The Solution To All Of Your Problems
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You can't control the future. You can't change the past. And efforts to do so so often result in something that we never wished for. In this week's chapter of The Diary of a CEO, we're going to go deep.
The things I talk about today may well be the most important things I will ever talk about. In fact, maybe The Diary of a CEO should have just been this episode. When you understand the one thing that matters above all else, maybe you'll agree.
So without further ado, 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.
For the first point in my diary this week, I've just written: You versus your thoughts. I'm going to start off with a quote which I think is incredibly relevant and pertinent to what I'm about to say. The quote is by Buddha, and the quote goes like this:
"To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to oneself, one's family, and peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind." It begs the question: why was Buddha so obsessed with something so internal when referencing external factors?
My question to you is: what is your experience? What is the experience you have as a human being? What is that? What is the experience you have at work? What is controlling that?
What is the experience you have within your romantic relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend? What is the experience you have when you're just walking down the street? When you're arguing with someone? When you're sad, when you're happy, when you're celebrating a victory?
When you're riddled with anxiety and you can't move? What is that? The irrefutable answer is: it's just a bunch of thoughts. Both vividly conscious thoughts and quite distant, intangible, subconscious thoughts.
Those immaterial thoughts, whether conscious or subconscious, have tremendous material consequences in your life. They can make you depressed. We all know that. They can make you physically ill. They can impact your physical appearance.
They can destroy your immunity. They can change your habits. They can change your diet. They can make you ecstatic, fulfilled, and content. They can make you react in ways that will cost you your job or your partner.
In some cases, as we've seen many times, they will cost you your dreams, your career, your livelihood, everything. Those thoughts are your experience. And the imperative truth that I've come to realize, especially this week, is I cannot control other people.
I really couldn't control all the bad things that happened to me this week. I can't stop bad things coming to the people that I love either. But I can control my thoughts. And in a world of total chance, luck, and unpredictability, I've come to learn that there is so little outside of my mind that I can control.
Basically nothing. I've given my life, every hour I have for the last couple of decades, and still, things go awfully wrong sometimes. No matter how hard I work, no matter how much I care about perfection, heartbreak, pain, and misfortune still manage to find me.
It doesn't take you long to realize that controlling the world and external factors is a fight that you will never win. This week, I witnessed two things which really gave me perspective on this. I witnessed a close friend of mine completely have a breakdown because their train was canceled.
Because of the storm that hit the country over the last couple of days, that resulted in a one-hour delay for that person to get home. I witnessed that cause them a breakdown. And I also witnessed another friend have a lesser reaction after her older brother was rendered brain damaged following a horrific car accident.
He regained his consciousness, lost his total sense of identity, and began to aggressively attack his own family, tearing her whole family apart and rendering her and her aging mother basically his permanent caregiver.
That one-hour train delay caused more of an emotional and bleak reaction in one friend than the loss of a close family member to another. If I ever needed proof that anyone's experience is not determined by what happens, but by the filter we apply to what happens, maybe that was it.
And what is that filter? It's your thoughts. We're all predisposed to think in constructive and productive or toxic and destructive ways. Of course, science has presented evidence that chemical imbalances can alter your thoughts.
That is true. But science has also clearly demonstrated that your thoughts can change your chemical balances. Every thought releases some type of chemical. When positive thoughts are generated, when you're feeling happy and optimistic, your brain produces serotonin.
This creates a feeling of well-being and happiness. And when you're thinking negatively, the brain actually draws precious metabolic energy away from your prefrontal cortex within your mind.
Even more alarmingly, the more you focus on negativity, the more synapses and neurons your brain will create, which will allow you to think more negatively in the future. Really, those that think positively will likely have more serotonin and feel better.
It's a cycle—a rewarding and positive one or a viciously negative one. But either way, it's a cycle that you have control over just by what you think. And what you think is the thing that's determining your entire experience at all times.
It's not what's happened to you. It's not that you've lost your keys, that you've got a flat tire, that it's raining, that your train's been canceled, or that asshole ex-boyfriend or your spouse. It's what you think about those things.
The majority of harm is caused in your head by you and your thoughts. The harm isn't caused by reality. The problem isn't the problem; the problem is the way you think about the problem. I don't think anybody loves this idea. I didn't love this idea the first time I heard it.
Because once again, it puts a mirror up in front of us and it makes us take responsibility. That horrible thing that none of us really deep down want to do. It makes us take responsibility for how we're feeling.
We're all conditioned to believe that things piss us off. Today, my videographer was telling me about the things that piss him off. He said, and I quote: "My clients used to piss me off when they didn't pay me on time." I thought about that sentence.
With the logic I've just presented, any sentence of that nature is inherently flawed. Your clients didn't piss you off. The sentence should have been: "I pissed myself off when my clients didn't pay me."
Suddenly, external blame becomes internal responsibility. Suddenly it's on you. And suddenly, you can do something about it. Suddenly you have control over a seemingly uncontrollable circumstance. When you have control, you can change your life.
You can make hell into a heaven. It becomes a choice. If you understand what I've said and you believe it, it may just be the most important thing I've ever shared with you. Because your thoughts are your experience, and what else is there other than your experience?
Understanding this is most of the battle. Believing it and embracing it is the rest. It's the helpless, losing battle of not being able to control negative news or negative events and negative people that causes most of our anguish.
This isn't an observational podcast where I just point things out I've noticed in my life. This is a podcast where I also try and share the solutions that I use for these problems. And I guess step one to this is to believe me.
It wasn't until I believed this that things started to drastically change in my life. I got so much better at dealing with bullshit. In my job as a 27-year-old CEO of a company with hundreds and hundreds of employees all around the world, I know that every day I'm going to be exposed to unpredictable bad news.
You have to believe that your thoughts are everything, not the circumstances you find yourself in. And then you have to resign. You have to hand in your notice. You have to quit the job of trying to control the uncontrollable.
Step two is you have to try and be ultra-conscious about your thoughts. You have to observe yourself thinking. This is an art in itself. It's not easy to do. One way you can do this is by writing down your thoughts, by journaling.
I can't tell you how much having this podcast and writing in my diary and really analyzing my thoughts throughout the week has changed my life. This will increase your self-awareness. When you can see your thoughts from a bird's eye view, you can understand the patterns and the triggers.
You can start to be more conscious about the effect those triggers are having on you. For fairly innate survival reasons, thinking becomes an automatic thing. By the time you're 27, although you like to believe you're the CEO of your own thoughts and actions, you're not.
Most of them are reactive. Most of them are survival-orientated, emotional, ego-driven, and somewhat negative. In many cases, they're so automatic that we don't even realize that thoughts exist in the process of us making a decision.
We don't even know we're thinking. People do terrible things, and then when the dust clears, they say: "Sorry, I wasn't thinking." Yes, you were. You just weren't aware consciously of your thoughts. Step two has to be actively becoming more conscious of your thoughts and the patterns causing them.
Step three: I'm going to give you a tool. Every time you encounter a situation that triggers a negative downward spiral of overthinking and doom and gloom, use the Best Friend Method. You have to write down your best friend's name at the top of a page.
It can be in your notes or wherever you want. It can also be a sibling or a parent. And then write down the problem, the thing that's been bothering you. Then write down what you would respond to your best friend if they came to you with that problem.
Be totally honest. Say exactly what you'd say to your friend. What would you say to your friend if they came to you with that problem? Earlier this week, a friend of mine came to me and they were having an absolute breakdown.
I'm going to call them Jenny. So I'm sat there on Jenny's couch and she is telling me all of her problems with this one particular situation. She's doing that thing people do where they make a bunch of negative conclusions all the way down into that dark hole where there is no solution.
She'll say: "This has happened, so that means this, which means there's no solution." I was observing her make those very irrational, emotional, negative conclusions. I just interrupted Jenny and I said: "Jenny, okay, I've listened to you now, and I've got a problem I want to tell you about."
"I need your help with this. I'm your friend, please help me solve my problem." And I just repeated back to Jenny what she'd told me. Immediately, her face changes. Immediately she looks at me like what I've just said is pathetic.
When she could see her problem reflected back on her from someone she cared about, it looked so pathetic. It looked very easy to solve. Without the emotional mist around us, for some bizarre reason, we're able to think so much more rationally.
She immediately could think of solutions for me when I had her problem. She was so compassionate. Remember earlier on in this podcast I said that the problem isn't the problem? It's the way you think about the problem.
How is one going to solve their own thinking with their own thinking when, in fact, your thinking is the problem? It's a bit of a conundrum. But for some remarkable reason, when we're in a cloud of emotion about our own problems, we can't reason clearly.
But we can still think rationally about the exact same problem if it's happening outside of the cloud of our own emotion to someone else. We're especially compassionate if it's someone we love and dearly want the best for.
I do this exercise to help me find the correct and compassionate way forward. It feels really silly, but I promise you this is backed by science. Once you've mastered the art of doing it on paper, then you can do it without paper. That's something that I default to now.
This week I posted something on my LinkedIn and my Twitter. It was just a thought that I had, and it went pretty crazy. On LinkedIn, it's been viewed by half a million people already. It caused a tremendous debate, but the vast majority of people completely agreed.
This is the statement that I made: "Unpopular opinion: The rise in young people wanting to be entrepreneurs and isolating themselves and working remotely or alone in co-working spaces is going to make this generation more miserable, lonely, burnt out, and purposeless than any generation that has come before them."
I said this because I know at the end of the day, we are tribal animals. We gain great meaning from having supportive communities around us and shared goals that we're working towards. The most empty days in my life were the days that I spent as a remote consultant.
Or when I was doing freelance work for a little bit. Or when I was building my startup alone in my bedroom in a boarded-up house in Moss Side for two years. This sounds crazy coming from an entrepreneur, but being an employee in a supportive, high-trust, and high-freedom environment where you're doing meaningful work is so underrated.
Largely because of disingenuous hustle pornstar entrepreneurs who are trying to convince you that being your own boss is inherently superior because they've got an agenda. But my advice is to try and create a set of principles completely agnostic to the solution.
One might be freedom. One might be working with good people that aren't assholes. One should be meaningful work. One might be doing something you're good at. And number five might be work-life balance. Make your career choice agnostically based on your principles.
Whether that leads you to becoming an entrepreneur or whether it leads you to becoming an employee at a great company. The other thing that I had to debunk is this idea that you can be your own boss. It is a total myth.
I work more now than I've ever done. Obviously, that work feels more meaningful because my previous jobs were predominantly in sales and tele-sales. But I also answer to more people now than I ever have in my life.
I have investors, I have clients, I have customers, I have the government to answer to. I only really had one person to answer to when I was an employee. This message sometimes is construed a little bit—people say co-working is amazing. It is. Remote working is amazing too.
But when you do it in total isolation, it's unhealthy. I'm not discouraging entrepreneurs. I'm encouraging healthy entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship that doesn't sacrifice these fundamentals that make humans happy and full of joy.
There's this obsessive optimization of our lives, and it's made loneliness just this epidemic within all of us, and especially within entrepreneurs. Loneliness is currently considered at epidemic levels by any government standard.
There was a really recent study of 20,000 adults who live in Western countries, and it found that nearly half of them feel like they are alone. Nearly half of them said they didn't have meaningful in-person social interactions on a daily basis.
Shockingly, one-fifth of people surveyed said they feel that they have absolutely no one to talk to. A large proportion of adults over the age of 45 suffer from chronic loneliness, while younger people, the people aged between 18 and 37, are the single loneliest generation in recorded history.
Clearly, social networks aren't that social after all. This is where it gets really bonkers. The loneliness epidemic is so bad that world leaders have now been forced to intervene.
The British Prime Minister that we've just kicked out, Theresa May, appointed the first Minister for Loneliness in January 2018. She declared that this was a decision taken to address the sad reality of modern life.
In doing so, the fight against isolation became official business of the central government. This news left me with this disturbing, dystopian vision of the government screaming at us through public tannoy systems: "Talk to each other for fuck's sake!" while we stand anxiously in lifts and underground trains.
Take it from me, as someone that did it, someone that spent years in isolation to start a business, someone that made it and got there: the best days of my life were not the days when I sat alone building my startup in a rundown house.
The best days of my life were the days where I was surrounded by good people doing meaningful work. And anybody that tells you otherwise is probably lying, or they have too much of a bias to realize how they actually feel.
The next point in my diary is one that I've really never touched on, quite surprisingly. I do these stickers on Instagram where I ask my audience to ask me a question. People always ask the question: "Steve, how are you feeling?"
I get asked that question all the time. I've never really answered the question because it's a fairly long answer, but I'm going to answer that question today. How am I feeling? In this exact moment, I'm tired. I'm almost tired to the point where I'm mildly delusional.
It's 3:00 AM. I didn't sleep yesterday, didn't get great sleep the night before either. I've got a flight to Berlin in literally two hours. So I'm probably not going to get much sleep tonight either. And I function fairly well, but I do feel the tiredness.
I also had one of those weeks where the bad news was pretty constant. That, coupled with tiredness, creates a high-risk situation for my state. In those moments, I have to be incredibly conscious about my thoughts and my actions.
If my thoughts are susceptible to tiredness or bad nutrition, then my actions can get pretty unfavorable. That's the micro answer to your question. The macro answer is a little bit different. The long-term, big-picture answer is: I'm so happy.
To the point that I literally just got goosebumps when I said that. I'm so grateful, and I always have been so grateful, to the point where I could literally cry tears of happiness at any moment if I really dwell on how happy and how grateful I feel.
That's the thing that lives at the core of me. All of the other shit—tiredness and bad news—just dances somewhere on the surface in the short term. Again, that core, that internal fulfillment, is maybe something I don't have the awareness to fully explain the origin of.
I'm conscious of the fact that none of us fully appreciate the full array of the factors that have led us to be where we are today. Successful people rarely point to luck and timing; they point to their hard work and their intelligence.
Happy people often demonstrate the same biases. When you try and ask them why they're happy, they might say: "I just look on the bright side." But the reality is perhaps much more innate. Despite me saying that, I'm still going to guess.
Number one, I'd say, is I'm living a life I love, one that's true to me. I've quit everything that wasn't that. My ability to quit things and run in the direction of uncertainty was probably a mixture of nature and nurture.
I probably don't know what made me that fearless, but I do know for a fact that you can become more fearless. Number two, I think there's probably some genetic disposition that I have. I say that because I see patterns in families, and my family are pretty optimistic throughout.
Number three, thoughts make me inherently grateful and positive. Number four, I think always that I'm in control of my circumstances. Studies show that when people think that they are not in control, they typically get more depressed.
Number five: podcasting, journaling, and analyzing my own thoughts. I think that has made me more resistant to toxic external influences. I think that self-awareness and being aware of what I'm thinking and feeling has made me happier constantly.
I don't believe Instagram. I don't believe some hater that tells me I'm a worthless idiot. I have healthy mechanisms to deal with external influence, to process it, and to make my own decisions. External influences go through my own filter before they become part of my reality.
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Point four in my diary. I wanted to do something this week on this podcast that I've never done before. I wanted to pick one direct message that I've received of the thousands that I get weekly from people.
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My mom, I was talking to her about Boost by Facebook the other day. She doesn't know how to use a phone. She's trying to run a business in 2020 and compete against people that do. Boost is a place for people like her. You can learn more about this at facebook.com/boostwithfacebookuk.
I imagine I get 1,000 DMs a week. I would say 90% of them could be answered by one of five different responses. We're all experiencing the same fundamental problems, but just in slightly different ways.
It's because I have millions of followers that I was able to see that we're all going through the same shit. The DM that I've picked this week is from a guy called Adam. Adam said to me: "Hey Stephen, I'm in such a hard spot in life right now."
"I have a handful of invention ideas and business ideas, but my current job has me traveling and working seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I have been trying to become a firefighter. In my current position, I'm a rescue technician doing technical rescue, but I'm getting burnt out and discouraged."
"It's so hard for me to apply for other jobs or to go for interviews. I don't know if I should take a huge risk and leave my job because I am so miserable. I've been holding on because I want to talk to a patent attorney, but I don't think I'm making enough money to do that, and I need to pay off my student loans."
"I know it's a long shot, but one of your posts just hit me hard and I don't know what to do." And here's my response to Adam. I've actually said to Adam that maybe we should jump on the phone and just have a phone call when the time is right for him.
It's a fundamental problem that we all go through in almost every facet of our lives. It's this battle between uncertainty or certain misery. People stay in miserable situations because they haven't got the strength or the foresight to experience a moment of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is this gap between the miserable situation you're in and the happy one you want to get to. It's a place you almost must have the guts to venture through if you want a chance of happiness. It's a place where the lights are off.
It's a place where your future is unclear, where your comfort has abandoned you. But it's a place right before you reach the happiness you've so desperately been searching for. The idea that we can swing straight from one miserable situation into a happy one without experiencing any uncertainty is fictional.
And it's also one that prevents people from making the jump. Because in their hopes of an easier route, they hold out for another chance to jump that won't involve any uncertainty or risk. And then decades pass.
I'm here to tell you that that's bullshit, Adam. Every time you leave a negative situation—a toxic relationship, a horrible job—the most unwelcome guest that is uncertainty shows up. And the feeling of uncertainty can feel so isolating that it might even make you consider not jumping at all.
We all need to stop searching for happiness in the same place we lost it. We also need to have that strength to weather uncertainty if we're ever going to get closer to the things that matter and that will deliver for us.
Of course, practicality matters. You need an income to support your kids. I get it. You need to pay your mortgage. I get it. We're not all privileged enough to have mommy and daddy light a path through uncertainty for us every time that we find ourselves there.
The need for practicality matters, but we cannot let it become our excuse for conceding to misery. We cannot abandon hope because of its presence. We cannot become its slave. It's not easy, not at all.
But if your question to me is what do I do in that situation, Adam, my answer to you is you have no choice. You have to fight for your happiness at all costs. There is no decision to make here. You do not need my advice; there's just a plan to formulate.
You have to leave. You have to get out. You have to go. And for the sake of yourself and your family and your friends, you have to go and make yourself happy. There was this monk in New York that I got to ask a question. I went to this big talk, and I said to this monk:
"Can I make myself a multi-millionaire while still being able to serve others?" And the monk said to me: "Just like a bottle of water, a bottle of full water, you can't pour out something for others that you don't have yourself."
If you become an empty bottle because you become miserable in your job and you fall into a state of depression, you can't provide for anyone at all. In fact, if you fall into a depression, the likelihood is everyone around you—your family, your friends—will provide for you.
In that context, in fact, being selfish might just be the most selfless thing that you can do right now.
Point five in my diary is just a lesson that I've learned. I've learned the value, especially in my romantic relationships, of communication. I think one of the biggest mistakes we make within our relationships is we have expectations from people that we've never communicated.
It causes this build-up and resentment and problems. This is the same in work. We have expectations from our colleagues, our employer, from our subordinates, whatever it might be, that we've never ever communicated. It causes frustration for the person that isn't meeting your expectations.
If you're going through a situation where your expectations aren't being met by your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your boss, whatever, ask yourself: Have I honestly communicated, without emotion, without any blame, have I communicated what I want?
So often we haven't communicated what we want, we haven't communicated how we feel, and we're letting a problem foster and become more than a problem that we don't need to. I've just learned that lesson so clearly this week.
I took an approach which I don't usually take within my romantic relationships, and I just communicated very, very honestly about how I was feeling. The problem was resolved in like 60 seconds. It evaporated.
That was a problem that in my life probably would have started to compound. When we get resentful and we feel contempt towards our partners or bosses, these problems just compound and get worse and worse. Communication can stop the molehill becoming a mountain.
My last point today is about The Diary of a CEO Live. Can I just say thank you? Because honestly, the reaction to The Diary of a CEO Live, which is the first-ever live event we're doing in Manchester with a special guest **Umar Kamani**, is going to be much more than what I think people think it is.
The event sold out instantaneously. We had about 800 tickets go on sale in three different waves, and every wave sold out instantaneously. It blew my socks off. But one thing I didn't do for the loyal people that listen to this podcast week in, week out, is I didn't give you a chance to get tickets.
And so before we put the tickets on sale, I said to my team: "Just keep 50 tickets back." After The Diary of a CEO Live tickets have sold out and gone on sale, I will give the podcast listeners a chance to get some tickets that I held back.
And so I created a special website, a very secret website, just for you and me listening to this podcast called diaryofaceounlocked.com. If you go to that link, you will find a private link to buy tickets. It's really just the people that listen to this podcast.
If you didn't manage to get tickets, you can buy tickets there. There's only about 50 tickets available there because the capacity of the venue's about 800-900. There's your chance. I can't wait for the event. I'm going to give it my all.
I'm going to meet everybody that I possibly can. I will stay for hours after to be able to shake your hand, to talk to you, to take photos. That's my promise to you. Thank you for listening.
If this is your first time listening to this podcast, do me a massive favor—or if even if it's not and you haven't subscribed—do me a huge favor and just hit that subscribe button. It means that you'll get the podcast first when they come out.
I'm going to continue to use that link, diaryofaceounlocked.com, to seed out special things to just this audience. So being a subscriber will make you susceptible to some awesome surprises going forward. I'm incredibly tired, but I've got one of the most incredible weeks coming up.
And for those of you that were OG fans of the vlog that I did every single day, I've got a major announcement to make to you: we've started filming again for the vlog. Which means that every day of my life is going to be filmed.
We're going to release it once a week, but we're going to film everything. And the big difference between this series and the series we made before is the theme of this series is "real." Realness. Which means you're going to see everything.
In fact, there's a camera recording me right now, sat here in my boxer shorts speaking into this microphone. You're going to see everything. You're going to see me in the bathtub. You're going to see me packing, getting ready, the 4:00 AMs, everything.
I want to experiment and I want to show you that. So stay tuned. I hope you have an amazing, amazing week. Thank you as always for listening to this podcast and I'll see you again soon.
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