Arianna Huffington is a journalist, author, co-founder Huffington Post, founder of Thrive Global, was an independent candidate for California governor in 2003 (bet you didn't know that) and a single mother of two girls.
No wonder she is on a mission to get people to sleep more.
And as I sat in her office, waiting for her to arrive for our interview, I couldn't help but notice that I was surrounded by books - tons of books! -- and all these beautiful photos of her - with her daughters, with Oprah, with Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, to name a few.
She's pretty amazing.
She grew up in Greece but studied at Cambridge in London. Her father was a journalist and led her to found the Huffington Post in 2005, which she created to to give people a platform to voice their (often more liberal) opinions. She literally called the likes of Arthur Schlesinger and Nora Epfron and asked them to be some of her first writers.
She sold HuffPo to AOL in 2011 and recently started her new company, called Thrive Global.
And she wants people to really focus on getting more sleep. "There is lot on unnecessary suffering in the world based on the delusion that in order to succeed you have to burnout," she said.
Part of that suffering was her own. Huffington had her "come-to-Jesus" moment when she passed out on her desk and broke her cheek bone. She woke up in a pool of blood but said it was "an amazing wake-up call that changed my life."
She realized she was just burnt out.
And lack of sleep was a big part of her problem.
She wrote the The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time to show the actual science behind the importance of sleep.
And she has some extremely accomplished people behind her. Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos recently has even written about why getting 8 hours of sleep is good for shareholders.
"Burnout also is a big reason for lack of women at the top," she says. "Women have a 40% greater risk of heart disease and 60% greater risk of diabetes...bc we internalize things."
"To make it possible for women to have the careers they want, we need to address burnout and stress."
So listen to the clip above as she talks about her a-ha moment and her new mission.
And then watch to our full interview as she addresses getting more women on boards, tech-life balance, her new Thrive app and her dreams for her two daughters.
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