So President Trump has disgraced the country once again. But as shocking as it was to see an American president standing beside Vladimir Putin and taking Russia’s side against the United States, it wasn’t that surprising. We now know who and what Donald Trump is. A more open question is who the rest of our leaders are. And, more particularly, what the fact that they’re still willing to stay in their jobs says about them, about their values and about our culture.

According to Politico’s Playbook, there was “general consensus in the Capitol” that Trump had “thoroughly embarrassed the United States.” But privately, “senior-level Republican aides and lawmakers had a second message: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT US TO DO?”

For all those furrowed-browed senators, members of Congress and White House and administration officials professing helplessness in the face of their boss serially dishonoring the country they took an oath to serve, here’s what you can do: Resign.

If ever there was an obvious example of the case for resigning [cut of the time to resign cut] on principle, this is it. And yet there they are, clinging to their jobs as if nothing else matters. That so many of our leaders are willing to publicly surrender all values of integrity, honor and patriotism is a stark illustration of defining ourselves so fully by our jobs that we can’t imagine existing without them. It’s a sign of how deeply held [cut is cut] the misguided belief is [cut dominating so much of our culture cut] that the only metrics of success that really matter are money, and in this case, power.

So many of our leaders appear to be so inexplicably held hostage to their job titles that they are not even considering one of the most noble practices in politics throughout history: the honorable resignation.

In 1973, both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow President Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. “There are lines,” Ruckelshaus said, “In this case, the line was bright and the decision was simple.”

In 1980, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned over Operation Eagle Claw, President Carter’s plan to rescue the hostages being held in Tehran. Vance’s resignation was in advance of the mission, not after its failure. He quit on principle because he disagreed with his president, convinced that the operation was too dangerous, not likely to succeed and that it would scuttle negotiations for the hostages’ release. When he died in 2002, one headline captured the decision, calling him a “principled statesman.”

During the Clinton years, two assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, along with appointee Wendell Primus, resigned over Clinton’s welfare reform plan.

Today the lines that should not be crossed could not be brighter and simpler. And the ultimate line is the line between one’s job and one’s sense of self. We’ll die with one, but not the other. And sometimes, we have to choose. In our eulogies, it’s not our jobs and our titles that we’re celebrated for. But it could be how and when we chose to leave them.

And if our Republican political leaders have forgotten their history and the distinction between our resume values and our eulogy values, former CIA Director John Brennan reminded them this week: “This…rises to the point of good American patriots resigning in objection to that performance by Donald Trump.”

Are you listening, Ambassador Nikki Haley? Ambassador Jon Huntsman? National Security Director John Bolton? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo? Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats? Indeed, days before Trump’s disgraceful performance, Coats issued a dark warning: “It was in the months prior to September 2001 when, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet, the system was blinking red. And here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say, the warning lights are blinking red again.” And yet, here is Dan Coats, refusing to do the right thing.

And it’s not just ambassadors and White House and cabinet officials who are in history’s crosshairs, it’s all of Trump’s enablers in Washington, both appointed and elected. They’re all making the same short-sighted choice. “Almost every elected Republican we talk to privately thinks President Trump’s warm embrace of Vladimir Putin was unexplainable, unacceptable and un-American,” write Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan in Axios. “Yes, they wish they could say this publicly. No, they won’t — not now, and probably never.” Why? “They see no upside in speaking out — and fear political suicide if they do, numerous Republican officials tell us.”

What about the upside of doing the right thing for your country? Of being on the right side of history? Of your grandchildren being able to be proud of you? “Political suicide” is another name for a job change. Is their entire identity so fragile and so entirely wrapped up in their job that resignation is perceived as threatening their very survival. And many of them claim to be men of faith, so let me remind them: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Let’s give credit to the one official who did resign (if I’ve missed anyone, please let me know). He may be far down the org chart from the White House, the cabinet and the congressional leadership but should be honored and celebrated. In Ohio, Belmont County Republican Chair Chris Gagin said “something snapped” when he heard Trump’s press conference, and he submitted his resignation “immediately” afterwards. But he doesn’t expect many others to join him. “Unless you have an attack of conscience, there’s nothing forcing you to do anything,” he said.

Actually, there’s a Greek word — one of my favorites — for being intrinsically motivated by conscience: filotimo. It’s not easy to convey — “love of honour” is the literal translation — but in Greek life it’s much more than that. “Doing the right thing” is how one Greek doctor put it. “Loving and honouring God and your society,” is how a Greek priest described it. Bottom line: valuing things beyond your job and your place in the social pecking order — things bigger than yourself.

So if you’re one of those privately — and rightly — complaining about how “unacceptable” and “un-American” your boss and party leader is, do it in public. Choose your values, your country and your legacy over your job.

— Published on July 19, 2018

The Trump Enablers are the Perfect Example of the Dangers of Defining Yourself by Your Job was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two years ago, then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy sounded the alarm about two looming crises. One was the opioid epidemic, and the other was burnout in the medical profession. “As I think about the emotional well-being for our country, I am particularly interested in how to cultivate emotional well-being for healthcare providers,” he said. “If healthcare providers aren’t well, it’s hard for them to heal the people for whom they are they caring.”

We know burnout is a huge problem in the United States. We know it’s a growing epidemic around the world. And we also know it has devastating effects on both our physical and mental health, and that three quarters of all healthcare spending in the U.S. is for the treatment of chronic, stress-related conditions that can be managed and prevented, like heart disease and diabetes.

So what do we do when the very people charged with safeguarding our health against the effects of burnout are themselves suffering from burnout? If we’re going to roll back the worldwide burnout epidemic, we’re going to have to start with healthcare providers. “The purpose of our calling has been broken,” write Dr. Sarah Bauer, a pediatrician in Chicago, and Dr. Angira Patel, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University. “And, in order to repair this for this generation of physicians and ones to come, we need to revisit how to practice medicine and find joy as physicians.”

And the numbers back up just how broken the system is. Almost two-thirds of doctors in the U.S. said they’re burned out, depressed or both. And over half of those who said they were depressed cited their work as the reason. In another survey, doctors from 27 specialties were asked to rank their burnout on a scale of 1 to 7. All but one specialty graded their burnout at a 4 or above. And in comparing physicians to the general population, researchers from the American Medical Association and the Mayo Clinic found that doctors were significantly more likely to show signs of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and overall burnout than the rest of us. This is reflected in the stunning fact that physicians have the highest suicide rate of any profession, three to five times higher than that of the general public.

This has dangerous implications for our national health system: we’re hemorrhaging doctors. Within ten years of joining the faculty of an academic medical organization, 40 percent of doctors will quit the field altogether. One survey of physicians across all specialities in the United States found that one in fifty doctors is planning to leave medicine in the next two years to pursue a different career and 20 percent are aiming to cut down on clinical hours in the next year. And in 2017, for the first time in at least ten years, applications to medical schools actually dropped. Combine this with the fact that in the next decade a quarter of U.S. doctors are going to retire — even as our population of aging Americans who are going to need more healthcare is going to skyrocket — and you can see the scope of the problem. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by the year 2030, our doctor shortfall will hit 100,000. And that’s a massive public health crisis. As Bryan Bohman, professor of anesthesiology at Stanford University, put it, “when a physician drops off the precipice because they’re overstressed, the amount of damage it does to the medical care system is tremendous.”

Then there’s the damage that burnout causes within the system. According to a Johns Hopkins study, medical errors are responsible for an estimated 250,000 deaths each year in the U.S. And as Dr. David Meyers, chief medical officer of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, recently noted, “when doctors and nurses feel burnt out, they are more likely to make a medical error.” The studies bear him out, with one finding higher death rates in intensive care units staffed by doctors and nurses who reported higher levels of burnout. Another found a connection between physician burnout and a range of “poor patient safety outcomes.” And a studyreleased just last week by the Institute of Medical Burnout found that if a doctor is showing signs of burnout, medical errors are over twice as likely. Not surprisingly, medical errors also cause stress and depression, which in turn drive more errors, and a downward cycle ensues.

There are some factors of burnout that doctors share with the rest of us — especially all the ways in which technology has accelerated the pace of our lives, both at work and at home — but there are also some factors that are unique to the medical world.

First among them is the fact that the people doctors are dealing with every day are themselves at their most stressed. Another factor is that the stakes are high — literally life and death — and any mistakes doctors make can be costly and irrevocable. “You have to learn to put those griefs in saran wrap and unwrap them at the end of your shift,” says John Garvin, an emergency room physician in Virginia. “Whereupon, I hope you will deal with them.”

And that’s in the best case — that’s the life of service that doctors are choosing when they go into the profession. In recent years, on top of the built-in stresses of actually trying to heal sick patients are the additional stresses of dealing with the growing bureaucratic demands that surround that process. Right now, nearly half a doctor’s day is spent on administrative and medical records work. For each hour spent face-to-face with a patient, a doctor will spend two hours at a computer doing desk work. You start out practicing medicine and you quickly find yourself managing a medical system. And very few doctors spend seven to ten years in med school and residency in order to do the latter.

Then there’s the culture of the medical world. Burnout culture afflicts the entire world and every profession. It’s built on the macho notion that overwork and sleep deprivation are signs of strength and dedication, and that prioritizing your well-being and unplugging and recharging are signs of weakness. But this is even more pronounced in a profession in which taking care of others is the entire point. In this culture, raising your hand because you’re drowning isn’t just a sign of weakness, it’s the medical equivalent of a cardinal sin: putting yourself ahead of your patients.

Dr. Dike Drummond is a family physician and author of Stop Physician Burnout: What To Do When Working Harder Isn’t Working. He writes that physicians internalize two prime directives. One is to never show weakness, and the other is that the patient always comes first. “This is a natural, healthy, and necessary truth when we are with patients,” he writes of the latter. “However, we are never shown the off switch. If you do not build the habit of putting yourself first when you are not with patients, burnout is inevitable.”

And, of course, what the science now clearly tells us is that taking care of yourself is the most essential thing you can do in order to properly care — and maybe make life and death decisions — for someone else. What that means is that putting the patient first also means putting yourself first. We’ll call this the Hippocratic Paradox to go along with the Hippocratic Oath of “first do no harm”.

As powerful as the taboo is about seeking help in the civilian world, it’s even more powerful in the medical world. “Concern about the stigma related to seeking mental health services is overwhelming,” says Dr. Carol Brownstein, former president of the American Psychiatric Association and professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, “in part due to anxiety about licensure, credentialing and hospital privileging.” And burnout prevention services are offered to less than half of hospital-based physicians and at only 31 percent of office-based practices.

So it’s not enough to put the burden on doctors to make changes in their individuals lives — as valuable as that can be. As Drs. Bauer and Patel write, even when well-being services like yoga and meditation rooms are available, they’re not going to address the large-scale structural issues. “The real problems on a systems level, such as decreasing clerical burden, allowing for a work-home balance, and changing the cultural expectations of the ideal physician, are harder to acknowledge and address,” they write. Or, as Dr. Tait Shanafelt, a physician burnout researcher at the Mayo Clinic put it, “the message to physicians…is that you are the problem, and you need to toughen up. We need to stop blaming individuals and treat physician burnout as a system issue. If it affects half our physicians, it is indirectly affecting half our patients.”

Part of that will involve changing how doctors become doctors. It’s in medical school and residency that many of these destructive notions about overwork and sacrifice are internalized. “We are not taught life balance skills in our medical education,” writes Dr. Drummond. “In fact, our residency training teaches us just the opposite. We learn and practice ignoring our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs to unhealthy levels and then carry these negative habits into our career.” But changing this medical education culture is challenging. In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which supervises medical-education programs, issued new rules limiting the average work week for residents to 80 hours. Even that seems extreme — in Europe the cap is 48 hours per week — but the change has triggered a continuing debate, with some claiming the reduced hours limit residents’ experience and training. And it’s still unclear how much has actually changed for residents since these rules were instituted.

What is clear is that once physicians enter practice, much more has to be done to help them do effectively what they’ve dedicated their lives — and often ten years of training — to do. In other words, more patients, less paper. “Let physicians focus on doing the work that only they can do,” says Dr. Shanafelt. “While physicians work at the top of their licensure, mini tasks should be delegated to support staff.”

We also need to make a more focused and meaningful distinction between where metrics are useful and where they’re not useful. Our entire world is increasingly driven by metrics, but as the saying goes, not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. As Drs. Bauer and Patel argue, while metrics are of course useful in the business of medicine, they can also be misused in the name of efficiency and productivity to drive burnout. What metrics don’t measure, they write, “is the dearth of time and space to think and to talk about patients, the connection with colleagues that is required to optimize care, and the inspiration required to innovate and to consider better ways to care for our patients.”

The good news is that there are creative responses popping up all over the country. In Minnesota, the Hennepin County Medical Center has created a “reset room” — a space filled with plants, soothing lights, a sound machine and cushy chairs where doctors can go to recover from a stressful event or simply recharge as part of their day.

One of the most innovative programs is the “time bank” at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The initiative allows doctors to “bank” time spent on things like meetings, teaching, mentoring, writing grants or covering for someone else’s shifts. They’re then able to redeem the credits for benefits that make their lives easier, like meal deliveries and cleaning services. One doctor planned to devote his time credits to helping his wife after the birth of their child, and also donated some to a co-worker who’d be covering for him.

The program started out as a pilot after a task force was charged with finding out why so many promising young doctors were dropping out. The investigation found that, even though the school had a range of work-life programs available — from paid parental leave to flex-work — they weren’t being used. “The physicians and scientists feared that if they used the policies, they’d be viewed as not being serious about their careers and would suffer as a consequence,” said Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist who led the pilot.

The time bank is being used to great effect. The proportion of doctors and researchers who said they’re satisfied with Stanford shot up by almost 60 percent. Grants submitted — aided by time bank credits — went up and were approved at a rate higher than that of the university-wide rate. The share of those willing to cover others’ shifts almost doubled, and participants reported feeling more collegial and having more time to talk about research with colleagues.

A few years ago, during a visit to the Cleveland Clinic, I saw firsthand how they were addressing the physician burnout crisis with a program called “Code Lavender.” Hospitals, of course, have “code red” and “code blue” for emergencies, but traditionally no way to address the crisis of physician burnout — including, frequently, the stress and emotions that come from experiencing the death of a patient, for example, or caring for sick children.

I spent the afternoon touring the hospital with the Cleveland Clinic’s then-CEO Toby Cosgrove, and among the many medical and technological marvels the hospital was using to save and improve lives, Code Lavender stood out as particularly innovative. Through Code Lavender, the Cleveland Clinic had assembled a “rapid response” team of holistic nurses to serve as a kind of SWAT team for burned out doctors and nurses, providing massages, Reiki, healthy snacks and water, and emotional support. They also dispensed lavender arm bands, as a visual reminder to doctors to not push themselves too hard. As Amy Greene, the Clinic’s director of spiritual care, said, “Cleveland Clinic caregivers are used to seeing really difficult cases, but even they are going to buckle when they get hit two or three times in one day. Code Lavender is a holistic team approach to going up and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got your back.’” Tellingly, the program originated as a support system for patients and their family members, but ended up being used mostly for hospital staff.

Changing our medical culture is a huge challenge but it’s also a huge opportunity. As Drs. Bauer and Patel put it: “The debate about burnout may be the beginning of a renaissance in medicine, where physicians reconsider how the art that feeds the joy of their calling is practiced, where they consider innovative models of care that allow them to be financially solvent but also establish meaningful healing relationships with patients, families and colleagues.”

And that’s going to benefit all of us — and not just because we’ll get better medical care. It can be the driving force that changes the culture of burnout worldwide. Medicine is all about the latest science and technology, but it’s also a deeply human practice fueled by connection, communication and empathy. This challenge — of maximizing what technology can do for us, while also creating room for our humanity — is common to us all. But it’s put into stark relief in the medical world. The sooner we can create ways for doctors to take care of patients without burning out, the better both for doctors and patients.

Hippocrates, We Have A Problem: Doctors Are At the Epicenter of Burnout was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tim Junio, Co-Founder & CEO at Qadium and Arianna Huffington

Tim Junio is the co-founder and CEO of Qadium, a hot cybersecurity startup. I first met him at an IVP dinner. We talked for a long time and have continued to talk over the past few months about how to use Thrive principles for peak performance. And yesterday he sent me this amazing email he had just sent to all employees at his fast-growing startup, which I immediately asked if we could publish. It’s a welcome sign that the long-standing Silicon Valley delusion that you need to burn out in order to succeed is finally changing. As Tim and his company show, prioritizing well-being isn’t something that undermines hyper-growth — it’s what makes hyper-growth sustainable. — Arianna Huffington

Dear Team,

I think we should spend more time talking about wellness at Qadium. On the heels of a short vacation, I’d like to share a few thoughts about recharging. A lot of it may not be news, but I encourage everyone to read all the way through, and consciously think about whether or not there are things you can do to optimize how you manage your energy, time, and health. We have many years to go on our journey, and I care enormously that everyone feels happy, excited, and effective as we continue to build.

I’ll start with where I’m coming from, which is that taking care of yourself requires deliberate, meaningful effort and thought. Depending on what is happening in the business, I work 70 to 90 hours per week. That is a high pace, but it has been sustainable for years because I make a deliberate effort to maintain my personal energy level during normal times, and create a buffer for crises.

Here are some best practices I’ve accumulated, citations for further reading, and new benefits Qadium is introducing to better effect these practices. I’ll caveat by saying that I’m looking to encourage deep thinking around these issues, and am by no means an expert — you will need to figure out what system best works for you. My examples are strictly FYI in the spirit of “well, it works for me!” I hope you find some of this helpful.

1. Sleep the right amount your body needs, and plan your schedule around it. This advice borders on cliche, but I continue to see patterns where people know it’s true but fail to take it seriously. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how consistently sleeping well will make you a higher performer and happier person over a long time horizon; good sleep filters down into being better and enjoying more in all aspects of life. Not sleeping enough causes tremendous bad consequences, starting with inferior decision-making and, at the opposite extreme, weakening your immune system and potentially causing long-term damage to your brain. I don’t believe in the glorification of all-nighters as a sign of being a hard worker. If you don’t believe me, take it from Jeff Bezos! For me, the right amount of sleep is 7–8 hours per night.

2. Improve the quality of your sleep by giving yourself time to unwind before you get into bed, when possible. Going straight from working to bed will often make it hard for you to fall asleep quickly. Using your phone to check email or Slack while in bed will reduce the quality of your sleep. When you’re committed to sleeping, put the electronics down, and build in a routine that gets your brain ready. Many articles offer tips on improving the quality of your sleep, so you have lots of opportunity to try new things if you don’t already have a good system. One tip I’ve followed, but don’t see in sleep advice articles very often, is building in extra time in bed. So if you want to sleep 7 hours, plan to physically be in bed for 8. I think this has a huge overall effect because even trying to sleep more creates anxiety, like “I need to sleep immediately to get a full night!” I also have a tendency to wake up after 1 REM cycle, and sometimes it can take a while to fall back asleep in the middle of the night, so the extra time ensures I get the full amount of sleep despite interruptions. Finally, I’ve found that wearing an eye mask and earplugs helps a great deal, even at home.

3. Establish some routines. This is less generalizable advice, since some people enjoy spontaneity and a little chaos. However, there are switching costs to doing the same things in different ways and at different times (like when you wake up and go to sleep, or eat, or unplug), and there are strong arguments and evidence regarding psychology of space and how that affects your mood. For example, people who do not watch TV in their bedrooms usually fall asleep more quickly and sleep better than people who watch TV in bed before sleeping. Personally, I love reading in the tub, and read and splash around in a bubble bath before bed 3–4 times per week. I love this routine so much that, when traveling, I plan what hotel to stay at based on whether or not they have tubs. (Shensi forcefully argues this is at great personal health risk due to various theories she has about hotel hygiene. Ask her about it). There’s a lot of evidence for high-performing people having huge variation in their routines, but a common principle in having routines / recurring practices. And they make for fun reading. However, I strongly advise against the Marcel Proust diet.

4. Exercise. This also borders on cliche, but is one of the simplest ways to keep your energy levels higher and overall health better. It’s also a great way to break up your day and establish routines. I usually wrap up in the office at around 9pm-10pm so I can make it to the gym for a quick 1 hr workout before heading home.

5. Meditate. Oodles and oodles of research are stacking up regarding the cognitive and other medical benefits of meditation, and is a good way to either start or break up your day. Sam’s an expert if you’re looking for some pointers.

6. Pay attention to your breathing. This is linked to meditation, but not the same thing. Deep, mindful diaphragm breathing can have an instantaneous effect on how you feel, and reduce stress and anxiety. This is another of Sam’s areas of expertise, so ping him for tips if you are curious!

7. Audit your nutrition. Think about whether or not you are achieving what you want with your current regimen — what you put into your body can have a big effect on how you feel.

8. Identify what rhythm works for you for disconnecting from work for a bit on a regular basis, including building in time to think about higher-level things related to your job. For me, this has meant doing minimal work on a computer on Saturday unless I have a time-sensitive or Board-related request, and making sure I schedule some social and other downtime with zero work. I’ve found from experience that if I (and those around me) don’t actively plan for this, it is easy to become overwhelmed by daily tasks and not do higher-level thinking for weeks or months. Most Sundays (when not traveling) are my dedicated introvert days, when I do written work for Qadium, fold laundry (example of a small routine that makes me feel good), and generally plan to not interact with any other people. I’m a borderline extrovert/introvert, and having a lot of meetings in a week leaves me needing to recharge by withdrawing socially over the weekend.

9. Periodically audit your time. Everyone has to do things we don’t like sometimes. But consistently doing things you don’t enjoy, and especially things you both do not enjoy and are not good at, will lead to burnout. People can work very large numbers of hours without burning out if they feel that their work is valuable and they are good at it. I audit my time several times per year by going through my calendar, and grading my recurring activities in the categories of “leverage for Qadium,” “can somebody else do it,” “am I good at it,” “do I like doing it.” Then I adjust the scope of my responsibilities such that I dedicate the majority of my time to tasks that are high impact for the company, no one else can do them, that I’m good at, and that I enjoy. I recommend looking over your last few months and thinking about how your activities align. If there is a major misalignment, you are probably not happy, and probably will not do great in the long run. You should sit down with your manager to consider how you could more effectively use your time.

10. Try using to-do lists if you don’t already, and use them effectively. To-do lists have an advantage of helping you build a mosaic of how you use your time if you approach them non-sequentially, such that when you are unable to focus on a particular task (because of your mood, etc.), you can pick up another, and therefore accomplish more overall than trying to force your way through an unproductive session. I’ve personally found that rolling to-do lists are better than daily ones. I used to lose sleep regularly to make sure I completed every item on my daily to-do list before going to bed. This made me more tired, irritable, and ineffective over a multi-week time horizon. By having a rolling to-do list, I stop work (unless something seriously urgent is happening) at my designated cut-off time to go to sleep, and resume work on my tasks once refreshed. This helps me stay high-output and high-energy for weeks and months. I like how Sam Altman approached this topic in a recent blog post on productivity.

11. Take your vacation, and take your vacation seriously. We offer a generous four weeks of vacation, plus eight companywide holidays, plus two floating holidays you can take at your discretion. Use them, and do not do any work when you are on vacation. Part of being a high performer at Qadium means you have built redundancy such that the company can survive without you for a little while. I strongly advise logging out of your email and Slack, and preferably not even taking your work electronics with you if you are traveling, when on vacation. I’d like for us to be culturally committed to not bothering one another when on PTO except for absolute emergencies.

12. Change your point of view. We have a large, beautiful, (for now) under-populated office. Move around every so often, and use quiet rooms when helpful. There are many coffee shops nearby and we’re a brief walk from the Embarcadero; take a stroll if you need to stretch and clear your head.

If you’d like to read further, check out Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive, which has far more information than this email regarding managing your personal energy to be a happier and more productive person. I like it. We’ve ordered ten copies to keep in the office. Please take one if you are interested in learning more.

Finally, we’re rolling out several new benefits that are directly tied to the advice offered above. I hope many folks take advantage of them. Details are forthcoming from our office staff.

1. Corporate gym discount.

2. Gym membership subsidy.

3. Meditation app subsidy.

4. Quiet rooms at SF HQ.

5. Literature on wellness around the office.

6. A new Slack channel, #wellness, for us to share the ever-evolving research into caring for ourselves while focusing on high performance.

Best,

Tim

— Published on June 25, 2018

Yes, You Can Grow a Successful Startup Without Burning Out was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Richard J. Davidson, PhD and Arianna Huffington

To everything there is a season. And to every cultural trend there is a backlash. And now the backlash cycle has come for meditation. Once confined to the lifestyle or health pages, you’re now as likely to read about meditation in the business, sports or entertainment news. And just last week, there was news that the app Calm hit a valuation of $250 million, amid what TechCrunch called “an explosion of interest in Mindfulness apps.” So it was no real surprise when we saw the New York Times opinion piece last week entitled “Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate.”

But the problem is that meditation isn’t just the latest fad to be fed into the cultural what’s-in-what’s-out machine. It’s a matter of public health. And the problem with this piece is — well, actually, there are many!

The central claim by the authors, Kathleen D. Vohs, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, assistant professor at the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, is that, based on their study, meditation diminishes motivation and thus “might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting.”

But getting to that conclusion, and justifying the backlash headline, required the authors to define virtually all the terms of the study, and in fact the study itself, as narrowly as possible. “A central technique of mindfulness meditation,” the authors assert, “is to accept things as they are.” In fact, what mindfulness does is empower you not to react emotionally, unthinkingly, or impulsively to things as they are. Acceptance does not mean resignation. What it means is summed up perfectly in the serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” As Mark Williams, psychology professor at Oxford, wrote, “mindfulness cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re doing them.”

Then the authors assert that motivation “implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.” But people are motivated all the time by more than discontentment — by love, by gratitude, by patriotism, by dreams of new products or new planets. With both mindfulness and motivation defined so narrowly, it’s not much of a stretch for the authors to set up a study that finds, as they write, “tension” between the two.

One of the biggest problems with the far reaching conclusions is the scope of the study itself. To test the effects of meditation, the authors had participants listen to a single 8 or 15-minute mindfulness meditation recording online. We do not know if people were lying down or washing dishes as they were listening. Seriously? That’s not nearly enough time to justify such sweeping conclusions. The benefits of meditation are much more obvious after several weeks of practice. That’s why so many of the studies that have proven those benefits are based on programs of eight weeks or even longer.

And those studies have been clear, unambiguous and nearly universal in showing a host of benefits, all of which are valuable in the workplace. One of us (RJD) has conducted some of the first serious neuroscientific research on meditation and the first randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. In the recent book Davidson wrote with Daniel Goleman entitled Altered Traits, theyexplain that the point of meditation is the enduring, trait-like changes that come with extended practice. The kind of one-time practice studied by Hafenbrack and Vohs does not produce any enduring change and should not be confused with the changes from mindfulness meditation that scientists have been documenting for decades. In their new book, Goleman and Davidson have sifted through the ~6,000 scientific articles on meditation and summarized the very best science in this area and find that meditation can indeed improve task performance in many domains, including those requiring focused attention and some types of memory. Meditation also improves emotional regulation which has secondary benefits on many other tasks.

Studies have also found that meditation can improve focus, lower stress, improve emotional regulation, help us get back to a task at hand after being distracted, and enhance compassion and creativity — all qualities incredibly important to the workplace. And in 2016, a review co-authored by Christopher Lyddy at Case Western Reserve andt Darren Good at Pepperdine looked at 4,000 studies on mindfulness. What the authors found was that mindfulness improved performance levels across a broad range of categories. And they also addressed the question of motivation. “Mindfulness may support goal pursuit through improved attentional and motivational properties,” they write. “Although mindfulness involves non-striving, it should not be confused with passivity. Indeed, autonomous motivation — that is, the drive to pursue activities perceived as important, valued, or enjoyable — appears to be higher among mindful individuals.” Adds Lyddy, “When you are mindful, you can have a greater consciousness in the present. . .That’s vital for any executive or manager, who, at any given moment, may be barraged with various problems that call for decisions under stress.”

And that’s why so many companies are availing themselves of this powerful tool. At Aetna, a meditation program for employees offered by CEO Mark Bertolini, himself a practitioner, has been credited with improving productivity by 62 minutes per employee per week, which Aetna values at $3,000 per employee per year. It’s why Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio encourages the practice among his employees. “It’s the greatest gift I could give anyone,” he says, “it brings about equanimity, creativity and peace.” He also considers meditation to be the “single most important reason” for his own success in building the biggest hedge fund in the world. It’s why Salesforce founder Marc Benioff installed meditation rooms all over the company’s new offices. It’s why Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Investors, relies on the practice for his decision-making. “Being an investor requires the distillation of large volumes of information into a few relevant insights,” he says, “Meditation has helped me discard interesting but unnecessary information and focus on the few things that make a difference to long run investment performance.”

— Published on June 25, 2018

Don’t Buy into the Backlash — the Science on Meditation is Clear was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I love many things about summer, but I especially love summer books. I love reading all year round, but in the summer there’s a perceptible change: what for the rest of the year seems like a solitary activity bursts out into the open and becomes part of the conversation. “What are you reading?” is asked almost as often as “where are you going for vacation?” We share our recommendations — and our actual books. Some of us plan our entire season’s reading in advance, the same way we pack for a trip.

Whether we embark on far-flung summer getaways or stay close to home, books have a unique ability to take us on amazing journeys. Some of us like to take along books that are set in places we travel to, while others want books about places they’d like to go — or perhaps, would rather not go but just visit in book form.

I also love how in the summer, the reading rules we impose on ourselves get relaxed. Along with the sunnier and longer days, we pick up lighter reads. We dig into mysteries, thrillers, romance novels or other “guilty pleasure” genres that we might not read at other times of the year. (I’m not sure why, though — if you enjoy something you think of as a “beach read” or an “airport book,” why deny yourself that pleasure when you’re not at a beach or an airport?)

It makes perfect sense that we associate books with vacations and travel and unplugging — especially from our phones, which are repositories of everything we need to put away to allow us to thrive, including our to-do lists and inboxes — because they’re essential for our well-being. And science has begun to validate all the different ways in which books enhance our lives. A recent study found that reading fiction can boost our empathy. Another found that books and stories have a long-term impact on children — the more children are read to, the more they develop a “theory of mind,” the ability to understand that other people have a different mental state than they do.

One of my favorite studies found that we actually read slower on pages we particularly like. We all know that feeling — when we’re reading a book we love — of stepping outside time, of becoming disconnected from our overly-connected world (the reading equivalent of a “driveway moment,” when you’re driving home and listening to a radio program that’s so compelling you sit in your driveway until it ends, delaying your return to “the world” as long as possible). And one study even found that reading is associated with longevity. “These findings suggest that the benefits of reading books include a longer life in which to read them,” the authors write.

So if your list of life-enhancing, potentially life-lengthening summer books isn’t long enough, here’s the Thrive Global Summer Reading Guide, 12 titles curated by me and our Thrive Global team members who are already gearing up for a season of reading. It’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction, old favorites and new releases. They will all help you unplug from the world and recharge in the way that only books can.

The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, by Daniel H. Pink

A deep dive into the science of timing, and how we can use it to make better decisions in our lives.

No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, by Michelle Segar
A practical guide to how we can change the way we motivate ourselves in order to change our health.

Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights and Every Day, by Alexander Smalls, JJ Johnson, Veronica Chambers.
Aside from all the killer recipes, it’s a poignant exploration of African diaspora and the impact it’s had on the culinary world. And the recipes read like poetry.

You Think It, I’ll Say It, by Curtis Sittenfeld
A new collection of short stories by the best-selling author of Prep and American Wife.

The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer
A coming of age novel about female friendship, ambition, power and mentorship.

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
A deeply insightful and moving novel about marriage, race and the criminal justice system.

Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, by Ingrid Fetell Lee
An exploration of how ordinary things in the physical world around us can enhance our sense of joy.

Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence — The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice, by Dr. Daniel Siegel
How you can put the science of meditation and awareness to work in your life to become calmer, more focused and more present.

Living with the Monks: What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me about Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus, by Jesse Itzler
An account by an endurance athlete and entrepreneur of what he learned both about himself and modern life from a self-imposed “timeout” at a monastery.

More Together Than Alone: Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in Our Lives and in the World, by Mark Nepo
A timely reflection on the importance of community and how we can deepen our sense of togetherness to improve both our individual lives and the world.

When Action Follows Heart: 365 Ways to Share Kindness, by Susan Spencer
The Woman’s Day editor-in-chief shares a year’s worth of simple and practical ways you can harness the profound power of kindness and giving in your life.

Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
A New York Times travel columnist explores Paris, Istanbul, Florence and her hometown, New York — and muses on the joys and rewards of solo travel.

What are you reading this summer? Let us know by tweeting your recommendations with the hashtag #thrivesummerbooks, and happy reading!

— Published on June 21, 2018

The Thrive Global Summer Reading Guide was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In its 1948 constitution, the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” That was ground-breaking and forward-thinking then, and it still is. But much has changed since then. Underlying our physical, mental and social well-being is our relationship with technology in our always-on and hyper-connected world. And this needs to be included in how we think about health and well-being, both for individuals and for businesses. That’s why I’m excited to announce a special section on Thrive Global’s media platform called Social Health. It will be edited by the acclaimed British writer and speaker, Julia Hobsbawm, visiting professor at London’s Cass Business School and at the University of Suffolk.

It’s a concept she laid out in her recently published book, Fully Connected: Surviving & Thriving in an Age of Overload. “Social Health is what I call a successful strategic approach to how we connect with each other in times which are overcrowded with ‘infobesity,’” she writes in her piece introducing this section. “The world’s soaring stress levels, stagnant productivity figures and cultural drop in trust and confidence in technology and social networks show that there is much work to be done.”

And this comes at a critical time. We’re at an inflection point in our relationship with technology. The past year has seen a great awakening about what the technology we’ve been swimming in for the past decade is doing to us. The impact of our always-on culture on our mental health, our relationships, and our productivity has become increasingly clear. And as a result, the need to set boundaries with technology so that we can maximize its benefit in our lives is one of most important conversations we are having.

We all feel this information overload and it’s getting worse. According to a recent study, the top ten percent of smartphone users touch their phones an average of 5,427 times each day. The rest of us are clocking in at 2,617 per day. And over 70 percent of Americans sleep next to or with their phone. It’s doing damage to our social interactions: in a Pew study, 89 percent of phone owners said they’d used their phones in their last social gathering, but 82 percent felt that when they do this it damages the interaction. This growing addiction to our phones is fundamentally changing our relationships: in one study, seventy percent said that phones had interfered with their interactions with their romantic partners. And it’s distorting our family life: according to one survey, 98 percent of parents said that unplugging from devices during meals is important to maintaining their family bond, and yet 42 percent couldn’t even remember the last time their family had eaten a meal with no devices present.

And we can see the results in the business world, as well. In the U.S., 70 percent of employees say they’re burned out — among senior leaders the number is 96 percent. And according to Gallup, 85 percent of employees worldwide say they’re not engaged at work, which costs economies hundreds of billions of dollars. Add to that the fact that stress costs an estimated $300 billion in the U.S. alone.

The “antidote,” Julia Hobsbawm writes, is to “put social health front and centre of organizational responses to the Always On era. And that’s exactly what our new section will be devoted to: strategies, tools, expertise, personal stories, and new role models of success who show how we can take control of our social health in the digital age.

Some of the pieces we’re featuring include:

• Johann Hari on mental health and social health and how our natural psychological needs inform why we might feel depressed or anxious.
• Puerto Rican social researcher Jorge Vega Matos on what coordinated hurricane responses teach us about community on social media.
• Jessica Morris of OurBrainBank on how a diagnosis of glioblastoma led her to found a nonprofit that enables patients to use an app to monitor their symptoms and “feel they’re controlling their disease, not the disease controlling them”
• Rasmus Hougaard and Louise Chester on how always-on connectivity compounded by the added pressures of leadership can neurologically rewire us to disconnect from both people and our own moral code and how leaders can help themselves focus on the right things
• John Dunton-Downer, the co-founder of the music charity Bolivia Classica on how meeting his wife, the acclaimed Bolivian pianist Ana Maria Vera, connected him with his passion in an unexpected way.
• Inger Paus, Managing Director of the Vodafone Institute for Society, on how being “always on” is draining people’s time.

And we want to hear from you. How do you manage to stay connected to your friends, to your work and to yourself in the age of overload? How do you prioritize your social health? Add your voice to this important conversation by tweeting or Instagramming your best stay-connected strategies to @thrive using the hashtag #socialhealth and we will share some of your best tips in an upcoming story.

— Published on June 18, 2018

Introducing Thrive’s Social Health Section was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy Father’s Day to my daughters’ great dad and all the dads around the world. Given that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, one of the most important things we can do as mothers and fathers is to learn to co-parent when we are no longer together as a family. Here is a piece I wrote after a vacation with my daughters and their dad. Happy Father’s Day, Michael!

Just like marriage, divorce isn’t easy either, and ours has been no exception. But even though we no longer had a marriage to keep us together, we had something even more powerful — our daughters. And, spurred by our mutual devotion to them, we have made a huge effort to work through all the difficulties and be friends.

This has included spending Christmas Day and both of our girls’ birthdays together as a family every year. And, little by little, with a lot of hard work, we’ve grown closer and closer. Indeed, a couple of years ago, on what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary, a magnificent bouquet of flowers that included twenty yellow roses arrived at my home. The card said, “Happy 20th Anniversary. We’ll always be the parents of two remarkable young women. Love, Michael.”

But this was the first time since our divorce that we had gone on a summer vacation as a family and this concentrated together time can often prove to be stressful. But we had a fabulous time, hanging out as a foursome, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and exploring the exquisite beauty of Crete — Kriti to my fellow Greeks. The brilliant sand, the jasmine-filled air, the crystalline sea, the jutting mountains — and history to be found with practically every step you take. Crete was home to the oldest Greek civilization, as well as Ariadne (who helped Theseus slay the Minotaur and then became the bride of Dionysus), and Nikos Kazantzakis (who gave us Zorba the Greek).

What we did more than anything, though, was talking. About anything and everything. We spent a lot of time strolling down Memory Lane, and also taking mental journeys into the future. These future forays were both practical and fanciful (we spent a lot of time the other night, for example, debating the pros and cons of evening weddings and the names of yet-to-be born — and, thankfully, yet-to-be-conceived — children).

The surest sign that my ex and I have reached a better place is a newfound willingness on both our parts to not let our pet peeves get in the way of our having a good time. Even in the happiest of marriages, there are little things that each partner does that inevitably set the other one off. These annoyances are magnified ten-fold when you are no longer together as a couple — which is why making an effort to avoid them is one of the secrets of a good divorce.

For instance, Michael really hates it when we are together and I check my phone or, god forbid, take a call on my cell, especially when we are out eating. He was ahead of me in recognizing how distracting and destructive of all relationships such interruptions are. But even before I had seen the light, I kept to 100 perfect phone ban during all meals. And he didn’t make a big deal of the couple of times I forgot to turn my phone off and it began to ring (especially since I didn’t take the calls)!

For my part, I am really put off by the way he openly fumes if I am even one second late for something. Even on vacation (I always thought not having to adhere to a strict timetable was one of the defining features of a vacation!). This trip was different. When I rolled in a few minutes late to dinner, he wasn’t glaring at his watch. Instead, he would greet me with a warm smile.

It was especially great for the girls to have their parents not only not be on edge with each other, but actually enjoying one another’s company.

Our children, after all, are the most important thing in our lives — and in most parents’ lives, for that matter. It’s a fact that becomes even more inescapable whenever we are in Greece, which is an utterly child-centered society. Children here are treated as little gods, creatures of worship — little totemic beings everyone wants to touch and nurture. They are made to feel so special, with even the tiniest accomplishment cause for exclamations of appreciation and praise.

The fact that Michael and I have these two girls (young women now) together is a bond that transcends all grievances we have had through the years.

And while we did not survive as a couple, at least we’ve survived in the joint parenting of our daughters. We have gotten to the point where there is really nothing left to work out — and it feels completely natural to be able to sit on a beautiful beach or stroll through a museum together.

“God,” Isabella said one night, “it’s hard to remember you guys are divorced.”

For some reason, that made me very, very happy. It felt like I had reached the end of a long and arduous journey. And we were all the better for having made it.

I only hope that, for the sake of the over a million children a year whose parents get divorced, it’s a journey more and more families take.

— Published on June 16, 2018

Happy Father’s Day after Divorce was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We got to know Anthony Bourdain as the fearless, authentic and deeply human host of “Parts Unknown,” who allowed us to escape from our daily lives and travel, at least vicariously, to amazing out-of-the-way places all over the world.

That’s why the heartbreaking news of Bourdain’s suicide came as such a shock. We’ll never know the private battles that drove him to this tragic decision, but in our natural urge to make some sense of his story, we can use what happened as a chance to stop and reflect on our own stories. Yes, there are many parts unknown around the world, but millions seem to have forgotten that exploring parts unknown inside ourselves is also a necessary part of a full life.

Because however many fulfilling relationships we have, the relationship with ourselves is the most important one we’ll ever have. And, like any relationship, it can’t be taken for granted — without care and attention, it will atrophy and, ultimately, break down.

If there is one thing I wish I knew when I was studying the Greeks in my school in Athens, it’s that the Delphic admonition “Know Thyself” and Socrates’ admonition that “the unexamined life is not worth living” are not ancient philosophical platitudes, but in fact the most relevant and important guiding truths for our lives. And today, in the words of Thích Nhất Hạnh, the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, “It has never been easier to run away from ourselves.”

All around us we see the tragic consequences — including in the rise of depression, anxiety, and suicide (a report released last week by the CDC found that suicide rates have gone up by more than 25 percent since 1999).

I completely understand the sense of wonder that has led men and women through the ages to explore outer space, but I’ve personally always been much more fascinated with exploring inner space. And every major religion and ancient philosophy — whether it’s the Tao, Zen, the Bhagavad Gita or the Stoics — has stressed the need to connect with those inner and deeper parts of ourselves if we want to find meaning in life.

But modern life has made it harder and harder to connect with ourselves. Instead we take pride in being always on, breathlessly running from one thing to another. Bourdain’s life was no exception. “His travel schedule was grueling and he often seemed quite beat-up from it, as anyone would be,” a friend said. “It was as if he gave everything to his work and then had nothing, zero, left for himself afterwards.”

As Andrew Solomon wrote in the New Yorker, part of what seemed so shocking about the deaths of both Bourdain and Kate Spade was the seeming disparity between the internal and external. “The gap between public triumph and private despair is treacherous,” he wrote, “with the outer shell obscuring the real person even to those with whom he or she had professed intimacy.”

The danger of that gap isn’t just limited to celebrities. We all need to maintain that bridge from the frenetic outer world to the peace, strength and wisdom of our inner world. But our entire culture, with its constant buzzing, blinking notifications demanding that we look out, not in, is designed to never allow us a spare second on that bridge. The temptations are constantly multiplying and are becoming ever more sophisticated at grabbing our attention.

So many of our collective resources go into drawing us outside of ourselves — new clothes, new makeup, new gadgets, new recipes — that we’ve lost the sense of what should be in the background and what should be in the foreground of our lives.

This week New York Magazine described how Netflix was becoming a “binge factory,” spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the best talent in Hollywood to capture our attention. And this, after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings proclaimed last year that Netflix’s main competition was sleep — one of the few remaining opportunities to explore inner parts unknown!

One of the problems of our culture is that while there are always plenty of signposts along our path directing us to climb up the ladder and be always on, there are almost no signposts reminding us to stay connected to the essence of who we are, to take care of ourselves along the way, to reach out to others, to pause to wonder, and to connect to that place from which everything is possible. “Give me a place to stand,” my Greek compatriot Archimedes said, “and I will move the world.”

So what if, as signposts reminding us to stay connected to the essence of who we are, there were multiple new series dedicated to exploring those forgotten inner parts through different spiritual teachers, philosophers, poets and artists? They could take us through the Tao, Zen philosophy, the Bhagavad Gita, the Stoics, through the poetry of Whitman and Wordsworth and Thoreau. And of course, the wisdom of Thomas Merton, who said, “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery.”

That’s my dream lineup of shows for the fall. But who would host? Any ideas? Who could breathe life into such explorations the way Bourdain did into Parts Unknown around the world? And what other episodes would you want to see in this spinoff? What other poets and philosophers and teachers would you like to see included? We’d love your thoughts. After all the recent tragic news, that’s a conversation worth having.

— Published on June 12, 2018

Why We Need Another Version of “Parts Unknown” was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yes, the Golden State Warriors have a deeper roster of stars than any other team in the NBA. But that’s not their only competitive edge. Last week Wired reported on how the Warriors “sleep their way to success,” through the story of Andre Iguodala, who was the finals MVP for their championship run in 2015.

I first heard these amazing stats from Andre when he did a presentation at an Aspen conference on the importance of sleep. When he put the stats up on the screen in the room, all the CEOs in attendance gasped. When Iguodala starting getting a consistent eight hours of sleep a night, his points per minute went up 29 percent, his free-throw percentage increased by 8.9 percent, his three-point-shot percentage more than doubled, his turnovers decreased 37 percent per game, and his fouls dropped by an astounding 45 percent. And, of course, there was the small matter of being named the 2015 Finals MVP (he Instagrammed a picture of himself holding the award — credit where credit is due — while sleeping). As he put it, “Sleep good, feel good, play good.”

In fact, he’s so convinced of the connection between well-being and performance that he became an investor in Thrive Global. Until recently, he was our tallest investor, but that title has now been taken by this year’s Finals MVP, Kevin Durant, another convert to the performance science of well-being.

And, I’m happy to say, the performance-enhancing secrets of sleep are becoming much more widely known. When I published The Sleep Revolution, I spoke to Cheri Mah, then at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, who performed some of the early experiments showing a link between sleep and athletic performance. “Some sports teams are beginning to realize there are untapped benefits in improving their athletes’ sleep,” Mah told me at the time.

Now, as Wired reports, she’s not only working with the Warriors but with professional football, hockey and baseball teams, in addition to other NBA teams. “The comparison most of us make, when talking about the importance of sleep, is to performance-enhancing drugs,” she says. “All these athletes are looking for that extra 1 percent boost in performance. But when you look at the research, it suggests a solid foundation of rest and recovery is worth way more than 1 percent.”

The Warriors are now not going to the White to celebrate their second consecutive title — if they were that would have been a good opportunity to educate our sleep-deprived president on the connection between sleep and performance, whether in the court or in the Oval Office.

— Published on June 12, 2018

The Golden State Warriors’ Not-So-Secret Weapon was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

SAN JOSE — Today Apple went from Think Different to Live Different. As it always does at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple introduced a host of new features, which will keep the Apple-watching press busy this week. But one set is different and more significant than all the bells and whistles, and in fact marks a milestone in the history of the company. By introducing a host of integrated human-focused featuresthat will help us set boundaries with technology, Apple has issued a powerful response to our current moment.

The past year has been a great awakening in our relationship with technology. The impact of our always-on culture on our mental health, our relationships, our productivity, and our children has become increasingly clear. And as a result, the need to set boundaries in our relationship with technology has become increasingly urgent.

And Apple has tapped into the zeitgeist with a comprehensive set of built-in features designed, as SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi put it at today’s WWDC, “to help you limit distractions, focus, and understand how you’re spending your time.” We’ve already seen this hunger for a new way to engage with technology reflected in Google’s announcement of a suite of “digital wellbeing” features, as well as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat announcing features that promote “time well spent.” And this was our mission when Thrive Global worked with Samsung to launch the Thrive App, which helps people monitor how they use their phone and gives them the tools to take a break from it. But our goal wasn’t just to get people to download the app — it was to shift the culture.

And that’s exactly what Apple is doing here. With Apple’s global cultural influence, this is going to dramatically accelerate a shift from a world that values constant connectivity at all costs to one that values unplugging, recharging and reducing noise and distractions.

That’s why today is so important. Because come September, the features that Apple unveiled today will be incorporated into the new OS update, seamlessly aligning with how people use their phone. And while some versions of these features have been available for a few years now, taking advantage of them involved going deep into the settings and activating them manually — which almost nobody did. Now they’re at the top level and designed to be easy and intuitive to use. This new integration significantly reduces one of the major barriers to real behavior change and makes it exponentially more likely that these features will become part of people’s lives.

With Apple’s global cultural influence, this is going to dramatically accelerate a shift from a world that values constant connectivity at all costs to one that values unplugging, recharging and reducing noise and distractions.

One of the images used at WWDC to illustrate the problem we are facing as a society showed a phone charging on a nightstand in silent mode, but still lighting up with notifications. Another showed a parent on a playground staring at her phone rather than actually engaging with her child.

So what are the new features? To start, Apple has made notifications much more manageable and in your control. The Do Not Disturb feature, around since 2012, has been effectively put on steroids so that you now have the ability to control all the iPhones and iPads on your account with one touch, and block all notifications, calls and texts except for those from your VIP list. And now you can sync Do Not Disturb with your calendar, geolocate it, or simply schedule it for any time you want.

And when you block notifications, you can choose whether to send them to the notification center — so instead of being interrupted and distracted from what you’re doing, you can go through them in your own time and assign different levels of urgency to different categories.

Then there’s “Screen Time,” a dashboard that breaks your usage down into categories (social media, games, email, etc.) and even tells you how many times you’ve physically picked up your phone. (If you use Bedtime to set yourself an alarm to go to bed, Screen Time will tell you how many times you use your phone after your bedtime!) You can access this dashboard at any time, but it will also give you weekly reports. And since knowledge is power, Screen Time lets you use all this information to set limits on how much time you want to devote to particular apps. When you hit your limit, you’ll get a message, which you can act on or ignore — but the point is, you now have the data nudging you to use your devices intentionally rather than mindlessly.

There’s also a new feature for parents, in recognition of the growing challenge parents face in a world where our children are leading hyper-connected lives. You can now turn on a setting in your children’s phone that will give you the ability to monitor their usage from your phone. This data can be a starting point for talking to your child about having a healthy relationship with technology — instead of a vicious cycle of speculation, accusations, and denials. Parents who want to go one step further can use the new Downtime feature, which will allow them to lock their child’s phone completely for set periods of time (after Bedtime, for instance), allowing access only to certain functions, like the calculator, clock and calls to important numbers.

What Apple showed today is that putting technology in its proper place in our lives isn’t about diminishing technology — it’s about better and smarter technology designed and built with a human purpose.

These new features are very much in the spirit of Steve Jobs, who prided himself on the way Apple was built to respond to human needs. “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” Jobs said back in 2011, “it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

What Apple showed today is that putting technology in its proper place in our lives isn’t about diminishing technology — it’s about better and smarter technology designed and built with a human purpose. As a result, what Apple unveiled has the potential to be the third pivotal moment in its history.

The first was the “1984” commercial, aired during the Super Bowl that year. The ad, inspired by the Orwell novel, shows a woman running with a large sledgehammer, being chased by several armored agents of what we can assume to be the Thought Police. She enters a darkened hall full of zombie-like people listening to a speech by a Big Brother figure. Before the agents catch up with her, she flings the hammer at the screen, shattering it and liberating the people from their groupthink and their connection to the screen.

Then, in 1997, Apple unveiled its “Think Different” campaign, assumed to be an answer to IBM’s “Think” slogan. Now, more than two decades later, what Apple has done is actually a culmination of those two campaigns. By incorporating the tools to liberate ourselves from the unthinking allegiance to our screens into the fabric of the OS, Apple is helping us not just Think Different but Live Different.

It’s a value that Jobs certainly recognized in his own life. He always stressed how important it is to drown out the noise for creativity to flourish. When your mind calms down, Jobs said, “there’s room to hear more subtle things — that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

By incorporating the tools to liberate ourselves from the unthinking allegiance to our screens into the fabric of the OS, Apple is helping us not just Think Different but Live Different.

Right now the new features are in beta, and Apple is asking for feedback on how people are using them and what improvements they’d like to see. I’ll be testing them myself, but here’s my early wish list:

First, I’d like to see bi-directionality (which we incorporated into the Thrive App). What that means is that when you go into Do Not Disturb mode, and someone tries to contact you, they’ll get a message letting them know you’re in Do Not Disturb and when you’ll be available again. That’s not just about practicality, it’s about creating a multiplier effect and a new kind of FOMO to hasten the cultural shift.

And last year the big takeaway at WWDC17 was Apple’s release of its ARKit (Augmented Reality Kit) and how it allowed developers to create and innovate around augmented reality. So my second wish would be that next year Apple release an AHKit (Augmented Humanity Kit), allowing third-party developers to take the features unveiled today and create new and more powerful behavior change apps and tools to help us deepen and augment our uniquely human qualities.

And my biggest wish is that we’ll soon look back and see today as a leap forward to a time in which we’re able to use technology in a way that enriches our lives and doesn’t just consume them.

The pace of the cultural change we’re going through has just accelerated. It’s a transformation that will help us move from the idea of “time well spent” to “time well invested.” Because as we set boundaries with technology, we’ll get back more of our time, which we can then invest in what matters most — our loved ones, ourselves, meaningful work, causes we believe in and the things that bring us joy. And that will truly be Living Different.

— Published on June 4, 2018

First Look at WWDC 2018: Today Apple Goes from Think Different to Live Different was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.