How Arianna Huffington Got Rejected 37 Times (Solo Episode)

Arianna Huffington, a Greek business tycoon who provided witty bon mots on Bill Maher, ran for Governor and pocketed $100 million when she sold her eponymous website, is no stranger to failure.

And she’s also no stranger to talking about failure. She often credits her mother with teaching her that failure isn’t the opposite of success but a stepping stone TO success.

In this solo episode, I break it all down: her early successes (first female foreign president of the Cambridge Union), early life struggles (37 rejections on her second book), getting less than one percent of the votes when she ran for Governor and then using that information to start and run the Huffington Post.

What else did she experience? A collapse from burnout, a multi million view TED talk and much more. In less than 12 minutes, I tell you all of it.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

This is a solo episode, and it is about somebody who I just side note, I find it sometimes hard to find people to look up to in history in current culture, aside from Taylor Swift, who I’m going to be doing an amazing solo episode about.

When I was brainstorming about 10 years ago, who do I really look up to this was one of the only people that I do and Arianna Huffington. I actually did have the pleasure of meeting her ever so briefly twice with my friend Mickey, who is friends with her. She has no idea. But it was in passing, and she was lovely.

So let’s talk about who she is. She was born in 1950 in Greece, she moved with her family, she went to University of Cambridge where she received an economics degree she’s you know, pretty successful right out of the gate. Side note, I did go to Cambridge for a year, not really. I pretended I went with Cambridge tutors, doesn’t matter. She was far above far better student. She in fact, became the first foreigner and only the third female to serve as president of the Cambridge union. Now already, she’s having crazy success. She’s only 22 years old.

But here’s what’s happening. Everyone’s telling her she doesn’t stand a chance. She could barely speak English. But she got the last laugh, even though they laughed at her for her accent. And she was elected as the first foreign female president. So she’s killing it. She publishes her first book, she’s got this Times columnist, fancy older boyfriend, Bernard Levin, he’s helping her. But — and I read this and didn’t hear it from her — he doesn’t want to marry her.

So then she’s trying to sell here second book, it’s called After Reason. And it’s 1975. And she is trying to sell it. And she is rejected 37 times before finding a publisher; she actually had to get a loan to survive. And this I know is true, because she recently posted about it on LinkedIn, this is what she said: By rejection 25, you would have thought I might have said, hey, you know, there’s something wrong here. Maybe I should be looking at a different career. Instead I remember running out of money and walking to press down St. James Street in London and seeing a Barclays Bank. I walked in and armed with nothing but a lot of hutzpah, I asked to speak to the manager and asked him for a loan. Even though I didn’t have any assets. This banker, whose name was Ian Bell, gave me a loan that changed my life, because it meant I could keep things together for another 13 rejections, and then I got an acceptance. It makes the point that failure isn’t the opposite of success. But as my mother often said, a stepping stone to success.

So she says kept up with the she’s kept in touch with Ian Bell, God bless him. And she sends him a holiday card every year. Happy holiday season.

So anyway, that all happens, she moves to the US. She meets and marries an oil millionaire and future congressmen Michael Huffington in 1986. They’re divorced. 11 years later, he comes out as bisexual. She starts working as a Republican journalist and political pundit. Michael’s a big deal of Republican, she’s writer for Bill Maher show, but then she realizes she’s at odds with Republican politics. And she’s more aligned with the views of the Democrats. So she becomes an activist for progressive policies. So I think that is also very interesting — that when you are feeling your way to success, you can change your mind in a pretty radical way and go from spokesperson for one thing, to spokesperson for another with the more information that you have.

So she’s getting all political, right. She runs for governor in 2003 during the recall election of Gray Davis, but she drops out before the election, and she received less than 1% of the votes. Kind of humiliating, right? Although I’ve never run. Have you ever run? Who are we to feel humiliated for she did she did that? Here’s the thing: she believes she said that the time she spent running for governor was not a failure because the experience gave her the information to understand how she could quote fix internet news.

Shortly after that, within two years, she launches the Huffington Post. And lots of controversial stuff happened. She stayed on as Editor in Chief and President and left in 2016. But let’s talk about the Huffington Post because I was a journalist who was making a pretty good living. And then the Huffington Post came along and decimated that living it because it got a lot of people writing for free for the exposure. That had not happened until that point. Those of us who were getting paid $2 or $1, a word and suddenly everybody’s writing for free. Websites realize they not only didn’t need to pay us, and they didn’t really have the money because advertising was changing and dynamic ads were replacing static ads. And so there was really no budget, they realized they could just get people to write for free. And it was it was really terrible.

I nevertheless continue my admiration for Arianna Huffington, because I believe that would have changed anything. The other thing that happened in post jet that had not really been done before is it started aggregating news, kinda like the Drudge Report. What that means is it was basically taking reported news that was from other sites, and rewriting it and linking out and calling that a story. It’s now so common we don’t even we don’t even notice when it happens. But they were really the place that originated that and made it popular.

So she started this thing called HuffPost Live, which is something I also know about because I was doing on air TV sort of punditry at that time, I can’t even say the word, which is probably why I’m not a pundit anymore. And I was called in, I had a TV agent, all that stuff. And I was called in to audition for HuffPost Live and it was a shit show. I was not cast. They were trying to run news casts on the website, and it was a total disaster, they spent $12 million, and it couldn’t generate any interest. So there were lots of things that didn’t work at Huffington Post. But she has been confronted with this and with people saying the The Huffington Post ruined lives of journalists. She said, “I’m surprised because that’s such a discredited argument. I’m a big believer in aggregation, but we always link back to the creators, so he or she wouldn’t, would have a lot more traffic. But beyond that, the Huffington Post has 800 jobs for journalists, editors and engineers, and staff pays comparable to newspaper rates.”

So look, I really look up to her and I also did experience the fact that the Huffington Post changed the game for journalists but I do think that would have happened anyway.

So anyway, success, success, success mixed with failures. She’s killing it. She’s working so hard. In 2007, she collapses and she wakes up in a pool of blood and is suffering from his job exhaustion after working 18 hours a day. And she has this big epiphany. She’s not been taking care of herself. A failure.

She does a TED Talk that gets millions of views about her exhaustion. And then she starts Thrive global in 2016.

She sells HuffPo and gets 100 million but by then she has really become an advocate for getting enough sleep. Amen. She, you know, makes these things that are little beds for your cell phones, so you put your own cell phone to bed, whatever. My cell phone doesn’t need a bed, but I think I get it. She’s doubling down on that.

And she’s had a lot of quotes about success. She tweeted on May 19 of 2019: “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions that will screw up royally sometimes.” And like she wrote on LinkedIn understanding that failure is not the opposite of success. It’s part of success. She’s famous for saying “We think mistakenly that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work. Instead, it’s the quality of the time we put in.” And she often talks about how her mother is the one who taught her that failure is not the opposite of success but a stepping stone to success.

And then she wrote, “For many years, I subscribed to a very flawed definition of success buying into our collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for success. Then in 2007, I had a painful wake up call.”’

That’s when she fainted, woke up at a pool of her own blood. And then she says, “From that point on, I knew I had to make sleep a priority.”

So, today, Arianna Huffington considers getting a good night’s sleep a great success. As the mother of a five-month-old I, too, consider that a great success. And I’m sure despite the fact that she was born in 1950 — she’s not a super young woman — this is not the last we will hear of Arianna Huffington’s great success.

So if we can take anything from this, I think it’s that there are highs and lows and sometimes the lows are personal. Sometimes they’re professional, sometimes making all the money just means it’s going lead to burnout. Sometimes it takes 37 rejections until you get to success. So keep going.

You heard it from Arianna Huffington, and you heard it for me. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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