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

by Arianna Huffington

Dr. Seuss summed it up beautifully: “How did it get so late so soon?” he wrote. “It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” Sound familiar?

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.

In other words, being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves. And that is where wisdom is found. I’m convinced of two fundamental truths about human beings. The 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 philosophies and religions—whether Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism—acknowledge in one form or another: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Or as Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” 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’s in this sacred place that life is transformed from struggle to grace, and we are suddenly filled with trust, whatever our obstacles, challenges, or disappointments. As Steve Jobs said in his now legendary commencement address at Stanford, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” There is a purpose to our lives, even ...

Eulogies are, in fact, very Third Metric. But while it’s not hard to live a life that includes the Third Metric, it’s very easy not to. It’s easy to let ourselves get consumed by our work. It’s easy to allow professional obligations to overwhelm us, and to forget the things and the people that truly sustain us. It’s easy to let technology wrap us in a perpetually harried, stressed-out existence. It’s easy, in effect, to miss the real point of our lives even as we’re living them. Until we’re no longer alive. A eulogy is often the first formal marking down of what our lives were about—the foundational document of our legacy. It is how people remember us and how we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesse...

Whether you believe in an afterlife—as I do—or not, by being fully present in your life and in the lives of those you love, you’re not just writing your own eulogy; you’re creating a very real version of your afterlife. It’s an invaluable lesson—one that has much more credence while we have the good fortune of being healthy and having the energy and freedom to create a life of purpose and meaning. The good news is that each and every one of us still has time to live up to the best version of our eulogy.

Marie Asberg, professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, describes burnout as an “exhaustion funnel” we slip down as we give up things we don’t think are important. “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.”

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: 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

In the 1970s, Basil Pennington, a Trappist monk, developed a practice called the “centering prayer.” It entails four steps: 1. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed, relax, and quiet yourself. Be in love and faith to God. 2. Choose a sacred word that best supports your sincere intention to be in the Lord’s presence and open to His divine action within you (for example, “Jesus,” “Lord,” “God,” “Savior,” “Abba,” “Divine,” “Shalom,” “Spirit,” “Love”). 3. Let that word be gently present as your symbol of your sincere intention to be in the Lord’s presence and open to His divine action within you. 4. Whenever you become aware of anything (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, associations), simply return to your sacred word, your anchor. It’s remarkable how similar the pathways that connect us with our own being are: the symbols and the mantras differ, but the essence and the truth remain through the ages and across many different continents, religions, and psychological practices.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner coined the term “managing compassionately.” He wrote that the objective to “expand the world’s collective wisdom and compassion … has influenced every aspect of my work.… Compassion can and should be taught, not only throughout a child’s K–12 curriculum, but in higher education and corporate learning and development programs as well.” Managing compassionately includes practicing and expecting transparent communications, and practicing walking in someone else’s shoes: When strongly disagreeing with another, most of us have a tendency to see things solely through our own world view.… In these circumstances, it can be constructive to take a minute to understand why the other person has reached the conclusion that they have. For instance, what in their background has led them to take that position? … Are they fearful of a particular outcome that may not be obvious at surface level? Asking yourself these questions, and more importantly, asking the other person these questions, can take what would otherwise be a challenging situation and transform it into a coachable moment and truly collaborative experience.

The benefits of getting up and walking—of moving—go beyond our bodies. A study led by University of Illinois researchers shows that walking three times a week for forty minutes at one’s own natural pace helps combat the effects of aging and increases brain connectivity and cognitive performance. So it’s not just ruminative, creative thinking that’s enhanced by walking—our focused, get-things-done type of thinking is improved, as well. Perhaps in addition to walking meetings we should consider creating walking classrooms. 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.”

To fully experience the world around us, we first have to be able to free ourselves from the distractions that are constantly begging for our attention. Even the supremely focused Thoreau struggled to stay in the moment: “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would … forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.… What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” “Shake off the village”—what a perfect way of conveying a vitally important and universal human need. Since Thoreau’s time, the village has grown exponentially bigger and become more intrusive and seemingly more intimate—giving us the semblance of human connection without any of the real benefits of that connection. Technology has enabled the village to become exceptionally good at not allowing us to shake it off.

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

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?

The seventeenth-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 that inner connection that allows life to proceed from the inside out, whether we are alone or in a crowd of screaming people. And we can remain in this state of being no matter how much we’re doing. It seems so simple, and when I’m in that place I wonder why I ever leave it. But it takes tremendous commitment and dedication to hold to it and, when I slip out of it, to catch myself quickly—again and again and again, and without judgment.

In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment. But it’s in our hands. 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.

What I learned through it is that we are not on this earth to accumulate victories, or trophies, or experiences, or even to avoid failures, but to be whittled and sandpapered down until what’s left is who we truly are. This is the only way we can find purpose in pain and loss, and the only way to keep returning to gratitude and grace.

“Grace isn’t something that you go for, as much as it’s something you allow,” wrote John-Roger, the founder of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. “However you may not know grace is present, because you have conditioned the way you want it to come, for example, like thunder or lightning, with all the drama, rumbling, and pretense of that. In fact, grace comes in very naturally, like breathing.”

Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough of the University of Miami, have established is that “a life oriented around gratefulness is the panacea for insatiable yearnings and life’s ills.… At the cornerstone of gratitude is the notion of undeserved merit. The grateful person recognizes that he or she did nothing to deserve the gift or benefit; it was freely bestowed.” 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. 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.”

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

Mindfulness, on the other hand, “cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re doing them.” In other words, we become aware that we’re aware. It’s an incredibly important tool—and

At the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2013, one of the best speeches I heard was by Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. What we need, said Koehn, is wisdom, because “information … does not equal knowledge, and knowledge does not equal understanding, and understanding does not equal wisdom.… Aren’t we searching like frisky pilgrims through the desert for that right here, right now?”

We try to shave a few seconds off our daily routine, in hopes that we can create enough space to schedule yet another meeting or appointment that will help us climb the ladder of success. Like airlines, we routinely overbook ourselves, fearful of any unused capacity, confident that we can fit everything in. We fear that if we don’t cram as much as possible into our day, we might miss out on something fabulous, important, special, or career advancing. But there are no rollover minutes in life. We don’t get to keep all that time we “save.” It’s actually a very costly way to live.

In William Faulkner’s book The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson’s father gives him a watch. “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

“Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly and creative,” wrote Carl Honoré. “It is what we do when the pressure is off, and there is time to let ideas simmer on the back burner. It yields rich, nuanced insights and sometimes surprising breakthroughs.… The future will belong to those who can innovate—and innovation comes from knowing when to slow down.”

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

Our attention is the fuel that drives our lives. Or as Viral Mehta, cofounder of ServiceSpace, put it, “the clay with which we mold our days.” 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.

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. Once I changed the amount of sleep I was getting, and started regularly getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night, other habits, such as meditation and exercise, became easier. Willpower alone is not enough. As a number of psychological studies have shown, willpower is a resource that gets depleted the more it’s used.

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. And from that place of imperturbability—or ataraxia, as the Greeks called it—we can much more effectively bring about change.

So much of the time, what is standing between us and satisfaction is … us. This isn’t to say we control whether we get that promotion, or how our kids are going to act, or if a relationship is going to work out. Nor is it saying that things like that are not important. It’s saying that we can control how much we’re controlled by things outside ourselves. So the first goal, as the first-century Stoic philosopher Agrippinus put it, is not to be “a hindrance to myself.” Or, in the classic comic strip Pogo’s famous turn of phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

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.” So, yes, it’s a blessing to be healthy. It’s a lucky thing if we live near a park or have access to the great outdoors. But no matter what our situation is, life will inevitably challenge us. What is important is to know that we have the inner tools to meet those challenges. 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.

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?

That sense of wonder is often stronger when it’s provoked by things ordinary and unassuming—our children’s faces, rain, a flower, a seashell. As Walt Whitman said, “After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights—not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else—is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.”

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. “Atheist that I am,” philosophy professor Jesse Prinz wrote, “it took some time for me to realize that I am a spiritual person.” And a growing number of people who proclaim themselves atheists because they’re uncomfortable with organized religion and its depictions of God (especially the image of the bearded figure in the sky), acknowledge experiencing awe and wonder in their lives—experiences that stop them in their tracks, transport them to hidden worlds, and give them a glimpse of the fathomless mystery of life. 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.” Throughout history, great scientists—whom Arthur Koestler described as “peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity”—have s...

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who is intent on colonizing Mars, has also given expression to the other age-old human yearning: “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.” But there is no collective enlightenment without personal 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.”

by the English poet Ted Hughes: “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.” Nature and art are two of the most fertile grounds for experiencing wonder.

Together, has written about the cost of constantly documenting—i.e., photographing—our lives. These interruptions, she writes, “make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.” And by so-obsessively documenting our experiences, we never truly have them. Turkle

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.

To me, the key question is this: Does the technology deepen the experience, or does it diminish it? Clearly, it can do both. It’s great to take advantage of new media tools to reach new audiences and provide platforms for greater engagement with the arts. But we should not forget that while technology will constantly change, the need to transcend ourselves through great art never will. From a centered state of being, every encounter with an object, however ordinary, can be an opportunity for transcendence. But if we don’t give our full attention to a deeper experience at a museum or exhibit, what are the chances that we’ll give it to a passing cloud, a tree, or a clay jug?

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.”

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

According to Martin Plimmer and Brian King, coauthors of Beyond Coincidence, “People who notice coincidences most tend to be more confident and at ease with life. Every coincidence they experience—even the minor ones—confirms their optimism,” they write. And according to Ruma Falk, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, events in our lives that are not part of a coincidence are less likely to be remembered than those that are.

The concept of simultaneity is especially interesting. By making us rethink the linear nature of time, it actually nudges us closer to how physicists describe time—with past, present, and future laid out together. So coincidences can be thought of as those moments when the invisible threads connecting and binding that timescape become momentarily visible.

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.

however, is obvious: Maintaining a childlike sense of awe and curiosity is part of the fun and intense mystery of being alive. 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.

If we want to redefine what it means to live a successful life, we need to integrate into our daily lives the certainty of our death. Without “dead” there is no “alive.” Death is the sine qua non of life. As soon as we’re born, we’re also dying. The fact that our time is limited is what makes it so precious. We can spend our lives feverishly accumulating money and power as some sort of irrational, subconscious hedge against the inevitable. But that money and power will be no more permanent than we are. Yes, you can pass on an inheritance to your children, but you can also pass down the shared experience of a fully lived life, rich in wisdom and wonder. To truly redefine success we need to redefine our relationship with death. I vividly recall all the preparations I went through during my pregnancies: the Lamaze classes, the breathing exercises, the endless reading on the subject. How strange, I thought to myself one day, to spend hour upon hour learning how to bring life into the world, but hardly a minute learning how to leave it. Where are our culture’s preparations for leaving life with gratitude and grace?

There is a reason the subject of death has been central to every religion and philosophy throughout history. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo, “is to practice for dying and death.” Since our body “fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense,” we can only achieve true wisdom when our soul is liberated from our bodies by death. And this is why philosophy, he says, is about “training for dying.”

Joan Halifax is a Zen Buddhist priest, anthropologist, and hospice worker. In her book Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death, she writes that

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross writes in her book Death: The Final Stage of Growth about how being so close to death enriched her life. “Working with dying patients is not morbid and depressing,” she writes, “but can be one of the most gratifying experiences possible, and I feel now that I have lived life more fully in the last few years than some people do in a whole lifetime.” She calls death a “highly creative force.… Facing death means facing the ultimate question of the meaning of life. If we really want to live we must have the courage to recognize that life is ultimately very short, and that everything we do counts.”