Steven Bartlett: 9 Secret Habits of a Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Diary of a CEO
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When I called my mother and I said I'm dropping out of university and I was shoplifting those pizzas at 18 years old to feed myself, it was like survival. Like I was either going to be successful or I was going to be successful. There was not a plan B option.

The guest that we have today on the podcast is Stephen Bartlett, and he's one of the biggest names in business right now. Steve went from being a completely broke college dropout to founding a company called Social Chain, which he then sold for like ludicrous amounts of money. He was the youngest ever dragon on BBC's Dragon's Den, which for the Americans in our audience is sort of the UK version of Shark Tank. And he's also the host of the ridiculously popular podcast, The Diary of a CEO, that has interviewed all sorts of really successful celebrities and famous people and also me.

I've sat with so many people and thought, "I will never be as good as you at what you do." I wish I was capable of it, but I'm able to separate out my admiration

and my aspiration. - And Steve is also a successful author. He's written a book called "Happy, Sexy Millionaire" that I've talked about on this channel. And he's just released his latest book of "The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life." We talk a lot about the things that made Steven successful. - I spent maybe three to four years working in call centers. I could have gone and got a more glamorous job, but choosing a job at that early age that was focused on my knowledge and skills is the reason why I was able to launch businesses and do well at a young age.

We talk about some of the principles, the strategies, the mindsets and the tools that he's learned through his course of building multiple eight-figure companies. Work-life balance is a load of nonsense, right? It implies that you're trying to balance the scales. You're not. You're trying to find harmony, which is where you feel good about your life.

Stephen, welcome to the podcast. How does it feel to be in that chair? This is a very unusual place for you to be. It's so weird. Genuinely, it's so weird. It's funny because before we started recording, I asked you if my chair was lower because there's something about looking at

at this frame, which I find quite daunting, even though it's like my frame and it's my, you know, my backdrop, it's daunting, but I'm, I'm here for it. And I'm excited. Nice. I'm so looking forward to diving into, into your story because you're normally the interviewer and I've been wanting to ask you a bunch of questions for the last several years since we first met. Oh gosh. I feel like I've got, I've got my chance.

So to start with, for the two or three people in the audience who might not know who you are, I wonder, can you tell us a little bit about the backstory? And in particular, I'm keen to hear about what your school and university years were like. Yeah, so... It's quite an unconventional path to success. I moved to the UK when I was a baby from Botswana. I was born in Botswana in Africa. My mother's Nigerian, my dad's English. So my mother's black, my dad's white. They're very, very different people. Probably the

total opposites. My mother didn't get an education in Africa. I think she left school at five, six, seven years old. Can't read or write. My dad is an academic who went to, you know, smashed every exam that was ever put in front of him. So I'm somewhat caught in the middle in many respects of who I am. We moved to Plymouth in the Southwest, only black family and the poorest family in the area and in my school, pretty much. Huge insecurity and shame. I

They stopped parenting me about 10 years old, which creates this huge void of independence. And in that void, I start experimenting. I learn a lot about myself and what I'm capable of. And that's kind of a consistent theme through my life. School, I decide at some point, and I think because my two brothers, Jason and Kevin, are geniuses, that this implicit narrative that school and grades will correlate to your outcomes is

I believed it. And so I knew that going to school wasn't going to be the way that I got all those things that I wanted to get. Financial freedom, all the nice stuff in life. So I gave up at about 14, 15 years old. I remember the conversation with myself where I realized it was going to have to be something else. And at the time I was running these little

experiments in school with businesses and they were working. So my thesis was when I'm older, these are going to be the adults with me. So that the party that I organized, the vending machine deal that I did, these would be the adults with me. So I'll do that when I'm old and that will be enough for me to get there. Go to university after being, so I was expelled from school by Mr., let's call him Mr. T.,

And then I was unexpelled by Mr. Sprenkle. He actually said this on TV a couple of months ago. He came on What I Lied to You, walked down the stairs and he said on What I Lied to You, he unexpelled me because I made the school so much money. I was doing lots of deals for the school, the vending machine deals, the trips, the school trips, the parties. And then I was expelled again in the last, roughly in the last week of school.

for attendance. Wasn't rude to anybody, always been well-mannered, couldn't do school, couldn't hand in homework, couldn't listen in class, had to fall asleep in every lesson. Go to university believing it'll be different, last one lecture, drop out. Call my mom, mom I'm dropping out, she says if you do I'll never speak to you again. I say I love you too. I put down the phone, we didn't speak for many years. At least no sort of amicable conversation. And then started businesses. And then that's, for the last 10 years that's been my life.

12 years in my life. I've been watching your vlog recently and you're constantly jumping from one thing to another, the to-do list with like 34 items on it by like 11 a.m. That doesn't seem like the sort of person that can't like focus in school or doesn't want to kind of take boxes.

Yeah, I think there's... And there's also often a misconception that I don't rate education because I don't love school or university. But school and university aren't education. They are institutions and systems. I love education. I fell asleep last night listening to a video about artificial intelligence and rockets, right? I'm a self-educator that loves education. If you zoom in on that kid that got expelled, what you'll also see is...

He stole the psychology textbooks because he was so interested in them. And he dominated the business class so much so that Mr. Hughes kicked me off, basically like almost expelled me in the business class because I wasn't letting anyone else do anything. So if you zoom in, you find someone that is absolutely obsessed with the things he likes and that is incapable of doing things he does not like. And that is such an important trait.

My resistance to do things that I do not like, I think is such an important trait for us all to try and embody. Because what it means is you won't overstay your welcome in relationships, in jobs, in career paths that aren't serving you. And we all have this wonderful sort of internal signal or barometer inside our chest that we just ignore. We put it at the very bottom of the priority stack and we put above it mum's opinion, social expectation, what that girl on Instagram will think.

And if that sits above the signal, and I call it a signal because it is a signal like hunger or thirst. If that signal of how do I actually feel sits at the bottom, you will overstay your welcome in situations that you're not meant to be in. My superpower is quitting with such ease and conviction and peace because the signal that matters the most is how do I feel right now? And that is useful. Tuning into that is really, really powerful. Yeah.

One of the things that I took away from your first book, Happy Sexy Millionaire, we can talk about the title of that in a moment. But one of the things I really took away was the quitting framework. I wonder if you can talk through that for people who might not have come across it. I feel like you know it better than me. But I'll pop in it. So the reason I wrote the quitting framework is because I realized in hindsight that I was able to quit things easily.

easier than most people. Let's take one step back. Why is quitting important? In life, we glamorize starting, right? But my observation was that the advantage I've had, as I've said, was being able to quit fast and eat with peace and ease. And when you just think logically about starting something, right, or saying, it's also the same with like saying yes and no to things. In order to start something in life, you actually...

first need to quit something else. So you can't start a new relationship unless you quit the last one. You're not going to start a new startup unless you quit the last one. You're not going to start a new career unless you've quit the last job. So quitting and starting should be held in equal regard. And there should be acknowledgement that they have a two-way relationship with one another. They're both the actions of winners.

People say quitting is for losers and they say like starting is for winners. In fact, quitting and starting are both for winners though. And the most successful intelligent people I've ever met have an unbelievable ability to quit things that make no objective sense. You're quitting that high paying job to go and deal, to go and do card tricks at a table in Bristol, Darren Brown. You're quitting that amazing career as a lawyer and,

that your parents are now so proud of you, of to go and spend the next 10 years going up and down the country in pubs and cracking jokes, Jimmy Carr?

It just, it objectively seems to make no sense, but subjectively they've reached a certain level of ease. So I, I could relate to myself in the same way in the regard of, if you look at what I've quit from, like stop going to school. Cause I realized that that wasn't going to be the paper that I got at the end of the process. Wasn't going to be enough, especially compared to my brothers. Quit university after that first lecture, quit my first startup after two years, quit my second one after about six years. Um, and lots of little quitting in and amongst there.

Why was I able to quit with peace at times when objectively you would think I was a madman for doing so, when I was leaving so much apparently on the table? And so I tried to make a framework, a framework that other people could use to try and make their quitting decisions through. So at the start of the framework, you ask yourself, am I thinking of quitting? See the, you know, yes or no. So if you are thinking of quitting, the framework begins. And I created these two subcategories.

which you can define for yourself, which I think is important to do. You're either thinking of quitting something because something's really hard, like it's difficult.

And then, which would be, you know, you're running a marathon and you're on the 23rd mile and you're doing it, you know, to raise money for a charity, but it's really, it's painful. It's difficult. It's, it's causing discomfort or you're thinking about quitting something because it like it sucks. And that's more of like an emotional mental thing. It's just, it just doesn't feel good to you on an emotional, mental, psychological level. So let's go down the hard route. I'm thinking of quitting because it's hard. The first question you should then ask yourself is,

Is the hardship worth the rewards on offer? So you're running that marathon, you're raising money for that leukemia charity, you're on the 23rd mile, but it's worth it. The hardship is worth the reward at the end of it. If the hardship is worth it, don't quit. If the hardship isn't worth it,

then you should quit because the worst thing to do in life is to do something that is hard and meaningless like those are those are where all the problems happen when i think about studies of the impact of not having autonomy in your work and working on a production line and not having meaning and purpose in what you're doing every day and how that impacts your health and disease rises in your body that is the worst situation to be in let's go down the other side of the framework

By the way, do correct me because you know this framework better than I do. No, you got it spot on. Okay, good. We'll go down the other side of the framework. So you're thinking about quitting something because it sucks. You're in a relationship, your husband, you know, the magic has just left the relationship. You're in a company and there's problems at work, but you, you know, you haven't yet had the conversation with your boss. The next question becomes, do you believe you could make it not suck?

Right. So in the context of a marriage, that might mean going to marriage counseling and having a difficult conversation, thrashing it out with your partner and going through those issues. If the answer is no, so it sucks, you think you can't change that, quit. If you believe you could make it not suck, the next question to ask yourself is,

Is the effort that it would take to make it not suck worth the rewards on offer? So like you look at how that marriage might look if you were to resolve it, you believe you can. Is it worth it? Is Dave worth it? Is the reward on the other end of that process to fix it sucking worth it? If the answer is no, quit. You believe you could make it not suck anymore, but the effort it would take is not worth the reward on offer, quit.

If you believe you could make it not suck, and the effort it would take is worth the rewards on offer, stay and fight for it." And that's my simple framework, which is intentionally ambiguous. One of the laws in the new book, I can't remember which one it is, but it's all about the power of discipline. The discipline equation, yeah, death time and discipline. And I think a lot of people struggle with the idea of, you know, obviously discipline is good,

And, you know, there's the Muhammad Ali quote, I, you know, I suffered for 10 years to become a champion. What's that effect?

But then it seems to conflict some of the time with like this thing that you're saying of like, don't do stuff that doesn't feel good necessarily. So like, how do you square this? Like, what is the balance between I'm going to discipline myself to get through school because like the reward at the other end could be worth it versus I'm going to actually quit school and do my own thing, which might feel better. Yeah, so it's so interesting because I've never...

tried to make the link. But for me, there's a really, really clear link between the two. So in the book, I started writing a chapter about time management.

Which is something you know a lot about. And the problem I had, Ali, was I started researching time management techniques, looking up how I manage my own time, and I encountered hundreds of time management techniques. And as I'm writing this, I'm going, okay, well, there's so many, and there's the promoter technique, and the A, B, C, D, da-da-da, and the time blocking technique. I asked myself, why is there so many techniques? If any of them worked...

for everyone there wouldn't be so many of them kind of like fad diets there's just a million endless list people are writing new ones because the current ones are failing them so they're going in search of new ones and people are writing new ones um and the reason why the old ones are failing them is because they don't have discipline any of these time management techniques would work if you could stick to them you know i say that like objectively i think they would um

So where does discipline come from? And why does discipline matter? And then I started writing about death, because I think you have to understand there's a really important relationship between our time and discipline, because

we could choose to do everything in a world where time was infinite. But it is the scarcity of time, the limited amount of time we have, which I talk about in chapter 19 of my first book, when I'm talking about the roulette pieces and the chips we wake up with every day. We wake up with 16 chips left out of the 24. We've placed eight of them on sleep.

So through that framework, it's important to allocate your time with a certain intentionality or you might regret the life you've lived. So that's why discipline matters because I only have 16 chips after spending eight of them on sleep. So if I don't want to have a regrettable life, I must need discipline.

As I go down my thought process here, I started talking about death and the fact that if I'm a 35 year old now, I'm 30 now, but I have 17,000 days left to live roughly if I meet the life expectancy of the USA. So I need to figure out in order to live a non-regrettable life, how to be disciplined. Then I started to examine the areas of my life where I possess discipline and the areas where I don't. And I was trying to establish a relationship between the two. Why am I really disciplined with going to the gym now?

but I'm undisciplined in other areas. Why am I really disciplined with... I was speaking to Simon Sinek the other day and I was telling him about this discipline equation. And he was like, yeah, but Steve, you know, I don't love putting the bins out, but at eight o'clock in the morning, I got out of bed yesterday and went and put the bins out. And I was like, no, that makes perfect sense, Simon, because the discipline equation to me is, and this is super, super rough. At the start of the equation, you have...

Why that goal subjectively really matters to you. Like how much that goal really subjectively matters to you. Plus the psychological enjoyment you get through the pursuit of the goal. Minus the psychological...

dissatisfaction and friction you get in the pursuit of the goal. So if I put that in the frame of Simon Sinek there, and what he said about getting out of bed at 8am because he could hear the bin truck coming down the road, I said to Simon, what is the cost of you not putting the bins out? There's two costs. Cost A is the bins overflow, and then he's got nowhere to put his, as they would say, garbage. Cost B is you can get fined.

So the reason for doing it is high at the start of the equation. The psychological enjoyment you get from it is super low, right? And the friction is high.

But the why is higher than all of it. So the equation still balances in terms of incentives for you to get out of bed and do it because you don't want to find an overflowing bins. And that desire is greater than the friction is. And in the context of me going to the gym, I didn't go to the gym for 27 years of my life. I couldn't find the discipline to do it. I was like most people, like I made the intention. I announced it to the world. I failed. And I did that for three years. I announced it to the world. I failed. And then the pandemic happened.

And I watched as the world was torn apart because our health outcomes were linked to our fitness and our current health. And as I watched that in March 2020, through the screens and watched Italy be ravaged by this pandemic and watched it come over from Wuhan and then start to creep through Europe, I realized very unforgettably that there is this tectonic plate called my health, which I'd never seen shake before.

And I was witnessing it shake globally, vicariously. And everything I'm pursuing and care about actually sits on top of it. My girlfriend, my dog, my cat, my businesses that I've built, my podcast, everything I care about is on top of that. So the tectonic plate of my health is my first priority. If you remove my health, you remove everything. You can take my other stuff. It doesn't impact. There's no relationship between them, really. But the health is the number one thing.

And that, going back to my equation, you can see how that influences the equation. Suddenly, the reason, the why for the goal to go to the gym and work out was so strong that it outweighed the friction. And for the last three years, I've gone to the gym 82% of the time, which is six days a week, roughly. And it's stuck. And now it feels to be effortless because the incentive structure is so clearly...

aiming towards discipline. Nice. I really like that equation. And as I was reading it, I was thinking that second component, the psychological joy of the pursuit of the thing. Yeah. That is the one that my whole productivity philosophy is based around. Because for me, discipline is like, having to rely on discipline to me feels like a negative thing. It's like, okay, I'm suffering, but it's worth it.

So when I read the chapter about health in the Diary of a CEO, I was reading this on a flight to Florida to attend a Tony Robbins event. And I was in a bit of like, yeah, I'm going to read the book. And you had that chapter where you talked about health. And it's the same stuff you talk about in a happy second. It's like somehow the reminder hit me so well that immediately I texted my assistant being like, okay, I need to take my health seriously. And the system we're going to put in place is I currently don't enjoy going to the gym. It's not fun.

I appreciate that it's valuable. But for me, that appreciation that it's valuable does not actually provide direction. Therefore, I need to make it fun. Therefore, can we book me a personal trainer and give him the goal that like three times a week, let's try and make working out fun. And so we've got the first appointment tomorrow, the next one the day after. And it was a direct result of seeing that reminder where I was like, fuck.

that's so amazing ali that's so incredible so amazing because it's a strange thing to find in this book i think i think it's like law number nine about your first foundation just remembering that everything you've done in your life like same same for me is contingent on that yeah and help goes everything else just dies it's just and then so why don't we live our life with that as the first like priority in the list of things you know if it is the tectonic play it should be the first thing

But even thinking about that through the discipline equation that you can know something, you can know something. I was saying to Rich Roll earlier, I know meditation matters because every guest has told me. I don't do it because when I look through the lens of the discipline equation, it's not just about the equation itself. It's also about how that then stacks against your other priorities.

So you can have, the equation can be in your favor, but in a world of finite time, there might be other things that are even stronger.

in terms of forces of discipline. So I know that meditation is good and I want to do it, right? It's like there. The psychological enjoyment of it is maybe not huge. The friction is kind of high because it costs you time and stuff like that. And it's a bit hard to just think of nothing or whatever the process is. So it's like slightly in the favor of doing it. But then in the context of 16 chips left when I wake up in the morning,

It's not going to win out over these other disciplines. So all of the disciplines are also competing with each other to get into the calendar. Yeah. And I think when, like in your case with the health stuff, it feels like when there's a clear emotional trigger, that's where it takes it from intellectual knowing to actual knowing. 100%. Whereas for me, I haven't yet had that with health for some reason. And so it's intellectual knowing. I said this to Rich with meditation. I said, maybe I need a little bit more pain. Yeah.

And I say this, I think sometimes I don't always say it because it's not the most empathetic thing to say in certain situations, but it's become clear to me from doing the diary of a CEO that change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of staying the same, as they say. And rock bottom is unfortunately a remarkable driver of transformation and changing people's lives. Yeah.

that some of us need to be for the why part of the discipline equation to suddenly go, you know? Yeah, I think the same thing applies to people who want to sort of quit their jobs and eventually start a business as a side hustle, all this stuff.

Like for me, when I read The 4-Hour Workweek, it was an intellectual knowing of like, oh, it would be nice to have a side business. But when I saw doctors in real life, absolutely miserable, 10 years into their career, and I was seeing them every day and talking to them and they were absolutely miserable and they couldn't leave the job because they didn't have enough money. That was when it became like...

like sort of deep a deep within a grounding of like oh shit like i don't want to be in that position where i'm shackled to a job i don't enjoy and that to me was the idea of hell so it's like that prompted so much action while i was at university and people would be like oh you're so disciplined you're like building a business on the side or editing videos on the side i'm like

didn't feel like it took much discipline at all it was just like the pain of the the pain of the alternative was just so great i'm just like we're gonna do this what i heard what i hear there as well is like the distinction between knowledge and belief one of them was knowledge the other one was belief and as i talk about in the book about like um flat earthers and stuff like that you can show them knowledge you can show them information

But there's nothing that will, in the case of someone that believes the earth is flat, the only possible way you could change their beliefs is if you took them up in a spaceship and showed them the earth with their own eyes. Because first party evidence that we experience with our own eyes, whether it's vicariously by watching someone you know and care and trust go through it, or you go through it yourself, is the path to belief change. And that's why I say sometimes like maybe you need a little bit more pain or there's a rock bottom you haven't yet gotten to with some of those more stubborn beliefs.

because all your friends and advice and the podcast and the quotes you've listened to haven't been enough. But also when you think about self-belief, how to build self-belief and confidence, same thing, first party evidence, looking in the mirror and saying like, I'm beautiful and I'm going to be this and that and the other, none of it works as far as I'm concerned. None of that works. It's not stronger than the seven-year-old that told you you're a jackass and what your dad said to you in the kitchen that time about your hair. Like that's a stronger belief

group of evidence that's ingrained in your self-story so the way that you counteract those stubborn beliefs you don't want to have is you have to go out there and you have to put yourselves in growth zones where you're going to be where those beliefs will be confronted and you'll be given first party evidence that those beliefs aren't true knowledge isn't enough unfortunately it is sometimes when the existing belief isn't super strong and stubborn

But if the existing belief that like, I'm a bad public speaker and I can't do that is super strong, then the only way to counteract it is with first party evidence, which you'll get from stepping outside of your zone of comfort.

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It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading212, for sponsoring this episode. I did an interview with Professor Steve Peters this morning, who I think has been on your pod as well. Oh, really? About the chimp paradox, and we talked a lot about limiting beliefs, goblins, gremlins, like the limiting beliefs that imprint onto us in childhood that is so hard to shake. Yeah. I wonder for you, what are some of those limiting beliefs that you still struggle with?

Limiting beliefs. One of my limiting beliefs, and I don't know how interesting this is, is that I believe I'm not organized. And so that shows up in my life. And I've almost abandoned the will to change it. And as my life has become more optimized towards the things that I'm good at, there's less, if we think about the discipline equation,

there's less reason to change it. There's less apparent reason to change it. So growing up in my home, it was a total mess. And the doors in my house had holes in them, like big holes in them, because just over the years, we're just like, as you know, four kids in a house, parents aren't there, smashed up the doors. It looked like the house of a hoarder. That's the environment I grew up in. There's almost something quite deep within me where today as an adult, I feel comfortable with mess because I grew up in mess. So I'm

I see that reflected in my behavior sometimes. Like I'm quite a messy person and it's a reflection of home. So that's one of them for sure. I have lots of other like insecurities and I think a lot of like hard, wide, not enoughness in me. That's like deep within me. That's it. Like I think growing up in, you know, it's funny because at the time I didn't know, but as I grew up and I became an adult, I look back on,

how I felt going back to that signal of how you feel growing up in Plymouth in like 1994 where everyone is white everyone is like well most people are doing okay even my street was like middle class nice our house was just destroyed at the time um

and you understand the value of things by the context in which you see them. So like on a menu, if there's three steaks, then you'll assume that the top one is delicious and the bottom one isn't going to taste good and it's cheap, and you'll therefore usually pick the middle one. If you remove one of those steaks, decision-making changes. In the same way, I grew up in a street full of, and in context full of, white people who had more money than me. So...

And had more money than our family. Like the shame of when my dad was dropping me to school in that van in the morning, praying that the traffic lights would turn red as far from the school as possible so that no one would see the car we were driving in or my family, um,

Like all those things, you reflect on those things and how like, how enduring that feeling was throughout my life. Like no, pretty much, I think there was one kid, I think there's one kid in the like 16 years that I lived in that city, grew up, that knew where I lived. Imagine that. Because when people would drop me home, I would tell them to drop me at the very top of the hill. I would tell them a different street and I'd get out and walk it. And then there's no way I'd let someone at school come into my house and see that we lived in like,

you know, in a mess. And you imagine just that subtle, constant desire to...

avoid the shame you're feeling and to fit in chemically relaxing my hair until i was about 16 years old like if you look at the old pictures of me when we're in the vlog you see this kid that has like kept like i have straight hair and i've like got this fringe and i've got like the skinny top on with the skinny jeans all of that shame and insecurity i think it permeates throughout my life a little bit i think it's part of my my ambition and i'm dry and my drive if i'm honest with myself

I think it's why I work hard and I think it's why I often ask guests if they're driven or dragged because I think part of me is being dragged. I've sometimes wondered this about you because especially like, you know, you guys have released a vlog now for three weeks. And just like every time I watch the vlog, I'm just like, wow, this guy is relentless. And in my mind, I'm thinking,

You've already made the money. You've already had the success. You've got the biggest podcast in the world. Like, what are you doing it for? So the reason I pause is because it's very easy to bullshit. And I don't want to bullshit. But it's also hard to know the answer. And I think most of us, we get used to giving an answer to that question. But I care a lot about whether it's true or not. And so...

I think if I was to hazard a guess at the truth, I would say it's a multitude of reasons. I would say on one hand, there's no greater feeling than doing something that people appreciate and adds value to someone else's life. There's no feeling like the feeling I experienced this morning when I walked into the office and the girl that grabbed me and said, I just quit my job. Literally this morning, I just quit my job. And I told my boss in that interview why I was quitting. And it's because of your podcast. I'm listening to this particular guest and they helped me with this thing. There's no metric that actually

that actually feels like as good for the human being as that. The ego might love, oh, we hit 3 million subscribers. It's funny, I walked into my team that day and go, I realize none of us care that we hit 3 million subscribers. I also don't care. It's important that we use this as a metric to understand that we've done well as a team, but I realize none of us care because we're like feigning caring. Who cares if you hit 3 million subscribers? It's one more than 2,000,000,000. But it's nice to have milestones where we celebrate

That matters to me. It matters to me that we're creating stuff that's helping people. That really matters to me. On the other end, I do look at the metrics all the time, as I know you do. Or at least you did. Yeah, stop now. Okay. I remember very vividly you telling me that you used to be really obsessed with it all. And it wasn't great. So that's important. I still have a bit of that in me where it matters to me how the episodes perform in terms of numbers. I don't know why, but...

It does. I want the episodes to do really well and I want things to grow and move forward and get bigger. I want that. Maybe that's the shame, like the kid again, trying to be enough. Why am I doing it? I believe in life to be happy, you have to kind of fulfill these five objectives in your profession. Number one, you need challenge, right? Things need to become incrementally more difficult, right?

to the level of appetite that you can take. That's why in game psychology, every level gets harder. You're not going to do the same crossword on the same difficulty over and over again. You would lose motivation. Daniel Pink, his book is behind you, says this. They do it in studies. If it's the same difficulty, people lose motivation. So when you're building teams, the thing you've got to know as a CEO or as a founder is the depth of difficulty that every single member of your team is at. And if at one point, one of your team members isn't challenged enough

they will quit. You're about six months from them asking for a meeting. Okay. So keep them one foot out of their depth. And I have this mental model in my head of all my team members. And I actually sat here this morning with one of them this morning at 9am this morning, who I knew was too comfortable. And my conversation with her this morning was give me 48 hours. I'm going to return you to the state you were when we working together in New York, where you were out of your depth. I

Because I know that's what you need. She didn't articulate that to me, but I knew it is. I know the reason why she's like, hmm, feeling... This is one of my companies. One of my companies. It's because she's not out of her depth anymore. Factor number two to be motivated and enjoy your work is...

what I call the progress principle, sense of forward motion. It's one of the laws in the book as well. When they interview people in work and say, what's your best day in work? Harvard Business Review found it was on days where people had a sense of progress. This is also what David Brailsford speaks to when he entered the British cycling team. Many people think of Sir David Brailsford who took over that down and out British cycling team and made them the best to ever do it.

They attribute the success of that to the fact that he cared about these 1% marginal gains. 100%. That is a huge part of it. But what Sir David Brailsford said to me, which I actually think is more important because it's the macro tailwind, is when we found those 1% gains, those small ways to improve something, making the water bottle one centimetre bigger, the pillow softer, the important part was the impact it had on people's motivation because, quote, we felt like we were going somewhere.

Humans need that sense of we're going somewhere. So if you're a CEO, one of the most important things you should always do, which I try and do a lot with my teams naturally, is

constantly remind the team of the fact that we are going somewhere. It's a feeling in the room. And so David Brailsford told me that when he could get that feeling into the room of we're going somewhere because those 1% gains are the easiest to find. It's hard to find a big gain in any pursuit. It's hard to, in what you do and what I do, finding those 100% gains, it's an accident.

focus on the smallest things, find it, enjoy the win together, which is like, oh my God, we just made this 1% better. There's a trackpad glued under the table you're at right now. And the trackpad is there because me and my team just found a 1% gain last week where during the conversation with someone, sometimes they say amazing things and I want to write it down and just remember it because that might be the title, the thumbnail, the description or whatever. And then after the conversation ends, I forget it. My team come up and say, what do you think of the episode? I don't have any notes.

Because I've had to pay attention. So you'll see a trackpad under the table where you are now. Can you feel it? Is it there? Maybe it was the trackpad they removed. There's a little Velcro. Okay, so that was the trackpad. So all I do is I just tap it with my finger. And what it's doing is that system underneath the table is listening to every word we say.

and it highlights it so the ai will highlight it and send it off to my team so afterwards i have all my notes and i just got to tap the bottom of the table idea let's do that it's a great idea but but anyway that's an example of a one percent gain we found as a team and when we did that we shared it with the whole team and it and we enjoyed it and we're like this is so awesome and it created that impression that we're going somewhere we made progress today that's point number two so you need to challenge yourself you need a sense of forward motion number three i'm going to say is um

I'm going to say you need to be pursuing a goal in your life that is subjectively meaningful. It goes back to what we said earlier. If you interview all members of my team, and there's hundreds of people across different companies, but if you just focus on the podcast team where there's 25, 30 people, every single person will give a different reason as to why they work here.

Holly will say it's because of this. I'll say it's because of this. Will will say it's because of the creativity and his love of production. I don't care what your reason is as long as you've got one. So you haven't got to give them all the same reason.

You haven't got to align on reasons, they just got to find theirs and you've got to help them find their reason. So that's point number three, if the goal is to feel subjectively worthwhile to you. Number four, which is super backed by science, we just touched on it a little bit, is autonomy and control. Feeling like you have control and autonomy of your work. When people don't have that in their work, physiologically, they're more prone to disease. Psychologically, they have tons of really difficult challenges and

so having control and autonomy over what you're doing is integral to feeling like a free animal that's not in a cage and last one maybe the most important of all because we can all recount on times in our lives where we had the previous fall but didn't have this one and the job and the work sucked is you've got to be working with a supportive community of people that you like

And that makes all of the other ones better. Makes all of the other four better. Notice that I haven't said, you know, I haven't said a particular career or a particular, you know, job or anything. If I have these five things in my profession, Steve will be balanced. And I've applied these five things to psychedelics, where I worked for a year, invested in the company of Ty. We took the company public.

at a big valuation in June 2021, I believe. I've applied it to Huel, to my businesses, to marketing, to software with Third Web. I'm applying it to podcasting, I guess, so business. I'm applying it to DJing. I'm applying it to the event businesses we run. I'm applying it to my production company, which we're doing shows on the BBC at the moment. So the subject doesn't matter. It's less important than what people think. I think everybody's

Everyone in this room and everyone listening to this now could find their passion in a multitude of industries if they had these five things. The subject matter is less consequential because I wasn't born to be a social media CEO. Didn't exist when I was born. So how could that possibly be my passion? But I have these five things. I've had those five things for a long time. As you were saying those five things...

Those are all five things that I talk about in my book as well. Because mine is called Feel Good Productivity. It's about what are the factors that make work enjoyable and how do we add more of that into what we do.

So the framework that I use is the three Ps, which is power, play, and people. So power is autonomy, control. Power is also the sense of improvement and competence, like you're getting better at the thing. Initially, we exploded this into like 10 different things. We were like, ah, 10's too many to remember. And then it was five because we had power, play, people, progress, and purpose.

And we were like, oh, but like five P's is a bit much as well. And like Dan Pink has already got the, and then we turned it into three, three P's and just sort of shoehorned in the subheadings in there. And so power, play and people. Play. Interesting. Please explain play. So in power, I fit in both autonomy and, is it purpose? I fit both of them into there because you talked about

The thing being something you, well, how did you describe it just a second ago? Yeah. So, so, so for us, power is, um, kind of a combination of taking ownership of

autonomy control autonomy control and also um improvement like progress progress okay getting better at the thing and growing in the thing so it gives you that sense of empowerment of my five you've put control and autonomy and um progress kind of together in power yes exactly so play what's that play is one that isn't that isn't in your five um play is um approaching work in the spirit of play and i think that's not a thing that's required for something to be for for a job to feel meaningful

But it's definitely a thing, you know, that second component of your discipline equation where the pursuit of doing the thing is joyful in itself.

And there was so many stories that we found, like Nobel Prize winners, Richard Feynman, who was burnt out with doing physics. And then one day he sees in the Cornell cafeteria, he sees like a student like throwing a plate up in the air. And he sees that the logo of Cornell University is like rotating at a slightly different rate than like the circumference of the plate. And he's like, huh, that's weird. Why is the logo like wobbling at a different like rate than like the edge? And he uses that to model like...

like thermodynamic equations and stuff and ends up ultimately winning the Nobel Prize. And he says in his autobiography afterwards that the thing that cured his burnout with physics, because he'd been doing it for such a long time in World War II, his wife had died, was finding that sense of playback in it, that lightness and ease that you can approach work with to make anything that you do feel more enjoyable.

So play was a big part. And if I actually plays chapter one in the book, because we were like, we really want to lead with this philosophy that feeling good makes you more productive. Experiencing positive emotions in your work makes you more creative, makes you less stressed. On the case of Richard Freiman there, what was he experiencing in his work up until he saw that play? He was burnt out. He was, the work had lost meaning, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, because he'd be so his burnout period was like post World War Two, like he'd worked on, you know, the US defense thing, he worked on like the nuclear bomb, he'd, he'd, he had this meaningful goal to work towards. But then, you know, when he got his tenured professorship, he was like, his wife had also just died. So obviously, that kind of played a played a role in it.

And he was sort of feeling like, ah, these equations that once brought me so much joy are now like, they all feel meaningless. There you go. Until he went back to the play thing. So if number four in mind was subjectively meaningful...

a goal that feel is subjectively meaningful to you so that's where you kind of i fit that's the play part that is sort of the play part um our final chapter is also about purpose um and just sort of alignment and choosing goals that align with your core values i didn't initially purpose was the very first chapter because it was like well starting with why but i think the problem with starting with why which i will talk to simon about if i ever meet him i think the issue with starting with why is that it can often seem overwhelming if someone's in a normal job

that doesn't feel that meaningful or purposeful. You have to start with why they're like, well, there's no purpose beyond the fact that it's a job. And it's like, I applied to 50 jobs, and it's the one that I got. And it's quite heavy to start with why in that context. And so we instead we end with why to be like, hey, once you've once you've done all these things to make it not suck, once you've incorporated power and play and people into your work,

At that point, you've done everything you can. And now let's think about the purpose question. Self-actualizing. Exactly. And if at that point it's still not working, then maybe it's time to quit the job. And then people is your point about people. How exciting. So you've got power. In the book, you start with play. Play, yeah. Power, purpose, people. Yeah.

I love that. I should have done alliteration. So stupid. Alliteration makes things so much more easy to remember. Okay, well, it's published now, so I'm fucked. It's a good book. I've just taken so many notes. I love highlighting and annotating stuff. Thank you. Which one was... You've read both of them. It's very rare for people to actually read these books because people buy them and they just don't read them. Like, I'm guilty of that. Which one do you prefer, honestly? I... Hmm.

I actually think they were both very good at different stages of my life. So the two takeaways I took from the first one were basically the time chip thing, which I still use, and also the quitting framework thing, which I still use. What I took from this one was a reminder to take better care of my health. The 11 or so laws you have about marketing were really helpful because I was highlighting the shit out of them, being like, send to Jakob, send to Alison, which is super helpful. I'm like, God, like, friction, adding friction, yes. And it's like...

it was very specific to business stuff yeah whereas in the first book it was more general general life stuff it's where i was at yeah no exactly that's where you were at clearly as well yeah so i think it's like different books hit you at different times yeah because i'm i i've never said this before but i like i'm almost a little bit shy about the first book now because it doesn't represent who i am now it's much more you know broad and kind of lifey and much more

kind of opinions and vibes whereas i feel like the second one that the new one is much more technical and much more like here's how to do it very specific i like the specificity of it yeah and like you weren't you weren't hedging you were like you had an opinion on each one and i also liked how you named things and i was thinking oh shit i should have named more stuff in my book because you know there was the thing where instead of using the word manifestation you called it like plan a you

Never be a plan B. The plan A chapter, there's two. There's one negative manifestation, like the power of negative manifestation. There's another one where it's like plan A thinking. You must be a plan A thinker. Yeah, plan A thinking. I was like, oh, plan A thinking. What a good way of repackaging manifestation in a way, because I don't vibe with the word manifestation. And I suspect a lot of your audience don't either. But plan A thinking, I was like, hell yeah, I'm a plan A thinker. Well, you did the whole alliteration thing. So you beat me there with the whole play power purpose. Steal ideas from each other. Because you can't name my five.

in terms of the titles right now but I can name your five your four play I can do them in order as well play power purpose and people or did you put purpose at the end you said purpose at the end we call it alignment well there you go yeah well I remember yours yeah

So that's the problem. Anyway. Yeah, we spent so long trying to do like A, B, C, D, E, and like autonomy, and B for like C for competence, D for drive, E for something. And it's like, can we go to FG? It's like, no, let's just keep it simple. I really miss that. I really miss the fact that alliteration is important for these new ideas and frameworks. That could have been in the story section, the power of alliteration and the power of threes as well. You know, that whole thing about like, you're an incredibly loyal, passionate,

and empathetic friend. For some reason, when something is in threes, the brain just...

I always speak in threes. Same. This is our whole process for videos, for podcasts, for online courses. We always think, what is the three-part framework? You just did that in three as well. Video, podcasts, online courses. There's a line I heard from a friend who works at McKinsey. And he said that the trick that all management consultants use is that the client will ask them a question and they'll say, well, there are three reasons. And then while they're saying the first one, they'll figure out what the second and third one are. The power of threes.

That's why we put purpose at the end within alignment because we wanted three Ps and not four. And so we have three, in my book, we have three parts and each part has three chapters. There's nine chapters in total. This guy's got the three. Each chapter also has three subheadings. Initially, we had like four or five. I'm like, nope, simplify. This is getting weird now. No, it's a bit too meta. One thing that I have a bit of a bone to pick with you because so

I watched your first vlog episode and I felt very inspired. Everyone on our team loved it. We sent it around to each other. Like, oh my God, this is so good. Inspired us to start a vlog. And we were like, yeah, this weekly vlog is a great idea. It's like, initially we tried daily vlogging like last year, but like daily is too much. It's like we were scrambling for content, but then weekly we were like, that's a great idea. And so we're very inspired after episode one. And then I watched episode two and I felt depressed because it was just too good. And I was like,

Why are we even bothering? Like, what's the point? Our vlog is going to be nowhere near as good as Stephen's. Like, oh, it's like Dragon's Den. It's like half an hour long as well. It's like normally our stuff is really long. And if he was doing three minute vlogs, then at least we add more value. But so much value in that as well. And I felt that sense of comparison. And I felt like, oh, what's the point? And one of the things that you talk about a lot is

as everyone does, is comparison. I think it was in the first book, like comparison is the root cause of our loss of self-esteem. So I wonder if you can speak to that. Is that something that you still struggle with? This sort of comparing yourself to others and feeling as if like, oh, didn't do as good a job as, yeah. I hope, I now believe that I, do I compare myself to others? Again, I want to pause to make sure. We all do. I think that's the first thing I have to say is it's human too.

And I've thought a lot about this, actually. I'm just going to go on a little bit of a tangent. I'll come around the houses and come back. You, when you said that, were beating yourself up a little bit. Like, it's important to the relationship you have with the feelings you have to understand that all of those feelings are there for survival reasons. And your body and your mind is not against you. It's very, very much on your side. The problem is we live in a world now where your body...

is misaligned with the world we live in. So in the context of sugar, right? Once, the reason why we have sugar cravings is because if you came across berries on the Serengeti, let's say, 10,000 years ago, eating those berries kept you alive. So your brain is attuned to eat more of them. The reason why we struggle to lose weight and lose belly fat is because the amount of belly fat you had correlated to how long you had left to live.

You know, so your body has this, the brain is trying to defend your weight. So losing weight is difficult because if you go for a big run, your body will then overcompensate with hunger and make you eat more. So that's why they often say cardio is not a great way to lose weight. You'll just end up eating more. The body is on your side. Comparison is important, really, really important and useful. And it's ingrained in all of us because we don't have time to make decisions about things in our

the real world. So our brain is using shortcuts and comparison is a wonderful shortcut to understand what something means, the value of something, and it's hardwired into you to help you to survive. As is your loving of sugar, your need for status. Again, important for you to fit into your tribe. If you were kicked out of your tribe, then you would die. Your body would go into self-preservation. Your stress levels would go up. You'd sleep less. You'd live seven years less longer. So all of these things that we fight with

We shouldn't be fighting with ourselves. It's just a case the world has changed and the body hasn't evolved to deal with it. Comparison's one of them. It's ingrained in us. We all have it. I'm sure I can prepare myself every day to everybody I meet. And I see this guy on Instagram with great muscles and I go, Jesus, what am I doing over here with this? You know, I'm doing that at all times. And I have empathy with myself for that because it's important to start with a place of

of empathy towards that and not like self-resentment. Okay. So it's normal to compare ourselves. It's not normal to live in a world where we see 7,000 people a day on a glass screen and the brain can't compute that information. It's not meant to, it's not normal to have a fridge. The brain wasn't designed in a world with fridges. Do I compare myself? Yes. Um, do I, how I interpret the comparison is the key part. So I look at things you've done over the years and I

I go, man, that's so dope. We can do that. I look at what Mr. Beast has done and go, I'm like studying this guy and I'm learning and I'm going, man, this guy's a gold standard and I'm learning from him. And I'm, you know, I write about him a little bit in one of the laws in the book about the first five seconds and,

And I look at Rogan and I go, man, this guy just sits there and does no preparation and then just like talks about like an anthill with like this super smart person or he'll get his mate on from the comedy club. That is insane how he does that. So I hope, I hope that my comparison results in inspiration and not like jealousy or resentment or any of those negative, self-destructive, unproductive feelings. And I think that can be a practice. Yeah.

I think you can realize that life really isn't like a zero sum game and that like everyone can win. Um, and that from, from them winning, they, they can, they can teach you something if you're there to listen. Most people lean out when someone is doing well. So they'll like, they'll attack, criticize or, um, or try and diminish that because of the dissonance it creates. What you described there as cognitive dissonance to some degree, like,

What I mean by that is when something you observe is at odds with your sense of self-identity or what you believe about the world, and it causes the psychological discomfort. If you're going, that's really good. Like we're not gonna be able to do that. There's different ways you can deal with the dissonance. One way is you can say, yeah, but he's got a team of 30 people. That is a great way to deal with the dissonance. It kind of like diminishes what you've seen and it makes it make sure it is right. He's got 30, but he's got 30 people.

Or you could say something else, right? The harder thing to do, I think the most important thing to do is what I call in the book, I'm going to butcher his name, but I'll call him the president of Israel did, when Reagan, who was his friend, went to that Nazi burial site. And obviously being Jewish, watching Reagan, who was meant to be your friend, go to that burial site, when reporters asked him,

You know, what do you think of Reagan going to that where, you know, where there's Nazis buried? And he says, when a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend and the mistake remains a mistake. What he's doing there is he's doing the hard thing of holding the dissonance separate, like holding these two facts separate.

it separately. He's not diminishing it. He's not saying Reagan's not my friend or yeah, but he didn't go to a burial site where the bad Nazis were, were buried. He held the two things together. And in doing that, you have, you create enough space to learn and to observe and for nuance, which is rare in this world. The thing we're all doing at the moment is just diminishing the other side. We're not listening. So, um,

Going back to it, if you're able to hold that dissonance, it becomes really productive and useful for you, which most of us are not able to do, especially if we have low self-esteem or we have those other issues because the dissonance feels a little bit too close to home. It actually says to us, I'm not good enough.

And that's a very deep thing to experience in the light of someone else's success. For their success to convince you that you are a scumbag and that what that seven-year-old said to you in school is true about your sense of self-worth is a lot to take. So if you have low self-esteem, I think reducing the dissonance by slamming the person, being pessimistic, justifying it away is much more likely.

So you interview a lot of kind of very successful people. Do you ever find yourself in that unhealthy comparison mode? Or have you gotten so good at the sort of comparison equals inspiration rather than comparison equals envy that it's just,

I've never sat with someone and thought, man, I'm so jealous of you. But I've sat with so many people and thought every day, I think I will never be as good as you at what you do. I will never have the knowledge recall, the intelligence, the perspective, the articulation. I will never get there. I will never be. And I wish I was capable of it, but I'm able to separate out my admiration and my aspiration. Yeah.

They are two different things which we often conflate. I can sit with someone and go, you're the GOAT, you're the best to ever do it, you're so much better than me at that thing, and also not then aspire to become them. And I think actually that's because at this chapter in my life now, I'm okay with who I am. So I can admire, I can just do the admiration part without turning it back on myself and saying, what does that say about me?

And I see it in some of my friends, one friend in particular that I have. If I said to this one friend that I have in particular, I go, they go like, what are you doing? So I was like, I just went to the gym. Immediately, they will actually hear that as, why didn't you go to the gym? So I can't even have a conversation with them about like, oh, I went, I had it yesterday in the car. She said to me, oh, where have you been? I said, I just ran to the gym. And then I watched her face. And I mean, she goes, I'm going to be going to the gym soon.

And in that moment, what happened is she actually, she heard my experience and she heard my discipline or she heard my goal. And it was so, where she is in her life at the moment is she's quite self-conscious and she's struggling with self-esteem. So what she experienced was extreme dissonance, which was why didn't she heard me?

Her brain translated it to, why didn't you go to the gym? You're not good enough. What I said was, I've just been to the gym this morning. And that's, again, it goes back to the interpretation based on our self-esteem for these events. That's an extreme example, but it's kind of the same thing in terms of comparison. That's the extreme example where someone can just tell you what they did and you actually hear, why didn't you? You're not good enough. Yeah. Nice. That's good stuff. Yeah.

Can we talk about your buckets? So filling the buckets in the right order. There's no alliteration there either.

I should have done alliteration. Yeah. So I really vibed with that story. I wonder if you can tell the story of how you came to come across these five buckets. Yeah, you know the person that I'm referring to. And I have to say, there might be a little bit of folk tale to this because this person said it to me. And the individual that I'm talking about is, they're very good at storytelling. But what they said to me was they were in San Francisco and they might, yeah, they were in San Francisco and they,

a sweaty man came jogging past. And this sweaty man was kind of like short on breath and he was explaining like that he was building rockets and doing these microchips and these monkey brains and all building tunnels and all of these crazy abstract things. And then he ran off. And as you hear that story objectively, you go, that is a lunatic that has escaped from an asylum.

But in reality, it was Elon Musk. And the only reason that when I say it was Elon Musk, it suddenly becomes believable is because Elon Musk has spent his life filling these five buckets. So Elon...

Elon could say anything. He could create any ambition and people would sell their houses to invest in his ideas because he is someone who has five full buckets. The last one of which is maybe in question, but five full buckets. The first bucket is knowledge. He's committed his life. And there's actually a side story to this as well, which is when I met a famous monk in New York City, I was with Jay Shetty.

for the first couple of years of my life, I was dealing with this kind of mental conundrum as to whether committing my life to building businesses, which would ultimately enrich myself, was that a worthier cause than me going back to the village in Africa and saving just one life with the skills that I have, right? Like what was more of a worthy pursuit? So when I was in New York and Jay introduced me to this monk and there's this big room of people, I got to ask one question. So I asked that question. I said like,

If I could go to Africa, and I was like 22, 23, I was young, I could go to Africa and like commit my time to saving one life, or I could carry on building these businesses. Which one is more worthy? Which one should I be doing? And the monk said to me, you cannot pour out for others that in which you do not have yourself. And so what I interpreted from that is filling these five buckets. First one is your knowledge.

which Elon certainly has a very full bucket. It's important context here as well. This first bucket of knowledge is always growing bigger. There's more knowledge to acquire. It's like a bucket that is increasing in size as more knowledge is available.

First bucket is your knowledge. The second bucket is your skills. Nothing in life can ever empty these two buckets. The remaining three buckets that I'm going to describe can be emptied. Things can go wrong, you can get fired from your job, professional earthquakes. But these first two buckets, no one can ever empty them, your knowledge and your skills. And skills are really applied knowledge. So when you learn something and then you apply it, we call it a skill.

which is kind of what we've been talking about with like knowing something but then doing it is completely different. You can read about exercise but then knowing how to do the squats and stuff comes from the application of the knowledge, which is a skill. These are the most important buckets in your life because when these overflow they fill the other three buckets of your resources, your network and your reputation. Now these three things, these buckets can empty at any time.

And if you're young and you're thinking, okay, which job should I take? You should make the decision through this frame because I talk about one of my team members in the very early stages of my entrepreneurial career who decided to leave our company because he was offered a great job title and a big paycheck, which is reputation and resources. But he hadn't filled his skills and knowledge bucket. He'd kind of like managed to

convince someone that he was capable of being a CEO of a very big company, even though he didn't have the knowledge and skills. And it's quite obvious what happens there. Life will catch you out. If you don't have the knowledge and skills to meet the situation you're in. What I'm fortunate for is in my life, I spent maybe three to four years working in call centers, picking up the phone, calling Dorothy at 9pm to sell artificial grass windows, doors, conservatories, kitchens,

because it filled up this knowledge and skills bucket profoundly. I could have got a more glamorous job, but choosing a job at that early age that was focused on my knowledge and skills, not that paid me more or that had higher status amongst my friends, is the reason why I was able to launch businesses and do well at a young age. So I would just impress upon people to really focus and prioritize those first two buckets, especially when you're young and especially when they're empty.

Yeah, this is a thing that I've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs. You know, I asked the question of if someone's young and they want to start their first business, what do you recommend?

And a lot of people say that if you want to start a business, it is very worthwhile getting a job at a startup first that has like fewer than 10 people because you will learn so much stuff and you're being paid to learn. And the objective of that is for you to just, you know, as you say, fill up those buckets or like add stuff to them of knowledge and skills. And then when you start your business, you're way, way more ahead of the curve than if you just quit your job, start a business completely from scratch.

And now you're having to fill the skills and the knowledge while also not having any money coming in. That's like a harder place to be. 100%. And it's like the cheapest way to fail, right? It's the cheapest way to observe failure. We talked about how beliefs are first party. Experience them yourself with your own eyes. Like you saw your doctor friends unhappy. And we talked about the importance of like, you know, beliefs coming from experiments you run.

being outside of your zone of comfort a startup is that environment exactly cheapest way to fail cheapest way to get that information to see it as close as you possibly can in a big corporate you might be cloaked from it so many people so much responsibility the failure kind of happens somewhere at the top and it's you know you don't see the consequence of it and also sometimes there's not a consequence of it in a big corporate you know it doesn't cost the company their

the lights um but in a startup you get all of that without the failure being you know it's a low cost way to fail yeah nice um law 22 you must become a plan a thinker interesting plan a thinker um i describe plan a thinking as really interestingly i'm like making a bunch of connections here because it kind of links back to what we said about discipline and prioritization

You know, our time is competing with a series of other things that we want to do. The problem is the studies and the stats show that if you give someone in a study an alternative, you even let them think about an alternative, they are less motivated for the primary objective. So the studies that I talk about in the book are, they get people to sit down and they say, this is the goal.

And if you do this goal, you'll get a candy bar, let's say. Then they ask the people to do the task. In a second study, they say, sit down, this is the goal. If you complete it, you get a candy bar. But just think about another place here on campus that you could get a candy bar. Just the thought of where else they could get a candy bar

that distorts their motivation and reduces their motivation towards the goal. So the evidence is really clear. When you have a plan B, it only detracts from your motivation and your commitment towards the plan A. Plan Bs are detrimental in the context of motivation towards a plan A. And I reflect on my own life. And again, I didn't have a plan A. When I called my mother and I said, I'm dropping out of university and I was shoplifting those pizzas at 18 years old to feed myself. Um,

It was like survival. Like I was either going to be successful or I was going to be successful. There was not a plan B option. I couldn't, I didn't have anywhere else to run to. So I think that focus, and you know, I talk about the story of the plane crash in the book, which is one of my all-time favorite stories.

Um, that focus enabled me. It was just at 10% more wind in the sails towards where I wanted to go. And sometimes 10% is the difference. It was just that, you know, on that day where it's really difficult and there's so many reasons to quit. And if I had a comfy place to run to that would have played on my subconscious and maybe tempted me to run, to run to that soft, comfortable place, not having that, put that energy back into the mission. And that's kind of what I speak about when I'm talking about planning thinking it's,

It's removing the alternative so that you can use all of your energy towards the main goal. Yeah, there's a remarkable power and focus. We've found this in our team recently, like...

It's so tempting. There's the infinite list of things that we could do. And then we'll be like, yeah, let's do all of this stuff. And then it's like we're making 1% progress in like a dozen directions. But when we focus in like the one or two things that really matter, then we're able to make more progress in those areas. And so one thing we've now done, we work in six-week cycles. And every six weeks, everyone on the team just picks one quest. The one thing that they're going to do in the next six weeks that's going to move the needle in their particular area.

Which we found super helpful. I love that. Again, when I look at your vlog and see what you're up to, you're doing loads of different things. You've got the various companies, you've got the podcast. It seems like you're out at like random times of the night, three podcast guests in one day, and then like 3,000 people in the evening. There's a lot going on. How do you think about where you're spending your energy and focus? So I have to say that I'm struggling with it.

So I think it's important because I think it's important to be honest. Like I've overextended myself definitely in my life. I've taken on too many things, which probably means six to 12 months ago I said yes to things I should have said no to. I like deferred them to a future Steve who I didn't appreciate. I didn't appreciate the context he was going to be living in. So I've definitely overextended myself. I definitely struggle with it. I can do it in bursts, but I can't do it consistently consistently.

I can't be consistently intense. So this chapter of my life is very intense. I came off the back of Dragon's Den. The problem with Dragon's Den is it takes all my time away. So everything has to fit into the residual time. And the residual time isn't enough to record my podcast, to run the businesses, to invest, to do all the things I have to do within media and whatever else. So I'm struggling with it. The struggle means sometimes I'm falling asleep at 3 a.m. and I'm like...

I'm tense. I'm like, there's like an angst to me. Like I'm tense. My brain is blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, I'm trying to have a relationship as well. So I'm struggling with it. So there's a problem here. So I want to say that because I don't want anyone to think I've got it cracked. The important thing that I can do to control it is to have a clearer framework of what I say yes and no to.

which goes back to our discipline equation thing and also goes back to this quitting and starting thing. Like you've got to be able to say no to a lot of things in order to say yes to them. Saying no and yes have an equal importance in life. And then the bigger overarching thing, which I think most people are aware of is there's actually just a few, a couple of things that I'm, I should be doing with my time.

And they tend to be the biggest things and the smallest things. What do you mean? So as a CEO of a company, there's two areas where only you can do the thing that adds value. So it's like the big stuff, right? Like strategy and all that stuff. All the stuff in the middle, everyone else can do. There's people that can do that. And then the small thing, and I say small because it seems small, not because I think it's small, which is going over to Berta's desk and saying, happy birthday. Coming from me,

That means a lot to Berta. I realize that. And no one else can go over to Berta's desk and say happy birthday from Steve and create that same impact that I have on her, which is like letting her know that I know it's her birthday and it matters to me and that. So I do the really big things and then I do the really small things. And also within that, there's, I have like very limited amount of skills. And this is not me being like humble or whatever, right?

I'm very comfortable with the fact that most things I'm bad at, maths, organization, I said to you, messy, operational stuff, process stuff. I'm bad at all of that stuff. I never do it. I never try finance related stuff. Don't even look at it. Not my problem. Thankfully, my older brother works in my company full time now. So, and he's a math genius, as I think I explained earlier. But there's this little thing here where that's me. That's where, that's the thing that Steve is good at.

And that should be the thing where I'm allocating most of my proverbial chips in a day. My 16, well, let's say I'll give nine hours, let's say I'll give 12 hours to work a day. I should spend those 12 chips in work doing that thing that only Steve can do, which is hard to explain, but it's kind of like linked to marketing. It's really an understanding of human beings and like, yeah.

and visionary vision stuff like knowing knowing it's a philosophy thing it's like i talk about the in the philosophy section in the book like that philosophy towards work which is the one percents the experimentation giving that philosophy to a team of people so that we we find the right answers before other teams is my thing team culture and team philosophy and then the marketing bits i'm good at as well but nothing else i don't need to be good at anything else

Because you've got the podcast, you've got Flight Story, you've got Third Web. You invest in a bunch of companies which require you to get input on them and attend board meetings and stuff. You know, we do a lot of, I'm on a couple of boards that matter to me, healing company. I did a tie for a year, the psychedelics business for a year. And then, yeah, those are like my professional things that are occupying my time. And then driver's here. Yeah. Which is like, yeah, it takes a lot of time. So,

I guess my question is, why bother continuing with Flight Story and Third Web and investing and all this stuff? I mean, from the outside, it seems like Dario Vecchio is the main thing, but obviously you're less public about what goes on with the other businesses. It's a very good question. I have a disease of, I have the disease of entrepreneurship and I have the disease of self-belief.

And I have the disease of curiosity. And as those three things collide, you need an antidote to the disease, which should be focus and saying no to things. And the someday shelf where I think I talk about my first, I don't even know where I talked about it, but just the shelf where you have a great idea and you believe you can do it and you believe it matters and you just put it on the shelf. And then if it jumps back off the shelf, you pick it back up and you put it back on the shelf. And then if it keeps jumping off the shelf, maybe for 12 months, then you go, okay, right guys, right. Priority. Priority.

So with those three diseases, disease of entrepreneurship, the disease of self-belief and the disease of curiosity,

when things happen, I have a desire to build in that area. So when the blockchain conversation began, I had a real desire to build. It's the same reason why I went into a Tile of Sciences and spent a year working on taking a psychedelics business public and learning about all of the clinical data around psilocybin and magic mushrooms and ketamine and ibogaine and going through all of that research paper and then figuring out how I could use that to tell the story of the mental health movement through the lens of psychedelics and

constructing everything. I remember writing the script for the IPO video. IPO-ed, it's worth 3.2 billion. And I was fascinated. This is what, when I was talking about these five principles of loving work, it doesn't matter the subject. Subject is inconsequential. What matters is that I care. And that's why, because I have that disease. And sometimes I can't quell it, so it turns into a company. That's what happened with Flight Story and Third Web.

I love marketing. I love psychology and business. I used to steal the textbooks for psychology. And what is psychology and business? It's marketing. That's what it is. And with ThirdWeb, I was fascinated by the blockchain. So I started a company there. Called the smartest guy I knew, started chatting to him about it for six months. And then that led to ThirdWeb. If you had, let's say, I don't know, an extra 500 million in the bank. Yeah.

To what extent would, how would, how would you change how you spend your time? Such a good question. I would, I believe I would, and I might be lying to myself because we all bullshit ourselves sometimes. I believe I would stop. Okay. So if it was right now, if you give me 500 million right now in the bank versus, let's

I wasn't currently doing anything and I was starting from zero. Two different answers. Let me answer if I was starting from zero. If I was starting from zero and there was nothing in my life, there was no podcast, there was no businesses, third web flight story, all of it's gone, I would start a media company. That does pretty much what Dire Overseer is doing. And I'd make it, I would have loads of podcasts all around the world with lots of different wonderful creators that I believe are making the world better and have important opinions to share. And I'd be running one of the biggest media companies in the world. That's what I'd be doing.

Because I say this because doing the podcast is my ikigai. And so I would just do more of that. And for anyone that doesn't know what an ikigai is, it's a sort of Japanese phrase for when you find the thing that kind of provides you with the most fulfillment in life when it meets these four criteria of, and I might butcher this, so help me here, Ali, because I know you know it. The first one is something you believe you can be good at. The second one is something that pays you.

The third one is something you enjoy. And the fourth one is something that you believe is of service to others. Now doing the podcast is the first thing I've done in my life that really feels like that.

It feels like it completes the Ikigai. So if you gave me 500 million and I had none of these other things going on in my life, I would do more of that. Okay. What about scenario two where you do have all the other things? I would take the money and I would invest it into my companies. I back myself. I'd invest, I'd get 100 million today and I'd put it into FlightStory.

and make that the greatest marketing business in the world, the greatest sort of agency in the world. Take another 100 million, put it into third web. So we win that game we're playing there within web three. I take 100 million, I put in Dair of a CEO. And within Dair of a CEO, we have this really nice philanthropy charitable initiative. I'm doing this initiative with the Red Cross at the moment called this cash card thing. So I'd invest in that for refugees and disaster stricken areas. Yeah.

I wouldn't need the rest. I don't know, put it in a bank or put it in a high growth fund. At this Tony Robbins event I was at last week, it was business mastery. It was really good. Interesting. Very interesting from like a meta perspective of like how he does events and stuff. But also some genuinely like really helpful like advice on growing businesses. And one of the main objectives of the event was to take people from being operators to owners.

where an owner can have freedom, flexibility, their businesses can grow, they can build the empire, but they've got operators in place for the various teams and stuff doing the doing. And one of the things he was saying was sort of splitting up people into three archetypes. There's the archetype of the artist who believes in the work for the sake of the craft. There's the archetype of the manager slash leader. There's the person who loves to build systems.

And then there's the archetype of the entrepreneur who loves the thought of building something from scratch and taking risks and making all that happen. And I very much resonated with the artist thing where my answer to if I won the lottery, I'm like, great, all I'm going to do is learn cool stuff and make videos about it because that's my icky guy. But it sounds like for you, if you won the lottery, you had the lottery times five.

It sounds like you're more of the entrepreneur and that you enjoy the idea of like building companies and taking the risk and growing them. Yeah. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur, but I, I can resonate with what you said about the artist as well, because if you look at the Diver of Seer live show where we spent 700,000 pounds and we made 700,000 pounds. So we broke even, um, it took,

several months of my life. There was no financial reward on offer, but I love music. Same reason I've, I've started DJing a year ago, two years ago now. Um, and I love the creative element of creating something that makes people feel something. So if you observe what I do on a daily, if you observe the conversation, I mean, well, he produces the vlog had last night. I mean, we were sat where you're sat, right? So we were sat there

And what I'm talking to Will about, I think a lot is like the creativity, the story arc, the art, how I was talking to him about Dave at home or like the 16 year old in Zimbabwe who clicks on the video and the experience and the way we want her to feel. And that's like one of the things that I do in all my companies is I'm, I'm like when you see our trailers for the podcast or whatever, I'm heavily, and is the genius, right? And is a genius, give him the credit. Um, but

I see every single one and I, and we obsess over every single one. If you came to my live show, it's like, I mean, how do I describe it? 40 person choir on stage with a huge band and visuals and the new show, we've got sound effects and we, I've spent the time on like the lighting effects to immerse you. So you think you're going through the seasons of life. So the room gets cold, then it gets hot. And then, um,

and the projections across the wall and the violinist and the orchestra for this show that we've got and the choir and I've picked every song and, and, and how it all comes together to tell a story that makes you feel something so deep in your chest that you want to cry or you want to stand up and, you know, almost, you know, that's the stuff I love. That's the stuff I love. And it links to my love of psychology somehow. Um, I'm not good at like,

drawing or painting. So when I thought of artists, I thought of like drawing or painting or these geniuses you see like Fred again, who's like, and it's like a musical genius. I'm not that genius.

But I love things. I love knowing how the things we create impact humans at a profound and deeper level. If that's creativity, if that's what artists do, then I can resonate with that. Um, where, when I look at Elon, I see like an engineer entrepreneur. When I look at myself, I see someone that like loves music and, and the way that you can change a story arc to make someone feel something, um, and to move them in a way. So my

My team know it, like titles, thumbnails, trailer stuff, story arc of the episodes, any video any of my companies have ever made for any announcement ever. I do the storyboard. I do, you know, and he's laughing. Will is laughing at my team because I'm like obsessed with it. Yeah. So...

Whether I'm good at it or not is another question, but I love it. You know, whether I'm good at it is, I don't know, because art is such a subjective thing, but I love that stuff. And I actually never related to being a creative. I never thought I was creative ever. But it's from... And I don't even know if I quite call myself a creative yet. Yeah, I don't vibe with the word creative either. I've always thought of myself as not particularly creative. I think I just...

take ideas from sources and connect them and apply my own synthesis to it which some people say is creativity but it doesn't like to me creativity feels like drawing an art which i've always been bad at if i wasn't an entrepreneur the next most obvious thing for me to be is like a movie director that's like or it would be a therapist now there is actually i actually did

spend many hours looking for a course I could do on a psychology degree that I could do that would allow me to become a therapist like six months ago oh not like not like not like when I was younger I mean like I'm like looking now for these like out of you know well you don't have to go to the university you could do it at home because I'm so fascinated by people and why they do what they do as you can probably tell if you listen to the diary of a CEO that I thought you know it would be good to have some kind of qualification in that

So if I wasn't a therapist and if I wasn't an entrepreneur, then I would be a movie director because I love how you can tell a story that makes someone feel something, how you create that story arc and surprise. And yeah. Interesting. Um, final couple of things I wanted to ask you about. Uh, one is that, you know, something that I struggle with is that I'd love to get your take on is when there's lots of stuff going on. Um, and it can sometimes, um,

Like balancing that with, for example, the relationship with my girlfriend, seeing my friends, seeing my family, those things that are not in the work category, but the work category can just take over because of all the trips and all the cool stuff going on and all the, this person's in town, let's grab dinner with them. Oh, no, that's date night. Like, do you find, how do you manage that balance between the work stuff, which is obviously continues to explode for you at a ridiculous level with like,

real life, like friends, family, relationship. How are you doing with it? Struggling? I think I was struggling. I've created rules, like Mondays and Thursdays is always date night and that's non-negotiable. Even if like, I've had to say, even if Elon Musk is in town and wants to go on a podcast...

and my girlfriend can't do like anything other than the Thursday night, I'd be like, "Cool, let's prioritize the relationship." You're lying to my face. You are lying! You are lying to my face. If Elon was in town and wanted to come on my podcast, I'd be like, "Babe, you can come and watch, we can eat while I do it." So I've been trying to figure out like, what are the rules? Because I find having rules in place makes it easy to say yes or no to things. But again,

It's a constant battle. It's okay to say it's a constant battle and you struggle with it. I feel the same way. I really struggle with it. And I'm trying to make sure I've got a different decision framework for different goals in my life. In some areas of my life, you think about productivity as we would define it, you know, within society. So if you think about productivity and then you can measure it by certain OKRs or metrics or whatever. And then I've learned over time to apply different measurement framework to my relationship with my girlfriend, which is no framework at all. Hmm.

No measurement at all. And just going back to the like poker chip analogy, the whole idea of you get these 16 chips if you've spent eight sleeping is

You need to place them intentionally against your values and the things that matter to you. So we both agree that our girlfriend and our relationships really matter to us. So focus on the allocation that you're giving to the thing that matters to you and make sure it's in balance with the allocation of the other things that matter to you. And when I say balance, that doesn't mean it's equal, but it means that you achieve harmony. Yeah.

So balance, work-life balance is a load of nonsense, right? It's a load of like, it's really unhelpful because it implies, like imposter syndrome, it's a really unhelpful frame to,

It implies that you're trying to balance the scales, like 50 grams on each side. You're not. You're trying to find harmony, which is where you feel good in this context. You feel good about your life. You know, you don't feel like you're sacrificing anything that's integral to your contentment and happiness. That's what I'm trying to do. I don't have balance at all. I'm not trying to find balance. I'm trying to make sure I'm in harmony with my relationship.

And that is an ongoing dialogue and that's ongoing check-ins to make sure that harmony is there. Um, but it's a struggle and it comes in seasons. It's what a lot of people have taught me is that you don't have work-life balance. You have seasons of life. And in this season of life, you might be over-indexing or over-prioritizing this goal more. But then when you become a dad, Ali, as I'm sure we will both become in the next, you know, five, 10 years, if we want to, um,

You're going to go into a different season of life and then it's going to shift a little bit and that's okay. You know, that's okay. And I would also, I think it's important because there'll be some people that are listening to this that are like happy workaholics. Fine. Good.

Because the key word there in the North Star is the happy word. So if you're a happy workaholic and you genuinely know you're happy, you're not being dragged by an insecurity that you're quenching through this obsession with work. If you're a happy, peaceful, content, fulfilled workaholic, all power to you, you're killing the game. If you're an unhappy workaholic, there's a problem and you're out of harmony. So also have empathy for yourself if you're a happy workaholic because the world will try and demonize you. Oh my God, Ali, you're so toxic. Yeah.

But fuck them. Listen to the signal inside of you. Like, am I happy? And I think I'm a happy workaholic. And I've created a harmony with my girlfriend where our relationship is good and I can be intense in the way I want to be in my work most of the time. Right now, I mean, I've overextended, as I said. But most of the time, as me and we zoom out on the four years we've been together, we're good. Nice.

Does that help at all? It does. Yeah, it's helpful. I think that's sort of how I think about it as well. Sort of...

almost like you know balancing on a tightrope it's it's less about being rigid but it's actually about like swaying one way and another way and then rebalancing when you notice you're yeah you'll have a bad week you'll have a bad week and you'll know you've had a bad week in terms of like you're just fucking hell i've paid no attention to each other we feel disconnected you can you'll feel the frustrations lingering in the relationships something will happen in the bedroom like in the bedroom or the kitchen and it'll become so much of a bigger issue but it's actually because last week you were really disconnected that check-in process is so key yeah

Are you a good communicator with her? I think we have definitely gotten better at that over time. We have relationship check-ins and stuff, which are good systems because I like systems, as does she, which is nice. And where we ask questions like,

How's the relationship been for you this week? What are three things that you appreciate about me this week? How do you do that? We have a Notion page with a template. This is out of control. It's been going on for the last two years. You have a Notion page. It's actually really good. And she was the one who put it together rather than me because, you know, I was...

It's so good. Yeah. And it's like, you know, what's, what's one thing I did that made you feel loved, appreciated or respected. And then, so the first half of the review questions are like, you know, the nice stuff. And then it goes on to, you know, what's one area in which, you know, you felt I did something that made you feel a little bit bad, even if it's really minor, you know, let's just talk about it. And in those check-ins, the stuff that would otherwise feel too minor to bring up day to day, cause it's like, oh, it's minor. It's like, I'm not gonna bring that up. It's like those little things. That's a good chance to bring those little things up.

And to discuss them in the light of day. And usually we find that like having a couple of days distance from it, like when the thing, if the thing is very big, we'll discuss it when it happens. But if it's not, you know, we'll discuss it in a relationship review over dinner at like a nice place. I'm really curious here. Yeah.

Who adds to the Notion document and when? So it's a shared Notion workspace where we're both on it. And when we know it's a review day, so Monday, so like every other Monday-ish, we try and do that's the review time. In reality, it ends up being like once every three weeks or so. So one of us will take the iPad or the laptop or the phone, worst case scenario. And then if it's a laptop or an iPad, I'll type because I type faster. If it's a phone, we'll just sort of pass it around and take turns because phones are annoying.

So we've got like the notes stretching back the last two years because we've been together for two years now. It's really nice looking back and we sort of like note down any sort of major disagreement we have and call it a gate. Like, you know, there was, I don't know, France gate and like Tenerife gate and stuff like that where it's like, oh, it's interesting to look back on these big arguments that we had and like the takeaways from them to make the relationship better.

So interesting. And then is there a conclusion to each question? So if you say, you know, you said this to me in the kitchen last week and it really worked me because it triggered me in this way. Do you then write a conclusion next to it or anything? We write action points. Action points. Yeah. It's like in future, this is the thing. Like there was one time we went on holiday together. I thought it was going to be a working holiday because I was like, hey, I've got my book deadline. This is a work holiday. She was like, cool. You know, that makes sense.

Turns out my definition of work holiday is I work 14 hours a day and we grab dinner together. Her definition of a work holiday is we work for four hours in the morning and then we go sightseeing.

We only realized that like five days into the holiday. And so our action point from after the conversation around that was, okay, before every holiday, we're just going to align on expectations. I was chatting to Mark Manson a few weeks ago in LA and he was like, because he traveled around the world with his fiance. And he was like, oh man, the main thing is just expectation alignment. That's what Mo Gowdat, the thing, that episode that I did, the first one with Mo Gowdat taught me so clearly and profoundly. He said,

we're happy when our expectations of how our life is supposed to be going are met. And from that you can deduce we're unhappy when our expectations of how our life is supposed to be going are unmet. So met expectations equals the billionaire in Mayfair getting a medium rare steak when that was what she or he ordered. Unmet expectations would be he ordered or she ordered medium rare and it came, I don't know, bloody.

Like, it doesn't matter the fact that you're in a super bougie Mayfair restaurant getting a, you know, Kobe beef A5 Wagyu steak. Unmet expectations, you get unhappiness. And you go to Botswana where I was born, hot bowl of rice, expectations met for some of the people back in the village that I was born in. The objective is,

situation matters less than the subjective meeting of expectations. Unmet expectations in work, in your team members, in your relationship, in yourself will result in unhappiness. And that's so important to understand because then you can influence it. You can work on, as it relates to yourself, this is why gratitude is so powerful. Gratitude is, for me, it's like an adjustment of one's expectations.

I have this really fond memory of getting, I'm not sure if I've shared this on a podcast before or somewhere else, this fond memory of, I didn't get on a plane and fly other than flying from Africa to the UK until I was like 21. So we didn't do holidays in our family. The money wasn't there.

And I remember getting on that plane when I was 21 years old with my business partner at the time, flying to Thailand and economy and just being captivated by this concept of being in this tin can. And we were going to attempt to fly to Thailand and I'm looking at the like safety manual and I'm like, it's amazing. It's so such an incredible experience. I was so happy on that flight. Fast forward, fast forward five years. I'm flying 50 weeks a year in 2019, flying business and first class,

And all I'm doing is rushing on the plane, throwing my bag up and pulling my laptop out as fast as I can before it takes off so I don't lose Wi-Fi. And then that day I encountered the lady next to me on the plane. She's probably on like a honeymoon or something. She's like putting on the slippers and she's going, Dave, Dave, look at this catalogue and they give you champagne and she's picking it up and she's sipping it and she's old me.

And she's experiencing the joy that I used to experience when my expectations were exceeded. And nothing has changed in my life other than my expectations have increased. And with that, out the door has gone my joy. So what I can do now and what I do now is when I get on the plane, just before I step in,

I touch the top of the plane and I take a moment before I step on and just remind myself of the absurdity that I am getting in this plane. We're going to fly it somewhere. And I get to sit in this comfy chair that reclines. And when they bring over the show, that's so incredible. You can influence your joy if you manage your expectations. And, you know, as it relates to relationship, the curse of,

the source of all unhappiness in relationship is unmet expectations that's one you could do something about that yeah we need to compare more notes on this relationship being there hey i'll send you my uh my review template yeah um final thing is how so to what extent do you get criticism and how do you cope with it all the time you're a very public figure i think like with especially with the dragon's den stuff you kind of became more mainstream than like uh

personal improvement business podcast would normally get you it's an occupational hazard my friend said to me but bigger the podcast gets i look over at rogan and what he's been through yeah and i go wow it's yeah it's a lot for like what rogan's been through i just couldn't imagine what anyone going through but it's an occupational hazard and with the claps comes the booze and and all that stuff and i think the important thing is

doing everything you can to stay true to yourself. Because then in the context of any feedback, whether it's positive or negative, you're anchored to something. If that makes sense. You're anchored to your own, like, your own certainty in your intentions and your values and why you do what you do. So even when we put out an episode with Mo Gowda on the podcast about artificial intelligence, and I got, like, significant criticism for that because, um...

can be seen as scaremongering. So a lot of people thought it was scaremongering or clickbait or whatever else. Um, I believe in the message. I believe in what we said and what we did. And I know it's coming from a good place. So when we receive that, that critical feedback, um, I can, I can receive it, um, knowing that we acted in line with, um, our own

personal integrity if that makes sense so that is the pursuit is like making sure why you're doing what you're doing is is true to yourself because then it's easier to um proceed forward regardless of feedback which is difficult so what do you tell yourself like like if you see something on twitter or something like do you do you feel the sting initially and do you tell yourself a story or like how how does that go it depends it depends it depends what the feedback is so

When Dragon's Den airs, you'll get like a lot of people saying a lot of things. And I think at the start I was more tuned into it. I was more tuned into like reading the tweets. As time has gone on, I've realized that I need to put systems and processes in place that you, as you'd call it, to make sure that stuff doesn't infiltrate my piece.

Which for me means don't read stuff, don't search stuff, friends don't send me stuff, haven't searched my name in any search engine or any way you can search yourself in about a year now. And trying to focus on the feedback that you know is, whether it's critical or positive, the feedback you know is potentially valuable.

as much as you can. And this practice is more increasingly important as like you reach more people. Knowing where to look for feedback and knowing where not to look for feedback, I guess. So, but does it sting? I mean, like, of course, I could open up a comment section on like my own Instagram and someone says something and your initial instinct is to argue with the thing.

to try and like argue with the thing or to understand or to maybe win them over. But as time has gone on, the distance between experiencing, seeing the thing and my experience, my response and emotion to it has reduced, which means that I can see something and go, that's not true. Like I saw an article that said, I was said, Steve is going to release a line of boxer shorts with his name on it.

And I remember like someone had sent it to me. People don't send me stuff because they know just not to send me stuff. Like I'm just trying to keep focused here. And I'm thinking, I'm going to release a line of boxer shorts with my name on it. And they're like, yeah, you registered the trademark for the diary of a CEO. And one of the categories in which my team had registered it was like clothing.

So the, like the newspaper ran with a story that I was coming out with a underwear line, like a box, like a boxer short underwear line with my name on it. And you read that and then you like understand that that's gone out into the world and people believe that now that I'm coming out with boxer shorts with my name on them. Um,

and that it will influence people but you also reflect and go there's nothing i can do about that and that is okay it is it comes with the territory and the choice i have here is to completely remove myself from the universe and go to bali and like where i love love to go um or to carry on doing what i love to do and the choice i make is i want to carry on doing what i love to do brilliant steven i think that's a great place to end this i just wanted to say firstly

Thank you for being gracious and being interviewed on the pod, sitting in that seat. I think also like, you know, your work is just so inspirational to me, to my team, to basically everyone I know. We sort of share the podcast episodes around when the vlog started. We were all sort of like watching that together because it's so inspiring seeing what you're building and the huge impact that you're able to have. But I think...

On top of that, like there was one comment when, you know, you and I were both speaking in Sharjah in the UAE a few months ago, a year ago, something like that. And you came and joined me and Gordon, my videographer, for breakfast. And he was saying afterwards that, wow, what a class act Stephen is because you were talking to him as much as you were talking to me. And normally with like celebrities and stuff, they...

they'll ignore like the team members. I'm thinking, you know, like Gordon's been in a bunch of situations where the videographer is kind of invisible. And just the fact that you're so gracious with everyone around you. I'm feeling emotional saying this, it's weird. It's just so impressive. It's so admirable. And yeah, just wanted to say thank you. You're so sweet. I mean, I don't know what to say. But yeah, I mean, thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, thank you for saying that.

I'm trying my best, you know, I'm trying my best to be a good person. And I'm not always great at that. Like I'm not, I sometimes let myself down. I think about ways I reacted or days where I'm tired and I didn't show up in the way I wanted, but I'm trying my best because it really matters to me what you just said. Trying my best to leave more people with that feeling that you, you know, your videographer was left with. So thank you for that. Because I do give myself a hard time about it sometimes, you know, like where I am in my life now, it's like,

It's like, I realized that everyone I meet, I'm meeting everyone they know. Do you understand what I'm saying? So the girl that stopped me this morning as I was going into the office to tell me about quitting her job, like that, um, it really matters that I'm patient with her in that moment and that I listened to her and make her feel, you know, as best as I possibly can. And it, and honestly, it feels like, it does feel like a responsibility and it's a responsibility I want to meet, but I don't,

I know I'm like, I'm human. So I sometimes I'll fall short. It's a new responsibility, you know, go back 10 years and no one would have cared if I'd done that either way. And they also would never have told anybody if I did that. So it's a new responsibility. It's one I want to me and it's one that I know is important. Um, and it's a fun, honestly, it's such a privilege that people care, like such a privilege that someone would care to stop you and say something nice or to,

they would care that you join them or they'd want you to join their breakfast in the same way that we were saying, like, it's a privilege that you asked me to be on, like to give you a quote for your book or whatever. I hope I never lose that. Nice. Thank you. I appreciate you so much. What you do is incredible. And the way you conduct yourself is, uh, with the grace you conduct yourself as a bar that I would like to meet. So, um, thank you for having me on. It's an honor that you would have me on and yeah, your team are a reflection of how wonderful you are. So,

as is usually the case. So thank you. And thank you for reading the books because... Good books. No, but thank you for that. And you're one of those people that, because I've not had much feedback on the book yet, I'd love to know, like, that's why I asked you the question, like, what do you like about them and which one do you prefer? I'd love to know more of that off camera. I'll send you my annotations. Oh, please. Yeah, I had to take this one off you. All right, good stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you, bro.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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