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

by Arianna Huffington

This book was conceived as I tried to pull together all the insights I had gleaned about my work and life during the weeks I spent writing the commencement speech I was to give to the class of 2013 at Smith College.

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. This idea of success can work—or at least appear to work—in the short term. But over the long term, money and power by themselves are like a two-legged stool—you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over. And more and more people—very successful people—are toppling over.

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.

Every conversation I had seemed to eventually come around to the same dilemmas we are all facing—the stress of over-busyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and with one another. The space, the gaps, the pauses, the silence—those things that allow us to regenerate and recharge—had all but disappeared in my own life and in the lives of so many I knew.

Even traits that we associate with our core personality and values are affected by too little sleep. According to a study from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control. In fact, the only thing the study found that gets better with sleep deprivation is “magical thinking” and reliance on superstition. So if you’re interested in fortune-telling, go ahead and burn the midnight oil. For the rest of us, we need to redefine what we value, and change workplace culture so that working till all hours and walking around exhausted become stigmatized instead of lauded.

As I know all too well, this is no simple matter. Changing deeply ingrained habits is especially difficult. And when many of these habits are the product of deeply ingrained cultural norms, it is even harder. This is the challenge we face in redefining success. This is the challenge we face in making Third Metric principles part of our daily lives.

This book is about the lessons I’ve learned and my efforts to embody the Third Metric principles—a process I plan to be engaged in for the rest of my life. It also brings together the latest data, academic research, and scientific findings (some of them tucked away in endnotes), which I hope will convince even the most skeptical reader that the current way we lead our lives is not working and that there are scientifically proven ways we can live our lives differently—ways that will have an immediate and measurable impact on our health and happiness. And, finally, because I want it to be as practical as possible, I have also included many daily practices, tools, and techniques that are easy to incorporate into our lives. These three threads are pulled together by one overarching goal: to reconnect with ourselves, our loved ones, and our community—in a word, to thrive.

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, or too committed, or who don’t know how to put limits to their professional lives,” he writes. “It is also a disorder that, like a mirror, reflects some excessive values of our society.”

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.”

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

Who was studied, when?

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,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “We have no mandatory vacation or sick day requirements, and we do have chronic layoffs, overwork, and stress. Working in many organizations is simply hazardous to your health.… I hope businesses will wake up to the fact that if they don’t do well by their employees, chances are they’re not doing well, period.”

One company that did wake up to the importance of employee health was Safeway.

In the sixth century, Saint Benedict established the tradition of Lectio Divina (“divine reading”), a four-part practice of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.

At Aetna, the third-largest health insurance provider in the United States, CEO Mark Bertolini discovered the health benefits of meditation, yoga, and acupuncture while recovering from a horrible ski accident that left him with a broken neck. He proceeded to make them available to his forty-nine thousand employees and brought in Duke University to conduct a study on the cost savings. The results? A 7 percent drop in health care costs in 2012 and sixty-two minutes of additional productivity per week for those employees who participated in Aetna’s wellness programs.

Great. More productivity. How was it measured? What were the business results?

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. As Mark Williams explains, “The brain’s alarm signals start to be triggered not only by the 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 do not switch off when the danger is past. Unlike the gazelles, we don’t stop running.” This is modern man’s predicament, perfectly summed up by Montaigne: “There were many terrible

The problem is that with smartphones, email is no longer confined to the office. It comes with us—to the gym, to dinner, to bed. But there are more and more ingenious ways to fight back. Like the “phone stacking” game when friends meet for dinner—they put their phones in a stack in the middle of the table and the first one who checks his device before the bill comes has to pick up the check. Kimberly Brooks, HuffPost’s founding arts editor, plays another game at dinner—the “don’t take a picture of your meal” game. “Unless you’re an on-call doctor or food professional,” she says, “pulling out your cell phone during a meal with family, co-workers, friends, and especially kids, at home or a restaurant, pierces the sanctity of mealtime or, as I like to think of it, the invisible-ceremonial-dome-under-which-humankind-forges-civilization.” She wants to add inappropriate phone-checking to the standard list of etiquette no-nos: “I seriously look forward to the day when the widely accepted practice of having phones anywhere near meals, never mind taking pictures, is looked upon as repugnant as picking one’s nose, scratching one’s balls, or chainsmoking in public.”

The editor of Scene magazine Peter Davis recounted a dinner party in which the host offered to check the guests’ smartphones at the door. Perhaps smartphones at a party should be treated like coats, usually taken to a back room or otherwise stowed away until guests are ready to leave—a signal, like taking off your coat, that you’re happy to be here and you’re going to stay awhile. Leslie Perlow, professor at Harvard Business School, introduced something called predictable time off (PTO), in which you take a planned night off—no email, no work, no smartphone. At one company that tried it, the Boston Consulting Group, productivity went up, and it’s now a company-wide program. And after noticing that engineers at a software company were tired and harried from working all-nighters and weekends, Perlow came up with “quiet time,” set periods in which employees agree to let one another work unfettered. Given that we multitask now for most of our days, if not our lives, unfettered work and play—unitasking—is something that has to be scheduled.

In the United Kingdom, according to a study by Oxford professor Russell Foster, more than half of British teenagers may be sleep deprived: “Here

"more than half" and "may be" means "we don't really know how many"

Till Roenneberg, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, who is an expert on sleep cycles, coined the term “social jetlag” to explain the discrepancy between what our body clocks need and what our social clocks demand. Of course, plain old jet lag can also play havoc with our body clocks—so, as someone who travels a lot across multiple time zones, I am ruthless in enforcing my anti-jetlag rules. While airborne, I drink as much water as possible, strictly avoid sugar and alcohol, move around the plane as much as space and security restrictions will allow, and, above all, sleep as long as I can with the help of my meditation music playlist (and by putting away portable electronic devices—even when they’re allowed).

Reconnecting with my dreams has been like reuniting with an old flame. I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. On a trip to Luxor in Egypt, I visited the “sleep chambers” at the Luxor Temple where the high priests and priestesses retired after they had prepared, through prayer and meditation, to receive in their sleep divine guidance and inspiration. In stark contrast to our modern habit of drugging ourselves senseless, hoping to “crash” for a few hours before having to face another frantic day, the ancient Egyptians went to sleep expectantly. This spiritual preparation for sleep allowed them to bring back remnants of their dreams and notes from their night’s travels.

Top athletes are all about results. And because sports are endlessly quantifiable, it’s often very easy to measure just what does and doesn’t work. The tough, hard-hitting world of elite sports is increasingly embracing meditation, yoga, mindfulness, enough sleep, and napping precisely because athletes and coaches realize that they work. And for the shrinking pool of doubters, there is perhaps no better way to see the tangible effects of mindfulness and stress-reduction tools on performance than in the world of sports.

One of the most interesting—and widely cited—studies came out of Stanford.

Research has shown similar benefits from simply being outdoors and surrounded by nature, which has “implications not only for city planning but also for indoor design and architecture,” according to Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester Medical Center. He coauthored a study showing that spending time in natural settings makes us more generous and more community oriented. Another study, this one by Dutch researchers, shows that those who live within one kilometer of a park or wooded area suffer lower rates of depression and anxiety than those who don’t. But even if we don’t live surrounded by trees and greenery, we can always take a walk through them.

At the personal level, there are three simple steps each one of us can take that can have dramatic effects on our well-being: 1. 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.

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?

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. —CARRIE FISHER

The Oxford clinical psychologist Mark Williams suggests the “ten finger gratitude exercise,” in which once a day you list ten things you’re grateful for and count them out on your fingers. Sometimes it won’t be easy. But that’s the point—“intentionally bringing into awareness the tiny, previously unnoticed elements of the day.”

When Your Inner Voice Speaks, Shut Up and Listen

In his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein tells the story of a group of firemen fighting a fire inside a one-story house, spraying water at the flames in the kitchen: “The lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building—a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary.” The commander later said that he couldn’t explain what had led him to shout the warning, attributing it to a “sixth sense.” It was a very good thing that he did because just after the men followed his order and left, the floor they’d been standing on collapsed. The fire, it turned out, had been centered right below them, in the basement, which he had no clue even existed.

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.

Just as money can’t buy happiness, neither can it buy time affluence. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, the more money you have, the more likely you are to suffer from time famine. The study concluded that “those at the top of the income spectrum are among the most likely to be time-poor.”

Rubbish! Of course money can buy time affluence. If you pay someone to do work you would have to do yourself and use your newly free time well, you've done the trick. Also the "fact" that the more money you have the more likely you are to suffer from time famine does not address "buying time affluence," It's only a correlation between money (assets? income?) and time famine.

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.

No one is defining success as "the person who works that hardest." That's the method to achieve success, not success itself.

The Slow Food movement was launched in Italy in 1989 with a manifesto to push back against the spread of fast food, focusing on local food, sustainability, and eating as a social act of connection. (Italians have other great traditions to draw from in preventing burnout: the riposo, the period of rest in the afternoon; and the evening stroll, the passeggiata, a time to disconnect from the pressures of the day.)

As psychologist Karen Horneffer-Ginter asks: “Why are so many of us so awful at taking breaks? What is it about our culture and conditioning as adults that prevents us from stepping away from our seemingly important tasks in order to briefly recharge?

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.

As Dr. Judson Brewer of Yale writes, “common signs of an empty tank are summed up in the acronym HALT (Hungry Angry Lonely Tired),” a term that originated in addiction rehabilitation programs. It also happens to be a good summation of the standard state of being for so many of us in our current workplace culture, which almost seems designed to create resource depletion.

Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens in the third century BC. Though Zeno of Citium is often credited with its founding, Stoicism is now more widely known through the work of the first-century Roman philosopher Seneca and the second-century Greek Epictetus. 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? Stoicism is hugely relevant to our time. “Stoicism took off because it offered security and peace in a time of warfare and crisis,” write Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, authors of a biography of the Stoic Cato the Younger. “The Stoic creed didn’t promise material security or a peace in the afterlife; but it did promise an unshakable happiness in this life.”

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.”

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,

Museums are where we go to commune with the permanent, the ineffable, and the unquantifiable.

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.”

Christopher Booker identifies seven kinds of stories: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. 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.

Mindfulness helps us become aware of our own story.

Without such spiritual renewal, we may be left with only negative experiences to draw from. And as Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness, writes, “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.

“Goodness like evil often begins in small steps. Heroes evolve; they aren’t born.

We mostly focus on the good giving does for others—the good it does for our community. But just as profound is what it does for us. Because it is really true that while we grow physically by what we get, we grow spiritually by what we give.

The modern equivalent of the pre-Copernican vision of the world as flat has been our secular view of man as an exclusively material being. This error has dominated how we live our lives and what we consider success. But today this is all changing. We have increasingly come to realize—partly due to the growing price we have been paying and partly due to new scientific findings—that there are other dimensions to living a truly successful life. And these dimensions, the four pillars of the Third Metric, impact everything we do and everything we are, from our health to our happiness. As a result, something as vast and epic as the destiny of humanity depends on something as intimate and personal as the shape of our individual lives—the way each one of us chooses to live, think, act, and give.