'Every Day You Wake Up You Are Punched in the Stomach': Mark Zuckerberg Vents About Stresses of Being a CEO The billionaire appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to talk about Meta and the company's future.
By Emily Rella
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's not easy being one of the richest men in the world.
Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in an episode released on Thursday to chat about the future of Meta (namely, the metaverse and the inevitable future of virtual reality and technology) as well as what it's like to be one of the highest profile company founders in the world.
Survey says? Not good.
"My sort of day is, you wake up in the morning, look at my phone, get like a million messages that have come in, it's usually not good," Zuckerberg told Rogan bluntly. "People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person, right? So it's like what's going on in the world that I need to pay attention to that day? So it's almost like every day you wake up you are punched in the stomach."
Zuckerberg went on to talk about the ways that he's able to ground himself while maintaining the level of productivity his role requires and for him, counterintuitively, that means moving his body as a way to find peace.
"It's like okay, well f**k, what do I need to do to go and reset myself and be able to be productive and not stressed by this? How do I do that? I basically go and read, I take in all the information and then I go and do something physical for an hour or two and reset myself," he explains. "I used to run a lot but the problem with that is you can think a lot when you are running, over the last few years I have gotten into things that require full focus."
The Meta CEO spent much of COVID down in Hawaii, having purchased an additional 110 acres to his estate for a reported $17 million in December 2021.
The laid-back lifestyle and connection to nature helped the entrepreneur find new ways to release and get moving, he said.
"I spent a lot of time down in Kauai early on. I got really into surfing and hydrofoiling and I would get up early and go and do that and then be really refreshed for my day of meetings," Zuckerberg told Rogan. "That is not something I could do in Palo Alto."
Despite having ownership over some of the biggest platforms in the world, Zuckerberg admitted that he doesn't use his personal social media that often. Just like many people working in social media fields or on a computer all day, it seems the last thing Zuckerberg wants to do is go home and fire up Facebook.
"Me, personally, I am just doing so many things that in practice that there are not [enough] hours in the day," Zuckerberg said of his time on social platforms, also noting that watching too much TV can put him in a "weird mental state".
Meta recently made headlines after it was revealed that the company would finally be implementing a customer service arm to its properties, namely Facebook and Instagram, per a report by Bloomberg.
The lack of available person-to-person communication has been a major point of contention for users of social platforms when their posts are removed or accounts have been suspended or deleted.
Meta was down around 55% in a one-year period as of late Friday morning.
