Transcript

Replay: Banishing burnout, with Arianna Huffington

0:01 The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. Since May is mental health awareness month, we thought it would be a good moment to revisit Reed Hoffman's conversation with friend of Masters of Scale, Ariana Huffington.

1:43 After Ariana's remarkable success scaling the Huffington Post, she found herself suffering from profound burnout. It inspired the creation for company Thrive Global, where she's still the CEO. Ariane is on a mission to empower us to make the behavioral changes we all need for sustainable, healthy, and productive. Listening back through this. Her insights feel even more important today. I hope you enjoy it. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing.

2:24 There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely nutball. We haven't made just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Founder of LinkedIn.

2:48 Investor Greylock. And your host. And I believe that to survive your entrepreneurial journey. You have to learn. How to recharge.

2:57 Call it balance. Call it wellness. Call it yin yang. Your business. And your life.

3:03 Depends on it. Entrepreneurship is grueling. So grueling that I have a speech I give to every startup I've ever invested in. At that inevitable moment. When the team is about to give up.

3:14 I'll share it later in this episode, in case you or your team Needs it. The way you respond to the trials will determine your success. But not always in the way you think. Many founders will trick themselves into believing that a relentless pace is right for them.

3:31 You'll tell yourself, Sur, I'm tired, but I'm still delivering. My performance hasn't suffered terribly. You should forgive yourself. for these moments of delusion. Because you're an entrepreneur. Optimism.

3:43 is your opiate. Treat yourself. As you need to survive the journey. But also recognize that every scale entrepreneur

3:52 has a blind spot. And it's the belief. the law of diminishing returns. applies to everyone but you. And sometimes.

4:01 It takes the calamity. Of a burnout before you realize. You need to rethink. I wanted to talk to Ariana Huffington about this for reasons that will soon become clear. Ariana is now two years into her new venture.

4:15 Thrive global. a platform to promote well being. Before that She achieved one of Media's most dramatic scale stories with the Huffington Post. But the success.

4:26 Came at a cost. I was two years into building half post, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters. Anybody listening with teenage daughters knows what that means. And had fallen complete prey to the delusion. that in order to succeed as an entrepreneur and as a mother I just had to sacrifice myself Founders wear this self-sacrifice as a badge of honor.

4:54 Па антисо. There's often a feeling that the constant self sacrifice is unsustainable. And this feeling often surfaces. In a wake up call. That's what happened to Ariana.

5:06 That morning when I stood up from my desk to go get a sweater remember'cause I was called and I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. That was this amazing wake up call. that I'm incredibly grateful for right now because It led me to trying to understand why that happened.

5:27 Ariana brought her journalist instincts to bear on this very personal experience. Part of what led me to trying to understand is that when something like that happens You go through a battery of medical exams because they don't know what's wrong with you. Do you have a a brain tumor, do you have a heart problem? And literally At the end of it.

5:48 I felt like if this was a movie, all my doctors in white coats would come together and and look at me and say, Ariana You have civilization disease burnout. And there is nothing the medical profession can do for you. You have to go and change your life. Being kind of a research driven person, I read, I studied, I talked to scientists.

6:11 And I came to this Really profound realize on that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living under this delusion. We're actually living, believing something false. It's like we're living at a time when we thought the earth was flat. And when you believe something falls, a lot of bad things follow, like the laws of navigation were all wrong at the time. So the laws by which we navigate our lives are all wrong right now. And it's a very, very, very profound belief. It's not easy to shake.

6:47 The laws of navigation Ariana had been following up to that point were Iran. And she had sailed off the edge of the map to the place marked. Here be dragons. A place

6:59 Or the infallible founder. never expects to find themselves. Right now we still talk about work life balance which I I think is just not the right way to address this problem. Because it's not like Work and life.

7:13 are at opposing ends. That in fact they rise or fall in tundra. So we need to get away from this idea of the trade offs. There's one little nuance here. A founder cannot

7:25 succeed unless they're obsessed with their company. And so part of being obsessed with a company means that it's what they think about on Saturday morning. It's what they think about when They end up with You know, fifteen minutes spare.

7:39 you know, kinda waiting for the D M V or for their friend to show up at the restaurant. There are no successful founders who are not obsessive. And you have to be obsessed with, and therefore, by the way, consumed with the effort and the journey of your project and your company. But you're also attentive to

7:59 Hey, it's a marathon for myself. And part of what I need to do is I need to have some Mental flexibility and agility and I need to not be dragged down by the obsession. The sustainable strategy.

8:12 Is one that maximizes the efficiency of you and your team. But avoids the dreaded burnout. And for that You have to know when and how to recharge. We'll talk to Ariana about this in a moment.

8:25 But before I go further I have to admit. I'm a very flawed spokesperson. On this particular theory. I have at times

8:35 Use the phrase Sleep. is for the week. But my defense I was being somewhat tongue in cheek.

8:43 Well. For the most part. I don't really think. Sleep is a sign of weakness. If I know that I have a particularly creative project coming up.

8:53 I'll make sure. I get eight hours of sleep. The night before. But a younger, less wise me. Вофтан лимит сліп.

9:00 To continue the thrill. The entrepreneurial chase. Those super late nighters to ship a new product. Are far behind me. But I can't deny I look back on those days.

9:11 With a hint. A fond romanticism. As do many of my previous guests. On masters of scale. They told me like look leave at 6 pm because you're we don't know when you'll ever leave at 6 pm again. I literally lay on the floor of the lobby and I use my backpack as a pillow. I did sleep outside of the conference room for a few nights.

9:33 I remember, you know, people were like sleeping under the desk. I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while would squeeze in a shower. Striking the balance between work and rejuvenation is something I still struggle with. My good friend. Joey Ito. Will tell you so.

9:52 Joey is the director of the MIT Media Lab. Here's what he told one of our producers. When they interviewed him about my idea of letting fires burn. So the only concern I have for Reed is that this notion of lighting fires burn isn't the greatest philosophy for having a work life balance. And I think that's something that Reed is now just starting to process. So on the one hand, I think he's the master of scaling, but on the other hand, I think he's just beginning to figure out how that ties into sort of taking care of

10:24 Himself in his life. Mm. In fact It's my conversations on the subject with Joey and other entrepreneurs that has got me thinking more seriously. About this question of wellness.

10:37 Not just when it comes to the individual. But how it can be scaled throughout a company in a measurable way. That boosts the bottom line. Like any good journalist. Ariana couldn't stop pulling at the thread.

10:49 That her burnout had given her. When in two thousand seven I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout, and that was two years into building the Huffington Post, And I started appreciating other things like sleep and recharging, et cetera. I launched a dedicated sleep section in two thousand seven and I rem I remember um having a board meeting and my board being like appalled at that. It's hard to go back to two thousand seven and see How disrespected sліp was.

11:20 There was no way you would ever see an issue about sleep in the Wall Street Journal or The Harvard Business Review, which is now a regular place to find these these conversations. Ariana overcame the objections of her board at the Huffington Post. And started a section.

11:37 Dedicated to sleep. She became more and more passionate about the subject. In two thousand fourteen She published Thrive. It opens.

11:45 With Ariana describing that wake up call. When she had collapsed from exhaustion. For making Well being, wisdom and wonder.

11:54 Есенчал парц агавин. The book was a hit. It caught the eye of Jack Ma. Founder of Chinese Tech Giant Alibaba.

12:04 And it was Jack Ma who first suggested that Ariana's new book Could be the basis. of a new kind of business. He asked Ariana to speak at his women's conference in Hangzhou, China. That night

12:17 Jack had a speaker's dinner and during that dinner he said to me, You know, if I were you I would leave the Halfington Post and launch a new company around Thrive because he said there is no market leader And the biggest crisis going on in China is The mental health crisis induced by stress. Over a hundred million people Suffering from mental health problems. And we're having this conversation at his Tai Chi Centre. You know, he's very steeped in

12:46 the Chinese culture of the Tao, Lao Tzu Just the whole idea of Yin Yang When you hear the term Yin Yang. You might think of that black and white circle with a dot on either side.

12:59 Or you might think of yin yang as a metaphor for good and evil. In eastern thought. It also represents А баланс Between two ways of being.

13:08 Young as you go out, you achieve, you conquer. You build your startup unis you come back and refuel. This concept of yin yang can be enormously helpful. To the Wayward Startup Found.

13:21 The idea is to keep them balanced. Not to let one eclipse the other. But when Jack Ma brought all of this up to Ariana And nudged her to turn her book thrive. Into a new business.

13:32 She wasn't ready to hear it. Honestly, Reed, it was kind of amazing when I look back because when he said that all I could do was try to be extremely polite and like thinking this is a crazy idea but thank you so much. Whatever. It's like I absolutely Not a single thought of ever doing what he said.

13:53 But that crazy idea played in Ariana's mind over the next couple years. Until she could no longer ignore it. She kept pulling. The threads. I became more and more involved in these topics and and speaking more and more about and seeing how real the need was.

14:11 to actually change the culture, to change how people were working and living. I mean seventy five percent of healthcare costs and healthcare Problems are stress related and preventable. 75% Ariana launched Thrive Global. in twenty sixstine

14:27 Her goal was to show just how essential sleep and rejuvenation are in helping you operate at peak efficiency while keeping burnout at bay. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered.

14:56 I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

15:25 Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. The Having Done Post is about everything. And thrive is about only one thing.

16:06 How do we build our best lives? How do we achieve everything we want without burnout and stress? And bringing together ancient wisdom. the later science and new role models. Read, I'm going to get you to write something about the good things you are doing. I'd be delighted. I'm yet to make my appearance on Thrive.

16:27 But my good friend Crish did recently. Chris and I co authored my newest book. Split scaling. Chris makes the argument. Та сліп із інчаста бонус.

16:36 In fact It can be the driving force that lets you perform at new heights. Here's Chris sharing my favorite part of his article. Napping my way to success in Silicon Valley. The most important 20 minutes of my day are always the same.

16:51 I set my timer for 20 minutes. Then lie down for a nap. Hopefully I get to lie down in my own bed, but I've trained myself to nap under many other circumstances. In the driver's seat of my car. Curled up on a conference room couch.

17:07 On the floor of a school while my son was taking a music lesson. Assuming that you have a job that allows you to carve out 20 to 30 minutes during the day, What's stopping you? I would argue that it's mostly about societal norms. Daytime nappers are malingerers.

17:25 It doesn't matter that we're a sleep deprived nation. Or that more naps would reduce accidents and boost productivity. Fortunately, I've always worked in the startup world, where a lot of unusual behavior is tolerated in Well, I can't prove that napping is responsible for the success I've had over the past decade. I can tell you that I've accomplished an order of magnitude more in the past decade.

17:48 than the previous one. Give it a try. I'd love to hear how it goes. Chris says he can't prove napping has helped in his success. But as Ariana points out

18:00 The evidence is in his favor. There's a McKinsey study. That was exempt at H the Harvard Business Review. And the headline was basically The importance of sleep in the quality of leadership. And at first when you read that you think it's an onion headline when you look at the authors being m a McKinsey sleep specialist. I mean the idea that McKinsey is a sleep specialist

18:24 You know, sounds like an onion headline. And yet there is this now purely scientific way of looking at what happens to are a frontal

18:37 loves and our cognitive decision making. When we're sleep deprived or running on empty for whatever reason. By the way, you can find that Harvard Business Review article. And Chris's SA and napping. All linked.

18:51 From this episode's page. on mastersofscale.com I was intrigued. By everything Ariana shared. But I admit.

18:59 I wasn't ready to throw up my own map of the world. The one that mostly bypassed The island of Healthy balance. I asked Ariana.

19:08 For a concrete example. has impacted Her effectiveness. And in turn her company.

19:15 I was surprised when she told me that fatigue had led to big mistakes. In hiring. I can trace back all my hiring mistakes to being tired, which has and the impact not just of impairing your cognitive abilities to make the right decisions, but also subconsciously Of

19:33 Making you want to say yes. When you're Running on empty. you are kind of overwhelmed by your to do list. So what we're doing now at Thrive having learned from uh my mistakes, we have this rule that nobody should interview while tired. The impact of bad long term decisions soon stack up.

19:54 А неф'яд by tiredness. You might not spot these mistakes before it's too late. The scientific evidence. Backs it up. I turn a sleep expert.

20:03 doctor Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience at Berkeley, and author of the New York Times bestseller Why we sleep. To explain. your subjective assessment of how well you're doing with insufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how well you're doing. So it's quite like the drunk driver at a bar you know, they've had seven or eight shots, they pick up their car keys and they say, I'm I feel fine to drive home.

20:27 And your response is I know that you think you're fine to drive home, but trust me, objectively you're not. And it's the same way when people try to get by on too little sleep. The science of insufficient sleep in the workplace can be summarised in the following facts. Firstly, underslept employees, um, defined as getting six hours of sleep or less.

20:47 They will select less challenging problems that you give them. Second Underslept employees will actually generate fewer creative solutions to novel problems.

21:00 that you do actually force them to try and solve Third. the less sleep that an employee has the more likely they are to slack off when they're working in teams and just ride the coattails of other people's hard work. One of the more surprising facts is that the less and less sleep that an employee has had, the more and more likely they are to lie.

21:22 become unethical. So for example, falsify data in a spreadsheet. And then finally what we found is that insufficient sleep and its impact goes all the way up to the top of the business chain. The more or less sleep that a business leader has had from one night to the next the more or less charismatic and inspiring that employees will rate that business leader, even though the employees know nothing about how much sleep that their boss has been getting. It's evidential in the CEO's behavior.

21:58 It's not just a mental health question. It's a business question. Because a founder who has pushed themselves too far and is running on empty. Becomes a liability.

22:09 Their employees. And their investors. Getting more sleep tends to solve a lot of other problems. That said. It isn't as easy as it sounds.

22:18 Especially if you're going through a particularly hectic time. You can find yourself falling off of The rejuvenation wagon. And that means you could undo all of the good that your newfound dedication to wellness has achieved. The more wound up you are.

22:33 The harder it is to wind down. Ariana has a two word solution. Bedtime ritual. Those uh uh who have children who are listening to the podcast know that You don't just drop your baby or your young child to bed. You

22:48 Lower the lights, you give them a bath, you read them good night moon, you sing them a lullaby. Why are you doing that? Because children And adults. need a transition to sleep.

23:02 So I did a parody of Good Night Moon on Audible called Goodnight Smartphone. Good night, Dark Room. Good night moon, which I can't see because of my black out curtains, but which I know is there. Good night sleep keeling blue light from my electronic devices which I have gently escorted out of the bedroom. And good night, Red Balloon.

23:26 And the point of that is you need to say good night to your day. Good night to all your problems, your projects, and all the things you're excited about, not just the problems. Your thing. Might be reading a book. Or listening to a whale song.

23:41 Different things work for different people. But what I really wanted to know Is this How do you scale? І адія в баланс.

23:49 А крос на організацію And how do you do this without sacrificing productivity? I asked Ariana. How she goes about practicing what she preaches in running thrive. Thrive is not a company.

24:02 where you don't occasionally pull an all nighter. or exert yourself because you are meeting a deadline. It's a company where when that happens you immediately Take time for yourself. We call them thrive time, thrive days, whatever you need. To completely refuel.

24:21 So the problem that creates the casualties that are proliferating around us It's the fact that you don't quickly cross correct. People Never have a problem with what they do occasionally. It's what's expected of you every day. That's the problem.

24:38 And now for a new segment we call It's bad. Um There's one little nuance here.

24:46 Part of the reason that there's a focus on relentless pace. is because more or less a slow moving startup is dead. Right. So it's a key portion for the success startups. That they're s that they're speedy, that they're fast. If they're not faster than big companies, they're dead.

25:05 Let the pet bugs bite. А кі метафор да I use for entrepreneurship. is that as an entrepreneur, you throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. And a key element of that metaphor, which packs in a lot of things.

25:19 Is that by default You're dead. If you don't assemble the plane You hit the graun. And if you don't assemble a plane in time before you hit the ground,

25:29 You know, it all crumbles. And that's part of what makes entrepreneurship so grueling, so difficult. Because the default state Until you get the whole plane running. Is death.

25:41 Ariana is very clear. That focusing on wellness Does not mean trading efficiency or ambition. Right. It means putting your focus

25:50 On working smarter. There were some people at the beginning who joined the company thinking that this was an opportunity to chill under the mango tree. And clearly these were not right for the company because we are not chilling under the mango tree. We're growing very fast. We are Working hard. We're just not working stupidly because working long hours is It's not working smart once you start having diminishing returns.

26:14 Diminishing returns in any situation. Is not working smart. You can find yourself expending more and more for less and less, but here's the thing. You can't always see this for yourself. But often others can.

26:28 Ariana told me about an executive at a big tech company. Who found himself confronted by poignant. Revelation He told his young children, Dad is gonna take you to the playground, and one of them said, Oh no, can't the babysitter take us?

26:44 And he was crestfallen and asked why and The little boy said Oh, because when you're at the playground you're always on your phone. But knowing when to intervene. To avert a burnout.

26:58 Isn't always child's play. That's why Ariana has made it part of Thrive's culture. To call out the warning signs. We actually catch each other.

27:08 And we laugh at each other when we Catch ourselves going back to the very culture we are trying to change. Whether you're designing a company culture That supports this kind of balance. Or just trying to change your own approach to life.

27:22 You have to recognize That there isn't a one size fits all solution. Different people have different capacities to Different priorities. And different ways to recharge.

27:33 And now Keep it down. Sorry. Now for another edition of

27:38 For me, recharging Interleave rest moments. into what you're doing. So like

27:49 Don't try to work fourteen days straight. Right. Like I almost never work on a Friday evening. And I rarely work the whole day Saturday. because it gives you kind of a recharge. And then Sunday is kind of the I'm getting back up to speed. I'm doing stuff, I'm reloading my stack. And then Monday is I'm in it.

28:05 Right. I've noted kinda entertainingly that I'm much better disciplined than most of the people I know at not looking at my phone constantly. Like I only have the ringer on if I'm waiting for a specific phone call, which is almost never. And I don't check messages, I don't check like I think people frequently like are messaging me because they think I'm gonna message back right away, and then are kinda surprised when I message back six hours later, because that's when I've gotten to looking at my phone and go, Oh, someone messaged me. Right. If you don't Context switch too much.

28:34 You can generally run longer between rest periods as well. Good night, Reed. You need a flexible system. And Ariana has a great solution for this.

28:46 One. I plan to borrow. We have what we call in our cultural values the entry interview. In the entry interview we ask people what's important to you outside your work. And

28:58 At one of our accenture trainings, for example, a woman said, What's really important to me is to take my daughter to school at seven thirty every morning. But my manager sets up seven thirty in the morning Conference calls every morning. We talked to her manager. Her manager said it's not a problem to have the calls at eight. I didn't know she wanted to take her kid to school at seven thirty. There may be a day when she will have to have a seven thirty conference call. That won't matter. What matters is what can she do every day. Yep.

29:29 So the entry interview is also something that helps build That Tim Spirit. because if I know that's important to you, I look at you a little differently. I want to know about your daughter. If it's important for you to go to your three PM violin class once a week, whatever it is We begin to know each other beyond work. The entry interview is a clever hack.

29:50 For scaling wellness to meet individual needs in an organization. But there are also many companies where employees face the same stress points At different times. Take call centers, for example. Call centers is one of the most stressed populations and also one

30:08 With the highest attrition. I want to speak to your manager immediately. The impact of a single angry customer call can cascade Through an employees' day. Taking down productivity. T morale. And ultimately

30:21 Employee retention. Ariana. Has a hack for this too. Through machine learning You know when an operator has received a particularly nasty customer call

30:33 Which It's going to make them be not as good on the next call and which is going to increase their stress. So their next call, which they expect to be another angry Customer is a thrive car. That lasts under a minute could be thirty seconds, forty five seconds, or sixty seconds because neuroscience tells us it takes under sixty seconds to cross correct.

30:56 From stress. The call may say Remember three things you are grateful for in your life. Stand up and stretch. Take some deep breaths. You know, very simple things.

31:08 These may sound like simple things. And that's the point. In the same way that small iterative changes in a system can have huge impacts on efficiency. Small course corrections in your culture. can have a huge impact on wellness.

31:23 It requires scale thinking. A general pattern to succeeding at scale is making accurate decisions Faster than your competitors. Part of this is down to having a better way of gathering and analyzing information. The other part.

31:38 Іллексон десиз. Байс онис аналізис. To do this. You need to hire the right people. But you also need to cultivate an environment that maximizes

31:48 Their ability to perform. If I were to write a wellness article for Thrive. I would focus on how it is that we can make each other better. how we can improve our cognitive performance and our ability to make decisions and move fast by working together. And some of that's paying attention to health and everything else, but it's also how we play together.

32:09 Howie. Ally together. and remind each other to take breaks. And this brings us back to the top of the episode.

32:20 We set out to prove. As an entrepreneur How do you survive the startup journey? Every small tip and trick in this episode will help. But there are also times

32:30 When you need to be reminded. Of the big picture. At some point. And usually at many points. The startups I founded or invested in

32:39 Hit dark days. The company Faces an existential threat. It will live or die. On how the emergency plays out.

32:46 The team is tired. The team is discouraged. The team is scared. And one of the things I'll do is give them a speech. That sounds something like this.

32:56 If startups were easy. Everyone would do it. They're hard. But that hardness. Is the thing that gives you the chance to change the world.

33:06 All startups. Go through a valley of the shadow. All of them. PayPal, LinkedIn, things that I've done personally. Things that I've invested in, Facebook, Airbnb.

33:15 all have Valleys of the Shadow where you're like Why did we think this was a good idea? Oh, we didn't realize it was gonna be that there was gonna be this landmine, it was gonna be this hard. But that's where you have the possibility of being heroic. Of accomplishing something.

33:31 Та нова елся дан. Of making a change in the world. That gets reflected in the society and changes millions of people's lives. And that's the reason why. You face down these dark days.

33:45 You band together And you work very hard to solve them. And that's your chance. To be heroes. And with that piece of inspiration for the weary entrepreneurial warrior.

33:58 I want to return to Ariana for one more question. There's a theme that played out through our entire conversation. Which I call the technology paradox. On one hand. Technology gets in the way of rejuvenation.

34:10 It distracts you from dinner with your partner or playtime with your kids. On the other hand. It can be used in ways to create healthy reinforcement. Like checking in with a call center staff. After a particularly stressful run in

34:23 With a customer. I believe we have an incredible opportunity to use technology for healthier lives. And we need to very consciously create boundaries around what is sacred and most important to us. So we actually developed an app the thrive app.

34:41 Which addresses that. So When you put your phone on thrive mode In order to have a meal. with your wife or your friends uninterrupted or do deep work. if I text you, I'll get a text back that says read is in thrive mode until such and such a time. So it's bi directional, which is very important because that's also any way to change the culture.

35:04 Right now. The expectation is that you know Reed is so amazing, he responds quickly, he's always on and we want to change that to Reed is so amazing and has such a clear sense of what's important in his life. That he can also disconnect. And the second thing that it does, it gives you a a dashboard of your social media, game, et cetera, consumption during the day. Which surprises people, you know. You spent two hours on Instagram today or

35:34 three hours on Candy Crush, um binge watching Netflix, whatever. And then it asks you if you want to set limits. And if you do, it sends you notifications and let's say you say I only want to spend an hour and a half on Instagram, it cuts you out at an hour and a half for this one day. So this is an example of technology helping you navigate your relationship with technology.

35:59 But technology based solutions alone aren't enough. You need to support them. Through the culture. That you instill. You can tell people

36:08 You don't have to answer emails after hours. If it's urgent, we'll contact you. But that doesn't matter. People can still get super stressed unless they learn two things. One is to relentlessly prioritize. And two, to be comfortable with incompletions. So relentlessly prioritize is key.

36:28 You know, nobody can do anything important, let alone thrive if they don't learn what's really important, what I have to get done And what is not important. But the second step is that There isn't anybody in any interesting job. who can complete everything they could have possibly done that day.

36:50 So if you're the kind of person Who thinks I haven't done everything. And therefore moves into stress. It doesn't matter.

36:59 What your company says. It's an internally induced stress. our whole B to B is based on a behavior change platform. broken down into science based micro steps for change And the most important micro step

37:14 In learning to live with incompletions is declaring an arbitrary end to your day. You have to declare it. At this time.

37:25 This is the end of my day. And because human beings learn through ritual We recommend that you declare the end to your day by Turning off your phones, iPads, laptops. And gently escorting them out of your bedroom. Mm-hmm.

37:41 Well yes, as you have helped the world know. Taking your phone and moving it away from your Your bedroom is actually in fact a super important thing to sleep. Stress, relaxation. Right. And wake up in the morning.

37:55 And have a minute. That's another micro step. Take a minute. to uh remember what you're grateful for, set your intention for the day. Before you go to your phone. Over seventy percent of people sleep with their phones and f the first thing they do is go to their phone. And if you think of it, our phone is everybody else's agenda for us. And our bodies are flooded with the cortisol stress hormone before we have even

38:23 Gotten out of bed. So these are small. changes, small microscopic changes that can have a huge impact. That's what is so wonderful and that's why I'm so optimistic. Th these are not like huge changes. We're not asking people to leave their jobs. Move to Caribbean Island.

38:43 Cool under the mango tree. Yeah, chill under the mango tree. We're asked them to take the small micro steps. My work here is done. Time to shut off my phone. And find a mango tree. Chill under.

38:59 I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wakewhat original. The show is recorded on site in California. And produced at the studio.

39:12 Inside SY Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris McLeod, Adam Skus. Jenny Cataldo Dan Kedme and Ben Manilla.

39:25 Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Original music and sound design is by the Holiday Brothers. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pew. Special thanks to Chris Y Bob Safien. Elisa Schreiber.

39:38 David Sanford, Saida Sepieva. Христіна Ганталес And Sarah Sandman. Visit mastersofscom Find the transcript for this episode.

39:47 and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.