James Smith: Become Confident In 100 Minutes
嘉宾：James Smith
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§01Transcript — part 1
The thing I think about most, especially when I’m on the go, but also when I’m sat here in the *Diary of a CEO* studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, any time I’m filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do is when I arrive, I open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I’ve sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it’s such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. Because on any given day, if I’m recording, let’s say, hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a "nice to have." It is absolutely business-mission critical. So, when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I’m sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
And of all the providers, the one that came back with the steadiest connection, as well as being the cheapest, was today’s sponsor, Spectrum Business. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services. Millions of business owners already rely on Spectrum to keep their operations connected. So, if you want to join them, head to spectrum.com/business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Service not available in all areas.
I was failing. That was the point for me where I was like, I need to do things differently. The hardest thing I’ve ever done.
He’s James Smith, the straight-talking personal trainer. Some see James’s curse-filled rants as confrontational. Others see James as a narcissist.
James, good to see you again. Self-esteem and confidence is decaying. When you’re at that place of feeling that you don’t have enough confidence, it’s actually a crossroads. It’s a left and a right—action and inaction. Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing.
Dating is such a big topic because people either don’t have the confidence required to meet someone, or they might not have the confidence to leave someone. We’re allowed to be ignorant with these things, and we’re allowed to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t endeavor to get the best possible outcome.
What are you not confident about?
I constantly have these battles in my head. Why did I create this fuss? Why did I have sweat patches from such a simple interaction and being uncomfortable? I have the same insecurities, the same fears, feelings of inadequacy.
Sometimes my biggest fear is losing is not the same as being defeated. You have to be audacious, you have to put your head above the parapet. I’m sure I’m going to be absolutely slammed for saying this.
So, without further ado, I’m Steven Bartlett, and this is *The Diary of a CEO*. I hope nobody’s listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
James, good to see you again.
Thank you very much for having me back.
It’s, I’ve got to say, we don’t have many guests back, but our conversation was so inspiring and surprising to me. When I messaged you the other day and said, "If you’re ever back in London, I’d love to have you back on," and then I learned you’d written a book about confidence. Why did you write a book about confidence?
Well, it’s kind of interesting that through my entire career, I’ve learned something personally and then I’ve taught other people the process. So, the first book, *Not a Diet Book*, I went through years of fitness industry bullshit that we spoke about before. And kind by the end of it, through my own journeys, I was like, I could teach people about this. And I didn’t want to write a diet book system. I was like, let’s break down everything and put it into a book.
Then the second book offer, I was like, I can’t do another one. If I’d written a second book about fitness, it would have said a lot about the first. You know, when people do sequels to things, I’m like, "Oh, you must have done a great job." And I kind of realized by accident that my work-life balance was pretty good and wrote the second book. A lot of the things we spoke about in that last podcast were based off *Not a Life Coach*.
Now, the kind of strange thing that I say to people is, I’m not a very confident person. I have the same insecurities, the same fears, the same feelings of inadequacy as the majority of people, but I kind of have a set of values and a way that I see these problems where I can break them down and dismantle them.
And in the book, in the first chapter, I say a lot of people sit back and they think other people are confident as if it’s a trait like height, or people say it’s a superpower. But straight away, I actually typed that in the first part of the book—I was like, "Confidence is a superpower." But then superpowers aren’t accomplishable by mortals. It’s almost something out of your reach.
And I’m a big believer that confidence can be within people’s reach. And even chatting to people in the same profession, they have a problem or a fear of judgment, of whatever it is. And if I can spend five minutes with that person, I can motivate them to post on social media, to prospect more with their business, whatever it is. And I realized it’s not something people are lacking. It’s more so the way they perceive and view their reality.
What are you not confident about? People, I think, would be surprised to hear that you have insecurities and inadequacies and there’s things you’re not confident about.
Everything. Body image, which is why I ended up going down the first huge 10 years of my life with *Not a Diet Book*. I was overweight as a kid. Even now, I constantly have these battles in my head through "How should I look? What shall I be doing? Should I be dieting?" And I think that’s why a lot of people resonate with what I say, because a lot of what I say to them is also for myself.
A lot of, you know, I say to people, "Look, I know this is how you’re feeling because that’s how I feel myself." And it’s an interesting one. Even with dating, with professional life, some of them I feel like I kind of got lucky—but I’m not a massive believer in luck. And I kind of tripped over some of the steps to becoming confident.
Even working in door-to-door sales, where working for NPower in Gloucester, knocking on hundreds of doors a day, it allowed me to perceive issues in front of me as a numbers game. And then I had the average of knocking on 100 doors to make a sale. Suddenly things didn’t seem so daunting. And people go, "Oh, you’d need to be really confident to knock on doors for a living." And I was like, "Well, not so much." If you appreciate there’s a certain amount of times you need to do something before you experience success, it’s not so scary.
Email marketing—I knew email marketing would work. I sent emails every day for 10 months; no one bought. In 10 months, someone bought finally. So, it was an appreciation of the numbers. Social media—four and a half years I posted near about every day before I made any money from it. Things aren’t so much scary or to be feared. It’s how you look at those things in front of you that really kind of break down the fear because we’re all capable of doing things, but we like to almost push things further away than we can reach so that it gives us a reason not to do it.
One thing that really blew my mind is I had Liver King on the podcast, right? This is a man, for anybody that doesn’t know him, who is jacked. He walks around with his top off. He’s very, you know, direct and loud and apparently confident. But at the very end of the conversation, I asked him to tell me something he’s never told anyone before. And what he said blew my mind. He said, "Coming on this podcast today and speaking in front of people cripples me to the point that I can’t sleep."
And then he tells me that between the age of 10 and 14 years old, he was bullied horrifically. Beaten up every day, had no friends. And I was trying to put the pieces together that—and you kind of allude to it at the start of your book when you start talking about the different types of confidence—that he might be confident in some ways, but the social confidence was literally knocked out of him at 10 years old.
So, in social situations where there’s a chance of rejection from the crowd, which is what happened to him in school, he is still crippled to this day. It appears to me that there’s a real variance in people’s social confidence, which originates from their early self-story. And really, that early self-story, I’m trying to understand how much of that determines our confidence today. Because there’s tricks and tips and the five-second rule and all this stuff, but do we really have to go back and fix that shit that happened to us at 10 years old in the playground?
No, I don’t think so. And that’s kind of the important thing. I don’t think it’s like a trauma that we need to hold dearly to ourselves. But like you say, so for instance, if you were to say, "James, there’s 3,000 people out there. I need you to perform a talk with no preparation," I’d be like, "Cool." But if you were to say, "Hey, there’s a girl at the bar and I need you to go approach her on a Friday night and try and get a number," that would be—that’s scary to me.
So, it’s kind of like double standards. Like you say, some situations, everyone has a certain lacking type of confidence, even the most confident of people. And that could be because when I was 12, the first girl I asked out said no. It could be that, or it could be because I’ve done more talks. And I think that at the root core of everything is a form of repetition.
And people that aren’t confident to do things, they need to find something they have the level of courage to do and get to that point. And for instance, that’s something I don’t need to work on. And as I’m in a relationship, I probably shouldn’t be working on this either, but if I am petrified of talking to a girl or a guy for any women listening, or either-either for whoever’s listening—maybe I don’t have the courage to ask for the number, but I might have the courage to go say hello or to compliment them or to, you know, do something chivalrous. And if people can then do that, then maybe from there they can move on.
And I think it is one of those things where everyone has like a gaping hole in their confidence. And for Liver King, it’s an interesting one. At first, I was actually very anti-him because he is obnoxious. He actually has a very similar approach to what I do—in your face, "This is what I believe in. If you don’t believe in it, that’s cool."
But I can sometimes look at him and appreciate that a lot of people are not being who they are; they’re being who they need to be. And I feel I resonate with that side of him where, as I’m sure you realized, on social media I’m very much like, "Listen mate, you know, do this calorie deficit, you know, fuck off," all of that. But really, I’m not like that. I portray the person I need to be. It’s one of those things where a lot of the time people need to appreciate that maybe everyone around them is fearful of everything like you, but they’re more focused about being who they need to be, not worrying about who they are.
In the start of this book, in chapter one, you investigate this idea of pain points as it relates to confidence. What do you mean by pain points?
So, we could look at this in the form of sales as well. So, I cannot sell to someone unless I understand their pain points. And I’ll use an analogy that probably is the one I’ve had most experience with: people in the gym. They come, they sit down, "Hi James, I want to get fitter. I want to lose a bit of weight. I want to tone up." And I’m like, "That’s not really what you want. That’s not a pain point. That is a knee-jerk reaction to what you think I want to hear."
And when you delve a bit deeper, they go, "Oh, my husband stopped fucking me. You know, every time I stand up in a meeting, I’ve got to pull my top down over the layers of flab that I have. I don’t feel confident in areas of my life that I should because I’m so crippled by the confidence I have with my physique. I’m not taken seriously." The pain points are deep.
And people need to draw on those because the day that you’re getting out of bed and you feel like shit and you’re tired and you want to give up, "I want to be toned" isn’t going to do it. The fact that your real pain point is that you’re lonely and you’re getting older and you’re worrying about the fact that you might not find a compatible companion ever—that is a strong enough pain point for you to change. Being more toned isn’t.
Interestingly for some, you know, I know people that are in that exact same situation. And I’ve debated for many a year whether—the situation you described there—"I’m getting older, I’m lonely, I’m scared I’ll be alone forever." I know people in that exact same situation that are exhibiting the fear of the consequences of a lifelong loneliness, but they still don’t do anything about it. Is there such a thing as like *wanting* to want to be someone?
I’m not sure to answer your question, but one of the things I would say to that person is: you’re in the—and I’m only using this in an example—I think dating is an analogy I love to use. I actually use it when I talk about business talks. I say marketing is like dating, you know, and we won’t get down that too much.
But you look at the person at the bar, you feel the fear. Rather than counting down from five—5, 4, 3, 2, 1, "Oh my god, I’ve got the confidence, let me go talk to them"—they could instead just for a flash of a moment just think to themselves, "I’m lonely. I don’t want to be lonely. What out of these two things is more uncomfortable for me? The idea of going another week, another month being single, or the idea of talking to a stranger?"
And surely, when you level those two things up, the pain point of being lonely should be much worse than the pain point of talking to a stranger. If you feel undervalued at work, the idea of talking to your boss and expressing how you feel, that’s a pain point. You’re like, "That’s going to make me feel uncomfortable." But then the pain point of feeling undervalued and not being given the bonus you were promised a year ago—you level them up and you’re like, there’s always two directions in which you can go.
And you’ve tweeted and mentioned this before: you say, "Saying nothing is still saying something. Doing nothing is still doing something." And they also say, "Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing." And these are really important because that person—and again, same analogy, whatever—when you’re at that place of feeling that you don’t have enough confidence, it’s actually a crossroads. It’s a left and a right; it’s a dichotomy of action and inaction.
And if you are controlled by fear and you don’t muster the courage to do what you need to do, especially by using the pain points to motivate yourself, you are choosing *inaction*. By doing nothing, that is a choice. And people just seem to think that, you know, not starting the passion project, not posting or expressing something on social media—they seem to think if they do nothing that it’s a void in our reality, but it’s not. It’s still a choice of inaction.
I used to think of—people ask me about confidence a lot, and it’s taken me quite some time to develop my thoughts on it because, you know, when you, I think, Level 1 of the confidence self-help guru is like, "Look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you love yourself." Like, that’s like Step 1.
And then eventually, hopefully, your thinking progresses when you find the holes in that thinking. And then I arrived at the conclusion that confidence, as we kind of colloquially talk about it in culture—I know there’s multiple definitions and lots of nuance—but confidence as we describe it in culture is really just based on the evidence you have in yourself.
Like, all beliefs are evidence-based. Subjective correct or incorrect evidence. And therefore, if it is evidence-based, the only way to build your confidence is to go and get evidence. And I say this because there’s a narrative that you can just kind of like write down in your book or look yourself in the mirror and say, "I’m going to be confident, I’m going to be sexy, I’m going to be a millionaire," which I don’t think is factually supported by how other beliefs work.
So confidence—when I started writing the book, I wasn’t sat there like, "I know everything about confidence." I was sat there going, "I couldn’t answer if you were to say, 'James, what is confidence?'" When I start writing it, I go, "I don’t know."
So, that’s why I was so excited about writing it. But one of the interesting kind of ways that I wrote about in one of the points was: if you imagine confidence on a spectrum, with anxiety on one end and confidence on the other, anxiety is *predicting failure* and confidence is *predicting success*.
And that is a really important thing to think about because our expectations massively influence the outcome of things. And like you say there, if people just go into a room and go, "I’m amazing, I’m whatever," it’s not really going to work. Even as one of your previous guests said about interrogative self-talk: asking yourself questions is a more positive thing. Instead of saying, "I can do this podcast today and do well," I ask myself, "Can you do well in this podcast today?" The answer, "You know what, I did all right in the last one. It got a lot of downloads."
So, it is one of those things that is in so many different spectrums and it has so many different meanings. But a lot of it points towards predicting success in things. And even if you don’t have the evidence to predict success, we should be able to be wrong. If there’s something I want to accomplish, I can’t let my mind and my thoughts take over. I must, in some sense, be overconfident and predict success. But if I am wrong, that’s fine. But what I can’t do is just set every single default to being "This isn’t going to work," because if you don’t think something’s going to work, you’ve already tripped at the first hurdle.
And there’s a guy, David Robson, he’s written a book called *The Expectation Effect*. And in that book, they got a group of people—I can’t remember how big the study was—but they lied to them and said, "This group have got a gene that is going to hinder their turnover of oxygen, and this group over here doesn’t." And they got them to perform fitness tests.
The people that were told they had this gene mutation performed a lot better, and the other people didn’t. And even just being primed with a lie completely changed their output in a fitness test. So, schools don’t teach confidence; society doesn’t really breed confidence because although on one hand confidence is essential for innovation—if we don’t have confident people, you know, Elon Musk, he was confident enough to say, "That rocket, we could land it back on Earth," and people, "No, you’re crazy."
But society doesn’t care if you’re confident or not. Society doesn’t care if you talk to that person or not. Society doesn’t care if you get a pay rise. No one in the world is going to come along and care about your levels of confidence. It’s something we need to do ourselves.
In that example of them priming two groups and they tell one of them a lie, and then the one that believes that they have a genetic advantage performed better, right?
Yeah.
So, is that not the case then for lying to yourself?
So, "fake it till you make it." I don’t particularly like that terminology. In the book, I write about it because what’s your metric of success in that? To fake it until you get recognition for something? I think with that, and with the book and with expectations, you’ve got manifestation and the placebo effect. And they’re intertwined, but they’re both separate.
So, manifestation, I think, is a very dangerous thing where people think, "Oh, I’m just going to think about success, you know, I’m going to meditate about success, I’m going to get it." But then things like the placebo effect is also a powerful thing. Sham surgeries that were performed on people—they would be cut open, they would do nothing, they’d stitch them back up, and up to 50% of people reported feeling better. That’s crazy.
When people take—or 30% of people that took the vaccine in the trials that were given the *no* vaccine felt ill afterwards because they thought they were going to feel ill. I’ve seen as well—I didn’t put this one in the book because I couldn’t find the study—the size of the pill you take as a painkiller, even with placebos, can impact the levels of pain that people report disappearing.
So, although we can’t say, "You know, just pretend you’re going to be confident, pretend all of this," in the same sense, we do need to instill a level of belief in ourselves that we are able to accomplish stuff. And if we try and we falsify that optimism and it doesn’t work out, we create another building block to step on. And behind everyone who is an expert in anything, there is a level of mastery.
And failure is put in such a negative light in society, but failure is, in most cases, the pathway to development. So, even if we do point the dial towards optimism, if things don’t go right, that’s fine. We’re allowed to be wrong; we’re allowed to make mistakes. You’re allowed to try that endeavor that you want and for it to all fuck up.
I think that—I was just thinking about that then—the, I guess, the difference is, with the placebo effect, you don’t *know* that it’s a lie. Whereas if I looked myself in the mirror and said, "You are in fact Jesus Christ," I would *know* that that was a lie. And so placebo, I guess, you know, the placebo effect stuff can work, and even in that operation, they didn’t know they were being lied to in those two control groups where one of them believed they had a genetic advantage.
They thought it was true. The problem is we can’t actually lie to ourselves. And the example I always give sometimes when I speak about confidence on stage is like, if I had your mom in a headlock and I was pointing a gun at her and I said, "You have to believe I’m Jesus or she dies," everything’s on the line. And all you could do is *pretend*. You couldn’t actually believe I was Jesus. If everything was on the line, you could only believe—and so that for me was the clearest evidence I needed that I can never really lie to myself about who I am.
It doesn’t have to be a lie as it could be even just a change in narrative. So, I remember so many times throughout my life, just before I was about to go on a date with a stranger, which I find incredibly daunting—it’s one of the reasons that I drank on dates for the first 25 years of my life—but that voice in your head, you don’t have to lie to yourself, but the voice in your head goes, "What if this is the worst day I’ll ever go on?"
But all you need to do is change that to say, "What if this is the best day I’ll ever go on?" That’s all I’m saying. And that is a change in expectations; it’s a different change in thought. It’s a different perspective on your reality that’s upcoming. I don’t think we should ever lie to ourselves, but we should at least turn the dial towards optimism because we are inherently pessimistic with our biases.
Audacity. You talk about that being one of the most important things. You describe it as being at the forefront of any of the successes you’ve experienced in your life. What is audacity? And how do you define that and what role has it played for you?
I had a lot of opinions in the fitness industry. But by airing them, you open yourself up to a lot of criticism. You open yourself up to hatred. Five years ago, I don’t think anyone bar a couple of my ex-girlfriends hated me. All right, you know, no one. Now there are thousands, thousands of people because you have to be audacious, you have to put your head above the parapet to really put yourself forward.
Even as we said before with this podcast, you had to be audacious one day as someone who’d never done a podcast to go, "We’re going to do a podcast in here." And you had to sit there and believe for a second, "We’re going to make this the UK’s leading podcast." And in some respects, behind anyone’s level of success, there was an audacious endeavor at the beginning. Whether it was to do a podcast, whether it was to start a business, whatever it was.
And I think that’s again something that’s not fully bred into people. You know, someone has an idea, go put that idea out there. Be audacious with it. You know, don’t be afraid to be wrong, don’t be afraid of critics. And ultimately for me, something that I kind of understood was there are going to be a lot of people that are never going to be interested in what you’re doing. They’re never going to be interested in a book that I release or whatever. I can’t take their criticisms to heart.
And fully understanding that there are people out there that are going to dislike me, but I can’t worry too much about that because they’re never going to benefit my net equation. They’re never going to come to a talk or buy a book or anything like that. So, audaciousness is like an essential element for progress in this. But you need to be armed with understanding that there are going to be haters, that there are going to be people that are going to not like what you say or what you do. And there’s quite literally no one out there that doesn’t get criticized for something. So, audaciousness does have that dark side to it. But for people, again, being audacious with your endeavor—what if it’s the worst thing you ever do? But then again, what if it’s the best thing you ever do?
Since you came on this podcast last time, I’ve been asking guests a similar question, which is about this ingredients list of happiness. Have you ever heard me say this to anybody?
I’ve heard you say it, but...
Okay. I just wanted, just in case you had a premeditated response. But the question I ask people is: if happiness was a list of ingredients on a recipe in different weights and quantities, what is missing from your list of ingredients that would make you perfectly happy?
Oh, John, I haven’t thought about this. I haven’t thought about this at all. I don’t really look at my life and go, "What’s missing?" And even some things I could say was, "Oh, you know, a permanent visa for Australia." But I quite like the fact it’s not happened yet. I’m looking forward to it if it does come.
And even if I don’t get residency in Australia, I kind of relish the challenge of what I would have to do to then get it again. So, all of the things that are lacking from my life also seem like little challenges that I’m excited for. But honestly, I know a lot of people have a facade for happiness. I’m progressing in everything that I’m doing.
And as I said before, even on the back burner, I love Jiu-Jitsu. I’m competing a bit at the moment. I teach classes on a Friday evening. I have that. And so much of my values revolve around my work, the book doing well, my professional life. But then also at the back burner, I’ve always said this: that I could just get a dog, open a little Jiu-Jitsu dojo with my savings, put it near the beach somewhere, hopefully in Australia, and I could just teach people Jiu-Jitsu for the rest of my life.
And I look at that and I go, on some days, that’s better than my existing life, you know? So, it’s one of those things where I don’t really dwell or use any mental or cognitive ability thinking about what’s missing. I don’t think that’s a productive way to use cognitive effort.
I think I sometimes question the balance of things in my life. And I sometimes wonder whether it’s society telling me that the balance is wrong, or whether it’s, you know, your girlfriend telling you the balance is wrong—that happens a lot—or whether it’s something else. But I think more in terms of the balance of things. So, for example, I might be going to the gym too much, or I might be working too much, or I might not be working enough. And those are the kind of things that I think I spend some time thinking about, usually upon getting feedback.
I foolishly for a long time used to say that I was fortunate that I’d never struggled with mental health problems. And in some respects, that’s true because there is a bit of a throw of the dice with how our baselines of certain hormones or whatever, and trauma that can occur in people’s lives.
But a friend of mine who suffered with depression quite heavily, he said to me, "You are not aware of your habits that protect your mental health. And you need to go away and think about the things you’re doing to actually uphold this." Because the way I see mental health now—and this could be quite controversial—is like a table, like the one in front of us with many legs.
And the legs can be completely subjective. "Am I going outside enough? Are my family relationships good enough? How’s my professional life? How’s my bank account?" whatever it is. And you can kick away one of the legs and you’ll be okay. But people, if they don’t realize that legs from their table are disappearing, it only takes that one final kick before it topples over.
For me, being comfortable not working too hard, not traveling too much, not stretching myself too thin is something that is really important to me. And I haven’t drunk in probably about six weeks at the moment. And as I’m getting older, I’m really losing and diminishing my relationship with alcohol because when I was younger, my values for happiness didn’t sit around productivity. I could play Xbox all day.
But as I’m getting older, my values are changing, and productivity is so important to me that drinking alcohol now inflicts that. And even now, I think to myself sometimes, drinking makes me less happy because it negates my levels of productivity. And it’s only as I’m getting older that I’m starting to realize how important that is to me.
And I think that when we’re younger, we don’t quite see it that way. We kind of look to use alcohol, and especially in the context of confidence. People *can* buy bottled confidence, and they buy it in the version of alcohol because it breaks down those social struggles that they have. It makes them feel more confident or, more importantly, it makes them care less. And as long as we have alcohol available to us, people don’t need to work on their inadequacies when it comes to social interactions or having the confidence to do things.
When you talk about productivity in that context of, you know, you value it more now than ever, do you mean professional productivity?
In all senses. Whether it’s having the energy on a Sunday morning to go, "Do you want a game of tennis?" You know, I’m rubbish at tennis, but I like, you know, you know when you throw a ball for a dog, how happy it is? That’s me chasing a tennis ball around a tennis court. I’m awful, but I enjoy just doing that.
Or productivity with work, where so many times I’ll be in the shower and I’ll have an idea, and the idea really excites me. And people around me know that when I do have an idea and I want to do it, you have to leave me alone to kind of hash it out. Especially if I have a video idea. We could be going for breakfast. If I have a video idea, I’m almost like I can’t enjoy breakfast while I’ve got the idea in my head.
When I’m hungover or tired or, you know, on the road with tours and book signings or whatever, if I’m trying to burn the candle too much, I lose that spark to be able to have these creative ideas. And four or five days into a stretch of not having anything creative come in, I feel the pressure. I haven’t posted in a few days, and to me that’s important that I stay on top of those things and, you know, be creative and come up with new ideas.
I even have a set of standards that’s pretty peculiar where I do look through my comments sometimes. Although I know comments are the most poisonous place to go—the weight of one negative comment outweighs a hundred positive—but when someone says, "That’s your best video yet," I’ve accomplished something. That’s what I want.
So, when I do go these long periods of time without being productive in that sense, it starts to drain on me. And I’m starting to think, "What am I doing that’s making me happy that’s taking away happiness from other areas of my life?"
Professionally, would you consider yourself a workaholic?
No, but that could be denial. Because I like working. And it’s a difficult one now where I do have to distinguish things where I can’t watch a film on my own because I don’t see it as productive. But if I watch a film with my girlfriend, that’s fine, because I’m—it’s almost like I’ve blocked out in the calendar professional time.
But then at the same time, I do like having downtime to train Jiu-Jitsu, skateboard to the beach, have a dip. I’m not like on my phone all the time. I do like leaving my phone in my car when I do stuff. But I couldn’t think of anything worse than retirement. This is why I kind of feel everyone is not brainwashed, because I can’t expect everyone to have the same values as me, but when everyone’s like, "Oh, you know, buy a house, pay off the mortgage, in 50 years you can retire with that"—and I’m sure that’s great for some people; my dad loves being retired—but me, that’s my idea of hell.
To wake up with nothing to do or no problems to solve. I think people underestimate human beings; for thousands of years, they’ve been problem solvers with much worse problems than what we have today. And the idea of just stopping that at a point in time just drives me crazy. But then I’m not sure if I’m just potentially wired differently to other people.
And you talked about your girlfriend there. You’ve been in a relationship for how long now?
Over a year. So this, you know, I’ve always been very skeptical of talking about relationships on podcasts, because by the time they go out, I’m no longer in a relationship. So, it’s one of those things.
But yeah, I’m incredibly happy. And I think that there has to come a point where—I actually did a magic mushroom trip probably two years ago. And about eight of us, we sat by the beach, we just thought shit out. And what was crazy was, if we went and got trolleyed on alcohol and, you know, were absolute—caused chaos—that’s legal. But for eight of us to take some magic mushrooms and sit and think about life and share what we’re experiencing with people, that was illegal.
And I had time to reflect on—I do see different areas of my life like races. And I like to be in competition with people that don’t even know I’m in competition with them. For years, I’d have a list of social media competitors that I’d never spoken to, and I’d work tirelessly to beat them.
Joe Wicks?
Yeah, and you know what? They—and there was an element of envy and bitterness and that fueled me in some respects. But I sat there on the beach and I thought to myself, "What if you win the race of having the most money and the most notoriety and the most, you know, fame, but your friends that did the nine-to-five and worked to retirement got the wife and the kids and the happy life?"
And also, my mom and dad, my family is very, you know, traditional. I thought, "What really are they going to prefer? Me coming home in a Ferrari or me coming home with a family?" And that was a really big insight in my mind to—what’s important to you? That I impress my family? Yes, because I want them to think that their investment of, you know, even now 33 years, is going to pay off. And I want them to one day sit back and go, "We did a good job."
So, it’s very important that I please my parents. And I thought, "I’ve really got to make sure that I don’t finish the race of life and have the money and the fame and realize that I was in the wrong race." And that was such a big epiphany for me. And I realized at that point that I was going to have to work harder in relationships.
How many relationships did you have? Give me a history of your sort of dating track record.
(Sighs) Someone just sighed in the background over there. No, it’s—I never really respected them or took them seriously because I thought that my young 20s and even my mid-20s were more important to accomplish other things. It was only as I got to my late 20s that I realized, "Hold on, maybe these values might be good for professional life, but they won’t be good further down the line."
In 10 years’ time—in Bondi, there’s a lot of wealthy older men that have got the sports cars and the young girlfriends, and I don’t envy them at all. I don’t ever think, "Oh, I’d love to be 40 with a 25-year-old girlfriend." I don’t think anything like that. But I think it’s just been one of those things where Carol Dweck, in her book *Mindset*, talks about a fixed mindset and an open mindset.
And I appreciate that for so many things, you could come in today with so many problems in the business, and my mindset is: let’s do this, let’s do this, we’ll do this, we’ll turn this up, we’ll do better on this, we’ll be fine. But with relationships, I was very fixed. Where if something went wrong, I was like, "Oh, this is your fault and we should stop this right away." And you can appreciate in some people’s lives when things get tough, they either take the option of developing and becoming better, or they blame other people and discontinue.
And I was fixed. And I only kind of realized that when I was older. And the negatives in your 20s of fucking up a relationship aren’t that severe. If anything, I was like, "Cool, I get to work more. You know, I have more time to myself."
How long was your longest relationship?
Probably about a year.
Okay, so the current relationship is up there with your longest ever.
Don’t tell her that! A bit of extra pressure on it! But yeah, it is. And I think that especially as there’s some crazy things going on in society where there are more women over 30 without children than under 30. And I think that’s a statistic that Chris Williamson brought up on Jordan Peterson when they had a chat.
And I was like, "We’re all not appreciating family life like the generation before us." And I don’t think it’s important that we take their values as our own, but I think it’s very easy, like a kind of rip in the sea, to get taken out without realizing that there’s so much in our lives that we can prioritize that aren’t the most important things.
And my friends that got married and had kids and families very early—there are some that feed the confirmation bias: "Oh, don’t get married mate," or you know, but the majority of them are very happy. And just before we started talking, I was going to mention like the—I think it’s called the Inner Citadel—where if you can imagine that someone, for whatever reason...
This is in response to the question I asked about monogamy?
Yeah.
Okay, so before we started recording, I asked James if he believed in monogamy.
So, imagine you’ve got someone who injures his leg and they have to chop his leg off. (I might butcher this when I’m saying it.) He then might end up being angry at people that have two legs and make up his own reason: "Actually, you know what, two legs is useless. You know, you don’t need that, you only need one leg."
And because something didn’t work for him or his surroundings didn’t suit what happened to him, he decided to tear everyone else’s down. So, when we talk about monogamy—where there are people that are in open relationships—I often look at them and (John, I was going to say without causing offense) fuck them. I was like, "Who hurt you?" You know?
Like, at what point did—it is a societal structure being monogamous, but it’s because there’s a huge benefit to doing that. You’re talking about sacrifice, you’re talking about, you know, primitive urges or whatever it is, but at the base of that, you get to support a family better. So, I believe monogamy’s good for loads of reasons. I do believe in it. And also, my mom and dad are still together; they’re each other’s first girlfriend and boyfriend.
But I do find that people that come along and try and tear down your beliefs of monogamy, they’re the people that it didn’t work for them so they want to burn the system. Same in the dieting world, where you’ve got plus-sized models promoting body positivity. I think there’s some absolute credit to that. I’m a personal trainer sat across from you that has a six-pack, but I think to them, they got fucked over so much in the pursuit of trying to get in shape that they decided to tear the system down for everyone else. You know, because it didn’t work for them, they have to go around and influence the way you see it. So, I think that’s one of the kind of ways that I see things like monogamy. I think for the majority of people, it’s perfect.
But you’re still going to get—well, I’m assuming here—but going to get temptations. And you know, that when we think about the monogamy discussion, I had this conversation with my friends the other day. There is—I’m going to stitch them all up, I don’t care—there’s six of them. And it’s split down the middle whether they believe in monogamy or polygamy, or whether they believe—I wouldn’t say polygamy is necessarily some of their beliefs; it’s more like, is one partner for life the right thing? Is marriage the right thing? Or do you have like a child with somebody maybe and then the future you’re probably going to be with somebody else?
The stats around this are showing, I believe, that people are struggling to stay in marriages as society develops. How do we not—like, are you not scared that you’ll lose the "thing"? How do you not lose the spark?
So, remember we said about the expectation effect? If you go into a relationship expecting that you’re going to cheat or you’re going to break up, I don’t think that sets a good foundation for it. Again, I would like to go into a relationship and potentially a marriage fully believing in it, but being happy to be wrong.
And if I get divorced later on in life, as long as I tried my hardest and I committed, I can take that. I could take that as a loss or whatever it is. But somehow in this debate, we’ve lost the ability to try your hardest at something. And you know what, if 10 and 15 years down the line you do lose it, be amicable about it. Don’t destroy someone’s life and make them feel like a piece of shit because you cheated on them or whatever. Instead, just call a spade a spade and be like, "Look, we might not be the same people we were when we met."
I think people should try their best and try and build a stable home to bring up a child because that’s what I’ve been exposed to. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I also don’t think that people should force the marriage at the point that it is broken. Because I think that two people under a house that resent each other trying to bring up a family, they’d probably be better off just having parents in two different households and get more gifts for Christmas or whatever it is.
Do you think cheating is a lack of discipline?
In some respect—and you know what, the majority of it, yes—because we do get urges. And I think, you know, we’re fucking monkeys in suits, right? We are chimps at the end of the day; we are organized apes. We have come from a lineage of fucking each other up for so long. Like, you go back 100 years, a thousand years—the wars that we’ve had, all humans have ever done is get territorial on bits of land and kill each other, right? Savages. You know, you watch *Braveheart*, you’re like, "Wow, imagine being a soldier back then." Or you watch *300*, you’re like, "Wow, these guys were spearing each other then going for lunch."
So, you know, we are forcing our DNA and who we are into this kind of preset mold of, you know, "Do you take you to be your lawful wife?" Of course, there’s going to be a lot of people that don’t suit that. I think at the moment as well, there’s so many options. There’s so much availability, so many secret places to slide DM. LinkedIn private message, or your Soho House app that can be used like Tinder—whatever it is.
I had no idea you could do that on the Soho House app!
Neither did I, but yeah—bullshit! So, like, there’s so many different places that people and avenues people can go. You know, back in the day, if you wanted to take someone for a date and you’ve got a wife, you could be seen out. You could be seen talking to that person. I think the repercussions of being a shit house are probably a lot less severe now.
And I think that the way society is going, it is worrying. It is definitely worrying that there are so many options. And what was that website? Was it Ashley Madison? It was a dating site for married people. All right, oh! If you wanted to be like, "Look, we need to be hidden away at a bar," and it had millions of users. So, straight away, I think it was brought down by that hacking group Anonymous or whatever. I could have got that wrong, but...
So, there are so many people—it could also be other things like a lack of confidence in your partner. It could be a lack of confidence in your relationship. It could be all these things. But in my mind, I think better that you go for something that feels right. If you’re someone that sits here and goes, "I do not want to get married," I’m not saying, you know, it’s going to fit everyone.
But I think if you’re someone that—importantly, there are sacrifices. And when I look to get married, it’s not just about the relationship I have with that person; it’s about creating a stable platform to bring up children. But again, we’re almost bred in society like we can never be wrong.
Ignorance is not a bad thing. We are all ignorant to so much. The majority of people couldn’t tell you anything really substantial about history. You know, we don’t know that much about so many things. I don’t know what the motorways are called in the North, all of these things. So, we’re allowed to be ignorant with these things, and we’re allowed to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t endeavor to get the best possible outcome.
I remember my girlfriend said to me one day, and it—you know when your girlfriend says something you kind of rubbish at the time, you deny it, and then later you’re thinking about it? It’s one of those things. She said to me, she was like, "Do you actually *want* to be in a relationship, or are you doing it because you know it’s the right thing to do?"
That’s a very important question.
Yeah. And it’s funny because a lot of what you were saying was related to, you know, "You know you should, it’s the right thing to do," etc. But deep in your core... and you talked a little bit about the fact that we’re all monkeys. And what would the monkey want to do? Would you actually *want* to be, if you could have an alternative option, would you choose the alternative option where you have the upsides of the relationship and also the upsides of being single? Is that what you believe most people would choose?
I could be getting this wrong as well, but there’s something called the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap. I think that’s what it’s called. Where when we’re angry, it’s very hard to imagine being calm. When we’re hot, it’s very hard to imagine being cold. When you’re in one state of consciousness, the opposing state feels very hard to reconcile.
So, when you’re single and you’re fucking strangers and you’re feeling very numb afterwards and thinking, "Why the fuck did I do that?" (post-nut clarity, as a lot of people call it), you’re thinking, "God, what I’d do for a relationship. What I would do to fuck someone and want them to stay."
You know? But then when you’re in a relationship, you get the opposite. When you’re in a relationship, you’re thinking, "Oh, it could be nice to sleep with a stranger," or whatever it is. I think that we’re always—they say grass is greener; it is very, you know, cliché. But we’re always looking at that opposing sense of feeling to how we’re feeling now, and almost curious about it.
But I think there are dangers of, you know, say you do want to open your relationship. You’re opening the door to catastrophic things should they happen. And I think that there is definitely like a hard-hard-wiring side of things where, you know, if you want that sense of freedom on your side, cool. But they’re going to probably need that sense of freedom on theirs.
And it might seem like a good idea now whilst you’re in the position of "only slept with one person for five years," but then when you experience the polar opposite realization and reality, what if you realize you made a grave error? And you can’t undo seeing or knowing or experiencing that. So, again, I’m not—they’re like, "Oh, this guy’s been in a relationship a year, he’s giving us all advice."
No, I get it. I think I’ve arrived at the same conclusion. I read *The Game*, that pick-up artist book, and then I read his sequel to it where he realizes that much of what—the way he had chosen to live was wrong. You know, he becomes the best pick-up artist in the world, he then tries polygamy, realizes polygamy is actually not the right approach and doesn’t lead to happiness, and then decides on monogamy.
And generally, when I think about all the things that are worth it in my life, they come at a *sacrifice*. There’s something else I have to choose instead. If I want a six-pack, I can’t choose waffles every day. If I want waffles, I don’t get the six-pack. And so, the six-pack itself is in fact just a story. It’s a story of sacrifice, of discipline. It’s a story about who you are. And that’s why it’s perceived to be valuable.
I think in, for me, a relationship is valuable because it’s a story of commitment and all the other things you said no to to say yes to this. That’s part of what actually gives it its intrinsic value. So...
And the six-pack is valuable because it’s hard to obtain. That’s why we give it value. And the story around it is the same. Yeah, they’re hard to obtain. They’re difficult. It requires work.
Like a six-pack.
Exactly. And you’ve got the temptations, whether it’s the chocolate cake or a single person, or maybe not even single. But you need to really have like a clear-set idea on what you want and, again, to lean on your values.
And it’s interesting you say about the book *The Game*. You realized in the first—the call to action wasn’t so much a system, but a belief in a system. And there is every chance that the systems I’ve put in that book might not actually hold any weight, but if someone believes they will, they could end up working a bit like *The Game*. You tell someone, "This is how it works," they have full faith in it. And it’s an interesting one that some people just need to know that it can happen.
For instance, I talk about the link we spoke about: confidence and anxiety. Confidence and inspiration also sit on a parallel with each other. Because to get inspired by someone, what we’re really doing is getting confidence from seeing it happen. So, you think about someone like Joe Rogan. Started off with being audacious. He then inspired us by allowing us to feel more confident about the chance that that could happen.
And there are two trails that people go with this, and this was really interesting when I wrote about it. People see your success, this success of the podcast—they go two ways. One, they’re bitter and they fucking want to hate you for it. Or two, they’re inspired. And you, without knowing it, are projecting confidence into the lives of hundreds of thousands because you’re showing them it can be done.
I think it was Nelson Mandela that said, "No one believes it’s possible until it’s done." And a good friend of mine, Lucy Lord, she bought me a little card that had it on it and gave it to me and I stuck it on my window when I first got to Sydney. And it’s so important that people do try their hardest in endeavors like relationships, because without knowing it, there are going to be friends (even your group of six people in that group) that you’re inspiring them without even knowing it. And inspiration doesn’t mean you have to be the best relationship in the world, but you’re showing people it works. So, I think that the buck doesn’t just stop at sacrifice; it also—my parents would have inspired me.
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My dad said the key to a happy marriage is accepting you’re wrong even when you’re right.
You talk a lot about dating in the book at different times. Chapter 6, you talk about dating apps again and your relationship with dating apps and how you’ve been—you’ve had kind of like an on-off relationship with dating apps. When I was thinking about writing my next book, one of the topics I was going to write about was modern dating, because it appears to me that there’s a generation that have kind of been caught in the technological transition, almost. See what I mean?
It’s really—it’s a very big topic. And when I was writing the book, I was thinking, "Fuck, this isn’t a dating book mate. There’s going to be a lot of married people reading this." And I say to them two things. I go: one, there might be something in there that doesn’t change your life but it could fucking change someone else’s, right? And even if you don’t have many friends, you could instill that in your kids or whatever it is.
And dating is such a big topic because it is actually an incredibly big pain point because people either don’t have the confidence required to meet someone, or they might not have the confidence to leave someone. And when I spoke about the sunk cost fallacy—people remaining invested in something purely based off their previous endeavor, whether it’s time, energy, resources—there are so many people out there that if you ask them why they’re with their partner, they’d give you the amount of time they’ve already invested. "Oh, I’ve been with them four years."
Yeah, don’t want to throw it away.
So, you’re already giving people confidence to leave a relationship. And if you think you’ve got professional life, home life, and health as three things, a lot of advice we need to give people is around dating.
And it’s been maybe three years since I’ve touched alcohol on a date. Because I realized how much alcohol skews the dating scene as well. And even my girlfriend won’t mind me saying this, but it got to the point where I would drink to kill nerves before a date. And you might meet someone and straight away look at them and go, "Ah, this isn’t going to work." But then three drinks in, "Mm, kind of all right."
And then before you know it, you’ve shagged a stranger on a weeknight, you’re hungover at work, and you’ve put yourself off dating again because you know that when you first met them, you didn’t want that. And the next day you did, and you’re painting dating in a negative light. And even how I met my girlfriend now, I would say to people, "Let’s meet and do something," whether it’s going for a swim in the sea, going for a walk—"Have you got a dog? Do you want to get a coffee?"
And I actually like the idea of moving with someone. The two places I find the most organic conversations are driving and walking. Driving, when you’re not sat facing each other and it’s not quite so interview-esque, people really open up. And they’re also in a place that’s very relaxing for them. And when you go for a walk and there’s movement involved, I feel it feels less interview-esque.
If you say to me, like, let’s remove dating out the context: "I want you to sit with a stranger and drink alcohol with them with a small chance they’ll be compatible." I’d be like, "No! Imagine—that’s ludicrous. I don’t want to do that." But when you break it down again, like the fear and insecurities or whatever, okay, if a date is too much, what about getting an ice cream at the beach? Okay, that’s something I can do.
And as long as you’re not trying to lose weight, doing a swim on a Monday, an ice cream on a Tuesday, a coffee on a Wednesday—people will think you’re a bit promiscuous, but you know what I mean. Then you can get more dates in. And again, we’re going back into my marketing analogy: surely seeing five people in a week for 20-30 minutes each is going to be better for your general building of prospects than it would be getting smashed on a Thursday night and shagging a stranger you’re never going to talk to again.
So, even the way people perceive dating can be hugely changed. And you talk about dating apps—there’s one in London called Thursday.
Yeah, I know it.
Where was that when I needed it! You know, because there is so much small talk on social media where "Oh yeah, what you doing this weekend? I like that idea," but it’s giving us one of many walls we can hide behind. Because dating is difficult, and it removes "Sorry, I’ve got a boyfriend," fake numbers—"Oh, I must have given my number wrong"—people are hiding behind that.
Confidence isn’t like an award; it’s not like a trophy that I give you to go on your wall. "Well done, Steven Bartlett, you’re confident." It’s more like fitness, where if you stop training it, you will lose it, and you will lose it a lot quicker than you probably would expect.
So, people don’t realize that with so many things they’re paying into this—bit like fitness, bit like going the gym or going for a run. And when you put up this massive stop like "I’m going to use dating apps," although some people do find love and meet their forever person on there, without realizing it, they are reducing their ability to train that area of them. A bit like when you maybe don’t do work for a week, you go back and sit in front of your laptop, you’re like, "Fuck, how does this work again?" So, there is a negative, definitely, that goes along with the positive—like Newton’s laws, where you’ve got all this convenience on one side, you’re definitely breeding weakness on the other.
What is it that—when you know that someone isn’t going to fulfill what they say they want to do—what are the cues of that? Like, I was just thinking because I’m thinking about a particular friend who continually says they want to go to the gym and they continually say they want to change their life, but there’s just no—there’s been no change in like 10 years. And as a friend, I’m getting like exhausted by trying...
Sometimes I’m like, I talk about it a lot on the podcast when I have psychologists and stuff on, I’m like, "Am I overstepping my mark for even wanting to help them?"
It’s a difficult one. I’m the same, where I’ve actually found myself turning into an asshole.
Yeah, I don’t want to be an asshole.
With my friends, because I feel like maybe there’s that point I’ll get to where finally it will click. And then I realize I’m actually ruining the relationship a little bit.
Amen.
I’m like, "Are my friends now resenting me because I’m trying to help them?" And yeah, I had a bit of a—not a falling out, actually—but having a chat with a friend and he said to me, "Oh, it’s all right for you." And we were living together at the time. And I said, "Well, I didn’t live with someone who had a fucking million followers when I was starting my business."
Ah! You know, like and—I said that to him and I said, "When I was starting out as a PT, I didn’t have any friends that I could lean on to do stuff. And I was trying—I said, 'Look, I’ll do anything you want for you to start this business. I’m here for you. You can have my Instagram for a week and promote your business, whatever it is.'"
But then you say, yeah, the talk and the actions don’t always add up. And then you get to a point where you’re like, "Do I want what’s best for them, or do I preserve the relationship?"
In that situation, what do you think the blocker is?
Belief. Belief. Yeah. I think they want it, but they don’t really think they can do it.
Confidence? Is that the—this is similar...
Yeah, and they portray confidence in some areas of their life tremendously. But I think the main thing is belief. I think they want to believe they can do it, but they don’t truly believe it. And unfortunately, action must come first. And you must actually prove to yourself that it can be done. And that requires a lot of work without any gratification.
People don’t realize that—you say about everyone knowing how to lose weight on the outside, it’s almost like a macro cycle. But really the micro cycle is the tiny habits in between. So, someone can go, "I need to eat less and move more," but like you say, that’s nuance. Really, we dive that down. We go, "Okay, let’s go no food till 1:00 PM. Let’s go, you know, two big meals, maybe one snack, whatever."
And then we go, "Okay, 10,000 steps a day." Although that does attribute to the macro, the big thing that’s happening, we still must give them the small steps. Whether it’s with a business where you say like, they—you know their big macro strategy is to post more on social media, but the micro is one post every day, answering someone’s questions, doing this, doing that.
I think that if people’s first stepping stone to where they think they need to go is too big, they’ll never take the step. And what I do as a coach in many facets of my life is to make that first stepping stone so small they have no other option but to take it.
Super interesting. Because what you said there, you know, at the start of that was about how in essence people—people want evidence in order to start. But the truth is, when you start, you *get* the evidence. And I see that a lot in people, you know, and people coming up to me saying, "I’ve got this business idea." They’ll come up to me in the gym all the time and say, "I’ve got this business idea."
And then you’ll hear the next thing they’ll say is all the excuses that they’ve put in front of themselves starting. And I really mean that. Like it literally is like, "I’ve got this great idea, I think it’s going to change the world, BUT..." and then they explain all the things that are imperfect about timing or funding or "I just need to wait for this" or this or whatever. And really, underpinning all of that is a lack of belief.
And like, you’re right, like when I started, I’m sure when you started, I didn’t have evidence. I didn’t have sufficient evidence that I knew what I was doing. But I gained the evidence which resulted in belief from stumbling forward in a very messy way. For some reason, people—a lot of people need the evidence *first*.
And we have this as well with imposter syndrome. And some people rebuke imposter syndrome, but we need to realize that every single person is going to feel like an imposter. You get someone macho going, "No, not me," but we will. And I like to point out to people that you will at some point be an imposter objectively.
Even being a parent for the first time—you have no previous experience bringing a child into the world. So, the beginning you need to pretty much lie to yourself and go, "I’m a good parent." And then after three months and your young baby or child hasn’t got any bruises on its head, you’re like, "Well, I’ve got evidence. I’m a good parent, you know, didn’t fall over and hit his head on a table" or whatever.
And the same in any endeavor. Your first podcast you did on *Diary of a CEO*, you would have had to say, "I’m a good podcaster," with no evidence that you are. But then a hundred episodes in, you go, "Oh, actually I’m all right." You are very good, by the way, as a podcaster.
I think I just *acted* like one.
But then again, you’re being the person you *need* to be. And that’s a massive part of confidence as well. The first thing that people need to have a real clear vision on is who they *need* to be. And that was the first thing that projected me from not being an inherently confident person—should have seen the sweat patches I had from the last episode, you know.
§02Transcript — part 2
And I’m not trying to masquerade that fact. I’m not trying to hide it up or be dishonest with people. Instead, I have so many internal conversations with myself about who I need to be today. Because we do need to become a persona in certain situations, like being a father for the first time, like doing your first business sales pitch, like starting your first podcast, or your first day as CEO when you get promoted within a business. You might go from Director to Managing Director. There is an element of you *having* to be an imposter, but you have to take it upon yourself with beliefs that you can do it because you can’t get the evidence that you’re good at it before you start.
If I spoke to your girlfriend and I asked her, I said, "What does James need to work on?" What would she say?
Ooh... (Laughs) "Oh yeah, no he’s perfect." No. Patience.
Interesting.
I have a very active mind. And I’m actually in the process of trying to arrange getting an ADHD test as an adult, because people I know that have been diagnosed in their older life say it’s really benefited them understanding how their mind works.
And sometimes I get so excited over doing things that will please *me*, I have blinkers on to other people. Whether other people want to relax right now, or other people, you know, don’t want to be in the room while I’m filming content or whatever it is. And I feel that sometimes I need to be more patient and go, "Okay, here’s the idea. Write it down. Do it tomorrow."
That’s one of the things that—it’s only after I’ve done it where I think, "I had no consideration for anyone else then," because I created a pain point in my head that I wanted to action that.
And I always break down our personalities—and this could be a really weird way to think of it—like a tribe. You know, whether you’ve got lefties and, you know, people on the right, whether you’ve got aggressive people or calm people. We’re all part of an ecosystem that we need the audacious people that, you know, are going to be impatient and do things; we need the critical thinkers and people that are more logistic with that.
But if you look at the 16 personalities, none of those personalities are "confident." Confident isn’t a personality trait. You’ve got debater, entrepreneur, all of these things. So, people need to appreciate that even though as an ecosystem we all need to be vastly different, confidence doesn’t sit as a personality trait. It sets—it’s almost like a set of values that each and every person can have.
Because some things that we have are predetermined, like height (and yes, height can be influenced by the amount of nutrition you get growing up or whatever), but ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you’re introvert, extrovert, whether you’re patient, impatient. Everyone really—confidence is your almost set of beliefs you have surrounding something based on previous experiences.
I could get you the most least confident person ever—some shy, timid person sat here—I go, "What you like at driving?" 93% of people say they’re above average at driving. Which doesn’t make sense as a statistic. Human beings are a massively capable-of-being-overconfident machines. Most exoneration cases are from faulty eyewitnesses. So, whenever anyone’s exonerated, I think maybe 70% of the reasons why were from faulty eyewitnesses. If I said, "Was that guy wearing a red top?" he’d go, "Yeah, yeah, definitely was." So, we *do* have the ability to be overconfident; we’re just not utilizing it in all the areas of our lives that we should.
That kind of brings me back to that point about evidence. When you said the thing about driving, because if I’ve never crashed a car, I would—I think I’ve got evidence of being good at driving. But then in another facet of my life, I might not have that evidence. I think I really am trying to understand that point about evidence. Is confidence just a result of the evidence we do or subjective evidence, whether correct or incorrect evidence, that we’ve gained in different areas? Like I could be—you know, if I’d crashed my car every day, I could be really confident on stage and on podcasts and in dates and whatever, if I’ve had loads of positive reinforcement in terms of evidence there, but really unconfident in cars.
So, in part of the book, I come up with my own kind of theory with this. And I say that we must take into account that the history of someone will have an influence on how they perceive the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. So, you might have, you know, asked some people on a date and never got a successful way face-to-face. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed forever.
You might go, "Oh, you know, my ability to talk to someone to get their number, it’s just not that good." "Oh, how many people have you asked for a number?" "Oh, three." It’s not something fixed that we can never develop. On the other side of things where people will be overconfident in certain scenarios, there’s also the availability bias that turns into this as well, where we make decisions based on the information that’s available to us.
So, I had a fun deep dive with this where people have a fear of flying. Much more people have a fear of flying than they do a fear of driving, but driving that same distance as far as fatality is much more dangerous. Your chances of dying driving are tremendously higher. Shark attacks, again in Australia, everyone goes, "Oh, do you go in the sea? It’s really dangerous." I go, "Mate, you’re like so many times more likely to drown than you are to get bitten by a shark."
But no one’s getting in the water being afraid of drowning, and that is the biggest cause of death, I believe, on Bondi Beach where I live. So much of what we perceive the outside world to be is really created and curated by what’s available to us. And our friendship circles are massively, you know, influential in that as well. Even you having three out of six of your friends that don’t believe in monogamy—that’s going to influence your availability bias of what you think is capable in a relationship. There’s so much more to the topic of confidence than just your history; it’s also your current and who you’re with.
I guess even that friendship circle or those, you know, that is a form of evidence as well. Like if my friends are telling me that I am a useless scumbag, whether they’re saying it directly or just with a facial expression, that is adding somewhat to my self-story, which is this formation of evidence I have about myself. And that could lead me to be pessimistic in my endeavors or optimistic. Are you saying to—like, are you advising people to chop these people out of their circle?
The term I use is "picking your passengers." Where if I said you’ve got to drive eight hours tomorrow, that’s one thing. But if I say I’m putting someone in the car with you, that’s something completely different altogether. And for eight hours, you would be so meticulous on who you go with. I’m sure that if it was someone you didn’t really get on with, you’d be like, "Can we not just get them a driver and drive them up, you know?"
Your space in your car is so, you know, private to you and important to you. And again, even when you are traveling around or whatever it is, having people with you that are going to drain you of energy becomes almost like a cost. And by going on your own or with someone better picked, you’re going to be able to improve your productivity, your sense of the way you see things.
So, we do need to appreciate that people we surround ourselves with are either going to be a headwind or a wind in our sails. They can be the neutral lot, but we must take note of that. And I’m not saying that if anyone causes you any issues, get rid of them. But you need to weigh it up in the long term. Because if you’re with someone who’s got a pessimistic outlook on life and the world and they’re not going to change irrespective of how much you help them, they will hinder your net position. So, the values of how much your net position is important to you and your family and people around you, you might have to make the decision to let that person go.
In the book, you reference Jordan Peterson. You talk about this "utility of deprivation" concept. A word, a phrase I’ve never heard before. Please explain it to me and why you felt it was contextually relevant to this topic.
I went down a rabbit hole on Jordan Peterson. You know, I don’t agree with everything he says. That’s the—that’s the term of 2022, isn’t it? You know, disclaimer: I do not agree...
Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
But I do agree with the majority of things he says. Masturbation is something that we kind of just, you know, porn and OnlyFans, we’re kind of "Oh, you know, let people live." But you know, there are some OnlyFans models being murdered by their fans. Where some of us might think, "Oh, it’s good for society."
We’ve got porn where men can access more naked women in an hour than a man could ever access in a life 20, 30, 40 years ago. That again—Newton’s laws of opposites, every reaction opposite reaction—that’s going to be doing things to people. And if I’m in a bar and I’m like, "You know, oh, I really want to talk to that person," again I’m using the dating analogy, it could be anything.
If I go home and masturbate to some really hot people in porn, I’m going to be like, "Oh, no, I’m just going to have another beer with my mates." So, having that utility of deprivation... and if you abstain from—and I’m not saying I’m not anti-porn or NoFap or whatever they call it—I’m just saying to people to consider the implications if you stop.
If you’re someone who’s lonely and you’re single, could abstaining from masturbation improve your net position? Fucking probably. Because you’re going to be in a position where you can’t just get the gas out of the release valve every now and then that suits your purpose. Because even some people are getting desensitized to sexual intimacy because of the amount of time they’re spending watching porn.
That’s not good for anyone. Imagine you get to 40 and the idea of actually fucking someone doesn’t seem as good as the idea of watching porn. And this is something, especially with young people—the real—or the reality of having sex when you’re 16 and what you’ve watched on porn is vastly different. So, we cannot say that this is just a net benefit or a net positive thing for people.
So, the utility of deprivation is to appreciate that sacrificing some things in your life has a positive effect. To stop drinking, for instance, will have a net positive on other areas of your life. To stop eating junk food, or at least reduce the amount, or reduce your adiposity—the amount of body fat you have—there is a utility to depriving yourself. Although porn is great, fast food is great, and all of these things—although that’s great, there is a utility and a benefit to depriving yourself of them.
Have you deprived yourself of masturbation?
Masturbation in general. I’m in a healthy relationship, so I haven’t really got the time to do it as I did before.
The urges are there sometimes, don’t get me wrong. Because it’s also a form of escapism. You know, people might fantasize about sleeping with other people. And I think that if any...
You haven’t got the time to do it? That’s bullshit.
No, but like—no, that is bullshit. You’re right. That’s my—I’ve kind of trying to fill the gap there with like a some kind of defense.
You could probably do it now and I wouldn’t even notice. (Laughs)
No, you said not to make the table make a noise! (Laughs) So, it’s one of those things where, you know, I’m not saying, "Make it illegal, get rid of porn," I’m not saying that. I’m saying that we need to take note of the conveniences in our life and...
I completely get that. I’m just asking from a personal perspective. It’s a thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about because I’m in a relationship as well, and I do believe that my intimate relationship with my partner will not be as good if I masturbate all the time. I—my desire won’t be there. So, if I masturbated at 9:00 PM and then I got into bed with my partner at 10:00 PM, I’m going to want to sleep.
You know what? Especially if they—if you’ve somehow misinterpreted where you’re at in the day and then an arm comes around and goes, "Hey babe," and you’re like, "Fuck." Yeah, so the—there’ll be a lot of female listeners that can’t appreciate to the full extent what it’s like to be a man once you’ve ejaculated. And they call it post-nut clarity and all these things. I’m sure I’m going to be absolutely slammed for saying this, but it is a change in psychology. Like instantly.
There’s no other way that you can experience it. Again, the hot-cold empathy gap. When you’re horny, you can’t imagine not having a sex drive, and when you’ve not got a sex drive, you can’t imagine being horny. But, you know, it’s one of those things where we just need to take it into consideration. And for someone, if I was to sit opposite someone today and go, "Could your life be better if you stopped drinking as much?" If they say yes, you should probably fucking not drink as much. "Could your life be better and your dating life be better if you stopped wanking to porn?" "Yeah." "Well, maybe stop wanking to porn, or at least do it less."
I think my entire life would be better if I stopped wanking to porn. I do. Because I think I’d have a better relationship. I genuinely do. I think you would look forward to the intimacy way more if you knew the only way that you were going to get it was with your part—I mean, there’s me saying masturbation isn’t intimacy—but you would look forward to it a lot more if you weren’t getting the release in the valve in your hotel room while you’re in London promoting your book.
I appreciate—did you have cameras? (Laughs) But you’re right, it’s one of those things where it’s a complex topic and I’m not coming at it from a position of expertise. When he said that, I thought, I’ve never heard it put so succinctly that there is a benefit to abstaining from things that you *like*.
Liver King, exact same philosophy. He goes, "We don’t eat the liver because we like the taste. We eat it because it’s good for us." And he’s like, "No one likes training, but we do it because..." (Do I sound like him?) Like he’s in the room again. But yeah, so it is one of those things where we must appreciate some things, you know, pure net benefit aren’t going to benefit us in the long term.
Now, if you’re in a relationship and you’re masturbating, I would say that maybe isn’t as severe as being single and masturbating. Because being in a relationship and say you masturbate here and there or you have a long shower and enjoy yourself, that’s one thing. But if you’re single and doing it, you’re preventing yourself from going down the path of doing something you *need* to do, which is to, you know, be more proactive in meeting a suitable life partner. And again, someone could say I’m brainwashed—"Oh, this guy’s monogamy brainwashed" or whatever. At least if you’re in a relationship, you’re not hindering your potential quite to the extent of inaction on this side.
What is your goal? Like what is your—do you have a goal in terms of your life? When you think about what you’re trying to achieve right now, from being here, from what you’ve done over the last month, what is it you’re trying to do?
I was—I got to Shoreditch this morning about quarter to seven. Couldn’t get a coffee. So I’m walking down the road to try and find something. And I ended up going down the road and a lady just said, "Thank you." And I said, "What for?" And she goes, "You’ve changed my life." And I was like, "Thank you," and I was talking to her.
And she started crying. And I get very awkward. I get awkward when someone gets me like a birthday present. When people are like, "Oh, get the cake out," I’m like, "Oh for fuck’s sake." I even at Christmas—it feels weird to be given gifts. I just feel very awkward. And I feel like me just going "Thanks for that" isn’t enough. So then I find myself putting it on like, "Guys, you didn’t have to," that’s fake, I just—it weirds me out.
So when people compliment me in real life, I get very awkward. And my friends laugh about it, they’re like, "You know, relax mate, she’s just saying thank you." And then she started crying and I was like, "What have I done?" And to me, this is still a very, very strange thing that a stranger would cry seeing me, when I’ve never met them, spoken to them on the phone or messaged them.
So from that interaction, it’s apparent that there is a net positive effect for what I’m doing. And I do take pleasure in that, even though I do find it incredibly awkward. So for me, that small interaction there kind of pays into this pot that this whole crusade I’m on of trying to eradicate bullshit. And I’m definitely roughing up some people on one side, but on the other side, I’m making people’s lives better. I think, fuck, that makes me feel good. That’s a selfish endeavor: I’m helping people because it makes me feel good. But I’d like to continue that. And at the same time, I live—I live a great life. You know, it sounds really cliché, people go, "I have something that other people will never have," and that’s enough. And that’s how I feel all the time. So, yeah, it’s a bit crazy.
What was the worst day of your life?
13th of March 2017. I went to—I was in Sydney. I’d been there. And personal training in the UK did well, earned good money. Lived with my parents, moved out, moved back in for a bit. My mom and dad were heroes for me. When I was doing the long hours and you have to do—I remember someone saying, as a personal trainer, "Get your first thousand hours under your belt." Because once you’ve done that, everything else is easy. I just focused on that.
And it went really well, and my mom and dad helped me. My mom would leave leftover food for breakfast. So I’d literally be eating like Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes at 9:00 o’clock in the morning, cold out of Tupperware. And then I’d come home from rugby at like 9:30 in the evening, my mom would be like, "Give me your washing," you know, "You go to bed."
So then when I went to Australia, that’s what I wanted to do again: just face-to-face personal training. But I went into a gym with 32 other personal trainers. Deren, who’s listening somewhere here, was the *only* person that introduced himself to me out of 32 PTs. Whether it was because he saw I was struggling, or the fact that I was English, he was just a nice guy. And he was like, "Hey mate, you want to get a coffee?"
And I’d pissed off so many of the other personal trainers by prospecting so hard on my first day that one of the trainers said he wanted—said, "If you talk to my client again, I’ll take your head off." And I was like, "Wow, this is a competitive gym."
And for the first six weeks in that gym that I met Deren in, I was failing. I was *not* creating a client base. I was doing 25-30 hours of PT a week in the UK. I moved to Paradise and I was struggling to do six hours. And this is the crazy thing now: I’m in Sydney and people go, "Oh James, I love your stuff." I go, "Well, in 2016, no one loved it." I couldn’t even get people in for a free session.
I would say to people like, "Hey mate, can I give you a couple tips with the exercise you’re doing?" They’d be like, "Nah." And so I’ve gone from this stage of my life where—that was demoralizing because at least if someone told me to fuck off when they’re doing a pec fly, in my old gym I could go into the PT room and have banter with the other PTs, we’d pick ourselves up and go, "Oh, don’t talk to him, Mr. Grumpy Guts, doesn’t want any help. Even though he can’t contract his chest" or whatever. But in this gym, I kind of had nowhere to go.
So, on the 13th of March, I sat in an area called Australia Square and my two housemates said, "How’s it going?" And I was like, "Not good." I was like—I was thinking about the fact I might have to move back home to my parents. And I’ve just moved into Paradise. The week before I had to borrow about 500 pounds off my dad to buy a sofa. I still have that sofa now. And like, being 27 at the time, messaging my dad and asking him to PayPal me 500 quid so I could buy a sofa and some of the IKEA stuff—I was like, "This doesn’t feel good because I had everything I wanted in the UK. I was doing well."
I went to follow my dreams and then suddenly I was borrowing money from my dad at fucking—at an age where I shouldn’t have to. And that was the point for me where I was like, I need to do things differently. So, there’s a street called Pitt Street. I walked down it and there was an OfficeWorks. And went into OfficeWorks and I bought a whiteboard and some markers.
And it was only 2:00 PM in the afternoon. I was like, "I’m done." Went home, 3:00 PM. 3:00 PM in Australia is 6:00 AM in the UK. So, I set up a tripod, got my iPhone. I didn’t have to edit, didn’t have to record. I had to do a speech for three minutes. I had about 3,000 followers. Live on Facebook with the use of a whiteboard. The first one got maybe like 100 likes and I was like, "I’ve gone fucking viral."
And I decided that I was going to do my six hours of PT, try the best that I could, which wasn’t even enough to survive at that point. But then I was going to go home and do everything I could to build an online following and to build an online business. And that was in March. By May, I left the gym. I still had to pay rent for a year. But I had one remaining client. It actually—I made more money staying at home than I did going into the gym. And I had one client and she said to me she couldn’t afford to go to a festival.
So I said, "Instead of paying me $120 (which is like 65 pounds), I said, 'You bring me a gift. I like training you, we have fun. You bring me a gift.'" So she’d come in, she’s like, "I got you a Lululemon hoodie." I was like, "Sick." Cost less than the PT session. So I’d go in, I’d skateboard in, and I would literally just go in to train this client for free but she’d have a gift for me. And all the other PTs were like, "Is it your birthday?" I was like, "I don’t charge money to my clients anymore. I have an online business."
But if it wasn’t for that day where I literally—that had the lump in my throat when I was messaging my mates and I was like, "I’m not good at work. I’m failing a PT business, which is the only reason I came to Australia." If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have got the whiteboard, I wouldn’t have got the markers, and I wouldn’t have gone home and gone live on Facebook, which just so happened to be the beginning of a compounding effect to build a following. It was then 50,000 followers.
I bought a camera, learned how to edit terribly. My first video that I ever filmed without an iPhone was one that I did on aloe vera. I didn’t know how to work the camera, didn’t know how to edit properly. I did one long piece that I put on Facebook. I was like, "Aloe vera? Isn’t that for fucking sunburn? What are you drinking it for fat loss? Oh, you’re an idiot."
And although that was kind of like not even *that* bad—like no one died. But in the same respect that all wins feel the same, all losses can feel the same. So, it’s not a competition. If you sell a business for 5 million dollars and someone else sells for 500 million, you don’t get a different dopamine and serotonin. You’re not on an Uber surcharge. You’re not waking up like, "Oh my god, I feel amazing."
But the same with pain. For me to struggle in my business, which was very important to me—someone might go, "Well, yeah, my dog died." And I said, "Well, we’re both fucking sad. This isn’t a competition." But to me, that was really one of the times that I was like, "This is shit." But I’m so grateful to the version of myself back then that took action from that. Because one of my favorite quotes in that book was from one of the most famous martial artists of all time called Rickson Gracie. And he goes, "Losing is not the same as being defeated."
And that was massive. He said it on my podcast where he goes, "You can lose, but if you turn up and you go again, you’ve not been defeated." So, if someone competes in Jiu-Jitsu and they lose a match, that’s cool. But if you lose and you never compete again, as far as I’m concerned, you were defeated that day. So for me, social strategy, whatever it is, if people can appreciate—whether it’s asking for a number, asking for a pay rise, starting a business—losing is one thing and being defeated is something completely different.
It’s one of the quotes you said in Chapter 3 in the book: "The key to confidence is being happy to lose." I thought that was really—it’s a really simple way of saying a lot.
People seem to correlate confidence with success. But that’s completely wrong. Confidence is much more of a relationship to failure. And I stumbled across that by accident with the door knocking. I was completely fine. Someone told me to fuck off knocking on their door to sell NPower. I was like, "Cool. One in a hundred is a sale. That’s one of the 99."
So, you know, it becomes at that point on the PT floor, trying to help the guy with his pec flies, him telling me to fuck off—I was so fine with that because I knew I’d have to talk to a finite amount of people to get a sale. So when people can be truly happy with losing (not being happy with being defeated—very different), then you build a sense of confidence.
And if we all imagine our friend that’s got the most confidence in the world, that’s just beaming with it all the time—if something doesn’t go right for them and they fail, how much does it affect them? Often not a lot. Because they’re not caught up with failing. They’re caught up with what or how many times they would have to fail to accomplish success.
But if I’ve got a self-story based on—and this goes back to one of the points I raised earlier—based on the fact that when I was 8 years old I did public speaking on stage and it went so badly that when I got off stage all the kids on the playground abused me, one of them threw an apple at my head, you know, the girl that I was dating with my little playground relationship dumped me...
When I grow up, my self-story around the consequence of public speaking failure will be trauma-centric. And so for those individuals, presumably confidence is much harder to obtain in—if confidence is evidence, you’ve got a pretty big mountain of evidence to overcome with positive evidence in order to change your belief. And that’s why I’m trying to understand the role of trauma in confidence and belief.
So, what I would say to this is: if we can try and develop a sense of gratitude towards these inadequacies. Because those inadequacies, even from 8-year-old public speaking, show you the path to progression. Without understanding and really dialing down to where you’re inadequate, you can’t have a path.
And so many people that are kind of lost in life, they’re like, "Oh, I don’t know what I should be doing in my life." Cool. Well, can you identify something that you’re insecure about and can you work on it? "Well, yeah, I’m insecure about how I look naked." Can you work on it? Yeah, then fucking work on it.
Because, again, I think it was Simon Sinek who sat opposite you and he goes, "Passion comes as a byproduct." Not a reason to start something, it’s a reason you remain invested in something. And people need to appreciate that passion may not exist in their life right now. And it might not exist for another five years, because you might do another career for two years and you fucking hate it, then you do another for three and you love it. Three years in, you feel passionate about it.
So, if you’re five years away from truly feeling passionate about your work, what can you do today? You can work on your inadequacies. Whatever it is. And it doesn’t have to be this huge mountain of, you know, "Oh, I’m going to ask a supermodel on a date." It doesn’t have to be that. You don’t have to double your salary asking for a pay rise. You just need to do something that you could do to develop your inadequacy.
Would that be your tip? Because there’s going to be people listening and I can almost—sometimes when I’m recording this podcast, the way I decide what question to ask the guest is I just go down the lens. I go through the lens into the person that I know is listening. And I know that there’ll be a Suzanne walking her dog this morning who’s got a confidence issue as it relates to just herself and her life generally. Maybe she might characterize it as low self-esteem; she struggles to take action against the things that she calls her ambitions. What is the actionable place for Suzanne? If there was one actionable thing to take away from this, what would that be? Where does Suzanne start today?
I’ll be taking this one from Tim Ferriss, and I’ll fully credit him.
Fine. We’ll cut that out; you can just own it, steal it. (Laughs)
So, there’s a exercise online which is very popular in asking 10% discount on a coffee. And everyone’s like really attacked this because they think it’s about the discount. It’s not; it’s about looking fucking stupid.
So, the next time you order a cup of coffee, you’re to ask for a 10% discount. Not because you expect to get one, but because it’s a really fucking uncomfortable situation. In many cases, you’re asking someone who can’t give you a discount. It’s completely out of your control. There are people around you and it is just a weird thing to ask.
So I wrote the chapter—I’m in Sydney—and I thought, "I’m a fucking hypocrite if I don’t do this." So there’s like a little cafe near where I work. I was like, "I’m going to do it." And there’s no one there. I was like, "Sweet, no one’s in the queue." And as I get there, it got to the point where I just didn’t get served. And then there’s two people behind me. I was like, "Fuck, don’t do it."
And I was like, "Well, it’s going to feel very difficult writing the next chapters of the book feeling like a fraud." So I was like, "Can I get a 10% discount on my coffee please?" And she just looked at me like, "What?" And I was like, "I’m such an entitled little prick right now, this is how I must seem." And she was like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "Can I get a 10% discount?"
And at this point, I was like, this is the most uncomfortable I’ve been. I was like, I would rather go out 5,000 people in a crowd, no—nothing pre-organized. I’d rather do that than do this situation right now. And she turned round behind and they had like a stamp card where you get your 10th coffee free. And she was like, "Well, you buy 10, you can get 10% off."
And then I walked away, I was sweating from that. And I realized why it was such a great example. Because it’s not about the discount. It’s about putting yourself in a situation that makes you feel very uncomfortable. And then when you leave, you realize, why did I create this fuss? Why was I sweating? Why did I have adrenaline? Why did I have sweat patches from such a simple interaction of being uncomfortable?
And I felt very accomplished. And I won’t lie, when I got back to writing, I felt invigorated. I’m never going to use that stamp card; to me, I’d rather not worry about the card and pay extra for the coffee. But I was like, "Wow." I was like, "What else can I do?" And I only did it as an exercise to help me with the book writing process. And I was like, "Wow, I get it. I get why people would tell other people to do that."
Because people seem to think people are paying a lot more attention to us than they actually are. Mark Manson, he said (as his favorite quote on your podcast), "People wouldn’t care what other people thought of them so much if they realized how seldom they do." I had to Google "seldom"; I didn’t know what it meant. (Seldom is little and not often.)
And I was like, "Fuck, that’s a really good point." And there’s been studies on this where people turn up to class late—they think everyone’s looking at them. They ask students at the end if anyone came in late; the proportions were much lower. And even people that wear t-shirts with embarrassing characters on it—they think that half the people they interacted with would remember, and the percentages were much lower.
We seem to think that we’re in *The Truman Show* and every single action we take that the world cares about us, but they don’t. They don’t even notice we’re there half the time. The chances are the people I was petrified of behind me didn’t even listen, or they were too busy, they’re on their phone checking TikTok. The person behind probably just thought I was a weirdo and never remembered my face again.
Maybe you inspired them.
Maybe. Maybe they’re going to go do it again. So, there are—there are little things like that. Or at least if you have something in front of you that is really petrifying you, is there some way you could break that down into an actionable step? Say, you know, if someone out there wants to express their opinions on a topic—maybe they’re a physio, maybe they’re a PT, maybe they’re an investment banker or a mortgage broker—they’re petrified of putting their opinion out there because they’re worried about what other mortgage brokers or PTs are going to think. They’re worried about the people that are *never* going to give them money. That’s the fucking craziest thing. PTs are petrified about what PTs think. I go, "How many fucking PTs sat in your consult?" "Oh, yeah, I’d like to hire you as my PT." Could they post something? Because something is better than nothing. Is there one step they can take? And if people can identify that one small step—if it’s too big, break it down. And I just don’t understand why people can’t set themselves that mental exercise.
I think the most amazing thing about the coffee example as well is the fact that you actually *got*... you found a path to getting 10%. And it’s funny because so many times I reflect on my own story—just asking a question was actually the catalyst. It was that was the inflection point in my life where everything changed.
And people don’t have the confidence to ask the question. And it sounds like such a trivial thing, like when you said just asking for 10% on coffee, but for me that was so profound that she—she was like, "What? What?" but then she turned around and actually opened the door to 10% off.
You think about that in your life generally—you talk about it in the book about asking for a pay rise, or asking for a promotion, or asking for whatever. I think if you zoom out on your life and you are the type of person who develops the habit of asking, your life will have a completely different trajectory the further you zoom out.
Because I can tell you the pivotal moments in mine where I asked a simple question and it seemingly changed everything. Or even, you know, like you think about how things compounded over time, the compounding moments were these moments of asking for something, which most people would have...
You know, you talk about personality types in here. You say, you know, the need to achieve or the need to avoid failure. I think a lot of that is kind of interlinked with what we’re saying here. Because I’ve always had the—I feel like the need to achieve has outweighed my need to avoid failure. So, I’m much more likely to ask for shit from people. Especially when I was starting out. Just email a guy, "Will you invest in my company?" The weird thing, which I don’t think I ever talk about, is the first email I sent became my first investor.
And I bet your relationship with him saying no would have been fine.
Well, I’d nothing to lose! I was shoplifting pizzas! (Laughs) I was like—and I was stealing pizzas to feed myself. I’d asked—I emailed this guy and asked him for 10 grand and he said yeah.
It’s crazy you say that. The—it’s this point you had before about asking the question. I was visiting in Split, they have these in Croatia, they have these like waterfalls and you go out in like minivans and you go and explore them. Usually we did Yacht Week, so after we were like dying a little bit, "Let’s go to a waterfall, do something wholesome."
There’s a guy on a laptop at the back of the minivan. And I was like, "What are you doing?" And he was like, "Oh, I have an accountancy business in Miami." I was like, "Okay, but what are you doing here?" He’s like, "Oh, I’m working." I was like, "What? You’re working on a laptop from Miami *right now*? Nah." And I was like, being inquisitive. And he goes, "Can I recommend a book?" And he recommended the book *The 4-Hour Workweek*.
And I got home and I read through it, and there was some things that just didn’t apply to me at all. But then the one sentence summarized exactly every single emotion I’d felt for the last year. And it said, "The opposite of happiness is boredom."
And within three weeks, I flew to Australia one-way. That was my inception moment. A book recommendation from a random guy in a minivan in Croatia sent me to do what is arguably—no, it is the best single decision I made in my life also. And I don’t—I look back now and I’m like, "Whoa, the universe, the butterfly effect. If I had picked a different seat on the minivan, I don’t know where I would be today."
"The opposite of happiness is boredom." So, sometimes when people experience almost like a malaise, or they’re not experiencing happiness in its full emotion, they think that—and this is only one spectrum of it—they’re not sure of the emotion they’re experiencing. And for me, I realized although I was successful in the UK in PT-ing, I was bored.
I wondered what this weird emotion was, why I wasn’t feeling the same motivation to go to work. I wasn’t enjoying the same transactions. And I realized that my growth had shunted without realizing because I was comfortable. I was earning good money, I was, you know, everything—I was the highest-paid PT in my gym. It was easy to just remain there.
Were you lacking a sense of purpose?
Probably, looking back now. But I was...
Meaningful purpose. Like, you’ve got a purpose, you know, going to the gym is a purpose, but like meaningful purpose where it really has a—an intrinsic, you know, meaning to you. You think it’s a worthwhile endeavor.
The way I feel now, I didn’t think was possible when I was younger. So when I was 27 and made this decision, I didn’t know that I could have purpose in that respect. I was very happy just being a PT in the gym. But I never realized—I’d always, up until this point, I’d gone 26 out of 27 years never earning enough money to really get by. You know, I’d never really succeeded in business. At 27, this is the first time I’ve actually accomplished anything. All my jobs and relationships before had just been failed at. At 27 years old, I’d done nothing remarkable with my life whatsoever. Rugby career, average. Grades, average. Job performances, average. At 27, I was actually excelling in something for the first time in my life. So being bored was a very strange emotion I couldn’t decipher. I was like, "What is this feeling?" Because I’d never succeeded in anything really, I didn’t think it was possible to be successful and bored at the same time. And then flying to Australia, I was never bored again and I haven’t been since.
I think a lot of people are successful and bored. You know what I mean? Successful in the context of someone else’s—the social definition of success, right? You’re not truly successful, I think, if you’re bored. But you are in the eyes of maybe your parents that wanted you to be a doctor, and now look at you smashing it as a doctor. But you, you know, but you’re bored.
Another tough thing to take into account was the fact I was servicing about seven hours a day of PT. Which is like seven one-to-one meetings. And I mean, it’s quite hard because at least when we do a podcast now, if it’s two hours, we can go hard for these two hours because we know there are going to be millions of hours listened to. But for me, that one hour I spend with a client, it’s just one person.
Shit, yeah.
If we were to record this and only one person would listen to it, you’d be like, "Mm, not sure this is really cost-efficient." So those seven hours a day, although I had a purpose in those lives, it almost got to the point where I was like, I could be helping more. And that’s why I enjoyed doing social media although it didn’t pay off for the first four years.
And that’s the purpose piece, though. That’s the—that would be even more meaningful and worthwhile for you to do more.
And people say this now—they go, "Would you PT someone for 2,000 pounds an hour?" I go, "It’s tempting, but that one hour I could spend making one video that could..."
I get that all the time. People—people say to me, "You should be like a life coach," or "You should do coaching sessions." And I’m like, "Yeah, but I get to do coaching sessions on here by bringing on the likes of, you know, people like you and Simon Sinek and whoever I bring on. This is the coaching session, and millions can listen versus one-on-one."
And it almost seems like a bit of a—a bit of a waste. Not no disrespect to my clients I’d before, they were the people that enabled me to sit here right now and I’ll be forever grateful for them. But it did get to the point where I was like, I almost take more happiness from helping thousands than I would one.
And the financial implications are obviously very different. But it’s amazing to see a video where so many people—the video might take me 15 minutes to make and edit and produce—I still do my own editing. It’s probably the happiest moment of some of my days. I love the creation phase. Like, I’ve had an idea, it’s been born, I’ve recorded it, I run to my room, I’m editing it, getting it all perfect. And then I put it out and I check the next day and I’m like, "I can’t comprehend the amount of people that might have benefited."
And especially when something gets a lot of views. And I’m sure, say you put this podcast out, I’m not sure I did this the other day, I was watching England play rugby. I was in a stadium with 50,000 people. And I was like, "There’s a lot of people here." And if someone asked me to go into the middle and be like, "James, here’s a microphone, chat shit," I’d be like, "Fuck, that’s a lot of people." My story views were at a quarter of a million the same day, and I was like, "How is this real? How is this real?" And when you think about the amount of people you can talk to, I can’t comprehend it.
What would you say to those people that are currently bored in their lives?
Sometimes my biggest fear is setting my sights on a mountain where I could reach the summit. And I think some people haven’t realized they’ve reached the summit. And it’s very important that you get to that point and you set a new height to accomplish.
So, again I always talk about Jiu-Jitsu. But for me, that is something that will never be finished. I will never conquer that. And it doesn’t have to be a martial art for people, but there—there should be something that you move away from your business, because someone can take away your business. Someone can take away your social media, someone can take away everything, but they can’t take away that. And having something where you know you’ll never master it—I think I—now I’ve discovered that I’ll never be bored. And I love that because if I break my leg tomorrow training, I can teach. And if I can’t teach, I can study. And if I can study, I can pass on the information to other people. I feel like stagnation is like my biggest fear. And I think a lot of people just haven’t realized that they’re there. So they just need to set their sights on something. Anything.
No, it’s interesting—it’s interesting that everything you’ve said resonates a lot there, because I realized at some point, maybe when I completed the first set of goals I had at 18, that the only goals worth having in this phase, in the next chapter of my life, were those that are *incompletable*. So, in every facet of my life, the best goals I have, the most intrinsically fulfilling, are those that I know I can’t complete.
So, I posted on my Instagram the other day about the gym. Every year I wanted to get a six-pack for summer, that was the goal. You know, it would maybe last four months and then I’d fail. At some point, my goal became "consistency." Something that I can never really complete. It’s something that I can, you know, I achieve every day but a goal that can’t be completed.
And it’s the same with this podcast. The reason it’s so enjoyable is because there is absolutely no end. There’s no conceivable end in sight. It’s the journey itself and it’s the—it’s the process that I think is going to be rewarding. And then I tried to change all my businesses at one point when I started reading about Simon Sinek and infinite games and finite games. So I said, "What would I have to do to create a business from top to bottom that was designed to—to not have these goals of like 'let’s be number one' or 'let’s make a hundred million,' but was *infinite*?"
And it completely changes everything. And then it has a really impact—strange impact on how you treat people as team members. So you start designing the organization to be sustainable in every way. That is where I’m at in my life now. It’s trying to fill my life with these incompletable goals because completed goals let me down. You know, I said about the anticlimax.
Seeking inspiration from people that have done it... From our last conversation, I didn’t realize how much our conversation had impacted me until I got home and I was like, "I’m not producing a good level podcast." I was like, "I need to get proper microphones. I need to invest in better cameras. I need to do a better job editing."
And then your social strategy as well. Just every facet of it. I was like—I was inspired by you doing better than me. And that was something that I—three months later I went, "Fuck, sitting down with you..." I was like, "That really like rubbed shoulders in a way that benefited me." And I was like, it’s one of the first times I really felt the impact of what even just sitting and talking to someone can do for your own habits.
And I find it such a shame that some people won’t be inspired by other people’s success. I feel like it’s a shame that so many people see success and see it as a reason to be bitter. And, yeah, for me it was—it was great. I left feeling—for a start, I think you forced a lot of people that didn’t like me to listen. They—I know a lot of people would have gone, "Why the fuck did Steven sit down with him?" And they’ve gone probably listened to—and I got a lot of people message me going, "I thought you were a dick."
We have a closing tradition on this podcast, as you know of. Your question, funnily enough, has been left by the Liver King.
Oh, snap! I didn’t think about that. When you said he was the last one on, I was like, "Oh, that’s really cool." I was like, "I kind of would have liked to have met him and just to be in his aura." Not because I’m a fanboy, but like I always look at him and I’m like, "I want to know how he smells." You know?
He smells bad. But I’m only saying that because *he* said it. So he walked in and said, "By the way, I smell bad because I don’t use any deodorant." But, um... I don’t actually usually tell people who’s written the question, but I’ll make an exception today. "What is the hardest—why am I nervous? This is a fucking—it’s a question. I feel like it’s, you know, you’re on an interview, like ready to get a job they’re like, 'The last question, if you want to win this—get this job...' What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in life? Your rite of passage." God, I got to try and answer this without sounding like a pussy. Rite of passage. Hardest thing I’ve ever done. See, all the things that come to mind are like jokes I can make, like putting up with Deren’s disorganization or something, you know? But I’ve got to think about a serious answer. He talked a lot about this concept of your rite of passage. So, his hardest moments in life he sees them all as a rite of passage for getting somewhere else. The only real thing that I would say has been hard or even noteworthy would be the ability to fall in love with repetition of dull tasks. It sounds like a really weird thing to say. It’s the only really painful thing I’ve ever done in my life really, where there are things you need to do every day consistently for years without any form of, you know, instant gratification. And evidently, not enough people have that ability. And there have been so many days where I’ve just not wanted to do anything, but you do it anyway. And you kind of fall in love with these very small, minute repetitions. And it’s the only thing that I’ve ever really found hard in my life. And it—it definitely sounds like I’m coming from a point of privilege. I feel like I’ve done a disservice. You probably expected a lot more battle-hardened people. I wish I could say it was a tour of Afghanistan or working in a ward during COVID or, you know, saving someone’s life. But I probably haven’t. I’ve probably done Liver King dirty a little bit there. Those small disciplines you’re talking about though, those small things where, you know, we all have them every day. It could be as small as just going—getting to the gym, avoiding eating something that’s tempting or whatever. Those small disciplines end up defining us over the long term, as one of my favorite books, *The Slight Edge*, describes. What is driving those small disciplines on a day-to-day basis? Why are you doing those small things, those small repetitions if there is no instant gratification? I think—one thing—it’s difficult to credit yourself with stuff, but I’ve always been very good at seeing long-term benefit of short-term actions. And, you know, for me, even little things. I’ve got a strange insight on life where so many people are focused on doing things now for a better life later on, where I’m completely inverted. I’m so focused on having a good life now. For my moment, my life isn’t that stressful. Everyone’s like, "Oh, you should buy a house or buy ten houses," and for me, I’m like, "It’d be good financially, but it’s stressful." And for me, I know if I turn up and do these little things every day, that future life, future relationships, future family can benefit from it. Something that my parents have definitely done. My dad commuted into London for 50 years, the same business every day. It’s about an hour and 25 minutes from where we live. There and back every day. He never pulled sick days, he was never lazy. My mom was also incredibly consistent with the upbringing of me and my sister. And I look back at the amount of sacrifice that they made—short little things like putting up with my behavior, or my dad going into work on a train every day—and I think he only really ever did these things not for himself, but for people that didn’t exist yet. Almost like confidence is predicting success in the future. We can create success in the future by doing these small things. So I think it’s definitely stemmed from that where it’s not so much about me, because I’m happy now, but if I keep doing these things I can create happiness for people further down the line. We talk about privilege as well, like we could talk about any form of privilege, whether it’s racial, economic, whatever. We need to take some ownership that the reason someone like me can take and experience privilege now is the fact that the people before me were long-sighted with their goals and ambitions. And the people before them were as well. My parents made very smart decisions for me to be able to be able to go to Australia at 27. That is a privilege. For some people, they have family members that rely on them. They have professional—if you’re a police officer, you work in a hospital, you don’t have the luxury of just leaving your—your precinct to go on a jolly to the other side of the world as a PT I did. So, yeah, I think I do the small things now so that in the long term, in the future, someone else can reap the benefits that I did off them. I have to say, well done and thank you for writing a book on this topic, because it is a topic that so many people—I think—I think I’m right in saying that confidence is the single biggest topic that I’m peppered with in terms of questions. People are trying to figure it out because it is this great inhibitor of all they believe they can be. It is a great inhibitor of so much happiness and health and fulfillment and all of those things. So when I—it was also one of the things that I did consider writing a book about one day. But after reading your book and understanding how nuanced and truthful and honest and appreciative of both sides of the coin it is, I don’t feel like I ever have to write a book on confidence again, because I think you really covered it. So, well done. People are going to love this book, for sure. Thank you. Thank you very much. And you know that as well, I think, because I’m—you know, I asked that first question at the start about why you wrote about confidence, assuming it was because of the fact you also get peppered in various ways, even as you say with those pain points. If they’re not saying it directly, at the heart of it they are trying to figure out how to—how to achieve their goals ultimately by this word that they believe is confidence. So, well done. Thank you. Thanks for coming back here. I love these conversations. I’d do them over and over again just because half the time I’m doing it just to try and develop my own thinking. And it’s also a huge honor that you even listen to this podcast. I find that really awesome because you’re an incredibly smart person. You’re an incredibly nice guy. And um, those are the kind of people that I love spending time with. So, thanks James. Hope to see you again soon if you’ll ever come back on. Of course. And I hope this book tour goes incredibly well. No doubt it will. Thank you very much. Control, compliance, confidence—that’s what the American Express Corporate Program helps deliver. Customized rewards, centralized company spending, and count on world-class customer care. With Corporate Cards from American Express, your company can be covered. Explore more at americanexpress.com/corporate. Terms apply.