Moment 25 - This Is How You Fulfil Your Potential: Matthew Syed

00:03One thing I certainly do want to talk to you about as well is how, as an individual, because we've talked a lot about companies and teams, how as an individual one is to reach their, this is a super broad question and I hate asking broad questions because you tend to get broad answers, but how as an individual one could reach their potential or what are some of the fundamental things that block people from reaching their potential? We've talked about a fear of failure.

00:30We've also touched on the idea that people don't start because of that fear of failure and they don't get the feedback loops. But what are the other common sort of threads that you see in the reason why people never get near their potential in life? So in addition to those things, so fixed mindset, fear of failure, risk aversity, all the things we've addressed. The other thing I think is I've become more interested in, it's related to what we've said, but I think it's different, is what you might call initiative or agency or proactivity.

01:01I remember having an idea. This is in the 1970s, early 1980s. I was going to table tennis competitions and carrying this very heavy bag, blue holdel, ascot holdel, and thinking, my goodness, this is really doing my backing. And it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many people had who were traveling a lot is to put wheels on luggage, right? Wheel suitcases, which we all have now. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea, right? You've got to say, right, I'm going to try and design something.

01:42I'm going to try and sell it to a department store. I'm going to try and market it. I'm going to try and buy a shop. I'm going to have to pay rent. I'm going to have to go to the bank and get some debt that is a there is a massive difference between a dormant passive idea and one that you act upon another example i lived on richmond uh on a road in richmond when i first moved there in my mid-20s and it had no off-street parking what i didn't realize is that in richmond parking is a nightmare because all the houses have less parking spaces than there There are less parking spaces than there are houses, and so people park on the street and then they get taken up, and you end up having to park 10 minutes away.

02:27A few doors down, I noticed at the top of the road, there's a house with a parking space that is always empty. I thought to myself, yeah, I should knock on the door, or I should write them a note, and so I'm willing to pay rent or to buy it from you. But I never got around to doing it. And then a few years later, I was at a house party, And this person said, oh, I used to live on Montague Road. Oh, really? That's interesting. I lived there too. He said, yeah, I had the house at the top.

02:54I said, what, with the parking space? And he said, yeah, what I never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it out. And I thought, that idea was in my head and I never acted on it. Why? Because there's a fundamental inertia in a lot of us. It's easy to have an idea. It takes a bit of – I remember when I was injured in table tennis and I wasn't practicing, I wasn't doing anything, and I sat at home. Just posting a letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do.

03:25You have to go all the way to the post office. You have to buy a stamp. You're like, oh, man, it was like, oh, I'm struggling. The psychologist I've got interested in recently is a guy called Michael Fraser. He's a German, really interesting guy. And he looked at the unification of Germany, right, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the West German businesses were like, this is fantastic. We're going to have this pool of really keen workers. And it just didn't work out because the East German, generalizing a little, but the East German workers had worked in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses.

04:03And so if a machine broke down, instead of taking action to fix it, they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them. If they needed the telephone number, they would wait and they wouldn't act on it. And I think that being able to – Richard Branson, you probably know. I mean, I've got to know little. He talked about how – I mean, I think this is probably – well, this is the way he tells it. Virgin Atlantic, he was flying to the British Virgin Islands to meet his girlfriend.

04:32He has a stopover in Miami. They're bumped off the flight. They delay it to the next day, and everyone's sat there going, this is a disaster. Then he thought, well, hang on a second. I could charter a private plane, which were in the airport. So he took the initiative. Probably a few people had that idea. What about chartering a private plane? But he actually picked up the phone and said, right, how much will it cost to charter a plane? You know, $10,000.

04:59He then went round to all the people with a blackboard saying, you know, flight, this is the amount per ticket. Some people bought it. They managed to take the flight. and then when he got home he rented a Boeing and went from there. And I think that proactivity is absolutely critical. You go to school for all those years, you get to 16, but what about going out there and you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be. In my day when you came out of university, some people would be in the same career for life.

05:32And you take that decision without going in asking people, what was it like in this job? Could I perhaps work for a day in this job? A lot of people I went to university with took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like. Now, you as an entrepreneur have this in spades. I want more entrepreneurship in schools. I want proactivity. Instead of learning business studies concepts, this is another experiment by Michael Fraser.

05:58Instead of people doing an MBA, he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action. he calls it the action cycle those entrepreneurs compared to a control group uh you know had had you know 25 i can't remember the exact amount but five times more successful businesses or 20 higher profits it was published in science magazine so you know i think that's a really really big deal that's a mindset i just can't get over this idea that you saw that that car parking space and you know you didn't you didn't knock on or send a letter and i'm trying to understand linked also to um what you then talked about with richard branson at that airport with the with the blackboard going around and trying to sell this airline that he'd just come up with what is the mental like cultural mental psychological difference between the people that sat there and thought i'm just going to accept this situation as is like you did with the driveway or like the other passengers who had just been cancelled did and the person that takes the initiative what is it about them and what is blocking i guess a better question is what is blocking those that are sat there on the airport floor thinking fuck i'm my life is over

07:09um or i can't find a car parking space what is blocking them and is it this is my hypothesis there's some kind of mental equation we're all doing very very quickly that's weighing up the effort it would take and also our perceived outcome of success our perceived chance of success in endeavour and coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth it or possible. I don't think that's what's happened. I would reject that hypothesis. I don't think people make a rational calculation.

07:36I think it's more habit. Once you're used to doing things, if you've been at a school, and some people are lucky enough to go to school, where you are encouraged to make things happen. to, you know, some schools, you know, they are actually asked to start a business, to pick up the phone, to engage with other people as they seek to do something. You begin to, it becomes a habit. The idea of writing a letter and dropping, it's like no big deal. That isn't a barrier for me.

08:09It becomes second nature. I can tell you from this parking space, you know, I was just in a, it was just pure inertia. I hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset. I mean, that took me a long time to learn as well. And you think, I'm just thinking about how I would teach someone to be proactive. So I've thought a lot about this too. And I think you get people to do it. So what Fraser does in his courses, he keeps linking ideas to action. You're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it.

08:40He calls it the active ingredient. So you get into a habit. So one of the entrepreneurs, so he's done these experiments in Europe and in Africa. But in one of, I mean, he tells great stories about it, but it's such a long time since I read the papers. So I think habit, doing it again and again and again, you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action. Honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if we just continue to go with the flow and we're not prepared to break it from time to time.

09:17Then you're kind of just a puppet to the course of life, I guess, in some respects. Right. And I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams. You had the dream, but think about your dream. That would remain dormant in your head had you not acted. These are distinct phenomena, the idea and the action. You can have ideas and dreams without acting on them. I just, my, yeah, so I get a lot of DMs from people.

09:52You can imagine the DMs are, I've got a great idea. And you know that 99% of the people you speak to are never going to do anything about it because the hardest part is doing, it's just day one. It's like, think of the name of the company, but they just, well, I call them sophopreneurs. They have the idea on the sofa. It never makes it up out of the sofa. And that's like 99% of people. And I wonder what the barrier is between like starting. I sometimes hypothesize that it's because of this culture of perfectionism and this culture of needing to start at a perfect point with all the resources, all the knowledge, all the contacts, the right team, which is not the case.

10:31I mean, if you look at how Ben Francis started his business or I started mine, it's Googling on a computer, how do you build a website? And doing that for three months. Um, but I, but I always, I always wonder, I think we could, we would, we would unlock so much potential if we were able to get people just to the starting blocks and we can't, they're all on their sofas. Yeah. And, and yeah, I, yeah, I, I describe it brilliantly. Um, a couple of things that might be worth throwing in as a guy called Mike Barton. He was the chief constable of, of Durham police.

11:05and he kept getting rated the highest by the independent inspector of the constabulary and i remember i was really intrigued by this so i i talked to him and met him and he said that if he could he would ask every wannabe police officer to take one year off to start a business and for it to fail or to succeed just so they started learning using their own initiative because that is what great policing is about. Stanley McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal was the head of the task force in Iraq after the invasion that were trying to quell the insurgency of al-Qaeda.

11:41And at the time, it was a top-down model. People at the bottom were passive. If they wanted to get anything done, they had to go up the chain of command, get sign-off, and it would go back down. So lacking agility and not really using their brains. and he pushed authority down the chain of command. People could, they could, as it were, initiate action against Al-Qaeda targets if they thought it was sensible to do so. And it had a big, big effect on the success of the army, the number of operations, but also the percentage of successful operations.

12:13So I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of different people who are working along the lines that we're talking about right now. But for me, education is a key and I'd like to see more work done in schools to really equip young people with this active ingredient.