Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

Huffington introduces the concept of redefining success beyond traditional measures of wealth and career achievements. She emphasizes that true success should encompass all aspects of life, with wellbeing as its foundational pillar. 

Huffington starts by challenging the prevalent notion of success, which often prioritizes financial wealth and professional accomplishments to the detriment of personal health and happiness. She writes that the “architecture” of life today is unsustainable because people’s daily lives do not align with their values (22). The compartmentalization of our lives and selves—separating our professional selves from our personal or “real” selves—leads to burnout and exhaustion and therefore hurts not only the self but also the economy. 

Huffington describes redefining success as a “third women’s revolution” (23) and points out that women feel the negative effects of society’s definition of success more acutely than men, leading to quantifiable health consequences, such as increased risk of heart disease, heart attacks, type 2 diabetes, and eating disorders (24). Often, Huffington states, women leave high stress jobs due to burnout when they can afford to do so. Huffington writes that women want to feel valued in the workplace, but the architecture of workplaces often prevents that from happening because the “masculine ways of succeeding–fueled by stress and burnout–are often accorded more value” (26).