How Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Richard Branson Cope With Stress (Infographic) Pressure at the top is inevitable. Here's how the best-known business moguls rise above it.
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They say it's lonely at the top. It's incredibly stressful, too. Sitting at the helm of a company, all eyes are on you. Grueling work, long hours and extreme responsibility weigh heavily. The pressure is on. How you cope with it can make or break you -- and your business.
Jeff Bezos deals with stress by taking action to fix what's triggering it fast. When something's stressing him out, he says he sees it it as a "warning flag" he can't ignore. The hard-driving Amazon founder and CEO doesn't waste time worrying about it. He tackles it head-on: "I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first email message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address the situation -- even if it's not solved -- the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it." And, when all else fails, he laughs...a lot and apparently not too quietly.
Related: How Successful People Beat Stress
Elon Musk, on the other hand, takes more of a suck-it-up-and-get-over-it attitude toward the intense pressures of running your own ship. "Creating a company is a very difficult thing," he told The New York Times. "A friend of mine has a saying: "Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.' You have to do lots of things you don't like." There's no time to wallow and lick your wounds. Don't let stress sideline you. Instead, use it as fuel to keep rocketing ahead, maybe even all the way to Mars.
For more on the stress-busting tactics of some of the world's most famous business leaders, check out the quote-packed infographic below. It comes to us by way of the Make It Cheaper, a London-based startup that aims to take the stress out of sourcing affordable utility and telecom services for SMBs.
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Related: What Elite Athletes Can Teach You About Dealing With Pressure
