Advice from Arianna Huffington in 17 Minutes | How to Work Smarter and Live Better

We are swimming in a culture built on a delusion. But my accent was a huge impediment. When I started speaking, people would laugh, literally. I have to get up and ask this question because it's the most important question.

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She's Arianna Huffington, and here's my take on her Top 10 Rules of Success Volume 2. Enjoy. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: put your own oxygen mask on first.

We are swimming in a culture, um, built on a delusion. The delusion that burnout is the way to succeed. And for me, that's the first thing that an entrepreneur needs to dispel for themselves, that myth. And to recognize that on the contrary, as they tell us on airplanes, you need to put your own oxygen mask first. And that's not self-indulgent. That doesn't mean you don't really care enough for your business. That means that you are taking the most important step towards having a thriving business.

Rule number 2: Keep on going.

I discovered the Cambridge Union, the university's famed debating society. But my accent was a huge impediment. When I started speaking, people would laugh, literally. On Monday, there is a debate on the English legal system. The exact motion is the present English legal system is incompatible with justice. But I kept going. I literally taught myself to speak at the union.

Rule number 3, get more sleep.

When Jeff Bezos, for example, wrote on Thrive a piece, the headline he chose was, yes, why my sleeping 8 hours a night is good for Amazon shareholders. It went crazy viral and had a big impact on people. Yes. Because he analyzed his decision-making. Yes. And he said, the value I bring to Amazon is the quality of my decisions. And if I get 6 hours, if I get less than my optimal 8 hours, he has analyzed that his decisions are 5 to 20% less good.

Rule number 4: Don't be afraid to fail.

What I say to everyone as the best business advice has to do with not being afraid to fail. Because so many business people, so many entrepreneurs don't even start on an idea because they're afraid it may fail. And there's a good chance that it may fail. I mean, when we were ready to start the Huffington Post, you have no idea how many people were trying to dissuade me from doing it. And I mean people who loved me. The rest on the grounds that why do you need that? You know, the internet is a young person's business. You are a successful author. Why do you need to risk your success, et cetera? So being willing to fail and recognizing, as my mother used to tell us, that failure is not the opposite of success, it's a stepping stone to success, that is key.

Also, if you want to learn from more successful female entrepreneurs, check out my 250 64 series. The link is free. It's in the description below.

When I'm not joyful, I look at what happened.

Rule number 5: Delegate.

I think delegating is incredibly important. A lot of entrepreneurs think everything has to go through them, and it becomes really a complete mess because, A, they can't possibly know everything, and B, they become a stumbling block for decisions. You know, if everything has to go through them. So I had to learn to hire great people and to delegate, not to micromanage. So here, let's take Thrive. I hired a fantastic COO who used to run SurveyMonkey, who had a lot of knowledge about setting up infrastructures and processes and quotas for salespeople. Bonus systems and all the things you need to get right to be able to deliver a profitable company. When I left the Huffington Post, I took a couple of amazing people with me whom I knew extremely well, which is also a great advantage. You know, one of them had joined the Huffington Post as an intern, so he had been with me for 12 years, and he is now running the global expansion of Thrive. The other one is used to be my chief of staff, and he's now running biz dev. So this is just a few examples of bringing great talent with you and not living under this delusion that, hey, I, superwoman, know everything, I'm going to do everything. Because A, I don't know everything, and B, I'm not going to be as good if I try to do everything.

Rule number 6: reconnect.

Neuroscience tells us that it takes less than 1 minute to course correct. The problem is not stress. We're not going to eliminate stress completely. The problem is stress becoming cumulative. So you have a stressful meeting, and then you go on to another thing and bring the stress with you. If you took 1 minute to take deep breaths, To look at something that helps you course correct, to be pictures of your kids. It could be a quote that you love. I have quotes that I love all around my office. My favorite is, "Live life as though everything is rigged in your favor." I love that quote. I love that quote. I have been saying that quote for weeks now, telling everyone who will listen. I have a few little quote cards laminated in my wallet. I'll give you a few when we're done. Go backstage. Okay. So in terms of vacation, what is most important is it's better to have a short vacation but really disconnect than a long vacation where you try to take phone calls and be on conference calls. You know, I'm— I was talking to Barry Summers. He's actually the head of private wealth globally at JPMorgan. And he said, I learned the hard way that if I'm on vacation and I think, yeah, I'm gonna do this one conference call, what does it matter? The truth is your whole mood and mode of behavior changes. You are suddenly back at work, you have to prep, then after the call you are thinking about it. So you're away from your vacation time with your family or your friends or whoever you are with. So I think it's better to at least have a few days when you can really disconnect, and we have an app for that, as you would expect.

Yes.

It's called ThriveAway. And if you are on vacation and I email you, I'll get an email back that says, "Jody's on vacation until such and such a day. If this is urgent, please contact so-and-so. If it is not, email her after that date." This email will be deleted. That is hardcore, but important, because if it's— the whole point is that you are going to have a vacation. It can be 2 days or 2 weeks. You decide what you can handle. But during that period, you are going to have zero emails in your inbox. When was the last time you had zero emails in your inbox? I think it was the day I started my job, approximately 7 years ago. [Speaker:DR_BORIS] Exactly. So the point is that if you don't do that and you have that— excuse me— stupid out-of-office email, what happens with that? How often do you get an out-of-office email and 2 minutes later you get an email from that person? You know, it doesn't really mean anything. And we need to kind of have that real disconnect. In order to reconnect and be recharged. And we all know that really the best things we bring to work are our creativity, our great ideas, our problem solving, our ability to collaborate, and these are the first things that are sacrificed when we are burnt out.

Rule number 7: Be connected to your wisdom.

If we are going to really cultivate leaders who will be able to take us through these turbulent times, they need to be able to, first of all, see the icebergs before they hit the Titanic. That's leadership. Everybody can see the iceberg after it has hit the Titanic. Aaron Cullen, who was the CFO of Lehman Brothers just before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, wrote a very moving piece in the New York Times recently in which she described her life. She said she had no life. She was working around the clock. Her marriage was destroyed. Her relationships were destroyed. And the thing she didn't say is that— and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. So that's the thing that I want everybody to understand. It's not like it's a trade-off, like I'm just going to build this great company and the hell with my relationships and my life and my health. You can no longer do that because the world is moving so fast, change is happening at such overwhelming speed that if you're not really connected with your own wisdom, your own intuition, if you're not able to listen to what Steve Jobs called the whisperings, if you're not going to be able to tap into the zeitgeist to know what the needs are before even your customers know what they need, People didn't know they needed an iPod, did they? If you don't know all that, you're not going to be able to be an effective leader.

Rule number 8: Don't sleep with your phone.

Do you mind if I put my phone to sleep here on this phone bed here?

Can you tell us about this phone bed of yours?

Yes, yes. So we launched Thrive in December 2016. 2016, so just over a year ago, and there was one product that I wanted to launch at the same time with the company, and that's this phone bed. It's actually a charging station. We are all addicted to our phones. What we recommend is that you put this little phone bed charging station outside all the bedrooms in the home, and then at night everybody puts their phones to sleep. And you put them under the blankie, you tuck them in, you say good night, and the idea is that while the phone is sleeping and charging, you are sleeping and recharging. I love the idea. Over 70% of people sleep with their phones by their bed. According to all the latest science, the worst thing you can do for your sleep— Is to sleep with your phone on your bed. Yes. The phone is the repository of every project, every problem, everything we're dealing with when we're awake. Therefore, it needs to be separated from us when we're asleep and recharging so that we can wake up fully recharged and deal with whatever life brings us.

Rule number 9: Make sacrifices.

You know, there is a quote that we both love by Mark Nepo, which is sacrificing what is not really important in order to focus on what is truly sacred. And so I would say, for example, let me tell you some of my sacrifices. I have not seen a single episode of Game of Thrones. I would like to, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I also do a regular life audit and look at what are the projects that I put down Sometimes I don't even put them down in writing, but in my head, it's like, I want to do this, or I want to do that. And they are like files that you open on your computer, and you need to close them if you are not going to do them. Just sweep it clean. Yeah, so what I do is like, for example, one of my open computer files in my brain was, I want to learn to be a good skier, because my children love to ski, my two daughters. And I think it's fun to do something like that together, and I'm allowed to ski. And then I kind of realized that I'm not going to give the time and attention it takes to become a good skier, so I have this rule which is called, "I can complete a project by dropping it." And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is work smart. I'm wondering how you feel your life may have been different if you had this perspective and mentality when you were 18 years old 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? So I have to get up and ask this question because it's the most important question. And I really think this is the key to whether thriving as a movement, as a way of living our lives differently, works or not. And this is because— 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'll say it again. I was having this conversation with Oprah, right? 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 have 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. And 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 and whatever is our unique personality. That's what makes us us. And then 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 makes us better at work.

Now I've got a special bonus clip from Arianna on how to not chase work-life balance that I think you're going to enjoy. Enjoy. But before that, it's time for the 3-point landing questions. Let's go from just watching a video to taking action. Here we go. Question number 1: Where can you work smarter? Number 2: How can you experiment with getting more sleep this week? And number 3: Where are you afraid to fail and just need to get started?

Work-life balance is a myth. You can call it work-life integration. Jeff Bezos calls it work-life harmony. The key is that there's never going to be a day when everything is balanced, you know, 50% work, 50% family. We're not talking about that. We are talking about refueling. So there may be a time when you pull an all-nighter. I mean, I obviously emphasize sleep, but I— Have you pulled all-nighters? Yes. I mean, let's say the day before we launched Thrive, we're all in the office pulling an all-nighter. The question is how quickly do you refuel? The next— if you can do it the next day or the day after that. Even in our cultural values at Thrive, we have something that we call Thrive Time. We don't say this is a 9-to-5 job. There are no interesting 9-to-5 jobs.

If you want more Arianna, check out the first Top 10 Rules video I made on her. The link is right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

We are afraid of failing. When I'm not joyful, I look at what happened. We have a dedicated section called Good News Section. It only has good news.