This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, how you doing? We are going to talk today about one of my favorite subjects, a hobby horse. Hopefully I'm not beating a dead hobby horse here, but I find this issue to be endlessly fascinating. Can you be ambitious and sane at the same time? Can you be sanely ambitious? And this.
Issue is one I've been noodling on for 15 years, probably more, but it's increasingly salient right now because five and a half months ago, about six months ago, I launched a new business and starting a new business. is a titanic pain in the ass. It's very, very hard. Just for context here, some of you may know this, but back in 2015-16, I co-founded a meditation app that was called 10% Happier. As of March 1st, I am now fully...
fully, fully separated from that app. They have changed their name. They have some of my old content, but I am not in any way associated with the app. That was a very painful transition for me where my sanity was challenged in many ways. But now I'm launching a new business and I'm not doing it alone. I have a little team of about 10 people who are awesome. And one of the things we talk about all the time is how.
Can we be sanely ambitious? It's like a catchphrase, a buzz phrase on the team. And so we've learned a lot. And want to share some of that with you and also tell you about some really cool things that are going to be happening in the 10% happier world, the Dan Harris world. So I'm going to talk about all of this.
with my main man, DJ Kashmir, coming right up. DJ Kashmir, I forgot in the intro to say what you do. You are the executive producer of the podcast, and you're also the head of content at... whatever this company is called. This is one of the live issues we're wrestling with. Right now, everything's under danharris.com, but I think we'd like to go back to 10% Happier, probably. Anyway, you're the head of content, which means you're overseeing the podcast.
sub stack, social media, and a million other things that we may or may not do going forward. We're going to talk about this ongoing... tension, this creative tension between sanity and ambition and what we've learned in this nascent company over the past five, six months. Yeah. Am I setting the table correctly, boss? Yeah, I think that's right.
Technically, you are my boss's boss, but I'll take it. Yeah, it's funny. As I was getting ready for this, I was thinking back to a time a few months ago where you we're talking about this exact thing in slack but you wrote insanely ambitious and it was yes yes um but we are trying to stay on the same side of sanely ambitious
My aforementioned boss, Tony Magyar, posed this question to me and you and to your executive assistant, Abby. When we were meeting in New York recently, we're trying to figure out the team structure, the org chart, the budget, what we're going to pick up, what we're going to put down.
one of the questions she framed our two-day summit around was, what does it mean to build this company in a way that's sanely ambitious? And, you know, we use the phrase a lot. It's the title for this recurring series we do on work life on the show. But it's easier said than done. And I think it's really important to me and to you that we try to close the gap between...
the advice we're peddling and the way that we're building the stuff that delivers the advice. And if we talk about work-life balance on the show and we don't have any, that's hypocritical at best and maybe dangerous at worst. So it's a big question. a live question for all of us the greatest source of embarrassment that is currently available to me is the delta the gap between what i say on the show and what i do in real life and so yes this is a place
This is the area because this is such a fraught area for me. I bring so much. We all bring a lot of baggage to this, but I bring a lot of anxiety and cultural conditioning and family conditioning. I'll take a first crack at Tony's question. Yes, Tony is the COO of the company, and she's amazing, incredibly smart, and is very good at framing big discussions. And so I'll start with the ambitious part.
that I want us to be taking big swings at making awesome, incredibly impactful, culture-moving content. But I want us to do it with, and this is a term you use a lot, a low resting heart rate. I worked in the news business. This memory, one of my producer friends.
I won't name her because she didn't give me permission to tell the story. But I remember her walking through an area of the building where a team was working on a primetime special for that night. And they'd been working like straight through for a week. And she said. The whole area smelled like pizza and fear. And that is just such an apt description of the way it is in the news business so often. And I don't want that here.
And you, I think, temperamentally are really focused on the low resting heart rate. So it's it's about having big, audacious, ambitious goals, but going about it in a way in which we're not driving ourselves nuts. so how's that for a starter yeah i think that's right and you're right this is you know temperamentally and i think maybe also circumstantially
I really am focused on the low resting heart rate piece. You know, it makes sense when you took a swing at defining sanely ambitious that you started with the ambitious first. And if I were to define it, I'd probably start with the sanely. And I think we both really... do value both. But, you know, just starting from where I am personally, the boundaries of what I can accomplish in this role are circumscribed by very real responsibilities, right?
I have to go drop my kid off in the morning and I have to pick him up in the afternoon and there's dinner to prep and there's dishes to wash and all of these things and I know that Every single person on our team, whether or not they have kids, they have responsibilities to themselves, to taking care of themselves and to various family, friends, community, etc. And I think it's just so important that we take that seriously.
create systems and structures and cultures where people feel like, you know, just for example, like they can not respond to a late-breaking message that comes in unless it's absolutely an emergency or not be checking Slack five times during the weekend or whatever. And so when I think about Sanely Ambitious, it's really just, yeah, can we... take care of ourselves and each other and the other people we're responsible to while also taking care of this.
community and this audience that we're cultivating some days it feels like we can and some days it feels harder and i think we're just constantly trying to to navigate that and be really honest when it feels like it's working when it feels like it's not when we're airing on one side or the other Yeah, that all lands. And as you were talking, I was thinking, what can we say that would be useful to the audience? And I just jotted down three things. I would say having humane policies.
for time off and for the expectation that you get rest. And we're not setting up a burnout culture and overload culture. is incredibly important. And this is where I think it's useful to anybody out there who is a manager or an employer of any kind. The data is pretty clear on this. You are not going to get
the best work out of people if they're not getting vacations, if they don't feel like they've got some balance and some ability to take care of their family, if they don't feel like they have good health insurance and things like that. And we haven't figured all of this out. But I think temperamentally and philosophically and spiritually, we all agree like this is a non-negotiable direction we have to go in. So that's, I would say, one big learning takeaway for the audience.
Not only if you're a manager, but also if you're managing your own life, like you need rest in the words of the great writer, Alex Pang, Alex Soo Jung Kim Pang. And I'll drop a link in the show notes to Mike. Pivotal conversation I had with him back in, I think, 2019 or 20. He wrote a book called Rest. Rest and work are two sides of the same coin. One fuels the other. We need rest. And that is not a.
Nice to have. That is a must have. That's the first kind of takeaway in this category. Does that land for you? Yeah, 100%. I've started making a point of just putting 15-minute rest blocks on my calendar, at least one a day, and our calendars are public-facing. And part of that is to hold myself accountable for just like literally just laying down and doing nothing for a second and catching my breath. And part of it is...
wanting other people to see that if I'm doing it, you know, they can do it too. They should do it too. Yeah. Maybe I should put in my public facing calendar. I'm going to take 15 minutes. to watch funny videos on TikTok. Sure, sure. Whatever works for you. You actually do...
Do a version of this, though, and you are transparent about it with the team. Like you talk about the fact that like, yes, I, Dan, will sometimes send an email early in the morning or send a missive late at night or record some voiceover narration over the weekend. You can see my calendar.
I'm going to take a break to work out. I'm going to take a break to have lunch with a friend. You're very honest about the fact that like you might touch in on work every day, but you're not going straight through eight to five or nine to six at a breakneck speed over and over. No. For me, the breaks that matter the most are exercise, meditation and socializing. I am a true extrovert. I mean, just this week, I had dinners two nights.
I will have an all day thing on Saturday and then I'll be traveling on Sunday. So like, yeah, I need the socializing. And those are right in the calendar. OK, so the second thing I would say that's really important, and this goes back to what you said before, how like if we're talking about sanely ambitious. I would lead with ambitious and you would lead with sanely. For me, it is so important to populate my world with people who are going to push back on me.
And Adam Grant, who, you know, is a friend of the show and somebody a friend of mine and somebody I have so much respect for, wrote this excellent book called Think Again and talking about intellectual humility and open mindedness and. crucial skill of being able to rethink your opinions you know he talks a lot about having people around you who are willing
to challenge you. That can be very difficult when there's such a clear power dynamic. The research is very clear. What is the one variable that contributes most to well-functioning teams? It's something called psychological safety. And this is true at
work, but you can apply this in your relationships and your family and your friend groups. Psychological safety is where everybody on the team, no matter where they are, if there's a hierarchy, feels comfortable speaking up. I'm not sure we have a thousand percent. psychological safety, but it is a huge priority of mine and a big, big learning in terms of how to be sanely ambitious.
yeah i think we work really hard at that and there's some really concrete things we've tried to do to help cultivate that psychological safety you know one is We spend a lot of time on Slack because we're a remote team. And so we've tried to move as much communication out of personal channels and into public channels as possible. Because what we noticed was the more conversations we were having on the sidelines, the more it could feel to.
people who weren't in those conversations. Like there was some secret cabal, you know, or that there were these like magical notes floating around or this master plan that they weren't being read in on. So we try to do as little kind of sidebarring and private messaging as possible.
necessary and sometimes it's efficient but it's just been one small way to try to do that and one other way that I've just personally tried to do that like there was a really small example but I think it's illustrative that happened earlier today where you
just dropped an idea for a little mini episode into slack and i wasn't sure how serious you were about it like i didn't know if it was something you really wanted to do or kind of wanted to do or didn't care you know i didn't know if it was off the top of your head or how loosely or tightly held it was
just asked you directly publicly and I think we just want to model as much as we can that like it's okay to push back it's okay to ask questions it's okay to look for clarity because I think otherwise we would spend a lot of time just sort of chasing after the breadcrumbs that you drop you know and I
we're trying to build a culture where we're not doing that i think we've come a long way in that regard this is such an important subject and to say i've got some scar tissue because i've had feedback over the years, that I'm particularly bad at this. I have a resting bitch face, so I'm a little scary just to look at. And, you know, I come out of a very hierarchical star based system and network news. Didn't have the best mentors in this regard. So I've really had to learn.
Two just very tactical things that have been helpful for me. One is trying to make it a habit to always bring into the discussion the most junior people. in a call or in a meeting. And then the other is, you know, if somebody calls me out to reward them publicly. What you're saying really lands for me. And it's something that you've built over time really intentionally. You know, I definitely did not come in on my first day as like a contract.
worker on the show speaking up in that way. But, you know, I sort of tested the waters. essentially, like you say, was rewarded for it. Yeah, you've been promoted like a million times. I've had a good run these last few years. One other thing that we try to do in this regard really concretely, we make sure to check in with our direct reports every single week. very, very rarely miss a week doing these one-on-ones. And we always start with just a really simple sort of red, yellow, green.
how are you doing relative to your work? And I think there might be a temptation in some workplaces to just show up and say, oh, I'm good, I'm green, right? We're really trying to build a culture where you're allowed to say, I'm yellow, or you're even allowed to say, I'm red.
Like we're, we genuinely want to know so that we can figure out how to remove obstacles, how to support. I think that's one way really concretely in my life that we have tried systemically and structurally to tack towards the sanely ambitious sort of North Star. Yeah, actually, that kind of leads me to another practical takeaway that I think we've learned in the credit for this to Tony. One of the dynamics that we have to manage on the team is that I'm just constantly coming up with ideas.
I'm not the only one coming up with ideas, but I'm mostly the guy coming up with ideas. Not all of them are good, but some of them are good and we want to do them, but we can't do them because it would drive everybody nuts because we're already doing 75 other ideas that I had. point. Tony's thing is we need a clear parking lot where we have a hierarchy of stuff we will do. It's like a not now list. So the ideas don't.
Get forgotten. There's a list. And we revisit. We actually just before this conversation, you and I were on a call with Tony and Abby, who's our executive assistant. And we were going through things on the list. It is a way to keep having these big ambitions and big plans and things we know we can do, but not try to boil the ocean and do everything right away. Yes, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely. Another thing I think about when I think about this idea of building a company and a team that's insanely ambitious is I think about, you know, what would it look like if we didn't see these two? forces of sanity and ambition as being in opposition to each other at all? What if we saw them as mutually reinforcing? Right. So, Thich Nhat Hanh famously talks about this idea of interbeing, and he might say sanity and ambition inter are, right? That they...
are made up of each other, they rely on each other, they include each other. You can't have one without the other. If we only cared about our sanity and we had extraordinarily easeful work lives without any ambition, we wouldn't get anything done and we would fail.
and we would fold and that would actually undermine our sanity right and if we only cared about ambition and we weren't thinking about sanity and sustainability then we would just work ourselves to the bone and burn out and fail and that would undermine our ambition so actually you know you
lean on the ambitious side and I lean on the sanity side. But I know you care really deeply about your sanity and the team's sanity. And you know I care really deeply about my own ambitions and your ambitions and the team's ambitions. So I think there is a lot of wisdom. that can be accessed by not seeing these things as being in tension with one another.
One concrete example of this as we build out this company is the out-of-office policy that we've landed on. There are a bunch of holidays that everyone takes. There is a week-long vacation in the summer that everyone takes and then there is also a minimum number of additional days that everyone has to take and they can take them whenever they want right and so for us it's
In addition to all of the company holidays and the week-long company summer vacation, you have to take at least 15 days off each year. That could be meditation retreat. It could be going on vacation. It could be just sitting at home. It doesn't matter what it's for. You don't have to tell us. have to take at least 15 days. And that way, nobody's incentivized to try to prove themselves by never taking a day off, and no one's incentivized to kind of run themselves into the ground unnecessarily.
Now, of course, we also have a maximum number of days. So in addition to the company holidays, the company vacation, and the minimum 15 days, I think the max we landed on is 25. So that's, I think, pretty generous relative to a lot of American companies.
I just make sure that we have people at work often enough to have meetings and get things done and do what we need to do. And that's been working well so far. The other thing we started doing just under a year ago, when it comes to sick days or emergency time off or anything,
anything like that. Just do what you have to do. If you wake up and you feel like crap and you can't work, just don't. You don't have a set number of sick days. Being sick doesn't count against your vacation time, a family emergency situation.
should not be a source of stress or a source of trying to see like, oh, how many days do I have left? And so that's just been a pure honor system, which felt at the beginning like absolutely the right thing to do and a bit of a roll of the dice. One thing that's been interesting is that ever since we set that...
policy really clearly people have taken sick days when they need them for sure but you know we're actually not seeing very many people get sick very much or have to take a lot of sick time and I wonder if part of that and part of their ability to come to work more and take sick days less is because of this really...
sort of spacious and humane policy. And so it just seems to be working across the board. And so I think this is, you know, this is just in our little laboratory. I can't say what would work in other workplaces necessarily, but for us trying to just create. insanely ambitious out-of-office policy has really made a huge difference. And it's been interesting to see how few sick days have actually been necessary when our team, myself included, you know.
actually does have the opportunity to rest yeah no that makes sense and i screwed up the list, actually said two of the things in the first rubric. So just to restate the list and then we can move on to some of the news updates we want to give people. I think it's humane policies, out of office policies, sick days, vacation. healthcare. I think the second is humane norms and practices around
I don't love this term, but like it's sometimes called heart centered productivity or Cal Newport calls it slow productivity. I'll drop some links to past interviews we've done with Cal Newport because he spent a lot of time thinking about how to be.
saintly ambitious, or he calls it slowly productive, time management, prioritization, workflow, thinking about the course of your day, what are you doing when? So that's number two. And then I would say number three is psychological safety is what allows it all. work because you need to have some honesty coming from all levels of the organization around if the policies and workloads and workflows are working. Does that sound right to you?
Yeah. One thing that comes to mind just real quick before we wrap here on Cal Newport, one of his many really useful teachings in that slow productivity. project of his is this idea of just doubling all your timelines, right? So if you think something's going to take a month, give yourself two. If you think something's going to take four months, give yourself eight. And we're in a world right now where we've got a lot of big projects on the table. We've got this transition.
out of the app. We've got to transition to a new ad sales partner. We're doing a big hiring process. We're reorganizing our entire team who's in what role and who reports to who and everything. And we're just really trying to give ourselves the time to get that right.
It's really tempting to try to just rush it and get to the next thing. And it would be really great if we could have all of this behind us tomorrow, but we can't. And just trying to give each other permission to say, actually, I can't do that this week. Actually, that's it. It's going to take longer. It's huge. Yes. All right. Let's do a few news updates. I'll save a few words about cool stuff that's coming down the pike here.
10% slash Dan Harris land. And then you tell me what I missed. So for many, many years, if you wanted to listen to the podcast early and ad free, you could do so on. what used to be known as the 10% Happier app. The app is now called Happier, but the podcast is no longer there. We're no longer releasing it early, but if you want to listen to it ad-free,
You can do that at danharris.com. You have to be a paid subscriber for that. If you are a paid subscriber, you can get it at podcast.danharris.com. And if you are not a paid subscriber, you will be prompted to sign up. Paid subscribers also get transcripts and a cheat sheet that sort of sums up the key takeaways and more. If you're not a paid subscriber, we'd love to have you.
As I always say, if money's an issue, we don't want it to be an issue. So you can always send me a note at free at danharris.com and we will hook you up. Another thing paid subscribers get is live meditation and Q&A sessions. We call them live AMAs, ask me anything. This business is so new and it's hard to... separate signal from noise, but I think we're getting a pretty clear signal that people really like these opportunities to meditate as a group.
and to ask questions and so we're going to be doing more of these i had been doing like one a month and we're going to go to two if you can't make it live we send it out and you can watch it on your own time and we're really finding that pretty large percentage of the paid subscribers.
either come live or watch it afterwards. So it's really cool. The final thing to say is that up until now on Fridays and sometimes on Sundays, we've been dropping bonus guided meditations. And those have been meditations from... my erstwhile app company. And I'm not...
part of that anymore, as I keep saying. So we're not going to be doing meditation from there. We will occasionally drop guided meditations on Friday. We're actually now going to move into an experimentation in terms of what we're doing on Friday. So occasionally you'll be getting interviews. We are also going to be doing a segment that...
For now, we're calling the mailbag, although that sounds a little close to douchebag to me. So we don't know what we're going to call it. I love that you wait till this moment to share that reservation. One of the things I love the most about this community is I get these amazing questions and I answer them to the best of my ability. And if I can't answer them, I either don't or I ask somebody smart. And so we're going to start dropping.
frequently asked questions and my answers to them on Fridays has licked little. episodes because so many of our episodes are long. We're going to start dropping Friday episodes that are either shorter interview with a celebrity or a short episode where DJ and I are doing behind the scenes stuff or a super short episode that is just me answering.
a very discreet question. And also, of course, we'll do guided meditations sometimes. All right, DJ, did I hit everything? We're playing with other Friday formats too. We might. pull little gems out of the archive, like little five or 10 minute exchanges from old episodes that we want to re-up. So got a lot to play with over the next few months. And if people who are listening have thoughts about what we're offering on Fridays.
in the next one, two, three months, please jump into the chat on danharris.com and let us know what you think. It's all very provisional and experimental at this point. There's a lot of flexibility for what we could offer and what would... be most useful. Obviously, Dan's not a part of the app anymore, but we are curating our own library of meditations on danharris.com. And so if you are eager to hear guided meds from Dan or from friends of the show like Jeff Warren or...
Sabine Selassie, you can also go to danharris.com and do that. Just to pick up on what you said about the chat, can we do a free chat today? that anybody can get into at danharris.com because I would love to hear thoughts on what we should be doing on Fridays, but also like thoughts on these episodes that I do with you, the sort of behind the scenes episodes and where we talk about.
lessons we're learning in the realm of Sanely Ambitious. I'd love to hear people's thoughts about that. You think we can organize like just a free chat today?
Yeah, for sure. This is dropping Friday, March 7th. So if you're listening today, we'll have a free chat open to anybody at all. And you can jump in at DanHarris.com and let us know what you think of this episode and of all these offerings. And just to reiterate, we're really... excited about the ad free listening on Substack and their instructions there and to set you up for ad free listening in whatever way you would like.
If you like listening to podcasts on Spotify, you can listen to us ad-free on Spotify. If you like listening to podcasts on Apple Podcasts, you can listen to us ad-free on Apple Podcasts. You just have to go through danharris.com and follow the instructions, but it will get you there. Yes.
It shouldn't be too hard, but if you're not particularly tech savvy or you just want a little extra help, we'll make sure to have some support in place for you all so that you can enjoy it. All right. Thank you, DJ. I want to thank.
A lot of people actually, just before I go here, our producers on the show are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. We get our recording and engineering from our friends over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.
DJ Kashmir is both our executive producer and head of content, and our theme music is made by my man Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands. Don't forget to sign up at danharris.com. Thank you. See you soon.