My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.    ~ Maya Angelou

Let’s start with a serious question. When you die, how do you want to be remembered? For many of us, we want to be recalled as someone who was successful in life. But how do you define success? In the eyes of modern society and for many, success has been primarily reduced to the notions of power and money. We talk about someone climbing the corporate ladder, capturing the corner office, managing their hedge funds well, or working a 50-60 hour week. But if that defines success, why do we feel like we’re barely surviving rather than really thriving?

Arianna Huffington, cofounder of the Huffington Post and author of Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, believes that lack of thriving or living well has to do with how well we move beyond the metrics of money and power to a third metric of success: one that incorporates well-being, wisdom, and wonder, as well as the capacity for compassion and giving.

Huffington states that what constitutes thriving isn’t always obvious as we live out our lives but becomes more apparent in retrospect. “Have you noticed that when we die,” she says, “our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?” She adds: “A life that embraces the Third Metric is one lived in a way that’s mindful of our eventual eulogy.” And though we will never hear our own eulogies (unless we write them ourselves), “we’re actually writing it all the time, every day. The question is how much we’re giving the eulogizer to work with.” There is much truth to the adage about living every day as if it were your last (or “Live Like You Were Dying” according to the Tim McGraw song). Fortunately, most of us still have time to “live up to the best version of our eulogy.”

The Three W’s + G

In her book Thrive, Huffington highlights four “pillars” that constitute the third metric when redefining success. While she draws from her own and others’ experiences, much of the book also references various research studies to reinforce the importance and effectiveness of each pillar. She begins with well-being.

1. Well-Being – Given that many in our culture suffer from burnout, stress, and exhaustion while pursuing the American dream of success, there’s a sense that there is more to life than earning a six-figure salary or achieving CEO status. What is missing is this important sense of well-being—of feeling happy, healthy, and whole. To combat our “treadmill” existence, Huffington offers the following proven strategies:

• Practicing mindfulness and meditation – Being more attentive to the things that matter, causing our mind and heart to come into sync, can lead to positive changes in our physical, emotional, and mental health.
• Creating a work-life balance and a culture of wellness in the workplace – Overworking actually leads to lower productivity while focusing on health and wellness within the work force increases productivity.
• Shutting off or reducing screen time – Reducing our time online or being exposed to technology can increase our self-awareness and empathy toward others.
• Getting the proper amount of shut-eye – “Creativity, ingenuity, confidence, leadership, and decision making can all be enhanced simply by getting enough sleep” (which includes modifying your personal habits and sleep environment to be more conducive to proper rest).
• Walking (or exercising) – The simple act of walking on a regular basis makes us healthier, improves cognitive performance, and helps us to reconnect with ourselves, others, and our surroundings.
• Keeping pets – Pets (I’m partial to dogs), because they offer unconditional affection, can help us to reconnect to what makes us human.

2. Wisdom – Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When we continue to focus our time and energies on the pursuit of power and money, we become like the proverbial lab rat who continues pressing a bar when there is no reward. Pursuing wisdom, on the other hand, can do much to improve our lives and help us to thrive. Beyond simply obtaining knowledge, wisdom also refers to intuition gained from life experiences. Huffington cites the following paths to wisdom:

• Move from struggle to grace – “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.”
• Develop an attitude of gratitude – “At the cornerstone of gratitude is the notion of undeserved merit . . . Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions.”
• Feed and nurture intuition – Relying on a hunch or our inner voice/wisdom can often be more accurate than a conscious, well-thought-out process.
• Unplug your smartphone, become wiser – More information ultimately does not equal more knowledge, understanding or wisdom.
• Stand up to hurry sickness and time famine – Learn to slow down and savor the moments in our lives and disconnect from technology (aka time wasters).
• Evict the obnoxious roommate in your head – Eliminate negative self-talk and seek to redefine success and what it means to live a life that matters.
• Break bad habits – Recognize when habits are no longer working for you and focus instead on “keystone” habits that can serve as powerful levers for change (e.g., sleep).

3. Wonder – Not just a product of what we see, but of “our state of mind, our being, the perspective from which we are looking at the world.” It involves “tak(ing) 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. To heighten your sense of wonder, consider the following:

• Become more attentive to the wonder in nature and in the arts – Be more intentional in focusing on the world around you and its beauty.
• Establish the habit of silence – Regain a sense of wonder by disconnecting from the outside world and reconnecting to your inner world.
• Consider the coincidences that occur in your life – They “connect us across time, to one another, to ourselves, and to an invisible order in the universe.”
• Redefine your relationship with death – Perhaps no single thing can teach us more about life than death, and the manner in which we live our lives often determine the quality of our deaths.

4. Giving – Huffington completes her treatise on thriving by calling attention to the pillar of giving or compassion (“the only way to counteract the excessive greed and narcissism that surround us”). In order to “keep our inner world strong,” she says, “it’s essential that we reach out to our outer world through compassion and giving.” Even more, studies have shown that giving or volunteering produce actual health benefits, including lowering rates of depression and mortality risk. When we start developing the habit of compassion, we begin making the transition from “go-getters” to “go-givers.”

To begin taking some small steps in this area, try employing some of the following activities:

• Demonstrate small gestures of kindness and giving during the week and notice how these affect your mind, body, and emotions.
• Make personal connections with people you might normally pass by and take for granted (e.g., the checkout clerk or bagger, the barista at your coffee shop, the janitorial crew at your office). I have developed the habit of spending a few extra minutes chatting with these “unsung” folks, asking how their day is going, and calling them by name.
• Use one of your particular skills or talents (e.g., cooking, home or car repair, gardening) to make a difference in someone’s life.

If you’ve made it to the end of this blog, then you have discovered several ways for moving beyond surviving to thriving. Applying this new knowledge, choose one of the strategies shared above and try implementing it for a week. As for me, I think I’ll go take a nap and recharge.

Giving and receiving kindness are easy ways to feel good and to help others feel good too. People, organizations, and societies thrive when they are grounded in a culture of kindness. ~ Vivek Murthy

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.   ~ Albert Einstein