Lessons In Creating A Successful Life - Steven Bartlett
嘉宾：Steven Bartlett
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What's happening people? Welcome back. My guest today is Stephen Bartlett. He's a founder of social chain and entrepreneur and an author. Building a business, buying fast cars and becoming a millionaire is the peak of some people's dreams. But does achieving that actually satisfy you and create success? Or does it leave you hollow inside? And is it possible to achieve material success alongside meaningful fulfillment? So today, expect to learn why 13 pounds in a chicken shop feels more satisfying than being listed on a stock exchange. Why Stevens, billionaire friends, and miserable? How to develop the skill of quitting?
Why Steven left dinner to do a bodyweight workout in his hotel room and much more? Steven is one of the most famous and most followed entrepreneurs in the UK. And I got to spend a bit of time with him in Dubai and then through this conversation here, there's certain elements and I'll see if you notice it as well. There are certain times when he drops into a particular mode of speaking and shows little glimpses of the drive that he's got inside himself, particularly the story around leaving dinner to go and do this bodyweight workout. Just listen to the way that he speaks. I think there's an awful lot that we can take from the philosophy
and underlying principles that Stevens following here. In fact, before I get to in other news, if you are new to the channel, or if you're a long time subscriber, press the subscribe button, please, it'll take you two seconds every day and it makes me very happy. And it means that you do not miss any of the amazing episodes that we've got coming up with. Dr Jordan Peterson, one of the world's most sought after podcast guests and two times amazing selling author, Brian Green, one of the world's best selling physicists and a fascinating human who broke the internet on Joe Rogan last week, and Stephen Kotler, one of the world's experts in flow research and peak
performance. You do not want to miss these episodes, and if you've not pressed subscribe then you might do. So go go and give it a little tap for me right now. I thank you. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Stephen Bartlett. First off mate I need to say thank you for dinner because the last time that we were together we were overlooking downtown Dubai and you invited me in a buddy out for a really wonderful evening dinner. But then as you left, I was in the toilet, so I haven't actually got to say goodbye. So thanks for dinner mate and also welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I left abruptly because I had a flight to catch that night and my suitcases were actually downstairs.
So when my PA grabbed me and said, you've got to go now. I just, I quickly scrambled and exited the building. But yeah, thank you. It was good to meet you and catch up with you in search. And I'm excited to be on your podcast today. Yeah, me too, man. So why did you write a book?
You've got a lot of stuff online already. Like why do you need a book as an outlet? You know what, there's a couple of, you make a really good point. We live in an era of instantaneous feedback and I'm a connected from birth. I'm part of the connected from birth generation where I've had some form of online connection
for my whole life and things have got even more superficial and ephemeral as I've got older. So you're right, I've got millions of followers online if I've got a message to communicate why don't I just do an Instagram story or something which gives me that sort of instant feedback. And I think in fact that was paradoxically why I needed to write the book because of the way that the world is heading and the lack of meaning and how shallow and surface level things are getting. And for me, the book is the antithesis of that. It is depth. It's meaning it's something you spend two years doing and then once you're done, you still have another year's weight until it's published.
And it was a chance to really, there's so many things with books that I came to learn that you don't get with social media as well. One of the real big things, which I think, changes the way you create your ideas, is you, because you don't get instant feedback, or pretty much no, not a lot of feedback at all, there's no comment section, you write with a certain level of freedom, which is quite rare these days. So I got to go deeper than I've ever gone before. I know that if I write a page, it's not gonna be discussed instantaneously, and I think that allows thoughts and ideas to connect in a different way.
So just for me, it was a bit of an experiment, to be honest, something I put off for a long time. But just to conclude that point, there was one day where I looked at my diary from when I was 18 years old, and then the front page of it, I'd basically written that I wanted to be a happy sexy millionaire. And I read that when I was 26 and I'd built this massive business and I was traveling from one country to another, and that was the moment where I thought I wanted to write the book because it dawned on me how dumb I was to aim for that,
and how many other people are. An interesting point around the instant feedback. I had Seth Golden on the show and he said that about a decade or a decade and a half ago he removed comments from his blog. Remembering he's one of the biggest bloggers on the planet. And people say you can't remove comments from your blog, you're not allowed to do that. And he was like, well, I know if I leave comments on,
I'll just add an extra caveat here and a little bit of a justification there because you're writing to preempt what people are going to say back. And I think, yeah, the low tech solution of just words on a piece of paper is good. The title as well, happy sexy millionaire. We attempted to call it just be consistent for a really long time. No, so the title, as I say, comes from when I was 18 years old. So I'm an 18 year old kid. I arrive in Manchester and I decided I'm going to drop out of university.
I know what I want from my life. It's pretty non-negotiable that I'm going to become one way or the other a very successful multi-millionaire at a very young age. It was all from the age of 14. I got to the point at 14, 15, where I was so convinced that that was going to happen with no evidence and no understanding of the future world that I would face, but I was so convinced. So I arrived at Manchester 18 years old, realized
that this degree wasn't going to give me what I needed to to get to where I needed to go, and dropped out and then wrote in the first page of that diary, which I've posted on Facebook if anyone wants to check it out. I just wrote four goals that I have for from 25. I range over sport was gonna be my first car. I was gonna make a million pounds for our 25. I was gonna work on my body because I was super skinny and I was gonna have a long time relationship with a girl. Four very simple life goals.
I wanted to be sexy and rich because I thought that would make me happy. And that's where the book starts. Where does that self-belief come from? It's a great question and I think I'm always super scared of indulging in like hindsight bullshit where you look back and you say, oh, this, this, and this and this and this is why I am the way I am. I think largely like 70% of the time, 80% of the time we don't know. But if I was if I was to hypothesize logically where belief comes from generally, other beliefs that I have, the answer is clearly evidence,
right? Some form of evidence that you have and what you sort of derived from that evidence. And I, the example that I give, and I think I give this example in my book as well, as I talk about, if I was to try and make you believe that I was Allah or Jesus Christ right now, and I held your mother hostage at gunpoint and told you to take that belief on, the only way I'm going to believe, the only way I'm going to release your mother from gunpoint is if you start to believe that I'm Jesus Christ, right? You couldn't believe it. You couldn't genuinely believe it, even if everything was on the line. And so I used to think about that and sort of, okay, well, if that's, if we can't, if we don't actually
choose our beliefs, we choose our faith, right? We can have faith in something or somebody, but we don't actually choose our belief. Where are they coming from? That in that same analogy, if I take this bottle here full of water and I turn it into wine and then I start levitating, your belief might start to change, as it relates to me being, you know, a deity or something. And so you take that back and you say, okay, so if our beliefs are based on some kind of evidence we have in what we drive from that,
maybe our self belief is too. Maybe, you know, maybe we're compounding a set of person case studies in our life that are telling us that we are capable of something, or that we're not. And it tends to be the case that from the things that I've read anyway, that the positive case studies upwards are slower. So I can do one thing. I speak on stage in front of 10 people. I'm like, okay, and then I can do 15 the next day. But when it compounds downwards against you, when yourself belief or any belief compounds downwards, it's rapid.
You go on stage and speak in front of 10 people, they heckle you, you forget your words, you never go, you try to get back to that stage again, is, it's tough. And so I think from a very young age, because of my parents absence, they weren't around when I was younger and I was basically raising myself from about 10 years old. I learnt this very important connection
that I hope my kids one day have, which is if I'm going to get something Whether it's dinner money or the nice pair of shoes that I want because I'm broken or the other kids have them It's going to come from my own actions and behavior and you learn that at 10 years old that if you're going to get shoes a football You know whatever lunch it's going to come from something you do so that sense of independence Created it created a help to me create a bunch of case studies for myself and some social factors I think or what gave me my sense of self belief. That would be my, that would be my guess. I think that you're right and it highlights something I've been thinking about for a long time.
We presume in 2021 because people can flate the words confidence with extraversion and being charismatic and outgoing. All of these words move in the same sort of fields, but confidence isn't the same, confidence isn't given, it's earned. Naval Ravikant has this quote where he says, self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself, you'll always know. And a lot of the time I think people want the self-belief, the outcome, the eye can achieve anything mentality, when they have zero evidence that it's going to actually happen. And this is where small wins come in, right?
Clean your room, make your bed, do the little things and build up, and that's what you've said, the progressive overload. Yeah, and this is one of the, this is why I've always been, I've always had this allergic reaction to this idea of like pure play visualization because it's such a dumb thing to me. This idea that there's almost this emerging culture where people will get up in the morning, they'll repeat these three affirmations. It's
kind of like my analogy of just saying that you think I'm Jesus because your mom's going to die. Like they'll look in the mirror and say, I am strong, I am powerful, I am whatever. And then they'll write on their little list of visualizations that I'm gonna be a millionaire. And like, but they haven't built any personal case studies. They don't actually believe at all what they're saying. It's just a bunch of nonsense. Like in their own self-esteem,
that is just a bunch of like wishy-washy, the differences at 18 years old, I believed I was capable. And I used to say to people at the time, I was like, if you tell me that I have to go to Mars this week, my brain defaults to like find out how to make it happen. Not it's not possible or why won't it happen. And I had that because of a set of case studies that proceeded that moment. And some people don't. And this is why like, yeah, I'm quite against the whole secret lifestyle that some people live where it's all about
visualization and not enough about small compounding efforts in the right direction. We're in the same page there. What does the things that invalidate you when you're younger or the things which will validate you when you're older mean? Yeah, so I think the quote from the book is, the things that invalidated you when you're younger will be the things you seek validation from when you're older, me? Yeah, so I think the quote from the book is the things that invalidated you when you're younger will be the things you seek validation from when you're older. And you could that can be anything, right? So for me, I was, imagine this, I come from Africa
as a two year old kid and you put me in an area where everybody is richer than me. Everybody has a different hair color than me. Everybody has a different skin color than me. You put me into a street where everyone's house is perfect, perfect, like out of a movie. And mine has six foot grass and fridges and TVs in the front garden, back garden.
The front window on my house is smashed. So this is already a kid that has some kind of insecurity at that age as well. And so I was invalidated by that. I was invalidated because the things that made me feel invalid or insecure were like money and the fact that I could never have a girlfriend come over to my house because it was a shithole. And so as I got older, you get to 18, you're like, I'm going to try and fill that hole. And so the things that had
invalidated me when I was a kid, which was like female attention or money or whatever it was became the things that were most valuable to me in my perception to seek and to chase when I was older. And you see this no matter who you speak to, whether it's your dad in validated you by giving you the impression that you could never be like him or you weren't good enough. And then most of my billionaire friends, I think two of my billionaire friends, and I haven't got that many of them, both of them have almost an identical story where their dad and validated them when they were younger. These are two billionaires you would know. And they spent their early years ruthlessly chasing that validation from somewhere.
Isn't it interesting that in the meritocracy quantifiable metrics of success world that we live in now, that we can look at someone that has the billion pounds, but the completely un-internalized, unactualized sense of self-love and consider them a success because we never get an externalized scorecard of their internal state? Yeah, and this is like a lot of the work that I'm sure you do, but like what I try and do with my podcast as well is I've had, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to me was, I was an 18 year old kid in 1920 maybe, 19 or 20, probably about 20 years old,
and I got to meet the guy I wanted to be. Who was that? Imagine that. So I can't say his name, but he is a young billionaire. So I got to meet the guy that I wanted to be when I was that age. He was like a couple of years older than me, maybe seven years older than me.
He had his nine sports cars, right? So he's probably, at the time, he's probably 29 and I'm 22, mansion, billionaire, like young kid running a business, whatever. And I got to meet him and I got to get to know him. I got to go to his house. I got to have private conversations with him. Conversations with him at 5 a.m. and I got to go around his house and look at all of the things that I thought I wanted from my life. There's probably the most important experience I ever had. I got to go into his
Louie Vuitton room upstairs and look at all of the Louie Vuitton bags he had, nine rooms full of fur coats, one train a room, which is bigger than my house now, and it's all rainbow, like perfectly colour coordinated, all the way around the room. And then I got to go downstairs and speak to the guy for hours and he became a friend, he's been my friend for about five or six years. And miserable. miserable and probably the last person I'd actually want to be. But on the surface, he had, he had, he was the mouse trap, he was everything I was chasing, everything I thought I wanted. But when I got to go behind the scenes,
the last person on planet earth that I want to be, deeply miserable and tormented. And he wants to be normal, normal in his own words. He said to me one day, he sometimes goes to supermarkets and puts stuff in the trolley, just act like he's a normal person. And he doesn't actually buy this. And it's just, I was just like, fuck, you know,
you've got it all wrong, stop. And this is, again, part of the inspiration for the book, which is like, I got to see that stuff before, I got to, you know, run down that hedonistic treadmill and it helped me turn back. Yeah. Can you tell us about this story about the cushions and the chicken shop and the satisfaction
for millions of pounds? I really like that. Oh, yeah, jokes. Yeah, so I remember this day very vividly. I was actually, I didn't write his name in the book, but I was with my friend Anthony Logan. I think you might have met Anthony. We did in the blind. Yeah, it was that next one. So I was with Anthony Logan in Manchester, this place called Living Room, and I was really, really broke at this point. To the point where I genuinely on a day-to-day basis didn't have a pound to feed myself. So I was taking
every day at a time while I was trying to start my business. And I went into this place called Living Room, which is this like takeaway place, this food place. And I'm sat there and I put my hands. I think a pound coin fell out of my pocket. And as I went reach down to retrieve it, there was so much more money down the sofa. And I just went around all of the sofas in this, it's restaurant place and I managed to retrieve about 13 pounds in total and it was like
the best day of my life at the point I was at in my life where I was living in Mossside in a above a Chinese takeaway in a house that was battered from full of rats finding these pound coins in that in that restaurant that day felt like a gift from God. And I absolutely, absolutely euphoria. And I think what I write about in the book is that day, that moment where I found that 13 quid, which meant that I could eat for maybe the next 10 days or so, was like 30 times more euphoric than the day I woke up in that five star hotel in Manchester.
And I looked at my phone and someone had texted me saying all the companies now are public. And you do the mental math about how much money that means you now have. And I just felt total, totally numb. And I contrast those two moments in my book. And this is where I kind of start to introduce the idea of like, you know, bring the stoic philosophy into play
and why those, and contrast and why those moments felt so different. The day that I became, you know, a multi-multimal 10 millionaire versus the day that I found 13 pounds in a chicken shop, I were two completely different days. One was euphoria and one was anti-climax. It's actually when you expect something to be a certain way, when you expect it to be euphoric and it's not, it actually becomes a negative, which is interesting. So when you, and this is the whole idea of like, I mean, this is a general principle about expectation and reality, like the difference between what you expect and what you, what you get is your level of satisfaction. And in that moment, I was, I've always expected that day where I became a multi-millionaire to be confetti and marching bands
and euphoria. So when it wasn't, and when it came in below my expectation, it was actually a big negative. Yeah, until I did some mind games. Can we sink into that time? How do you get yourself to a place where you can leave your company? This is, as you say, a young kid who's never really had money, who's never really had quantifiable metrics of success. A lot of people would struggle to give up the good for the great. Is quitting a skill in that way? Yeah, quitting is definitely a skill and it's really underrated. I think people spend a
ton of time. Words are really shitty. This is one thing that I really came to learn in my book is most of the time, when we try and answer difficult live questions, we get trapped in words. And like, I love you. Do you love them? What is this your passion? We forget that these are actually human words that some other guy made and attached some definition to that they felt or they were trying to describe in their life at that time. And it's like crazy, as I'm writing this book, I'm trying to answer these questions.
And then most of the time, the question is answered by questioning the question, something we just never do. We accept words, right? And to get your point about quitting, one of the things we hear in society, which has really held people back, a set of words, is like quitting is for losers, right? You're quitting as soon as this really, really bad thing, you don't, you just prevail. But then they glamourize starting and starting as soon as this, you know, this, you know,
amazing to be in my adventure that people go on, whether it's starting a business or a hobby or whatever. And the crazy thing is the often unappreciated, but very important, necessary thing you do before you start something else as you quit something and quitting and starting go hand in hand, right, in all facets of our life, like a monkey swinging through the jungle in Costa Rica, they have to let go of the last branch in order to grab the next. Quitting in itself is just as much of a skill as knowing when and what to start. And in my life, quitting decisions
have quite literally defined me. Quitting school, quitting university, quitting my first company, Wallpock, where I'd still be now trying to make it work. Quitting social chain more recently. And I see quitting as a skill. In the book, I talk about this quitting framework I've devised, which will hopefully give people
a bit of a guard rail, or sort of a, yeah, a bit of a flow chart to consider when they're deciding to quit something. I've quit effortlessly my whole life and I've never known why. I've never known why quitting has always been so easy for me. But when I've got time to write out what my brain is doing, it started to make very logical sense. I'm very, very logical in the way that I think and quitting has always been easy. So I presumed it was some kind of logical flow chart.
And that's what I, what's the process? So if you're thinking about quitting something, whether it's a relationship or a job or whatever, and I wish I had my book in front of me because it is quite an extensive, oh, I do. You're actually leaning on it. This is like a... We're going to drop down my bow and inch in a half, get the book out. Okay, and then we've got the...
Fine, fine. So, I want to run you through this because I actually think it's really important. And I've never, nobody's ever given me this before in my life in terms of like a framework for deciding when to quit something. And it's also something that I would love to like, I would love to debate with people because I was alone in a jungle when I wrote this. And here we go. So the chapter's called, I quit my job.
And it's chapter 11 in my book. And I've drawn this very useful little flow chart you can see here. So the first question is, are you thinking about quitting something, right? And you eat that either yes or no. If the answer's no, why are you looking at the fucking flow chart? If the answer is yes, go to the next chapter and if the answer is yes, I ask you why are you thinking about quitting?
And there's typically two reasons why people are thinking about quitting. And I make these words intentionally ambiguous. So because something sucks or because it's hard, right? And if it sucks, that for me means it's toxic. It's it's um, it's um, it's intrinsically unfulfilling whatever it might be in your own definition. If it's hard, it's because it's a challenge, right? You're not qualified to do it. Um, it's difficult like running a marathon. You're in the 22nd mile or whatever. If you're thinking if you're trying to quit because it's hard, is the challenge worth the potential reward? This is kind of the question I've always asked myself.
So in the hardest moments of my business, in which we're always in the first years, it was really, really hard, but the potential reward in my mind was worth the hardship. So if the answer to that question is yes, don't quit. If you're doing something hard, that isn't worth the potential of rewards, quit, right? Let's move to the other side of the flow chart.
Say you're thinking about quitting because it sucks, which is actually where I found myself in with my company. It started to suck, right? It wasn't hard, it sucked. Do you believe you could make it not suck? Question I asked myself all the time. Do I think I could go and have the meetings I need to have with the board and with other people to make this company for me, the company doesn't suck,
it's a great company, for me, the experience for me and what I want out of my life, not suck. If the answer is yes, you then ask yourself that question again, which is, is the effort it would take to make it not suck that traveling around the world, persuading you, worth it. Yes or no? And so if it's if it's not worth it, if you think that you it would require a year of your life, a million conversations, a gazillion conversations, and it's not actually worth the rewards to put that effort in, then you quit. If not, don't quit. Do the work, fix it, and you get it right. However, I got to the point where I thought that the effort it was required to make the
experience for me not suck anymore wasn't actually any worth rewards anymore. I was an 18 year old kid that started, you know, 21, where I started that business at 21. Start the business at 21 got really diluted. As you get diluted as a young guy, you lose, you give up control. You can't take back, you know, shareholder control. The business had got bigger. I didn't have the control I wanted to
have over the top level things. And I also owned a small piece of the company by this point. And so you have those two factors there where it's going to take a lot of effort to change it, but the rewards are not for you as an entrepreneur aren't actually that great anymore. So this led me to this part on the flow chart where I was thinking about quitting. I didn't believe that anymore that I could make it not suck and the effort to make it not suck wasn't going to be worth it. So I ended up quitting. And this is a framework you can basically use for everything, I think.
It's simplified enough for you to, you know, make it work for you and to make sense for you and hopefully for the reader as well. Having just come out of social chain, how did you decide what you were going to do next? It's a really good point. It's a really good point. I went off to the jungle, I went in Costa Rica to spend some time alone with my thoughts, which is actually when I started writing the book. I think it's chapter 10 or something in the book where 10 or 11, where I start thinking
about that. I've realized that the tempting thing to do is just to go and do the same thing again. But there's a number of problems with that. You know, one of the things that I discussed in the book that makes humans intrinsically motivated is challenge. And the challenge of doing the same thing again when you're the type of person that I am is not very challenging to say the least, right? And the next thing that played on my mind was why I would go and do the next thing again,
and it's because of comfort. It's because I have this label that's been given to me as by society and by my past and by my accomplishments, which is social media CEO. And there's this temptation to then spend the next 10 years of my life living out those labels, right? To think that's who I am,
and to play the, follow the implicit instructions of those labels. And I dwelled on that and thought that this is probably why a lot of people get themselves into these like midlife crises where they lose their intrinsic joy for their work and they start to question who they were because they let society or their past or their mum define who they are and then they just played that role until they got to 41 years old. They work at a KPMG and they're thinking out and out of the window. And so I thought the most intrinsically rewarding way I could probably live my life was to resist my labels and to go back to these because labels as well, they're just a bunch of really unhelpful words that we give ourselves to make ourselves make sense.
So I thought, you know, go back to the fundamentals. What am I? Who am I? I'm a guy with a bunch of skills that loves so many things. I don't have one singular passion. I have tons of passions. I like music and playing with my dog and my niece and I like art and I like video games
and FIFA and football and business. I didn't like social media. Like I'm not a, I didn't come out of the womb. My passion wasn't social media. Social media didn't exist didn't come out of the womb. My passion wasn't social media. Social media didn't exist when I came out of the room. So how could that be my innate passion anyway? But there's principles about that job that I did like. I liked working with teams. I liked having a big ambition. I liked the challenge. I liked storytelling. And these are things that can apply to any industry. So I resisted my labels and over the last since I've left about nine months, I think it's been now six or nine months somewhere
in that region. I've just resisted my labels over at a book. I've learnt to DJ. I've got a big theatrical show that I've sold out in Manchester written and directed by me, the music done by me. I've been working in one of the biggest biotech companies in the world in the mental health space for the last six months, a three billion dollar biotech company. I've been working at Hule, which is the fastest growing, like consumer, the fastest growing e-commerce company in the national UK. I'm on the board there. I'm about to accept another board role at one of the fastest growing companies in a completely different industry and the beauty industry. And why the fuck not? I thought to myself that like, you know, this is how I would behave if I truly resisted my labels.
And my inspirations that hang on the walls and some of my rooms in this house, Elon Musk or Kanye West, I don't love all of their ideas, but the thing I love and admire most about those individuals was they didn't let their past or a label or anything define them. Elon, you know, zip-to-paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralin, and Kanye started as a producer
and they said, you're a producer, you can't wrap. I mean, not only wrap, he pawns shows and clothes and shoes and choirs and everything. And that inspires me. I think that's a free way to live. I think everybody, the vast majority, 99% of people don't live freely. They live confined by words that their
mum or dad or themselves have given them. And those words are restrictive and why be restrictive? I'm going to die anyway, it doesn't fucking matter. Yeah, I think one of the central themes of your book is to remind people that much of what we're told by the culture at the moment will not make them truly happy or fulfilled. But identifying that is great. But how can people actually rid themselves of those internalised values that don't serve them? I think one of the easiest ways to do it, if I had to just give a simple way, it's like to constantly question the question.
Maybe that's my single greatest skill or gift. I say gift because it's not that intentional. It seems to be, it just seems to what happens when someone presents me with something. A good example is my book promo. So we're doing my book promotion today and I said to my publisher, like, you know, they said, oh, what we do is we get like an envelope and we put the book in an envelope and send it out to people. And I, like, you know, they said, what we do is we get an envelope, and we put the book in an envelope and send it out to people. And I was like, but this, you know, that's not necessarily a great idea
because we want these influences to post. So what we'll do is we'll print $100 bills and Chris, if you get your box, it'll have your face on it. It comes with this, like, mirror, it's as happy as it. This big, like, Instagram, of a box. And we'll send, we won't send $100, we'll send $1,000. And they go, oh, no, but that's not how it's done. Why would you do that?
Well, think about it from a psychological perspective. If I see something three times in a short period of time, we can get them all still living on the same day. We get the world's biggest influence. Like this is, and but they go, oh no, but that's not how it's gonna be done. And then they're like, oh no, but you can't print money, that's like a legal.
You can't put them in. And that moment there is, that is a perfect metaphor for the slow, almost subtle force that you're faced many times a day in your life of life just saying like, stick to the blueprint, like in stick to convention. And it's that little bit of resistance where you've got to turn and say, no, we're going to do it this way. And for me, that was at 16. When I decided that school wasn't going to get me to where I wanted to go.
Well, University day one where I call my mom and I say, mom, listen, I'm dropping out of university. And she says, I'm not going to speak to you until you go back, didn't speak to her for two years. And suddenly, when I started to promote the book, and if you look at Instagram today, we probably had, I was trying to do the numbers. I was like, probably had 500,000 pounds
in free marketing to day alone, probably had 500,000 pounds in free marketing today alone. Send out 1,000 books. I reckon I've been tagged already today. What time is it? It's like 5pm today. And most of my friends haven't got it yet. Maybe 500 or 600 times. These influences, some of them have three million followers.
That one moment of resistance, where life in this case my publisher was like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the way it's always been done. And having the conviction to resist and think in terms of first principles is the most important thing for me. And like, I've built the case study now, so you can't tell me otherwise.
And a lot of people haven't built the case studies. Like you built the case study for yourself, it's much easier to resist in those moments and to rely on your first principles. But yeah, I've built the case, so there's no going back for me now. I can't see what I know. So it's thinking in terms of first principles,
and very honestly, that's just about questioning the question. Every, when you come to promote this podcast, you will do what you did last time. That's what most people do, and I do the same thing. And what I do with my team now is, I'm like, what is the 1% marginal gain? What is the like one new idea based on first principle so try and get that one percent? And that's a that's a mental philosophy, which is continually like questioning the question and trying to think of new ideas
Even though it requires much more sort of mental effort Yeah, I agree with you. If you do that in your life, you'll you'll go somewhere else If you if you're able to do that in your life. It's just tough and it's apparently scary And I say apparently because in fact the most scary thing is not doing that But trying to can try to persuade people of that is probably an argument I won't win just like the Jesus bullet mother head analogy I give like trying to convince you that the fear The thing that you should fear is not taking a risk, is a battle I probably won't win. Well, my TEDx talk, which I recorded a couple of weeks ago,
had a section in this, which is quoted from Mutual Friend of ours, George McGill, although I wasn't able to actually reference him on the slides, but I quoted him directly from an episode I did in your old office upstairs. Oh yeah. And Ollie was filming it. And it's talking about the fact that I'm astounded
by how many people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to be normal. By being normal, you are, by definition, aiming for average. You regress to the mean by doing what everyone else does. By doing what everyone else does, you get what everyone else has got. Normal people get normal results, weird people get weird results. You call it questioning the question,
I call it assessing assumptions. Like we all have assumptions about the world, about how things should be done, about the way that we're supposed to release a book, the way that we're supposed to release a podcast, construct a conversation, all of these things. But when you assess your assumptions and its first principles is now the sort of buzzword of the last few years popularized by Shane
Parrish and Elon Musk. But what I find interesting about what you just said there is that it's innate because what a lot of people want, it may have been developed but that it's something that's built into your source code. Because there are people who struggle to rebel and there are people who find rebelling a little bit easier Yeah, yeah I Think it might be somewhat connected to my self-belief because I like what you've just described there where you said You know everybody wants to be extraordinary, but everyone also wants to be normal is like it's like because risk and reward like
We all we all want no risk which is being normal, you know, safety, do like stay within the sheep pen, and then we all want the gazillion pounds and to live an extraordinary life, which is the reward. So like, of course, we, none of us want risk, but we want to optimize reward. And like, I think that maybe that ability to question, you think, what does it take to think from first principles and to write your own script? It takes fucking guts for a start because you are quite literally rewriting a new blueprint. It's like walking down, I used to live in the woods
and I'd walk this path every single day to get home. And then I look up and I look up the hill and I think, well, I actually live there. So why am I walking this path, which is gonna be like a mile down this way, then it's going to cut right. When I theoretically could just cut up this hill and go straight to my house, and this is like a metaphor for life again, it's like, well, but this is the path and there might be snakes there and there's not like a carved out, smooth way for you to walk.
So what does it take to go up there? It takes a sense of adventure. Where does that come from? That comes from probably nurture. It takes some self belief. It takes the conviction and the confidence to be wrong. Which again, probably comes from self-esteem, right? Because if I walk up this path and I get up there
and I, you know, everyone laughs at me and says, well, there's a big fence, you fucked up. That takes a certain sense of self-esteem. People don't want to risk their self-esteem, especially when they have a weak self-esteem. So maybe it's more nudge than I think, but what I'm saying is now it feels innate. I can't pretend that I, yeah,
and I don't choose it on a daily basis. Like the argument with my publisher, it felt like that was the right thing. And it was, I was fighting for what I knew was right. I wasn't think, I didn't sit back and think, okay, let's think first principles here. And then start like writing out on a piece of paper. That's what I mean by it feels almost innate now. It's so second nature to me to question the question and to not accept questions when there are. And the one I talk about in the
book, I think there's a chapter on it. I say I think because sometimes I'm not sure if it's a chapter or just a section, which is, no, it is a chapter. It says, mom, stop asking me about love. And it's like you come home and your mom says, oh, you're dating Melanie, are you? Yeah, are you in love? And that moment of like, oh shit,
now I have to answer either yes or no. And my definition of love has to be exactly the same as hers. And if it's no, then fuck, what's wrong? Right? And then like, yes, that means I'm getting married. And the unnecessary pressure to slide into one of these binary boxes doesn't help my relationship with my girlfriend, you know what I mean? So why do we fuck around with these questions when they're like really
unhelpful? And what that's another thing I uncover in the book which is like how invalid so many of the questions we ask ourselves are. You know, I think I say in the book as the example, what number is blue? And it's a perfectly reasonable question because you know what numbers are and you know what blue is. So what number is blue? And it's the same thing question because you know what numbers are and you know what blue is. So, what number is blue? And it's the same thing, are you in love?
Have is this your passion? You know what you are? You know what passion is. So are you just because you can put to like just because you can ask a question, doesn't make it's, I mean, it's valid or worth answering or worth stressing over or worth overthinking over. And like 70% of the young kids in my DMs are messaging me because they've been imprisoned by a question.
That society's trying to make them answer. Steve, I'm 22 and I haven't found my passion. And they're like, some of them are like verging on suicidal because of these questions. Genuinely, you look like, I'm like, bro, fuck, I don't know what my fucking passion is either. Just like stop asking yourself shitty questions and like, follow your, your joy and do more of this stuff you like and less than stuff you don't like and that's kind of foundational
thinking and not this sort of binary jump in this box and thinking is, is freeing again and it lets you live a more, yeah, peaceful life. If people shouldn't be trying to find their passion, what's a better question that they should be asking themselves? So the problem with the word passion is, it's inherently binary. It's like inherently too binary, but it also comes with a definition
that you don't actually know, right? So like a good example would be, a good example is like the word like love or passion, like I love my dog. I love my mom. I love my girlfriend. I love my mom. Lamborghini's. I love, love, love, love, love. We spray this word around so like, ubiquitously that we don't actually know what it really means. It means different things are apparently in different situations. And so if someone comes to you and says,
do you love Jenny? And you think, well, I can like, oh God, I don't know what you mean. I have to understand your definition of that to understand if I can fit in the box so you just ask me to jump in. With the passion question, I tend to ask myself in my life,
it's like, am I enjoying this? You could ask yourself, am I happy? Do I, do I feel good? These are like more foundational questions which are subjective and it doesn't require me to know your deaf definition of the words and then to fit into it in a binary way. That's probably what I ask myself in my life, which is like, does this feel good? And as it relates to my time at social training, it didn't feel good anymore. And as I say in my quitting at social training, it ended, it didn't feel good anymore. And as I say in my quitting framework, I didn't think I could change it.
And even if I could change it, I didn't think it would be worth it. So, super easy decision. Not brave, not courageous. Brave to stay. Imagine something not feeling good. You don't think you can change it. And you think you might be able to change it,
but the rewards of changing it, aren't worth it. And you stay, that takes courage. I don't have courage. Like people say this when I dropped out of Universal, I was like, oh, you're so brave, no, no, no, no. Brave would have been staying in a situation I hated and toughing it out. That's courage.
You know what I mean? So again, this is the war of words and how it ruins people's lives. I get it. I think the main thing that I learned from 1984, reading that is the volume of your vocabulary and the accuracy of the words that you use directly influences the quality of your thoughts.
And what you're relating to here is that any word is just a nearest approximation for a notion that you have in your head. All of the things, all the things, the emotions, the concept that you're trying to convey, you find the nearest possible term linguistically, apply it to that, and then try and get across something which is subtly, slightly different. We all are shardonfraud. German has some wonderful words that we don't have.
And this is one of the interesting things about hearing them because you go, oh, that's almost like a thing that I didn't know. It's like a thing that didn't exist until there was a word for it. And this is exactly what Elon talks about with Niroling as well. And why he talks about the loss in communication, but also how, in terms of computers in the bandwidth they have versus like vocabulary, I think it's the same thing, the most foundational thing that I, the most foundational vocabulary I have, if you were to call it a vocabulary, is like how I feel and my sensory experience, and then you're right, I try and communicate it with another person using these words that we've all agreed mean something,
but you've experienced one thing, I've experienced it, and we've said that the word is love is that the same thing, and there's a loss in translation there, and that's why I try and take I try and take take it back to foundational things, which is like how do you feel? Because maybe that's your first language, and maybe it's the language which is easiest to articulate for most people, like we know we have, we're quite good at understanding how we feel. But these societal, Instagram, movie, magazine, inspired words like, Bay and love and passion.
These ones are confusing for me, and there's a greater loss in translation when they come with all this package, and especially when they're really important words, like love and passion. These are the most important decisions we make in our life and we've distilled it to four letters and we all have to say yes or no.
This is a risky fucking game to play and that's why I wrote the book at the chapter of my book about like Mum stop asking me about love because I'm like this is not an interesting, this is a dangerous and risky, useless question to ask me. Talking about Instagram, how is following Kylie Jenner a type of self-harm? Yeah, this is something that I thought about a lot in the book, because I've got a lot
of Instagram friends, a lot of girls that are Instagram inferences that I've known for a long time, and they seem to have a 5x greater prevalence of mental health disorders. I've always wondered why that was, Then I spoke to Johanna Haare, that the famous author of Lost Connections, and after reading his book and having him on my podcast, he talked about the nine real reasons by people are getting depressed and anxious, and it started to make a bit more sense to me.
And then I went and did my own reading and studying for my book. And a lot of what I was looking at is how our mind works and how it makes its decisions and how it makes these split comparison oriented decisions that we needed to make in order to survive 10,000 years ago when a lion's running at you, you think, okay, fucking run. Or when something happens and you can't over process
or turn to deep logical thought to find answers, you have to make split decisions. We see it today, the studies show that if you present someone with three stakes on a menu, ones really expensive, ones middle and ones cheap, they'll think the top ones too bougie, the bottom ones are shit steak and the middle ones probably the ones, so they'll pick the middle one. If in a TV shop, they give you three TVs on a wall and there's, you know, the top ones ex super expensive, they'll pick the middle one. And even in more other ways, you, that this thing I write about in the book where
they did a study, they said, would you be willing to drive? I think it's an hour to save 10 pounds on a 200 pound jacket or an hour to save 10 pounds on a 10 pound jacket. It's an hour and you're saving 10 pounds, but the way people make that decision is totally different. They think, well, I'd rather drive the hour
to save 10 pounds on a 20 pound jacket, but it's an hour of your time and a 10 pound set, with these aren't logical decisions and the same applies for Instagram. We make very, and another example that I'd like to give is I remember when I got my first phone, my Nokia brick phone, and I could play Snake on it. I remember feeling like the bees knees in school,
going into school, I had polyphonic ring turns, I was the man, my big aerial. If I had that phone today, how would I feel? And I pondered that question, you know, like if I had that phone today in a world full of iPhones, how would I feel? I would feel ashamed. Because the value, and the phone hasn't changed, the Nokia phone is the same, same game, same ringtones everything, but the context in which it exists has changed. And that, in the human mind changes, as it does with the menu in the TVs, the perceived value of that thing. And this is what's happening on Instagram is, I know me, I look in the mirror every single day. When I look down into this phone, I'm making very snap comparison oriented judge judgements
about my own value, my own appearance, my own body, based on what I see, but what you're seeing is fake. And I speak to a cosmetic surgeon and he says, oh my God, this is the best era ever for my business because girls are coming in with photos from Instagram. He said, I've never had more Instagram references ever for surgery in my life. And now they all want to change their bodies. He said, the biggest rise we've seen is girls coming in with a photo of Kylie Jenner or the Kardashians and they want to change the shape of their body.
And also the face she sees as he sat on a gold mine because people are looking at Instagram. The brain does what it does, lazy as hell, comparison orientated. It's telling you that because she looks like that, you are a piece of shit. You can't avoid that. So I said, there's a chapter are a piece of shit. You can't avoid that So I said there's a chapter called fire your mind. You can't stop that you can't sell me I'm gonna stop doing comparisons. This is why like half my quotes. I know don't actually help Because you can't just say stuff like the Jesus analogy you can't just tell yourself to stop comparing. It's a survival mechanism but unfortunately in the era we live in
that is killing But unfortunately in the era we live in, that is killing yourself a steam. It's toxic for your mind, and that's why I say stop keeping up with the Kardashians. I think that's one of the chapters chapter four. There is a statistically significant increase in cosmetic surgery called the Zoom Boom of lockdown face. And it's because of the amount of people that have been looking at themselves for six hours a day, plus on video conferencing calls. And yeah, plastic surgeons
have been reporting that. T-John's from up here, Mr. Esho. Dr. Esho is from up here in Newcastle originally. So I've been sort of following his work for a while as well. One of the things that I thought was really interesting. Can I just say something on that as well. Yeah, sure. Think about the term fat. It doesn't sound like a comparison, but then remove everybody from planet earth. And suddenly, you're not fat. You're the prettiest, sexiest, richest person on earth. You are by definition enough, suddenly, just because I removed everybody else. And we don't actually
realize that most of these adjectives were descriptive words are just comparison based. And I would be the sexiest man alive. You would also be the unsexiest man alive. You would also be the fattest man alive. You would also be the the the the the the the the the is naturally what happens. You come from a hierarchical background and cestrally and you compare who am I above, who am I below? You continue to aim up, you continue to kind of dispose of the people that are down. How do you find that creeping in with yourself?
That obviously you do this self work, the same as me, we spend a lot of time doing gratitude journaling and internal work. How do you, when you notice that creeping in, that ego, that self talk, that destructive monologue, what do you do? It's a good question. So it's a really interesting one, because there's so many contradictions here.
I'm someone, and I discuss this in the book, I really, in fact, the 20th chapter is kind of trying to answer the contradiction between believing that you're enough, whilst also striving for so much more. Well, he's felt like a contradiction, I just couldn't understand. And then again, as I get into the chapter,
it's actually just a making a mistake with a bunch of words. Enough sounds like, you know, this idea that I wasn't enough, sounds like some kind of like internal measure of myself worth that came from somewhere. And the truth is, it did it came from my perception of the outside world and external validation. I thought that when I was broke I was less than and so I
strive to be more than or to get to the point where I was enough and in fact the whole time I've always been the same. There's never been a change in my intrinsic inherent value. That was just external like status games that I was playing in my mind. So I wanted to get myself to this point where I knew that I was enough, because that's the foundation you need to chase the right things for the right reasons. For example, my friend, who I described earlier, the billionaire friend with all the clothes and houses, and the sports cars, this is a guy that doesn't know he's enough yet. So he thinks by getting a room full of trainers and color coordinating them, that will make
him enough. So he started chasing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. The most important thing for me was getting myself to that point where I knew that intrinsically no matter what I did, no matter how successful I become, my inherent value doesn't change. And then that has become the platform to be competitive and chase and be aggressive at the things that really matter to me. And that's the phase in life where I'm at now, where when I'm chasing something, when I want to be number one at something,
or I want to be the best at something, I'm largely doing it, not completely, I'm largely doing it because the prize at the end of that is worthwhile intrinsically for me. So I can channel that like ambition and that competitiveness and that desire to be number one into win. But knowing that when I get there, or if I get there,
because a lot of the time I set myself goals that I don't think I'll ever even achieve, the journey will be intrinsically rewarding. That's been a big thing. And as you say, do I find myself in moments seeking external validation or not thinking I'm in a hot day, yeah, but just like 95% less than I used to maybe more, maybe 97% or something in that region.
I'm really glad to hear that man, like it's really encouraging to know, especially coming from the background in the industry that you were in, right? Like you were weaponizing the platforms that you're now criticizing. Your company was built off the back of that. And that insight obviously has enabled you to transform more effectively personally. I've got a story actually that you told while we were out at dinner. And this kind of highlights, I think,
what you're talking about here that you're prepared to do things just because you want to win at them and you're prepared to put effort in. You were talking about, I want to say that you were at some sort of conference or it may be a race event and you and your friends were competing about who could get the most calories burned on their Apple Watch and you noticed one of your friends on a Sunday night at the end of the week was in the gym training. So you decided to excuse yourself and then go and run sprints on a set of stairs nearby? I was I was at dinner with like Philip Green's family, the very notorious billionaire. I was in Monaco,
they invited me for dinner. First time I'd met the full family. Yeah, very important dinner in this beautiful, beautiful restaurant in Monaco. And me and my friends have spent 10 weeks every week competing against each other, six friends to see you can do the most calories, but then also you can compete individually at the same time. I'd never lost. I never lost.
I wouldn't allow myself to lose. So for the nine weeks I hadn't lost. I'm in the 10th week, I'm at the dinner. It's 11 o'clock, it shuts the competition closes at midnight. And I look down and I just see Don McGregor, my all business partner, who's in the group. I see him doing a workout at 11, caught past 11 or something like that.
And I'm at this dinner. And yeah, I have a personal philosophy where I like, I'm not gonna voluntarily lose. Something else might be the reason I lose, but it's not gonna be, it's not gonna be a decision that I'm making. It is a decision. So I said, I said to the people at dinner, I said, I'm just gonna excuse myself,
just gonna walk back to the hotel. Fucking sprint back to the hotel across the street. I'm up in the fucking bathroom in the hotel and I've put my phone recording and I start recording a video for them in the group and I start doing a hit work out and I'm screaming at the phone, I'm telling them, I'm saying, never try that again, never try and do me like that again. And I beat them. And I never lost, I'm telling them, I'm saying, never try that again. Never try and do me like that again. And I beat them. And I never lost.
I never lost that competition. I competed against all of them individually for 10 weeks and then the whole group collectively. And I wouldn't lose. And I don't let myself lose. Because for me, it doesn't matter. But it's that you're setting a personal philosophy for yourself every single day and every decision you make.
I talked to my team about that, but I also talked to them individually. I'm like, are you going to allow that thing to be part of your personal philosophy, like the way that you conduct yourself? So for me, in that moment, how do I let myself lose, like made the decision that I was gonna lose?
Then somewhere in my brain, I think, well, that kind of thinking will then creep into other areas of my life that are probably more important, especially as they compound over time. So I just make the decision that I'm not gonna choose to lose. And that was that story. But it's an insight into the way that I, the way that I think.
I love that story, man. That's why I remembered it. What do you think Stephen ten years from now would tell Stephen now? I mean, the only way that I could answer that question is by going back the other way and saying like, what would 28 year old Stephen have told 18 year old Stephen? So I think, because that's all I know, no, right? So that's the experience that I can draw upon. And I would have told 18 year old Stephen, like, it's funny, because I asked people this question,
like really successful people and they all tend to answer the same way, they all said. You're gonna do the same thing. You're gonna pop me up in the end. I'm gonna try and be slurred from the top. Repurpose answer from there. Like, I asked Reaff I had an end last week. I asked Abaddleton and they all say, nothing, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, more conviction. It would have been like experiment even more and fail faster. I think, you know,
I'm 28 now. I think I could have got to where I am now by probably about 26, 25, 24. If I just failed faster, had more conviction. And then the other thing is focus. So, and it's almost like a bit of a paradox for me to, no, it's almost a bit of a contradiction for me to say to experiment more, but to focus, right? But when you choose your experiments, you double down and you move fast and hard and aggressively in that direction, the worst possible case scenario is doing loads of experiments, but with low focus, right? So now in the phase of my life that I'm in, every experiment I do, I pick more selectively and I apply more focus. Whether that's in my business, my personal brand, my podcast, whatever it is, my book. And that's the point of conviction. I think it'll get
me there faster. It will allow me to achieve more and it will accelerate my personal development and bring the day where I'm my best version of myself one step closer, although that, that they will never, never arrive. So I was gonna keep moving away. Man, thank you so much. It's been long overdue catch-up since we last together in Dubai. Yeah, thank you, bro.
You're killing it. And I love what you stand for. It's such a powerful podcast that you have. And I think you're getting the credit that you deserve for the content you produce. And it doesn't take long for, I I think someone that's making great stuff. There's a bit of a lag on it sometimes to get the credit they deserve for what they're producing. And your consistency is inspiring as well because that's the thing that I think sort of comes before great success. It's
just someone that shows up every day and just you know follows, does something that they love. So if I could bet if you were a stock and I could invest, I would invest. Thank you, man. Thank you very much. My dad used to say, form is temporary, but class is permanent. And I've always, I've always held that with me. Happy sexy millionaire will be linked in the show notes below. Usually when I talk about the book, I like, pick it up like this. But it's currently at the Royal Mail depot
for me to go and collect. So I'm gonna do that before it closes. Yeah, what a bastard. So I'm gonna go and collect it. But man, congratulations, really well done. Seeing someone who's young from the UK, swimming in the circles that you do, and personally for me as well,
utilizing a team, the way that you do. Personal branding team, small, focused, it's really inspiring. In the right form of the word, right, it's somebody who's grinding through the operations, who's being very open and transparent about the things that they do and about their failures. And long way it continued, dude, I think the UK's lagged behind in this sort of arena, whatever you want to call it, this sense-making insight, sort of entrepreneurial vision world for far too long. And it's our language, right?
So if you're part of the new age of the British Empire, then so be it. Look at that. You know, it's so true. You know, you're so, you're so, you're so right. And right. And at some point you get the temptation, people say, oh, good, L.A. They're trying to persuade you to go out there and... You're going out for a month, don't say that. I know that you're going out for a month in a couple of weeks time. Well, maybe. We'll see what happens.
No, it's really good to see people from the UK like yourself that are creating global platforms, because we're told in the UK to just focus on people around, you know, nationally. So it's nice to see, you know, you've got killer killer guests coming on your podcast and that's a testament to, you know, what you've been able to build here. So well done. It's amazing. Thank you, brother. Look, until next time, man, we will catch up. Good luck with the rest of the book to everything will be linked in the show. To below, including Steve's fantastic podcast, go and check it out. But for now, man, thank you. Thank you.