Extremely Honest Q&A
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The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do when I arrive is open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. On any given day, if I'm recording hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a nice-to-have; it is absolutely business-mission-critical. So when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
Of all the providers, the one that came back with the steadiest connection, as well as being the cheapest, was today's sponsor, Spectrum Business. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services.
Millions of business owners already rely on Spectrum to keep their operations connected. So if you want to join them, head to spectrum.com/business to learn more. That’s spectrum.com/business. Restrictions apply. Service not available in all areas.
One of the thoughts that continually gets me to the gym and continually makes me show up and work hard is this: if you’re good at it, if you’re great at it, then you might just be great at everything. For me, that really is the meaning of life.
On this week's podcast, we're going to do something very different—something I've never done before, but something that you've requested time and time again. This week, I posted online asking you to ask me any question about me, my life, my business, whatever you want to ask me.
I promised that in return, I would give very brutally honest answers. My team went through all of the questions that were submitted, and they went through and picked the ones they thought were most interesting. They’ve written them in my diary here.
So I'm going to start from the top and answer these questions with the objective of giving you the most valuable, honest advice that I possibly can. Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Okay, so the first question is: "What is the most important lesson that this pandemic has taught you or reconfirmed for you?" For me, that relates back to a podcast I did at the start of the year, and it's that uncertainty is not predictable, but it's preparable.
I don't actually think that's a word, but here's what I mean: what I know for sure—and this relates to everybody—is that your life is, of course, going to be full of a lot of joy, amazing things, breathtaking moments, and rapturous moments of ecstasy, right?
But it’s also going to be riddled with moments of unexpected uncertainty and chaos. Joy is much easier to handle. You just kind of let go and go with it, right? The good times—not a lot of action or thought required. But uncertainty and chaos require a real rigid set of principles.
For me, those principles over the last 12 months have become acceptance, optimism, and action. These three principles have a real linear connection to the outcome you're seeking. Without acceptance when bad things happen, there’s no optimism. Without optimism, there’s no action. And without action, there's often no victory.
Or at least victory is delayed and hard times are elongated. So when bad news visits, whether that’s being unexpectedly fired from your job, dumped by your partner, evicted by your landlord, or losing a loved one in the case of a pandemic, you have to do everything you can to stick to these principles despite the intense cloud of natural emotions that will try to convince you and me otherwise.
You know, I do a lot of introspective thinking for a living, and even I am not immune from letting emotion get the best of me in times of intense chaos. No matter how much I've read or written in my diary or how many podcasts I've done, even I fall victim, especially in the short term, to all of those emotions.
Sometimes I follow the instructions those emotions give you, which will lead you to pretty dire outcomes. You get dumped by your partner; you immediately think revenge. You get fired by your boss; you think, "I'm going to sue them." I fall for those traps too.
I don't think the aim of all humans should be to try and avoid those emotions and that thinking because I think it’s quite impossible. But it’s to be better at the response—to shorten the time that those emotions sit with you and to be better in your reaction.
I want to clarify that acceptance, when I talk about acceptance, it doesn't mean being emotionless. It can often mean the exact opposite. You have to accept how you're feeling, accept what's happened, and importantly, retire from trying to change the unchangeable or from wallowing in regret.
You have to do everything you can to get yourself to a place of optimism. I see that as your responsibility. People won't like me saying that, right? People typically, especially in hard times, don't like to delegate responsibility to themselves.
As hard as it can be, you have to find and create hope for yourself and have faith, just like everything else has in your life, that this too shall pass. Then you have to use that optimism to drive you into action, which is the third principle I've learned over the last 12 months.
If your partner's dumped you, it's time to dust yourself off and get yourself into the gym to fight back. I don't mean fight back as in bomb their house; I mean fight back in a mental capacity—to stop stalking their Instagram, to triple down on your friendships and your meaningful relationships, to stand tall and weather the unavoidable emotional storm, and have faith and acceptance sit by your side.
The opposite of these principles, of course, is denial, pessimism, and inaction. These are the principles of a baby gazelle that’s decided to fall asleep with its toes dipped into crocodile-infested waters. This is a decision to lose twice.
When unexpected chaos happens like this pandemic, which smashes our businesses and destroys our social lives and steals a year from our youth, the first "L" we take is involuntary. Stuff happened and you didn't choose it. It’s totally out of your control. I get that.
But the fateful decision to choose denial, pessimism, and inaction as our response is a voluntary second "L." You're choosing to increase the chances that bad times will become even worse times. You can make the choice not to lose twice. The first "L" wasn't your choice; the second "L" is a byproduct of how you choose to respond: acceptance, optimism, and action.
And I guess the second lesson I've learned this year is a lesson in the importance of prioritization. This advice people often give—and I've often given—of protecting your time and saving your time really feels somewhat incomplete to me now. Because you've got to then ask yourself, saving time to do what?
Saving time just to spend more of it doing the wrong things? Saving time to spend more of it being more productive just so you can get more work done? I guess better advice is to prioritize better.
If you told 19-year-old Stephen Bartlett just to save more time, he probably would have said no to a couple of things and then just spent that saved time working alone in his office all weekend, every weekend. That advice would therefore lead him to a less joyful, more depressive existence.
But if you told 19-year-old Stephen Bartlett to prioritize better, the first question that comes to mind is: "What are my priorities?" My long-term priorities, as I think is the case for all of us, are ultimately linked to the things that make our life meaningful.
Friends, the joy of work, our relationships, the satisfaction of pursuing our goals, the challenge of achieving greater freedom, knowledge, health, and fitness. I guess I would have reviewed the allocation of my time through that lens.
I would have saved time only on the things that aren't connected to my macro priorities and reinvested it in better places. This year, because we've been forced to realize what matters in many cases, I guess now I'm not trying to save time just for the sake of spending it more on optimizing my productivity.
I realize that's an incomplete sentence, and really the most important thing is just to prioritize all of my time better and allocate it to those things that ultimately will matter the most.
Okay, so the next question in my diary is: "How do I maximize my earning potential?" Let me tell you a little bit of a story based on a friend of mine and his company. My friend has a business which is listed on the stock exchange in Germany—one of the very small stock exchanges in Germany.
Having spoken to banks and from my own knowledge of how the stock market and the public markets work, him and me both know that right now his business is worth one billion dollars because of the stock exchange he's on.
If he moves his business to the New York Stock Exchange, the banks and everybody knows that the valuation will be four billion dollars. It's the exact same company. The exact same team, the exact same products, the exact same mission—everything's exactly the same.
But because he's on the wrong stock market, because he's on the wrong stock exchange, the value is 25 percent of what it would be if he just took that same business, the same people, and the same products, the same skills, the same experience, and just moved it to a different stock market.
I reflect on this analogy as a wider, broader sort of life analogy. If I look at my career decisions over the last, I'd say, 10 years, I remember working in one call center in Plymouth in Devon, where I was getting paid about four pounds per hour.
For whatever reason, I decided to move to a different call center with the exact same skills, the exact same experience, and I got paid ten times what I was getting paid at that call center. This is what I've started to notice in my own life.
I've had this particular set of skills, whether it's social media, storytelling, marketing, brands, whatever you want to call it, for the last maybe six or seven years. As I've moved into different rooms and different markets and different companies and different industries, I've noticed that that exact same set of skills is valued completely differently.
This made me reflect on that story of my friend's business. One of the questions you have to ask yourself sometimes in life isn't just, "How do I improve my skills?" But it's, "How do I maximize the earning potential for my skills, and where are my skills going to give me the greatest reward?"
Let me give you another analogy just to cement the point. My ex-girlfriend is a flight attendant, and she currently flies for Emirates, right? Emirates pays okay, but she's told me that she'll get paid up to ten times more if she manages to get a job flying on private jets.
Because of tips and things like that, the same set of skills yields ten times the return if she can move her skills to a different theoretical stock exchange. This is just one of the principles I've learned about life really over the last year.
Skills I was paid X amount for a couple of years ago, I'm getting paid ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 times that amount for the same set of skills just because I've found a market where those skills are more in demand, they're higher valued, and they're probably more rare. So that's something I think we can all ponder: asking yourself where your skills will reap the greatest return.
Okay, the next question is: "Do you have imposter syndrome? Have you ever had it and can you relate? And how do I shake this off?" Here's the thing: whenever somebody does something that's outside of their zone of comfort and that they don't have a ton of experience in doing, we all feel the same thing, right?
We all feel that sort of low-key inadequacy or that slight fear. But the reaction that everybody feels and the way that we label that feeling is completely different. I actually think it's how you label that feeling that determines how you perform in that scenario.
Some people will say, "Okay, this is an exciting challenge. I'm going to learn; I'm going to throw myself at it. I'm going to use that energy that I'm feeling, those nerves or whatever it might be, to focus." Some people will say, "Oh my god," and they'll implode and they'll try and retreat back into their zone of comfort, right?
So the feeling is human; the response to it is optional. If you go through your life avoiding situations that give you that feeling of imposter syndrome, then I would bet everything that I have that you aren't going to reach your full potential.
I genuinely believe the feeling of imposter syndrome is both healthy, natural, and a sign that you're putting yourself in a position where there's pressure, which will make you grow. I can't think of a moment in my life where I didn't feel out of my depth.
However, that feeling of being out of my depth never meant that I retracted from the challenge. It meant the exact opposite. It meant that I attacked the challenge; I put more hours in, I focused on it. That reaction is ultimately the reason why you can hear my voice now. It's the reason I have this podcast.
I very unfondly remember the first day ever where I tried to make a video down the lens of a camera and into a microphone. Oh my god, was that a shit show. My friend tells me we should make a YouTube video—it's about something political. So I sit in his house, he turns the cameras on, puts a microphone on me, and I sit there and try and get just two minutes of spoken word out down this camera lens.
I sat there for seven hours. So much so that at the start of this two-minute video, it's light outside and it's sunny—it's like the morning. By the end of this two-minute video, if you were to watch it on YouTube, it's dark outside and you can see stars.
It took me that long because I was sat there feeling like an imposter. "People aren't going to give a fuck what I think. I'm an idiot." I sat there sweating. Ultimately, it was my decision not to let that sort of knock me back and to swerve being in that uncomfortable situation ever again that's taken me to this place today.
Now I'm doing this podcast and there's all these people that listen to it and we've got this YouTube channel and all of these wonderful things. That is the defining thing. It's not about avoiding imposter syndrome; that's a very human thing. It's learning the art of embracing it.
Okay, so next question is: "How do you do things you don't want to do?" I've had this cross my mind a lot lately. I'll tell you why: because I've committed myself to working out in the gym downstairs every single day. I have been going every single day for many, many months now.
I think the first time I started going to the gym consistently was actually March last year when all of this craziness was thrust upon us. But some days, as I've talked about on this podcast—and I know people get tired of me talking about the gym, but it's just a place where you learn so much about yourself and discipline—some days I just can't be bothered.
I can't be bothered to go; I can't be bothered to train hard when I'm there. In many ways, that's kind of like synonymous of life. There's so many things in life that I just don't want to do. One of the thoughts that continually gets me to the gym and continually makes me show up and work hard is this principle I live by: comfortable and easy are like really short-term friends, but they're long-term enemies.
Here's what I mean by that: comfort in the short term makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but then it might lead me to being obese and having arthritis and having high blood pressure and having a heart attack in the long term.
So comfort and easy, I just view anything that's comfortable and easy—like super comfortable and is inherently avoiding hard work or discomfort—I kind of view that decision or that thing with skepticism. I think, "You're trying to fuck me in the long term, aren't you?"
I genuinely, cognitively have that thought process sometimes when my brain flutters with the idea of, "Oh, just skip it, Steve. You know you don't really want to do that. Just get an early night and swerve that thing." I think that's going to stab me in the back one day.
In 12 months' time or ten years' time, that decision to choose comfortable and easy as my friends—well, they're going to become enemies and they're actually not on my side. If you're looking for growth, my general principle is to choose the challenge.
I'm not saying choose the thing that you fucking hate. I'm not saying choose the toxic thing that's going to destroy your mental health. I'm saying if you're looking for growth and you're looking to achieve the future that you envisage in your mind—your ambition—then you should choose the challenge.
That's the thing that I continually come back to every time it hits 6:30 and I know I've got to go to the gym in half an hour and I'm manic-ly busy. Everything in my head is saying, "Make an excuse. No one will know. Go tomorrow." But then I think, maybe that's the enemy. Have those thoughts really got my long-term ambitions and my values in mind? They nearly always haven't.
When we try to procrastinate or we convince ourselves not to do the things we don't want to do, it's because of some kind of psychological discomfort. It's because I know that these weights are heavy and I know that it's uncomfortable and I know that I'm tired.
If you are able to overcome those moments where it’s easier to quit, those are your growth moments. Those are, in fact, the most valuable moments. The moments where I want to quit, the days that are the hardest to get myself up and going, are probably by definition the most valuable moments to overcome.
Because that's probably, again thinking logically, where most people decide to stop. So that's where the greatest returns are. It sounds like fluffy bullshit in hindsight—no, I think this. I think that in the moment. I think it before I go to the gym.
You're connecting yourself to who you want to be in those moments. You're reminding yourself of the person you want to become. I read this on Twitter nine months ago, but it's stayed with me ever since: "How would the person you want to become behave right now?" If you ask yourself that in those moments, that's usually a good way to decide what the best answer is.
Okay, so the next question is a very deep question: "What is the meaning of life?" Very good question. Something I've actually pondered a little bit over the last year or so, as I've got more into Elon Musk's work and space and his motivations for wanting to understand meaning.
He actually said that when he was really, really young, he started pondering the meaning of life and it actually made him depressed. It wasn't until he read *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* that he found some meaning and optimism.
But to answer that question myself, I would say the meaning of life is to create and live a meaningful life. I know that sounds like a bit of a cop-out, right? But what you consider meaningful is totally subjective and nobody can tell you what that is or what it isn't.
But I think you can spot it when you get that feeling inside yourself that your efforts are resulting in progress or outcomes that feel deeply worthwhile and fulfilling to you. In any facet of your life, whether it's raising your dog or whether it's your relationships or your work or whatever it might be.
Some people find that sort of connection and meaning in building their businesses, in writing, in hobbies, in training their body through exercise, raising kids, or practicing their religion. One of the most important things I've learned on this podcast from interviewing guests and asking them about the toughest moments in their life—specifically guests that suffered with depression—was the need for purpose.
I remember we had Dan Murray on the podcast, who had lost his father and talked about how it wasn't until he did Ayahuasca and saw that the world was interconnected that he re-found his meaning. We also had Ben Williams on the podcast, who said he was suicidal and considering taking his own life until he saw an advert to be a military commando and went off on that journey to pursue his intrinsic career ambition.
Also from writing my book, there are some just crazy, mind-bending studies that I read about in the preparation for my book that totally changed my thought process on this. One of them is studying Johann Hari's work to understand the true causes of depression and anxiety.
His work continually points to the fact that depression and these depressive feelings and this sort of lack of orientation in life come from people who have had something happen to them, often who have lost a sense of meaning through trauma in their life—not what's wrong with them, not because of some sort of chemical imbalance in their brain.
The other really sort of example that I just can't shake that's in my book as well is this study they call Rat Park. Very, very simple. They took a group of rats, they put them in cages, and they took all meaning from their life. Literally just a white cage on their own.
They gave them a choice: "Do you want to drink heroin water, or do you want to drink normal water?" The rats that are stuck in a white cage alone become drug addicts, right? Then they have Rat Park, which is this rat utopia where there's female and male rats, there's little running machines where you can exercise, there's food, there's space to roam around and to explore, there's toys for stimulation.
Those rats don't become drug addicts when they're offered either heroin or normal water. They avoid the heroin. If you zoom out a little bit and apply the same thinking to humans, the science says that over the last two years, the life expectancy had dropped—I think it was 2018 and 2019—because of opioid-related deaths. Because people are getting addicted to opioids, and that's resulting in their death.
And again, that is because we have an epidemic of meaninglessness, of purposelessness. That's what my podcast has taught me. Commonly prescribed antidepressants do work for some people, but adding additional meaning and connection to your life does seem to be one of the most powerful antidotes for those feeling lost, depressed, and unhappy and lacking that orientation.
A lot of my friends have been calling me and telling me that they're feeling down, right? They can't particularly describe what exactly is causing them to feel down, but over the last three months in particular, as the UK has gone into this third lockdown, I've really grown concerned about some of my friends.
Life before pre-lockdown gave you meaning. You wake up in the morning, you go to the office, you've got colleagues and friends, and then you go to the club, you go to watch your favorite football team play, you go and see your mom and your dad, your grandparents. Life was full of meaning before.
Now it's been pulled from you. So now it becomes your responsibility, if you want to maintain those good feelings, to go and get that meaning—to go and create that meaning in your life. You can't assume that it's just going to show up like it used to.
So you really have to fight back. You have to go and get it. I'll give you an example that relates to me personally. The weekends, right? My team and me, we work in this building through the week. The weekends come around. I have fucking nothing to do. I'm a single guy. It's me and my dog, right? And he's not a barrel of laughs, to be honest. Very simple guy. So he doesn't do an awful lot.
So what I've started to do on the weekends is to really take time to pursue some of my hobbies, which I would never normally do. I've started to DJ all the time. I'm now learning to DJ. I do a DJ lesson every single weekend via Zoom. I'm reading books that I used to love reading—philosophy books.
I'm doing this actually not because I want to, but because I know I have to keep my life full of like intrinsic passions and meaning, especially at a time when so much of that has been robbed by this pandemic. So for me, that really is the meaning of life: to create a meaningful life.
Okay, so the next question is a really, really great question: "What is something you miss about being poor that you think you'll never get back?" The Stoic people used to talk about this concept of hedonic adaptation and the hedonic treadmill. I'll give you an example that's really easy to understand.
I remember at 21 years old when I took my first flight to Thailand with my business partner, Dom. I remember getting on that plane and just because I'd never really been on a plane before, other than when I was a baby coming over from Africa, I remember being so in awe of the fact that we were on this metal ship that was flying across the ocean.
They were giving me snacks and free water and "Do I want a Coke?" and I'm sat there in the economy section, just like, "Oh my god," right? Totally full of joy and appreciation for everything.
The principles of hedonic adaptation say that once you've been exposed to a certain level of joy or a certain level of gluttony or material possessions, your satisfaction starts to decay over time. Obviously, as I got more and more money and I got on flights every week and then eventually I upgraded to business class and then first class and even got myself on a private jet a couple of times, your appreciation for the small things wanes.
The Stoic people would take the good things out of their life as a practice just so that they would appreciate them again. I think that's one of the things that I definitely miss. I've got nice things all the time, and that is a blessing and a curse. Imagine some rich guy talking about he's sick of nice things—but there's truth to that. You lose appreciation for things that used to mean so much to you.
You now require even more to give you that same level of thrill and joy and satisfaction. That's a really sad thing. It's kind of unavoidable to some degree, but with all things in life, you can really make a conscious effort to be grateful and to take moments not to let life pass you by.
There's that phrase "ignorance is bliss," and it totally applies to this question as well. When I was 18 years old and I thought the meaning and point of life was to buy fast cars and to have a million quid in the bank account and to pursue those kinds of things, there was some bliss to that.
I thought I had it figured out. I thought I understood that the pursuit of greater happiness was just more stuff, more money. That was quite blissful because I didn't have it now at 18. So I thought, okay, that creates real meaning in my life. All I have to do is get more money and then my life will be more meaningful and full of joy.
Then upon getting the money, I realized that's not the case. I remember watching an interview by the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek, where he says the exact same thing. He's an insecure kid growing up, bit of a geek, and then he gets all this money and he has this deep existential crisis where he's like, "Oh my god, this wasn't it."
He had to then go on the journey of finding out exactly what mattered to him. I'm still on that journey. This is why I talk so much about meaning and purpose in this podcast, because I'm still figuring out where I should be prioritizing my time. I think I didn't think about those things when I was 18 and I was broke.
But getting what you aim for is the best way to find out if it's actually what you wanted. And I was this young kid chasing material things and probably passion, mistaking it for happiness. As I got closer to it, it moved off into the distance like a mirage.
We all know that guy who has a two-bedroom house in a small area, married to his wife, one kid, two kids, looks forward to going to the pub on the weekends and supporting his favorite team. Those individuals who live the most simple lives and who are happier with less, to me from my experience, generally seem to be much more fulfilled than my friends that are successful billionaires.
My friends that are billionaires, but also intellectuals and low-key philosophers, are the most fucked, right? Because they really have got pretty existential and asked themselves, "What is the purpose of life?" That's what I mean by ignorance is bliss.
When I was 18 years old starting out in business, living in Moss Side in Manchester, I had absolutely nothing. I'd just dropped out of university, and I'm basically stood at the bottom of this big, ambitious mountain that I've told myself I'm going to climb. I'm looking up at it—excited, terrified, but hopeful. Excited—that's the key feeling.
Then you climb the mountain. The mountain for me was like financial freedom; it was accomplishment, maybe for my ego it was recognition. I have all of those things now. So when you get to this point, you have to make a very conscious, active effort to create new, even bigger goals.
Goals that will match the same level of excitement and challenge that you had when you were 18. It's not easy because you don't become financially free twice unless you lose it all, right? So my goals have to be way bigger to give me that same level of hunger and grit and determination that I need to stay stabilized and to be happy.
To some degree, I miss not being at the bottom. I miss not having that massive Mount Everest in front of me. This is what I've seen in many of my friends who are entrepreneurs and even some of my idols—when they get to that point where Elon sold PayPal or when Bill Gates sold Microsoft, they then go and take on some of these tremendous philanthropic challenges.
It's no surprise that every billionaire becomes this crazy, massive philanthropist and tries to take on some of the world's most existential problems. It's no surprise that Elon is trying to save the planet and take us to a new one. Because he will not be able to find a sense of fulfillment and happiness in doing another PayPal. He just won't find it.
In many respects, this is why I think people who are tremendously ambitious have a bit of a curse. I've spoken to a lot of my friends that run businesses. You are obsessive about progress and challenge and ambition and reaching the next milestone. I think a lot of them would actually, if they could just press a button and trade their life for a much simpler life, they probably would.
Someone who doesn't wake up every single day and check their WhatsApp for 30 different messages about their business on fire in five different countries. If they could press a button and live a simple life and be content in that life, I think most of them probably would.
I've got one particular friend in mind who sat me down about two years ago, and he's very, very successful. He's probably a billionaire by now. And he confided in me that he wished his life could be simpler. He wished he didn't have the level of ambition he had. He told me this one story about going around to someone's house and they were a very, very normal family with not very much at all. They just sat there drinking tea, and he said, "I was sat there thinking, I wish this was my life."
This is a billionaire with more sports cars than I've ever seen in my entire life in one driveway, wishing he had a simpler life but realizing that he is infected with this virus which many of us have—the most ambitious amongst us—which stops you from being happy with less and without pursuit and without climbing that mountain.
Okay, so the next question is: "What is my greatest weakness?" When I first read this question, a bunch of different things came to mind in different sort of parts and areas of my life. I'm just going to share as many of them with you as I possibly can.
The first thing that comes to mind is I'm really bad at prioritizing against the things that really matter to me and I know that will matter long-term. I don't call my parents enough. I don't see my family enough. I probably don't give enough time in person to meaningful friendships and connections and those kinds of things.
I'm completely, totally convinced that those things are really, really important. It's not that I don't understand the importance of them; it's that my work priorities always seem to be just one step higher on the to-do list. My work has urgency to it. There's no urgency with calling my mom. And that's kind of one of the things that I know is a weakness in myself that I continue to strive to be better at.
The next thing is in relationships: I'm really self-centered. I just want to do what I want to do, and I'm generally really unwilling to compromise. Relationships are all about compromise, apparently—so I've been told many times. But I know it's a weakness of mine.
I kind of live the world in my own head, and if I want to just get up and go and DJ or walk down this street or go in my room and just look at my laptop and watch YouTube videos, doing that is quite hard when you're in a relationship and you've got someone else to consider.
Throughout the week, my brain is fucking chaos. So on the weekend, I'm not really all up for doing much, you know? That's my downtime. And that's become a real weakness of mine, and it's made forming romantic relationships harder because on the weekend, I don't want to get out of bed. I just want to do nothing or something very, very simple.
I spend all my time on my work Monday through Friday, so Saturday and Sunday logically have to be the time that I commit to you as my partner. So this is why I continually struggle in relationships—because Monday to Friday, it's not about you, and on the weekend, it's about me and my downtime watching Manchester United play.
Because I'm so mentally bombarded with a billion things I have to do at all times, over the years, the one thing that I've definitely noticed in myself is I get more and more arguably rude and to-the-point. At the start of my career, I had more time and there were less things—less tabs open in my brain.
So I could take more time about how I respond to things and I could be a little bit more fluffy and soft and whatever. But when you have a ton of urgent priorities, your brain is so funny. I was giving some feedback to one of the teams I'm working with at another company because the CEO had basically got in touch and requested that all comms become much more streamlined.
Because when the team were using extra words, he basically gets a little bit frustrated with that because we're trying to move fast as an organization. I totally related to that. I notice myself getting annoyed when anything takes longer than it should.
So I guess the thing that I have to be wary of is that even in the situations where I'm just desperately trying to save time, I don't compromise on being a decent human being. I can't explain to you how hard this is. We tend to have a philosophy for how we act and how we behave, and that philosophy sits deep within us.
Whether it's a landlord showing me around a new apartment or a new office or whether it's an email or whether it's a phone call, the philosophy tends to be the same, right? And it's hard to switch between different philosophies. So I tend to treat very personal things sometimes in my personal life with the same rapid urgency.
I need to get better at switching between the contexts and behaving differently in each scenario and realizing that in some scenarios, the saving of the time is not more beneficial than just remaining a decent person and engaging in the situation.
I say it's hard not just because of my own experiences, but I've seen pretty much over 70 percent of the highly successful people I know become so incredibly impatient that it almost verges on looking like rudeness—like they don't care about you and like they are not present when you're with them.
Over the last couple of years, I've noticed that I've got incredibly impatient with any request I get. I notice it in some of my friends who run very, very big, really sort of ambitious global businesses who are constantly bombarded with stuff. They are some of the most anti-social, slightly rude people I've met. You just can't get 10 seconds of their attention.
Right now as I'm making this podcast, I know that I'm missing this phone call with this PR firm. I know that I've got this major IPO coming up with this one company. I've got this board meeting coming up with this company. I've got this other conversation about joining this board in this other IPO coming up. And I've got all of these other personal things going on in my life.
My brain has just got all these tabs open. So when my PA walks up to me and she goes, "Hi Steve, how's your day going? Shall I buy Pablo some dog food?" It just—the only way I can describe it is the question is like an irritant. What I've learned over the years is I have to understand that people don't understand.
And I have to try and respond on that basis, which sometimes, especially when I'm really tired, can be a challenge. Something I've really tried hard to work on but I'm still really not that great at is remembering to be gracious and just a decent person irrespective of what's going on in my head.
I talked on this podcast once upon a time about the day I got on a plane, was sat in business class, and I look up and it's that guy from *Man v. Food*. We were running at the time one of the biggest food publishers in the world, Lovefood. So I messaged the Lovefood team—there was about 150 people that got this message in the social chain chat at the time.
I said, "Oh my god, that guy from *Man v. Food* is on the plane." They all said, "Okay, go up to him and ask him this famous social chain question we have, which is what's your favorite sandwich." Long story short, when you join social chain, you get asked the question, "What's your favorite sandwich?"
So I jump up and I walk over to his seat in business class and I say, "Hey, got a question..." Boom, shuts me down. "Not right now!" Shouts in my face. So I like slowly tiptoe back to my seat in business class and slouch down. Then I have to message 150 people saying, "Oh by the way, that guy we all really like is an asshole."
And he would have had no idea that he was speaking to somebody who ran at the time the biggest food publisher in the world and had hundreds of employees and at some point in the future might have wanted to do some business with him or work with him. But now thinks he's a total asshole.
And this for me, that moment I'll always remember as teaching me how important every interaction is, even the ones that don't seem that important. I try and bear that in mind. If you've ever come and watched me speak anywhere in the world, I'm sure a lot of you have, then you would have known that I never ever would leave a venue before everybody's got a chance to take a photo or meet me or ask me a question.
I would be the last one to leave my own talks because that's the way that I would want someone to treat me. Someone that I followed and admired—that's how I would want them to treat me. I'm scared of being an asshole. And it's much easier to be an asshole when you've achieved some level of success, right? Powerful people find it the easiest to be an asshole. They can therefore also probably do the most damage by being an asshole. I believe in being a good person as much as I possibly can be.
Okay, so the next question is: "I'm scared to post my business online at the risk of failure or humiliation. Do you have any advice?" This is a very interesting thing that I don't think people talk about enough, especially when they're starting out in business—which is how do you overcome the sort of public transition from just being Steve to now being this entrepreneur who's running this business and raising money and giving people advice and has a podcast.
How do you square that with, especially in your friendships and your personal circles, with the person that they knew first, right? When we started social chain, my business partner Dom, who's come on this podcast to talk about it, was ridiculed by his friends privately.
You know those kind of jokes that people do where it's a joke but it's also not a joke? He would post on his Facebook page saying we've just started social chain, just started this business, it's going really well. Five or ten of his best friends in the world from his hometown would jump on there with these kind of snide, jokey, patronizing, bantry comments.
But they were like inherently mean comments. I remember back in the day continually jumping into his comment section and trying to defend him. He was posting his achievements and being ridiculed with not-funny-kind-of-funny banter. And for me, as I reflect on what that actually was, I think his friends saw him changing and somewhat didn't like who he was becoming because his success kind of alienated them.
Nobody—this is just a principle of psychology that I've actually written a little bit about in my book—people are most envious of people who they can relate to. So if your colleague at work or your friend or someone your age is achieving huge amounts of success and they look like you and went to the same school and came from where you come from, that inadvertently shines a mirror on you.
It means you've got no excuse, and that your success—or lack thereof—is probably a consequence of your own actions. As humans, we just don't like that thought. So Dom's social circle back home were trying to rein him in and saying, "You're one of us. Stay here. Don't become something that we can't resonate with."
If you find yourself in this scenario that Dom did, you basically have a really simple choice to make. It feels complicated and it feels like a bit of a minefield, but it's not. The central question and the most important question you have to ask yourself is: "Who do I want to be, and what makes me happy?"
Decide what that is and pursue that thing. Anybody that you lose in the pursuit of your happiness is probably not someone you needed or wanted in your life anyway. They're probably not someone that had your best interests—which by definition are you being happy—at heart.
They're probably someone who was riddled with a little bit of jealousy who didn't want you to become everything you could become. So that's the framework in which you make your decision. Pursue that and be open to losing people who no longer resonate with you pursuing your happiness along the way.
I remember a day where I'd posted something on Facebook, like one of my quotes or whatever it was, and a friend of a friend had made some snide little comment about like, "Who the fuck does Steve think he is?" It's those moments where you can make that decision to like fall back in line and conform and to avoid criticism.
Can you imagine my life if I'd done that? If I'd let a couple of comments stop me from pursuing my career and producing all this content which gives me so much intrinsic joy and fulfillment? Can you imagine if I'd let the fear of a few comments hold me back from my potential and the things that make me happy? I'm so glad I didn't.
In that particular case, that same person four years later—when he went through some troubles in his life and some mental health issues—reached out to me because he was in love with my podcast now. He met me in a sushi bar in London and just sat there and asked me advice because of something I'd said on the podcast that he initially ridiculed.
And that kind of shows—that teaches me a lesson that, you know, even some of the people that ridicule you at the start, you've kind of got to forgive whatever it is in their nature that's making them try and hold you back. But you've also got to understand that it's not a you problem.
It's not your responsibility to control what people think of you in their head or the image that they've created of you in their mind. That's not your responsibility. Your central responsibility as a human being is to pursue your happiness, your truth, and the things that give you the most intrinsic joy. That's your responsibility.
One of the things I've come to learn about success generally in life is that it's the small, seemingly invisible, seemingly insignificant decisions piling up over time that have the greatest impact on you. It's not our big life choices; it's the small ones—the ones that are easiest to do or not to do.
And it's the same with bending under public pressure or criticism. It's easy if you see a friend of a friend slag you off just to stop doing that thing. If you allow these small, seemingly insignificant comments to nudge you one day at a time away from the person you want to be and the person you want to become, can you imagine how far you're going to be from that person in ten years' time? It doesn't bear to think about.
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