Life Lessons from Ariana Huffington

I finished listened to a podcast where Tim Ferriss interviewed Ariana Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post. She sold it to AOL for US$315 Million and personally pocketed a cool US$21 Million. Today, I read that she raised US$30 Million in funding for her new wellness company, ThriveGlobal at a valuation of US$120 Million.

These are reasons enough to listen to the podcast a second time and glean important life lessons from it. That’s exactly what I did.

Sleep 8 hours: If you haven’t watched her TED talk on sleeping your way to success, you must. She insists that our body needs 8 hours of sleep for higher productivity. I can vouch for this totally from my own experience. The only thing that I didn’t like was that Ariana does not have a fixed sleeping schedule. She says that her sleeping time varies but he’s her 8 hours sleep. I would rather respect our body clock.

Meditate: Ariana spends time every morning meditating that clears up her mind to take on the day.

Connecting People: She is a master networker and the trick, she says, is to find out what is it that people want to achieve. She then finds ways to connect people who will help achieve those goals.

Learning to Communicate Well: One of the first things that stuck me hard was the strong accent she had. She is from Greece and it clearly shows. Growing up, she’s learned French which was the official foreign language in Greece. But she consciously worked on learning and improving her English. She eventually went on to be the President of the Cambridge Debating Society which is a big deal because she was the only female foreigner to hold that post in all of Cambridge long history.

Book of Dreams: This is something that I loved and immediately put into practice. She would write down her bucketlists, goals and dreams in notebooks so as to capture them. It important to document them lest we lose to them.