A C-Suite Exec On Finding Growth After Battling Depression with Paul Greenberg

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:00)

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Hi, I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

If I told you you're about to hear from someone who first tried to take his own life at age 13, has spent a lifetime burden by clinical depression and suicidal impulses, and who finally found solace after electroshock therapy, you might expect to hear from someone who sounds a little bit like his mouth is filled with cement, whose sadness and malaise and trauma just oozes through the airwaves.

But on the contrary, you're about to hear Paul Greenberg, who sounds exactly like what he used to be, a charismatic radio sports announcer. Despite living through deep and chronic depression for decades, Paul built an incredibly successful career as a media executive and CEO, as CEO of College Humor, digital president of Time Inks Lifestyle Brands, EVP and GM of TV Guide Digital, and VP of Business Operations at mtv.com. And today, he runs his own fast-growing company, Butter Works.

I think you'll really enjoy the conversation with Paul and I and learn a lot, be surprised by his positive attitude in the midst of severe mental illness. But we do talk about suicide and suicidal thinking. And if this is an issue that will trigger you or upset you, I wanted to let you know that we do talk about that. So, Paul, you wrote, I worked nearly three decades of ten-hour days during which none of my colleagues knew that I was struggling. How is that possible?

Paul Greenberg (5:05)

I honestly wish I could tell you.

It was brutal. But there was some ability I had to parcel out the work that I needed to happen and kind of containerize, if you will, the issues of how I felt and what I needed to get done. Sometimes the work was a solace where I could focus on something else besides the depression. Often, however, it was a slog, really working hard to get through it. I talked to my doctors.

Some of the treatments that I've had, which I know we'll discuss, have been quite aggressive, and I've had very few side effects. But they theorized that maybe the reason I had few side effects is that I exercised quite a bit. And so maybe there's good blood flow to my brain, which they also theorized might have been one of the reasons why I was able to tolerate the depression in the first place.