Arianna Huffington has spent a lot of time thinking about the links between hard work and success, and she came to the conclusion that there is a “collective illusion” on positive correlation, while neglecting omnipresent risks that can be literally fatal. She has spent years studying science, but also derives the conviction of personal experience.
Two years after the Huffington Post Foundation, Huffington collapsed with exhaustion and sleep deprivation. She struck her head on her desk, broke her cheekbone and, while gone from the doctor to the doctor, from MRI to the echocardiogram to discover what was wrong, the diagnosis that came back was professional exhaustion.
“What in 2007 was not the term that was widely used,” she told Julia Boorstin de CNBC in the first episode of the new Podcast “CNBC Changmakers and Power Players”.
“This is what changed my life,” said Huffington. “Not only in terms of which I changed my daily habits, but as regards the way I wanted to change culture, because I realized that we all suffer under this collective illusion only to succeed, to realize, we did not have luxury as we see, to take care of ourselves, and science is so contradictory.”
Now as CEO of Thrive Global, Huffington’s mission is to use technology to change behavior and help individuals find healthier and healthier paths towards success.
“Is it a successful life if you find yourself in a pool of blood on the floor of your office?” Huffington says in the new podcast. “And now we have so much data and so many sciences that, in fact, we are more effective when we give ourselves time to recharge.”
Huffington says that culture changes, but she thinks it is always difficult for young people to think of these problems in the right way. “We have CEOs of Silicon Valley in competition with each other on the quantity of sleep, and how much deep sleep and the quantity of sleep paragraph, and wearing their rings, which I wear. It would have been impossible to imagine in 2007, but despite this, especially for young people who start in their careers, there is always fear.
In consultations with many scientists brought internally to work with Thrive Global, Huffington has developed new approaches to success, including what it calls the “power of micro-stages”.
“These are not New Year’s resolutions,” she told Boorstin. “I’m going to sleep eight hours or abandon sugar or something else. It is very difficult to keep these resolutions. But if you think of micro-stages, which is at the heart of what we do at daily progressive steps which become gradually which become gradually how you are more creative. See the difference,” she said.
Follow and listen to this and each episode of the podcast “CNBC Changakers and Power Players” Apple And Spotify.
