Extremely Honest Q&A | The Diary Of A CEO | E70

and one of the thoughts that continually gets me to the gym and continually makes me show up and work hard is and if you're good at it if you're great at it then you might just be great at everything but for me that really is the meaning of life on this week's podcast we're going to do something very different something i've never done before but something that you've requested time and time again this week i posted online asking you to ask me any question about me my life my business whatever you want to ask me and i promised that in return i would give very brutally honest answers my team went through all of the questions that were submitted and they went through and picked ones that they thought were most interesting they've written them in my diary here so i'm going to start from the top and answer these questions with the objective of giving you the most valuable honest advice that i possibly can so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diver ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself okay so the first question is what is the most important lesson that this pandemic has taught you or reconfirmed for you and for me that is um it relates back to a podcast i did at the start of the year and it's that uncertainty is not predictable but it's preparable and i don't actually think that's a word but here's what i mean what i know for sure and this relates to everybody is that your life is of course going to be full of a lot of joy and amazing things and breathtaking moments and rapturous moments of of ecstasy right but it's also going to be riddled with moments of unexpected uncertainty and chaos joy is much easier to handle you just kind of let go and go with it right the good times not a lot of action or thought required but uncertainty and chaos require a real rigid set of principles and for me those principles over the last 12 months have become acceptance optimism and action and these three principles have a real linear connection to the outcome you're seeking without acceptance when bad things happen there's no optimism without optimism there's no action and without action there's often no victory or at least victory is delayed and hard times are elongated so when bad news visits whether that's being unexpectedly fired from your job or jumped by your partner or evicted by your landlord or losing a loved one in the case of a pandemic you have to do everything you can to stick to these principles despite the intense cloud of natural emotions that will try to convince you and me otherwise and you know like i do a lot of sort of introspective thinking for a living and even i am not immune from letting emotion get the best of me in times of intense chaos i like no matter how much i've read or written in my diary or how many podcasts i've done even i fall victim especially in the short term to all of those emotions and sometimes to the the instructions those emotions give you which will lead you to um to pretty dire outcomes so you know you get dumped by your partner you immediately think revenge right you get fired by your boss you think um you know i'm gonna sue them right i fall for those traps too and i don't think i don't necessarily think it's the aim of all humans should be to try and avoid those emotions and that thinking because i think it's quite impossible but it's to be better at the response right to shorten the time that those emotions sit with you and to be better in your reaction and i want to clarify that acceptance when i talk about acceptance it doesn't mean being emotionless it can often mean the exact opposite you have to accept how you're feeling except what's happened and importantly retire from trying to change the unchangeable or from wallowing in regret and you have to do everything you can to get yourself to a place of optimism i see that as your responsibility people won't like me saying that right people typically especially in hard times don't like to delegate responsibility to themselves so as hard as it can be you have to find and create hope for yourself and have faith just like everything else has in your life that this too shall pass and then you have to use that optimism to drive you into action which is for me the third principle that i've learned over the last 12 months if your partner's dumped you it's time to dust yourself off and get yourself into the gym to fight back and i don't mean fight backers in bomb their house i mean fight back in a mental capacity to stop stalking their instagram to triple down on your friendships and your meaningful relationships to stand tall and weather the unavoidable emotional storm and have faith and acceptance sit by your side the opposite of these principles of course is like denial is pessimism and is in action and these are the principles of a baby gazelle that's decided to fall asleep with its toes dipped into a crocodile-infested waters this is a decision to lose twice and when i say l right i mean loss and when unexpected chaos happens like this pandemic which smashes our businesses and destroys our social lives and apparently steals a year from from our youth the first l we take is involuntary happened and you didn't choose it totally out of your control i get that but the fateful decision to choose denial pessimism and inaction as our response is a voluntary second l what you're choosing to increase the chances that bad times will become even worse times you can make the choice not to lose twice the first l wasn't your choice the second l well that's the byproduct of of how you choose to respond acceptance optimism and action and i guess the second lesson i've learned this year is a lesson in the importance of prioritization you know this advice of which people often given i've often given of protecting your time and saving your time really feels somewhat incomplete to me now because it's like the first half of the sentence you've got to then ask yourself saving time to do what saving time just to spend more of it doing the wrong things saving time to spend more of it being more productive just so you can get more work done i guess better advice is to prioritize better if you told 19 year old stephen bartlett just to save more time he probably would have said no to a couple of things and then just spent that saved time working alone in his office all week and all weekend and that advice would therefore lead him to a less joyful more depressive existence and if you told 19 year old stephen bartlett to prioritize better the first question that comes to mind is what are my priorities and my long-term priorities as i think is the case for all of us are ultimately linked to the things that make our life meaningful which are friends the joy of work our relationships the satisfaction of pursuing our goals the challenge you know achieving greater freedom knowledge the pursuit of knowledge health and fitness and i guess i would have reviewed the allocation of my time through that lens i would have saved time only on the things that aren't connected to my macro priorities and reinvested it in better places and this year because we've you know been forced to realize what matters in many cases um i guess now i'm not trying to save time just for the sake of spending it more on optimizing my productivity i realize that that's an incomplete sentence and really the most important thing is just to prioritize all of my time better and allocate it to those things that ultimately will matter the most okay so the next question in my diary is how do i maximize my earning potential let me tell you a little bit of a story based on a friend of mine and his company my friend has a business which is listed on the stock exchange in germany one of the very small stock exchanges in germany and having spoken to banks and from my own knowledge of how the stock market and the public markets work him and me both know that right now his business is worth 1 billion dollars because of the stock exchange he's on if he moves his business to the new york stock exchange the banks and everybody knows that the valuation will be four billion dollars it's the exact same company the exact same team the exact same products the exact same mission everything's exactly the same but because he's on the wrong stock market because he's on the wrong stock exchange the value is 25 of what it would be if he just took that same business the same people in the same products the same skills the same experiences and just moved it to a different stock market and i i reflect on this analogy as a wider broader sort of life analogy because if i look at my career decisions over the last i'd say 10 years i remember working in one call center in plymouth in devon where i was getting paid about four pounds per hour and for whatever reason i decided to move to a different call center with the exact same skills the exact same experience and i got paid 10 times while i was getting paid at that call center and this is what i've started to notice in my own life is i've had this particular set of skills whether it's social media storytelling marketing brands whatever you want to call it for the last i don't know maybe six seven years and as i've moved into different rooms and different markets and different companies and different industries i've noticed that that exact same set of skills is valued completely differently and this made me reflect with that story of my friend's business in mind that one of the questions you have to to ask yourself sometimes in life isn't just you know how do i improve my skills but it's like how do i maximize the earning potential for my skills and where are my skills going to give me the greatest reward let me give you another analogy just to just to cement the point my ex-girlfriend my ex-ex-girlfriend is a flight attendant and she currently flies for emirates right and emirates pay they pay okay right a lot of lifestyle perks there but they pay okay she's told me that she'll get paid up to ten times more if she manages to get a job flying on private jets because of tips and things like that the same set of skills ten times the return for the same set of skills if she can move her skills to a different theoretical stock exchange if you get what i'm saying and this is just like one of the the principles i've learned about life over the really over the last year um because skills i was paid you know x amount for a couple of years ago i'm getting paid 10 20 30 40 50 times for the same set of skills just because i found a market where those skills are more in demand they're higher valued and they're probably more rare and so that's something i think we can all ponder which is asking yourself where your skills will reap the greatest return okay the next question is do you have imposter syndrome have you ever had it and can you relate and then there's a little question underneath which is and how do i shake this off here's the thing whenever somebody does something that's outside of their zone of comfort and that they don't have a ton of experience in doing we all feel the same thing right we all feel that sort of low-key inadequacy or that slight fear but the reaction that everybody feels and the way that we label that feeling is completely different i actually think it's how you label that feeling that determines how you perform in that scenario so some people will say okay this is an exciting challenge i'm going to learn i'm going to throw myself at it i'm going to use that energy of that i'm feeling those nerves or whatever it might be to focus some people will say oh my god and they'll implode and they'll try and retreat back into their zone of comfort right and so the response to that the feeling is human the response to it is optional if you go through your life avoiding situations that give you that feeling of imposter syndrome then i would bet everything that i have that you aren't going to reach your full potential i genuinely believe the feeling of imposter syndrome is both healthy natural and a sign that you're putting yourself in a position where you're there's pressure which will make you grow and i've literally i can't think of a moment in my life if you look at any sort of two-year period in my life where i didn't feel out of my depth however that feeling of being out of my depth never meant that i retracted from the challenge it meant the exact opposite it meant that i attacked the challenge i put more hours in i focused on it that reaction is ultimately the reason why you can hear my voice now it's the reason i have this podcast i very very unfondly remember the first day ever where i tried to make a video down the lens of a camera in the microphone and oh my god was that show my friend tells me we should make a youtube video it's about something political so i sit in his house he turns the cameras on puts a microphone on me and i sit there and try and get just two minutes of spoken word out down this camera of the lens and i sit there for seven hours so much so that at the start of this two minute video it's light outside and it's sunny it's like the morning by the end of this two-minute video if you were to watch on youtube it's dark outside and you can see stars it took me that long right that long because i was sat there feeling like an imposter people aren't gonna give a what i think i'm an idiot i'm not sat there sweating and ultimately it was my decision not to let that sort of knock me back and to swerve that being in that uncomfortable situation ever again that's taken me to this place today where i'm doing this podcast and there's all these people that listen to it we've got this youtube channel and all of these wonderful things and that is the defining thing it's not about avoiding imposter syndrome that's a very human thing it's learning the art of embracing it quick one starting from the minute the lockdown is lifted we're gonna start bringing in some of our subscribers to watch how this podcast is produced behind the scenes means you get to meet the guests meet myself and see how we put all of this together if you want that to be you all you've got to do hit the subscribe button okay so next question is how do you do things you don't want to do i've had i've had this crosstalk in my mind a lot lately and i'll tell you why because i've committed myself to working out in the gym downstairs every single day and i have been going every single day for many many months now i think the first time i started going gym consistently was actually march last year when all of this craziness was uh thrusted upon us but some days as i've talked about this podcast i know people get tired of me talking about the gym but it's just a place where you learn so much about yourself and discipline and and your body and your brain and all of that so i always refer back to it but some days i just can't be bothered i can't be bothered to go i can't be bothered to train hard when i'm there and um in many ways that's kind of like synonymous of life there's so many things in life that i just don't want to do and one of the thoughts that continually gets me to the gym and continually makes me show up and work hard is this principle i live by which is comfortable and easy are like really short-term friends but they're long-term enemies and here's what i mean by that comfort in the short term makes me feel warm and fuzzy but then it might lead me to being obese and having arthritis and having high blood pressure and having a heart attack in the long term so like comfort and easy i just view so anything that's comfortable and easy like super comfortable and is you know inherently avoiding hard work or discomfort i kind of view that that decision or that thing with skepticism i think you're trying to me in the long term aren't you and i genuinely cognitively have that thought process sometimes when my brain flutters and flirts with the idea of oh just skip it steve you know you don't really want to do that just you know get an early night and swerve that thing um i think that's going to stab me in the back one day in 12 months time or 10 years time that decision to choose comfortable and easy as my friends well they're going to become enemies and they're actually not on my side if you're looking for growth my general principle is to choose the challenge i'm not saying choose the thing that you hate i'm not saying choose the toxic thing that's going to destroy your mental health i'm saying if you're looking for growth and you're looking to achieve the future that you you know you envisage in your mind your ambitions then you should choose the challenge and and that's the thing that i continually come back to every time steve you know it hits 6 30 and i know i've got to go to go to the gym in half an hour and i'm manically busy and everything in my head is saying make an excuse no one will know go tomorrow just tell yourself you'll go tomorrow you'll do it another time procrastinate or when i get to the gym and i don't really want to show up and i don't want to work hard the same little thoughts whisper in my brain but then i think maybe that's the enemy is that has have those thoughts really got my long-term ambitions and my values in mind they nearly always haven't and that goes back to the podcast i did with neil where he says that you know when we try and procrastinate or we convince ourselves to do the things we don't want to do it's because of some kind of psychological discomfort because i know that these weights are heavy and i know that it's uncomfortable and i know that i'm tired and those are if you are able to overcome those moments where it's easier to quit those are your growth moments those are in fact the most valuable moments and this again comes to another point which i always think which is the moments where i want to quit right the days that are the hardest to get myself up and going are probably by definition the most valuable moments to overcome because that's probably again thinking logically where most people decide to stop so you know that's where the greatest returns are and i it sounds like fluffy in hindsight no i think this i think i think that in the moment i think it before i go to the gym i think yeah this is this is the day when most people wouldn't go you know after the week you've had right so hopefully that helps and the conclusive point here is like you're connecting yourself to who you want to be in those moments you're reminding yourself of the person you want to become and this you know i read this on twitter i think nine months ago but it stayed with me ever since which is how would the person you want to become behave right now and if you ask yourself in those moments how would the person i want to become behave right now what are the decisions the person i want to be would be making um that's usually a good way to decide what the best answer is right hope that helps okay so the next question is a very deep question it's what is the meaning of life very good question something i've actually pondered a little bit over the last over the last year or so as i've i've got more into elon musk's work and space and his motivations for wanting to to understand meaning he actually says that when he was really really young he started pondering the meaning of life and actually made him depressed and it wasn't until he read hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that he found some meaning um and optimism but to to answer that question myself i would say the meaning of life is to create and live a meaningful life i know that sounds like a bit of a cop-out right but in what you consider meaningful is totally subjective and nobody can tell you what that is or what it isn't but i think you can spot it when you get that feeling inside yourself that your efforts are resulting in progress or outcomes that feel deeply worthwhile and fulfilling to you in any facet of your life whether it's raising your dog or whether it's your relationships or your work or whatever it might be and some people find that sort of connection and meaning in building their businesses in writing in hobbies or you know training their body through exercise or raising kids or practicing their religion one of the most important things i've learned on this podcast from interviewing guests and asking them about the toughest moments in their lives specifically guests that suffered with depression i remember we had dan murray on the podcast who had lost his father and talked about how it wasn't until he did ayahuasca and saw that the world was interconnected that he refound his meaning and we also had ben williams on the podcast who said he was suicidal and considering taking his own life until he saw an advert to be a military commando and went off on that journey to pursue his his intrinsic career ambition of becoming a commando that he found meaning in his life and stability and also from writing my book there are some just crazy mind-bending studies that i read about in the preparation for my book that totally changed my my thought process on this one of them right is studying johanna hari's work and the work he's done to understand the true causes of depression and anxiety and his work continually points to the fact that depression and these depressive feelings and this sort of lack of orientation in life comes from people who have had something happen to them often who have lost a sense of meaning through trauma in their life not what's wrong with them not because of some sort of chemical imbalance in their brain the other really sort of example that i just can't shake that's in my book as well is this study they call rat park very very simple they took a group of rats they put them in cages and they took all meaning from their life literally just a white cage on their own and they gave them a choice do you want to drink heroin water or do you want to drink normal water the rats that are stuck in a white cage alone become drug addicts right then they have rat park which is this rat utopia where there's you know female and male rats there's a little running machine where you can exercise there's food there's a space to to roam around and to explore there's toys for stimulation and those rats don't become drug addicts when they're offered either heroin or normal water they avoid the heroin if you zoom out a little bit and apply the same thinking to humans the science says that over the last two years the life expectancy had dropped between i think it's 2018 and 2019 because of opioid related deaths because people are getting addicted to opioids and that's resulting in their death and and again that is because we have an epidemic of meaninglessness of purposelessness um that's what my podcast has taught me and that's what um that's what my research in my book has taught me as well commonly prescribed antidepressants do work for some people i think it's important to to sort of caveat my points with that but adding additional meaning and connection to your life does seem to be one of the most powerful antidotes for those feeling lost depressed and unhappy and lacking that orientation and just to relate it to what we're going through now with this pandemic you know a lot of my friends have been calling me and telling me that they're feeling down right they can't particularly describe what exactly is causing them to feel down but over the last three months in particular as the uk has gone into this i think third lockdown i've really grown concerned about some of my friends and the advice that i continually give them centers around the point i've just made which is to find things that will give them meaning life before pre-lockdown gave you meaning you you wake up in the morning you go to the office you've got colleagues and friends and then you you know you go to the the club you go to what's your favorite football team player you go and see your mum and your dad your grandparents life was full of meaning before now it's been pulled from you so now it becomes your responsibility if you want to you know maintain those good feelings to go and get that meaning right to go and create that meaning in your life you can't assume that it's just going to show up like it used to so we and this goes back to one of my points which is when you really have to fight back you have to go and get it and you know i'll give you an example that relates to me personally the weekends right so my team and me we work you know in this building through the week the weekends come around i have nothing to do i'm a single guy i have nothing to do it's me and my dog right and he's not a barrel of laughs to be honest he's very simple guy so he doesn't do an awful lot and so what i've started to do on the weekends is to really take time to pursue some of my hobbies which i would never normally do i've started to dj all the time i'm now learning to dj i do a dj lesson every single weekend via zoom i'm reading books that i used to love reading philosophy books and i'm doing this actually not because i want to but because i know i have to keep my life full of like intrinsic passions and meaning especially at a time when so much of that has been robbed by this pandemic so that's the long way around the houses but for me that really is the meaning of life to create a meaningful life and um as i say in these times it's more important than ever that you fight for that meaning okay so the next question is a really really great question which is what is something you miss about being poor that you think you'll never get back the stoic people used to talk about this concept of hedonistic adaptation and the hedonistic treadmill and i'll give you an example that's really easy to understand i remember at 23 years old when i took my first flight to thai i think it was 20 21 years old to thailand with my business partner dom and i remember getting on that plane and just like because because i'd never really been on a plane before other than when i was a baby coming over from africa i remember like being so in awe of the fact that we were on this like metal ship that was flying across the ocean and they were like giving me snacks and free water and do i want to coke and i'm sat there in the economy section just like oh my god right totally like full of like joy and appreciation for everything and the principles of like hedonistic adaptations say that once you've been exposed to a certain level of joy or a certain level of like i don't know gluttony or like you know um material possessions your satisfaction starts to decay over time and obviously as i got you know more and more money and i got on flights every week and then eventually i upgraded to business class and then like first class and you know even got myself on a private jet a couple of times your appreciation for the small things wanes the stoic people would take the good things out of their life as a practice just so that they would appreciate them again and i think that's one of the things that i definitely miss i've got nice things all the time and that is a blessing and a curse imagine some rich guy talking about he's sick of nice things but there's there's truth to that like you you lose appreciation for for things that used to mean so much to you and when you look at hedonistic adaptation in the hedonistic treadmill you now require even more to give you that same level of thrill and joy and satisfaction that's a really sad thing it's kind of an unavoidable thing to some degree but with all things in life you can really make a conscious effort to be grateful and to take moments not to let life pass you by all these wonderful things pass you by so the other point is you know there's that phrase ignorance is bliss and it totally applies to this question as well when i was 18 years old and i thought the meaning and point of life was to buy fast cars and to have a million quid in the bank account and to pursue those kinds of things there was some bliss to that i thought i had it figured out i thought i understood that the pursuit of greater happiness was just more stuff more money and that was quite blissful i didn't have it now at 18 i didn't have it so i thought okay that creates real meaning in my life all i have to do is get more money and then my life will be more meaningful and you know full of joy and then upon getting the money i realize that that's not the case and i i remember watching an interview by the founder of spotify danielec where he says the exact same thing he's an insecure kid growing up bit of a geek and then he gets all this money not from spotify but from the business before and he has this deep existential crisis where he's like oh my god this wasn't it and he had to then go on the journey of finding out exactly what mattered to him and i i'm still on that journey like i still this is why i talk so much about meaning and purpose in this podcast because i'm still figuring out like where i should be prioritizing my time in order to reap the greatest returns as it relates to fulfillment and i i think i didn't think about those things when i was 18 and i was broke but getting what you aim for is the best way to find out if it's actually what you wanted and i was this young kid chasing material things and and probably passion mistaking it for happiness as i got closer to it it moved off into the distance like a like a mirage or something or a rainbow we all know that guy who like you know has a two bedroom house um in a small area he's married to his wife one kid two kids um looks forward to you know going to the pub of the weekends and supporting his favorite team those individuals who live the most simple lives and who are happier with less to me from my experience generally seem to be much more fulfilled than my friends that are successful billionaires and my friends that are billionaires but also intellectuals and sort of like low-key philosophers are the most right because they really have got pretty existential and ask themselves what is the purpose of life that's what i mean by ignorance is bliss and my third point in answer to this question relates to challenge when i was 18 years old starting out in business living in moss side in manchester i had absolutely nothing i just dropped out of university and i'm basically stood at the bottom of this big ambitious mountain that i've told myself i'm gonna climb and i've told myself i'm gonna accomplish and i'm looking up at it excited terrified um but hopeful and yeah excited that's that's the key feeling and then you climb the mountain right the mountain for me was like financial freedom it was accomplishment maybe for my ego it was like recognition to some degree i have all of those things now and so when you get to this point where you've accomplished many of your goals you have to make a very conscious active effort to create new even bigger goals goals that will match the same level of excitement and challenge that you had when you're 18 and it's not easy because you don't become financially free twice unless you lose it all right so my goals have to be way bigger to give me that same level of like hunger and uh grit and you know determination that i need um to to to to stay stabilized and to be to be happy and i guess it's a crazy thing to say but to some degree i miss like not being at the bottom i miss not having those massive this just mount everest in front of me and this is what i've seen in you know many of my friends who are entrepreneurs and even some of my idols is when they get to that point when when elon sold paypal or when you know bill gates sold microsoft they then go and take on some of these tremendous you know philanthropic challenges it's no surprise that every billionaire becomes this crazy massive philanthropist and tries to take on some of the world's most existential problems right it's no surprise that elon is doing you know trying to save the planet and take us to a new one because he will not be able to find a sense of fulfillment and happiness in doing another paypal he just won't find it and in many respects this is why i think people who are tremendously ambitious have a bit of a curse i've spoken to a lot of my friends that run businesses you are obsessive about progress and challenge and ambition and reaching the next milestone and i think a lot of them would actually if they could just press a button and trade their life for a much simpler life someone who doesn't wake up every single day and check their whatsapp for 30 different messages about their business on fire in five different countries if they could press a button and live a simple life and be content in that life i think most of them probably would many of them would if they wouldn't maybe they're twisted enough not to not to realize that the meaning of life is to be happy so if i gave them a happiness button maybe some of the psychopaths would still opt for their current life i've got one particular friend in mind who i won't name who sat me down about two years ago and he's very very successful he's probably a billionaire by now and he confided in me that he wished his life could be simpler he wished he didn't have the level of ambition he had he he told me this one story about going around to someone's house and they're a very very normal family with not very much at all and they just sat there drinking tea and he said i was sat there thinking i wish this was my life this is a billionaire with more sports cars than i've ever seen in my entire life in one driveway wishing he had a simpler life but realizing that he is infected with this virus which many of us have the ambitious the most ambitious amongst us which stops you from being happy with out pursuit and without climbing that mountain breaking news i have a new favorite flavor of huel about a month and a half ago they sent me in the post this white bottle with this sort of sharpie red pen on it that said top secret and i took it out i sipped it probably shouldn't have because if people send you things in the post like that you probably shouldn't drink it as your first reaction you should confirm that they sent it but i took it out i drank it and it tasted amazing and now i'm i'm very happy to announce that my new favorite flavor of the hule ready to drink slow release carbs 20 grams of protein vitamins minerals 27 essential vitamins 7 grams of fiber per bottle is banana which has just gone live on cure and my friends know that i'm a massive hulu again so they've been messaging me all this week saying steve how good is it is it good and i've been telling them this is my new favorite flavor which i think says a lot so barry is now number two and the new banana flavor ready to drink huel is my number one so yeah give it a taste it kind of tastes like banana milkshake but um banana milkshake isn't usually as nutritionally complete so that's win win win try it fiverr fiverr.com i've talked about this a lot in this podcast and um i just wanted to give you a bit of an update i've really really got into using fiverr over the last couple of weeks and i think if i was to estimate i've now had six different tasks completed on fiverr in the last four weeks i've had two website builds i've had two decks made from designers that are all around the world one is in venezuela the other one is in iceland i've had one logo made and one video made and to be honest i just wish i knew about fiverr sooner in my career because i think i would have been able to accomplish more in a much more cost-effective way okay the next question i have here is what is the most valuable skill you've learned and how does that serve you now um my mind bounced around to a few different things when i read that question but it came back to this this this one answer which kind of summarizes all the other little points which is sales and i genuinely believe sales however you kind of want to define that is the single most important skill in the world i don't mean like selling rolexes out your coat or selling double glazing to a grandmother on the phone i mean the art of being able to persuade other people to take an action right and this is a skill that you will deploy in a nightclub when you meet someone you fancy with your teams when you're trying to build businesses with investors every time you communicate in some respect if you're trying to achieve a certain outcome you are a salesman or woman and the art of being a good salesperson is broken down into a bunch of different factors there's an understanding of you know having the self-awareness to understand how you're coming across having the awareness to understand what the person you're speaking to is after it's how you carry yourself it's your body language it's the way you speak it's the energy you bring when you're talking it's all of these small things which are very hard to to train into somebody but for without shadow of a doubt sales is the most important thing because it's the skill that i use every day the most right and i want to answer the question like how did i learn how to sell things i've raised investment maybe 20 times maybe more probably more if you consider some of the road shows i did when we took our company public one of the most important experiences i had in my whole life was i started working in a call center in plymouth when i was 16 years old selling double glazing at everest call center and then i did that job until i was about 18 and then moved to manchester dropped out of university and then my next 10 to 12 jobs were all in call centers whether it's because of my voice or because um because of my skills with selling i was just so good at that job and i genuinely believe that that tele sales experience i've had and i genuinely would work in a telesales call center for three months make so much on the bonuses that i'd quit this is why i've had 12 teddy sales jobs i'd quit i'd spend the next two months trying to build my business i'd then go back to another call center make huge bonuses then i'd quit and i'd keep doing that but i genuinely believe that that experience working in call centers where you're honing this particular skill which is calling someone usually completely cold out of the blue and having to persuade them in less than a minute to give you a chance or to buy immediately but to give you a chance to sell them something that they didn't need we all hate tele sales people including me i just hang up immediately these days because i'm so time poor but if you got a chance to do one job in order to improve your sales skills i would highly highly recommend you do either that or even better which i did again when i was in plymouth door-to-door sales because that introduces sort of body language and other sort of more physical communication skills which uh which are even more relevant to the world we live in today so yeah sales is definitely the most important thing and i often say to people when they're when they tell me that they've got an offer to take one of two jobs i'll often always prefer the sales role especially if they're young and they need to develop in that area because i think it will yield the greatest returns over the long term i think getting good at selling stuff when you're young will yield tremendous returns as a skill as you get older and as i said at the start sales applies to everything everything and if you're good at it if you're great at it then you might just be great at everything or at least be able to convince people you are okay so the next question is what is my greatest weakness and when i first read this question um a bunch of different things came to mind in different sort of parts and areas of my life so i'm just gonna share as many of them with you as i possibly can the first thing that comes to mind is i'm really bad at prioritizing against the things that really matter to me and i know that will matter long term i've talked about this a lot in this podcast i don't call my parents enough i don't see my family enough i probably don't give enough time in person to like meaningful friendships and connections and those kinds of things and i know i'm completely totally convinced that those things are really really important it's not that i don't understand the importance of them it's that like my work priorities always seem to be just one you know one step higher on the to-do list my work has urgency to it there's no urgency with calling my mom right and that's kind of one of the things i know is a weakness in myself that i that i continue to strive to to be better at is trying to prioritize things that aren't urgent but in the long term are really really important the next thing is in relationships i'm like really self-centered i i just want to do what i want to do and i like i am generally like really unwilling to compromise and that's an awful thing because relationships are all about compromise apparently so i've been told many times um but i know it's a weakness of mine i am kind of like i kind of live the world in my own head and if i want to just get up and go and dj or walk down the street or go in my room and just look at my laptop and watch youtube videos doing that is quite hard when you're in a relationship and you've got someone else to consider you have to consider what they want and you know the things that they want to do that day and and also in relationships generally i don't want to do much because nine to five like throughout the week my brain is chaos so on the weekend i'm not really all up for doing much you know that's my down time and that's become a real weakness of mine and it's made forming romantic relationships harder because on the weekend i don't want to get out of bed and if i do i just want to do some i just want to do nothing or something very very simple but the problem i have there is through monday to friday i've spent all my time on my work so saturday and sunday by definition like logically have to be the time that i commit to you as my partner so this is why i i continually struggle in relationships because monday to friday it's not about you and on the weekend it's about me it's about me and my down time watching manchester united play and i have to i have to learn to compromise i'm sure a lot of people can relate to that the last thing would be because i'm so mentally bombarded with a billion things i have to do at all times over the years the one thing that i've definitely noticed in myself is i get more and more arguably rude and to the point which is like when at the start of my career i was very i had more time and there were less things like less tabs open in my brain so i could take more time about how i respond to things and i could be a little bit more fluffy and soft and whatever but when you have tons of urgent priorities your brain is so funny i was i was talking to a friend about this this morning in fact and i was just giving some feedback to one of the teams i'm working with at another company because the ceo had basically got in touch and requested that all comms become much more streamlined because when we when the team were using extra words he basically to some degree gets you know gets a little bit frustrated with that because we're trying to move fast as an organization and i totally related to that i noticed myself getting annoyed when anything takes longer than it should and this is something that's really changed like totally changed in the last couple of years so i guess the thing that i have to be aware of is that even in the situations where i'm just desperately trying to save time is that i don't compromise on being a decent human being and i can't explain to you how hard this is because we tend to have a philosophy for how we act and how we behave and that philosophy sits deep within us and it whether it's a landlord showing me around a new apartment or a new office or whether it's an email or whether it's a phone call the philosophy tends to be the same right and you it's hard to switch between different philosophies so i tend to treat very personal things sometimes in my personal life whether it's a landlord showing me around an office with the same rapid urgency or my mum having a conversation with me with the same rapid urgency that i might treat business things and i need to get better at like switching between the context and behaving differently in each scenario and realizing that in some scenarios the saving of the time is not more beneficial than just remaining a decent person and like engaging in the situation it's hard and i say it's hard not just because of my own experiences but i've seen pretty much pretty much i'd say over 70 of the highly successful people i know become so incredibly impatient that it almost verges on looking like rudeness like they don't care about you um and like they are not present when you're with them now this is a really hard point to explain but i think people who are incredibly busy will understand this over the last couple of years i've noticed that i've got incredibly impatient with um any request i get and it's something i've noticed not just in myself but in some of my friends who run very very big really really sort of ambitious global businesses who are constantly bombarded with stuff they are some of the most like anti-social slightly rude people i've met you just can't get 10 seconds of their attention and like just to give you context of what's going on in my head now right now as i'm making this podcast i know that i'm missing this phone call with this pr firm i know that i've got this major ipo coming up with this one company i know i've got this board meeting coming up with this company i know i've got this ipo coming up got this other conversation about joining this board and this other ip coming up and i've got all these other personal things going on in my life and this you know i've got to record this podcast my brain has just got all these tabs open so when my pa walks up to me and she goes hi steve how's your day going you know shall i buy pablo some dog food it just it's just it's almost the only way i can describe it is the question is like an irritant um and what you what i've got what learnt over the years is like i have to understand that people don't understand and i have to try and respond on that basis which sometimes especially when i'm like really tired can be a challenge um something i've really tried hard to work on but i'm still like really not that great at is remembering to be like gracious and just a decent person irrespective of what's going on in my head and treating people and being super polite and trying to be my best self every single day in every interaction you know i i talked on this podcast once upon a time about the day i got on a plane i sat in business class and i look up and it's that guy from man versus food and we were running at the time one of the biggest food publishers in the world love food and so i messaged the love food team there was about 150 people that got this message in the social chain chat at the time they said oh my god that guy from um man vs food is on the plane and they all said okay go up to him and ask him this like famous social chain question we have which is what's your favorite sandwich long story short when you join social channel you get asked the question what's your favorite sandwich so i jump up and i walk over to his seat in business class and i say hey uh um i got quite boom shuts me down not right now like shouts in my face so i like slowly tiptoe back to my seat in business class i'm like slouched down and then i have to message 150 people saying oh by the way that guy we all really like is an um and he would have had no idea that he was speaking to somebody who ran at the time the biggest food publisher in the world and had hundreds of employees and at some you know some point in the future might have wanted to do some business with him or work with him but now thinks he's a total and this for me that moment i'll always remember of as teaching me how important every interaction is even the ones that don't seem that important um and i try and bear that in mind if you've ever come and watched me speak anywhere in the world which i'm sure a lot of you have because i was a bit of a speaking hoe over the last couple of years then you would have known that i never ever would leave a venue before everybody's got a chance to like take a photo or meet me or ask me a question i would be the last one to leave my own talks um because i that's the way that i would want someone to treat me someone that i followed and admired that's how i would want them to treat me and i'm scared of being an um yeah and it's much easier to be an when you're when you've achieved some level of success right powerful people find it the easiest to be an they can therefore also probably do the most damage by being an but also get away with it a lot of the time i believe in being a good person as much as i possibly can be and i'm like clearly imperfect in many many ways and i still struggle with this but i'm doing my very best to be a good person um and to be kind and to you know to never forget who i am and where i come from okay so the next question is i'm scared to post my business online at the risk of failure or humiliation do you have any advice this is a very interesting thing that i don't think people talk about enough especially when they're starting out in business which is how do you overcome the sort of public transition from just being steve to now being this entrepreneur who's running this business and raising money and giving people advice and has has a podcast how do you like square that with especially in your friendships and your personal circles with the person that they they knew first right and when we started the business when we started social chain my business partner dom who's come on this podcast to talk about it was ridiculed by his friends privately like you know those kind of jokes that people do where it's like a joke but it's also not a joke so he would post on his facebook page saying we've just started social chain just about this business it's going really well or whatever he'd say and like five or ten of his best friends in the world from his hometown would jump on there with these kind of snide jokey like patronizing bantery comments uh but they were like inherently mean comments and i remember back in the day continually jumping into his comment section and trying to defend him and i'd get some of my other friends to jump in there and just be a bit nicer he was posting his achievements and being like ridiculed with like not funny kind of funny banter and for me as i reflect on what that actually was and the psychology behind his friends and knowing his friendship group back home i'll be completely honest i think his friends saw him changing and somewhat didn't like who he was becoming because his success kind of alienated them and nobody this is just a principle of psychology that i've actually written a little bit about in my book people are most envious of people who they can relate to so if you're you know colleague at work or your friend or someone your age is achieving huge amounts of success and they look like you and went to the same school and came from where you come from that inadvertently shines a mirror on you it means you've got no excuse and that your you know success or lack thereof is probably a consequence of your own actions and as humans we just don't like that thought and so dom's my business partner dom's social circle back home many of them not all of them there was one or two key exceptions we're trying to rein him in and saying you know you're one of us stay here don't become something that we can't resonate with and if you find yourself in the scenario that dom did you basically have a really simple choice to make it feels complicated and it feels like a bit of a minefield but it's not the central question and the most important question you have to ask yourself is who do i want to be and what makes me happy whether and this is a point you can extrapolate to any sort of area of your life even those outside of your career who do i want to be and what makes me happy and decide what that is and pursue that thing anybody that you lose in the pursuit of your happiness is probably not someone you needed or wanted in your life anyway they're probably not someone that had your best interests which by definition are you being happy at heart they're probably someone who was riddled with a little bit of jealousy who didn't want you to become everything you could become so that's the framework in which you make your decision which is who do i want to be and what makes me happy pursue that and be open to losing people who no longer resonate with you pursuing your happiness along the way and i distinctly remember going through this myself which is facing ridicule and banter and little snide comments behind the scenes i remember a day where i posted something on facebook like one of my quotes whatever it was or some of my content on my daily vlog and a friend of a friend had made some snide little comment about like who the does steve think he is the friend had told me and it's those moments where you can make that decision to like fall back in light line and conform and to avoid criticism had i can you imagine my life if i'd done that if i'd let a couple of comments stop me from pursuing my my career and producing all this content which gives me so much intrinsic joy and fulfillment can you imagine if i let the fear of a few comments hold me back from my potential and the things that make me happy i'm so glad i didn't and in that particular case where that guy was ridiculing me behind my back that same person four years later um when he went through some troubles in his life and some mental health issues reached out to me because he was in love with my podcast now and uh met me in a sushi bar in london and just sat there and asked me advice because of something i'd said on the podcast that he initially ridiculed and that kind of shows that that teaches me a lesson that you know even some of the people that ridicule you at the start you've kind of got to forgive whatever it is in their nature that's making them try and hold you back but you've also got to understand that it's not a you problem it's not your responsibility to control what people think of you in their head or the image that they've created of you in their mind that's not your responsibility your central responsibility as a human being is to pursue your happiness your truth and the things that give you the most intrinsic joy that's your responsibility and one of the things i've come to learn about success generally in life is that it's the small seemingly invisible seemingly insignificant decisions piling up over time that have the greatest impact on you it's not our big life choices it's the small ones the ones that are easiest to do or not to do and it's the same with bending under public pressure or criticism it's easy if you see a friend of a friend slagging you off just to stop doing that thing if you allow these small seemingly insignificant comments just nudge you just one day at a time away from the person you want to be and the person you want to become can you imagine how far you're going to be from that person in 10 years time it doesn't bear to think about people ask me for book recommendations all the time and i finally got one for you it's a book called happy sexy millionaire which is authored by me there's this crazy thing when you write a book because you spend so much time pouring your heart and soul into it and everything you know and all of the revelations you've had in your life and then there's this barrier which is that people have to buy the thing in order for them to get that thing that means so much to you i wish that wasn't the case it's just the way the industry is and in order to get that distribution and to get it on shelves you need a publisher so please please please if you can if you've ever liked anything i've ever produced this podcast my instagrams anything i've ever said read this book there was no ghostwriter i wrote every single word myself there's some real surprises in there it's an honest sometimes hilarious incredibly vulnerable hopefully valuable recount of my life my journey everything i've learned across across the way and really the answer to being fulfilled to being happy and to achieving success it is the most important important thing i've ever created so i implore you to go to amazon now or wherever you get your books and get that pre-order if you get that pre-order i'm going to put you into a group with everybody that's pre-ordered it and i'm going to send you some exclusive stuff so the first things i'm going to do is a series of voice notes which i think are um are going to be pretty powerful i'm going to give you access to some tickets which nobody else will have and i'm going to do everything i can to thank you for for giving me that sort of nine quid of your money or whatever it is happy sexy millionaire you can pre-order it everywhere now and if you do get that pre-order please do dm me because i'd love to thank you myself thank you so much for listening i feel like i didn't i i don't say that enough to all of you guys it means a ton to me and honestly there'll be little moments where i'm in the street or in the gym or someone will say something about the podcast and it just puts this tremendous fire under my belly to continue to do it it requires a huge commitment and the driving force behind that commitment is all of your feedback if you're listening on youtube hit the subscribe button if you're listening on the the spotify or the podcast or hit the subscribe button it means a ton to me and it's more fuel for this movement um and yeah it's the reason why we can keep bringing you these episodes and i'll see you again next week for another installment of [Music]

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO

Views: 55,823

Keywords: The Diary Of A CEO, podcast, the diary of a CEO podcast, life lessons, podcasts about life, how to be successful, podcast now, podcasts about life lessons, steven bartlett, how to be successful in business, ceo lifestyle, what is the meaning of life, how do you do things you don't want to do, Do you have imposter syndrome?, how do I find out my greatest weakness, How do you do things you don't want to do?, Extremely Honest Q&A, How do i maximise my earning potential

Id: _wSO42jYP6Y

Length: 52min 33sec (3153 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021