When I was 20, I was on top of the world.
I was an East Asian studies major,
and I had just won
a prestigious fellowship from the Japanese government.
I would spend a year in Tokyo,
studying language and culture,
all expenses paid.
For a financially strapped kid like me, that was like winning the lottery.
One day on campus, there was a health fair,
and just for the heck of it, I got my blood pressure checked.
And to my surprise, it was startlingly high.
So the nurse sent me off to the school clinic for more tests,
and they found protein in my urine.
This was not a good sign,
and so I rushed off to see a specialist,
and within a few weeks,
I found myself diagnosed
with an incurable autoimmune disease that was attacking my kidneys.
And the doctor’s best guess was that I had five years left.
In an instant,
it felt like my life was tumbling into darkness.
And I realized what was worse was that I had to give back the fellowship
(Laughter)
to stay in Ohio, where I live, for medical treatment.
After the initial shock passed,
I looked around at my classmates.
They were throwing frisbees,
partying,
getting drunk,
and I got pissed
because I was 20 years old
and I was dying.
Intellectually,
I knew that anger and resentment were not a way forward.
But the bigger question was, How was I going to deal with it?
And my mind kept coming back to a favorite documentary
on the journey of the hero.
And this is a kind of universal theme
that revolves around a central character who is thrown out of his comfortable world
by a call to undertake a perilous quest.
And if that quest was successful,
it results in growth, transformation,
and renewed life.
And I thought to myself,
"Could kidney disease be that call?"
I began to realize
that I could approach this illness as an inner spiritual challenge
in addition to a medical one.
But again, how?
It wasn’t like I could call my doctor and get a prescription.
However,
as if on cue,
my religion professor introduces me to a classic book
on how to practice Zen meditation.
In Japan, historically, Zen was the practice of warriors,
and they would use its intense focus
to transform fear and other emotions that came from facing mortality.
I was intuitively attracted to the idea that I could be a warrior
and face this illness with Zen as my weapon.
So, night after night,
in my sweltering attic apartment,
I would sit cross-legged with my eyes closed
and do battle, Zen-style,
with the darkest parts of my life.
And one by one,
I would face inner demons,
and as I observed and accepted them,
little by little,
they began to shrink,
and little by little,
in their place grew
very slowly
a sense of calm.
The focus of Zen
gave me something to do with my mind
because at that point in my life, it was the only thing I could manage.
A year went by,
then two, then four,
and I got on with the business of living.
But I made a deal with myself
that I would only do what I was passionate about.
And my passions led me to graduate school,
where I found a lab that was run by an eminent psychologist
who studied flow experiences.
And flow experiences are those moments of intense focus
where we feel vital and alive.
And he found that people who could manage their minds into flow
were connected to themselves and others,
to a sense of meaning and purpose and to life.
Flow showed me, through science, what I had only begun to learn in Zen.
We eventually moved the lab
from a department of psychology to a school of management.
And there I had the opportunity to study successful professionals
who were long-term practitioners of something called mindfulness.
Mindfulness, like Zen, was a way of training the mind,
and one thing that mindfulness does
is return you from being stuck in the past
or fixated on the future
to what’s going on right here, right now.
These professionals had all kinds of backgrounds.
They were Fortune 500 CEOs,
world famous architects, filmmakers, artists, musicians, writers,
and I would ask them,
"So, you know, what do you think your life would be like
if you didn't have this practice?"
And they'd say,
"My life is so complex.
I’m being pulled in so many directions at once
that if I didn’t have this to keep me centered, grounded, and sane,
I think I’d be dead."
And then it hit me:
there was something missing from management,
that management education
had focused almost entirely on what happens outside you
and there was precious little, if anything,
that spoke about leadership from the inside.
And I sensed that was an opportunity.
So with my school’s blessing,
I created a course that put executives through a series of grueling challenges.
They would have to learn how to focus their mind
in a world of distraction.
They would have to rigorously observe their emotional reactions.
And they'd have to face unflinchingly
their own ego.
This was not for the faint of heart,
and to my surprise,
people signed up!
And one CEO drove three hours to take the class.
My coworker warned me that he was a "very difficult man."
And my colleagues were intimidated by his hard glare and short fuse.
And they smugly wished me,
the youngest guy on the faculty at that time,
"Good luck."
I felt like I was being thrown to the lions.
The CEO sat right up front,
and for a while he was quiet.
But as time passed, he began to open up.
And he confessed that he was completely overwhelmed
by endless email and customers' demands for instant responses.
Constant multitasking made his life frenetic,
and pressures to increase the bottom line escalated his stress.
But as he began to awaken,
he admitted to me
that perversely,
he enjoyed playing the role of victim.
Now, that might not sound like much,
but for a CEO to admit that,
that turned into a turning point for him.
As time went by,
he started to see how hardened and indifferent he had become to others,
how his management style was to fly off the handle
and lose control and get caught up in a swell of his own emotions.
He wrote to me saying,
"I’m beginning to see my own obsession with me,
and my own pride, vanity, and greed."
And what was surprising to him
was that when he was open, unguarded, and vulnerable,
he felt stronger and free.
"Maybe," he says,
"Maybe I’m beginning to know what compassion means."
At the end of the class, his eyes smiled more.
And I asked him how had the class affected his personal life.
And he says, "You know,
I realized that I haven't had a personal life in 35 years.
But back then my hair was a lot longer,
and I was interested in consciousness and spirituality.
But then we got married,
and then we had kids,
and then I realized I had to support this family.
And I went to work,
and I never stopped.
And all of those longings quietly faded away."
And with tears streaming down his face,
"My wife says to me the other day,
'I don’t know what’s happened to you,
but you’ve turned back into the man I married.'"
That moment, for me, was like being hit by lightning,
and to see such a profound shift in this "difficult man"
showed me the path that I had to take for my life.
So I quit a promising research career to do this work,
which I felt like is what I needed to do.
He, In a decade of teaching,
he became the first of a long line of "difficult people"
who were fundamentally existentially frustrated.
They had used all their talent, skill, and intelligence
for external achievement,
and they enjoyed it.
But in the end, they found it unsatisfying.
But they didn’t know what to do.
And that’s why they were frustrated.
We are told
that the unexamined life isn't worth living,
but we’re never told how to examine it.
And I think the secret is cultivating mindful attention
because that creates self-awareness.
And the self-awareness creates the opportunity for change.
And that can lead to self-transformation.
As a society, we don't pay enough attention to "attention."
We don’t take care of it, preserve it, grow it.
We need to take care of attention!
So when are we going to realize
that a meeting where everyone is staring at their laptop
isn’t really a meeting.
And shouldn’t memories of Grandma and her blackberry
be about a pie,
and not a phone?
(Laughter)
Quality of attention is quality of life.
It’s quality of relationship,
quality of work!
Attention is the secret ingredient that connects us to ourselves and others.
And mindfulness and Zen are ways of enhancing attention
so we can live with more flow.
I'd like to think
that my practices helped me live beyond the five-year diagnosis.
But after years of teaching,
fatigue, gout, and undeniable lab results
all pointed to the fact I was dying.
But since 16 years had passed since the original diagnosis,
my doctor believed that a kidney transplant could save my life,
and this presented another problem.
I would have to ask for help.
And the idea was like throwing a birthday party
with a secret fear that no one was going to show up.
So, like the CEO,
I had to look at my own fear, pride, and vulnerability
to live.
And so when 25 people came forward as organ donors
and 13 of whom were my former students,
I got more help than I could have ever imagined.
And luckily,
one was a positive match.
And here I am.
It’s not done.
(Applause)
I used to think that pain was a negative,
but I learned, with the right tool it could become fuel for growth.
And it led me down a path of strength, courage, and love.
I believe that we all have the capacity within us
to make our minds beautiful.
So my wish is that we become warriors of our own journey.
Because when we do,
we change our heart,
our mind,
and our future.
Thank you.
(Applause)