Today I looked back over my book list to see what I haven’t posted about and wanted to mention this great read. Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan was inspired by a course taught at Google. Meng was an engineer at Google when he realized that personal joy and career success were two completely separate accomplishments.
He discovered mindfulness and meditation and saw how much it improved his life. Meng started teaching these ideas to his co-workers at Google. Fast forward many years, and now he’s translated these learnings into the best-selling book, Search Inside Yourself.
This book is a perfect introduction to mindfulness and meditation. Meng has a strong engineering background and was always very skeptical of meditation. He cites dozens of sources about how these concepts improve lives and work outcomes. If you’ve always thought meditation was too spiritual and not grounded in science, read this book because you will finish with a different outlook.
Meng provides dozens of ways to approach a practice, so even as someone who has been exposed to these ideas for a while, I learned a lot. The book is filled with actionable steps and funny comics. It’s easy to digest, and something curious happened whenever I dove into this read: I immediately became more mindful.
Maybe it was some form of consistency bias. We naturally like to be consistent in our thoughts, beliefs in actions. It helps us make sense of the world and see ourselves as logical people. When you pick up a book about mindfulness, you start racking your brain about your own mindful tendencies. That’s a good habit, if you ask me.