04-15-2026MY FIRST JOB

Thrive Global founder and CEO Arianna Huffington on her first job and what lessons she learned from it

‘People starting out, especially women, often think they’re not ready. But we’re usually more ready than we think.’

[Source images: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images; Adobe Stock, Aubrey Odom/Unsplash; enrico bet/Unsplash]

BY Arianna Huffington

My first job was an unusual one, but I learned so many lessons from it that I carried with me throughout my career.

I was in my last year at Cambridge and was planning to leave the next year for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when a British publisher approached me. He had seen me at a televised Cambridge Union debate speaking on the changing role of women and he wrote to me asking me if I would write a book on the subject. I replied, “Thank you, but I can’t write.” He replied: “Can you have lunch?” So I took the train to London and ended up........

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