51 pages • 1 hour read
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
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Section 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 2 Summary: “Wisdom”
Section 2, Subsection 1 Summary: “Life as a Classroom”
Huffington reflects on how her classical education in Athens, Greece, taught her to view life as a learning experience. She turns to Athena, who represented numerous ideals from wisdom and strength to pragmatism and intellect, as a source of inspiration for women, arguing that wisdom can liberate individuals from unfulfilling modern metrics of success (money and power), facilitating connection and love instead. She also explores the myth of Icarus as a cautionary tale for what happens when one doesn’t pay attention to warning signs or is excessively proud. Huffington again turns to ancient wisdom when she quotes Marcus Aurelius, who tells his readers that everything that happens in life is instructive.
Huffington reflects on her divorce, describing it as a challenging and transformative period in her life. She acknowledges that it was a painful process but highlights the growth and self-discovery that emerged from it. She discusses how her relationship with her husband was far from over after the divorce, and “like any relationship, it requires work and care and attention” (120). Huffington shares personal anecdotes about strengthening relationships and increasing emotional intelligence through tales of family vacations (with her ex-husband included) and navigating her daughter Christina’s drug addiction. Huffington echoes her daughter’s reflection on the experience, saying that learning to be vulnerable makes it “easier to move from struggle to grace” (125). Huffington reflects on childbirth as a similarly transformative experience and recounts how she moved from struggle to grace after the birth of Christina. Between the two anecdotes, Huffington offers ways to promote introspection and differentiate “everyday worries and preoccupations from what is truly important” (121), such as HuffPost’s smartphone app with tools to help workers return to a calm state of equilibrium.
Section 2, Subsection 2 Summary: “The Power of the Hunch: When Your Inner Voice Speaks, Shut Up and Listen”
Huffington explores how failing to acknowledge warning signs or intuition can lead to failure. For Huffington, “one big source of wisdom is intuition, our inner knowing” (131). Huffington traces the connection between wisdom and intuition back to the third-century philosopher Plotinus, then contextualizes wisdom through intuition as less accessible in the modern day against the backdrop of technology. She cites scientific research and literary anecdotes that affirm the positive role intuition plays in decision making. The beauty of intuition for Huffington is that everyone has access to it if they “nourish it and listen to it” (134). At times, intuition nudges one toward seeking more information, but Huffington cautions against technology-induced information overload, which can be a roadblock to intuition. She instead reminds the reader that meditation, yoga, and mindfulness can help one listen to their intuition. Listening to intuition is of paramount importance, according to Huffington, because intuition “connects us both to our inner selves and to something larger beyond ourselves and our lives” (137).
Section 2, Subsection 3 Summary: “iParadox: Your Smartphone Isn’t Making You Wiser”
Huffington focuses on how technology makes connecting with one’s inner wisdom challenging. Though technology is a powerful tool, mindfulness cannot be “farmed out” to it (140). Huffington echoes the writer Nassim Taleb’s caution that more information isn’t always a good thing because the quality may decrease with quantity. Information overload also impacts people at a young age in the modern world; Huffington cites studies about the adverse health effects of screen usage among children before returning to the central idea of this section: Devices “block the path to wisdom” (142).
Section 2, Subsection 4 Summary: “Hurry Sickness and Time Famine”
Huffington discusses the value of slowing down and living in the moment in a world that encourages us to hurry toward the future. Various studies demonstrate the physical benefits of slowing down, such as lower calorie consumption when eating slowly, and better sex due to dopamine production, and mental benefits like increased creativity and production. She describes James Gleick’s concept of “hurry sickness” and Leslie Perlow’s “time famine,” both of which make people feel rushed, as an “epidemic.” Huffington’s mother serves as a foil to the modern concept of “hurry sickness” because she excelled at living in the moment and slowing down, which Huffington illustrates through personal anecdotes. Huffington laments that time affluence is neither inherited nor bought, but a poor relationship with time can be passed to children from adults. Yet time affluence, according to Huffington, facilitates both well-being and wisdom. Throughout the entire section, Huffington describes technology as a force that robs individuals of health and wisdom.
Section 2, Subsection 5 Summary: “Evicting the Obnoxious Roommate in Your Head”
In this three-page section, Huffington challenges readers to end negative self-talk by reminding themselves of their successes—redefined to focus on internal well-being rather than external pressures.
Section 2, Subsection 6 Summary: “Breaking Bad Habits: What We Can Learn from Minotaurs, Seat Belts, and the Stoics”
Huffington draws lessons from ancient Greek myth: She compares bad habits to the minotaur slain by the mythic hero Theseus, who found his way to the creature by following a thread to the center of an impenetrable labyrinth. Huffington urges readers to create a thread to connect themselves to their center, working through the labyrinth of the self by following the thread. Huffington shares her own practice of breathwork, calling this the “thread” that grounds her in difficult moments. She then delves into the science, philosophy, and challenges of building good habits (159-63). Huffington connects habit-building back to sleep, which is a critical resource to supply willpower.
Before concluding the section on wisdom, Huffington pivots to Stoicism, citing it as a starting point for changing one’s life because of its central tenet that happiness and peace stem from introspection. In Huffington’s words, Stoicism is “saying that we can control how much we’re controlled by things outside ourselves” (166). Huffington concludes with three of her own suggestions for introspection and increased happiness: 1. Listening to inner wisdom; 2. Sharing gratitude with others; 3. Setting a time to disconnect from devices each night.
Section 2 Analysis
Huffington positions technology and modern workplace culture as the antagonists of Wisdom. Huffington’s definition of wisdom entails connection and love, both of which are the foci of anecdotes shared throughout this section. Huffington demonstrates The Inherent Accessibility of Wisdom throughout this section. Wisdom, for Huffington, is not the exclusive province of a few special people, but instead is something everyone can find within themselves. Throughout, Huffington uses metaphor to imply that societal definitions of success and technology detract from wisdom and lead to an unfulfilling life.
Huffington begins by discussing the Greek goddess Athena, who took on numerous “traditionally masculine” roles in antiquity, such as moderating wisdom and war, effectively breaking the traditional gender roles seen among mortals in antiquity. Athena is a metaphorical ideal for women in the workforce; like Athena, Huffington believes, “women don’t need to leave behind the deeper parts of themselves in order to thrive in a male-dominated world” (116). The divine status of Athena in myth, however, underscores how bridging these gender-based expectations in a “male-dominated world” is, in mortal reality, challenging.
Huffington’s central metaphor in the Wisdom section frames life as a classroom, underscoring the importance of a growth mindset. Huffington relies on anaphora to reinforce the abundance of opportunities to learn: “[E]very misfortune, every slight, every loss, and also every joy, every surprise, every happy accident–is a teacher and life is a giant classroom” (118). In doing so, Huffington also creates balance by offering a tricolon of positive circumstances and a tricolon of negative circumstances, underscoring that both positive and negative experiences can lead to personal growth.
Later, Huffington writes that “Ariadne’s thread is our way in and our way out” (158), using the thread that led the mythical hero Theseus through the minotaur’s labyrinth as a metaphor for the intrinsic self-awareness that she says can guide her readers on a journey of self-discovery. In Huffington’s reading of the myth of Ariadne, the Minotaur represents personal challenges, negative habits, or societal pressures—all of which require guidance to overcome. Through this mythological allusion, Huffington again underscores that every circumstance can be overcome because everyone has access to wisdom through their metaphorical internal thread. The theme of the previous section, Well-Being as a Foundation for Success, is relevant here too, as readers must first cultivate well-being to prepare themselves for the rigors of self-discovery—a process that can be daunting, as the metaphor of Theseus and the minotaur attests.
Though Huffington uses one metaphor rooted in reality, framing societal pressures as the “obnoxious roommate in your head” (155), in this section she relies predominantly on mythological metaphors and other ancient wisdom. At the end of the Wisdom section, she discusses the wisdom of the Stoics, a group of Ancient Greek philosophers, giving the section a ring structure by starting and ending with ancient frameworks for understanding wisdom. Like Athena, the Stoics exemplify The Inherent Accessibility of Wisdom, as one of their core teachings is that each individual—rather than any outside force—is in control of their own emotional experience.
Throughout this section, technology is presented as an adversary of wisdom. While technology has a lot of information to offer, the quality does not necessarily correspond with quantity. From small details in personal anecdotes, like Huffington’s ex-husband Michael’s regulation of cell phone use on vacation, to entire sections focused on technology-induced information overload (subsection 2: “The Power of the Hunch: When Your Inner Voice Speaks, Shut Up and Listen” and subsection 3: “iParadox: Your Smartphone Isn’t Making You Wiser”), Huffington underscores the message that technology blocks intuition and mindful moments, which are the key to accessing inner wisdom. This emphasis on the harmful effects of technology corresponds with the book’s countercultural framing: Huffington positions herself as someone offering an alternative to the more damaging aspects of the current cultural mainstream, and she positions smartphones as the ultimate symbol of that mainstream. Devices “block the path to wisdom” (142) because intuition is compromised when information overloads the brain. Therefore, disconnecting is the best way to find one’s inner wisdom, and then that wisdom connects one to others.
Cultural attitudes toward time also serve as foils to wisdom. Huffington classifies the modern cultural norms “hurry sickness” and “time famine” as “epidemics,” thereby metaphorically presenting culture as a diseased body. The antidote to the metaphorical epidemics is time affluence, which requires one to do the exact opposite of what is culturally normative: slow down and be present. This antithetical approach underscores how far society has strayed from what Huffington argues is a healthy and wise way of life. By presenting her mother as an exemplar of slow living and appreciation of the moment, Huffington does two important things for her narrative. First, she remains consistent in her implicitly gendered argument that women will be the ones to enact positive changes in society through behaviors and norm resetting. Indeed, her most developed examples of wisdom rely on a triad of women: Athena, Ariadne, and her mother. Secondly, Huffington introduces the theme of the next section: Presence as a Means to Cultivate Wonder.
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