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

Dave Asprey

Apr 22, 2025

Episode description

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

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

• How procrastination can boost creative performance

• What astronauts, athletes, and leaders have in common

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

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

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

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

It's time to start turning stress into strategy.

Mindsip insights from this episode:

Leverage optimal stress for enhanced performance

According to Yerkes-Dodson's curves, performance increases with stress up to an optimal point, meaning zero stress is not the ideal state for high performance.

#stress

Learn from losses to grow in sports psychology

Sports psychology is surprisingly not about winning, but about how you handle a loss and what you learn from it to grow.

#personal-growth

#resilience

Practice strategic patience to enhance decision-making

An underrated skill for leaders is strategic patience, where you take advantage of the time you have left to make a decision rather than rushing to be decisive.

#decision-making

#resilience

Incorporate Fatty 15 to slow biological aging

The supplement Fatty 15 contains C15, the first essential fat discovered in 90 years, which acts as a gero protector to slow biological aging by strengthening cell membranes.

#biological-age

#C15

Detach from ideas to embrace constructive arguments

To become comfortable with losing an argument, you must remember that your idea is not you, which allows you to detach emotionally from the outcome.

#awareness

Request feedback to minimize stress response

Proactively asking for feedback, rather than waiting to receive it, can decrease the biological stress response to the feedback process by almost half.

#stress

Leverage procrastination for optimal performance

Procrastinating can be beneficial because it allows more time for mental preparation and ramps up your stress to a more optimal level for performance.

#motivation

#stress

Prioritize kindness over niceness for meaningful connections

Being 'kind' is more valuable than being 'nice' because kindness involves telling the truth with empathy, even when it's hard, which is more productive long-term.

#emotion

#relationships

Avoid goal-induced blindness by balancing ambitions with ethics and health

Being too focused on a big, measurable goal can lead to 'goal-induced blindness,' causing you to lose sight of other important things like ethics or health.