Arianna Huffington Shares Timeless Advice on Facing Fear

A black and white image of Ariana Huffington smiling superimposed over a red and green background.

Giovanna Chung/KCM

“Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear.”

At a time when we could all use a little inspiration, we’re looking back at Katie’s 2012 book, The Best Advice I Ever Got. In it, she examines her own experiences from the front lines of the worlds of politics, entertainment, sports, philanthropy, the arts, and business — and collects the ingenious, hard-won insights of countless leaders and visionaries. They tell us how to take risks, follow our passions, cope with criticism, and commit to something greater than ourselves. You’ll find thoughts from everyone from financial guru Suze Orman to George Lopez to Christina Applegate to Maya Angelou.

Couric also reflects on the sage advice that has guided her, from her early days as a desk assistant at ABC to her groundbreaking role as the CBS Evening News’ first female anchor.

As the co-founder of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington knows a thing or two about working hard to be heard. A notoriously productive writer, columnist, and editor, Huffington has faced myriad career challenges — and has used grit, stubbornness, and “a lot of Greek chutzpah” to confront and master fear. Huffington says that she thinks of failure as “an integral part of success”; she even has a few failures that are near and dear to her heart.

Arianna Huffington on Finding Fearlessness

My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice. She used to say, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” And she taught me that there is always a way around a problem—you’ve just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life. It’s not the opposite of success; it’s an integral part of success.

I talk a lot about learning to become fearless in your approach to life. But fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s all about getting up one more time than you fall down. I had this lesson brought home to me in a very powerful way in my mid-twenties when I was writing my second
book. My first book, The Female Woman, had been a surprise success. Instead of accepting any of the book contracts I had been offered to write on women again, I decided to tackle a subject I’d been preoccupied with through college (and, indeed, remain preoccupied with today): the role of leaders in shaping our world. I locked myself in my London apartment and worked around the clock on this
book. I would write until I couldn’t stay awake—sometimes into the early hours of the morning.

The book was finally finished, and I don’t remember ever before or since having been as happy with the work I’d done. So imagine my surprise when publisher after publisher rejected it. Indeed, thirty-six publishers turned it down before it was finally published. It was the kind of rejection that unleashed all
kinds of self-doubt, including fears that I was not only on the wrong career path but was going to go broke in the process. “What if the success of my first book was a fluke and I wasn’t really meant to be a writer?” I would ask myself in the middle of many a sleepless night. And this was not just a theoretical question—it was also a crassly financial one: “How am I going to pay my bills?” I had used the royalties from my first book to subsidize the second, and now that money was running out. It seemed I had no choice but to get some kind of “real” job. But my desire to write turned out to be stronger than my fear of poverty. Had I been afraid, I might have tossed the manuscript in the wastebasket somewhere
around rejection letter number fifteen and taken a job that had nothing to do with my passion. Instead, I walked into Barclays Bank in St. James’s Square in London and met with a banker named Ian Bell. With nothing more to offer than a lot of Greek chutzpah, I asked him for a loan. And, with a lot of unfounded trust, he gave it to me.

I’ve always been grateful to Ian Bell, and have since sent him a Christmas card every year. He was, after all, the person who made it possible for me to write a book that, though never a commercial success, did finally get published and garnered lots of good reviews. More important, the book was like a seed
planted in my twenties that finally sprouted in my forties, when I became seriously engaged in political life.

I had abundant passion and abundant hope (not to mention abundant nerve!), all of which pushed me past all my fears.


Excerpt(s) from THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GOT: LESSONS FROM
EXTRAORDINARY LIVES by Katie Couric, copyright © 2011, 2012 by Katherine Couric. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.