Thrive

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!