10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Chapter 11 Hide the Zen

When the email arrived, I was marinating in sitar music in the ornate, honey-lit lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in New Delhi. It was late 2010, and I was in India to shoot an investigative story about unscrupulous back-alley doctors.

Back at the home office, an earthquake had hit. After months of fevered speculation about who would take over for David Westin, we finally received the official announcement from the head of the ABC Television Group. The name of my new boss was: Ben Sherwood.

He and I had a history. It was Ben who was in the control room as the executive producer of GMA when I had my first panic attack. Ben had been very supportive in that moment, immediately getting in my ear and making sure I was okay. As I stared at my BlackBerry, I began calculating what this announcement meant for me. Ben and I had always had a good relationship, I told myself. Although, with a twinge of embarrassment, I also quickly flashed back to moments when I’d mouthed off to him, in an era when I was prone to do such things. There was that time when he’d asked me to do a live shot in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina holding up a handful of sludge from the soaked streets of New Orleans, to give viewers a visceral sense of the scope of the disaster. I was exhausted and ornery after days of round-the-clock coverage, and I got a little lippy. (I ended up holding the sludge.)

Ben was an unusual species in the broadcast news ecosystem, both in terms of pedigree and personality. A Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar, he’d held a variety of senior jobs at both ABC and NBC. Between news gigs, he would head off on his own and write a book. He had three bestsellers under his belt, one nonfiction book and two novels. (One of the novels had even been made into a movie, Charlie St. Cloud, starring teen idol Zac Efron.) He was extremely tall, crackling with energy, and capable of both earnestness and sarcastic candor.

I didn’t know it as I sat in the lobby in India absorbing the news, but Ben’s arrival would precipitate a professional crisis.

He began work a few weeks later. Things started off well enough between us. He was sending encouraging emails. For example, he liked a one-liner of mine during a “live-wrap” I did on weekday GMA. After a story about a young man who was forced to stand for an entire flight from Chicago to Florida because he was too tall to sit in his seat, I said, “Not a problem I’ve ever had.”

Then, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly killed by a deranged, gun-toting college dropout at a “Meet Your Representative” event, Ben dispatched me to Tucson as part of the first team in. It was a round-the-clock work marathon. I’d covered mass shootings before, but the outpouring for Representative Giffords and the other victims was like none I’d ever seen. After a few days on the ground, Ben called me and we had a detailed, positive discussion about how the news division was covering the story.

It quickly became clear that Ben was going to be the most hands-on boss most of us had ever had. He personally presided over the division-wide conference call every morning, putting on a master class in TV producing, variously engaging in pointed critiques and lavish praise of our work, including details as small as the graphics and the individual shots that producers chose in their stories. The call became appointment listening.

His emails—evocative little tone poems—showed up in our in-boxes at all hours. The man did not appear to sleep. He watched every minute of every show we did, and nothing escaped his attention. One day, I did a story for World News about a new poll showing that mainline Protestant churches were losing membership. Distracted by other work, I hadn’t put a lot of time or effort into the piece—I had basically phoned it in. As soon as the story aired, I got an email from Ben saying the writing seemed flat and unimaginative. He was right and I had no defense. It was both terrifying and invigorating to have a boss who knew your job as well if not better than you did. He had served notice: no one would get away with lazy work.

As I watched the entire news division scramble to reorient to this dynamic new presence, I made a calculation: I wasn’t going to crowd him or go out of my way to impress him. I didn’t put in any extra effort to produce special stories that might catch his eye, and I didn’t angle for face time. My motives were opaque, even to me. Maybe I thought it’d be unseemly. I was now a guy who was hanging out with the Dalai Lama; I shouldn’t be striving so nakedly, right? I figured he knew me, knew my history; I’d be fine. I’d lived through these seismic events before—including Peter’s death and Charlie’s retirement—and always emerged unscathed, if not enhanced. I had seemingly stowed my internal cattle prod in favor of a new, creeping passivity.

Very quickly, my strategy—or lack thereof—began to backfire. When massive street protests flared up in Egypt against the dictator Hosni Mubarak, Ben flooded the zone with ABC News staffers. This was history in the making—the kind of thing I lived for. In the past, it was exactly the type of story for which I’d been first out the door, but this time I did not get the call. Instead, I watched from the discomfort of my living room couch as Terry Moran and David Muir, among others, covered the story. The old me might have made an impulsive phone call or two. But the new, metta-meditating me thought that approach, which involved making my case to the detriment of my peers, uncompassionate.

As I pondered this dilemma, the situation at work only got worse. When a real, not figurative, earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, Ben sent David and Bill Weir over to cover it. At home on the couch with Bianca, we watched the horror play out on-screen. The images were overwhelming. My wife was in a puddle of tears, while the freshly minted brown belt in loving-kindness was feeling badly both for the victims—and himself.

Not long after Ben’s arrival, I reluctantly went up to snowy central Massachusetts for a metta meditation retreat. Sharon Salzberg, an old-school Jew-Bu and new friend of mine, had invited me up several months before. It was a nice gesture, and I had accepted the invitation, but given recent developments at the office, I just wasn’t in the mood for it. Even so, I drove the four hours to endure three days of straining to generate good vibes.

The setting was nice, at least. Sharon, Joseph, and another teacher named Jack Kornfield had founded the Insight Meditation Society (also known by regulars as IMS or, sometimes, “I’m a mess”) back in 1976. They’d scraped together $150,000 for a down payment on a multiwing, one-hundred-room redbrick mansion that had most recently served as a Catholic monastery. They had converted the chapel into a meditation hall, although they’d left up the stained glass images of Jesus. The rest of the building was decorated with potted plants, large geodes, and ancient Buddhist artifacts, which reminded me of the living rooms of my childhood friends with progressive parents.

Sharon happened to give a very timely talk on the subject of mudita, the Buddhist term for sympathetic joy. She admitted that sometimes her first instinct when trying to summon this feeling was “Ew, I wish you didn’t have so much going for you.” The meditation hall erupted in laughter. Sharon said the biggest obstacle to mudita is a subconscious illusion, that whatever success the other person has achieved was actually somehow really meant for us. “It’s almost like, it was heading right for me,” she said, “and you just reached out and grabbed it.” More laughter, as everyone in the room enjoyed one of the most satisfying of all dharma delicacies: an accurate diagnosis of our inner lunacy.

On the second day, I spotted a little note with my name on it posted to the message board in the main hallway. Sharon would see me that afternoon. As I padded into her interview room, she gave me a big hug. She was a jolly woman in her late fifties who, like pretty much every long-term meditator I knew, looked significantly younger than her chronological age. As we chatted, I mentioned that I was somewhat preoccupied by things at work; I described my concern that I’d suddenly become more of a bench-warmer.

“When faced with something like this,” she said, “often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen—and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know.”

The smart play, she said, was to turn the situation to my internal advantage. “Fear of annihilation,” she said, “can lead to great insight, because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control.”

This got me thinking again about the “wisdom of insecurity.” From the comfort and remove of the sylvan idyll of IMS, it hit me afresh that the “security” for which I had been striving was an illusion. If everything in this world was in constant decay, why expend so much energy gnashing my teeth over work?

I began to examine the source of my drive. Was it rooted in my privileged upbringing? Maybe this is just what “people like me” did? Was it because I grew up in a town crawling with rich kids whose parents drove Porsches and BMWs, while my folks—academic physicians, not bankers—drove a shit-brown Plymouth Valiant and a gray Chevy Chevette? Much of my adolescence was characterized by a self-imposed feeling of lack. Now that I was a “spiritual” guy, maybe it was time to transcend my bourgeois conditioning?

I snapped out of it quickly enough. The Buddha never said it was un-kosher to strive. Right there on his Noble Eightfold Path, his list of the eight things you had to do to get enlightened, “Right Livelihood” was number five. He was proud of everything he built, including his ranks of monks and nuns. He wasn’t particularly modest, either. This was a man who regularly referred to himself in the third person.

Here I was, two and a half years after I’d first discovered Eckhart Tolle, still wrestling with the same question: Was it possible to strike a balance between “the price of security” and the “wisdom of insecurity”?

Back at the office, what I viewed as a downward spiral only continued. 2011 was a huge news year: the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Qaddafi in Libya, the Royal Wedding of William and Kate, and I didn’t get tagged to cover any of it. (That last one fell into the didn’t-want-to-do-it-but-would-have-liked-to-have-been-asked category, but still  . . .)

At times, I managed to convince myself I was handling it pretty well. When I got into a rut, it didn’t take long for me to jar myself out of it. I would use RAIN—watching how the feelings would show themselves in my body and then labeling them with some degree of nonjudgmental remove. It reminded me of how soldiers and police officers I’d interviewed described their reactions in emergency situations. They would almost always say something to the effect of “My training kicked in.”

I also thought, with a degree of self-satisfaction, that having a calmer, more compassionate mind was allowing me to take a dry-eyed view of the situation, unclouded by unhelpful emotion. Rather than take it personally, I tried to see it through Ben’s eyes. He was just doing the best he could to turn the news division around. Maybe I just wasn’t his cup of tea? I comforted myself with the conclusion that I was engaged in a healthy acknowledgment of reality that would ultimately allow for the virtuous cycle of less unnecessary straining and better decision making.

My loving wife, however, thought I was being a total wuss. While she was glad I wasn’t losing my cool, she was bewildered by the fact that her husband seemed so suddenly gelded. When a big story broke, she and I would often have text exchanges in which Bianca would urge me to advocate for myself. For example:

Me: “I feel I still don’t have a good approach yet to asserting myself in these situations w/o reverting to my old dickish ways.”

Bianca: “I understand. But you’re not going to risk anything by being slightly more aggressive about it instead of a passively available team player.”

I knew she wasn’t trying to criticize, but I could feel defensiveness welling up anyway. I struggled not to misdirect my frustration at the one person who was trying to help me. All I wanted to do was bury my head and hope the situation went away. I just couldn’t figure out the right play.

By now, the nice emails from Ben had stopped—because I wasn’t doing anything to deserve them. Not only was I not getting tapped to cover the big stories, but I’d somehow lost my motivation to pitch and produce special investigative reports, my longtime specialty. I’d hear Ben praising people on the morning call, summoning rounds of applause from the attendees, and I wanted to do work that merited this reaction. And yet the more discouraged I got, the more trouble I had overcoming inertia.

After months of drift, in July of 2011 I finally decided to act.

I emailed Ben to schedule a chat, and a few days later I was in his corner office, ready to see if I could fix this thing. Between where I sat on the couch and Ben’s chair was a large coffee table covered in snacks, including tall glass jars filled with pretzel sticks and licorice. There was even, curiously, a bunch of bananas. He joked that he liked to see how people managed to peel and eat a banana in front of their boss.

I assumed he’d be expecting me to come at him with a litany of complaints, so after a lot of strategizing with Bianca, I decided to take a different tack. “I’m concerned,” I said, “that you do not see me as part of the A-team, and I want to know how I can change your mind.”

His response was a thing to behold. I could practically see the wheels in his head turning as he calibrated, then recalibrated, his approach. After maybe five seconds of buffering, he launched into his speech.

“First of all,” he said, “you’re wrong. I do see you as a major player.”

But, he went on, there were some real problems I needed to address. Chief among them: I wasn’t hustling and getting on TV enough. He said, “I think you’ve fallen into that classic weekend-anchor trap where you have your little pocket of airtime on Saturday and Sunday, and then the rest of the week you’re nowhere to be seen.” This was unquestionably true. “You need to up your game,” he declared.

The second issue was weekend GMA. Too often the show was going off the rails, he said, with our anchor banter devolving into silliness. I needed to play a larger role in getting this under control. “I need you to be a leading man,” he said. When I put up a mild protest, arguing that I didn’t want to be bossy or imperious, Ben—who knew I’d become a meditator—looked me dead in the eyes and said, in a tone that was both playful and serious, “Stop being so Zen.”

In mere minutes he had pinpointed and pronounced my errors. Behind the fig leaf of being a good yogi, I had gone so far down the path of resignation and passivity that I had compromised the career I had worked for decades to build. It was just as my dad had feared; I had become ineffective. What I should have done when faced with this adversity was buckle down and work harder. Instead, I had confused “letting go” with going soft.

It was my toughest and most productive professional meeting since that encounter with my boss back at the local station in Boston who told me I was being an asshole. Except this time, ironically, the problem was almost diametrically the opposite.

Serendipitously, on the very night of my meeting with Ben, I had scheduled a dinner with Mark Epstein. In the taxi on my way downtown I called Bianca and told her how it’d gone.

“He’s right,” she said. Which came as no surprise; Ben had basically affirmed her thesis. “This is good. Now you know what you need to do.”

Mark and I met to eat at a fussy Japanese restaurant called Brush-stroke, where they only served a tasting menu and the waiters took themselves very, very seriously. Once we’d placed our orders, I told Mark what had just gone down in Ben’s office. He responded with a catchy little suggestion: “Hide the Zen.”

“People will take advantage of you if they’re reading you as too Zen,” he said. “There’s a certain kind of aggression in organizational behavior that doesn’t value that—that will see it as weak. If you present yourself too much like that, people won’t take you seriously. So I think it important to hide the Zen, and let them think that you’re really someone they have to contend with.”

But I was attached to my rep as a Zen guy. “I don’t want to be an asshole at the office.”

“No,” he said. “That’s the tricky thing about what he’s saying to you. I’m sure there’s a way of doing it where you don’t have to be an asshole. I think it might be possible that you could give the appearance of being one of those guys while deep inside of you, you wouldn’t be.”

I had fallen, he said, into several classic “pitfalls of the path.” People often misinterpreted the dharma to mean they had to adopt a sort of meekness. Some of Mark’s patients even stopped using the word “I,” or disavowed the need to have orgasms during sex. He recalled scenes from his youth when he and meditation buddies would have group dinners at restaurants and no one would have the gumption to place an order. They didn’t want to express a personal preference, as if doing so was insufficiently Buddhist. Another pitfall was detachment. I thought I was being mindful of my distress when I was left out of the big stories, but really I was just building a wall to keep out the things that made me angry or fearful. The final pitfall to which I’d succumbed was nihilism: an occasional sense of, “Whatever, man, everything’s impermanent.”

At this point, the waiter came by to deliver an extremely long description of the dish that had just been placed in front of us. “For your next course you have the grilled anagi, which is freshwater eel . . .”

As he prattled on about kabocha squash and “large, translucent bits of daikon radish,” the nature of my missteps became radiantly clear. The Sufi Muslims say, “Praise Allah, but also tie your camel to the post.” In other words, it’s good to take a transcendent view of the world, but don’t be a chump. Joseph often told a story about his first meditation teacher, an Indian guy named Munindra, who used to advise all of his students to keep things “simple and easy.” One day, Joseph came upon Munindra in the village marketplace, haggling fiercely over a bag of peanuts. When confronted about this apparent contradiction with his simple-and-easy mantra, his teacher explained, “I said be simple, not a simpleton.”

When the waiter left, I said, “This is really humbling.”

Mark, always eager to put things in the best possible light, said, “I think it’s like a revolution in your understanding of this material—a deeper understanding. This makes it so much more alive.”

“Right. Right,” I said. “Because when everything’s going well and you’re being mindfully aware of stuff, that’s pretty easy.”

“That’s easy! This is, like, a real conundrum.”

The same conundrum I’d been fixated on for years, in fact—the balance between Buddhist principles and ambition. It was, I mused aloud, frustrating after all this time not to have the answer. As I sat there feeling bad for myself, it slipped right past me when Mark offered up that he actually did have an answer. It was simple, brilliant advice, but I was too preoccupied to hear it.

Nonetheless, back on the job, things began to improve. At the top of the to-do list I kept in my BlackBerry, I wrote down my marching orders from the meeting with Ben: “UP YOUR GAME,” and “LEADING MAN.” I’d never been one for this type of sloganeering—I liked my mottoes to be a touch more arch—but having these exhortations blaring out at me in all-caps every time I checked the list was extremely useful.

I started saying yes to every assignment that came my way, no matter how small—the way I used to do when I was an eager cub reporter. It did not go unnoticed. A mere three days after our meeting, the emails started coming again, the first about my writing in a GMA piece on the phone-hacking accusations rocking Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire:

I covered the arrest of the so-called “Craigslist killers,” who allegedly lured their victims through a help-wanted ad; I reported from a hospital on Staten Island where they had to send away all their patients because Hurricane Irene was bearing down; I covered the child sex abuse allegations that brought down legendary coach Joe Paterno at Penn State, where I got pepper-sprayed on camera during student riots.

Like any good coach, Ben was satisfying to please. He savored the little things—“grace notes,” as he called them. When he gave a shout-out to my work on the morning call, my chest swelled more than I cared to admit.

I got back into the habit of finding, pitching, and producing special reports, which I had neglected during my long slide into professional lethargy. I chased down the CEO of Philip Morris International on the street, and confronted him about the sale of cigarettes to young children in Indonesia. I reported on suburban moms who stole Adderall from their children. I investigated con men who ran a scam that involved calling people who had illegally ordered prescription drugs online and pretending to be DEA agents. They would threaten criminal charges, and then ask for bribes to make the case go away.

But the story of which I was proudest involved my spending two days locked up in solitary confinement. The idea was to bring attention to the growing national debate over whether this kind of incarceration was torture. My producers convinced the officials at the county jail in Denver to hold me for two days in a cell wired up with cameras. During this time, I endured boredom, bad food, claustrophobia, and the nonstop screaming of my fellow inmates, also in solitary, many of whom were having full-on nervous breakdowns. I awoke on the first morning to the animal howls of the inmate in the cell directly beneath me. It lasted for hours. Other inmates were hollering just to let off steam, including one troublemaker a few cells down, who, upon seeing our cameras, yelled out to no one in particular, “Yo, they’re making a movie! They should come suck my dick and make it a love story!” On my last day in captivity, as I was walking to the shower (mercifully, they only have solo showers in solitary) my mischievous neighbor shouted the following advice: “You need sandals, bro. You’ll catch gingivitis!”

My time in solitary was a humbling reminder of the limits of meditation—or, at least, the limits of my meditation abilities. I had cockily figured I could meditate through most of the experience, but the noise level and the lack of privacy—with cameras everywhere, and guards constantly peering in—made it nearly impossible. To make matters worse, whenever I tried to meditate, my neighbor, who couldn’t even see what I was up to, would uncannily break into “Karma Chameleon.”

My meditation also suffered when I was out covering breaking news, arguably the time when I needed it most. During the Penn State story, for example, in between live shots and filing deadlines, I would try to meditate in my hotel room, but I was often unable to fight through the fatigue.

In the midst of these intense work sprints, when I had less time to sleep, exercise, and meditate, I could feel my inner monologue getting testier, too—and I didn’t have the wherewithal to not take the voice in my head so seriously. I looked tired in my live shot this morning. I need a haircut. I can’t believe that Facebook commenter called me a “major clown.” The ego, that slippery son of a bitch, would use fatigue as an opportunity to sneak past my weakened defenses.

My increasing “story count,” as we call it, may have created difficulties in my meditation practice, but it was well worth it. And this was not the only area of professional improvement. I also made some progress on weekend GMA.

The upturn began one morning after the show, when Bianca found me sitting on the living room couch, once again watching and puzzling over some on-air moments with which I was dissatisfied. She grabbed the remote out of my hand and spontaneously began an hour-long clinic, starting at the top of the show and deconstructing exactly how and where I went wrong. The Hellos had started well enough that morning; I was smiling and laughing alongside my cohost. (Bianna was out on maternity leave, and her seat was filled by our excellent new overnight anchor, Paula Faris.) As we were all encouraged to do, Paula made an unscripted joke a few seconds into the show. Bianca pressed pause on the remote. “Look what happens right here. You tense up. You can literally see it.” It was true. Paula’s quip must have deviated from the preset plan for the Hellos that I had apparently constructed in my head, and I went stiff.

“You need to stop trying so hard,” said Bianca. “Just let go.”

It was delicious to have my wife throw Buddhist terminology back in my face. Especially since, in this case, she couldn’t have been more spot-on. I needed to approach anchoring more like meditation. If I could relax and be present enough to listen to what people were saying, it would enhance our natural camaraderie on the air.

Almost immediately, Bianca’s advice started to work. I found myself less preoccupied with strictly following a blueprint and more focused on just being there, in a good mood, ready with a tart comment—or equally ready to react to other people’s jokes with genuine, unforced laughter. So, for example, when Ron read a news item about women being happier if they had a few drinks a week, I responded by saying I would be stopping by the liquor store on my way home. I was starting to realize that by “leading man,” Ben wasn’t asking me to be Errol Flynn, but instead to be comfortable in my own skin.

While things were going well on various fronts at work, it was certainly not all sweetness and light. Ben’s praise emails were equally balanced by notes that contained extremely precise (albeit polite) criticism. For example, he razzed me a bit for my use of the overly technical term precip when introducing Ginger Zee’s rainy forecast on weekend GMA. More seriously, when I raised my hand to cover the United States’ withdrawal from Iraq, I didn’t get the nod. Furthermore I did not land a role in ABC’s special coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the event that had been a turning point in my personal and professional life. This exclusion nearly sent me right back down to the subbasement. It was clear there was something still missing from my strategy.

During my most recent dinner with Mark, the one at the Japanese restaurant, I had, as always, placed my iPhone on his side of the table, so I could use it to record what he said for future reference. (I carried both a BlackBerry and an iPhone. Belts and suspenders.) Listening to our chats after the fact, I often found myself rooting for Mark as his thoughtful answers were continually interrupted by an amped-up interrogator, interjecting non sequiturs, half-baked theories, and partially realized insights, with a mouth filled with mindlessly consumed food.

On the tape, I could be heard lamenting the fact that after years of contemplating the balance between ambition and equanimity, I still didn’t have an answer. Whereupon Mark, in his understated way, told me that he did. “The answer is in nonattachment,” he said. In my defense, the term was deceptively bland. “It’s nonattachment to the results. I think for an ambitious person who cares about their career—who wants to create things and be successful—it’s natural to be trying really hard. Then the Buddhist thing comes in around the results—because it doesn’t always happen the way you think it should.”

As I mulled this advice after the fact, I suspected there might be something to it, but I couldn’t quite figure out how you could work your tail off on something and then not be attached to the outcome. I had come up through a system that venerated bootstrapping and a fierce refusal to fail. Doing this without attachment didn’t seem to fit the paradigm.

A few months later, at our next meeting over eggs at Morandi, I broached the subject again. I said, “When we last spoke, you said it’s okay to be ambitious, but don’t be attached to the results. I cut you off, as I usually do—but what does that mean?”

“It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”

For a minute, I thought he was being simplistic, giving a version of the perfunctory advice that parents give their children. “When I was a kid,” I said, “and I would get worked up about some soccer game or whatever, my parents would say, ‘Just do your best.’ That’s basically what you’re saying.”

“Yeah,” he said, in as snide a tone as he was capable of. “Me and your parents.” But it’s not the same thing, he explained. You can do your best and then, if things don’t go your way, still become unconstructively upset, in a way that hinders your ability to bounce back. Dropping the attachment is the real trick.

Then it clicked. Per usual, Mark’s advice was sound, even if it took me a while to absorb it. Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.

It brought to mind a meeting we’d had at ABC a few months before the 2012 election. A small group of reporters, anchors, and executives were in a conference room, clustered around David Axelrod, who was conducting President Obama’s reelection campaign. At one point, Ben asked the preternaturally even-keeled Axelrod about the existential challenges of conducting a campaign in an environment where there were so many factors out of his control—from the European debt crisis to a potential al-Qaeda plot to Israel’s saber-rattling against Iran. Axelrod responded, “All we can do is everything we can do.”

This was a hopeful outlook, really. I didn’t need to waste so much time envisioning some vague horribleness awaiting me in my future. (Do they even have flophouses in Duluth?) All I had to do was tell myself: if it doesn’t work, I only need the grit to start again—just like when my mind wandered in meditation. After years of drawing a false dichotomy between striving and serenity, unable to figure out how to square these seemingly contradictory impulses, it struck me over eggs in a bustling brunch joint: this clunky phrase “nonattachment to results” was my long-sought Holy Grail, the middle path, the marriage of “the price of security” and “the wisdom of insecurity.”

It was the last piece of a puzzle I’d been trying to put together since the start of this whole unplanned adventure. All along, I’d been straining for some sort of framework, a holistic answer to one of the central challenges for a modern meditator: How can you be a happier, better person without becoming ineffective? The books and teachers I’d consulted had already done the most important work: reorienting my internal life by mitigating the noxious tendencies of my mind and juicing the compassion circuitry. It was just this one area where I thought they fell short.

Since the Buddhists are always making lists (I was convinced that somewhere they had a list of the Best Ways to Make a List), I resolved to draw up one of my own. Nothing on the list I compiled was, in and of itself, mind-bogglingly brilliant. There’s a reason why they call Buddhism “advanced common sense”; it’s all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something in you shifts. Likewise, with my new list, executing these precepts in tandem—and then systematizing and amplifying the whole thing with regular mindfulness practice—elevated them from platitudes to powerful tools.

I played with titles for a while (“The Ten Pillars of Cutthroat Zen” was briefly a contender), but then I heard about the ancient samurai code, “The Way of the Warrior.” I decided to create a version for the corporate samurai.

The Way of the Worrier

1. Don’t Be a Jerk

2. (And/But  . . .) When Necessary, Hide the Zen

3. Meditate

4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful

5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity

6. Don’t Force It

7. Humility Prevents Humiliation

8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod

9. Nonattachment to Results

10. What Matters Most?

Don’t Be a Jerk

It is, of course, common for people to succeed while occasionally being nasty. I met a lot of characters like this during the course of my career, but they never really seemed very happy to me. It is sometimes assumed that success in a competitive business requires the opposite of compassion. In my experience, though, that only reduced my clarity and effectiveness, leading to rash decisions. The virtuous cycle that Joseph described (more metta, better decisions, more happiness, and so on) is real. To boot, compassion has the strategic benefit of winning you allies. And then there’s the small matter of the fact that it makes you a vastly more fulfilled person.

(And/But  . . .) When Necessary, Hide the Zen

Be nice, but don’t be a palooka. Even though I’d achieved a degree of freedom from the ego, I still had to operate in a tough professional context. Sometimes you need to compete aggressively, plead your own case, or even have a sharp word with someone. It’s not easy, but it’s possible to do this calmly and without making the whole thing overly personal.

Meditate

Meditation is the superpower that makes all the other precepts possible. The practice has countless benefits—from better health to increased focus to a deeper sense of calm—but the biggie is the ability to respond instead of react to your impulses and urges. We live our life propelled by desire and aversion. In meditation, instead of succumbing to these deeply rooted habits of mind, you are simply watching what comes up in your head nonjudgmentally. For me, doing this drill over and over again had massive off-the-cushion benefits, allowing me—at least 10% of the time—to shut down the ego with a Reaganesque “There you go again.”

The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful

Mindfulness proved a great mental thresher for separating wheat from chaff, for figuring out when my worrying was worthwhile and when it was pointless. Vigilance, diligence, the setting of audacious goals—these are all the good parts of “insecurity.” Hunger and perfectionism are powerful energies to harness. Even the much-maligned “comparing mind” can be useful. I compared myself to Joseph, Mark, and Sharon, and it made me happier. I compared myself to Bianca and it made me nicer. I compared myself to Bill Weir, David Muir, Chris Cuomo, David Wright, et al., and it upped my game. In my view, Buddhists underplay the utility of constructive anguish. In one of his dharma talks, I heard Joseph quote a monk who said something like, “There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.” To me, this gave short shrift to the broad gray area where it pays to wring your hands at least a little bit.

Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity

Being happier did not, as many fear, make me a blissed-out zombie. This myth runs deep, all the way back to Aristotle, who said, “All men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics . . . had a melancholic habitus.” I found that rather than rendering me boringly problem-free, mindfulness made me, as an eminent spiritual teacher once said, “a connoisseur of my neuroses.” One of the most interesting discoveries of this whole journey was that I didn’t need my demons to fuel my drive—and that taming them was a more satisfying exercise than indulging them. Jon Kabat-Zinn has theorized that science may someday show that mindfulness actually makes people more creative, by clearing out the routinized rumination and unhelpful assumptions, making room for new and different thoughts. On retreat, for example, I would be flooded with ideas, filling notebooks with them, scribbling them down on the little sheets of paper between sitting and walking. So, who knows, maybe Van Gogh would have been an even better painter if he hadn’t been so miserable that he sliced off his ear?

Don’t Force It

It’s hard to open a jar when every muscle in your arm is tense. A slight relaxation served me well on the set of GMA, in interpersonal interactions, and when I was writing scripts. I came to see the benefits of purposeful pauses, and the embracing of ambiguity. It didn’t work every time, mind you, but it was better than my old technique of bulldozing my way to an answer.

Humility Prevents Humiliation

We’re all the stars of our own movies, but cutting back on the number of Do you know who I am? thoughts made my life infinitely smoother. When you don’t dig in your heels and let your ego get into entrenched positions from which you mount vigorous, often irrational defenses, you can navigate tricky situations in a much more agile way. For me humility was a relief, the opposite of humiliation. It sanded the edges off of the comparing mind. Of course, striking the right balance is delicate; it is possible to take this too far and become a pushover. (See precept number two, regarding hiding the Zen.)

Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod

As part of my “price of security” mind-set, I had long assumed that the only route to success was harsh self-criticism. However, research shows that “firm but kind” is the smarter play. People trained in self-compassion meditation are more likely to quit smoking and stick to a diet. They are better able to bounce back from missteps. All successful people fail. If you can create an inner environment where your mistakes are forgiven and flaws are candidly confronted, your resilience expands exponentially.

Nonattachment to Results

Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match. Push hard, play to win, but don’t assume the fetal position if things don’t go your way. This, I came to believe, is what T. S. Eliot meant when he talked about learning “to care and not to care.”

What Matters Most?

One day, I was having brunch with Mark and Joseph, forcing them to help me think about the balance between ambition and equanimity for the umpteenth time. After the entrées and before dessert, Joseph got up to hit the bathroom. He came back smiling and pronounced, “I’ve figured it out. A useful mantra in those moments is ‘What matters most?’ ” At first, this struck me as somewhat generic, but as I sat with the idea for a while, it eventually emerged as the bottom-line, gut-check precept. When worrying about the future, I learned to ask myself: What do I really want? While I still loved the idea of success, I realized there was only so much suffering I was willing to endure. What I really wanted was aptly summed up during an interview I once did with Robert Schneider, the self-described “spastic” lead singer for the psych-pop group, Apples in Stereo. He was one of the happiest-seeming people I’d ever met: constantly chatting, perpetually in motion—he just radiated curiosity and enthusiasm. Toward the end of our interview, he said, “The most important thing to me is probably, like, being kind and also trying to do something awesome.”

I proudly presented my list to Bianca. Her response was to flash an impish grin and say, “But you’re not actually practicing these.” Specifically, she was referring to the first one about not being a jerk.

“This is aspirational, not operational,” I assured her.

While imperfectly applied, my precepts were having salutary effects at the office. Nine months after my initial meeting with Ben, I requested another meeting—this time to ask him a specific question related to this book. I wanted to make sure he was okay with my including old stories of drug abuse. It was the first time I was telling anyone in power about the real story behind my panic attacks. It was fascinating to watch the twitch of recognition on his face as he recalled and reevaluated the event. We discussed the pros and cons of disclosure. Ultimately, he said he would have my back, whatever I decided.

Then, unprovoked, he raised the subject of the two mantras he had created for me in our last meeting, and declared that I had, in his eyes, fully succeeded in both “upping my game” and becoming a “leading man.” For good measure, he also pointed out that while he had enjoyed a recent story I’d done for Nightline on a squad of teenage girl exorcists, he thought I could have used a cleaner shave.