Why We're All F*cked Up
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Hello, it’s me again. Once again, I’ll start by setting the scene for you in your mind. It’s 5:22 AM on Sunday night here in my apartment in Manchester—or I guess Monday morning, actually. I’m sat in my boxer shorts in the cupboard under the stairs, and once again, I’m staring at a very packed collection of notes in my diary.
I am always busy, but this week I was incredibly busy, which meant that I couldn’t record the podcast when I usually record it, so it’s probably going to be out a little bit later than I hoped for this week. I do apologize. The thing with the podcast is I have to be in a certain mindset to record it. I speak about this all the time with my team: if I’m not in that mindset where I can sit, stop, reflect, and focus, it just won’t work. During a very busy week, it’s hard to find that mindset.
We’ve got a tremendous amount to discuss this week. So without further ado, this is Chapter 13. I’m Stephen Bartlett, and this is *The Diary of a CEO*. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Okay, so the first point in my diary this week, I've just written down: "Every encounter counts." Let me tell you a story. I have a YouTube channel, as some of you will know, and on that YouTube channel, I do a series called *Everyday Entrepreneurs*, where I interview interesting modern-day entrepreneurs and try to figure out why they were successful.
This week, I sat down and interviewed Deliciously Ella. For those of you that don't know Ella Mills—the very, very few of you that don't—she is one of the world's most well-known healthy eating bloggers and entrepreneurs. I believe she had the fastest-selling healthy cookbook in the world. I also believe she’s got five delis around London. Her products are in all of the supermarkets. She's just a tremendous person, right? Hugely successful.
Before meeting her, I had a few reservations. I had a few suspicions that she might be a little bit of an asshole and a bit of a diva. I was quite nervous because I don't like dealing with people like that. I don't like dealing with people that are up their own arses. The reason why I thought this was because I know someone that knows her, and that person is notoriously an asshole.
My naive prejudice made me assume that maybe she hangs around with assholes or she knows assholes because she is one. When she walked into the room, I kid you not, she was a ray of sunshine. That’s the only way I can describe it. She was unbelievably nice. She made me feel welcome. I could have sat and talked to her for hours and hours and hours.
When she left, I was actually quite sad because I thought, "God, I hope I get to meet that person again." She’s the type of person you meet and you just want them in your life. Tremendously humble, an incredible story, and I don’t have enough superlatives to tell you how I feel about this woman. She was just the best.
Here’s the point. She taught me a very, very valuable lesson about first impressions. I went from a position of maybe thinking she was going to be an asshole to really wanting her to win based on a singular impression she had given me of herself. The minute that I realized the power of the first impression was this: we had hired a sound engineer to be there on the day to take care of all the sound for the interview.
After Ella packed up and left, I went over to the sound engineer and said, "Hey, how was that for you? Did you get everything you needed?" He said, "Yeah, I got everything I needed. I also ended up buying her book because I just thought she was wonderful, and I texted my wife and told her to buy the book as well."
I thought, "What?" While we were doing the interview, this person gave such a good impression of herself—she was so humble and wonderful—that my sound guy bought her products during the interview. Literally during the interview. Then he texted somebody else and told them to buy the products too, and they bought them as well.
I just thought, okay, so that’s one isolated incident. But just for a second, imagine that force on your side for your entire 70, 80, 90, 100-year life, and how that would compound in your favor to fundamentally change the trajectory of your life. Here’s the point: first impressions and *all* impressions, in fact, count.
This is irrespective of if the person can do something for you or not. I’m talking about the person that gives you your groceries behind the checkout. I’m talking about the person that cleans your house. I’m talking about the person that lies on the floor and sleeps outside that can do nothing for you. All these impressions count.
Here’s another example of this, which has just sprung to my mind and isn't actually in my diary, but did happen this week. Three years ago, there was a guy that emailed me. He was a student, and he had an event he was putting on. I won't say his name, but he asked me if I would come down and judge at his event in London.
Obviously, I wasn't in London. I was incredibly busy three years ago, as I always am. But I responded to him and said, "Sure, let me know what I can do for you and I'll be there." I copied in my PA, and she organized it, and I ended up coming down to this student’s event and being a judge on his panel.
Fast forward three years. Social Chain has grown into this huge international business, and we’re pitching to YouTube. YouTube is one of the biggest brands in the world, right? So we’re taking this pitch very, very seriously. We’re putting everything we can into it. Then I get an email.
It’s on the same email chain that the student who emailed me three years ago used to ask me to come and be a judge at their event. That student says, "Hey mate, hey Stephen, hope you’re well. I’ve been following your success over the last couple of years. I now work at YouTube, and I’m the one that’s leading on the project that you’re pitching for."
So three years later, the person that I had done a little bit of a favor for is now, in many respects, my boss—because I consider all my clients to be my bosses, right? He’s now basically my boss, and he can now open doors for me or recommend me or suggest me. I just thought that was crazy because I had nothing to gain from helping him three years ago.
Now, I have everything to gain from this guy that I did a favor for. It’s so apparent in my life how there’s people I met that I did things for that are now very important. Also, there are people that did things for me that I will never, ever forget.
When I was an 18-year-old kid waltzing around talking about an idea, even though I had holes in my jumper and I had no idea what I was talking about, no experience, and no money, there were certain people that just gave me a little bit of time. Still to this day, I know their names. When I see them, I tell them every single time, "If there’s ever anything you need from me now, let me know and I’ll do it for you." I genuinely mean that. So that’s just something to bear in mind. It's crazy how things come back around.
Okay, so the next point scribbled into my diary, I've just written this: "Figure out your fucked up and what it’s done positively and negatively for you, and use it to your advantage." Here’s what I mean. It’s my ardent belief that every single person in the world, including all of you listening to this right now, are fucked up in some way.
Fucked up because we’re all fucked up isn’t actually fucked up; it’s actually quite normal. But I’m still going to use that term, "fucked up." Here’s how you might be fucked up: various experiences in your life at a very young age shape you more than any other experiences. This is something I learned when I studied child psychology in secondary school, and I’m fascinated with this.
The way you’re treated and the experiences you have when you’re a very young kid tend to shape the character and the very fabric of who you become. So, it’s my belief that everybody has a different experience, and everybody comes out of that processor slightly different. If you can figure out what that experience did for you positively and negatively, I think you can gain control over those things and use them for your advantage.
So, I’m going to tell you the three reasons—the top three reasons, let’s say—that my fucked up childhood did for me that were positives. The first thing is my childhood made me incredibly good at being alone and being independent. My parents weren't around a huge amount. So by the time I was 14 years old, they had already had three older kids. I was the fourth of their kids, and they almost treated me as if I was the oldest.
My oldest sister was about 19, so I got treated at the age of 13 or 14 like a 19-year-old. This meant that I could go out of the house for days upon end and not really tell anybody where I was. I would make my own dinners, I would do whatever I wanted to do at a very young age because my parents weren't around.
They weren't around not through anything negative, but they were trying to provide for me. My mom would just work and work and work, and she never came home. She would literally sleep in the back room of the shop she was running virtually every day, including every weekend. The positive thing that that fucked up childhood experience gave me was it made me independent.
I’m still incredibly independent today. If it wasn't for that, there is no doubt in my mind that I would be where I am today. The way I’m able to work and have been able to work for the last seven years of my life with this solo "I’m good on my own, I don’t need anybody else" mindset is the reason I’m sat here right now. I promise you.
I’ve spent all weekend sat in the office alone. Last weekend I spent all weekend sat in the office alone. I spend all of my time sat alone, and that’s because of how I was when I was a child. I didn’t have many people around, especially parents, so I just became my own person.
Point number two of how my fucked upness impacted me positively: because my parents didn’t have any money and we didn’t get Christmases and birthdays and nice things virtually at all—they did their best, I don’t mean to talk bad about my parents, but we didn’t get nice things at all—they inadvertently taught me that if I was going to have anything in life, it would be as a direct result of my actions.
If I was going to have all the things I wanted, the only way I was going to get them was me. There was no force in my young life that just gave me really nice things without having to work. So I had that connection that I would create my life. That’s what makes me an entrepreneur as far as I’m concerned. Had they just given me stuff without hard work, I wouldn’t have known the connection of hard work equals reward.
Obviously, that’s been instrumental to where I am now. Point number three is my parents both taught me what hard work was. Again, this is part of the fucked up element because they just weren't around, but they weren't around because they were working all the time.
I’ll never forget when I asked my mom, "Where is it you sleep?" and she pointed at the floor in the dirty back room of her shop in a rough area in Plymouth, where I knew there were rats running around because I could see all of the food bags had been bitten by rats. I knew my mom was sleeping on the floor with rats, and I just thought, "Where do you get that from? How do you do that?"
But the way she worked—and then she started a restaurant and she worked the same way, she would go home at 4:00 AM at night, wake up at 6:00 AM—I’m like, she doesn't sleep and she just works all the time. She almost normalized that to me as a child. She taught me that that’s what you do, that’s just normal.
My dad was the same. My dad would finish his job at 6:00 PM and go to my mom’s restaurant and help there until 1:00 or 2:00 AM in the morning. Then he was up at 7:00 again every day of my childhood. They taught me hard work, and I’m incredibly thankful for that, although it meant that they weren't around as much to parent me.
This kind of leads on to the bad sides, the negative things that my "fucked up" have done for me. The first thing is it made me tragic at romantic relationships. Because I’ve never had a very close relationship with my parents, I’ve found it over the years hard to form relationships, especially romantic ones.
The other thing, which I don’t mind talking about, is my mom and dad would argue with each other all the time. When I say argue, I mean my mom would stand there for like five hours screaming at my dad while he sat down watching TV. It used to boggle my mind why a man would allow a woman to treat him like that.
In my mind, it was low-key domestic abuse. So I grew up—and I used to say to my dad, "You can't let her talk to you like that, you can't just take that." My mom's African; sorry to stereotype, but generally African women can be a little bit more fiery, and my mom certainly was.
So I grew up with this opinion in my head that romantic relationships meant this imprisonment and this inability to move, and it was just this horrible negative construct in my head. My whole life I’ve had that. My whole life I’ve thought of romantic relationships equaling like a prison sentence, basically.
So when I was about 14 and I started to like girls and girls started to come into my life, I would do anything in my power to avoid the commitment or the relationship. I would make up excuses, I would tell them I didn't like them when I did, I would run. I would sometimes start looking for faults in them if it ever got serious. That’s something I still struggle with today, and that’s a direct result of my "fucked up."
The next thing is it made me struggle with forming family relationships. I still have to make an effort to stay in touch with my family, which is a bit sad, but I think it’s getting better. The last thing is I believe the way I was brought up made me fundamentally unorganized. Because I didn’t get taught organization from my parents, I didn’t get taught really routine because they didn’t really have routine because they were so busy.
I’m a fundamentally unorganized person in every element of my life. I’ve talked on the podcast about this before; I am trying to better that. Fortunately, because I have so many great people around me now, including my PA and my brand manager, you wouldn’t be able to tell that I was so unorganized unless you were very, very close to me.
When you realize your "fucked up" and what you’re bad at and what you’re good at because of your early childhood, you can start to use these things as weapons. Me knowing that the positive things are fairly unique to me allows me to double down on those things and become who I am today. When I know the negative things, I can work to correct them.
In my relationships, because I’m aware of my "fucked up," it now is less impactful on my relationships. I feel myself running from the commitment, and I rationalize those thought processes in my head and I end up being able to commit. I just think it’s very important for all of us to understand the positive and negative impacts of our fucked-upness and to figure out how we can pacify the negative side and use the positives to our advantage.
Okay, so the third point in my diary this week is just one word, and that word is written in big and then I filled it in, and the word is "focus." I think it’s the word on my mind this week. Some context: our business is getting big. There are 30 companies within the Social Chain group, and we have a lot of opportunities and freedom to make our mind up in terms of which direction we go in.
We have very, very big plans for the future which I can’t tell you about just yet. But if you listen to this podcast, I promise you when I say this: you’re coming on one hell of a journey with me. When I said that then, I literally got goosebumps in my legs because I can’t tell you just yet, but when you do find out how this story unfolds, I think you’re going to be pretty excited.
Anyway, the point is there’s a lot of opportunity and there’s naturally a lot of things we *could* be doing. But one thing I’ve learned over the last seven years of being an entrepreneur and running businesses is that there is nothing more important than the word focus, especially when things are going well.
When things are going well, what happens is entrepreneurs and CEOs, we try and reach for *more* things to do well at. If we are a clothing company, we’ll try and release more lines of clothing. If we’re selling female clothes, we’ll try and release male clothes. If we are an entrepreneur, we’ll try and move into different sectors and industries and these kinds of things.
Often, as one billionaire once told me, you should never drop the pie reaching for an apple. When I was 18 years old, I was this young entrepreneur that had all these ideas, and I would email my investors all the time telling them that I've got this new idea or I've got this new business idea. They would literally hammer me and say, "Stephen, the single most important thing if you want to be successful in life is focus."
Sometimes things appear to be great, great, great opportunities, and they probably are—some of them. But you will never realize the full opportunity that you have right now if you don’t focus. One of the things my mom inadvertently taught me was she started 20-odd businesses. Anybody could stroll in off the street and tell her that there was a very exciting opportunity round the corner, and she would drop what she was doing now—well, lose focus—and she would pursue that business. She spent two decades doing that, just going after the apple and dropping the pie.
I’ve got to a point now where I’ve got to make decisions on where the Social Chain group goes. This week, our very, very successful investor partner and a mentor to me reminded me that focus is key. There I was telling him about a couple of other ideas that I had which I thought could be additional businesses within the group, and he reminded me that you’ll never, ever reach the full potential of what you have right now if you don’t focus. As an entrepreneur, focus is this really counter-intuitive thing because you just want to take every opportunity.
Okay, so this next point in my diary is one that I am incredibly passionate about, and so passionate about in fact that I'll be releasing a bit of a content series on this topic. I’ve just written in my diary: "Admiring the wrong thing. Remember the point."
Here’s what I mean. I get so many messages from young kids who will tell me that they admire my success, they’re jealous of it, they admire my car, my stuff, the business—whatever it is, they admire my stuff, my success. Growing up and being an entrepreneur, when I was like 18, 19 years old, I would look at other very successful entrepreneurs—and I've got one in particular in mind that had all the stuff and the success—and I just desperately wanted that.
I’ve talked on this podcast before that I confused pleasure with something else. Those nice things—the car, the house, the holidays—give you pleasure. What they don’t give you is contentment and inner fulfillment, and that happiness. Ultimately, everything we do, we do in an effort to make ourselves happy.
Instagram has convinced us that people posting pictures of nice cars, holidays, money, and their physical attractiveness are the most happy. So we all end up envying them and trying to emulate them. But all the major studies have shown that these people are often the most unhappy, and many of them have what I guess is called an attention addiction—an addiction to the likes and the comments and the social validation and reinforcement that means that their self-esteem now depends on what other people think of them.
They’ll be in a good mood if they get a high amount of likes and comments on their imagery or their photos, and a bad mood or feel low or ugly if the amount of engagement and love they get on social media isn’t to their usual standard. Studies show happiness comes from family and friends, it comes from enjoyment of your work, it comes from exercise, it comes from avoiding comparison, it comes from having a purpose, and it comes from constant challenge.
But most importantly, it comes from gratitude for who and where you are right now. Not stuff or likes or anything like that. We live in a generation where this generation is jealous of the wrong thing. You should never be jealous of stuff. You should never be jealous of my stuff or my success or even my appearance—I doubt you were, but you know, my appearance—because that wasn't the aim, and none of those things mean that I'm happy.
The aim is happiness. So be jealous of happiness, and that’s probably what you’ll get more of, right? Because if you’re jealous of my car, you’ll try and improve yours and you’ll probably end up with a nicer car. Or if you’re jealous of my bank account, you’ll try and make more money and then you’ll probably end up with a little bit more money. If you’re jealous of my happiness, you’ll focus on that and you’ll probably end up happier. Be jealous of happiness.
Okay, so this is something I've been quite excited to share with you. During this week, I wrote down 20 reasons why you should not be an entrepreneur and you should not be a CEO. Why have I done this? We live in a generation where social media and all influences encourage young people to be an entrepreneur. I'm a big believer in that, don't get me wrong.
But I'm also a big believer in the fact that it's not for everybody. There are so many resources and influencers out there telling you you should be an entrepreneur and telling you why you should. So I wrote down a list of 20 reasons in my diary why you should not be an entrepreneur. All I'm doing is trying to balance the scale.
Here’s number one in this list of 20: people are going to talk shit about you and you will lose friends and family. Okay, so that’s a fairly big point. Again, from my personal story, my mom didn’t speak to me for two years when I told her that I was going to start a business. I lost friends along the way. Everybody spoke shit about me in the early days. There’s still a lot of people that I know talk rubbish about me now. That’s just something to consider. Can you deal with that? Are you willing to lose friends and family to pursue being an entrepreneur?
Point number two: it’s a prison sentence. You can't switch off, you can't leave it, you can't disconnect, and there’s no guaranteed end to the sentence. Your lifestyle is pretty terrible generally speaking in terms of work-life balance. It *is* a prison sentence. As I said, it’s a prison sentence that you can't leave because you’re fundamentally tied to your business.
The further you go, the more tied to your business you are. The bigger it gets, the more tied to your business you are. You don't ever know if or when this sentence will end. I say prison sentence as if it’s the worst thing in the world, but it’s just a very real thing. Some people like that prison sentence. For me, I like the prison sentence. I signed up for the prison sentence and I'm enjoying the prison. That’s the choice I make.
But it’s important for you to realize that lack of freedom. People when they talk about being an entrepreneur, they talk about the freedom you have. You have the *least* freedom when you’re an entrepreneur in terms of your life direction. You are bound to your business for an indefinite period of time.
Point number three is total uncertainty. Some people aren't good at dealing with uncertainty, but being an entrepreneur and being a CEO, you have total uncertainty. Every day you wake up you don't know what's going to happen. Anything could happen, and when it does happen, it hits you harder than anybody else.
Point number four: you should expect to work seven days a week. A lot of the allure of being an entrepreneur is that you get to work when you like and how you like, right? But for that privilege, you have to work, in my case, all the time. Many of my friends who are entrepreneurs are the exact same. There is no switching off and you work every hour for seven days a week.
You do that for a sustained period of time. I’ve literally worked every day for the last seven years without exception. I've worked weekends, I've worked when I'm on holiday, it’s nonstop. So being an entrepreneur in fact is more work and less flexibility than having a job.
Point number five: many years of work before any recognition, success, or reward. For the first three years of my entrepreneurial journey, I was still completely broke. Thereafter it started to pick up, but it took three years of no reward, no real recognition, and no success at all for me to get to a decent place.
It’s been seven years, and sometimes I forget that because things seem to move so fast. Can you deal with a long period of no rewards, no success, no money, and no recognition? Gandhi, I think it is, that says, "First they ignore you, and then they laugh at you, and then they fight you, and then you win." Being an entrepreneur is very much like that. The early stages can be quite horrific.
Point number six: nobody tells you what to do. This is again one of the stereotypical reasons why you want to be an entrepreneur, but it’s also one of the great reasons why you shouldn't want to be an entrepreneur. That lack of direction and that lack of management can be a real pain for some people. You wake up in the morning and you could be doing anything. It’s a choice. You could also be sleeping, or watching YouTube videos. That’s what being an entrepreneur is all about. Nobody's telling you what to do, and that pressure and that freedom can be the making or the breaking of people.
Point number seven: you have to motivate yourself every day for years. If you struggle with motivation and self-motivation, being an entrepreneur is probably not for you. Fortunately, I’ve not had to motivate myself as such. There are moments when I have to say, "Right, come on Stephen, do this now because I know you don’t want to do it," and that tends to be when I’m doing things I don’t like doing. But my motivation is very deep, a very innate thing, a burning fire within me that I've had for the last ten years. I don’t have to look at myself in the mirror and repeat affirmations.
Point number eight: unexpected, soul-sucking bullshit every day for years. This is again something I've touched on before, but when I wake up in the morning, every single day of the week, I’m mentally ready to receive some news that is absolutely soul-suckingly terrible. That’s something you get used to as an entrepreneur.
It might be that someone's hacked your company, or you’ve lost something big, or a client has cancelled, or your app is crashed, or you’ve lost all your users. In one case in a company I work for, Apple just decided to pull the app from the App Store. They’d built a team of 100 people, and Apple just decided all of a sudden that they were going to remove that company’s whole business from the world overnight without warning. This is what entrepreneurs deal with every single day. If you don’t want to deal with that, then being an entrepreneur is probably not for you.
Point number nine: you’re probably going to fail. That’s statistically the truth. 50% of startups fail within the first five years, and many more never go on to reach heights of success. So you probably will fail.
Point number ten: your relationships will suffer horrifically. I don’t know an entrepreneur that has managed to build a big business that hasn’t had to sacrifice relationships to some fairly extreme extent. Most entrepreneurs I know are terrible at being in relationships. The ones I know most personally are deeply concerned about this as well. Obviously, me as a prime example, I'm terrible at relationships as well.
Point number 11: the weight of the world will be on your shoulders. Especially as the business grows, your staff count increases, and the amount of mouths you have to feed and provide for increases. Speaking for Social Chain, we have nearing about 200 people. That’s 200 people that are dependent on this job and this company for their livelihoods. That’s an incredible weight to carry. For me, it doesn't feel like a weight on my shoulders because I have so much self-belief, but for some people, it does.
Point number 12: you *do* have a boss. One of the reasons people want to be an entrepreneur is because they don’t want to have a boss. Believe me, I have many bosses, whether they are my investors or my clients. They wouldn’t call themselves my bosses, but there is really no difference. I consider myself to be serving them and I report to them. They can at any moment tell me that they are done with me. They can talk shit at me—some clients decide to talk shit at you. So get rid of this idea that you no longer have a boss.
Point number 13: no flexible working. The point I’m trying to make is you actually have no flexibility in your work. I’m run by my calendar. My calendar tells me where in the world I have to be, what I have to do, and how long I have to be there. It tells me I have to sleep in a hotel in Coventry this night, then Bournemouth, then Amsterdam. I have very little say over my life calendar because my work calendar has to take priority.
14: financial damage and inconsistent income. Your income is not guaranteed. It could be 100 pounds one month and then 1,000 pounds the next. Also, you can get yourself in tremendous debts. Starting Wallpark, my first company, did serious long-term damage to my credit. I’m still recovering from the damage I did to myself when I was 18.
Point number 15: you’re just not built for it. A very small percentage of every society is comprised of people with the right temperament, the right energy level, the right risk profile to be a successful entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. It’s almost for nobody. I genuinely believe in many respects entrepreneurship is a bit of a mental disorder. It’s an affliction, not a choice. It’s a compulsion. The demands startups put entrepreneurs under—their relationships, their nervous systems, their bank accounts—would make no sense to a rational person.
Point number 16: living with constant paranoia, becoming a different person, becoming cold, numb, and ruthless. Being an entrepreneur has changed me. It’s made me cold, it’s made me numb, it’s changed the fabric of who I am. It’s made me paranoid. It’s made me look for the worst in people because that’s a good way of protecting myself.
17: no holidays. You don’t really get to take a holiday, and even when you do, you’re still working. 18: if you don’t have focus, there’s no point being an entrepreneur because you’ll just bounce around and waste your life. 19: mental health issues. There are an incredible amount of mental health issues among entrepreneurs. If you don't have anxiety as an entrepreneur, you're doing pretty well. It is a lifestyle that causes incredible mental strain.
And point number 20: every major study suggests that life is about much more than what most entrepreneurs get in the game for, which is money. Life is about much more than money. Every major study on happiness suggests that if you want to be happy, many of the things it takes to be an entrepreneur are not conducive with happiness. So if you want to be happy, science says you probably shouldn't be an entrepreneur.
My aim isn't to put anybody off. My aim is always to give you realism. After seven years of being an entrepreneur, I have a very real perspective on what it’s actually about. That perspective is in contrast to what the movies and the TV shows and Instagram tells you. I’ve got friends that have been doing this for longer than seven years and they are still, in their own minds, unsuccessful. They are still struggling financially. For me, I will always be doing this. I will do this until the day that I die because it’s just who I am. I would rather be trying to change the world and be broke than concede for playing it safe in the middle. I don’t like safe.
Okay, point number six in my diary is about New York. In my previous podcast, I think it was Chapter 11, I had a big announcement to make, which was that I was moving to New York. I can’t wait to update you on this. Here’s the thing: the New York team have great potential. I’m going to be moving out there probably this month on the 28th to look for permanent residence.
I’m flying out with my PA and we’re going to look around Manhattan for an apartment for me to live in. We’ve just confirmed an office space in Manhattan next to the Empire State Building. We’re basically going back to a point of hustle to the startup work. What I’ve realized is that in order for me to be effective in that environment, I’m going to need to change my mindset.
As Social Chain in the UK and Europe has grown, the way that I’ve had to work has changed. I don’t make proposals anymore and I don’t do a lot of the outreach and the pitching. But in order for the US business to work, I have to go back to that. I’ve been trying to bring myself back to a startup state of mind. We embark on a completely new journey together: me and the team trying to build Social Chain New York to be the powerhouse business that it deserves and we all believe it can be.
And last but not least in my diary this week: relationships. Okay, so relationships. Always terrible, right? Still terrible. I’m very, very on my own. Before I explain, I’m going to do a little bit of a disclaimer: I’m so happy. I don’t actually think I’ve ever been more content and happy in my life ever. But I am very, very alone.
See, when I say that, it sounds bad. Let me go back to the disclaimer: I am very, very happy. I feel totally at peace. But I’m not even thinking about the opposite sex. I’m not thinking about women. It doesn't cross my mind, which again is a first. I think that actually comes from being so content with where and who I am.
When I was 18, I would still turn to women to give me a sense of affection or something. Then when Social Chain grew, it was almost like I was turning to a partner to stabilize my mental state and to keep me grounded. I’m now at a point where the business is great, we’ve got phenomenal people, I’m at peace with everything, so I don’t have the need for somebody anymore.
I’m just great alone and I love it. I love my little dog and I just go to the office with my dog and I come home with my dog and that’s it. And all of my entrepreneur friends are fucking single too—well, most of them. Maybe we’re all fucked as entrepreneurs. I hope at some point this changes. I hope at some point I find a girlfriend or a fiancé or I marry somebody. I don’t want to be like this forever.
But the more I’ve read about happiness, one of the key things is relationships and people and friendships. So I do hope at some point I find a companion. But I’m just cool right now with being alone and focusing. I’ve got this real intense tunnel vision at the moment for where Social Chain group is going, and I don’t want anything to mess with that. I don’t want anything to mess with my focus.
So maybe when I’m like 30, then I’ll start giving people a chance again. It’s pretty sad; I imagine most people listening to this think I'm a bit of a weirdo. But this is just who I am. Thank you for listening. Please, please subscribe to the podcast. Please leave a review. Tweet me, put it on your Instagram story. Everyone that does, I will follow you and I will be forever in your debt.
I hope you enjoyed Chapter 13. Again, it’s been a therapeutic experience for me to offload all these things into the dark universe that this cupboard under the stairs creates. I hope nobody is listening. Sometimes I actually do hope nobody is listening. I say that as the tagline, but sometimes I’m like, "It would probably do a lot of damage if a lot of the things I say get out into the world." But I just don’t care. This is my own little space.
Anyway, I’m rambling now. I’m tired, can you tell? It’s now 5:58 AM in the morning and I have to get ready and go to the gym and then go to work. I’ve not slept tonight, which is also really bad, but I slept all through the day so I will be fine. Don’t feel sorry for me. See you next week. I love you lots. Bye-bye.
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