Arianna Huffington's MISSION: REIMAGINE Journalism, Spotlight SOLUTIONS | Arianna Huffington EP 625

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11What was your original vision when you decided to launch Huffington Post? What was the vision? Did you exceed your vision as well in 10 years? My original vision when we launched on May 9, 2005, was to offer a platform to anybody who had anything interesting to say. whether they were well known or completely unknown whether they were presidents of a country or a homeless student with something interesting to say to say it on the Huffington Post and at the same time to build a very robust journalistic enterprises who have done so from the beginning my dream was to create a hybrid both great journalism and a great platform and I would say we've exceeded the dream in many ways.

1:03Let me just mention a couple. One is that we are now all over the world. We're in 13 countries now, including all over Europe and Japan, Korea, India. We're launching in Australia next month, then in the Arab world, then Mexico, China. So that's a dream come true. And the other thing that I'm really, really excited about is that We started as a primarily news and politics site, but now our content around thriving, around reducing stress and helping our readers and our viewers, because we do more and more video, lead more fulfilling lives, has seen a phenomenal growth. We have over 20 sections on these themes ranging from sleep, meditation, parenting.

1:53And so I love the fact that as well as informing people, we can inspire them, empower them, and help them lead the lives they want and not just the lives they settle for. I'm very proud of the fact that we are working to reimagine journalism. So it doesn't just focus on all the things that are dysfunctional, corrupt, all the crises, the rapes, the beheadings, which of course we will continue to cover relentlessly and robustly, but that we also put the spotlight on all the good things happening. We have a dedicated section called Good News. We have a section called Impact, about the impact often ordinary people make on the lives of others.

2:38and we've just launched a new global editorial initiative called What's Working, where we focus on solutions. Because right now, the way we journalists cover the news leaves out a lot of news. It's not the full picture. And as a result, our coverage leads to a lot of copycat crimes and not a lot of copycat solutions. But there are amazing things happening. in the world and if we cover them with the same kind of journalistic integrity and drama and color we're going to get a lot of people trying to replicate them and we'll have them scale our solutions what was the biggest lesson you learned about yourself in the last decade during this process well that's really the the whole theme of thrive this book that i wrote because eight years ago two years into launching the Huffington Post I collapsed from exhaustion burnout and sleep deprivation and that started me on this journey of recognizing that it wasn't just me that our whole world is suffering from what the Belgian philosopher has called civilization's disease burnout and that we are all living under the collective delusion that burnout is the only way to succeed.

4:06And I'm really excited now that modern science is proving this wrong. And that's why at the end of Thrive, I have 55 pages of scientific endnotes to prove that in fact, contrary to what we have believed for decades, sleep, meditation, pauses to renew ourselves are performance enhancement tools. And I'm actually thrilled to be talking to you because you come from the world of sport originally and Athletes you're asleep. You know you are ahead of business people You're ahead of the rest of the world in recognizing that there is no trade-off Between taking care of yourself and winning in fact muscles will recover.

4:51That's exactly Rick I mean as a marathon runner and an Olympic marathon runner said, he said, I can run really hard, the problem is recovery. I'm just launching this Thrive e-course with Oprah. Every week we work on two steps and have a different guest teacher. So my first guest teacher is Kobe Bryant. Because I wanted to have somebody unexpected to talk about sleep and meditation. And Kobe talks to everyone on the course about how important sleep and meditation has been on his performance and also on his ability to be a good dad and a good husband but even if somebody only cares about the performance at work which I hope is not the case we have done it wrong you know we've been congratulating people for working 24 7 and from net for not taking care of themselves not taking a vacation and all these things may make people actually less productive and less creative and less healthy.

5:53In Germany for example a lot of companies are taking measures to reduce stress in the workplace because they are seeing the impact of burnout on the bottom line. Like Volkswagen gives employees smartphones that are automatically turned off at 6 p.m. and turned on at 7 a.m. So they can actually take time to be with their children, their loved ones, themselves. Because again, the science shows that people need predictable time off. If your boss expects you to be on all the time in case they send you an email, you can never really unwind and truly recharge. And therefore, you're not going to be as effective in the morning.

6:51Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:41Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.