Latest / Possible NOW / Sebastien Page on Goal-Induced Blindness, Strategic Quitting, and the Power of "I Don't Know"

Transcript

Sebastien Page on Goal-Induced Blindness, Strategic Quitting, and the Power of "I Don't Know" · Possible NOW

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Possible Now, Stories of Possibilities, the podcast where
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: we dive into the leadership frameworks, bold ideas, and personal
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: stories shaping the future of marketing technology and leadership. My
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: guest today has spent more than 25 years professionally answering
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: one question, what happens next? Not philosophically, but with real money.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Markets rise, markets crash. Inflation returns, technology changes everything. And
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the middle of all that uncertainty, somebody has
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: to make a decision. And Sebastian Page is one of
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: those people. Today, he is co-head and global investments and
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price, helping lead the
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: investment organization of one of the world's largest asset managers.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: And you would think his world is numbers, data, probability risk.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: And for most of his career, it was. Until Sebastian
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: became interested in a much harder asset to understand. People.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: He started studying sports psychology, positive psychology, personality, happiness, stress,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and ego. And why some leaders and teams perform under
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: pressure while others fall apart. And then he tried to
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: write a book about it. And more than 200 literary
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: agents rejected him. Their message was basically, you're a finance guy,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: stay in your lane. But he didn't. His book, The
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Psychology of Leadership, became a bestseller. And what interests me
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: today isn't whether Sebastian Page knows how to predict markets.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: It's whether someone who has spent his life studying uncertainty
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: has figured out something about how the rest of us
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: should live and lead through it. This is Possible Now,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Stories of Possibilities. I'm Christian Mugler, co-founder and global president
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of Possible. So, Sebastian, we've never met before. which actually
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: makes this conversation so much more interesting. And because I
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: have a lot of things I would like to find
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: out about you. So welcome to Possible Now.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Christian, thank you. This might have been one of the
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: best intros I've had in all the podcasts I've done
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: promoting the psychology of leadership. I'm fired up now. I'm
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: ready to go.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: I love to hear that. Thanks for the flowers. And
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: you deserve it for sure, because you have such an
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: interesting story to share. And so let's dive in. Sebastian,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: when I did my research, I discovered something which really
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: surprised me about you. Because I would say you didn't
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: write the Psychology of Leadership, your book, because you had
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: leadership figured out. I would say you started writing it
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: partly because you didn't. So you've talked about going through
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a period of work where things that were not actually
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: catastrophic but started affecting your well-being and even your sleep.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: So forget the best setter for a moment. What was
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: wrong at this time? What was wrong in this environment,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: maybe wrong, if I may say, with yourself being in
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: that situation? And how could you figure it out?
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Christian, I was stressed. I was stressed at work. And
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: not only was I stressed, but I was stressing about stressing.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: I kept telling myself, you've been doing this for 25 years.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: This should be easy. You should be resilient to all
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: this uncertainty. That second layer of stress was a problem
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: for me. Look, it wasn't a clinical issue, but it
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: was something that was affecting my well-being. And at that
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: point in my career, I thought that would be behind me,
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: that level of stress. That's when I started digging into
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: positive psychology, sports psychology, and eventually personality psychology, Christian. And
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: I became passionate. I went into the rabbit hole because
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: I'm a research nerd. I'm a research nerd around financial markets.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: And as you said in your intro about predicting what
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: comes next, but then I directed my research energy towards
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: understanding this wonderful world of positive psychology.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So in other words, you understood markets even better at
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: this stage than yourself. And of course you did it
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: for yourself to get out of this situation. And then
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: obviously you figured out, okay, obviously more than you expected,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: you know, many other people are in a similar situation.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: And that was the motivation, right? To share your insights,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: your knowledge, your learnings. Absolutely.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: But I think you hit the nail on the head
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: when you said, I was researching psychology to first and foremost,
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: improve myself, improve my own leadership. There was a moment
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: in my intro for the psychology of leadership where I
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: talked about Marcus Aurelius, who was a famous Roman emperor
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: and a stoic, a philosopher. Scholars think that his famous
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: book Meditations was written to himself. A lot of scholars
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: think he didn't even want to publish this. He was
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: just writing notes to himself about how to be resilient
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: in the face of uncertainty. And I kind of felt
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: like that because every day I go to work, you know,
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: a lot of people who write self-improvement books and leadership books,
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: I love these authors, but they don't have a boss.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: They don't have big corporate politics to deal with. They're entrepreneurs.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: They're full-time authors, full-time academics. So I felt a little
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: bit like that. So I wrote it in the intro,
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: and my agent struck it out of the proposal because
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: he said, Seb, you're not Marcus Aurelius, okay? So he
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: wanted to keep me humble. So I ended up writing it.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: Dear reader, this is in the intro, dear reader, you're
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: reading this book for self-improvement. I wrote it for the
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: same reason.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: There's a very serious part which I discovered, as I
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: said before, doing my research about you, which brings me
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: back to the year 2005, in which you're, I think
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: I can say you nearly died, right? You had really
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: serious issues. And what's interesting to me is that you've
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: connected that experience to ambition and what you later described
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: as goal-induced blindness. I mean, your career was accelerating. You
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: were traveling constantly, you were succeeding, and apparently your body
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: was telling you something that perhaps your mind wasn't listening to.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: So did that experience change your relationship with ambition then?
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Or did it take you another 20 years till today
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: to understand what this was trying to teach you?
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: It was a critical moment in my professional and personal life.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: I was run down from work, from nonstop travel. I
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: tried to get back into a healthy lifestyle. And that
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: morning I decided I'm going to go run outside and
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: I'm going to try running some intervals. And I never
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: run intervals. I wasn't a particularly good runner. I was
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: out of shape. I was just sleep deprived. And something happened.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: And I only realized later what happened. But a few
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: days later, without knowing what had happened. I was in
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Canada visiting family in bed when I started shivering and
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: a very violent shivers, but I didn't have a fever.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: It was very hard to understand what was going on.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: And I thought I would be okay. So I drove
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: to four hours back from my hometown, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada,
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: all the way back to Boston. And then the fever started.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: And clearly I had something serious. My wife took me
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: to Mount Urban Hospital. I had an infection that had
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: most likely entered my bloodstream when I went out running
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: because I had cuts on my toes. And because my
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: body was so depleted, I ended up almost dying from it.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: At the end of the week, when I started recovering,
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: they carpet bombed my bloodstream with antibiotics. They didn't really
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: know what the infection was anyways. The doctor came by
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: and said, you know, we tried some new antibiotics. If
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: we hadn't had those, I don't think you would have
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: made it. And then I thought back about what had
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: led to this, which was basically being exhausted.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Shocking and amazing at the same time. And of course,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: I can imagine that it is life-changing. But what does
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: it really mean for how you were dealing with ambition?
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Because you was fired up. You was in full swing
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: in terms of what you did every day. as you described,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: did it change your perspective on ambition so that it
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: doesn't become dangerous again for yourself?
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: It eventually did. It took me years. It would make
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: a nice story to say on that day, I recovered,
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: I realized what goal-induced blindness was. My study for the
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: psychology of leadership has been about high performing leaders, about
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: high performing teams. And Christian, you were describing your audience
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: as senior leaders in business and marketing and technology, high performers.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: It's fascinating to me how high performers underestimate the mindset,
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: the game that you play above the shoulders. And it
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: turns out that in the world of sports, where you
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: reach an elite level, you actually start focusing more and
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: more on your mindset and your mental game, because that's
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: where the small differences matter at those elite levels. But
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: not in business. We don't think necessarily about our mindset.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: We think about our quarterly revenues, and we fall into
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: some traps that I think athletes have actually figured out.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: And one of those traps is goal-induced blindness, which is
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: well-documented in the literature in psychology. Goal-induced blindness, Christian, is
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: when you become so obsessed with your goal, often a
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: measurable goal, that you lose sight of every non-goal aspect
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: of your life. My goal in 2005 was to drive
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: my career upwards. Everything else, my personal health, was secondary.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: I had blindness on it. So you start looking into
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: this concept of goal-induced blindness and you realize, hey, wait,
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: it happens in business and especially in high-performing teams that
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: are so obsessed with the goals. And there's blue-chip companies
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: that have fallen into this trap. Wells Fargo, it's a
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: great company. They created dummy bank accounts just to reach
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: their goals of number of account opened. And it was
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: a big scandal. Volkswagen, Volkswagen, it's a great company. They've
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: started cheating on their emission tests. This is all examples
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: of goal-induced blindness. And I'll just stop here and say,
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: in the literature, the example that psychologists like to use
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: for goal-induced blindness is Mount Everest. Because if you want
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: to summit Mount Everest, you have a 4% chance of
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: dying in the process. If there's 100 people who summit
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Mount Everest, statistically four of them die.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: We will come back to this point a bit later
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: because one of the consequences, I assume, is also to
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: learn when to say, okay, I stop what I'm doing here.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: I have to change my direction. So we will come
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: back to this in a second. But you touch base
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: a bit on, I would call it the two Sebastians here.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Because the more I read about you, the more I
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: see what looks like a fascinating contradiction. There seems to
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: be one Sebastian who is intensely competitive, obviously, you know,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: highly ambitious, high performer. very successful, someone who clearly likes
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: to win. And then there's another Sebastian who writes about
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: strategic quitting, lowering expectations, happiness, relationships, and controlling the ego.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Which one usually wins? Or in other words, have those
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: two sides of you become easier to reconcile, you know,
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: as you've gotten older? Tell me a bit about your
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: daily situation with these two Sebastians here.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: I love that question because it's a tension that we
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: all live. As I'm getting older, I think that the
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Sebastian that is focused on well-being and long-term high performance,
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: which needs to be approached differently from short-term results, that
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: one tends to win more and more. But I'll tell you, Christian,
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: two weekends ago, we had to raise money for an
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: organization called Stop Soldier Suicide. They help military veterans deal
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: with mental health issues. We had a friendly competition of
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: a group of business executives, myself included, against a group
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: of military veterans at our company. And the competition was simple.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: Which team is going to accumulate the most miles over
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: three days? You can run. You can walk. The clock starts.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Three days later, the clock stops. We accumulate all the miles.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: It's a team challenge. But at the same time, we're
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: also going to report our own personal miles. And I
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: had done 100 the prior two years of this competition.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: And I was not trained and not ready to do
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: 100 miles run walk in three days two weeks ago.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: And I could not stop. I had goal-induced blindness. I
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: injured myself. I finished. But I knew I was going
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: to get injured. I was just starting to get better,
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: and I can't run for another three or four months.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: So the Sebastian that is subject to goal-induced blindness lost
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: that one.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: I think everybody is in a very similar situation every day,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: and therefore it is really good to have somebody like
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: you who is sharing his learnings. present, at least for
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: some of us, a way out of this situation.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: I know your audience is interested in marketing. And I
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: appreciate that you're highlighting that this is a vulnerable thing
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: to do, for me to share that I've had goal-induced blindness.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: And I think what's happening in marketing, and you and
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: your audience will know more than this, but I'm realizing
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: this with branding and communication. In the world of social media,
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: authenticity is prized. And it's not about being always transparent
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: and just talking about yourself, but the ability to say
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: I was wrong, the ability to say I don't know,
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: the ability to say I learned something, and also to communicate,
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: not in corporate lingo using AI or a shadow writer,
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: but to communicate in your own words. It's so fascinating.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: And I don't want to go on a tangent on marketing,
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: but I know your audience is interested in this. If
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: you go on social media, what performs? It's not a branded, slick,
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: polished corporate logo post. Not at all. It's not an
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: expensive ad. It's the executive going out running and being
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: filmed and talking about what's on his mind and why
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: his company is great. Right? So you put these two
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: pieces of content next to each other and you get
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: different performance.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: But I would say I personally still see perfectly described
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: or produced kind of posts. I think this is still
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: the majority out there.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But they just don't perform as well as a
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: bit of authenticity.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. And also from a non-commercial perspective, I agree people
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: are more keen to learn about the real person or
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: the real situation or the real project, whatever the content
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: of your post is. You mentioned, you know, to learn
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: to say, I don't know.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: And I agree.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: This is in my audience's interest for sure. And we
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: will discuss this a bit more. Before we do this,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: as I discovered only fascinating things about what you've done
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: so far, you know, let's talk about the 200 no's,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: which brings me probably to my favorite contradiction in your story.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: We love telling leaders, never give up. You know, you
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: have to move on. And you actually challenge that. You
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: teach something you call strategic quitting. that great leaders need
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: to know when something isn't working and have the courage
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: to walk away. And then you try to publish this
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: book to talk about this. And then you got 200
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: no's and rejections from your literary agents. So how do
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: you know when persistence is courage and when persistence is ego?
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: How do you figure that out?
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: This is a hard question. It's harder than it seems
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: because it's about how you differentiate when strategic quitting is
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: a good idea and when you should stick to it.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: And that is the key question. But the principle is
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: important first. Of those Mount Everest climbers, one of them
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: has the world record of over 30 successful summits. What
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: is he good at? He's a great climber, but he's
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: also very good at quitting. He knows exactly when to abort.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: the summit attempt because there's not enough time left, because
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: the weather's turning, or because his own health is sending
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: signals that he should turn around. So quitting is an
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: underrated skill. There's a great author. She ended up endorsing
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: the psychology of leadership. Her name is Annie Duke. She
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: wrote a book titled Quit, and she showed that it's
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: actually one of the most underrated skills in business. The
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: famous California rail project that's about 10 years behind and
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: billions and billions and billions of dollars behind should have
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: been abandoned clearly years ago. We have these projects where
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: the market is telling us the product is not going
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: to compete anymore. But because we've invested so much in it,
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: it's very difficult. It's called a sunk cost fallacy for
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: those who are familiar with decision making under uncertainty. So
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: quitting is a skill. But Christian, you're asking a tougher question, right?
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Which is if you sort the decisions, right? Which ones
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: have urgency and you need to make them right now?
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: Which ones you should exercise strategic patience? And then which
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: ones you should quit? Let's take my book. So I
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: get rejected by agent after agent after agent. But for me,
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: there was no opportunity costs in continuing to try. So
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: if I decided not to publish the book, it's not
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: like other parts of my life would get crowded out.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: I wanted to write the book. I was passionate about it.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: And I knew I had space in my life to
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: write it on the weekends. And I'd already kind of
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: made the time and discussed it with my family. Now,
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: when strategic quitting is important is when you can redeploy
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: the resources to something else that's more profitable. And there's
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: a mental trick to make those decisions. And it's actually
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: a finance trick, and it's gonna sound a bit nerdy
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: but it's the net present value you look forward what
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: will cutting these resources stopping this rail train project and
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: putting it into housing for homeless in los angeles or
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: whatever the alternative is right What is the net present
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: future benefit? So the mental trick when you think about
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: is this an opportunity to strategically quit is to forget
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: the past.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Look forward.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: And do a net present value, what we in finance
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: do all the time. But what is going forward the
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: benefit of alternative A versus B? It's really interesting what's
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: happening at Tesla, for example, because Elon Musk is controversial,
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: but he's been successful in business. And one of the
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: things he did recently, I drive a Model S, I
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: love it. And he decided we're gonna stop doing the
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Model S, we're gonna stop doing the Model X, We're
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: going to do the robo-taxis and the cheaper cars. And boom,
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: they quit. And strategically, they just cut it off. That's
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: a skill. That's not an easy decision because there are
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: a lot of people like me that would like to
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: continue to buy the Model S. But if you look forward,
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: the business is more scalable in his mind, and there
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: are more opportunities to grow in robo-taxis and other things.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: And looking forward and make those decisions... quite often means
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: or could mean acting before you know, right? And this
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: is one thing leaders also, I think, need to understand
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: because this is something I've been thinking about a lot myself.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: We tend to imagine great leaders as people who somehow
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: see the future more clearly than everybody else. We expect
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: those kind of answers from the leaders. I'm increasingly convinced
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: that that's not really what happens and this is not
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: always true. Maybe they simply become better at acting while
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: the future is still unclear. And your professional life is
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: almost the ultimate version of that because you make consequential decisions,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: I would say, without complete information. You do your best
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: to have as many as possible. But in fact, there's
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: something almost unfair about investing, I would say. By the
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: time you have certainty, it's too late. The opportunity may
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: already be gone because then everybody knows more or less.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: So I'm curious, is that ultimately true of leadership too? After,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: you know, 26 years of investing or maybe more, What
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: have you learned about acting before certainty that most businesses
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: still get wrong?
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: That's why I loved your intro, because you summarized my
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: career in about a few words by saying you spent
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: his life trying to figure out what comes next. Money
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: management is about trying to figure out what comes next.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: And to your point, Christian, trying to figure out what
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: comes next with incomplete information. It's about decision making under uncertainty.
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: This is absolutely not unique to money management. Money management
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: is a framework where you have to do it repeatedly,
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: but leadership is about decision-making under uncertainty. You set goals,
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: because if you don't set the goals, who will? That's
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: your job as a leader. But you set goals with
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and a lot of times
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: you actually need to carry the organization towards these goals
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: of hiding a little bit of your own uncertainty and
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: showing confidence because you want to move people along. But
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: there's so much research across economics and psychology and across
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: both with Daniel Kahneman, who eventually passed away recently but
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: won a Nobel Prize, about decision-making under uncertainty. It's a skill.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: It takes practice. And the number one thing it takes
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: is is the ability to change your mind, to be
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: humble about the fact that.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: You might be wrong. Have you recently made such a decision,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: you know, to move on with something where you didn't
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: know all the potential outcomes?
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Just recently, to promote the psychology of leadership,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: I was very active on Instagram and TikTok, where I
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: would post some clips of inside some reels. And I
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: just realized that it wasn't really working. It wasn't really
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: getting traction. And it's just hard, you know, to compete
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: in social media, especially when you start from a very
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: low base like I did. So I decided last week
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: that I was done. And It might hurt book sales.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: It might not. It just was a strategic quitting decision
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: where I can spend more time on Substack. And I
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: write a story every Sunday on Substack and I can
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: build a following there. If I kept going, kept trying
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: with Instagram and TikTok, I wouldn't have had the energy
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: or the resources to redeploy towards writing better stories every
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: week on Substack.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: We touched base on this, that you said leaders need
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: to become more comfortable saying, I don't know. And I
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: completely agree. But your actual job is one where people
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: pay you to know. And there are other jobs, of course.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: So people are trusting you and your organization with extraordinary
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: amounts of money precisely because they believe you know everything.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: So how do you project confidence without pretending to know
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: the future? And maybe let's leave your space and what
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: you do as a daily work. Let's adapt this to
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: all the leaders who are listening to our conversation here.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: It's very counterintuitive. And there's so many things in the
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: psychology of leadership that are counterintuitive. If you have a
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: high performing team, I hate to reveal this to all
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: of you listening. If you don't know, they know you
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: don't know. So the ability to look your high-performing team
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: in the eye and say, I don't know, is counterintuitively
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: a show of confidence and a trust builder. Now, you
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: don't leave it at that. I don't know, but here
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: are the questions we need to answer. Let's work together
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: on finding those answers. It's not just, I don't know,
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know, you know. But that's a show of confidence.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: It's a trust builder and it's completely counterintuitive. And usually
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: you feel like you shouldn't say it. And I go
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: on live national TV all the time. I was on
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: live national TV three times this week on Bloomberg and CNBC.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: I still haven't said to a question about financial markets.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: I still haven't answered. I don't know. To be honest,
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: it's still a hard thing to do. But yeah, in
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: leadership meetings, I will. And the other trust builder, is,
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: I was wrong. Team, I got this wrong. Here's why.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: Here's what I've learned. That's also very hard and counterintuitive
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: to say, but it's also a trust builder, and it's
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: also a case of, they know you were wrong. So
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: why not just take the pressure out of the room?
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: It's liberating, in fact. And there's another leadership cliche, I
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: would say, which is, stay calm. Eliminate stress. You argue
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: almost the opposite, right, in your book. The best performers
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: don't necessarily eliminate stress. They learn how to use it.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: So let's make that very practical for our audience. Let's
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: assume markets are falling. Your phone is exploding. Clients are nervous.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: Billions of dollars are exposed to decisions your organization and
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: yourself are making. What do you actually say to yourself?
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: And I mean, not the psychology theory. What's the internal
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: conversation inside Sebastian Page's head in this moment.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: It has changed after I wrote the book. As I said,
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: it used to be, why am I so stressed? I
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: got to bring my stress level down. I shouldn't be
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: that stressed and stressing about stressing. Then discovering that there's
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: something called the Yerkes-Dodson's Curves, That's another nerdy thing, but
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: it's simple. It turns out that in athletics and in
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: mental tasks, performance increases as your stress level increases up
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: to a point of optimal functioning, after which performance decreases
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: as your stress continues to increase. So There's a point
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: where you're stressed or activated just enough to perform optimally
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: beyond which you'll choke or burn out or stress can
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: be very unhealthy. Clearly, we all know this. That's called
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: the Yerkes-Dodson's curve. And discovering this is fascinating. And the
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: simplest way to think about it is that stress prepares
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: your body to focus more, to fight, or to run away.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: But it creates a reaction and activation in your body.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: Sports psychology uses this, and sports psychologists love to reframe stress.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: It's not stress as activation, which is actually a useful
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: mental model. I'm not really stressed. I'm just activated here.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: So if you and I, Christian, stand on the starting line,
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: and we're going to race against each other a 100-meter dash,
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: and if I'm slightly bored, super relaxed, and I think
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: I can run faster than you, and there's nothing at
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: stakes for me, and you're anxious and nervous and jumping
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: up and down about how you're going to do, and
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: you really want to beat me because all your listeners
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: are going to know the result, if we have the
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: same speed in normal times, you're going to run faster.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: If someone's going to do surgery on you, you want
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: them to be anxious about it. You want your surgeon
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: to double-check the scan, to have the extra level of
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: focus that comes from a certain level of activation as
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: they perform the procedure. Now, I just want to be clear, though,
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: that I'm not saying stress is good. On the other
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: side of the curve, it's really bad for you. But
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: what I'm saying, though, the key message is going around
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: in life trying to bring your stress level to zero
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: is not the right strategy, plus it's not part of
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: the human experience. Zero stress doesn't really exist.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: I think it's really well explained. And for me, translating
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: it for myself, it means the right intensity level could
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: be more helpful than painful. But of course, it depends
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: on the length, right? Obviously, depending on what you do
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: and which situation you are, it shouldn't last too long, obviously,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: because then it will turn into a negative thing.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: It also means very intuitively, if you're overstressed, if you're
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: on the other side of the curve, It does mean
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: you need to bring it.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Down, not up. It cannot be a permanent situation, obviously.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: There's something else you say which I love. I really
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: deeply believe into this as well. You've said the more
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: senior you become, the more important listening becomes. That's almost
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: the opposite of how organizations normally work because we tend
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: to promote people because they have answers, or they tend
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: to have answers, because they are decisive, because they are
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: comfortable being the smartest voice in the room. That's the leaders.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: They feel they need to speak up all the time
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: and provide the direction, et cetera. And then suddenly we
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: expect those same people to shut up and listen. At
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: what point does having all the answers become a leadership weakness?
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: When does it turn into something not good, where people feel,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: you know, you talk, but you don't say anything anymore, right?
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: How do you learn to shut up and listen instead?
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: That's been a transformation for me. The higher you go
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: in an organization, the less it is about you as
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: a player and it becomes more about you as a coach,
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: your ability to help people in the team perform at
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: their best. That's what it becomes about, more than your
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: own individual contribution. For that, Listening is key. You also
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: need to make smart decisions. We were talking about decisions
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: under uncertainty. If you speak first in meetings when you're
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: a senior leader, that's it. You've biased the room. You
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: can say as much as you want. I'm just saying this.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: Please give me your real unfiltered opinion. You've influenced the room. Now,
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: if you hold your thoughts and listen to smart people,
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: and I have people that work for me, they're way
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: smarter than me. You listen and you hear the debates
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: and you hear the points of view, and then you
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: speak last as the leader. You're going to speak with
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: the wisdom of the room if you generally were listening.
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: and you're going to make better decisions, and you're going
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: to be more credible. There's also a lot of emotion
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: in business and internal competition and issues. That's something I
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: can talk about because I go to work every day,
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: and maybe self-improvement authors that are full-time academics or full-time writers,
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: they don't really kind of live it every day. But
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: for your audience that work in real teams in the trenches,
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: They know there's a lot of emotion. There's a lot
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: of internal competition. There's a lot of conflict. And oftentimes,
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: talk about strategic patience, people just want to feel heard.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: People just want to feel heard. At one point in
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: my career, I had to make a difficult set of
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: decisions that would reorganize our team with different reporting lines,
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: including people who were peers before. Now your peer would
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: become your boss. It was a very difficult reorganization. But
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: before I did any of this, I sat down with
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: every leader and asked for their thoughts on how they
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: think we should reorganize our business to be more efficient.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: And I didn't follow everyone's recommendations because some I disagreed with.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: I did learn a lot and it helped me formalize
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: my thinking. Some recommendations were in completely different directions. But
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: the fact that I took the time to listen to
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: everybody and ask them, even on a piece of paper,
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: tell me what changes we should make, increased buy-in significantly,
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: and the actual reorganization went well because people felt like
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: they'd been, at least, maybe they disagreed, but at least
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: they'd been listened to.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: You can measure performance. You can measure returns. You can
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: measure productivity. but you cannot put trust neatly into a spreadsheet.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about trust. And trust comes along with relationships
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: between people and to trust each other. So what really
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: caught my attention in your story is that when you
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: had two major career opportunities in front of you, you
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: and your wife Anne, you sat down and compared them
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: and ultimately one of the deciding factors for choosing T.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: Rowe Price was positive working relationships. So despite spending your
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: career surrounding by numbers, one of the biggest career decisions
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: came down to people. I love that. Let me ask you,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: can you build extraordinary things with people you don't generally
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: connect with?
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: I'm going to be very clear and say that there
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: are high-performing teams where people don't get along. And that happens.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: And so it's not a magic formula, build trust and everything.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: it'll explain performance between teams. The difference, though, is that
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: where there's trust and mutual respect, and even better, just
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: generally positive relationships, it's just more engaging to go to
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: work every day. And if you send a survey out
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: in America, like Gallup did, and you say, are you
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: engaged in your work? And you find that 70% of
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: employees in corporate America will respond, they are not engaged
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: in their work, you start to realize the value of
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: having positive relationships. And that's what you learn from positive psychology.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: It's fascinating that there's a study that has gone for
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: 80 years. It's a Harvard study where they send surveys
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: to people and they ask them, how are you doing
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: in your life? And people self-report their happiness, their life satisfaction.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: And then they asked him a bunch of other questions.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: You might have heard about that study, Christian, but it's
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: critical here because the researchers tried to explain people's self-reported
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: happiness with a bunch of different data. Were people who
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: were sick less happy than people who were more healthier?
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: Were people who had financial success more happy than those?
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: And on and on and on and on. And they
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: couldn't find any really meaningful factor except for one, which
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: was people who had positive relationships with people around them,
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: over their lifetime, self-reported, higher happiness, better ability to thrive.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: And not only that, now this is where it gets interesting,
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: they were also healthier, physically healthier, and lived longer, all
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: else equal, controlling for the other variables. So when it
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: came down to two job offers that had similar reasons
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: in terms of all the other factors, right, career potential
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: and so on, except that one was in a company
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: where I knew that trust and mutual respect were core values,
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: then it was a no-brainer. That's just going to be
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: more fun every day to go to work.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: To connect two dots here, because we talked about this previously,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: but connecting this with the trustful relationship, can people trust
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: a leader who never admits uncertainty? Do you believe that?
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Or does it need to be part of your leadership
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: skill to show this as well?
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, look, the obvious answer is no, because people see
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: through it. The nuanced answer, Christian, is you do need
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: to show confidence as a leader. And people will tend
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: to trust you if you speak clearly and if you
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: do have genuine confidence in where the business is going.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: And even when The boat is leaking and the mission
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: is going sideways. I don't know if you watched the
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: movie The Odyssey recently, but there are all these obstacles, right?
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: The leader needs to continue to show confidence. So it
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: is nuanced. But at the same time, in order for
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: people to believe in your confidence, you do need to
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: be a person that they can trust. And so it's nuanced.
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: Where people err, I think where the error is often
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: made in leadership, is through just not being vulnerable enough
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: to build trust. And so in the spirit of your question,
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: I agree with, but my answer is a little bit
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: more nuanced than that. It's a balance of forces that
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: you need to manage in yourself and in the team dynamics.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: But that also means it's nothing wrong If there is
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: such a situation, and of course, everybody will face it
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: at some stage or will experience this, to accept that
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: and to share it with the team as well. That
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: you were not right, as we just said before, that
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: you didn't know everything, as we discussed before.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: Yes. And Christian, my advice for everybody listening, right? If
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: you're looking for simple takeaways from the discussion today. Never
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: underestimate the importance of positive relationships in your life. And
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: positive relationships doesn't mean just be nice to everybody and agreeable.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: It means having trust and sometimes having the difficult discussion
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: to build trust and having mutual respect. So go and
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: hug someone you love after this podcast and see how
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: it feels. The other one is to try over the
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: next week in your job as a leader. And I
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: know we have a lot of marketing and technology and
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: whatever the industry. Try to say, I was wrong at
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: least once. And believe me, you'll all be wrong at
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: least once over the next week. Try to say it.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: See how it feels.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: You have a mentor. Maybe you have more mentors, but
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: one specific one. His name is Mark Ritzman. And for
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: our listeners who don't know him, I would say the
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: best description is he's a finance and investment guru. And
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: as I said, your mentor. And he gave you what
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: may be some of the worst motivational advice in business history.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: You were young, you was ambitious, you was frustrated that
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: your career wasn't moving quickly enough, and he told you,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: lower your expectations. And you've never forgotten it. But Sebastian,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: come on. You don't become a co-head of global investments
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: and CIO of T. Rowe Price by lowering your expectations.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to challenge you on that one. Have
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: you actually learned to lower yours?
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: So the equation is your happiness equals reality minus your expectations. And,
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: you know, if you go somewhere and you don't expect
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: to have fun and you have fun and it's a
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: cocktail party or something, Or if you go see a
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: movie and you think the other side of it, the
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: movie is going to be fantastic. Everybody's going to tell
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: you it's great. It's going to be harder to enjoy
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: the movie. So there is something to that equation. What
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: Mark was telling me was not give up your ambition.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: It was manage how, you know, your patience, basically. And
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: manage the expectations that you put on yourself in the
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: sense that if they're always too high, you're just setting
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: yourself up for disappointment. In money management, we do these
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: things called stress tests. And you talk to an investor
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: and you go, hey, you know that if markets really
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: go down, you could lose 10 to 15 percent in
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: a month. And that's part of, you know, lowering your expectations.
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: But then you build resilience into the investment plan and
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: people don't panic and sell at the bottom. So It's
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: also a philosophical question. Stoic philosophy, which I don't talk
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: about in the psychology of leadership, maybe a little bit briefly,
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: teaches you the importance of your expectations on your overall
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: level of happiness. So it was much more philosophical than
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: give up your ambition. And it's a little bit different too.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: Expectations and ambitions are two different concepts.
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: So before we come to the last part of our podcast,
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about predicting the future versus creating it. You
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: spent your professional life thinking about what happens next, markets, technology, risk,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: human behavior, all sorts of things. But prediction and creation
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: are two very different things. And perhaps this is where
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: investing and leadership ultimately separate. So my question to you is,
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: do great leaders predict the future or do they create
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: the conditions that allow a different future, a different outcome
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: to happen?
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: Great leaders take the reins and control the conditions as
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: much as they can rather than passively predict and adjust.
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: Great leaders understand that they have influence in the world.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: There's a famous dialogue between Steve Jobs and he was
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: recruiting a CEO from, I think it was Coke or Pepsi,
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: and he said, Do you want to sell sugared water
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: for the rest of your life or you want to
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: come with me and change the world? And this change
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: the world from Steve Jobs is I'm not just going
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: to predict and adapt to the future. I'm going to
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: create the future. And that's a great way to think.
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: It gives meaning to what you do. It gives agency.
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: But of course, going back to philosophy, you also, as
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: a leader, need to learn what you can and what
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: you cannot control. What you cannot control, you learn to adapt.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: What you can control, you focus your energy on.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: I want to finish with something we call the possible five.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Five quick questions, short answers, no models, no probabilities, no
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: investment committee, nothing like this. No overthinking. Are you ready
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: to do this?
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: I'm ready.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: Let's go. First one. What's a no in your life
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: that ultimately made something else possible? Maybe the no's in
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: regards to the book, but at the end you published
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: the book, right? So it wasn't a different outcome. Maybe
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: there was another no in your life.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: There was a big no that I've learned to use
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: to turn down meetings. And just not going to so
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: many meetings where I thought I was needed has created
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: a tremendous amount of space in my professional life for
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: me to perform better. No is the best time management
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: word in the world.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: Maybe a kind of similar question in regards to your answer,
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: but maybe there's another example you can share. What's something
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: you've completely changed your mind about recently?
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: How stress can be fuel for performance. I used to
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: think of stress as an impediment to performance. That's been
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: a big mindset change in the process of writing the book.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: What's possible for you today that you couldn't imagine let's say, two,
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: three years ago? Is it something which is technology-based, maybe
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: outside the technology world?
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: Well, I like that you mentioned technology, and I know
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: I'm supposed to give very short answers, and I will,
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: but artificial intelligence is... making things possible for me in
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: terms of productivity that I'd never dreamed of. I don't
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: need a book editor anymore. I don't use AI to compose,
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: but I use it as an editor, and it's wonderful.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: And I've been using Cloud for Excel, where I basically
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: have a financial analyst that's virtual that is never tired
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: and works 24 hours for me. There's so many things
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: that are possible now that weren't before.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: Not part of these five questions, but quick question. Are
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: you working on another book?
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: I might at one point think about the stories I'm
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: writing on Substack and turn them into a book. But
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: for now, I'm focused on the Substack itself. That's my
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: writing outlet. One story a week, every Sunday.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: Question number four. And this is more finishing the sentence.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: The best leaders always think long term. And finally, the
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: future is possible when?
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: When the goals are clear and the organization is aligned
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: behind them and the leader is ambitious and everyone is energized.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: Sounds amazing. Sebastian, thank you so much to be my
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: guest here at Possible Now in today's episode. You've spent
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: clearly your career trying to understand uncertainty and first in
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: markets and increasingly in people. And we talk about this
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: a lot today. And perhaps that's a connection between investing
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: and leadership. Neither is about knowing exactly what happens next, right?
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: And it's about having the judgment and the courage to
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: move before every answer is available. So I would like
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: to thank you for sharing all your learnings, your insights.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: It was an amazing conversation. And I hope, as mentioned before,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: we've never met before. I hope that will happen soon
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: in person. So I'm really looking forward to this. Thank
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: you again.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Christian. This was so much fun.
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: And I agree. Let's do it again sometime.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: If you're curious to learn more about Possible, sign up
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: for our newsletter. Or if you want to join us
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: at the Possible show in Miami, visit possibleevent.com. Possible Now
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: is a co-production of iHeartMedia and Possible. Our executive producers
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: are Ryan Marks and Yasmin Melendez. Our supervising producer is
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Meredith Burns. Special thanks to Colleen Lawrence-Mack from our programming team.
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: Our theme music is composed by Anthony Catacoli. For more
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.