What great founders do at night, w/Arianna Huffington
Dec 26, 2023
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Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post and Thrive Global, discusses the importance of self-care, redefining work-life balance, and the impact of sleep on leadership. With cameo appearances from Chris Yeh and Dr. Matt Walker, this podcast explores the difficulties of scaling businesses and the need for rest and avoiding burnout.
Founders and entrepreneurs need to prioritize self-care and recharge in order to sustain themselves through the challenges of scaling their businesses.
Insufficient sleep can have detrimental effects on employee performance, including decreased creativity, productivity, and ethical behavior.
Deep dives
Prioritizing Rest for Founders and Entrepreneurs
Ariana Huffington shares insights on the importance of rest for founders and busy entrepreneurs. She emphasizes that sustaining oneself through the challenges of scaling requires prioritizing self-care. Believing in the myth of the infallible founder, where long hours and extreme stress are seen as badges of honor, can lead to burnout. Ariana urges entrepreneurs to recharge themselves and find balance, as their business and life depend on it. She highlights the need for relentless prioritization and being comfortable with incompletions, while also emphasizing the benefits of bedtime rituals and declaring a routine end to the workday.
The Impact of Fatigue on Decision-Making
Sleep expert Dr. Matt Walker explains the detrimental effects of insufficient sleep on employee performance. Under-slept employees are prone to selecting less challenging tasks, generating fewer creative solutions, slacking off in teams, and engaging in unethical behavior. Fatigue also impacts the perception of business leaders, affecting their charisma and inspiration ratings. Ariana Huffington underscores the importance of recognizing the link between sleep deprivation and cognitive abilities, and how getting more sleep can enhance decision-making and overall efficiency.
Navigating Technology and Wellness
Ariana Huffington discusses the technology paradox and the need to create boundaries for a healthier relationship with technology. She introduces the Thrive app, which helps users navigate their device usage and declare dedicated periods of disconnection. The app also offers a dashboard to track social media and game consumption, allowing users to set limits. Ariana emphasizes the importance of making small changes, implementing bedtime rituals, and practicing gratitude. She also shares how Thrive Global cultivates a culture that supports balance and encourages team members to prioritize self-care.
Scaling Wellness in Organizations
Ariana Huffington provides strategies for scaling wellness in organizations. She highlights the importance of the entry interview, where individuals express their personal priorities and non-work commitments. This information facilitates a better understanding of team members beyond their work roles. Ariana also emphasizes the value of creating a culture where team members hold each other accountable for maintaining work-life balance. By reinforcing the importance of prioritization and teaching individuals to be comfortable with incompletions, organizations can make small course corrections to promote wellness and boost productivity.
To survive your entrepreneurial journey, you have to learn to recharge. Knowing when to turn the lights out may be the only way to keep the lights on. Few know this better than Arianna Huffington, who dramatically scaled the Huffington Post – and then experienced profound physical burnout. Her venture, Thrive Global, scales the idea of balance across an organization. With cameo appearances from Chris Yeh (co-author, Blitzscaling) and Dr. Matt Walker (author of Why We Sleep).