I have a huge announcement to make...
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The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do when I arrive is open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. On any given day, if I'm recording hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team, who then do the edit.
Fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a "nice to have," it is absolutely business mission-critical. So, when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I’m sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
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Hello again. It's great to be back. Last week on the podcast, we delved into Dom's incredibly inspiring diary. The feedback from that chapter has been tremendous, and I think I speak for Dom when I say we’ve both been pleasantly overwhelmed by the amount of tweets, direct messages, and posts we've both received.
Following that chapter, many people approached Dom and shared their own personal battles with him. I guess that's part of the beauty of this format, because honesty begets honesty. We live in a world where that raw honesty is so rare, where everybody is sharing their best life and the edited, filtered highlight reel of their life.
This podcast will never ever be about big names. We might have big names on—and we've got a few coming up—but that's not the point. The podcast is about big stories told honestly. This week, we're reopening my diary, and I’m going to apologize in advance because I've not processed most of the scribbles in front of me.
If I stumble, it's because I'm working these things out for myself as I go. As you know, there's no scripter here, there's no writer; it's just me, myself, and my thoughts. In the next chapter, I've got another incredible guest coming on who a lot of you will actually know. This guest is guaranteed to take us on a journey that we've not been on yet. I cannot wait to share that with you.
Lastly, I've been repeatedly asked this week where and how I record the podcast. To give you a bit of context, it's currently 3:00 AM here in my house in Manchester. I record the podcast from my phone using a mic that just plugs into my phone. I'm sat in my boxes in my laundry cupboard with the lights off under the stairs. It doesn't get much more real than that. Without further ado, this is Chapter 11. I'm Steven Bartlett. This is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Personality defines you. Okay, so this point in my diary was a real revelation. This point is for anybody that’s looking to someday start a business, someone that's currently within a business, or someone who has started their own business. This was a conversation I had with a really good friend, and it allowed me to sort of diagnose why Social Chain as a business has been successful.
For context, for any of you that don't know the business I run, I run a company called Social Chain Group. It’s a group of companies with 200 members of staff now. That's grown from zero to 200 in the space of about three years. We have five offices around the world; we work with the world's biggest brands—everybody from Apple to Coca-Cola.
We’re super young. When we started, we had virtually no experience in this agency world. So, I’ve tried to define and diagnose how we managed to do that in an industry that is incredibly competitive. I was sat with a friend who runs a different type of agency business in the same city, and we were discussing this.
Here’s what I figured out. His business is not in the marketing world; it’s in a slightly different arena. Mine is in the marketing world. I was sat with him making the point that the personality of your business is what will make you stand out. I said from day one, Social Chain has been the guy in the pub dancing on the table.
Here’s what I mean. When you walk into the pub, you look over and you see someone dancing on the table. Everybody else is sat down, and there's that one person dancing on the table. The pub represents the industry. The people that are sat down, sipping their drink and looking at the person dancing on the table judging them, are the ones that never get noticed.
The person dancing on the table gets noticed. What tends to happen is the person starts dancing, and 50% of the pub absolutely hate him. They hate him partly because they envy his confidence for being able to get on the table. They hate him because he's different. In life, people will always hate you when you take a different route.
The other 50% of the pub love him. They applaud him, they follow him, and eventually, they're all on the tables dancing. When they get home, they tell all of their friends that they saw someone in the pub dancing on the table. Social Chain has always been the person in our industry dancing on the table.
When we started out, we had unbelievable hate because we were doing things differently. Unbelievable hate—to the point where members of our team would cry when we logged into Twitter because Buzzfeed and the major papers were doing these hit jobs on us because we were just doing things completely differently and we really didn't care.
We were dancing on the table. The other 50% of the tweets, which are naturally the ones that you ignore because we all only see the hate, were people praising us. They were applauding us, saying we were geniuses. But because we were the object of contention and because we were the one on the table, over time, we were the ones that accelerated out of our industry.
We were the ones that drove the most attention, picked up the most business, won the most awards, and became the most notorious for what we stood for. Taking you back to my conversation with my friend sat in the hot tub with him, I said to him, "Tell me three things you think of when you think of Social Chain."
He said, "You do things differently, you're always first to do things, and you always do things fearlessly." Those are three of our key values. He asked me then to ask him the same question in return. All I could think of was, "You make nice designs." I couldn't think of two other things because his agency didn't have a personality.
His business doesn't have that personality that ours had in the early days which made ours break out. If you're operating in a saturated industry—a pub full of people—and you're just stood in the corner sipping your drink, no one's ever going to know you're there. You're never going to break out.
If you run an agency business or really any type of business, your personality will define you. Funnily enough, my advice to that friend was that he should, next time he receives a budget from a big charity, take the budget and give all of the money away. Give the ten thousand pounds away to charity.
Then put up a landing page that says, "We gave all the money away to charity to make this website," and come up with some creative concept around that. Then make a 60-second video explaining what you did and push that out on social media. If you do that once a month, you're going to tell the world why you're different.
You're going to show the world your personality, and it won't take long for people to think, "Oh, that's that agency. They do things that way. That's what they're known for; they're notorious." Funnily enough, Drake this week did exactly that. He took a million-pound budget he was given from his record label to make a music video.
He gave it away and filmed himself giving it away. I messaged my friend—and anybody that thinks I'm lying about this, everyone around me knows this story now because I've told them, and there's many a screenshot—but Drake went and did that this week, and he broke the internet.
Drake did things differently and was therefore able to define his own personality. Interestingly enough, a couple of days after having that conversation with my friend, I met a different person who knows both me and him. I asked that person the exact same question. I said, "Name three things you think of when you think of Social Chain."
He said the exact same three things my friend said. I honestly got goosebumps because it just struck me how clear and defined our personality in the industry we operate in is. That's the reason why we're here. So, my job is to protect our business's personality and make sure it's notorious, it's defined, and it's clear.
Interestingly again, I asked my friend when we were sat at this restaurant—this is my second friend now—to explain what he thought of my friend's agency business. He literally said the same thing. He said, "They make really cool, clean black and white designs," and he couldn't think of anything else.
In that moment, I was convinced that in a saturated market where there are so many people who are reporting to be able to do a very similar thing and the barrier to entry is really just owning a laptop, you will be defined by your business's personality. Also, linking to that, your business's personality will then define your culture, your culture will define your work, and your work will define your success. Personality defines you.
The next point in my diary is something I've put off for my whole life. I've written in my diary: "Personal organization epiphany." I have been unorganized my whole life. When I reflect on my life, personal organization has cost me tremendously. Your organization is a habit.
I've told myself for the last couple of years that I don't have time to be organized. What I realized this week is the reason why I don't have time to be organized is because I'm unorganized. It's as simple as that. I have, over the last couple of years, put people in place around me to help deal with my total lack of organization.
I've got a personal assistant; I've got a cleaner that keeps my house tidy and things like that. But the problem is that sort of mentality towards life—of being unorganized and leaving mess behind you and not sorting things out—is really destructive. I looked in my bag earlier on this week, and it's just this duffel bag full of wires, receipts, cords, and a scratch card.
I can't remember doing a scratch card. There's a sock in there. It's a total, total mess. When I think about the organization of my life, if it wasn't for these people around me, my life would look exactly like this messy, tangled-up duffel bag. Nobody can tell me that I would operate better with this sort of tangled wire state of mind and this tangled wire life.
This week, I finally tried to confront it. I'd heard for years and years and years that some of the most effective people are those that make their bed in the morning. Upon waking up this week, I made my bed every single day, and I'm continuing to do so. I keep my room completely clean—not because I have to, because my cleaner will come anyway, but because I think that's how you start as you mean to go on.
If I make my bed, hopefully, I'll continue that attitude throughout the day. It really is a habit that I'm trying to break that I've always had. I reflect on my life since being in school and I try and calculate how much my lack of organization has probably cost me. Benjamin Franklin said—which I'll always remember—"For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned."
I kind of crunched the numbers in my diary this week. I imagine I lose about two hours a day being unorganized. You might think that sounds like a lot, but I completely believe it. If you're not organized, that has a knock-on effect to how you start the day. You miss meetings which you have to reschedule; you overlap on meetings.
If you've not done the work for those situations, you then get into bed probably at a really bad time, which again causes this knock-on effect. So, I believe that I'm probably losing about two hours a day being unorganized. That is 730 hours a year. In the last 15 years since I've been at school, that's 11,000 hours I've lost since I've been at school, which is almost a year and a half of time that I've lost.
Think about what you can do in a year and a half. I've lost a year and a half because in the short term, I've just thought, "Okay, leaving that there or not sorting that out now or letting that be a mess is fine." But you don't see that compounding force over time. So, it's not just about the amount of hours you've lost; it's the way that that could have compounded in your favor had you been more organized.
Being organized for me is a very, very serious thing now, and I'm really making an active effort to be more organized. That starts with small things. It starts with making the bed in the morning, getting out of bed, having a shower, brushing your teeth, having your breakfast, going to the gym, taking the dog for a walk—all these things.
Funnily, they're all weirdly connected. When I make my bed in the morning, my routine then seems to happen. I'll go and I'll brush my teeth, I'll have a shower, I'll iron my clothes, I'll have my breakfast, I'll go to the gym. It all starts with me doing my bed, which is bizarre. I can't actually figure out how this has happened, but every day I've done my bed, I've then followed my routine.
Historically, because I've been in rushes and I've forgotten stuff and I've been in hotel rooms, I would have forgotten my toothbrush, which meant that I didn't brush my teeth. I go into the day, I try and brush my teeth at lunchtime, but the problem is, if I forget at lunchtime, then my teeth go a day unbrushed.
I'm just going to be completely honest; it's not the nicest thing to hear, but if I go for a day with my teeth unbrushed, again, over time that causes me other problems. That means that I have to go to the dentist, and I lose more time there, and I lose more money there. If I think about the cost in money terms that I've probably wasted—I imagine with the lifestyle I have now, a lack of organization probably costs me a minimum of 30 pounds a day.
That is forgetting my railcard because my bag was a mess and I didn't move it into my work bag. That is losing something—losing my hat. You guys know that I wear hats all the time. In the last three years, if I've lost 30 pounds a day, I've probably lost about 30 to 40 thousand pounds.
Organization isn't a joke. Organization is required if you want to be your most effective. I've spent so much time trying to optimize my time, and the secret that I've found to really optimizing my time and maximizing who I am starts with making my bed in the morning. I challenge you to try it. It's incredibly funny how your whole day seems to fall into place if you make your bed. So yeah, personal organization is not a joke.
The next point in my diary is a bit of a curveball to the typical motivational, inspirational message you'll probably get. I've just written: "Work really hard, want it so badly, and fail anyway." In popular culture, a lot of the Instagram motivation, Twitter motivation, Motivation Monday stuff says: "Work hard, want it badly, and you'll get there. You just gotta stick at it."
That is not the truth. You can work really, really hard, you can want it more than anybody on the face of the planet wants it, and you will fail anyway. I did. In my first business, I failed. I started businesses when I was 14 years old, and they failed too. I tell you, I really, really, really wanted it.
Reason—having a reason does get results. It tends to be the case that those that have the strongest reason do stand the best chance of getting the results, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee it. I know a kid that really wants to be an entrepreneur. He really wants to be a CEO. He's got these big ambitions; he wants to invent this product and take it to the world.
But, having a bit of an idea of what that might take in terms of skills to persuade, to pitch to investors, to build a team, and all these kinds of things—I'm going to be completely honest, because that's what this podcast is supposed to be about—this kid doesn't have it. He just doesn't have it.
It's a struggle for me because this kid has listened to all of my content; he listens to the podcast, he listens to everything I put out there. He's kind of misconstrued it to mean that if you just try hard enough and you want it bad enough, you can get it. The problem is, fundamentally, this kid has a few personality disorders and he struggles in a few areas.
He's unable to speak to people; he's unable to solve problems pragmatically and logically. So, he's going full steam ahead into a business which he doesn't quite have the experience or the capabilities yet to take on. He's trying to take on one of the biggest brands in the world. He lives at home with his parents; he's got no money; he's not got the ability to get money.
You see the picture I'm trying to create. I don't want to be a hypocrite because I was that kid. I was an 18-year-old kid who really believed in myself, who really wanted it, who had no money, who had bailiff letters piled up on his desk, who was shoplifting food to feed myself. So when I think about our circumstances, if you looked at them on paper, we were very similar people.
But I had some natural talent. I had a bit of experience when it came to organizing things and building events and raising interest for things and pitching and telling stories. Since I was seven years old, I was organizing my peers and I was a leader. So how do I possibly tell this other kid, who on paper looks very similar to me, that he shouldn't do what I did?
Because I genuinely, at the very core of me, believe that he shouldn't. I genuinely believe that. I know him; I've met him. He's shown up at my office at 4:00 or 5:00 AM in the morning. He's done this multiple times. He is not ready to be doing that. I often say to young entrepreneurs, "Do it and fail and learn," but he's not even ready for that.
He's not ready to fail and learn. So, I wrote some notes in my diary this week to try and help myself understand how to address this situation when my message tends to be "try it, fail, learn, and you won't regret it." How on earth do I then say to someone who knows my story, "Actually, don't try just yet. Go and get some experience. Don't try and be Steve Jobs today. You're not there yet."
The funny thing is, when I told this kid that, he interestingly did again what I had advised, which is he ignored my opinion. That's what I tell people to do. I tell them to make—it's your life, your choice, it's going to be your regret, so you get to make the choice. I was trapped in this sort of Frankensteinian world that I'd created.
I think, "F*ck, what have I done?" I hope I never ever convey the message that entrepreneurship and these kinds of things are for everybody, because they simply are not for everybody. Everybody has their thing which will make them their most happiest and deliver them their most fulfillment.
Of course, the journey is part of that. But also, I don't want you to undergo tremendous negative stress trying to take on Steve Jobs and Apple when you're unable to hold a conversation with another human being. You know what I mean? What I've realized is that if you really, really want it, naturally that creates drive, and the drive will be there.
Then if you have the drive, it comes down to you having the persistence. Persistence is a combination of patience and determination, which is kind of the fuel. It keeps you going. The amount of fuel you have dictates the distance you'll be able to go through the assault course, which is the journey.
As you heard from Dom's diary, the journey of making yourself a successful person or achieving your ambitions is a long, undetermined length assault course. If you have enough fuel because of the persistence and the determination which derive from the drive which derives from the passion, you'll get through the assault course.
However, your natural ability—and in this kid's case, he doesn't have the natural ability, and when I say ability, I mean talent and experience—will determine how long your assault course is. Some people will have to learn more, more skills, and have to go through more to get there.
Unfortunately, some people have to go further, so they require more fuel than others. It often gets to a point where I'm the most unrealistic person you'll ever meet. I pride myself on being unrealistic. It's in my Twitter bio that I'm unrealistic. But I'm not delusional.
These are two different things. If your assault course is a million miles long and you don't have the fuel to go a million miles, then don't run the assault course. Don't run the assault course. Do a different assault course that is at least somewhat perceived to be achievable. You will hurt yourself; you'll waste your life in trying to do so.
Devil's advocate to myself: the upside of running an assault course you think you can achieve is you'll learn more from doing so than anything else in your life. By trying and running into that assault course, if it is somewhat achievable to you and getting to the end and failing, you'll learn a shitload. But running a one mile of a million-mile assault course won't teach you much.
Okay, I think I've got that off my chest. I'm literally hot and flustered by sharing that with you, but it's just something that I've really battled with because, yeah, it's something that I've not really had a huge amount of time to think through.
This is a quick-fire note in my diary. I've just written three words, and they are three different things I think all of us should do everything we can in our power to stay away from. The first one is caution. From my own experiences, people with caution live unfulfilled lives.
I've just embraced from a very, very early age that very, very little is going to kill me other than life. So, we're all going to die anyway. The greatest danger that we all fear is going to be realized anyway. I promise you that. None of us get out alive. So, practicing caution in this thing called life is literally the most stupid thing you can do.
It is the biggest risk. You sometimes think about taking the path less traveled or doing things that other people haven't as being the risk. No, the risk is going through this life with caution. There is nothing that is going to deliver you more guaranteed regret than being cautious.
The next thing is about being pessimistic. We all know those people that try to find what's wrong instead of trying to find what's right. They look out the window at a sunset and all they see is a dirty window. They see the dirt on the windowpane. Those people are destructive. They will ruin your life.
At all opportunities, I beg you—I beg, beg, beg, beg you—remove those people from your life. It may be hard in the short term, but long term, you can change the trajectory of your life by letting go of that baggage. Lastly—which kind of links to the point that I just made in the previous note—is about realism.
And it also relates to caution. Don't be realistic. Don't be realistic with your dreams; don't be realistic with your life. A sense of what realistic means is totally subjective to all of us. We're told what realistic means by school, by parents, and as we're growing up.
If you want to live your very best life, stop being realistic. One thing I'll never forget is the story that Will Smith told about the Wright brothers. Everybody that has been transformative to our world and to our society wasn't realistic. It wasn't realistic to think we could bend a sheet of metal into a tube and fly it across the Atlantic Ocean.
Thank God there are people out there that are unrealistic when it comes to the change they can affect in the world. I implore all of you at all opportunities to be unrealistic. That's why I have the word unrealistic in my bio—because my life is a journey of me being unrealistic and trying to see how that lack of realism leaves a dent in the world.
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Your reaction is your result. Again, a super quick point, but this week I got a couple of messages from various people and the sentiment was generally the same. They had undergone tricky circumstances: they’d had a death in their family, they'd been fired from work, one girl had been rejected from her apprenticeship.
I've just uploaded that onto my Instagram; I've just put the screenshot up. She was beating herself up about it, as people naturally do when they undergo unfortunate circumstances. The thing that we all know in life is that the circumstance is beyond our control.
Every time I wake up in the morning and I do the job that I have to do, I walk into work, and I promise you I get five pieces of unexpected bad fucking news that I have to deal with. As you know from listening to the podcast, that's my world, that's my life—it doesn't have an effect on me anymore.
But I also know that that circumstance that I'm handed by life isn't the outcome. That's not the bit I had much to do with most of the time. How I respond in those situations is my result. Your reaction is your result, not the circumstance.
If you can start to really believe that, you'll live a much more happy, future-thinking life, and it'll stop you from living in the past. Back in the day, when I used to get bad news, I would think the bad news was my result. I would think that the circumstance that I didn't have anything to do with was my outcome.
It wasn't until I started to see it as, I guess, a bit of a Christmas cracker. Every day I wake up, I pull the Christmas cracker and a joke and a toy come out. I can't help the toy I get; I didn't pick it. But my perception on that toy and how I deal with the toy, how I play with the toy, how I respond to that situation is really my result.
I can either be unhappy that I didn't pick a different Christmas cracker, I can beat myself up, I can blame other people—all those things lead to less than satisfactory outcomes. Or, I can pull the cracker, I can put the hat on—okay, I got a bloody pencil again, but that's fine. I can write something with that pencil, and I can perceive that situation to be positive.
Your reaction is your result, and the result can be whatever it is you want it to be if your perception is positive. That's also why that pessimism is one of the most corrosive things I've identified in my journey over the last three years that I've been on.
I think it was Jim Carrey that said—all of us have the story that our eyes see and the story that the world gives us. So, there's this one story going on around us. And all of us have this second story, that's our perception. We run that second story over everything that's happening in our life.
If something bad happens to you, that's one story. The second story which dictates what that means to you is your perception. You run that over the thing that's happened to you. Your boyfriend might dump you, you might get fired from work, and upon getting fired from work, that's one story.
The story you run over that is that it was unfair because you were so good and they just were out to get you. That is a destructive, unhelpful story. It's a blame-filled story. A more productive story might be, "How can I be better? I wasn't good in this situation; it wasn't for me. I understand that. How can I be better in the future? How can I make a better job choice for myself?" That is a productive second story to run over the circumstance that has happened to you. Your reaction is your result, and your perception will define your reality.
The next point in my diary is a bit of an announcement. This is an announcement that I've not told anybody other than my immediate team just yet. That is that I will be moving to New York permanently. Let me explain. When I say permanently, you've got to understand that the nature of my life and the way that my calendar works and my schedule—I can't be anywhere permanently.
I'm going to be everywhere always. But I'm moving my base from Manchester in the UK to New York. I currently live in Manchester; I'm going to live in New York. In a short way, here's why. Our teams here are tremendous. Our leadership team here is tremendous. They are capable of solving problems without me.
Honestly, most of them are significantly smarter than I am. They don't need me anymore. I am a support system for many of the leaders; I offer my opinion, my advice on the vision, on keeping that specialness, on making sure that we dance on the table, and on being a bit of a soundboard to the managing directors, the directors of the company.
But they don't need me in the same way that the New York team, I believe, need me. So, when I think about my time spent and where my time spent would return the greatest value, the answer to me is clear. The answer is in New York. We have offices in London and in Berlin and in Munich as well, but all of those teams have the leadership within them, the managing directors within them to flourish.
In New York, we don't currently have a managing director, although we do have a room full of incredibly inspiring leaders. I think my value there will deliver the greatest return on investment. The prize, obviously, in the American market is tremendous. We have the ambition to be a global, truly, truly global agency. To fulfill that mission, I have to be there.
That's what I believe now. On a personal level, I've spent my whole life putting myself just outside my comfort zone. Within the UK right now, because of the incredible leaders within the business who have taken on the leadership of the business, I'm closer to my comfort zone.
By going into the US market where we don't have the reputation—we don't have the amazing 30,000-square-foot office and the slides and the ball pit and all the teams and all the data systems and processes and all of these things—it's a new challenge. It's a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous challenge.
It's something that will make me go through tremendous pain; it will make me struggle. It will make me, hopefully—and I have no doubt in this—come out the other end. Because that's what I've always done, and that's the way that I'm built. Me moving to New York is a decision to take on that challenge, a desire to take on that challenge, and in doing so, further all of us as a global family.
I believe that if I move there, I will help all of the other teams around the world by doing so, because some of the brands and the clients we can achieve there will be global brands. Right now, the UK team are so good; they're the ones that are delivering much of the work out to the US.
I hope by being there we can send some work back the other way as well. So, this is a big decision. It's a decision I think will probably come into effect in about April time because, again, my calendar is just absolutely rammed. So, I have to start booking my time a little bit more sensibly.
What does it mean again for more personal elements of my life? I've got a dog; my dog will come with me—which is pretty sad news to a lot of people, I imagine, because there's a few people in the UK teams that are in love with the dog. Becky, I know who I'm talking about.
He'll come with me at some point. I think I'll leave him here for some time to spend time with the wonderful people within the family here. I don't have a girlfriend; I'm completely unconnected in that regard. I've always been a free spirit, I've always been a lone wolf, and it's time for that challenge. It feels completely right. I want the pain. I want the struggle. I want the uncertainty. I'm built for it.
Deathbed thinking. I wrote this note in my diary and I've shared this thought across my social channels this week, but if you haven't heard it, even if you have, in fact, it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Here's what I wrote: "Deathbed thinking. In order to become someone, you have to stop being everybody."
This is probably one of the hardest things to do in today's world because society naturally rewards conformity, and it talks shit behind the back of anybody that doesn't. It's not just haters talking shit; it's your best mate, your family, your colleagues, your partner. In my personal situation, it was my mom talking shit about me.
As you know, I didn't speak to her for two years when I told her that I was dropping out to start a business. It wasn't until I proved that I was right, or that my hypothesis or my ambition was going to work out, that she came back to my side. Right now, there's that one thing your gut is telling you to do—something you would love to try or something you want to do more of—but you care too much about what people think.
You've started to believe too many negative voices that have told you in their own subtle, bitchy way that you can't do it anyway, so you better stay in line and you better conform. I knew when I started making videos and I started doing my podcast and I started putting myself out there in the world that people would talk shit about me.
And they do. But I also knew that it would only ever matter if I gave a fuck. Thankfully, I don't. I never will. Deathbed thinking. Stop making your decisions based on other people's opinions and start making your decisions now from your deathbed. On your deathbed, you're not going to give a fuck about their opinion.
That famous study done by Bronnie Ware, where she interviews people on their deathbed, proves that the biggest regret of the dying is living a life that wasn't true to themselves. Please don't make that mistake. You can imagine people on their deathbed have a retrospective clarity that none of us have right now. Believe them. Letting other people and their opinions win is a guaranteed way to regret your decisions then. It's going to be your regret because it's your life and your happiness, and so it has to be your choice. Your regret, your life, your happiness, your choice. Deathbed thinking.
Okay, so the last point in my diary today is about family and relationships. I tend to always end the podcast on family and relationships. The note I've scribbled in my diary today is: "Why haven't you gone and seen your niece, idiot?" My niece has been born for a little while now; I think she's probably about a month and a half old.
My whole family has made the time to go and see her, but me. It really does chew away at me because the reason in my mind that I haven't done that is because I've been busy. Again, it's bullshit, isn't it? It's just a lie we tell ourselves because we prioritize things that are important to us.
The things we focus on—as my friend Sam Budd once told me—are the things that grow. If I want to have a good relationship with my family, then I've got to focus on it, I've got to invest in it, and put time into it. Business will never be more important than family. It will just never be the case.
But what I've struggled with is prioritizing, right? Because business will always present me with urgent, immediate tasks that need to be solved, whereas family will virtually never—until it's too late, speaking quite frankly. I don't want it to have to be too late for my family to be a priority of mine.
So this week on Tuesday, I'm going to pop down to London. I've got a couple of meetings there. After my meetings, I'm not going to get back on the train; I'm going to go across and travel across to see my brother and my little niece. I've become like a dad; I'm like showing this picture of my niece to everybody in the fucking street.
So, I'm tremendously proud. I've just got to put in the time. I cannot wait to meet her. The next point connected to this is about relationships. Over Christmas time and January, I went out to India and Sri Lanka with my ex-girlfriend. Some of you will know she used to also be my personal assistant. Long story—go back to Chapter 1 if you want to hear more about that.
I went out there, I guess, in the bid to rekindle things. Over the last few weeks, we've been chatting and unfortunately, we've come to the decision that it doesn't make sense. She lives in Australia. I guess we tried to make it work at distance, but it just doesn't make sense for various reasons which I won't go into.
She's a wonderful person; I will always love her and I'll always be here for her, and she knows that. But it just hasn't made sense. So here I am again, back on my ones with my dog and you guys.
Thank you so much for listening to Chapter 11. It's been again a sort of cathartic, wonderful journey for me to offload all of these thoughts to you. Hopefully, you've gained something from listening. If you could be so kind—and I won't ever ask a tremendous amount from you—please, please, please, could you leave a review in the App Store for me?
I really, really, really appreciate all of your five-star reviews. They bring a little bit of a light to my life, and I've read every single one. Feel free to tweet me your thoughts on the podcast—to myself on Twitter or on Instagram. If you do tweet me, I will follow you on Twitter, which is also an upside, I guess.
We can chat via DMs, etc. Reach out to me, let me know what you think. You guys will help me, hopefully, solve some of these challenges—specifically on the point of family—that I go through. I want this to be a two-way communication. It's not just me sat here in my boxes talking to you; hopefully, you can use Twitter to talk back to me.
Thank you so much. I cannot, cannot, cannot wait to share next week's guest with you. Probably one of the most interesting guests we have ever had in terms of their story and their level of success. It's going to be amazing, I promise you that. I will see you in Chapter 12. Thank you.
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