RACHEL WHETSTONE: So I wanted to introduce Arianna,
who I've met a couple of times, who I admire enormously
for being an amazing journalist, an amazing entrepreneur,
and an incredibly warm person.
And every time I meet her, I feel very, very happy,
which is a lovely gift to give people.
And I actually read her book at the weekend.
And it got me at a moment, actually, when I was quite low.
I was feeling quite stressed out about work.
I was very frustrated with my inability
to be present when I was at home and be
a good mother and a good wife.
And I felt a really shitty mother, actually.
And so the opening-- the introduction
in the first chapter, actually-- really made me cry,
but really made me think about my life
in a very different way.
And I think it's a kind of path that Arianna's been through.
So I actually really think everyone
would love to hear from her.
How she went through that journey.
And how she manages now to be more present,
and to be with the people she loves.
And not to be distracted by all the other things that
are going on in her life, which are many.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Thank you so much, Rachel.
And thank you all for being here.
Can you all hear me?
Because we have to deal with my Greek accent.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's a beautiful introduction.
Because what I'm hoping to do with
the book is to open up conversations
like that, where we can be more personal, intimate,
and vulnerable with each other.
And where we can look at how we can build a path forward
for our lives that is more sustainable and less
fueled by burnout, sleep deprivation, exhaustion.
And how I got on this path, as Rachel alluded to,
is because of my rude awakening, my wake-up call,
which happened on April 6, 2007.
And that's how I start the book with,
when I collapsed from exhaustion, burnout, and sleep
deprivation, hit my head on the way down,
and broke my cheek bone, got four stitches on my right eye.
And as I was going from doctor's office to doctor's office,
while they were trying to find out if I had something
seriously wrong with me, like a brain tumor, heart disease.
And they discovered that I didn't
have anything medically wrong with me.
But I discovered that I had just about everything
wrong with the way I was leading my life.
And so I started asking the big questions
that I had asked in college, that my compatriots, all
the Greek philosophers, used to ask, like, what is a good life?
And Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not
worth living.
And I started asking these questions
from the starting point of what is success.
Because I feel that is a great starting point for our culture.
Because at some point, by default,
we began defining success as just two metrics--
money and power.
And this is like trying to sit on a two-legged stool.
Sooner or later, you fall off.
And that's when I came up with a third metric,
without which we cannot thrive.
And the third metric consists of four elements
that have become the four sections of the book.
The first is our well-being and our health.
If we sacrifice our health in the course of attaining
our ambitions at work, it's a really Pyrrhic victory.
And we pay a very heavy price.
And we look around at all the casualties.
And we women, if I can address the women in the room,
really cannot afford to do that.
Because the data-- I know Googlers love data,
and I have 55 pages of scientific footnotes,
because I knew I was coming to speak to you.
[LAUGHTER]
The data is unequivocal, that women in stressful jobs,
which is everybody in this room, have
a 40% greater risk of heart disease
and a 60% greater risk of diabetes.
Because we can internalize stress differently than men.
And so I'm kind of calling, in the book,
for the third women's revolution.
The first one being getting us the vote,
the second being getting us equal access to every field,
and the top of every field.
And the third one being women saying,
we don't want just to be at the top of the world,
we want to change the world.
Because the way the world has been
designed by men-- I'm not blaming
the particular men in this room, but men generally--
is not working.
[LAUGHTER]
All men in this room are excluded
from any comments I'm going to make about men.
But men have created the world of workplace
to basically treat sleep deprivation as a virility
symbol.
I mean, I had dinner recently with a guy who
bragged that he had only gotten four hours
sleep the night before.
And I didn't say it, but I thought to myself,
you know what, if you'd gotten five
this dinner would have been a lot more interesting.
[LAUGHTER]
And now you have unequivocal scientific evidence
of the importance of sleep and the dangers of sleep
deprivation, including killing brain cells.
There's an article in "Forbes" today
about how a lot of the failure of the tech
startups here in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the sleep
deprivation of the founders and the delusion
that if they just work 24/7, that's
how they're going to succeed.
So that is the central delusion of our time.
And I think it would be fantastic
if you as Googlers can sort of experiment with another way
of doing things and demonstrate to the world
that this delusion is really, literally hurting us.
And I thought back to-- I thought of that,
actually, after I wrote the book, so it's not in the book.
But I thought of how before Copernicus,
the general assumption that everybody accepted
was that the Earth was flat, right?
They accepted that mindlessly.
Because then [INAUDIBLE] better.
I think the equivalent of the pre-Copernican flat Earth
assumption in our society is the delusion
that in order to succeed, achieve, accomplish, change
the world, you have to be plugged in all the time.
And really that's a demonstration
of your commitment, of your seriousness about this.
And anything else is basically slacking off
and wanting to chill out under a mango tree.
And the scientific evidence against that
is conclusive, especially in the last few years.
So all we need to do now is to A.,
read the evidence and B., a much more important-- take,
actually, tiny, microscopic steps in our lives to change.
And when I say microscopic, I have three steps
at the end of each section, as you
know, Rachel, which are really small and manageable and tiny.
Because I really think that if we can experiment-- again,
that's the other thing you like to do, right?
If you can experiment with that, you will get your own proof.
You don't have to trust me, or even the science.
You will get your proof and you'll get it very quickly.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: It's interesting on the sleep--
I remember after the birth of my first child, which I didn't
find a terribly enjoyable experience.
Not so much the birth, but the after bit.
Some object that didn't do what I wanted it to do.
Didn't respond in the ways--
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: You couldn't talk, right?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Exactly.
And I was so overtired.
And being overtired made it much, much worse.
And when things go wrong at work,
it's normally because you're overtired.
I also have a husband who's a bit eccentric,
in that he refuses to have any kind of phone, at all.
And so he actually never looks at email.
He looks at email for about 1/2 an hour a day.
And he's much more productive and efficient than anyone
else I know.
Because he doesn't actually just sit
there like a gerbil on a wheel, just responding
to the emails that come in and then generating
more and more emails.
He actually decides what he wants to do in the morning,
he goes and does it, and by the end of the day
he's normally done it.
It's also profoundly selfish, because it
means no one in his family can get a hold him,
or interfere with him, or do anything else.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's been very interesting to me,
because I just wouldn't have the self-control to do that.
Because actually, when I'm not with my computer,
I feel very tense.
And after I get off an airplane and I open my computer,
I can feel the sort of-- [DEEP BREATH] phew,
I'm back with my addiction again.
It's very interesting.
And I literally don't have the self-control.
So I think it really would be great to hear from you two
or three of the small steps that really started getting you back
to a state where you didn't feel that you were constantly
needing to be connected.
I mean, when you realized that you had a problem, what
were the first one or two little things that you did,
that maybe some of us in this room could start copying?
Because the notion of completely changing
your life seems very scary.
But I think the notion of the tiny steps is really great.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Absolutely.
And first of all, like in AA, acknowledging
that you have a problem is the first step.
Acknowledging that our lives have become unmanageable
and we need some higher power to help us, wherever we find it,
is incredibly important.
For me, the microscopic step I took, which at the time seemed,
actually, pretty big, was at night,
to charge my smartphones , iPads, all devices,
outside my bedroom.
How many people here sleep with their smartphones
beside them, or with them?
Wow.
This is definitely the biggest percentage
of any group I've spoken to.
[LAUGHTER]
Wow.
So this is great.
[LAUGHTER]
Because you can actually get immediate results by simply--
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Tonight.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Tonight.
Tonight.
And then can you please write about it?
On your own blog, Facebook, Google+,
and "The Huffington Post."
And I will give you my email address,
to make it super easy to bypass "The Huffington Post"
bureaucracy.
It's Arianna@huffingtonpost.com.
And seriously, I would love to hear
what happens to you if you charge your devices outside.
Because what my experience and the science show,
is that if you wake up in the middle of the night
to go to the bathroom, whatever, you're
going to be tempted to look at your data, right?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Who's tempted to look at their phones
in the middle of the night?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Quite a lot.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Quite a lot.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: And if you do that,
your sleep, when you go back to sleep,
is not going to be as recharging, regenerating,
and the kind of sleep that you want to have so that you can
wake up ready to take on the day and face all the challenges
and obstacles that come your way.
And you probably have two objections to what I'm saying.
And you may have more that we can
discuss when we go to questions.
But one of them is, I need my smartphone
to wake me up in the morning, right?
OK, Pottery Barn has these great vintage alarm clocks.
They look really pretty.
They cost $32.
I gave them to all my friends for Christmas.
Excuse number two-- maybe you're in a job where
something terrible or fantastic may happen
in the middle of the night, and they need to reach you, right?
Really cheap, old-fashioned phones without data.
Just it rings, if something happens.
[LAUGHTER]
I have one of those.
So try it.
A small, microscopic step.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Actually, funny enough,
I took that step about six months ago.
Because sometimes people do have to ring me
in the middle of the night.
In fact, someone rang me in the middle of the night on Monday.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Was it legitimate?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: It was very legitimate, yes.
But I'm even more old fashioned in that I
have a landline in my house.
Which everyone sort of looks at-- shock, horror-- of what
is that thing sitting in the corner of your kitchen?
But it is brilliant, because it means that I can actually
be contacted, without being contacted by email.
Which I think is fabulous.
So I did do that.
And it did make me feel much better.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: That's great.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: And I also found, actually,
if I didn't look at my smartphone before I got
the children up and took them to school,
then I didn't have all this-- [DEEP BREATH]-- the emails,
and seeing all the things that I should be doing.
It actually meant I could give my kids breakfast and have
an enjoyable time taking them to school, I found.
For any mothers, fathers in the room,
it was a really good way of being present in the car
with my kids.
It actually made a huge difference.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Rachel, that's fantastic.
I didn't dare suggest the second step.
I though it might be too much.
But that is actually the companion piece.
Don't start-- because most people literally
open their eyes and grab their phones.
And there is no entry ritual.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: And one thing I
was reading about in your book-- there's
a lovely section about happiness and love.
And that happiness really is love,
and there's a lot of research that shows that.
How do you think about love in a work context?
I think in a home context, it's very easy for everyone
to understand that.
But if you think about being happy at work,
and love being an important part of that,
is that love of doing your work well?
Is it the fulfillment that comes from creating
something beautiful?
How do you think about that in the context of your work?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: That's a great question.
I think there are a few different entry points,
depending on your personality.
And one entry point is bringing joy back
into our everyday lives.
Because so many of us-- and I speak as a complete culprit,
as a certifiable type A, workaholic, driven personality.
Who basically felt my job was about getting it
all down, getting it done in time, getting it accomplished.
And joy?
Who has time for joy?
And now, I feel that-- not at all.
When I'm not joyful, I look at what happened.
I don't mean joyful like there are
no challenges, problems, et cetera.
I mean when I'm not like, hey, this is great, I'm blessed.
I'm doing something I love.
I'm grateful.
When I don't have that feeling, I know I'm off.
I need to course correct.
So joy, kind of really checking in, seeing how am I doing?
Am I-- you don't even have to check in,
because you know when you are in the flow, in the joy,
and when you're not.
The second one is-- and this is one of the microscopic steps
at the end of the giving section.
So just quickly, it's well-being and health, wisdom, wonder,
and giving.
So one of the microscopic steps that is a great way
to bring love into the workplace is making a personal connection
with people that otherwise, at work,
you might tend to take for granted or pass by.
It could be the cleaning crew.
It could be somebody serving lunch.
Very often, we're just too busy to interact, right?
We're either buried in our smartphones or in our thoughts.
And I think that really changes the experience at work.
And also, another thing is-- and I
think, from the Googlers I know, you're really good at that--
is to really tap into our creativity,
even though this is not part of our job.
There are people who love-- it's one of the things
that our cultural, I think, has suppressed--
every child is creative.
They sing, they draw.
Then at some point, if we can't make a living
through our creative love, we drop it.
But in fact, it's just great to maintain it in some way.
Now it's happening more and more.
I have examples in the book of people who love to sing.
They were never able or willing to even try
to make their living that way.
But they now find ways to practice.
Some of them have joined what they call threshold choirs.
And they go to hospices and sing to the terminally ill people,
because their hearing is apparently
the last sense that goes.
Or cooking.
They love to cook, and they prepare
meals for people who are in homeless shelters.
Or surprise people with their birthday celebrations.
So there's just incredible creativity
that is buried in people.
And when we tap into it, we can make it part of our giving.
And here the science is absolutely amazing,
that we are actually wired for giving.
So when we give, all the biological inflammation markers
and the precursors of disease go down.
And when we're simply engaged in self-gratification, they go up.
Obviously life is a mixture, unless we
have a lot of Mother Teresas here.
And so it's important to remember that actually giving
is a shortcut to happiness.
And Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin,
has an amazing amount of research about that.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Yeah, I was very interested
reading "The Giving Book," because it reminded me
of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago
when I was down in San Francisco.
And there's obviously a lot of debate going on
about technology companies in San Francisco and the role
that we play in society.
And there was a subset of people who
I was talking to who really believe that their product is
their gift to society.
And I said, yes, that's a good starting point,
to have a product that's great for society.
But it's probably not sufficient,
and it's probably not going to be seen as sufficient
by the community in San Francisco, who expect people
to be present and part of the community
and not just their products.
And so I thought that that was an interesting observation.
In the giving, I think that the notion of public service
has become massively undervalued.
You touch on that in this section.
And I think all the partisanship in politics
and and things makes that very hard.
The old-fashioned public service--
that my parents probably think about
and many people's parents would think about--
seems to be terribly, terribly different
from how people think about public service, and politics,
and those kinds of things today.
And I'm interested-- you've obviously
dealt with lots of people who do public service-- you could
argue that journalism is a public service.
How do you think about public service?
And what do you think we're getting wrong at the moment,
that people don't want to stand up and do that stuff,
in some of the more traditional ways that they used to?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes, I think a lot about it.
Because I've always been fascinated by politics, and you
spend a lot of time around politics.
And something has happened where people
have lost hope that good, major, big things are
going to happen through politics.
And I think that we need to recapture that spirit, where A,
we don't demonize people that we disagree with.
And B, can take it to the next level-- I know your husband
works with David Cameron, and I quote what David Cameron said.
He said, actually, two important things, one of which
was really misunderstood, which I
thought was really important, about compassionate capitalism.
That whole element.
For me, it's very important not just
to delegate our compassion to government.
Government has its role, but to also
take some responsibility ourselves.
And the other thing was about the national happiness index--
that it's not just about the gross national product.
How do you measure well-being?
How do you measure a country's human capital, basically?
And we have staggering statistics
of dysfunctionality here.
We have, in the States, 3/4 of our health care costs
are for preventable, chronic stress related diseases.
We have an epidemic of increasing addiction,
depression, and all the criteria of lives that are not
sustainable without some kind of chemical crutch.
And that's why I feel that right now, we
are at the tipping point, where a lot of people
realize that fundamental changes have to happen.
Starting at the individual level, but a lot of companies--
Google included-- are recognizing
that the well-being of their employees
is not separate from the bottom line of the company.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Yeah, I find that the way that governments
don't try and measure happiness at all--
it's always very focused on the economic side.
Because actually, the measurement of happiness
would, in some ways, get at the demands that
are put on the state by all the failures in the system.
The people who are sick who didn't need to get sick.
The people who become addicted and all those kinds of things.
And because we don't measure any of those things,
the demands on the state get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then you just end up with a fairly pointless debate
between the right and the left about how big the state should
be.
Rather than thinking, if we put less demands on the state,
then different consequences would happen.
And I find that really not well thought through.
I thought the other thing in your book which
was fascinating, which is true from a lot of the statistics,
is that religion makes people happy.
There's some very clear statistical evidence,
if you track happiness, that people who believe in a creed
are happier.
But I thought you made the lovely point,
is that because so many of us reject religion now--
we live in a very secular society-- we also
reject spiritualism.
And that's a big mistake, because spiritualism
is an enormous part of well-being and joy and about
future learning.
And I was really interested in your thoughts on that.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes, and it's very different.
I was at LinkedIn, and I had lunch with Reid Hoffman,
before I came here.
And he said, I call myself a mystical atheist.
And I think a lot of people who would say they're atheists,
when you really scratch the surface,
they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism
or wonder at the mystery of life.
But they don't believe in a particular creed.
And for me, really what matters--
and that's what my wonder section is about--
is to have that sense that there is something
amazing and mysterious about life.
That we haven't figured it all out,
and the journey of exploring it-- it's fascinating.
I'm personally much more interested in an inner space
project than an outer space project.
And I've always been very interested in that,
ever since I was a kid.
That's why I have a whole section on coincidences.
Because I find that even my most militantly atheistic friends
love coincidences, because they're
like this kind of miracles that the universe seems
to perform anonymously.
And you can't exactly explain them,
and you don't need to draw grand conclusions from them.
But they're almost like a little reminder
that we're living in an incredibly amazing,
mysterious place.
And we forget that when we shrink ourselves
down to our to-do list.
That's really, for me, the worst thing.
If we completely identify ourselves
with our jobs-- however magnificent
our jobs may be-- we are missing out
on the fullness and the grandeur of what a human being is.
And also, I think we make bad decisions about our lives.
I was talking to Ellen.
I just did her show last weekend.
And we're talking about the fact that if she had really
believed, in 2008 when she came out,
that the most important thing in her life, who she was,
what defined her, was to be a successful sitcom host, then
she would never have come out.
Because coming out was important to her as an individual.
She didn't want to live with the shame and the fear of being
found out, of not owning up to who she was.
But when she did come out, her sitcom was canceled,
and the phone did not ring for three years.
After that, of course, she did thrive, in every sense
of the word.
But she had to take that risk.
And she wouldn't have taken it, as she
said, if she didn't think there was something more in life
than the job.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: That's a rather amazing story.
The last thing I wanted to ask before throwing open
to questions, if anyone wants to come up,
was-- Larry spoke at TED last week, actually--
and this was about the wisdom and knowledge section.
And it became very clear to me, in listening
to what he was saying and talking to him in advance,
that search is really a crucial part of who he is.
Because he's very curious, and he
wants to understand about the world.
And he wants to understand how you can improve things,
how you can create a self-driving car, how you could
create bicycles that were more efficient.
And that search is a huge part of that.
He has this thought, why is it like that,
why does it work like that?
And then he goes and searches, searches on YouTube
and searches on Google.
And he finds all the experts, and he
finds all the information.
And so I just thought that was such an interesting insight
as to Google.
And it got me from Google and search
to your section about wisdom, and your point about discovery
and being open to new ideas.
And all those kinds of things, which I guess you
get to do a lot in your job, anyway.
How do you keep yourself on a constant course
of wondering and getting wiser about things?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well I feel that's one
of my favorite things to do.
And I also love what Meng is doing here,
with "Search Inside Yourself."
And I actually just joined his board.
Meng, are you there?
[APPLAUSE]
And I'm really looking forward to working with Meng on this.
Because for me, that that's the search
that interests me the most.
But whatever it is that interests you the most,
pursuing it always leaves open amazing possibilities.
And that's what I love.
But what makes it really hard to wonder and notice these things
is our obsession with multitasking and avoiding
any kind of pauses and space in our lives.
And as I've been traveling around the world,
as "The Huffington Post" is launching across the globe,
I'm just amazed by how ancient wisdom has always
incorporated pauses.
I was in Japan when we launched there.
They have the actual concept of-- ma,
is their word, which literally means "space."
And creating spaces in life is an incredible regeneration
tool.
And I now have included these spaces in my life.
I deliberately do that.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: How do you-- I don't understand
how you write a book, how you launch
your company all around the world, how you're still
an active journalist, how you can give everyone your email.
And I'm sure if I email--
[LAUGHTER]
--you'll respond.
So I find it amazing how you can create pauses in your life.
And that you're not constantly exhausted.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Here's what is interesting.
Well first of all, I prioritize sleep.
And that means saying no to things you want to do.
It's not easy.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: No, it's hard.
I think the hardest thing.
Yeah.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Last night Sheryl Sandberg Interviewed me
at the San Francisco Symphony Hall.
And then I had to sign books.
And I would have loved to go and have dinner with her,
but I went to bed.
Because if I had gone out to dinner
and hadn't gotten my at least seven hours
sleep that I need, and had to get up early to do TV,
I would not be enjoying being here with you now.
And I'm really enjoying it, and I'm 100% present.
And I'm not tired.
And I hate being tired more than I hate anything.
And I've had so many people come up to me in the last two days--
the book just came out two days ago,
as I've been talking about-- I had two women who
came to me yesterday and said the same thing, they said,
I don't remember the last time I was not tired.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: I feel that a lot.
Who else feels that in this room?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Rachel, I have to become your--
Who feels the last time that they weren't tired?
Maybe not that many of us, but I certainly do.
Jacob does, because he spends too much time on an airplane.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Can I become your third metric sponsor?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Yes, please.
I'll email you once a week, and I know that you'll--
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I did Karen May-- you know Karen?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: There's Karen.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Karen, where are you?
Karen and I bonded at Wisdom 2.0 and we had dinner together.
KAREN MAY: You're my sleep coach.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: And now I'm her sleep coach.
[APPLAUSE]
RACHEL WHETSTONE: So when did you
discover that you hate being tired?
When did you get the cause and effect?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I'm a bad case,
because I only got it after I collapsed.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: And that made you really
understand that you just need to sleep?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: That was the first time
I realized that I really-- I was one of those cases--
until my collapse, I literally was not even aware
that I was tired all the time.
Except that all my friends knew that if we stopped
talking for a minute, I would fall asleep.
I would fall asleep instantly, because I
had such a deficit of sleep that I was operating under.
I'm a bad case.
If I can change, anybody can.
That's basically why I am giving you
all these examples of how bad of a case I was.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: And for the mothers-- parents in the room.
Let's be gender neutral.
You obviously have children, and you've obviously
had to work at being present with them.
And what are the tricks that you've
learned to put-- I'm not thinking about "The Huffington
Post" now, I'm not thinking about these things.
I'm thinking about family and other people.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well first of all,
let me just say that when I look back,
I was always there for my children.
I didn't miss things.
For a lot of my life, as I was a writer, before "The Huffington
Post," I worked from home.
So they could walk in at any time, et cetera.
I was always fully available.
But when I look back, I would often be with them,
but not be with them mentality.
And that's a big problem.
So now, since my wake up call, I really
have been there with them.
And they're now 22 and 24.
So I definitely missed times, when I was only
physically present with them.
And the experience is so dramatically different.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: I know, I had that last night.
I was reading a story to my son, "The Famous Five."
And I realized that I'd read an entire chapter to him
out loud where I had been writing a blog post in my head.
And I couldn't remember a single thing that was in the chapter.
It was extraordinary, how one can just not be present at all.
And what was interesting is after I put him to bed,
I then couldn't actually remember a single thing
of the blog post that I'd been doing in my brain.
So I'd ended up failing at both things miserably.
Although I don't think he noticed, actually.
But I certainly noticed.
And that's why I think phones and things can be so bad.
Because when you have them with your kids,
you want to be present.
And just a little bit of looking at an email,
or looking at a text message, just gets you straight--
thinking about the other thing--
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Exactly.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: --rather than being focused with them.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: But you know, honestly Rachel,
I can't say enough about how important it
is that you're talking about that.
Or that we are having this conversation.
Because that's what we haven't had.
And having this conversation, and saying
what it is that we are experiencing,
is going to make all the difference.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: Someone else wants to share.
AUDIENCE: Hi welcome. [SPEAKING GREEK]
RACHEL WHETSTONE: This is going to be in Greek.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: [SPEAKING GREEK] I had a quick question.
It was more geared around diversity.
As a fellow Greek and a woman, I'm
sure you've been quite diverse in your space.
And I was wondering, what are some of the challenges you've
faced in the business world?
Or perhaps how you use diversity as an advantage?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well some of the challenges
I faced were inside my head.
Because for a long time, I had a huge problem with my accent.
It was the bane of my existence.
I tried to change it.
Actually, my ex-husband gave me the most passive
aggressive gift one birthday.
He gave me a dialect coach to follow me around for two weeks.
And not just any dialect coach, but Jessica Drake,
who's a famous Hollywood dialect coach who
trained Tom Hanks in "Forrest Gump."
And she would walk around with me and give me notes.
Including-- my children were young at the time--
she would put diphthong symbols on the Dr. Seuss books.
So when I would be reading to them I would be practicing.
And by the end of two weeks, I was completely paralyzed.
I knew what I was doing wrong, but I
couldn't fix it and have a normal life.
And also, soon after that I divorced my husband.
Not because of the dialect coach.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm saying that-- obviously, every company
needs to pay attention to diversity,
for the sake of creativity, culture, and everything.
But also, we need to realize how much of what
happens with us immigrants, outsiders, is in our heads.
And one of my favorite quotes in my book is from Montaigne.
He said, there were many terrible things in my life,
but most of them never happened.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: I think there's another one.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm one of the perpetually tired,
so hopefully this is coherent.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So I was wondering-- I love
the metaphor of the two-legged stool and the third metric
being the third leg.
How do you feel your book, and your overall philosophy,
applies to those who don't even have access to the first two
legs?
When you think about different socioeconomic classes--
like a single parent working three jobs--
where does "Thrive" fit into that?
And what can we do, as the privileged few,
honestly, to expand that beyond just
Google and the corporate world?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Absolutely.
Great question.
I have a whole section in the book about that.
Because I feel everything I'm saying,
and all the tips and practice in the book,
are ultimately about building our own human resources
and our own resilience.
And recognizing that whatever our circumstances,
whether we're at the top of the world struggling
with all the demands of success or struggling
to put food on the table, we all have a place in us--
all of us, just by virtue of being alive-- that
is a center of strength, wisdom, joy, and peace.
We all have it.
We would not be alive if we didn't have it.
Most of the time we don't live there.
But we all have it, and it's up to us
how quickly we can get back to it.
So that's why I even include in the book people who
are in extreme circumstances, like in concentration camps.
Like Viktor Frankl who talked about people in concentration
camps who somehow were able to tap into that center
and therefore have the ultimate freedom,
which is to choose your own attitude and your own way
of thinking and responding.
And also, I have studies-- there's
a famous study done in Illinois, when the Bell phone
company downsized dramatically.
Like 50% of the employees lost their jobs.
And they followed everybody who lost their job.
And they saw that 2/3 of them were kind of destroyed by it.
They became alcoholics, depressed, got divorced.
1/3 of them thrived.
Not only did they survive the downsizing,
but they went on to start their own companies,
go to bigger and better jobs.
So how we respond to bad things happening in our lives, even
terrible things happening, is a function
of how resilient we are.
And how much we have developed our own human capital.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: I though Frankl's book was amazing,
about how some people got broken by it,
and some people were able to move beyond it and through it.
It's really amazing.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming.
My question, I think, is in the same vein as the last one.
And I'm wondering how you feel your life may
have been different if you'd had this perspective
and mentality when you were 18 years old, versus now.
And if, for some reason, it meant
you may not have been at the top of your game--
but still a successful journalist in some regard,
maybe differently than you are now-- would that have been OK?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: So I have to get up and answer
this question, because it's the most important question.
And I really think this is the key to where
the thriving, as a movement, as a way of living
our lives differently, works or not.
And I totally understand why you're asking this question.
Because when you look around, you
see that the majority of people we
know about who are successful are workaholics.
So you look around and you say, hey
they succeeded because they worked around the clock.
And they were always available, et cetera.
But there is no correlation, that's
what I'm here to tell you.
And again, I was having this conversation with Oprah,
one of the super successful people we know.
And I just taped Super Soul Sunday with her,
which is airing on Mother's Day.
And we both agreed that if Oprah had not
worked as hard as she did, including, as she said,
often going to bed at night with her clothes
on because she was too tired to take them off,
she would still be Oprah.
But she would have had a much better time of it.
Because what makes her Oprah is not
that she worked around the clock,
but all the great gifts and talents and abilities
to connect with people.
These are hers.
It's not a function of how hard she works.
And what makes me me is whatever talents I have,
and what makes Rachel Rachel are her talents.
And what makes you you are your talents and gifts.
Whatever is our unique personality,
that's what makes us us.
I'm not for a minute suggesting we're not going to work hard.
I work hard now.
I'm suggesting working stupidly, and not regenerating,
and not renewing ourselves, which
only make us better at work.
And I think the ultimate evidence here is in sports.
Because sports is all about winning.
Nothing else matters, right?
And now sports is ahead of business
in incorporating all these thriving measures.
And sleep, and meditation, and yoga, and pauses.
And you saw, probably, the LeBron James meditation video
that went crazy viral.
And another way to explain that is,
I was watching an interview that Charlie Rose did
with Andy Murray, the great tennis player.
And they talked about how when you're really
recharged on the court-- do you play tennis?
RACHEL WHETSTONE: No, I'm terrible at it,
but I do sometimes play, yes.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well for those who play tennis,
whether good or bad, you know that when
you're really recharged and feel good,
the ball is coming at you almost in slow motion.
So you have time to deal with it,
to decide what you're going to do,
where you're going to hit it, et cetera.
And I feel it's a great metaphor for life.
I know that when I'm exhausted, its as though everything
is coming at me this way, and I have to deal with it,
and I don't know where I'm looking,
and it's like an onslaught.
And so this is like the key thing
that we need to disentangle.
The fact that more successful people we know,
or perhaps every successful person we know,
has worked around the clock.
With the assumption, therefore, that that's
the only way to succeed.
That's the kind of disentangling that has
to happen in our brains, and I think
the way to do it is through experimenting and collecting
data.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: It's also, presumably,
about phases in your life.
I mean, presumably, when you were starting up
"The Huffington Post," that was a very intense phase.
And now you know more how to do the job,
there are ways in which you can pause and do things
differently.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Right, but also,
even when you have the most intense phases,
then you can have a pause, regenerate, and then have
another intense phase.
I think it's the lack of pauses and opportunities
to regenerate and renew ourselves
that's the problem, not the intensity.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Arianna, for coming.
So I've been dying to ask this question, since you're
giving practical tips.
One of the problems this entire room suffers from
is the volume of information we deal with, especially email.
So I want to ask a question about email hygiene,
as to how you do it.
Now you take the opposite attack, as Rachel mentioned.
You stand up at conferences and say,
email me at arianna@huffingtonpost.com.
And you did it at Wisdom 2.0.
Since we test everything at Google--
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: And I got an amazing amounts of email.
AUDIENCE: So I emailed you.
[LAUGHTER]
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: And I responded, right?
AUDIENCE: You responded immediately,
connected me to the editor--
RACHEL WHETSTONE: You're a very effective router.
AUDIENCE: Exactly.
And I went on to become a blogger at Huffington,
and you responded every single time.
And I have no idea how you do it.
I just want to know, specifically,
do you have 10 people scanning your email
and answering for you?
Or do you actually look at every single email?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I do have people scanning,
but I look at every email.
I don't look at them in real time.
That's the key.
The key is what you said about your husband.
The problem is when we allow email to just constantly
intrude into what we're doing.
If you think of it, it would be the equivalent,
before email, if every time a letter came,
the postman rang the bell and you got up
and you went out and got the letter and opened it.
And then you went back to what you were doing.
It doesn't make any sense.
So changing our email protocol is absolutely key.
At "The Huffington Post," for example,
we have new email rules.
Which is that, unless you're on the night shift or the weekend
shift-- we're a 24/7 media operation,
so there are a lot of people on this shift-- they are not
expected to answer work email after hours.
If there is an emergency and we need to reach you,
we'll text you, we'll call you, we'll find you.
And that makes a big difference, because I
think what's hard for people is the expectation that they
have to be always on.
And even Goldman Sachs, now, told its analysts
that they don't have to work weekends,
which is a radical point.
But it shows that there's something happening,
that it's in the air, that they're
going to be more effective.
And fewer of them will commit suicide, too.
Right now there's a spate of suicides
in the finance industry.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: I think there should be a rule that there's
no such thing as an urgent email.
If you want to get hold of someone, you ring them.
Because otherwise you're expecting people
to walk around like this the whole time
to catch the urgent email, which is very unrelaxing.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Arianna.
Thank you for being here.
You've had a unique journey.
You've been successful in a time when
we've got great political and economic polarization.
You've been successful on the right and the left
and certainly economically.
And this newest work, "Thrive," going from the ethic of work
harder to be successful to try to be happier.
There aren't many people who've made that transition.
And I'm often stumped by people who are diametrically
opposed to me philosophically, being
on the other end of the spectrum.
Can you say something about the major philosophical transitions
you've made in your life?
And how we might bring others along, as well?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: So philosophically,
ever since I can remember, I've always
been really interested in these big questions-- what
is the purpose of life, what is the meaning of life,
why are we here?
I never considered that these questions
had to stop when we're in college.
I always love these conversations.
And I fell in love with a man, when we lived in London,
because he was always writing about these questions.
And he was twice my age and half my size, but I didn't care.
And I was with him for seven years,
and it was all about these conversations.
And I find that the difference was that these conversations
had remained intellectual for me,
and now I tried to apply them.
I tried to apply the wisdom, and loved the fact
that so much of the ancient wisdom
I have studied-- whether it's Buddhism, or Christianity,
or mystical Sufism-- basically says the same thing.
Which is that life is shaped from the inside out, period.
And I love, now, to be putting this into practice.
So that's the difference.
The difference is now that I'm applying these things
that before I just used to have as fascinating conversations.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Arianna.
Thanks for coming.
So you talk about pauses and building them into your life.
And I, two and a 1/2 years ago, took a three-month break
from Google for an unpaid leave.
So I'm wondering, what is your take,
so we can help companies figure out
how to build in these pauses that ultimately make people
more effective, more visible, and just
having more energy overall?
Because I feel like that's one of my main messages
that I want to be sharing with people,
as I've learned a lot from that.
And I want to help, from the corporate level,
other companies understand.
I would love to hear what you have to say about it.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well that is the key-- sharing
your experience.
Because we need more role models of doing things differently.
At LinkedIn where I was before, I
was talking to the general counsel.
And Erica, who's one of the more successful women lawyers,
was talking about how she started
integrating pauses in her life.
She would go hiking over the weekend
and see how incredible space is created
in her and in her responses.
And then she started doing it on Fridays.
And then she went on a call-- she had an important conference
call.
But she still went on her hike.
And she said there she was on the conference call,
and suddenly she saw a mountain lion.
And she was talking about how, for the first time,
she noticed that there were black squirrels.
And that is amazing, because she always
thought that squirrels were gray.
And in her office she has this picture
of a squirrel, which is like her kind of totem,
about, remember to look at the color of the squirrel.
So I think hearing these stories, among women and men
who are successful, making room in their lives for pauses
and space, is very reinforcing.
And that's one of the things I want to do.
And that's why I always want to ask you all
to write about these things.
Because when you write about taking a sabbatical for three
months, and the world did not collapse.
And you're back, and your job, or another job,
was still there.
It just takes a lot of the fear out of these pauses.
And I think companies are beginning
to realize that if you have a good employee that you want
to keep, allowing them to take a sabbatical
is just in the interest of everybody.
AUDIENCE: Well that's great, because I'm
writing a book about it.
And it's called "Pause."
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Oh, fantastic.
Well let us know.
We'd love to help promote it.
AUDIENCE: So I've been at Google for nine years.
And just to your point about being a role model,
I thought I'd send you an email while I was sitting
in the front row, but decided, maybe
I'll get up here and say it.
We talk all about working around the clock.
I've been at Google for nine years,
and I don't work around the clock.
I don't check my email, I don't respond
to email in the evenings.
And I think I've done fairly well at Google.
So I'm standing up here, telling people
that you can do it at Google.
You don't have to be connected to your email.
You don't have to respond to everything in real time.
But it's hard to say it, because you're
in a company where everyone does it.
And so you kind of stand out as the anomaly.
So I think we have to figure out how
to make this a safe environment, in Google
and the corporate world.
To talk about it, to say, you can be successful.
You can do great things by taking pauses,
by doing things that you're more interested in doing
on weekends than doing a document or an email.
But it takes people to stand up and start talking about it,
before that can happen.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Absolutely.
Until we get to a critical mass.
And so everybody who stands up, as you did now, and says that
is bringing us closer to the critical mass.
And also being aware of companies and individuals who
are doing it, like the Boston Consulting Group.
They have what they call a red zone report, where
if consultants are billing too many hours,
they consider them at risk of depression,
health problems, et cetera.
So they issue a red zone report and talk to them.
So I have a lot of those examples that it is happening.
Just us talking about it is accelerating
the shift that's already happening.
This is a global shift.
And it's happening partly because we are recognizing ,
more and more, the price we are paying.
And partly because more and more people
are beginning to live differently,
make different choices, themselves or their companies
and seeing that this has a great positive impact.
Let me give you an example.
Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, the third largest health
insurance company, had a terrible skiing accident,
broke his neck, spent a year hooked on narcotics, barely
able to function, And then discovered
what he called his cocktail, of yoga, meditation,
and acupuncture, which saved him.
It had such a positive transformative impact on him,
that he made them available as benefits
to his 49,000 employees.
And then he brought in Duke University
to study the cost benefit.
And they found a 7% reduction in health care costs
and a 69-minute improvement in productivity every day.
So you see, here we're talking about data.
It's not his opinion, it's not California new-agey,
flaky stuff.
It's proof.
And that's how we're going to get a critical mass.
Thank you for telling us.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: And I think, on that note,
we are out of time.
But thank you so much for coming and sharing
your advice with us.
And really, really good luck with your book talk.
Thank you so much.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]