Arianna Huffington

I was invited to dinner honouring the Top 100 Powerful Women in Canada this week.  The guest speaker was Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post.  She is an engaging speaker, without a doubt.  I had been hoping she might provide her opinion on the recent Wikileaks, but for this occasion, she was providing advice to women to help them be more powerful.  She surprised me by placing 'get more sleep' at the very top of her list of advice.  She said most of the world, and particularly those scratching for advancement, were trying to survive on minimal sleep.  Her advice was to balance up your life by getting more sleep, so that you could be a much more effective person.

Arianna, rightly or wrongly, posited that men think the one getting the least sleep has bragging rights.  She exhorted women not to follow their lead.  She described a recent dinner where one of the guests had boasted that he had only got four hours sleep the night before.  She resisted the impulse to riposte that he would have been a much more interesting dinner companion if he had got five.