Replay: Banishing burnout, with Arianna Huffington

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1:26After Ariana's remarkable success scaling the Huffington Post, she found herself suffering from profound burnout. It inspired the creation of her company Thrive Global, where she's still the CEO. Ariana is on a mission to empower us to make the behavioral changes we all need for sustainable, healthy, and productive lives. Listening back through this, her insights feel even more important today. I hope you enjoy it. you gotta have incredible talent at every position it's like this huge push there are fires burning when you're going home can you believe it such an idiot and then you go back to this is totally going to be amazing there are so many easy ways i have no idea what to do sorry we made a mistake but you have to time it right oops working out of a three-bedroom apartment stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls 10 years later like well that's just how you do it we haven't made just how you do it.

2:25This is Masters of Scale. I'm Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock, and your host. And I believe that to survive your entrepreneurial journey, you have to learn how to recharge yourself. Call it balance, call it wellness, call it yin-yang. Your business and your life depends on it. Entrepreneurship is grueling, so grueling that I have a speech I give to every startup I've ever invested in at that inevitable moment when the team is about to give up. I'll share it later in this episode in case you or your team needs it. The way you respond to the trials will determine your success, but not always in the way you think.

3:08Many founders will trick themselves into believing that a relentless pace is right for them. You'll tell yourself, sure, I'm tired, but I'm still delivering. My performance hasn't suffered terribly. You should forgive yourself for these moments of delusion. Because you're an entrepreneur, optimism is your opiate. Treat yourself to as many hits as you need to survive the journey. But also recognize that every scale entrepreneur has a blind spot. And it's the belief that the law of diminishing returns applies to everyone but you. And sometimes it takes the calamity of a burnout before you realize you need to rethink.

3:51I wanted to talk to Arianna Huffington about this for reasons that will soon become clear. Arianna is now two years into her new venture, Thrive Global, a platform to promote well-being. Before that, she achieved one of media's most dramatic scale stories with the Huffington Post. But the success came at a cost. I was two years into building HuffPost, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters. Anybody listening with teenage daughters knows what that means. And had fallen complete prey to the delusion that in order to succeed as an entrepreneur and as a mother, I just had to sacrifice myself. Founders wear this self-sacrifice as a badge of honor.

4:38But under the surface, there's often a feeling that the constant self-sacrifice is unsustainable. And this feeling often surfaces in a wake-up call. That's what happened to Ariana. That morning when I stood up from my desk to go get a sweater, I remember because I was cold, and I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. That was this amazing wake-up call that I'm incredibly grateful for right now because it led me to trying to understand why that happened. Ariana brought her journalist instincts to bear on this very personal experience. Part of what led me to try to understand is that when something like that happens, you go through a battery of medical exams because they don't know what's wrong with you.

5:25Do you have a brain tumor? Do you have a heart problem? And literally, at the end of it, I felt like if this was a movie, all my doctors in white coats would come together and look at me and say, Ariana, you have civilization's disease burnout, out and there is nothing the medical profession can do for you. You have to go and change your life. Being kind of a research-driven person, I read, I studied, I talked to scientists, and I came to this really profound realization that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living under this delusion. We're actually living, believing something false.

6:08It's like we're living at a time when we thought the earth was flat. And when you believe something false, a lot of bad things follow. Like the laws of navigation were all wrong at the time. So the laws by which we navigate our lives are all wrong right now. And it's a very, very, very profound belief. It's not easy to shake. The laws of navigation Ariana had been following up to that point were wrong. And she had sailed off the edge of the map to the place marked Here Be Dragons. A place where the infallible founder never expects to find themselves. Right now, we still talk about work-life balance, which I think is just not the right way to address this problem.

6:54Because it's not like work and life are at opposing ends, that in fact, the rise or fall in tandem. So we need to get away from this idea of the trade-offs. There's one little nuance here. A founder cannot succeed unless they're obsessed with their company. And so part of being obsessed with a company means that it's what they think about on Saturday morning. It's what they think about when they end up with, you know, 15-minute spare, you know, kind of waiting for the DMV or for their friend to show up at the restaurant. There are no successful founders who are not obsessive. And you have to be obsessed with and therefore, by the way, consumed with the effort and the journey of your project and your company.

7:40But you're also attentive to, hey, it's a marathon for myself, and part of what I need to do is I need to have some mental flexibility and agility, and I need to not be dragged down by the obsession. The sustainable strategy is one that maximizes the efficiency of you and your team, but avoids the dreaded burnout. And for that, you have to know when and how to recharge. We'll talk to Ariana about this in a moment. But before I go further, I have to admit, I'm a very flawed spokesperson on this particular theory. I have at times used the phrase, sleep is for the weak. But in my defense, I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

8:27Well, for the most part. I don't really think sleep is a sign of weakness. If I know that I have a particularly creative project coming up, I'll make sure I get eight hours of sleep the night before. But a younger, less wise me would often limit sleep to continue the thrill of the entrepreneurial chase. Those super late-nighters to ship a new product are far behind me. But I can't deny I look back on those days with a hint of fond romanticism, as do many of my previous guests on Masters of Scale. They had told me, like, look, leave at 6 p.m. because we don't know when you'll ever leave at 6 p.m.

9:06again. I literally lay on the floor of the lobby, and I used my backpack as a pillow. I did sleep outside of the conference room for a few nights. I remember, you know, people were, like, sleeping under the desk. I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while would squeeze in a shower. Striking the balance between work and rejuvenation is something I still struggle with. My good friend, Joey Ito, will tell you so. Joey is the director of the MIT Media Lab. Here's what he told one of our producers when I interviewed him about my idea of letting fires burn. So the only concern I have for Reed is that this notion of letting fires burn isn't the greatest philosophy for having a work-life balance.

9:55And I think that's something that Reed is now just starting to process. So on the one hand, I think he's the master of scaling. But on the other hand, I think he's just beginning to figure out how that ties into sort of taking care of himself and his life. In fact, it's my conversations on this subject with Joey and other entrepreneurs that has got me thinking more seriously about this question of wellness. Not just when it comes to the individual, but how it can be scaled throughout a company in a measurable way that boosts the bottom line. Like any good journalist, Ariana couldn't stop pulling at the thread that her burnout had given her.

10:35When in 2007 I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout, and that was two years into building the Huffington Post, and I started appreciating other things like sleep and recharging, etc., I launched a dedicated sleep section in 2007. And I remember having a board meeting and my board being like appalled at that. It's hard to go back to 2007 and see how disrespected sleep was. There was no way you would ever see an issue about sleep in the Wall Street Journal or the Harvard Business Review, which is now a regular place to find these conversations. Ariana overcame the objections of her board at the Huffington Post and started a section dedicated to sleep.

11:22She became more and more passionate about the subject. In 2014, she published Thrive. It opens with Ariana describing that wake-up call when she had collapsed from exhaustion. She then argues for making well-being, wisdom, and wonder essential parts of how we think about success. The book was a hit. It caught the eye of Jack Ma, founder of Chinese tech giant Alibaba. And it was Jack Ma who first suggested that Ariana's new book could be the basis of a new kind of business. He asked Ariana to speak at his women's conference in Hangzhou, China. That night, Jack had a speaker's dinner. And during that dinner, he said to me, you know, if I were you, I would leave the Huffington Post and launch a new company around Thrive.

12:10Because he said there is no market leader. and the biggest crisis going on in China is the mental health crisis induced by stress. Over 100 million people suffering from mental health problems. And we're having this conversation at his Tai Chi Center. You know, he's very steeped in the Chinese culture of the Tao, Lao Tzu, just the whole idea of yin yang. When you hear the term yin yang, you might think of that black and white circle with a dot on either side. Or you might think of yin-yang as a metaphor for good and evil. In Eastern thought, it also represents a balance between two ways of being.

12:52Yang is you go out, you achieve, you conquer, you build your startup. Yin is you come back and refuse. This concept of yin-yang can be enormously helpful to the wayward startup founder. The idea is to keep them balanced, not to let one eclipse the other. But when Jack Ma brought all of this up to Ariana and nudged her to turn her book Thrive into a new business, she wasn't ready to hear it. Honestly, Reed, it was kind of amazing when I look back, because when he said that, all I could do was try to be extremely polite and like thinking this is a crazy idea, but thank you so much, whatever. It's like absolutely not a single thought of ever doing what he said.

13:36But that crazy idea played in Ariana's mind over the next couple years until she could no longer ignore it. She kept pulling the threads. I became more and more involved in these topics and speaking more and more about it and seeing how real the need was to actually change the culture, to change how people were working and living. I mean, 75 % of health care costs and health care problems are stress-related and preventable. 75 percent. Ariana launched Thrive Global in 2016. Her goal was to show just how essential sleep and rejuvenation are in helping you operate at peak efficiency while keeping burnout at bay.

14:26Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

15:16And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

16:00So if you're scaling, make it simple with DEAL. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. The Huffington Post is about everything. And Thrive is about only one thing. How do we build our best lives? How do we achieve everything we want without burnout and stress? And bringing together ancient wisdom, the latest science, and new role models. Rita, I'm going to get you to write something about the good things you are doing. I'd be delighted. I'm yet to make my appearance on Thrive, but my good friend Chris Yeh did recently. Chris and I co-authored my newest book, Blitzscaling. Chris makes the argument that sleep isn't just a bonus.

16:46In fact, it can be the driving force that lets you perform at new heights. Here's Chris sharing my favorite part of his article, Napping My Way to Success in Silicon Valley. The most important 20 minutes of my day are always the same. I set my timer for 20 minutes, then lie down for a nap. Hopefully, I get to lie down in my own bed, but I've trained myself to nap under many other circumstances, in the driver's seat of my car, curled up on a conference room couch, on the floor of a school while my son was taking a music lesson. Assuming that you have a job that allows you to carve out 20 to 30 minutes during the day.

17:27What's stopping you? I would argue that it's mostly about societal norms. Daytime nappers are malingerers. It doesn't matter that we're a sleep-deprived nation, or that more naps would reduce accidents and boost productivity. Fortunately, I've always worked in the startup world, where a lot of unusual behavior is tolerated. While I can't prove that napping is responsible for the success I've had over the past decade, I can tell you that I've accomplished an order of magnitude more in the past decade than the previous one. Give it a try. I'd love to hear how it goes. Chris says he can't prove napping has helped in his success.

18:07But as Ariana points out, the evidence is in his favor. There was a McKinsey study that was accepted at the Harvard Business Review. And the headline was basically the importance of sleep in the quality of leadership. And at first, when you read that, you think it's an onion headline. When you look at the authors being a McKinsey sleep specialist, I mean, the idea that McKinsey is a sleep specialist, you know, sounds like an onion headline. And yet there is this now purely scientific way of looking at what happens to our frontal lobes and our cognitive decision-making when we're sleep-deprived or running on empty for whatever reason.

18:54By the way, you can find that Harvard Business Review article and Chris's essay on napping, all linked from this episode's page on mastersofscale.com. I was intrigued by everything Ariana shared, but I admit I wasn't ready to throw out my own map of the world, the one that mostly bypassed the island of healthy balance. I asked Ariana for a concrete example of how tiredness has impacted her effectiveness and in turn her company. I was surprised when she told me that fatigue had led to big mistakes in hiring. I can trace back all my hiring mistakes to being tired, which has the impact not just of impairing your cognitive abilities to make the right decisions, but also subconsciously of making you want to say yes.

19:45When you're running on empty, you're kind of overwhelmed by your to-do list. So what we're doing now at Thrive, having learned from my mistakes, we have this rule that nobody should interview while tired. The impact of bad long-term decisions soon stack up. And if you're clouded by tiredness, you might not spot these mistakes before it's too late. The scientific evidence backs it up. I turn to sleep expert Dr. Matt Walker, professor of neuroscience at Berkeley, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Sleep, to explain. Your subjective assessment of how well you're doing with insufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how well you're doing.

20:28So it's quite like the drunk driver at a bar. You know, they've had seven or eight shots. They pick up their car keys and they say, I feel fine to drive home. And your response is, I know that you think you're fine to drive home, but trust me, objectively you're not. And it's the same way when people try to get by on too little sleep. The science of insufficient sleep in the workplace can be summarized in the following facts. Firstly, underslept employees, defined as getting six hours of sleep or less, they will select less challenging problems that you give them. second underslept employees will actually generate fewer creative solutions to novel problems that you do actually force them to try and solve third the less sleep that an employee has the more likely they are to slack off when they're working in teams and just ride the coattails of other people's hard work one of the more surprising facts is that the less and less sleep that an employee has had, the more and more likely they are to lie, become unethical.

21:33So for example, falsify data in a spreadsheet. And then finally, what we found is that insufficient sleep and its impact goes all the way up to the top of the business chain. The more or less sleep that a business leader has had from one night to the next, the more or less charismatic and inspiring that employees will rate that business leader, even though the employees know nothing about how much sleep that their boss has been getting. It's evidential in the CEO's behavior.

22:07It's not just a mental health question. It's a business question. Because a founder who has pushed themselves too far and is running on empty becomes a liability to themselves, their employees, and their investors. Getting more sleep tends to solve a lot of other problems. That said, it isn't as easy as it sounds, especially if you're going through a particularly hectic time. You can find yourself falling off of the rejuvenation wagon. And that means you could undo all of the good that your newfound dedication to wellness has achieved. The more wound up you are, the harder it is to wind down. Ariana has a two-word solution, bedtime ritual.

22:48Those who have children who are listening to the podcast know that you don't just drop your baby or your young child to bed. You lower the lights, you give them a bath, you read them Goodnight Moon, you sing them a lullaby. Why are you doing that? Because children and adults need a transition to sleep. So I did a parody of Goodnight Moon on Audible called Goodnight Smartphone. Good night, dark room. Good night, moon, which I can't see because of my blackout curtains, but which I know is there. Good night, sleep-killing blue light from my electronic devices, which I have gently escorted out of the bedroom.

23:33And good night, red balloon. And the point of that is you need to say good night to your day. Good night to all your problems, your projects, and all the things you're excited about, not just the problems. Your thing might be reading a book or listening to a whale song. Different things work for different people. But what I really wanted to know is this. How do you scale the idea of balance across an organization? And how do you do this without sacrificing productivity? I asked Ariana how she goes about practicing what she preaches in running Thrive. Thrive is not a company where you don't occasionally pull an all-nighter or exert yourself because you're meeting a deadline.

24:19It's a company where when that happens, you immediately take time for yourself. We call them Thrive Time, Thrive Days, whatever you need to completely refuel. So the problem that creates the casualties that are proliferating around us, it's the fact that you don't quickly course correct. People never have a problem with what they do occasionally. It's what's expected of you every day that's the problem. And now for a new segment we call... There's one little nuance here. Part of the reason that there's a focus on relentless pace is because more or less a slow-moving startup is dead, right? So it's a key portion for the success of startups that they're speedy, that they're fast.

25:11If they're not faster than big companies, they're dead. Don't let the bed bugs bite. A key metaphor that I use for entrepreneurship is that as an entrepreneur, you throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. And a key element of that metaphor, which packs in a lot of things, is that by default, you're dead. If you don't assemble the plane, you hit the ground. And if you don't assemble a plane in time before you hit the ground, it all crumbles. And that's part of what makes entrepreneurship so grueling, so difficult, because the default state, until you get the whole plane running, is death.

25:51Ariana is very clear that focusing on wellness does not mean trading efficiency or ambition. Rather, it means putting your focus on working smarter. There were some people at the beginning who joined the company thinking that this was an opportunity to chill under the mango tree. And clearly, these were not right for the company because we're not chilling under the mango tree. We're growing very fast. We are working hard. We're just not working stupidly because working long hours is not working smart once you start having diminishing returns. Diminishing returns in any situation is not working smart.

26:28You can find yourself expending more and more for less and less. But here's the thing. You can't always see this for yourself, but often others can. Ariana told me about an executive at a big tech company who found himself confronted by a poignant revelation. He told his young children, Daddy's going to take you to the playground. And one of them said, Oh no, can't the babysitter take us? And he was crestfallen and asked why. And the little boy said, Oh, because when you're at the playground, you're always on your phone.

27:05But knowing when to intervene to avert a burnout isn't always child's play. That's why Ariana has made it part of Thrive's culture to call out the warning signs. We actually catch each other, and we laugh at each other when we catch ourselves going back to the very culture we are trying to change. Whether you're designing a company culture that supports this kind of balance or just trying to change your own approach to life, you have to recognize that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. Different people have different capacities, different priorities, and different ways to recharge. And now – hey, shh, keep it down.

27:45Sorry. Now for another edition of Reed's Bedtime Thoughts. For me, recharging interleave rest moments into what you're doing. So like don't try to work 14 days straight, right? Like I almost never work on a Friday evening and I rarely work the whole day Saturday because it gives you kind of a recharge. And then Sunday is kind of the I'm getting back up to speed. I'm doing stuff. I'm reloading my stack. And then Monday is I'm in it, right? I've noted kind of entertainingly that I'm much better disciplined than most of the people I know at not looking at my phone constantly. Like I only have the ringer on if I'm waiting for a specific phone call, which is almost never.

28:28And I don't check messages. I don't check – like I think people frequently are messaging me because they think I'm going to message back right away. and then are kind of surprised when I message back six hours later because that's when I've gotten to looking at my phone and go, oh, someone messaged me, right? If you don't context switch too much, you can generally run longer between rest periods as well. Good night, Reed. You need a flexible system, and Ariana has a great solution for this. One, I plan to borrow. We have what we call in our cultural values the entry interview. In the entry interview, we asked people, what's important to you outside your work?

29:07And at one of our Accenture trainings, for example, a woman said, what's really important to me is to take my daughter to school at 7.30 every morning. But my manager sets up 7.30 in the morning conference calls every morning. We talked to her manager. Her manager said, it's not a problem to have the calls at 8. I didn't know she wanted to take her kid to school at 7.30. There may be a day when she will have to have a 7.30 conference call. That won't matter. What matters is what can she do every day. So the entry interview is also something that helps build a team spirit because even though that's important to you, I look at you a little differently.