so impressed with the concept of mindful eating that he
hired a young courtier to recite this verse to him before every meal. And,
sure enough, by practicing mindful eating, the king became “quite thin,”
according to the scriptures. As the modern monk-scholar Bhikkhu Anālayo
summarizes, “As a result of being regularly reminded of the need to be
mindful while eating, the king overcomes his tendency to overeat and
gradually loses weight.”9
I can’t promise that just taking a lunch break will solve the world’s
weight problems, but modern studies have confirmed again and again that
mindfulness is a helpful part of any diet.10 When we pay attention to what
we eat, we make better choices about our food. We tend to eat healthier
and we tend to eat less.
This advice applies to snacking, too. Resist the temptation to grab a
handful of M&Ms when you walk by the receptionist, or to munch on
potato chips while you finish a report. If you’re hungry between meals, it’s
fine to eat. But do it deliberately. Take five minutes to sit somewhere and
eat those chips. Think about what you’re eating. Stop when you’re not
feeling hungry any more. Eat to sustain your body—not to pass the time.
As long as we’re discussing eating at work, we should also mention
drinking—specifically, drinking alcohol. Drinking at work has a long and
storied history (as any fan of the TV series Mad Men can attest), almost all
of which is negative (as any fan of Mad Men can also attest).
So, no surprise: There is ample evidence that alcohol contributes to lots
of issues in the workplace.11 Almost everything about it seems bad.
Drinking at work leads to lower productivity, health issues, and a higher
incidence of misbehavior of all sorts. A 14-year-long study in Europe
found that those who drink excessively are at higher risk for losing their
jobs, thereby “solving” the problem of their workplace drinking but
creating lots of other challenges for those individuals and the broader
society.12
Alcohol is one place where Buddha didn’t seem to advocate much of a
middle ground. He was against it, plain and simple. He forbade his monks
and nuns from drinking any “intoxicating liquors” or indulging in
recreational drugs, and strongly discouraged laypeople from the practice
as well. He listed six specific dangers of consuming alcohol: “diminishing
of wealth, increased quarreling, a whole range of illnesses, ill repute,
exposing oneself, and weakening of the intellect.”13 Pretty much all of
these can be issues at work—especially at the office Christmas party.*
My advice if you choose to drink is to keep your drinking and working
as separate as possible. You can have a glass of wine at an after-hours
work function, but anything more than that and anything during the
workday itself is asking for trouble. And if you’ve never had a long period
of abstinence in your adult life, consider giving that a try. I gradually
stopped drinking in my 30s and found that I was much happier without
alcohol in my life. You may be, too.
The most important thing is not to let eating or drinking at work
become just another distraction. Lunch is the perfect opportunity to take a
break, recharge your physical and mental batteries, and practice
mindfulness, if only for a few minutes. Don’t let it slip away by gobbling
down a sandwich or salad while you try to do a dozen other things.
 CHAPTER 21

Who Would Buddha Fire?

MANY IN THE MODERN WORKPLACE WILL ONE DAY FIND themselves managers
or supervisors of one form or another. According to data from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, nearly 12 percent of US workers were in “management
occupations” in 2017.1 To put that in perspective, that’s considerably more
than all health-care providers—doctors, dentists, nurses, and the like—
combined. It’s more people than work in food service or factory
production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the percentage increases as we get
older and more experienced: It’s over 14 percent for workers older than 45.
And the numbers are increasing. Management is one of the modern
economy’s largest and fastest-growing fields.
Buddha wasn’t a boss. He never hired anyone and he never fired
anyone. So, whether you’re a brand-new supervisor or a seasoned
executive, Buddha may not sound like an obvious source of management
advice. But Buddha did create the Buddhist sangha, a community of
monks and nuns who lived by certain rules, and there are some interesting
lessons there for anyone managing today.
It’s not entirely clear exactly what the rules were in Buddha’s day, but
by the time they were fully codified and written down, there were a lot of
them—by one account, 227 for monks and 311 for nuns.* When we talk
about these rules today, it’s common to talk about what’s allowed and
what’s forbidden. We might say that monks weren’t allowed to lie or steal
or eat after noon.* And that’s true in a certain sense, but also not quite
accurate. Forbidding something implies a certain authority. Parents might
forbid their children from eating too much candy or staying up too late,
which is something they can do because they are in charge of these
children (sort of). Buddha didn’t claim that sort of authority. He wasn’t a
king or a master whose word was law. He was just a guy explaining how
the world worked.
What Buddha did say was that certain actions have certain
consequences. This is his principle of “karma,” or cause and effect. In his
mind, much of this was just natural law. If you drop a ball, it falls to the
ground—and it falls whether you happen to believe it will or not. Gravity
doesn’t require you to accept anyone’s authority—it exerts its force on
believers and nonbelievers alike. Similarly, Buddha saw karma as a
reflection of natural consequences—of actions and reactions. As Buddha
explained, “Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows, as
the wagon wheel follows the hoof of an ox.”2
The monastic rules are framed as an extension of this. For monks and
nuns, certain actions have certain consequences that they might not have
for laypeople. For the most serious infractions, a monk or a nun is
expelled from the sangha. Because the original sangha was celibate, sex
fell into this category: If you broke your vow of celibacy, you were
effectively deciding to leave the sangha. But there are only a handful of
these absolute prohibitions among those several hundred rules. (My
favorite is the rule against claiming supernatural powers.) For violating
the rest of the 200-plus rules, the consequences vary from a sort of
“probation” period to a simple public confession.
The whole sangha got together regularly and recited the rules and
confessed any missteps. So everybody knew the score. There was no “Why
didn’t anyone tell me I couldn’t claim supernatural powers?” excuse. Even
today in traditional monasteries, the rules are laid out clearly, right at the
outset, and repeated often.
Contrast this with most workplaces. There may be an official employee
handbook, but I’d bet no one reads it. And it usually isn’t very specific
anyway. The rules are often imprecise, and the consequences of breaking
them vague at best. “Discipline up to and including termination” is a
common description of a consequence—a very corporate and unhelpful
way of saying pretty much anything could happen.
Buddha’s approach was very different. He was specific about which
actions had which consequences. And he was consistent. He followed his
own rules.
It’s probably not possible to follow this model exactly in a modern
workplace. Your legal department wouldn’t want you to try to enumerate
every bad action and every consequence, and HR would probably object to
the whole ritual of public confessions on the full moon. But you can get
close.
 If you’re a manager, you can start by setting expectations as clearly as
possible. What do you want your employees to do? This is harder than it
sounds for many people. If you’re not used to being a manager yet, it can
feel weird or even rude to give someone direct instructions. I’ve noticed
that some new managers try to phrase their instructions as suggestions:
“Maybe you could try this?” Many new bosses often don’t want to sound,
well, bossy. Some don’t bother with instructions at all, convincing
themselves that it’s more polite or even more empowering to let
employees figure things out for themselves.
But ambiguity is rarely empowering. It’s usually just confusing.
That doesn’t mean you should micromanage. Different employees will
need different levels of instruction, and Buddha always suggested that we
adapt our methods to our audience. With an experienced carpenter, you
might be able to say, “Build a table.” With someone brand-new to
carpentry, you might have to start with how to select and prepare the wood
and even explain the difference between a screw and a nail. But notice that
what matters here is what level of detail the employee needs, not what is
most comfortable for the boss. Elsewhere in his monastic rules, Buddha
prohibits “evasive speech and causing frustration,”3 and that’s exactly
what we do when we withhold needed information from employees.
If someone working for you is doing something wrong, let them know.
And be frank with them about the consequences if they don’t start acting
differently. This is probably not an easy conversation, but it is a very
necessary one. Again, we owe our employees honesty and clarity.
We sometimes feel reluctant to speak negatively about anyone, even
our own employees, out of a desire to be nice. This is understandable and
reasonable. As we discussed, Buddha himself taught that it was important
to speak “with a mind of loving-kindness.”4 But he also placed great
emphasis on honesty, and did not see these two principles in conflict. It’s
unkind to be dishonest to our employees, even with the best of intentions.
They deserve honest feedback. If they are not doing well, honest feedback
is the only way they can improve.
One advantage of presenting all rules in karmic terms is that there is no
moral component. The rules and consequences have nothing to do with
anyone’s worth as a human being. Buddha never claimed that even the
most upright monk was worth more than one about to be disrobed. It’s not
about that. This is why the Buddhist injunction against killing applies to
capital punishment5—because every life has value, and that doesn’t
change by breaking even the most serious rules.
Some people’s actions are just incompatible with the monkhood, just as
some people’s skills or temperament might be unsuited to a particular job.
It isn’t unkind to let these people go—it can be more like helping someone
find new shoes if the ones they’re wearing don’t fit.
At the same time, it is also important to be honest with ourselves.
Where have we failed in this situation? Where can we do better? Rather
than focusing exclusively on the faults of others, Buddha asks that you
consider “what you yourself have or haven’t done.”6
So who would Buddha fire? He would fire anyone who had committed
an action for which firing was the appropriate consequence. He would
make sure they understood these consequences at the outset, and that they
knew what actions had caused them. And he wouldn’t make them feel bad
about their transgression or misstep, or make them feel they were any less
for it. He would wish them well, treating them with kindness and respect
at every step.
 CHAPTER 22

Walking Away
BACK IN 2013, ECONOMIST AND FREAKONOMICS COAUTHOR Steve Levitt
launched an audacious experiment.1 He asked people who were struggling
with a life decision to register online and allow him to make the decision
for them based on a coin toss.* By the end of this program, 22,511 people
had participated, posing questions as large as whether to break up or
propose marriage and as trivial as whether to dye their hair or grow a
beard. Levitt then asked them to fill out a series of questionnaires,
disclosing whether they followed the “advice” of the coin toss and
estimating their happiness, both two months and six months later.
When push came to shove, not everyone was willing to let random
chance dictate their life choices. But fully 63 percent of participants
followed the coin toss, including more than half who faced major life
changes.
Many of the results match what our usual intuition might tell us about
such decisions. People who asked whether to “splurge” on some
discretionary spending were less happy two months later if the coin said
they should, but showed no discernable difference after six months,
suggesting some short-lived buyer’s remorse but no long-term ill effects
of small spending sprees. People who went on a diet as a result of the
experiment tended to have the opposite experience, feeling happy after
two months but neutral after six.*
But the most common question posed to Levitt’s online coin flipper
was a big one: Should I quit my job?
If you’ve read this far, you know that quitting your job will never solve
all your problems. But that doesn’t mean it’s never the right decision,
either. And in Levitt’s experiment, quitting a job had by far the largest
positive outcome on people’s reported happiness after six months. They
rated themselves on average 5 points higher on a happiness scale of 1 to
10. That’s like going from a miserable 3 to an ecstatic 8.
What does this tell us? As Levitt puts it, these results suggest that we
tend to have “a substantial bias against making changes when it comes to
important life decisions.”2 Specifically, we are biased against making big
changes, when, in fact, “Those who do make a change report being no
worse off after two months and much better off six months later.” He
concludes that, “Admonitions such as ‘Winners never quit and quitters
never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.”
In a nutshell, sometimes quitters win.
To be clear, changing jobs is not always the right decision. Other
research suggests that job satisfaction increases immediately after a job
change, but then declines again over time.3 And in many cases, the roots
of our unhappiness are deeper than our work.
As with any big decision, the most important thing is to be clear about
your motivations. Decisions that spring from those “unwholesome roots”
of greed, hate, or delusion4 are unlikely to be good ones.
So what are some good reasons to change jobs? Buddha felt that certain
jobs were best avoided because they seemed intrinsically tied to suffering.
These included dealing in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and
poisons.5 We might extend that to any job that directly harms others or
damages the planet. He also discouraged his followers from all forms of
fortune-telling or any other profession based on deceit.6 Of course, it’s up
to you how to interpret these guidelines. In Buddha’s time, he
recommended against acting, because it seems he felt it was a form of
deception.7 These days, the entertainment industry is well established and
well understood, so it seems strange to consider acting a form of lying. On
the other hand, some might argue that Hollywood does propagate
unhealthy and perhaps dishonest visions of the world—so perhaps it could
be viewed as a form of lying after all.
Most jobs these days seem to fall into more of a gray area—good for
the world in some ways, but perhaps bad for the world in others. My work
in high tech is certainly no exception—helping people connect and
communicate online lets them spread positive messages, but also negative
ones. Publishing a book can be helpful to readers, yet consumes precious
environmental resources. Even when I taught English to desperate
refugees in Southeast Asia, some people felt our presence there
encouraged vulnerable families to risk fleeing their country when it might
have been wiser to stay. Judging any of my jobs or yours as good or bad
may never be wholly clear-cut. You’ll have to come to your own
conclusions.
Many of us these days take a long time to find the right career. I had a
series of unrelated jobs before starting in the tech industry, and spent over
a decade in software engineering before discovering data science. I didn’t
publish my first book until well into my 40s. It’s okay to try a few
different things in the course of a lifetime, and to be honest with yourself
about when you might have made the wrong choice—or when the right
choice for some time in the past is not the right choice for you any longer.
Sometimes we’re not the best judges of our own talents. Talk to people
who know you well and know your work. Try to get an honest assessment
of your strengths and weaknesses. Buddha didn’t think at first that he’d be
a good teacher. He was wrong! I once thought I could work as a male
model in Japan.* I was wrong, too! Sometimes others see us more clearly
than we see ourselves.
It’s not just about choosing a profession. Within any given field lies a
wide range of companies, jobs, and bosses. Even the most humanitarian
organization can have a tyrant in its midst, making all their employees
miserable. Great careers may still have dead ends. The best reason to
change jobs is to reduce suffering—including your own.
Of course, as we discussed in the previous chapter, not all job changes
are voluntary. Try also to keep Buddha’s guidance in mind if you are ever
laid off or fired. Buddha saw no shame in unemployment and was a fierce
defender of the morality of not working. Losing a job can be painful and
frightening, and can bring real hardship. But it has no bearing on our
intrinsic worth.
One of Buddha’s central teachings was that nothing lasts forever. Our
jobs, our careers—these are no exception. No matter what you do for a
living, most of you will not die doing your current job. That means that, at
some point, it will be time to walk away. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the average American at age 50 has held about a dozen jobs
since the age of 18—with half of those job changes occurring between 18
and 24!8
For almost all of us, job change—even career change—is a fact of life.
And that’s good! It’s good to fit many experiences into one lifetime. As
Buddha put it: “Just as from a heap of flowers, many garlands can be
made, so, you, with your mortal life, should do many skillful things.”9
Levitt’s research suggests that we are collectively a bit too risk-averse
about these transitions. In other words, the right time for a change may
well be sooner than you think.
 PART 4:

PERFECTIONS
 CHAPTER 23

Data-Driven Dharma
BUDDHA DIDN’T DISCOVER MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS and the rest of his
path on day one. He spent six years trying other practices, studying with
other teachers. To be honest, some of these sound a little nuts. He tried
holding his breath for so long that his ears exploded, and even the gods
assumed he was dead.1 (Thankfully, he wasn’t.) He tried extreme fasting,
reducing down his daily meals until he was living on just a few drops of
soup each day. He got so thin his arms looked like withered branches and
the skin of his belly rested on his spine.2
Buddha was trying to do the same thing we’re all trying to do. He
wanted to stop suffering. He wanted to be happy. And he was willing to try
anything to make that happen. He would travel any distance and learn
from any teacher. Nothing was too far-fetched to be a worth a try.
In the end, Buddha didn’t reject these crazy extremes of fasting and
suffocating and the like because they were too hard. He abandoned them
because they didn’t work.
Buddha believed in data. Every time he tried something new, he paid
attention. He collected evidence. He figured out what worked for him and
what didn’t. If something didn’t work, he moved on. No moping or
complaining. Buddha followed the data.
When Buddha finally had his awakening—when he actually became the
Buddha—he insisted that all of us hold his teachings to the same standard.
He didn’t want any student to take his word on faith. He wanted us to test
his teachings ourselves and to learn from our own experiences. “Do not go
by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, [or] by a collection of
scripture,” he admonished a student in one lecture.3 In another passage he
explained, “Something may be fully accepted out of faith, yet may be
empty, hollow, and false; but something else may not be fully accepted out
of faith, yet may be factual, true, and unmistaken.”4
In other words, believing doesn’t make it true.
You should apply this same skepticism to everything in this book. I’ve
included numerous studies and stories here so you can learn from the data
others have collected. But collect your own, too! See what works for you.
See what doesn’t. Experiment on your own life, just as Buddha
experimented on his. Learn from your successes and your mistakes.
And keep asking hard questions when you get to work. One of my
favorite things to ask when I’m listening to a presentation at the office is,
“Why do you believe that?” I’m asking this not to be argumentative—
although people sometimes take it that way!—but out of true curiosity.
Sometimes there turns out to be good evidence for whatever the presenter
is claiming. But oftentimes not. Often they have accepted that premise on
faith, and are implicitly asking me to do the same. This can lead to a
dangerous groupthink, where none of us realizes that our strategy is based
on an unproven assumption.
On the other hand, the opposite situation also happens more often than
you might think. People don’t always realize how much they already know.
Coworkers will want to go off and study a question that I’m pretty sure we
can already answer—or at least answer well enough. People often search
for certainty about things that are inherently uncertain, and misjudge when
we know enough to move on.
As a simple illustration, imagine that you were asked the approximate
population of the United States.* Maybe you remember reading this figure
somewhere, but, if not, your first response might well be, “I have no idea.”
You’d tell them to go look it up.
But if you pause for a moment, you probably don’t have no idea.
Maybe you vaguely recall that China has around a billion people (it’s
actually a bit more). You’re pretty sure the United States has fewer people
than China, so now you know that the US population is under a billion.
That’s something!
Maybe, like me, you live in California, and you’re pretty sure
California has about 40 million people (it’s actually a bit less). Of course,
the whole United States encompasses more than just California, so now
you know that the US population is more than 40 million. That’s
something, too!
Can we narrow things down a bit further? We just said that the United
States encompasses more than just California—but how much more? Does
half the United States live in California? That can’t be right! Could it be a
quarter? If California was a quarter of the United States, that means you
could divide all 49 other states (plus Washington, DC) into just three
groups, and each would be no bigger than California. That doesn’t seem
right, either. There are only two or three really big urban areas within
California, and many more in all those other states. Could California
comprise 10 percent of the US population then? That would mean you
could divide the other states into nine groups the size of California—and
that seems a bit more probable. There are probably a couple of California-
sized clusters in the Northeast, maybe another in the Southeast, one around
Texas, a few in the Midwest, one in the Northwest. I could see maybe
coming up with about nine.
If California is about 10 percent of the United States, then the total
population would be around 400 million. That turns out to be not a terrible
estimate! (The actual number is around 327 million.) And it might be a
good enough answer to satisfy the needs of whoever asked you.
In this example, we started out believing that we knew nothing. But we
did know a little: We knew the rough population of China and California,
and we knew a little about the relative size of the United States in
comparison to those places. That may not sound like much, but it turned
out to be enough.
When someone poses a tough question to me, I often ask myself what’s
the best answer I can give right now. Sometimes I really can’t answer at
all. But other times, on reflection, I realize that I know something that
might be helpful. As long as I’m open about the limitations of this initial
answer, there’s no harm in sharing it. After all, a very rough estimate may
be all they need.
Buddha asked us to follow the data. We can’t do this unless we know
what data we already have.
You can think of this as the flip side of beginner’s mind. In beginner’s
mind, we accept and even embrace what we don’t know. But we also need
to be clear about what we do know. We must avoid the arrogance of
assuming that we know everything, and also the arrogance of insisting that
we know nothing. If you find yourself believing either of those extremes,
you are probably wrong. Reality is almost always in between.
It’s as important to be honest with yourself as with the people around
you. Ask yourself hard questions—about your life and your work. Test
your answers against the evidence. Pay attention to the data around you
and learn from everything you try. Don’t let willful arrogance or blind
faith lead you astray.
 CHAPTER 24

Living in the Present Moment

THERE’S A RISK TO ALL OUR TALK OF EFFORT AND GOALS, experiments and
data. We might forget how amazing it is just to be alive.
Pause for a moment to consider the miracle of merely being here, now,
and perhaps reading this book. So many things could have prevented this
from happening. Life itself requires an incredibly complex and unlikely
set of circumstances to exist. There are countless ways your own life could
have ended before now. No matter how old you are today, many have died
before your age. The fact that you are here, right now, is an amazing feat.
But it’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re having a tough day.
Some work is boring. The most exciting job you can imagine generally
involves at least occasional drudgery. We all have mundane or even
unpleasant tasks that have to be completed. I sometimes find myself in
meetings I wish I could skip, or filling out reports that I doubt anyone
really needs. I have days when the California sun calls me to take a hike or
a swim, and I’m stuck indoors dealing with some minor crisis.
Yet there is no such thing as mindless work—or at least no such thing
as work that needs to be mindless. The most basic, rote tasks lend
themselves well to meditation. Zen monks in Japan are famous for doing
seemingly mindless things like raking sand around the temple gardens of
Kyoto, yet doing so with full presence and attention.
When I’m struggling to pay attention in a meeting, there’s a temptation
to start daydreaming about the things I’d rather do, counting the minutes
until I can be somewhere else. (That’s what I did in high school French
class.) But instead of doing that, I try to do the opposite. I try to focus on
exactly where I am. Sometimes I look around the room and try to see each
individual as they truly are. I try to notice the expression on everyone’s
face—who is tense, who is happy, who is annoyed. I try to notice the color
of their eyes. I’m often struck by how beautiful people are—ordinary
people—when I really look at them. Each is a complete human being, with
a life as rich and varied as my own. Each struggles with the same basic
questions as I do—the same questions as Buddha did. Each wants to be
happy.
When I start paying attention to the people in the meeting, I can’t help
paying attention to the meeting itself.
All of us have bad days. All of us get mad at our boss sometimes, or
our coworkers or customers. All of us have moments when we wish we
were somewhere else. But rather than taking that as our cue to disappear
into mental fantasies, try to find something good about that exact moment.
It doesn’t have to be big. Maybe you hate your new assignment, but you
love your chair. Maybe you love the outfit you chose that morning. Maybe
you love the sound of the keys of your keyboard or the voice of a friendly
officemate. If you can find something to love in this moment, then you can
find something to love in the next moment, too. Because that’s all life is—
one moment after the other.
Wherever you are right now, try this experiment: Close your eyes (after
you finish reading this paragraph), and listen to every single sound you
can hear. Try not to judge them or to classify them or even to identify
them—just hear them. If you can set aside your discriminating mind,
there’s as much music to the sound of rushing traffic as there is to a
babbling brook. As I write this now, I can hear the steady hum of the
refrigerator, the soft roar of water boiling in a tea kettle, the faint ticking
of my watch, and a wayward bird or two chirping outside. Each of these
has its own subtle beauty.
Try finding these glimpses of beauty in every moment. Much of
working life seems to conspire against it. We’re constantly pulled from
one task to the next, forever thinking about everything else we have to do.
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains that “We often
become so busy that we forget what we are doing and even who we are.”1
Yet we can resist that slide into mindlessness and distraction. All we have
to do is take this moment to be exactly where we are. As Thich Nhat Hanh
goes on to say, “When we settle into the present moment, we can see
beauties and wonders right before our eyes.”2
Many of us experience that forgetting at work more than anywhere
else. We think of work as what we do when we don’t have a choice. But in
every moment, we do have a choice. Even in the midst of the dullest or
most annoying task, we can choose to be present, to pay attention.
Whether it is raking sand or filling out spreadsheets or restocking the
kitchen or folding sweaters, we can pause to appreciate the miracle of
being here right now.
 CHAPTER 25

Serving All Sentient Beings

AS BUDDHISM CONTINUED TO SPREAD AND EVOLVE throughout Asia, a new
strand emerged and flourished that called itself the Mahayana, or “great
vehicle.” These teachers believed that our task here on earth is not just to
realize our own awakening but to help others realize their awakening, too.
They vowed not to depart this world for nirvana until everyone else could
join them. And thus, according to the Mahayana tradition, we each only
have one real job, which is called the bodhisattva vow—to save all beings
from suffering.
Sounds easy, right?
OK, obviously, it’s not easy. But it might not be as hard as you think.
There are many ways to help others. You don’t have to become a doctor
or a nurse. You don’t have to travel to some war-ravaged land. You don’t
have to live among the poorest of the poor or the sickest of the sick.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those choices, of course, and some of
you may feel called to do that.
But suffering is not just about pain or deprivation. It’s not even mostly
about pain or deprivation. Our material wealth and comfort have increased
astronomically since Buddha’s time, and yet the problem of suffering has
persisted. The roots of suffering go deeper than the physical, so the
bodhisattva vow extends well beyond offering material comfort and
support.
Buddha himself didn’t dedicate his life to feeding the poor. On the
contrary, he expected the poor to feed him. He went out begging for alms
every morning, even in the humblest villages, and ate only what the locals
would give him. You see this same ritual in Buddhist countries today. The
monks and nuns collect food from those around them—not, generally
speaking, the other way around.*
Buddha didn’t do this out of some sense of entitlement. He simply felt
the greatest service he could offer was his own teaching. When the earliest
Buddhist scriptures talk about “compassion,” it is not about what we
usually think of as helping each other out—it’s entirely in the context of
helping our fellow beings find awakening and end their own suffering.
Buddha made this his life’s work.
Again, this is not to say there’s anything wrong with volunteering at
your local soup kitchen or donating to charity. There isn’t. Those are great
things to do.
But you can help to end suffering without doing anything that looks or
feels like charity. Practicing kindness to everyone you meet. Offering a
smile or a hug to someone who’s struggling. Speaking truth to those who
need to hear it. Embodying calm in the face of chaos.
Most jobs provide countless opportunities like these for fulfilling our
bodhisattva vow. Some are big, dramatic events, like responding with
sympathy to a colleague with cancer or a dangerously ill child. But they
can be smaller moments, too. The important thing is to take these chances
when they come. I still remember the morning I interviewed for my last
job. In the midst of a very stressful day, the receptionist greeted me with
such warmth and kindness that she immediately put me at ease. I still
thank her for this regularly, three years later.
When we see other people suffering, we’re tempted to turn away. It’s
painful. Seeing their suffering makes us suffer. But facing that suffering is
the heart of the bodhisattva vow. Everyone you work with is a human
being. All of them are suffering. All of them wish they weren’t. You can
help.
Buddha didn’t start out wanting to become a teacher. That wasn’t why
he left his palace home in the first place. His quest was to find answers for
himself to life’s great questions. Once he found his answers, he was
content to float out into nirvana on his own. He didn’t ask to be anyone’s
hero or savior. What got him teaching, and kept him engaged with the
world, was his sense of compassion. He felt an obligation to help others
find their own release from suffering, and for him teaching seemed like
the best way.
You can find that same sense of purpose in your work. Everyone you
meet at work presents an opportunity to practice compassion, to put others
before yourself. Putting others first doesn’t mean being a doormat. You
shouldn’t let your colleagues walk all over you. But you should treat each
of them with respect—and even love. As we talked about before, even the
most difficult messages can be delivered with kindness. As the Dalai
Lama himself has said: “The main theme of Buddhism is altruism based
on compassion and love.”2 The working world may seem like a strange
place to practice such altruism, but it’s not.
Don’t stop there, either. You get plenty of opportunities to help others
outside of work, too. A friend of mine befriended a homeless woman years
ago and still puts her up in a local motel now and then when things are
tough. Another friend paid for an immigration lawyer for her hairdresser.
My older daughter is constantly finding lost pets and returning them to
their owners. My younger daughter used to bring an extra lunch to school
for a friend who seemed hungry. I’ve never worked as a lifeguard—I’m
not nearly a strong enough swimmer—but I once fished a toddler from a
swimming pool because I was in the right place at the right time and was
paying attention.3 Sometimes that’s enough. No matter what you do for a
living, you have the chance to be an amateur bodhisattva in your spare
time if you pay attention, too.
Perhaps no one thought more about this practice than Santideva, the
early Mahayana monk in India, who wrote a whole book on the subject.
The title of his masterwork is usually translated, quite appropriately, as “A
Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life.”4 In it, he summarized the path this
way: “One should do nothing other than what is either directly or
indirectly of benefit to living beings.”5
Bring that mission with you to your job, no matter what kind of work
you do. Commit to using each interaction as a chance to make the world a
little better. By paying attention to how everything you do affects those
around you, you’ll not only help them—you’ll help yourself wake up, too.
 CHAPTER 26

Did You Just Become a Buddhist?

THE UNITED STATES IS IN MANY RESPECTS AN UNUSUALLY religious country.
Many Americans feel deep ties to their religious traditions—mostly as
Christians, but with large and dedicated minorities of Jews, Muslims,
Hindus, Buddhists, and others.
So let’s say you’ve read this book and agree with everything I’ve
written. (Thanks!) Did you just become a Buddhist?
You might think that anyone who agrees with Buddha’s basic message
—in other words, anyone who believes that Buddhism is true—would have
to qualify as a Buddhist. And yet the author and philosopher Robert
Wright who actually wrote a book with that title1 doesn’t call himself a
Buddhist.
What gives? Wright explains his reasoning this way:

I don’t call myself a Buddhist, because traditional Buddhism has so

many dimensions—of belief, of ritual—that I haven’t adopted. I
don’t believe in reincarnation or related notions of karma, and I
don’t bow before the statue of the Buddha upon entering the
meditation hall, much less pray to him or any Buddhist deities.
Calling myself a Buddhist, it seems to me, would almost be
disrespectful to the many Buddhists, in Asia and elsewhere, who
inherited and sustain a rich and beautiful religious tradition.2

I myself have taken a different approach. I do call myself a Buddhist,

and have for most of my life. I even got ordained. Once in a while, I put on
my traditional Buddhist robes and perform the same rituals that monks
have carried out in Zen Buddhist temples across Japan for a thousand
years, and which now occur all over the world. I don’t believe in literal
reincarnation or pray to Buddhist deities, but I do bow to statues of the
Buddha when I see them, out of respect for the original teacher and his
teachings.
 But enough about me and some philosopher you’ve never met. What
about you? Did you just become a Buddhist?
Of course, I can’t possibly answer that question for you. Some people
find sustenance and support in the long tradition of Buddhist practice that
has brought forth the ideas discussed in this book. For them, identifying
with that tradition and placing themselves in that lineage is comforting
and perhaps helpful in developing a mindfulness practice. After all, while
similar thoughts have occurred to those of other faiths, this particular
rendering of mindfulness and related ideas derives from the specific line
of teachers that began with Buddha about 2,500 years ago. When those two
businessmen became the very first Buddhists, all they did was find refuge
in the Buddha and his teachings. Perhaps you feel that you have found
refuge, solace, or inspiration in them, too.
Others will still feel a strong tie to the religion of their birth. Perhaps
despite appreciating Buddha’s teachings, you still deeply believe in the
teachings of Christ or Muhammad or another great religious figure outside
of Buddhism. Perhaps you regularly attend a church or temple, synagogue
or mosque. Perhaps you continue to pray at home.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those choices. There is a story in the
sutras of a wealthy householder named Upali who meets Buddha and
becomes his disciple. He is so enamored of his newfound faith that he tells
the Buddha that, from then on, he will make donations only to Buddha and
his followers and not to his previous spiritual teachers. (They were
apparently Jains, another ancient Indian religion.) Buddha says no, that
Upali’s family has long supported these other teachers and that he should
continue to do so.3 Buddha is happy to accept Upali as a student, but he
sees no reason for him to cut himself off from his past.
Buddhism is not a faith that asks you to be exclusive or to give up any
other beliefs. Buddhism doesn’t really ask you to believe anything exactly.
As I hope you’ve discovered already, Buddhism is much more about doing
things, practicing things, having experiences rather than beliefs, and then
paying attention to those experiences and the results. You can put Buddhist
labels on those practices and experiences. You can call yourself a Buddhist
and talk about enlightenment and awakening in Buddhist terms. Or not.
This book was not intended to make you a Buddhist. My goal was much
more modest—and much grander at the same time. My goal was to help
you use some of Buddha’s teachings to be happier and to suffer less—
primarily at work, but also anywhere else you happen to spend time. And
not just fleetingly happy, but truly, deeply happy—what Buddhists would
call awakened, which turns out to be the same thing.
Most of the techniques we’ve discussed probably don’t even feel very
religious or spiritual to you. Pay attention. Look for balance. Eat well,
sleep well, and exercise regularly. Set healthy goals. Work hard, but not
too long. Tell the truth. Be kind.
Buddha didn’t care if you became a Buddhist, either, by the way. He
just wanted you to become a Buddha. I think you can.
Now get to work.
 CHAPTER 27

Further Reading
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BUDDHISM, I HAVE good news and bad
news. The good news is that there are lots of books about Buddhism. The
bad news is that there are lots of books about Buddhism.
The Buddhist scriptures themselves are often challenging for modern
readers, but Martine Batchelor’s The Spirit of the Buddha (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2010) includes many selections in a clear and
approachable style and is a wonderful introduction, as is Gil Fronsdal’s
The Dhammapada (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2006), a lyrical
translation of Buddha’s best-known sayings. If you insist on going straight
to the unabridged originals, the editions I cite in my “Notes on Sources”
are my favorite translations.
Most readers will find the writings of contemporary Buddhist teachers
much more accessible. I particularly like Stephen Batchelor’s* Buddhism
Without Beliefs (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997) and Robert Wright’s
Why Buddhism Is True (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), both of
which attempt to strip away the more “mystical” aspects of Buddha’s
teachings and focus on practical practice. For a more “Buddhist”
introduction to Buddhism, Thubten Chodron’s Buddhism for Beginners
(Boston: Snow Lion, 2001) is excellent, as is Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s
priceless gem Tell Me Something About Buddhism (Charlottesville:
Hampton Roads, 2011).
To learn more about the nuts and bolts of meditation, Shunryu Suzuki’s
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2004) is the
classic introduction to the Zen way (which I practice), while Kathleen
McDonald’s How to Meditate (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications,
2005) approaches the topic from the Tibetan tradition. If you want to know
more about Buddha himself, John S. Strong’s The Buddha: A Beginner’s
Guide (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2001) is surprisingly great, as
is Karen Armstrong’s popular Buddha (New York: Penguin, 2004).
On the work front, Mike Steib’s Career Manifesto (New York:
TarcherPerigee, 2018) will walk you through how to establish healthy
career goals. Alex Soojun-Kim Pang’s wonderful The Distraction
Addiction (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013) discusses the
crucial issue of distraction and technology in far more detail than I have
here and is well worth reading. Kim Scott’s eye-opening Radical Candor
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017) will teach you, as she puts it, “to be a
kick-ass boss without losing your humanity,” and is essential reading for
anyone who aspires to be an honest manager.
Joseph Emet has written a whole book on mindful techniques for better
sleep: Buddha’s Book of Sleep: Sleep Better in Seven Weeks with
Mindfulness Meditation (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2012). If you’ve
chosen yoga as your preferred exercise—an excellent choice!—Eddie
Stern’s One Simple Thing (New York: North Point Press, 2019) will be an
invaluable companion.
My first book, Buddha’s Diet, cowritten with my dear friend Tara
Cottrell, has lots more to say about diet and exercise (and Buddhism, too).
These are incredibly important topics that we’ve only touched on here.
Getting that part of your life in order will really pay off at work. If you
liked this book, you’ll probably like Buddha’s Diet. And if you didn’t like
this book, you shouldn’t be asking me for reading advice.
 Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT my family, who
indulged all my writing time over the last year when perhaps I should have
been more focused on them. Thank you, Dina, Anna, and Maxine. My
agent, Laura Dail, and editor, Jennifer Kasius, believed in this book long
before I did, and provided much-needed encouragement and patience
while I wrote it. Although I couldn’t convince her to write this one with
me, my writing partner and friend Tara Cottrell continues to be an
inspiration and support, and texted me many good ideas as I wrote. My
friend Irina Reyn offered critical perspective when I was struggling to
make progress and helped me see what this book could become.
I’ve worked at many companies over the years and learned from all of
them. Those jobs gave me space to think more deeply about the connection
between my Buddhist practice and my working life, which then formed the
basis for much of what I’ve written here.
I started writing this book in earnest during a brief stay at Tassajara
Zen Mountain Center. I am grateful to everyone who welcomed me there
and who helps maintain that unique Buddhist presence in the West.
 Discover Your Next Great Read

Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite
authors.

Tap here to learn more.

 Notes on Sources
THE PALI TEXT SOCIETY, A VENERABLE BRITISH INSTITUTION founded by
intrepid scholars in 1881 and still going strong, established a
comprehensive system for citing the ancient Buddhist scriptures so that
the same passage can be found in any translation, in much the same way
that one can look up “Luke 6:31” in any edition of the New Testament.
Alas, the Buddhist system is very complicated (a typical reference looks
like this: “SN 22.59; III 67, 25”), and I have not used it here. Instead, I
give simple page references using my favorite translations of each text,
which is usually Wisdom Publications’ beautiful Teachings of the Buddha
series. This will be much simpler for most readers, although more
challenging if you want to find the equivalent passage in some other
translation. I follow this same practice for non-Pali scriptures, simply
citing the specific translation that I prefer to use.
 Endnotes
INTRODUCTION: WAKING UP AT WORK

1 U.S. Travel Association, Project: Time Off, The State of the American
Vacation (2018).

2 Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Stefanos A. Zenios, “The Relationship

between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the
United States,” Management Science (2016) 62:2: 608–628.
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2115.

3 Caroline Foley Rhys Davids. “Notes on Early Economic Conditions in

Northern India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain
and Ireland (1901): 859–888. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25208356.
 CHAPTER 1: WHY WORK?

1 I. B. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. IV (Oxford, UK: The Pali Text
Society, 1951), 5–6.

2 Mohan Wijyayaranta, Buddhist Monastic Life: According to the Sources

of the Theravada Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 164.

3 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 112.

4 Rupert Gethin, Sayings of the Buddha (Oxford, UK: Oxford University

Press, 2008), 10.

5 Mike Steib expands on this in his wonderful Career Manifesto: Discover

Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life (New York:
TarcherPedigree, 2018), although he revised it to “learn, earn, serve,”
which I find less catchy.

6 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Suttanipata (Somerville, MA: Wisdom

Publications, 2017), 223 and 863.

7 Ibid., 291.

8 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1597.

9 Bodhi, The Suttanipata, 199.

 CHAPTER 2: THE COST OF SUFFERING

1 See, for example, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Wings to Awakening: An

Anthology from the Pali Canon (Valley Center, CA: Metta Forest
Monastery, 2018).

2 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “STRESS… at

Work,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/99-101/.

3 Madhu Kalia, “Assessing the Economic Impact of Stress—The Modern

Day Hidden Epidemic,” Metabolism 51, no. 6,supplement 1 (June
2002): 49–53.

4 Joanne H. Gavin and Richard O. Mason, “The Virtuous Organization:

The Value of Happiness in the Workplace,” Organizational Dynamics
33, no. 4 (2014): 379–392

5 D. M. Rose, A. Seidler, M. Nübling, U. Latza, E. Brähler, E. M. Klein, J.

Wiltink, M. Michal, S. Nickels, P. S. Wild, J. König, M. Claus, S. Letzel
and M. E. Beutel, “Associations of Fatigue to Work-Related Stress,
Mental and Physical Health in an Employed Community Sample,” BMC
Psychiatry 17, no. 1 (May 5, 2017):167. doi: 10.1186/s12888-017-1237-
y.

6 Kristina Holmgren, Synneve Dahlin-Ivanoff, Cecilia Björkelund, and

Gunnel Hensing, “The Prevalence of Work-Related Stress, and Its
Association with Self-Perceived Health and Sick-Leave, in a Population
of Employed Swedish Women,” BMC Public Health 9 (2009): 73. doi:
10.1186/1471-2458-9-73.

7 Daniel C. Ganster and John Schaubroeck, “Work Stress and Employee

Health,” Journal of Management 17, issue 2 (June 1, 1991): 235–227.
doi: 10.1177/014920639101700202.

8 Kalia, “Assessing the Economic Impact of Stress.”

9 Helge Hoel, “The Cost of Violence/Stress at Work and the Benefits of a
Violence/Stress-Free Working Environment,” Report Commissioned by
the International Labour Organization (2001).
http://www.ilo.org/safework/info/publications/WCMS_108532/lang—
en/index.htm

10 Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck (New York: Harper Collins,

2018), 1.

11 Kalia, “Assessing the Economic Impact of Stress.”

12 T. A. Wright and B. A. Straw, “Affect and Favorable Work Outcomes:

Two Longitudinal Tests of the Happy-Productive Worker Thesis,”
Journal of Organizational Behavior 20 (1999): 1–23.

13 Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi, “Happiness and

Productivity,” Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. 4 (2015): 789–822.

14 Cynthia D. Fisher, “Happiness at Work,” International Journal of

Management Reviews 12 (2010): 384–412. doi:10.1111/j.1468-
2370.2009.00270.x.

15 John M. Zelenski, Steven A. Murphy, and David A. Jenkins, “The

Happy-Productive Worker Thesis Revisited,” Journal of Happiness
Studies 9, issue 4 (December 2008): 521–537. doi: 10.1007/s10902-
008-9087-4.

16 Lisa C. Walsh, “Does Happiness Promote Career Success? Revisiting

the Evidence,” Journal of Career Assessment 26, issue 2 (2018): 199–
219.
 CHAPTER 3: BUDDHISM WAS A START-UP

1 Heinz Bechert, When Did the Buddha Live?: Controversy on the Dating
of the Historical Buddha (New Delhi, India: Sri Satguru Publications,
1995).

2 Christopher Titmuss, The Political Buddha (Morrisville, NC, Lulu.com:

2018).

3 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 240 and 1642.

4 Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures (London: Penguin Books, 1959), 39.

5 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 260.

6 Ibid., 534.

7 Moshe Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville, MA:

Wisdom Publications, 1987), 408.

8 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Suttanipata (Somerville, MA: Wisdom

Publications, 2017), 178.

9 Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 270.

10 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1644.
 CHAPTER 4: BUDDHA’S BIG IDEA

1 H. W. Schuman, The Historical Buddha: The Times, Life and Teachings

of the Founder of Buddhism, translated by M. O’C Walshe (Delhi, India:
Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1989), 22.

2 Mathew Meghaprasara, New Guide to the Tipitaka: A Complete

Reference to the Buddhist Canon (Regina, Saskatchewan: A Sangha of
Books, 2013), 5–6.

3 Schuman, The Historical Buddha, 4.

4 Richard Solomon, The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhāra

(Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2018), 1–3

5 See, for example: Cheri Huber, Suffering is Optional (Murphys, CA:

Keep It Simple Books, 2000).
 CHAPTER 5: PAYING ATTENTION

1 Jon Kabat-Zinn, “An Outpatient Program in Behavioral Medicine for

Chronic Pain Patients Based on the Practice of Mindfulness Meditation:
Theoretical Considerations and Preliminary Results,” General Hospital
Psychiatry 4, issue 1 (April 1982): 33–47.

2 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 145.

3 Nyanaponika Thera, The Power of Mindfulness (San Francisco: Unity

Press, 1972), 5.

4 Kirk Warren Brown and Richard M. Ryan, “The Benefits of Being

Present: Mindfulness and Its Role in Psychological Well-Being,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 4 (2003): 822–
848.

5 Darren Good, Christopher J. Lyddy, Theresa M. Glomb, Joyce E. Bono,

Kirk Warren Brown, Michelle K. Duffy, Ruth A. Baer, Judson A.
Brewer, Sara W. Lazar, “Contemplating Mindfulness at Work: An
Integrative Review,” Journal of Management (January 2016). doi:
10.1177/0149206315617003.

6 Maryanna Klatt, Beth Steinberg, and Anne-Marie Duchemin,

“Mindfulness in Motion (MIM): An Onsite Mindfulness Based
Intervention (MBI) for Chronically High Stress Work Environments to
Increase Resiliency and Work Engagement,” Journal of Visualized
Experiments 101 (2015), e52359. doi:10.3791/52359.

7 Amishi P. Jha Elizabeth A. Stanley, Anastasia Kiyonaga, Ling Wong, and

Lois Gelfand, “Examining the Protective Effects of Mindfulness
Training on Working Memory Capacity and Affective Experience,”
Emotion 10, no. 1 (2010): 54–64.

8 Patrick K. Hyland, R. Andrew Lee and Maura J. Mills, “Mindfulness at

Work: A New Approach to Improving Individual and Organizational
 Performance,” Industrial and Organizational Psychology 8, no. 4
(December 2014): 576–602. doi: 10.1017/iop.2015.41.

9 Ruth Q. Wolever, Kyra J. Bobinet, Kelley McCabe, Elizabeth R.

Mackenzie, Erin Fekete, Catherine A. Kusnick, Michael Baime,
“Effective and Viable Mind-Body Stress Reduction in the Workplace: A
Randomized Controlled Trial,” Journal of Occupational Health
Psychology 17, no. 2 (2012): 246–258. doi: 10.1037/a0027278.

10 Kimberly Schaufenbuel, “Why Google, Target, and General Mills Are

Investing in Mindfulness,” Harvard Business Review (December 28,
2015).
 CHAPTER 6: MEDITATE LIKE A BUDDHA

1 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 260.

2 See, for example, Bhikkhu Analyao, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to

Realization (Cambridge, UK: Windhorse Publications, 2003).

3 Nanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 145.

4 Ibid., 146.

5 Ibid., 155.

6 Ibid., 147.

7 Gil Frondsal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shamabhala

Publications, 2005), 1.

8 Peter W. Mayer and William B. DeOreo, “Residential Uses of Water,”

American Water Works Association (1999).

9 His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, “Routine Day,”

DalaiLama.com. http://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-
and-daily-life/a-routine-day
 CHAPTER 7: THE PROBLEM WITH EXPERTISE

1 Carl Bielfeld, Dogen’s Manual of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1988), 195.

2 Eleanor Rosch, “Beginner’s Mind: Paths to the Wisdom Not Learned,”

in Teaching for Wisdom, edited by Michal Merrari and Georges
Potworowski (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2008).

3 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill,

1970), 21.

4 Ibid., 21.

5 Joe Langford and Pauline Rose Clance, “The Impostor Phenomenon:

Recent Research Findings Regarding Dynamics, Personality and Family
Patterns and Their Implications for Treatment,” Psychotherapy Theory
Research & Practice 30, no. 3 (December 1992): 495–501. doi:
10.1037/0033-3204.30.3.495.

6 Albert J. Stunkard, “Beginner’s Mind: Trying to Learn Something About

Obesity,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 13, issue 2, (January 1, 1991):
51–56. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/13.2.51.

7 Arlo Belshee, “Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind: Embrace

Inexperience,” in Proceedings of AGILE 2005 (Piscataway, NJ: IEEE,
2005). doi: 10.1109/ADC.2005.37

8 Sheryl I. Fontaine, “Teaching with the Beginner’s Mind: Notes from My

Karate Journal,” College Composition and Communication 54, no. 2
(December 2002): 208–221. doi: 10.2307/1512146

9 Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, “The Prepared Mind versus the
Beginner’s Mind,” Design Management Review 16, no. 1 (Winter 2005):
10–16.

10 Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra (Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1995), 40.
 CHAPTER 8: WORKING WITHOUT WORKING

1 Robert A. Henning, Pierre Jacques, George V. Kissel, Anne B. Sullivan

and Sabina M. Alteras-Webb, “Frequent Short Rest Breaks from
Computer Work: Effects on Productivity and Well-Being at Two Field
Sites,” Ergonomics 40, no. 1 (1997): 78–91.

2 Simone M. Ritter and Ap Dijksterhuis, “Creativity—The Unconscious

Foundations of the Incubation Period,” Frontiers in Human
Neuroscience 8 (2014): 215. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00215.

3 Charlotte Fritz, Allison M. Ellis, Caitlin A. Demsky, Bing C. Lin, and

Frankie Guros, “Embracing work breaks: Recovering from Work
Stress,” Organizational Dynamics 42, (2013): 274–280.

4 Sooyeol Kim, Youngah Park, and Lucille Headrick, “Employees’ Micro-

Break Activities and Job Performance: An Examination of
Telemarketing Employees,” Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Proceedings 1 (2015): 13,943–13,943. doi: 10.5465/AMBPP.2015.169.

5 Pavle Mijovic, Vanja Ković, Ivan Mačužić, Petar Todorović, Branislav

Jeremić, Miloš Milovanović, and Ivan Gligorijević, “Do Micro-Breaks
Increase the Attention Level of an Assembly Worker? An ERP Study,”
Procedia Manufacturing 3 (2015): 5074–5080.

6 Brent L. S. Coker, “Freedom to Surf: The Positive Effects of Workplace

Internet Leisure Browsing,” New Technology, Work and Employment 26,
issue 3 (2011): 238–247. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-005X.2011.00272.x

7 Fritz, et al., “Embracing Work Breaks.”

8 Hongjai Rhee and Sudong Kim, “Effects of Breaks on Regaining Vitality

at Work: An Empirical Comparison of ‘Conventional’ and ‘Smart
Phone’ Breaks,” Computers in Human Behavior 57 (2016): 160–167.
doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.056.

9 Marianna Virtanen, Archana Singh-Manoux, Jane E. Ferrie, David

 Gimeno, Michael G. Marmot, Marko Elovainio, Markus Jokela, Jussi
Vahtera, and Mika Kivimäki, “Long Working Hours and Cognitive
Function: The Whitehall II Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology
169, issue 5 (March 1, 2009): 596–605.
https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwn382.

10 Erin Reid. “Embracing, Passing, Revealing, and the Ideal Worker

Image: How People Navigate Expected and Experienced Professional
Identities,” Organization Science 26, no. 4 (2015): 997–1017.
doi:10.1287/ORSC.2015.0975.

11 Thich Nhat Hanh, Begin Peace (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1987),
47.

12 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “How Resting More Can Boost Your

Productivity,” Greater Good Magazine (May 11, 2017).
 CHAPTER 9: BUDDHA ON THE BUS

1 J. N. Morris, J. A. Heady, P. A. B. Raffle, C. G. Roberts, and J. W. Parks,

“Coronary Heart Disease and Physical Activity of Work,” Lancet 262,
no. 6795 (1953): 1053–1057. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-
6736(53)90665-5.

2 Laura E. Finch, A. Janet Tomiyama, and Andrew Ward, “Taking a Stand:

The Effects of Standing Desks on Task Performance and Engagement,”
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 14,
no. 8 (August 2017): 939. doi: 10.3390/ijerph14080939.

3 Frank W. Booth, Christian K. Roberts, John P. Thyfault, Gregory N.

Ruegsegger, and Ryan G. Toedebusch, “Role of Inactivity in Chronic
Diseases: Evolutionary Insight and Pathophysiological Mechanisms,”
Physiology Review 97, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 1351–1402. doi:
10.1152/physrev.00019.2016.

4 I-Min Lee, Eric J Shiroma, Felipe Lobelo, Pekka Puska, Steven N Blair,
Pand Peter T .Katzmarzyk, “Impact of Physical Inactivity on the
World’s Major Non-Communicable Diseases,” Lancet 380, no. 9838
(July 21, 2012): 219–229. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61031-9.

5 Andreas Ströhle, “Physical activity, exercise, depression and anxiety

disorders,” Journal of Neural Transmission (Vienna) 116, no. 6 (June
2009): 777–784. doi: 10.1007/s00702-008-0092-x.

6 Helen E. Brown, Nicholas D. Gilson, Nicola W. Burton, and Wendy J.

Brown. “Does Physical Activity Impact on Presenteeism and Other
Indicators of Workplace Well-Being?,” Sports Medicine 41 (2011): 249.
https://doi.org/10.2165/11539180-000000000-00000

7 Candice L. Hogan, Jutta Mata, and Laura L. Carstensen, “Exercise Holds

Immediate Benefits for Affect and Cognition in Younger and Older
Adults,” Psychology and Aging 28, no. 2 (June 2013: 587–594.
doi:10.1037/a0032634.
8 Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs:
The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40, no. 4
(2014): 1142–1152.

9 Nicolaas P. Pronk, Brian Martinson, Ronald Kessler, Arne Beck,

Gregory Simon, and Philip Wang, “The Association between Work
Performance and Physical Activity, Cardiorespiratory Fitness, and
Obesity,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 46, no.
1 (January 2004): 19–25.

10 J. C. Coulson, J. McKenna, and M. Field, “Exercising at work and self‐

reported work performance,” International Journal of Workplace
Health Management 1, issue 3 (2008): 176–197.
https://doi.org/10.1108/17538350810926534.

11 Emmanuel Stamatakis, Ngaire Coombs, Alex Rowlands, Nicola

Shelton, and Melvyn Hillsdon, “Objectively-Assessed and Self-
Reported Sedentary Time in Relation to Multiple Socioeconomic
Status Indicators among Adults in England: A Cross-Sectional Study,”
BMJ Open 4 (2014) e006034. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006034.

12 Hidde P. van der Ploeg, Tien Chey, Rosemary J. Korda, Emily Banks,
and Adrian Bauman, “Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in
222,497 Australian Adults,” Archives of Internal Medicine 172, no. 6
(2012): 494–500. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.2174.

13 Avner Ben-Ner, Darla J. Hamann, Gabriel Koepp, Chimnay U.

Manohar, and James Levine, “Treadmill Workstations: The Effects of
Walking While Working on Physical Activity and Work Performance,”
PLOS ONE 9, no. 2 (2014): e88620.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088620.

14 Avner Ben-Ner, Darla J. Hamann, Gabriel Koepp, and James Levine,

“The Effects of Walking while Working on Productivity and Health: A
Field Experiment” (May 2, 2012). Available at SRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2547437 or
 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2547437.

15 Brittany T. MacEwen, Dany J. MacDonald, and Jamie F. Burr, “A

Systematic Review of Standing and Treadmill Desks in the
Workplace,” Preventive Medicine 70 (2015): 50–58. doi:
10.1016/j.ypmed.2014.11.011.

16 Christi S. Ulmer, Barbara A. Stetson, and Paul G. Salmon,

“Mindfulness and Acceptance Are Associated with Exercise
Maintenance in YMCA Exercisers,” Behavioral Research and Therapy
48, no. 8 (August 2010): 805–809. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2010.04.009.

17 Katy Tapper, Christine Shaw, Joanne Ilsley, Andrew J. Hill, Frank W.

Bond, Laurence Moore, “Exploratory randomised controlled trial of a
mindfulness-based weight loss intervention for women,” Appetite 52,
issue 2 (April 2009): 396–404.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2008.11.012.

18 Teresa D. Hawkes, Wayne Manselle, and Marjorie H. Woollacott,

“Cross-Sectional Comparison of Executive Attention Function in
Normally Aging Long-Term T’ai Chi, Meditation, and Aerobic Fitness
Practitioners Versus Sedentary Adults,” Journal of Alternative and
Complementary Medicine 20, no. 3 (March 1, 2014): 178–184. doi:
10.1089/acm.2013.0266.

19 Anu Kangasniemi, Raimo Lappalainen, AnnaKankaanpää, and

TuijaTammelin, “Mindfulness Skills, Psychological Flexibility, and
Psychological Symptoms among Physically Less Active and Active
Adults,” Mental Health and Physical Activity 7, issue 3 (2014): 121–
127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mhpa.2014.06.005.

20 Fumio Shaku, Madoka Tsutsumi, Hideyoshi Goto, and Denise Saint

Arnoult, “Measuring the Effects of Zen Training on Quality of Life
and Mental Health among Japanese Monk Trainees: A Cross-Sectional
Study,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 20, no. 5
(May 2014): 406–410. doi: 10.1089/acm.2013.0209.
21 Fabiana Braga Benatti and Mathias Ried-Larsen, “The Effects of
Breaking up Prolonged Sitting Time: A Review of Experimental
Studies,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 47, no. 10 (October
2015): 2053–2061. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000654.

22 Markus D. Jakobsen, Emil Sundstrup, Mikkel Brandt, and Lars L.

Andersen, “Psychosocial Benefits of Workplace Physical Exercise:
Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial,” BMC Public Health 17 (2017):
798. doi: 10.1186/s12889-017-4728-3.

23 James H. O’Keefe, Carl J. Lavie, and Marco Guazzi, “Part 1: Potential

Dangers of Extreme Endurance Exercise: How Much Is Too Much?
Part 2: Screening of School-Age Athletes,” Progress in
Cardiovascular Diseases 57, issue 4 (2014). doi:
10.1016/j.pcad.2014.11.004.

24 Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra (Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1995), 103.

25 O’Keefe et al., “Part 1: Potential Dangers of Extreme Endurance

Exercise: How Much Is Too Much? Part 2: Screening of School-Age
Athletes.”

26 Stéphane Brutus, Roshan Javadian, and Alexandra Joelle Panaccio,

“Cycling, Car, or Public Transit: A Study of Stress and Mood upon
Arrival at Work,” International Journal of Workplace Health
Management 10, no. 1 (2017) 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-
10-2015-0059.

27 Crosby and Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra, 26.

 CHAPTER 10: SLEEPING TO WAKE UP

1 Moshe Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville, MA:

Wisdom Publications, 1987), 463.

2 Gil Frondsal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shamabhala

Publications, 2005), 84.

3 Ariana Huffington, The Sleep Revolution (New York: Harmony Books,

2017), 3.

4 Michael A. Grandner, “Sleep, Health, and Society,” Journal of Clinical

Sleep Medicine 12, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–22. doi:
10.1016/j.jsmc.2016.10.012. Epub December 20, 2016.

5 E. R. Kucharczyk, K. Morgan, and A. P. Hall, “The Occupational Impact

of Sleep Quality and Insomnia Symptoms,” Sleep Medicine Review 16,
no. 6 (December 2012): 547–559. doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2012.01.005.

6 R.C. Kessler, Patricia A. Berglund, Catherine Coulouvrat, Goeran Hajak,

Thomas Roth, Victoria Shahly, Alicia C. Shillington, Judith J.
Stephenson, and James K. Walsh, “Insomnia and the Performance of US
Workers: Results from the America Insomnia Survey,” Sleep 34, no. 9
(September 1, 2011): 1161–1171. doi: 10.5665/SLEEP.1230.

7 Mark B. Rosekind, Kevin B. Gregory, Melissa M. Mallis, Summer L.

Brandt, Brian Seal, and Debra Lerner, “The Cost of Poor Sleep:
Workplace Productivity Loss and Associated Costs,” Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Medicine 52, no. 1 (January 2010):
91–98. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0b013e3181c78c30.

8 Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader, “Time Use and Productivity: The
Wage Returns to Sleep,” Review of Economics and Statistics 100, no. 5
(2018), 783–798. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00746.

9 Irshaad O. Ebrahim, Colin M. Shapiro, Adrian J. Williams, and Peter B.

Fenwick, “Alcohol and Sleep I: Effects on Normal Sleep,” Alcoholism
 Clinical and Experimental Research. 37, no. 4 (April 2013): 539–549.
doi: 10.1111/acer.12006.

10 Michael Gradisar, Amy R. Wolfson, Allison G. Harvey, Lauren Hale,

Russell Rosenberg, and Charles A. Czeisler, “The Sleep and
Technology Use of Americans: Findings from the National Sleep
Foundation’s 2011 Sleep in America Poll,” Journal of Clinical Sleep
Medicine 9, no. 12 (December 15, 2013): 1291–1299. doi:
10.5664/jcsm.3272.

11 Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach, Jeanne F. Duffy, and Charles A.

Czeislera, “Evening Use of Light-Emitting eReaders Negatively
Affects Sleep, Circadian Timing, and Next-Morning Alertness,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112, no. 4
(January 2015): 1232–1237. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1418490112.

12 YongMin Cho, Seung-Hun Ryu, Byeo Ri Lee, Kyung Hee Kim, Eunil
Lee, and Jaewook Choi, “Effects of artificial light at night on human
health: A literature review of observational and experimental studies
applied to exposure assessment,” Chronobiology International 32, no.
9 (2015): 1294–1310. doi: 10.3109/07420528.2015.1073158.

13 Jitendra M. Mishra, “A Case for Naps in the Workplace,” Seidman

Business Review 15, issue 1, Article 9 (2009).

14 Mark R. Rosekind Roy M. Smith, Donna L. Miller, Elizabeth L. Co,

Kevin B. Gregory, Lissa L. Webbon, Philippa H. Gander, J. Victor
Lebacqz, “Alertness Management: Strategic Naps in Operational
Settings,” Journal of Sleep Research 4, supplement 2 (December
1995): 62–66.

15 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 342.

16 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 313.
17 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,
MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 1573.

18 David S. Black, Gillian A O’Reilly, Richard E. Olmstead, Elizabeth C.

Breen, and Michael R. Irwin, “Mindfulness Meditation and
Improvement in Sleep Quality and Daytime Impairment among Older
Adults with Sleep Disturbances,” JAMA Internal Medicine 175, no. 4
(April 1, 2015): 494–501. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.8081.

19 Sheila N. Garland, Eric S. Zhou, Brian D. Gonzalez, and Nicole

Rodriguez, “The Quest for Mindful Sleep: A Critical Synthesis of the
Impact of Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Insomnia,” Current
Sleep Medicine Reports 1, no. 3 (September 2016): 142–151. doi:
10.1007/s40675-016-0050-3.
 CHAPTER 11: TELLING THE TRUTH

1 Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code I (Valley Center, CA:

Metta Forest Monastery, 2013), 291.

2 Moshe Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville, MA:

Wisdom Publications, 1987), 462.

3 Bella M. DePaulo, Deborah A. Kashy, Susan E. Kirkendol, Melissa M.

Wyer, and Jennifer A. Epstein, “Lying in Everyday Life,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 979.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.979.

4 Keith Leavitt and David M. Sluss, “Lying for Who We Are: An Identity-
Based Model of Workplace Dishonesty,” Academy of Management
Review 40, no. 4 (2005). https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2013.0167.

5 Kim Scott, Radical Candor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 10.

6 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Buddha’s Teachings on Social and Communal

Harmony (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), 75.

7 Ibid., 81.

8 Ibid., 75.

9 Ibid., 60.

10 Scott, Radical Candor, 32.

11 Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra (Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1995), 41.

12 Bhikkhu, Buddhist Monastic Code I, 293.

13 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 524.
14 Gil Frondsal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shamabhala
Publications, 2005), 27.
 CHAPTER 12: BICKERING BUDDHAS

1 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 743.

2 Elfi Baillien, Jeroen Camps, Anja Vanden Broeck, Jeroen Stouten,

LodeGodderis, Maarten Sercu, and Hans DeWitte “An Eye for an Eye
Will Make the Whole World Blind: Conflict Escalation into Workplace
Bullying and the Role of Distributive Conflict Behavior,” Journal of
Business Ethics 137, issue 2 (August 2016): 415–429.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2563-y.

3 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Buddha’s Teachings on Social and Communal

Harmony (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), 76.

4 Ibid., 131.
 CHAPTER 14: WHAT YODA GOT WRONG

1 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1597.

2 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path (Onalaska, WA: Pariyatti

Publishing, 2000), 63.

3 Moshe Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville, MA:

Wisdom Publications, 1987), 462.

4 Tait D. Shanafelt, Colin P. West, Jeff A. Sloan, aul J. Novotny, Greg A.

Poland, Ron Menaker, Teresa A. Rummans, and Lotte N. Dyrbye,
“Career Fit and Burnout among Academic Faculty,” Archives of
Internal Medicine 169, no. 10 (2009: 990–995.
doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2009.70.

5 Rita Gunther McGrath, “Failing by Design,” Harvard Business Review

89, no. 4 (April 2011): 76–83, 137.

6 Daw Mya Tin, The Dhammapada: Verses & Stories (Delhi, India: Sri
Satguru Publications, 1990), 380.

7 Gil Fronsdal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications,

2005), 72. (I have translated tatagathas as “teachers,” while Fronsdal
leaves it untranslated.)

8 Matthew Bortolin, The Dharma of Star Wars (Somerville, MA: Wisdom

Publications, 2015), xii.
 CHAPTER 15: REMEMBERING TO BREATHE

1 Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy (July 1870):
138–140.

2 Kathleen Nolan, “Buddhism, Zen, and Bioethics,” Bioethics Yearbook 3

(1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1886-6_9.

3 Thich Nhat Hanh, Breathe: You Are Alive! (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press,
2008), 3.

4 Eddie Stern, One Simple Thing (New York: North Point Press, 2019),
171.

5 Ibid., 145.

6 Thich Nhat Hanh’s Breathe: You Are Alive! is especially good.

7 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 943.
 CHAPTER 16: ATTACHMENT AND DETACHMENT

1 Oskar von Hinuber, A Handbook of Pali Literature (New Delhi, India:

Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997), 24.

2 John D. Ireland, Itivuttaka: The Buddha’s Sayings (Kandy, Sri Lanka:

Buddhist Publication Society, 1997), 11.

3 Thomas Hugh Feeley, Jennie Hwang, and George A. Barnett, “Predicting

Employee Turnover from Friendship Networks,” Journal of Applied
Communication Research 36, no. 1 (2008): 56–73.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880701799790.

4 Charlotte Fritz, Chak Fu Lam, and Gretchen M. Spreitzer, “It’s the Little
Things That Matter: An Examination of Knowledge Workers’ Energy
Management,” Academy of Management Perspectives 25, no. 3 (2017):
28–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/AMP.2011.63886528

5 Rachel Morrison, “Gender Differences in the Relationship Between

Workplace Friendships and Organisational Outcomes,” Enterprise and
Innovation, 2007, 33.

6 Julianna Pillemer and Nancy P. Rothbard, “Friends without Benefits:

Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship,” Academy of
Management Review 43, no. 4 (2018).
https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2016.0309.

7 Patricia M. Sias and Daniel J. Cahill, “From Coworkers to Friends: The

Development of Peer Friendships in the Workplace,” Western Journal of
Communication 62, no. 3 (1998): 273–299.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319809374611.

8 Fritz, et al., “It’s the Little Things That Matter.”

9 Charles A. Pierce and Herman Aguinis, “Bridging the Gap between

Romantic Relationships and Sexual Harassment in Organizations,”
Journal of Organizational Behavior 18 (1997): 197–200.
10 Vanessa K. Bohns and Lauren A. DeVincent, “Rejecting Unwanted
Romantic Advances Is More Difficult Than Suitors Realize,” Social
Psychological and Personality Science (2018): 1–9.

11 Ibid.

12 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1524.
 CHAPTER 17: BALANCING BETTER THAN BUDDHA

1 Mohan Wijyayaranta, Buddhist Monastic Life: According to the Sources

of the Theravada Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 173.

2 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Suttanipata (Somerville, MA: Wisdom

Publications, 2017), 223.

3 Erin Reid. “Embracing, Passing, Revealing, and the Ideal Worker Image:
How People Navigate Expected and Experienced Professional
Identities,” Organization Science 26, no. 4 (2015): 997–1017.
doi:10.1287/ORSC.2015.0975.

4 Charlotte Fritz, Chak Fu Lam, and Gretchen M. Spreitzer, “It’s the Little
Things That Matter: An Examination of Knowledge Workers’ Energy
Management,” Academy of Management Perspectives 25, no. 3 (2017):
28–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/AMP.2011.63886528

5 Evangelia Demerouti, Arnold B. Bakker, Sabine Sonnentag and Clive J.

Fullagar “Work‐Related Flow and Energy at Work and at Home: A
Study on the Role of Daily Recovery,” Journal of Organizational
Behavior 33 (2012): 276–295. doi: 10.1002/job.760.

6 Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brenda A. Lautsch, “Work-Life Flexibility for

Whom? Occupational Status and Work-Life Inequality in Upper,
Middle, and Lower Level Jobs,” Academy of Management Annals 12,
no. 1 (2017). .https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0059.

7 Bodhi, The Suttanipata, 742.

8 Hubert Nearman, O.B.C., translator, The Monastic Office (Mt. Shasta,

CA: Shasta Abbey, 1993), 18.
 CHAPTER 18: YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB

1 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 901–903.

2 Rev. angel Kyodo williams, “Radical Challenge,” in Rev. angel Kyodo

williams, Lama Rod Owens, with Jasmine Syedullah, Radical Dharma
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016), xxiii.

3 Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through

Race, Sexuality, and Gender (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications,
2015), 8.
 CHAPTER 19: DEALING WITH DISTRACTIONS

1 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, The Distraction Addiction (New York: Little,

Brown and Company, 2013), 15.

2 Preetinder S. Gill, Ashwini Kamath, and Tejkaran S. Gill, “Distraction:

An Assessment of Smartphone Usage in Health Care Work Settings,”
Risk Management and Healthcare Policy 5 (2012): 105–114.
doi:10.2147/RMHP. S34813.

3 Ibid.

4 Jill T. Shelton, “The Distracting Effects of a Ringing Cell Phone: An

Investigation of the Laboratory and the Classroom Setting,” Journal of
Environmental Psychology 29, no. 4 (December 2009): 513–521.
doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.03.001.

5 Bhikku Analayo, Early Buddhist Meditation Studies (Barre, MA: Barre

Center for Buddhist Studies, 2017), 109.

6 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sami Abuhamdeh, and Jeanne Nakamura,

“Flow,” in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Foundations of
Positive Psychology (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer, 2014), 230.

7 Shelton, “The Distracting Effects of a Ringing Cell Phone.”

8 Wesley C. Clapp, Michael T. Rubens, Jasdeep Sabharwal, and Adam

Gazzaley, “Deficit in Switching between Functional Brain Networks
Underlies the Impact of Multitasking on Working Memory in Older
Adults,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Science 108, no. 17
(April 26, 2011): 7212–7217. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1015297108.

9 Faria Sana, TinaWeston, and Nicholas J.Cepeda, “Laptop Multitasking

Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,”
Computers & Education 62 (March 2013): 24–31.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003.
10 Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 36.

11 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, The Distraction Addiction (New York: Little,

Brown and Company, 2013), 61.

12 Ibid., 62.

13 Shunryu Suzuki, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999), 3.
 CHAPTER 20: BEGGING FOR LUNCH

1 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 134.

2 Malia Wollan, “Failure to Lunch: The Lamentable Rise of Desktop

Dining,” New York Times Magazine (February 27, 2016): 50.

3 Stephanie A. Boone and Charles P. Gerba, “The Prevalence of Human

Parainfluenza Virus 1 on Indoor Office Fomites,” Food and
Environmental Virology 2 (2010): 41.

4 Stephanie A. Boone and Charles P. Gerba, “Significance of Fomites in

the Spread of Respiratory and Enteric Viral Disease,” Applied and
Environmental Microbiology 73, no. 6 (March 2007): 1687–1696.
doi:10.1128/AEM.02051-06. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12560-010-9026-
5.

5 Thanaissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code (Valley Center, CA:

Metta Forest Monastery, 2013), 497.

6 Evangelia Demerouti, Arnold B. Bakker, Sabine Sonnentag and Clive J.

Fullagar “Work‐Related Flow and Energy at Work and at Home: A
Study on the Role of Daily Recovery,” Journal of Organizational
Behavior 33 (2012): 276–295. doi: 10.1002/job.760.

7 Jessica de Bloom, Ulla Kinnunen, and Kalevi Korpela, “Exposure to

Nature versus Relaxation during Lunch Breaks and Recovery from
Work: Development and Design of an Intervention Study to Improve
Workers’ Health, Well-Being, Work Performance and Creativity,” BMC
Public Health 14 (2014): 488. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-488.

8 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 176.

9 Bhikkhu Anālayo, “Overeating and Mindfulness in Ancient India,”

Mindfulness 9 (2018): 1648–1654. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12671-018-
 1009-x.

10 See the chapter titled “Food for Thought, Thought for Food,” in Tara
Cottrell and Dan Zigmond, Buddha’s Diet (Philadelphia: Running
Press, 2016).

11 Michael T. French, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Jody L. Sindelar, and

Hai Fang, “The Morning After: Alcohol Misuse and Employment
Problems,” Applied Economics 43, no. 21 (2011):, 2705–2720.
https://doi. org/10.1080/00036840903357421.

12 Silje L. Kaspersen, Kristine Pape, Gunnhild Å. Vie, Solveig O. Ose,

Steinar Krokstad, David Gunnell, and Johan H. Bjørngaard, “Health
and Unemployment: 14 Years of Follow-Up on Job Loss in the
Norwegian HUNT Study,” European Journal of Public Health 26, no. 2
(April 2016): 312–317. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckv224.

13 Rupert Gethin, Sayings of the Buddha: A Selection of Suttas from the

Pali Nikāyas (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131.
 CHAPTER 21: WHO WOULD BUDDHA FIRE?

1 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, “Labor Force

Statistics from the Current Population Survey” (January 19, 2018).
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm.

2 Gil Fronsdal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications,

2005), 1.

3 Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code I (Valley Center, CA:

Metta Forest Monastery, 2013), 329.

4 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 816.

5 Damien P. Horigan, “Of Compassion and Capital Punishment: A

Buddhist Perspective on the Death Penalty,” American Journal of
Jurisprudence 41 (1996). http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-
PHIL/damin2.htm; Leanne Fiftal Alarid and Hsiao-Ming Wang, “Mercy
and Punishment: Buddhism and the Death Penalty,” Social Justice 28,
no. 1 (2001): 231–247. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768067.

6 Fronsdal, Dhammapada, 13.

 CHAPTER 22: WALKING AWAY

1 Steven D. Levitt, “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss and Major
Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness,” National Bureau of
Economic Research, Working Paper 22587 (August 2016).
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22487.

2 Ibid., 16.

3 Wendy R. Boswell, John W. Boudreau, Jan Tichy, “The Relationship

between Employee Job Change and Job Satisfaction: The Honeymoon-
Hangover Effect,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90, no. 5 (September
2005): 882–892.

4 Moshe Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville, MA:

Wisdom Publications, 1987), 482.

5 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 790.

6 Walshe, Long Discourses of the Buddha, 69–70.

7 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1333.

8 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “Number of Jobs,

Labor Market Experience, and Earnings Growth among Americans at
50: Results from a Longitudinal Survey” (August 24, 2017).
https://www.bls.gov/news.

9 Gil Fronsdal, The Dhammapada (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications,

2005), 14.
 CHAPTER 23: DATA-DRIVEN DHARMA

1 Bhikkhu Nanamoli, The Life of the Buddha (Onalska, WA: BPS Pariyatti
Editions, 2001), 17–18.

2 Ibid.

3 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Somerville,

MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 285.

4 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 780.
 CHAPTER 24: LIVING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT

1 Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment (Berkeley, CA:

Parallax Press, 1990), vii.

2 Ibid., viii.
 CHAPTER 25: SERVING ALL SENTIENT BEINGS

1 Larry Yang, Awakening Together (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2017),

41–42.

2 His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Kindness, Clarity, and Insight
(Boston: Snow Lion, 1984).

3 Dan Zigmond, “A Toast to Paying Attention!” Lion’s Roar (January

2019).

4 Stephen Batchelor, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Dharamsala,

India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999).

5 Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, The Bodhicaryavatra (Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1995), 43.
 CHAPTER 26: DID YOU JUST BECOME A BUDDHIST?

1 Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2017).

2 Ibid., 261.

3 Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses

of the Buddha (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 484.
* And it’s not that he was busy doing a lot of housework, either. He left home the day after his
only son was born. It’s safe to assume that he did not change any diapers before he left.
* The wife and son he abandoned were eventually ordained and joined Buddha’s burgeoning
community of monks and nuns, so his one and only descendant ended up broke, too.
* At least so far. The oldest surviving Buddhist scriptures we now have were discovered in
Pakistan only 25 years ago, written on birch bark and buried in clay jars.4 Who knows what we
may find next? So please don’t throw away old jars.
* Yes, another arrow metaphor. (See the previous chapter for the first one.) It seems safe to
assume that getting shot by an arrow was a lot more common in Buddha’s time.
* There are many! I particularly like the Insight Timer app, which is both free and fantastic:
https://insighttimer.com/.
* In fact, the only people who don’t seem to have these fears are those so self-absorbed that they
can’t imagine themselves as anything but successful—exactly the ones who could use a dose
of self-doubt.
* Paul McCartney claims to have written the melody to “Yesterday” in a dream.
* Buddha’s Diet, my first book (co-written with Tara Cottrell), has a whole chapter on how
sleepless nights make us fat.
* It’s generally eighth for Catholics and Lutherans; ninth for Jews, Orthodox Christians,
Calvinists, and Anglicans. The Bible doesn’t number them clearly.
* If I’m not working with a group of smart and well-intentioned people, it may be time to move
on anyway. If you can’t trust that the second-best decision will usually be a good one, you
may have deeper misgivings about this team or this work that need to be addressed.
* In case of actual limb severing, though, you should definitely notify someone in HR.
* There are exceptions to this. I’ve had people at work tell me they have cancer, that someone
close to them is sick or has died, or that a marriage is dissolving painfully. Those situations are
the wrong time to offer critical feedback. Offering comfort is the priority; work-related
criticism can wait.
* Buddha was not a great dad, as we’ll explain in chapter 17. But his son was eventually
ordained as a monk and joined Buddha’s sangha, after which Buddha did his best to train him.
* OK, not literally nothing. They are allowed three robes, one bowl, a razor, a water-strainer, and
a needle and thread.
* When China invaded Tibet in the 1950s and began dismantling their monastic system, the
Chinese authorities claimed the Tibetan monks were exploiting the laypeople by living lives of
idleness while others worked. The fact that the Tibetan people were willing, even eager,
participants in this arrangement was seen as a sign of their brainwashing.
* He’s a tubby monk from China who became a symbol of good luck. His name is Hotei in
Japanese but Budai in Chinese—which may be one source of confusion.
* I realize that this advice would undermine the plot of virtually every workplace romantic
comedy. You should follow it anyway.
* Buddha didn’t know about cars, of course. But because he preached that all things were
empty, he would have included cars, too.
* Another reason is that it just doesn’t work very well. People are much more likely to
compromise if you are criticizing their ideas than if you are criticizing their whole being.
* Buddha’s Diet, written with my friend Tara Cottrell.
* Seriously, “exposing yourself” actually happens, and it’s not pretty.
* The different modern schools of Buddhist monastics observe somewhat different rules, but all
the “traditional” sects (usually called the Therevadin) have more rules for women than for
men. Some claim this was necessary in Buddha’s time in order for women to be accepted at all,
because full gender equality would have been beyond the pale. In many modern Buddhist
schools, men and women observe the same rules and are treated entirely as equals. The San
Francisco Zen Center, for example, has had several women serve as abbess in recent years.
* The book I cowrote on eating and health, Buddha’s Diet, grew out of an investigation of this
one odd-sounding rule.
* It was not a literal coin toss. A computer chose randomly between heads and tails.
* Presumably because the effects of most “diets” are short-lived. See Buddha’s Diet to learn
more about why.
* True story.
* And let’s assume you were asked this in the middle of the Utah desert, with no access to
Google or Wikipedia or any other obvious source.
* There are exceptions. The American Buddhist teacher Larry Yang tells the story of donating his
extra alms to migrant laborers when he was a monk in Thailand.1
* Yes, he’s Martine’s husband. The Batchelors may be the first Buddhist power couple in the
West.