Thrive, page 1
More Praise for
Thrive
“Full of compelling arguments (backed by substantial research) about why we need to redefine success.”
—Real Simple
“A captivating look at what it takes to live a more meaningful, satisfying life. Brimming with passion, supported by science, and crowned with practical insights, Arianna’s exceptional book will transform our workplaces, schools, and families.”
—Adam Grant, Wharton professor and author of Give and Take
“More aha moments than an episode of Oprah.”
—People
“Reading this book is the best thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones. A monumental work that will change your life, and your health.”
—David B. Agus, MD, professor of medicine and engineering, University of Southern California, and author of New York Times bestsellers The End of Illness and A Short Guide to a Long Life
“Begs us to redefine how we measure success: As women everywhere put their foot to the gas pedal in their careers, what happens when we go too far?”
—Shape
“Filled with cutting-edge scientific research, captivating stories, and straightforward everyday practices, [Thrive] is a call to action that informs, invigorates, and inspires all at once.”
—Daniel J. Siegel, MD, professor, UCLA School of Medicine, and author of Brainstorm and Mindsight
“Arianna Huffington has written a passionate and much-needed prescription for reshaping life from the inside out. Turn off your cell phone, your email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and every other tool of the stressed-out, distracted world to spend some time thinking about grace, joy, and wonder. You’ll be glad you did.”
—Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and bestselling author of I Know Just What You Mean
“This is a generous, urgent, vital book, a chance to redefine how we keep score before it’s too late. Arianna has given us a gift, and delivered it with style.”
—Seth Godin, bestselling author of The Icarus Deception
“Arianna’s honest, raw, and compelling call for us to thrive in the midst of a jumbled, chaotic world by redefining what matters—well-being, wisdom, wonder, service, and each other—is the right book, at the right time, to heal us of our disconnection from ourselves and each other.”
—Mark Hyman, MD, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Blood Sugar Solution
“Thrive is a book that makes me smile just thinking about it. It is a book of wit, wisdom, and practical advice for changing our lives by changing our values. After all, why should we be content just to live when we can thrive?”
—Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation and author of What Works for Women at Work
“In our relentless pursuit of more and more success, we have lost touch with our true selves, our bodies, our families, and our friends. In Thrive, Arianna brilliantly explores how we can climb out of our stressed-out, over-committed lives and once again create lives of balance and well-being.”
—Jack Canfield, coauthor of The Success Principles
“Socrates, Plato, Aristotle … Arianna. Beyond politics, there is her wisdom, applicable to everyone. This book probably added ten years to my life, some of which I’ll spend rereading it.”
—Bill Maher, host of Real Time with Bill Maher and bestselling author of The New Rules
“Rich in worldly wisdom and brimming with motivation, Arianna gently shows us how to face the craziness of life today with awareness, grace, and a sense of humor.”
—Congressman Tim Ryan, Ohio, author of A Mindful Nation
“You can feel Arianna’s passion on every page of this book. In Thrive, Arianna has created a new paradigm for redefining how to systematically build a life of purpose and balance and accomplishment—the whole life we’re all ultimately after.”
—Tony Schwartz, CEO, The Energy Project, and author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working
“Beautiful, bold, and brilliant … I did not just read this book; I entered into long conversations with it. Thrive profoundly transforms our understanding of success and wakes us up from the broken dreams we chase.”
—Elif Shafak, bestselling author of Honor and The Forty Rules of Love
“Warning: The content of this book is highly contagious. Even slight exposure may set you on a path to far clearer seeing, a radical resetting of your priorities, deep contentment, and, of course, thriving. Chances are, it will also melt your heart.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and author of Full Catastrophe Living
“One of the most important books of this century. Weaving a tapestry of homespun wisdom, science, and compelling life stories, this is a profoundly uplifting and practical book that has something for everyone. A must read for anyone wishing to live life more fully.”
—Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Desperately needed in today’s type A, hurry-up world. [Thrive] just screamed at me to slow down, turn off the inner dialogue, sleep more, and stay in daily touch with my source of being.”
—Wayne Dyer
Copyright © 2014, 2015 by Christabella, LLC
Excerpt from The Sleep Revolution copyright © 2016 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 1909–1962 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. Women—Psychology. 6. Career development. I. Title.
HF5386.H9125 2014
650.1—dc23 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_r11
FOR MY MOTHER, ELLI,
who embodied wisdom, wonder, and giving, and made writing this book a homecoming
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Well-Being
Wisdom
Wonder
Giving
Epilogue
Appendices
Acknowledgments
Notes
An Excerpt from The Sleep Revolution
Preface to the
Paperback Edition
THRIVE OPENS with an account of my own wake-up call in 2007. And in the year since it was published, as I’ve gone around the world speaking about the themes in the book, I’ve been thrilled to see firsthand evidence of a global awakening. More and more people, of all ages and from all walks of life, are coming to realize that there’s more to life than climbing the ladder, that we are more than our résumés, and that we don’t have to buy into the collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for success.
Wherever I go I see the same hunger to live our lives with more meaning and purpose, more happiness and joy, and less unnecessary stress and burnout.
Hundreds of people have told me personally or through social media either how exhausted and stressed they are all the time or how transformed their lives have been after their own wake-up calls, when they realized that what they truly valued and what they were spending their time on were out of sync.
And this same sea change can be seen in our media coverage as well. This has been the year in which the discussion about well-being and mindfulness broke through in a big way—going from health and lifestyle magazines to the business pages, the sports pages, and even the front pages. Much more today than even just a year ago when Thrive was first published, these discussions are no longer considered “alternative” or new age–y; they are now firmly part of the mainstream. Every day brings fresh scientific findings on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, on the dizzying array of harmful effects of stress, and on how integral sleep is to every facet of our lives. There is so much new scientific data and so many personal stories, it’s hard to keep up—and I try! And, yes, there is the irony of my getting stressed out about my inability to keep up with the increasing number of stories about stress. (Perhaps there should be a word for this. Stressenfreude?)
Just how widespread is our feeling of burnout? In many parts of the world, when you type the words why am into Google, before you can type the next word, Google’s autocomplete function helpfully offers to complete your thought. The first suggestion: “why am I so tired?” The second: “why am I always tired?” The Zeitgeist, perfectly captured by Google.
In fact, we take much better care of our smartphones than ourselves. Look at how mindful we are of our smartphones. People have little recharging shrines all over their houses, with a cord permanently attached to an outlet right by the door or by the bed. For many of us the first thing we do when we get home is make sure our phone gets recharged. (My editor on this book keeps a cord at the office to recharge his phone in case he forgets, and another in his knapsack that he carries with him.) We’re all exquisitely aware of the recharging routine of our phones: how often we need to do it; how long it takes; how long we can go without recharging it; where the nearest outlet is. And yet, on the flipside, with our bodies and our minds and our souls, we’ll run them right into the ground until they shut down. You know the warning that comes up on your phone when it’s running out of battery power: “Alert! You’re running below 20 percent!” Unfortunately, we don’t have an indicator like this that alerts us when our bodies are out of energy. Imagine being in a meeting with someone and suddenly realizing, “Oh, wait, we need to stop here; I’m only at 10 percent—I need to take a nap and recharge.”
Of course, sometimes life does give us warnings like these—in my case, it came in the form of a corner of a desk when I collapsed. But many warnings come in much more dangerous guises—heart attacks, depression, high blood pressure, and anxiety. I heard so many such stories over the past year. Yale Law student Kim Farbota had her wake-up call in college when she got out of bed and collapsed. She was diagnosed with heart palpitations, iron deficiency, and muscle loss. As she put it, “Through an arduous, year-long recovery process, I discovered my own balance. By my senior year I was spending less time studying, yet performing better than ever in my classes.” Danielle Lajoie’s wake-up call came a week after she’d been laid off, in the form of a rushed hospital visit for diverticulitis. “The attack was most likely brought on by stress and everything that comes with it, including lack of sleep and bad eating habits,” she writes.
Technology has made it even harder to find time to unplug and recharge, to tap into our inner creativity and wisdom. Researchers from Harvard and the University of Virginia did an experiment in which they gave people a choice to be alone in a room, without anything—devices, books, papers, phones—or get an electric shock. 67 percent of men chose an electric shock. I’m very happy to say that only 25 percent of women chose the shock.
Because that capacity to go deep—to be alone with ourselves—is so essential to our creativity, it’s become a much more valuable skill, worth far more than a productivity app, a cleared-out in-box, or a rigidly efficient schedule. As Eric Barker, who studies how human behavior affects creativity, wrote, “Those who can sit in a chair, undistracted for hours, mastering subjects and creating things will rule the world—while the rest of us frantically and futilely try to keep up with texts, tweets, and other incessant interruptions.”
In other words, there is a distinct upside to downtime. In the fall of 2014, I spoke at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Salesforce is known for its Salesforce1 cloud platform, which has, I was told, 99.9 percent uptime. That is, it operates 99.9 percent of the time. When it comes to machines, nonstop uptime is a good thing. For human beings, not so much. We need downtime. A lot of downtime. When we deny ourselves our need for it—and many of us do—we eventually crash. For human beings, downtime is not a bug but a feature.
As Peter Thiel and Blake Masters wrote in their book Zero to One, “Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level.” That’s true in many important ways. But, if we let it, technology can also add a lot of noise and distraction that get in the way of our most fundamental creative capabilities—instead of freeing us, it can consume us. What we’re beginning to recognize now is that success is not always about doing more, but also about doing better—and we do better when we’re connected to our inner wisdom, strength, and intuition.
Take the cheetah, the fastest land animal on earth, for example. It can accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in just three seconds. But it also spends up to eighteen hours a day sleeping. They’re sleeping their way to the top of the animal kingdom.
These lessons have been creeping into the sports world for years. Legendary basketball coach and New York Knicks president, Phil Jackson, recently made mindfulness and meditation training mandatory for the Knicks. As he put it, after setbacks such as “a referee’s bad call … you’ve got to be able to come back to your center.” And Jackson, who holds the record for NBA championship rings, clearly knows how to win.
I’m also happy to see that in the last year our national conversation about stress has grown to include one of the most stressed-out demographics—young people. For instance, there has been an increase in meditation and yoga programs in our schools, including a program in New Haven, Connecticut, that yielded reductions in stress hormone levels and a program in San Francisco that resulted in higher scores in English, decreased suspensions, higher attendance, and increased levels of student happiness. “This is a matter of education reform and public health,” said Katherine Priore Ghannam, founder of the program Headstand, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps disadvantaged schoolchildren reduce stress by making mindfulness and yoga part of the curriculum. And this trend has been gaining traction around the world. The Willy Hellpach School in Heidelberg, Germany, began offering happiness classes in 2007. Since then the school’s principal, Ernst Fritz-Schubert, has opened an institute to train happiness teachers. And happiness classes are now offered at over one hundred schools in Germany and Austria, starting as early as kindergarten.
Even before they enter the workforce, young people pay the high cost of our society’s insistence on equating overwork, stress, and burnout with success. “I sleep only three hours a night and I can’t keep doing it,” a student at the Harvard School of Public Health told me. “You are telling me something I had known all along: that it is okay to sleep, that it is okay to give time for the little things in life.”
Colleges, too, are beginning to open up a dialogue on what it means to live a good life. Dartmouth, for example, has introduced Thriving@Dartmouth, an eight-week pilot program designed to help students recharge in the midst of a high-pressure academic environment, through sleep, nutrition, stress reduction, and healthy habits.
Even in the world of banking and finance, the boiler room of burnout, the past year has seen considerable change. In response to a rash of suicides and the death of a twenty-one-year-old intern who had reportedly worked for seventy-two hours straight, many of the big banks instituted new policies designed to prevent burnout and exhaustion. The new rules varied: mandating four weekend days off per month; requiring employees to use their vacation days; and in some cases banning employees from coming into the office on weekends. At Citigroup, which now insists that junior bankers take off Saturdays and use all their vacation days, a memo stated that compliance with these new rules “will be tracked and reported to senior management,” and “exceptions should be rare and defensible” and require approval ahead of time. Imagine that—we now live in a world where a manager’s approval is needed not to take vacation. This would have been unthinkable even three or four years ago.
There is, of course, still a long way to go. One recent study from the U.S. Travel Association found that 40 percent of American workers leave paid vacation days unused. And there is a major gulf between what we know we should do and what we’re actually doing: only 37 percent of senior executives said they fully disconnect from work while on vacation, even though 95 percent said they’re aware of the benefits of unplugging.
And it’s not just our work lives that are being rethought, but our lives after work as well. September saw the publication of a new book called Unretirement by Chris Farrell. “I don’t think there will be a retirement crisis if we continue to work longer,” he said. “But we’re going to want to do it with jobs that provide meaning rather than those that make people just miserable enough that they have to continue to work.” The first step to a thriving “unretirement,” he added, is to “begin by asking yourself what it is you want to be doing.”
