He wrote that "the need for the meditator to retrain his attention, whether through concentration or mindfulness, is the single invariant ingredient in the recipe for altering consciousness of every meditation system". In his first book, The Varieties of Meditative Experience (1977) (republished in 1988 as The Meditative Mind), Goleman describes almost a dozen different meditation systems.
Goleman's most recent best-seller is Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Harper, 2013). In Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998, Bantam Books), Goleman developed the argument that non-cognitive skills can matter as much as IQ for workplace success, and made a similar argument for leadership effectiveness in Primal Leadership (2001, Harvard Business School Press). Goleman authored the internationally best-selling book Emotional Intelligence (1995, Bantam Books), which spent more than one-and-a-half years on The New York Times Best Seller list. He sits on the board of the Mind & Life Institute. Currently he co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. Goleman co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning at Yale University's Child Studies Center, which then moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago. David McClelland, his mentor at Harvard, recommended him for a job at Psychology Today, from which he was recruited by The New York Times in 1984. Goleman then returned as a visiting lecturer to Harvard, where during the 1970s his course on the psychology of consciousness was popular.
He wrote his first book based on travel in India and Sri Lanka. While in India, he spent time with spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba, who was also the guru to Ram Dass, Krishna Das and Larry Brilliant. Goleman studied in India using a pre-doctoral fellowship from Harvard and a post-doctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council. His maternal uncle was nuclear physicist Alvin M. Daniel Goleman grew up in a Jewish household in Stockton, California, the son of Fay Goleman (née Weinberg 1910–2010), professor of sociology at the University of the Pacific, and Irving Goleman (1898–1961), humanities professor at the Stockton College (now San Joaquin Delta College).