27 Arianna Huffington quotes on the importance of the now
Founder of The Huffington Post and author of Thrive, Arianna Huffington is perhaps the ultimate businesswoman. Intelligent, driven, but still able to keep in touch with the self; an aspect often lost in the pursuit of money and power.
As the co-founder and editor-in-chief of one of the most successful publications in the world, Arianna knows how to achieve great things – and what it usually takes to reach the top. However, after hitting “the wall” a couple of years upon launching the magazine that earned her a net worth of $50 million, the hard working entrepreneur has come to praise the present as well as to redefining the idea of “success” altogether.
These Arianna Huffington quotes are advice on how to make it in the business world in a sustainable fashion; about the virtue of pacing oneself, about finding you in the midst of everything else and the importance of putting joy first.
“Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is”
– Arianna Huffington
“By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office”
– Arianna Huffington
“We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind”
– Arianna Huffington
“I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are”
– Arianna Huffington
“The one habit I changed first was sleep. I went from 4-5 hours, to 7-8 hours”
– Arianna Huffington
“Sleep your way to the top”
– Arianna Huffington
“My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past”
– Arianna Huffington
“I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present”
– Arianna Huffington
“The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds”
– Arianna Huffington
“I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion”
– Arianna Huffington
“I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like ‘what is a good life?’ Socrates famously said that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ I started asking these questions from the starting point of ‘what is success?’”
– Arianna Huffington
“I had dinner recently with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours of sleep that night. I didn’t say it, but I thought to myself ‘If you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting’”
– Arianna Huffington
“Now you have unequivocal scientific evidence of the importance of sleep and the dangers of sleep deprivation”
– Arianna Huffington
“Before Copernicus, the general assumption that everybody accepted was that the earth was flat. They kind of accepted that. Mindlessly. Because they didn’t know 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 that that’s a demonstration of you commitment, of your seriousness and anything else is basically slacking off and wanting to chill out under a mango tree”
– Arianna Huffington
“Like in the AA, acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step. Acknowledging that our lives have become unmanageable and that we need some higher power to help us, wherever we find it, is incredibly important”
– Arianna Huffington
“I speak as a complete culprit; a certifiable type A workaholic-driven driven personality, who basically felt that my job was to getting it all done, getting it done in time, getting it accomplished, and ‘joy’ – who has time for joy? And now I feel that not at all”
– Arianna Huffington
“When I am not joyful, I look at what happened. I don’t mean joyful as in there are no challenges, problems etc., 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 that I’m off; I need to course correct”
– Arianna Huffington
“One of the microscopic steps that I think is a great way of bringing love into the workplace is making a personal connection with people that otherwise, at work, you might take for granted or pass by. It could be the cleaning crew, it could be somebody serving lunch. Very often we are just too busy to interact. We are buried in our smartphones or in our thoughts. And I think that really changes the experience at work”
– Arianna Huffington
“Tap into your creativity – even if it isn’t a part of your job. It’s one of the things that our culture has suppressed. Every child is creative; they sing, they draw. But then at some point if we can’t make a living out of our ‘creative love’, we drop it. But in fact it’s great to maintain in some way”
– Arianna Huffington
“We are wired for giving. When we give, all the biological inflammation-markers, the precursors of disease, go down”
– Arianna Huffington
“Giving is a shortcut to happiness”
– Arianna Huffington
“Right now, we are at a kind of tipping point, were a lot of people realize that fundamental changes have to happen. Starting at the individual level, but a lot of companies are recognizing that the wellbeing of their employees is not separate from the bottom line of the company”
– Arianna Huffington
“I think a lot of people who would say they are atheists, when you really scratch the surface, they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism or wonder of the mystery of life, but they don’t believe in a particular creed. For me, really, what matters 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 is fascinating”
– Arianna Huffington
“Personally, I’m much more interesting in an ‘inner space project’ than an ‘outer space project’”
– Arianna Huffington
“I find that even my most militantly atheistic friends love coincidences, because they are 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 are almost like a little reminder that we are living in an incredibly amazing, mysterious place. And we forget that when we shrink ourselves down to our to-do list”
– Arianna Huffington
“If we completely identify ourselves with our jobs, however magnificent our jobs may be, we are missing out on the fullness, and grandeur of what a human being is”
– Arianna Huffington
“If I can change, anybody can”
– Arianna Huffington