HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
to give of ourselves, prompted by
our empathy and compassion.
America’s Founding Fathers
thought enough of the idea of the
pursuit of happiness to enshrine
it in the Declaration of Independence. But their notion of this
“unalienable right” did not mean
the pursuit of more ways for us
to be entertained. Rather, it was
exhaustion in 2007. For New York
Times food writer Mark Bittman it
was obsessively checking his email
via his in-seat phone on a transatlantic flight, leading him to confess, “My name is Mark, and I’m a
techno-addict.” For Carl Honoré,
author of In Praise of Slowness:
How a Worldwide Movement Is
Challenging the Cult of Speed, it
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.
the happiness that comes from
feeling good by doing good. It
was the happiness that comes
from being a productive part of a
community and contributing to
its greater good.
There is plenty of scientific
data that shows unequivocally
that empathy and service increase our own well-being. That’s
how the elements of the Third
Metric of success become part of
a virtuous cycle.
If you are lucky, you have a “final straw” moment before it’s too
late. For me it was collapsing from
was contemplating “one-minute
bedtime stories” for his two-yearold son to save time. For Aetna
CEO Mark Bertolini it was a skiing
accident that left him with a broken neck and eventually led him
to the rejuvenating practices of
yoga and meditation. For HopeLab
president Pat Christen, it was the
alarming realization that, due to
her dependence on technology, “I
had stopped looking in my children’s eyes.” For Anna Holmes, the
founder of the site Jezebel, it was
the realization that the deal she
had made with herself came at a
very high price: “I realized, ‘Okay,
if I work at 110 percent, I get good
results. If I work a little harder, I’ll