Thrive
The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder
By Arianna Huffington
2014
Listen
to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the
boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because
in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is
grace.
-- Frederick Buechner
Introduction
"What
is a good life?" has been a question asked by philosophers going back
to ancient Greeks. But somewhere along the line we abandoned the
question and shifted our attention to how much money we can make, how
big a house we can buy, and how high we can climb up the career ladder.
Over
time, our society's notion of success has been reduced to Money and
Power. In fact, at this point, success, money, and power have
practically become synonymous in the minds of many.
It
seemed to me that people who were genuinely thriving in their lives
were the ones who had made room for well-being, wisdom, wonder, and
giving. Hence
the Third Metric of success was born. Well-being, Wisdom, Wonder, and Giving are the four pillars of the Third Metric.
The
Western workplace culture -- exported to many other parts of the world
-- is practically fueled by stress, sleep deprivation, and burnout.
Even as stress undermines our health, the sleep deprivation so many of
us experience in striving to get ahead at work is profoundly -- and
negatively -- affecting our creativity, our productivity, and our
decision making.
When
we include our own well-being in our definition of success, another
thing that changes is our relationship with time. There is even a term
now for our
stressed-out sense that there is never enough time for what we want to
do -- "time famine." And when we're living a life of perpetual time
famine, we rob ourselves of our ability to experience a key element of
life: wonder -- our delight in the mysteries of the universe, as well as
the everyday small miracles that fill our lives.
Whenever
we look around the world, we see smart leaders -- in politics, in
business, in media -- making terrible decisions. What they're lacking
is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise. It has never been harder
to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to
disconnect from all our omnipresent devices -- our gadgets, our screens,
our social media -- and reconnect with ourselves.
I'm
convinced of two fundamental truths about human beings. First is that
we all have within us a centered place
of wisdom, harmony, and strength. This is a truth that all the world's
philosophers and religions acknowledge in one form or anther. The
second truth is that we're all going to veer away from that place again
and again and again. That's the nature of life. In fact, we may be off
course more often than we are on course.
The
question is how quickly can we get back to that centered place of
wisdom, harmony, and strength. It is in this sacred place that life is
transformed from struggle to grace. Our ability to regularly get back
to this place of wisdom depends on how much we practice and how
important we make it in our lives. And burnout makes it much harder to
tap into our wisdom.
After
all, the function of leadership is to be able to see the iceberg before
it hits the Titanic. And when you're burnout and exhausted,
it's much harder to see clearly the dangers or opportunities ahead.
Meditation and Wisdom
Belgian
philosopher Pascal Chabot calls burnout "civilization's disease." It's
certainly symptomatic of our modern age. "It is not only an individual
disorder that affects some who are ill-suited to the system, it is also
a disorder that, like a mirror, reflects some excessive values of our
society."
Burnout, stress and depression have become worldwide
epidemics. What produces stress in our bodies is deeply subjective. We
only realize how trivial and insignificant they are -- and unworthy of
our attention, let alone our stress over them -- when something truly
significant intrudes upon our routine: the loss of a loved one, sickness
or a health scare.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought
over another.
-- William James
Meditation: It's Not Just for Enlightenment Anymore
One
of the best and most easily available ways we can become healthier and
happier is through mindfulness and meditation. Every element of
well-being is enhanced by the practice of meditation and mindfulness.
What
study after study shows is that meditation and mindfulness training
profoundly affects every aspect of our lives -- our bodies, our minds,
our physical health, and our emotional and spiritual well-being. It's
not quite the fountain of youth, but it's pretty close. When you
consider all the benefits of meditation, it's not an exaggeration to
call meditation a miracle drug.
Dr. Richard Davidson, professor
of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin calls meditation mental
training: "What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is
physically different from the untrained one." When our brain is
changed, so is the way in which we experience the world. Meditation is
not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your
brain and therefore changes what you are.
And this automatically
changes how you respond to what is happening in your life, your level of
stress, and your ability to tap into your wisdom when making
decisions. Meditation may be a wonder drug, but it does need to be
regularly refilled. To get all these benefits, we need to make it a
part of our everyday lives. Meditation can help us not only focus, but
also refocus after being distracted -- which is an increasingly common
peril of our technology-besieged lives.
No longer is the
meditation seen as some sort of New Age escape from the world. It's
increasingly seen for what it is: a practice that helps us be in the
world in a way that is more productive, more engaged, healthier, and
less stressful.
Have
patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do
not lose courage by considering your own imperfections, but instantly
set about remedying them; every day begin the task anew.
-- Francis De Sales
Mindfulness
Mindfulness
is about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to
have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected. There is no
work-life balance. We have one life. What's most important is that you
are awake for it.
The
main purpose for mindfulness and meditation is that if you're fully
present in life, you will be more effective and you will make better
decisions.
What
matters is that we find a way -- any way -- to recharge and renew
ourselves. My screensaver is a picture of gazelles: They are my role
models. They run and flee when there is a danger -- a leopard or a lion
approaching -- but as soon as the danger passes, they stop and go back
to grazing peacefully without a
care in the world. But human beings cannot distinguish between real
dangers and imagined ones. The brain's alarm signals start to be
triggered not only by current scare, but by past threats and future
worries... So when we humans bring to mind other threats and losses, as
well as the current scenario, our bodies' fight-or-flight systems don't
switch off when the danger is past. Unlike the gazelles, we don't stop
running. We need to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our
fight-or-flight mechanism. And yet much of our life has actually been
structured so that we live in an almost permanent state of
fight-or-flight. Under our current definition of success, a chronic
state of fight-or-flight is a feature, not a bug.
Unfortunately,
the ever-increasing creep of technology -- into our lives, our
families, our bedrooms, our brains -- makes it much hard for us to renew
ourselves. It has created the state of "continuous partial attention"
where we are always partly tuned into everything while never completely
tuned in to anything. "Continuous partial attention" seems like a good three-word description of modern life.
Meditation
and mindfulness once upon a time have been thought of as New Agey,
alternative, and part of a counterculture. But in the past few years,
we've reached a tipping point as more and more people realize that
stress-reduction and mindfulness aren't only about harmonic convergence
and universal love, they are also about increased well-being and better
performance.
Our current toxic definition of success and our
addiction to our devices is having a particularly
negative impact on the next generation. "Generation Y," otherwise
known as the millennials, could be given a third, more alarming name:
"generation stress." Higher levels of stress put millennials at higher
risk downstream for all sorts of destructive consequences.
Of
course, many of these are problems that require political action and
economic reform. But whatever end of the spectrum one finds oneself,
mindfulness and meditation practices not only help strengthen our
resilience and ingenuity in the face of adversity, they also lead to
greater performance in the workplace.
Sleep Your Way to the Top
The
most basic shift we can make in redefining success in our lives has to
do with our strained relationship to sleep. As Dr. Michael Roizen,
Chief Wellness Officer of the Cleveland Clinic put it, "Sleep is the
most underrated health habit." Most of us fail to make good use of such
an
invaluable part of our lives. In fact, we deliberately do just the
opposite. There is practically no element of our lives that's not
improved by getting adequate sleep. And there is no element of life
that's not diminished by a lack of sleep.
Our creativity,
ingenuity, confidence, leadership, and decision making can all be
enhanced simply by getting enough sleep. Sleep deprivation negatively
impacts our mood, our ability to focus, and our ability to access higher
level cognitive functions: the combination of these factors is what we
generally refer to as mental performance.
Like meditation, our
sleep patterns can have a physical effect on our brain. A study
conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep
than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter
in their brain, which is linked to improved psychological health.
By
sleeping more, we become more
competent and in control of our lives. It gives new meaning to the old
canard of women sleeping our way to the top. Women have already broken
glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, and business --
imagine what we can do when we're all fully awake.
Too many of us
think of our sleep as the flexible item in our schedule that can be
endlessly moved around to accommodate our fixed and top priority of
work. But like a flight or train, our sleep should be treated as the
fixed point in our day, and everything else should be adjusted as needed
so we don't miss it.
All we need is the commitment to get enough
sleep, take time to recharge our mental and emotional batteries, put
away our phones and laptops and tablets regularly, and try to introduce
some stress-reduction tools into our lives. Mindfulness, meditation and
contemplation aren't just tools reserved for retreats over long
weekends anymore -- they are the
ultimate everyday performance enhancers.
Simple steps to get you started meditating --
1. Choose a reasonably quiet place to begin your practice, and select a time when you will not be interrupted.
2.
Relax your body. If you would like to close your eyes, do so. Allow
yourself to take deep, comfortable breaths, gently noticing the rhythm
of your inhalation and exhalation.
3. Let your breath be full,
bring your attention to the air coming in your nostrils, filling up your
abdomen, and then releasing. Gently and without effort, observe your
breath flowing in and out.
4. When thoughts come in, simply
observe them and gently nudge your attention back to the breath.
Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are
more than our thoughts
and our feelings. You can imagine the thoughts as
clouds passing through the sky. If you find yourself judging your
thoughts or feelings, simply bring yourself back to the awareness of the
breath.
5. Some people find it helpful to have a special or
sacred word or phrase that they use to bring their awareness back to the
breath. Examples include: thank you, peace, grace, love and calm. You
can think of that word each time you inhale, or use it as your reminder
word if your mind starts to wander.
6. It is really important
not to make your meditation practice one more thing you stress about.
In fact, reduce stress is one of the major benefits of meditation
together with increased intuition, creativity, compassion and peace.
Wisdom
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word...
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T. S. Eliot
Athena
was the goddess of wisdom, and for me, the idea of wisdom is forever
identified with her -- weaving together strength and vulnerability,
creativity and nurturing, passion and discipline, pragmatism and
intuition, intellect and imagination, claiming them all, the masculine
and the feminine, as part
of our essence and expression.
Wisdom
is precisely what is missing when we press the same levers again and
again even though there is no longer real reward. By bringing deeper
awareness into our everyday lives, wisdom frees us from the narrow
reality we're trapped in -- a reality consumed by the first two metrics
of success, money and power, long after they have ceased to fulfill us.
Wisdom is about recognizing what we're really seeking: connection and
love. But in order to find them, we need to drop our relentless pursuit
of success as society defines it for something more genuine, more
meaningful, and more fulfilling.
My favorite expression of wisdom is by Marcus Aurelius:
True
understanding is to see the
events of life in this way: "You are here for my benefit, though rumor
paints you otherwise." And everything is turned to
one's advantage when he greets a situation like this: "You are
everything I was looking for." Truly whatever arises in life is the
right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around
you. This, in a word, is art -- and this art called "life" is a
practice suitable to both man and god. Everything contains some special
purpose and a hidden blessing; what could be strange or arduous when
all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend?
-- Marcus Aurelius
There
is nothing that we need more today than having proportion restored to
disproportion, and separating our everyday worries and preoccupations
from what is truly important.
The
17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said
that "All of humanity's problems stem from
man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." When we have learned
to sit quietly in a room alone, we can
maintain the inner connection that allows life to proceed from the
inside out. And we can remain in this state of being no matter how much
we're doing. It seems so simple, but it takes tremendous commitment
and dedication to hold to it.
We
all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace, whatever
the challenge we encounter. When I'm in that "bubble of grace," it
doesn't mean that the everyday things that used to bother, irritate, and
upset me disappear; they don't, but they no longer have the power to
bother, irritate, or upset me. And when the really hard things come our
way -- death, sickness, loss -- we are better able to deal with them
instead of being overwhelmed by them.
The harder we press a violin string, the less
we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear... If I "try" to play, I fail; if
I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability.
-- Stephen Nachmanovitch
Learning
to be vulnerable without shame and accepting our emotions without
judgement becomes much easier when we realize that we are more than our
emotions, our thoughts, our fears, and our personalities. And the
stronger the realization, the easier it becomes to move from struggle to
grace.
One
big indicator of the absence of wisdom is our failure to heed warning
signs. The warning signs of impending catastrophes are all around us
today, pointing out the gulf between what we know we should do and what
we're choosing
to do instead. And the source of this gulf is an absence of wisdom.
One
big source of wisdom is intuition, our inner knowing. We've all
experienced it -- a hunch, an inkling, our inner voice telling us to do
something or not to do something. It feels right, even if we can't
explain why. But can we hear it? Are we paying attention? Are we
living a life that keeps the pathway to our intuition unblocked?
Feeding and nurturing our intuition, and living a life in which we can
make use of its wisdom, is one key way to thrive, at work and in life.
Intuition, not intellect, is the "open sesame" of yourself.
-- Albert Einstein
We
all have access to intuition if we nourish it and listen to it. We
know that our intuition can be more accurate than trying to bear down on
a problem with cold, hard logic. And we know that the consequences of
listening to -- or not listening to -- our intuition can be a matter of
life and death. So, why do we so often ignore or disregard that inner
voice in our lives? Meditation, yoga, and mindfulness can help us still
the noise of the world so we can listen to our inner voice.
Intuition
is about connections -- but connections that aren't obvious and that
can't be reasoned into existence. Our intuition connects us both to our
inner selves and to something
larger beyond ourselves and our lives. But it's incredibly easy to
become disconnected from it. And with the pressures and pace of modern
life, without deliberate effort, it's more likely than not that we will
stay disconnected. Our intuition is like a tuning fork that keeps us in
harmony -- if we learn to listen. It helps us live more of our lives
from that still center in us called our "inner citadel."
In that quiet center there is perspective and balance and a recognition of what really matters in life.
One
of the things that makes it harder and harder to connect with our
wisdom is our increasing dependence on technology. People have a
pathological relationship with their devices. They feel not just
addicted, but trapped. We are finding it harder and harder to unplug
and renew ourselves.
Mindfulness
cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we're doing them. We
become aware that we're aware. It's an incredibly important tool -- and
one that we can't farm out to technology.
"God,
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage
to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
And the wisdom to know the difference comes from our ability to move
from our narrow, self-absorbed world to a world that encompasses a
larger perspective and a higher altitude.
1.
Slow down and listen to your inner wisdom, let go of something today
that you no longer need -- something that is draining your energy
without benefiting you or anyone you love.
Everything changed the day when she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.
-- Brian Andreas
2.
Have a specific time at night when you regularly turn off your devices
-- and gently escort them out of your bedroom. Disconnecting from the
digital world will help you reconnect to your wisdom, intuition, and
creativity.
Epilogue
We
have, if we're lucky, about 30,000 days to play the game of life. How
we play it will be determined by what we value. Or as David Foster
Wallace put it, "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to
worship."
We
now know through the latest scientific findings that if we worship
money, we'll never feel truly abundant. If we worship power, recognition, and fame, we'll never feel we have enough. And
if we live our lives madly rushing around, trying to find and save
time, we'll always find ourselves living in a time famine, frazzled and
stressed.
"Onward,
upward, and inward" is how I ended my commencement speech at Smith
College. And in many ways, this book is bearing witness to the truth
that we cannot thrive and lead the lives we want without learning to go
inward.
But
remember, that while the world provides plenty of insistent, flashing,
high-volume signals directing us to make more money and climb higher up
the ladder, there are almost no worldly signals reminding us to stay
connected to the essence of who we are, to take care of ourselves along
the way, to reach out to others, to pause to wonder, and to connect to
that place from which everything is possible. To quote my Greek
compatriot Archimedes again: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move
the world."
So,
find your place to stand -- your place of wisdom and peace and
strength. And from that place, remake the world in your own image,
according to your own definition of success, so that all of us can
thrive and live our lives with more grace, more joy, more compassion,
more gratitude, and yes, more love.
Onward, upward, and inward!
