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Introduction

Searching Inside Yourself

Look within; within is the fountain of all good.

—Marcus Aurelius

What does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly does not look like me. In fact, he looks like a bald French guy in Tibetan robes. His name is Matthieu Ricard.

Matthieu was born and grew up in France. In 1972, after completing his Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur, he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I tell him that the reason he became a monk is because he could not join Google back in 1972—and the monk thing seemed like the next best career choice.

Matthieu’s career choice leads us to the story of how Matthieu became the “happiest man in the world.” When the Dalai Lama became interested in the science of meditation, he invited Tibetan Buddhist monks to participate in scientific studies. Matthieu was an obvious choice as a subject, as he was a bona fide scientist, understood both Western and Tibetan ways of thinking, and had decades of classical meditation training. Matthieu’s brain became the subject of numerous scientific studies.¹

One of many measurements conducted on Matthieu was his level of happiness. There turns out to be a way to gauge happiness in the brain: by measuring the relative activation of a certain part of your left prefrontal cortex versus your right prefrontal cortex.² The stronger the relative left-tilt is measured in a person, the more that person reports positive emotions, such as joy, enthusiasm, high energy, and so on. The reverse is also true; those with higher activity on the right report negative emotions. When Matthieu’s brain was scanned, his happiness measure was completely off the charts. He was, by far, the happiest person ever measured by science. Pretty soon, the popular media started nicknaming him the “happiest man in the world.” Matthieu himself is a little annoyed by that nickname, which creates an element of humorous irony.

Extreme happiness is not the only cool feat Matthieu’s brain can pull off. He became the first person known to science able to inhibit the body’s natural startle reflex—quick facial muscle spasms in response to loud, sudden noises. Like all reflexes, this one is supposed to be outside the realm of voluntary control, but Matthieu can control it in meditation. Matthieu also turns out to be an expert at detecting fleeting facial expression of emotions known as microexpressions. It is possible to train people to detect and read microexpressions, but Matthieu and one other meditator, both untrained, were measured in the lab and performed two standard deviations better than the norm, outperforming all the trained professionals.

The stories of Matthieu and other masters of contemplative practices are deeply inspiring. These masters demonstrate that each of us can develop an extraordinarily capable mind that is, first and foremost, profoundly peaceful, happy, and compassionate.

The methods for developing such an extraordinarily capable mind are accessible even to you and me. That’s what this book is about.

In Google, the effort to make these methods widely accessible began when we asked ourselves this question: what if people can also use contemplative practices to help them succeed in life and at work? In other words, what if contemplative practices can be made beneficial both to people’s careers and to business bottom lines? Anything that is both good for people and good for business will spread widely. If we can make this work, people around the world can become more successful at achieving their goals. I believe the skills offered here will help create greater peace and happiness in your life and the lives of those around you, and that peace and happiness can ultimately spread around the world.

To promote innovation, Google generously allows its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects outside their core jobs. A group of us used our “20 percent time” to work on what became Search Inside Yourself. We ended up creating a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum with the help of a very diverse group of extremely talented people, including a Zen master, a CEO, a Stanford University scientist, and Daniel Goleman, the guy who literally wrote the book on emotional intelligence. It sounds almost like the prelude to a good joke (“A Zen master and a CEO walked into a room . . .”).

The name of the mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum is Search Inside Yourself. Like many things in Google, that name started as a joke but finally stuck. I eventually became the first engineer in Google’s history to leave the engineering department and join People Ops (what we call our human resources function) to manage this and other personal-growth programs. I am amused that Google lets an engineer teach emotional intelligence. What a company.

There turned out to be unexpected benefits to having an engineer like me teach a course like Search Inside Yourself. First, being very skeptical and scientifically minded, I would be deeply embarrassed to teach anything without a strong scientific basis, so Search Inside Yourself was solidly grounded in science. Second, having had a long career as an early engineer at Google, I had credible experience in applying emotional intelligence practices in my day job as I created products, managed teams, asked the boss for raises, and stuff. Hence, Search Inside Yourself had been stress-tested and applicable in daily life right out of the box. Third, my engineering-oriented brain helped me translate teachings from the language of contemplative traditions into language that compulsively pragmatic people like me can process. For example, where traditional contemplatives would talk about “deeper awareness of emotion,” I would say “perceiving the process of emotion at a higher resolution,” then further explaining it as the ability to perceive an emotion the moment it is arising, the moment it is ceasing, and all the subtle changes in between.

That is why Search Inside Yourself has the compelling features of being scientifically grounded, highly practical, and expressed in a language that even I can understand. See? I knew my engineering degree was good for something.

Search Inside Yourself has been taught at Google since 2007. For many participants, it has been life changing, both at work and in their personal lives. We receive a lot of post-course feedback similar to one that says, “I know this sounds melodramatic, but I really think this course changed my life.”

At work, some participants have found new meaning and fulfillment in their jobs (we even had one person reverse her decision to leave Google after taking Search Inside Yourself!), while some have become much better at what they do. Engineering manager Bill Duane, for example, discovered the importance of giving himself quality time, so he reduced his working hours to four days a week. After he did that, he was promoted. Bill found time to take care of himself and discovered ways to accomplish more while doing less. I asked Bill about the most significant changes he experienced during Search Inside Yourself, and he said he learned to listen a lot better, gain control over his temper, and understand every situation better by, in his words, “learning to discern stories from reality.” All these make him a much more effective manager to the benefit of the people working for him.

For Blaise Pabon, a sales engineer, Search Inside Yourself helped him become much more credible to customers because he is now better at calmly overcoming objections during product demonstrations, he speaks compassionately about competitors, and he is courageous and truthful when telling customers about our products. All these qualities earned him great respect among his customers. One engineer in the class found himself becoming much more creative after Search Inside Yourself. Another engineer told us that two of his most important contributions to his project came after doing mindfulness exercises he learned in Search Inside Yourself.

Not surprisingly, people found Search Inside Yourself to be even more beneficial in their personal lives. Many reported becoming significantly calmer and happier. For example, one participant said, “I have completely changed in the way I react to stressors. I take the time to think through things and empathize with other people’s situations before jumping to conclusions. I love the new me!” Some have found the quality of their marriages improved. Others reported overcoming personal crises with the help of Search Inside Yourself. For example, one person told us, “I experienced personal tragedy—my brother’s death—during the course of Search Inside Yourself, and [the class] enabled me to manage my grief in a positive way.” One person simply said, “I now see myself and the world through a kinder, more understanding set of eyes.”

This book is based on the Search Inside Yourself curriculum at Google. We saw how this knowledge and the practices enhanced creativity, productivity, and happiness in those who took the course. You will find many things in this book that are very useful for you, and some things that may even surprise you. For example, you will learn how to calm your mind on demand. Your concentration and creativity will improve. You will perceive your mental and emotional processes with increasing clarity. You will discover that self-confidence is something that can arise naturally in a trained mind. You will learn to uncover your ideal future and develop the optimism and resilience necessary to thrive. You will find that you can deliberately improve empathy with practice. You will learn that social skills are highly trainable and that you can help others love you.

What I find most rewarding is how well Search Inside Yourself has worked for ordinary folks in a corporate setting right here in a modern society. If Search Inside Yourself had worked this well for people from traditionally meditative cultures doing intensive retreats in zendos or something, nobody would be too surprised. But these are ordinary Americans working in a high-stress environment with real lives and families and everything, and still, they can change their lives in just twenty hours of classroom time spread over seven weeks.

Search Inside Yourself works in three steps:

1. Attention training

2. Self-knowledge and self-mastery

3. Creating useful mental habits

Attention Training

Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotional intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. That quality of mind forms the foundation for emotional intelligence.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Mastery

Use your trained attention to create high-resolution perception into your own cognitive and emotive processes. With that, you become able to observe your thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, and to do so objectively from a third-person perspective. Once you can do that, you create the type of deep self-knowledge that eventually enables self-mastery.

Creating Useful Mental Habits

Imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, I wish for this person to be happy. Having such habits changes everything at work, because this sincere goodwill is picked up unconsciously by others, and you create the type of trust that leads to highly productive collaborations. Such habits can be volitionally trained.

In creating Search Inside Yourself, we collected some of the best scientific data and gathered some of the best minds on the topic to create a curriculum that is proven to work. You will not want to miss this; it may change your life.

I am confident that this book will be a valuable resource for you as you embark on your exciting journey. I hope your journey will be fun and profitable. And, yes, that it will contribute to world peace too.