HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
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 chas-
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, stressedout 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
We need to redefine what we value,
and change workplace culture so that working
till all hours and walking around exhausted
become stigmatized instead of lauded.
ing 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 rear- view 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
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