The Arianna Huffington Interview : On learning to fail - Part 1
Arianna Huffington has had a remarkable rise from poverty to become editor of the world's second-biggest news website, the Huffington Post.
We are in the queue for the ladies' lavatories and all around Arianna Huffington women are gathering in clusters, exclaiming at the talk she has just given, admiring her hair, telling her she's fabulous. She has just spoken to them about the need to work less and sleep more and they bring forth their own stories from their overburdened lives. "I was in six different cities this week," one woman tells her. "I flew in from Buffalo this morning and when you said that we are working ourselves to death, I thought, 'That is my life!'" Another tells her how she's so overstretched that "I went to work last week and didn't realise until I got there that I had forgotten to put on my skirt! I had to go out and buy one from J Crew!"
Arianna, glamorous, approachable, smiling, laps it up. "I love the story about the skirt!" she says. "You should write about that for us." It sounds like the sort of invitation you might offer someone to submit to the parish magazine or the company newsletter, though, of course, when Arianna says "us", she means the Huffington Post, the second most popular news site in the world that she created from nothing and that is now, after a £315m deal, part of the AOL empire.
Her assistant, panicked at the potential disruption to her schedule, sees the queue for the lavatories and says to me: "I'm going to have to find a way to get Arianna to the front of that." But Huffington doesn't queue jump. She waits patiently. She deploys her weapons-grade charm. But then, Arianna Huffington didn't get to be Arianna Huffington without knowing how to work a room; it is of no import that this one just happens to be the ladies. She had, that morning, already enraptured an audience of high-level corporate women at a private event for International Women's Day in New York by preaching a mix of self-help, female empowerment and a home-spun, can-do, go girl! chutzpah.
And then, suddenly, she is there. Putting her phones into her bag, turning to face me, her hands calmly folded in front of her, ready and waiting for her first question. Except she has just answered all my first questions during the on-stage Q&A and there is something about her smooth unruffability, her poise, her world-conquering success that has me sweating and rifling the pages in my notebook.
Arianna looks on patiently. Or maybe pityingly? It's as if she's risen to a higher plane of what it is to be human or at least what it is to be a woman in professional life. She has banished self-criticism. She brushes off failure. In Thrive, she writes about her struggle to subdue and contain the voice in her head that she calls her "obnoxious room-mate".
"How do you do that?" I ask, as I think I really ought to have got my questions in order. "It's not been completely eliminated," she says. "The last time I heard it I was doing a TV show and I was running late and I started hearing the voice – 'You should have left earlier. You always do that. Why did you do that?' It's like, that's the voice. You recognise it?"
I'm still panicking about my next question. Of course I do, I say.
"And, you know it was a legitimate thing, I should have left earlier. But now I can acknowledge something like that without tearing myself down. That's the difference. It's like, 'I made a mistake.' As opposed to, 'You are a bad person.'"
But then Arianna's whole life has been an act of will. She willed herself to Cambridge University, despite growing up Greek and poor with her single mother in a one-bedroom flat in Athens. She willed herself to the presidency of the Cambridge Union. She willed herself on to the national stage, aged 23, with a counter-feminist tract, The Female Woman – a counter-blast to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. And it's just gone on from there.
She moved to New York. Married a billionaire oil magnate. Supported his political career. Divorced. Tried her hand at her own political career. Failed. Started a blog. Was ridiculed for creating a silly little vanity site. And went on to turn it into what is arguably the most successful blog of all time, the Huffington Post, a commentary-cum-aggregation site that changed the face of news.
We are in the queue for the ladies' lavatories and all around Arianna Huffington women are gathering in clusters, exclaiming at the talk she has just given, admiring her hair, telling her she's fabulous. She has just spoken to them about the need to work less and sleep more and they bring forth their own stories from their overburdened lives. "I was in six different cities this week," one woman tells her. "I flew in from Buffalo this morning and when you said that we are working ourselves to death, I thought, 'That is my life!'" Another tells her how she's so overstretched that "I went to work last week and didn't realise until I got there that I had forgotten to put on my skirt! I had to go out and buy one from J Crew!"
Arianna, glamorous, approachable, smiling, laps it up. "I love the story about the skirt!" she says. "You should write about that for us." It sounds like the sort of invitation you might offer someone to submit to the parish magazine or the company newsletter, though, of course, when Arianna says "us", she means the Huffington Post, the second most popular news site in the world that she created from nothing and that is now, after a £315m deal, part of the AOL empire.
Her assistant, panicked at the potential disruption to her schedule, sees the queue for the lavatories and says to me: "I'm going to have to find a way to get Arianna to the front of that." But Huffington doesn't queue jump. She waits patiently. She deploys her weapons-grade charm. But then, Arianna Huffington didn't get to be Arianna Huffington without knowing how to work a room; it is of no import that this one just happens to be the ladies. She had, that morning, already enraptured an audience of high-level corporate women at a private event for International Women's Day in New York by preaching a mix of self-help, female empowerment and a home-spun, can-do, go girl! chutzpah.
And then, suddenly, she is there. Putting her phones into her bag, turning to face me, her hands calmly folded in front of her, ready and waiting for her first question. Except she has just answered all my first questions during the on-stage Q&A and there is something about her smooth unruffability, her poise, her world-conquering success that has me sweating and rifling the pages in my notebook.
Arianna looks on patiently. Or maybe pityingly? It's as if she's risen to a higher plane of what it is to be human or at least what it is to be a woman in professional life. She has banished self-criticism. She brushes off failure. In Thrive, she writes about her struggle to subdue and contain the voice in her head that she calls her "obnoxious room-mate".
"How do you do that?" I ask, as I think I really ought to have got my questions in order. "It's not been completely eliminated," she says. "The last time I heard it I was doing a TV show and I was running late and I started hearing the voice – 'You should have left earlier. You always do that. Why did you do that?' It's like, that's the voice. You recognise it?"
I'm still panicking about my next question. Of course I do, I say.
"And, you know it was a legitimate thing, I should have left earlier. But now I can acknowledge something like that without tearing myself down. That's the difference. It's like, 'I made a mistake.' As opposed to, 'You are a bad person.'"
But then Arianna's whole life has been an act of will. She willed herself to Cambridge University, despite growing up Greek and poor with her single mother in a one-bedroom flat in Athens. She willed herself to the presidency of the Cambridge Union. She willed herself on to the national stage, aged 23, with a counter-feminist tract, The Female Woman – a counter-blast to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. And it's just gone on from there.
She moved to New York. Married a billionaire oil magnate. Supported his political career. Divorced. Tried her hand at her own political career. Failed. Started a blog. Was ridiculed for creating a silly little vanity site. And went on to turn it into what is arguably the most successful blog of all time, the Huffington Post, a commentary-cum-aggregation site that changed the face of news.
Source;Carole Cadwalladr, The Observer 30 March 2014:
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