Arianna Huffington: “Value your well being above money and power”

Arianna Huffington is the founder of The Huffington Post. She is the author of 14 books and has featured on Time magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people

1. "Something in our culture has made us identify with our jobs so strongly that we’ve come to believe we are our jobs. I love my job, and that’s a real blessing, but I know
I am not my job. Recently, I was doing an interview with Oprah and one of the things she asks all of her guests is: what do you know for sure? I said, ‘However magnificent your job is, you are, in your essence, more magnificent.'"

2. "Every night, give up something that no longer serves you. It could be a grudge, negative emotion such as jealousy, or a project that you were going to embark on, like in my case: learning to be a good skier. By dropping an unreachable project, you complete it. Now, while my children go skiing, I sit by the fire and read. Heaven."

3. "We know much more about the state of our smartphone than we do about the state of our own being. If you have an iPhone, like I do, you’ll get alerts saying ‘20% battery remaining’, ‘17% remaining’. By about 13% you’ll get really nervous and start searching for a charger. Why don’t we feel that way about ourselves? When I collapsed from exhaustion seven years ago, I must have been below 0% battery but I wasn’t even aware of it. We’ve created a ‘new normal’, where we think being burnt-out is the price we pay for success – a complete delusion. Even God worked for six days then took the seventh day off."

4. "Try unplugging. Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology officer at [multinational tech company] Cisco. She oversees tens of thousands of engineers. I saw her speak at a conference in New York and she said, ‘I sleep for eight hours a night, I meditate, and every Saturday I do a digital detox. I thought to myself, ‘If she oversees thousands of engineers and she can do a digital detox, so can I."

5. "Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s the stepping stone to success. Ignore that negative voice in your head. I call mine my ‘obnoxious roommate’. It has been the bane of my existence, telling me my accent was awful and I had to do everything I could to change it, especially while I was at Cambridge University and everyone was making fun of me. Then I moved to New York and met Henry Kissinger. He said, ‘Never worry about your accent because in American public life you can never overestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility.' He made me see things with a bit of humour."

6. "There’s nothing worse than comparing ourselves. Each one of us is unique and any time we spend comparing ourselves to others is like drinking poison. One of my favourite quotes is by ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov: ‘I don’t try to dance better than anyone else, I just try to dance better than myself.'"

7. "Women are going to lead a new revolution. I call it the third women’s revolution. The first was giving us the vote; the second, giving us access to the same jobs as men and the chance to be at the top, and the third is saying, ‘You know what? We don’t just want to be at the top of the world, we want to change the world.’ Men have made being busy a badge of honour. We need to change that."

8. "If we only value power and money, we’re never going to have enough – we’ll always want more. We have to realise what else we value and make sure that includes our wellbeing, our capacity to find our own wisdom and to wonder at life. We can all do that with more gratitude, more grace and, yes more sleep."

Life Lessons Part 1: Arianna Huffington, Laura Bates & Francesca Martinez on what every woman should know