Moment 179: How To Stop Stress From Killing You: Mo Gowdat
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The sources of stress in your life, we call them a ton of stress, T-O-N-N, right? And, you know, trauma, obsessions, nuisances, and noise. Trauma happens from outside. 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 trauma.

but often several PTSD-inducing traumatic event in their life. That's like the loss of a loved one or losing your job so unexpectedly to the point you have to suffer or whatever, okay? Being in a war zone and so on. Believe 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 trauma and noise. Obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself 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.

right? And and make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself. Okay, you know, nuisances are the little ones, the little forms of that, you know, things that are triggered every day by you passing in front of the of the mirror as you walk out of the door and you go like, Oh, man, you're still fat or whatever, right?

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. Okay. But there are so many of them that you include in your life. So many of them. When Alice wrote, you know, the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script about the first situation.

five minutes or 10 minutes of your day. And she started to count the stressors that you trigger in your life in those minutes from the very loud alarm, right? To the, you know, opening your social media and seeing something upsetting or, you know, opening WhatsApp and getting a message you don't like and so on and so forth, right? And this is five minutes, 10 minutes before you even had your coffee, you get 10, 15 stressors. 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.

Okay, 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. Right? My commute. If I leave 10 minutes early, would it be easier? If I leave 10 minutes late, would it be easier? If I take music or the Diary of the CEO podcast with me, would it become easier?

And 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, okay? By simply texting them and saying, I don't want to be your friend anymore. Or simply winding down the conversations. Or when they send you something or talk to you about something, you go like, oh, very interesting. Okay?

Right? Instead of engaging in those things, can you limit the amount of junk food you let 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. Practically though, how does someone who's listening to this now that has built that life...

you know, 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, they're on the way to work on the tube or the plane or the train or whatever. And they've built up all of these like commitments. So they're getting the WhatsApps, they're getting the emails, they're getting the Pilates instructor checking you. They've built that noise into their life. How do they set about unpacking it without like destroying their life? You can do it granularly or you can do it at macro levels.

So limit, remember, limit, learn and listen. Limit the first module. The first ability is what can I limit? 80% of that person's life is not needed. Okay. 80% of the money, unless you give your money to charity is a waste of resources.

Because you cannot buy, you cannot enjoy two cars at the same time, you cannot enjoy two beds at the same time, you cannot simple really. And and the trick is this, you can add the micro level, tell yourself I met when I was in my chief business officer of Google x, I met this wonderful CEO, who

you know, basically I 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. Okay. 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. Okay. If I do meetings that are longer than an hour, they haven't figured it out yet.

Okay, I'm so sorry, Steve, but how much of your business can be run by Oliver? Okay, you know, 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 work, would walk into my review meetings, and they would present 12 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 10. They go like, why? 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, right? Go do two. And by the way, if there are 12, we should hire more salespeople. But if you focus on two, you'll do 110% of your target. What's better than that? And normally what ends up happening is they focus, they continue to focus on all 12. And you know what happens? That portfolio approach changes.

Reality hits. You're running a portfolio so that 10 of them will fail and two will run, will happen. You lose the 10. That's the reality, right? You're spreading yourself so thin that 10 of them are not getting your attention anyway. They're just bothering you in the back of your mind and you lose the 10. Instead of two, run three, 50% buffer.

Okay, devil's advocate again here. I'm thinking about the listener who every entrepreneur that they admire, every person they admire... Lies. It's lies and you're contributing to it, my friend. No, but I'm trying to, I'm really trying to... How many of those people, we know all of them, how many of them are happy? Oh my God, that's a different question. How many of them are well?

So here's what I was going to say, is when you hear about the people you admire and that first year or two in starting the thing that they went on to do that maybe even gives them fulfillment now, you know, 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 wouldn't have left. I respect that. I couldn't have left the call center. I respect that. That's me. That's me.

That's what I tell people. You're not working in the call center anymore. I'm not, no. But for that first year or two. Fine. If you want to do a year or two, fine. Okay. 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 preview. There's no pre-plan of when I reach this, it's enough. 20 trips is enough.

Yeah. Okay. You know what happens when you limit yourself to 20 trips? Your value becomes higher. Yeah. You make the same amount of revenue. Okay. 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 text them. So you're saying cancel the third podcast a week we're going to launch?

Are you going to do a third podcast a week? Look at your face. I struggled with that too because I've been trying to build an Arabic podcast for a while. Yeah. Which I have to say is needed in the region. Yeah. Okay. Really needed. The 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 Lomo. Right. But the cost of that podcast is my health.

So there will be a moment in my life where one of my projects will be handed over and the Arabic podcast will show up. But I sat with the person that I was working on this with and I said, look, just it's not going to be right if I do it now. 52 more episodes a year beyond my capabilities. Think about one kick-ass diary of the CEO a week. Does that slash your sponsorship revenue by half? I wouldn't even know. Yeah.

I 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 know this because they all get to see the bank accounts and stuff. I said to them, if we make any money from this, we put it back into the show. Now, we've obviously, we make more money than we can put into the show. So 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...

I mean, what does it mean? We can hire more people, we can have a studio in LA and in America at the same time, we can buy a big boat or buy a fleet. I'm never going to buy a boat because I'm so busy. I'm talking about the fishermen. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. 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. Okay, interesting. Not the number of guests.

but the quality of guests, right? Not the number of topics, but the topics that you believe in. And how does that look over the long term? So you're saying you'd get to the same place over the long term? You'll not become Steve Jobs. When I say get to the same place, my rebuttal in my brain was like, 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,

So you're saying that because you're doing two episodes a week, by the way, when I did one, 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, right? There are 62,000 books written last year. You need to step up your game.

If you want to serve all books. No, I don't want to serve all books. I just want the best ones. So the question really is, again, what's the ceiling? How many good books can you spread a year? Right? I mean, when you look at slow-mo, I do the opposite of what you do. So a very interesting part of what I do with slow-mo is I rarely ever get a celebrity.

Okay. 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 million possible guests, billion, sorry. Right. It's impossible. Impossible. Okay. The question truly is what do I want to stand for?

I mean, there are so many ways I can grow slow-mo. 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, gazillion, gazillion, something like that. I don't know. That's a very large number, right?

What difference does it make? Well, you said to me, you said you want to make a million people unstressed. Yeah. A billion people happy or whatever it was. It'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? Right?

But you know, if this podcast had six listeners, you probably wouldn't have chosen it for your book tour. I would have chosen a thousand of them. The question really is very straightforward. The question is, you're there already. Yeah, I understand that. This is why I asked like, 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. Like,

And it's clearer to me now more than ever that the cost is significant and the reward is not clear. It's diminishing. Yeah, like, well, I don't even know what the reward is. The most rewarding thing I do, you've identified as this. Yeah. 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. So I asked myself, why don't I just do this? Because there are...

40 other companies that I'm involved in as an investor or six or seven that I founded and

you know, 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. And I do go like, what insanity is this? And I know it's not just me. Like, it's a lot of people out there that have engaged in this like voluntary insanity of overstressing their lives. The addiction of stress as you describe it in the book. And a lot of us,

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. It's the only script that you know. Yeah. 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. And 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. Why did you say that? Because at the time I was in a system where I was very good at helping startups, but it wasn't my life's purpose. Okay. And as a result, I coached 50 startups a week.

When I used to go to California, I used to say, to tell me 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 and 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. on Sundays. Come over, catch me, and I'll try to help you. And I would meet 15, 20 of them every single week, right? Why? It's not my life's purpose at all. I focus my life now on things that are very different.

happiness, well-being, you know, and it wasn't me that chose this path, by the way. That purpose was, chose me by Ali leaving the world. And at the moment where I was ready,

Okay. That's what that's. And what does that mean? 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. And, you know, 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. Who wants that?

Okay. And the real question is, and I say it with worry that a lot of people might have already switched off the podcast by now. Okay. 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 life 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?