For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices, habits, and routines that get them through their day.
Dacher Keltner’s days are awesome—quite literally. As a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley and the director of the school’s Greater Good Science Center, Keltner’s area of expertise is human emotion (he was a consultant on Pixar’s 2015 Inside Out). More specifically, awe.
Earlier this year, he released the book about that feeling Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. And though living under the eucalyptus shade in Berkeley, California makes wonder more easily accessible, Keltner’s days are still peppered with the types of not so awe-inspiring tasks that fill many of our days, things like emails, meetings, and commutes. Keltner says the lessons he’s learned from studying awe have helped him find more everyday astonishment among his daily routines. “Part of the reason I wrote Awe is that it has been my compass in a way,” he said recently, over the phone. “If I teared up at a piece of music, or I laughed at the marvels of young kids playing on a playground, or got a moment to look at a sunset, that will register as, This is a good day.”
GQ: What’s the first thing you do on a usual day?
Dacher Keltner: I’m up at 5:30 on average. I do two cups of coffee, get some oatmeal, and write for two hours. Then I do some push ups and sit ups and some band work to keep the body fresh. Then I get outside for 10 minutes and do an awe meditation, taking in the different senses, and thinking about the feeling of sun or wind, the sights of light on oak leaves. That gets me to 9:00 AM. I have a 25-minute walk to work that is beautiful. I have to get out to walk or hike every day—I walk to work, I walk in the hills, I walk at night—usually six to eight miles a day.
How many push ups and sit ups are you doing?
I will do like 30 push ups a shot, and do that three or four times a day. Then 40 sit ups.
Do you have a to-do list of everything youI need to get done in a day? What do you work off of?
I have the essentials set into my calendar. Writing two hours, meetings with my lab members and meetings with my podcast team. Then I write down lists. I've done it for 35 years. Here's what I'm doing for the next six hours. Then, when I'm on an airplane or have a moment of deeper reflection, I'm writing bigger, like five-year aspirations in terms of work.
You wear so many hats and you do seem to get so much done, but reading your book, you don't strike me as somebody who necessarily holds up productivity as the North Star for your day. At the end of the day, how do you judge whether or not it's been a “successful” day?
Well, there are simple metrics when you're a lab scientist: Am I producing papers? Do my students get jobs? That’s the core. But then you’re right. I was lucky in the rather unconventional background that I've had where I'll judge my life according to questions like, have I encountered a moment of moral beauty in other people? Have I had a moment where I feel connected to the natural world? Do I feel like I’ve lifted up the people around me? When you're a teacher and a professor at a big school like Berkeley, you have a lot of those opportunities.
There are a lot of daily things that are a little less awe-inspiring, like doing emails. Are there things you learned from writing the book that have allowed you to approach something mundane like that with a little more lightheartedness or awe? Or is it more like, this is something I’ve just got to get this done?
I was blown away by the finding in the book—and In some sense, it’s the pivotal finding—about everyday awe. There are ways to just hold a meeting [with awe in mind]. I try to have more eye-to-eye contact, or ask the people I work with what was awe-inspiring about a finding they uncovered in the data analysis, or if it’s a one-on-one meeting we might do it while walking. There are ways to build in these little moments of awe to work life, and I learned that through that science.
There's a lot about grief in the book, and how it's intertwined with awe. As a parent and teacher, how do you think about teaching kids to find astonishment and happiness while also leaving room for sadness and grief?
I really struggled with that as I got locked into teaching human happiness. There is a sense from the literature that it's all about optimism and thinking good things. But I've studied two emotions that suggest otherwise. One is compassion, which is about coming close to other people's suffering and engaging with it. The other is awe, which often arises out of death, hardship and existential uncertainty, and grappling with big ideas that are confusing, like life and death, or infinity. That taught me to leave a lot of room in work and daily life to be present with the hard things of life—it’s in those moments of shared hardship that we find our kindest tendencies, that we find our sense of wonder about what could come out of hardship.
One of the things the book discusses is that awe makes us open. It's an expansive emotion and makes us feel more connected. I feel like so much of daily living closes us down. The news can be terrible, Twitter can be terrible. If someone is feeling closed down or angry, is there a way someone can access wonder or openness that doesn’t involve being deep among the trees? What are some everyday ways people can access that wonder?
We are publishing a paper about an exercise that we did for healthcare providers during the pandemic that brought them more wellbeing, less stress, less anxiety, less depression. The exercise is simple: pause, put away your devices, don't look for your next task, orient your attention to what's in front of you, think about the bigger point of what you're doing in that moment. Pause, look outside your window, reflect and then pan out and look at the bigger view. Take a moment to still the mind and then think about, what is the meaning here that I'm after? It’s that simple practice of taking a moment to pause and think about what's marvelous. Like, right now, I'm just looking at my reading glasses. They're 18 bucks, and ordinarily I gloss over them, but it’s amazing that with a simple technological innovation, we allow people to see into their dying days.
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As someone who has studied happiness, what’s something that people regularly think that will make them happy, but fails to do so?
One of the big myths that we gotta watch out for, especially in the United States, is “I'm gonna do it on my own,” the myth of individualism. People overestimate how important money is to them, and I think we underestimate how powerful certain kinds of relationships are. Time and time again in the literature, it's like, man, your friends give you so much joy and happiness. Stay close to that. I also think in our world that we've over prioritized shifting our beliefs—like, “I gotta just have the right mindset and it'll work out.” That's partially true. But I think we have to remember that we have to create lives and situations and contexts that are happiness-making. Another myth is that you lose happiness as you get older. In fact, the data suggests that from age 55 on, you get happier.
What does the end of your day look like?
In some ways, the pandemic made me really intentional about this. Post-dinner is usually a walk. I'm embarrassed to say I have a couple of ritualized walks. I walk to this giant rock and touch it. In the summer, there's this park twenty minutes away where there's a stream and redwoods and I go sit there and look at the water. I'm lucky because Berkeley offers that. Sometimes I’ll go out with friends for beers. Sometimes I do saunas. Sometimes I’ll read something from The New York Times or The Guardian. I will often watch a show—I’ve been hooked on Scandinavian thrillers for years. And then I will always do some more sit ups and push ups and try to avoid the snacks. Then I read The New Yorker, and then I fall asleep. I am always prepared for a little meditation if I get up at four in the morning and need to go back to sleep.
What’s the significance of the rock?
Man, you know, I love touching things in nature. So when I backpack, I love touching trees. So there’s this park called Indian Rock. It's got these giant granite rocks, they're spectacular. People come to watch the sunsets. But there's this one rock that I've touched for what is now 12 years. It’s just like how I used to touch this giant cedar tree with my daughter when she was young and used to go on night walks. I like to consecrate parts of Berkeley. It's like a sacred object. It gives me this deeper sense of time. Like, This is the present moment that I'm feeling, but, by the way, there's a whole history I have with this rock. I used to touch it when this was going on in my life, and now it's this thing.
What’s the meditation you do when you wake up at 4:00 AM?
I do a loving-kindness meditation. My specific one, I think it's from [Buddhist teacher] Jack Kornfield. I pick a person and I say, “May you be filled with love and kindness. May you be safe from inner and outer danger. May you be well in body and in mind. May you be at ease and happy.” My daughter and I got these sandalwood beads in Bhutan some years ago, and I'll hold those while I do it. It’s like 10 minutes and truly the next day I feel more kind and at ease. Because I've always awakened at irregular hours, I turned it into a good thing.
Most PopularTo zoom out a bit and speak more generally about routines, I think there’s a way in which routines can make us less open to discovery. Is awe something that can be ritualized, or is wonder something that has to find us? How do we strike the balance between those things?
You’re right at a really subtle point. You have to ritualize it. There's great power in ritualizing awe. But you have to build in variations. I fold into routines fast. I wear the same clothes all the time, I walk the same path, I get the same lunch, I order the same thing. Down to the minute. But what awe teaches us is to add variations. I have a nice walk to school and I’ll try to take a different route. I have a favorite burrito place, but I'll get a different burrito. It’s great to ritualize awe. Pick a moment where you pause and be open and listen to a piece of music, look at an interesting piece of visual art, read a great passage from a book you admire, study a person whose life matters to you. But build in variations, right? With awe, you have to say, I am gonna have an awe walk to work today, but in the middle of it, I'm gonna shift course somehow that leads me into the unexpected.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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