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A review by chaghi
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan
2.0
I like the idea behind the book, but ultimately I think it tries to cover too much, with too little.
I'm familiarized with meditation and mindfulness, but I had zero knowledge about Emotional Intelligence. Yes, I've heard about the term, I know it created a lot of fuzz, especially in the corporate world, a few years back, but I've never read anything about EI. This is important because the book tries to teach mindfulness using EI as a framework, so to speak. But in my opinion, it fails as an introduction to EI, for somebody (like me) that has no idea about it.
The first part of the book deals with meditation and mindfulness, and it's a nice read, albeit a little too simplistic. It's a practical approach to mindfulness, and it tries to explain the science behind it, and I'm totally cool with that, but somehow it felt... short. Oversimplified. Not deep enough. People already familiarized with meditation has little to gain from the first half of the book, and for completely newbies it might spike their curiosity, and give them a starting point... but little more.
And then we have the second part of the book, which is more related to Emotional Intelligence, the use of mindfulness in a social context (especially in the workplace). To me it tries to cover a lot of things, and sometimes it assumes some Emotional Intelligence background, which I don't have.
Finally, I'm not particularly happy with the author (too much about himself and how a nice guy he is), his (forced) sense of humor, and his praise for all-things-Google. I get that his work was possible because Google somehow sponsored it and gave the author time to work on this, and the program was born inside Google, but I don't feel comfortable being reminded of that every other page or so.
I'm familiarized with meditation and mindfulness, but I had zero knowledge about Emotional Intelligence. Yes, I've heard about the term, I know it created a lot of fuzz, especially in the corporate world, a few years back, but I've never read anything about EI. This is important because the book tries to teach mindfulness using EI as a framework, so to speak. But in my opinion, it fails as an introduction to EI, for somebody (like me) that has no idea about it.
The first part of the book deals with meditation and mindfulness, and it's a nice read, albeit a little too simplistic. It's a practical approach to mindfulness, and it tries to explain the science behind it, and I'm totally cool with that, but somehow it felt... short. Oversimplified. Not deep enough. People already familiarized with meditation has little to gain from the first half of the book, and for completely newbies it might spike their curiosity, and give them a starting point... but little more.
And then we have the second part of the book, which is more related to Emotional Intelligence, the use of mindfulness in a social context (especially in the workplace). To me it tries to cover a lot of things, and sometimes it assumes some Emotional Intelligence background, which I don't have.
Finally, I'm not particularly happy with the author (too much about himself and how a nice guy he is), his (forced) sense of humor, and his praise for all-things-Google. I get that his work was possible because Google somehow sponsored it and gave the author time to work on this, and the program was born inside Google, but I don't feel comfortable being reminded of that every other page or so.