Never worry alone
How a crisis got me to follow my own advice
There’s nothing like a good crisis to get me to follow my own advice. This is a newsletter about both the crisis and the advice.
The crisis: As some of you know, I’ve been chipping away at a book for the last 8+ years. It’s about how a massive humiliation (a terrible 360 review — an anonymous, comprehensive feedback survey from colleagues, friends, and family) helped me embrace the evidence-based case for self-love. Which, properly understood, is not about selfishness; it actually makes you better at relating to everyone in your life.
Anyway, a few months ago, I handed in what I thought was a close-to-final draft of the book. I even bragged about it on Instagram.
I shared the manuscript with my team as well, and they set up a little focus group, enlisting four outside readers who were fans of mine, but people I did not know personally. And the feedback, to put it lightly, was not good. One outside person couldn’t even finish it.
This was a body blow for me. I had poured everything into this book. It was devastating to see that it was having the opposite of the intended effect. A book designed to help people was turning them off.
Making matters worse, this terrible news arrived at a time when I was already struggling with an uptick in anxiety and depression. I felt like I got hit by a truck.
My initial instincts ran in all the wrong directions. Dismiss the feedback as ridiculous. Curl up in furious denial. Conversely, accept every word of it as gospel and think how I had wasted so much of my time on a project that should obviously be euthanized. Some other unhelpful instincts included: isolating in my own bubble of stoic, masculine bullshit. Or: feverishly racing to fix the manuscript without taking any time to pause and reflect.
But then I remembered one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. I got this from a guest on my podcast, Robert Waldinger.
Never worry alone.
Instead of coiling into denial or self-punishment, I reached out. The first person I talked to was my wife, who was incredibly supportive. Then I talked to my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. Ditto.
After that, I had a long phone call with my dear friend Sebene Selassie. At one point I started crying, and she gently reminded me that it was good to feel my feelings.
I continued to reach out. To Toni, Caroline, and Abby from my team. To my editor and agent. To my brother, Matt. To literally dozens of my friends, including Jonathan, David, and Corey.
And you know what? It genuinely helped. It didn’t magically fix the book, of course. But taking a few weeks to lick my wounds and get support from my friends allowed me to craft a plan. I’m now, with a shocking degree of calm, taking a few months to attempt a rewrite. I’m actually feeling reasonably optimistic. And grateful to the four people who gave me such powerful feedback. They may have saved the book. (Also, it’s not lost on me that their feedback represented a fresh 360 review.)
What does this mean for you? When you’ve got a problem, don’t carry it alone. You may be tempted to isolate, but that is—and I am sorry to be a little flip about it—strategically stupid. As I often say, life is better, happier, and more successful in the carpool lane. Apparently, it’s a lesson you have to learn over and over.
IPMF
Never Worry Alone
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Stay tuned for our brand-new Summer Sunday Live Series with legendary meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, which premieres July 12. Every Sunday through August 30, Sharon will guide us through the Noble Eightfold Path—the Buddha’s 2,500-year-old, hyper-practical operating system for living a good life without losing your mind. Each week features a short teaching, a guided meditation, and a live Q&A with Sharon. Only in the 10% with Dan Harris app. Sign up here.
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Upcoming event in person:
Tickets for the next Meditation Party are available here! Jeff Warren, Sebene Selassie, and I are doing another version of our annual retreat this Oct. 16-18. It’s at the Omega Institute in upstate NY. Think four big sessions of meditation, conversation, and Q&A—with plenty of free time to hike the 240-acre campus, play some pickleball, shoot hoops, or just relax by the lake. You can also drop into yoga or tai chi classes, and on Saturday night there’s even a dance party (totally optional, I promise).
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On the 10% Happier podcast:
I recently sat down with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon as part of our Get Fit Sanely series. Lyon is a physician and the founder of what she calls "muscle-centric medicine," and the author of Forever Strong. She makes the case that the convenience of modern life — the constant engineering-out of the hard thing—is quietly making us worse off. “We live in a culture where we’re constantly trying to remove the hard thing,” she told me, “and we shouldn’t.” Check out the full interview here.
Today we’re dropping my conversation with Claude M. Steele — the Stanford psychologist who coined "stereotype threat.” He has a new book called Churn, and the central idea is deceptively simple: any time we interact across lines of difference, we carry a low-grade psychological tension about how our identity is being perceived. In this episode, Steele lays out exactly what's happening in our brains during those moments and offers a surprisingly actionable three-step framework for building trust across that divide.
I forgot to mention another person who was massively helpful in the aftermath of my book Waterloo… Adam Grant. The guy who literally wrote the book on generosity genuinely practices what he preaches.
One thing I've learned is that worrying alone rarely leaves the problem alone. It usually recruits a story.
Silence becomes rejection.
Uncertainty becomes failure.
Delay becomes, "I must have done something wrong."
The people I've reached out to over the past couple of years haven't usually solved the problem.
They've helped me make contact with reality before the story took over.
That has been worth far more than advice.