Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

What is the difference between stress and anxiety?

October 8, 2018 · 31 min

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

Stewart interviews Chris Saad, a serial entrepreneur and former head of developer relations at Uber. We talk about how stressful it was to work for Uber, the difference between stress and anxiety and a lot of tips to actually work with anxiety, particularly what worked for Chris.

Episode transcript
Guest 100:05

I think Uber was stressful in that there's a lot of, you know, AAA players who expect a lot from each other. And so you definitely wanted to bring your A game to every meeting and every conversation every day. You know, the speed at which you're going, the paranoia about competition, the. The drinking the Kool Aid and really wanting to make a difference and frankly, trying to keep up with the performance reviews, which were really, you know, brutal. You know, the bar was very high. And so, yeah, that was all stressful, and the work was stressful, and I was in a particularly politically charged area of the company. The kind of work we were doing. A lot of stakeholders had a lot of points of view on it, and I had a very strong point of view on it. So there was a lot of very stressful and debates and discussions and meetings and things. So, yeah, that was all, you know, stress. I think I really actually appreciated the CEO Travis's perspective on it. People would always ask about the red line. They'd always ask about stress and how to make sure that you don't burn out. And his answer I really appreciated. I don't think a lot of people understood it very well, and some people didn't implement it very well, but his answer was a very entrepreneurial answer, which is, you know, he thinks of himself as like a math professor. If a math professor had no math problems, then the math professor would be pretty bored. And so, as startup operators and entrepreneurs, if we didn't have startup problems, we would be pretty bored, right? So it's like our job is to check out, you know, figure out what the most important problems of the day are and tackle them. And it's your perspective that decides to make those things stressful or just make them part of the day.

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