by Harris, Dan
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-se
t, 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.”
