Here are some more of my favorite moments from my conversation with Dave Asprey on his podcast The Human Upgrade.
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 Dangers of Goal-Induced Blindness
Dave Asprey: You write about something really interesting in The Psychology of Leadership. You say setting big goals is dangerous. This flies in the face of everything we think we know about goals. What do you mean?
Sébastien Page: When you suffer from goal-induced blindness, you're so obsessed with the metric of a measurable goal, that you lose sight of everything else that might matter.
I’ll give you an interesting example.
I was at a conference two weeks ago with about 1,000 university students, and something shocking happened.
I asked the audience, “Suppose I give you a bowl with 100 gummy candies. Four of the gummies in that bowl are poisoned and will kill you. Would you take a gummy randomly and eat it for a million dollars?”
About 15% to 20% of the audience raised their hands.
In the literature on goal-induced blindness, one of the most famous examples is the number of deaths that occur on Mount Everest. If you want to summit Mount Everest, you have a 4% chance of dying in the process. Hence my example of four gummies out of 100 that are going to kill you.
To me, it’s hard to understand risking your life to summit Everest. Research in positive psychology proves that having lots of money won’t make you happier, so there’s no reason to risk your life in that four-gummies gamble.
Goal-induced blindness happens all the time in business. Volkswagen, a world class company, started cheating on their emission tests. What's up with that? Wells Fargo, a world class company, started creating dummy accounts because they had goals and metrics based on the number of new accounts.
In The Psychology of Leadership I talk about the importance of long-term goals. I bring positive psychology into it, but then I also warn about goal-induced blindness. A lot of your most important goals, you can't measure. For example, process improvement is super important. You can’t measure that, but it really matters.
Application to Social Media
SP: With social media, you can catch goal-induced blindness very easily. If you have a goal of growing your presence in social media, you might put out content that might get a lot of clicks but isn’t true to your mission.
DA: In many of those cases, they get clicks but they’re not useful clicks.
This week, I’ll probably cross 1.3 million followers on Instagram. Every single one of those is real. It took ten years to do that. I could have bought followers. But the people who listen to this, and the people who listen to me on social, trust me.
However, I’m not adverse to using some tactics.
For example, my team’s research shows that on video formats that having a visual hook in the first three seconds will engage someone's nervous system.
I know this will get clicks. And while I don’t particularly love these visual hooks I’ll do them because it’ll help people get a message that I think will be of service. But I wouldn't want people to think that I was doing something that wouldn't be in my follower’s interest.
How to Find a Sense of Meaning
SP: I think the way you're avoiding goal induced blindness relates to positive psychology.
You have a tremendous sense of meaning in what you do. You might have some clickbaity thing, but under it, you're really trying to help people in a genuine way.
DA: I believe my content does that. I could be wrong, but so far, it's helped an enormous number of people. I have a lot of gratitude.
SP: I think it comes down to meaning. I have a story in The Psychology of Leadership that’s about finding meaning in business and life.
In the story, there’s an architect who walks up to three brick layers. The first brick layer doesn’t seem very engaged. The architect asks him, “What are you doing?”
The first brick layer says, “I'm laying bricks to make money to feed my family.”
The architect then moves on to the second bricklayer, who’s a bit more engaged. The architect asks him, “What are you doing?”
The second bricklayer says, “I'm building this wall.”
But what's interesting is that the third bricklayer is fully engaged and energetic, and when the architect asks him what he’s doing, he says, “I'm a cathedral builder. I'm building this awesome cathedral.”
All three of these bricklayers are doing the same thing, but they each have a completely different approach to meaning behind what they do.
Going back to our social media example, I could say, “What are you doing, Dave?”
You could say, “I'm just trying to get to a million followers.” But that’s not the goal.
Instead, you could say, “Using science, I really want to help as many people as possible with their health and fitness in very practical ways.”
DA: Okay, I’ve gotta turn this around. You’re a banker. How can you have any meaning in what you do?
SP: I love that question.
Here’s a story.
I was in California a few months ago with two really good friends, Charles and Christian. Christian is an engineer. He wears T-shirts, he's secretly wealthy, and he swears a lot. He’s no nonsense. Charles is an investment banker who's comfortably retired.
We're drinking our California wine one evening, and Christian says something about me being a bankster.
In his mind, a bankster is kind of a broad insult to anybody in finance. It implies that you're up to no good.
Usually, I just laugh it off and kind of move on, but that day, I decided to have the conversation. I said, “Look, Christian, every day I go to work, it's to make money for our clients, to help them pay for retirement, lead better financial lives, and send their kids to college.”
Dave, I know we're not curing cancer, but we are doing something meaningful for people's financial lives.
I could walk to an analyst and say, “What do you do?”
They could say, “I'm just debugging this spreadsheet.”
Another analyst might say, “I'm building a strategy to try to beat the markets.”
But a third might say, “I'm doing everything I can to make money for as many of our clients as possible.”
I think what we do is important, and I measure it every day. We’re helping people build better retirements. How’s that not meaningful?
DA: You’ve changed my mind. That’s a great lens on it. And of course, I’m mostly teasing you.
SP: I’m sure a lot of your audience will still think I’m full of it, but I really believe it. And this whole thing about active management in finance, it has an important function. It’s about price discovery. It’s about allocating resources in the economy. It’s the engine that makes the whole thing hum and work.
DA: Without money flowing a lot of things don’t happen in the world.
Leading Your Family
DA: You also have a wife and kids. How do you apply the psychology of leadership to leading your family?
SP: Balance. As a leader, I have to understand that when I get home, I'm in a different environment. I'm not the CEO of the family. My wife is. And so, it's about creating that balance and understanding the difference in context.
I find that you still have to lead by example.
You must be honest and open about your own vulnerabilities.
It's all about listening.
I used to think leaders need to be great communicators. They need to talk and inspire others.
But the counterintuitive leadership secret is that the number one leadership skill might very well be listening. And that works at home too. Just listen actively, and understand where people are coming from.
DA: How do you get teenagers to talk?
SP: My son is an interesting example. He'll very rarely want to talk, but once in a while he will, and I'll always take that call. Then I’ll shut up. Mostly. I’ll listen. I used to try to help and reassure and intervene and run the thing, but I've learned to do the exact opposite.
So, I’ll just be there for him. When he calls, I’ll pick up the phone and listen.
Takeaway
I hope you enjoyed this series. If you missed any of my previous highlight posts, you can check them out here:
Be sure to give the full interview a listen. And remember:
Don’t become so obsessed with the metrics that you lose sign of everything else that matters. Sometimes your most important goals can’t be measured.
When searching for meaning in work, consider the impact you have on others.
Lead by example.
Listen more than you talk.
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.
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