Arianna Huffington, née Ariadnē-Anna Stasinopoulou / b. 1950 / Athens, Greece / Businesswoman, Publisher, Political Commentator, Author
Charity
Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Child-Rearing
If you look at the best research on parenting, it comes down to one thing and one thing only. Not what you teach your children or how much time you spend with them, or if you read to them or not. What it comes down to is who you are, because we teach who we are.
On Becoming Fearless . . . in Love, Work, and Life (2006).
Employees
Treat people like family, and they will be loyal and give their all.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Fear
Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Forgiving and Forgetting
There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Health
On the importance of getting enough sleep:
Sleep your way to the top.
Source unknown.
Huffington on Huffington
My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice. . . . [S]he taught me that there is always a way around a problem—you’ve just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
And whenever I’d complain or was upset about something in my own life, my mother had the same advice: “Darling, just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.”
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Leadership
The essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.
Interview, Forbes, August, 2014.
Whenever we look around the world, we see smart leaders―in politics, in business, in media―making terrible decisions. What they’re lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise; it has never been harder to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our omnipresent devices―our gadgets, our screens, our social media―and reconnect with ourselves.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Iagos
Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Life
Money and power by themselves are a two-legged stool―you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
It’s not “What do I want to do?,” it’s “What kind of life do I want to have?”
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Today we often use deadlines—real and imaginary—to imprison ourselves.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Motherhood
The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly—indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
On Becoming Fearless . . . in Love, Work, and Life (2006).
Self-Confidence
The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics—and our external ones too—the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are—as women and as mothers.
On Becoming Fearless . . . in Love, Work, and Life (2006).
Life is shaped from the inside out. The more we embrace our own ordinariness, the more extraordinary our lives become.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Success
We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes—understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).
Have you noticed that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (2014).