How do executives at Microsoft manage their stress? By Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and Developer Community VP Scott Hanselman

We talked a little bit in the last episode about the TED Talk stressing me out. And as a general rule, I don't think I present stressed. I might present like type A or vibrating with enthusiasm or whatever. And I do have a certain amount of freak out just before I do a talk. But you seem like preternaturally chill. Are you just pretty much a robot all the time?

No, no, I definitely get stressed. Yeah? Yeah. You know when I get stressed, when I feel like I've lost control of, when I've just, and I'm not managing things. Let me say, it's not control, it's about lack of managing things. and things are flying off in different directions, and I'm not sure where they're going to land or how they're going to land or if I'm going to land them on time. I also get stressed when I don't have time to process what's happening.

So I'm actually kind of related to my levels of stress. If you take a look at extroversion, introversion spectrum, where one end is I need to be around people all the time. If I'm by myself, I'm... Right, right. Depressed. Like ENFJ. Yeah. And then the other side, which is I hate being around people completely. I'm an extroverted introvert. Dude, I am too. Yeah.

Because it's like you'll do a thing and then they'll want you to go to the after party and then you go for a while and then it's like, I need to go. Yeah, exactly. I am done. Yes. I look at people like Paul Rudd, who's always nice and no one's ever found a video of him being mean. He must be super stressed out when he goes home because it's like someone might push him or want an autograph or whatever. And it's like he has to be kind because that's his thing.

God forbid I should meet somebody at Chipotle and be rude once. So you're an extroverted introvert. Oh, 100%. 100%. And when the battery is... I used to be like unlimited because I think it was just age. Like just youth kept me, but I didn't realize that it's like, done. Yeah.

I'm done. I mean, so you hit a wall as opposed to slow, you know. No, it's not a slow thing. It's just like at the MVP summit. Yeah. I do a bunch of talks. I have a bunch of fun. We have friends. And then it's like, I start kind of going, all right. That happens pretty fast. Yeah. For you? For me, it's pretty fast, too. I just don't want to do this anymore.

The whole social battery thing I never used to believe in, but it is 100% a thing. But when I'm in a good place, they need the battery to charge. That's the way they charge it. And if they're by themselves, it depletes.

100%, yeah. But actually, extroverted introvert, I think for me too, if I'm by myself for too long without good social interaction and engagement, I also start to get stressed. Okay, so how did you do during COVID? So for me... slightly before COVID, when I was still working from home, because I've been working from home the whole time, I used to go to the mall and sit in the food court and use their Wi-Fi and do like Teams calls just to have electrical energy of humans walking by.

Okay. I didn't do that. No. We got a nice house, though. And that's not the kind of energy I need. It's not... Yeah, true. You got a nice house, too. Look at your room. Look at that room. it's just leds i've talked about this it's a spare bedroom with leds but no my what i'm talking about is like even the teams meetings with people at work is recharges me like especially the one-on-ones

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. The team meetings where people are presenting to me, not as much. Yeah. But one-on-ones. Do you have a collection of work besties?

Because I have like three or four and it's just like. Yeah. So then somehow I ended up on the Instagram, which is like filled with memes about like your work wife or your work besties. And it's just like, you have that person. It's like, do you know? happened in this. I mean, work is a lot about networking, right? The networks you create. And it's the trust that you build. And we talked about this before in the Repudate thing, I think. The trusted network of people. Yeah. You've got to have.

I mean, just like not being afraid to show yourself, you know, with your partner, for example, you know, your warts. You need somebody, you need people at work where you're going to be like, I'm going to say something and it's probably really stupid.

But I trust you. That's a great point because... I want the young people, the early in career people, the new people, the ones who came up maybe doing a post-COVID time where they don't necessarily have their five years into their career and it's a different time than when we used to be able to be in the office and vibing.

to have those kind of relationships because you got to have somebody at work who's not going to burn you yeah who's your friend who even and like i always believe in teams meetings zoom meetings whatever having a back channel yeah For sure. In a big meeting is so important. And if you can't trust those people, then you're going to feel very alone. And that's not cool. So anyway, stress. Oh, yeah. Sorry. So tell us about your stress for your TEDx talk.

I asked you another question. That was very good. Thank you for doing that. We're finding balance in our relationship. They wanted it done a certain way. I was like, oh, I'll do a talk. This is great. But they have a style, like TED has a style. They assign you a speaker coach. I won the speaker coach lottery. This lady, Kathy, wrote a book called How to Give a Great TED Talk. She's super chill. We met in person. But then they wanted me to practice.

Well, that's one thing we talked about for talks. We don't practice our talks. Not anymore, if we know our stuff. This was not a talk like you do at Build. This was a thing like you do, like if you've ever heard of The Moth, which is an NPR. storytelling show or This American Life. Those are scripted, planned things. I had to write up a seven-page script, memorize it, no teleprompter. Oh, there was no teleprompter? No teleprompter, because they don't want you to look like you're reading.

Wow. So you look and you can see your current slide and your next slide. So when's the last time you ever memorized something? High school drama. Yeah, same. Probably same for me. Like literally, you know.

How hard was it to memorize the whole thing? It was brutally difficult. And the part that was so interesting was that I... And when you say memorize, it wasn't even like, you know, at this bullet. you know, say this. Yeah, I can show you. It's like I've got a seven page. And you had to say those words. Well, so that's the part that's interesting. So it's like paragraph, slide, paragraph, slide, paragraph, slide. And so I got the tempo. I gave the talk 54 different times.

Kathy, my speaker coach, had me. That's 54, a precise number, not just a round. That's a precise number I can show you in the Voice Notes app. Yeah. So Kathy's process is you record it, and then you listen back to it. And then you make a refinement and you keep doing it until it's in your mouth. And then once your muscles of your mouth have formed themselves around your talk, then she says at the end, you rip up the slides, you rip up the, and then you give the talk.

So I would say it was 80% what I wrote and then 20% was just like... Okay, so here's the question I got for you on that because we could do that for our build talks. And the question I've got is... We do prepare quite a bit for... Yeah, at least 15 minutes before. No, we do prepare. But what I'm saying is we don't, for our talks...

The words. I've never done this. I've never memorized. I totally agree. Yeah, yeah. And the question is, is there value in memorizing versus the way that we do our talks? Which is, I know the content, I know the... point I'm going to make here. And I'm going to ad-lib a little bit. I'm going to just let the energy come out and deliver it. This was closer to stand-up comedy than it was to a technical build talk. Technical build talk, you hit beats.

and you have points you're trying to make, and you dot, dot, dot, and then you can go A, B, C, but you're really going point B, point C. And as long as you hit the beats, you're good. This is more like stand-up, where... When you do stand-up, and I did stand-up for a time, you do small rooms, small bars, you do open mics to 12 people at 1130 on a Tuesday.

and then you test out what's a funnier word or what's the right beat and then once you find that you go to a bigger room and then a bigger room and then you do colleges and then you go and you do the talk so if you go and see like a pro like bill burr or dave chapelle or somebody

And you see their classic joke. That joke has been honed. Every word matters. Now, they'll play and they'll do crowd work, but they've got funny sentences that have been designed. And there's a really cool podcast with Mike Berbiglia. called Working It Out, where it's him and another comedian working out their material. And they talk about like, I don't know why that word's funnier, but it's just funnier than this other word. So it's almost like it's a poem. So with this...

This TED Talk, there was the larger narrative, there was the point I was trying to make, but then there were four or five lines that hit. And when we did it 54 times in front of different audiences, and I did it internally at Microsoft twice as a practice. I didn't know that. So you did it 54 times. How many times in front of an audience? Six. And you honed it based on their reactions? I honed it based on their reactions, and I asked them explicitly, like, what lines hit?

And then I, it was because the talk is like 12 to 15 minutes long. So I wanted to have six hits that were going to like stick with people. And then when I went out to the food carts afterwards, when we were walking around, people were like, oh man, when you said, that really hit. So.

That's like saying, oh, man, that classic joke by so-and-so, I love that joke. And then you do it back. You can say that joke back. Every word matters for those beats. And then the middle part was made up. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. It was closer to stand-up than it was to a build-up. Would you use that technique for training and memorizing and refining for any other talk you give? Where other places is that applicable besides a TED talk? I would say... it is that this was really close to like getting a guest star on

Law and order. You were given pages, and I memorized the pages, and then I ripped it up at the end, and I know it so well. It's like a, like, I think we talked about martial arts. If you do a kata or a hyung. You just keep doing it over and over and over until it's in your muscles. And then you can vibe a little bit, but there's a general rule. You hit all of the beats. It was very exhausting, though.

I saw a thing by Pedro Pascal. But you didn't answer my question. Oh, I'm sorry. Where else is this applicable? Nowhere. I don't think it's applicable anywhere because I don't do stand-up anymore and I don't do acting. But for anybody listening, we're all... Unless they're asked to do a TED Talk, is this applicable anywhere? A wedding speech, maybe? Or a presentation to your boss's boss, something like that? It is...

What was cool about it is that now I know I can do that. It was an enormous amount of stress, and I thought I was going to freak out, and I had also blood sugar to manage, so I had to make sure my blood sugar was good going into the talk. It was a dramatic landing of a plane at night in the fog, instruments only. And I did it. And afterwards, it was just like...

So it's like running the marathon once in your life or something. Exactly. I can do that. Now I know I can do that. So now I have this thing I can do if I need to. I don't necessarily want to go and do it again. But, you know, like Jan is saying in the chat here that the difference between this talk... and a build talk is the density of information right so the talk was 12 minutes maximum now they give you a buffer in case you yap but when you have 12 minutes every

Yeah, everyone matters. When you have 60 minutes and Visual Studio code, it's not as dense. That would be overwhelming to do an hour with that level of density. So how did you manage the stress?

I walked a lot. I slept an enormous amount. So Kathy Armillas, my speaker coach, had me muttering the talk to myself as I went to sleep. because she wanted me to start muttering it and then dream. So she was doing spaced repetition. She was doing spaced repetition of like short, medium, and long to bake it into the brain. So I would mutter it to myself and then fall asleep.

And then I'd wake up and I would remember more than I did the night before. Wow. Isn't that crazy? The whole system. It's a whole thing. It's a science. And what's crazy is it's only 12 minutes and I talked to my buddy, Chris Connors, who's an actor, and he... He's like, yeah, you just get the pages and you just absorb them and you make them part of you until then you do the thing. So yeah, it's not at all what I thought it would be. I thought it'd be, oh, you'll be a natural.

I was going to go up and vibe. Going up and vibing a 12-minute talk. You're the best vibing TED Talk speaker ever. It would have been a nightmare. But yeah, so no teleprompter. Actually, there's a question for you. By the way, I've been asking you tons of questions. I love it. We should do this more. Yeah. How different would the talk have been if you'd just done the, here are the points I'm going to make. You've got 15 minutes. Go.

Oh, it would have been a rambly mess. It would have had no emotional core. The slides would have been sloppy. So you don't know if you could have delivered that talk. For build, if you had to like, here, Scott, give that talk. It's for build.

You've got 15 minutes, and so you're doing your normal prep for it. How different would that talk have been? I think it would have been 70% of the same talk. It would have been fine. Yeah. It would have been a perfectly fine. I thought that talk was amazing. Yes. I think the difference is I have been doing this long enough that I'm confident that I can put together a perfectly good B plus talk, B minus talk, in a couple of weeks with minimal effort.

This was the difference between a bronze medal and a gold medal. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So you're saying that we're going to go for the bronze in our build talk. Fully going for the bronze or maybe just a national championship and a failure to qualify. Should we go for gold? We prepare. I mean, we're joking here. Remember when we did the asteroids thing? Yeah.

And we had a Word document open and Jan was in the back like, don't forget to push this. And I forgot to push something. There is a huge amount of prep. There was a huge script for that too. The difference is no... Again, no teleprompter. It was shocking. Every single person that I've said there's no teleprompter at TED was like, what? Yeah. Nobody gets a teleprompter. Yeah.

As a confidence monitor with the next slide. By the way, I could see sometimes they would show the audience view from behind you. Oh, yeah? And there's a clock, countdown clock. Yeah. It actually went negative, like by three minutes. It looked like to me. Really? Did I go over? It looked like it. Oh, crap. I got to watch that. I can't. So I tried to watch the talk and I couldn't. So then I watched it with the sound off. But I haven't actually watched it since because it makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah, let me know, because it looked like you went over. Yeah. They're letting him go over like that much. They give you 12 minutes, and then there's a 15-minute slot for buffer. And then they have an hour-long lunch or a two-hour-long lunch.

And it turns out we, enough people went over that they ate into the lunch by half an hour, but they do that so they can start again on. So they don't, they're not really strict. It's not like they're flashing and yelling at them. No, no, no. Not that kind of strict. Red flashing lights. Three minutes.

Three minutes buffer is not a lot of buffer. Yeah. Well, it looked to me like you ate the whole three minutes based on that. Well, thank you for ruining it for me. You didn't practice enough. I think, oh, that's why. This is a great point. So when I did it, I was regularly 12 minutes 30, 12 minutes 30, 12 minutes 30, 12 minutes 30, 12.05, 12.25, consistently. But totally did the obvious beginner move, which is forgot that people will clap.

So it probably was still 12 minutes 30. People loved it so much. I'm just saying like a little pause or a chuckle or a clap and then a little bit of gravitas. The next thing you know, you've added two minutes of chuckles. Yeah. It was good, though. It's done. I want it done. I want them to chop it up and put it on YouTube. I guess the one you saw was the live stream they put on the local news. Oh!

And when I got on stage afterwards, my Apple Watch says, do you want to track this workout? Yeah. Actually, I noticed that I get zone minutes for my talks whenever I give a talk. Okay, this is helpful. So you do get stressed. I thought you were just a robot with a really low heart rate. Actually, so for talks, it's not so much stress. It's the speaking, projecting, and moving around.

I guess my heart rate up into, you know, it counts as some level of cardio, like low-level cardio. Okay, so when I do talks, my heart rate, I always check it beforehand. I come in, I'm backstage. It's at about 99 to 100. I do the talk, it's about 120. This talk, I was 140. This was like I had run a mile. It was the highest heart rate I'd ever seen on stage. Yeah, but so for you too, though.

you get your elevated heart rate while you're giving a talk, too. It is work. Giving a talk is work. And Kathy was saying that if you don't, what did she say? If you don't feel like that, then you don't care enough. Yeah. Because you don't want to just go out and... give a lame performance. Yeah. How do you manage your day-to-day? Do you get stressed? Yeah, so for one, like I said, if I don't have enough time, if I don't have the time I need to digest what's going on, if I get a...

There's days where I'm literally back-to-back meetings with no breaks. And I have to be on in the meeting because a lot of my meetings at my level, like you, are people presenting to me. where I've got to stay engaged and keep up with it. It's not like... And then he's like, squirrel. Yeah. So those are exhausting times. And if I have two days of that, I am going to combust. I try to keep breaks where I can go check emails and surf the web a little bit and read something.

periodically. Otherwise, I just start to get overloaded and really stressed. I think a tip I would give to people if they're Microsoft employees or tech employees is you've got to listen to your body. You've got to listen to what's going on. Like right now, it's 10. and my back of my thighs is hurting but i also have really like this is no this is my normal posture because i used to do this all the time and over years it screwed me up real bad so i have this like very

Pop doctor. And you can't do that for eight hours a day. It's hard. So then I'll take a meeting while walking or I'll listen, you know, you got to listen to your body, get on the treadmill. The kids call it a walking pad. Do you ever take meetings and walk or are you always locked in sitting? Locked in sitting, yeah. How much do you work out to undo what the damage you're doing by sitting? So I work out six days a week in the morning, first thing.

Oh, you're a morning workout person. I became a morning workout. So I've exercised pretty much my whole life except for a period where I kind of stopped and then gained a lot of weight and then started again. And what I found was when I was stopped, it was one of the slippery slopes things of, oh, I'll work out after work. Oh, wait, you know what? I'm too tired or I need to do some more work. You skip one and then you skip that. And then it starts.

And I'm going to, oh, I'm going to go on a business trip. And, oh, you know what? I'm on a business trip. It's just, I need more sleep. So I'm going to skip the workouts. And it just became, you know, this slide down into, instead of doing it six days a week, it was.

Four days a week, and then three days a week, and then every now and then. And then so I got on this, and it's not for everybody, but I got onto No Excuses. workout program. Is that what it's called? No excuses? No, it's just my own. I should write a book and promote it. Mark's No Excuses Workout Program. By no excuses, I meant like...

Unless I'm really sick or the schedule is out of my control and I just can't fit it in, I'm going to exercise. Wow. Okay. No matter how much is going on in my life, like, oh, there's a talk. and I'm not quite prepped for it, and I could use the time. I'm like, nope, I'm not eating into the exercise time. Okay, so how long are these workouts? An hour. An hour? You work out six?

days a week for an hour well it's approximately like the the time slot is variable but sure sure like i'll do cardio for 45 minutes or an hour or some days it'll be 30 minutes um and i do weight training with a trainer three days a week. And those are 50-minute sessions. Do you go somewhere? Yeah, I go to the local pro club, which is like the Microsoft gym. Man, I've got to do that. If I could...

So two things. No excuses means unless there's some circumstance out of my control, I'm doing it. And the second thing is for weight training, having a trainer is a huge... Because it's a person you are obligated to go see. I'm obligated to go see. And the other thing, too, is I don't have to think about it. I don't have to come up with my weight training program. That is hard, yeah. And then be like, you know what? I don't feel like doing that today.

um i'm feeling a little you know i'm not gonna i'm only gonna you know do three two sets instead of three because i'm a little fatigued it's like if the trainer's like if they can read you well they're like no you're doing three So it kind of takes it out of your hands. That's a great point. I'm going to draw the parallel back to having a coach. Like when I was assigned a speaker coach.

People were like, you don't need to speak a coach. You speak fine. You can always have a hype person. I did the talk once on the week just before. She wanted to start intensifying, like you're getting ready before a show, right? So the parallel.

getting ready before a show. She's like, okay, you're going to do the talk. And I did it twice. And I was like, okay, I'm good. Let's go to lunch. No, you're going to do it one more time. And it was very much like you're doing pushups in the rain and then your Marine Sergeant sits on your back and you're going to keep doing pushups. So she grinded another.

It's really helpful to have somebody motivating you like that. Yeah, yeah. That applies at work as well. And surprisingly, that stress is good stress, which helps you manage your stress. Well, I think that...

helps me manage stress a lot is the exercise. The other thing too, and we talked about this in a previous episode, is learning how to breathe. When I feel myself getting stressed, I focus on my breath. and taking long breaths. Because I think one of the things that happens when people get stressed is their breath, their breathing gets shorter and then you're not getting as much oxygen and your brain is racing and that causes the stress to get worse. So just...

stopping, thinking about your breath, and that kind of takes your mind off of the thing that's stressing you out and slows you down. And that helps you deal with it better. That is so important. I really appreciate the breath thing. We'll end on the breath thing because I have seen people of all early career, late career, whatever, they won't breathe at work all week.

Yeah. And we'll do a one-on-one. I'm just like, you seem a little tight. I'm just like, let's just, you know, it's like, oh my God, I didn't realize I was carrying all the stress. It's okay to be human and breathe. That's an important thing to remember. I think that breathing, like once I learned about breathing and focus on breath, which is kind of mindfulness too, it's called focusing on the breath, that that should be taught to children.

In elementary school. Because it is such a huge skill for managing life, is breathing. Sometimes when I'm really stressed, this is how I've managed my stress, just a couple days before the talk.

I felt that my room was messy. I cleaned my room. I vacuumed it so I could see the lines. I want to see the lines on the carpet. And then I went and got a haircut, and I went and went to the car wash. I tweeted about this on Blue Sky. And it was like, okay. When did you do it? I tweeted about it on Blue Sky. No, when did you do all this? The Tuesday before the talk. So like four days before the talk. It's like, everything's falling apart. Everything sucks.

Car wash, haircut, clean your room. It helps you make you feel like you're managing things. By the way, also, here's another tip for managing stress that I use is writing things down. Oh, we talked about this. Yep. We got my remarkable... Yeah, here's my pad with stuff. Not as fancy as my e-ink display. I put it up because nobody can read my writing, including me. So I'm not worried about leaking anything. 100% agree. I wrote a blog post about this almost 20 years ago called Sync to Paper.

Everything is stressed out. Put your phone in airplane mode. Airplane mode works on the ground. Turn off your computer and just write down everything that's going on. It offloads it from your brain for one point. 100%. Put it into a trusted source. Look at that. Build Seattle. Right there. 100% agree. It's another episode. Everybody, let's breathe. Let's all breathe. It's true, though. Through your mouth, out through your nose. Or is it the other way around? I'm always ice skating uphill.

All right, friends. Thank you for, as always, I will say this. You know what helps my stress? Comments on Mark and Scott learn to help my stress. And telling your friends about it. And telling your friends about the show. Spread the word. One day we will be... One day we'll get the promotion, the self-promotion that we're looking for. The self-promotion that we need. People will be talking about this on the end. All right, brother.

It's off to the minds. Time to do meetings. Thank you, everyone, for spending time with us. Bye.