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

by Arianna Huffington

In fact, we take much better care of our smartphones than ourselves.

But what I urge you to do is not just take your place at the top of the world, but to change the world.”

It’s no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies. To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. These four pillars make up the four sections of this book.

In the new definition of success, building and looking after our financial capital is not enough. We need to do everything we can to protect and nurture our human capital.

And when we’re living a life of perpetual time famine, we rob ourselves of our ability to experience another key element of the Third Metric: wonder, our sense of delight in the mysteries of the universe, as well as the everyday occurrences and small miracles that fill our lives.

What we really value is out of sync with how we live our lives.

Our current notion of success, in which we drive ourselves into the ground, if not the grave—in which working to the point of exhaustion and burnout is considered a badge of honor—was put in place by men, in a workplace culture dominated by men. But it’s a model of success that’s not working for women, and, really, it’s not working for men, either.

“Often, the very first things we give up are those that nourish us the most but seem ‘optional,’ ” write Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. “The result is that we are increasingly left with only work or other stressors that often deplete our resources, and nothing to replenish or nourish us—and exhaustion is the result.”

According to a Harvard Medical School study, an astounding 96 percent of leaders said they felt burned out.

And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” —IAIN THOMAS

Too many companies don’t yet realize the benefits of focusing on wellness. “The lack of attention to employee needs helps explain why the United States spends more on healthcare than other countries but gets worse outcomes,”

Esther Sternberg explains that “healing is a verb; the body is constantly repairing itself. That’s what life is. You know, a rock just sits there and it eventually gets into sand or mud or something as the elements affect it. But a living being is constantly repairing itself against all of these different insults at a very molecular level, at a cellular level, at an emotional level. So disease happens when the repair process is not keeping up with the damage process.”

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, indeed, studies have shown that mindfulness and meditation have a measurable positive impact on the other three pillars of the Third Metric—wisdom, wonder, and giving.

You wander from room to room Hunting for the diamond necklace That is already around your neck —RUMI

How does it do all this? It’s not about just distracting us from pain and stress; it literally changes us at the genetic level.

Richard Davidson has come to view “happiness not as a trait but as a skill, like tennis.… If you want to be a good tennis player, you can’t just pick up a racket—you have to practice,” he said. “We can actually practice to enhance our well-being. Every strand of scientific evidence points in that direction. It’s no different than learning to play the violin or play golf. When you practice, you get better at it.” And trust me, it’s much easier than mastering the violin or becoming a golf pro. Davidson found “remarkable results with practitioners who did fifty thousand rounds of meditation, but also with three weeks of twenty minutes a day, which, of course, is more applicable to our modern times.”

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

The simplest tool for avoiding email apnea? To observe your breathing as you deal with your emails—to pull yourself out of automatic pilot. And remember, as Financial Times columnist Tim Harford puts it, “Email is your servant. Corner-office people have secretaries to prevent them from being interrupted.… Email will do all this for you too.” His advice: Turn off all notifications; you should control when you want information, not the reverse.

“This highlights very clearly that our Western notion of body-mind duality is entirely false. The study shows that we are a whole organism, and when we get healthy that means our body and our mind get healthy.”

Animals help us be better humans. Quite often, they show us how to be our best selves. Always in the moment, sticking their noses into everything (literally), they see a world that we take for granted, one we’re usually just hurriedly passing through on our way to lives we never quite reach.

Unless you are one of the wise few who already gets all the rest you need, you have an opportunity to immediately improve your health, creativity, productivity, and sense of well-being. Start by getting just thirty minutes more sleep than you are getting now. The easiest way is to go to bed earlier, but you could also take a short nap during the day—or a combination of both. 2. Move your body: Walk, run, stretch, do yoga, dance. Just move. Anytime. 3. Introduce five minutes of meditation into your day. Eventually, you can build up to fifteen or twenty minutes a day (or more), but even just a few minutes will open the door to creating a new habit—and all the many proven benefits it brings.

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.

“Here’s what no one tells you about sobriety,” Christina says. “Giving up drugs is easy compared to dealing with the emotions drugs protected you from.” 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.

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. —RUMI

It’s summed up in a quote I love (attributed to Imam Al-Shafi’i, an eighth-century Muslim jurist): “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.”

Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life. —BRIAN ANDREAS

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

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.”

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

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. —WU MEN

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.”

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

Focus on the rising and falling of your breath for ten seconds whenever you feel tense, rushed, or distracted. This allows you to become fully present in your life. 2. Pick an image that ignites the joy in you. It can be of your child, a pet, the ocean, a painting you love—something that inspires a sense of wonder. And any time you feel contracted, go to it to help you expand. 3. Forgive yourself for any judgments you are holding against yourself and then forgive your judgments of others. (If Nelson Mandela can do it, you can, too.) Then look at your life and the day ahead with newness and wonder.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. —THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

Make small gestures of kindness and giving a habit, and pay attention to how this affects your mind, your emotions, and your body. 2. During your day make a personal connection with people you might normally tend to pass by and take for granted: the checkout clerk, the cleaning crew at your office or your hotel, the barista in the coffee shop. See how this helps you feel more alive and reconnected to the moment. 3. Use a skill or talent you have—cooking, accounting, decorating—to help someone who could benefit from it. It’ll jumpstart your transition from a go-getter to a go-giver, and reconnect you to the world and to the natural abundance in your own life.