I was recently desperately seeking some answers to a burning question: I know there are a lot of books, Youtube videos and blogs out there about “How to avoid burnout for your team, how to manage stress in a Covid and remote world, etc…”. Those are all great for daily levels of stress.
But what is the secret to managing stress when it comes to the billion and trillion dollar club? I wanted to get a lens into how some of the largest CEO’s in the world manage stress. I call that “Next Level” stress, where the “weight of the world” is literally on your shoulders.
WSJ: Mr. Dimon nearly faced a near-death experience and surgeons perched above his chest repairing a gash in the artery that delivers blood from the heart to the rest of the body.
For example, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon is responsible for a client base that collectively aggregates to nearly $4 TRILLION!! Think of that number for a few minutes and compare that to the level of finances you personally are responsible for.
How does he sleep at night given such a high responsibility and pressure? One wrong move and all those assets could exit. And all fingers will be pointed at him.
Elon Musk is no stranger to personal, financial and investor NEXT-LEVEL stress
How about Elon Musk? Tesla chief watched his fortune fall $22 billion after shares of his electric vehicle maker had a rough week, falling over 10%. Even though Tesla posted record profits after reporting quarterly earnings on Wednesday, investors focused on the company’s warning that supply chain issues may hurt growth in 2022. In the past, he worked through near concurrent collapses of Tesla and SpaceX as well as a significant amount of family strife and other struggles. The fact that he has continued to persevere and is handling as much of a load as he is now is remarkable.
All of these incidents would make any ordinary person fall apart. Now you may be thinking: Yes, they’ve got so much money they don’t care. But it’s not just the money; it’s the level of public scrutiny, teammates counting on you, investors expecting more and more from you.
How do these Fortune 500 companies handle this NEXT LEVEL stress, and how can we learn a thing or two so as CEO’s, we too can think bigger beyond the daily possibilities of stress burnout.
For anyone who has been on a nice 1-2 week vacation, we all know that while helpful, the stress reduction is temporary. First, as a busy CEO, a one month trip to Seychelles may be an impossible feat. And even if it was, it doesn’t take away from the pressure that mounts when you come back.
There had to be a more permanent and long term answer to this challenge.
My studies led me to an understanding of the concept of Serious Leisure.
What is Serious Leisure?
Much of this research is from The Pacific Sociological Review Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 251-272 (22 pages); Published By: University of California Press
Many social scientists believe the future will offer significantly fewer opportunities for most adults to gain and maintain a job in the way they are used to doing today. A smaller number of jobs and a substantially reduced number of work hours are in store for many employees in the postindustrial society. Whether or not their jobs ever provided such things, they will increasingly be searching the world of leisure for ways to express their abilities, fulfill their potential, and identify themselves as unique human beings. Serious leisure is a main route open to people with these goals.
Its three types--amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and career volunteering--are defined, described, and interrelated. They are contrasted throughout with unserious or casual leisure, on the one hand, and work, on the other. The intermediate position of serious leisure between these two extremes relegates its current participants to the status of marginal men and women of leisure.
According to SeriousLeisure.net, a website that focuses on that exact concept, "The serious leisure perspective” (SLP) is the name of the theoretic framework that bridges and synthesizes three main forms of leisure, known as serious leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. Research began in 1973 on the first of these, and has continued since that time, while work on casual leisure and then on project-based leisure came subsequently.
Leisure is defined in the SLP as un-coerced, contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both). Think of this as that luxury trip to the Seychelles. Sure, it’s a quick burst of de-stressing, but ask yourself: Even if you moved to the Seychelles to handle your daily job, would it remove that level of stress you are constantly feeling at work? We can answer this by seeing the level of divorces and unhappiness even in some of the most “relaxing” parts of the world, such as in Newport Beach, CA.
This of a trip to Seychelles as a complete “de-stressor”. But it still doesn’t seem to be a cure for that next-level stress.
Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience (Stebbins, 1992). The adjective "serious" (a word Stebbins' research respondents often used) embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness. This adjective, basically a folk term, signals the importance of these three types of activity in the everyday lives of participants, in that pursuing the three eventually engenders deep self-fulfillment.
Amateurs are found in art, science, sport, and entertainment, where they are inevitably linked, one way or another, with professional counterparts who coalesce, along with the public whom the two groups share, into a three-way system of relations and relationships. By contrast, hobbyists lack the professional alter ego of amateurs, although they sometimes have commercial equivalents and often have small publics who take an interest in what they do. The professionals are identified and defined in (economic rather than sociological) terms that relate well to amateurs and hobbyists, namely, as workers who are dependent on the income from an activity that other people pursue with little or no remuneration as leisure (see Stebbins, 2007, pp. 6-8).
Hobbyists are classified according to five categories: 1) collectors, 2) makers and tinkerers, 3) activity participants (in noncompetitive, rule-based, pursuits such as fishing and barbershop singing), 4) players of sports and games (in competitive, rule-based activities with no professional counterparts like long-distance running and competitive swimming) and 5) the enthusiasts of the liberal arts hobbies, which are primarily reading pursuits.
Volunteers, whether pursuing serious, casual, or project-based leisure, offer un-coerced help, either formally or informally, with no or, at most, token pay, for the benefit of both other people (beyond the volunteer's family) and the volunteer. Nevertheless, the reigning conception of volunteering in nonprofit sector research is not that of volunteering as leisure (volitional conception), but rather volunteering as unpaid work. This latter, economic, conception defines volunteering as the absence of payment for a livelihood, whether in money or in kind. This definition largely avoids the messy question of motivation so crucial to the volitional conception.
Occupational devotees are people who are inspired by“occupational devotion,” by a strong, positive attachment to a form of self-enhancing work, where the sense of achievement is high and the core activity (set of tasks) is endowed with such intense appeal that the line between this work and leisure is virtually erased (Stebbins, 2004b). “Devotee work” is serious leisure from which the worker gains a livelihood.
Serious pursuits is the umbrella concept encompassing serious leisure and devotee work (Stebbins, 2012). See the SLP map in Resources.
Serious leisure is further distinguished from casual leisure by six characteristics found exclusively or in highly elaborated form only in the first. These characteristics are:
1) need to persevere at the activity,
2) availability of a leisure career,
3) need to put in effort to gain skill andknowledge,
4) realization of various special benefits,
5) unique ethos and social world, and
6) an attractive personal and social identity.
Casual leisure is immediately, intrinsically rewarding; and it is a relatively short-lived, pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. It is fundamentally hedonic; it is engaged in for the significant level of pure enjoyment, or pleasure, found there (Stebbins, 1997). It is also the classificatory home of much of the deviant leisure discussed by Rojek (1997, pp. 392-393). Among its types are: play (including dabbling), relaxation (e.g., sitting, napping, strolling), passive entertainment (e.g., TV, books, recorded music), active entertainment (e.g., games of chance, party games), sociable conversation, and sensory stimulation. Casual volunteering is also a type of casual leisure as is "pleasurable aerobic activity," or casual leisure requiring effort sufficient to cause marked increase in respiration and heart rate (Stebbins, 2004a). Casual leisure is considerably less substantial, and offers no career of the sort just described for serious leisure. In broad, colloquial language casual leisure, hedonic as it is, could serve as the scientific term for doing what comes naturally. Yet, despite the seemingly trivial nature of most casual leisure, I argue elsewhere that it is nonetheless important in personal and social life (Stebbins, 2001b).
Project-based leisure is a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time (Stebbins, 2005). Such leisure involves considerable planning, effort, and sometimes skill or knowledge, but for all that is not of the serious variety nor intended to develop into such. Nor is it casual leisure. The adjective "occasional" describes widely spaced undertakings for such regular occasions as arts festivals, sports events, religious holidays, individual birthdays, or national holidays while "creative" stresses that the undertaking results in something new or different, showing imagination, skill, or knowledge. Although most projects would appear to be continuously pursued until completed, it is conceivable that some might be interrupted for several weeks, months, even years.
The foregoing is the heart of the serious leisure perspective - a view of some of its basic concepts - as pulled together from the sources in the Basic Bibliography (see below). The broadest, detailed presentation of the entire Perspective is available in R. A. Stebbins (2007) Serious leisure: A perspective for our time. For a somewhat fuller summary of it, see Leisure Reflections 13 in the Digital Library.