Episode 13 of The James Altucher Show features Arianna Huffington, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post. HuffPo was founded in 2005 then sold to AOL in 2012 for US$315m. Arianna is still the EiC and ranks in the Top 100 of Forbes World’s Most Influential Women. In this episode, James and Arianna discuss her 2014 book, Thrive.

• Sleep. You NEED sleep to thrive. Sleep is you opportunity to rest, refuel and rejuvinate. Arianna used to sleep 4-5 hours a night because she always wanted to be doing more, but found that she became a lot more productive when she upped that to 8 hours a night because she was more mentally prepared for work.
• Related to sleep, a good tip is to charge your phone outside of the bedroom. I, like most people, have my phone charging next to my bed. If we check out phones at night as we’re trying to go to sleep or if we wake up in the middle of the night, the artifical light will definitely detract from the quality of our sleep. The next level is the instigate a ban on screens at night, like a 6pm screen curfew.
• Multi tasking: Whilst people think it is productive to be doing multiple things at once, Arianna found a focus on one task at a time gave her much better results. You can fully focus and don’t have the loss of concentration that comes with task switching and therefore you can produce better quality work.
• “Giving is a short cut to happiness”
• Society has a general understanding that more money equals more happiness. Whilst incremental pay increased intially lead to incremental improvements in happiness, James and Arianna argue that this hits a wall. At a certain point, a pay rise won’t make you more happy.
• The biggest takeaway from this episode is that your eulogy has nothing to do with your resume. Whilst it may be a little unpleasant to think about, no body gets up at your funeral to tell people about how you increased market share by a third or how you became vice president at age 35. Eulogies are always about other things like how we made people feel, what made us laugh, small random acts of kindness, our lifelong passions… Arianna says that “we have 30,000 hours to play the game of life, if we’re lucky, and how we play it will depend on the things we value”. Whilst you may think ‘that’s easy for her to say, she’s already sold a company for $315m’, but we really need to apply this to our own lives. We need to work out what’s important to us, and working in a job you don’t like just because you’re close to a $5,000 pay rise is pretty insignificant in the bigger picture.

This episode was pretty short compared to most Altucher interviews (usually around 1hr, this was about 33 mins). A good short episode that definitely made me want to read her book Thrive.