Counterintuitive Aspects of Resilience and Leadership
More of my discussion with Dave Asprey
Welcome back to the series that highlights some of my favorite moments from my conversation with Dave Asprey on his podcast The Human Upgrade.
In this post we explore:
finding the optimal stress point;
ADHD and performance under pressure; and
the importance of physical health to leaders.
The following transcript has been edited and trimmed. Also, all references to “stress” should be interpreted in a broader context that includes reframing stress as “activation.”
The Optimal Stress Point
Dave Asprey: There's a quote from Jeff Bezos: "I want my employees to have terror every day." But I’m thinking that if I had a terror level of arousal every day, I would hate my life, and I probably wouldn't do a good job. Are there people where that's the best performing state for them?
Sébastien Page: We keep talking about the optimal point, saying that stress increases performance up to a point, but let's talk about the other side.
Here's the thing with performing optimally: You’re always pretty close to being too stressed.
You're always on that edge. If you’re stressed too much, it's unhealthy. It's basically going to kill you. But the idea is to find that point of optimal performance and activation and approach it.
ADHD and Performance Under Pressure
DA: As a young man, I had Asperger's syndrome and ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder, which I think is a trait for entrepreneurs. My brain is very different. If you’ve ever heard the Rage Against the Machine song, you know, "F you, I won't do what you tell me" that's just running constantly in your mind.
With ODD, you literally have a visceral and mental reaction when someone tells you to do something.
I don’t have that anymore, but what I did notice was that if I wanted to perform my best, I'd wait until the last minute. This is classic ADHD stuff.
When this happens, you're saying, "Okay, I have two hours, and I could use two hours to write this up, but if I wait till 15 minutes before, I'll perform better. I'm gonna just crank it out and it'll be really good." It’s sort of like intentionally increasing stress by creating time stress. Is that a thing that you see in your org? Is that a thing that you do?
SP: In one of his books, Adam Grant talks about procrastination and how procrastination can be good because you're spending more time mentally preparing. The other side of it, to dovetail with our discussion, is that by waiting until the last minute you're ramping up your stress curve, maybe closer to your optimal performance.
DA: I do think that over time, wisdom steps in. I think there's great value in allowing your unconscious to process info.
If you have an hour, and you spend a half hour playing a mindless video game or going for a walk or doing something, and then you sit down to focus, for me at least, the answer will already be there.
But if I sat down right away and just wanted to come up with something that took creative energy or real thought, I would crank the whole hour, and it would not be good.
SP: It applies to leadership too. If I have a team and we're working toward something that's pretty straightforward, like we're digging a ditch, I kind of want to crank the pressure up. But if I go to my research and development team and I go "create, innovate by tomorrow," it doesn't really help.
The Importance of Physical Health for Leaders
DA: There's an old book that was impactful years ago, probably 20-25 years ago, called The Corporate Athlete by Jack Groppel and Jim Loehr.
The point was that senior executives and entrepreneurs are the same as professional athletes, except after professional athletes play, they stop and recover. But in business, there's always more business. So, we don't get recovery. We actually sometimes have an energy output that’s as high or higher than that of an athlete (depending on the sport) because of what’s going on in our heads.
SP: It’s huge. The brain is 2% of your body mass. It's 20% of your calorie consumption. That's a big deal.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to give advice to MIT students who were doing a Master’s in finance, and I was thinking, What am I going to tell them?
Most of them have jobs lined up at Goldman Sachs. They don't really need my advice. What should I tell this group of students?
And I came in and I said, "Take care of yourselves."
I insisted on three things: sleep, diet and exercise.
My point was that if you take any of these three away, the other two basically don't work.
I also talked about relationships and the importance of working hard and being nice to the people around you.
DA: Be nice or be kind?
Sometimes being nice means not telling someone the truth because it might hurt their feelings, and being kind is being truthful with empathy, even if it's hard.
If you’re the hard charging jerk CEO, you might say, “You failed.”
But if you’re being nice, you’d say, “Well, that wasn’t as good as we wanted.” But that’s not going to land either.
I tell the people on my team that we’re not a nice culture, we’re a kind culture.
It’s a core value of my companies.
SP: That makes complete sense. Being nice for the sake of being nice leads to passive aggressive behavior, it leads to back channeling, and it's just not productive.
Kind might be much harder, but it has long term benefits for the culture.
You know, I was in business school and used to read about corporate culture, and I always thought, this is fluff.
DA: Me too.
SP: I was studying math, finance, investments, accounting, and then we have these classes like “Culture Starts at the Top.” And I didn't realize until ten years in my career when I switched companies that culture is everything.
It's how people feel about going to work every day. It's how they interact with each other.
The burden of being a leader is that everybody's looking at you, even when you don't realize it.
You can frown at someone and not even think about the fact that you might have just ruined their week.
You might say something just as a gut reaction, and that might mobilize the organization in a way you don't want to. You set the tone for the culture, and it's a burden, and you have to accept it and live with it.
Takeaways
Different tasks need different stress levels. Crank up the pressure for straightforward execution and dial it down for creative innovation.
Strategic procrastination can boost performance by allowing unconscious processing time.
Sleep, diet, and exercise form an interconnected triangle. Remove one and the others fail.
Culture is everything, and leaders set the tone.
Seb
Watch the entire interview with Dave here.
When he decided to write a book on leadership and self-improvement, Sébastien Page was rejected by over 200 literary agents.
He was asked, “Why would a finance expert write about leadership?” He was told to stay in his lane.
Sébastien has more than two decades of leadership experience. As an author, he believes breakthroughs often happen when experts venture outside their field. That is why, in "The Psychology of Leadership," he went beyond finance and economics to study research in psychology.
He is currently Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in assets under management.
Sébastien won research paper awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022 and the Financial Analysts Journal in 2010 and 2014. In addition to The Psychology of Leadership, he is the author of Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation (McGraw Hill, 2020) and the coauthor of Factor Investing and Asset Allocation (CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2016).
Sébastien is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group). He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.