Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

by Arianna Huffington

Beyond the practical benefits of remembering your dreams, there are the deeper, spiritual reasons, summed up by Rumi: “There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, and yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on your inner door. No other.” Remembering our dreams is a way to knock on our inner door and find deeper insights and self-awareness.

Though he didn’t have the science to back up his beliefs about the benefits of walking, Henry David Thoreau was onto this truth long ago. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” he wrote. In her book Wanderlust, author Rebecca Solnit noted the connection between the act of walking and how we experience the world. “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” she wrote, “of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”

Walking is one of the ways we move through our world; language and writing are how we articulate that experience. “Words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space,” writes British author Geoff Nicholson. “Writing is one way of making the world our own, and … walking is another.”

Forcing our brains to process in a new environment can help us to engage more fully. Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, writes that our brain gains “new insights from people and new environments—any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will come next.” So, please, walk. It makes us healthier, it enhances cognitive performance, from creativity to planning and scheduling, and it helps us to reconnect with our environment, ourselves, and those around us.

A purpose of life is to expand the boundaries of our love, to widen the circle of our concern, to open up rather than shut down, and to expand rather than contract.

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. E

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.

Today we need Athena’s wisdom more than ever. She breathes soul and compassion—exactly what has been missing—into the traditionally masculine world of work and success. Her emergence, fully armed and independent, from Zeus’s head, and her total ease in the practical world of men, whether on the battlefield or in the affairs of the city; her inventive creativity; her passion for law, justice, and politics—they all serve as a reminder that creation and action are as inherently natural to women as they are to men.

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.

Icarus, the Greek mythological figure who flew too close to the sun until his wax wings melted, is a great distillation of the tragedy of modern man. Ignoring all warnings until it is too late, he plunges headlong to his death in the ocean below.

When we reexamine what we really want, we realize that everything that happens in our lives—every misfortune, every slight, every loss, and also every joy, every surprise, every happy accident—is a teacher, and life is a giant classroom. That’s the foundation of wisdom that spiritual teachers, poets, and philosophers throughout history have given expression to—from the Bible’s “Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without God knowing it” to Rilke’s “Perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” My favorite expression of wisdom—one that I keep laminated in my wallet—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 the very thing 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 men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend?

I had a dream many years ago that sums up this thought in a different way, one that has become a sustaining metaphor for me. I am on a train going home to God. (Bear with me!) It’s a long journey, and everything that happens in my life is scenery along the way. Some of it is beautiful; I want to linger over it awhile, perhaps hold on to it or even try to take it with me.

Learning to be vulnerable without shame and accepting our emotions without judgment 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.

I’ve come to believe that living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace. Gratitude has always been for me one of the most powerful emotions. Grace and gratitude have the same Latin root, gratus. Whenever we find ourselves in a stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off mindset, we can remember that there is another way and open ourselves to grace. And it often starts with taking a moment to be grateful for this day, for being alive, for anything.

I love saying grace—even silently—before meals and when I travel around the world, observing different traditions. When I was in Tokyo in 2013 for the launch of HuffPost Japan I loved learning to say itadakimasu before every meal. It simply means “I receive.” When I was in Dharamsala, India, every meal started with a simple prayer.

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day. —R

“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race,” wrote Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk from Kentucky, “though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.”

Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger, and resignation.

“My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”

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.

There are some for whom the word “intuition” conjures the idea of hippy-dippy New Age thinking, or something to do with the paranormal. But, in fact, from the beginning of recorded history, we have had the recognition of a kind of wisdom that is not the product of logic and reason. Western culture is a monument to reason. It gave us the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution and the information age, and all that has followed. But it wasn’t reason alone that gave us those triumphs, nor is it reason alone that gets us through the day.

Science has confirmed how important intuition is in the way we make decisions. “It has long been realized,” psychologists Martin Seligman and Michael Kahana wrote, “that many important decisions are not arrived at by linear reasoning, but by intuition.” They go on to describe intuition-based decision making as: “a) rapid, b) not conscious, c) used for decisions involving multiple dimensions, d) based on vast stores of prior experiences, e) characteristic of experts, f) not easily or accurately articulated afterwards, and g) often made with high confidence.”

There’s a reason why we feel that our intuition comes from deep inside—why it’s referred to sometimes as a “gut instinct” or a “feeling in your bones.” It’s because it’s part of the core of our internal wiring. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes how that core, the adaptive unconscious, functions as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

We all know we 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, literally, a matter of life or death. So why do we so often ignore or disregard that inner voice in our lives?

“The longer we wait to defend our intuitions, the less we will have to defend,” Gary Klein writes. “We are more than the sum of our software programs and analytical methods, more than the databases we can access, more than the procedures we have been asked to memorize. The choice is whether we are going to shrink into these artifacts or expand beyond them.”

Meditation, yoga, and mindfulness can help us to still the noise of the world so we can listen to our inner voice.

One of the people who helped popularize meditation and yoga in the West was Paramahansa Yogananda. Here’s how he put the need to take care of our intuitive inner selves in his 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi: “Intuition is soul guidance, appearing naturally in man during those instants when his mind is calm. Nearly everyone has had the experience of an inexplicably correct ‘hunch,’ or has transferred his thoughts effectively to another person. The human mind, free from the static of restlessness, can perform through its antenna of intuition all the functions of complicated radio mechanisms sending and receiving thoughts, and tuning out undesirable ones.”

“The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world,” Jobs said. “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

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 that Marcus Aurelius called our “inner citadel.”

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love … by loving. —FRANCIS DE SALES

What we know from the neuroscience—from looking at the brain scans of people that are always rushing around, who never taste their food, who are always going from one task to another without actually realizing what they’re doing—is that the emotional part of the brain that drives people is on high alert all the time.… So, when people think “I’m rushing around to get things done,” it’s almost like, biologically, they’re rushing around just as if they were escaping from a predator. That’s the part of the brain that’s active. But nobody can run fast enough to escape their own worries.

As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, “Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.” And even when the information is not false, the problem is “that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.”

“There are many things big data does poorly,” writes David Brooks. “When making decisions about social relationships, it’s foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk.” The quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools today, but wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon. In fact, ours is a generation bloated with information and starved for wisdom.

Children are much more connected to the moment, and much less connected—yoked, actually—to the artificial constructs of time that we’ve imposed on ourselves (and for which we’ve appointed our devices as rigid enforcers).

It turns out that, not surprisingly, mastering the art of slowing down doesn’t happen quickly. Learning the wisdom of slowing down, of truly living, is itself a journey. But it is also a prescription for better health.

Even sex is better when slow since stress from rushing inhibits production of dopamine, a chemical that affects libido.

Studies have shown that, as Keith O’Brien wrote in The Boston Globe, “Small acts, simple emotions such as awe, and even counterintuitive measures like spending time doing tasks for someone else—essentially giving time away,” can make us feel more time affluent. “It’s not just that people felt less impatient,” said Jennifer Aaker, a Stanford business professor and coauthor of a study on people’s perception of time, “but … they reported higher levels of subjective well-being.… They actually felt better in their lives.”

As long as success is defined by who works the longest hours, who goes the longest without a vacation, who sleeps the least, who responds to an email at midnight or five in the morning—in essence, who is suffering from the biggest time famine—we’re never going to be able to enjoy the benefits of time affluence.

So what can we do to fight back against “hurry sickness”? You can walk—don’t run—to join the slow movement. As Carl Honoré, the author of In Praise of Slowness, put it: “Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes in between.”

And now the slow movement has widened to include slow travel, slow living, slow sex, slow parenting, slow science, slow gardening, slow cities, and, now, slow thinking. “Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly and creative,” wrote Carl Honoré. “It

Gaining a sense of time affluence can help lead us to both greater well-being and deeper wisdom—not a bad thing to put on top of our ever-expanding to-do lists. But to do that we’ll have to address the relationship between our sense of time and technology.

As we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, it is important to ask what is being communicated. And what’s the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we’re locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending? Social media are a means, not an end. Going viral isn’t “mission accomplished.” Fetishizing “social” has become a major distraction. And we love to be distracted. I believe our job in the media is to use the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter—as well as the stories that entertain—and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story.

No matter what people say about what they value, what matters is where they put their attention. When technology eats up our attention, it’s eating up our life. And when we accumulate projects on our to-do list, they eat up our attention, even if unconsciously, and even if we never start them.

Educating our obnoxious roommate requires redefining success and what it means to live a life that matters, which will be different for each of us, according to our own values and goals (and not those imposed upon us by society).

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly,” my mother used to tell my sister and me, quoting G. K. Chesterton.

Since my roommate fed on my fears and negative fantasies, the message that resonated with me the most was the message with which John-Roger ends all his seminars: “The blessings already are.” Or as Julian of Norwich, the fifteenth-century English mystic, put it, “And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Or as Sophocles’ Oedipus cried out, “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” I keep repeating it to myself until I am bathed in this calm and reass...

If you walk in with fear and anger, you’ll find fear and anger. Go into situations with what you want to find there.… When you worry, you’re holding pictures in your mind that you want less of.… What you focus upon, you become. What you focus on com...

As we are liberating ourselves, building new habits, and slaying our old habits—our own Minotaurs—it is critical to find the thread that works for us. When we do, no matter what life throws our way we can use the thread to help us navigate the labyrinth of daily life and come back to our center.

I have worked to integrate certain practices into my day—meditation, walking, exercise—but the connection that conscious breathing gives me is something I can return to hundreds of times during the day in an instant. A conscious focus on breathing helps me introduce pauses into my daily life, brings me back into the moment, and helps me transcend upsets and setbacks.

Habits are habits for a reason. Humans lead complex lives, and one of the traits we’ve developed that has allowed us to be such productive creatures is the ability to make many learned traits and responses an automatic part of our lives, buried so deeply in the inner workings of our subconscious that they no longer require conscious thought.