How to Thrive in a Crazy World: An Interview with Arianna Huffington

In her new book Thrive, Arianna Huffington calls into action the imperative need to redefine success in today’s society. After her own personal wake-up call to health, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group writes about how our current definition of success, money and power is killing us, and that we need a new way forward that cultivates our well-being, intuition and inner wisdom.

We got a chance to interview Arianna and hear some great wisdom she had to share.

Jacob: What’s the #1 thing you now know that you wish you knew when you turned 21?

Arianna: I wish I had known that there would be no trade-off between living a well-rounded life and my ability to do good work. I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard, but also unplugging, recharging and renewing yourself.” That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout and exhaustion.

Jacob: So many of us in this generation know that there has to be something more to life than the traditional roadmap for success. But one of the challenges we face is that we’re not sure how to articulate this intuitive feeling. What advice do you have for someone who’s trying to figure out “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose in life?”

Arianna: Redefining success is a good beginning. Over time our society’s notion of success has been reduced to money and power. In fact, at this point, success, money, and power have practically become synonymous in the minds of many. This idea of success can work—or at least appear to work—in the short term. But over the long term, money and power by themselves are like a two-legged stool—you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over. And more and more people—very successful people—are toppling over.

I love what Walter Isaacson told a group of college graduates: “It ain’t just about you and your damn passion.” We need to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Jacob: Since many of us don’t know how to articulate the identity quest we’re on, when we try to explain ourselves to our family and friends, they don’t always support us in going out and finding our purpose. What advice do you have for the person looking to rock their purpose while their immediate circle isn’t supportive of their journey?

Arianna: Our parents and our friends want us to be secure and sometimes this means they’ll try to dissuade us from pursuits that are risky or aren’t the most lucrative in favor of paths that are more certain. This comes from a place of love, but often isn’t the advice we want to hear. Ultimately, we have 30,000 days to play the game of life–and we have to play in our own way, determined by what we value.

Jacob: At this stage of life, oftentimes young adults are on an identity quest asking themselves: “Who am I?” and “What am I here to do?“ One of the reasons it’s hard to figure this out is that popular-culture is persistently attacking us with unrealistic ideas about what it means to be happy and successful. Giant corporations, mass-media, and the advertising industry realize and exploit our vulnerability by promoting the obtainment of wealth, fame and beauty as the ultimate objectives of our existence. These superficial values don’t just affect our spending habits, but more importantly they affect our attitudes, social interactions, and understanding of who we are and where we should be in life! What advice do you have for people in this generation who are trying to find themselves while dealing with these specific current cultural challenges of 2014?

Arianna: “What is a good life?” has been a question asked by philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks. But somewhere along the line we abandoned the question and shifted our attention to how much money we can make, how big a house we can buy, and how high we can climb up the career ladder. Those are legitimate questions, but they are far from the only questions that matter in creating a successful life. Jobs and financial security will always be important, but when we fall into the trap of chasing only the successes built on money, fame and power, we miss out on the happiness, purpose and meaning that come from reaching out to others, pausing to wonder, and connecting to that place inside us from which everything is possible.

Jacob: We have more options than any group in history ever has, but paradoxically, many of us feel stuck, anxious, and afraid to pick any option because we don’t want it to be the wrong one. We fall into “analysis paralysis”. How do we deal with that?

Arianna: So much of that anxiety and paralysis stems from our fear of failure. I speak from experience. The Huffington Post launched to decidedly mixed reviews (including one that said the site was “the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one”) and my second book was rejected by 36 publishers, which amounted to one of the low points of my life. By about rejection 25, you would have thought I might have said, “hey, you know, there’s something wrong here. Maybe I should be looking at a different career.”

Instead, I remember running out of money and walking, depressed, down St James Street in London where I was living at the time, and seeing a Barclays Bank. I walked in and, armed with nothing but a lot of chutzpah, I asked to speak to the manager and asked him for a loan. Even though I didn’t have any assets, the banker — whose name was Ian Bell — gave me a loan. It changed my life, because it meant I could keep things together for another 13 rejections – and finally, an acceptance.

In fairytales there are helpful animals that come out of nowhere to help the hero or heroine through a dark and difficult time, often helping them find a way out of the forest. Well, in life too, there are helpful animals disguised as human beings – as bank managers like Ian Bell, to whom I still send a Christmas card every year. So, very often, the difference between success and failure is perseverance. It’s how long we can keep going until success happens. It’s getting up one more time than we fall down.

Jacob: Previous generations traditionally defined success as holding a good job and raising a family. But these days, it seems there’s a lot more encouragement for young adults to follow their passion and chase their dreams. Many of us doubt if we actually have what it takes to do what we love. How can we figure out which dreams are actually worth pursuing (especially if they seem unrealistic)?

Arianna: Aside from echoing Walter Isaacson’s remarks from above, I’d urge you to read what Nicholas Kristof wrote about Marina Keegan, whose first book, The Opposite of Loneliness, was recently published posthumously. Marina was tragically killed in a car crash days after graduating from Yale in 2012. In one of the essays in the book, she laments a transition she saw in her fellow students, from youthful idealism to an acceptance of “success”-driven practicality.

“Students here have passion,” she wrote. “Passion for public service and education policy and painting and engineering and entrepreneurialism. Standing outside a freshman dorm, I couldn’t find a single student aspiring to be a banker — but at commencement this May, there’s a 50 percent chance I’ll be sitting next to one. This strikes me as incredibly sad.”

There is nothing wrong with being a banker in itself; Keegan’s point was that so many graduates choose professions based on the lure of jobs that fit our traditional notion of success. “Perhaps there won’t be fancy popcorn at some other job,” wrote Keegan, “but it’s about time we started popping it for ourselves.”

And for those who do create their own path, and for those who don’t, the one absolutely certain thing you can expect is that things won’t turn out the way you expect. As John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Jacob: Many successful experts advocate the importance of self-care and well-being. But if you actually look at their journey, often times they’ve “killed themselves” hustling to become successful – and now that they are – they advocate self-care. The argument could be made that they wouldn’t be in the position that they are without that initial phase of prioritizing their goals instead of their health. What do you say to that?

Arianna: For far too long, we have been operating under the collective delusion that burning out is the necessary price for achieving success. This couldn’t be less true. As I said earlier about what I wish I knew when I was 21, not only is there no tradeoff between high performance and living a well-rounded life, butperformance is actually improved when our life becomes more balanced.

Jacob: There’s so much great wisdom out there – from blogs to books to interviews and so on – it can be fairly common to have an “ah-ha” moment. Now epiphanies can be life altering but most fade in a few days or weeks. How can we deal with this and effectively translate these epiphanies into lasting change?

Arianna: By taking those “ah-ha” moments and turning them into habits. That’s whyThrive is designed as a bridge to help us move from knowing what to do to actually doing it, filled with daily tips, tools and techniques that are easy to incorporate into our daily lives.

Jacob: In the US, we’ve got roughly $1 trillion in *student* debt – which is more than we have in consumer debt. I read a statistic in the Huffington Post that the average college graduate accumulates about $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day. We graduate college with huge job expectations for high salaries, flexibility, and the ability to make a massive impact on day one – but because the secure economic foundation that previous generations grew up with doesn’t exist anymore, we sometimes settle for something uninspiring or soul-sucking. What advice do you have for someone who’s looking to make a massive impact in the world but feels weighed down by financial debt?

Arianna: Graduating with this kind of burden would be challenging even if today’s graduates were entering a robust job market, but of course they are not. Indeed, the effective unemployment rate (which factors in those who have given up looking for jobs) for those aged 18 to 29 is nearly 16 percent. For African Americans in that age bracket, it’s nearly 24 percent.

As steep a challenge as this is, it does not mean it can’t be overcome. The ability to accept life’s inevitable twists and turns, losses, defeats and surprises plays a profound role in how resilient we are and how we thrive. And to harken back to freshman philosophy class, true happiness can only be found in our own attitudes and inner life, which the outside world cannot control or take away. This is not about indifference or resignation but, rather, a concept very much on the minds of young graduates: freedom. As one of the most famous Stoics, Seneca, said, “once we have driven away all that excites or affrights us, there ensues unbroken tranquility and enduring freedom.”