The Real Discussion We Need to Have About the Peloton Ad

Staying Away From Toxic Culture: The Verge’s Zoe Schiffer had the week’s viral business story, reporting on a toxic workplace culture at the celebrity favorite luggage startup Away. Former employees described communicating only via Slack (no emails allowed), ostensibly in the name of inclusion and transparency, only to find that the company's leadership created a culture of intimidation. "The cutthroat culture allowed the company to grow at hyperspeed, developing a cult following with celebrities and millennials alike. But it also opened a yawning gap between how Away appears to its customers and what it’s like to actually work there," Schiffer writes. "The result is a brand consumers love, a company culture people fear, and a cadre of former employees who feel burned out and coerced into silence." The whole piece is worth a read, and it's a great reminder that workplace culture is more important than ever and companies ignore it at their own risk. It’s also worth noting that the toxic culture described in the piece centered mostly around the customer service division, which was straining to keep up with their inboxes. But as we can see from the backlash Away is experiencing, even from dedicated fans of the company, the employee experience is itself a customer service issue — one more important than a late shipment. People increasingly want their favorite brands to reflect their values. Let me know here what you like most about your company's culture. Read More on Thrive: 10 Ways to Actually, Finally Improve Company Culture

You Had Me at Hello: If you’re a manager who wants to engage your employees, it’s as simple as that: just say “hello.” H.R. Dive reports on a study by employee engagement firm Peakon that found that simply greeting employees at the start of the workday builds engagement. It helps start a conversation and encourages workers to open up with ideas and opinions. And, not surprisingly, saying goodbye also helps. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious, it’s easy to miss. But it’s also not surprising that it works — we're all people first, and co-workers second. Read More on Thrive: Try This Now — Take the Time to Say Hello to Your Team

Coffee Ergo Sum: Love this story, which involves two of my favorite things — coffee and philosophy. Jim DeCicco and his two brothers are the co-founders of Kitu Life, which produces Super Coffee. In the wake of #MeToo, they noticed that the company was very white, very male, and veering into bro culture. “It felt like a locker room sometimes,” Jim told The Wall Street Journal. So they hired a philosopher, Jim’s former college professor Reid Blackman. Blackman and the DeCicco brothers set about making changes, drafting an ethics statement that included diversifying the company. And their commitment has worked: the leadership team is now two-thirds women. It’s a great example of how philosophy still holds the answers for so many of our modern problems. When I founded Thrive, our mission was based on bringing back the ancient philosophical question: what it means to live a good life. At Kitu, Blackman has led workshops about what it means to be a jerk. Two sides of the same question. The answers aren’t easy, but the point is to ask. I hope the trend spreads — including to actual coffee shops: I’d love to be able to get my venti latte with a shot of Stoicism each morning.

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Value Judgment: In The Harvard Business Review, time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders has a question for working parents: “does your schedule reflect your values?” All families have values, and schedules, but syncing them up can be a challenge. As Saunders notes, too often we start with our schedules and then try to fit in time for our families and ourselves around whatever’s left. So Saunders advocates developing a “values-driven schedule,” in which you “determine what is most important to you and your family, and then craft your calendar around those priorities.” She also includes a list of tips to get this done. And even if you don't have a family, the holidays are a great time to think about how aligned our values are with our schedules. Spending a little time reflecting on that is a truly cost-effective form of holiday spending. Read More on Thrive: One Mom’s Mission to Bring “Fair Play” to the Home and the Office — Through a Card Game

Don't Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before: Is your family one of those that repeats the same stories all the time? If so, consider yourself lucky (if also, maybe, bored and annoyed at times). As Sue Shellenbarger writes in The Wall Street Journal, retelling family stories has a lot of benefits, especially for younger generations. “They have a very important function in teaching children, ‘I belong here. I’m part of these stories.’ They provide not just a script for life, but a set of values and guideposts,” Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor at Emory University, says. Studies cited by Shellenbarger show that retelling family stories can help children feel like they’re part of a larger group, learn to regulate their emotions, and reduce anxiety and behavioral problems. As Professor Fivush notes, the holidays are a particularly great time to bring family stories back out, along with old holiday decorations and the fruitcake nobody eats (which might even be older than the stories). So if you’re heading home in a few weeks and Dad wants to tell the grandkids about that time you projectile vomited on stage at the school play, just go with it.

American Exceptionalism: Axios reports on a grim new Journal of the American Medical Association study showing that life expectancy for Americans ages 25 to 64 has dropped for the third straight year, with death rates for the youngest in the cohort — those 25 to 34 — increasing nearly 30% from 2010 to 2017. And the trend is not global. As the lead author, Dr. Steven Woolf, says, it’s “a distinctly American phenomenon.” The question is why? “It would have been easier if we could blame it all on one cause like opioids or guns or obesity,” Woolf told NBC News. But the causes of death are “so diverse that it makes us think something systemic is responsible and is expressing itself in our health in many different domains.” The answer is, in fact, hiding in plain sight: All aspects of our physical and mental well-being are deeply interconnected, and can’t be considered in isolation. We need to widen our conversation about health care far beyond just how to pay for health insurance. If we want to tackle what ends up downstream as “deaths of despair,” we need to go upstream and deal with the root causes of our despair. Read More on Thrive: Bernie Sanders Is Missing a Great Opportunity to Lead on Health Care

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What the Peloton Ad Says About Our Morning Routine Obsession

We’ve all seen the Peloton ad by now, and probably also read several takes on the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash, and seen Ryan Reynolds's humorous take on the ad's actress now drowning her sorrows in gin. But with as much ink that’s been spilled, or pixelated, on the ad, we’re still not making the most of Peloton-gate. The questions of whether the ad has sexist undertones, or what it says about body image, aren’t unimportant. But the ad is also a symbol of how we’ve gone off course in how we think about our mornings. 

I have built a morning routine that works for me, and many others have built healthy habits that bring them energy and joy at the start of their day. But at some point, the Morning Routine became more than just a way to start the day. It became a craze — a fetish, even. The Morning Routine has become ground zero for FOMO and self-judgment.

In an Atlantic piece, “The False Promise of Morning Routines,” Marina Koren writes that there is a “sinister” side to all this predawn perfection. Koren rightly notes that our morning routine mania is fueled by a culture obsessed with early-rising self-optimization. In this definition of success, productivity is king. Our culture celebrates people who start their day very early —“rising with the sun,” as the Peloton ad instructor puts it. We define ourselves by how early we wake up, celebrate how little sleep we get and equate our value with how much we can accomplish. 

That’s an incredibly narrow definition of success. It leaves no room for who we are, the actual impact of what we’re doing, connecting with ourselves and others, our ability to recharge ourselves throughout the day or the reality that the optimal time to get up depends on what time we went to sleep. Otherwise getting up at 4:30 or 5:30 or 6:30 a.m., without getting enough sleep, simply means that your body will automatically crave carbs and sugars during the day — and that you’ll be less productive and experience less joy throughout your day.

As Gordon Flett, a personality researcher at York University in Canada, tells Koren, all this morning routine obsessiveness can also have mental health consequences. “People are sitting there going, ‘I need to be perfect,’” he says. “And they get locked into a very self-critical pattern.”

This self-critical pattern is the voice I call the obnoxious roommate living in our head. It’s the voice that feeds on putting us down and strengthening our insecurities and doubts. Rather than succumb to our self-judgments, we have an opportunity to evict our obnoxious roommate and create a morning routine that works for us — whether or not we tell the rest of the world about it on social media.

It starts with acknowledging the necessary role sleep plays in an effective morning routine. A good morning starts the night before. As Thrive's Sleep Editor-at-Large, Shelly Ibach, says, "sleep well at night to dream big during the day. Sleep well to be your best self." And the research is clear: Unless we have a genetic mutation that means we don’t require a lot of sleep, the vast majority of us need seven to nine hours to wake up fully recharged.

I’m not sure what Marcus Aurelius’s morning routine was, but it probably didn’t look like the Roman equivalent of the Peloton ad (not sure what that would be — maybe being chased by lions?). It would more likely reflect this quote, which I have laminated in my wallet, on my desk and on my nightstand: “People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills . . . There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. . . . So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”

However we choose to use our mornings, we have an opportunity to take a page from the Marcus Aurelius playbook. When we do, we’ll set ourselves up for a day of less stress, more productivity and more joy.

Read More on Thrive: What the Peloton Ad Says About Our Morning Routine Obsession

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Before You Go

Sign warning that the road is unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles, with an unnecessary apostrophe. (Stephen Barnes / Getty Images)

Grammar Nerdery of the Week: On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the Apostrophe Protection Society will be shutting down after nearly two decades of zealously protecting the proper use of one of our least appreciated but hardest working punctuation marks. “The ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!” wrote John Richards, the 96-year-old founder, on the group’s website. It’s a sad day for grammar nerds all over the globe. I’ve long been an apostrophe aficionado myself. Read More on Thrive: R.I.P., Apostrophe Protection Society

Book of the Week: Principles for Success, by Ray Dalio. Ray is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. He’s also an old friend (and investor in Thrive) and has one of the most unconventional and brilliant minds in business. His new book is an illustrated children’s book based on his 2017 book Principles: Life & Work. That book was nearly 600 pages — and a New York Times best-seller. The new book breaks down the principles behind Ray’s incredible success, which include how to work with others, how to learn from failure and how to set goals. And it’s told in Ray’s very particular style — with radical honesty. My favorite quote: “The quality of your decision-making will determine the quality of your life.” It’s a great book to give to children this holiday. Read More on Thrive: Why Overcoming Your Ego Is Essential for Success

Podcast of the Week: We miss so much of the beauty of life by failing to see what’s right in front of us. That’s the theme of this week's mesmerizing episode of our immersive podcast “Meditative Story” with novelist and neuroscience scholar Siri Hustvedt. Here, she takes us along with her to The Frick Collection, and shows us what we can find when we really take the time to get lost inside a painting. “If I let go of my expectations,” she says, “I may be surprised by what I discover." In art, as it is in life. You can listen and subscribe here.

Color of the Week: Actually, it’s Color of the Year, as the color design firm Pantone has declared the lovely shade Classic Blue. If it feels calming, that’s no mistake, as The New York Times reports. “Many of us,” the company recently said, feel “completely overloaded and perpetually stressed.” As Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, points out, technology “has sped things up to the point where we can’t necessarily handle all that’s coming in.” And what we need, says Pantone, is a color that “provides a refuge,” made of “a boundless blue evocative of the vast and infinite evening sky.” In other words, the answer to the blues is blue. Read More on Thrive: Why Pantone’s Color of the Year — Anti-Anxiety Blue — Is Especially Significant for Our Well-being