With MasterClass CEO David Rogier and his wife Vitruvi CEO Sara Rogier and Esther Perel
Dinner at my home with MasterClass founder and CEO David Rogier and the one and only Esther Perel. I love MasterClass — as David has said, one of his goals in founding MasterClass was to bring the joy back to learning, and that’s exactly what he’s done.
For the dinner, Esther brought the card game she launched, “Where Should We Begin?” which is also the name of her podcast. The first question to the group was: “In three words or one sentence, what advice would you give to your younger self?”
My advice was “life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen.” Others at the dinner offered these bits of wisdom: “stay bold,” “don’t be perfect,” “never give up,” “70 isn’t so bad,” “just show up,” “it will be good,” “pain becomes power,” and “they don’t know you better than you know yourself.”
“Where Should We Begin?” is a shortcut to intimacy and meaning, and you learn as much about yourself as about others. I’m giving it out as a holiday gift, and it’s a great stocking stuffer! To borrow from Socrates, the unexamined game is not worth playing.
Thriving Through the Holidays
Photos: Donna Morris / LinkedIn
A timely reminder: in her “Making the Difference” newsletter, Walmart Chief People Officer Donna Morris makes the point that while the holidays can be joyful, they can also be challenging, so it’s important to prioritize our well-being. There’s a reason why airlines remind us to put our own oxygen mask on first. I love all Donna’s suggestions, and here are two of my favorites:
Schedule it: Establish your boundaries and make sure you schedule what is important to you. Consider your requirements beyond the holiday season because the new year will be upon us quickly.
Recharge in the moment: Formal time away is important, but there are also ways to recharge your battery in your busy schedule. Strategies like breathing exercises or a quick stretch have been proven to improve mood, but I have an approach I like even more: choosing joy.
Read all Donna’s holiday suggestions here, and go here to subscribe to her newsletter.
Coming together over food is, of course, a big part of the holiday season. But it can be stressful for those tasked with the cooking part (which I cleverly got out of by never learning how to cook!). If you find the prospect of holiday cooking daunting, here are recipes for a fun and easy 3-course meal from our Cognitive Nutrition Director, Tess Bredesen. (Save room for the Tess-approved Chocolate Cranberry Bon Bons.)
Starter: Fall Cauliflower Soup
Main: Herb Roasted Ginger Garlic Chicken with Miso Honey Roasted Root Veggies
Dessert: Chocolate Cranberry Bon Bons
Bon appetit — or, as we say in Greece, kali orexi!
Expanding Our Mission on Thrive’s 7th Anniversary
Seven years ago, Thrive launched with the mission “to end the stress and burnout epidemic by offering companies and individuals sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance well-being, performance, and purpose.” And now, as we enter our eighth year, we’re expanding our mission to include improving health outcomes through science-backed behavior change. After seven years, the results are in and the data clearly shows that the five daily behaviors Thrive focuses on — sleep, food, movement, stress management, and connection — are a miracle drug not only for preventing disease but for optimizing the treatment of disease.
As we say at Thrive, health is what happens between doctor visits. And as the latest science shows, our genes are not our destiny (accounting for less than 10% of our health outcomes). It’s our daily behaviors that have the power both to prevent disease and to optimize — together with life-saving drugs and medical treatment — the management of disease.
Since our launch in 2016, we’ve built a comprehensive all-in-one behavior change technology platform that combines Microsteps, storytelling and community. And just as incremental daily Microsteps leading to healthier habits are an effective tool at driving productivity, so too are they incredibly effective at improving health outcomes. Adding health outcomes to our expanded mission reflects the fact that we’re actually already delivering on it. For instance, in our work with Walmart, by helping associates make small changes in those five foundational behaviors, we began seeing stories of Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes being reversed and hypertension being reduced.
This expansion of our mission is all the more urgent since it comes at a time when chronic diseases are eating up an increasing share of healthcare resources in every healthcare system across the world in ways that are not sustainable. In the US, around 90% of our $4.3 trillion in healthcare spending goes toward the treatment of chronic and mental health conditions. There’s no healthcare system in the world successfully managing health outcomes against this onslaught of chronic diseases. And yet studies show that medical care accounts for a smaller share of our health outcomes than our daily behaviors.
Yes, behavior change is hard, but over the last seven years at Thrive we have proven that it is absolutely possible and sustainable when it’s done right. Working with leading behavior change scientists, including BJ Fogg, who founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford and is the Behavioral Science Chair of our Scientific Advisory Board, Thrive has cracked the code on behavior change. And now we’re adding the power of generative AI. We know that the more personalized nudges and Microsteps are, the more successful they will be.
We remain as passionate and mission driven as ever about driving employee productivity through well-being and ending the stress and burnout epidemic. That’s why we’re continuing to double down on embedding Thrive’s well-being tools into the workflow itself with integrations into Microsoft Teams, Slack and Webex and contact center integrations including Genesys, NICE, Webex Contact Center, Intradiem and others.
But while we’ll continue our work to improve the productivity and well-being of employees, seeing the profound impact of our behavior change platform and methodology on health outcomes has shown us that we have an opportunity to think even bigger. By expanding our mission, we’ll be expanding our impact on people’s health by empowering them to adopt daily behaviors. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at Thrive and I look forward to working with our growing team to deliver this urgently needed solution to people around the world.
BEFORE YOU GO
Book of the Month
Cover: Flatiron Books
I was so moved by Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s inspiring new memoir The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Li, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, could have simply written a straightforward book on the AI revolution and her critical role in shaping it, but her book is much more than that. She shares her journey as a Chinese immigrant and how she became a scientist. Her resilience, passion and relentless curiosity will inspire the next generation of leaders. If you’ve ever had a dream to break into a difficult industry and pursue a path that brings you real fulfillment, this book is for you.
A Note From the Grammar Grinch
Christmas came early for me with this Axios piece from Carly Mallenbaum on the scourge of apostrophe misuse. “If you don’t want to turn your grammar-nerd friends into grinches this holiday season,” writes Mallenbaum, “here’s a reminder: Avoid overusing apostrophes.” For example, holiday card signatures: “Love, the Smith’s,” vs. “Love, the Smiths.”
Yes, there are bigger problems than one of our smallest punctuation marks, but this one can drive picky grammar nerds (PGNs, but definitely not PGN’s) insane. I first wrote about the apostrophe crisis back in 2005 with the constant mentions of “WMD’s.” There were no WMDs, but there were definitely zombie apostrophes and nothing seems to be able to stop them.
My crusade began when my daughter Isabella was in middle school and wrote an essay mentioning a “rope’s course.” I gently corrected her, and she responded by saying that, in fact, her teacher agreed with her. She kept the apostrophe and, sure enough, it went uncorrected.
Sure it’s minor, but it’s a grammar version of the broken windows theory. Once one broken grammar window becomes normalized, where does it end? Thanks to texting, we’ve already done away with capitalization, and we’ve accepted the invasive species of emojis. But we have to draw the line somewhere!
So our apostrodemic is still raging. Since we humans seem to have proven ourselves incapable of stopping it, perhaps this is one of those humanity-enhancing uses for AI. The LLM’s LLMs will do it for us. The only danger is that we have to make sure the texts they’re trained on don’t themselves have misused apostrophes – otherwise we’ll be headed for an AGI apocatastrophe. Maybe this can be on the agenda of the newly reconstituted OpenAI.
And with that said, happy holidays (no apostrophe)!
Moment of Wonder
Photo: Blake Randall
This haunting image of trees seemingly trudging up a mountain is one of the photos that won Vancouver-based Blake Randall the Photographer of the Year award in the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Awards. As we approach the holidays, it’s a beautiful reminder that nature is alive even in the frozen depths of winter.
Best,
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