Thrive Arianna Huffington Quotes

We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.

If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.’ 

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

Have you notices that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?

It’s not ‘What do I want to do?’, it’s ‘What kind of life do I want to have?’ 

Treat people like family, and they will be loyal and give their all.

And whenever I’d complain or was upset about something in my own life, my mother had the same advice: “Darling, just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

Today we often use deadlines—real and imaginary—to imprison ourselves.

We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day.

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

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace. —PAULO COELHO

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say “so what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. —ANDY WARHOL

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. —WU MEN

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. —WILLIAM JAMES

just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

We forget we’re mostly water till the rain falls and every atom in our body starts to go home.

We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. —FR. ALFRED D’SOUZA

Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings.

Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train.

Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.

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.

as the Zen saying goes, ‘If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.’ 

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.

Whenever we look around the world, we see smart leaders – in politics, in business, in media – making terrible decisions. What they're lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise; it has never been harder to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our omnipresent devices – our gadgets, our screens, our social media – and reconnect with ourselves.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love. —ANNE LAMOTT

music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.

The average smartphone user checks his or her device every six and a half minutes.

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.

Making money and doing good in the world are not mutually exclusive.

When we are all mind, things can get rigid. When we are all heart, things can get chaotic. Both lead to stress. But when they work together, the heart leading through empathy, the mind guiding us with focus and attention, we become a harmonious human being.

The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

And time inherently creates a story. Things begin and they end. How they end is the story. Or maybe it's what happens between when they begin and end that's the story.

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly,

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

Taoist philosophy, “Rest is prior to motion and stillness prior to action.

sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control.

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage by considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them; every day begin the task anew. —FRANCIS DE SALES

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.94 “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” –CHEROKEE LEGEND

When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity, the impact can be profound. People start to separate the world into those who are creative and those who are not. They come to see these categories as fixed, forgetting that they too once loved to draw and tell imaginative stories. Too often they opt out of being creative.

the ease with which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before. All of our small anxieties and trivial preoccupations evaporate with the sudden recognition of what really matters. We are reminded of the impermanence of much that we assume is forever and the value of so much we take for granted.

enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” Nature

In fact, we take much better care of our smartphones than ourselves.

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone.

Turn off all notifications; you should control when you want information, not the reverse.

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality in people who meditated versus those who did not,

In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment.

really true that while we grow physically by what we get, we grow spiritually by what we give. Ever since I became a mother, I’ve

being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.

One of the most popular classes Google offers employees is known as SIY, which is an acronym for “Search Inside Yourself.

Everything you do, you’ll do better with a good night’s sleep,

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone. She still had it in her hand when she was rescued.

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 Exxon Valdez wreck, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island all were at least partially caused by a lack of sleep.5

As Steve Jobs said in his now legendary commencement address at Stanford, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” There

A study conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter in their brains, which is linked to improved psychological health.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.112 They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

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.

Arianna Huffington cites studies in her brilliant book Thrive that show how the act of giving actually improves your physical and mental health. One example I love in particular is the 2013 study from Britain’s University of Exeter Medical School that reveals how volunteering is associated with lower rates of depression, higher reports of well-being, and a 22% reduction in death rates! She also writes, “Volunteering at least once a week yields improvements to well-being tantamount to your salary increasing from $20,000 to $75,000!

As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, “Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.” And even when the information is not false, the problem is “that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.

Like airlines, we routinely overbook ourselves, fearful of any unused capacity, confident that we can fit everything in. We fear that if we don’t cram as much as possible into our day, we might miss out on something fabulous, important, special, or career advancing. But there are no rollover minutes in life. We don’t get to keep all that time we “save.” It’s actually a very costly way to live.

And during the day, to prevent stress from building up—which makes it harder to fall asleep at night—every few hours take sixty seconds of recovery time the way top tennis players introduce tiny slots of recovery rituals into their game. All you have to do is stop what you are doing, and simply bring your awareness to the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet, or both. Let it stay there for a minute, and feel all tension leaving your body, drifting away from you through your hands and feet.

Giving up drugs is easy compared to dealing with the emotions drugs protected you from.” 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. The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear.… If I “try” to play, I fail; if I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability. —STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH

True understanding is to see the events of life in this way: “You are here for my benefit, though rumor paints you otherwise.” And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this: You are the very thing I was looking for. Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you. This, in a word, is art—and this art called “life” is a practice suitable to both men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend? I had a dream many years ago that sums up this thought in a different way, one that has become a sustaining metaphor for me. I am on a train going home to God. (Bear with me!) It’s a long journey, and everything that happens in my life is scenery along the way. Some of it is beautiful; I want to linger over it awhile, perhaps hold on to it or even try to take it with me. Other parts of the journey are spent grinding through a barren, ugly countryside. Either way the train moves on. And pain comes whenever I cling to the scenery, beautiful or ugly, rather than accept that all the scenery is grist for the mill, containing, as Marcus Aurelius counseled us, some hidden purpose and a hidden blessing. My family, of course, is on board with me. Beyond our families, we choose who is on the train with us, who we share our journey with. The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

pictures of pictures, or of other

Robert F. Kennedy in 1968: Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we judge America by that … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills … There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind.… So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself. —MARCUS AURELIUS

It’s time we recognize that, as the workplace is currently structured, a lot of women don’t want to get to the top and stay there because they don’t want to pay the price—in terms of their health, their well-being, and their happiness.

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.

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.

Studies show that U.S. employers spend 200 to 300 percent more on the indirect costs of health care, in the form of absenteeism, sick days, and lower productivity, than they do on actual health care payments.

As Sheryl Sandberg told me, “I found that when I cut my office hours dramatically once I had kids, I was not just working less, but I was more productive. Having children forced me to treat every minute of my time as precious—

ON 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 wasn’t, 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.

British historian Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2010. In an extraordinary interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Judt explained that with a severe condition like ALS, in which you’re surrounded by equipment and health professionals, the danger isn’t that you’ll lash out and be mean. But, rather, it’s that you’ll disconnect from those you love. “It’s that they lose a sense of your presence,” he says, “that you stop being omnipresent in their lives.” And so, he said, his responsibility to his family and friends was not to be unfailingly positive and “Pollyanna,” which wouldn’t be honest. “It’s to be as present in their lives now as I can be so that in years to come they don’t feel either guilty or bad at my having been left out of their lives, that they feel still a very strong … memory of a complete family rather than a broken one.” Asked

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if—as the poet Rumi put it—everything is rigged in our favor.

Perhaps smartphones at a party should be treated like coats, usually taken to a back room or otherwise stowed away until guests are ready to leave—a signal, like taking off your coat, that you’re happy to be here and you’re going to stay awhile.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” —CHEROKEE LEGEND

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.… Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. ELIOT

What study after study show is that meditation and mindfulness training profoundly affects every aspect of our lives—our bodies, minds, physical health, and our emotional and spiritual well-being. It’s not quite the fountain of youth, but it’s pretty close. When you consider all the benefits of meditation—and more are being found every day—it’s not an exaggeration to call meditation a miracle drug… —Arianna Huffington, Thrive

Email is your servant. Corner-office people have secretaries to prevent them from being interrupted.… Email will do all this for you too.” His advice: Turn off all notifications; you should control when you want information, not the reverse.

That’s because women are paying an even higher price than men for their participation in a work culture fueled by stress, sleep deprivation, and burnout. That is one reason why so many talented women, with impressive degrees working in high-powered jobs, end up abandoning their careers when they can afford

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

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.

How did it get so late so soon?” he wrote. “It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger, and resignation.

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

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?

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.

Wisdom The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.… Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. ELIOT

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —FREDERICK BUECHNER

The poet Mark Nepo defines sacrifice as “giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.” So recognizing when habits are no longer working for us and sacrificing them is a cornerstone of wisdom.

The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear.… If I “try” to play, I fail; if I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability. —STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH

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Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.

To truly redefine success we need to redefine our relationship with death.

we can only achieve true wisdom when our soul is liberated from our bodies by death.

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.