Hi, Sebastian. Great to connect on the podcast today.
Nate, I'm super pumped for this. I've become a fan of your show. I've been listening to prior episodes.
Awesome.
Very kind of you, and I'm intrigued by your work as well. Both the work you do in finance and, of course, the psychology of leadership because my PhD is in organizational behavior, which is basically social psych. I teach leadership, and so I'm quite intrigued by the work you're doing. And as you think back on maybe an experience you've had where you learned something about leadership, finance that you would most want to pass on to others.
I like that question. It was a critical moment a few years ago, Nate, where I was stressed at work. And you know what? Money management is pretty stressful. But I was also stressing about stressing. I was telling myself, 'You've been doing this for 25 years. Why are you anxious about this?' And I ended up talking to a sports psychologist. Uh, his name is Dr. Daniel Zimet. He lives in Maryland, where I am. The first time we sat down, we had this conversation about his best handball match ever. Now, I should tell you about Dr. Zimet. He's a PhD sports psychologist, but he's also a pro athlete. He's got his mental game figured out. He has 40, Nate, 40 national titles.
In the sport of handball. This is kind of like squash, but you whack the ball with your hands, if you're familiar with that sport. So, we sit down, and he tells me the story of his best match ever. It's fascinating because the match took place 10 years prior, but he remembers everything about it in detail. He's telling me, 'Oh, in the second point, the ball hit that wall and then that wall.' And at some point, there's emotion. I can tell he's reliving the match 10 years prior. And he's got like almost like a tear in his eyes and he said, 'I was on my knees and made the extreme shot that was impossible.' But then, something strange happens. It's kind of a letdown because he goes, 'Oh, and I lost the next two points.' And I go, 'Wait, wait, wait. What? You lost the match? This was your best match you played ever?' This was his way of introducing the mindset of a sports psychologist to me. This day to him, he was playing a much stronger opponent and realized that his ability to play at a higher level had just made a huge jump.
So, for him, winning or losing meant very little. It was more about the process and the development of his skills. We then started talking about things like intrinsic motivation versus ego-driven motivation. Lots of research in sports psychology about this. I just became absolutely fascinated by everything sports and positive psychology, which led to the book The Psychology of Leadership. So, if you ask me about a pivotal moment, I'm stressed at work. I sit down with Dr. Daniel Zimet and he tells me this story about this match, this fascinating story. I ended up opening the book with it to set the scene.
What a great story that applies to all of us in a very outcome-driven world. And I love the mindset of it's the process that matters. So, how did you go on to apply this in your own life? I mean, one, you wrote a book about it, but in what other ways have you applied this learning in others?
In the book, I write in the introduction, 'You're reading this book for self-improvement. I wrote it for the same reason.' So, as I was doing research on sports, eventually positive and also personality psychology, I was uncovering principles to improve my own leadership. This was absolutely a self-improvement journey. A lot of it has to do with dealing with uncertainty. If you think about money management, for example, we make a lot of decisions under uncertainty. And there's a great example of the mindset that I found is extremely useful in many areas of life and in leadership and has been part of my journey. You know, sports psychology, if you think of the Zimet story, it's not about winning at all.
Sports psychology is all about losing. Sports psychologists are fascinated with how what you do with the loss, how you handle the loss, because that's where progress comes from. Nate, did you catch Roger Federer, I think now it's maybe 2 years ago when he spoke to the students at Dartmouth for their commencement?
This went viral and I hope your people listening to this can go and find it online. It's everywhere.
I'll post a link in the notes.
Yeah, and look, Federer has this discussion where he goes, 'I have played 1,500 matches in my career.' This is one of the best tennis players of all time. And then he goes, 'I won 80% of those matches. But then, I don't know if you remember from that video, he asked the students, 'What percentage of the points I played do you think I won?'
Do you remember, Nate, what that is?
