Former Skype Exec: I Nearly Died Mid-Flight, here's The Mistake That Caused It!

0:00I said, Lewis, can you feel my left arm? Just to make sure I'm not going crazy here. And he feels my left arm, looks at me and goes, Eric, it feels like your arm has been hanging in a meat locker. Like it was just completely dead cold. And then I start getting very, very nauseous. Long story short, there happens to be a doctor on board the flight who sees the commotion, what's going on. Yeah, rushes up, takes my vital signs and says, look, we need to land the plane immediately. He's having a heart attack.

0:30What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:07Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Truthworks. I'm your host, Jessica Neal, and I'm going solo today. No other co-host, but it's okay because I get my guest all to myself. I don't have to share, which is wonderful. And I'm excited about the guest today because I think He's going to enlighten us with a lot of just lessons around not only like leadership, but even more broadly. And I will just say that this person is known as a CEO coach, but he's also been a CEO and a founder and an entrepreneur. And he's an author and he has a new book coming out, which we're going to talk about. It's called Ultra Productive, which I really want to be ultra productive.

1:50So I'm hoping that he's going to make me more productive by the end of this conversation. But Eric, welcome to the show. We're so excited to have you. Thank you so much, Jessica. Yeah, really excited to be here. And yeah, excited to just have a fun, free-flowing chat and see how we can make some maybe new and interesting connections between some fundamentals around productivity and how to improve productivity. and how that actually relates to building companies, leading teams and doing all of that super well. Yes. Well, I'm excited to talk about that too because these are the things that I get really, I love to geek out on and get really excited about.

2:32So before we do that though, I always like to go back in time because I was doing some research about you and you have an interesting story and you were in the business world yourself And then, you know, you created your coaching consultancy and you've been writing books. But you also had something, I think, that happened to you in your life when you were very high up in the air that may may have changed things for you and put things in a different perspective. So tell us a little bit about just who you are and why you do what you do. Yeah, sure. And then I can kind of take us up to that point.

3:08Do you remember that John Lennon quote, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans? Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's like that. That's my life. It's just it's so bizarre. Like, I honestly like laughed to myself. If I were to go back and you said go back in time. I love thinking about that, too. It's hard to go back in time to me at college, university, whatever, and say, look, this is how your life is going to unfold. I probably would have smacked myself in the face. Like, what are you talking about? You idiot. That sounds completely ridiculous. Yeah. So I started off, I'm half Norwegian, half American.

3:44And I mean, that's interesting, by the way, in its own right, because you have two very different cultures there. But I went to school at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and graduated with a degree in finance and started off at McKinsey & Company in the Chicago office and transferred then to the Oslo, Norway office after McKinsey ended up working at Skype. So I joined the early team at Skype, helped build that. Again, this is like one of those - was like a big deal. It was, you know, that was in its height. And I think I read that you tried to get in there a few times because you didn't get in.

4:20Like, you really wanted to work there. Well, I was using the product just as a normal, you know, user. Yeah, as we all were. Yeah, exactly. And given its Scandinavian roots, you know, Skype as a company, and me working in, you know, Norway, I was using it earlier than most people probably. So I remember when I first used it, I thought, wow, this is going to literally change the world. And yeah, I knocked on the door. It's like, hey, can I join the team? And they're like, no, we don't need anybody with a business background right now. Come on. No. Three months later, I applied again. I was like, how about now?

4:55Yeah. And they're like, yeah. And then, you know, the company was just growing like a rocket ship. Yeah. And then they said, yeah, actually, it would be useful to have someone come in with a more of a business background. because prior to that point, it was just heavy, heavy, heavy tech focus. And so I joined, led business development, helped with the blitzscaling of that. And that was like one of those unexpected things, right? I knew the product was amazing. Did I know that it was going to, if I joined this company, I can help build a multi-billion dollar success, have this great exit? No, of course not.

5:28I didn't know that it was going to take place for sure. But yeah, so that happened. And then I was sat on my, this is kind of funny. So I sat on my sofa and so I'm in London now and it's and it's I'm just remembering back to university days. And I sat there thinking, I really wish I had a burrito right now. It'd be like amazing to have some Mexican food. One online. There's no good Mexican food in London. And in fact, there's like a ton of people complaining about it. And so I thought, wow, you know, could I do that? Take a model that is tried, tested and proven, you know, in the US, apply it to the UK and build a Mexican restaurant chain.

6:04So started doing that. Now, the one thing I haven't said is that during this whole time, I am of the mindset that if you want to achieve your absolute best, you just have to sacrifice yourself on the altar of success and, you know, work. It started in the McKinsey days, and I just kept applying that kind of mode of operating, you know, 80, 90, sometimes 100-hour weeks. I remember once I was up for a few days straight with, like, no sleep. And it culminated, as you said, 35 ,000 feet up in the air, and I start feeling chest pain. And I remember thinking, like, no, this can't, you know, no, no, no, no, come on.

6:41This can't be the case. Because you were quite young. Yeah, I was. I mean, I'm 50 now and I was, it's been like 35 or something at the time. Yeah. And, and so I actually, one of my colleagues was sat next to me at the time and I said to him, his name's Louis. I said, Louis, can you feel my left arm? Just to make sure I'm not going crazy here. And he feels my left arm, looks at me and goes, Eric, it feels like your arm has been hanging in a meat locker. Like it was just completely dead cold. And, and, and then I started getting very, very nauseous. Long story short, there happens to be a doctor on board the flight.

7:15who sees the commotion, what's going on. Yeah. Rushes up, takes my vital signs and says, look, we need to land the plane immediately. He's having a heart attack. And Jessica, when you hear, like, I certainly didn't expect to hear words like that, right? Boy in the plane. And when you hear it, it is like, I got taken over with a combination of like deep shame and guilt at the same time. And of course, fear, because you think, you know, it's all over, but the shame, because I knew I had put myself in that situation that I didn't have to. I just couldn't get out of the rut of keep working harder, harder, you know, don't stop.

7:51Like I, I, I knew like, you know, I'm not stupid. Like I knew that that was not what I should be doing, but I couldn't get out of it. And then, you know, because I have two boys, a 21 year old and a, and a 12 year old. And at the time, the 21 year old was five and the guilt was, cause I thought, you know, Jesus, like I might not see him again. And so, yeah, it felt like it took an eternity for the plane to emergency land. I'm sure, yeah. Yeah. But they finally land. There's an ambulance waiting on the runway. They take me straight into the ambulance. They administered some nitrates right away to kind of open up the arteries and increase blood flow to the heart and all that.

8:29And yeah, I just remember looking up into the eyes of the paramedic, looking down at me. And I said, please don't let me die. I have a five-year-old son. And he said, well, I think we got you just in time. Just, you know, just relax now. Take it easy. Thank God. So I don't really remember much after that. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I woke up the next day. It was like the next morning, you know, in the hospital or whatever. And then I just knew, you know, something had to change, right? I couldn't keep going, you know, in the way that I was. Today's show is sponsored by Manifest Law. From startups to scale-ups to enterprise, Manifest Law is the AI native immigration law firm.

9:12Just think about that. AI native immigration law firm. Come on. This is great. There is no such thing, but there is Manifest Law. And they have all of your immigration needs handled. It's real-time visibility. It's fast filings. It's in over 40 countries. And did I mention the AI? It's got an AI-enabled workflows, a tech-forward experience, and straightforward pricing. So if you are in HR and you are doing a lot of immigration, Manifest Law is the solution for you. If I was running HR, guys, I'd be getting it. All right? Go out there and check it out. Well, sometimes, unfortunately, it takes that for us to have those moments of, ah, Yeah, exactly.

9:59So what did you change? Like, what was the first thing you changed? Yeah, and this is something that I've infused now into like all the, you know, the CEO coaching and mentoring is that one of the things that we talk about in our book, so Christian and I in our book, Ultra Productive, is that from a productivity point of view and trying to, you know, achieve more, we operate as if we're machines. and we're not you know like machines need virtually no rest and they can just keep going and you know they don't need any recovery and and so we operate as if we are like that but we're not we're we're biological systems you know we we we you know we start the day with a charged battery we lose battery power throughout the day we need to recharge and we start again and so one of the things was just starting to operate more with that kind of like ebb and flow to recognize that if you're going to perform at your best, you need to just match energy to task and, you know, make sure that, for example, your most important, most cognitively demanding work, you know, are you matching the time of day when you're going to work on that to when your energy is at its highest naturally, which differs from people.

11:12And when you're doing that work, are you treating it like you would a meeting with someone else? Like you and I are having a meeting right now. You're not secretly, I don't know, making a presentation at the same time or like Googling something. No. Right. So we're like focused on this conversation. Yeah. You have my undivided attention. Yeah, exactly. And I started to think that way with my most important work. What if I treated these meetings on my most important work as a meeting with someone else, although it's a meeting with me on that particular topic. And when you meet with somebody who's important, you know, do anything else.

11:50And those very, very simple starting points, you know, matching the energy to the task, treating meetings on my most important work as meetings with someone else, single tasking focus, just that alone started to skyrocket, you know, my output and at the same time reduce a lot of stress. Because you know that feeling when you start the day with like the best intentions, but you finish having done virtually nothing that you intended. yeah yeah you feel terrible yeah yeah exactly and you beat yourself up about it and you feel like you feel like a loser yeah and you're tired and and you're tired because your brain's frazzled because the reason that that happened in the first place is probably because you had divided your attention across like 17 million different things instead of like the one thing that you know where change would uh create the most impact and uh yeah and uh and so yeah long story short that started to deliver really good measurable, you know, results.

12:48So that was one of the first changes. And, you know, thinking back to, and this is going to sound super basic and simple, but we also don't take enough breaks, right, throughout the day. We get seated in our chairs and we sit there for endless, you know, hours. And I started to just develop a very, very simple habit of every 15, 20 minutes, just getting up, standing, moving around, also noticing that that had a very, very big impact on my ability to, you know, kind of stay focused. Yeah. I mean, so those are a few of the, you know, the starting, you know, changes. Yeah. And then how did you get into the CEO coaching?

13:28How did that all come about? Well, I had spent most of my career from the McKinsey days at Skype. You know, I wasn't the CEO there. I was part of the, you know, senior leadership, but then built, you know, the restaurant chain that I referenced after that. So I'd spent most of my days either advising CEOs or acting in that role. And I just thought it would be fun. I thought it'd be fun to help others, you know, scale what they're doing. But do it in a way that way you don't have to sacrifice your soul, you know, having gone through what I had experienced. And so it started, yeah, it started with just a handful of people organically reaching out, looking for support and help.

14:06And then it just kind of over time became bigger and bigger, you know, blew up more and more. I started it. This is another thing with the whole John Lennon quote. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So I had never posted on social media before. And I started a post for the first time on LinkedIn a few years ago. And then suddenly, you know, the account grew to, you know, like a million plus over time. And that was a big signal for me that the things that I was sharing, the thoughts, the ideas, that they were obviously resonating. Yeah. And so then that just pulled me more and more into it, essentially, wanting to do it more.

14:44Yeah. Well, let's talk about these ideas that are resonating because it's pretty fascinating that you can get to over a million followers. I'm just going to post on LinkedIn and see what happens. So what do you think was that thing that got people like, oh, wow, this is interesting. I feel this way too. Or what was it? Yeah, a combination of things. I think at its core is simplifying the complex and helping people, you know, focus on what matters most and being willing to sacrifice, you know, everything else. Because when we get caught up or exhausted in the things that we're doing, it's usually because we're not actually focused on what creates the most leverage or the most growth opportunity.

15:33And instead, we're trying to do everything. and a lot of it can be fear-based because we feel like we have to place lots of bets and try to grow in lots of different ways because you never know where the growth might come from and God forbid if I miss an opportunity. Right. Yeah, lots of the content at its core takes the 80-20 principle to heart. So it's like what are the 20 % of the things you need to focus on for 80 % of the improvement that you're seeking? So I think that as like a basic like meta idea and is something that permeates, you know, everything that I do was something that people latched on to.

16:07Because we don't need, people do not need more information. It's like there's books, there's podcasts, right? There's programs and everything. What they need is people to help them cut through the noise and say, look, if you just focus on these things, this is enough. Can I give you a few examples? Yeah, I was actually going to ask. Yeah. So let's go back to ultra productive, right? Yeah. So that book is all about how can you anywhere from 2 to 10x your productivity by focusing on one single 90 minute method. So that's an example of, you know, how do we achieve a big high leverage result by just focusing on one thing?

16:54So this 90-minute method, if you apply it in just three areas, your focus, your sleep, and then your stress management is what leads to that 2 to 10x outcome. And I can give you a quick example within each. So within focus. So the average leader, what the studies show is that the average leader, if you combine, consolidate all the time that they're working, distraction-free, uninterrupted on their most important work, it comes out to about 23 minutes per day. And yeah, let's just say that the version of you that is doing 23 minutes a day on your most important work is probably not going to achieve what you would hope to achieve in a life well lived or a successful career.

17:37No, yeah, no. So you're going to be left wanting. You're going to be left looking in the mirror at some point thinking, is this it? I thought I should be further ahead than I am right now. Right. so if somebody just focuses for 90 minutes uninterrupted distraction free on a daily basis that right there can 2x your your productivity so that's the first thing is to find so it's like you gotta you gotta pick the most important thing one and then you gotta put yourself in a place where you can be uninterrupted exactly and you have to shut down no kids banging on the door no phone, no employees, you know, needing an answer to a question.

18:14Yeah. 90 minutes. Exactly. Where do you go? Where do you go? I have a six-year-old and like, you know, thank God school's back in session as of this week. But I, you know, I can't go. It's hard to find a place to hide. Yeah. And look, it's not to say that every day somebody will be able to do that. But one thing for sure, aim for nothing. You're guaranteed to hit nothing. I believe that. Don't. Yeah. If you don't have the intention of trying to maximize the minutes and at least have a target, then you are guaranteed to not drive the train. You'll hang on to the back end of it and you'll just react throughout your day.

18:58Yeah. So look, maybe the 23 minute average doesn't go straight to 90 minutes during the summer when the kids are at home, etc. But can it get to 40 minutes or 45? You know, yeah, probably it will improve. Yeah. And even if you're going from 23 to 45, that's a huge difference. Yeah. Massive difference. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the first thing is just focus optimization. And one powerful question that you can ask yourself to help cut through the noise and focus on the thing that really matters most, the biggest lever that you can be pulling is just, you know, with your business or with your team that you're trying to lead or whatever it is that you're trying to optimize, ask yourself if every area, you know, of the team's performance or if every area of the business were to maintain its current level of performance, where is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?

19:58And that will help you filter and find, you know, the leverage. And then if you focus your attention on knocking that one thing out of the described, you know, distraction-free, uninterrupted for whatever time that you can create, you're certainly going to get better results than obviously not doing it. So that's focusing. I like, I love it. When, when you start out to, to write ultra productive, what, what was the, the real inspiration for it? Was it this 23 minutes that you found or, or was it, you know, sort of a pattern of things that you were seeing, with the CEOs that you're coaching or just with individuals?

20:33Yeah. I mean, for Christian and I, my co-author, it was basically born, the inspiration was born from the same thing for both of us in that the success that we had achieved just came with way too much stress, way too much pain, heavy grind, and collapse slash burnout. Like it was just exhausting. Yeah. Yeah. And so we just wanted to find a better way of doing it. And that's one of the counterintuitive things with all the research that went into the book is that through those three pillars of focus, sleep, and stress optimization, you not only can 2 to 10x your productivity, depending on your starting point, but who would have thought such a big productivity increase can also improve and potentially extend your life.

21:25Right. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, let's talk about sleep, for example. I mean, everybody wants to sleep better, you know? Yeah. And there's lots of things that we do to hurt our sleep, like looking at your phone before you go to bed, a glass of wine, whatever it is. How should we be thinking about sleep and its impact on our productivity? Yeah, I think the first thing is that people underestimate the massive issue globally that we're seeing with sleep. I mean, it is a fact that, especially in the most developed nations, that people are sleeping less and less, like it's trending down. That is not being driven by evolution.

22:05It's not like a human today needs less sleep than a human 30 years ago. Yeah. It's totally driven by our always on society where information and triggers and notification and do this now, don't miss this. All of that stuff is like happening at an accelerating rate. And and so that's it's keeping us in this always on state, essentially. And so we were not sleeping nearly as much as we should. that negatively impacts our focus, our productivity, but also, you know, it comes with a lot of health risks as well, right? So your risk of cancer goes up, your risk of mental illness, whether it's, you know, Alzheimer's or dementia goes up, your risk of cardiovascular disease skyrockets.

22:53We're sleeping less and less. And contrary to what people believe or think, if you actually spent more time sleeping and sleeping well, although it's less time, say, on the job. Again, what studies will show is that a group of, you know, put it this way, the more rested version of you who had less hours in the day over time will actually outperform the version of you that is constantly trying to cut into or buy an extra hour and a half by sleeping less. And that's because of the quality of your output, how quickly you think, the groundbreaking creative idea that comes to you. If you're not well-rested, for example, you know those great insights that you have, you're taking a shower, you're going for a walk.

23:39Well, those come less when you're frazzled, when you're not rested enough. And so the 90-minute method there just relates to your deep sleep and your REM sleep. So those are your two most restorative sleep stages. And if you prioritize your sleep, plan the plane correctly at night, you will get 90 minutes of those in each of those two most restorative stages and you'll be way more productive. So, okay. So how does one do that? Yeah. Because I have like three dogs in the bed and, you know, like, I don't know. How do you get the 90 in both of those? Yeah, this is something that I struggled with for years.

24:25There's several things that can help. One is having data. Some people like this, some people don't. For me, it's helpful because it helps you. Like the aura ring? Yeah, or a ring or like the whoop band, like, you know, I have the whoop band or whatever. And when I just put that on, it showed loud and clear that my baseline was way lower than I expected. Because I always had thought that, oh, you know, I'm probably getting close to seven hours. And then I realized that I was getting like five and a quarter, sorry, five and a half to about six and a half hours. And that's just not good, right? So that awareness, you know, first port of call kind of wakes you up into reality.

25:03Second thing is what you do to kind of like wind down your day. So some very, very simple things. One is you can have a simple shutdown ritual to your day. Cal Newport talks about this in one of his books where you have a static appointment with yourself where at the end of your day, you just simply ask yourself, OK, final review of the to do list, final review of your email. Choose the top three things you want to work on the next day and just schedule them as appointments into your calendar and then shut down. And the act of doing that allows you to kind of transition into the evening, not constantly thinking about all the things that you need to do.

25:40And did I miss anything? And what am I going to do tomorrow? All that. Because you've already thought that through. Right. Second simple thing is a digital sunset. So having a set time where you are just going to shut off all your devices. For me personally, I do that within an hour to go to bed such that I can get eight hours of sleep. Now, Matthew Walker, in his book, Why We Sleep, he talks about how if you don't do that, and if you're on your devices still, especially in that hour before you go to bed, it can reduce your brain's melatonin production by 50%. Jeez. Yeah. And melatonin. I am not good at turning.

26:23I need to do a digital sunset for sure. I'm not very good at that. Yeah. Because you got to think of it this way. Think of it as if to complete your eight-hour journey of sleep, you need a full tank of gas, let's say. Well, that full tank of gas is your brain producing enough of melatonin, your sleep-inducing hormone. If it only produces 50%, you have a half tank of gas, are you going to struggle to complete the eight-hour journey, not sleep well, have broken sleep, maybe not even manage to sleep a full eight hours? Of course you will. Yeah. So just doing those two things so far can have a massive, you know, improvement.

27:01And then the last thing is just watch, and there's loads more that we go into in the book, but these are just some tasters. But the last thing is just watch how close you eat to bed, basically. Here's a simple way to think about it. You're falling asleep. 100 factory workers report for night shift duty to the brain. All right, what should we do tonight? And the brain says, 70 of you are going to get in your trucks, hit all the streets. I want you to run all the routes, clean up all the trash and the rubbish throughout the city. You know, don't leave nothing unturned, you know, and they're like, yeah, but 70 of us, that's not enough.