The Her Edit

Building Softly · Women Worth Watching

In 2007, Arianna Huffington collapsed from exhaustion on the floor of the company she built. What came next was a new way of building — one that includes rest. A reflection on ambition that leaves something of you standing.

In 2007, a woman who had built one of the most talked-about media companies in the world woke up on her office floor in a pool of her own blood.

She had collapsed from exhaustion. On the way down, she hit her head on her desk and broke her cheekbone.

Her name was Arianna Huffington. Two years earlier she had co-founded The Huffington Post, and by every measure the world uses, she was succeeding. She was working eighteen-hour days. She was everywhere at once. And her body had quietly decided that it was done.

I keep coming back to that image this month. A woman on the floor of the business she built, wondering how she got there.

A girl from Athens

Arianna was born in Athens in 1950. As a teenager she came to Britain, and she went on to study economics at Cambridge, where she became president of the Cambridge Union, the university’s famous debating society.

She began her career writing in London, then moved to the United States in 1980. Books, columns and a life in public followed. In 2005, with Kenneth Lerer, she launched The Huffington Post. It grew into one of the most widely read sites on the internet, and in 2011 it was sold to AOL for more than $300 million.

It is the kind of story we are taught to admire. Bigger, faster, more.

The question on the floor

What I find most moving about Arianna’s story is not the company she built. It is the question she asked herself after the fall.

Is this what success looks like?

The doctors found nothing wrong with her, except that she was running on empty. And so she began to look again at the way she had been living. She wrote that we had been measuring success with only two things, money and power. It was like sitting on a stool with two legs, she said: sooner or later, you fall.

She called the missing leg the third metric: wellbeing, wisdom, wonder, and the capacity to give. In 2014 she wrote a book about it, Thrive. Two years later came The Sleep Revolution, a whole book on the thing so many of us treat as optional.

Building something about rest

In 2016, Arianna Huffington stepped away from the company that carried her name to build something new. Thrive Global is a company devoted to helping people work and live without burning out.

At its heart is a small, gentle idea: microsteps. Not a life overhaul. Not a new version of you by Monday. Just tiny, almost-too-small changes, like charging your phone outside your bedroom, or taking sixty seconds to breathe before the next meeting. The kind of steps you can take on an ordinary Tuesday, when you are tired and the children need feeding and the inbox will not stop.

I’ve come to realise that this is what building softly looks like. It is not the absence of ambition. Arianna is still one of the most ambitious women you could name. It is ambition that has learned to include you in it.

She did not stop building. She simply stopped building at the cost of herself.

What Arianna Huffington’s story holds for us

Most of us will never build a media empire. But many of us know the feeling of running a life on empty. We push through the tiredness because there is a business to grow, a career to protect, a family to hold together. We tell ourselves we will rest when things calm down.

Arianna’s story is a quiet reminder that things rarely calm down on their own. Sometimes rest has to be chosen. Sometimes stopping is the brave thing.

And perhaps that is the invitation for this season. Not to want less, but to build in a way that leaves something of you standing at the end of the day.

Softly, Fiona x.