Thrive Arianna Huffington Quotes

We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.’ 

Have you notices that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?

It’s not ‘What do I want to do?’, it’s ‘What kind of life do I want to have?’ 

Treat people like family, and they will be loyal and give their all.

And whenever I’d complain or was upset about something in my own life, my mother had the same advice: “Darling, just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day.

Today we often use deadlines—real and imaginary—to imprison ourselves.

And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” —IAIN THOMAS

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say “so what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. —ANDY WARHOL

What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace. —PAULO COELHO

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. —WU MEN

just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.

We forget we’re mostly water till the rain falls and every atom in our body starts to go home.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. —WILLIAM JAMES

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. —FR. ALFRED D’SOUZA

Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train.

Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings.

Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.

And yet we spend so much time and effort and energy on those résumé entries—entries that lose all significance as soon as our heart stops beating.

as the Zen saying goes, ‘If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.’ 

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.

it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

Whenever we look around the world, we see smart leaders – in politics, in business, in media – making terrible decisions. What they're lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise; it has never been harder to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our omnipresent devices – our gadgets, our screens, our social media – and reconnect with ourselves.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love. —ANNE LAMOTT

Making money and doing good in the world are not mutually exclusive.

The average smartphone user checks his or her device every six and a half minutes.

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.

music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.

When we are all mind, things can get rigid. When we are all heart, things can get chaotic. Both lead to stress. But when they work together, the heart leading through empathy, the mind guiding us with focus and attention, we become a harmonious human being.

The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

Taoist philosophy, “Rest is prior to motion and stillness prior to action.

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

And time inherently creates a story. Things begin and they end. How they end is the story. Or maybe it's what happens between when they begin and end that's the story.

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly,

sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control.

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage by considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them; every day begin the task anew. —FRANCIS DE SALES

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.94 “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” –CHEROKEE LEGEND

When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity, the impact can be profound. People start to separate the world into those who are creative and those who are not. They come to see these categories as fixed, forgetting that they too once loved to draw and tell imaginative stories. Too often they opt out of being creative.

the ease with which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before. All of our small anxieties and trivial preoccupations evaporate with the sudden recognition of what really matters. We are reminded of the impermanence of much that we assume is forever and the value of so much we take for granted.

One of the most popular classes Google offers employees is known as SIY, which is an acronym for “Search Inside Yourself.

Everything you do, you’ll do better with a good night’s sleep,

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality in people who meditated versus those who did not,

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone. She still had it in her hand when she was rescued.

being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.

In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment.

really true that while we grow physically by what we get, we grow spiritually by what we give. Ever since I became a mother, I’ve

enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” Nature

Turn off all notifications; you should control when you want information, not the reverse.

Countless things in our daily lives can awaken the almost constant state of wonder we knew as children. But sometimes to see them we must look through a different set of eyes.

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone.

In fact, we take much better care of our smartphones than ourselves.

The Exxon Valdez wreck, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island all were at least partially caused by a lack of sleep.5

As Steve Jobs said in his now legendary commencement address at Stanford, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” There

A study conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter in their brains, which is linked to improved psychological health.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.112 They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.

Arianna Huffington cites studies in her brilliant book Thrive that show how the act of giving actually improves your physical and mental health. One example I love in particular is the 2013 study from Britain’s University of Exeter Medical School that reveals how volunteering is associated with lower rates of depression, higher reports of well-being, and a 22% reduction in death rates! She also writes, “Volunteering at least once a week yields improvements to well-being tantamount to your salary increasing from $20,000 to $75,000!

As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, “Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.” And even when the information is not false, the problem is “that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.

Like airlines, we routinely overbook ourselves, fearful of any unused capacity, confident that we can fit everything in. We fear that if we don’t cram as much as possible into our day, we might miss out on something fabulous, important, special, or career advancing. But there are no rollover minutes in life. We don’t get to keep all that time we “save.” It’s actually a very costly way to live.

And during the day, to prevent stress from building up—which makes it harder to fall asleep at night—every few hours take sixty seconds of recovery time the way top tennis players introduce tiny slots of recovery rituals into their game. All you have to do is stop what you are doing, and simply bring your awareness to the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet, or both. Let it stay there for a minute, and feel all tension leaving your body, drifting away from you through your hands and feet.

Giving up drugs is easy compared to dealing with the emotions drugs protected you from.” Learning to be vulnerable without shame and accepting our emotions without judgment becomes much easier when we realize that we are more than our emotions, our thoughts, our fears, and our personalities. And the stronger the realization, the easier it becomes to move from struggle to grace. The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear.… If I “try” to play, I fail; if I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability. —STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH

True understanding is to see the events of life in this way: “You are here for my benefit, though rumor paints you otherwise.” And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this: You are the very thing I was looking for. Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you. This, in a word, is art—and this art called “life” is a practice suitable to both men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend? I had a dream many years ago that sums up this thought in a different way, one that has become a sustaining metaphor for me. I am on a train going home to God. (Bear with me!) It’s a long journey, and everything that happens in my life is scenery along the way. Some of it is beautiful; I want to linger over it awhile, perhaps hold on to it or even try to take it with me. Other parts of the journey are spent grinding through a barren, ugly countryside. Either way the train moves on. And pain comes whenever I cling to the scenery, beautiful or ugly, rather than accept that all the scenery is grist for the mill, containing, as Marcus Aurelius counseled us, some hidden purpose and a hidden blessing. My family, of course, is on board with me. Beyond our families, we choose who is on the train with us, who we share our journey with. The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

As Nicholas Kristof put it in The New York Times: “Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body’s metabolism or the architecture of the brain. The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.

meditation “a reboot for your brain and your soul.

Rob yourself of sleep and you’ll find you do not function at your personal best.

equanimity,

is a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life,

is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind.… 

According to a study from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control. In fact, the only thing the study found that gets better with sleep deprivation is “magical thinking” and reliance on superstition. So if you’re interested in fortune-telling, go ahead and burn the midnight oil.

Eighty percent of those she examined were found to have periods of “email apnea.

human beings cannot distinguish between real dangers and imagined ones.

predictable time off (PTO), in which you take a planned night off—no email, no work, no smartphone.

Too many of us leave our lives—and, in fact, our souls—behind when we go to work.

According to a study from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control. In

bring ourselves back to that place of stillness, imperturbability, and loving—until it becomes second nature to return quickly to what is our true nature.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love … by loving. —FRANCIS DE SALES

The quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools today, but wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon.

Just as money can’t buy happiness, neither can it buy time affluence.

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, the more money you have, the more likely you are to suffer from time famine.

those at the top of the income spectrum are among the most likely to be time-poor.

the word “deadline” has its American origin in Civil War prison camps;

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone Together, has written about the cost of constantly documenting—i.e., photographing—our lives. These interruptions, she writes, “make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.” And by so-obsessively documenting our experiences, we never truly have them.

Darling, just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

One company that did wake up to the importance of employee health was Safeway. The supermarket chain’s former CEO Steve Burd recounts that in 2005 Safeway’s health care bill hit $1 billion and was going up by $100 million a year. “What we discovered was that 70 percent of health care costs are driven by people’s behaviors,” he says. “Now as a business guy, I thought if we could influence the behavior of our 200,000-person workforce, we could have a material effect on health care costs.

peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity”—have

Essayist and philosopher Alain de Botton describes art as “an apothecary for the soul.

Intuition, not intellect, is the “open sesame” of yourself. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

In the new definition of success, building and looking after our financial capital is not enough. We need to do everything we can to protect and nurture our human capital.

Throughout history, famous nappers have included Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy.

Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,

WE HAVE, if we’re lucky, about thirty thousand days to play the game of life. How we play it will be determined by what we value. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritualtype thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” We now

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say “so what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. —ANDY WARHOL Some

But, if we let it, technology can also add a lot of noise and distraction that get in the way of our most fundamental creative capabilities—instead of freeing us, it can consume us. What

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if—as the poet Rumi put it—everything is rigged in our favor.