Talk about perseverance. While Arianna Huffington has penned 14 books, including works on corporate greed, Pablo Picasso and, her latest, on success in the workplace (above); her first work—The Female Woman—was rejected 37 times before a publisher decided to take a look at it.

Famously, at the age of 21, Arianna became the president of the Cambridge Union debating society.

However, what makes that achievement all the more special is that, besides being the first foreigner to assume the post, Arianna had moved from her native Greece to England to attend the University and taught herself how to speak, read and write English all while she was enrolled.

Nora Ephron suggested the idea for the immensely popular vertical, HuffPost Divorce. The idea came while the two (along with Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times) were meeting for coffee. And with the cool, ready-to-publish lines that only Nora Ephron could proffer, she delivered the tag line as well: “Marriage comes and goes but divorce is forever.”