Shambhala Sun | September 2009
You'll find this article on page 34 of the magazine.

Barry Boyce is senior editor of the Shambhala Sun and editor of the anthology In the Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Difficult Times, a Shambhala Sun Book from Shambhala Publications.

Google Searches

Hot-shot geeks at the world’s leading information company are taking a ground-breaking course called Search Inside Yourself. As Barry Boyce reports, it’s a new model for teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and its creator is thinking big.

“For as long as I can remember, I have had a desire to do something big and important for humanity,” says Chade-Meng Tan. “In 2004, the door of opportunity opened up for me. One August day that year, I suddenly had real money.”

That was the day Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two graduate students on leave from Stanford, took their little start-up public. Raising $1.7 billion in capital in one day, Google became the largest internet IPO (Initial Public Offering) ever. Google—the noun, the verb, the company, the way of life they created—was about to make its early employees, those who’d taken stock options to compensate for the low pay and long hours, very rich.

One of the people whose lives changed on “IPO Day” was employee #107, Chade-Meng Tan, who is now bringing mindfulness to Google through a program known as Search Inside Yourself (SIY). Googlers—as employees there are known—operate with a lot of autonomy and are urged to be free spirits. For example, Meng just up and decided to call himself Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” and had cards printed adding the phrase, “which nobody can deny.” As Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, Meng has become Google’s unofficial VIP greeter. Behind the reception desk in one of the main Google buildings is Meng’s Wall, a gallery of snapshots of Meng standing next to luminaries like Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nancy Pelosi, Muhammad Ali, and more than one hundred and fifty others—and counting.

Excepted from the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun

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SEE ALSO:

Meng’s Peace Plan

Chade-Meng Tan, creator of Search Within Yourself, hopes the benefits of meditation will someday be as widely accepted as those of exercise.

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