6.11.15

Takeaways from 10% happier by Dan Harris



Recently Sriram got this book as a gift and I devoured it! The book that I borrowed from our local library, RLS' Treasure Island, Sriram is devouring it - tit-for-tat I suppose!!

In this book 10% happier, Dan Harris mainly writes about meditation. The book is about how a skeptical TV newsman embarks on an evolving journey of exploring meditation. For me however it was also about getting a peek into the insanely intense and the intensely competitive field of TV journalism.

I never knew these anchormen & women wrote their own stories. I always thought someone else did all the grunt work for them and all they had to do was look good and read from the teleprompter. It was a revelation for me that these people, even bigwigs like Barbara Walters wrote and edited their stories. I now have a newfound respect for what they do! And also a new found appreciation for how crazily intense and competitive this profession is. The amount of travelling, scripting, editing and all the leg work that is required to produce a single segment seems to be equivalent to producing a full blown movie in the time span of a single week! and this is done week after week!! that is how crazy this business is. To make things even more insane, there is this non-stop competition for air time. Apparently every day, for every show, these anchors have to pitch their stories. Every day they battle it out to get their stories selected and aired on TV. What exactly are these people made of - those that can thrive in a job so brutal?

In any case, the book is about meditation. So back to meditation...