Toto Wolff: The Brutal Truth Behind My Success, Self-Doubt & Leadership

I always stared into an abyss. Tomorrow could be the end of everything. I'm a glass half-empty person and I think that keeps you on your toes. My father got very ill with a with a brain cancer when I was very young, six or seven years old, and got operated many, many times until he died when I was 15. Even if you can't see light at the end of the tunnel, because things are so bad, the choices

It always ends. That is the very distinctive voice of Mercedes Formula One team principal and CEO, Toto Wolf. Now, this was an unforgettable pleasure for me, this podcast episode, one of the most honest conversations we've ever recorded, as Toto traced his own decisiveness back to what he calls an effed up upbringing. His father got really ill with brain cancer when Toto was just a few years old. He was operated on again and again, and sadly died by the time Toto was fifteen, and he reckons he had to become an adult somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, looking after his sister, while his mother tried to hold the whole thing together on her own.

But Toto doesn't reach for sympathy. He reaches for a theory about why he might not be sitting in that chair at Mercedes at all without that start in life. We also get into something he's talked about far less periods of depression from the age of eighteen onwards. A night at the amber lounge in Monaco at twenty nine, standing on the outside looking in at a room full of people who apparently had it all. And because this is Toto, we don't stay reflective for too long.

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