The Freedom Of Not Knowing with HBS's Martin Sinozich

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:02)
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Today's guest is a former executive, entrepreneur and investor. He also invests his time in the world's future business leaders as a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. But Martin Sinozich is also more open and honest with his students than a lot of B-School professors might be. He talks about his own experiences with fear, imposter syndrome. He's ignited by the mission to improve mental health at work.

**Martin Sinozich** (2:42)
My personal experience and my experience with my, especially my MBA students, more so than my exec ed students, is that we are all navigating the sense of needing to do more, of being enough, of living up to the challenge, of living up to the brand, of all of these external pressures we have on ourselves that are outside of us, but that push us along, often in good ways, but often in some really bad ways.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (3:08)
A lot of us struggle with depression or anxiety as a result of those kinds of external pressures. The idea is that we have to be good enough, especially as we get into schools and jobs that are, quote, impressive. Many turn to keeping up the façade at all costs.
They do that not just in their professional lives, but in their personal lives. In fact, there's a lot of parallels between the external pressure we feel to perform and achieve at work and the pressure we put on ourselves in our personal lives, to have the seemingly perfect relationship, home life, family.
Like getting fired, divorce or separation can often shake people to their core, not knowing how to change that definition of a key piece of themselves. And of course, it's hard to balance while managing a high-powered career.
In this conversation with Martin Sinozich, we hear how his own journey with divorce helped him shift the idea of living with fear and the advice he gives now. Gosh, you know, I'm going to tell you, I was interviewing a former Google VP yesterday. And we were talking about the layoffs that are happening. And he said he's left Google and he's sort of been going around the country seeing friends who had worked at Google as long as he did, which was almost 20 years. And he said, you know, it's like their identity has been torn away from them. He had himself a terrible episode of Depression and Anxiety about 10 years ago, and said that part of it was having worked in an environment like Google, where he had been the smartest person in the room, the quote, best, right, for all of his life. And then he gets to an environment where everyone's the smartest person in the room. And his anxiety just flared. But it became something that he just sort of learned to live with until he couldn't anymore. Does that resonate?

**Martin Sinozich** (5:03)
I don't have the same experience of anxiety in the sense of kind of anxiety attacks and anxiety as a paralyzing force, you know, in a moment. The way my daughter, Satan, who suffers from anxiety attacks, suffers it from. I see it in my experience of it in my own life and that of many around me is more kind of a generalized sense of I gotta keep up or I have to compete or I have to do what the other people are doing or I'm not living up to some standard that is kind of ill-defined and even who defines it is often not clear.