Arianna Huffington and Sheryl Sandberg: Redefining Success

hi everyone good evening everyone I'm Cheryl Samberg and I'm really excited to be here with the Commonwealth clubs inform and all of you to interview the great Ariana Huffington on her latest book um so there's a lot of things people already know about Ariana she was the founder and she is the editor and president and C CEO of the Huffington Post which is today the largest newspaper in the world 25 million readers in 11 countries and just founded in 2005 I think everyone knows that Ariana immigrated to the United States from Greece when she was 16 sorry immigrated to the UK uh when she was 16 studied at Cambridge studied economics we know she's written 14 books we know the Hall of Ft post had run a Pitzer prize what not everyone knows uh but I have been lucky to know is just what a wonderful and amazing human being she is I met Ariana about 10 years ago we were both speaking at an event in um San Francisco and she adopted me and became the big sister I always wanted she has been there uh for me and so many women uh through everything I've been through she is a great career advisor uh hugger drier of tears and laugher of laughs I'm excited to welcome my dear friend Ariana Huffington so this is Ariana's new book it's Thrive it came out yesterday and it is an amazing book I read it on my uh Christmas vacation this year I couldn't put it down and I'm excited to get a chance to talk to you about it so thank you so much for doing this and the one thing Cheryl didn't mention is that she didn't just read it during her Christmas Vacation she sent me line edits literally like you know cut all these references to Aristotle a few too many and U restructured the entire epilog but then what puts her in the kind of editor Hall of Fame is that on Monday she sent me an email she said I was looking at the finished book and she said for the next Edition you know gazel it says in the index that it's page 59 but it's actually page 61 okay I really like the book so let's start Ariana with your path to writing this book how did this start for you because this is an amazing journey and an amazing story so it actually starts the way I start the book the first line of the introduction which is on April 6 2007 I was lying on the floor of my office in a pool of blood having collapsed from exhaustion hit my head on my desk broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye so it really starts with a very rude awakening a wakeup call that only kind of got um more intense during the weeks that followed when I was going from Doctor to doctor from MRI to echo cardiogram to find out what was really wrong with me medically they thought it could be a brain tumor it could be um a heart problem it turned out there was nothing medically wrong with me but just about everything wrong with the way I was leading my life and that's really when I started asking the question what is success because by the conventional definition of success which in our culture right now is really two metrics money and power our successful you know the time 100 list covers of magazines but by any same definition of success if you're are lying in a pool of blood on the floor of your office you're not successful

so when this happened how long did it take you to make changes in your life you know it was very dramatic you said something when you read the first dra you said you know there are other moments in your life when you could have woken up you said very kindly and because you know there were other moments and I this is the book is partly a personal Journey you know there are moments when I lost my first child that was still born when I had a breast cancer scare and a biopsy that turned out to be benign you know there moments like that when I could have relooked at all my priorities but it took that root Awakening and then after that I first of all made one big change you know they say that if you want to change your life you need to begin with changing one habit they call

it the Keystone habit and the habit I changed was to go from 4 to 5 hour sleep at night to 7 to 8 and that was transformational right so one of the many pieces of advice in this book and she actually um says specifically to women Ariana advises sleeping your way to the top um it's part of my journey as well I that did not come out right let me finish the thought um for many years I thought that the way I would you know get everything done is just get less sleep and Ariana every time I would see her first question before hero how much sleep are you getting you look tired darling you look tired which I was tired and she really kept saying you need to sleep more and it was a very interesting Journey for me because the reason I learned to sleep more was when I had children yes I watched them and for those of you who have seen children pretty much if your child does not get enough sleep everything is a disaster right and if your child does get enough sleep nothing can go wrong and I thought how interesting it was that children were that way and then I thought wait a second Ariana keeps telling me I'm that way too and I figured out that when I got enough sleep everything went well and when I didn't get enough sleep how is it that you realize this because you urged it on me and I think so many people long before how did you learn how important sleep was and do you still advise women to sleep their way to the top oh absolutely incidentally I remember one uh time we were at a conference to together and you're coming down the hallway and you said to me okay I know I only got six hours last night but I promise I'm going to have a nap this afternoon so the way I realized is because I started reading and the science about sleep is absolutely incontrovertible and it's only gotten even more profound since 2007 and now you know I have 55 pages of end notes in the book so for any Skeptics here when you read the science from the biggest universities and hospitals you will see that sleep is really a wonder drug and what you said about um children is so key but also you can look at athletes now Elite athletes are prioritizing sleep meditation yoga you know I don't know if you saw the video of LeBron James meditating that went so viral but there's also another thing that Charlie Rose in a conversation with Andy Mari the great ten Tenn player they talked about how when you re charged and arrested and you're on the court the ball is coming at you in slow motion which means you can handle anything you have time to make decisions and I feel this is a great metaphor for life because I know that when I'm burnt out whatever happens I feel kind of overwhelmed by it I feel like it's all coming at me and I have to react and it's not a good way to live I mean that's really for me the biggest realization I had when I switched to 7 to eight hour sleep is that it had been a very long time since I was actually really rested and in the last few days speaking to different groups I've had so many women come up to me and say I don't remember the last time I wasn't tired and that's like why are we doing that to ourselves that's really the big question that I'm asking in the book you know why do we think this is the good life you know Greek Phil philosophers used to ask this question what is a good life and we kind of Shrunk the definition down to money and power and now we need to expand it again to include what I'm calling the third metric so let's talk about the third metric in the book which has four chapters it has four elements well-being wisdom wonder and giving and we'll hit each in turn um but you talk about all of this adding up to a third metric so what is it so the third metric is what really Gives Life Meaning purpose and joy is very important one of the things I want all of us to do is to put Joy back in our everyday lives again why did we sort of decide that we're just going to go after whatever it is that we want and that that's all that matters and Define ourselves by whatever that is and I had this kind of realization which is really the realization of every major religion philosophy everything but you don't have to believe in God or a particular religion to believe that which is that ultimately who we are inside ourselves like the essence of who we are is greater and more magnificent than whatever we are in the world and that's like a that's kind of a very a big shift in terms of how we look at our life and it means that we can never shrink ourselves down to our to-do list so you're arguing for something pretty profound which is a change in the definition of success I know you also argue that everyone should define success for themselves so how do you go about doing it for this amazing audience who's here we're going to go home tonight and we're all going to redefine success how well the first thing is to look at what is it that you want to do in your life and that is what is that you want not what Society wants you to do what you read in a magazine everybody should want to do but what is it that you want and that's why I think that leaning has been so important to so many millions of women around the world including my two Millennial daughters thank you because it basically tells us don't let your fears your self-doubts your images of yourself fly bastter your dreams and I know from my own daughter who is a senior graduating this year that when she read your book in draft um she immediately said to me I'm going to do what Cheryl says which is ask myself the question what are you afraid of and she decided great answer yeah she decided that what she was afraid of is to call them the editor of the Yale paper where she's at school and tell him that she really wants to start writing and she was a afraid to do that because she didn't know whether he would reject her or you know all the things that stop women more than they stop men from taking the step so he welcomed her with open arms she started writing and she sort of changed her life and her definition of herself for me that is like huge to not let our own fears stop us in the book I called our these fears the obnoxious roommate living in our head and I was recently on Steven colber show and I told him that my obnoxious roommate I said stepen sounds exactly like you we ask the audience how many obnoxious roommates sound just like Steven coar got to be a few raise your hands well because it's kind of very sardonic you know obnoxious roommates are often s sardonic they put us down they tell us we're not good enough so overcoming that is a big step on once that happens then we need to decide what is it that we want and then to realize that while we are going for our dreams that we cannot be defined by them because that's also what often stops people the fear that they are going to fail and then if they fail it's almost like their survival is at stake I mean as you know I write a lot about my mother in the book you know the book is dedicated to her and when we're growing up in Athens with little money in the first draft of the book it said with no money but then sh said you can't say with no money because no money is people who really have nothing so I changed it to little money and she's right because obviously we were not completely destitute but we lived in a one room apartment my mother was always struggling and there were she and my father had separated when my father told her when she complained about his philandering not to interfere in his private life so the one thing that she kept saying to us to my sister Agapi who is here and me is

failure is not the opposite of success it's a stepping stone to success and that means take risks and if you fail see it part of the as part of the journey but if you completely define yourself in terms of that success then you're going to be much less likely to take risks and maybe fail along the way so you've described this the third metric redefinition of success as the third women's Revolution um it's interesting because as I read your book and we talked about this I think the book's principles and practices are just equally applicable to men absolutely but you've also said that you found women more interested well what I found is that the world first of all let me just say what I mean about the third women's Revolution that the first women's Revolution was giving us the vote the second equal access to all the fields of work um at the top of every field equal pay and this is a very incomplete Revolution correct there is a lot of work that has to be done but I think we're never going to complete the second revolution if we don't launch the third because the third women's Revolution is about women saying we don't just want to be at the top of the world we want to change the world yes w i think that is and well said because you know the world the way it is now is not really working and was designed by men excuse me run by and run by men yeah I say this turns out men still run the world and I'm not sure how well that's going yeah exactly because it's basically I mean look at the amount of burnout which is I think affecting the planet it's not just individual lives look at um the fact that you know just to give you just two quick statistics 75% of our health care costs in the states are because of chronic preventable stress related diseases amazing and also women are paying a heavier price I mean the latest studs that have come out show that we internalize stress differently so women in stressful jobs have a 40% greater risk of heart disease and a 60% greater risk of diabetes so we can't even afford not to change workpl cultures the great news is that there is a shift in the air and we've talked about that and we now have it's almost like we have two very dramatically different realities coexisting you know the old Paradigm of a workplace fueled by um burnout sleep deprivation exha exhaustion you know a corporate culture where people are still using all these male Macho War metaphors like we're killing it we're crashing it we're about to kill crush it and then you know you have the most popular book among CEOs apparently is the Art of War you know the Chinese military treaties that talks about how deception is at the heart of war and I think maybe we should just give CEOs books like the Giving Tree or maybe makeway for Ducklings I don't know just like because you know that really or th because the reality is that the workplace has changed I mean modern work is different and it's it requires much more teamwork flexibility uh it's much more Project based so a lot of these old paradigms can shift but there is that other reality where we have 35% of American companies I don't mean just Facebook and Google and the big companies here but you know Etna and Target and U and um little companies all over the Midwest that are recognizing that if they take care of their employees they will do they're actually will be better for the bottom line that's right so this goes to your first chapter which

is well-being um you have said sometimes we need to lean back to lean in which I wholeheartedly agree with you also said something very funny to my husband and I last night which is you said um people take such good care of their cell phones your cell phone gets to 177% battery and we all run around like crazy people looking to recharge our cell phone yet we get to 17% and we're not looking for our own recharge we don't even notice but we're so worried if our cell phones get down I mean literally people begin to panic if it gets down to 8% and they and we have all these little recharging shrines or lover our offices that's right so you have very specific suggestions for how people recharge and Thrive yes so um again we each have to create our own cocktail because we are all individuals but again following your editorial suggestion I have at the end of each of these four sections three small baby steps because my biggest hope is that people will not just read the book and say I agree with that but that they will make small little microscopic changes and that's all it takes and I did it you did it I've been meditating five minutes a day almost every day which is B but trying yes on days I know Ariana is going to call me I always get it in um but it was a very important conversation because I read it it's like oh my God you have to meditate and I pictured myself in a room for 4 hours a day and thought I can't do that but I can do five minutes and that's what we put in because that's what Cheryl could do so now that's what the book says stop but it's a nice but it makes it approachable absolutely and I'll confess to sometimes being able to go longer now because I started with something and because you begin to get a reward and because you realize and that thoughts are going to come and it doesn't have to be some incredible like uh Earth shattering experience that it's just some quiet time with ourselves because especially I'm sure most people here we are also hyper connect to technology and technology has been magnificent in so many ways in our lives and around the world and connecting us and democratizing um areas of the world and people who otherwise would not have a voice but at the same time there is a snake in this digital Garden of Egen and that's the hyperconnectivity to technology that often disconnects us from ourselves and one another thing that I feel is very important is that when we talk about meditation we need to remember that that's just the word we tend to use more today but you know you can use prayer contemplation whatever it is that gives you quiet and connects us with our inner wisdom yeah so some of the things you suggest sleeping more walk walking uh meditation these all take time and people especially women are tired overburdened a lot of people are really worried about getting by and don't have any time in their lives for anything how do you believe these Concepts can be accessible for everyone well the first thing is to stress and that's such an important question that all these Concepts apply to all of us wherever we're in life whether we're at the top of the world or whether we're struggling to put food on the table that's why I have a whole section where I quot people in concentration camps I mean nothing can be more extreme than that and you have Victor Frankl who basically wrote in this in his great book um about the fact that we actually no matter how much is taken away from us we have this ultimate freedom of choosing our own attitude and what we think and that is very profound that's really the whole stoic philosophy and there's a book that I quote a lot in Thrive by Marcus Aurelius who was an emperor of Rome and every night he would go to his room and write what came out as meditations and his whole point was how can you become imperturbable how can you not let all the challenges the things that upset us during the day actually disturb our inner peace how can you be the eye in the middle of the hurricane of course nobody's going to achieve it all the time but it's such a great goal because it empowers us no matter what is happening in us to to actually become more resilient and there is a study to answer your point of um what happened in Illinois when the bell company downsize one of the most dramatic downsizings in American C corporate history over 50% of its employee force and they followed everybody who had been downsized and 2third of them had a really hard time I mean they became alcoholics they got addicted they got divorced onethird thrived not only did they do well they did better than they had done before so that challenge brought all the resources to the Forefront for so the next chapter you talk about wisdom which is a big word and something I think everyone wants more of my favorite line in the book other than the obnoxious roommate

is the power of the hunch you say when your inner voice speaks shut up and listen is this how you think we achieve wisdom is wisdom yes learning from others is wisdom learning from ourselves obviously learning from others but I think learning from ourselves because I really believe two things one is that we all have that place of wisdom strength peace and joy in us we all have it we've all had glimpses of it we've all experienced it however fleetingly and the second thing I believe is that most of the time we're not going to live there so life is really about how quickly can we C correct and get back to that place and it can actually be done very quickly and I was talking to a friend of mine who was a pilot and he said to me most of the time planes fly off course the reason we don't have more accidents is because there is any an impeccable course correcting mechanism and in order to have we need to really listen inside to our inner wisdom listen to our intuition and the more we listen to it the more it develops but we need a little more silence for that you know as I was writing this book I realized that I had a bad habit which is that the minute I would walk into my apartment or into a hotel room I would turn on the television and especially kind of feeling that because I run a 247 media organization I should always be on top of the latest news Etc and I said okay let me try not to do that and have a little more silence in my life to listen to those whisperings and it was amazing what happened first of all I didn't miss anything well you can find some well you can actually so quickly get caught up on the news and also I realized that during that silence there's really so much of that inner voice that I was more able to listen to that's great so you talk about wonder and uh one of the many things I've learned from you again is watching children and I read this great article on the Huff po called the day I stopped saying hurrying up by a mother and I think this article went pretty viral it was by a mother and she talked about how she felt that she was constantly hurrying her child up and I realized that I was doing that too that my daughter is incredible capable of Wonder so you know when it's bedtime she can pick up every object in her room and look at it as if she's seeing it for the first time and then put it down and then pick up the teddy bear and this can take us way past bedtime um and I was reading your chapter this article and it really came together me that Wonder was letting those moments rather than it's time for bed letting her look at that teddy bear again and experience it in new when are the moments in your life when you feel that you most experience Wonder well first of all let me say that I watched you this morning Cheryl had this lovely book launch party for Thrive last night and I spent the night in her guest room and this morning watching you with your daughter and seeing her how she was you had to get her to school but there she was and she was writing in her journal and uh she was writing and the way you handled it I didn't tell you that at the time was just so lacking any kind of rushing her kind of honoring her experience and that's hard to do because you have to get her to school you have to go to work so it's very natural to move into the hurry up and this uh blog post that you wrote which went crazy viral it was read by six million people it was um it got to million two likes on Facebook Etc is I think because it resonate with something in us not just the way we treat our children but ourselves finding Wonder for ourselves and for me learning I mean that was where I started remembering my mother who used to say all the time don't miss the moment because that's really all we have we cannot DVR our lives and yet we're so used to dving everything so you have a chapter on giving it's the last of the four elements of the third metric and you talk about how and I really appreciated this it shouldn't take a natural disaster for us to give and we see this charitable donations Focus go way up in the natural disaster but really there's a lot of need that exists every single day and you

talk about the power of giving and why it's good not just for the recipient but for the giver yes I think that's going to be a transformational moment when each person really gets that that's why I have so much science about it that in our DNA we are actually wired to give that biologically nature rewards us when we give so they've done studies of how our biological inflammation markers which is the precursor of disease go down when we give and they go up when our Pleasures are purely what they call honic meaning purely self-gratification OB life is going to be a mixture but if it's all one without the giving part we pay a price and Richard Davidson the professor of Neuroscience in Wisconsin has done amazing work showing that giving is a

shortcut to happiness and one of the reasons actually is that when we're in a getting mode which obviously we all are in aspects of Our Lives we are operating from lack because no matter how much we have we are trying to get something that we don't have when we are giving no matter how little we have we're operating from abundance so we're more expanded and that's why one of the things I write in the book is how do we move from honoring in our culture go-getters to honoring gogers and you know yesterday you spent a day with this amazing um group who that created free the children we day and what I love about we day is that it involves children and you took your children there and I think that's going to be key getting our children to learn that giving is part of life from very early on so it's not something that they do around Thanksgiving or Christmas but something that is part of their everyday experience and I remember when Isabella my youngest daughter was 5 years old we're living in Washington and I was having them volunteer in Anacostia at a place for ATR children called um children of mine and by coincidence which as we know in the book you know I don't actually I think coincidences are the Miracles that the Universe performs anonymously but so it happened to be that the day before was Isabella's fifth birthday and we celebrated it with balloons and presents and a big cake and the day were at the center was a little girls these were all at risk children in anacosta fifth birthday and her entire birthday celebration was one big chocolate chip cookie that was her gift that was her birthday cake and from across the room I could see Isabella tearing up and she rushed to me and when we got home said I want to pick up all my presents and take them to that little girl now Isabella did not turn out to be Mother Teresa you know she she had many moments of selfishness since then but I really believe that experience you know taught her something that I could never have taught her no matter how many lectures I had given her and that's why I think starting children early is so key so you've said that you think the moment is now and there does seem to be more interest in mindfulness there's been a cover of Time Magazine but you've also said that these ideas connect very directly to ancient tradition Greek my Greek mythology religion how do you see the connection between kind of the older ways or the more traditional ways that are still very much alive of spirituality and the new mindfulness and the third metric bring this together for us it just happens to be the truth and the truth is rediscovered every generation rediscovers as if they're first as they they're first right as if we just kind of discovered all these things but in fact they're incredibly ancient and um there may be different names different um ways we express them but they come down to one thing um the Bible describes it as the kingdom of Heaven the kingdom of God is within H Archimedes if you don't want me to quote um a spiritual Source let me quote a scientist you know my Greek comp compatriot Archimedes he said give me a place to stand and I can move the world that is that place that is the place we all have in us and basically what every religion and every spiritual tradition and every great literature tells us is that life is shaped from the inside out that's nice and that's really for me when we realize that life is a huge classroom and it's not just about collecting victories and triumphs it's about sandpaper ing ourselves and learning through whatever comes our way that's right so now we're going to um turn pretty quickly to social media and audience questions so get ready but in the meantime we're

going to do a the lightning round so you have to just answer no thinking mindful perfect New York or La New York oh wow that new I'm fairly certain Ariana would said La a couple years ago Democrats or Republicans Democrats uh favorite US president oh Abraham Lincoln books hands down books or blogs books wow blonde or brunette uh blond Thrive more John Stewart or Steven coar oh no if you've ever seen Ariana on either one of these shows it's an unbelievable thing that is very cruel that is a very that is a selfish Choice say both I can say both say she just gave me a pass she said I can say both mountains or Beach mornings or night

favorite movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington time machine forward or backward oh forward Greek or American food Greek Billy Joel or Bruce Springstein Bruce springin Beyonce or Beyonce I'm a big Beyonce fan she's a feminist I only letting pick her an accent about how to pronounce it favorite drink oh definitely um soy capuccino thank you notes email or handwritten ah email wisdom or wonder wow um Wonder leads to wisdom sleep or meditation sleep on becoming fearless or Thrive oh Thrive

okay we're going to take uh audience questions in about five minutes so get ready um but right now and if you have a question forna there are microphones I think in the center here please come up but we're going to turn to social media so a few days ago I posted on Facebook and asked for questions for Ariana I got this actually from um a woman I was friends with in my childhood Davi Deo is exciting okay she writes the summary of the book and it wasn't out yet so it's not her fault she hadn't read it seems like she's reflecting on a major life Epiphany knowing now what she does if she could go back and do things differently what would she do what major differences would there be in her career choices and actions in her family choices mhm well I would first of all have said to my younger self not to worry as much H because I worried about so much and I would say to my younger self to believe what roomy the poet that I quote a lot in the book said live life as though everything is rigged in your favor so no matter how it looks trust trust and I would have avoided so many anxieties and unnecessary worries and um it's a little bit like what Montaine the French writer said there were many terrible things in my life but most of them never happened from Shelly Carell on Facebook what do you see as the biggest barrier to redefining success and how will we get past it the biggest barrier is that our world sends us insistent flashing signals to keep climbing the ladder making more money to basically live our lives based on the first two metrics and we need to therefore create our own rituals our own tribe to support us as we are making these changes and um I love this passage by Ian Thomas the writer who said every day the world will yank you by the hand and say this is important and you must worry about this and worry about that and you must yank your hand back and put it on your heart and say no this is important nice I'll take one more social media and then we'll turn to the audience um from Nicole as a working college student who wants to go to an Ivy League graduate school more sleep is not an option so already you have to tell Nicole it is that's what I used to say it is an option is Thrive something that really applies to me at this stage in my life at the very beginning of my career more than ever you know that is really such a great delusion it's a delusion that our world has really paid a huge price for and I see it you know with my daughters I see it with their friends you know the idea that you sleep you lose you'll sleep when you're are dead you know and you see the casualties you see the price we are paying you see what's happening in colleges with addiction and blanking out from drinking and stress and we really need to keep talking about role models who at any stage in life have integrated all these practices and have thrived and succeeded by every measure that's great all right we're going to turn to our audience hi I'm Julia you two are some of my biggest hero so this is very humbling um as a 15-year-old girl I've noticed that a lot of times putting yourself first and having high self-esteem is seen as kind of vain and narcissistic do you have any ideas about how I could overcome that well first of all you have to ban the word bossing right correct we have to encourage you to lead yes and I mean quite a why don't you take that question because you've been saying so much about it so I think what happens systematically is that a lot of us feel insecure that we're not up to tasks I think we know the data that happens more to women we also know that we encourage boys to lead by using words like leader and discourage Girls bossy but we also know that you have a great future ahead of you and that in order for you to make the changes you want to see in the world you're going to have to start by

believing in yourself what I tell people when I'm not telling them to read Thrive and learn to meditate is don't wait till you feel the confidence just do it ask yourself what would I do if I felt the confidence or if I wasn't afraid and take your seat at the table raise your hand ask your question try to do something you'll either succeed and then you'll prove to yourself that you can or you won't and you'll learn how to succeed the next time but show yourself you can step up to the plate we think you can do it this whole audience think thinks that's a hard act to follow hi my name is Lisa Nash and I had my moment I left a corporate marketing career and started a nonprofit on safe drinking water and it changed my life tremendously so I would love to know from the two of you how do you see your

lives thriving in the next five years so I um I see myself as a work in progress and as continuing to get better and better at all these things that I write about because I don't think it's like a an overnight thing um I think it's a constant process and um and two things that I do more and more often now are one is to do a constant kind of life audit and look at my projects and look at the things that I haven't even begun but I'm thinking I may want to do and it's very liberating when you I remember how liberating it was for example when I decided that my project of becoming a good skier was just not going to be ever completed and so I dropped it and I and I learned that you can complete a project by dropping it so I plan you know as to continue both to be dropping projects and to be focusing on new things I mean that I may not even know about that's what is so exciting I it's great I think for me I've kind of faced a lot in the last year did things I didn't think I'd do before and I think finding uh the space and time to do one thing at once been something I've always really struggled with I think a lot of us struggle with you know not picking up my phone when I'm doing something else uh finding those moments uh to just reflect um but the more I do it the easier it gets and I'm going to continue trying to be better at the things Ariana writes about too thank you and to you too hi uh my name is Renee um and I'll be honest that I'm not entirely convinced um so almost to build on that last question I guess that was from Facebook a part of me really wonders would the two of you be where you are right now um to use the term success right which is a very loaded term but to be in positions of such tremendous influence and Prestige and power and even wealth right if you H if you had really up until this point practice what you are preaching right now on the stage a fair question so first of all thank you so much for raising this question because this is the key question and I've thought a lot about it and I've actually gone back over my life and looked at what I did the decisions I made and I can tell you categorically I can look you in the eye and tell you categorically the answer is not only yes but that I would have done it with a lot less cost to my health to my relationships to my enjoyment of my life to my happiness and I say that because when I look back as all my biggest mistakes were when I was burnt out and I quote Bill Clinton that was one of your favorite quotes in the book saying that my biggest mistakes I made when I was exhausted he did not specify what mistakes but bottom line is the same and then I look back to not big mistakes but even little mistakes like hiring the wrong person H missing the red flags that we all get that voice of our intuition when we know something but we don't hear it because we are operating on automatic or rushing from one thing to the other so in both big things and little things life would have been incredibly easier so that's something which I know you have to kind of take on trust because it's very hard to completely believe it because our culture is completely built on the opposite and you look around and that's why we need to tell the stories and that's one of the things I want to do in the next year of women and men who are doing it differently not just after the reach a certain level of worldly success but from the beginning because I want my daughters to do it I want you and our 15year old first questioner to see how much more effective we're going to be not just in terms of our own personal health and well-being but in terms of whatever our goals are you know for me I think a lot of what Ariana writes about remains really aspirational for me I mean I am really trying to meditate for five minutes and it's really hard and I'm certain I'm not doing it at all well not even for a minute um so I don't know and I'm learning along with the rest of us but the one thing I'm sure she's right about is sleep and I resisted it directly the pressure from her for years I have now become completely convinced that when I sleep less I waste more time whatever time I think I'm getting by getting in hour or two of sleep I make more mistakes that take more than an hour or two to clean up or I'm kind of groggy or I get more frustrated more easily and then I regret things I say and do and so on that one piece I really believe that you know getting more sleep is something and I don't always do it perfectly but the extent I do it more has made a huge changes and made me much more efficient and I'm using my time more effectively so that part I really have experienced and believe and that's actually that's a fantastic answer because that's all you have to do just make one little change you know you don't have to do all my 12 steps as it happened that there are that was accidental you know just pick one step and it doesn't if you don't want to pick sleep although I highly recommend it you can pick doing a gratitude list every day which seems trivial but it's incredibly important because it Focus us on what we're grateful for rather than what we are upset about well I just got a couple hours of sleep last night so hopefully this will come out all right but um my name that was your last night of two hour sleep right three hours but uh my name is Tim and as writers and speakers you both have advocated the benefits of gender equality and as a culture and specifically many men feel that gender equality and feminism comes at some kind of cost to men in terms of power in terms of influence so how would you suggest enlisting men specifically younger men in seeing that as a gender equality actually gives them benefits instead of takes away their power yeah I love the question and it's so key to so much of what I believe I don't believe we can say to men you should do this you know gender equality is good for someone else the truth is it's good for them and there are a lot of men that have spoken out on the huff post and other places saying that here's what we know that if you are better at working with half the population whether you're the most junior level employee or the most senior level CEO you're more effective at work you either can be better because you're a better partner and people want to work with you more or you can be better because your whole company can use half the population better and be more effective and lots of studies show this we also know that when men are more active Partners at home particularly in heterosexual couples where the dynamic and the amount of housework and child work is usually so uneven those hap those marriages are happier more sex very compelling for a lot of people men and women importantly at any income level no matter how active a mother is children with more active fathers and involved fathers are happier have better educational attainment better outcomes and so gender equality is important for all of us and for men as well and only happens with men like you who ask the question and take the steps hi my name is Alicia Rob I'm with the Kaufman Foundation which is the foundation that's with a focus on entrepreneurship one of the um areas where we haven't gained uh gender equality is entrepreneurship specifically high growth entrepreneurship um and that's and Kaufman's interested in disruptive entrepreneurship that creates Innovation how do we get more women to lean in in the field of Entrepreneurship and because in order to get power and influence and make the world a better place we need power and influence and Entrepreneurship is one way for us to get there how do we get more women in entrepreneurship and women investing in entrepreneurs well actually I think that if you look at the new world where um women are creating their own jobs building their own startups and we're seeing that including in technology not at all in the numbers we want to see it and there's a same flexibility that comes with that is something that women are looking for I mean we see every the statistics of women who have children and are able to leave the workforce and we have 43% of them leaving the workforce and only 40% of those who return returning fulltime so there's something wrong with this picture there an enormous amount of talent wasted so if we can educate women to the power and the importance of Entre r preneurship instead of just following a particular corporate career ladder it's going to make a huge difference my answer to this is we have to fight the stereotypes that the stereotypes are completely self-reinforcing when we expect something to look and act a certain way we don't like it when it doesn't so this is what's happening with technology women are getting 133% of the computer science degrees in this country 133% down from 35% three decades ago then we expect computer scientists to look male there was a magazine article that was doing a study of was doing an article on female entrepreneurs and they did that article by putting them on male bodies on the bodies that looked like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg because that was the only image of Entrepreneurship um when we tell women they can code they code lead they lead when we tell women that they can be entrepreneurs they can and I think that's incumbent upon all of us to do that and also just one more quick thing which is to publicize and put a spotlight more on the women who have done it we were talking last night about padmasri Warrior who is the chief technology officer of Cisco and she's obviously um phenomenal at her job running thousands of Engineers but she's doing it her way she talks about getting eight hour sleep she talks about that's really aspirational yeah and she's the chief technology officer of a major company she talks about taking Saturdays off as for her what she calls digital detox and that's the time when she writes High cus and paints and she meditates so you know we don't have a lot of Role Models like that and when we talk about it encourages the rest of women first I want to thank you guys for just being so open and honest and creating this space and I also want to thank my mom for inviting me tonight cuz I wasn't going I want to take your mom tomorrow is her birthday too so this is really awesome that we both get to experiences together um the question that I have for both of you is um being a black American Muslim there's a lot of different stories that I'm connected to and narratives that matter to me and I constantly see this perpetuation of negative stories around my community and the communities I associate with and so I'm curious to know about um talking about the responsibility of media and social media um sharing stories uh that are positive around Humanity not just within the Muslim Community but then just the global Humanity we have a lot of amazing people in the world doing lots of amazing things but we constantly see on the news we constantly hear about negativity going on specifically in the black community and also in the Muslim Community so I'm curious to know how do you um what roles you seees respons possibility of media and journalism today I think that's incredibly important I think the media are not doing a good enough job at spotlighting what is working at spotlighting the good things the examples of generosity Ingenuity compassion and we have a multiple dedicated sections doing that including a section called the good news section that is one of our most popular sections a section called impact sections called what is working because I think we need to put as much attention on covering what is dysfunctional what is corrupt H as we're doing on covering what is good what is generous and social media here has a very positive role to play because this are the stories people like to share yeah the DAT is very strong on a lot of the things that become the memes in social media Facebook are very positive stories of compassion stories of individuals um fixing something stories of connecting those actually are very viral and we also you know have a lot of data to suggest that as people connect more with other people their personal happiness goes up which makes them more likely to share happy moments and I think your point is really real this is a world with a lot of stereotypes to overcome um a lot of assumptions that things will go wrong to overcome so that positivity from all different Role Models is so important hi I'm Coco and if you had to rewrite your book would you change anything or would you keep it the same C how old are you seven yay let's start by congratulating you for asking a question I think since Cheryl wrote her book first you should go first book so in my case actually I was thinking that today as I was getting dressed I thought if I had written my book now I would have changed the following thing I would have been much stronger about what damage the current definition of success is doing for us because the stories I have been getting from people um ever since they started hearing about the book or they've been reading excepts from the book are so horrendous I mean today I was speaking at the watermark um women's group and in the afternoon and the stories of women who are making law partner and they got a blood clot or an ulcer or they damaged to Women's Health you know because of the way our workplace culture has been functioning has been horrendous and I had not kind of fully grasped that so now I would have actually written the following sentence which I didn't right and I wish I had which is the current definition of success is literally killing us um a question for you both as mothers uh I have a startup and a one-year-old how do I balance my desire to spend every minute with him and my desire to keep my business successful so I would say the first thing is to look at what are the things that um are negotiable and are not negotiable and I know for myself that there are many things that are negotiable that I would love to do I mean it involves saying no to things that I would love to do in order to be able to say yes to the things that I need to do to recharge and renew myself and also whatever it is that I'm doing to really do it 100% the biggest mistake a busy juggling mothers are doing and I've made those mistakes a lot are to think that by multitasking when we are with our children especially we're going to be able to save time the last time my mother got angry with me was when she saw me reading my email and talking to my children at the same time and she liter looked at me and she said with an accent that makes mine seem completely insignificant she said I upour multitasking and now modern science is backing her up modern science shows that multitasking is actually the most stressful thing we can do it's not really effective at all because it's task switching uh I think for me two things we have these great posters at Facebook and one of them says done is better than perfect done is just better than perfect you can't do I don't do anything close to perfectly and really giving yourself permission to do 80% not 100 and the second is really forgiveness I think as mothers as women I'm sure as men too we hold ourselves to such high standards um I have a story that happened in my life where I dropped my son off at school on St Patrick's Day when he was five wearing a blue t-shirt and you know the woman who opens the door and the carpool lane gets out and she says it's St Patrick's Day he's supposed to be wearing green so I do what any mother would do I spend the entire day completely unable to focus focusing on how I'm a horrible mother and maybe I should leave and you know I'm sure target has a green t-shirt I could just run in well then maybe I'm going to be that crazy mother showing up with a green t-shirt and embarrass my kindergartener and so halfway through this really stressful day where I really did feel I mean joke about it now but I felt bad I called my husband and he said oh our son learned something really important today he learned he didn't have to be like everybody else forgiveness we're not going to do everything perfectly forgive yourself forgive others and it sounds like having a good husband yeah definitely for sure I think this is our last question oh thank you I'm Mickey brigh Griffin you once wrote that empathy and wisdom are drowning an opinion for those of us who have loved ones are husbands who are caught by loud opinion shows do you have any suggestion of widening those conversations R empathy and compassion are drowning out opinions she's asking if you very strong opinions like a husband with very strong opinions what would you do so I think Ariana knows many people with very strong opinions she never you should follow Sheryl's advice and forgive him first of all and also empathy and compassion are not um in any way antithetical to strong opinions because yes empathy and compassion are totally tied to wisdom and because in the end if we don't one of the first things that I feel every wise person has taught us is that we are all kind of connected however much we disagree and that um the worst thing we can do is to demonize people who disagree with and that just because you don't disagree with them it doesn't mean they're Hitler you know the I remember the John Stewart Stephen colber R you know which was precisely about that you know restoring sanity in terms of our national conversation that's something we have to learn and relearn every day is your husband here no okay so in the inform tradition we are going to ask all they ask all speakers The Following last question what is your

60-second answer to how we can change the world so my quick answer is that uh we need to realize and remember that because life is shaped from the inside out every time we actually show self-compassion towards ourselves it's going to be easier to show compassion towards others and that will help us change the world every time we forgive ourselves it's going to be easier to forgive others and that will help us change the world every time we actually connect with our own health and wellbeing and avoid being burnt out is going to help us avoid burn burning up the planet and change the world so all these things are very interconnected and that's why I want us to end the way I end the book which is upward onward and inward adding that word inward is going to help us change the world thank you so much Ariana Huffington everyone thank you so thank you you're amazing