Last year I wrote to Arianna Huffington after listening, more than once, to her podcast interview with Tim Ferris (it helped that she gave her email address at the end). There were several things she said that really spoke to me for different reasons. Here are some of them:
16 mins. 20 secs. – I love bringing people together. I think that’s one of the things I most love is introducing my friends to each other and making sure they are connecting and setting people up.
Like her, very often when I’m speaking with a family member, a friend, a work colleague…. and I’m listening to them speak I start thinking of someone I’d like to introduce them to but I realised that the ways in which we make introductions nowadays, normally via email, could be substantially improved. That’s what motivated me to design and develop You Should Meet, a free iOS and Android app that allows you to introduce two people in a quick and easy way.
21:14 – Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s a stepping stone to success.
This is something her mother used to say to her and her sister. She made them feel comfortable with failing. Taking risks was part of life and failing was part of life.
46:41 – I think for me, persuasion is about what does the other person want?
48:00 – For me, the key is to find out what is the common point of what I’d like to see happen and what the other person would like to see happen.
When I emailed her I kept this in mind and referenced it.
49:00 – A lot of people think that success is about what we get from the outside. But the truth is that success is so based on what we can create from what we have inside us and how we can access that place of creativity and resilience and peace inside us. I’m so convinced of that now. It’s getting harder and harder because the distractions, the invasiveness of technology are so overwhelming. I don’t think there’s anything more important. It helps you come up with the best ideas. It helps you not burn out, which makes you more resilient in terms of facing those no’s and failure.
Tim Ferris then asks what a digital detox looks like for her or for anyone else who might want to try it:
52:38 – People can pick their own way of doing it but it could be anything. From a day, a weekend, an hour away from our phones. Thích Nhất Hạnh said ‘It’s never easier to run away from ourselves.’ The human attention span is now shorter than the attention span of the goldfish. It’s down to eight seconds.
Anything we can do that helps us disconnect from the distractions, reconnect with ourselves. Whatever form it takes. I’m a big believer in micro-steps. If the idea of a one-day digital detox is overwhelming, just try an hour. Try half an hour. Whatever. Whatever your entry point is, just take it.
55:13 – For me another little microstep is not charging our phone by our bed. The reason for that is that we are all slightly addicted to our phones.
My Excerpts 