Mo Gawdat: Moment 179: How To Stop Stress From Hurting You: Mo Gowdat

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00:30The sources of stress in your life, we call them a TONN of stress: trauma, obsessions, nuisances, and noise. Trauma happens from outside you; it's a major change in your life and it hits you so hard and it breaks you for a short time. But believe it or not, 91% of people will face at least one, but often several, PTSD-inducing traumatic events in their life. That is like the loss of a loved one or losing your job so unexpectedly to the point you have to suffer or being in a war zone and so on.

01:00Believe it or not, 93% of them will recover within three months. Trauma is not what breaks us. The interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions, nuisances, and noise. Obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself. They don't exist in the real world at all. Like, "I have a belly, a little belly, so no one will ever love me." You can obsess about this for the rest of your life and make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself.

01:30Nuisances are the little ones, the little forms of that. Things that are triggered every day by you passing in front of the mirror as you walk out of the door and you go like, "Oh man, you're still fat," or whatever. Believe it or not, most of our stress, however, comes because of what we call nuisances. Nuisances are stressors that don't break you; they're not trauma. But there are so many of them that you include in your life, so many of them.

02:00When Alice wrote the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script about the first five minutes or ten minutes of your day. She started to count the stressors that you trigger in your life in those minutes, from the very loud alarm to the opening of your social media and seeing something upsetting, or opening WhatsApp and getting a message you don't like, and so on and so forth. And this is five minutes, ten minutes before you even had your coffee; you get ten to fifteen stressors.

02:30The trick is, how beneficial for your life have those been? And if we're aware, if we're able to look at those stressors and say, "Hold on, I'm going to take an inventory of all of the things that stressed me last week." A genuinely, honest inventory. And I'm going to tell myself, "Oh, by the way, I don't need this. I don't need this. I don't need this. I don't need this." My commute: if I leave ten minutes early, would it be easier? If I leave ten minutes late, would it be easier? If I take music or the Diary of a CEO podcast with me, would it become easier?

03:00And if you actually attentively, deliberately look at all of the nuisances in your life, how many of them can you limit? Countless. I promise you, you can limit countless nuisances. You can remove that friend that's annoying you by simply texting them and saying "I don't want to be your friend anymore," or simply winding down the conversations. Or when they tell you something or talk to you about something, you go like, "Oh, very interesting," instead of engaging in those things.

03:30Can you limit the amount of junk food you're getting into your life? Can you limit the amount of restrictions and control that you apply to yourself in your life? And millions of little things.

04:15Practically, though, how does someone who's listening to this now that has built that life? Where they're in the corporate world and they're the managing director of this fund or whatever they are. They're listening to this now on their way to work on the tube or the plane or the train or whatever. And they've built up all of these commitments. So they're getting the WhatsApps, they're getting the emails, they're getting the Pilates instructor checking in. They've built that noise into their life. How do they set about unpacking it without destroying their life?

04:45You can do it gradually or you can do it at macro levels. So limit: remember, limit, learn, and listen. Limit is the first module, the first ability: what can I limit? 80% of that person's life is not needed. 80% of the money, unless you give your money to charity, is a waste of resources. Because you cannot enjoy two cars at the same time, you cannot enjoy two beds at the same time. Simple, really.

05:15And the trick is this: you can at the micro level tell yourself... I met, when I was Chief Business Officer of Google X, I met this wonderful CEO who appeared so chill. And I asked him and I said, "How are you so chill?" and he said, "I do only four meetings a day at most. Each is an hour. Nothing less, nothing more." And I said, "How?" and he said, "I'm a CEO. If I do meetings that are shorter than an hour, they're too operational. If I do meetings that are longer than an hour, they haven't figured it out yet."

06:00I'm so sorry, Steve, but how much of your business can be run by Oliver? Your CEOs should run that business. But again, I don't want to limit this to the top business people of the world. How much of your life as a salesman? So my sales team would walk into my review meetings and they would present twelve opportunities every week. And I would go like, "Okay, I'm going to focus on number one and number four; don't talk to me about the other ten."

06:30They go like, "Why? This is like a billion dollars of business." And I'm like, "Yeah, but this is enough. Those are more difficult, those customers are interested, we can serve them better. If you serve them better, you're going to close the deal. Go do two." And by the way, if there are twelve, we should hire more sales people. But if you focus on two, you'll do 110% of your target. What's better than that?

07:00Normally what ends up happening is they continue to focus on all twelve. And you know what happens? That portfolio approach? Reality hits. You're running a portfolio so that ten of them will fail and two will happen. You lose the ten. That's the reality. You're spreading yourself so thin that ten of them are not getting your attention anyway. They're just bothering you in the back of your mind. Instead of two, run three; 50% buffer.

07:22Devil's advocate again here. I'm thinking about the listener who every entrepreneur they admire, every person they admire, lies.

07:35It's lies and you're contributing to it, my friend.

07:38I'm really trying.

07:40How many of those people, we know all of them, how many of them are happy?

07:44Oh my god, that's a different question.

07:45How many of them are well?

07:47So, here's what I was going to say. When you hear about the people you admire and their first year or two in starting the thing that they went on to do that maybe even gives them fulfillment now, all of those people will say there was no work-life balance at the start. We had to work really hard, and that's just the way it is. I was working in a call center, I was building my business on the side, I had to work until midnight or else I couldn't have left the call center.

08:15I respect that. You're not working in the call center anymore.

08:19I'm not, no. But for that first year or two?

08:23Fine. If you want to do it for a year or two, fine. Okay? Fine. But the lie is it's never-ending. I told you openly, for every one of us, not just you, there's no ceiling. There's no pre-plan of "when I reach this, it's enough; 20 trips is enough."

08:45You know what happens when you limit yourself to 20 trips? Your value becomes higher. You make the same amount of revenue. You know what happens when you limit yourself to two deals? You serve the customer better. You know what happens when you limit yourself to five friends? They become real friends. You go out and meet them instead of texting them.

09:05So you're saying cancel the third podcast a week we were going to launch?

09:10Are you going to do a third podcast a week? I'm joking, look at your face! Oh my god. I struggled with that too because I've been trying to build an Arabic podcast for a while, which I have to say is needed in the region. A region of 350 million people, and in reality, I'm one of the few that can run an Arabic podcast that's as successful as Slow Mo. But the cost of that podcast is my health.

09:45So there will be a moment in my life where one of my projects will be handed over and the Arabic podcast will show up. I sat with the person that I was working on this with and I said, "Look, it is not going to be right if I do it now. 52 more episodes a year is beyond my capabilities. Think about one kickass Diary of a CEO a week."

10:04Does that slash your sponsorship revenue by half?

10:08I wouldn't even know. This is the truth; people might not believe it's the truth, but the sponsorship revenue is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I think when we started, for the first three years, I said to the team—and the team knows this because they all get to see the bank accounts—I said to them, "If we make any money from this, we put it back into the show." Now we obviously make more money than we can put into the show.

10:33So, it's like I see the message in our Slack channel that we've made this much money from the podcast or whatever else. But obviously the impact of that is, what does it mean? We can hire more people, we can have a studio in LA and in America at the same time.

10:45Buy a big boat or buy a fleet?

10:48Never going to buy a boat because I'm so busy I'm never going to be on it.

10:50I'm talking about the fisherman. No, so the real question is, if you allowed yourself to measure a different objective? Not the number of listeners, but the impact on every listener. Not the number of guests, but the quality of guests. Not the number of topics, but the topics that you believe in.

11:20And how does that look over the long term? So you're saying you'd get to the same place over the long term?

11:25You will not become Steve Jobs.

11:28When I say get to the same place, my rebuttal in my brain was because we built a platform, people like you, when you've got something good to talk about like your books, you came and we had that incredible conversation, episode 101—my favorite conversation of all time. That was a byproduct of us fighting hard to build a platform where you felt, or whoever's decision it was...

11:52So you're saying that because you're doing two episodes a week—by the way, when I did 101 it was one episode a week—but because you're doing two episodes a week, you're enabling more people to have a channel to speak. There are 62,000 books written last year. You need to step up your game if you want to serve all books.

12:15No, I don't want to serve all books, I just want the best ones. People like you.

12:19So the question really is, again, what's the ceiling? How many good books can you spread a year? I mean, when you look at Slow Mo, I do the opposite of what you do. A very interesting part of what I do with Slow Mo is I rarely ever get a celebrity. It's a podcast by the people for the people, if you want. Sort of like a lot of people will listen and say, "I can relate to this, this is part of my story." And the game here is that 7.8 billion possible guests. Billion, sorry. That's impossible. Impossible.

13:00The question truly is, what do I want to stand for? I mean, there are so many ways I can grow Slow Mo, but is that what I stand for? Why do I want to grow it? I mean, look at my Instagram and your Instagram. This is a very interesting conversation. My Instagram I think is 150,000 people or something. Yours is what, 15 million, bazillion, gazillion, something like that? No, I don't know, but it's a very large number. What difference does it make?

13:35Well, you said to me, you said you want to make a million people unstressed, a billion people happy or whatever it was.

13:40It's my ambition. But do I have to do that? Or do people listening to this, are people listening to this going to tell other people about this so that they come and listen to this? But, you know, if this podcast had six listeners, you probably wouldn't have chosen it for your book tour.

14:02I would have chosen a thousand of them! No, the question really is very straightforward. The question is, you're there already.

14:12I understand that. This is why I ask what's the bullshit I'm telling myself. Because I do realize that there's some kind of bullshit I'm telling myself at a deep level about why I need to work hard. It's clearer to me now more than ever that the cost is significant and the reward is diminishing.

14:38Yeah, well I don't even know what the reward is. The most rewarding thing I do, you've identified, is this. It's the most impactful thing I do, it's the thing people appreciate the most, it opens so many minds. It's a wonderful part of people's life. It is this.

14:47So I ask myself, why don't I just do this? Because there are forty other companies that I'm involved in as an investor, or six or seven that I founded. Before you were sat there today, there was a founder, an hour before you arrived, of another business that I'm involved in and I'm a co-founder of. And we were talking about funding and this plan and this plan and this plan.

15:09I do go, like, what insanity is this? And I know it's not just me; it's a lot of people out there that have engaged in this voluntary insanity of over-stressing their lives. The addiction of stress as you describe it in the book. A lot of us, we as I said earlier, we know it's insanity when we zoom out and think about it on a piece of paper. But there's something so tempting about the addiction.

15:35It's the only script that you know. So I keep telling myself... there was a time, if you really dig deep back in probably 2009, I did a public talk somewhere and it was filmed. They asked me what is your life's purpose and I said, "My life's purpose is to help startups build technology that is as complex as Google outside the Western world." So specific, you very, very interesting thinker. Truth is, I am not that person.

16:11Why did you say that?

16:13Because at the time I was in a system where I was very good at helping startups. But it wasn't my life's purpose. And as a result, I coached fifty startups a week. When I used to go to California, I used to say from the number of startups that needed my time, I used to say I'm going to be in Blue Bottle Cafe on University Avenue between 11:00 AM and 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM on Sundays. Come over, catch me, and I'll try to help. And I would meet fifteen, twenty of them every single week.

16:48Why? It's not my life's purpose at all. I focus my life now on things that are very different: happiness, well-being. And it wasn't me that chose this path, by the way. That purpose chose me by Ali leaving the world and at a moment where I was ready.

17:12That's what that means. It means that I had to leave Google X, I had to leave a career around being an angel investor and being this and being that. Now people text me and say, "Mo, I have this new startup and I really need you to invest," and I say, "I don't invest. Period." Why? Because investment is not giving someone some money. Investment is a call every four hours. "Hey, we have this opportunity. We have this..." Who wants that?

17:37And the real question is—and I say it with worry that a lot of people might have already switched off the podcast by now—it's a big lie. The whole endless cycle of growth and progress is a big lie. It's the reason why we're allowing AI into our lives without thinking of the dangers of AI. Because it's a big lie: more is better, faster is better, more progress is better. Is it? Is it?

18:15The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you’re eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

18:45The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you’re eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.