Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - I Just Went Through A Career Earthquake. Here’s What I Learned About Anger, Insomnia, And Bouncing Back | Dan Harris

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

In which Dan gets candid about a major life struggle, the practical takeaways, and a big new project.In this episode:Dan shares news about what’s next for himHis strategies and lessons from a big career change including how to deal with conflict, anger and insomniaWhat he's learned about the power of self-compassion, the value of failure and how to gain perspective when you need it most If you'd like to be a member of Dan's new community but a subscription isn't affordable for you, write to [e-mail], and we'll hook you up, no questions asked.Related Episodes:Your Sleep Questions, Answered | Donn PosnerHow To Sleep Better | Diane MacedoKryptonite for the Inner Critic | Kristin NeffCheck out all the offerings at DanHarris.comFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/dan-career-earthquakeAdditional Resources:Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/downloadSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. how we doing? I have a very personal episode for you today. No guest, it's just going to be me talking. I have three things I want to talk about. The first thing is that I want to tell you about a career earthquake I have recently

gone through that has been very hard for me. It's been going on for a while, but I haven't been able to talk about it until now. The second thing is that I wanna tell you about something very cool that is emerging out of said earthquake. And then the third thing, and this will be the meat of the episode,

is that I wanna talk about some of the lessons I've learned in the course of this very difficult period of time, because I think some of these lessons are potentially directly applicable to your lives. This has somehow become my MO. I go through something hard or incredibly embarrassing, like having a Coke-fueled panic attack on national television,

and then I attempt to turn it into content that is useful for you. So that's what I'm gonna attempt today. Does that make sense in terms of an order of operations? I'm going to start with the hard news, then I'm going to do the good news, and then I'll do news you can use. All right. First step is the hard news.

Let me give you a little bit of context here. In Buddhism, one of the central concepts is impermanence. Everything's changing all the time. Or as the Buddha says, everything is always becoming otherwise. I love that phrase, becoming otherwise. So in that spirit, I'm gonna make this announcement. I am very sad to report that I am no longer part

of the meditation app that I co-founded many years ago. I am incredibly proud of all of the work that we've done on the app and all the impact we've had on our team members, on the teachers who have been working on the app, and most importantly on all the folks who have used the app. I'm really proud of all the work we've done. That said, in recent years my co-founders and I developed some pretty significant creative and financial and interpersonal differences.

Everybody tried their best. Seriously, everybody tried their best, but we could not come to an agreement about the future of the company. Hence this separation. We had a lengthy negotiation. It lasted nearly three years. And here is where we landed. I am going to keep this podcast, the 10% Happier podcast, and it will not change.

You will be able to hear it wherever you're listening to it right now. I'm also going to keep the brand name 10% Happier. And my now former co-founders are going to keep the app itself. And they are, as of today, changing the name of the app to just Happier. I've known my co-founders for many years and these are deeply well-intentioned people. I think they've got some cool ideas about the future of the app and I am very confident

they will continue to help a lot of people. That said, these past three years of negotiation have been some of the hardest of my life. My hair is a lot grayer. I have quite literally lost a lot of sleep and my panic attacks came roaring back. I learned a lot of lessons though, a lot of lessons about how to manage anger, about how to manage insomnia, about self-compassion and I'm going to share a lot of those lessons with you coming up. But before I do that, I wanna talk about the second thing

that I mentioned I was gonna talk about, which is the good news. Because one of the other things I learned in this process is about the value of failure and the possibility of resilience. And in that spirit, I'm making a very exciting or at least exciting to me announcement, which is that we are gonna take this podcast

to the next level. Over the past eight years and 700 episodes, we've learned a lot about why people like this show. For sure, it's about great conversations, but through direct listener feedback and also through surveys, we've learned that there are two other things that people really love about this show. One of them is that this is a font of practical wisdom

for changing your life. Wisdom based both in ancient traditions and modern science. This is a font of practical wisdom for changing your life. Wisdom based both in ancient traditions and modern science. And the other thing that we've learned, and this is actually a little surprising to me, is that people are coming to the show as a kind of virtual community. Even though you don't know each other,

you know, it can be very hard to find people in your little world who take training the mind or meditation seriously. So many of you have told us that listening to the show makes you feel like you're part of a community where this stuff is taken seriously, which is so cool for me to hear because it plays that role for me too. So we're launching a new project

where we're gonna double click in a big way on these latter two value propositions. So the conversations are not going to change. As I said, you'll still be able to listen to this podcast everywhere you listen to it now. But we're going to go deep on the practicality and on the community. Starting today, I'm launching a new, I don't know what to call it, membership subscription service, community cult. I'm kidding. Whatever you call it, it's at danharris.com. And if you sign up, here's what you'll get. First of all, on the community side,

I'm really excited about this. We're gonna roll out a new feature, which will allow you, as I said before, to connect directly to me, to the producers of the show, to the experts from the show, and to one another. This is a chat feature where you'll, after every episode that launches, you'll be able to talk to each other.

You know, I love podcasts where you can listen to recaps of your favorite TV show. And there's a way in which we drop these really emotional episodes on you. And then you're just left to your own devices. We wanna give you a chance to connect with each other and with us over what you've just heard and ask questions and share your impressions.

I'll also be using this chat feature to run surveys with you and to share random musings and get your reactions. So this is really cool. Along those lines, I'm also gonna start doing monthly live video AMAs where you can ask me anything. You can join a virtual room where I will lead a guided meditation

and then we'll chop it up and talk about stuff. And I suspect these AMAs will feature a cavalcade of guest stars. Another thing I'm really excited about, and this is on the practical tip, we are gonna launch a new feature called Cheat Sheets. Up until now, we've been dropping these nutrient dense episodes on you.

And you've kind of had to figure out on your own how to make the wisdom operationalizable in your life. But these cheat sheets are designed to help you do just that. They will include a summary of the top takeaways. They will include time codes that help you get to the parts of the conversation that might have meant the most to you and a full transcript. I do wanna make clear, there's no homework here. These cheat sheets will land in your inbox, but you can delete them if you want.

There's nothing to keep up with. This is not designed to add something to your to-do list that is gonna further stress you out. These are just resources that are available to you if you want. A few other features to tell you about. I'll be sending out short emails several times a week with some aha moments, some practical wisdom

from the ancients or from modern researchers. These will land in your inbox in the morning and hopefully color your day in a helpful way. I'll have a library of guided meditations from some of my favorite teachers that we will build out over time. And finally, I'm gonna, this is a real experiment, I'm gonna try to live stream

some of my daily personal meditations. So this is just me doing the meditation I would otherwise be doing at home or on the road or wherever, I set up a camera, there's gonna be no guidance and very little warning. I'm just gonna live stream the meditation I would otherwise be doing. And my suspicion is potentially

that there's an HOV lane effect, a carpool lane effect of just meditating together. You can dip in for a few minutes, sit with me and move on. This whole thing really is an experiment. We're launching with the features I just listed, but a lot of this will change based, I hope on your feedback. There are lots of other potential features

that we may build in. We have lots of ambitious ideas, maybe dropping guided meditations tailored to the episodes, maybe having emails come out every day of the week instead of just three days a week. So we have lots of cool ideas, but we want to hear from you as we go. What does it cost? It costs eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year if you choose the annual plan. However, and I cannot make this clear enough, I cannot state this loudly enough, we do not,

I do not want money to stand in the way of membership. If you can't afford it, or if you just don't feel like paying, send me an email, and we will give it to you for free. No questions asked. As I said, I don't want money to be an object here. I want this to be a community that everybody can access.

Along those lines, if you've got extra cash, there is a founding membership where you can give whatever you want. So if you're in the 1% or just feeling generous, you can give us more cash and that will help us effectuate all of these ambitious plans we have and continue to give it away for free to people who need it and can't afford it.

This whole thing is a big deal for me. I'll be honest, I'm a little nervous. So I really could use your support and your feedback. I wanna get this right and I'd love your help. Again, it's danharris.com or you can just search for me on Substack. Okay, so those are the first two things I wanted to talk about.

Let me move to the third thing I wanted to talk about, which is really gonna take up the lion's share of this podcast, which is the lessons I've learned. I've learned eight lessons that I wanna talk to you about today that I think really could make a difference for you. As always, these are not commandments. What works for me might not work for you.

Think of this more as a menu or a buffet rather than a to-do list. Take it with a grain of salt, but I suspect you might find something in here, if not all of them, that work for you. Some of these little lessons are quick. Some of them take a little bit more explication. Here we go with lesson number one,

and it is that conflict is very human and natural, and healthy conflict is a skill you can learn. I spent the early part of this situation feeling really embarrassed that I was in this separation negotiation. I had this whole story of Harris, you're supposed to be a quasi self-help guru and here you are in this situation,

something must be wrong with you. And I would call my longtime meditation teacher and great friend Joseph Goldstein to talk about this. And he did this really helpful thing. Many times when I would express my fears, he would tell me stories of all of the episodes of conflict that he has gone through as a meditation teacher. Yes, in the Dharma world,

they fight with each other sometimes. They tend to do it in a pretty civilized way. And that gets me to my point, which is not only that conflict is natural, they even do it in the meditation world, but that healthy conflict is possible and is a skill you can learn. What's the difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict?

Healthy conflict is where you learn how to communicate clearly, to state your needs, to set your boundaries, to listen to what the other side has to say. Unhealthy conflict is where things spiral out of control and get violent, either interpersonally or physically violent. And we see this playing out

in many places around the planet. Unhealthy conflict is where humanity is at its worst. We're gonna do a whole episode on how to engage in healthy conflict in a couple of weeks here on the show, because there are a whole set of skills. However, in the interest of moving things along, I want to tell you about one practical skill I learned from Joseph about how to do conflict better.

It comes with a little bit of a story. As Joseph tells it, he was sitting in a board meeting for the Insight Meditation Society, which is the meditation retreat center he co-founded back in the 70s that he's still very involved with. And they were in a contentious board meeting. There were two camps and they couldn't agree on something.

He doesn't even remember what the issue was. But he had this epiphany in the middle of this still very involved with and they were in a contentious board meeting. There were two camps and they couldn't agree on something. He doesn't even remember what the issue was, but he had this epiphany in the middle of this and it came in the, in the form of this phrase, don't side with yourself. I love this. Don't side with yourself. This is not about, you know, being a doormat and giving into the other side. It's just about this little move of intellectual openness or open-mindedness

and seeing the situation from the viewpoint of the other side. Even if you don't agree with them, they have a rationale. There's a reason they believe what they believe. We're also gonna be releasing a podcast in a few weeks in the run-up to the election with a woman named Rabbi Sharon Brouse,

who talks a lot about how we can improve our relationships with one another on a micro scale and on a society level scale. And one of her observations is that in unhealthy conflict, curiosity dies. But in healthy conflict, curiosity is a superpower. Can you start to understand or even attempt to understand what the other side is thinking? This is incredibly useful, not because curiosity should lead to capitulation, but because as Rabbi Sharon says, curiosity can be

the birthplace of compassion. Compassion is a gauzy sounding word, but really in this context, just think of it as understanding. Basic understanding of why people are doing what they're doing. And it doesn't mean they have to give in or agree with them or invite them to dinner or hug them or whatever. It's just about seeing things from their standpoint,

because then you can do all the same things you would have otherwise done in conflict. You could make all the same moves. You just don't have to do it from a standpoint of rage, which in my experience makes everything worse. Which leads me to the second lesson, which is that anger is workable. I experienced a lot of anger in this situation.

Anger is one of the parts of my personality that I like the least. I don't want to vilify anger however, just like there's healthy conflict and unhealthy conflict, there's healthy anger and unhealthy anger. Healthy anger gets you off the couch. It can help you see things clearly, it can highlight a problem or as my friend Sam Harris says, it's a salience signal. In my experience it is very easy to cross that line between healthy anger and unhealthy anger. There's a great expression from the Buddha,

reputed to be from the Buddha, which is that anger has a poisoned root and a honeyed tip. It feels good. It's got some honey to it. It can feel righteous. But if you pay attention, It can feel righteous, but if you pay attention, it's got a real toxic flavor to it running through your veins. And I have found that if I can walk that line between healthy anger and unhealthy anger, it can make a huge difference. And walking that line is,

and this is really the lesson, is possible. Two things to say on the score. One is that through mindfulness, through my meditation practice, through the self-awareness you generate through meditation, you can see what's actually beneath the anger. Anger is often described as a secondary emotion. I like that because I think it's true for sure for me

that anger is often covering up for something deeper. And in my case, meditation has really helped me see that it's covering up for anxiety, for fear. And I don't wanna feel the fear. So it's easier to change gears and get into anger. But anger, in my experience, just almost never leads to anything good. So meditation helps me tune into what's really going on

and work with that instead of the anger. The other way that I've learned to work with anger is through some phrases, again, from Joseph Goldstein. Two phrases, this is kind of a double-barreled approach that he gave me to deal with my own rage monster. The first phrase is dead end. It was so easy during this situation to just fall back into this reflexive, routine-ized story that I was getting angry about.

But as Joseph pointed out, no more thinking on this subject is going to help. I've thought this through all the way. Dead end. And so if I could catch myself in that moment of anger and drop that phrase into my mind, it would help me change the channel. Okay, so that brings me to the second phrase, which is the ultimate channel changer. I will admit upfront, I did not like this second phrase at first because it struck me as a little cheesy. Joseph got it from a guy who I really admire, Father Gregory Boyle, who's a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles, and he works with gang members, current and former gang members.

And Father Boyle's approach is to love no matter what. Again, this is not about approving of the questionable behavior, but to love the person no matter what. And so Joseph recommended I drop that phrase into my head right after dead end and has been incredibly helpful. As Joseph says, you don't have to invite the other person over for dinner, you don't have to approve of their behavior, but you can realize that everybody's just

acting out their stuff. And so dead end and love no matter what helped me work with anger. Other things might help you, but the bottom line is anger is workable. That leads me to lesson number three, which is that self-compassion makes everything better. Literally everything in my experience gets better with a little self-compassion. Many of you know what this is. One way to think about it is just learning to treat yourself the way you would treat a good friend,

specifically in like how you talk to yourself. I think many of us talk to ourselves like a drill sergeant, when in fact the better, and this is backed by evidence and a lot of research, the better approach, the more effective approach is to talk to yourself the way a good coach would talk to you. A good coach doesn't let you off the hook, doesn't pretend you didn't make a mistake,

but doesn't grind you into dust or grind you into a fine powder every time you make a mistake. They help build you up, they help build your resilience. And you can do this. I have found I can channel my own inner mentor. It's not hard for me to mentor my son or my friends or younger colleagues, but I learned in this process to channel that for myself specifically when it comes to anger, because it was very easy for me to drop into this whole story about how I'm irredeemably monstrous and filled with rage and I'm never going to get any

better and blah, blah, blah. No, no, dude, you got angry. Wasn't your best moment. You can fix this, you can apologize, and you can do better. And that has been incredibly helpful to me as an inner dialogue and has just calmed me down. That kind of inner talk, that self talk, has also been really helpful with regard to my panic disorder, and it's just calmed me down. That kind of inner talk, that self-talk

has also been really helpful with regard to my panic disorder, which as I mentioned came back. And I've had lots of embarrassing situations. Just the other day, I was standing for a half hour in a New York City medical building where I had a doctor's appointment on the fifth floor. They didn't have stairs in this place.

And so I had to take the elevator and one of the elevators was down, and they were super crowded. And so I stood there for a half hour waiting until there was a sufficiently empty elevator with faces that I found friendly enough to ride with. I'm supposed to be some sort of self-help dude. That this is happening to me, it's very easy to feel like a total fraud. Or the fact that I dragged my wife off of a plane recently.

I didn't drag her, but I left and she came with me because I was, my pupils were dilated. I was freaking out because the plane was too small and I felt like garbage afterwards. But then my training and self-compassion could kick in and I can just be like, look, dude, panic is a very human thing. It's insidious, it's persistent. You can work with it. You have in the past conquered your panic, conquered probably not the right word, managed your panic. And sometimes it comes back

and then you can manage it again. And that kind of inner mentoring is huge. One other thing to say about self-compassion, which is that has helped me have a kinder, cooler relationship to the parts of my personality I do not like. Anger, let me go back to anger for this. I'm embarrassed that I have this capacity, this penchant for anger. But one expression that's come to mind along these lines is from my longtime executive

coach Jerry Colonna, who has been on the show many times and has been incredibly helpful to me throughout this whole process. He'll often say, don't make it bad. Don't make the anger bad. The anger is just some ancient program, some ancient self-protective program that is just the organism trying to defend itself. And actually it's based in love.

It's based in giving a shit and some ancient part of my body or my mind or both wants to protect me and it comes out as anger. This is not to say you give into the anger or venerate it. It's just that you develop a friendly relationship with it which is a kind of high-fiving or blowing a kiss to the anger. Thank you, I know you're trying to help me, but not now.

And that's a radical disarmament that helps me at least move out of the grips of anger through self-compassion to something saner. Okay, lesson number four, this one's much quicker. Insomnia is also workable. I've done a lot of episodes on the show about basic sleep hygiene. I'll drop some links in the show notes.

And I think we all know basic sleep hygiene. I'm just gonna talk about a few hacks that worked for me. One is walking meditation. I would set, I still do this. I set a timer on my watch and do 10, 15, 20, often 30 minutes of walking meditation before bed. Because for me, insomnia, which has been a huge problem over these past couple of years,

as I've been in the middle of this situation, insomnia for me often manifests as this like irresistible and overwhelming physical restlessness. And so doing walking meditation before bed kind of exhausts the body and mind in a way that allows me to sleep. Maybe just worth saying quickly a word about walking meditation,

because I think a lot of people are, and I know this is a little cute. I think a lot of people are sleeping on walking meditation. It's a great practice. And many of us think we need to be seated with our eyes closed in order to properly meditate. But walking meditation is, it goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha and earlier.

Here's how to do it. Here's how I do it, at least. I just stake out a patch of land in my house from five to 10 yards long. And I walk back and forth. It's a long walk to nowhere. The point is not to get anywhere. The point is to 10 yards long. And I walk back and forth. This is a long walk to nowhere. The point is not to get anywhere. The point is to just wake up.

Wake up to what's happening in your mind and body right now so that you're not sleepwalking through life. And counterintuitively, this can actually help you fall asleep. You walk, or at least I walk at a moderate pace, not a normal pace and not a snail's pace, just kind of somewhere in the middle. And I bring my full attention to the feeling of my body moving through space.

And then every time I get distracted, I start again and again. One thing that can help in walking meditation is using mental noting. It's like a whisper in the mind where you use just a little word, like hot or cold or movement or tightness or pressure, just to connect you. It's a skillful harnessing of thought to connect you to the reality of your sensate experience in the moment. So I would do this practice.

I still do this practice pretty much nightly, 30 minutes usually right before bed. And it's really helped me with insomnia. The other thing I do is, and I learned this in my episodes on sleep, which again I'm linking to in the show notes here, that when I'm struggling to fall asleep, which is not uncommon, don't stay in bed.

If you stay in bed and struggle and toss and turn, you're teaching the mind that the bed is a place to struggle. But what you wanna teach the mind and the brain is that the bed is a place to sleep. So get out of bed and do something fun. That's to sleep. So get out of bed and do something fun. That's literally the advice. Get out of bed and do something fun.

Read a book, watch TV. For me, I would often go back to more meditation. It's a great way for me to up my meditation minutes. Another part of my personality I don't love is that I'm always trying to be productive. So I found that this process, getting out of bed really helped. I have not trained my brain to view the bed

as a place for anything other than sleep. And one last thing to say on the sleep tip, self-compassion is also really helpful here. Learning to talk to myself in a more productive way when I can't sleep has been really helpful. There's a way in which when you can't sleep, you get into this grim, phantasmagoric projection state where you're thinking about how tomorrow is gonna be irretrievably fucked

because you haven't slept. And I would just say, dude, that may be true, you may not sleep, but you have been through this a million times and you've always survived, you're always fine, it's not awesome to be tired, but you can deal with it. And interestingly, surrendering to the potential fact of sleeplessness often initiates sleep.

Okay, a few more lessons. This is lesson number five, never worry alone. This comes right out of the vast body of research that shows that most likely the most important variable when it comes to human happiness and longevity and success is not your sleep, not your meditation minutes, not your steps per day, not whether you've achieved ketosis. The most important variable is not any of those things,

even though those are largely healthy. The most important variable is the quality of your relationships. Why? Because stress is what kills most of us in the end, and quality relationships can mitigate stress. Hence the expression that I picked up from one of the leading researchers in the space, never worry alone.

And luckily for me, I had a lot of really good people to worry with. My colleagues, including many of the people who work on this show, my lawyers, my agents, my wife, my brother, Matt, who's been indispensable, Jerry Colonna, Joseph Goldstein. I had incredible friends and colleagues and family members

who I could talk to when I was feeling like garbage. I've been confronted with a degree of uncertainty that I've never confronted before. I didn't know how this was gonna turn out. And it was going on for a long time. And it was going on against the backdrop of my having retired from ABC News in 2021 after 30 years as a news anchor

and basically forfeiting that part of my identity. And now I no longer have an app. I'm a podcast host in a period of time when podcasts are going through some bumpy economic straits. It's an insecure time and one where like the bedrock of my identity has been challenged quite aggressively. And to be able to talk to people about this makes it so much easier.

One moment that really sticks out is a call I was having, here we go, Joseph again. We were on the phone talking about something else. He then asked me, can you give me an update on the situation with the app? And I said, you know, I don't wanna talk to you about it because I'm just gonna get angry and He said something is

To me scanned is one of the nicest things that anybody's ever said to me. He said no go ahead get angry I like when you get angry anger away and he wasn't teasing me He wasn't saying I like to provoke you or anything like that What he was saying in effect is I'm cool with every part of your personality. If you can find a friend like that or two, you can handle anything. Lesson number six, this is another Josephism. It's not blank. This is the expression. It's going to take a second for this to land. It's not fill in the blank. And you fill in the blank with whatever global catastrophe is happening right now.

So whatever problem you're dealing with, it's not Ukraine. It's not climate change. You get the picture. So for me, bringing that to mind on days when I was wrapped up and all the latest developments in the negotiation, it's not Ukraine, dude. That is extremely helpful. I keep saying that. But all of these things in the negotiation. It's not Ukraine, dude. That is extremely helpful.

I keep saying that, but all of these things are incredibly helpful and this is no exception. And I just wanna be clear, this is not to poo poo any problems in your life. Yeah, I'm aware of the fact that there may be people listening to the show who are physically in Ukraine right now or dealing with objectively horrific circumstances.

In those cases, this expression, this lesson is not for you. But for the rest of us, for the worried well, this is a massive injection or a bolus, to use the phrase that I learned from my wife who's a physician, bolus is like a big dose of something. This is a bolus of perspective that can calm you down. Lesson number seven, the value of knowing my motivation. I don't think a lot of us think too much

about what our motivations are. It's not a common move in my experience, but in Buddhism, it's a huge issue. It's been said in Buddhism that everything rests on the tip of motivation from a karma standpoint and not karma in a magical sense, but in karma and the law of cause and effect, one thing leads to another.

From a karmic standpoint, the most important variable is, what is your motivation? Why are you doing this? It colors the entire enterprise, whatever enterprise you're engaged with or engaged in. I have the capacity, as I think many people do, to be selfish. I may have this capacity in spades. In fact, I also, like all of us, have the capacity for altruism.

And the more I can nudge myself toward altruism, the happier I am. I've learned in this process. It's why I got a tattoo that some of you are aware of. Last summer, I got my first tattoo. It's why I got a tattoo that some of you are aware of. Last summer I got my first tattoo. It's an acronym, FTBOAB. It's an acronym for a Buddhist phrase, which is off brand and how earnest it is. But the phrase is, for the benefit of all beings.

And it's right there next to my watch, right here. I look at this all the time. I look at it while I'm working out. I look at it every time I check the time. It's right there. And it nudges me back into my center, which is, what is my job? My job is to be useful. And this is not about performative self-sacrifice.

The A in FTBOAB is all beings, and I'm part of that. So it doesn't rule out ambition or self-interest. It's just to see that my self-interest is in a symbiotic relationship, in a double helix with altruism, with other interest. And that in fact, doing good is good for me. I mean, this is the aspect of human nature that makes me most optimistic about the future.

When you do good, you feel good. That feature in the human design is what we can potentially, I hope, ride to salvation. And for me, just remembering that my job is to be useful. When I remember that, when I'm in that mode, all my existential crises, all the shit that I'm worried about evaporates. It comes roaring back.

That's why this is a practice. Final lesson number eight, there is a value in failure. When my nervous system is relaxed through all the things we just talked about, being in touch with my motivation, being self compassionate, finding great people with whom to worry, when my nervous system is relaxed, I can start to see the opportunity embedded in this crisis.

I spent a lot of time thinking that this situation was irredeemable, that it just sucked irretrievably, but actually there's been a ton of benefit, not only all the lessons that I just relayed to you, but the fact that there are so many cool things I can do now. Having this negotiation go the way it's gone has led me to do a ton of really fun experimentation.

If you've been following this podcast over the last 18 months, you may have noticed I'm doing live events, live retreats, having my wife or my brother co-host some of the shows, selling merch, going on social media, and of course now launching danharris.com. Lots of cool stuff that I otherwise might not have done. And there's real benefit to this.

A lot of us worry about experimentation because we're worried about failure, but there's this enormous value in failure in that you can learn something. And this is what is meant by the term radical optimism. There's a great episode we're gonna drop in a few weeks with a German guy named Frederick Fert, who's an innovation expert at Stanford and at Google.

And he talks about how radical optimism doesn't mean, you know, you're blowing sunshine out of your butt, or just, as I like to say, you're a rainbow barfing unicorn or whatever. It doesn't mean not seeing that some things suck. It just means that even when things suck, even in a calamity, there are the seeds of progress. There's something to learn.

And that has been very powerful for me to take in through this process. All right, those are my eight lessons. Thank you for sticking with me. And I'll thank you in advance for signing up over at danharris.com. Again, if you wanna pay for it, great. If you can't pay for it, totally fine.

I want you there anyway, please. It launches today. I'll be at home today with some of my closest colleagues, not worrying alone. I'll be in the chat. You can hit me up danharris.com or just search for me on Substack. I'm incredibly grateful to all the people

who have helped me through this process and all the people who've listened to this show for so many years. Some of you have been with me slash us since the jump. Thank you, and I'm excited about what's coming next. Before I go, I just want to quickly thank everybody who worked on this specific episode so hard. Caroline Keenan, Tony

Magyar, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, Abby Smith, Hayden Broom, Tara Anderson, Lauren Smith, Eleanor Vasili, my wife, our lawyers and PR folks. I'm grateful to all of you and yeah I'll see you over at danharris.com. Peace.