Unlocking the Performance of Athletes, Finance, and Leadership with Sebastien Page

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Timestamps:
00:00 — Cold Open & Intro
03:35 — Nearly Dying from Burnout: The Wake-Up Call
07:10 — Health Is the Baseline for Every Other Goal
08:53 — The PERMA Model: What Actually Drives Long-Term Happiness
12:14 — Why Sports Psychology Obsesses Over Losing
14:39 — Mastery vs Ego: The Shift That Changes Everything
19:35 — Federer’s Lesson: Losing Half the Points and Still Winning
23:57 — Goal-Induced Blindness: When Success Becomes Dangerous
27:57 — Fear, Stress, and the Performance Curve Leaders Miss
31:02 — Why Leadership Stops Being About You
34:46 — Strategic Patience and the Skill of Knowing When to Quit
39:10 — Relationships: The One Variable That Predicts Happiness
43:00 — Final Takeaway: Don’t Burn Bridges on the Way to Success

Sebastien Page (00:02.00)
If I give you a jar of gummies and there’s a hundred gummies where four of them are poisoned, what would I do to convince you to eat one of them?

The best in the world aren’t the best in the world because they never lose. Effortless tennis is a myth. They’re the best in the world because they lose repeatedly and they’ve learned to deal with it.

The best acronym in the world that I described in the psychology of leadership is to describe what positive psychology is about.

Skot Waldron (00:39.00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

(01:38.00)
What do you get when you mix psychology with finance, with sports? You get Sebastien Page and that’s who going to be on the show today. He’s a finance guy that’s really fascinated with psychology and sports and the performance of sports and the psychology behind performance in sports. And that’s why he wrote a book called positive psychology and this is so cool. He dives into the things that make us tick and he analyzes the performance of athletes and the way they think and the way they perform their duties as athletes to help us understand how we can be better leaders. Yes, I know you’ve probably heard some of that stuff before, but it’s really applicable. He really dove into that, really came up with some really great, great, great stuff. And I get to pull pieces of that out of his brain today just for you.

Sebastien has more than two decades of leadership experience and has done extensive research on positive psychology. He is Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He is the author of the new book The Psychology of Leadership. He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.

So, this guy’s got some clout. He’s really fun to talk to, really energetic, has a lot of good things I think you’re going to get from this episode. So, if you’re ready to start thinking about positive psychology and how to lead better, listen to this episode. Here we go.

(03:35.00)
Sebastien, thanks for being on the show, man. This is gonna be good. I love psychology, I love sports, I love finance, and you seem to bring them all together, so.

Sebastien Page (03:44.00)
And Skot, the feeling is mutual. I’m fired up about this. I’ve been listening to prior episodes of your podcast and I’m an instant fan. I’m super fired up right now.

Skot Waldron (03:56.00)
Wow. All right, man. This is cool. I mean, if I had like an audience button, like clapping and stuff, I would hit that one and then like have the crowd go wild kind of stuff. That’s so great, man.

So, let’s talk about how you almost died. Can we do that? Like right at the start? I don’t know the story yet, but I heard that you almost kind of, you died in 2005. So, I would like to hear how that happened. What happened? Tell me.

Sebastien Page (04:21.00)
I was in Canada visiting family and I started shaking, but I had no fever. It was strange. I was shaking hard. Then the fever started and I lived in Boston, Massachusetts at the time. So, I decided to drive down. I didn’t know I was risking my life, but I drove down and things did not get better. I started getting massive pain in my abdomen and it was just indescribably painful. My wife took me to Mount Auburn Hospital in Boston where we live and I entered an episode of Dr. House. Now I don’t know how many people in your audience, Skot, might have watched the show Dr. House, but the idea is they never know what the patient has. They take a bunch of risks to diagnose the patient or to treat the patient, but it’s mysterious and it’s dangerous. That was my one-week episode of Doctor House. They couldn’t figure out what I had. Specialists after specialists, they wanted to do surgery. Then they didn’t wanna do surgery. They thought I had something called diverticulitis. I didn’t have it.

Ultimately, they pumped me full of antibiotics directly through an IV because they thought I had a kind of strep infection, like a mysterious bacterial infection. I almost didn’t make it. At the end of the week, the doctor came by, one of the doctors, and said, look, we still don’t really know what you had. We think it was some kind of strep. You we’re lucky because we have new kinds of antibiotics that we gave you. And if it had been a few years ago, you wouldn’t have made it.

Now, why do I tell that story? And I tell that story in the psychology of leadership. I was not taking care of myself at the time. I was completely run down. I was a workaholic. I was traveling nonstop. I was not eating well. I was not sleeping well. I was tired.

And I think, you know, one of the doctors probably cracked the mystery. I was very tired one morning, jet lagged, and I decided I was going to get into an exercise regimen to get better. I went outside and I started running intervals in wet terrain. Eventually the doctor looked between my toes and there were some little cuts, and he thought that’s where you got the infection and your body had no defenses because you were sleep deprived, completely run down from work and traveling.

This was a moment in my life, this was in 2005, where I realized that if you don’t take good care of yourself, and I know Skot, you’re into sports, and I know you take care of yourself, but if you don’t take care of yourself, nothing else matters. None of your goals matter, none of your relationships matter. It’s the baseline for everything else in your life. So, I pressed the reset button and it kind of changed how I think about health and fitness and became the baseline that has allowed me to improve my leadership, improve my relationships and so on. But health comes first was the lesson.

Skot Waldron (07:48.00)
You have a new book came out in 2025. It’s now 2026. Sounds like so long ago. But it’s all about positive psychology. How does that story tie into your book?

Sebastien Page (08:10.00)
You know, it’s the story with which I end the book, and I talk about long-term goals, taking care of yourself being the basis to establish all your goals. Positive psychology is fascinating, Skot. There’s a model by the founder of the field, Martin Seligman. I don’t know if you’ve come across it. Now I’m gonna give you a caveat. I’m in investment management. We use a ton of acronyms, almost as many acronyms as technology people. I don’t like acronyms. But the best acronym in the world that I describe in the psychology of leadership is to describe what positive psychology is about. It goes as follows. It’s PERMA, P-E-R-M-A.

P stands for Positive Emotions. And in positive psychology, Positive Emotions are clearly overrated. This is what we’re after every day, a laugh, a good glass of wine, a couple of likes on social media. Sadly, some people are chronically unable to experience many Positive Emotions all the way to depression. There’s a distribution of how people are even able to experience those in society. But what positive psychology will say is this is overrated. You’re going after this every day. It’s overrated. What matters for people is the ability to thrive in the long run is E-R-M-A.

E-R-M-A, which stands for Engagement. You talked about flow a few episodes ago on your show. R stands for Relationship. The number one factor of long-term happiness, according to the Harvard study, is the quality of your relationships in your life. M stands for Meaning. When you have a sense of meaning about what you do, you’re going to thrive in the long run. And A stands for Accomplishment. Long-term accomplishment. We are wired to accomplish, not sit on the couch.

So, there you go. That’s an acronym. It’s what positive psychology is about in a nutshell. And it’s fascinating because we all think of psychology as treating clinical issues like anxiety and depression. And that’s super important. But as much as half the research in the field of psychology nowadays is on the positive side.

How can people be happier, live happier lives? How can people thrive over time? How can we achieve high performance, ultra-high performance? And that’s the part of psychology that I explore in the book. So, I have a chapter on Engagement, E. Chapter on Relationship, R. Chapter on Meaning. Chapter on Accomplishment, A, and I make it really practical for a leader’s self-improvement and for organizational leadership as well.

Skot Waldron (11:07.00)
Why do you talk about sports so much?

Sebastien Page (11:09.00)
Oh, I love sports psychology. I didn’t know much about it before. This goes back to when I decided to write the book, The Psychology of Leadership. I was stressed at work. And not only was I stressed at work, but I was stressing about stressing. I was adding a second layer of stress in my life that was not necessary. I was beating myself up. I kept thinking, I’ve been doing this money management thing for 25 years. Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so stressed at work?

And that’s when I ended up talking to a sports psychologist in Maryland, where I live. His name is Dr. Daniel Zimmet, fascinating guy. He’s also an athlete. He happens to have 40 national titles in the sport of handball. This is like squash, but you whack the ball with your hands. It’s kind of a niche sport. But the point is he has his mental game together as an athlete.

So, Skot, we sit down and first thing he wants to do is tell me the story of his best handball match ever. And he’s describing this match that took place 10 years prior that he remembers point by point. And it’s full of details like the ball hit that wall and then the back wall. And then I was on my knees and made an impossible extreme shot. And then the match almost over. He’s telling me the story. It’s not that fascinating a story because I don’t play handball. But clearly he’s got a point in telling me this. And then it’s a letdown because in a nonchalant way, he goes, and then I lost the next two points. So, I interrupt and I go, you lost the match. Dude, you’re telling me this is your best match ever. And that’s when he introduced me to sports psychology, the concept of mastery over ego.

For him as an athlete that day, he realized he could play the game at a higher level and it didn’t matter that he lost. It was not about ego. And also, sports psychology, it turns out, is all about losing. It’s not about winning at all. Sports psychologists are obsessed with what you do with your losses. This applies directly to my professional life and money management because we don’t always get it right. We have setbacks. You can’t predict the markets perfectly. No one can.

So, you need to learn to, if you want to go extreme in sports psychology, which is difficult, cherish your losses, get excited by losing. This sounds crazy, right? But in a sports psychologist’s mind, this is where you’re going to learn and grow. So that’s how I got into it. And then I’m a nerd. I’m a research nerd in my day life and finance and economics. I’ve published a lot of articles. I do a lot of quantitative research. So, it was easy for me to start reading papers in another field, but with the same statistical modeling, I just went into a rabbit hole of reading research and sports psychology and got completely fascinated with it. So here we are, Skot.

Skot Waldron (14:17.00)
It sounds like I preach this whole infinite game thing a lot that, you know, when I read Simon Sinek’s book, The Infinite Game, that really like hammered on, you know, that whole idea of long-term growth mindset of not winning and losing by the quarter, winning and losing by the project. But you’re talking about this, you know, he smashed these, you know, this game he was rocking it and then, but he still lost the match, but that wasn’t the point, right?

We would sit there and go, well, they win or lose. And it’s like, well, what kind of what things happened during the match that are going to enable him to go on and keep playing at a higher level. And that’s what business I think is really about and should be. And I talk about this all the time with my clients, but I’m doing strategic planning.

Strategic planning, we should not be thinking how are we gonna win and lose the next year, two or three years? It is how are we setting this up for continual growth and progress into the future? And it’s just a mindset shift. And I hear that’s kind of what you’re talking about.

Sebastien Page (15:29.00)
And Skot, it’s a difficult mindset shift and absolutely it applies to strategic planning and business. It also applies to people’s lives. Now I just want to say it’s you want to win. That’s perfectly fine. Like that’s why you compete that you want to achieve. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just too easy to say sports psychology is about losing. Just embrace losing.

The reality is this mindset is difficult to apply and develop over time, but it is so rewarding because you start thinking longer term, as you suggest in your strategic work. And when you start thinking longer term, you care more about your skills, about the mastery. There’s a famous example in the sports psychology literature of two golfers. And by the way, for the record, for audience, I cannot play golf to save my life. Okay. But that’s research. So, let’s just talk about the research. One golf player is ego oriented. All they care about is the score, is the trophies is the prestige of winning golf games. The second golf player is mastery oriented. The second golf player has the sports psychologist coaching them and what she gets excited about what she goes home and talks about is improving her swing. Like, oh, today in the rain I improve my swing so much this is so exciting. See how different those mindsets are one’s about mastery and really you know you do want to win but if you realize you can play the game at a higher level you improved your swing you’re getting into that mindset where you’re to be thriving as an athlete or as a business leader or in life, if you think about things that way with that mindset, it’s the same in business.

I get excited if we find the better sources of research for money management. It doesn’t mean we’re hitting home runs in the markets, but I just know that long-term from a mastery perspective, we’ve improved our research process. We have better sources of information.

I get super excited about how teams work together because the better the teams work together from a mastery perspective, the better we’re going to be in the long run. And then it kind of doesn’t matter if we make money or not from day to day, we know we’re going to make more money over time. So, it all comes together, ego versus mastery, short term versus long term, the scoreboard versus skills improvement into a mindset that can transform people’s lives. Maybe I’m overselling it. I don’t know. I think it can transform people’s lives.

Skot Waldron (18:24.00)
No. You’re not, man. I think it’s super important. I love that you focus so much on it. You have another thing you hone in on quite a bit. It’s Roger Federer’s commencement speech. Roger Federer is famous tennis player, for those who don’t know, but his commencement speech is there. What about that speech is so profound to you that you like to talk about it?

Sebastien Page (18:51.00)
It went completely viral at the time. I’m sure a lot of people in our audience have seen that clip. He got up in front of the Dartmouth students and said, “I have played 1500 matches in my career.” This is one of the top tennis players of all time. He said, “I won 80% of those matches.” Then he asked the students, what percentage of the points do you think I won? And do you want to guess, Skot?

Okay, so we have one of the top tennis players of all time. Wins about 80% of the matches. What’s the percentage of points he wins?

Skot Waldron (19:31.00)
I don’t remember from his talk. I mean, 56%.

Sebastien Page (19:37.00)
It’s 54%, right?

Skot Waldron (19:38.00)
So okay. Alright.

Sebastien Page (19:39.00)
You were close. Well done. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.

Skot Waldron (19:42.00)
That’s good. I like it when you ask me questions. It’s good.

Sebastien Page (19:46.00)
So, 54%. Ok. That one of the best tennis players of all time lost almost half of the points he ever played. And what he said next is profound. I’m going to paraphrase a little bit, but he said, no matter what game you play in life, you’re going to lose. He’s looking at these eager A level students, right? And then he goes, get used to it. He explains the best in the world aren’t the best in the world because they never lose. Effortless tennis is a myth. They’re the best in the world because they lose repeatedly and they’ve learned to deal with it. Adapt and grow. That was his message. And that’s why it went viral because here we have a super successful tennis player who’s looking at the other side of the coin of sports psychology, not just winning, but also growing and adapting to losses.

I mean, you know, if I talk to Dr. Zimmett and I don’t, I think that’s almost impossible, but it’s all taking the idea to an extreme. As I said earlier, you would even get excited by setbacks. I’m still trying to do that in my life, to be honest.

But like, if you think about it from a long-term mastery perspective, the setbacks are where you improve. If you’re willing to reflect, to grow, to adapt. My daughter just texted and she had a bad grade on a geometry test. She’s in high school. She might not be happy that I’m saying that in a podcast, but she’s super smart.

Skot Waldron (21:24.00)
Her life is ruined, Sebastien. You just…

Sebastien Page (21:26.00)
Yeah, I won’t say her name. But she got a bad grade and it’s 77%. It’s not horrible, but you know, all I said is it’s good, you can work on it, right. And, at that age, kids don’t really have a growth mindset. So, then I replied, “growth mindset,” right. And I can’t say I’m doing this perfectly with my kids, but I’m trying to bring that message to them and that mindset to them as well.

Skot Waldron (22:00.00)
Aren’t our kids so lucky that they get people like us as parents where we can use words like growth mindset? I mean my parents never said that to me

Sebastien Page (22:09.00)
Yeah. And you know what, maybe perversely, there is something about this generation, perhaps over parenting versus our generation. I don’t know how old you are Skot. I’m 48. You know, there was very little direct parenting, and we stubbed our toes and we dealt with it ourselves. Right. And that’s also important. So, I can pontificate. I, in no way am I an expert in parenting, but I’m finding things in sports psychology and positive psychology that I can try to bring to my kids.

Skot Waldron (22:39.00)
Yeah, it’s brilliant. And I just turned 48 in December.

Sebastien Page (22:43.00)
There you go. Happy Birthday.

Skot Waldron (22:46.00)
Thank you. I appreciate that. I was waiting for you to tell me Happy Birthday, Sebastien.

You know, this reminds me back to something else you talk about and we talk about, you talk about resiliency and you talk about bouncing back from the hard times and the setbacks and the whatnot. I mean, going from, you know, a champion to just struggle and then coming back is Simone Biles, right? The famous gymnast and her story, I mean, holy moly, man. Talk about impact all over the place. What about Simone do you talk about?

Sebastien Page (23:23.00)
I, in the psychology of leadership, I talk about goal induced blindness. If you’re a high performing individual, sometimes your risk is not to have clear goals and go after them. It’s to forget everything else that doesn’t have to do with your goal. And I like to use Simone Biles as example as goal induced blindness because at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, she’s the top gymnast in the world, right? And she started doing her maneuvers. I don’t know what they’re called, but she gets the twisties, like anxiety-driven loss of control in the air. And she famously walked out of the Tokyo Olympics, like the top contender. And at the time, she caught a lot of criticism, but she reflected back and came back in 2023 to win four gold medals.

What happened between Tokyo and 2023? She realized that she was suffering from goal-induced blindness, and this was encouraged by people around her. She was overtrained. She was overworked. She was exhausted. So, I like to say, Skot, that Simone Biles became a better gymnast by watching Netflix on Sundays instead of training. And she’s been public about this. You know, I’m relaxing today. I’m not training. Or she would tweet or send X-posts about, I slept really well last night. So, rest is part of a top athlete’s regimen, and she just pushed it too hard. So, resilience involves, absolutely involves rest.

Going back to our original story where I almost died. And this is a problem. It’s called goal-induced blindness. It’s all over the literature in psychology. It’s often used to describe what happens on Mount Everest. Did you know, Skot, that if you want to summit Everest, you have a 4% chance of dying in the process? It’s like, why? It’s goal-induced blindness. I mean, a lot of the deaths are unpredictable. We just had the worst season in Everest climbing in terms of casualties, in terms of accidents. That’s just goal induced blindness. People get so obsessed with reaching the measurable goal of the summit that they lose sight of everything else that’s not goal related, including their personal safety.

That also Skot, leads some people to lose their sense of ethics to cheat just in favor of the goals. I know you coach corporations, right? Blue chip corporations will suffer from goal-induced blindness. Great company, Wells Fargo, had a goal of opening as many new bank accounts as possible in the year, and they incentivized people that way. People started opening dummy accounts that didn’t even have money in them. This is pure goal-induced blindness. There’s famous accounting frauds like Enron, WorldCom, but even like really good companies. Volkswagen got caught cheating on their emissions testing. This stuff matter. If you want to go in the world of high performance, you got to think about the risks of goal-induced blindness.

Skot Waldron (26:53.00)
This leads me to think about fear and the way we use fear to drive some of the things that we do. When fear drives more leadership behavior than probably confidence ever will. We talk, I talk about fear all the time to my clients and, hey, you know, that’s one of the first questions I’ll ask is, hey, what are you afraid of? Or what are you afraid of losing? Or what are you afraid of? How is that gonna impact you? Like that fear motivator. What do you think a fear motivator or fear shows up most often for people? What is that thing that drives people the most you think in that space?

Sebastien Page (27:37.00)
Well, I think we’re wired to be anxious. That’s part of the human condition. Fear can be a motivator. The fear of failure will drive students to study more and get better grades. But it’s a balance, Skot. I wouldn’t go out and say you should not feel any fear in your life. I don’t think that’s productive. And there I will link fear with anxious feelings with activation and motivation.

So, in sports psychology, it’s fascinating. It’s been proven over and over again that if you have a little bit of stress, anxiety, sports psychologists will reframe it as activation. You’re actually going to perform better. Now this goes up to a point because after that, if you’re too stressed, too anxious, too fearful, you’re going to choke.

And it’s also not healthy long-term to be chronically stressed. But up to a point, increasing your stress level will increase your performance. Just think about that. Like if I ask you, if I give you a challenge, run a hundred-meter dash and you’re a little bit nervous, you got adrenaline pumping, biologically, your ability to focus increases and your fight or flight response pumps adrenaline through your blood and you’re actually going to run faster. So that’s interesting. There’s a curve. It’s like an inverted you and the research is called a Yerkes-Dodson’s curves. I talk about those in the psychology of leadership, but what it says is fear is not all bad.

So, I’m interested, Skot, how you frame fear because I’m responding in the context of stress and anxiety. I think fear has a broader definition, but I’m interested in your thoughts since you talk with executive leaders about, you know, get rid of your fears to perform better on this idea of you do need a bit of activation, even in organizations, a bit of a sense of urgency, a bit of stress to get things moving. What’s your thought on that?

Skot Waldron (29:57.00)
Yeah, I think it’s really. I don’t think they should get rid, I think they should understand it where it’s coming from, because that’s gonna drive their motivation and find what their motive is. If they’re strictly leading a certain way because they’re afraid they’re gonna get fired, that’s important to understand, because then we understand that I may be acting from a selfish, I may be leading from a selfish space. I may be leading, I may not care about my impact on you or how you’re living your life or your workload or whatever, because I need to save my job. And so that fears, I just want to understand where it’s coming from so, we can, now that fear of losing my job can also be a positive boost for me to say, hey, this is a survival, we’re all here to, we’re all survival people, right? We’re on this earth to survive and thrive. And how do we do that? Well, we understand our motivations.

So, I believe that that fear, as you say, there’s good stress, bad stress, right? Good stress helps me perform. Bad stress just is debilitating and can ruin me in all kinds of ways, health-wise and career-wise.

Sebastien Page (31:17.00)
Absolutely. So, I think we’re on the same wavelength on this. And this idea of fear, you know, can be a wakeup call that you got to do something. But also, the way you describe the leader about self-centered about their own career. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about leadership, especially in the later years, as I’ve climbed the ladder in organizations is that it’s not about you.

Now, of course you should perform well, right? And I’m not saying like, you shouldn’t care whether you get fired, but what I’m saying is the way to not get fired as a high-level leader is to help people perform their best in your team. Not about you anymore. It’s about your ability to help others deliver the best output possible. That’s a mindset shift.

And it might not happen at the first level of leadership. You have a small team of five, you’re still a player coach, maybe not at the second level, but as you keep climbing, you realize it’s about listening more than talking. And it’s about getting the best out of others, helping others perform their best. And that it might be counterintuitive if you’re fierce, if you’re worried about your own job, but ultimately what’s going to happen, your area is just gonna deliver better results. And ultimately there’s no better job security than being a leader of an area that delivers better results.

Skot Waldron (32:52.00)
But isn’t that interesting? But think about it, what you just said is really interesting to me because as we, as it’s not all about us when we think about leadership, it’s not all about us. And we’re so worried about our job and the way it reflects on us and our performance measures. And we want to be able to prove to our bosses that we’re doing a good job and look at all the things that I’m doing here. But when we don’t make it about us, at the end of the day, we’re able to talk to the boss and say, hey, look at what my team did. It does end up reflecting on us as leaders and our bosses will end up seeing that. So, the thing we’re so concerned about performing well and the image that we want, if we do it in the service of others and others performance, it will ultimately come back and reflect on us anyway.

Sebastien Page (33:42.00)
Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. And beyond that, top companies typically, I don’t think it applies to all companies, have a 360-feedback process where feedback on you as a leader is being collected by your peers, by your stakeholders, but also often in my company right now, by people who work for you. And if you shift that mindset towards, my job is to help others perform their best. How are they going to feel about your leadership? Way better, way more engaged. And you’re just going to become a better leader and that’s going to transpire. It might not be about, you know, me, me, here’s what I did. I won this mandate or I sold this client. But yes, I think you hit the nail on the head, Skot.

There’s so many things about leadership that are counterintuitive. I cover a bunch of them in the Psychology of Leadership. You know, for example, what I just said about at some point, it’s not really about communicating and being so inspiring, but it’s really about your listening skills. It’s not about you. It’s about your ability to help others perform better. It’s not about always making quick decisions. I have a chapter on strategic patients. There are some decisions, not all, that require the leader to actually wait it out. And that’s very hard for leaders to do. And it’s a prized skill, strategic patience, completely underrated. I have an entire chapter on this.

And the other part, Skot, is this idea of the leader never quits. The leader is so resilient, like she doesn’t give up. You know what? One of the best skills in business, the hardest, the most prized, is knowing when to quit. Projects that you’ve invested in, that are no longer gonna work and you got to fold, that’s a hard skill to deliver.

And kudos to Annie Duke, she actually wrote a book titled Quit. She also endorsed my book, which I thought was awesome, because she’s one of my favorite authors. But she shows very clearly that the quitting skill is the hardest, going back to Everest deaths. There’s someone who’s climbed Everest 30 times, like the world record holders, they’re above 30. But they’re really good at one thing. They know exactly when to stop and turn around before they reach the summit. Here’s how leadership is so different than what people typically think, right?

Skot Waldron (36:22.00)
And you talk about that and the whole sunk-cost fallacy and the psychological principle of sunk-cost and in finance, I mean, talk about sunk-cost and how you’re doing things and I’ve invested this, I’ve invested this, I’ve invested this and I don’t wanna pull out now. And you talk about Everest, I mean, it costs over $100,000 to kind of climb Everest, right? If you’re gonna do it, it’s a chunk of change. Time investment, you’re training forever. You get there; you spend months climbing that mountain. It’s not like you do it in a weekend. And then to bail at “Camp Three” because of altitude sickness or cause the weather isn’t right, you know?

Sebastien Page (37:06.00)
Skot, I wonder, I mean, you’re athletic, would you wanna try to climb Everest?

Skot Waldron (37:13.00)
My brother wanted to go, he did Kilimanjaro this year, 2025, he did Kilimanjaro and he wants to do Mont Blanc. And he was like, dude, you gotta come with me. And I totally would, except I Raynaud syndrome in my fingers and my fingers get all blanched. It’s horrible. Although I did go snowboarding last week and I did pretty good. Like my hands didn’t freak out. I was really paranoid because that’s first time I’ve gone up to like 12,000 feet in a while and I did alright. So, I was actually considering it. Everest though, man. I don’t know.

Sebastien Page (37:51.00)
That 4% that rate if you want to reach the summit, that gives me pause.

Skot Waldron (37:57.00)
I say 4%. I’m like, I’m not going to be that 4%. Maybe I think 15%. I don’t know. It’s kind of, I don’t know, I sit there and go, there’s other mountains that climb besides Everest. I don’t know if I want to tackle that one. I’ve seen too many movies, and I’ve seen too many images of congestion. I mean, it’s just, it’s so like popular to climb that mountain now that just gets crazy, you know, although that’d be an experience for sure.

Sebastien Page (38:25.00)
I just think we all need more clarity on our goals and positive psychology. If it’s about E-R-M-A, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, Accomplishment, it helps you think about your goals differently. I have this thought experiment that I do at presentations sometimes where I go, if I give you a jar of gummies and there’s a hundred gummies where four of them are poisoned, what would I do to convince you to eat one of them? And I did this with a crowd of about 800 finance students. And I said, if I give you $1 million, raise your hand if you’d eat one of those gummies knowing that four out of those hundred are poison and are gonna kill you. And it was kind of sad. These are well-off students. They’re not nowhere near the line of poverty. And I probably, and I like said, be honest, and I probably got like 60% of the hands already at a million dollars. You know, 10 million. I can’t remember exactly when I got…

Skot Waldron (39:26.00)
What is that telling you?

Sebastien Page (39:28.00)
It tells me that and you see it in surveys. If you ask people in their 20s, what are your goals in life? 80% say I want to become rich. 50% say I want to become famous. It tells me that generally those goals are fine, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing conventional measures of success. But we underestimate what truly makes people happy.

And I know we’re running up on time, and I think it’s a great way to kind of emphasize something for this discussion, Skot, is the R, Relationships. Like, this has been proven through a research study that has gone on for over 80 years. And we all know this, that if you get the million dollars, you make more money, or if you make less money, if you’re healthy or sick, or the one thing that’s going to improve people’s self-reported happiness is the quality of their relationships in their lives.

Skot Waldron (40:28.00)
Amen.

Sebastien Page (40:29.00)
And so, it’s just, we’re all not thinking about the right goals. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about my family, about trying to be close to my family, have quality. And quality relationship doesn’t just mean agreeing and always being nice. It means being able to disagree in a respectful way, right?

So, I would leave that with our audience. If you want to change one thing in your life that is scientifically proven that’s going to make you happy, improve the quality of your relationships with people around you. It’s so simple.

Skot Waldron (41:02.00)
That is so important. I don’t know. Either you hear the stories, all the deathbed stories all the time. Yeah. You know, the regrets and the wishes and things like that. And I don’t know if I’ve ever heard one. They’re like, gosh, I wish I made more. I wish I was a millionaire. You know, it’s most about…

Sebastien Page (41:20.00)
I mean there’s nothing wrong with that.

Skot Waldron (41:22.00)
No. I think they reflect on relationships is my point. They mostly reflect on, wish I just hadn’t mended that relationship with so and so, or I wish I could have had more relationships or more time with my spouse. There’s always that relationship component of the humanity that we are, that we really try to connect to. I think there’s something there.

Don’t burn the bridges on your way to whatever success measure you think that is. Because like you said, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s just what are we doing to get there and what do we, you know, what’s the cost of getting there.

Sebastien Page (42:02.00)
Exactly. And I have a little bit of a fascination with billionaires. I have a couple of chapters on billionaires and the Psychology of Leadership. They clearly have a great sense of meaning in what they do. And I talk about Bezos and Musk and Steve Jobs and others. And it turns out though, you know, most of them have very poor relationships with people around them. And so, I just find that interesting. You’ll have to read the book to get more of my thinking on that.

Skot Waldron (42:31.00)
Teaser, teaser, good. This has been so good.

How do we get in touch with you? How do we get a hold of the book? I’m sure we just get it wherever books are sold. Is there anything else we can do there or know there?

Sebastien Page (42:46.00)
You can find me easily on LinkedIn or Instagram and the book is available everywhere. It’s very easy to buy on Amazon, for example.

Skot Waldron (42:54.00)
Okay, awesome. Sebastien, thank you so much for the insights. I love the psychology of why we do things and how we do things and the stories and the tying it into the sports stuff. I love that too. And I will tell you that, yes, I try to exercise and be as healthy as I possibly can. In fact, I over-trained, I was gonna tell this back when you were talking about it, but I used to over-train a lot as a cyclist and just hammer because I just wanted to push, push, push. I did, resting days felt really lazy to me. And I think, you know, when COVID hit and I would go and get tested, I’m a test freak. So, every three months I would go get blood draws to test my blood to see long-term, short-term COVID reactions. I ended up based on what the data was saying, knowing or unknowing, I had COVID six times. Two times I got really physically sick. The other times I didn’t even know, right? But there were times when, you know, that on top of other ailments where I was just like getting sick. And it was just like, what is, I tried to do everything to prevent getting sick and it was hitting me.

And my wife who’s really into functional medicine was doing a lot of research and looking at how I would, I was breaking down my body so much that it was really susceptible. So, going back to your story and other things, I just, I echo the sentiment of take care of yourself, don’t over train, in the sense of work, right? Don’t overwork, make sure you’re pacing yourself well and do the good thing.

So anyway, just not trying to end it on my story, but Sebastien, I just want to say I agree with you. I appreciate your words and all the thoughts and love you’re giving to this work.

Sebastien Page (44:52.00)
Thank you, Skot. This was a lot of fun.

Skot Waldron (44:58.00)
Mastery over ego. Mastery over ego. I think if we spent more time mastering the art of leadership, working on it, practicing it, experimenting, we would be a lot better off. Instead, we focus too much on what happens if I say this wrong, or what happens if I lose this, or what happens if nobody does this, or what happens if this project doesn’t go well, and what happens if, and we’re so worried about the image and the perception.

Now, as a brand guy, should we worry about what people think of us? Yes, we should. But what does it say when we’re constantly worried about ourselves? It says that we’re only for ourselves. And that is the problem. Mastery over ego helps us be excited by losing, helps us understand that what it means to lose, it actually means that we can improve. It actually means we can learn. And I know y’all know that, and I know you’ve heard it. I don’t know if you believe it.

And maybe it’s not safe for you to fail at your job. That’s also a problem for another episode. His acronym, Positive Emotions, but Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, Accomplishment. Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, Accomplishment. Those elements are so crucial to what we do. And the last thing about strategic patience, now, that’s so good. That phrase is so good. If he did not coin that phrase, he should. Strategic patience. It’s not just patience; it’s strategic patience because it takes effort. It takes an element of why we’re doing it, moving to the big picture of understanding how that’s going to impact how we lead.

Thank you, Sebastien, for spreading the word. I appreciate you and everybody else, thanks for being here.

(46:42.00)
If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.