Snap CEO Evan Spiegel Says Stress Can Be a ‘Gift’

Some call stress the silent killer. Evan Spiegel likes to reframe it as a gift and opportunity.

The Snap CEO has been in his fair share of stressful situations. He led Snapchat from its founding through a 2013 acquisition offer from Meta (he ended up rejecting it) and a 2017 IPO.

On the “Grit” podcast, Spiegel explained that he has come to take a more positive view of stress.

“How do we approach stress in our minds?” Spiegel asked. “Do we call it out as stress and something that’s bad, or do we say, ‘Actually, this is a gift, this is a learning opportunity, this is a growth opportunity.'”

Spiegel referenced research that suggested reframing stress as positive can have a “huge impact on your ability to manage it.”

Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal has led this line of research, publishing her book “The Upside of Stress” in 2015 about “getting good at” the condition.

A high-intensity job like the CEO of Snap isn’t for the faint of heart. In September, Spiegel wrote in a letter to employees that company would restructure into smaller, startup-like “squads” as it faced a “crucible moment.”

Spiegel said that being CEO for a long time made him “better at managing” the stress.

“Once you’re just in a rhythm of dealing with stressful events all the time, it becomes very normal, and stress is about a response to something unusual,” he said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the job had a different psychological effect: anxiety. On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Huang said that he was driven by a “fear of failure.”

“I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed,” Huang said, adding that he’s “always in a state of anxiety.”

Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook cofounder and former CEO of Asana, told Stratechery that he found the top leadership gig “exhausting.”

“I had to just kind of put on this face day after day, and then in the beginning I was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to get easier, the company will get more mature,'” Moskovitz said. “Then the world just kept getting more chaotic.”

For Spiegel, stress isn’t just a response to reconsider; it’s a part of his job description. On the podcast, he said that part of his role was absorbing the team’s stress — and not unloading it on the people around him.

“I’ve tried to find my own ways, whether that’s exercising or going in the sauna or just taking time to meditate,” he said. “But, in my family and in my job, I want to absorb that stress, right? I don’t want to unload that onto people that I care about, whether that’s our team or family or my wife.”