- Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai remembers his manta when making tough choices: making a decision is the most important thing you can do, but oftentimes they’re inconsequential. Melinda French-Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey have their own methods to deal with stress—from bathroom cool-downs to attacking problems head-on.
Tasked with navigating economic turmoil, making tough calls, and quelling company friction, CEOs have the weight of their companies on their shoulders—and when it all becomes too much, Google’s chief exec Sundar Pichai remembers two things.
“One is: making that decision is the most important thing you can do. You’re breaking a tie and it unlocks the organization to move forward,” Pinchai said at Stanford’s Business School in 2022, adding that the former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell taught him that while studying at the elite college.
“The second is, with time you realize most of those decisions are inconsequential.”
“It might appear very tough at the time. It may feel like a lot rides on it, [but] you look later and you realize it wasn’t that consequential. There are few consequential decisions, and judgment is a big part of leadership.”
Essentially, most of us aren’t surgeons saving lives at work—that font colour or PowerPoint presentation you’re worrying about probably won’t matter in 10 years’ time.
Making decisions gets harder at the top—but it can be ‘fun’ too
Pichai has come a long way since roaming the halls of Stanford in the 1990s as an engineering student. Starting out at Google as a project manager in 2004, he spent the next decade working his way up through the company before taking the reins as CEO in 2015.
Now, helming the eighth largest business on the Fortune 500—there’s a lot riding on every move he makes as CEO. The gravity of every choice feels greater.
“It took me a while to realize…the higher up you are in an organization, the easy decisions don’t come to you,” Pichai said at the event.
But by leaning on his mantra—that not every choice is make-or-break—he’s able to distance himself mentally from the weight of every sign off and weather the stress that comes with steering a $2 trillion operation and.
“Thinking through both helps me think about it as it’s just another normal day in the office, and so you keep going through it,” Pichai added.
While the prospect of running a tech giant as huge as Google is nail-biting to the average person, Pichai says he has overcome any fears over the enormity of his choices by reminding himself: “You’re really helping the company, and so that makes it a bit more fun.”
Other ways leaders handle the stress of the job
Being put under immense stress comes with the territory of being a leader—and each has their own method of getting through it. Billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates received some words of wisdom from her hedge fund mentor on how to keep her head above water.
“Like if I get tough on myself about philanthropy, I remember what Warren Buffett said to us originally, which is, ‘You’re working on the problems society left behind, and they left them behind for a reason,” French Gates recently said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “‘They are hard, right? So don’t be so tough on yourself.’”
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Other leaders, like Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos, take a more aggressive approach by confronting their anxiety head-on.
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over,” the former Amazon CEO said in an interview with Academy of Achievement. “I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first e-mail message…The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.”
Meanwhile, iconic TV personality Oprah Winfrey finds zen in the chaos; she said she’s not someone to scream to let the anxiety out. When she’s overwhelmed, a restroom stall can become her oasis.
“Some days, I want to scream out loud when dealing with the complexities of getting good shows on the air. But one thing I know for sure: I’m not a screamer,” Winfrey wrote in her book, What I Know for Sure. “I usually go to a quiet place. A bathroom cubicle works wonders. I close my eyes, turn inward, and breathe.”
