O
n the morning of April 6, 2007, I was lying on
the floor of my home office in a pool of blood.
On my way down, my head had hit the corner
of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my
cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion
and lack of sleep. In the wake of my collapse, I
found myself going from doctor to doctor, from
brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was
any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion. There wasn’t,
but doctors’ waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to
ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.
We founded The Huffington Post
in 2005, and two years in we were
growing at an incredible pace. I
was on the cover of magazines and
had been chosen by Time as one
of the world’s 100 Most Influential People. But after my fall, I had
to ask myself, Was this what success looked like? Was this the life
I wanted? I was working eighteen
hours a day, seven days a week,
trying to build a business, expand
our coverage, and bring in investors. But my life, I realized, was out
of control. In terms of the traditional measures of success, which
focus on money and power, I was
very successful. But I was not living a successful life by any sane
definition of success. I knew something had to radically change. I
could not go on that way.
This was a classic wake-up call.
Looking back on my life, I had other
times when I should have woken
up but didn’t. This time I really
did and made many changes in the
way I live my life, including adopting daily practices to keep me on
track—and out of doctors’ waiting
rooms. The result is a more fulfilling life, one that gives me breathing
spaces and a deeper perspective.
This book was conceived as I
tried to pull together all the insights I had gleaned about my
work and life during the weeks I
spent writing the commencement
speech I was to give to the class
of 2013 at Smith College. With
two daughters in college, I take