What's up, gang? Welcome to The Greatness Machine. I'm your host, Darius Mashad. I'm so pumped to have you here with me. Now, listen—The Greatness Machine, we're about two things. Number one, people who are living their passions. And number two, those who are creating greatness in the world and doing both of these things despite the odds against them. Each episode, we're going to feature interviews with game changers, business leaders, you know, telling us their origin stories, what made them tick, what got them to where they are now. Why? So it can help you step into your greatness within your life, your business, and your career. Occasionally, you might hear a few solo episodes from myself, as I leverage my 20 years of entrepreneurship as a CEO and founder to help you grow and level up in your journey to scale your life and your business. So, come be a fly on the wall. Enjoy the conversation, and I'm stoked to have you here with me.
Guys, welcome to this episode of The Greatness Machine. I'm your host, Darius Mashad. And boy, do we have a special guest. My man Sébastien Page is in the house. Sébastien, welcome to the show.
Hey, Darius. I'm fired up for this. I've been listening to your podcast and I'm an instant fan. So, let's go.
Thanks, man. I appreciate you being a fan and supporting the show, and more importantly, I'm really appreciative that you came on the show. It's really good to have you here today. So, for listeners of the show, you guys know I'm a selfish sob when it comes to the interviews, and you also know that I'm really picky. And interestingly enough, Nardie Media—they did my book launch when we did The Core Value Equation six years ago, and they reached out. I didn't put two and two together when I saw it, but they presented this author of this amazing book that's all about leadership. We'll talk about it in a second. And I know there's stuff about Everest climbers in there. And I'm like, 'Oh, that sounds interesting. I want to talk to that guy.' And so we quickly accepted the request to be on the show, and man, here we are. Sébastien, welcome here. I'm so pumped to have our conversation today. Thank you.
So, you know, what I want to do is a quick formal bio if you don't mind, and then here at The Greatness Machine, we love origin stories. Would love to get into, you know, some of how you got to where you got to. Most people, you know, I'm going to be going over Sébastien's bio in a second here, but you've done some really big things in business and obviously in the world of authorship and leadership. So, you know, most people won't just get there overnight. That's usually an arduous path. But you guys, Sébastien Page is here today. He's the head of global multi-asset and chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price, a multi-trillion dollar firm, award-winning investment researcher, and author of multiple books. Today we're here to talk about The Psychology of Leadership: Timeless Principles to Improve Your Management of Individuals, Teams, and Most Importantly Yourself. So, but like I said a moment ago, Sébastien, I doubt you just woke up one day and you're some leadership guru that was managing trillions of dollars of monies. You know, would love to hear some of that origin story—like, how did you get to where you got to?
Okay, great question. To start, I'm in a financial mathematics class. I'm finishing my master's degree. We're doing some complicated math about bond pricing—really nerdy stuff, Darius. I hit a 100 on the test. Perfect score. Immediately, I go to the professor and I go, 'I don't want to work in Quebec.' I grew up in the province of Quebec, Canada. I wanted an opportunity to work either in Toronto or New York City—was my dream, the mecca of financial markets. And so I put pressure on him because I know he's connected. He eventually connected me with a large multinational custodian bank and asset manager in Boston called State Street. But all I could get, Darius, was an internship. I crossed the border in my red Jetta with an old computer in the trunk, a disassembled desk, and a bag of clothes. That's all I owned at the time. I rent a small room that ends up being infested with rats, and my roommates are dealing drugs. And I start the internship. I had impostor syndrome, Darius, because I didn't speak any English. This is the year 2000. And I was sitting next to Harvard and MIT students competing for the same jobs.
My project was to build a strategy to outperform the markets, and I became absolutely obsessed with it. I did deep research. I was alone over there. My girlfriend, then wife now, was still back in Canada. I didn't have family. I didn't have friends. I just worked really, really, really hard, and the project panned out. It ended up being very profitable for State Street. They hired me, and that was the origin story of a phenomenal career. A pivotal point comes after about a year or two where I'm coding—I'm self-taught in coding, basically self-taught in English—and someone asks me to present my research, and it turns out I surprise everybody. Even in my broken English, I can present things pretty clearly, and that's rare for people in quantitative nerdy fields. That's a pivotal moment too, because then I get on a track where year three I start managing people, I work with clients, and then my career was up and running. And I ended up working on the West Coast after 10 years at PIMCO, and now for 11 years at T. Rowe. It's been an amazing ride. But the reason why we're here, Darius, is that about three or four years ago, I was pretty stressed at work, and I was beating myself up about being stressed, which is not a good thing. The self-talk was not good.
I kept telling myself, 'Why are you so stressed? You've been doing this for 25 years. Why are you so stressed? You shouldn't be stressed. You're good.' That was not productive. I started an exploration in sports and positive psychology, and that eventually led to the book, The Psychology of Leadership. My father said, 'Why don't you stay in your lane and write another finance book?' And I said, 'Look, my job is leadership now,' hence the book. I wanted to improve myself, so here we are.
Love that. And so, like, on that journey, you know, when you go from this—and one could argue it's left brain for leadership too because there's a lot of strategy, but there's a huge emotional aspect to leadership at least in my experience. How did you—when you started thinking of your own journey, obviously you hit this pivotal point where you weren't feeling comfortable within yourself of how you were feeling, and then you took another deep dive into, to your point in the subtitle, leading oneself. Tell us a little bit about that journey, that story—what were your steps to doing that?
Well, clearly, I mean, I didn't have clinical issues—depression or clinical levels of anxiety—but I wasn't comfortable. I was struggling with this. So, I decided to talk to a sports psychologist. His name is Dr. Daniel Zimmit. He's a fascinating guy. He lives in Maryland where I live. We sit down and Zimmit starts telling me a story. It turns out he's a pro athlete. He holds 40 national titles in the sport of handball. Darius, this is where you whack the ball with your hand. Like sometimes you see this in movies. People for some reason play this sport in prison. He's never been to prison, but it's a mental game just like tennis or golf or pretty much any high-level sport. The story is interesting because it took place 10 years prior. And Zimmit, the PhD sports psychologist and athlete, remembers every single point of that match.
For him, it was his pivotal moment as an athlete. And he's telling me play by play—the ball hit that wall, then that wall, and then at some point, he's talking about an extreme shot that was almost impossible that he made. And it's exciting. I'm following the match. But then, Darius, complete letdown. He goes, 'Oh, and then I lost the next three points.' And it turns out he lost that match. He told me that story to explain the difference between the mastery and the ego mindsets. Part of my stress was probably coming from an ego mindset, focusing on the results. The score for him at that point did not matter at all. What mattered was that he'd played better than he had ever played before, and that from a mastery perspective, his game was much better. So I discovered this mastery versus ego, and then I just went deeply into the rest of the field.
A question on that. So, a former guest on the show is Jim Murphy who wrote Inner Excellence. Are you familiar with that book?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it was a football player or baseball player was reading it.
Someone had it on the sidelines.
Yeah, right. And so he was just on the show a few months ago. I read his book and we talked a lot about that. So, the point that your mentor made—or your coach made—was it that he had—because Jim would have said if he had played better than he ever played, then he had exceeded his own abilities because he had done the work and he played to a certain level. At that point, then it's not about the quote-unquote winning of that game. It was winning oneself at that moment. Is that the point that you had received from that?
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. Another comparison you can make is between two golfers. One golfer is obsessed with the handicap so they can brag to their friends. The other one is obsessed with her swing, and then she comes home and tells her husband, 'I'm super excited. My swing got better today.' That's a process mindset. I think Rory McIlroy, when he won the last tournament, he was quoted in the media saying, 'Every point in the match, I kept reminding myself: process, process, process.' This is important in business because, as you know—and I've heard your fascinating story with your mortgage lending business and how it went out of business—there's so much unpredictability that you need to differentiate between luck and skill. Sometimes you do everything right, you make the right decisions, and the thing blows up.
Other times—this is harder, Darius—what's the other side of this? The other side of this is you get lucky and you think you're good.
You get lucky and you think you're good. You bought this crypto meme coin and you tripled your money in three weeks and you think you're a genius investor. Luck and skill, mastery, ego, process orientation—all these concepts started coming together for me, and I thought it was fascinating. What do you think about those concepts?
Yeah, it's interesting. I would tell you that for a majority of my life, up until probably four years ago—I'm 48 years old now—I was a person that was obsessed with the outcome. And if I didn't get the outcome—two things happened. If I got the outcome I want, I would maybe celebrate it for a second and then I would move the bar. And when I didn't get the outcome I want, I'd beat myself up until I got the outcome I wanted. And I reached a point in my life where I had done that enough times at enough levels that—and it was like the fourth or fifth standard deviation away from where I had started—where I was like, 'Well, this is screwed up. I'm never going to be happy.' And that was a very painful realization because I was in a lot of—like, you had talked about having non-clinical versions of anxiety. I was like borderline clinical version of anxiety at that point. And I started thinking about it differently, which was, to your point, more around mastery of process. I quit caring about the outcomes. I still want the outcomes to be good, but I didn't do it for the outcome. I did it for the love of the process and of the game. And really, I was like, how can I express my talents and make my talents better and better and better, and use that in the game, and the outcome's going to be whatever it is. If I'm the best, then I'm the best. And if I'm not the best, then I'm not the best, but I'm the best version of me. And once I got there, it was a surrender project, really. I kind of surrendered to a higher calling. And I'm like, I'm here to bring the best version of myself into this world every single day. And it was a game-changer the minute I got there.
Yeah. And to be clear, it's okay to care. It's okay to have the outcome orientation, too. To me, it's about balance. If you're 90% outcome, 10% mastery, it's not going to work. But we have to be realistic in all this. I'm not going to say you shouldn't care about the outcome. It's all cool—just process, process, process. That would be nice, but I don't think it's realistic, and I don't think it's necessarily optimal. But let me just drive home the point of luck versus skill, because it's so hard for people to differentiate between the two sometimes. That's human nature. So let's say, Darius, you and I go out to dinner to celebrate this wonderful podcast we just did. Now we're doing this remotely, so we can't do it this time—next time. And we each drink a bottle of wine. That's too much. That's not good. But let's say we do. And then I decide to drive home and I make it home safely. This was a bad decision to drive home, but a good outcome.
I need to be smart enough or self-aware enough to know that this was a bad decision even though I got a good outcome. Now, if I hire an Uber and the Uber crashes, that's a bad outcome. But I also need to be self-aware that I made the right decision. Once you start looking at the world that way, you'll realize that this is an extremely simple example that sounds a little dumb when you think about it. But there are many, many situations where we forget that principle. I like to use the example of Roger Federer because famously he told his students at Dartmouth — did you catch this? This was a viral clip, Darius. So, Roger Federer, top tennis player, one of the top tennis players of all time, goes to Dartmouth and gives a commencement speech. He goes, 'I've won 80% of my matches. Yeah, I'm a good tennis player.' But then he asked the students, 'What percentage of the points do you think I won? What percentage of the points, one of the best tennis players in the world, do you think won?' You want to take a shot, Darius?
I'm going to say, uh, 51%.
It's 54, close. So Roger Federer, one of the best tennis players of all time, lost about half his points. If you're outcome obsessed, you're not going to thrive. If you're 90, 100% outcome, it's going to be so stressful and so difficult. And what he said next is amazing. I'm going to paraphrase because I don't remember the exact quote, but he looked at the students and said, 'The best in the world are not the best in the world because they never fail. In fact, they fail repeatedly, but they've learned to deal with it.'
And then he goes to the students, adapt and grow.
You and I have worked in finance where it's very difficult to control the outcomes. No one has a crystal ball. There will be times when it's not going our way. And the master skill is to learn to deal with those.
Yeah, it's amazing. And the other thing, as you were saying that, you know, one of — I guess a thought around that which is, yeah, like how do you deal with adversity when things don't go your way? How do you learn from it? How do you grow from it? How do you minimize that from happening, as in your ability to control it? Those are all important. I'm curious also with him, was it that he won the right points as well, right? Like when the pressure was there, that 4% only — you know, the 50% was him playing great people. He's playing some of the best in the world, arguably some maybe better than him sometimes, but he won the match because he knew that he had done the work to win the right points even though he lost almost as much as he won.
Absolutely. When it matters.
When it matters. Exactly.
There are high pressure moments. In those high pressure moments, you need to understand your stress. Accept your stress. By the way, I talked about this with Dr. Daniel Zimit, the sports psychologist I mentioned earlier. All pro athletes, he said, are highly neurotic. This is stressful. Don't think they're very chill and don't take this seriously. So you start managing your stress level and understanding your stress level for these critical points, these critical moments. I just got off live national TV to talk about investment views. And Darius, that is stressful. You don't know what they're going to ask. You got 60 seconds for each answer. And you want to make a good impression. Your boss is going to watch. Your clients are going to watch. That's a kind of high pressure moment. But I've learned to accept that I'm going to be stressed or activated when I do that. And I've learned to manage it.
How do you manage your stress?
Well, I was — yeah, it's funny. I was going to ask you that question. You know, for me... you go first.
Yeah. I've done a ton of work around this. I actually do a lot of embodiment work, meditation. I do some cognitive behavioral therapy depending on the situation. So I have a pretty heavy tool belt when it comes to this stuff. So it depends on what it is. Kind of going back to what you said before, and it's funny. When I had described how I approached, you know, objective quote-unquote winning versus the process — the underlying, and the audience probably knows this already — underlyingly, I'm so damn competitive. I still want to win no matter what. I just don't want that to rule who I am. And I realize that's a given for me no matter what. So me obsessing about the outcome without enjoying the process and the mastery — it's a losing game because inherently I want to win. I just know that that's not going to be the end of it, right? With that said, for me I started thinking about, you know, I'm going to deal with a lot of adversity because I like to win. I like to take risk. I like to try things that probably are going to fail. And because I care a lot, I'm going to internalize — sometimes things are out of my control, sometimes things that are in my control — but I've learned to have a semblance of mastery of my emotions really by doing the work. I ask myself the question, did I do the work to handle this situation?
And if I'm ill-prepared, then I go to just my practices. I go back to those basics of like, let's do breathing exercises, let's meditate, let's do embodiment work, I'm going to do some cognitive behavioral therapy, I'm going to do these things I've taught myself so that I can manage that moment to then go back to performing. That's at least what — and what I found is it's a muscle. And I was an athlete in college and I love athletics. And so for me, I just view it as like, have I done the work? And if I haven't done the work, I'm going to go figure out what work I got to do to improve so that I can actually manage the moment. And as I've gotten older and more experienced, I just have built those muscles and an awareness around, you know, situational awareness and myself and how I interact with the world. And what's come of that is I have the tools or I have the resources or I have the people I reach out to say, 'Hey, I'm really losing my mind right now. Come talk to me a little bit. I need an outlet for this.' So those are the things I do that have worked. But a lot of it's just having an awareness. I have a mentor, leadership mentor, his name is Ran Stan of Stan Institute, and he's a conscious leadership expert and he has a quote which is, 'With awareness comes choice.' And so for me, having an awareness then kind of gives me — I start to choose how I want to approach it. And it's just a lot of practice and a lot of work and a lot of muscle building so I could kind of slow down the moment and take a beat and then get back on track. How about yourself?
Well, I'll pick up on two things you said that I think are awesome and insightful. First of all, you didn't talk about pushing your stress away. You talked about awareness. This idea that we can go through life at a stress level of zero is not only wrong, it's counterproductive. It's not part of the human condition. Sports psychology shows that when your stress level increases up to a point, your performance increases with it. Sports psychologists don't like to call it stress. They'll reframe it as activation. But this idea that there's an optimal point to me was liberating because then you start with the awareness, then comes acceptance. Okay, I'm feeling excited. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling engaged here. And the stress response in part in the human body increases your focus. It prepares you to run faster, to do some things athletically and mentally that are difficult. The problem is when you get to the other side of the optimal functioning point where the stress is too high, then you choke. Then it can become chronic and then it's highly unhealthy. We all know that. I talk about this in the psychology of leadership in my book because it's such an important point to manage yourself but also to manage teams. You manage teams, Darius. How much stress do you put on the team? There's probably an optimal point just like you think about an individual.
The other thing you said — and I was thinking about this this morning because I was looking forward to get on your podcast — you hinted at the basics. And social media these days, it's about optimization. I think there's a backlash brewing about this concept of optimization and doing everything you know perfectly with the supplements and the walking outside barefoot with the sun in your eyes at that time of day and all that stuff. Let me tell you a story that I came across about optimization to make the point. There's a famous competitive cycling team in the UK that at some point decided they were going to compete at a higher level and they were going to look at the details and they did crazy stuff. They looked at everything. They painted the walls of the van white so when they put the bikes on the rack they could see how much dust there was on the chains to know where to clean the chains. They traveled with their pillows and bedding to make sure their sleep was absolutely optimized. Now, this sounds great. And then they won a bunch of championships. But I bring up that example because the difference between us and those cyclists is that we're not at the absolute top elite level. You know, if you're overweight and you don't sleep well, it doesn't matter whether you look at the speck of dust on the chain of the bicycle, it just doesn't matter. So you talked about — I do the basics. I do awareness. I do breathing. I do mindfulness. And you didn't mention this, but I'm sure that's important for stress management — you'll agree — sleep, a decent diet. All these boring meat and potato basics. If you're not at the 99th percentile trying to optimize the last second in an elite bike race, if you don't have the basics, then focus on the basics. Really, all that stuff that we're all obsessed with these days on social media is overoptimized.
Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to a friend.
I hope I didn't offend. Do you like all these techniques like cold plunge? And I mean, I'll admit I take a lot of supplements. I kind of like some of them, but I'm kind of aware. I'm not even sure if they work, but...
Yeah, I'm a Pareto's principle person, so I'm like, give me the 20% that gets me the 80%. Because I just don't have the bandwidth for the rest. So, for me, to your point, I didn't say it because it's actually just hardwired into what I do. It's like, yeah, diet and exercise is just like, yeah, you have to do that to operate at a high level. I sauna. I got a dry sauna that I love and there's some cool data out there about the health benefits of it. I don't like the cold plunge. I just jump in the pool instead. But yeah, I'm good. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today. And I've been doing — I lost about 23 pounds in the last 10 weeks.
Yeah, thanks. I had like a little light itch that was like pervasive for like a couple weeks and my doctor's like, 'Look, you got to go on an elimination diet.' And so I always tell people I can tell you what I can eat. It's faster for me to tell you what I'm able to eat instead of what I can't eat. I'm allowed to eat meat, vegetables, fruit, and legumes. And I haven't even tried. The weight just fell off. It was like, you know, it's not very fun, but it is what it is. And he starts asking — he's like, 'Hey, do you have like one of those like glucose monitors to measure your blood and your glycogen?' I said, 'Listen, man. I'm eating nothing but meat, vegetables, fruit, and legumes. I'm pretty sure my blood's fine.' [laughter] 'You know, I don't need to optimize to see what my glycogen or blood glucose levels are. They're not going anywhere. I'm not eating hardly any sugars or carbohydrates in my diet.' But that's a good example, right, of like, yeah, I'm just going to make it simple. The other thing that you said that was funny is — and you might laugh at this — I actually travel a fair amount for business and about, I don't know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, probably 15 years ago, I realized that my sleep was getting screwed up when I was in hotels. Well, why was my sleep getting screwed up? I'm kind of a temperamental sleeper and I didn't like the way their pillows felt and I didn't like their blankets. So, half of my suitcase is a pillow and blankets so I can get — I swear to God. Sebastian, last year I went on sabbatical with my family for two months in Europe and Africa. And all I had was a carry-on. Half of my carry-on was a pillow and blanket because of what you just said — because I'm like, if I have bad sleep, I'm screwed. You know, it messes my whole day up.
Look, I just want to give a disclaimer to people listening. Like, I'm on board with all these things. I'm just saying — and the sauna is fantastic, but I'm just saying like if you do an hour of sauna, it's not an excuse to eat an entire pizza.
Yeah. No, no, not the same.
