I Made A Mistake

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 WiFi 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 WiFi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast WiFi. 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.

So, fast WiFi 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 WiFi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.

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Hello. It’s me again. It’s been a little while since we’ve last spoken, and whenever I go a big duration without uploading a podcast, something inside me feels like I owe you an apology. So, I’m sorry. But I want to give you the context as to why that is and why that sometimes happens.

Basically, I’m very, very busy. I literally work all the time, which is something that if you know me, you know to be true. I work all the time. And when I’m not working, I’m probably traveling, and even when I’m traveling, I’m working. Over the last eight weeks, I’ve spoken on nine different stages in every corner of the world imaginable.

I’ve been on stage in Brazil, and Italy, and Newcastle, and London, and the Ukraine. You name it, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been there. I’ve been to Atlanta, New York—everywhere. Getting the time to get into this flow state, which allows me to produce this podcast, is a challenge, and it’s an increasing challenge these days.

But what I’m doing is I’ve dedicated a day every single week now, starting from this week, where I’m going to focus on production of content for my podcast, for my Instagram, and for my other channels as well. Let’s see how that goes. Usually, it’s Sunday, but I’m going to change that up a little bit.

Let’s see if I can achieve a little bit of consistency. This episode is going to be interesting. There’s one central theme to this episode, and that’s probably the first time I’ve had one consistent theme. I’m going to be looking out for your feedback on that on Twitter and Instagram DMs and so on. But without further ado, I’m Steven 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 is a little bit of a confession. I’ve just written: "Stolen tweet: how that felt and what it taught me." Let me give you a bit of context as to what happened and what I learned and what this means. If you go to my Instagram, I post one of two things.

I post a screenshot of a tweet that I’ve done, or I post videos. I always think of those tweets and videos myself. I write every single word myself, and I pride myself on the originality of that content. I get so much out of the process of summarizing a thought into 280 characters that I wouldn’t do it if it was me just copying other people. That’s where I get my enjoyment from.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tweet on my Instagram which I did not tweet. It was kind of a mock-up. I didn’t actually tweet it; I just posted a photo of it looking like I’d tweeted it. It was something that relates to my ex-girlfriend and something I learned from that relationship.

That post was my best-performing Instagram post ever in terms of an image. It reached two million people, it did 70,000 likes, and I think it did 2,000 comments. It was crazy. It meant a lot to me that an experience I’d had with my ex-girlfriend, something I’d learned about myself, resonated so much with so many other people.

Really, that’s why I do all of this. I self-analyze, I self-analyze my experiences, I analyze my thoughts, and then I produce little pieces of content which explain those thoughts in the hope that other people have those thoughts and, hopefully, I try and provide some sort of practical solution or way through if you too are experiencing that.

So, when it got 70,000 likes and reached two million people, I was overjoyed. And here is what happened next. A young entrepreneur on the West Coast of America, in California, who’s kind of like a self-help guru type person, saw that post. He copied and pasted it and posted it to Twitter.

Although my post looked like a tweet, it was actually Photoshopped and I’d never actually tweeted it. Long story, don’t ask. But his tweet, which was a complete copy and paste of my post including the exact punctuation, every single letter the same, went viral. When I say viral, I mean crazy viral.

He did 300,000 retweets or something mental like that. He must have reached hundreds of millions of people, I’m guessing. Staggering, staggering numbers. He was quoted in the press; he was everywhere. He gained thousands and thousands of followers. An Instagram page with 15 million followers quoted him and shouted him out for having that thought.

He relished in all of this praise. He was screenshotting everyone praising him and posting it on his story. It became his identity. And there I am sat watching something that I’d produced, something I’d created, something I’d written, completely be stolen from me and watching someone else revel in the success of all of that.

I am imperfect. I’m imperfect. The process that I’m on is a process of self-development. It’s a journey that will last forever. Every now and then, I act out of character and I slide back into somebody that I do not want to be. And in that moment, here comes my ego.

Watching someone openly and publicly take credit and reap all of the rewards for your work—for something that genuinely took you two hours editing. That might sound crazy, but the things I post on my Instagram, I obsess over them. I later on showed this guy the whole process of me writing those words.

But also something that was very personal to me because it came from a situation with my girlfriend. Watching someone just revel in that, take it from you, and get all the credit from it was not easy. I’m someone that doesn’t really care about credit, and I genuinely am self-aware enough to know that’s true.

But in that moment, it wasn’t easy for me. Here’s how it played out. I messaged him. I said, "Mate, please can you just credit me under the post." He put a little thing under the post, not really crediting me, but kind of just tagged me underneath the post. And that was fine, I let it go.

Two days later, someone comes up to me in the office—Paige, who works in the New York office—and she said to me, "Look, your tweet has been posted by one of the biggest publishers on Instagram and this guy has taken the credit." It just so happens that I know that publisher well. I’ve been speaking to them about potentially acquiring their business.

So, I messaged the guy. I said, "Hey, how did you get hold of that tweet? It’s actually my post and my piece of content." He said, "Well, the guy is going around and telling us all to post it and credit him." And that’s when I reacted. That’s when I lost my cool.

Because it just annoyed me. It annoyed me that this guy, after we had spoken and after he had said to me that he would credit me, has been going around and telling everybody to publish it, to tag him, and to give him the credit, even though he now knows where it came from. He was telling people that it came from a magazine he read years and years ago, which is just fundamentally untrue.

He admitted that later, but I reacted. This is something that I am not proud of. But if I’m not honest about it, then I’m almost telling myself that I’m unwilling to learn from it, and I really, really want to learn from this because it’s fundamentally so far from who I am today. It kind of reminds me of a less mature, less developed, less self-aware version of myself that I’ve moved away from.

Here’s what happened. I’ve got very good friends at Twitter and Facebook, etc. I’ve got very good friends at all the major publishers. I messaged him and I told him that I was going to have him deleted everywhere, and I was going to have his tweet deleted by Twitter, and I was going to have him struck on Twitter, which is like a DMCA strike if you copy other people’s stuff.

Within two hours, he was deleted everywhere by every major publisher. The account with 15 million followers deleted him as well, and they all posted correcting it. Twitter gave him a DMCA strike, removed his tweet that did 200,000-300,000 retweets, and that was earning him a lot of followers. And it was over. It was gone.

I felt good for maybe five seconds and then I felt like a piece of shit. I wasn’t angry with myself and I wasn’t disappointed with myself because of the outcome, because the outcome is probably fair. I was disappointed with myself because I had reacted and I had lost control of my composure, my class, and my values.

The way I spoke to him was very, very angry and antagonistic, and it’s so far from who and what I want to be. I think anytime when you react, you really lose yourself, because a reaction is instant. It’s driven by the beliefs, biases, and prejudice of our unconscious minds.

When you say or do something without thinking because of emotion and because your survival mechanism has been triggered, that’s the unconscious mind running the show. A reaction is based in the moment and doesn’t take into consideration long-term effects of what you say or what you do. A reaction is survival-orientated.

On some level, it’s a defense mechanism. In this case, it was a defense mechanism. It might turn out okay when you react, but it’s always one of the things that I regret later. I don’t regret all of my reactions, but everything I regret is a reaction. Does that make sense? I’ll say that again. I don’t regret all of my reactions, but everything I regret is a reaction.

A response, on the other hand, as we’ve talked about in this podcast, usually comes slower. It’s based on information from both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. It’s considered, it’s thought through, you’ve taken things into consideration, and it’s much more aligned with your values and your goals and who you want to be.

The more reacting we do, the less empowered we are, the less in control we are. The results of reacting live somewhere between horrendously regretful and slightly embarrassing. The more successful you get, there’s a correlation between your success and the amount of people that piss you off.

I’ve come to realize that the things that come from the unconscious mind can be absolutely life-saving in terms of the wisdom, the intuitive feelings about people or situations, what we call our gut instinct. But they can also be devastating. Our unconscious mind can be our worst enemy because it’s based on prejudices, biases, fears, and limiting beliefs.

Malcolm Gladwell found out that his subconscious makes him a racist. So, we cannot be led by our unconscious mind, because the main goal of our unconscious mind is survival. So, anything that might threaten our survival becomes the enemy. If someone offends you, if a colleague gives critical feedback, if someone wrongs you, you risk losing your class, your values, your composure, and doing or saying something that you will fundamentally regret.

As a leader, you will be pissed off by more things and have more negative emails and more critiques and more press bullshit than any other position. So, if anyone has to be in control over their sort of conscious and their rational decision-making and their cognitive processes, it is you. The higher you go, the more composure you need.

Words are powerful. Just a few words and a few regrettable words can destroy a relationship. We’ve seen words destroy careers; we’ve seen words destroy reputations, progress, and lives. Throughout human history, our greatest leaders, our greatest thinkers, have used words to transform our emotions, to galvanize us to fight causes, and to shape the course of our destiny.

Words are maybe the most powerful thing. We can all remember one time someone said something to us when they were angry or acting from their unconscious mind, and we will never forget it. We’ll never forget how much it hurt, how it changed our opinion of them forever, and in some cases, how it made us question ourselves.

There are very personal things that friends and family have said to me flippantly when they were angry that I’ve never forgotten. I won’t share them because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but those things have stayed with me. You can always change your mood, and your mood does change, but you cannot take back words.

So, it’s so important to choose them wisely. I can’t express that enough. In this instance, I didn’t know the difference between my ego and maybe self-protection. I deeply regret losing my class, and I regret the way I spoke to him, and I regret the way I reacted. I really should have just put this whole situation in context.

People copy me all the time. The only reason I was pissed off was because it did so well and he got so much credit. That’s just an ego play. The truth is, the game I play is not protectable. If I let situations like this piss me off, then I will spend my life pissed off. The bigger I get, the more people are going to copy me.

Like I said, the more successful you get, the more challenges you have against your ego and your emotion. The more followers I get—I’ve got half a million followers on Instagram now—when that gets to one million, there’s going to be another 500,000 people that are capable of copying me. I don’t mind if they copy me. For some reason, I was pissed off that he copied me, took the credit, and did really, really well from the credit.

So, in future, here’s what I’m going to do, and I want to give you a little bit of a conclusion to the situation. About 24 hours passed and I messaged the kid on Instagram and I just apologized. I said, "Sorry, this isn't who I want to be. I'm much better than this, and in this instance, my ego got the better of me."

I apologized to this kid unreservedly. The key learning from this is: A, if anyone copies me at any point ever, I’m not going to do anything about it. It’s the nature of the world, and I do not want to get emotionally controlled by that which I cannot control. And B, if this ever happens again, I am not going to react. And C, if I do end up reacting because we are all imperfect, then I just want to apologize as fast as I possibly can and again try and learn from it.

Speaking of being classy and composed, the second point in my diary is about Barack Obama. Some of you may know that follow me on social media, because I did shout about it a lot, will know that last week I had the absolute pleasure of speaking on stage with Barack Obama, sharing a stage with him in Brazil in front of thousands and thousands—up to 15,000 people.

It’s one of the honors of my life. Barack Obama is someone that I watched when I was 16 years old, and I stayed up all night watching him on my brother’s TV as he got elected. I was inspired, I was overwhelmed, I was emotional, and it just meant so much for so many reasons. When people have asked me what I want to be when I’m older or what my objective is, one of my objectives has always been to just do myself justice.

What I mean by that is to reach my potential. Obama is somebody that I look at and I think, "You are great. You’ve achieved greatness. You’ve reached your potential." I want to reach my potential in my career, as a friend, as a boyfriend, a dad, in terms of fulfillment. I don’t want to be the best. I don’t want to be the biggest; I don’t want to be the strongest, the most successful, the richest.

Because all of those things are just comparisons against other people. You are measuring and ranking yourself, your performance, your happiness, whatever, not against your own feelings, not against your own fulfillment, not against your own satisfaction, but against somebody else. That feels like a completely pointless thing to do.

Anytime you’re measuring something against an external benchmark, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons, and you’ll probably never be satisfied. Because then what? What happens when you become the biggest? You realize that as a goal, as an objective, was completely empty because it was extrinsic. It wasn’t for your own fulfillment; it wasn’t because you cared about that, it wasn’t because you enjoyed that. It was literally just a status game.

As Naval often says, status games are unfulfilling. I’ve also made the same change within our business. I think businesses typically get caught up in the idea of winning the best-place-to-work awards or being the biggest or having the most revenue. But really, for a business to be sustainable, a business needs to just focus on being happier or being better at what they do.

So, I did a big presentation to all of our teams globally in which I communicated our new sort of goals, and all of these things are measures against ourselves. We want to be 20% happier this year. We want to be 20% better in terms of our environmental sustainability, and we want to improve our revenue by X.

These things matter more. These are self-comparisons. By focusing on yourself, not others, not comparisons, the funny thing is you just might end up being the biggest and the best. But anyway, back to my point. I’ve obsessed about personal improvement, not matters of status or comparison.

It kind of begs this question internally: how far do I think I can go? If I’m saying that really my aim in life is to do myself justice and to get closer to my potential, what is my potential? Here’s the truth: I genuinely, genuinely in the soul of me, in the core of who I am, believe that there is no limit.

I believe there is no limitation to how far I can go. I think often in life, when people are so vocal about their ambitions and their ambitions are big, we are intimidated by them. Sometimes we try and tear them down, and the reaction is never really good. We’re also personally, individually quite scared of saying who we think we can become.

Society makes us play ourselves down to be humble and whatever, but I genuinely, genuinely think that there is no limitation on how far I can go. I feel like through all of the conditioning from society and social media and school that tells you to just be happy with something, I feel like it’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally broken out.

I’ve broken out of caring about other people. I’ve broken out of caring about people’s opinions, strangers, friends, family, and all of that. I feel like I’ve broken out of a prison. I’ve broken out of Alcatraz, and I’ve run to the end of the island’s cliff and I’ve jumped off. And as I was falling, I learned how to fly.

Now my only limitation is time. Nothing else. The distance I travel will be purely based on time—how much time I have and how I use it. I don’t think this is just me. If you know me, if you’ve seen me speak, if you’ve met me in person, or if you’ve asked me this question, I’ve never ever believed that I’m special. I still don’t.

The truth is, I think everybody has the potential to be great. This leads to the next point in my diary, which is about greatness. I’ve literally just written: "Obama is great. How do I become great?" I’m going to try and answer this question. The question is: how can you become great? How can I become great? How can anyone become great?

In the past, I’ve always thought that great people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Rosa Parks became great because they took on one singular great challenge and won. But I’ve started to completely rethink that based on a little bit of research and a little bit more of a contextual understanding into all of these people’s backgrounds.

For me, there’s a kind of unspoken secret about greatness, and I’m hoping I can articulate that. For me, to become a great person, you have to have great achievements. Achievements take time, and achievements live in hindsight; they live in the past. Therefore, greatness is a reflection of a period of effort.

With that said, the most important factor of great people has to be consistency. Let’s be honest: nobody that wins the lottery is considered great. We’ll either say that they did good or they were lucky or something like that. But Nelson Mandela, he started marching in 1943, and now he’s considered great.

Consistency does two really important things: through momentum, it kind of compounds your success, kind of like going to the gym where muscle builds on top of yesterday’s muscle. If sharing a stage with Obama was my greatest speaking achievement, then we can dig down into that and figure out what actually happened.

So, the organizer of the event in Brazil where I spoke with Obama saw me speak on a different stage in Texas at South by Southwest. And when they saw me in Texas, they were impressed. Not only have I spoken hundreds and hundreds of times to get to the point where anyone would be impressed, but the organizer of the event in Texas saw my videos online, and that’s why I was in Texas in the first place.

I’ve been improving the delivery and content of my videos for three years almost every day. Consistency created the opportunity, but consistency also made me ready for the opportunity. This is where the second upside of being consistent is so evident. In terms of personal development, consistency teaches you rapidly through trial and error.

You try something, you fail, you learn, you improve. If you’re consistent, you try again, you fail, you learn, and you improve even more. The problem is, it’s not easy to be consistent for any of us. We’ve all been there—trying to go to the gym, trying to eat healthily. Consistency is hard.

They say consistency comes from discipline, but I don’t think that’s particularly useful information if you can’t tell me where discipline comes from. The truth is, in order to be disciplined, you have to be fulfilled and enjoy the process. That’s made easier if you believe in the rewards and you believe in delayed gratification.

So, instead of me thinking I have to do one more thing to become great—have one more idea, say one more thing, launch one more business—perhaps "great" is just "good" repeated. I’m going to say that again. Perhaps great is just good repeated. To become great, we must be consistently good.

In the mind of society, in order to be considered a great person, you have to apply that consistent effort to a noble, worthwhile cause, as Martin Luther King did, as Rosa Parks did, or Mother Teresa. Because if we all become great at the things we’re repeatedly doing, well, for some of us, that means we’re great at navigating Netflix or texting on WhatsApp or scrolling through Instagram.

For others who have focused their consistency in areas with more substance according to society, that means they’ve become great philanthropists, great entrepreneurs, great speakers. Perhaps great is just good repeated. Society hands out the medals in this area. But you should focus on becoming great at the things that intrinsically matter to you.

Not to society, to you. The things that will lead you to personal inner fulfillment: becoming a great dad, a great friend, a great artist. Perhaps great is just good repeated. That’s my big takeaway. Instead of obsessing about the big move I’m going to make to make myself great, I’m just going to try and be good consistently. I think, according to the evidence, that should be enough.

Okay, so the next point is something that I’ve tried to summarize for the longest time, and about a week ago, I posted it on my Instagram because I finally managed to put it into words. Here’s the context: Don’t we all know some people who read the most books?

They are the most intelligent people on paper; they’ve got the best grades. But when it comes to society and being a stand-up, productive, self-aware citizen, they just fall down. Some of the smartest people I know that read the most books are the most stupid when it comes to emotional intelligence and understanding the impact of their behavior.

This is probably also why people who do really well in school often don’t go the furthest in life. They were incredibly good at memorization, but when it comes to taking what they’ve learned and being able to apply it to themselves in terms of that self-awareness, they fall down.

What I wrote in my diary this week is: "You can read as many books as you like, but if you're unable to read yourself, you'll never learn a thing." From the ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" to Western psychology, the topic of self-awareness has been studied by everybody—philosophers, psychologists—for the last couple of centuries.

We all know smart people who are rude, self-centered, egotistical, and continually demonstrate the same character flaws time and time again. No matter how many books they report to read or how book-smart they get, the most important lessons—the consequences of their actions—seem to go unlearned.

When we’re able to focus on and learn ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our own internal standards and values and to who we want to be. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves. When we do this, we learn. When we do this, we grow, and when we do this, we can progress and become better than we were yesterday.

As I said earlier, that’s one of my key aims: just being better. When we do this, we’re able to take information we’ve read and act upon it without the flaws in our characters getting in the way. Some of the smartest people I know have the biggest egos, and their egos stop them from ever implementing what they know and have learned.

The truth is, we need humility to grow. We need to be able to reflect objectively, analyze, critique ourselves, and that’s the required foundation of all progress. I’ve really, really thought long and hard about a practical thing I can do to get better at reading myself and, honestly, the most productive thing I do in this area is this podcast.

Think about it: throughout the week, every time something happens, you’ll see me quickly pull out my phone and write something in the note section in my phone. At the end of the week, I sit and I analyze it and I share it with the world. I pick it apart, I learn how I can improve, and I really think about those moments.

So, just think about that for a second. If I live 10 years and I’m analyzing everything that happens to me, my progression in those 10 years, my learnings, the amount that I’m going to self-analyze and then improve is going to be exponentially more than someone who’s not doing that. That means in 10 years of living, I might get 20 or 30 years of knowledge and information about myself.

I cannot believe everybody doesn’t do this. I cannot believe that. Listen, the thing you’ll know about me, the thing you’ll come to learn about me, is I don’t share things that I don’t believe in. I’m not the type of hocus-pocus, bullshit motivator whatever that sits around reading books searching for something to give you.

When I give you something or when I tell you something that I’m doing, I tell it to you because it’s fucking changed my life, and I’m almost internally angry that everybody isn’t doing this because I genuinely, genuinely want you to be more fulfilled. That’s my key objective.

I think the process of understanding ourselves will make us more successful, will mean that our inputs result in the outcomes we desire, and then ultimately you’ll be more fulfilled. So please, just try it. Try it for a week. Try a little bit of micro-noting in your diary or in your notes or on your phone or whatever, and at the end of the week review it and write about it.

Do a newsletter, an article, a blog—whatever you want to do. It’s so cathartic; it’s therapeutic, but it’s incredibly productive for your personal development.

Okay, so the next point in my diary, I’ve just written: "Correlation between giving less fucks and success, happiness, peace, composure, and great achievements." You know, I was sat on my sofa in New York and I was just thinking. I was in a bit of a flow state where my mind is completely clear, and it just dawned on me that the situation I’ve got into now in my life where I really, really give less fucks than at any time in my history is the most happiest, the most successful, the most peaceful, the most composed, and the most full of achievements.

There’s this clear correlation in my life between me saying, "Do you know what? I'm going to do it anyway. Do you know what? I don't care what people think or say or might think or say. I'm just going to do it anyway because I want to." And my happiness.

I genuinely, genuinely believe that without even realizing it, nearly all of us are living a life in some way to fit in. We’re doing things to make us accepted, to avoid anything that might lead to criticism or negative gossip from friends, family, total strangers.

After spending years and, in some cases, decades being conditioned by our societal bubble, after years of conforming and reading the script and playing the part and living the life we were told we were supposed to live, some of us have totally lost a sense of who we actually are. What we actually enjoy, the things that make us fulfilled.

This act has gone on so long and is now so deeply ingrained in our behavior, in our sense of self, that some of us—and I know people like this—are unable to distinguish this people-pleasing behavior that pleases everyone but ourselves from personal passion that pleases the person that matters the most. We are unable to break free.

Because of this, the stats say especially young people are depressed more than ever before. The suicide rate has started going up again. That’s according to my friend who’s the clinical director at the NHS. We feel trapped. We can feel totally alone, totally misunderstood, and totally isolated in a room full of familiar faces.

Here’s the truth: we live someone else’s life because the life we’re supposed to live, the life we want to live, the things we want to do, come at the cost of criticism. In some cases, it might mean you lose your job. It might mean that you lose close friends. In my case, I know that there were so many people talking shit about me when I started posting some of my achievements publicly, but also I started doing all of the personal brand stuff.

So many people talk shit about me and, here’s the catch, I know they still do. I’m fully aware that they still do. In some cases, being yourself might even cost you your family. As I told you when I dropped out of university and called my mom, I didn’t speak to my mom for another two years.

The path to getting there feels so unknown and so uncertain and sometimes so unworthwhile because of the cost, but it always feels slightly unachievable. Here’s the thing that I think has the highest chance of making you fulfilled in your whole life forever. I never really need to revisit this topic again once I’ve said this.

One of the bravest things anyone can do in 2019, where we live in a social media "capture everything, share everything, then compare everything" world, is to be our true selves. It’s never been harder to be you because it’s never been easier for society to give their opinion of you.

But when you look at the data and you see the rise in youth depression, anxiety, loneliness, it’s clear that it’s never been more important to try. To try and be you. To try and be Jenny, Steve, Isaac, Tom, John, Dave, Lindsey. Try and be you.

To do things that make you feel good, not things that make you look good. To try and associate with people who have substance and passion, not people with followers and status. To try and love someone because of their character and morals, not because of their cars and money.

Here is the truth: most of your potential, your peace, and your power is trapped behind other people’s opinions. But deep down, deep down somewhere in your inner child, you know who you actually are. But the pressure from your environment has made you very, very good—all of us—it’s made us very good at pretending that we’re someone else.

We’ve done that because it’s safer. In the short term, it’s easier. But across the length of your life, it’s the most regrettable decision you can make. According to the "regrets of the dying," that study done by Bronnie Ware where she interviewed people on their deathbed, the number one regret of the dying is living a life untrue to yourself and living someone else’s life for someone else’s reasons.

You have the opportunity to avoid that regret in every moment. You have the opportunity to change this, to make decisions for yourself, to put yourself first, to value your ambitions over theirs for once, to prioritize your dreams for once, to step outside of your comfort zone for once, and to run towards you.

You can make that decision today, you can make that decision right now, you could have made it yesterday. But today and right now is the best next available time. I just implore everybody listening to this: I say this from the very bottom of my heart and from the bottom of my soul.

The thing that has changed my life more than any other thing is getting closer to being me. It’s made me more successful, it’s made me happier, it’s made everything that I do—I don’t have to question whether it’s the right thing because it’s me. And me will always be the right thing.

About four years ago—probably about five years ago—a guy called Ashley Jones, a good friend of mine, said to me, "Steve, you should start your personal brand." And I said to Ash, "No." And the reason I said "no" is because I cared too much about what people would think if I started putting my ideas out there.

I genuinely was worried people would think that I was a know-it-all or some kind of asshole or whatever. So, for about two years, I just put it off. He said, "You should start a YouTube channel." I said, "No," and put it off. The minute I made the decision to do all of those things—to be more vocal, more public, to get out on stage more—everything changed.

At that same time, I was too scared, and if you go on my Instagram, you’ll do well to ever find a photo of me. I was too scared to even post a photo of my face. This is where I was, right? And by finally deciding that I was just going to fucking go for it irrespective of what people would think or say, everything changed.

My self-esteem went through the fucking roof. My personal achievements went through the fucking roof with my self-esteem. Everything changed. I became happier, more fulfilled, more successful—everything—just because I took down some of that bullshit that society had put there. Just because I stopped giving a fuck about what people might think if I was just Steve.

It just makes me wonder how much of the world’s potential is locked and trapped behind other people’s opinions. How many inventions, how many cured diseases live behind someone who is scared of someone else’s opinion? It’s such a tragedy. You know, there’s that old expression that the richest place in the world is the graveyard because we all take our potential there.

And I just—we’re all going to die anyway. This topic genuinely frustrates me. There’s a book I read on the plane the other day—it’s a psychology book—and it shows that so many of us try and escape ourselves. In trying to escape ourselves and be someone different, we arrive at two different outcomes.

This is a study done in 1813 by a Polish psychologist. We end up in two different outcomes when we try and escape ourselves: we either despise ourselves because we fail—you can't be anybody else, so we end up despising ourselves for not succeeding in being someone else—or we succeed in abandoning our true selves.

Either way, we end up in despair about our true selves. So, if we abandon our true selves, we end up in despair, and if we fail to abandon ourselves, we end up in despair. The truth is—the first conclusion—is: to escape despair, you first have to accept your true self. To be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair.

It’s a really famous psychology study done, I think the psychologist is called Søren Kierkegaard. I probably said that wrong, but the conclusion is the most important thing: to be that self which one is truly is indeed the opposite of despair. I think I’ll just leave it there.

Someone came up to me the other day—this is my sort of sign-off, I guess—and the kid said, "Steve, I love all the hard work you put in and seeing that and all those things. It's great to see. But the thing that I value the most from you is the vulnerability." He says a lot of entrepreneurs don’t show the downsides, they don’t show the stuff that happens to them.

What he really values is me showing how human I am and all of the tough stuff that I go through. So, what I’m going to do—historically, I’ve kind of assigned the end of my podcast to talk about relationships and things like that—I’m not going to do that this week. I’m just going to talk about vulnerability.

I have no script, I have no notes on this. I want to share some of my vulnerabilities. So, my first vulnerability—the first thing that springs to mind—is I genuinely think I don’t have balance in my life. I think that if I’m going to be successful in being happy according to everything I read and believe, I need to find more balance.

This means that I need to be more social, I need to spend more time in nature, I need to spend more time with myself, and all of these kinds of things. I need to have more meaningful relationships in my life. So, that’s a real big vulnerability to me. In the pursuit of success and business and whatever else I do—being a public speaker, all these things—there’s been a great sacrifice.

I’m someone that kind of disproportionately sacrifices things. I don’t sacrifice things a little; I go all-in. When I commit my mind to something, my friends will tell you, I go all-in. I’ve been all-in on self-development, on my career, on my business for maybe eight years now. Yeah, eight years, coming up to nine years.

So, I’ve lost balance in my life, and that’s something that I need to fix. It’s one of my big sort of personal objectives. On the point of balance, I need to improve the relationship with my family, I need to become better at dating romantic partners. There’s something broken in me.

I think it comes from my childhood. I think I’ve spoken about this before: watching my mom and dad argue and watching marriage and relationships be such a negative thing when I was a kid. The model of relationships I saw and observed was such a negative one that I almost feel like I can’t get—like I’m just undatable.

Like I’d be a bit of an asshole boyfriend. I’m trying to work on that. Because if I don’t fix that, I won’t have meaningful relationships, and if I don’t have meaningful relationships, I won’t have happiness according to the science, right? So, I need to fix that.

What other vulnerabilities do I have? I don’t know. I think that’s really it. Those are the things at the moment that are really on my mind—the things that I want to fix. People ask me, they say, "Have you ever had any mental health issues?" I haven’t. I haven’t.

Quite sort of naively, when I was younger, I thought I was immune from all of that stuff. I thought that I was immune from needing balance, I was immune from ever getting depression or anxiety or anything like that. But I’ve come to learn that I’m not. The truth is, nobody is.

We can all—all of us, even me, right?—we can all go through hard moments, tough times. I’ve had moments where I’ve been really, really anxious. I remember about a year ago, there was this one decision I had to make and I was absolutely riddled with anxiety. That was the day that I learned what anxiety really is. Horrible fucking thing. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

But yeah, we’re all just fucking vulnerable, like imperfect, weak humans that are trying to figure all of this shit out and trying to do our best and trying to be loved and admired and trying to achieve status and freedom and financial success.

On this journey, I guess like what I’m doing here, what I’m doing with this podcast, what I’m doing with my life, is just trying to figure some stuff out and figure out what I can’t figure out. Most of the big existential questions that exist in my life, I realize now that there’s no answer to them.

One of the dangers that we can all fall into is trying to get simple answers to very complex, invalid questions. We all try and find the answer to "What's the meaning of life?" or "What's your purpose?" or "Find your purpose." That question is just as invalid as "What color is number nine?"

Just because you can ask the question doesn’t mean it’s valid. What I’ve done over the last couple of years is just try to detach myself from all of these invalid, complex questions in which society has provided oversimplified answers. It’s dangerous, you know? That’s a vulnerability that I’m working on, I guess.

Anyway, that’s the podcast for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you have, do me the biggest favor: just rate it. Wherever you’re listening to it, just give it a rating. If you do, just leave your Instagram or Twitter handle in the comment section of the rating. That would mean the world to me and I’ll check out your Instagram, etc. If I can, I’ll do my very best.

You’ll see me next week. If you like this podcast—it’s the first time listening to it—do subscribe, because they are quite infrequent at times and I do want to let you know when I post them. Other than that, have the best week ever and I’ll catch you guys soon.