The “Winning Expert”: How To Become The Best You Can Be: Sir David Brailsford
Guests: Sir David Brailsford
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
I'm very, very lucky that I get to help other people be the best version of themselves. Sir David Browsford. To many, he's one of the greatest winners of our generation. If you can get that little bit of insight, why do I feel how I'm feeling? Why do I respond like I do? And then you realise, you think, wow, a lot of my behaviour, a lot of my life was driven by emotion. It wasn't driven by the real me. Best thing ever, if it happens, and if it doesn't, then you might be absolutely devastated.
But you've got to leave it as a dream. And you've got to understand that actually worrying about the consequence of an event is detrimental to the process and the performance and the chances of you achieving that event. perfection perfection was so far away that there's no point aim because we're going to fail every day so i thought well let's have a little progression it's right then what could we do by next week that we're not doing this week what little things could we do there's a million things that could impact performance and it works it works 100 it works it's been 20 years Sir David Brailsford.
I've tried since this podcast began to get Sir David Brailsford to come here and have a conversation with me. So having this conversation today and being able to share it with you is one of the highlights all time in this podcast history. I don't think it's an understatement to say that he has worked miracles with teams, taking teams in cycling that were underachieving and making them... undeniably the greatest team in their world and maybe of a generation.
He's famous for this concept of marginal gains. It's a concept which I speak to my team about every single day. And maybe that's why I wanted to sit here with him. Today you will understand, without a shadow of a doubt, how to build a successful team. That's what you'll come away with. You'll understand how to be successful personally. You'll understand how to inspire those around you to be successful. But the surprising thing, which I think you'll also take away from this, is the cost of success.
And we don't often take enough time to ask ourselves that very honest question. Is the climb worth the view? But by the end of this podcast, I think you'll be closer in your life to having an answer for that question. 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. A conscious sense of outsideness from a very early age. You said that once upon a time and it rang very true to me as well.
And I found it to be a very relatable thing. Where did that come from? Where did your conscious sense of outsideness come from? Yeah. It's funny when you say that because it resonates, it really does. So I was very young, just being born and my parents, my dad really decided to move from Derby where I was born to North Wales and buy a house in Snowdonia, very keen climber and he wanted to go to the proximity of the mountains. So we moved over there and I grew up, it was a very, very Welsh dominated Welsh speaking little village called Dain Jollan.
I went to primary school there and grew up speaking first language Welsh. All my friends were Welsh. Everybody was Welsh, pretty much apart from my parents. And I had this sort of conundrum then. I didn't probably realise it at the time, but I certainly on reflection, you know, look back And, you know, I was very, very much in this Welsh community, very, very tight community. And I'd go home and my parents were obviously English parents and I felt, you know, my dad didn't really conform.
He was there to climb. He was there as one of these outsiders who'd come in there to... you know, get up into the mountains. And I think that left me challenged, I think, because I was so wanted to be the same as all my mates, same as everybody else, part of the tribe, part of the gang. And yet somewhere inside I felt maybe I wasn't quite You know, I wasn't fully immersed in it, you know, it wasn't quite there. And don't get me wrong, I loved it.
And I still, I go back then, I love it. I've got, you know, my great friends there, my mum still lives there. But I never actually quite, quite got that full sense of I belong there, you know. So I've always felt that little bit on the outside, I guess. You... went on to be a great anomaly in what you've achieved in your life and success. And I look, I always, I'm always, I guess I'm a bit nosy, but I'm, and I did a little bit of childhood psychology when I was in school.
So I try and look at like which, what the parental dynamics were that might've made someone, that little bit more relentless and that little bit more hardworking. And I sat here with Eddie Hearn and I go, oh, your dad. I could tell the way his dad was, that ruthless intensity, clearly rubbed off on him at a young age. And I was reading about how you described your dad. And it seemed to be, dare I say, a little bit similar to... Yeah, he was orphaned when he was very young.
So he lost his mum when he was five, lost his dad when he was seven. And, of course, for anybody that's going to have a big impact, and I think it had a life-changing impact on him. And I think he was then fostered, and he tells a story when he was growing up in a foster family. The foster family would eat together, and they'd make him eat in another room. And, you know, it was tough enough, I guess. And I think that's had a profound effect on who he was.
And he became somebody who was very much, you know, driven to make his own way. And I think, you know, that was one of his core, core sort of deep-seated drives and values is that he pushed hard and it was always about being professionals, all about working hard, make your own way. Don't rely on anybody else to do anything for you, do it for yourself. And he drilled that into us and I think we just lived it really. And cycling, you were very into cycling from a young age.
I had used to wait on Thursdays for the sort of cycling newspaper to arrive. Yeah, that's Cycling Weekly. A little magazine which is a bit of a cult magazine, quite a niche magazine and that used to arrive, get delivered on a Thursday. And I'd wait with great anticipation and it was one of those when the The newspapers came around, you'd get your cycling weekly, and then you'd sit there and read about all the results and who'd done what. Of course, there was nothing on the internet.
There was no other way of getting the news. And in the back, there was all these little sections where all the results were, all the race results. And you'd look to see who'd done what and study it all. It was... It was like a real, you know, it's a real part of the cycling culture. And it still is, to be fair. Cycling Week is still going, despite all of the changes in sort of media and everything else. But for me, it's a real cornerstone of my growing up with the sport, that's for sure.
You then go to school. You go to university. Did you go to university? No, no, I didn't enjoy school at all. Did you do an apprenticeship? No, no, no. Well, no, I'd left school when I was 16. Yeah. First day I could leave school, I was out. I was done. I didn't enjoy school. Why? I don't know. I just didn't like being confined. I didn't like having to sit in chemistry lessons. I just didn't. It wasn't for me. I just didn't enjoy it. And it wasn't I couldn't do it, I don't think.
I just didn't enjoy the environment. I enjoyed the PE and I enjoyed being with my friends and all that kind of stuff. But I didn't. I don't know, I just didn't enjoy that educational... I felt trapped, I felt enclosed. And I don't know, I wasn't really motivated to learn at that time. You know, I was off doing other things, really. Do you think because you had so much freedom in your childhood home, you then struggled going to places where you didn't have that same level of freedom?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I certainly like autonomy. There's no doubt about that. And I think it's probably there since childhood. Because I did. I enjoyed quite a lot of freedom going up. But I think it's quite interesting because somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew at some point I was going to have to go and have to get an... learn or felt this kind of responsibility for an education somewhere, but I just wasn't ready, you know, and so I thought there's the...
There's what I should do and what I wanted to do, I think, and there's a little bit of what I should do kind of came along, and then in the end I sort of thought, well, actually, I... I want some freedom, I want to explore, I want to go on an adventure, I want to do something different. So many of the guests that sit here, including Jimmy Carr, reminded me of him, have that moment, usually in their early 20s, where they, as you've perfectly described it, there's the thing they should do, usually what their parents want them to do.
what society's told them to do and what they want to do. And in Jimmy's case, it was like, quit everything and go and be a comedian, getting paid no money because that's what he wanted to do and take all those unpaid gigs. For you, you set off on a bike to France. That was your breaking out of Wales moment, right? Yeah, and I kind of got this... It didn't happen overnight, but slowly but surely, I started to really, really get passionate about cycling.
Like, really, the sport of cycling kind of, you had the freedom maybe, but it was a sport of suffering. It was a sport of sacrifice. It was a tough sport, and I liked that. And I liked the idea that you were a... It was only you, you know. If you could, you know, it's like the head and heart, really. If you're intelligent and you could... figure out how to train and then you had the heart and the commitment and the desire and a passion to suffer a little bit and how deep could he go and you know that attracted me to cycling so if you were good you were good and if you weren't good you weren't good and in a you played a lot of football and in all the little all the junior teams and everything else we were growing up and there you could you could have a great game and lose or you could be you know terrible and win the team could win and I kind of like the the You know, this idea that if what you do really counted in terms of your own performance, as it were, that sort of chimed at me.
And anyway, I kind of got this passion for the Tour of France and this sort of thing that was kind of happening somewhere in the world. And the more I looked at it, it sort of felt quite... gladiatorial and the mountains and the you know it felt just epic a three-week race and all i wanted to do is go and see if i can watch this race and i got the chance to go and i stood there and i got this passion for it and in the end i thought right i want to go and try and win that thing and so i sort of said to my uh mum that right i'm gonna i'm just gonna jack everything in i'm gonna go and go to France and see if I can become a professional cyclist.
And she was mortified, horrified, actually. Like, you can't, you know, what you're thinking, you can't go, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I said to my dad, I said, listen, I'm going to jack it all in, I'm going to go, and he was like, yes! Really? He loved it, yeah, and that's all I needed to hear, you know. Once I heard that, then I was like, right, it's okay, I'm going. And so I got a single ticket to Grenoble, and got my bike in a cardboard box, rucksack, 700 quid, and got a ticket onto Bangor Station in North Wales, and off I went.
I don't think I'd ever really kind of had to cross... I remember having to cross London on the tube with my bike in a box and rucksack. That was a real ordeal for me. Got down to Dover, crossed on a ferry, got to Calais, and I was sitting there, and somebody came along and said, you know, do you want a coffee or whatever, or a drink, and, you know, on the train... And it kind of dawned on me then. I thought, I haven't got a clue what's going on here.
I was trying to find out. I wanted to go to a place called Argentier. That was my destination. And I didn't know there was two. So there's two Argentiers, it turns out. So I went, I was trying to ask this guy to buy a ticket to Argentier. And he was just being awkward. You know, you could see I couldn't speak French. And obviously he wasn't making much of an effort either. And then these two quite young guys came along and they said, oh, can we help you?
You know, we speak French and English. Thanks. So they helped out. It turned out they were Polish and there were two likes trying to defect from Poland because we're still communist. And they were trying to get into university in Grenoble. And so the very first night I had in France, we slept head to toe, sleeping bags on this thing, and these two polis, like, they were petrified. And the time I said, any kind of steps or something come in, footsteps, they'd jump up, pops up, rise, and like, shoot, we're going to get caught.
And... Anyway, so I jumped on a train at six o'clock in the morning, jumped on a train to where I thought I was going. I actually ended up in Switzerland. Fucking hell. So I was like, whoa. By which time the phone had worn off, I must admit. So I got the same train back to Grenoble again, spent my second night on the same platform, the same bench. And then eventually the next day got to where I wanted to go in Argentiere. And that was a bit of an ordeal.
But why were you going there anyway? What was the aim of when you arrived at that destination? What were you thinking? I wanted to be a professional cyclist. I wanted to find a way of getting into a professional cycling team. There's no, how do you do that? Back in the day when cycling was very much a niche sport in Britain, there wasn't any obvious kind of route. So the club structure... The amateur club structure in France was very, very strong and they were like feeder teams, sort of professional teams.
So if you get over there and get yourself in an amateur team and if you're any good, you'd work your way up. So I thought, right, that's what I'm going to do. Did you have a meeting arranged with an amateur team? No, no. So you just showed up? So I just went, yeah. So I looked for the end of a race, waited until everybody arrived. Mm-hmm. you know, finish the race and they're all there's a car, didn't have the buses back in those days, the cars were there and they came and so I looked around, chose the nicest kit as you would.
Changed the nicest kit? Seemed like a good start. And I went up to them and asked if I could race and they kind of, what? They were like, what? And kind of chuckled and they thought it was a bit odd. And then they sort of passed me on to the next team and the next team and the next team. I spoke to one little group and a guy came over and he said, oh, look, we're, he spoke English. And he said, we're from Saint-Etienne. And if you can get yourself over to Saint-Etienne, we trained as a whole team together on a Wednesday.
He wrote me down the address and said, right, come near nine o'clock on a Wednesday, you can come train with us. So I started training with them and that was it. I lived there for three years then. Three years. And eventually, you know, you admit that, you realised at some point you weren't going to make it. Yeah. You weren't going to win the... Yeah, that was a shame. But then I look back on it now and I think if I'd have known now, people say, what would you change?
If I could go back in time, I think if I knew what I know now in terms of training and nutrition and everything else, I'm pretty sure I could have done... a much better job. But I decided for some bizarre reason, I decided I didn't want to eat, particularly didn't, wanted to really reduce my fat intake and just eat carbohydrate and hardly any protein. And so I stopped eating meat, I became, you know, a vegetarian. And then I realised now I was just nailed all the time.
So I never really optimised the chance that I had. which kind of makes me think now when I get younger, you know, young, talented athletes or people wanna try out. And you can't just leave them alone, you know, just talent alone, not always gonna get you there, is it? You know, and they need, you need to be in the right environment. Same as my education. When I was young growing up, I'm, you know, I'm a bright enough guy, I think. I just wasn't ready to learn.
I wasn't in the right environment to learn. I could have learned, but I didn't learn at the time. And I kind of reflect quite a lot on that really now. in terms of creating the right environments, but to people to be able to just progress. You know, what's it take for a human being to progress? And, you know, I think my role is to try and create those environments and support people to do that, really. And I think it takes a lot of learnings from that, you know.
I want to get to some of those key learnings that you've had. To take a step forward in your story, you then go to university, which is actually quite surprising. You do a sports science degree for a couple of years. Yeah, it was early years of sports science. It was kind of developing, you know. And the idea of sports nutrition was developing. The idea of sports psychology was just developing. And I started to read around this. I thought, God, I love this stuff.
I absolutely, I couldn't get enough. I couldn't get enough. So the idea of eventually when I realized I wasn't going to be good enough to, you know, make the top end of professional cycling, I thought, right, well, I'll go back now because I would really want to learn more. And so I went back to university and I was just absolutely wasn't interested in anything to do with like freshers week going out. I just wanted to learn and that was it. So I met every one of the lecturers asked if I could have a meeting and said, right, I want you to tell me how you're going to teach me.
I want to make sure that I learn as much as possible. How are you going to do that? And of course, I've gone back since and they're a bit full on. And so I came out of that. And I loved, I absolutely loved every minute of being at university. I loved it. I loved meeting other people. I loved people that got the same passion. It was a topic that I just couldn't get enough of. I loved the psychology and the sports psychology. And I came out of all of that and really wanted to go and sort of pursue the sports psychology area.
But it just felt at the time it was too fluffy. It was... You know, the top pro teams weren't really, it's too, it's like all too macho to talk about, you know, psychology. And so it wasn't getting any traction at the time. So I thought, God, I'm not sure if I can make a career out of this. So I ended up, I worked a bit longer in, I went back in and worked in the cycle industry. And then I decided to go and do an MBA. I thought I don't know anything about business, like really don't know anything about business.
So I thought I'd like to know about that. So I went back to Sheffield Business School and did an MBA. And same there, I just wanted to learn. So I think if you're motivated to learn and want to learn, it changes, something changes in your mind, doesn't it? It's amazing to hear that. Yeah, like absolutely something changes. If you can, I don't know, if you unlock the desire, you're not learning because it's a... not learning because you have to, or it's not learning because it's a must-do kind of thing, but you learn because you want to, and then the whole process, life's learning, isn't it?
Life's all about learning, really. And so I think if you can unlock that, then you're on to something. And luckily, I think I did. And then eventually the first contact I had with the British Olympic programme was back in 1997 with a guy called Peter Keane. And Atlanta, Britain won one gold medal, I think, in the entire Olympic Games, which is ridiculously bad. I mean, it's so bad. It's like, I can't even imagine how that happened, you know, but they did anyway.
And at that point, John Major brought in the National Lottery. with a view that half of the money, half of the profit was going to go into culture and the arts and the rest was going to go into sport. And the real kind of goal of sport was to get the country up the Olympic table, which was unheard of, you know. It's like they were all amateur governing bodies. It was like a dream scenario. And cycling was very, very fortunate that they had a guy at the time called Peter Keane, very, very bright guy, visionary guy, And he wrote a beautiful plan, an amazing, amazing plan.
Then I kind of met him in and around 1997. I got my own little consultancy business at the time and I started to help out and I got more engaged and I thought, God, this is a combination of everything I've done sort of in my life really. You know, you've got the sporting side. the performance planning side, you've got the psychology of it all. It's new. It's like could be a first time ever kind of scenario. The ambition is amazing. And there's a bit of business wrapped in there as well, you know.
So I just saw that and I thought, right, I'm getting my elbows out. I'm not missing that chance, you know. It's like I thought, right, this is my calling and I'm going for it. I love so much of that I wanted to pick up on. The point you made first about learning is, It resonates so strongly with me again. I was kicked out of school, but just exceptionally obsessed with learning as an adult. And it goes to, speaks to the fact that the reason my attendance was 30% in school was I was being pushed to walk down an alley I didn't want to walk down.
Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? Yeah, truly. And everyone's unmotivated when you try and get them to do something that they intrinsically don't want to do, right? And this is, I think, a lot of the problem with the schooling system. But when I, as you were talking, I was reflecting all of these messages I get from kids. who like label themselves as unmotivated, but in whose eyes, right? In the eyes of their parents who want them to be a doctor or in the eyes of society that wants them to do a nine to five.
But I, I reject the idea that they are unmotivated. A million percent. I couldn't agree more. You know, and I've worked with a lot of people over the years and, And I think you've got to find out what's an individual's intrinsic motivation, what's driving somebody inside, what they really want to do. And you've got to unleash that in the end. You know, that's what life's about, isn't it? Really, there's nobody, there shouldn't be any, we shouldn't be pigeonholed and there shouldn't be lines and lanes.
And I'm very, very, very lucky that I try and get to help other people be the best version of themselves, basically. And you think, you know, when you no longer compete for yourself and you think, right, I'm going to be judged on somebody else's performance, that's what people judge me on. They go like, well, did somebody else win a race? Not me, I can't, you know, I'm never going to win a race. But it's like, did somebody else win a race? And then you realise, well, if I'm going to be judged on somebody else's performance...
I better get pretty good at understanding how to optimise and help somebody be the best they could possibly be. And then you think, well, what does that look like? How do you, what is that? And that's where you think, well, let's take the human being as a thing. You think, how do you help a human being be the best they could possibly be? Are there certain things that if you can generally get those things right, it helps an individual in the main...
be the best version of themselves. But the first thing you've got to ask is like, is that person, what is that person's internal intrinsic drive? Because if it's not aligned, if not really committed and really driven and excited to what you'd like them to be, it doesn't matter how much you'd like them to be, if they're not, they're not. And there's nothing you can do about that. But if there's a little bit of a flicker of the light burning there, you can turn that up, I think.
You can turn it down. You can very easily turn it off by mistake. Or deliberately, if you're that way minded. But I think you do... The very essence of people achieving things is they've got to be driven. There's got to be a reward. I mean, avoiding... Avoidance is a very, very strong motivator as well, I think. And You know, maybe I had to argue that maybe in my life I was avoiding failure rather than being dragged towards the positive emotion of winning.
You know, the positive emotion of winning for me isn't that great, unfortunately. I wish it was. But avoiding failure is a massive driver for me. And so, you know, either way, you figure out what somebody's drive is and then you help them. Then you think about what you need to do to create the environment around somebody. to optimise what they're doing. And then you've really got to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and forget yourself, forget your preconception.
Really genuinely say, right, I'm going to stand in this person's shoes, I'm going to try and see what life looks like for them and feel what life looks like for them and really understand, regardless of what any preconceptions I might have, What does that feeling look like and what do they need? What would the best thing I could do? What do they need to help or support? The more you go through that, the more you kind of recognise we're all different, but there are some common denominators deep down inside, I think.
And if you take the time to listen to people, they might not want to tell you first and foremost, but if you dig away at it, you know, eventually people will tell you what works for them, what they like, what they don't like. And if you listen carefully... You know, people, you give them a bit of ownership and they'll tell you, you know. And that is probably one of the most powerful drivers, I think, that exists, really. You know, you can put a gun to somebody's head, ask them to jump up and down, they'll jump up and down.
You cock the trigger and say jump higher, they'll jump higher. or they'll try to anyway, and then you pull it away and you walk away. And that is not a pleasant experience. It's used a lot, and it's used a lot in sport, actually, and less so now but certainly has been in the past. But your performance is going to be inconsistent, I think, through that. And it's certainly not going to be a very pleasurable experience. And I think by going down the route of trying to find people's carrots, as it were, I mean, you'll have known, I'm sure, I think you've interviewed Steve, haven't you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's an amazing guy. Oh, yeah, I believe. And his work, I think, is just phenomenal and something I buy into. But I do believe that it's carrot, not stick. On that point of finding out what their true motivation is, what they truly want and checking that it's aligned with yours as a coach or as a team. If you ask somebody, they'll typically give you the what they think you want to hear answer. So if I was sat in front of you and you asked me and I was new to your team, I'd say, I want to be a world champion.
because I think that's what you want to hear. How do you see past that? I'm asking this because a lot of people have people in their lives, whether it's a friend or a sibling or a son or a daughter, who they're trying to motivate to be something and often failing because they want it more than that person wants it for themselves. How do you see past that? Is there a technique? Is it just intuitive? Well, I think you've got to, you know, as soon as I sit down in front of somebody and they think, okay, this guy's got some kind of influence over what happens to me, then it's biased immediately.
And of course if you don't recognise that, if I just take at face value what people are telling me now, then that's, it's naive I think really. And I think you've got to go beyond that. Like you say, and I think most people will have a network and you can identify, if you watch the spheres of influence or the kind of who's influencing who and who has good relationships with who, You know, if I ask you now what your drivers are in this scenario, in the scenario we're currently in, you'll kind of think about what you're going to say, really.
Yeah, yeah. Whereas I think if you took, give me a couple of weeks, I think I could piece together slowly but surely by chatting to you, chatting to other people, asking the right questions, giving you some time. you know, different kind of environments and some formal, some informal, slowly but surely you could piece together a relatively good picture of where you think somebody's at. Is it a person who's driven by, you know, I like order and discipline and process or is it somebody who wants harmony?
Is it somebody who wants to be life and soul of the party and out there and express themselves? Or is it equally somebody who, you know, wants to please others? And if it is pleasing others, then who is it? It's the parents. Quite often I see that, really. And then, you know, you just piece it all together. And once you have that, then you're armed with information. You're armed with something which is you should really then respond and think carefully about...
You know, what's this person all about? You know, can you draw a map of somebody? Can you really map out somebody's drivers, who they are? What do you think their influences are? What do they really want? What's their, you know, what's pulling them and what's pushing them? And I think when you get into that kind of realm of high performers and people who are really pushing themselves to extreme levels, there's something pulling or pushing them pretty hard normally.
And trying to just understand that and dig a little bit around that, at least, like I say, it gives you the, you know, I think it's an obligation for somebody in our kind of roles, as it were, to make the effort to make sure you do take the time to fully understand somebody. Have you encountered instances in your career where someone's got so much talent, but they're just lacking in drive and no matter what you've done? 100%. Yeah. And what do you do in those situations?
Well, in our world, you wouldn't work with them. You know, I wouldn't work with them. I'd support them and be very, very, you know, not unpleasant or unkind or everything else, but it's not going to work. You have to have that commitment and that drive and that's got to be there. If that's not there, then don't go past square one really. When you're young, you can perform and get to a very high standard on your talent. Yeah. But then when you get to the top of the top, as it were, and there's maybe five or six people who have a similar level of talent and some can get the best out of themselves and get that little bit.
§02Transcript — part 2
You know, it's like you can get a normal kind of high level of performance And then every now and again, you get this like discretionary level of performance, that little bit on top thinking, wow, that was absolutely me or you at your best. And we're not in the business of that, you know, the high level performance. We're in the business of trying to get that discretionary performance as often as possible when it really matters. And that's what, you know, that's what we really got to think about.
And it's unlikely that you'll get there on talent alone. And even in the most sort of out there sort of talent, who can be flamboyant or do the unexpected, etc., they've nearly all... They're all committed and very, very, very bought into and driven by what they're doing. That word commitment is the first letter in your acronym, CORE, which is a philosophy you're known for. What is this CORE philosophy? What is that acronym and what does it stand for?
To be fair to, you know, I just mentioned Steve Peters. I think, you know, one of the great things I think that I've been very, very fortunate to have happened in my life was that we met Steve back in, I think it was 2002, something like, you know, around that. I was always into, you know, I liked the psychology. Obviously, I'd studied psychology, but I couldn't quite, it wasn't quite input-output enough. It wasn't, I don't know, it didn't feel quite solid enough at times.
And then we had an athlete who had a bit of an issue and somebody within our medical team had been a student of Steve's at the School of Medicine in Sheffield. And they said, well, we could ask this guy to come across, and he did. And he did this amazing piece of work with his athletes. I thought, wow, I've really got to meet this guy. And so I sat down. with Steve and he's a psychiatrist, not psychologist, obviously a forensic psychiatrist. And he sat down and he said, right, well, here's my mental kind of map, as it were, and this is how your brain works and this is the different parts of your brain, think differently and you do realise that this different blood goes to different areas and you'll be driven by emotion or logic or past experiences, etc., And I was like, okay, this is really interesting.
And what I liked about it, Tim, he was like, if you do this, then that. And you should do this, not that. And he's quite prescriptive in a very neutral way, but quite strong. And I really liked that. Really, really liked that. So I thought, wow, this guy would be absolutely dynamite in sport. And so Steve was still working in the NHS and he was actually working at Rampton. at the time as well with, you know, the mass murders and the psychopaths and all that.
And so I tried to persuade him, I said, Steve, come on, you've got to come and work in sports. And eventually, you know, he did, to be fair. He came and worked full time and it was just an amazing period really because we sat down and said, right, forget cycling for a minute. Let's think about the human brain, the human being and how do we create the best possible environment for people to perform? And that's where the core principle came from with Steve in the first instance.
So it was like, you know, the C was commitment. So let's screen these people for commitment. And you do a commitment screen and he'd ask people about their homework, how they did their homework. You know, when people had to do something, deliver on something, he'd interrogate them a little bit about that. And then the O of the core was for ownership and the idea that we, we, a human will perform better and respond better with a little bit of ownership over what they're doing.
So, you know, sport was very much a dictate and control kind of coaching model really and management model. And he was very much of the, you know, very, very strong that. As a human, we like to have a little bit of control of what's happening to us. We like to negotiate or have a little say, this works, that works. And that's a very powerful kind of construct to work with. The R was for responsibility and accountability. And of course, we've all worked in professional jobs in the end and we've all got accountability and responsibility in life.
And so people need to be held accountable and responsible. And then the E was for excellence, but it was personal excellence. And as he used to joke about it, it should have been personal excellence, but it sounded a bit like corpse. So we stuck with core. And so we got all the coaches in and said, I bought this 100%. Really, really thought, right, we're going to do this. And then we'll sort of use cycling as the kind of, you know, It was the opportunity to do something different.
I was absolutely sure, really, really sure it was the right thing to be doing. Of course, he was there to coach and help and support. So we got the coaches in and said, right, guys, we're going to change the way we're working here. We're going to put the time, actually, we termed it, we're going to take the crown off the heads of the coaches and put them onto the heads of the riders and they're going to become the kings and queens of their own world, their own destiny, and we're going to support them in that.
And it was just that slight change of emphasis, which a lot of the coaches threw it at arms in the air. Well, they'll be out of control. They won't turn up for training. It was kind of an emotional response, really. And, of course, Chris Hoy and Vicky Pendleton and all of the athletes who were with us at the time, they wanted to perform for themselves. They wouldn't perform for a coach. They might have a brilliant relationship with a coach, but they were after their own performance or a team performance.
It wasn't done for the coach. It was a real... I mean, it sounds a bit... obvious now i guess but at the time it felt like a quite a big deal to be to be really empowering a group of athletes and um yeah and off we went with that really and um it was an exciting time one of the things that i've taken from that many things but one of the things that i've taken from that which is again feels really consistent throughout lots of things i've read about you is this idea of going back to first principles to make to create better solutions and i'll tell you the three touch points where i've kind of I've seen that in your philosophy.
The first is you basically went down to the first principles of the human brain there and said, how does the human brain work? And let's treat the human brain in a better way outside of the conventional way of treating the human brain to get a better outcome. That's like, again, with first principles, it's a lot of work. No one wants to do it. Convention is much easier. The second thing is just generally your attitude to breaking down what you are trying to achieve as a team into small sections that's where I see the first principles thing and the third thing was I read that you hired younger coaches into a team that weren't tainted with convention and again they're much easier to train in in new ways is that yes I think in the main I think I do like to break things down into you know the smallest component parts or first principles anyway it's not copy and paste yeah and I read a lot and and I'm constantly kind of reading and listen to podcasts.
I'm constantly taking information in. and I'll use some of the information, but I won't just copy and paste it. I won't just apply it. It's contextual. I'd like to understand what's going on behind it. I'd like to understand the theory and the thinking. It drives people mad, actually, because I can talk about methods and whatnot and models all day long, you know. But fundamentally, it's how I like to work. And I think it's like the true... Take it down to its kind of deepest, sort of simplest level of understanding and then...
construct it relative to the context of the situation, how it could best apply to what you're doing. And take the time and effort and the energy and the, you know, I'd like to think about it and I'll draw it. I'll draw nonstop so I don't write so much. I draw. And then I cover my office wall in sticky plastic stuff on the wall and draw over the walls. It looks like a madman's in there, I must admit. But it's what I like to do and it's how I work.
It drives a couple of people I work with a bit crazy, but I think they used to by now. But I do like to do that. And then if you get a real understanding for something, then you can see whether you really agree with the fundamental principles and either go with that or question it and develop your own ideas. And light development, if you're going to develop your own ideas, do it sort of with originally, as it were, rather than necessarily just kind of taking something as well and just applying it, you know.
I'd be a bit uncomfortable with that, I think. One of the things that definitely felt very original when I was reading about your philosophy is this idea of forgetting about the results. Because thinking about the results or the outcome of your performance can reduce the chances of success in that performance. That's very unusual because in teams, in competition, in business, we think about the result, we think about closing the deal and what that will mean and we kind of imagine ourselves...
in that moment of getting the medal around our neck or that business deal won. Why is that not a good idea? Well, if an event happens or something happens, the first thing that's going to happen to you without you even knowing is you're going to have an unconscious emotional reaction to it. And it's emotion. You're not thinking it through. It's just purely emotion. And that's going to be either sort of a fight, flight, freeze response, really. But that emotional response will happen quicker than you know it before you can go in and get any logic or get any rationale into it.
And of course in any kind of situation like what could be perceived as a threat state where you're putting yourself in some kind of threatening scenario, be it damage my pride or what happens to people, they start thinking, well, what happens if I win? what happens i lose what happens i look ridiculous i don't look ridiculous i'm under threat and that then becomes you know very easily to get emotionally hijacked by that so then you're purely ringing on emotion which is inconsistent it's illogical you know it's not a it's not a good way for you to be basing it's not a good place for you to be basing your behavior and But if you understand that and you think, okay, well, look, I understand that it's normal that I'm going to put myself in a threatening scenario.
So if I worry about, let my emotion take over and I worry about what happens if I succeed, what happens if I fail, what happens if this, what happens if that, then it's actually pointless exercise. And if you can train slowly, recognise and train your mind to go, OK, I know what's happening here. This is just emotion. I'm going to put it to one side. Now then, let me separate this, whatever I'm doing, out into two things. We can have a dream. I want to win the Tour de France.
It's a dream. My ability to win it or our ability or anybody else's to win it is I'm going to do my absolute best to try and win it. But other people are going to try and stop me and other people are going to try and do something. It's stuff beyond our control that can impact on that. So if you set your goal as I'm going to win, you're going to agitate nonstop because it actually is out of your control. Whereas if you set your dream and say, this is what I'd really, really like to happen, I'll go all in, I'll do everything I can.
I'm fully committed to that. But let me break it down into targets, which is, well, I could get to the ideal weight. I could do the proper training. I could do the, you know, follow a nutritional plan. That's going to give me the optimal energy. And, you know, I can train my tactics. I can be better. really work hard to get a fantastic team around me, build good rapport, build confidence in my teammates. These are all things that you can do. And so if you say, OK, let's leave the dream over there for a while, but I'm going to go after the things I can do.
And you base your plan around the things that you can actually control and do. You'll be on fire. you'll be on fire, you'll be absolutely on fire. And the dream might happen and it might not and you'll be absolutely delighted and the best thing ever if it happens and if it doesn't, then you might be absolutely devastated but you've got to leave it as a dream and you've got to understand that actually worrying about the consequence of an event is detrimental to the process and the performance and the chances of you achieving that event.
So you park that, Go after your targets and go, right, I'm going process, not outcome. And we talked a lot about process, not outcome. And when you catch yourselves, you know, it's emotion in the end. So, of course, we do get hijacked and, of course, we do get fearful or, you know, a bit panicked. And you've got to have a system whereby you can talk to yourself a little bit. You can bring yourself back round and focus on the now and the process of now.
rather than worrying about the future. And then you can come back and concentrate on the process, get back into now. And, you know, some of the athletes would have a routine where they'd tie the undo and tie the shoelaces again. Or they'd have a little, you know, a little process that they'd tap into and they'd go into that and bring their mind back into the present and stop worrying about the future. And, of course, the penalty kick's the best example.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Ronaldo stood there. Yeah. I'm sure they bag 100% in training. Yeah, exactly. But in the Euros final. Exactly. You know, if you take the crowd out and take a penalty, those guys are so accurate. And the, you know, signal from the brain down into the muscle to contract in a certain way, that happens. And the accuracy and the... The repeatability of that is absolutely massive. Put a crowd in there and what changes?
Nothing changes physically. It's all between your ears. And so how can you train that? And mental skills can be trained just as much as you... We all know that we want to get fit and strong and you go to the gym and you know that you're going to overload your body and you give it time to adapt and it's adaptation that's going to make it a little bit stronger. And it's the same with a mind. You can train your mind. And I think that's what certainly working with Steve was...
was an eye-opener. As well as, I think probably the biggest eye-opener for most people is it gives you, once you realise you've got like an emotional brain and a logical brain and, you know, a bit of a memory computer side going on, then it gives you insight into yourself and why you are behaving and feeling like you are and some of the assumptions you're making about other people. Then you've got to start with yourself first. if you can get that little bit of insight, why do I feel how I'm feeling?
Why do I respond like I do? What triggers me? What's my best self look like? And what's my sort of, you know, not the best self. Why am I different? Why sometimes am I behaving in this kind of, you know, the second or shadow version of myself. And why am I so much in my best self? What's happening there? Why can't I just be my best self all the time? Surely that must be doable. So take a bit of time to understand it and pick it. And some people just maybe haven't been educated.
I certainly wasn't until really I sort of stopped and started to look at this stuff. And then you realise, you think, wow, a lot of my behaviour, a lot of my life was driven by emotion. It wasn't driven by the real me who could be calm and logical and think things through and quite... you know, I have a lot of passion and feelings and caring. And yet at times I could be something else, you know. And I think understanding that's fundamental, I think.
I don't think there's any excuse for that. No, I agree. Both points sounded very similar, in fact, because on one hand, you're saying with your goals, only go after the things you can control, like really focus on those things. And in the same way, when we're talking about personal responsibility of self, you're saying you can't control other people. Yeah. So, but the thing that, you know, maybe you do have control over in your life is your behaviour, how you act, how you conduct yourself and then kind of leave the rest to… Well, I think you can understand how other people are responding and how they're feeling.
So you can accept that if somebody's, you know, somebody's in a very… Well, it's two things, really. I think first and foremost, ambition is a big thing not to forget. You know, what's your level of ambition? You can be incredibly ambitious. Why can't we be the best in the world at something? Why can't we be the first to do something? What's stopping us doing something that nobody in the human race has ever done before? Nothing, as far as I can see.
You know, so I think there's a... You know, you've got to have that ambition, enthusiasm, the belief we can do whatever we want to do, you know, and really stretch that. And then I think the next bit, really, the target is more like the how to get there. It's more like the boring stuff to get there, you know, so it's like head and heart, really. And I think that if you understand yourself, then you should be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.
And if they're having a tough time or if somebody else is angry or there's something else going on with them, you know, rather than just dive in. and respond to the behaviour you see in at face value. Why not stop and think about it a little bit? Is this person in trouble? What's causing this? Where are they coming from? What's going on? Try and understand it. And if they're just responding emotionally to something, and you allow yourself to immediately respond emotionally back.
doesn't really get anywhere, you know. So you'd better halt back and wait and find out and try anyway. Not always easy. Not always easy. I struggle with that. Yeah. I struggle with that, especially being in an environment where my time feels so precious, right? There's so many things I could be doing, and you're exactly the same. I know people that work with you. I know you're a very, very busy person. So it's tough in the moment to stop and pause and to have patience when the rest of my life is run on like efficiency.
Yeah. You know what I mean? It's difficult. Yeah. I guess in my world, you know, I'm out to try and help people. And I do push people. We've got high standards. You know, you do want to level... I don't like laziness, for example. I just can't. That would really... That gets me, you know. But then I have to manage it and think, okay, well, if that's what they want, there's no problem. This isn't the environment for them, you know. But in the main, I think understanding challenges and...
Setting standards and boundaries and working to all of that is important. You built teams and developed teams that won over and over and over again in the same way that Sir Alex Ferguson did. I'm a Manchester United fan, so I was lucky enough to be, you know, it's not going so well lately, but in that era to watch our team win over and over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the thing that really I find, because I just thought that was normal growing up, that my team wins all the time.
The thing I find amazing now when I look back on it is how he managed to reinvent those teams, but also to get the same team to win again. And this idea of like, where is your motivation after victory? And how do you get a team that's just won and then they win again and I win again to win again? Where do they find the motivation? They've still on the podium. They've had the moment. Where does that come from? Yeah, it's a great question, that one.
And I think credit to Sir Alex and the work that he did. I mean, you know, I think now looking back, there are those long-serving, successful managers who, like you say, whilst it's happening, it's an era. Nobody really kind of thinks too much. It's just the norm. But then when you realise it's not actually the norm at all, you know, it's something very, very special going on. And I think success is interesting in terms of what it does to people.
And, you know, I think in sport, we're kind of more geared to failure, really. You lose more than you win normally. And, you know, we kind of recalibrate the goals, dust yourself down and redo your plan and off you go again. But when you succeed, all of a sudden, not many people have a plan for success. You know what I mean? So you succeed, nobody wants to tempt fate, I guess. But not many people have a plan for success. And it does impact on people massively in terms of their expectation on themselves, in terms of their hunger going forward.
You know, it does impact people in different ways. And, of course, you get more... you probably get financially better off, your position in society changes, you know, who you are, you become a celebrity, whatever, whatever, whatever. And, of course, all that can change and impact on your drive and your hunger. And I think fundamentally that's the bit that's incredible about the people who stay at the top for a long time. It's not really the reward, you know, what they're getting sort of financially and all those other kind of sort of...
trappings of success, I don't think that's what's driving them. You know, there's something else deeper down, driving those people forward, and they'll just keep going and going and going. And I thought what Alex Ferguson did ever so well was he... There's always a challenge with teams when you've got a generation who grow together and they come together and you'll have two, three, four years of amazing success with a group who've bonded and they're on a journey together.
And of course, then you start to get towards the end of that. And at what point do you bring young talent in and let some of the more established talent go? You know, and there's a transition. And he did that ever so well. He really did that ever so well. And we met and chatted a couple of times about that. When I was younger, up in the velodrome in Manchester, he'd pop over to the velodrome and we'd sit there and chat. And that was always one of the big things I wanted to ask him.
You know, it was like, OK, what are you watching? What are you seeing now? why are you doing this? You know, what have you seen there that makes you think that's the right time to change and you're bringing this youngster in here, you know? And he'd say, you know, he'd quite often say that, you know, people get a bigger voice, they get a bigger standing in the dressing room, they might start to second, you know, I'm not so sure about that gaffer, you know, and they'd have an influence and, you know, there'd be the celebrity, the media and other things going on, et cetera, et cetera, and...
definitely sooner rather than later that would be right okay off we go we'd only change it listening to him talk about it he knew exactly what he's doing to be fair to him and he was a master at it you've got to have had moments like that in your career where you see that culture at threat or at risk because of an individual i've had him in my business too and in those moments Very early in my career, I would try and, I guess, look past when I was a bit more naive in business, look past it or put things in place to try and mitigate the impact that one individual, the negative impact that one individual was having on the overall culture.
And as I got older, I realized that I just needed to address the situation ASAP before it becomes like a virus and spreads, right? Yeah, yeah. What do you do in that situation where you see an individual in your company? It's a tough one. It really is. I mean, it's an easy one to talk about. It's a very difficult one to do, particularly when, you know, that might be your best player, your best rider, your best performer, and all of a sudden you've got the hitting the numbers and the behaviour's not great.
And then you've got to ask yourself, well, we have to just win and it doesn't really matter, just win. And you kind of manage the impact of that across everybody. Or does behaviour and conduct and culture matter? And you want to make sure that you actually have got some cultural values that you're going to stand by come what may. And, of course, those real moments when they do arrive and you've got to address it, they're very, very stressful moments.
I kind of get very introspective and look at myself in the mirror and think it through and think it through. And everybody who works for me will say it takes me time to make a decision because I think of every permutation and I think it through so much. Emotionally, I don't think I can't, actually. I'm just so engaged with those things that I've really, really got to think carefully about them. And I've had to make a couple of... pretty big decisions along those lines.
And in the end, I thought, right, what do I believe in? Is it a popular decision? Is it a performance decision? In my world, you know, it's like, we're trying to win here or do we want to keep people happy or where do we go? And you need some kind of, you need to establish your own, right, what do I believe in? And without really figuring out what you believe in, you're always going to be... caught in a storm otherwise and it's always going to be mentally excruciating I think because you're never quite sure so I like to anchor myself in right what are my values what I believe in and how does that apply to this situation and then okay well that's it and if it goes wrong I always want to be able to look back and say okay well I made decisions based on my principles I didn't make decisions based on that particular moment doesn't matter how difficult it was And I'll stick to that.
I've had one quite recently, actually, or two, actually, in the last two to three months, which were pretty challenging decisions like that. And on both occasions, I'm right back. And I tend to, I don't know if it's a good thing, probably not a good thing for the people around me, but I've got a few, you know, people I really value their opinion, you know, and they're sort of like, you know, I'll chat away to them and I'll ask them questions and, you know, And I think sometimes I think, okay, I'm going to make that decision or he's asking me to make this decision.
And what I'm trying to do is just kind of run through my thought processes and sound it out, sound it out, sound it out, sound it out until I get really pre-anchored onto, no, I know what I really feel now. And then I'll make the decision immediately. I won't hesitate then. But to get to that point takes me a bit of time. I need to talk about it to somebody. I need to express it vocally, I think, to really make sure I understand what I'm thinking because if I can't explain it to somebody, I'm maybe not quite there.
So just thinking about it in my own head or even writing it down for myself on big stuff, I like to try and be able to explain it to somebody to then understand fully that I really, if I can explain it to somebody, I think I pretty much got it. Whereas if I just in my head explain it to myself, that's what the hell I'm talking about, you know. So, yeah, it's quite an agonising process. But you just need your principles in the end. You need the decision-making framework.
You do, yeah. Because everyone can relate to that, even if they've not been in your position. I mean, we all face really tough moments, but we kind of arrive at that path and we have to decide if we're going left or right. And the worst possible thing is often making no decision, right? Making no decision or making a decision that you thought was the right decision because you thought it was the right thing to do, but it wasn't actually what you thought.
And I think we're always fearful of the consequences of our decisions. I think quite often, you know, I say to our guys sometimes, okay, imagine, let's imagine we've got a problem. And take away, you know, we're going to have a group discussion about something. And imagine that all of our riders didn't have emotions. They were just robots. And what would you do? And they go, it's simple. Well, you just do this, this and this. Okay, so now we put the emotions back in.
And that's, what's that doing to you? Why is that changing your thinking? Yeah. And then, of course, you've got people's feelings and you might have conflict, somebody might not be happy. And that then impacts because we're trying to second guess the emotional response of a group or we're trying to second guess how somebody might feel or whether they're going to come at you or it creates conflict. And so I think it's every now and again I go, right, okay, let's just have the robots.
What would we do? What would be the best thing to do? And they go, simple, we'll just do this. And so that's one thing. I think if you think that right, the consequence of whatever we've decided about, nothing bad happens. Nothing bad happens. Absolutely. There is... So you can make any decision you want and nothing happens, nothing bad happens, what would you do? And people's mind freed up immediately and they'll make a good decision probably. But it's fear or it's the consequence of this might happen or that might happen or it might go wrong or this or that or the other.
They might not be happy or they might not be happy. And it impacts your decision-making really. So you get all these biases, these emotional biases all the time. And don't get me wrong, sometimes a gut feel is a good thing, you know, so... But on the other hand, I think if you strip out the consequence of like nothing bad would happen. And also people's, other people's emotions, what would you do? Most people get pretty quickly to where they'd want to be, you know.
I just put that in my head about some of the big decisions I have in my life. I thought, well, if there was no, if I was dealing with robots and I could just shuffle things without consequence, what would I do? Exactly. And the answer you're seeing there is probably the right thing for the objective. Exactly. But maybe, well, you could also say, well, there's emotional consequences which might hinder the objective. So if I really annoy this person or if I upset the balance here, then the objective's compromised.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it just helps a little bit. In the end, you know, it's like taking out. If you've got bad tooth, you've got to take it out. Might as well take it out quick. Yeah, exactly. It's going to hurt just as much in a couple of months' time, you know, so might as well take it out now. Marginal gains. Do you know what? I have to say. This podcast is doing very well. I think it's maybe number one in Europe now, but I have to give you a lot of credit for that.
Because I think my team are sick and tired. I can see them laughing over there. They're sick and tired of me saying this phrase, we've got to find the 1%. And for us in what we do with this podcast, I mean, it's in my businesses as well, but in this podcast, it means like really giving a... about everything from the audio to these eight cameras that are on us. Nobody else does it like we do it with eight cameras and the robots and the thumbnail, the title, the way you were picked up today, to how you leave, to really make, even when you walk in, we were a little bit slow on it today, but the music to create the right atmosphere.
§03Transcript — part 3
atmosphere yeah the lighting we've installed these blinds here because we're trying to we want you looking at me because it's a better all of these small things and i never heard that directly from you but i heard it indirectly by you as in my friends would tell me about this thing called marginal gains from this guy called david david brailsford and i like adopted it as a personal philosophy maybe i adopted it as a personal philosophy or it made my existing philosophy make sense okay yeah yeah probably either one you know sometimes you hear an idea you go that's yeah that's a great way to articulate exactly you articulated it for me and um so thank you for that but my i guess my question because that has genuinely really helped me communicate um why small things are so important but as it relates to marginal gains how marginal Ah, good question.
And how marginal was that? A smile's marginal. Sorry? A smile's marginal. Yeah, okay. Oh, good. I like that. Probably your best marginal gain ever. Smile at people more often. Cheapest and easiest. Yeah, exactly. And people like it. People smile back. I wonder what the trajectory, how that impacts your trajectory through life if you just smiled more. A lot. I'd have thought so. You know, you'd be more approachable. People think he's a friendly person.
You know, just in the main, you know, smile at people, smile at each other, say hello. Don't walk past. You know, you're not so that you can't be all so consumed in your head that you're walking around with your head down and ignoring people, which was very easy to do. You know, somebody says hello, oh, hello. That's a marginal gain right there. People don't value the small stuff, though. They focus too much on the big stuff, right? Well, I think you've got to get the basics right.
I think the marginal gains concept came about originally is when we started out with the Olympic programme and the Olympic medals were so far away. It seemed like such a mountain and they were so in the distance and untouchable. They were thinking, wow, how on earth, what are we going to do to get from where we are now to get up there? And as we kind of, as we started working through, you know, how we're going to approach this, it occurred to me that there was a couple of things really.
One was there's obviously the fundamentals, the basics of any kind of performance really. When if you get the fundamentals right for a consistent period of time, it's going to get you a long way there. It really is. So that's important. But the whole idea of marginal gains really starts to think, right, okay, so we're a pretty long way off up there, but so what can we do? What can we believe in? How do we get some momentum? How do we get some contagious enthusiasm?
Of course, people like a little bit of progression. And if we just aim for perfection, perfection was so far away that there's no point in taking me, because we're going to fail every day. So I thought, well, let's have a little progression, just a little, little bit of progression, and that'll make you feel good, you know. So let's identify where we're going. Are we doing the basics? Right, then, what could we do by next week that we're not doing this week?
What little things could we do? There's a million things that could impact a cycling performance. Could we... I don't know, change our diet to be slightly more optimal than it is this week and do that by next week. And everybody goes, yep, we could do that. Okay, what else could we do? Could we do more in the gym? Could we do, could you change your attitude slightly? Could it be really kind of think about, just even engage with thinking about your attitude once a day?
Could you do that? Yeah, we could do that. Okay, so off we go. And then you get to next week. And did we do all that stuff? Yeah, we did actually. We haven't moved a long way, but I tell you what, it felt pretty good. What are you doing? I did this. Oh, what are you doing? I did this. And all of a sudden you kind of start to get in this idea of you make, you're on the move. And one of the things about marginal gains is you're on the move. And we like progression.
We like to feel, well, I feel quite good about myself today. I did X, probably means nothing to anybody else. And probably, you know, very unique to me, but it meant something to me, you know. And I feel quite good about that. And so I can do that again tomorrow. And small, small step stick. or as you're trying to do something big, you can go to something big for a little while. We all go to the gym in January now in a couple of weeks' time. We'll go full gas in the gym and then of course by February or mid-February we've all stopped again.
Not generalisation, but you know what I mean. And why is that? Whereas we're trying to make too big a change, that's not sustainable. And it's quite rare that you can make major change and make it sustainable, but it's quite easy to make small incremental change and make them stick. And it's the stickability over time, I think, which makes the big difference. And it's as much psychological as it is anything else. And if there's a group who buy into, right, let's look at the little things, you know, let's look at the difference.
Let's look at the, you know, your setup in here, like the music and everything. Once you start doing that, everybody's on the, you know, getting quite excited. Yeah, that's what makes us different. And then somebody's going to go, well, we could have that picture instead of that picture, or we could do this instead of that. And it feels good. And by virtue of the fact that you're all going, you're on it, and you're enjoying it, and there's a bit of energy about it, then other ideas will come to the surface and you'll be more open to adopting them.
And people talk about it. You know, we're on the move. We're changing. We're doing all these little things because we can be asked to do the little things that other people can't be asked to do. and that makes a difference that makes you a winner in my opinion and i say that quite often in our team you know we'll be working late and i say all right guys let's just all get together for a minute the reason we've been good the reason we're good is we can be asked to do all these little things all these other teams are now locked up they've gone to bed they're in the hotel they can't be bothered to do this we can and it matters to us that's what we're all about now let's keep going And it works, you know.
It works, 100% it works. It's been 20 years. Yeah, I know, yeah. And it's as much about that kind of enthusiasm and a positivity about embracing. Change isn't a chore. Improving isn't a chore. If it's a chore, it's a bit like I was saying about education. You know, if what you're trying to achieve is a chore, then that's a challenge. How do you make something, how do you change something, do you reframe something into a little bit that's not a chore or something that actually can be over there and think I'm going to reframe that into a positive and then you'll stick with it.
You know, feel good about yourself in the end. If we feel good about ourselves... we're going to be happier, we're going to be more engaged and be more willing to make more change if we feel good about ourselves. And that was where sort of marginal games come from. And I was lying on my floor actually when I really have to think, I did this crazy thing where I used to do my homework lying on the floor as a kid. And now when I really, really want to think, sort of really think about something, I get big sheets of paper, tend to lie on the floor and write on that.
And marginal gains came from economics, really, with marginal costing. That's where I was reading all about that and about little kind of incremental gains. And I thought, actually, if you aggregate all of these marginal gains, maybe you get a big gain. But conceptually, it sounded like, yeah, this is worth a go. And off we went. I always reference a compounding interest as well. It's like it feels like the same thing, right? Exactly, exactly. You get 1% more a year.
I often whip out the compounding interest calculator on Google. And I'm like, just change it by 1% and see what it looks like in 20 years. And the graph is just in a completely different place. And that's another really good way to get people to believe in this invisible force that is compounding for or against you, these 1%s over time. you know getting 10 percent interest on a million for 30 years versus getting 11 percent it's ridiculously different um at the end of that compounding cycle you sound like i mean you've described yourself as being obsessed you sound like you're pretty obsessed with what you do yeah i suppose i am yeah what's the cost of that obsession Well, I think, you know, I've pretty much kind of put everything I've got into what I do, really.
And that means currently I'll spend 220 days a year, you know, at races and, you know, a long time on the road. And that does come at a cost, I guess, you know. And, yeah. Hmm. It's hard to get out of it, I think. I don't know if it's obsessive or not. I suppose... You know, I've obviously got... Millie, my daughter, who I absolutely adore. I love her to bits. And, you know, we've spent, I guess, since she's born, I've always been, you know, involved in sport.
And at some point soon, I'd like to think, right, I'm going to stop and really spend time, more time together. That would be nice. And yet, I think if I was thinking of why, why am I doing all of this? I think a lot would be, you know, I'd like her to be happy. I'd like her to have whatever, whatever she can have really. And, uh, yeah, it's a tough balance, balancing act that one. That doesn't come easy to me. I can, I can tell, I was just trying to visualize you sat on a beach with your cigar with no work, no sports.
Yeah. It sounds more like torture. That's a bit of a struggle. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would. I think I'd, I would like to just, I think, have a period where I just maybe just switch off. You know, I haven't had a holiday for a long time and I've had a few health issues, obviously. I had an issue with my heart this year and I have a cancer and that kind of forced me to stop a little bit. But then I got back as soon as I called and carried on. So I think I'd like, yeah, I would like to just at some point learn to maybe take time out and...
and enjoy the colour of life a little bit more and the various things in life. But, yeah. You mentioned that, getting news that, I mean, we all hope to never get up about ourselves or our loved ones, which is that you had cancer. Now, that's something you can't control. No, that was a shock, I must say. That was a real shock. I wasn't expecting it at all. I ride my bike, I train hard and I ride my bike a lot, look after myself and I was very fit.
And then I started to get these bouts of fatigue more than anything and it was a really weird kind of... You know, you race every day, you're moving every day, and I think people see the sport on telly. They don't see the rigour of all the travel and all the movement and the early mornings and late nights. And, you know, you go and race for a month, a three-week race, you go there a week early, and you're nailed, you know, halfway through. And, of course, then you've got a really...
dig it until you're tired a lot of time, but then I started getting these bouts of fatigue, which just like somebody pulled, literally taken my battery out. And I could feel it coming on and then I just couldn't function. And then I went for a check and did a blood test and then, you know, my PSA had gone up and so I said, I better go for another check and I said, oh God, you know, I'll be all right. And then didn't bother. And then eventually I did.
And then they said, yeah, I turned around and said, right, better come see me straight away. And that was it. I thought it was quite a big deal at the time, but then I moved on. I don't dwell on it. I don't think about it much. I like the sort of tough times don't last, tough people do, you know. And I just thought, right, that's it, done. I'm not going to dwell on this. I'm going to move on. And that's what I did, really, as quick as I could. But those moments give you a different type of perspective on what matters, right?
Where you have like a kind of an existential moment of, you think about, oh my God, the tectonic plate of my health is something that can... Yeah, very much so, yeah. You wouldn't even consider the thought of it No, no, 100%. And absolutely, you're spot on with that. You realise, right, okay, we're not here forever. A hundred percent. Which is true for everybody, isn't it? And when you're younger, it's one of those things. You've heard older people say and whatever, but then you have the dawning or the realisation, right, I'm not here forever.
So then you think, okay, what's important? What, you know, is it like to come back? You know, what time I've got left? All that kind of stuff. And then you start to think about that. And so then you start to think even more. You know, a lot of people talk to you about, you know, living in the moment. Of course, you've got to plan for the future. You can't just ignore the future because we're all... we're all preparing the future, aren't we? You know, we're trying to get fitter or whatever, whatever.
And that's, of course, today thinking about doing something today for your current self but for your future self. You're thinking of your future self when we diet or train. It's not going to happen now. So your mind is on your future self. And to what extent are you worried about your future self and the consequences of things happening rather than enjoying the here and now? And I think that really does bring it home in terms of to what extent am I enjoying the present and living in the present?
And what extent am I just going to keep on going and sort of sacrificing for my future self when my future self is never going to arrive? You know, and that's a bit of an odd question to sit and contemplate for a while. it's a reality check to spend any time in hospital, isn't it? But equally, there's some amazing people working in there and it's just, yeah, I was blown away by that actually. Did Steve Peters speak to you through this period as well?
Oh yeah, I speak to Steve. I mean, I love Steve, I must say. I think you had Fran Miller on as well. She'll say the same, I'm sure. And a lot of people who we worked with Steve would say, you know, he's a game changer for us. And whenever I'm worried, I'm not sure about something, I kind of know what he's going to tell me, but I still like to hear it anyway. So I chatted to him then about what to deal with. It upset, I didn't like it that it upset Millie, I think.
And I didn't like that. I didn't like the idea that... she was worried and so that was quite, I wanted to make sure they dealt with that properly. But then equally, lives for a living, you know, and you think, okay, well, here I am, I'm still here and I'm going to make the most of this, you know, and I'm going to enjoy it a little bit more and stop, you know, worrying and thinking and, you know, constantly this idea of chasing and doing something for the next event and...
And it's like, boys, chill out a little bit and enjoy the things that you like doing. And in the end, like most people, the things I like the most are simple things. I like around my bike. I like being out in beautiful roads on my bike. I like socialising with people. I'm not a big kind of big gathering person. I'm a, you know, smaller group of people and I've got some amazing, you know, people and friends. And I don't know, I just like the simple things in life really, but really, really taking them in.
Yeah. acceptance when reading and hearing how you dealt with that situation I think the really powerful thing that I kind of got from that was getting to that point of accepting the situation as fast as you can yeah good point yeah and I know it's a bit cheesy as well but we talk about it's a bit of a cheesy phrase but the whole idea of you know when you're under pressure and you're really in a moment of real you know okay the heat's on here You know, the idea of instead of sort of trying to resist and being like a stick and kind of bending, bending and snapping, just think of yourself as bamboo and just bend.
And you know full well that once this moment's passed, you're going to snap back up, you're going to be okay. And so we talk a lot about bending like bamboo and not bending like a stick, you know, not snapping and just bend like bamboo. And when we're in difficult moments, we go, we're just bending like bamboo, it'll pass, it'll pass. And sure enough, most times it does. We worry about stuff that never happens, don't we? Always. We worry massively about stuff that never actually happens.
And they're all sort of, it brings all of that kind of stuff home. You know, it resonates after. And it's still so much joy from our present, right? When we're thinking about all that could go wrong. And then as you've highlighted with your theory of focusing on the controllables, it hinders performance, which is incredibly detrimental too. One of the things when I started reading about your future and I'm looking forward, you then also got the news a couple of years later this year, I believe, that you had to have as well yeah so I was so after the pandemic I was riding my bike a lot and my my dad actually was very ill so I went down to as soon as we could travel after the pandemic I went down to to France to the Alps and I was there visiting the hospital Rode my bike.
And as I was riding uphill, I was getting this kind of, I thought it was a pain in my throat or something to do with my breathing or the dry air, maybe the altitude. And when I was trying pretty hard, pushing myself pretty hard, it really started to hurt quite a lot. And then if I slow down, it subsided and off it went. So I thought, okay, it was just going to pass, as you do. I went out for a ride with a... a friend of mine, a guy called Nicky Craig, and we were out riding, and I really, whoa, I ride, I said, blime, I think I'm going to have to stop here because his pain was getting really bad.
So I thought in the end, I thought, well, I'll go and have it. I'll go and have it. I'll go and check it out, you know, just in case. I went for a CT scan of my heart, and the guy came out. It was a German guy. I said, do it. You have a big problem. And my left descending artery was totally blocked. And I was literally kind of, they wouldn't let me, that was it. They kept me there, put me on medication straight away and I pretty much operated on...
you know, to avoid a heart attack, basically. And that was a shock. That was pretty full on, really. Yeah. That was more of a shock than a cancer was. I don't know why your heart feels worse than... I don't know, but it was a different sensation, that one, I must admit. That had me worried. And that's another set of uncomfortable conversations with Millie and... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I had to go in and so the doctor, again, doctor's brilliant, went in.
And then I thought, God, I've done a typical bloke thing here where I ignored all these symptoms for, you know, eight months, nine months. Just ignored it, didn't go and have it checked properly. And then in the end, of course, I could have done it sooner. And then I went in. And they went in with a wire and a camera to have a look how badly it was blocked, you know, the artery. And they had an open heart surgeon there and a guy puts a stent in like a plumber.
And they were going to decide whether they could get a stent in and open up the artery or they were going to go and do a bypass basically and take a bit of vein and stitch it in. And then I came out and I felt like 10 men, yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah, amazing. Amazing. Went out my bike, it's like I'd gained 50 watts. It was brilliant. Really? Yeah, brilliant. And then I haven't had any pain since and I still, I did six and a half hours the day before yesterday with the lads in Melbourne, Mallorca.
Wow, unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of progress then, one of the things that we were kind of talking about before we started chatting, but also I really wanted to ask you about kind of the last point I was really curious about regarding the team, was that your philosophy towards the team is evolving with time and how you get the best out of the people. People are typically quite rigid in their philosophy in the way they think, but I read that you're now taking an individual first approach, not a team first approach.
Is that accurate and why? Well, I think there's the individual behind the performer. Right. You know, and I think everybody is, so I don't think it's individualized in terms, you know, the team is still absolutely, you know, the fundamental kind of tenets of what we do. But there is an individual behind the performer and that's worth exploring and maybe expressing more. We've been tremendously successful and with Team Sky, we had a brilliant run and won a lot of back-to-back Tour de France and other Grand Tours.
However, over that time, when you become serial winners... It becomes predictable. And, of course, some people like that. If you're a supporter, some people don't like that. It becomes predictable. And, you know, the interest and sort of the emotional response that it generates, the performance generates, is an interesting thing to contemplate. You know, we've just seen the Formula One at the weekend and everybody's gripped by it because it was just unpredictable.
Nobody's going to happen. There was suspense. There was an emotional, you know, rollercoaster along with the actual performance. And I think when you look at sports, if you look at, you know, if you think you can perform on a vertical axis, performance goes up and up and up and up and up until you become serial winners. But then across the bottom you think, actually, what kind of emotional response, what kind of feelings, what kind of style, you know, how are you making people feel?
And you can have a team like Germany, let's say, who's serial winners and think, hmm, people go, yeah, okay. But the Germans love it, obviously, but everybody's, yeah, okay. But a team who achieved the same, like Brazil, People love Brazil. Everybody loves Brazil. Why is that? What's the difference? You know, they're still performing, they're still winning. So the metric, if you like, the winning is still similar. But the way that they're going about winning seems to be slightly different.
And in Senna, let's say the motor racing scenario or Schumacher maybe or, you know, some of the... And you think, I don't know, Usain Bolt or maybe the All Blacks or, you know. Manchester United. Manchester United. Injury time. Yeah, injury time, yeah. And there are certain teams or that they think, oh, yeah, hmm, don't really warm. Not feeling that, but this one over there doing the same thing. God, I love them. And what is it about? What is it about those teams?
And is that something... Is it just happens or is it something that you can actually work towards? So, for example, when I first left home to go to France to be a professional cyclist, there was something in that sport that chimed with me so much and got me so passionate that I left everything behind. I left home, I went to a foreign country, I couldn't speak the language, didn't know what I was going to do, but I still did it. I still went because something was pulling me forward And it was something about that sport at that time that I just adored.
And when I think now and think, right, when I was that age, what kind of team, if you'd have told me then at that age I could be running one of the world's biggest cycling teams and had the success that we've had and still be running one, I'd think, what kind of team would I have loved to have seen? What kind of flair and what kind of, you know, How are they erased? Would it have been very much park the bus? Or would it have been like, you know, just bulldoze your way through?
Or would it be a bit of panache and flair and cool, you know? Excitement. Excitement, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so can you, where does style, you know, and that sort of emotion fit in terms of performance? And you can go after performance clinically, you know. And can style ever be a performance attribute? And if you think about that, you know, so is that something you can... go after or is it something that you just have? Is it just something that happens in the chemistry of a team or is it the way that you are?
So for us, we obviously do the race of bikes, but what about off the bike and the way you speak and the way you do your social media and the way you are with people and the way you are with fans and who you are, the colors and everything else that goes on. Is there something in there which actually can bring out the individual and you get to know the individual. So they're not just kind of guys with sunglasses on, with helmets on, and kind of like sort of faceless, you know, warriors, as it were.
Where's the person? You know, we've got guys from Ecuador and, you know, come from, you know, unbelievable backgrounds in Ecuador. And their stories of how they found themselves in our team is just incredible. and the guys from columbia and the guys from britain the guys from everywhere they've all got their journeys they've all got personalities they've all got the humans you know they're interesting the backstories are interesting and it's like where does that all kind of come together in a team and how does that get how do you how do you watch that performance and see all of that is it possible and i'm really interested in that in a minute This is such a conversation that someone who has won a lot would have.
They're now thinking about the way they want to win. And it's interesting because when you were saying that, I was thinking about different teams and Jose Mourinho and Klopp. And then the one that I really stumbled on was boxing, where you can have Vladimir Klitschko, who holds the throne for a decade, but then everybody turns off the sport. And then you get an Anthony Joshua and a Tyson Fury that come along. They're still champions, but they're doing it in a way that's captivating the public.
So my question, my mind then became, well, you have to ask yourself, is the objective just to win? Or is it to win and make loads of money and inspire a generation? Because people are flooding into boxing now because of Fury and AJ. And the money those guys are making is way more than Klitschko was making. So I guess it's a case of a victory. I think it's like the old, we've been talking about it, you know, it's like if you win a lot, you can be respected.
You'll be respected, but can you be respected and loved? Can you be respected for your victories, but loved for a way that you achieve them? And that's the holy grail. Why is being loved, why does that matter? Admired and loved and get passion from people and just generate emotion, and that's what sport's about. You know, that's what really I think in the end, you know, there's something about sports that is inspiring. It can move people, you know, and I think the whole emotion of sport is something that is why we love it.
In the end, you know, you can take part in it or you can watch it. You know, why is everybody watching a Formula One at the weekend? Because it was so inspiring and emotional. It's just, wow, you've got to see it. And the same with Klitschko or Tyson Fury, you know, when he's got that knockout punch, you know, And he was out. He gets back up. And then he gets back up again. That is insane. It's just insane. I can feel myself now. It's just like, those moments in sport are what sport's all about.
And I think that's what, you know, if you're involved in sport and you've been most of my life involved in sport, of course you've got to try and win first and foremost. And winning itself isn't easy, you know. And, of course, that's got to be the... The first kind of absolutely, you're not going to, you'd never go after style if it wasn't intelligent, but some people have got intelligence and style and the flair and the cantonars or the sennas or, and we race, you know.
And I guess for me, I know this sounds bizarre, maybe a bit bonkers, but, you know, we're in the business of thoroughbreds, really, if you think about it. The top of the top where I'm, you know, the guys I work with, they're all thoroughbreds. But I want a thoroughbred racer. Somebody can race. Golf sport isn't a team sport, it's a race. You know, we're racing one another. You're trying to outwit your opponent and trying to outmanoeuvre. It's not just a physical endeavour.
It's a race. And there's something about... There's something very, very cool about the guy, the great racers. And there's something about that which I just adore. You saw it at the weekend with Hamilton and Verstappen, I mean, unbelievable. I admire those guys so much, I really do. And I think... I think most people admire Hamilton now maybe even a little bit more because we've seen a different dimension of his character, a different kind of...
He was amazing after that. In that short period after that, you know, when Verstappen won, the way he managed himself and the way he handles himself was just unbelievable. And I think everybody saw a different view or looked at Lewis Hamilton through a different lens and they saw a very different person than what they would normally maybe see. And therein lies the magic of sports, I think, you know. My last question for you. Again, I asked this question from a very personal, personally curious space, because it's a problem I've not figured out for myself, which is, we talked a little bit about sacrifice there, is about romantic relationships and the struggle of being a great and winning and sacrificing and doing 200 days a year at races, while also trying to meet these goals of romantic relationships.
I've struggled with it pretty much my whole life. Have you struggled with it? Do you have any answers for me? No, I don't. I'm not your man here. Unfortunately, no, that's something that, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm that good at, if I'm honest, if I'm really honest, you know. Same. And I think I'd like to be. You selfish, do you think? Sort of selfish, yeah, probably, or... you're sort of concerned really you know like so so like driven oh god i can't i can't fail at this you know and that that sort of fear of and it is there's something that inside of me that that worries about failing so much that i i can't switch off from it in a way you know in 2014 you struggled with that right when that was the you didn't win the tour de france Big time, yeah.
What do you mean by big time? Give me the specifics. I don't know. I just, at the time, I was embarrassed. Not about the team or anything, just for myself. And I felt this ink of, oh, God, I couldn't go out. I couldn't go out of the house. I couldn't leave the garden. I remember speaking, I called Steve Peters from the garden and thought, God, I've let everybody down. I've failed. And it was, yeah, quite a... Winning for me doesn't actually... That sounds terrible, but...
I mean, I get exhilaration from the moment that you win, obviously. It's great to win. But the emotion, you know, the depth or the amount of emotion it gives me to win is nowhere near the amount of emotion I get from losing. So the negative emotion from losing is massive for me. Whereas the positive of winning is okay. It's done the job, part of the journey, great, fantastic, let's keep on going. Yeah. And so I think this kind of the avoidance, but not wanting to lose and really trying to help people to win.
§04Transcript — part 4
Do you know where that comes from? Because that does sound intense. Yeah, I don't know, but I've always had it. I've always been the same. You know, I get super excited by wanting to do those big, bold, ambitious things and then going out and say, right, let's go and do X. And then afterwards I think, oh, what have I done? And then, of course, then I've got to make it happen. And I get after making it happen. And I think that's where I've got this kind of dichotomy, really, of there's part of me which is probably my heart, which is the crazy ambition of wanting to do things that have never been done before and helping people go after stuff and all that kind of, you know, nothing's impossible.
Nothing's impossible. Anybody says it's impossible will prove you wrong. And then you've got to get after it. Yeah. And I think the getting after it is where I go back into more of this whole detail. That's the doing of it. And it's as if my heart sort of sets these wild kind of ambitions and then I've got to switch out of that into the right, let's get after it. And then not wanting to not succeed at whatever it was drives me then, you know. we have a tradition on this podcast, which is the previous guest writes a question for the next guest.
And I don't actually get to see it until I open this book. So you will also be writing a question for my next guest. If you could turn back the clock on one day this year and do it differently, what would it be and why? This year, wow. There's a lot going on for me this year, that's for sure. I think I'd like to go back. So Millie's just had her 17th birthday. And on the 29th of November, driving, car, test, et cetera. And I wouldn't go back and change it necessarily, but I'd just go back and relive it because I loved that.
And rather than something I'd change, I'd just go back and do it again. Yeah. It's like a big deal. You know, get your car and... yeah so i'd like to come spend that whole day again that's what i'd like to do amazing well thank you so much for coming here because as i've said to you you know it's so funny that i've i've never met you but you've had such a big influence on me and my philosophy and helping me articulate that and um you know sophie who's my assistant once upon a time worked with you and she yeah has always spoken well about you, which is actually really remarkable because people often don't leave a job and speak so highly of the person they worked with.
But even, you know, since we started doing this podcast, she was telling me, you've got to get, you've got to get Dave on, you've got to get Dave on. And she's, she's always just sung your praises and your philosophy, the way you articulate it, I think it's helped more people than you'll probably ever realise. But it's an, I consider this to be a huge honour having you here today, as did my friends when I told them you were coming. And that's for very, very good reason, because everybody thinks you're a bit of a legend.
So... Thank you so much for your honesty and your openness. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for what you guys do, you know. Oh, thank you. I think you bring a lot of happiness and joy and inspiration to a lot of people. A lot of people to listen to what you've got to say, you know, which is remarkable. And I think, you know, when you get, there's a sense of responsibility in a way, isn't there, by the level of the platform that you built for yourself and you do an amazing job with it.
So thank you. Oh, thank you. It means a lot.