The People Who Shaped Me (And a Book Giveaway!)
Having good role models will give you a North Star.
Back by popular demand, I will give free signed copies of my new book, The Psychology of Leadership, to the first 20 readers who answer the quiz below and email a mailing address to info@psychologyofleadership.net.
Quiz: This book has sold a staggering 40 million copies, making it one of the best-selling nonfiction books ever. It’s about habits for personal and professional growth (and no, it’s not Atomic Habits). Hint: There’s a “7” in the title.
Having good role models will give you a North Star. It will make you a better person and a better role model to others.
For most of us, whether it’s nature (inherited) or nurture (acquired), our parents have played an essential role in shaping our belief systems.
My mother
My mother carries herself confidently, is physically fit, drinks a little too much coffee (like me), and is incredibly intelligent. She’s pleasant to be around and quite sociable, but if she wants to, she can be a little intimidating. She commands respect.
She was a social worker in a psychiatric hospital for her entire working life. She helped people with mental illness reintegrate into society and provided most of the counseling and mental therapy they needed.
That was her lifelong mission: to help people with mental illness. It was a dangerous job, driving people with severe mental illness around in her car without security backup. But I heard her say once that after decades on the job, she had never felt really in danger.
Now that she’s retired, she goes on humanitarian missions around the world, helping people who live in poverty.
She’s never derived satisfaction from making more money, getting a promotion, or getting more “Likes” on social media. Her purpose has been about helping others.
Reflecting on why I wrote The Psychology of Leadership, I find some of the same motivations, no doubt partly driven by my upbringing.
My father
As for my father, he was a finance professor for over 40 years. He was a tough grader. Strong students loved him, but he made the mediocre students sweat. In his classes, you either learned something for life or you received a bad grade.
Sometimes, I run into his former students. Many of them say that my father was the best professor they ever had. On the other side of the coin, some remember his class as “torture.” I secretly put these complainers in the mediocre student category.
During his working life, my father had a herculean work ethic. In addition to his day job as a professor, he maintained a working cattle farm by himself. He also published more educational material than any other professor in his department and probably across Quebec. If you stacked his published textbooks, you’d have a tower higher than your kitchen table.
When I was a teenager, his idea of quality father-son time was to force me to join manual labor projects on the farm. It would drive me crazy. I wasn’t intrinsically motivated to do the work.
However, I think I learned my work ethic from my father. It took me years to understand that he was teaching me by example.
He’s retired now. If you visit him, you’ll find a white-haired man in his seventies running a chainsaw, veins popping out of his forearms, standing next to a giant pile of freshly cut logs. He’ll be in his third straight hour with the chainsaw running, with no intention of stopping any time soon.
The best way to describe his lifetime goal and why he had a successful 40-year career as a professor is to replay a brief conversation I had with him about 30 years ago.
It was a normal conversation, albeit quite profound, which is probably why I remember it to this day. I asked my father:
“Why haven’t you made tons of money in the private sector, maybe as a consultant, instead of teaching? You would have been incredibly successful. You’d be wealthy.”
I didn’t mean it that way, but “you would have been incredibly successful,” came across as a backhanded compliment. He was successful as a professor. But back then – and still a little bit now, if I’m being honest – I equated wealth with success.
In his typical philosophical style, he answered:
“How do you define ‘wealth’? I’ve trained generations of financial experts. Most of them, thousands of them, have become incredibly successful. It makes me happy just thinking about that. This is my definition of ‘wealth’.”
In a sense, my father is a billionaire—just add up all the money his students have made. He talks about their success with pride. He’s maintained lifelong friendships with a few of them. They buy him good wine. They can afford it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this one as much as I did writing it,
Seb
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.