Illustration by: iStock.com/Oleh Kuzminskyi
Sustainability is often tied to environmental stewardship, but it’s just as powerful when applied to everyday moments. It’s reflected in how we allocate our time, nurture meaningful relationships, and seek out beauty — building the personal resilience we need to lead and meet challenges in both work and life.
In the Sustainable Human Behavior course offered at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, The General Atlantic Professor Jennifer Aaker and Associate Professor Szu-chi Huang explore how to “create a sustainable life, foster healthy relationships, and promote a sustainable planet.” Aaker and Huang also teach Executive Education programs, and in a recent episode of Class Takeaways they share five practical tips for living more sustainably in your daily interactions with people and the world around you.
1. Use Time with Intent
Time is a limited resource, which makes how you choose to spend it essential to living more sustainably. This means designing your days with greater intention, seeking out activities that nourish multiple aspects of life at once. One powerful strategy is to build more multipliers into your life — activities that fulfill several meaningful goals at the same time.
For example, doing yoga with a friend supports both physical health and relational connection. Volunteering with colleagues advances a social cause while strengthening workplace bonds. “To lead a sustainable life, we need to use time with intent,” Aaker explains. “Multipliers help us tackle time poverty — the feeling that we never have enough time.”
2. Notice and Savor Beautiful Moments
Beauty isn’t limited to objects — it lives in experiences, too. Research by Aaker and Huang shows that making a conscious effort to notice small, beautiful moments — a loved one’s laughter, the warmth of the sun — is an investment in cognitive vitality, emotional resilience, and a more sustainable life. “These beautiful moments jumpstart ripple effects in our neural network,” Huang explains.
Their new studies with colleagues Yu Ding and Louise Lu reveal that individuals who journaled about beautiful (rather than merely happy) moments developed a 137 percent richer visual memory of those experiences — and nearly 20 percent greater memory accuracy.
3. Recognize Moments of Flow
Beautiful moments aren’t just about outcomes — they emerge from the process, even in dynamic environments that can seem unpredictable. Aaker recalls interviewing Chef Michael Mina, who described the beauty he sees not in perfect order, but in signs of a process unfolding well. For him, a simple signal — the sight of perfectly cut tomatoes — reveals that a team is moving in flow, with discipline and care even amid the chaos.
In high-growth or fast-moving environments, these beauty signals become essential. They allow leaders to scale excellence without being everywhere at once, trusting that the standards for quality and harmony are understood and shared. In your own work, what signals tell you the process is beautiful — even before the final product appears?
4. Build Purpose into Every Day
Sustainable living isn’t a one-time decision — it’s a daily practice. To build the habit of living with greater purpose, Aaker and Huang recommend asking yourself intentional questions each day: How will I use my time today? How can I turn this activity into a multiplier? What beautiful moment can I savor? By actively engaging with these questions, they explain, “the lens through which you see the world will change profoundly.”
5. Align with Nature
Lastly, living sustainably also means remembering our deeper connection to the natural world — and finding strength, beauty, and responsibility within it. “Throughout history, bird songs have signaled places where human flourishing is possible,” Aaker notes. She encourages seeking out spaces where you feel connected to nature and “aligned with the planet.”
These moments of alignment serve a dual purpose: deepening your sense of responsibility for the environment and creating a wellspring of beautiful experiences that sustain your own well-being — and can be shared with others.
Putting Insights into Action
Building a sustainable life through greater intention and behavioral science helps you meet challenges with more flexibility, composure, and resilience. Leaders who model personal sustainability can inspire their teams to follow suit, improving overall well-being and flow across the organization. Here are a few ways to put these ideas into action:
- Create multipliers. Find activities that achieve more than one goal at once, like volunteering as a team or walking outside while discussing a project.
- Notice and share beautiful moments. Write down one beautiful moment each day. Invite team members to do the same — and, if comfortable, set aside circle time to share.
- Recognize moments of flow. Be present and pay attention to the moments when your team moves seamlessly — when emotional awareness, clear communication, and shared goals align. Recognizing these instances of flow reinforces a culture of trust, collaboration, and shared purpose.
- Build purpose into every day. Sustainable living is built through small, deliberate choices made consistently over time. Embed purpose into your daily routine by asking intentional questions that transform sustainability from an abstract goal into a lived reality — one mindful decision at a time.
- Align with nature. Sustainable living begins with reconnecting to the natural world. Find places where you feel deeply at ease, and return to them often. These spaces become a wellspring for resilience, creativity, and beautiful moments that sustain you.
