Life Changing Lessons From 100 Of The World’s Greatest Minds
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents1 chapter
§01Transcript — part 1§01Transcript — part 1
When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello? Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vedge ER for Pets. This is Kate. Vedge, the better, kinder ER for pets.
Wow, we’ve now recorded more than 100 episodes of *The Diary of a CEO*. I’ve had some of the most amazing, inspiring, and life-changing conversations with some of the world’s most accomplished experts, business people, psychologists, athletes—you name it. So, this week we’re going to do something a little different, something many of you have requested for a long time and something I’ve always wanted to do. This week we’re going to look backwards. This week I’m going to share with you the key moments, the actionable, life-changing, epiphany-inducing moments from the last 100 episodes that had a lasting impact on me, that changed my life. So, 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.
We hear this phrase a lot, which is "find your passion." I almost feel that it’s, in many respects, quite harmful because that question is kind of loaded. It assumes a singular passion for a start, it assumes that you can discover it like an Easter egg, and also, the context in which that question usually sits implies that once you find it, then it’s a can of unlimited happiness and orientation forever. I just feel like sometimes language can be harmful because it simplifies very complex things and sometimes multi-faceted, plural things. I wondered if that phrase "find your passion" was something you felt similarly about?
I do. It's true that passion can be a significant multiplier of human potential. If people are passionate and engaged in a business, they can direct their energy in a worthwhile and meaningful manner. So, it's worthwhile, but you're right that there's a big difference between passion and a big difference between happiness and joy. Some are in the moment—I think joy is in the moment. I think happiness is something that we continually adjust towards.
Passion can be a significant multiplier of human potential, particularly in the workplace. So, it does have a place. It is something which is useful to understand. Ultimately, it always comes down to personal introspection and self-awareness for me. I think that we need to work harder at understanding ourselves. When we are constructing a mindset which is conducive to performance, we optimize our potential when we're in a particular state of mind.
That state of mind might be passion, it might be relaxation, it might be enthusiasm or enjoyment. But we need to almost get to know ourselves and know that there are certain things which enable us to do others. Once we work backwards and understand what that looks like, maybe we can gain more consistency. I say to a lot of sports people and to a lot of business people that consistency of mind gives you consistency of play, and I'm convinced of it. The more consistent we can be in our thinking, and understand the building blocks—the component parts to success—the more success we can have.
And how does one establish consistency of thought? Because I completely agree with that. I've seen it in my own life. When I've been consistent with my thinking, I've managed to perform the same habits every day. But then sometimes I'll lose consistency in my thoughts because I lose attachment or my anchor with my "why."
I’ve talked a lot on this podcast over the last couple of weeks about this realization I've had this year with the gym. Every year, February or March, I was incredibly motivated to go. I was fired up, trying to look good for summer. Then obviously, once you look good and summer has ended, it's almost like you've lost your anchor. You get into September and the "why" which made you go and to think consistently every day has evaporated, and I can't get myself to go to the gym in October.
Consistency of mind comes from understanding the intrinsic quality of our decision-making processes. I say that a lot to people in sport and in business. You can make a good decision and have a really bad outcome, or you can make a bad decision and have a good outcome. This is why I've worked with leadership teams who have confused luck for genius. They made a really bad decision and got a great outcome—markets changed, competition did something, something just worked in their favor.
So, it's really important for us to not judge our decision-making by our outcomes, and we often do. We'll all say, "this was a good decision because it resulted in this," or "this was a bad decision because it resulted in that." We can only understand the outcome retrospectively, so it is wrong to measure our decisions by the outcomes. We need to go back to how we made the decision in the first place. Once we start to understand the intrinsic quality of our decision-making process, we can become more consistent in how we make decisions and therefore have more control over those outcomes.
Consistency of mind will come from knowing how we make decisions—understanding how much we put our weight into evidence, how much we use prejudice, bias, and opinion. Let's understand how we make decisions, and in that way, we can be consistent in how we apply our logic, thinking, and feeling to try and determine some best outcomes. We actually weaken the strength by trying to strengthen a weakness. We need to be careful. I think understanding what's good about us, understanding where our behaviors come from in regard to the thinking before it, and then reframing some of those words and pictures is the way forward.
I want to talk about failure now, which seems like a good thing to talk about. In your book *Failosophy*, you list seven failure principles. Number one: Failure just is.
Failure is a fact. It's inevitable. It's going to happen to all of us, no matter how much we try to avoid it. I guarantee that it will happen, and that can feel scary, but it can also feel liberating. Once you've accepted it as a fact, there's no point in trying to avoid it, so you might as well take the risk. Acceptance of failure starts with the observation of it. Failure is a fact, but how you respond to it is within your control—whether you decide to feel like a failure for many years after the thing that happened, or whether you think to yourself, "Okay, well, that's taught me something and I'll do it differently next time."
I guess the risk there is one bad failure and people stop trying. I was thinking this is very similar to confidence, in the way that if you have one bad failure, your performance next time you get an opportunity will probably be worse because of nerves and the memory of "I'm terrible." That's going to increase your chances of failing again, and the self-negative reinforcing cycle continues. Your confidence and your guts kind of cascade downwards. It can for some people work in the other direction where you have a success, your confidence builds, you walk on stage to do that public speech next time with a bit more confidence, and you do a better job, which increases your chance of success and it cascades upwards. Is that how failure works from your experience?
It can work like that. One of the ways of looking at that, if you're then stuck in a downward cycle and you're failing, is that you're therefore in the wrong situation—you're in the wrong workplace, for instance, that isn't generous enough to make you feel okay after your failures or doesn't make you feel like you can be your true self. In which case, I would argue you need to remove yourself from that situation and find the place that does suit you. Or it can be a question of mindset and a question of applying that mindset which is, "Okay, I failed. I'm feeling in a downward spiral. How much of that is fact?"
That's a very difficult thing to do on your own when you're at a very low ebb, and that's why I'm a huge advocate of therapy. Even if it starts with reaching out to your friend and talking about it, or reaching out to your work helpline, or texting a mental health charity, that's a really valuable step. My definition of failure—which is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan—has a fatal flaw, which is that sometimes there are failures that are totally cataclysmic, that we couldn't possibly have predicted, that go against any plan whatsoever—like a global pandemic, like a terrible illness, like the death of a loved one.
It would be monstrous for me to sit here and say those failures are as easily assimilated or learned from as failing your driving test. I'm not saying that at all. Those kind of failures will require a process of mourning and coming to terms with the thing that you've lost, and that's absolutely right and as it should be. The way that I choose to live my life is I mourn, but I don't have to constantly relive the pain. I can still feel sadness about something, but I don't need to live in that place of reliving it constantly.
Becoming a victim?
Yeah, and becoming defined by that. I can choose to be defined by something else. I can choose to be defined by my response to it. I can choose to find some kind of meaning in something that was meaningless at the time. That's how I choose to live my life because that makes it less sad. I think that choice is available for most of us.
So, point number two in your book is: You are not your anxious brain. I think you've talked about that.
Yes. I met this man called Mo Gawdat who used to be the Chief Business Officer of Google X, but he wasn't happy. He has a lot to say about expectation versus reality. If we can manage our expectations of life so they're equal to or less than our perception of events and how they turn out, then we can be happy or contented. He was the one who really brought it home to me that we are not our worst thoughts, that our thoughts are produced by our brain as organic matter in the same way that blood is pumped around our body by our heart.
We wouldn't think we were defined by our blood, so why would we think that we are our thoughts? Actually, the premise of all meditation is that you can observe your thoughts. Who's doing the observing? That's you. Your thoughts are just being produced by your brain constantly, and I found that really helpful—the idea that once you realize that, you can train your brain to think differently and to replace negative thoughts with positive ones as much as you're able.
He gave this incredibly moving example. His son, Ali, died at the age of 21 during a routine operation. In the aftermath of Ali's death, Mo would wake up every morning with tears streaming down his cheeks, and his first thought would be "Ali died." It was an unbelievably oppressive, grief-stricken thought. After a few more weeks of it, he was like, "I just can't live like this." So, he challenged his brain to come up with a different thought. Each morning he would wake up and he would still think "Ali died," but he added something to that sentence. He added: "Yes, but he also lived." In that differently expressed sentiment was 21 years of memories of a father and son who are best friends, and that was what enabled him to carry on living. If he can do that in that situation, I sure as hell can do it when someone criticizes me on Instagram. It was a really helpful lesson.
Almost everyone feels they have failed in their 20s.
I think that a lot of people struggle in their 20s, particularly in this day and age because of the curse of comparison and because we live in a culture of curated perfection where you're constantly comparing yourself to your peer's filtered appearance on Instagram and the life that they seem to be living. We're comparing our insides with everyone else's projection of their outsides. For many people, it's the first time that they've come out of full-time education and come out of a system of exam and reward. There's no exam that you can sit to show that you're being a good grown-up.
So, you feel quite lost, plus piling on top of that the pressure to find your passion, to make a career for yourself, but also to earn enough to pay your rent, living in house shares, just trying to make your way and trying to forge your identity in this day and age—it's just so hard to do all that at once. And then you're like, "Oh, and I should be having a thriving personal life and I should either be in a long-term relationship or having one-night stands and being footloose and fancy-free and drinking loads, and then at the weekend making vegan brownies because I've got to watch what I eat." It's exhausting.
So really, what I wanted to say in that failure principle was that so many people come on the podcast and say that they feel they failed at their 20s. I think a lot of us fall into the trap of believing that we had to have our life sorted out by then. Actually, your 20s are a decade of transition, of discovering who you are, of grinding up the spices of life in your pestle and mortar. The older you get, the more you know yourself and the more you know what you want to do, and that's where success lies. I've had so many more opportunities after leaving my 20s behind in the rearview mirror.
When we choose to share our vulnerabilities is when we feel most satisfaction.
Most connection, I think is what I said. But I like that too, because you probably do feel personal satisfaction. But when we choose to be open about our vulnerabilities, that's paradoxically when we find the most strength and the source of the most real connections with other people. That's something that I have genuinely learned through the podcast.
The first season of the podcast I did, I came from a very traditional newspaper journalist background. So for me, it was like, "I'm interviewing my guest, I will ask the questions and I will listen and then I will ask another question." It was only as time went on that I felt more comfortable sharing my own experiences. Whenever I did that, I had such an incredible feedback loop of just amazing people sharing their stories and their vulnerabilities and also saying that they felt less alone because I shared mine. Really, that's what my entire life is about ultimately—connection. So, I really want to encourage people not to be scared of opening up about the things that they perceive as their weaknesses, because so often what you think of as your most personal shame turns out to have most universal resonance.
Why do you think that is? Why do you think in terms of why it has such wide resonance?
Because I think that when we're vulnerable, we're being real and we're letting our masks slip and you see a glimpse of who the authentic person is. There's something just absolutely quintessentially human about that—it's a human recognizing another human. It's a human recognizing another human beneath the pretense. I think it also reassures people because in this culture that we live in, which is so defined by social media and how you appear and the currency of perfection, again it's such a relief. It makes you feel like you can breathe if someone's like, "Oh god, I tell you about today, I sat in bed in my pajamas eating hummus directly from the tub because I felt really down." That's an act of singular generosity to someone else who can then have the space to talk about how they're feeling.
That brings us to the topic of mindset really nicely. You know, I've heard you talk about having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. What is the difference between the two?
I think this contrast is so important. In a fixed mindset, people think that success, however defined, is all about talent—having the gift, having the genetic inheritance, having the personality trait in order to excel. A growth mindset is saying, "Okay, talent obviously matters, it's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents."
People in a fixed mindset have two massive risks. One, they think they're so talented they don't even need to try. Think of a young person who's just been invited to join the Manchester United Academy and they're suddenly getting money into their bank account, they're able to buy the fast car, and they think, "I'm God's gift." The amount of academy coaches who have come to me and said, "We don't understand it, we had this hardworking youngster, we invited them into the academy, and then they just went off the rails." It's a fixed mindset. They think their success is assured, so they stop putting in the hard yards and don't transition into the first team. That's one danger.
The other danger is people who don't think they're God's gift, but what happened like me at Goldman Sachs—you make one failure and you interpret that as meaning "I obviously don't have talent, therefore I'm just going to give up." So, you've got the talent-is-everything-and-I've-got-it-so-therefore-I-don't-need-to-try, and the talent-is-everything-and-I-don't-have-it-therefore-I-should-give-up. They're both terribly damaging. A growth mindset doesn't mean that we think we're all going to be the best speaker in the world. I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world, but with that attitude, I maximized my own potential.
I’m very intrigued as to certain people in our society being more self-believing than others. You see differences in genders, in races, in backgrounds. A lot of young kids in my DMs are struggling with confidence or lack of self-belief. I wondered if you had any words of wisdom for them?
I think that self-belief and self-esteem are overrated. The reason goes back to something we said earlier. There was a movement in the 70s and 80s in Western education to build self-esteem in young people. The way to do it was to let them succeed all the time. You give them easy tests, get them to pass, and then praise them for how super talented they were. They'd get all this self-esteem and they can change the world.
People were so worried about undermining self-esteem that there were no losers in sports days at some schools—everyone's a winner. That was all about building the self-esteem movement, but it failed. The reason it failed is because people would keep succeeding and they'd get all this self-esteem, and then they would be given a difficult test or they would leave school and they'd actually hit the real world where they would fail. What happened? All the walls of their world would come crumbling down.
Self-esteem that is fragile makes people protect their self-esteem by not trying new things. That's a disaster. Self-esteem can be very fragile. I like to talk much more about resilience. We want people to be resilient—to try new things, to mess up, but not to be devastated by it. Every person who's a success has had some really tough, difficult moments. I just think that's an inevitable part of learning.
How do we build resilience in ourselves?
Growth mindset is very strongly related to it. Instead of praising young people for their talent—"You're super talented, you're the next Picasso"—much better thing to do is to praise them for the effort or the process. "I love the way that picture, the colors fit together." They think, "Oh, right, if I want to develop as a painter, I have to make the colors fit together in a more sophisticated way." You're aligning their mind and motivation with the journey they need to take to fulfill their potential. Praising for effort, praising for process is a much more positive thing than praising for talent and fixed attributes.
It's interesting because in my company I came to learn that the most effective way to get my team to innovate was to praise them for the effort and the process as opposed to the outcome. Because if it became about the outcome, the success or failure of the experiment, which is largely actually outside of their control—whether there's product-market fit, whether it's a success or a failure isn't actually in their control. The bit they can control is starting doing it and the process of getting to the point where we press "go live." So, what I learned in the last year of my business was we would celebrate the conducting of the experiment, not the outcome of the experiment.
Exactly right. That's exactly the same thing. One of the big mistakes is judging people on the outcome. When you're innovating, you need variation. You need to try new things. If you're trying to create a new drug and you don't know which combination of ingredients is going to create it, you need to try lots of combinations. If you penalize people for failure and you're only judging them on the outcome and it fails and then they're like stigmatized, they will never try. You've nailed it. That's exactly the insight that I think is important.
For some people that's terrifying—the thought of throwing themselves into that place of uncertainty that they have to travel through before they get to their new self. How do you get someone to come willingly into uncertainty?
Well, then I would think about what I'm excited about. Rather than what I'm afraid of, I think about what I'm excited about. Rather than "I'm afraid of what I'm going to leave behind" or "I'm afraid of what might happen," I'm more about "what could happen?" When we focus on what we want and what we could have—it's optimism, isn't it? It's about what's possible and what could I achieve? Visualization was a massive technique that I learned from my sports psychologist and employed and still use all the time. I think when you can start to visualize what that new role, person, identity could be, and when you bring it to life with all of your senses and see it really vividly, then that's exciting. The power of visualization is that your mind, when it sees it really vividly, your mind doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined experience and a real-life experience.
What's your process for visualization now? Is it something that you do actively—you set time aside and do it—or is it just something that you naturally now do when you're pursuing a goal?
A little bit of both. As an athlete, it was definitely something that I would sit down, usually I'd be lying on my bed, I would have done some relaxation because the more we clear our mind and relax, the easier it is to visualize and to see really clearly. So, it would be a conscious, "right, I'm going to spend the next 15 minutes, or even two minutes or five minutes, visualizing my next race." I would visualize everything from—if it was the Olympic discipline and we've got nine boats on a start line, I'm seeing myself race in every lane, I'm seeing myself with the headwind, with a tailwind, with it raining. I'm seeing myself cock up the start because that might happen, but then I'm just going to recover from it and I'm going to see myself win from behind, I'm going to see myself win from the front. All these eventualities. So that when it comes to the event, I'm prepared and it can just all unfold and I'm not phased by anything that happens. But most importantly, I've seen it happen the way I want it to happen and then I believe that it can happen.
Professor Steve Peters. Steve’s invented this groundbreaking concept called the Chimp Model, and it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain. The first part is called the Chimp, which is our desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short-term. The second part is what he calls the Human, which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks things through in the long term. And the third part is what he calls the Computer, which is our set of core values and beliefs. I wanted to talk about exactly that topic, which is managing your emotional reactions across different facets of life.
Let me just give you an example of a situation that I went through. I broke up with a girl and like two days later I found out that she'd slept with somebody else. Even though I'd broken up with her, when I read the message that she'd slept with somebody else, my brain: revenge, message her, destroy her life. That's what my brain said to me. I'm at a place in my life where I feel quite secure in my self-image, I'm a confident person, but even I couldn't seem to get a grip of my own desire to react emotionally in that situation. It was actually my friend calling me and saying, "Steve, just remember you broke up with her. She's probably doing this to make herself feel better." That was one of those key moments where I was like, god, the damage you can do if you don't know how to control that primitive urge.
Okay, you’ve covered a lot of ground there. One is, first of all, what would you expect somebody's mind to do confronted with the same situation? What would you expect them to do?
Probably the same.
Exactly. So, nothing abnormal happened. There wasn't a problem. This is absolutely healthy and normal, but maybe not helpful. And what you really said, because you've told me this, if it wasn't a problem to you, you wouldn't have mentioned it. So, clearly your human brain is saying "I don't want to get revenge. That's not what I want. What I want is to just be calm and collected, accept the reality of it, and move on." Unfortunately, we have to learn now how the mind works. So, now we know it's normal, how does the mind work when we get a really nasty shock and something which is devastating?
The reason the Chimp is there and the reason we're here is for us to be safe and present the next generation to the world. That's what the Chimp's agenda is. So, what happened there is the generation that you thought you were going to get was taken away from you. This is devastating. So, we expect you to be devastated. We also expect you to accept the mind is going to now grieve, and it'll take approximately three months, give or take. Yeah, you've got to grieve.
So, the mind as a rule on the way it deals and processes grief—I can't speed that up. So, if I met you that night and I say, "right, I'm going to get you out of it," I'm going to fail. Because you have to go through these ripples and work it through. Your human brain can do it in seconds because that's logic—"she's gone, she was dishonest, it's a good thing she's gone now, no more wasted time." Yeah, that's easy. But the emotional Chimp brain has got to process it. It cannot do it overnight. So, you've got to now allow around a 12-week process, and you're going to go through various stages of grief in the loss of what's a very significant relationship. And on top of that, there was another insult—it wasn't just she said "it's not for me," she slept with someone else. So, that is really going to get your Chimp. Your Chimp's reaction: it wants revenge. It wants to say "right, if you did this to me, you're going to suffer now."
In reality, what you've just said by your nodding is that's not what I want. I just want to move on and accept it wasn't for me. She did what she did, that's her problem, not yours. And what your friend did is start to try and turn it round with some facts to calm your Chimp down and say, because it always looks to the computer, let's look at reality. And the reality is—let's look at the facts of the situation but you cannot stop the grieving. You cannot stop the yearning or the bargaining. This can all be circumvented if you suddenly met somebody new, your Chimp might recover very quickly. This is the rebound.
Is that what tends to happen?
Well, we know this is the rebound. This is never a good thing. Generally speaking, you need time to get over this, gather yourself so you're in a good place when you do meet somebody else to have a good relationship. So, it's quite complex the whole thing. So, yes, rationally we can pull you along, but we've got to give you a lot of TLC and let you go through grieving. Don't be harsh on yourself, and what you're experiencing is totally natural. Unhelpful, but natural.
Is it the stories that I then tell myself about myself which impact my self-image? It feels like when you go through romantic rejection or heartbreak, it feels like the fact that someone didn't want you or they wanted someone else makes you tell yourself that you are not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, you weren't enough. It feels like so much of the hurt and the pain lives inside that story you're telling yourself about yourself.
And again, if you stop and we look at what you've said there, are these factual statements or are they impressions and feelings?
Impressions and feelings.
So, we know that the Chimp brain is in full flow now. So, what we're saying is don't quench that. It's not wrong, it's expressing. And it's like, as I said earlier, you've got this best friend. So, if this happens to me, I now say, "what is it you're telling me?" and it'll go through all this, "it's the end of the world and clearly no one's ever going to love you." And then we start to counter it by saying, "well, let's look at that." So, we start to rationalize and that can help the grieving process. Because we start saying, "well, let's not just sit there with these falsehoods, let's challenge them and let's replace them with truths."
Not brainwash. It's no good saying, say I'm your best mate and you've just fallen apart and you say "it's because I'm ugly," it's no good me saying, "no, you're really handsome." That's an impression again from me. What I'd be saying is, let's look at facts. If we look at people in relationships, do people find a partner eventually? And the answer is most people, yes. So, the chances are very high. And if you can get through this, will you eventually get back on your feet? Is there a future? Yeah, there always is a future. When you start giving these facts and rationalizing the facts of the situation, that is going to be powerful for starting to settle your emotions. But giving falsehoods—"I know you can do it," "you're super talented"—that's not going to settle your Chimp. He's streetwise. So, he'll just keep agitating.
Whereas if we talk facts, then it'll settle. But again, as a key point here, we have to find the facts that resonate with you as facts. Because if I said, "will you find another partner?" and if you said to me, "yeah, but I don't believe that everybody does," there's no point me forcing this truth onto you. I'd have to look for others that might resonate with you. Such as, if I go out and I actually start socializing when I'm ready, then the chances are I'll increase my probability, so that gives me a bit of hope. You might work with that. So, you've got to find what resonates with the person. Discover them, but think around, but you can offer common things.
Super interesting. And it perfectly explains why in that moment, for some bizarre reason, my friend telling me, being very sort of rational with me, things that I genuinely did accept to be true, just completely diffused my brain.
Because he's acting effectively as your human. That's what he's doing. He's coming in rationally and stepping back and saying "let's look at the facts here." And he's hit some nails on the head where you think, "oh, that settled me down a bit." But what tends to happen is you tend to isolate yourself. Most people do this after this has happened, and they go within themselves and they engage these emotions which generates more and more falsehoods and distorted ways of perceiving themselves and the world. Instead of being able to—which is not easy—talk to themselves rationally and work with reality. It's not easy to do that. So, when you can't do it, it's not a failure, you turn to your best friends and they'll do it for you.
What is the cause of unhappiness, as you see it? Especially if you're building machine learning applications that are going to solve, you know, make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way. We must be able to know what's causing this lack of happiness.
Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it's simple when we get it, but it's not simple to get to it. Happiness is very predictable. If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation. You've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life. Take for example rain. Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy. There is no inherent value of happiness in rain. Rain makes you happy when you want to water your plants, and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe.
And so, it's not just the event, rain. It's the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be. If you're worried about your plants, then life should be generous to me and get me rain so I can water the plants. And if life does that, then life meets your expectations and you're happy. And so, happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. And apply that to anything.
My favorite example is nature. We're all happy in nature. Why are we all happy in nature? I mean, you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and trees are crooked and there are shrubs everywhere and bushes, and it's just really not that hedged and organized. But that's what we expect. So, nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be, and so we feel happy. Nobody's ever sits in front of the ocean and says, "I like the view, but please mute the sound." You just take it, you know, it's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and the sun and the whole experience. And because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us.
What was defined to us is that happiness is found in a gathering at the pub or a party or an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is. That's not at all true. These are—I call these the state of escape. Happiness as per the definition of the happiness equation is: events equal to or beating expectations, life going my way. And so, basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay with life as it is. It doesn't really matter what life is. What matters is that you can be okay with it.
So, if your boss is annoying and your expectation is, "Yeah, bosses are annoying. This is what life is about. They become bosses because they're annoying," if that's your expectation, you're going to look at it and go like, "Yeah, I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses." And if that's the case, then you're not going to be upset about it. Similarly anything else. If you look at it then it's not just the event, it's your perception of the event. So you have something to influence. Your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4 PM. That's the event. My partner said something hurtful. At Sunday morning, you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore. That's your perception of the event. That's not actually the event. The event is something hurtful was said. But your perception of the event is your work—it's your brain adding color to it. And then you compare that to your expectations.
We blur the happiness equation, we break the happiness equation, because of what I call the six and seven. Six grand illusions and seven blind spots, which are the six grand illusions are basically call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that are illusions—are not true. Take for example control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world you have to learn to control certain events. So, you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of physics, that we never are in control. That the absolute design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos. That's the actual design. And so, if you try to control it, you're bound to be disappointed a lot of events are going to miss your expectations.
And yes, I'm not saying don't control anything at all, but start to understand that you're going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort. And by the way, even if you're selective and you try to control everything, sometimes things will fall out of control. If you live your life through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness. So, six grand illusions: the illusion of thought, the illusion of self, the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of time, control, and fear. That disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life because you're expecting life to behave through a lens of an illusion.
The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots. And the seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain—as a matter of fact, they are the very design of your brain. Your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong. It's not designed to—you know, if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me "oh my god look how majestic that animal is." It's a beautiful animal, but my brain will say we're going to die. And "we're going to die" is the idea that basically makes our brain constantly look for what's wrong, blur the events of life. You ask a mother and she will say "oh, my daughter's been sick all winter." No, she just had two episodes of flu three days each. But to the caring heart of a mother, that needs to be exaggerated to—the exaggeration is one of the blind spots. Your brain is trying to get you to take action so it pushes you, it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action. And accordingly, you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation and the happiness equation falls apart.
Under all of this, you're inferring something which I think will annoy a lot of people, and that is that happiness is a choice. And that you can choose to be happy. And that if you're unhappy, really, for many circumstances in our life, day to day—in work, in love, in relationships—personal responsibility is the answer and a lack thereof is the cause.
Totally. Absolutely. You know what you just did? You've just lost us 8% of the audience. To tell someone it's your responsibility to get yourself out of this horrible place that you're in is quite disturbing because we like the idea of saying "no, no, hold on, no, no, it's not me. Life is treating me really badly. That's why I'm not happy. I can't do anything about it. Life took my son. I have the right to be unhappy." Yes, life took your son. That's true. And you have the right to be unhappy, but you're never going to get out of unhappiness if you wait for life to bring him back or you wait for life to correct its action.
The only way you can come out of unhappiness is if you choose and say, "Okay, it's going to be a long journey. It's going to take a lot of time. And I'm going to try and try and try, but I'll get there." And neuroplasticity proves that. Neuroplasticity basically tells you that if you just run a happiness kind of activity once a day, every day, your brain will be better at it. And I mean, please don't get me wrong, but what do most of us do every day? We watch negative news, we swipe on toxic positivity, and we're just drowning ourselves in negativity and then what happens? What happens is we become really good at being negative. We become really good at finding what's wrong with life. We become very good at getting pissed off with the Prime Minister. Because it's an activity we do on a daily basis. So, your brain goes like, "this must be important for her or him. Okay, I'm just going to make sure I have the neurons aligned around that," and so we're basically configuring our brains to be unhappy.
And that is the kind of neuroplasticity that we need to shift. If you go to the gym and lift weights every day, you're going to look like a triangle. If you squat every day, you're going to look like a pear. The same is happening inside your brain, you just don't see it. If you're constantly watching news media, you're literally building your muscles that are concerned and are critical and are worried about the world when in reality most of the time you can't do anything about it.
There’s something in there which is clearly a theme in three topics we’ve touched on, which is this theme of radical acceptance.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is what I call the Jedi Master level of happiness. So, there are three levels of happiness. I call it the happiness flowchart. Events are going to piss you off. It's just the truth. If you can manage to acknowledge your emotion and say, "Oh my god, I feel—am I angry? Is this anger? I mean, is this what I'm feeling?" And then you take that feeling and you say to yourself, "Okay, interesting, I am angry. I need to do something about it."
I will give you three steps. The beginner's level is ask yourself if what you're thinking is true. Your partner said something hurtful on Friday. Your thought is he or she doesn't love me anymore. Ask yourself if that thought is true. If it isn't, drop it. There is no point to be unhappy. If it is, then let's go to the black belt level of unhappiness, which is: can I do something about it? That's the second question. "Is it true" is question one. "Can I do something about it" is question two. And honestly, by the way, it doesn't take more than two seconds to feel the emotion, ask yourself if it's true, and then go to "can I do something about it?" And if yes, then do it! What are you waiting for? Text him or text her and say, "Baby, can we please talk over dinner? What you said on Friday hurt me." Instead of just banging your head against the table hoping that they will find out and come and say "oh, I'm so sorry."
This story really hurts me. I was teaching—before lockdown, I taught a lot of people in workshops and seminars, more than 20,000 people. One day one of them comes to me in the first break and says, "What are you talking about? What do you mean happiness is a choice? You have no idea what happened to me." And I said, "Okay." And she said, "When I was 17..." She was 74 at the time. Can you believe that? 57 years of holding on to one thought, hitting her head against the wall. And I hugged her. I hugged her and I cried and I said, "Did it work? Did all of that work? Or was the better thought: 'Okay, it was horrible. But can I do something about it?'" And that's question number two. That's black belt.
Sometimes, however, there's nothing you can do about it. Whatever she experienced could be irreversible. What I have experienced, the loss of Ali, is irreversible. There is nothing you can do about it. And I'm not asking everyone to get there quickly, but the Jedi Master level of happiness is to say, "Okay, it happened, and I have no choice to change it. There is nothing I can do to fix it. So, can I accept it? But not surrender and lie down and die. Accept it and then start to do something to make my life better despite its presence—or maybe because of its presence."
Can I accept that Ali died and start to spread his message so that my life and the life of others become better? Can I do that? I call that committed acceptance. And it's very simple. If you commit and accept to—if you accept things you can't change and commit to make your life better despite of or because of their presence, nothing can beat you. Nothing can beat you. And yeah, does it—is it horrible that I actually managed to move on and, you know, not hit my head against the wall for 27 years? Does that say I don't love Ali? What are you talking about? I adore Ali. I cry about missing him still today. It's not that there is nothing to prove in that. What I can prove is I love him so much that I actually dedicate my life to spreading his message. That's so much better than sitting there and saying, "Ah, life hit me. I don't like life." That's a six-year-old attitude, honestly. Adults will say "Okay," and especially business people—I mean your audience—yeah, the market changes all the time. Do you sit down and go like, "Ah, I lost another deal," or do you just get up and say, "Why did we lose this deal? What can we do about it? And if there is something wrong with the product, can we change the product?"
What you talked to there about business in particular rings very, very true because in business—and you've been a very successful entrepreneur yourself and worked with teams—you'll get people who are high in defaulting to logic in moments of chaos and also default to personal responsibility. And those that don't, and the outcomes of both groups are quite pretty different. Very different. And actually, this approach of "is it true, can I do something about it, can I accept it and commit," I learned that in business. And it's a very simple business approach. Now, most of us do that in business, but when it comes to our personal life, we don't do that. And interestingly, most of us who do that in business are very successful in business, and most of us who do that in life are very successful in life. It's not just happy. It makes us successful because it doesn't waste our cycles on things that are not necessary. So, if you can do it at work, do it at home, do it in your life, do it in your relationships. It's really a very straightforward flowchart.
I hope you enjoyed that look back at my life-changing moments from my first 100 episodes. I've got to say, November, December, January, we're publishing the best podcasts we've ever published. When I saw the guest lineup, I genuinely was like—I looked at the list and thought "How? How is it possible that my idols, world exclusives, people I've wanted on this podcast since it began many years ago, have all decided to come in the same month?" And honestly, November and the guests we're recording with within that month, which will be published over the next three months, is the reason I started this podcast. And it's a real sign of where it's going and the platform it's become. So, thank you for sticking with me. It's going to be one hell of a last quarter. I know it's going to change my life again, that's for sure. And I can't wait to bring you more people's diaries. Have a wonderful week.