We all love to win, but if you don't learn to lose, you're going to struggle. So Federer said, 'The best in the world are not the best in the world because they never lose. In fact, they lose repeatedly, but they've learned to deal with it.'
Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Widell and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level — the decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello everyone. We are talking to Sébastien Page. Hello Sébastien.
Hey Larry. I'm fired up for this. I've been looking forward to it.
Well, tell me why. Because I love talking to interesting people like you and I've listened to a few of your prior shows and super interesting stuff.
Gee, I mean, I'm even more fired up than I started here. Thanks for the nice words. And yeah, it's amazing in the world where the bulk of people are looking to get by and survive, and when they get around high achievers, they want to drag them down. That when you get around people like yourself and you can talk on the same level from an energy standpoint — not necessarily intelligence or anything, but just drive and fun and expectation and an attitude of abundance and looking to explore the world and find the treasures out there. It's a different kind of mentality and it is fun to have friends like that. It's one of the highlights of my life to be able to talk to people like yourself.
But especially you, because what I was looking at here — I mean, I've got a little bit of experience in financial services so these numbers mean more to me than other people. We look for people that have numbers by their names, because people can relate to achievements, who have been able to do things, accomplish things most people have not been able to do. And to be able to say the global multi-asset trading platform market reached 4.8 billion in 2024. It's projected to grow to 13.2 billion by 2033. And the fact that you grew T. Rowe Price multi-asset assets under management, or which we call AUM, from 200 billion to over 500 billion — that had to be the experiences, the worlds, the groups of people, probably countries involved in that. It's quite an experience and I'm really excited about being able to tap into the things that you saw, you learned, you realized from those situations in terms of particularly about fundamentals of winning, how you set yourself up for success. Because the great thing about principles of success is that they're very similar for individuals, companies, countries. And when you see things going right, it's exciting, but when you see things going wrong, it just drives you nuts. And so you've had a chance to see real-world experience. And let me point out another — I'm doing too much talking here, but I want people to know you won awards. What impressed me was you won awards for papers in the top journals. Four from Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022. Two from Financial Analysts Journal, 2010, 2014. You've written a book in 2020. But then you go out there and you've applied the knowledge, applied that and seen incredible success from that, which almost nobody when they get into writing actually goes out and applies it. That's the thing about the media — they're not accountable for their stuff. But you've got out there and put these ideas and this thinking and these point of views that you've come up with to the test and got amazing results. So congratulations.
Thank you, Larry. 25 years in the rough and tumble world of money management and here we are. You pointed out I've won research paper awards. I am a research nerd. I've studied markets from a mathematical perspective. So what am I doing here talking about leadership and psychology? At some point a few years ago, Larry, I was stressed at work. And I realized that I was also stressed about being stressed. That was not good. I kept telling myself, you've been doing this for decades. Why are you not calmer? Why are you not handling the pressure better? I started exploring sports psychology, self-improvement, and I just got into, as a nerd, a rabbit hole, if you will, of all the research in positive psychology. It's amazing, Larry. We think of psychology as treating clinical depression and anxiety.
About half the research published in psychology for years, if not decades, is on the positive side — what makes people resilient, what makes people thrive. So, I ended up writing the book, The Psychology of Leadership, that launched last year. And so, I'm not a psychologist. I'm someone who works in money management and got interested in self-improvement and wrote the book to improve myself and to help others.
Yeah. And the thing is, explain to people — how did you — let's go behind the scenes, go back before the 25 years. How did you get on that track right from the beginning? And how did your worldview, how did that get started, your approach to things and the way you looked at things and things that interested you?
Yeah. So how do I end up being a research nerd in money management? Well, first of all, my father was a finance professor. Now, I want to say he never pushed me towards business or finance, but he had a lot of passion and he would invite his friends, other academics for dinner, and I would be there 13, 14, no idea what they're talking about, but it sounds super interesting. So, you could say finance is in my DNA. But also, I'm going to be really honest. I was young looking at career paths. It was interesting. I was interested in making money, and that's a good way if you can manage risk well to do well in life. Now, if you look at surveys, Larry, people when they are asked, 'What's your goal in life?' 80% of respondents say, 'I want to be rich.' And 50% say, 'I want to be famous.' What I've discovered though over time is that these aren't really — these are great goals to have, but they're not the fundamental goals you should have. You should have broader goals that are geared towards positive psychology.
Yeah. And basically related to things that excite you or interest you that you can pour your energy into and get good enough to be able to make the money and have the financial independence. But you remind me of a point — I spent the bulk of my life and even now today in a financial services company organization. And the thing is that it was started by an ex-football coach and he was very successful as a football coach. He would go in and he talked about having faculty meetings in the high school and all the teachers — the English, the math teachers — they would say, 'You know, the whole school's delirious with joy about your football team and excited, but all they want to talk about is the next game and the winning streak and all that.' He said, 'We just can't get them excited about English or math.' And he said, 'That's because you don't make it exciting.' You can't go in there and do a boring presentation and approach it just like trying to teach all the concepts. You got to get them excited about the concepts. And it sounds like inadvertently your father and his friends got you excited about finance at an early stage. Inadvertently just by their own enthusiasm and you being around it, and it actually turned out to be a privilege.
And you know what, it's important to understand the meaning of what you do. And what we do in money management is work really hard to give people better financial futures. It's not like we're curing cancers, but I go every day, I try to make money for clients that need to pay bills, send their kids to college, build better retirements for themselves. It's a meaningful job, Larry. The analogy I like to use is the famous analogy of the three brick layers. Have you heard that one, Larry?
Okay. So, an architect walks to three brick layers. They're doing the exact same job. He asks the first brick layer, 'What are you doing?' And the brick layer says, 'I'm laying bricks. It's hot outside. I'm tired. I hate it.' Architect walks to the second brick layer. Second brick layer says, 'I'm a wall builder. I'm building this wall.' And that brick layer has a little bit more energy to your point about having energy and enthusiasm for what you do. Then he walks to the third brick layer who is fired up who says, 'I am a cathedral builder. I'm building this amazing cathedral, an ode to the Almighty.' The three of them are doing the exact same job. They're just approaching it differently.
Absolutely. It's how you view what you're doing cannot help but impact the energy and enthusiasm you put into it. And it starts at the beginning. And if you're in a company, that's probably one of the bigger things when you got into leadership. That was probably something you covered in your leadership book — that the leader has got to be able to project that vision and that excitement about what the company's all about on a high level to the people working there if it's going to be an outstanding company.
It also makes you more resilient. You're going to be more long-term focused if you have in mind the meaning behind what you do. You know, Larry, you said earlier it's about winning and winning is awesome. But when you start studying sports psychology and top athletes, you'll realize that sports psychologists are actually obsessed not with winning. It's not about winning. It's about losing. It's about what you do when you lose. How you learn from your setbacks. I love what Roger Federer said to the students at Dartmouth in a famous commencement address. It's all over the internet for our audience if you've never heard that speech. At one point he said, 'Look, I was a top tennis player maybe of all time.' I don't think he put it that way, but he said, 'I've played 1,500 matches and I've won 80% of them.' But then he asked the students, 'What percentage of the points that I've played do you think I won?'
And that's a bit of a trick question because Federer lost almost half the points he ever played. He only had a small edge, 54%. He won 54% of the points he played. But it's what he said next that's super important. And again, you can be obsessed with winning. That's okay. We all love to win. But if you don't learn to lose, you're going to struggle. So Federer said, 'The best in the world are not the best in the world because they never lose. In fact, they lose repeatedly, but they've learned to deal with it.' And then he looked at the students and he said, 'What you have to do in your life is adapt and grow.' And if you're only going to learn to adapt and grow by losing, losing, getting it wrong in financial markets, losing in sports, just facing setbacks. I know it sounds a little bit trite and somewhat motivational, but there's a lot of science behind this and it's a mindset that surprisingly few people have. You can take it to an extreme. I was talking to a sports psychologist once, Larry, and you tell me if you think that way. He actually cherishes his losses. So that sports psychologist, his name is Dr. Daniel Zim. He lives in Maryland where I am. And he's also a pro athlete. He's got over 40 national titles in the sport of handball. This is where you whack the ball with your hands. So, he's one of the top players for his age group in the country.
And for him, when he loses a game, he gets excited. This is the mindset pushed to an extreme. It's not realistic really. But I'm telling you about this extreme vision of sports psychology, which by the way could also be life psychology, that you've lost something in your life. Something did not go your way. It's an opportunity. It's hard to put in practice, to be honest. It's hard to do.
Well, Nick Saban — I don't know if he's still the winningest coach in football, at least in Alabama, winning all the championships and all that. Top football, college football coach said, when you get beat, he said, 'Don't lose the lesson.' It's one thing to get beat, but you don't want to get double beat by missing the point of how you got beat. And the most famous example of that is when they started the expansion in the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys became an expansion team and they brought in Tom Landry who was a division coach for the New York Giants who had won championships. And he went down there the first two years. I think they were like 1 and 17, or maybe the first year like one game, 17 losses. And then they went on and for the next 17, 18 years they had not only winning records, they made the playoffs and did very well. But they said, 'Wasn't it depressing for you during that first year where you went from the Giants where you won all the time, then you went down there and you got beat all the time?' He said, 'Not really.' He said, 'What we did was — and this is in line with what you're saying — we started off the season with a game plan to win, and then we played the first game. And then we went in and then the other team taught us a lesson. We found out what we didn't know. So, we went back and fixed it, made a new game plan. We went back and then we played the next team. And then they taught us some lessons. Then we went back and took those lessons and improved.' And he said by the second year we were the ones teaching lessons because they had learned the lessons. They didn't just get beat. They got beat and they learned the lessons and adjusted.
So the only thing I would add on to what you said earlier is, you take the lesson, you realize and you accept it, but then you improve. The idea is like what that clearly shows you is your blind spot. Usually it reveals a blind spot that you would have plugged, put something in place to where that didn't get you. But because you didn't, it got you. And so it's like, okay, we're going to plug that hole. And so this is a transformation, Sébastien, of how you go from starting something and you're terrible at it to where years down the road people say, 'What a genius that Sébastien is.' And they don't realize Sébastien became a genius by making a million mistakes and learning from them. You know what I'm saying? And so I'm sure people right now today — I'm sure you hear that quite frequently, like how smart you are. They're just jealous. But you had to go through quite a process to learn that, I would imagine.
And I see it in business. We're talking about sports. The leaders that are able to learn from their failures end up performing better over time. I've seen leaders get really harsh feedback, take it on, improve themselves, and keep climbing the ladder. So, it's not just sports. It's a complete mindset. Again, it sounds easier in theory than in practice. We also have to be careful. It's interesting about Tom Landry because I read about this dynasty of the Dallas Cowboys in the 70s as well. It's been studied in different areas of psychology. This idea that you learn from your setbacks has to be very personal and you have to build the skills for yourself. In sports we give a lot of feedback and we receive a lot of feedback. In business it's the same but people hate feedback. Here's an interesting anecdote about Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys. Earlier in this dynasty, he was showing players their mistakes in the video room. Have you heard that story, Larry?
So, he's showing them their mistakes and he realized at some point that the negative feedback was not working. He realized that the players were rehearsing their mistakes. It was making them anxious and essentially their mental image was stuck on their mistakes. So he flipped it to the highlights, not the lowlights. And then in the video room, he would show, here's the best play you made, and here's what went right. And that worked much, much better in terms of learning the feedback process. So here I am saying something a little bit different, right? I'm saying you have to learn from your losses and your setbacks. But the caveat or the other side of it is when it gets to feedback, whether in the workplace or in sports or in other ways, positive feedback is actually underestimated compared to negative feedback. So there's nuance here and I think it's interesting to explore that a little bit.
Well, and the thing is that's the intrigue of leadership and how you're able to apply those principles in operation while the bullets are flying. And the thing is that you hear the thing of catch them doing something right — when you catch them doing something right and you notice that in particular. And the thing about resilience — you and I kind of talk, we're both nerds studying behavior and everything — the thing about resilience, what I think, I'm interested in your opinion of this. Why I think some people are more resilient than others. The people that are not resilient take the defeat and that's crushed. It's like, oh, and they go into the spiral of either 'I'm not good enough,' self-flagellation, 'I should have done this, I'm not good,' or they go into victimhood. 'The world's against me. This doesn't happen to other people. When am I going to get a break?' Who's ever heard of — it's like the story of the guy — I used to live up in Greensboro, North Carolina for about 28 years. And one Friday at 5:00, a small plane came out of the sky and had an engine failure or something and crashed into this car on its way home from work. And they were interviewing the guy who was in the car and he said, 'Man, you're really lucky. You only got a broken arm.' And the plane came out of the sky and most people would think you'd get killed. And he said, 'Lucky? You call that luck?' He said, 'There's 100,000 cars in this town.' And it hit me.
Two ways to look at the same situation.
Yeah. But I think what makes the resilient person resilient is they don't get hung up on 'poor pitiful me' or 'I'm not good enough.' They look at that and say, 'Why did that happen?' And then, 'What adjustment can I make?' And they're resilient because they want to bounce back, because that's what resilience is — a bounce back ability. But they're focusing on their ability to bounce back. And I think that's the advantage, Sébastien, of making sure people that are in training, in process, in development are well aware that they do have strengths, because they're very aware of their negative things. But to be able to give them that positive feedback where when things go wrong, it's not like everything's wrong. It's just like, I'm doing a lot of things right, but I still got beat here. Okay, let me fix that. And so I think that attitude of how you respond to the defeat is actually at the root of how resilient people are. But then you see it described as grit, determination, toughness or whatever. I think that's right where the point is that how they look at what happened to them and what they're thinking about what their response is going to be like. What are they going to do next?
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