Young Entrepreneur on How He Built A Multimillion-Dollar Business | Steven Bartlett on Impact Theory

once upon a time i thought intensity was the answer i thought you know big intense strides forwards was the answer to changing your life and as i've as i've managed to achieve more things in my life it's become patently obvious that it's the tiny little seemingly insignificant decisions that i've made that have compounded in my favor over the space of five or ten years um and not any individual decision and so i would employ people to to try and get the tiny tiniest things in their life right and see that as a as a compounding um a compounding tailwind [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with stephen bartlett steve and welcome to the show thanks for having me tom it's a real pleasure dude i'm excited for this one so you are a crushingly successful entrepreneur at a ridiculously young age you built social chain from nothing to being valued at half a billion dollars i think um so pretty extraordinary extraordinary at any age but at your age it's really quite dizzying given that context i want to start with a quote from your new book happy sexy millionaire and this really jumped out of me i love this you are not what happened to you you are how you choose to handle it now give people a little bit of background that's easy to say when you are you know worth millions and millions of dollars but give people a little background on where you started and the context for that statement so i was born in a village in africa in botswana near this near south africa and i came to the united kingdom when i was about two years old and i was raised five days a week by my mother who can't read all right still to this day so even up until the age of about 15 or 16 i was trying to help her learn how to read by using the bible um i went off to university when i got kicked out of school at 16 17 years old because i was way too preoccupied with starting businesses i was running the vending machine deals that we had for all of the vending machines in our schools i was running all of the events for the sixth form which was the top level year at school so school trips i was doing everything organizing the venues doing collecting the money um coming up with the idea marketing in it and i got to the point where my attendance in school was about 30 percent um and then they decided that they would kick me out to make a statement despite the fact i was making the school a lot of money there was two expulsion attempts the first was rejected by the head of the school he took the expulsion letter off me ripped it up and said you're my little harry potter we keep you under the stairs because you made money but then later near the end of school they kicked me out and off i went to university to study business went to one lecture walked in looked around everyone else was sleeping on the tables and clearly didn't didn't want to be there to study business in the same way that i did so i walked out called my mom told her i was dropping out of university she said to me i'll never speak to you again unless you go back to university um and i decided that i was going to do it anyway so i didn't speak to my mum for from that point onwards for the for the next two or three years i didn't have any money at this point and when i say any money i mean i had negative money so i i end up moving into these very derelict houses in this place called manchester and moss side and you know at my lowest i was leaving the house and rummaging through takeaways looking for food that someone had left i was stealing pizzas from corner shops it was a very dire time but i was i was completely convinced that i was going to be a happy sexy millionaire before the age of 25 and that's what inspired the title of the book i wrote it in the first page of my diary 18 years old after dropping out i had four goals in life they were to have a range over sport before i was 25 to become a millionaire to work on my body image because i was very very skinny and to get a girlfriend that's what i thought happiness was so off i went at 18 years old um and yeah started a company started another company and then we had a bit of success that that is uh yeah putting it mildly so one of the things in there that i found really interesting is that you were so embarrassed by your house that had smashed up front windows a bunch of refrigerators in the backyard that you would actually have your friends drop you off at a different house and then you would walk home and that if i'm not mistaken you never had anybody growing up over to your house so that to me is is very interesting given obviously the trajectory of your life so i have a hypothesis that you don't have to have a wound to be successful but it really helps and there is something about look poverty breaks most of the people that it touches and so i'm not a champion of poverty by any stretch of the imagination but i want people who right now are struggling who think they're never going to make it to recognize the gigantic chasm that you had to cross in order to become successful and in the book you detail at great length all the different pieces that you had to pull together sort of beliefs way that you move through the world what were some of the key things that and i know you're not a you've said that i've always just had the belief i was going to be successful so we won't waste time with that one but what was it about the way that you had to learn to move whether it was first principles thinking or whether it was recognizing that if it is to be it is up to me like what what got you doing the right things that allowed you to become successful yeah i think i think you're you're totally right there there's a quote in the book where i say the things that invalidated you when you're younger will be the things you seek validation from when you're older and for me not being able to have people at my house not being able to celebrate birthdays and christmases these they carved this insecurity into me that as i get to 16 17 18 years old i just want to fill and as you say like a lot of successful people if you dig into their stories you'll find this moment this trauma this event that happened in their early years and of course it's then the thing that often makes them successful but the reason they become successful is because they're in some way unusual right they might be obsessive about money or power or control and that often also comes with a unappreciated downside which means they might find it really hard to form relationships which i did and they might be a little bit too selfish they might be you know they might chase after material things thinking it's happiness get there it moves away like a mirage and they're left with a lack of fulfillment um to answer your question about what the things were in me that made me move differently one of them was by the age of 10 years old my parents were never in the house and when i said i'll never i mean like i would wake up they weren't there and when i went to bed they weren't there so at 10 years old i have to fend for myself and you think think about the pressures going on in my life at that age i'm a kid who is feeling like really inadequate and insecure because i have nothing and my parents aren't there so i'm looking around thinking how can i fill this void so i'm thinking i'm gonna do a deal with the local vending machine company to stock our school with vending machines and we're going to get 20 of the revenue and i'm going to take a little bit of a cut and i'm going to organize all of the events in my school and this was my way of like i had independence and i had an insecurity and when the two came together i became this young kid who just had no choice but to take on the world um on his own and and the other bit that you mentioned was about belief because i think this is so incredibly important one of the things i hate about like typical cliche poxy instagram advice is people just say just believe in yourself we all know that that's not how belief works right like i i use the example in the book if i held your dearest loved one at gunpoint and said i'm gonna kill them unless you believe that i am jesus christ you could only lie to me because you can't even if everything's on the line you can't make yourself believe something that you don't have evidence to believe and so the way the way that my belief built was in that phase where i had radical independence at 10 years old and i had this huge insecurity and it's like it's like building muscle in the gym you just gradually build these small case studies that compound on top of each other but you know what i didn't have lunch money today but i left the house i did this i told this kid to buy a ticket and now i have lunch money i can influence my peers that's an interesting new piece of evidence i've got about myself and so it was those three things it was building the case studies it was just radical independence and it was which which you know and this insecurity that led me to yeah to being a young person who had built a big company yeah all right i want to get to the case studies in a second but first i want to know why you didn't get bitter so as you know the child of a an african immigrant and a british father in a town where i think you said 1500 kids at your school and they were all white except you so there's and then on top of that the crushing poverty the absence of the parents like you had every reason to get really pissed off um why didn't you i got pissed off when i was i got i was i felt very sorry for myself at the time and it's one of the things that i feel tremendously guilty for now as an adult because if you look at my situ so i this is the crazy thing that i almost uncover while i'm writing the book if you look at where i came from in africa the village in africa where i was born and the the standard of living there then you take that same baby and you move him to a better environment where he has this house and he has you know public education and he has these things and he's miserable only because the context changed and this is one of the things that i uncover as i'm going through the book is it's actually like much of our um much of how we deem the value of something is based on the context we see it in and it's like when you go to a restaurant they've done these studies and they show that if there's three stakes on the menu an expensive one a medium price one and a cheap one people go for the middle one or the same with my you know i talk about my nokia phone i used to have this big nokia phone when i was younger it was amazing until you put it in a world full of iphones and then suddenly you feel inferior and it was really the contrast of you know seeing my neighbors that had nicer gardens and nicer houses and they had christmas presents that was making me miserable and i've tried it as i've gotten older to really free myself from allowing contrast in comparison to be um to allow me to determine my intrinsic value and this was one of the real ultimate revelations i'd gone through life believing this like societal lie that we are intrinsically valued like bartlett's value changes based on what the people around me are wearing or you know how they look or how nice their hair is as if my intrinsic value like there's a number and it goes up and down and that was that lie was was ultimately causing me a lot of my misery so yeah all right so there there's obviously a lot in there and i don't want to go too far afield before we get back to these case studies because i think that's so important but you talk about self-awareness you have a great quote i don't remember the exact quote off the top of my head but basically you're never going to progress unless you can develop the self-awareness you're just not going to learn the lessons so how like because the quote that i started with to me that's the juice of your story right is you get to the point where you say okay i can sort of reframe everything that's happened to me in a way that disempowers me or i can tell myself the same like the same events but in a different sort of story context and now i'm empowered and i'm moving forward one when did you become aware of that and then how do you think about self-narrative is it something that you're shaping every day to make sure what you choose to deal with the situation you're in is always going to move you to a better place yeah so one of the the decisions i think everyone has to make when they're trying to understand what their true self narrative is or the direction they should be moving in is like what what actually intrinsically matters to you and it's so difficult to um to know these days what who you actually are and what actually matters to you especially if you're growing up in my generation where you have you know all of these screens and all of these social networks telling you that being tom bill you the entrepreneur is the thing to do but also you need to be traveling all the time and these contrasting narratives and you kind of lose yourself within that and so by stripping away a lot of the by understanding these forces that had taken hold of me in my life like in security and comparison i was able to get closer to like listening to that voice within me that was like this is who we are um and now i try and make my decisions on that basis which is a real clear understanding of my intrinsic values and i try and place my time against those values so one of them is my health at the moment i went from being a really skinny guy to being in the best shape of my life because i started to understand that one of my intrinsic values was to live a happy healthy life um another point which i wanted to touch on which is kind of connected is it's very easy to get caught up in the labels that you or society have given you and these labels can be black white poor dad mum social media ceo impact theory university host right it's it's funny that we start to follow the implicit instructions of those labels and at one point when i left social chain um in august it was so incredibly tempting to go and play out that those labels of being a social media ceo for the next five ten years of my life and i stopped again and i said is that who i am am i those labels or am i something else and it was that revelation for me that allowed me to resist my labels as i call it and since i left social chain and the obvious move is obviously just to start another company or a social media business i started a theatrical production i'm doing i'm working at a multi-billion dollar biotech company solving mental health disorders i'm djing now and i've got a big show coming up and i'm trying not to be confined by my own self-narrative which i think will actually lead me to a less fulfilling life if that makes sense all right so let's dive into the self-narrative then so i would say everyone is going to be confined by their self-narrative but you can tell yourself whatever narrative you want so your narrative could be i can dj i can work for a biomedical company i can solve mental health crises um or it can be man i am my last success and that's it and [ __ ] i better out do what i just did and um how how do you work with that narrative is it conscious are you journaling do you write it down do you just you're obviously highly verbal so is it that it's you're telling your friends and sort of shaping it as you go like how do you make sure that whatever narrative you are telling is expansive enough to not become the trap it's it's a really good question um i think my self-narrative is actually more of a philosophy it's it's a set of principles that i make or like a prism in which i make my decisions through so for example if someone comes up to me and says um steve we've got this cancer company in the biotech space do you want to come and work there i don't sort of use my my own self-narrative as a way to decide whether that's the right opportunity for me or the right direction i ask myself i probably run myself mentally through a certain set of principles which is is it challenging for me challenge is a really important part of having that sort of feeling of forward motion and challenge my life keeps me stimulated and i talk about in the book how i used to think chaos was chaos and stability with stability now i came to learn and from studying like michael phelps when he accomplished all of his goals and reached apparent stability that in fact stability is chaos and chaos is stability so now i i prioritize chaos in the form of challenge i've heard you explain this so i know what you mean but for somebody that doesn't understand why you're saying that stability is actually chaos why is that true so um there was a day when i was 24 where someone came along and offered me i think it was 40 million to buy my company and 18 year old insecure steve bartlett showed up that day in my head and he was like let's get that lamborghini right and i went home that day and i'm sat in a small dark room and i go on auto trader which is the site where you buy cars and i go on rightmove at the same time i'm looking at this amazing car this amazing house and there's this weird sense of like emptiness growing inside me that i'm about to trade my like purpose for this piece of metal and um i had like a mini existential crisis which was 18 year old steve bartlett told us that we came for this but 25 year old steve bartlett looking at it is thinking but then what if it was all about a lamborghini and this was the mountaintop or the finish line and i'm feeling totally unfulfilled by looking at my completed goals um then i must have it all wrong and the moment where i approached what i thought stability was it felt like chaos it was an existential crisis and in fact the moments in my life where i've been building something striving which you would probably count as chaos those have been when i've been most stable and so that's why i've made this sort of distinction between the two and i've swapped them now so i look for chaos i think it's a it's a non-negotiable in any in my sort of decision-making prism i look for um a challenge that i'll find intrinsically fulfilling um you know in line with my interests or because it's gonna change the world in some way and that's probably the third point which i talk a lot about in the book is people who do careers that have an impact on others um have the most fulfilling careers it's no surprise that clergy you know priests um um and people like uh teachers report to having the most fulfilling careers you know they say that the best way to lift yourself up is by reaching down and pulling someone else up and again that's proven to be incredibly true in my life yeah no that makes a lot of sense i actually i really resonated with that flip of um when you lose sight of where you're trying to go you no longer have that clear objective there's no purpose to what you're doing there's a sense of being unmoored like you're just you're adrift and that feeling is deeply uncomfortable one of the most interesting stories in your book dude this is so true and i want people to know how true this is that when you were scrounging in the restaurant cushions like the seats and you found your 13 pound 40 and you said you were more excited in that moment than when you realized that you were worth tens of millions of dollars yeah tell people that moment and what you realized then so so one of the days where i was exceptionally poor and i'd gone into this this chicken shop looking for um some food that someone had left and i remember sitting on the backs of this chair and i just i dropped some of like 20 pence down the back of this chair and i put my hands down there it's filthy and i reach down and i find these this this big coin and i pull out it's a pound coin and i'm like oh my god and i'm there for like 10 minutes going down my hands are full of money although they're filthy and i went around all of the chairs in this little chicken shop and and managed to find about 13 pounds and 40 pence yeah and um i was that day i was it was just like i'd won the lottery it was like euphoria and i thought i can eat for probably for the next two weeks now with this money and then contrasting that to the day when i'm sat in my hotel room in manchester and i get the news that social chain is now listed on the stock market and i can see it um i can see the ticker symbol and i can see the valuation at the time was like 250 million dollars and i felt i would say num but it's less than num it's like a negative version of num like that's totally anti-climactical um and the the the confusion that comes about when you don't feel the way you expect expected to feel in those moments can be quite confounding and i i called my business partner dom and i said you know he's my age and we did this all together i said you know hoping that he would give me the energy and the positivity that i was seeking and i called him and he was worse than me he was more down than i was and again it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense because 18 year old steve told me he made me a promise that when we become a sexy millionaire then we we get everything we get the marching band the confetti we get you know i don't know something goes up i don't know so and it didn't happen and i i felt really down that day because of the anticlimax and it wasn't until i left the the hotel room and i thought i'll walk to work today which i never did i put my music on i'm walking down the street and the money trees by kendrick lamar comes on and it was the song i used to listen to when i lived in the gun crime part of the city and i was doing a two-hour walk at night time to go work in a call center and it was the song i used to dream about being here today um while i was listening to and i was looking around the streets and suddenly all of the memories of that time when i was 19 and i was struggling came back to me that was the apartment block i used to fantasize about living in that was the car dealership that i used to say to myself one day we'll get one of those and tears just come down my face but again it was a moment of real deep gratitude that was brought about because of contrast i got to walk in 19 year old steve's shoes that day on the way to work listening to the music he used to listen to walking past the the shops that used to create his dreams and i was just overcome with gratitude and i couldn't have been happier and so i called dom back my business partner and took him through that journey with me too and i used to i basically took a trip down memory lane with him and he felt the same way and i that day i learned a lot about the concept of gratitude and and also one actually one of the downsides of living in forward motion is you never get it's so gradual the climb it's one step at a time so there's it's hard to find a moment where you go oh my god we've done a thousand steps because yesterday was just one more step than today so there isn't that big moment um and your brain doesn't especially when you're an entrepreneur that's always a little bit paranoid and and slightly scared of being complacent there isn't a moment where you stop and say well oh my god look at what we've done it just doesn't happen so yeah that's what you know but i learned a lot that day and i since then to be honest i've since about 25 26 years old i've had a bit of a sort of an existential journey trying to figure out what life was all about you're you're very good at synthesizing insights which is incredibly powerful and now one of those things i'm hoping you can articulate for people is how when you feel like a loser when you have nothing going for you how do you begin to build those case studies so that you can begin to believe that the things that you're you know dreaming about can actually be possible for you you know what i'm knocking around on this topic so much at the moment because i'm trying to understand the amount of sort of self-responsibility and um personal discipline is required to start this journey i've got this friend back home who was was my best friend for my whole childhood up until the age of 16. same street same school hang around with each other every day i've gone on to where i've gone to he is still living there um he is marginally suicidal he is on government support and we've gone in two completely different directions and i've always tried to understand you know just by all the help and effort that i've tried to give him i've offered to pay for his accommodation i've offered to help him get a job nothing i've been able to do has been able to move him whereas we can all think of people in our lives that just required a little bit of support and they they went and they transformed themselves and so i reflect and i say okay so how would you go if you if you are someone who is down and out how do you go about making those steps you know part of the issue when we're thinking about making radical change in our lives is we see it as being stood at the foot of like mount everest a huge mountain we want to chain completely change our life but as is the case in my life and probably yours for me it starts with like first picking up the smallest pebble whatever that is and i've seen this time and time again with my podcast guests as well he went down and out my last guest on the podcast was a guy that was suicidal had just left his house to go and kill himself he couldn't bring himself to do it comes home and he watches a youtube video just an advert that popped up and it showed him these military commandos and that just gave him a sense of something it gave him a sense of fire here so that day he put on his shorts and he said you know what i'm gonna what i'm gonna do today is gonna put on my shorts and i'm just gonna go for a run and it was that run which ultimately led to another run and another run and it changed his life he became an elite military commando he's now like a mindset coach and he's now you know absolutely dominating the world sometimes it requires a spark and that spark um for me or for a lot of people is understanding that there is something worth taking the first step for and for me in terms of like the practical way you start to build those case studies it literally is it can be the smallest thing it can be deciding the name of the business you it can be getting out of bed at 7 00 pm uh 7am that day it can be the smallest thing and when you start to look at it like small tiny decisions compounding in your favor versus having to climb everest i think then it becomes a little bit more mentally achievable than uh then a lot of sort of instagram hustle porn stars might want to make you believe and i think yeah that's that's once upon a time i thought intensity was the answer i thought you know big strides for big intense strides forwards was the answer to changing your life and as i've as i've managed to achieve more things in my life it's become patently obvious that it's the tiny little seemingly insignificant decisions that i've made that have compounded in my favor over the space of five or ten years and not any individual decision and so yeah i would employ people to to try and get the tiny tiniest things in their life right and see that as a compounding tailwind all right so uh you said that every every self-help book ever written should be titled be consistent for a really long time yeah and i thought that was so on the money why is that um how more importantly how does one know what to be consistent on in order to have the the big impact i i tend to actually believe that you don't have a huge amount of choice now that sounds like a crazy thing to say but i think life has a really remarkable way of making you inconsistent at things that you absolutely intrinsically absolutely hate doing um the thing do you see what i mean like the things that i've become most successful at i got some type of like intrinsic payoff from just like a little token one token a day and that was one of the most important factors that allowed me to be consistent the thought of having to be consistent at something that you intrinsic intrinsically hate doing that offers you no return um i find uh like i just i don't think that's possible it's why i dropped out of university it's why i couldn't pay attention in school um why is consistency so important i just think i just think it's everything i think if you understand the laws of compounding returns um and you've read the book the slight edge by i'm gonna say jeff olsen you'll probably know you've read every book ever um you'll understand again as i said like it's the small seemingly insignificant things that are compounding for or against us in every aspect of our life whether we know it or not the old analogy of you know if i eat a cookie today i won't be fat if i eat a cookie tomorrow i won't be fat if i eat a cookie every single day for the next five years i will be fat and you look at you know the way that great things happen the grand canyon i think i talk about in the book if you got a hundred million gallons of water and dropped it on a mountain there would be no impact it wouldn't change shape but if you get a trickle of water and you trickle it through the mountain for 10 years you'll have a grand canyon like that's that's how you move um huge objects and achieve great things it's that showing up every single day and one the other way that i learned it and specifically how when you focus on consistency things go really slow and then fast was my instagram following um it took me 800 posts to get 10 000 followers in my next 800 posts i got 1.1 million additional followers in fact i got 10 uh i got 300 000 followers in my lot in 10 posts yeah so i when the whole carousel thing blew up i got 300 000 followers by just doing 10 carousels and i thought to myself you know i've been doing this instagram thing for eight years and and if you looked at the graph of how my instagram is gone it's exactly like every compounding interest graph ever if you look at my health if you look at my brushing my teeth if you look at anything my business it's exactly the same um and that just requires consistency and i think it's so liberating to say that because again people think that performing radical change in your life is some like you know pythagoras um quantum physics equation that they've got to solve to move this mountain but it's not it's the one thing you can control is your time you can see it as i get 24 chips every single day i'm stood in front of this roulette table my job is to place as many of these chips on things that are in line with my values because then at the end of the day the roulette wheel spins and you see what returns you made and so every single day i just think about my 24 chips and where i'm going to place them today and all those decisions in line with my values um and that's a that's how i if i want to try and simplify my thinking to that level it becomes it feels really achievable and manageable you know when i think about trying to change my life it's daunting and terrifying but placing my 24 chips better every single day 16 by the time i've woken up it feels like something that i can achieve you know so all right so how do you pick where you put the chips john there's two questions i ask myself the the first question is um the person i want to be how would they place their chips another way of asking that is like you know how would the person i want to be use their time and i find that as a re a really useful distilling question to ask myself because sometimes you don't know what the right thing to do is but you know the person you want to be you know you i feel like we all have an idea of how they behave and so i can ask myself even when i'm about to consume you know like a big mcdonald's burger would the person i want to be make this decision and for some reason that feels like an easier question to answer than is it right right now because our present self as as we all know um tends to lean towards seeking comfort and tends and likes to avoid discomfort whether psychological or physical i think i wrote on twitter the other day um comfort is like a short is is a i can't remember my own bloody quote now basically like comfort is a short time frame but a long-term enemy like so in the moment i'm continually not making maybe the best decisions but um yeah in the long term that comfort will will stab me in the back whether that's my health my fitness or my my intrinsic joy so that's really the most important question i ask myself when i'm thinking about placing my chips and then it's just a case of what my values that's the other question so am i clear on my values do i want to be as you'd say a better husband or do i want to be a better uncle to my niece do i want to have a greater impact on the world of mental health or change the education system is my book important to me is that more important than it to me than watching netflix for four hours and that again is a really useful prism which is my clear intrinsic values of knowing where to place my chips it sounds like nonsense it's actually really simple and i think that's as i say is liberating totally agree that uh you are liberated once you know sort of what the rubric is by which you're going to evaluate an opportunity like you have that filter uh it's very powerful in the book you actually include one of your decision making rubrics around quitting and you said something that i found very um useful it is a very unique frame which is quitting is a skill so you recently left social chain which had to anybody else would look at that and say that is a staggeringly large decision most people would be trapped they'd never leave and in the book you just say here's my matrix it essentially forces a decision walk people through how to think about quitting yeah so starts with like the question are you thinking of quitting if the answer is no obviously you're in the wrong frame if the answer is yes it asks you why you're thinking about quitting um are you thinking about quitting because it's hard are you thinking about quitting because it sucks and what i mean by sucks as i define it is like um it's like toxic for your mental health fulfillment intrinsic values right so it sucks to find that however you will if i'm thinking of quitting because it's hard right which is the other side of the framework i'll then say okay well are the rewards on offer um do they justify how hard this challenge is right the potential rewards and offer and if the answer is yes then i'll carry on because i don't think we should quit things um purely because they're hard especially if the rewards on offer are equivocal to the challenge and in fact as you'll know and as everyone i think will know my hardest moments in life have been my most valuable so moving to the other side of the spectrum if well if it if the answer is no there and the rewards on offer aren't worth how hard it is then i'll quit so if i'm struggling but at the end of that struggle is one dollar bill then again this is this is probably a pointless effort moving to the other side of the framework so it sucks the first question if it sucks whatever you're doing in your life a relationship a job whatever ask yourself if [Music] if you believe you can make it not suck right if you believe there's something you can do to make that situation not suck and then if you say yes you've got to ask yourself are the rewards on offer worth the effort it will take to make it not suck and that could be a toxic boss at work you know or whatever and you think well you know i actually it would take so much effort maybe to the point of impossibility to get that person out of my life or to remove that barrier that it's not worth it anymore and then going down that side of the framework as well so if if it sucks and you believe you can change it and it's worth changing then again you stick at it and that in simple is my quitting framework it really it's quite simplified and everything has tremendous nuance and we've all got bills to pay so things aren't always that simple but that's kind of the prisoner and that's why i've been at total peace at times when other people have thought my quitting decisions were courageous or dumb or terrifying it just doesn't seem to be a decision to me and that's where i got to the social chain where um it sucked and the rewards on offer weren't worth it weren't worth how much it sucked anymore and i didn't think i could change it so i was um i was gone and what changed fundamentally was it something in the business or was it something in you when you start a company at 21 years old and you dilute yourself tremendously um you also lose a lot of control and um as you'll read about in the book again but also as most sort of psychologists have determined when they're trying to understand why people love their work control is a huge huge part of motivation feeling like you have autonomy what we call self-determination of your work is tremendous and i diluted myself but then there was you know eight boards of direct you know eight people on the board of directors who were double my age living in another country all living in the same country and i just felt like i didn't have the control i needed anymore to take this company in the direction i wanted to so for me the decision was to step out of that and it's i almost see it like you reach a ceiling and you've got to like turn right to carry on going up and that was my decision it was this is giving me everything it can and now i move on and we you know i take with me the thing that got me here so nothing lost all right so obviously i'm pretty sure i know what it is uh but what is the thing that got you here that you're taking with you it's a perspective on the world i think um it's a the way that i see the world and that first principle thinking which you alluded to at the start of the conversation being able to look at a situation and um hold it out in front of you and question if if this is still the correct answer to the problems that we have ahead of us so you know if you look at my decision to drop out of university i was a business student that sat in the room looked around and thought i'm going to get the same piece of paper as her and she's drunk and asleep and she definitely doesn't want to be here so is this a piece of paper of value this degree probably and if i'm going to be an entrepreneur this is all first principle thinking if i'm going to be an entrepreneur and run my business who am i going to show this piece of paper to anyway what am i actually going to need to become the entrepreneur i'm probably going to need experience and i'm sat here listening to this guy who's never ran a business before trying to tell me to think he was trying to he was trying to tell us to make posters with like felt it pens and this is all not so like first principle thinking and and then you're spending huge sums of money to indebt yourself for this worthless piece of paper first principles very simple first principles will tell you that this is a very bad idea so that's first principle thinking um self-belief you can't take that from me in fact it only compounds in one direction really um i guess it could massive failure might shake that but my self-belief and now you know there's five buckets that i've spent the last and this is really a point for young people that are listening to this if they're thinking you know before the age of 30 what should i be doing i kind of see there's five buckets that we all should be doing everything we can to fill the first is like your network right so it's like who you know the contacts you have which proves to be incredibly valuable the second is your knowledge which is what you know you like knowledge and skills um i'll see your knowledge and then i'll say the third one is actually your skills so knowledge and skills knowledge for me is the information i have the skills kind of relate to my ability to apply that those skills public speaking sales that kind of thing the fourth is your res resources so money thing you know money you have your disposal and the fifth is your reputation right which is again proves to be incredibly valuable a lot of people call it personal brand now but your reputation is you know it shows up when you when you need it to most so what i'm think when i when i say to young people a lot of the time i'm like if you're below the age of 25 and you're trying to optimize your future remember you're pouring into those five buckets at all times and to put yourselves in positions whether that's taking a shitty sales job working on the phones but you can you know optimize and increase those those five buckets and yeah those are the five things i took with me as well my reputation my skills my knowledge my network and my resources that is a way better answer with far more detail than i was expecting my friend that is very impressive tell me what do you want people to get out of your book i see it as kind of like an intervention right so i i represent a certain generation the connected generation that were connected to the internet from you know from my very early adolescence and we've all gone through a very similar experience um i think my experience is probably slightly exacerbated in some areas because i grew up with social media and uh with just this you know it's almost like i grew up in a much bigger room where i could see much more people and contrast myself to them and these forces including some of the the more specific personal forces about being a black kid in an all-white school the only kid with curly hair being uh you know a broke kid in a middle class area all of these forces exacerbated it for me but i think the principles are fundamentally the same for for the vast majority of our generation in fact the data says it is if you look at um cosmetic surgery and and the way that our generation in particular are going under the knife to change their body more so than anything now because of the like the kardashians of the world and things like that i know that my like i know that the majority of my generation are going in a certain direction and i also think we've not yet seen the true extent of the results of this experiment we've done but we decided to give everybody this piece of glass in their hand where they could see a bunch of fake things and they would be reinforced um psychologically with likes and followers based on how they behaved and would say that was good that was bad we don't do that again and look she's really good you know and we had like superficiality and materialism ground into our character i don't think we've yet seen the the results of this experiment um so before we see the results of this experiment fully transpire in our mental health and our happiness as we're seeing now with this like mental health epidemic i think i have a chance as someone who's like climbed up the ladder that i that 18 year old steve wanted to get up to to like look back down and shout no no no no no no don't come up this [ __ ] lap do you know what i mean but i hate the cliche of like oh money doesn't buy you happiness like i'm not giving up my [ __ ] money shouldn't i mean i don't know about you but i prefer it having money and it's a good thing but um but i was just wrong about everything and i i i you know my publisher asked me for years to write a book and i was like i've got nothing to say and then it was it was the day where i looked back at my diary from 18 years old and in the front page it says like before i'm 25 i want to be a happy sexy millionaire and it lists it i thought how am i encouraging more 18 year old steve bartlett's right now to follow in that same path and and um and what can i do what what would i want to write for 18 year old steve who was insecure who was growing up in this connected world he was chasing pleasure thinking it was happiness as it moved off into the distance every time i thought i grabbed it like a rainbow or a mirage um and that was that was it i thought you know i i have a chance for my generation to write a bit of an intervention and hopefully and i'm not even sure if it's possible if i'm honest with you to get them to realize something about the true nature of like fulfillment about love and about success without them having to make the same mistakes that i did because i've got a friend and i've got many friends who have become wildly successful and still haven't figured it out so you know and then and then some people will spend their whole lives chasing it the thing that i managed to get um never get it but get everything get all of the adverse consequences of the chase which is like shitty mental health isolation loneliness um depression anxiety and so this was my intervention and that's what it says across the back of the book it says this is my intervention for a generation that i think are have more information than ever before but are seemingly less informed and and uh yeah and that was that was it well i think you nailed it man the book is great very well done where can people connect with you anywhere my uh anywhere to be honest you know it's just social media i guess to get to instagram my name's stephen on instagram um yeah that's probably the best place to find me um and you can get the book on amazon you know if you're in america or anywhere else yeah perfect thank you so much by the way honestly you're such a an inspiration and i really really respect your values they really come through in everything you do more so than and i've met a lot of people in this game a lot of people on instagram a lot of people that are producing content there are almost none with the level of like authentic values that you have and i've met you in person i've met you online and i've met you now again and it really stands out and you can really tell when someone is real you know what i mean and you are one of those very very i'll be honest rare real people so thank you for that because you've helped guide me in a way that i've known is without a gender if you know what i mean so thank you man i really appreciate that that means a lot and it comes from a place of having been a total mess and figuring it out along the way and realizing i actually get anxious when i try to be cool so if i didn't i would be a poser like everybody else but sadly i get way too anxious so but thank you man no i really appreciate that and uh to everybody watching guys trust me this dude like one you're going to want to listen to the interviews that he's done is extraordinary he has his own podcast which is also fantastic and the book is amazing it will change your life if you let it and that is the highest praise that i can pay it speaking of things that will change your life if you let it if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care the hardest thing to do is to is to enable people to see themselves as they are not as they hoped they were not as they've been taught they are but as they actually are it's the single hardest thing to do and i'll tell you why because we're all embedded in this construct of a thing called identity

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 113,381

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Steven Bartlett, Happy Sexy Millionaire, belief, insecurity, entrepreneur, investor, founder, success, validation, self awareness, narrative, self narrative, chaos, gratitude, consistency, quitting, social chain, social media, intervention, business, startup, Botswana

Id: 9mV3Pp7VHD0

Length: 44min 31sec (2671 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021