Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington is a very interesting and encouraging book. The book aims to redefine success as not only something measured by money and power, but a metric that reflects our well-being, wisdom, and wonder. I occasionally read the Huffington Post, yet knew little about Huffington’s personal life, so I felt like I was able to get a better sense of who she is through the anecdotes in this book.

I liked how this book dealt with success in a holistic way, criticizing the idea that the most successful people are those who are burning the candle at both ends. The book sends the message that success isn’t based on how much you work or on how little you sleep; while your work ethic does correlate to success, things like taking care of ourselves and stopping to marvel at the universe are part of success, too. I enjoyed reading about the ways resilient people coped with losing their jobs – people who bounced back from bad situations often saw their hardships as a challenge and felt like they were still in control of the situation. The appendixes at the end of the book were extremely helpful, pointing to a lot of handy websites pertaining to volunteering (such as DoSomething.org) as well as computer apps to help people who are trying to pay attention to their work (like Nanny on Chrome).

This is a great book if you want to be inspired!

I received a review copy from Blogging for Books. You can find Thrive here on Amazon.