Monday 1 December 2014

Thrive

You know those moments, those rare, memorable moments in life, when something is said to you, and it's so profound and so inspiring that you never forget the exact moment you heard it, and the precise message accompanying it?

One such a moment happened to me a few months back. I was sitting in my friends house, getting ready in her sisters room, whilst she was sat on the floor with her legs folded reading me an excerpt from a book. I remember thinking that I would be bored and probably not pay much attention but I couldn't help but feel eerily motionless as the words tumbled out of her mouth one after another. I couldn't help but be paralysed by the reality of what I was hearing, whilst simultaneously feeling shivers travel up and down my spine. It was something I have always known but finally learned that day, and since then my life has never and will never be the same again. So all I want to do today is to share that excerpt and hope that somebody else gains something from it too.

It's funny. People achieves all levels of success and the one thing they constantly remind us is that the most important thing in the world is love. And family. And being there. And watching your kids grow. And building a unit. That is what we die with.  Not our merits or medallions. So why do we work so hard to achieve something we know can't make us happy, and forsake the one thing that we know will? This is how we lose sight of the true purpose of life and get lost in the societally constructed illusion that we always have to be better. Work harder. Be smarter. It's always one more deadline, one more promotion, just one more week, one more month, one more year. Then suddenly, you wake up and time is lost. And so is everyone you ever loved. And you're sitting in your million-dollar apartment wishing you could give up every penny to get back the only thing that could complete you. And ultimately, that is the prize. Love. Wisdom. Sanity. Spirituality. Growth. Consciousness. The Third Metric.

There are no pauses in life. There is no later, after, or some day.

We are forever wanting to be there. But "there is no there there."
There is only here.

There is only now.

--------
Arianna Huffington - Thrive (Excerpt) 


I remember it as if it were yesterday: I was twenty- three years old and I was
on a promotional tour for my first book, The Female Woman, which had become
an unexpected international bestseller. I was sitting in my room in some
anonymous European hotel. The room could have been a beautifully arranged still
life. There were yellow roses on the desk, Swiss chocolates by my bed, and French
champagne on ice. The only noise was the crackling of the ice as it slowly melted
into water. The voice in my head was much louder. “Is that all there is?” Like a
broken record, the question famously posed by Peggy Lee (for those old enough to
remember) kept repeating itself in my brain, robbing me of the joy I had expected
to find in my success. “Is that really all there is?” If this is “living,” then what is
life? Can the goal of life really be just about money and recognition? From a part
of myself, deep inside me— from the part of me that is my mother’s daughter—
came a resounding “No!” It is an answer that turned me gradually but firmly away
from lucrative offers to speak and write again and again on the subject of “the
female woman.” It started me instead on the first step of a long journey.
My journey from that first moment of recognition that I didn’t want to live
my life within the boundaries of what our culture defined as success was hardly a
straight line. At times it was more like a spiral, with a lot of downturns when I
found myself caught up in the very whirlwind that I knew would not lead to the life
I most wanted.
That’s how strong is the pull of the first two metrics, even for someone as
blessed as I was to have a mother who lived a Third Metric life before I knew what
the Third Metric was. That’s why this book is a kind of a homecoming for me.
When I first lived in New York in the eighties, I found myself at lunches and
dinners with people who had achieved the first two metrics of success— money
and power— but who were still looking for something more. Lacking a line of
royalty in America, we have elevated to princely realms the biggest champions of
money and power. Since one gains today’s throne not by fortune of birth but by the
visible markers of success, we dream of the means by which we might be crowned.
Or perhaps it’s the constant expectation, drummed into us from childhood, that no
matter how humble our origins we, too, can achieve the American dream. And the American dream, which has been exported all over the world, is currently defined
as the acquisition of things: houses, cars, boats, jets, and other grown- up toys.
But I believe the second decade of this new century is already very different.
There are, of course, still millions of people who equate success with money and
power— who are determined to never get off that treadmill despite the cost in
terms of their well- being, relationships, and happiness. There are still millions
desperately looking for the next promotion, the next million- dollar payday that
they believe will satisfy their longing to feel better about themselves, or silence
their dissatisfaction. But both in the West and in emerging economies, there are
more people every day who recognize that these are all dead ends— that they are
chasing a broken dream. That we cannot find the answer in our current definition
of success alone because— as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland— “There is no
there there.”
More and more scientific studies and more and more health statistics are
showing that the way we’ve been leading our lives— what we prioritize and what
we value— is not working. And growing numbers of women— and men— are
refusing to join the list of casualties. Instead, they are reevaluating their lives,
looking to thrive rather than merely succeed based on how the world measures
success.
The latest science proves that increased stress and burnout have huge
consequences for both our personal health and our health care system. Researchers
at Carnegie Mellon found that from 1983 to 2009, there was between a 10 and 30
percent increase in stress levels across all demographic categories. Higher levels of
stress can lead to higher instances of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fully three- quarters
of American health care spending goes toward treating such chronic conditions.
The Benson- Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General
Hospital estimates that 60 to 90 percent of doctor visits are to treat stress- related
conditions.

 The stress we experience impacts our children, too. Indeed, the effects of
stress on children— even in utero— were emphasized in the journal of the
American Academy of Pediatrics. As Nicholas Kristof put it in The New York
Times: “Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a
fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body’s
metabolism or the architecture of the brain. The upshot is that children are
sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are
more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments.
They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with
the law.”
One reason we give for allowing stress to build in our lives is that we don’t
have time to take care of ourselves. We’re too busy chasing a phantom of the
successful life. The difference between what such success looks like and what truly
makes us thrive isn’t always clear as we’re living our lives. But it becomes much
more obvious in the rearview mirror. Have you noticed that when we die, our
eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?
Eulogies are, in fact, very Third Metric. But while it’s not hard to live a life
that includes the Third Metric, it’s very easy not to. It’s easy to let ourselves get
consumed by our work. It’s easy to allow professional obligations to overwhelm
us, and to forget the things and the people that truly sustain us. It’s easy to let
technology wrap us in a perpetually harried, stressed- out existence. It’s easy, in
effect, to miss the real point of our lives even as we’re living them. Until we’re no
longer alive. A eulogy is often the first formal marking down of what our lives
were about— the foundational document of our legacy. It is how people remember
us and how we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling what
we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like:
“The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice
president.”
Or:
“He increased market share for his company multiple times during his
tenure.”
Or:
“She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.”
Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to
go over those figures one more time.”
Or:
“While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook
friends, and she dealt with every email in her in- box every night.”
Or:
“His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.”
Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we
connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses,
lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.
So why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on
all the things our eulogy will never cover?
“Eulogies aren’t résumés,” David Brooks wrote. “They describe the person’s
care, wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little moral
judgments that emanate from that inner region.”
And yet we spend so much time and effort and energy on those résumé
entries— entries that lose all significance as soon as our heart stops beating. Even
for those who die with amazing Wikipedia entries, whose lives were synonymous
with accomplishment and achievement, their eulogies focus mostly on what they
did when they weren’t achieving and succeeding. They aren’t bound by our
current, broken definition of success. Look at Steve Jobs, a man whose life, at least
as the public saw it, was about creating things— things that were, yes, amazing and
game changing. But when his sister, Mona Simpson, rose to honor him at his
memorial service, that’s not what she focused on.
Yes, she talked about his work and his work ethic. But mostly she raised
these as manifestations of his passions. “Steve worked at what he loved,” she said.
What really moved him was love. “Love was his supreme virtue,” she said, “his
god of gods.
“When [his son] Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He
was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and
Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.”
And then she added this touching image: “None of us who attended Reed’s
graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.”
His sister made abundantly clear in her eulogy that Steve Jobs was a lot
more than just the guy who invented the iPhone. He was a brother and a husband and a father who knew the true value of what technology can so easily distract us
from. Even if you build an iconic product, one that lives on in our lives, what is
foremost in the minds of the people you care about most are the memories you
built in their lives.
In her 1951 novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has the
Roman emperor meditating on his death: “It seems to me as I write this hardly
important to have been emperor.” Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph describes him as
“author of the Declaration of American Independence . . . and father of the
University of Virginia.” There is no mention of his presidency.
The old adage that we should live every day as if it were our last usually
means that we shouldn’t wait until death is imminent to begin prioritizing the
things that really matter. Anyone with a smartphone and a full email in- box knows
that it’s easy to be busy while not being aware that we’re actually living.
A life that embraces the Third Metric is one lived in a way that’s mindful of
our eventual eulogy. “I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy
and I realize I’m listening to it,” joked George Carlin. We may not be able to
witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day. The
question is how much we’re giving the eulogizer to work with.
In the summer of 2013, an obituary of a Seattle woman named Jane Lotter,
who died of cancer at sixty, went viral. The author of the obit was Lotter herself.
“One of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial
cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen,” she wrote, “is that
you have time to write your own obituary.” After giving a lovely and lively
account of her life, she showed that she lived with the true definition of success in
mind. “My beloved Bob, Tessa, and Riley,” she wrote. “My beloved friends and
family. How precious you all have been to me. Knowing and loving each one of
you was the success story of my life.”
Whether you believe in an afterlife— as I do— or not, by being fully present
in your life and in the lives of those you love, you’re not just writing your own
eulogy; you’re creating a very real version of your afterlife. It’s an invaluable
lesson— one that has much more credence while we have the good fortune of
being healthy and having the energy and freedom to create a life of purpose and
meaning. The good news is that each and every one of us still has time to live up to
the best version of our eulogy. This book is designed to help us move from knowing what to do to actually
doing it. 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.