Wonder

Learning How to Thrive: Wonder, with Arianna Huffington, Co-founder, The Huffington Post and Author, Thrive

Presence

Wonder has been at the heart of science and philosophy and a lot of joy in our lives. And it connects us both with the mystery of life but also with just the small ordinary beauty around us that so often we ignore, we don’t even notice because we are so mired either in our thoughts or in our smartphones.

Here in New York you walk down the street and it’s becoming rarer and rarer to see a person who’s just walking. When I started making these changes in my own life and I started just walking and I started noticing things that I had not noticed before, like I remember noticing a really beautiful building near my apartment and noticing the ornamentation at the top and asking a friend… “This is really beautiful.” I said. “When did this building go up?” And she said “1890.”

So the world is full of places, people that we can completely ignore when we are not really present in our lives. And as a result we miss out on a lot of wonder and a lot of joy.

Storytelling

Storytelling is key because any time we want to have an impact it’s not enough to do it through data. So whether we are reporting on income and equalities and the plight of the working poor, we can be much more effective when we tell stories of individual people rather than simply giving statistics to our readers.

Another example is when we have a lot of coverage, as we do, of ways that we can reduce stress and increase fulfillment in our lives. If we can tell stories of how people have done it, it’s much more likely to resonate with our readers or our viewers. We love the fact that we have a platform that can give people an opportunity to reach millions of others about messages that really resonate with and that can help them lead lives that are less stressful and happier.