Arianna Huffington, President and Editor in Chief of Huffington Post Media Group. Photo by Kim Kalunian, WPRO News.
By Kim Kalunian, WPRO Arts and Entertainment Reporter
Arianna Huffington isn’t typically spotted in Smithfield, Rhode Island. But the pull of more than 1,000 women eager to hear her keynote speech at the Women’s Summit at Bryant University was enough to get the media mogul to pay a visit to the Ocean State.
Huffington, 62, serves at the President and Editor in Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group. She ran as an independent candidate for Governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, and she’s parodied regularly on Saturday Night Live by cast member Nasim Pedrad. Huffington’s net worth is ball-parked around $115 million, according to internet sources, and it’s not surprising considering she made a $315 million deal with AOL to buy her baby, The Huffington Post, in 2011.
But despite her status as one of America’s most influential women in media, Huffington is a firm believer that success is defined by other factors other than money and power. Men she says, are the ones who see success so narrowly defined.
“There’s a whole other third metric of success,” she told WPRO Thursday. “Which is, how fulfilled are you at what you’re doing? What’s your sense of wellbeing and how much joy do you get from your work?”
Huffington believes women will lead the movement to redefine success.
“I think women are going to lead that revolution and then it’s going to be great for men, they’re going to be very, very grateful to us,” she said with a smile.
Huffington has two daughters, one who just graduated from college and another who is still enrolled. The pair are part of a generation called “millennials,” but Huffington calls their group “generation stress.”
“[Their] generation is more stressed than any other,” she said. Why? A lack of jobs, high debt and the constant pull of technology.
“Technology has made life much easier and has given us amazing access to information and each other,” she said. “But it also means that we’re always on.”
Huffington has been an outspoken advocate of stress reduction and “un-plugging,” especially in the work place. The Huffington Post provides nap rooms for employees and has launched a mobile app called “GPS for the Soul.” The app was designed to help people de-stress in a technology-filled, fast-paced, always-on world.
“We all know when we are in the zone, in the flow – whatever term you want to use –we’re more effective and productive at what we’re doing,” she said.
Referencing a World Health Organization study, Huffington said that stress is costs American businesses $300 billion dollars a year.
Huffington says stress and technology aren’t just negatively affecting the economy, they’re detrimental to the nation’s political climate, too.
“I just feel right now that, how dysfunctional Washington has become, is another indication of how broken our leadership is at the moment and how necessary it is for our leaders to learn, to distress more…and reconnect with their own wisdom,” she said. “We have an enormous amount of leaders with very high IQs at the moment making terrible decisions, not because they’re not smart but because they’re not wise.”
Huffington says she won’t toss her hat into the political ring again (“Oh no, no I love my day job”) but she does believe the country’s leaders are misidentifying the problems plaguing our nation.
“We’re careening from one crisis to another,” she said. “We don’t really have a fiscal crisis or a sequester crisis, what we really have is a jobs crisis and a growth crisis.”
By growing the economy and jobs, Huffington said it would be much easier to get the nation’s deficit under control.
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Kim Kalunian
