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

by Arianna Huffington

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Some of these habits are useful and some are not. Some start out being useful and become destructive later on or in different contexts. But the internal machinery we’ve developed to create them doesn’t discriminate. And whether good or bad, once established, habits rapidly grow roots and entrench themselves in our lives. And that’s the problem—habits are a lot easier to learn than to unlearn, easier to bury than to exhume.

To Aristotle, “Habit’s but a long practice,” which “becomes men’s nature in the end.” To Ovid, “Nothing is stronger than habit.” And as Benjamin Franklin put it, “ ’Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.”

Charles Duhigg explains in The Power of Habit that scientists at MIT have, in essence, mapped the habit genome. What they’ve found is that the nucleus of a habit is made up of a neurological loop, which has three parts. It begins with a cue that sends the message to the brain to switch on the automatic mode. Next comes the routine—what we think of as the habit itself, which can be psychological, emotional, or physical. And last is the reward, the cue that tells the brain to reinforce this process. This is the “habit loop,” and it’s easy to see why as time goes on it becomes more and more automatic, more and more difficult to break.

The poet Mark Nepo defines sacrifice as “giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.” So recognizing when habits are no longer working for us and sacrificing them is a cornerstone of wisdom.

In the same way, if we’re not able to reprogram our autopilot, all our protestations of wanting to change will be as pointless as the little boy furiously turning the wheel on the cruise ship. Reprogramming the autopilot takes different amounts of time for each of us. What makes it easier is focusing on “keystone habits”; when you change one of them, it makes changing other habits easier. “Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything,” Duhigg writes. “Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.” For me, the most powerful keystone habit has been sleep.

“We can see ourselves as part of a social structure; it’s very hard to change a behavior if it is still accepted socially. For instance, stress is bad for us, yet we wear it as a badge of honor. It is seen as a socially desirable thing to be overworking. We don’t seem to have the same respect for people who work a 40-hour week.” This kind of thinking feeds on itself, creating a downward bad habit spiral.

Stoicism teaches that unhappiness, negative emotions, and what we would today call “stress” are not inflicted on us by external circumstances and events, but are, rather, the result of the judgments we make about what matters and what we value. To the Stoics, the most secure kind of happiness could therefore be found in the only thing that we are in control of—our inner world. Everything outside us can be taken away, so how can we entrust our future happiness and well-being to it?

For Marcus Aurelius, the quality of our day is up to each one of us. We have little power to choose what happens, but we have complete power over how we respond. It all starts with setting the expectations that make it clear that no matter how much hardship we encounter—how much pain and loss, dishonesty, ingratitude, unfairness, and jealousy—we can still choose peace and imperturbability.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius did not sugarcoat life: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

Stoicism is not just a tool for staving off unhappiness when we don’t get a much-desired promotion—it also teaches us to put that promotion and all our success in its proper perspective. Too often, Stoicism is confused with indifference, but it’s really about freedom. As Seneca said, “Once we have driven away all that excites or affrights us, there ensues unbroken tranquility and enduring freedom.”

In fact, it’s in extreme circumstances that Stoicism has the most to offer us. It is in times of great adversity when we are pushed and challenged that these principles become essential.

Such equanimity and grace in the face of real suffering are in sharp contrast to the way we often react to the trivial challenges we let disturb us. The truth is that even in everyday adversity, the principles—though, of course, not the immediate stakes—remain the same.

By finding something—anything—to enable us to keep the pathways of hope open and a positive attitude alive, we can deal with loss, suffering, and tragedy bit by bit. “Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes,” writes Gonzales. “Count your blessings. Be grateful—you’re alive.”

There is a big difference between stoic acceptance and resignation. Cultivating the ability to not be disturbed by our lives’ obstacles, disappointments, and setbacks doesn’t mean not trying to change what we can change. The serenity prayer, adapted from the one written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1942, sums up stoic wisdom: “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. And it all starts with daily, tiny, positive changes that move us in the direction we want to go.

Let me suggest three that have made a big difference in my life: 1. Listening 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. It could be resentments, negative self-talk, or a project you know you are not really going to complete. 2. Start a gratitude list that you share with two or more friends who send theirs to you. 3. 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. And when you wake up in the morning, don’t start your day by looking at your smartphone. Take one minute—trust me, you do have one minute—to breathe deeply, or be grateful, or set your intention for the day.

Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the extent of the oceans, and the courses of the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves. —ST. AUGUSTINE

Wonder is not just a product of what we see—of how beautiful or mysterious or singular or incomprehensible something may be. It’s just as much a product of our state of mind, our being, the perspective from which we are looking at the world.

Countless things in our daily lives can awaken the almost constant state of wonder we knew as children. But sometimes to see them we must look through a different set of eyes. The triggers are there. But are we present enough to experience them?

When men began to wonder about the hidden causes of things, they were on their way to the discovery of science.

“Men were first led to the study of philosophy,” wrote Aristotle, “as indeed they are today, by wonder.”

At the root of our secular age is the fatal error that has led us to regard organized religion and the spiritual truth that man embodies as one and the same thing. This has caused millions to deny the reality of the latter because they have rejected the former. The impulse to know ourselves—which, after all, is a key component of spiritual seeking—is as deeply imprinted within us as our instincts for survival, sex, and power.

As Goethe wrote, “This life, gentlemen, is too short for our souls.” The preoccupations of our daily life can never satisfy our deepest needs.

Einstein defined wonder as a precondition for life. He wrote that whoever lacks the capacity to wonder, “whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.”

“There was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught … I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it.… I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos. I realized that this was a biological response of my brain attempting to reorganize and give meaning to information about the wonderful and awesome processes that I was privileged to view.”

I had this experience. It was chemical induced.

“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

And spiritual teachers, poets, and songwriters alike have in so many ways, through so many centuries, told us that unconditional loving is both at the heart of the human mystery and the only bridge from our sacred inner world into the frenetic outer world. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in his book The Sirens of Titan, “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

“The only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”

“Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself,” wrote Susan Sontag in “The Aesthetics of Silence.” And museums offer a pathway for that reinvention. Sometimes, of course, reinvention means going back to something that’s always been there. What makes it harder today is our obsession with photographing everything before we’ve even experienced it—taking pictures of pictures, or of other people looking at pictures.

Fully giving our attention to anything—or anyone—is precisely what is becoming more and more rare in our hyperconnected world, where there are so many stimuli competing for our time and attention and where multitasking is king.

The museum experience provides us with mystery, wonder, surprise, self-forgetfulness—vital emotions most undermined by our always-connected 24/7 digital culture, which makes it a lot easier to shy away from introspection and reflection.

Of course, the visual arts are only one of art’s voices. Music, sculpture, photography, cinema, architecture, literature, drama, poetry, dance—each can ignite the deeper truth, and awaken the sense of wonder that slumbers within us. Even the ancient art form of rhetoric can pierce through the crusts of our everyday preoccupations and spark the memory of who we are.

A symphony or an opera is such a metaphor for life. As philosopher Alan Watts put it, “No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.”

There is sadness in many popular songs, and there is plenty of darkness in great art, whether Shakespeare’s Tempest or Mozart’s Magic Flute, but in the end it is overcome by love. There is chaos and ugliness, but a new order of harmony and beauty evolves out of them; there is evil, but it is cast out by good.

Along with music and the visual arts, another art form that often offers a direct road map to our inner lives is storytelling. Humans are hardwired for narrative; we may be the only creatures who see our own lives as part of a larger narrative.

Things begin and they end. How they end is the story. Or maybe it’s what happens between when they begin and end that’s the story. Jung called the universal language of stories “archetypes.” He described them as “ancient river beds along which our psychic current naturally flows.” Our conscious minds relate to these archetypes through stories. Far from simply serving as entertainment or diversion, stories are a universal language about the purpose of life itself. And that purpose is self-actualization—integrating the Third Metric into our lives.

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But though there are seven plots, in one way or another they’re all about the same thing: the personal transformation of the protagonist and his or her journey through challenges, ordeals, and wrong turns to a place of wisdom. As in our own lives, the story’s outward form must track the inner journey of the hero. When we disconnect from our inner selves and identify exclusively with our ego, that’s when we lose our connection with life’s meaning and purpose and are left facing a void that we try to fill with more money, more sex, more power, more fame. And as we see in all modern literature, when the ego separates itself from the self, the end is always frustration and destruction—whether

We can use the power of story, and our primal need for it, to redefine our own narrative. We’re all on a journey, a voyage, a quest to slay the monster, free the princess, and return home. But too often the goals we seek—those that the conventional notions of success tell us we should be seeking—take us down dead ends, searching for the meaning of our lives in all the wrong places. Mindfulness helps us become aware of our own story.

What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace. —PAULO COELHO

No matter where you go, there you are. —BUCKAROO BANZAI

“The brain is very good at building brain structure from negative experiences.” But our brains are relatively poor at doing the same thing with positive experiences. To fight this, he explains, we need to “install” the positive experiences, “taking the extra 10, 20 seconds to heighten the installation into neural structure.” In other words, we need to take the time to wonder at the world around us, feel gratitude for the good in our lives, and overcome our natural bias toward focusing on the negative. And in order for it to “take,” to become part of us, we need to slow down and let wonder do its job, at its own pace.

Reflection helps with this. Taking time out to think of the things that go good.

There is something about coincidences that delights us. There are thousands upon thousands of examples to choose from—yet not so many that they lose their strange power over us. And that’s the point—the combination of improbability, timing, and felicity has a kind of magic power. To the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, coincidences were the “wonderful pre-established harmony” of the universe. To Carl Jung, they were “acts of creation in time.” To author and journalist Arthur Koestler, they were “puns of destiny.”

In my experience, whatever your spiritual beliefs, whether you believe in something larger than yourself in the universe or not, we all love coincidences. (There may be some curmudgeons who don’t, but I haven’t met them yet.) “Coincidences are kind of like shortcuts to very big questions about fate, about God, even to people who don’t believe in either one,” said Sarah Koenig, producer of public radio’s This American Life. “The notion that somewhere out there, someone or something is paying attention to your life, that there might be a plan conjured through coincidences.”

“Allegory and metaphor work by linking together two normally unconnected ideas in order to startle the reader into seeing something they thought they knew in a different light,” they write. “Strictly speaking metaphors aren’t coincidences, as they are man-made, but they work the same trick: fusing unrelated entities to power a revelation.” As an old Chinese saying goes, “No coincidence, no story.”

Carl Jung used the term “synchronicity” to describe events that are “other than causal”—the product of “a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity.” Jung grew interested in synchronicity by hearing stories of his patients that he “could not explain as chance groupings,” and “which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.”

He concluded that “we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.”

But if coincidences are a sign that there is meaning and design in the universe, there are consequences for how we live our lives. Because if there is meaning in the universe, there is meaning in our daily lives and the choices we make. And so we can choose to live in ways that help us live fuller, more complete lives, aligned with what matters: A life that isn’t defined by our salaries and résumés. A life that encompasses all that we are and can become.

Coincidences connect us across time, to one another, to ourselves, and to an invisible order in the universe. We can’t choose where or when they grace us with their presence, but we can choose to be open to their power.

No matter how good and fulfilling a life we have, no matter how successful we are at filling our lives with well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving, at some point our life is going to end. And no matter what we believe happens after we die, whether our souls live on, whether we go to heaven or hell, whether we’re reincarnated or folded back into the energy of the universe or simply cease to exist altogether, our physical existence and our lives as we know them will end.

In today’s highly polarized times, in which so much media ink (or pixels) is spent highlighting how divided and disconnected we are, death is the one absolutely universal thing we all have in common. It’s the ultimate equalizer.