Dan Harris Quote

Serendipitously, on the very night of my meeting with Ben, I had scheduled a dinner with Mark Epstein. In the taxi on my way downtown I called Bianca and told her how it’d gone. He’s right, she said. Which came as no surprise; Ben had basically affirmed her thesis. This is good. Now you know what you need to do. Mark and I met to eat at a fussy Japanese restaurant called Brushstroke, where they only served a tasting menu and the waiters took themselves very, very seriously. Once we’d placed our orders, I told Mark what had just gone down in Ben’s office. He responded with a catchy little suggestion: Hide the Zen. People will take advantage of you if they’re reading you as too Zen, he said. There’s a certain kind of aggression in organizational behavior that doesn’t value that—that will see it as weak. If you present yourself too much like that, people won’t take you seriously. So I think it important to hide the Zen, and let them think that you’re really someone they have to contend with. But I was attached to my rep as a Zen guy. I don’t want to be an asshole at the office. No, he said. That’s the tricky thing about what he’s saying to you. I’m sure there’s a way of doing it where you don’t have to be an asshole.