Interview:
Arianna Huffington
Chair, President & Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post Media Group
As the chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of fourteen books, Arianna is a powerhouse in our culture. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands READ MORE »
ON Journey
Q: Please share with us the story of how your professional journey began and has brought you to where you are today as the leader of Huffington Post and this Thrive movement?
A: In college, I joined the Cambridge Union debate society. A British publisher, who had published Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. happened to see me on television debating the importance of women not throwing, so to speak, the baby out with the bathwater, and sent me a letter asking if I would be interested in writing a book on my views. I was in my last year at Cambridge and was planning to leave the next year to get a graduate degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So I sent him a letter saying, Thank you, but I don’t know how to write a book. He wrote back: “Can you have lunch?” Thinking of all my friends wandering around looking for a home for their manuscript, I decided it was at least worth a train ride to London. By the end of lunch, Reg Davis-Poynter had offered me a contract and a modest advance. And that contract marked a new beginning in my life.
Many years and several incarnations later, I co-founded The Huffington Post. I was working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, trying to build a business, expand our coverage, and bring in investors. But my life, I realized, was out of control. In terms of the traditional measures of success, which focus on money and power, I was very successful. But I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success. I knew something had to radically change. I could not go on that way. These realizations – made clear when I collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone – led me to write Thrive and to make the Third Metric a major editorial initiative at HuffPost.
ON Leadership
Q: You’ve spoken to many young women, including your commencement speech at Smith College (my alma mater!). Given all the success you’ve had as a female leader, what’s your advice to the next generation of female leaders on achieving/defining success?
A: Our definition of success right now is based almost solely on money and power. In fact, success, money and power have practically become synonymous. And so to succeed, we lead lives of overwork, sleep-deprivation and burnout. These are actually considered badges of honor! We voluntarily drive ourselves into the ground, if not the grave.
This idea of success can work—or at least appear to work—in the short term. But over the long term, money and power by themselves are like a two-legged stool—you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over. And more and more people—very successful people—are toppling over.
ON Transitions
Q: Change can be difficult, but I believe that it can also be an opportunity for self-reflection and alignment. Was there a time when change created a positive shift in your life?
A: Of course, it’s never a convenient time to change your life. On the other hand, and even more important, I realized it’s always the right time to change your life.
So I adopted some daily practices to keep me on track. I renewed my estranged relationship with sleep—and, in fact, I became a sleep evangelist. If it were possible to be an ordained sleep evangelist, believe me, I’d be a Reverend. I might even be a Cardinal. I began meditating. I began to be much more deliberate about building in time to recharge.
All these changes started adding up, and I couldn’t help but notice how out of sync it was with our work culture. It was like going back to your old drinking buddies after getting out of rehab (and by the way, I’ll be your Third Metric sponsor if you need one).
I began to realize that if you want to live a balanced life, you have to fight to do it. But I also noticed that the people who were genuinely thriving in their lives were the ones who had made room for well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.
ON Self Care
Q: Too often women take care of themselves last, yet prioritizing self care is what makes us great care takers for our families, work and beyond. How do you take care of yourself?
A: Sleep, or how little we get, has become a symbol of our prowess, a badge of honor. We make a fetish of it. It’s even considered a virility symbol. I once had dinner with a man who bragged to me that he’d gotten only four hours of sleep the night before. I resisted the temptation to tell him that the dinner would have been a lot more interesting if he had gotten five.
Sleep has become aspirational—more of a survival tactic and less of a way to really recharge, renew and reconnect with ourselves. Studies show that more than 30% of people in the U.S. and U.K. are not getting enough sleep.
Yet there’s a reason why sleep deprivation is classified as a form of torture, and why it’s a very common, and successful, strategy used by cults. Sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-esteem, sense of independence, empathy, positive thinking, and impulse control. In fact, one study found that the only thing that gets better with sleep deprivation is “magical thinking” and reliance on superstition. So the only career sleep deprivation might help you in is fortune-telling!
Of course, sleep deprivation is also associated with stress and higher risk of a host of illnesses, like heart disease. Lack of sleep was a “significant factor” in the Exxon Valdez wreck, Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
Bill Clinton, who famously used to get only five hours of sleep, once admitted, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.” Let’s hope his wife has learned more about the benefits of sleep. She did say after she stepped down as Secretary of State that the first thing she wanted to do was to get “untired.” I not only hope she’s done that, but that if and when she returns to the campaign trail she’ll be the public face of changing this mostly-male-created, stressed out, dysfunctional work culture we have.
Sleep is a feminist issue, because of all the sleep-deprived Americans, women are the most fatigued.
ON Self Care
Q: Talk a bit more about the importance of mindfulness.
A: When I first heard about mindfulness, I was confused. My mind was already full enough, I thought—I needed to empty it, not focus on it. My conception of the mind was sort of like the household junk drawer—just keep cramming things in and hope it doesn’t jam. Then I read more about it, by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Oxford psychology professor Mark Williams, and it made sense.
While the world provides plenty of flashing, high-volume signals directing us to make more money and climb higher up the ladder, there are almost no worldly signals reminding us to stay connected to the essence of who we are, to take care of ourselves, to reach out to others, to pause to wonder, and to connect to that place from which everything is possible. Mindfulness makes us aware of our lives as we’re living them. And the world is practically begging us to not be aware of living, to not see, to not connect, and to not engage.
For those who still think of meditation and mindfulness as exotic imports, Western traditions of prayer and contemplation, or philosophies like Stoicism, from my home country, fulfill many of the same purposes. I love Mark Williams’ definition of mindfulness, that it “cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re doing them.” In other words, it gives us a heightened sense of being alive, of living our lives. It’s like getting the premium tier on cable, or flying first class. By making you present to what’s going on, it gives you the VIP version of your own life.
We now know from many scientific studies that the reason why mindfulness and meditation have such profound effects on us is because they literally rewire our brains. And that means they can also be powerful tools. For instance, one recent study out of Johns Hopkins showed that meditation’s effect on depression was essentially equal to antidepressants—and without all the unpleasant side-effects. The list of all the conditions that these practices improve—depression, anxiety, heart disease, memory, aging, creativity—sounds like a label on snake oil. Except this cure-all is real.
Another study found that meditation made people more willing to act virtuous. It literally makes us better versions of ourselves. It’s the Swiss army knife of medical tools.
ON The State of Women
Q: How do you define what is happening now in “women’s empowerment” and why do you describe this as the third women’s revolution?
A: The first women’s revolution was led by the courageous suffragettes more than a hundred years ago. The second was led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who fought (and Gloria is still fighting) to expand the role of women in our society and give them full access to the corridors of power.
Our current definition of success—in which exhaustion is a badge of honor, practically a virility symbol—was largely created by men. And because women are still outsiders in many sectors of the workplace, they’re less invested in the status quo. Even very successful women are still more likely to be managing their home life, so it’s reasonable to think women will be the ones most inspired to bring in a more well-rounded idea of what constitutes success.
For instance, there’s the fact that working moms get the least sleep, with 59% in one survey reporting sleep deprivation, and 50% saying they get six hours of sleep or less. And 43% of women who have children will quit their jobs at some point. Around three-quarters of them will return to the workforce, but only 40% will go back to working full-time.
Most of the time, the discussion about the challenges of women in the workplace centers around the difficulty of navigating a career and children—of “having it all.” It’s time we recognize that, as the workplace is currently structured, a lot of women don’t want to get to the top and stay there because they don’t want to pay the price in terms of their health, well-being, and happiness. When women do leave high-powered jobs, the debate is largely taken over by the binary stay-at-home-mom versus the independent career woman question. But, in fact, when women at the top—or near enough—opt out, it’s not just because of the kids, even though that’s sometimes what takes the place of the job they’ve left. And the full reasons why they’re leaving also have implications for men.
Women have already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business, and the media—imagine what we can do when we’re all fully awake and thriving.
ON The State of Women
Q: How do we get businesses on board to support this change, and given the lack of women at the top and why they may not excel or stay in the workplace, are there different policies and programs for them vs. men?
A: If we look at the business world today we see two very different things. First, we see a lot of burnout: a business culture obsessed with quarterly earnings and short-term profits. But we also see an increasing recognition of the effects of workplace stress on the well-being of employees—and on a company’s bottom line.
More and more companies are recognizing that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for business—that the health of employees and the bottom-line are inseparable.
ON Giving Back
Q: Why the emphasis on giving?
A: Giving is so important in redefining success and allowing us to thrive because its power to change and transform flows as much to the giver as to the recipient. This isn’t just an aphorism—there’s been a ton of recent science proving that giving is like taking a miracle drug for our well-being, except with no nasty side-effects.
Throughout our history, the spirit of giving, of service, and of civic engagement helped bind a country of disparate parts and races and languages, and has continued to bring us closer to a more perfect union. The fading of that spirit is behind the feeling so many Americans have that the country is breaking apart, that we’re polarized and no longer indivisible.
One Harvard Business School working paper showed that donating to charity has a similar effect on our well-being as a doubling of household income. And last year a study showed that volunteering is associated with lower rates of depression, higher reports of well-being, and a big reduction in mortality risk.
And in the workplace, studies show that giving makes employees healthier, more creative and more collaborative
We know that collective, we’re-all-in-this-together spirit is there in America. We see it time and time again after natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, or tragedies like the Newtown shooting. We hear again and again how the disaster brought out the best in us. But it shouldn’t take a disaster to make us tap into our natural humanity. We know there are people in need all the time, in every community. So the question is, how can we sustain that best-self spirit all year round? How can we make it a part of our lives so it becomes as natural as breathing?
I dream of a day when families look at their weekend plans and say, What are we going to do this weekend—are we going to shop, see a movie, volunteer?
Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.