Thrive

Key Concepts

We need a wider definition of success, a third metric

“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.” (p. 3)

“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.” (p. 4)

We are increasingly stressed and burned out, and it hurts performance

“What produces stress in our bodies is deeply subjective. It’s as if stress is always floating around looking for something—or someone—to land on. And it often lands on completely trivial and insignificant things. We only realize how trivial and insignificant they are—and unworthy of our attention, let alone our stress over them—when something truly significant intrudes upon our routine: the loss of a loved one, sickness, a health scare.” (p. 32)

“Indeed not only is there no trade-off between living a well-rounded life and high performance, performance is actually improved when our life becomes more balanced.” (p. 68)

“Whatever your entry point is—take it. Right now you may just want to be better at your job, or help your company become more successful, and that’s the reason you start meditating, or practicing mindfulness, or sleeping more.” (p. 73)

Meditation is awesome

“One of the best—and most easily available—ways we can become healthier and happier is through mindfulness and meditation. Every element of well-being is enhanced by the practice of meditation and, indeed, studies have shown that mindfulness and meditation have a measurable positive impact on the other three pillars of the Third Metric—wisdom, wonder, and giving.” (p. 38)

“It’s the Swiss army knife of medical tools, for conditions both small and large.” (p. 42)

“Meditation may be a wonder drug, but it does need to be regularly refilled. To get all these benefits, we need to make it a part of our everyday lives.” (p. 46)

Sleep is awesome too

“As Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic, put it, ‘Sleep is the most underrated health habit.’” (p. 74)

“There’s practically no element of our lives that’s not improved by getting adequate sleep. And there is no element of life that’s not diminished by a lack of sleep.” (p. 74) 

“A study published in Science even calculated that for the sleep deprived, an extra hour of sleep can do more for their daily happiness than a $60,000 raise.” (p. 76)

“Hard work helps women fit in and gain a measure of security. And it can work, at least initially. So they begin to do it more and more and more often, making long hours part of their professional lifestyle. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: The workaholism leads to lack of sleep, which, in turn, leads to not being at our best. Too many of us are fueled by the fear that getting the proper amount of sleep means we must not be passionate enough about our work and our life.” (p. 80)

“Too many of us think of our sleep as the flexible item in our schedule that can be endlessly moved around to accommodate our fixed and top priority of work. But like a flight or train, our sleep should be thought of as the fixed point in our day, and everything else should be adjusted as needed so we don’t miss it.” (p. 83)

Sleep tips

“The sleep experts I have consulted with have provided me a number of additional sleep tips. Here are some of the ones I found the most useful: 

• “Get a new pillow. And a new pillowcase.

• “Make your bedroom darker and keep it cool. 

• “Practice deep breathing before bed. 

• “Take a warm bath before bed. 

• “Exercise or at least walk every day. 

• “Banish all LCD screens (laptops, tablets, smartphones, TV) at night.

• “Cut down on coffee after 2 p.m. and avoid alcohol right before bedtime to give the body time to metabolize it.” (p. 86)

Walking can help with creativity and mindfulness

“Between our minds and our legs, one of them is going to wander. Sit still and our minds want to ramble. Get up and start walking, and our minds can slow down and be more focused.” (p. 94)

“Nietzsche went even further and proclaimed that ‘only thoughts conceived while walking have any value’!” (p. 96)

“‘I suspect the greatest mental benefits of walking are explained not by what it is, but by what it isn’t,’ writes Burkeman. ‘When you go outside, you cease what you’re doing, and stopping trying to achieve something is often key to achieving it.’” (p. 102)

Wisdom comes when we set ourselves up to listen

“Wisdom is precisely what is missing when—like rats in the famous experiment conducted by B. F. Skinner more than fifty years ago—we press the same levers again and again even though there is no longer any real reward. By bringing deeper awareness into our everyday lives, wisdom frees us from the narrow reality we’re trapped in—a reality consumed by the first two metrics of success, money and power, long after they have ceased to fulfill us.” (p. 117)

“What the foremost researchers in the field of gratitude, 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.’” (p. 130)

We should listen to our intuition 

“Sometimes what your intuitive response signals is that you need more information. But our modern, hyperconnected world throws up roadblock after roadblock between us and our intuition. It can get buried under a groaning email in-box, the constant chirping of our smartphones, or our running from appointment to appointment, stressed and burned out. If our intuitive voice had the same strength-of-signal bars our phones do, we’d often see that we’re out of range of our wisdom.” (p. 135)

“Hurry Sickness and Time Famine”

“Research published in the Harvard Business Review shows that speed adversely affects creativity and work: ‘When creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed.… Complex cognitive processing takes time, and, without some reasonable time for that processing, creativity is almost impossible.’” (p. 144)

“Harvard professor Leslie Perlow has given this feeling a name: ‘time famine.’ Feeling like you’re experiencing time famine has very real consequences, from increased stress to diminished satisfaction with your life. On the flip side, the feeling of having enough time, or even surplus time, is called ‘time affluence.’ And though it may be hard to believe, it’s actually possible to achieve.” (p. 145)

“Not surprisingly, when it comes to winning the war on time famine, we are our own worst enemies. To win the war, first we have to declare that we want to change.” (p. 148)

“Our digital devices both reflect and amplify our hurry sickness. We use technology to save time (or so we think), but we also impose our distorted sense of time on our technology and use of social media.” (p. 151)

“I did a major ‘life audit’ when I turned forty, and I realized how many projects I had committed to in my head—such as learning German and becoming a good skier and learning to cook. Most remained unfinished, and many were not even started. Yet these countless incomplete projects drained my energy and diffused my attention. As soon as the file was opened, each one took a little bit of me away. It was very liberating to realize that I could ‘complete’ a project by simply dropping it—by eliminating it from my to-do list.” (p. 155)

Reflecting on death can help us understand how to enjoy life

“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.” (p. 204)

“In talking to others about their experiences with death, Goodman has concluded that ‘the difference between a good death and a difficult death seemed to be whether the dying person had shared his or her wishes.’” (p. 212)

Giving helps connect us with others

“If well-being, wisdom, and wonder are our response to a personal wake-up call, service naturally follows as the response to the wake-up call for humanity.” (p. 224)

“‘To feel the intimacy of brothers,’ wrote Pablo Neruda, ‘is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being and unites all living things.’ And that’s really what we are engaged in when we are engaged in service and volunteering—widening the boundaries of our being.” (p. 228)

“Empathy, compassion, and giving—which is simply empathy and compassion in action—are the molecular building blocks of our being. With them we expand and thrive; without them we wither.” (p. 237)

Quotables

“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.” (Preface)

“Over 30 percent of people in the United States and the United Kingdom are not getting enough sleep.” (p. 6)

“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.” (p. 8)

“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.” (p. 8)

“‘I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it,’ joked George Carlin.” (p. 18)

“As mentioned in the introduction—but it is so important it bears repeating—women in highly stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease and heart attacks compared with their less-stressed colleagues, and a 60 percent greater risk for type 2 diabetes (a link that does not exist for men, by the way).” (p. 24)

“And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, ‘This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!’ And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, ‘No. This is what’s important.’” —IAIN THOMAS (p. 34)

“I was under the impression that I had to “do” meditation. And I didn’t have time for another burdensome thing to “do.” Fortunately, a friend pointed out one day that we don’t “do” meditation; meditation “does” us.” (p. 40)

“This is modern man’s predicament, perfectly summed up by Montaigne: ‘There were many terrible things in my life, but most of them never happened.’” (p. 61)“Bill Clinton, who used to famously get only five hours of sleep a night, admitted, ‘Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.’” (p. 74)

“And Cindi came up with a new trick to use if she was having trouble falling asleep: ‘Counting backward from 300 by threes—it works like magic and you never get below 250.’” (p. 81)

“One of the benefits of getting enough sleep was starting my day feeling like one of those horrible ‘rise and shine’ people you normally want to throttle when you are among the sleep-deprived majority. I hit the ground running, minus the morning mental fog.” (p. 82)

“How many times have you experienced a sense of joy in a stale conference room while half listening to an endless PowerPoint presentation?” (p. 94)

“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.’” (p. 130)

“Even the very existence of the phrase ‘having it all,’ no matter how it’s debated, is, in effect, implying that we’re somehow not measuring up.” (p. 156)

“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?” (p. 175)

“Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone 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.’” (p. 180)

“Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.” (p. 235)

“It’s not enough to tell our children about empathy; we have to show them—which means, of course, that we have to demonstrate it ourselves. Parents teach empathy the same way they help their children learn to talk.” (p. 244)

“‘Onward, upward, and inward’ is how I ended my commencement speech at Smith. And in many ways, this book is bearing witness, both through my own experience and through the latest science, to the truth that we cannot thrive and lead the lives we want (as opposed to the lives we’ve settled for) without learning to go inward.” (p. 259)