Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader who introduced mindfulness to Westerners (Google got first dibs on him as a guest speaker), once said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” Yet for the majority of sentient beings today, simply getting through an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” without tending multiple screens is a quasi-mystical triumph. Naturally, the architects of our electronic age approach the situation as if it were an engineering problem..
“This isn’t the old San Francisco hippie fluff,” said Mr. Tan, who started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as an extracurricular program in 2007. More than a thousand Googlers have gone through the course, which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and programmers to be here now.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness training, and Mr. Tan appeared familiar with all of them. Meditation thickens the brain’s cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis and “it can help you get a promotion,” he said. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Farmers Insurance also hire Mr. Tan and his team to teach techniques like pausing before sending important emails and silently wishing happiness upon difficult co-workers.
Mr. Tan’s official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a conference table inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner. “People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 items on your to-do list,” he said. “I tell them, one item at a time, duh.”
It is easy for Mr. Tan to joke. With the financial benefits that come from being Google employee No. 107, he works only three days a week and concentrates more on giving away his wealth than growing it. “I don’t have much sympathy for miserable rich people because sharing money is the key to happiness,” he said. “For me, becoming rich was a wonderful experience, but then the thought became, now what?”
That’s a question Evan Williams said he asks himself frequently. The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago. His practice has made an impact in ways both profound and less so. Last month as Twitter was finalizing its paperwork to go public, Mr. Williams did the unthinkable for someone in his position. He took a 20-minute walk through San Francisco without his phone. “I was able actually to look around and think about things for most of that period,” he said. “I would have had many more fleeting anxieties doing that a year ago, but I’m better with those silences now.”
Mr. Gordhamer said the desire is rampant for “non-doing,” as he put it. “What the culture is craving is a sense of ease and reflection, of not needing to be stimulated or entertained or going after something constantly. Nobody’s kicking out technology, but we have to regain our connection to others and to nature or else everybody loses.”
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“This isn’t the old San Francisco hippie fluff,” said Mr. Tan, who started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as an extracurricular program in 2007. More than a thousand Googlers have gone through the course, which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and programmers to be here now.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness training, and Mr. Tan appeared familiar with all of them. Meditation thickens the brain’s cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis and “it can help you get a promotion,” he said. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Farmers Insurance also hire Mr. Tan and his team to teach techniques like pausing before sending important emails and silently wishing happiness upon difficult co-workers.
Mr. Tan’s official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a conference table inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner. “People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 items on your to-do list,” he said. “I tell them, one item at a time, duh.”
It is easy for Mr. Tan to joke. With the financial benefits that come from being Google employee No. 107, he works only three days a week and concentrates more on giving away his wealth than growing it. “I don’t have much sympathy for miserable rich people because sharing money is the key to happiness,” he said. “For me, becoming rich was a wonderful experience, but then the thought became, now what?”
That’s a question Evan Williams said he asks himself frequently. The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago. His practice has made an impact in ways both profound and less so. Last month as Twitter was finalizing its paperwork to go public, Mr. Williams did the unthinkable for someone in his position. He took a 20-minute walk through San Francisco without his phone. “I was able actually to look around and think about things for most of that period,” he said. “I would have had many more fleeting anxieties doing that a year ago, but I’m better with those silences now.”
Mr. Gordhamer said the desire is rampant for “non-doing,” as he put it. “What the culture is craving is a sense of ease and reflection, of not needing to be stimulated or entertained or going after something constantly. Nobody’s kicking out technology, but we have to regain our connection to others and to nature or else everybody loses.”
- More Here
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