Arianna Huffington: I Was Lying In A Little Pool Of Blood! The Huffington Post, A $1 Billion 'Flop'!

Arianna Huffington (0:00)

The biggest success of The Huffington Post happened after I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, and came to in a little pool of blood. That was the beginning of a journey to find out what was wrong with me. Arianna Huffington is one of the world's most powerful business leaders in media. And the co-founder of The Huffington Post.

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

Which under her innovative leadership became the second most popular news site in the world before being sold for $315 million.

Steven Bartlett (0:27)

What are the most important things I should be thinking about to be successful?

Arianna Huffington (0:30)

One is when you overcome that fear of rejection, that fear of failure, we are much more likely to take bold moves.

Steven Bartlett (0:36)

I mean, that's the story of your life. You got into Cambridge when only three colleges accepted women. You become the president of Cambridge Union and the third woman ever to lead the debating society.

Arianna Huffington (0:44)

And also coming to New York and launching The Huffington Post that happened because the men wouldn't marry me. Good to remember that. The next point, our culture makes us think that I have to achieve everything before 30 But I launched The Huffington Post at 55, Thrive Global at 66, and now launched a new company with OpenAI at 74 It is never too late.

Steven Bartlett (1:07)

I want to talk to you about mistakes that you made.

Arianna Huffington (1:09)

I had bought into this delusion that in order to be super founder and super mom, I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself. And then I was literally diagnosed with burnout. It was unnecessary suffering. But as I talked to a lot of scientists, it became very clear that there are five daily behaviors that makes everything you are doing even more successful. And the first is...

Steven Bartlett (1:36)

Ariadne, what do I need to know about you and your earliest years to understand the woman that sat in front of me today? What was those formative early experiences that shaped you most profoundly?

Arianna Huffington (1:50)

The most important formative experience was my mother. And so we lived, my mother, my sister and I, in a one-bedroom apartment in Athens, Greece. We had very little money, but she always made us feel abandoned, partly by cooking.

She was constantly cooking. I think she really believed that if you didn't eat every 20 minutes, something terrible would happen to you. And she created that sense of life as an adventure. And one story that kind of captures her is, I was walking home from school one day, and I saw a magazine that had a picture of Cambridge University on the cover. Something immediately connected with me, and I got home and threw the magazine on the kitchen table, and I said, I want to go there. And my mother said, oh, let's see how we can go visit. I said, no, no, no, I want to go study there.

And everybody else I said that to said, don't be ridiculous. You don't speak English. We have no money. And it's hard for English girls to get into Cambridge. My mother said, let's find out how you can go there. And the most amazing thing that sums her up and defined so much about my life is that she never made it seem honor. She never made it seem like, oh, you must get there. You know, this is something that absolutely has to happen. It was more like, this is an adventure. We are going to give it a hundred percent. But if you don't get in, there's going to be another adventure. And I'm not going to love you any less because at the heart of everything was this unconditional loving that made us feel, my sister and I, that we could aim for the stars. But if we failed, it was fine.

Steven Bartlett (3:52)

Were you ambitious at that age?

Arianna Huffington (3:54)

Yes, I was ambitious, but also I was willing to fail because she used to say, failure is not the opposite of success. It's a stepping stone to success. So I was never afraid of failing. And I think so often people are reluctant to try something, to risk something because anything really ambitious, anything really important you want to achieve, there are no guarantees. So if failure seems something overwhelming, you are less likely to try it.

Steven Bartlett (4:31)

I mean, that's the story of your life in many respects, taking quite audacious leaps forward into the unknown. I mean, as I went through your career, you ended up getting into Cambridge, which is pretty incredible because it's not only difficult to get into Cambridge, but back then, sort of pre-1970s, only three colleges at Cambridge actually accepted women, and you got into one of those colleges. So from a very early age, you were kind of breaking the rules.