Burnout, Breakthroughs, and Bestsellers: Betsy Tong’s Journey to Reset and Recharge

Betsy Tong’s relentless drive in the high-stakes world of major tech companies led her to a breaking point culminating in a terrifying fainting episode on a plane. In this eye-opening episode, she shares her raw and powerful story of burnout, resilience, and the crucial turning points that transformed her life.

We also dive into the fast-paced world of book writing as I break down how I crafted a bestseller in just 72 hours. From AI-powered creativity to strategic adaptation, I reveal the game-changing techniques that can help anyone maximize productivity and success. Plus, my collaboration with Peter Swain highlights the power of innovation and streamlined communication in achieving remarkable results.

What You’ll Learn:

✅ The warning signs of burnout and how to reset before it’s too late
 ✅ The emotional and professional impact of high-stress careers
 ✅ How Betsy transformed personal struggles into growth and empowerment
 ✅ Strategies for leveraging AI to supercharge creativity and productivity
 ✅ The mindset shifts needed to reclaim balance and long-term success

🔥 Whether you’re navigating a high-pressure career or looking to unleash your creative potential, this episode is packed with insights to help you rise, reset, and redefine success.

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Chapters

• 0:02 From Burnout to Brilliance
• 20:17 AI & Book Writing Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

ladies and gentlemen, welcome to rice mash's season five. This is burnout to brilliance. Why burnout to brilliance? Quite simply, people like yourselves listening to this have a journey, they have a story and it usually starts with something fucking tragic, a anomaly in their lives they feel has taken them off the rails. Go. High level people, people with ambition, ceos, c-suite and above and anybody else who are high level entrepreneurs, have this issue. They have the challenge, but what makes these people different is they come back and they bounce back with a vengeance. My next guest is one such person. She has come from tech, poverty and all sorts of drama in her life into complicity, into peace. But, more importantly, she empowers other people who are searching for more in their lives C-suite and if you're female, please listen to this, stop are searching for more in their lives C-suite and if you're female, please listen to this, stop it. Get a pen and paper and pay attention. Betsy Tong, how are you today?

Speaker 2: 1:17

And welcome to Russian Nashes. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the time and for your thoughtfulness. I feel like I've been taken care of every minute of the way into this podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:30

The privilege is mine, I will assure you, and it's a complete honor to have you here today. I know you're a very busy woman. You have many things going, many fires going in the background, and your time is precious to me. I want to touch on a moment of burnout first, and can you take me back in time to early stages in your business career or even in your childhood? Were you experienced a derailment or a burnout within your life that really shook you to your core?

Speaker 2: 2:03

Gosh, there are many moments in my life that I have been shaken to my core, but if you're specifically talking about burnout, I think one of the things that is true for women of a certain age like myself, particularly who rose to an executive level, particularly who grew up in big tech, and I spent 20 years at companies that were the size of small cities IBM, lenovo, symantec, intel. You get used to being the only one in the room that looks like you and you get used to the idea that you have to work twice as hard to be noticed half as much, and that is one of the factors that leads to burnout, or that led to my burnout. And when I was at Lenovo, I was running the services business in Europe and that business delivered 40% of the profit to the bottom line on a much smaller percent of revenue. But that's how bad PC. At the time, pc profitability was right and so the pressure was so intense and I was not. I had never run a warranty business before.

Speaker 2: 3:38

There were many things that probably I would have gotten wrong or did get wrong At the same time. I would have gotten wrong or did get wrong At the same time. We were moving our support center from Scotland to the newly divided Czech Republic but not even the sexy side of the Czech Republic, the Slovakian side and trying to teach really smart former communist people and literally 20-year-olds what customer service meant. And that you couldn't just fire off an email that said, dear complainers which was probably technically correct, but not the experience that we wanted that you couldn't drink during working hours or snog your girlfriend yeah. So just little lessons. And then, at the same time, we had a massive battery recall and battery shortages, because that was during the time when Dell's batteries were exploding and catching fire and nobody wanted that to happen. So we were doing recalls. So there are many things going on.

Speaker 2: 4:46

And so I was traveling. I was living in California and traveling back and forth to Paris, where nobody should be sad about that, but I was traveling back and forth to Paris and then going to Slovakia and traveling all around Europe and also Beijing, because our headquarters were in China, and at a certain point I was exhausted, like literally exhausted. I remember being on a plane, getting up, coming back from the bathroom and then fainting and waking up because the airline attendant had called a doctor from back and he was super nervous because he'd never been called before and he stepped on me and that's what woke me up again. So the reason I tell this story is when you are driven and you are used to producing and you feel this anxiety about not doing enough, you just keep pushing to the point where you're falling over and fainting on an airplane and it's no good.

Speaker 2: 5:52

And, by the way, I was no good at work for doing that. I was no good at work and I ended up taking a leave, probably a couple months after that, because my body, my mind, I was just exhausted. I was exhausted and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it again. I couldn't do it. First of all.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Betsy, thank you for sharing that was quite. I was being very vulnerable and I know you well. Actually, you actually went back there and you actually relive that story. I can tell because I know you and you can see your face and your face expressions. So this is why I like asking these questions, because it's real and it's real so to my listeners.

Speaker 1: 6:35

If you are hearing this and you are regretting with this and you can pick up on things that best, you have gone through in similar situations that you're experiencing, these are signs for burnout and it doesn't mean burnout as in physically. That's the end or part of the end result, where you either step back and do time off, take a reset or a sabbatical, whatever you're to do. But the problem affects scaling. Problem affects much deeper levels of the business and your, what you have to do in it and you what you do now is awesome within your own right because you've actually paved the way from your own experiences. If someone was coming to you now and they had a problem with scaling because of burnout, because they just hit that 24-mile wall of the marathon and they've gone holy shitbags, my whole fucking life is born apart and they're having this problem scaling because of that. How would you advise them?

Speaker 2: 7:41

So, so, fundamentally, if you are on a railroad track going 90 miles an hour and that is the choice that you want to make I'm not going to be able to advise you. And the people that I do best with are not the ones that come to me and say, betsy, help me, use AI to save time, because that's a false premise. They are the ones that come back and say I don't know how to figure out how to do more with the time I have. And so there's this great book that I read last year called 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Bergman, and it puts into great perspective the idea that any human has 4,000 weeks. That's it, that's it. And are you going to use that time working harder and more hours for your company or whatever else, or are you going to do that building a life that is significant to the people around you or your customers or whatever else it is? It may be that, yes, I have to. I got to work for the company and that's what makes my life significant. But I think, when you start to realize it's really 4,000 hours, it makes a big difference. It makes a big difference to perspective.

Speaker 2: 9:10

And then the second thing that I think makes a big difference to perspective and this is why the people who find me are generally in their second stage is that most of us end up dealing with parents who are in some kind of decline. And not only do you, are you maybe at your 2,000 weeks left, 1,000 weeks left, whatever it is? But you're observing what will happen at the end of life, and your parents' end of life is now affecting the amount of time that you have to do the things that you ordinarily would have done, and maybe you're an empty nester. Now You're like, oh great, life is going to be so much greater. But no, because you have the burden of a parent.

Speaker 2: 9:52

And in my life right now, my father is in early stage dementia and he thinks that he should be able to do whatever he wants and live the life that he wants. And he'll say that over and over again and that takes hours of my time to enable him to live the life he wants, which means it's hours of my time that don't get enabled Betsy to live the life she wants, and that's a reality that you have to face and it's bullshit, frankly, and I hate it when people say you're just such a good daughter, you must get so much out of it. No, I don't. I think about the thousands of dollars that I'm not like my time is worth money. I'm thinking about the thousands of dollars that I don't get to work on me and me things because I have to sacrifice for him and it's not.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Yeah, I'd love to be able to say that. Oh, yes, I'm an angel. I'd love it, but these are real constraints that we live with and when you think about that, then it's not doing things faster or saving time that you need, it's trying to get people to the. Are you doing the things that are the smallest increment or the domino that creates the biggest leverage one, or are you taking things off your plate? What are you taking off your plate?

Speaker 1: 11:15

Because we don't live in a world where all things are possible all the time thank you for thank you for sharing a bit of your personal life with your father, and you have a check relationship with the sounds of things, but it's real and it's important as entrepreneurs, as people who are leading others, that we stay honest and authentic with who we are. And I think a lot of that gets diluted in a world of bucket fakery, when a prime example is when a younger generation of millennials or gen x said I want a real woman. A woman says I want a real man, but a woman I'm just being honest has fake hair, fake nails, fake fucking teeth, eyelashes. They've done up to the nose.

Speaker 1: 14:52

Airbrushed, yeah, and they put all these Instagram posts or things like that. That's all AI generated Newsflash. It's not fucking real. Stop messing with humans and who you truly are. Betsy just shared something very real and that's reality, it's not fake. And who you truly are. Betsy just shared something very real and that's reality, it's not fake. And lessons like that can't be learned by books and books are a wonderful thing, but they don't create real life. They create a scenario so you can learn from them, but the actual learning comes from people like Betsy who are in the fucking trenches doing the work, making the sacrifices and the emotional components to that lifelong. But what she's done here and I which I love is using them, them scenarios, that them experiences, to not just empower herself, because she's now setting a standard for herself going this is what I'm worth. Going back to the a thousand dollars an hour or whatever you believe you're worth. That's where you start. And the emotional components yes, they cause fatigue.

Speaker 1: 16:05

There's been examples from that in this conversation so if you're listening to this now and you're thinking about I'm just surviving and I really want to thrive, try subscribing, try sharing the message, taking some goddamn notes and actually using betsy's wisdom, because if you were doing a consultant with her, she'd charge you a fucking thousand dollars an hour. This is free information. You get to do what you want with it. When you're reframing some of this, betsy, and you're learning all these situations from the experiences, who do you really speak to? Who's he? Who's your ideal person? Someone's to walk into your office, in, in, in, wherever you live? I can't remember. I don't really want to say I do, but I don't want to say where you live over the internet anyway. Um, unless person walked in, who is that person? What do they look like? Obviously not physically, but what are their problems? What do you? What's your sweet spot? What's your passion?

Speaker 2: 17:10

Yeah. So I think the people that come to me are ones who have achieved a certain level of success and significance, right? And they have been in the trenches 20, 30 years, whatever it is 20, 30 years, whatever it is and they know how. They've spent a lifetime of getting the experience, getting the expertise, honing what they do, and now they're looking out at the second stage and going what do I do now?

Speaker 2: 17:47

And it might happen because you were a VP here or whatever, and suddenly Google or somebody else says ah, you know what, we don't need you anymore, like what I spent 20 years of my life building you and you don't need me anymore, right? And I think many parents feel that when their kids fly off, yeah, I'm an adult now, I don't need you. And so then what does that mean? So maybe you've just lost your job, or you feel insecure about your longevity because AI is here and suddenly they can do a lot more things with less people, or whatever else it is. Or you literally are ready to transition into a different way of life and a different way of work, and maybe you're considering becoming a coach, a consultant or an entrepreneur of some sort and you start to realize wait a minute, yeah, wait a minute, I don't even know how to express how I got to where I got and tell my stories, much less productize it.

Speaker 2: 18:57

And one of the places that I start with people is taking what made them brilliant and great and helping them create that into. This is your system, this is the BAS system, this is the BAS methodology, the tools and the templates, and along the way, let's figure out how it changes, because AI is here and can do things differently than you would have done a year ago even and then figure out how to make that a product or something that scales, or something that you teach, or something that makes your team or your company work more effectively. And the specific way that I started doing this myself is number one. I've spent decades helping big tech companies disrupt themselves, and so, at Lenovo, it was a PC business that needed to have services. At Symantec, it was a huge enterprise at the time storage business that wanted to build appliances. At Intel, it was an ingredient company that suddenly decided it wanted to be solutions. And, oh, people weren't just going to say yes because I showed up. You actually had to talk to a customer and know what their problems were. Oh, great, in a very small way.

Speaker 2: 20:18

I've taken that background and experience and in June, developed my process for building a book and wrote my first book, the Edge, which is about the proficiency meta.

Speaker 2: 20:30

It's about the process of building a book, and wrote my first book, the Edge, which is about the professionary meta. It's about the process of building a book, and I did it in 72 hours, put it out on Kindle and then made it a bestseller six days later because I was speaking it. I had two speaking engagements and I could market the book and I had coaches along the way the brilliant Peter Swain of ROAI. One of the things that I've done is I've taken what I've learned from him. I've taken my own experience and then I've created a system that allowed me then to create three more books and ghostwrite other books and teach other executives who want to create a book and learn AI. But the point is not the deliverable, which is a book or a course. The point is that process allows them to really think through what makes them really good and to think of themselves as a methodology that they now can share with the world and be more significant as a result. Hopefully that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 21:40

To me it does, and I'm tracking you. So I love that. You mentioned a couple of things in there, and that was your book Curse at Super 1, and I want to touch on that for a moment. But you're not just a one-time bestseller. How are you? You're being modest. Can you? Can you inline what else you've done in the in the author space, because it's a huge accomplishment for any of you just be a bestseller, but you've done it two or three times, I believe. Is that correct? Five times? Okay, I was wrong five times. I apologize, I fucked up. Five times. Bestseller whatever, but please can you tell them where they are, how, how?

Speaker 2: 22:18

and yeah, can you choose. So, if you think about the package of books together, right, and the three package of books, and and so I've done five books, but the three that are the package together is the first is the Edge, and that really is about how I, with the fact of AI, reframed and rethought the, the process of how I do work and the process of creating Betsy's brain into at the time this feels very old now at the time custom GPTs, right, and to codify how I analyze, how I synthesize, how I communicate, and then ultimately created an army that is my chief of staff, my CFO, my focus groups, all of the things into different chat GPTs and that process of again taking what I'm really great at, which is creating operations, people, systems that scale and doing it now in AI. That scale and doing it now in AI. The second book behind me is Unstoppable Advantage and that one I started to realize as I was working with executives last year, which is that everybody gets very excited about the productivity potential of AI and we are super well-tra trained as executives to think, oh, I can do more with less, and fundamentally, that to me, is a terrifying. It's a terrifying trajectory because people are outsourcing work to AI, which means a very dark future, because if there are no jobs for humans, there's nobody to buy the things that the companies create. Then there are no companies, and then they're like. The cycle is terrible, but to actually talk about that is a little bit more than people can think, and so, in Unstoppable Advantage, I try to break down the cycles of disruption that have happened during our history and create the analogy that what's happening now is like electricity and we don't know what the end results of having electricity in our lives will be, but we know something will happen. Hopefully it'll be good. And so I spent time looking at 21 disruptive, highly disruptive scenarios and have a methodology that allows you to look at if those disruptions happen, what is the margin compression that happens? How quickly does it happen Sorry, somebody is calling me how quickly does it happen? And then what happens to your valuation? And again, that's really theoretical, but let me break it down for you, for anybody who doesn't spend a lot of time nerding out about this like I do.

Speaker 2: 25:18

I needed to get a headshot done the other day. In the old world, I would have gone on Yelp, I would have looked for photographers and I would have booked somebody for I don't know $500. I would have driven myself over to their studio with my little makeup bag and my seven outfits and we would have spent a couple of hours and two weeks later I would have had some proofs. Okay, so, if that elapsed time three weeks, four weeks, whatever Today or this week, I can take a picture of myself with an iPhone. I can pay $12 for an AI app and I can generate 100 headshots, right, and that took me maybe 30 minutes. And it only took me 30 minutes because I started playing around and I gave myself a haircut. I made myself a blonde.

Speaker 1: 26:15

You went down the rabbit hole, didn't you?

Speaker 2: 26:16

I went down the rabbit hole and the thing is 30 minutes versus weeks and $500 versus 12, massive value to me. Great for me. Can you share that?

Speaker 1: 26:32

for the viewers.

Speaker 2: 26:34

But sucks for the photographer, right. And that's what will happen. To the extent that you are having productivity games you also will be. Somebody else is going to come around and do what you do a thousand times faster, a thousand times cheaper, and that is what companies need to be defining strategies around. And then the third book is unusual and unique because I wrote it with our mutual mentor, peter Swain, and here's how that process. This is why this system works so well.

Speaker 2: 27:10

So the process for that book is Betsy and Peter are on Telegram talking to each other, as in chatting right, and Peter is on a plane going from New York back to England and Betsy is in California having insomnia and Peter says I've got a great idea and I said great, I'm in, and Peter shows me this methodology that he wants to write about, and then, at the end of his flight, he sends me a 10-page document that just has an outline of a methodology, and then Betsy takes it and she writes a book called the ADAPT Framework in 24 hours.

Speaker 2: 27:59

And then, at the same time, chatgpt created projects, and so I took the book and the notes, I created all the tools, templates and the methodology and again, these are things that we know how to do. We just had not productized them and created beautiful templates, tools and products. The book itself is it's a book. It's not the best book I've ever written, but the point of the book is that we also have call outs to my clone. 90% of the content is in my clone, not in the book itself, right? Because the point of a book like Adapt Framework is that somebody does something with the frameworks. You often have to talk to somebody to do that and, by the way, if you get the book, you get to talk to the clone and you get access to all of that knowledge and those explicit do A, b, c lessons and, like amazing, and that was done literally within one weekend for the book, one weekend for the methodology and less time for the clone.

Speaker 1: 29:12

You see, what you've just done there is you've put components of people's audience into one place, productize them, systemize them and then monetize them all in about 72 hours. Absolutely, that to me, is a genius. First, and I know Peter very well, I know you well enough the things that we do to uncover our brilliance. Before we close part one today, I want you just to think about and this is for the viewers where are you burning out? Where are you limiting yourself? And before I go with that, I want to ask Betsy. To ask Betsy what are you avoiding? What are you not telling yourself that?

Speaker 2: 30:13

you where you can play bigger and better. So many places right, because, again, you don't have the privilege of living living a full life if you don't come up with many myths in your head that are true or not true, as the case may be. And I feel like where I am burning out, or where I have the chance to burn out, is that idea that I'm not going to be good enough for what I want to do and who I'm speaking to. And that goes back to the ego of somebody who, frankly, was an executive right and all the sacrifices and things you have to do to get chosen for, because in public companies they often the board has to say okay to you, not just your boss anymore, and so there's that fear that I'm not going to meet the bar and that I'm going to lose steam in doing what I do. That's just that's. That is one of the things. This. The second is and I was talking to Peter the other day and he was making me laugh because he was using this analogy is are you the fishmonger who says I sell fresh fish? And he said if you're a fishmonger, you pretty much are not going to not sell fresh fish, not going to not sell fresh fish, and I've listened to a lot of people who, basically, are the equivalent of the fishmonger. And so then I start to have doubt about myself and say is what I'm saying differentiated enough? And that's again also an ego issue, because fundamentally, if you can help one person, isn't that enough? Isn't that enough? And that, at my core, is something that I've always believed and always felt.

Speaker 2: 32:14

And if I could diverge for a second, one of the stories of my life is in the early days I was a police reporter and then I was a reporter at the Boston Globe. I realized I didn't like to watch life, I wanted to participate. And so what did I do? Something that I ended up being terrible at, but I became. I went and I worked in schools in the city of Boston to learn how to apply arts into everyday teaching, and they put me in probably one of the worst school systems.

Speaker 2: 32:49

I won't name it. It was like, literally, you never want any child to be taught by the folks that were there. And so I had to make friends and influence people, and at the end of a year we had spent all this money, we had done all this stuff and it was the end of my tenure at that school and one of the kids came up to me and he gave me a flower. And I've always remembered that because, even if I couldn't tell whether next year they would do anything, whether any program that we had built would still live, for that moment, for that year, I made a difference to that kid and I've always had him in my mind Any moment that I have, no matter where I am, no matter what I do, no matter what job I'm in, did I make that difference to that one person, that one kid? And if I did, then okay, I'll be okay. All the other trappings money, fame well, it doesn't matter in a 4,000-week life.

Speaker 1: 34:02

I really like that analogy, especially in memories, because they don't go away. They're the ones that drive you forward into the next level of achievement. You can't replace them and they're amazing to share. So thank you for sharing that To my viewers. Thank you very much. This is part one of Betsy Tong and myself having a little chat. Please download, give a review and share the message to somebody who this may change their life. Don't forget. In part two we'll be going a bit deeper into a few other things, some few surprises on the way as well. Thank you very much, betsy. I'll see you very shortly and to make this?

Speaker 1: 34:45

please download, subscribe and share. See you soon.