Daniel Goleman

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Chade-Meng Tan

From the Groundbreaking Course at Google Whether your intention is to reduce stress and increase well-being, heighten focus and creativity, become more optimistic and resilient, build fulfilling relationships, or just be successful, the skills provided by Search Inside Yourself will prove invaluable to you.

The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Search Inside Yourself

For the benefits of meditation to become widely accessible to humanity, it cannot just be the domain of bald people in funny robes living in mountains, or small groups of New Age folks in San Francisco. Meditation needs to become "real." It needs to align with the lives and interests of real people. —from Search Inside Yourself Early Google engineer and personal growth pioneer Chade-Meng Tan first designed Search Inside Yourself as a popular course at Google intended to transform the work and lives of the best and brightest behind one of the most innovative, successful, and profitable businesses in the world . . . and now it can do the same for you. Meng has distilled emotional intelligence into a set of practical and proven tools and skills that anyone can learn and develop. Created in collaboration with a Zen master, a CEO, a Stanford University scientist, and Daniel Goleman (the guy who literally wrote the book on emotional intelligence), this program is grounded in science and expressed in a way that even a skeptical, compulsively pragmatic, engineering-oriented brain like Meng's can process. Whether your intention is to reduce stress and increase well-being, heighten focus and creativity, become more optimistic and resilient, build fulfilling relationships, or just be successful, the skills provided by Search Inside Yourself will prove invaluable for you. This is your guide to enhancing productivity and creativity, finding meaning and fulfillment in your work and life, and experiencing profound peace, compassion, and happiness while doing so. Search Inside Yourself reveals how to calm your mind on demand and return it to a natural state of happiness, deepen self-awareness in a way that fosters self-confidence, harness empathy and compassion into outstanding leadership, and build highly productive collaborations based on trust and transparent communication. In other words, Search Inside Yourself shows you how to grow inner joy while succeeding at your work. Meng writes: "Some people buy books that teach them to be liked; others buy books that teach them to be successful. This book teaches you both. You are so lucky."

Sonja H

Für Anfänger zu viele Sachen auf einmal, für Fortgeschrittene zu wenig Neues. Etwas egozentrisch geschrieben.

Omar Fernandez

This book does a great job at reviewing holistically the many ways in which mindfulness meditation can help workers, in particular, knowledge workers. Chade-Meng has been working on this course at Google for a decade and exposes many of the benefits of mindfulness, including the scientifically researched benefits. 

Many of the exercises in the book are helpful, although frankly I read through them and kept going. I just wish that I had an audio companion for some of them.

I found new nuggets of information or tips that influenced my practice. In particular, I never really explored loving-kindness meditation much, at least not for years, and this book helped me understand it better and try it out again.

Nikolay Bachiyski

My hopes for the book were that it would be the one book about mindfulness I could recommend to all friends, because it was coming from an engineering mind. It almost lived up to my expectations, but not quite. While the bullshit levels were super low, the depth was sometimes lacking and substituted with name-dropping.

Still, it was a great overview of mindfulness – some theory, a ton of practices, which I think will be useful to everybody in the “creative workforce”.

Give it a try.

What I mostly got out of the book were the kindness and compassion practices – I guess that’s what I am lacking the most :-)

Lance Willett

Enjoyed this survey of mindful meditation from an engineer turned "jolly good fellow" at Google. It's filled with stories of developing calm, clear minds alongside other practical applications for meditation to create productive work relationships.

This book covers topics like attention, self-mastery, compassion, and happiness. How to recognize your triggers and self-regulate. How to pause when stimulated and, "Acknowledge it, experience it without judgement, maintain mindfulness if you act, and let it go." Wisdom brings the mind to know the difference between the sensation and our perception of it. One leads to the arising of the other; yet we have the opportunity to delay, control, or avoid the reaction.

Love this quote: "The way to make a friend is to be one."

I liked the useful exercises to practice mindfulness every day. Checked it out of the library this time, but would consider owning it as a reference.

Hat tip: Marcus Kazmierczak.

Search Inside Yourself The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

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