Eric Partaker, a former McKinsey consultant and Skype executive, talks about why hustle culture burns people out. A health crisis forced him to rethink performance, leading him to focus on sleep, energy management, and deliberate practice instead of grinding harder.
So there's a default, a reactive self, and then there's a self that you create and invent. And the big question is, who do you need to be? Who do you need to be in each and every area of life to have the performance, to achieve the performance that you want to see? Not just in your business life as a leader, but in every area of your life, there's a question about who do you need to be and who could you invent yourself to be? That's what today's show is all about with, ah. And an acknowledged or renowned CEO entrepreneur from the uk. So listen in as we talk with Eric Partaker. Hello, and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher on the show with me today is Eric Partaker, and welcome to the show.
Hi, Bill.
Thanks. So we're here in Atlanta in an empty meeting room right in the middle of the Scaling Up Summit.
Slightly too cold.
It's a little chilly.
Right.
It'll keep us awake.
Yeah.
If that's an issue. And we're gonna talk about high performance. So Eric lives in London. Right. And your accent's kind of blended.
Yeah. So I'm half American, half Norwegian.
Half American, half Norwegian. Living in London.
Living in London. Also have a chain of Mexican restaurants.
And a chain of Mexican restaurants. Right. And as we're getting set up, so Eric talked to the co. He talked at Scaling Up Summit. And this focus around high performance, I think is of interest to everybody all the time. All our folks, they want to perform well in their company, they want to perform well personally. They're trying to balance all of that kind of thing. So Eric's background. McKinsey, CEO of the Year, top 30 CEOs, crowdfunded a restaurant, now a restaurant group or restaurant chain, and worked with Skype while on the consulting side, helping to build Skype business. And my son's business efforts have been funded by one of the shared investor. The shared investor. Right. Jan Talent, who's helped my son, Jack Gallagher with his projects around AI and crypto and now crowd, not crowd, cloud computing, hosted apps kind of stuff. So, yeah, it's funny when you find that you're connected.
Who would have known? It's like same investor. And we're in Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah.
So we have great speakers all the time. It's great when we can actually kind of do it in person and have the show recorded when we can actually see each other versus Skype or that kind of thing. So before we get into it, talk to us Again, about this interest in high performance.
Right.
Anything that we have like that usually starts early on. I know it's. It started for you.
For me, it was an obsession that started, you know, quite early. I remember being in high school and wanting to make the high school basketball.
Team and I was never a dream at my height. Right.
Well, when you're six two, it's like you feel inadequate.
Maybe I should.
So. But I didn't have the benefit of anyone in my family being athletics. I literally did not know how to play. Yeah. And this is freshman year.
Yeah.
And so my goal was I have to make the varsity team. And so from summer of freshman year through sophomore year, basically almost every day I would wake up before school about 5:30am, go with my basketball to the park, dribbling the whole way, do a bunch of drills, practice, and did that for about 15 months and it worked. And then I went from not knowing how to play basketball at all to through all that deliberate practice making the varsity team. So the seed was planted then that if you really want to develop mastery at something and close that gap, be obsessive. Yeah. Really, really go for it. Put it into practice. One of the things I try to teach my boys, a 14 year old and a 5 year old, is that everyone is born exactly the same. Right. We're all a white canvas. And what you paint on it is just what hours you put in which direction, how many repetitions you rack up, you know, all of that. So that was like the seeds of high performance. And you know, along the way I got my first job was with McKinsey and Company. Yeah. So super high performance environment they call the bottom 10% every year.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fell more in love with it, but that kind of started me on the path of probably pursuing high performance and not the right way though.
You're saying that working in a consulting company environment is unhealthy.
Yeah.
But you learn amazing things and you get exposed to. You work on cool things, learn amazing things in training.
Learned amazing things. And it really, it fortified the high performance drive, but it also created this person who would work two days straight. You know, one time I worked nearly three days straight, no sleep, 100 hour weeks, 120 hour weeks. And then that started to seep in other areas of my life.
We see that all the time. I mean, I had some clients who were doing regularly, like two, three hour nights all the time on. And I'm like, dude, stop that.
And the research is so in a great book out recently, why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, preeminent sleep scientist or researcher, neuroscientist. And you have all this hustle attitude out there.
Yeah.
And it's literally going to kill us.
Oh, hustle and grind, man.
Yeah. I mean here's an interesting thing to look at. So one of the coaching certifications I have is through a high performance institute. And one of the studies that they did is look at the energy expenditure of a CEO versus professional athletes elite military and they found that the high performing CEO is actually using the same amount of energy as a professional athlete. So then let me ask you the following question. How many professional athletes have great seasons and play the game well if they're sleeping five hours a night, you know, not looking after themselves, don't have, you know, the family support, maybe are drinking too much, not exercising. Right, right. None. Right. They're gonna have very short careers. Yeah. So you know, it's. I almost feel like we have to start communicating an anti hustle. Right. You know, message because it's just incongruent with what the job demands.
So tell the story for our listeners of where it shifted for you.
Yeah, so I had. So I've been obsessed with, you know, I say I've been obsessed at a high level, high performance for about 20 years. 43 years old now. Although again the seeds were kind of planted in high school and for the first so following my time at McKinsey then went on to manage nonprofit joined Skype in its very early days helped build that up to its multi billion exit to ebay. And all this time I just kept pushing, pushing, pushing myself and then started my own business, a chain of Mexican restaurants in the London and again just kept pushing myself and it kind of, it culminated, it was November of 2010 and I hadn't been having issues with my blood pressure and feeling quite odd and had gone to see my doctor and he kept advising me to really.
