Rediscovering other metrics for achievement. Excerpted from Inforum’s “Redefining Success,” March 27, 2014.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, President and Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post Media Group; Author, Thrive

In conversation with
SHERYL SANDBERG, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook; Author, Lean In

 

SANDBERG: How did this start for you? This is an amazing journey and an amazing story.

HUFFINGTON: It actually started on April 6, 2007. I was lying on the floor of my office in a pool of blood having collapsed from exhaustion. [I] hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. So it really starts with a very rude awakening – a wake-up call that only got more intense during the weeks that followed when I was going from doctor to doctor, from MRI to echocardiogram, to find out what was really wrong with me medically. They thought it could be a brain tumor; it could be a heart problem. It turned out there was nothing medically wrong with me, but just about everything wrong with the way I was leading my life. And that’s really when I started asking the question, “Why the success?” Because by the conventional definition of success – which, in our culture right now, is really two metrics: money and power – I was successful: the Time 100 list, covers of magazines. But by any sane definition of success, if you’re lying in a pool of blood on the floor of your office, you’re not successful.

SANDBERG: How long did it take you to make changes in your life?

HUFFINGTON: They say that if you want to change your life, you need to begin with changing one habit. They call it the keystone habit. The habit I changed was to go from four to five hours of sleep a night to seven to eight hours of sleep a night. That was transformational.

SANDBERG: One of the many pieces of advice in this book, and she actually says specifically to women, Arianna advises sleeping your way to the top. It’s part of my journey as well. That did not come out right – let me finish the thought. For many years, I thought that the way I would get everything done was just to get less sleep. Every time I would see Arianna, her first question always, before even saying hello, was, “How much sleep are you getting? You look tired. Darling, you look tired.” I was tired. She really kept saying, “You need to sleep more. You need to sleep more. You need to sleep more.” And it was a very interesting journey for me, because the reason I learned to sleep more was that when I had children, I watched them. For those of you who have seen children, if your child does not get enough sleep, everything is a disaster, right? If your child does get enough sleep, nothing can go wrong. I thought how interesting it was that children were that way. Then I thought, “Wait a second. Arianna keeps telling me I’m that way, too.” I figured out that when I got enough sleep, everything went well, and when I didn’t get enough sleep…

How did you learn how important sleep was, and do you still advise women to sleep their way to the top?

HUFFINGTON: So the way I realized this was because I started reading. The science about sleep is absolutely incontrovertible and it’s only gotten even more profound since 2007. When you read the science from the biggest universities and hospitals, you’ll see that sleep is really a wonder drug. What you said about children is so key, but you can also look at athletes. Now elite athletes are prioritizing sleep, meditation, yoga – I don’t know if you saw the video of LeBron James meditating that went so viral. But there’s also another thing that Charlie Rose, in a conversation with Andy Murray – the great tennis player – talked about: when you’re recharged and rested on the court, the ball is coming at you in slow motion, which means you can handle anything. You have time to make decisions. And I feel this is a great metaphor for life because I know that when I’m burnt out, whatever happens, I feel kind of overwhelmed by it. I feel like it’s all coming at me and I have to react. It’s not a good way to live.

The biggest realization I had when I switched to seven to eight hours sleep is that it had been a very long time since I was actually really rested. And in the last few days, speaking to different groups, I’ve had so many women come up to me and say, “I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired.” Why are we doing that to ourselves? That’s really the big question that I’m asking: Why do we think this is the good life? You know, Greek philosophers used to ask this question, “What is a good life?” And we kind of shrunk the definition down to money and power. And now we need to expand it again to include what I’m calling “the third metric.”

SANDBERG: So let’s talk about “the third metric.” In the book, it has four elements: well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving. You talk about all of this adding up to a “third metric.” So what is it?

HUFFINGTON: So the third metric is what really gives life meaning, purpose and joy. Joy is very important. One of the things I want all of us to do is to put joy back in our everyday lives. Again, why did we sort of decide that we’re just going to go after whatever it is that we want and that that’s all that matters, and define ourselves by whatever that is? I had this kind of realization (which is really the realization of every major religion, philosophy, everything, but we don’t have to believe in God or a particular religion to believe it) which is that, ultimately who we are inside ourselves – the essence of who we are – is greater and more magnificent than whatever we are in the world. And that’s kind of a big shift in how we look at our lives. It means that we can never shrink ourselves down to our to-do lists.

SANDBERG: So you’re arguing for something pretty profound, which is a change in the definition of success. I know that you also argue that everyone should define success for themselves. So how do you go about doing it? For this amazing audience here, we’re going to go home tonight and we’re all going to redefine success. How?

HUFFINGTON: The first thing is to look at what it is that you want to do in your life. And that is what you want – not what society wants you to do, what you read in a magazine everybody should want to do. But what is it that [we] want? To not let our own fears stop us. In the book, I call these fears, “the obnoxious roommate living in our head.” I was recently on Stephen Colbert’s show and I told him that “my obnoxious roommate,” I said, “Stephen, sounds exactly like you.”

You know, obnoxious roommates are often sardonic. They put us down; they tell us we’re not good enough. So overcoming that is a big step. Once that happens, then we will decide what it is that we want.

Then to realize that while we are going for our dreams, that we cannot be defined by them. Because that’s often what also stops people: the fear that they are going to fail. And then if they fail, it’s almost like their survival is at stake.

SANDBERG: You describe this “third metric” redefinition of success, as the third women’s revolution. I think the book’s principles and practices are equally applicable to men, but you said that you found women more interested.

HUFFINGTON: First of all, let me just say, what I mean by the third women’s revolution. The first women’s revolution was giving us the vote. The second women’s revolution was giving us equal access to all the fields of work at the top of every field, equal pay – and this is a very incomplete revolution.

But I think that we are never going to complete the second revolution if we don’t launch the third. Because the third women’s revolution is about women saying, “We don’t just want to be at the top of the world. We want to change the world.” Because the world the way it is now is not really working. And the world the way it is now is designed by men and run by men.

SANDBERG: It’s true. It turns out men still run the world, and I’m not sure how well that is going.

You talk about wisdom, which is a big word and something, I think, everyone wants more of. My favorite line in the book, other than the obnoxious roommate, is “the power of the hunch.” You say, “When your inner voice speaks, shut up and listen.” Is this how you think we achieve wisdom?

HUFFINGTON: Yes.

SANDBERG: Is wisdom learning from others? Is wisdom learning from ourselves?

HUFFINGTON: Obviously learning from others, but I think [also] learning from ourselves. I believe two things. One is that we all have that place of wisdom, strength, peace and joy in us. We all have it. We’ve all had glimpses of it. We’ve all experienced it, however fleetingly. The second thing is that most of the time, we’re not going to live there. So life is really about how quickly [we can]get back to that place. It can actually be done very quickly. In order to have an impeccable course-correcting mechanism, we really need to listen to our inner wisdom, listen to our intuition; the more we listen to it, the more it develops. But we need a little more silence for that.

SANDBERG: Giving [is] the last of the four elements of the third metric. You talk about how it shouldn’t take a natural disaster for us to give. Charitable donations go way up in a natural disaster, but there is a lot of need that exists every single day. You talk about the power of giving and why it’s good, not just for the recipient but for the giver.

HUFFINGTON: Yes. I think that’s going to be a transformational moment when each person really gets that. In our DNA, we are actually wired to give; biologically, nature rewards us when we give. They’ve done studies that our biological inflammation markers, which are a precursor of disease, go down when we give and go up when our pleasures are purely what they call hedonic, meaning purely self-gratification. Obviously, life is going to be a mixture. But if it is all one without the giving part, we pay a price.

Richard Davidson, the professor of neuroscience in Wisconsin, has done amazing work showing that giving is a shortcut to happiness. One of the reasons is when we are in a “getting mode,” which obviously we all are in aspects of our lives, we are operating from lack because no matter how much we have, we are trying to get something that we don’t have. When we are giving, no matter how little we have, we are operating from abundance. So we’re more expanded. That’s why one of the things I write in the book is, “How do we move in our culture from honoring go-getters to honoring go-givers?” [By] getting our children to learn that giving is part of life from very early on, so it’s not something they dwell on [only] on Thanksgiving or Christmas, but something that is part of their everyday experience.

SANDBERG: We’re going to take audience questions. [Here’s one] from Facebook: What do you see as the biggest barrier to redefining success, and how will we get past it?

HUFFINGTON: The biggest barrier is that our world sends us insistent, flashing signals to keep climbing the ladder, making more money, to basically live our lives based on the first two metrics. Therefore we need to create our own rituals, our own tribe to support us as we’re making these changes. I love this passage by Ian Thomas, the writer, who says that every day, the world will yank you by the hand and say, “This is important and this is important and this is important and you must worry about this and worry about this and worry about that.” You must yank your hand back and put it on your heart and say, “No. This is important.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ll be honest that I’m not entirely convinced. A part of me really wonders, would the two of you be where you are right now – to use the term, “success,” which is a very loaded term – to be in positions of such tremendous influence and prestige and power and even wealth, if you had really, up until this point, practiced what you are preaching right now on this stage?

SANDBERG: You know, for me, I think a lot of what Arianna writes about remains really aspirational for me. I mean, I am really trying to meditate for five minutes. It’s hard and I’m certain I’m not doing it at all well, not even for a minute. So I don’t know and I’m learning along with the rest of us. But the one thing I’m sure she’s right about is sleep —and I resisted the pressure directly from her for years. I have now become completely convinced that when I sleep less, I waste more time. Whatever time I think I’m getting by [giving up] an hour or two of sleep, I make more mistakes that take more than an hour or two to clean up or I’m kind of groggy or I get more frustrated more easily, and then I regret things I say and do. So, on that one piece, I really believe that getting more sleep is something I don’t always do perfectly, but the extent that I do do it more has made huge changes and has made me much more efficient and I’m using my time more effectively. That part I have experienced and believe.

HUFFINGTON: That’s a fantastic answer, because that’s all you have to do, just make one little change. You don’t have to do all my 12 steps as it happened that there are — that is accidental. Just pick one step. If you don’t want to pick sleep – although I highly recommend it – you can pick doing a gratitude list every day, which seems trivial, but it’s incredibly important because it focuses us on what we are grateful for rather than what we are upset about.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well I just got a couple hours of sleep last night, so hopefully this will come out right. But…

HUFFINGTON: But that was your last night of two hours of sleep, right?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Three hours. My name’s Tim and as writers and speakers, you both have advocated the benefits of gender equality. Many men feel that gender equality and feminism come at some kind of cost to men, in terms of power, in terms of influence. So how would you suggest enlisting men, specifically younger men, in seeing that equality actually gives them benefits as a gender, instead of taking away their power?

SANDBERG: I love the question, and it’s so key to so much of what I believe. I don’t believe we can say to men, “You should do this; gender equality is good for someone else.” The truth is it’s good for them. There are a lot of men that have spoken out on HuffPost and other places saying that.

Here’s what we know. We know that if you’re better at working with half the population, whether you’re the most junior-level employee or the most senior-level CEO, you’re more effective at work. You either can be better because you’re a better partner and people want to work with you more or you can be better because your whole company can use half the population better and be more effective. Lots of studies show this. We also know that when men are more active partners at home, particularly in heterosexual couples, where the dynamic and the amount of housework and child work is usually so uneven, those marriages are happier (more sex) – very compelling for a lot of people, men and women. Importantly, at any income level, no matter how active a mother is, children with more active fathers and involved fathers are happier or have better educational attainment and outcomes. So gender equality is important for all of us, for men as well [as women] and it only happens with men like you who ask the question and take the steps.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, my name is Alicia Robb. I’m with the Kauffman Foundation, which is a foundation with a focus on entrepreneurship. One of the areas where we haven’t gained gender equality is entrepreneurship. How do we get more women in entrepreneurship and women investing in entrepreneurs?

SANDBERG: My answer to this is we have to fight the stereotypes, that the stereotypes are completely self-reinforcing. When we expect something to look and act a certain way, we don’t like it when it doesn’t. So this is what’s happening with technology: Women are getting 13 percent of the computer science degrees in this country, 13 percent—down from 35 percent three decades ago. Then we expect computer scientists to look male. There’s a magazine that was doing an article on female entrepreneurs, and they did that article by putting them on male bodies, on the bodies that look like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg because that was the only image of entrepreneurship. When we tell women they can code, they code. When we tell women they can lead, they lead. When we tell women that they can be entrepreneurs, they can, and I think that’s incumbent upon all of us to do that.

HUFFINGTON: Also just one more quick thing, which is to publicize and put a spotlight more on the women who have done it. We were talking last night about Padmasree Warrior, who is the chief technology officer of Cisco and she’s obviously phenomenal at her job, running thousands of engineers, but she’s doing it her way. She talks about getting eight hours of sleep. She’s the chief technology officer of a major company. She talks about taking Saturdays off for what she calls “digital detox” and that’s the time when she writes haikus and paints and she meditates. We don’t have a lot of role models like that, and when we talk about it, it encourages the rest of women.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Being a black American Muslim, there’s a lot of different stories that I’m connected to and narratives that matter to me. I constantly see this perpetuation of negative stories around my community and the communities that I associate with. I’m curious to know about the responsibility of media and social media in sharing stories that are positive around humanity not just within the Muslim community but [also] the global humanity. We have a lot of amazing people in the world doing lots of amazing things, but we constantly hear about negativity going on, specifically in the black community and also in the Muslim community. What roles do you see as the responsibility of media today?

HUFFINGTON: That’s incredibly important. I think the media are not doing a good enough job at spotlighting what is working, at spotlighting the good things – the examples of generosity, ingenuity, compassion. [At the Huffington Post,] we have multiple dedicated sections doing that, including The Good News Section that is one of our most popular sections, a section called Impact, a section called What Is Working, because I think we need to put as much attention on covering what is good, what is generous, as we put on covering what is dysfunctional, what is corrupt. Social media here has a very positive role to play, because these are the stories that people like to share.

SANDBERG: Yeah, the data are very strong; a lot of the things that become the memes in social media, become memes on Facebook, are positive stories; stories of compassion, stories on individuals fixing something, stories of connecting. Those actually are very viral and we also have a lot of data to suggest that as people connect more with other people, their personal happiness goes up, which makes them more likely to share happy moments. I think your point is really real. This is a world with a lot of stereotypes to overcome, a lot of assumptions that things will go wrong to overcome. So positivity from all different role models is so important.