More than half of chief executives reported anxiety, burnout or depression in 2024, a jump of twenty-four points in a single year. Six in ten say isolation is degrading the quality of the decisions they make. Among first-time CEOs, seventy percent name loneliness as the main challenge of the job.
João Rios gave it a name: Solitary Success. A Brazilian entrepreneur who has started or run more than forty businesses across six countries, he has spent recent years advising founders and executives privately, by referral, under confidentiality. In this interview he explains why the problem is not a shortage of people around you, what happens to an answer before it becomes speech, and why Jeff Bezos needed someone to tell him he was destroying his own company with ideas that were too good.
1) You gave this a name, which is usually what people do when they want to sell something. Convince me Solitary Success is a real phenomenon and not a category you invented to have something to charge for.
It started as something I was living. Something I thought was only happening to me, that it was just part of the job of leading.
Over time, talking to more founders, more CEOs, more partners in businesses, I understood it was not an individual experience. It was a phenomenon. And more than that: a global phenomenon that is growing. At the top. Among the people carrying operations, the people making big decisions, the people who answer for the final result.
And that is what leading has become. Because for all the tools, all the information, all the connections you have today, and you have more than any leader of any previous generation, when it comes to deciding what actually matters, you are more alone than ever. Even surrounded by people.
2) I want to push on that. A founder running a company today has a leadership team, a board, a partner, a spouse, probably a therapist, and a WhatsApp group full of other founders. That is more access to other minds than any generation before him. What is he complaining about?
Look at that list. Anyone leading today rarely has fewer than some of those connections. There is a team. A business partner. A spouse. A therapist. A mentor. A peer group. An old friend.
People to listen to you vent are not in short supply.
And still, the pattern I see repeating is this. Sometimes it shows up as an important decision that sits untouched for weeks. Sometimes as a decision that went out without the person ever getting to look at it properly, on autopilot, because it had to go out. Sometimes as a feeling that something needs to be decided, but the person is not present enough to name what it is.
All of that with all those people around.
What people who lead are missing is not someone to listen.
3) But that sounds like a personality problem. Some people open up, some do not. You are describing a man who chooses silence and then resents being alone.
It is not a choice he makes once. It is a sequence, and it happens in three places before he ever gets to be resentful.
The first one is before speaking. People leading at a high level have a silent pact with themselves: do not open up. They believe that saying how they actually are diminishes whoever occupies the chair. And asking for help seems worse, because it sounds like admitting you cannot handle it alone.
The sentences are always the same. If I say this, they will think I am weak. If I show doubt, I lose authority. If I bring this home, I become a worry, and she does not deserve that. If I take it to my partner, he will look at it through the company, through the relationship, through himself, never only through me. If I take it to the group, I leave with more doubt than I arrived with.
Those sentences are not in a self-help manual. They are in the head of whoever sits in that chair, every day, before any conversation begins. Before speaking, whoever leads has already gone quiet. And pays the price for that alone.
4) Say he does open up. He calls the partner, or sits down with his wife on a Friday night and tells her everything. You are saying that still does not work?
Then comes the second barrier. Whoever listens also has a filter.
The employee hears it and filters through fear. Fear of seeming unsupportive, fear of costing himself the job, fear of disrespecting the chair. The spouse filters through love and care, she will not say what might hurt. The partner filters through the company, through the relationship he has with the other partner, and through himself, because he has skin in the game and never answers with only the interest of the person asking. The friend filters through the friendship. The mentor filters through what is safe to say inside the role he occupies.
Every filter is legitimate. There is no malice. But the effect is perverse: the best answer stops before it becomes speech.
And the person asking will never know that answer existed.
5) Then what he needs is better people around him, not a paid adviser. Find sharper friends.
Better people would not fix it, and that is the third barrier. Even when the answer comes out, it arrives contaminated by the repertoire of whoever answered.
Each person answers from themselves. From their own repertoire. Their own experience. What would have worked for them. Peer groups work like that. A founder friend works like that. Each one brings their own track record, what they used, what they know. Nobody has deep enough context about who the person is and what they built to calibrate an answer to their reality.
So the person leaves with five different answers, each one looking right to whoever gave it. And freezes. A question with little context becomes a contaminated answer. A contaminated answer becomes a decision that is not theirs.
You leave with more doubt than you arrived with.
It is not bad will. It is a structural limitation.
6) Give me something concrete. All of this is abstract until someone shows me what it actually costs.
A friend of mine builds sailboats in the Netherlands. The kind that take two years, where the owner argues about the grain of the wood in the cabin for a month.
A buyer came to collect one. Arrived by helicopter, champagne on the dock, photographs. Then, while the crew was still coiling lines, he said he would probably never set foot on that boat again. My friend, who had spent two years on that hull, asked why buy it, then.
A few weeks earlier, that man’s only daughter had asked him for money. She needed to buy the dress for her own wedding. The wedding was in fifteen days. He did not know she was getting married.
That man looked like someone who had just fallen from a hundred-storey building.
And the boat is still in the marina. He pays for the marina, pays the people who look after it, and other people use it. It was not a purchase. It was a receipt, arriving late, for something he had already spent and never counted.
Nobody around him had asked a single question about it.
7) Is there something in this that you think everyone is looking at wrong?
There is, and it is the one that worries me most. Sometimes the problem is not strategic at all. It is the body.
Cortisol high for months. Fragmented sleep. Hormones out of balance. The person tries to solve at the level of the decision something that needed a blood test first.
But nobody points that out. Because nobody asks from the outside.
So I ask a simple question in a session: when was the last time you had a full check-up? There are people dying slowly without knowing it.
8) Let me shift. You claim the most respected leaders in the world share something almost nobody talks about. That is the kind of sentence people use before selling a course. What is it?
Let me tell you the story Jeff Bezos told publicly for the first time in October 2025.
In Amazon’s early years, Jeff Wilke, who was a manufacturing expert and saw the company as a production line, looked at Bezos on an ordinary day and said: you have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week, to destroy Amazon.
Bezos described the moment as a profound revelation. He describes himself as an inventor, says he can generate a hundred ideas in half an hour. And every idea he threw out, the team absorbed as a demand. Wilke saw what Bezos could not see: the brilliant ideas were overloading the organisation.
The virtue was destroying the execution.
And here is the part that matters most. Bezos used a rare word to describe who Wilke was to him. He called him a tutor. One of the most successful founders in history, in public, admits he had a tutor, and credits him with a fundamental part of what Amazon became.
9) Wilke could have just been a good executive giving feedback. Why elevate that into a category?
Here is the point that changes everything. Wilke did not walk in and say “Bezos, stop having ideas.” He did not say “the way you think is the problem.” If he had said that, Amazon would never have become Amazon.
What he said was: you have a superpower, and it is being used without calibration. It is not about switching it off. It is about learning to modulate. When to release an idea. When to hold it. When the team can absorb it. When it needs to wait.
Bezos did not have a defect. He had a superpower. He did not need to switch it off. He needed someone beside him to see what he could not see.
That is the role. Someone beside you, seeing from outside. Close enough to know the context. Outside enough to see what you alone cannot. It is not about telling you that what you are is wrong. It is about helping you use what you are with aim, instead of firing a bazooka to kill a mosquito.
10) You describe that superpower with a lot of confidence. Are you talking about Bezos or about yourself?
I do. I have ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and giftedness. All three together, plus every other quirky thing that eccentric geniuses have and annoying people have too.
I treat that as a specification, not as adversity and not as something to overcome. You do not overcome a load limit. You design to it.
Read as engineering, it is a mismatch between components. Processing capacity runs far above average: it takes in a great deal, connects it fast, holds many threads at once. Executive energy runs far below. An engine sized for one vehicle, a tank sized for a much smaller one.
I never managed to keep a schedule. I always tried, but I did not know why it failed. I thought I was lazy, I procrastinated, I could not organise myself. Until I started to understand how I work. Because until you know how you function, nothing functions.
Think of a huge combine harvester. If you do not know how it works, you harvest nothing. So why on earth does a human being not read the manual of the most powerful machine that exists, which is himself?
And there is a cost. The worst thing you can do is assume you know everything about something. Someone with giftedness is saying that, and saying it to himself too. When you have to play the genius, it is a pain: you always think you know everything about something when you know a lot. And you do not know everything.
11) One story is an anecdote. Two is a coincidence.
It is the rule, and it is a silent one.
Bezos had Wilke. Jobs, for decades, had Andy Grove as the person he called on critical decisions. Buffett had Tom Murphy. Gates considers Buffett his mentor in life and business. Oprah had Maya Angelou as an adviser in defining moments.
And there is the most extreme case. Bill Campbell, who died in 2016 and whom you have probably never heard of. That is on purpose. He worked from a table in a sports bar in Palo Alto, refused interviews, and forbade anyone from writing about him while he was alive.
When he died, Eric Schmidt wrote a book called Trillion Dollar Coach. The title is not a figure of speech, it is arithmetic: they added up the value created by the companies Bill advised over his lifetime. A trillion dollars of market capitalisation. One man, silent, with no stage.
Nobody knew Bill Campbell because whoever had Bill did not tell. Because that is competitive advantage, and silent competitive advantage is worth more than any other.
Nobody who went far went alone.
12) So Brazil is behind. That is a convenient thing to say if you happen to be the man selling the solution here.
It would be convenient if it were only Brazil. It is not. For decades this was not public anywhere. Bezos only spoke about Wilke in 2025. Schmidt only wrote about Bill Campbell after he died. The story came out, but it came out years later.
In Brazil it is not very different, until now.
When a founder here goes looking for that level of counterpoint, the market insults his intelligence. They try to push a stage guru with a packaged method, a consultant who delivers a report and disappears, a group where everyone is selling a solution to a problem they never lived. The figure of the strategic peer, with no hidden agenda, who thinks the decision through before it leaves your head, never had public space in our culture.
The result is that the Brazilian founder keeps making the heavy decision alone. And most conclude that this thing does not exist.
But what does not show up does not mean it does not exist. It only means it is still backstage.
13) Then explain what separates you from every mentor and consultant already doing this, because they all say the same thing about being independent.
Look at what happened with Bezos. Wilke did not want to build his company. He did not want the credit. He did not want to become a headline. He wanted Bezos to decide well.
Your partner wants you to decide for the company. Your spouse wants you to decide for the marriage. Your employee wants you to decide for his continuity. Your mentor wants you to decide for his method. Each one is legitimate. But none of them wants only that you decide well.
That is what is missing. And that is what you may never have had.
That is why I limit it to ten people at a time. I was asked for twenty. Twenty I cannot do, however much I would like to, because while I am directing, serving, I am receiving. What I do does not scale, and I am not thinking about scale. I am thinking that the message should be bigger than the messenger. Ten I organised, checked, and it is entirely feasible.
14) You have been doing this for years without anyone knowing, and now you are giving an interview about it. What changed?
Nothing changed in the work. What changed is that I decided to open a small door to it. The work always existed without exposure and without noise. The people I advise came by direct choice, by invitation or by referral. The rule of that table is confidentiality. And even when the person decides to speak openly about it, I never use their name as a trophy.
Access to that table ranged from twenty-five to fifty thousand reais a month, depending on the scope of the project and the level of demand. From founders deciding alone to full alignment between partners and senior management. That format is now closed.
This is not false modesty. I am not famous and I do not want to be. I work backstage, where the real decisions happen.
15) What do you ask that they are not being asked anywhere else?
I ask why the person does what they do. I do not ask for whom, because if I ask for whom, it becomes much easier for them to lie. They answer that it is for the family.
Then I usually accuse them. You know that is a lie, right?
And the question that proves it is: when was the last time you were with your son, with your wife, with your mother, with your father, present, without a phone in your hand and without your head in the operation?
There have been times when founders of billion-dollar companies cried in front of me at that question. Why? Because until then nobody had the courage to ask him a question like that. Not even himself.
16) That question sounds like it is designed to make someone feel guilty. What do you actually do with the answer?
It is not designed to make anyone feel guilty. Guilt is useless. It is designed to show the person the gap between what they say matters and where their hours actually went. And then I do not work on what the person decides. That takes five seconds and the pen is theirs. I work on what comes before.
I ask what they are assuming that might not be true. Which way out they dismissed too quickly. Which piece of the context they have not looked at yet. What happens if they do nothing. And above all: is this direction still aligned with what they decided to build at the start, in the business and in life?
And it does not stop at what they brought me. I point at what they did not bring me. The choice being postponed without them noticing. The pattern repeating without them seeing it. Something they promised themselves and did not do.
Answering what the person asks is the minimum. The real value is in pointing at what they cannot bring themselves to look at.
17) Most founders would say they simply do not have time for any of this. What do you tell them?
That the arithmetic is inverted, and it is not a shortage of time.
The normal assumption is that it is bad time management. Bad time management is a consequence of bad energy management. And all of that is a lack of prioritisation. And all of that is because people do not know why on earth they are doing what they are doing. They are just doing it. And they get used to doing only that. Then a moment arrives when it is too late to go back.
If you do not look after every second, someone else looks after it for you, and it will not stay with you. You end up reacting to the management of shouting. Whoever shouts loudest gets my time.
In my calendar, everything that is a priority is marked in there. What is related to faith is in there. Looking after my health is in there. Being with my family is in there. I only fill the spaces left over after that, first with smaller stones and then with sand.
Most people do the opposite. If there is time left, they look after their health. If there is time left, they are with the family. If there is time left, they do the things that, in theory, if they are priorities, should have come before everything else.
18) Plenty of people would say you cannot be an aggressive operator and a present father at the same time, and that pretending otherwise is what makes founders miserable.
That treats those two things as opposites. And they are not, or should not be.
Most of the time I see that happen, it is a well-told story, because human beings have an enormous capacity to bribe their own conscience.
And there is something I say that bothers people. A lot of them tell me there has to be sacrifice, that you have to give something up in order to get things done, give up the family. If you are giving up what should be your priority, that is not sacrifice. That is stupidity.
The right question is not whether you can be an aggressive CEO and a present father. The question is: are you organising your life in a way that is coherent with what you say is your priority?
19) You say that from an office in São Paulo while founders in New York post about eighty-hour weeks and treat it as a badge. Are you calling those people liars?
I am not calling them liars. I am saying most of them are counting wrong, and I doubt the number itself.
If you work fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, I am sorry, but I am absolutely certain that at least thirty or forty percent of that, and probably a lot more, is anaesthesia. It is the habit of doing what should not be done by you, or what nobody should be doing at all. It is more waste of time than execution.
And there is the other side. A CEO who spends eighty percent of his time on what should not be him, arrives at the twenty percent that matters already tired, already spent, with nothing left of himself.
It is a disguised absence, because he is not there. It is only the body.
20) Fine. Someone reading this is convinced and has a company that will not run itself. What does he do on Monday?
It is not about you reaching tomorrow the level I am at today, with half my time on myself, my family and my faith, and the other half working.
But if you do not start with ten minutes, you will never reach ten hours.
It is habit building. I started putting aside five reais a week, sixteen years ago. It was what I could do. Then ten, then fifteen. Today I can invest thousands of reais a day. The habit stayed the same, we only increased the amount.
And before that there is a diagnosis. I run a time diagnosis that lasts fifteen days, where the person looks at exactly what they are doing. Because if you ask most people, they say they have no time. And all the time they are using, they are using for what they are building. Except they do not know whether what they are building is part of what should be their own definition of success, because they never stopped to define it.
21) You keep coming back to defining success. Everyone says that. How do you define it in a way that is not a poster on a wall?
With one question.
What do you have today that, if you woke up tomorrow without it, would make your day lose its colour, lose its taste, lose its value, to the point where you would not even want to get out of bed?
Your success is in that direction. That is where we have to look.
Because success is not what other people can see. It is what you live.
22) Last one. You are forty, healthy, and things are going well. What do you want people to say about you when you are not in the room?
Inheritance is what you leave to people. Legacy is what you leave in people.
I am in a moment of building legacy, and it is an enormous challenge, because how do you become alive after you are dead? In the sense of: what will people remember you for, what do they say about you when you are not around, what kind of example did you set, what marks did you leave in them.
With my daughter I think about it this way. It is not only about what world I am creating for her. It is what daughter I am creating for the world. And for that I need to be the behaviour I would want her to have, because she will learn from what I do, not from what I say.
And there is a line from my mother that I repeat: we learn things either through love or through pain. I learned through pain. I say this so that nobody has to go through what I went through to understand the same thing.
João Rios is a Brazilian entrepreneur and advisor to CEOs and founders. Over twenty-five years he has started or run more than forty businesses across six countries, one of which reached 6,147 employees, and founded an e-commerce company still operating since 2012. He was strategic mentor to the team behind Tony Robbins’ 2018 Brazil event, which drew thousands to São Paulo Expo. Over the past eight years he has advised more than 1,100 founders and executives, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies, privately, by referral, under confidentiality. More at joaorios.com.
