The $500 Billion Secret: Why Top Leaders Chase Stress | Sébastien Page : 1272

The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey

Fat, Health & Fitness, Meditation, Biohacking, Lifestyle, Diet, Science, Self-improvement, Fasting, Nutrition, Hacking, Fitness, Brain, Wellness, Education

4.6 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most people run from stress. The world’s highest performers run toward it.

Sébastien Page manages over $500 billion in global assets. He’s the CIO of one of the world’s largest investment firms, and he wrote The Psychology of Leadership while living under relentless pressure. His secret? He doesn’t avoid stress—he uses it as a tool for performance, clarity, and control.

But here’s the twist: this isn’t just about boardrooms or billion-dollar trades.

Whether you’re running a company, chasing a deadline, or just trying to stop procrastinating on your goals—this conversation will flip what you think you know about pressure, performance, and productivity.

You’ll learn why trying to “relax your way to success” doesn’t work—and how to harness discomfort to create better decisions, higher output, and more resilience in every part of life.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The psychology of stress and why zero stress leads to burnout

• How procrastination can boost creative performance

• What astronauts, athletes, and leaders have in common

• Why the key to better decisions is strategic patience, not speed

• The stress-performance curve no one taught you in school

• Why losing is the real path to mastery (and what Roger Federer can teach you)

• The difference between being nice vs. being kind—and why it matters

It's time to start turning stress into strategy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's an ideal dose of stress that creates the highest performance, and it's different doses for a different thing.
0:06.2	Maybe you hate bankers, fair.
0:08.3	But this one, you want to hear him out.
0:10.1	Because the guy managing $500 billion a day doesn't just handle money.
0:15.6	He masters pressure.
0:17.3	Sebastian Page, chief investment officer at T. Row Price. Governments trust him. Fortune
0:22.6	100s call him. He moves markets with a single decision. Optimal performance does not happen at zero
0:29.7	stress. But this episode, it doesn't focus on money. It focuses on performance. If you procrastinate,
0:35.8	you're not lazy. You're strategic. If stress runs your day,
0:39.3	you're not broken. You just never trained for it. And if you still think leadership belongs in the C-suite,
0:44.8	you've already lost the room. Because the people who perform under pressure don't rely on motivation.
0:50.8	They run systems. This is the psychology of a leader. There's this whole area of
0:56.3	research called Yerkes-Dotson's curves. The origins of the research is fascinating because they
1:03.3	started with testing Japanese dancing mice. Those curves are fascinating because at zero stress,
1:09.7	you're not at the optimal performance point.
1:12.2	As stress increases, your ability to perform as money manager or in any aspect of life increases.
1:20.6	How do you handle the mental burden or stress of managing $500 billion every day?
1:27.1	Leadership isn't a title.
1:28.8	It's a mindset.
1:30.0	You don't have to be a CEO.
1:31.5	You just have to start acting like one.
1:35.0	You're listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
	...

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