Huffington - Thrive: the third metric to redefining success and creating al life of well-being, wisdom, and wonder

Copyright 2014 by Christabella, LLC

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from Choruses from The Rock from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos Thrive/Arianna Huffington.First edition.
pages cm
1. Success in business. 2. Success. 3. Work-life balance. 4. Well-being. 5. WomenPsychology. 6. Career development. I. Title.
HF5386.H9125 2014
650.1dc23 m 2013049123

ISBN 978-0-8041-4084-3
eISBN 978-0-8041-4085-0

Jacket design by Rex Bonomelli
Jacket photography by Carlos Serrao

v3.1

Contents

Introduction

O N THE morning of April 6, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep. In the wake of my collapse, I found myself going from doctor to doctor, from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion. There wasnt, but doctors waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.

We founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and two years in we were growing at an incredible pace. I was on the cover of magazines and had been chosen by Time as one of the worlds 100 Most Influential People. But after my fall, I had to ask myself, Was this what success looked like? Was this the life I wanted? I was working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, trying to build a business, expand our coverage, and bring in investors. But my life, I realized, was out of control. In terms of the traditional measures of success, which focus on money and power, I was very successful. But I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success. I knew something had to radically change. I could not go on that way.

This was a classic wake-up call. Looking back on my life, I had other times when I should have woken up but didnt. This time I really did and made many changes in the way I live my life, including adopting daily practices to keep me on trackand out of doctors waiting rooms. The result is a more fulfilling life, one that gives me breathing spaces and a deeper perspective.

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. With two daughters in college, I take commencement speeches very seriously. Its such a special moment for the graduating classa pause, a kind of parenthesis in time following four (or five, or six) years of nonstop learning and growing just before the start of an adult life spent moving forward and putting all of that knowledge into action. Its a unique marker in their livesand for fifteen minutes or so I have the graduates undivided attention. The challenge is to say something equal to the occasion, something that will be useful during a charged time of new beginnings.

Commencement speakers, I told the women graduates, are traditionally expected to tell the graduating class how to go out there and climb the ladder of success. But I want to ask you instead to redefine success. Because the world you are headed into desperately needs it. And because you are up to the challenge. Your education at Smith has made it unequivocally clear that you are entitled to take your place in the world wherever you want that place to be. You can work in any field, and you can make it to the top of any field. But what I urge you to do is not just take your place at the top of the world, but to change the world.

The moving response to the speech made me realize how widespread is the longing among so many of us to redefine success and what it means to lead the good life.

What is a good life? has been a question asked by philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks. But somewhere along the line we abandoned the question and shifted our attention to how much money we can make, how big a house we can buy, and how high we can climb up the career ladder. Those are legitimate questions, particularly at a time when women are still attempting to gain an equal seat at the table. But as I painfully discovered, they are far from the only questions that matter in creating a successful life.

Over time our societys 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 workor at least appear to workin the short term. But over the long term, money and power by themselves are like a two-legged stoolyou can balance on them for a while, but eventually youre going to topple over. And more and more peoplevery successful peopleare toppling over.

So what I pointed out to the Smith College graduates was that the way weve defined success is not enough. And its no longer sustainable: Its 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.

First, well-being: If we dont redefine what success is, the price we pay in terms of our health and well-being will continue to rise, as I found out in my own life. As my eyes opened, I saw that this new phase in my life was very much in tune with the zeitgeist, the spirit of our times. Every conversation I had seemed to eventually come around to the same dilemmas we are all facingthe stress of over-busyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and with one another. The space, the gaps, the pauses, the silencethose things that allow us to regenerate and rechargehad all but disappeared in my own life and in the lives of so many I knew.

It seemed to me that the people who were genuinely thriving in their lives were the ones who had made room for well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. Hence the Third Metric was bornthe third leg of the stool in living a successful life. What started with redefining my own life path and priorities led me to see an awakening that is taking place globally. We are entering a new era. How we measure success is changing.

And its changing not a moment too soonespecially for women, since a growing body of data shows that the price of the current false promise of success is already higher for women than it is for men. Women in stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease, and a 60 percent greater risk of diabetes. In the past thirty years, as women have made substantial strides in the workplace, self-reported levels of stress have gone up 18 percent.

Those who have just started out in the workforceand those who havent even yet begunare already feeling the effects. According to the American Psychological Association, the millennial generation is at the top of the chart for stress levelsmore so than baby boomers and matures, as the study dubbed those over sixty-seven.