If I Were 22: Chart Your Own Path to Success

This post is part of a series in which Influencers share lessons from their youth. Read all the stories here.

In the course of my Thrive book tour, one question has come up over and over again. It goes something like this: it’s all fine and good for people who have already succeeded to care for their well-being, but shouldn’t young people pursue their dreams by burning the candle at both ends? Surely getting by on less sleep and constant-multi-tasking are an express elevator to the top, right?

This couldn’t be less true. And for far too long, we have been operating under a collective delusion – that burning out is the necessary price for achieving success.

I wish I had known this when I was 22. I’m convinced I would have achieved all I have achieved with less stress, worry and anxiety. In college, just before I embarked on a career as a writer, I wish I had known that there would be no trade-off between living a well-rounded life and my ability to do good work. I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard, but also unplugging, recharging and renewing yourself.” That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout and exhaustion.

There’s one moment I remember it as if it were yesterday: I was 23 years old and I was on a promotional tour for my first book, The Female Woman, which had become an unexpected international bestseller. I was sitting in my room in some anonymous European hotel. The room could have been a beautifully arranged still life. There were yellow roses on the desk, Swiss chocolates by my bed, and French champagne slowly melted into water. The voice in my head was much louder. “Is that all there is?” Like a broken record, the question famously posed by Peggy Lee (for those old enough to remember) kept repeating itself in my brain, robbing me of the joy I had expected to find in my success. “Is that really all there is?” If this is “living,” then what is life? Can the goal of life really be just about money and recognition?

From a part of myself, deep inside me — from the part of me that is my mother’s daughter — came a resounding “No!” It is an answer that turned me gradually but firmly away from lucrative offers to speak and write again and again on the subject of “the female woman.” It started me instead on the first step of a long journey.

Today, millennials, who are just starting on their own journeys, are facing even more stress than my generation did. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest causes of stress among younger Americans is work. Seventy-six percent of millennials report work as a significant stressor (compared to 62 percent of baby boomers and 39 percent of older Americans). Among the challenges facing millennials is the growing number of them who graduate college with massive student debt and find themselves entering a weak job market. So millennials more than any other generation are casualties of the stress built into our economy— either overworking and hooked on technology, or unable to find work and struggling to pay the bills and survive.

So the advice I’d give to young people today is this: don’t just climb the ladder of success – a ladder that leads, after all, to higher and higher levels of stress and burnout -- but chart a new path to success, remaking it in a way that includes not just the conventional metrics of money and power, but a third metric that includes well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving, so that the goal is not just to succeed but to thrive.

Photo courtesy of Arianna Huffington