Transcript
What great founders do at night, w/Arianna Huffington
The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.
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Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscot com slash apply. Twenty six.
What And always You're tuned in to the MOSFM Red Eye Radio Hour. The only radio show dedicated to all you hardworking entrepreneurs who routinely burn the midnight oil.
The time is 330 a.m. and we'll be here with you until dawn. Or until you pass out from nervous exhaustion. Now it's time to vote for your number one stress reducing classic of the week in a segment we call Now that's what I call a work obsessed entrepreneur. Your choices are
Barely staying alive by the hairy disco dudes. Nothing but a work thing. By no dollar, Bill Gates. One, two. Two
F These are days I've been sweeping on the office floor. I haven't seen my kids since Christmas by Workbench Crosby. Haven't seen my kids since Christmas. And of course, forgot to feed my dog again blues by Johnny Cashflow Crisis.
But don't Tweet us at Masters of Scale with the title of your favorite song, and you just might win a special prize. A sign photo of your own family so you can remember what they look like.
If you're a founder. Then no doubt you can relate to those songs. Because constant pressure Is the sound track. To your life.
Your long hours and all-consuming focus will play a huge role in making your company successful. But they'll also change you. And if you're not careful Consume you. It isn't entrepreneurship itself that's the dangerous ingredient in this heady cocktail.
The real peril lies in believing the myth of the infallible founder. The pervasive tale that you can and that you must. Work inhumanly long hours. Put yourself under enormous stress, forego sleep, meals, relationships, and life's other pleasures.
and that doing so is a fundamental part of the founders' journey. Taking too many gulps of this particularly popular flavor of Kool-Aid. is a path. paved with parallel. I believe that to survive your entrepreneurial journey
You have to learn how to recharge yourself. Call it balance, call it wellness, call it yin yang. Your business And your life. Depends on it.
You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. We haven't made it just how you do it. This
is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Founder of LinkedIn. Investor Greylock. And your host.
And I believe that to survive your entrepreneurial journey. You have to learn. How to recharge. Call it balance. Call it wellness.
Call it yin yang. Your business. And your life. Depends on it. Entrepreneurship is grueling.
So grueling that I have a speech I give to every startup I've ever invested in. At that inevitable moment. When the team is about to give up. I'll share it later in this episode, in case you or your team Needs it.
The way you respond to the trials will determine your success. But not always in the way you think. Many founders will trick themselves into believing that a relentless pace is right for them. You'll tell yourself. Sure, I'm tired, but I'm still delivering.
My performance hasn't suffered terribly. You should forgive yourself. Because you're an entrepreneur. Optimism.
is your opiate. Treat yourself. to as many hits. Аж не то сервани. But also recognize
That every scale entrepreneur has a blind spot. And it's the belief. The law of diminishing returns. applies to everyone but you.
And sometimes it takes the calamity of a burnout before you realize you need to rethink. I wanted to talk to Ariana Huffington about this for reasons that will soon become clear. Ariana is now two years into her new venture. Thrive global.
a platform to promote well being. Before that She achieved one of media's most dramatic scale stories with the Huffington Post. But the success. Came at a cost.
I was two years into building half post, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters. Anybody listening with teenage daughters knows what that means. And had fallen complete prey to the delusion. that in order to succeed as an entrepreneur and as a mother I just had to sacrifice myself Founders wear this self-sacrifice as a badge of honor. But under the surface
There's often a feeling that the constant self sacrifice is unsustainable. And this feeling often surfaces In a wake up call. That's what happened to Ariana. That morning when I stood up from my desk to go get a sweater remember'cause I was called
And I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. That was this amazing wake up call. that I'm incredibly grateful for right now because It led me to trying to understand Why that happened. Ariana brought her journalist instincts to bear on this very personal experience.
Part of what led me to trying to understand is that when something like that happens You go through a battery of medical exams because they don't know what's wrong with you. Do you have a a brain tumor, do you have a heart problem? And literally At the end of it. I felt like if this was a movie
All my doctors in white coats would come together and and look at me and say, Ariana You have civilization disease burnout. And there's nothing the medical profession can do for you. You have to go and change your life. Bien kind of a research driven person, I read, I studied, I talked to scientists.
And I came to this Really profound realization that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living under this delusion. We are actually living, believing something false. It's like we're living at a time when we thought the earth was flat. And when you believe something falls, a lot of bad things follow, like the laws of navigation were all wrong at the time.
So the laws by which we navigate our lives are all wrong right now. And it's a very, very, very profound belief. It's not easy to shake. The laws of navigation Ariana had been following up to that point were I'm And she had sailed off the edge of the map to the place marked. Here be dragons.
A place Or the infallible founder never expects to find themselves. Right now we still talk about work life balance which I I think is just not the right way to address this problem. Because it's not like
Work and life. are at opposing ends. that in fact they rise or fall in tundra. So we need to get away from this idea of the trade offs. There's one little nuance here.
A founder cannot succeed unless they're obsessed with their company. And so part of being obsessed with a company means that it's what they think about on Saturday morning. It's what they think about when They end up with
You know, fifteen minutes spare You know, kinda waiting for The DMV or for their friend to show up at the restaurant. There are no successful founders who are not obsessive. And you have to be obsessed with, and therefore, by the way, consumed with.
the effort and the journey of your project and your company. But you're also attentive to Hey, it's a marathon for myself. And part of what I need to do is I need to have some
Mental flexibility and agility, and I need to not be dragged down by the obsession. The sustainable strategy is one that maximizes the efficiency of you and your team. But avoids the dreaded burnout. And for that. You have to know when and how to recharge.
We'll talk to Ariana about this in a moment. But before I go further. I have to admit. I'm a very flawed spokesperson.
I have at times use the phrase. Sleep. is for the week. But my defense I was being somewhat tongue in cheek.
Well. For the most part. I don't really think. Sleep is a sign of weakness.
If I know that I have a particularly creative project coming up, I'll make sure. I get eight hours of sleep. The night before. But a younger, less wise me.
Воффаліт сліп. To continue the thrill. The entrepreneurial chase. Those super late nighters to ship a new product. Are far behind me.
But I can't deny I look back on those days and With a hint. A fond romanticism. Аз до мене привіз гест. On masters of scale.
They had told me, like, look, leave at six PM because you're we don't know when you'll ever leave at six PM again. I literally lay on the floor of the lobby. And I use my backpack as a pillow. I did sleep outside of the conference room for a few nights. I remember, you know, people were like sleeping under the desk. I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while would squeeze in a shower. Striking the balance between work and rejuvenation is something I still struggle with. My good friend.
Joey Ito. Will tell you so. Joey is the director of the MIT Media Lab. Here's what he told one of our producers. When they interviewed him about my idea of letting fires burn.
So the only concern I have for Reed is that this notion of letting fires burn isn't the greatest philosophy for having a work life. balance and I think that's something that Reed is now just starting to process. So on the one hand, I think he's the master of scaling, but on the other hand, I think he's just beginning to figure out how that ties into sort of taking care of Himself in his life.
In fact It's my conversations on the subject with Joey and other entrepreneurs that has gotten me thinking more seriously. About this question of wellness. Not just when it comes to the individual. But how it can be scaled throughout a company in a measurable way.
That boost the bottom line. Like any good journalist. Ariana couldn't stop pulling at the thread. that her burnout had given her. When in two thousand seven I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout, and that was two years into building the Huffington Post,
And I started appreciating other things like sleep and recharging, et cetera. I launched a dedicated sleep section in 2007 and I rem I remember um having a board meeting and my board being like appalled at that. It's hard to go back to two thousand seven and see how disrespected sleep was. There was no way you would ever see an issue about sleep in the Wall Street Journal or
The Harvard Business Review, which is now a regular place to find these these conversations. Ariana overcame the objections of her board at the Huffington Post. Dedicated to sleep.
She became more and more passionate about the subject. In two thousand fourteen. She published Thrive. It opens. В Аріна скрабін да вейкап кол.
When she had collapsed from exhaustion. She then argues. For making well being, wisdom, and wonder. Essential parts of how we think about success. The book was a hit.
It caught the eye of Jack Ma. Food of Chinese Tech Giant. Alibaba And it was Jack Ma who first suggested that Ariana's new book Could be the basis.
Of a new kind of business. He asked Ariana to speak at his women's conference in Hangzhou, China. That night Jack had a speaker's dinner and during that dinner he said to me, You know, if I were you, I would leave the Havington Post and launch a new company around Thrive because he said there is no market leader And the biggest crisis going on in China is
The mental health crisis induced by stress. Over a hundred million people. Suffering from mental health problems. And we're having this conversation at his Tai Chi Center. You know, he's very steeped in the Chinese culture of the Tao, Lao Tzu Just the whole idea of Yin Yang
В нюр. Yin Yang. You might think of that black and white circle with a dot on either side. Or you might think of yin yang as a metaphor for good and evil. In eastern thought.
It also represents А баланс Between two ways of being. Young as you go out, you achieve, you conquer.
You build your startup here is you come back and refuge. This concept of yin yang can be enormously helpful. The Waward Startup found her. The idea is to keep them balanced. Not to let one eclipse the other.
But when Jack Ma brought all of this up to Ariana. And nudged her. To turn her book Thrive into a new business. She wasn't ready to hear it. Honestly, Reed, it was kind of amazing when I look back because when he said that
all I could do was try to be extremely polite and like thinking this is a crazy idea but thank you so much. Whatever. It's like I absolutely Not a single thought of ever doing what he said. But that crazy idea played in Ariana's mind over the next couple years. Until she could no longer ignore it.
She kept pulling. The threads. I became more and more involved in these topics and and speaking more and more about and seeing how real the need was. to actually change the culture, to change how people were working and living. I mean seventy-five percent of health care costs and healthcare
Problems are stress related and preventable. 75%. Ariana launched Thrive Global. In twenty sixteen. Her goal was to show just how essential sleep and rejuvenation are in helping you operate at peak efficiency while keeping burnout at bay. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.
The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together.
Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.
And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada.
It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. The Having Done Post is about everything. And thrive is about only one thing. How do we build our best lives? How do we achieve everything we want without burnout and stress?
And bringing together ancient wisdom. the later science and new role models. Read, I'm going to get you to write something about the good things you are doing. I'm yet to make my appearance on Thrive. But my good friend Crish did recently.
Chris and I co authored my newest book. Blitz scaling. Chris makes the argument. Та сліп із інчаста бонус. In fact.
It can be the driving force that lets you perform at new heights. Here's Chris sharing my favorite part of his article. Napping my way to success in Silicon Valley. The most important 20 minutes of my day are always the same. I set my timer for 20 minutes.
Then lie down for a nap. Hopefully I get to lie down in my own bed, but I've trained myself to nap under many other circumstances. In the driver's seat of my car. Curled up on a conference room couch. On the floor of a school while my son was taking a music lesson.
Assuming that you have a job that allows you to carve out 20 to 30 minutes during the day, What's stopping you? I would argue that it's mostly about societal norms. Daytime nappers are malingerers. It doesn't matter that we're a sleep deprived nation.
Or that more naps would reduce accidents and boost productivity. Fortunately, I've always worked in the startup world, where a lot of unusual behavior is tolerated in Well, I can't prove that napping is responsible for the success I've had over the past decade. I can tell you that I've accomplished an order of magnitude more in the past decade. than the previous one.
Give it a try. I'd love to hear how it goes. Chris says he can't prove napping has helped in his success. But as Ariana points out. The evidence is in his favor.
There's a McKinsey study. That was exempt at H the Harvard Business Review. And the headline was basically The importance of sleep in the quality of leadership. And at first when you read that you think it's an onion headline when you look at the authors being m a McKinsey sleep specialist. I mean the idea that McKinsey is a sleep specialist You know, sounds like a non headline.
And yet, there is this now purely scientific way of looking at what happens to are a frontal
Decision making. when we're sleep deprived or running on empty for whatever reason. By the way, you can find that Harvard Business Review article. And Chris's essay on napping. All linked.
From this episode's page. on mastersofscale.com. I was intrigued. By everything Ariana shared. But I admit.
I wasn't ready to throw up my own map of the world. The one that mostly bypassed the island of Healthy balance. I asked Ariana For a concrete example.
Of how tiredness has impacted Her effectiveness. And in turn her company. I was surprised when she told me that fatigue had led to big mistakes.
In hiring. I can trace back all my hiring mistakes to being tired, which has and the impact not just of impairing your cognitive abilities to make the right decisions, but also subconsciously Of Making you want to say yes. When you are
Running on empty. you are kind of overwhelmed by your to do list. So what we're doing now at Thrive having learned from uh my mistakes, we have this rule that nobody should interview while tired. The impact of bad long term decisions soon stack up. А неф'яд by tiredness.
You might not spot these mistakes before it's too late. The scientific evidence Backs it up. I turn a sleep expert. doctor Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience at Berkeley, and author of the New York Times bestseller
Why we sleep. To explain. your subjective assessment of how well you're doing with insufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how well you're doing. So it's quite like the drunk driver at a bar you know, they've had seven or eight shots, they pick up their car keys and they say, I'm I feel fine to drive home. And your response is
I know that you think you're fine to drive home, but trust me, objectively you're not. And it's the same way when people try to get by on too little sleep. The science of insufficient sleep in the workplace can be summarised in the following facts. Firstly, underslept employees, um, defined as getting six hours of sleep or less. They will select
less challenging problems that you give them. Second Underslept employees will actually generate fewer creative solutions to novel problems. But you do actually force them to try and solve
Third. The less sleep that an employee has the the more likely they are to slack off when they're working in teams. And just ride the coattails of other people's hard work. One of the more surprising facts is that the less and less sleep that an employee has had, the more and more likely they are to lie and
So for example, falsify data in a spreadsheet. And then finally what we found is that insufficient sleep and its impact goes all the way up to the top of the business chain. the more or less sleep that a business leader has had from one night to the next the more or less charismatic and inspiring that employees will rate that business leader.
Even though the employees know nothing about how much sleep that their boss has been getting, it's evidential in the CEO's behavior. It's not just a mental health question. It's a business question. Because a founder who has pushed themselves too far and is running on empty. becomes a liability.
To themselves. Their employees And their investors. Getting more sleep tends to solve a lot of other problems. That said.
It isn't as easy as it sounds. Especially if you're going through a particularly hectic time. You can find yourself falling off of The rejuvenation wagon. And that means you could undo all of the good that your newfound dedication to wellness has achieved.
The more wound up you are. The harder it is to wind down. Ariana has a two word solution. Bedtime ritual. Those uh uh who have children who are listening to the podcast know that
You don't just drop your baby or your young child to bed. You Lower the lights, you give them a bath, you read them good night moon, you sing them a lullaby. Why are you doing that? Because children And adults.
need a transition to sleep. So I did a parody of Good Night Moon on Audible called Goodnight Smartphone. Good night, Dark Room. Good night moon, which I can't see because of my blackout curtains, but which I know is there. Good night sleep keeling blue light from my electronic devices which I have gently escorted out of the bedroom.
And good night, Red Balloon. And the point of that is you need to say good night to your day. Good night to all your problems, your projects, and all the things you're excited about, not just the problems. Your thing. Might be reading a book.
Or listening to a whale song. Different things work for different people. But what I really wanted to know. Is this How do you scale?
І адія в баланс. Акрос на організацію And how do you do this without sacrificing productivity? I asked Ariana. How she goes about practicing what she preach in running thrive.
Thrive is not a company. where you don't occasionally pull an all nighter. or exert yourself because you are meeting a deadline. It's a company where when that happens you immediately Take time for yourself. We call them thrive time, thrive days, whatever you need.
To completely refuel. So the problem that creates the casualties that are proliferating around us It's the fact that you don't quickly cross correct. People Never have a problem with what they do occasionally. It's what's expected of you every day.
That's the problem. And now for a new segment we call We'S B. Yeah. T There's one little nuance here.
Part of the reason that there's a focus on relentless pace is Is because more or less a slow moving startup is dead. Right. So it's a key portion for the success startups. That they're s that they're speedy, that they're fast. If they're not faster than big companies, they're dead.
Let the bed bugs bite. А кі метафор да I use for entrepreneurship. is that as an entrepreneur, you throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. And a key element of that metaphor, which packs in a lot of things is
Is that by default You're dead. If you don't assemble the plane You hit the graun. And if you don't assemble a plane in time before you hit the ground.
You know, it all crumbles. And that's part of what makes entrepreneurship so grueling, so difficult. Because the default state Until you get the whole plane running. Is death.
Ariana is very clear. That focusing on wellness Does not mean trading efficiency or ambition. Rather. It means putting your focus
On working smarter. There were some people at the beginning who joined the company thinking that this was an opportunity to chill under the mango tree. And clearly these were not right for the company because we're not chilling under the mango tree. We're growing very fast. We are working hard. We're just not working stupidly because working long hours is It's not working smart once you start having diminishing returns. Diminishing returns in any situation.
is not working smart. You can find yourself expending more and more for less and less, but here's the thing. You can't always see this for yourself. But often others can. Ariana.
Told me about an executive at a big tech company. Who found himself confronted by Poignon. Revelation. He told his young children, Dad is going to take you to the playground, and one of them said, Oh no, can the babysitter take us?
And he was crestfallen and asked why and The little boy said Oh, because when you're at the playground you're always on your phone. But knowing when to intervene.
Isn't always child's play. That's why. has made it part of Thrive's culture. To call out the warning signs. We actually catch each other.
And we laugh at each other when we Catch ourselves going back to the very culture we are trying to change. Whether you're designing a company culture That supports this kind of balance. Or just trying to change your own approach to life.
You have to recognize That there isn't a one size fits all solution. Different people have different capacities, different priorities. And different ways to recharge. And now
Keep it down. Sorry. Now for another edition of Read Attack the
For me, recharging Interleave rest moments. into what you're doing. So like Don't try to work fourteen days straight.
Right. Like I almost never work on a Friday evening. And I rarely work the whole day Saturday. because it gives you kind of a recharge. And then Sunday is kind of the I'm getting back up to speed. I'm doing stuff, I'm reloading my stack. And then Monday is I'm in it. Right. I've noted kinda entertainingly that I'm much better disciplined than most of the people I know at not looking at my phone constantly.
Like I only have the ringer on if I'm waiting for a specific phone call, which is almost never. And I don't check messages, I don't check like I think people frequently like are messaging me'cause they think I'm gonna message back right away, and then are kinda surprised when I message back six hours later, because that's when I've gotten to looking at my phone and go, Oh, someone messaged me. Right. If you don't Context switch too much. You can generally
run longer between rest periods as well. Good night, Reed. You need a flexible system. And Ariana has a great solution for this. One.
I plan to borrow. We have what we call in our cultural values the entry interview. In the entry interview, we ask people what's important to you outside your work. And At one of our accenture trainings, for example, a woman said, What's really important to me is to take my daughter to school at seven thirty every morning But my manager sets up seven thirty in the morning
Conference calls every morning. We talked to her manager. Her manager said it's not a problem to have the calls at eight. I didn't know she wanted to take her kid to school at seven thirty. There may be a day when she will have to have a seven thirty conference call. That won't matter. What matters is what can she do every day. Yep. So the entry interview is also something that helps build
A team spirit because if I know that's important to you, I look at you a little differently. I want to know about your daughter. If it's important for you to go to your three PM violin class once a week, whatever it is We begin to know each other beyond work. The entry interview is a clever hack. For scaling wellness to meet individual needs in an organization. But there are also many companies where employees face the same stress points
At different times. Take call centers, for example. Call centers is one of the most stressed populations and also one With the highest adrite. I want to speak to your manager immediately. The impact of a single angry customer call can cascade through an employee's day. Taking down productivity.
T morale. And ultimately Employee retention. Ariana. has a hack for this too.
Through machine learning You know when an operator has received a particularly nasty customer call Х not as good on the next call and which is going to increase their stress. So their next call which they expect to be another angry
Customer is a thrive call. That lasts under a minute could be thirty seconds, forty five seconds, or sixty seconds because neuroscience tells us it takes under sixty seconds to cross correct. From stress. The call may say Remember three things you are grateful for in your life.
Stand up and stretch. Take some deep breaths, you know, very simple things. These may sound like simple things. And that's the point. In the same way that small iterative changes in a system can have huge impacts on efficiency.
Small course corrections in your culture. Can have a huge impact on wellness. It requires scale thinking. A general pattern to succeeding at scale is making accurate decisions. Faster than your competitors.
Part of this is down to having a better way of gathering and analyzing information. The other part. Із денето месиз. Байс онис аналіз. To do this.
You need to hire the right people. But you also need to cultivate an environment that maximizes Their ability to perform. If I were to write a wellness article for Thrive. I would focus on
How it is that we can make each other better. how we can improve our cognitive performance and our ability to make decisions and move fast by working together. And some of that's paying attention to health and everything else, but it's also how we play together. How we Ally together.
And remind each other to take breaks. And this brings us back to the top of the episode. And the central theory We set out to prove. As an entrepreneur
How do you survive the startup journey? Every small tip and trick in this episode will help. But there are also times Of the big picture.
At some point. And usually at many points. The startups I founded or invested in Hit dark days. The company
Faces an existential threat. It will live or die. on how the emergency plays out. The team is tired. The team is discouraged.
The team is scared. And one of the things I'll do is give them a speech. That sounds something like this. If startups were easy. Everyone would do it.
They're hard. But that hardness. Is the thing that gives you the chance to change the world. All startups. Go through a valley of the shadow.
All of them. PayPal, LinkedIn, things that I've done personally. Things that I've invested in, Facebook, Airbnb. All have Valleys of the Shadow where you're like Why did we think this was a good idea?
Oh we didn't realize it was gonna be that there was gonna be this landmine, it was gonna be this hard. But that's where you have the possibility of being heroic. Of accomplishing something. Та нова елся. Of making a change in the world.
That gets reflected in the society and changes millions of people's lives. And that's the reason why. You face down these dark days. You band together And you work very hard to solve them.
А час. To be heroes. And with that piece of inspiration for the weary entrepreneur warrior. I want to return to Ariana for one more question. There's a theme that played out through our entire conversation.
Which I call it The technology paradox. On one hand Technology gets in the way of rejuvenation. It distracts you from dinner with your partner or playtime with your kids.
On the other hand. It can be used in ways to create healthy reinforcement. Like checking in with a call center staff. After a particularly stressful run in the With a customer.
I believe we have an incredible opportunity to use technology for healthier lives. And we need to very consciously create boundaries around what is sac and most important to us. So we actually developed an app the Thrive app. Which addresses that. So
When you put your phone on thrive mode. In order to have a meal. with your wife or your friends uninterrupt it or do deep work. if I text you, I'll get a text back that says read is in thrive mode until such and such a time. So it's bi directional which is very important because that's also any way to change the culture. Right now.
The expectation is that you know Reed is so amazing, he responds quickly, he's always on and we want to change that to Reed is so amazing and has such a clear sense of what's important in his life. That he can also disconnect. And the second thing that it does, it gives you a a dashboard of your social media, game, et cetera, consumption during the day. Which surprises people, you know. You spent two hours on Instagram today, or three hours on Candy Crush, um binge watching Netflix, whatever
And then it asks you if you want to set limits. And if you do, it sends you notifications and let's say you say I only want to spend an hour and a half on Instagram, it cuts you out at an hour and a half for this one day. So this is an example of technology helping you. navigate your relationship with technology. But technology based solutions alone aren't enough.
You need to support them. Through the culture. That you instill. You can tell people You don't have to answer emails after hours. If it's urgent, we'll contact you.
But that doesn't matter. People can still get super stressed unless they learn two things. One is to relentlessly prioritize. And two, to be comfortable within completions. So relentless to prioritize is key. You know, nobody can
do anything important, let alone thrive if they don't learn what's really important, what I have to get done. And what is not important. But the second step is that There isn't anybody in any interesting job. who can complete everything they could have possibly done that day. So if you're the kind of person
Who thinks I haven't done everything. And therefore moves into stress. It doesn't matter What your company says It's an internally induced stress.
our whole B to B is based on a behavior change platform. broken down into science based micro steps for change And the most important micro step In learning to live with incompletions is declaring an arbitrary end to your day.
You have to declare it. You have to like At this time This is the end of my day. And because human beings learn through ritual We recommend that you declare the end to your day by
Turning off your phones, iPads, laptops. And gently escorting them out of your bedroom. Well yeah, it says you have helped the world know. taking your phone and moving it away from your
Your bedroom is actually in fact a super important thing to sleep. Stress. Relaxation. Right. And wake up in the morning. And have a minute. That's another micro step. Take a minute. to uh remember what you're grateful for, set your intention for the day.
before you go to your phone. Over 70% of people sleep with their phones and f f the first thing they do is go to their phone. And if you think of it, our phone is everybody else's agenda for us. And our bodies are flooded with the cortisol stress hormone before we have even Gotten out of bed. So these are small.
changes, small microscopic changes that can have a huge impact. That's what is so wonderful and that's why I'm so optimistic. Th these are not like huge changes. We're not asking people to leave their jobs move to Caribbean Island. Cool under the mango tree. Yeah, chill under the mango tree. We're asking to take these small micro steps. My work here is done.
Time to shut off my phone. And find a mango tree. To chill under. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening.
Hey there, it's Jill Slesinger. I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're gonna help you make better financial decisions. We're gonna call out the BS you're finding all over social media. We're gonna give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're gonna answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life. Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger wherever you get your podcast. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside SY Partners in New York.
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