From Dropout to DOAC: Steven Bartlett's Secrets to Success | A Bit of Optimism

So the best part about sitting down to do a podcast with you is that you are never on the receiving end of these things. And you have made quite a career out of getting people to say all the things they don't want to say. And now here you are on the receiving end.

Yeah, it's terrifying.

Now you know how we feel.

I'm not going to start with here's how to, here's how nice I am. I'm not going to start with. I'm going to ask you a question. Most people lie about the answer and I want you to be honest. How are you? I'm not going to start, but how are you?

How am I? I'm good. Interesting chapter of my life. It's an interesting chapter of my life. I think things feel more balanced than ever, if that makes sense. When I say balanced, I don't mean in any equal proportion. I just mean quantities that make me feel good. Right. And I feel like I'm in a bit of a boring phase of my life in an interesting way.

Define boring.

Just this kind of straight compounding phase of my life where nothing huge happens, but in fact everything is happening because it's boring. It's the same. It's showing up every day. It's disciplined.

Does boring mean routine or does boring mean you're bored?

It means.

There'S not a huge variance in the amount of experiences, but it's intentional.

So it's maintenance.

Yeah. Focus focused.

That is counter to your personality. And what I mean by that is, you know, you're, you are sort of an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. You, you know, dropped out of school, went into business by yourself, sort of lived the entrepreneurial life. And entrepreneurs, their mentality, the don't do well. The creativity, the excitement, the joy, it's is not, doesn't suit maintenance. Which is why entrepreneurial minded folks struggle in a corporate environment. Does that mean you're changing? Does that mean that you're in a position of no creativity? You're not feeling challenged, like so bored is a very interesting choice of words.

Yeah. So let me, let me, I'll give you an example of something. Let me just take my podcasting business. It's about 30 people. It's called the Diary of a CEO. And everything is going up until and to the right. So this month is our highest downloads ever. We're going to do about 35 million downloads this month. 400,000 new subscribers on YouTube this month, Spotify. Everything's going up into the right. And I know that it's in those Moments because I know this from I'd say two and a half decades of observational analysis of my mother, of successful people, of Joe Rogan, of all the people that were big and then fell off. I know that it's in those moments when temptation to lose focus is the highest. So it's in those moments when everything is going great that you need to have this kind of boring patience with the process. And it's this slow, iterative 1% finding of marginal gains that feels boring because I'm not accepting huge new opportunities that might divert my focus. I'm doing, in fact what, what I think Joe Rogan did so well, which is do the same thing for 15 years and don't allow yourself to be swayed by temptation, which is, as I said, optimal when things are going well.

Give me an example of a person or an organization that you believe gave into temptation. Like what does that look like?

A specific name of a person. I mean, or a company I can talk broadly about.

I mean, the point is like we're talking about these things in the abstract.

Yeah.

So help me understand a tangible example so that I can relate to what giving in temptation looks like.

The biggest YouTuber in our country in the UK.

Yeah.

Had, let me say3.3 million subscribers. He was the king of YouTube. He was the king of in depth conversations, he was the king of the algorithms, et cetera. He got so big that he got so many opportunities. He got an opportun to start a fighting channel, he got the opportunity to start a gaming channel, a football channel, a second football channel, loads of other channels, a gambling channel. He took those opportunities. He got an opportunity to move to another platform called Twitch. He took that opportunity, he lost focus and that the end he slow. You slowly saw this descending of, of his, his ability to reach people, his message. He started, he lost sight of also his authenticity and would take opportunities based on their lucrativeness, not the resonance that it had with him and his audience. And I just watched him go from being the king to being now completely. You know, he texted me the other day and asking me for a loan because his whole team have left him. And I diagnosed that moment against someone like a Joe Rogan who doesn't get credit for really the consistency and staying power. And I go, it was in the moment when temptation was highest that he should have done, he should have made the toughest decision which was to focus. And I talk about that a little bit in my book. This, these moments in my life where I had such high temptation to lose focus or my mother, who I watched start 25 businesses between the age of. Between the age of my age of 10 and 20. And I watched how she was never successful, because whenever something showed any sign of success or failure, she would be swayed by a narrative that there's. There's greener grass elsewhere. And watching your mother, like our family were, we were virtually bankrupt for my entire childhood. No birthdays, no Christmases, no driving licenses, living in a derelict house purely because of my mother's lack of focus. Even the one business she started, which is this restaurant that went remotely well, she was immediately swayed by someone down the street telling her that an estate agent's business was better. And then I watched the restaurant crumble as she tried to give 50% to two things when both of her competitors in those industries are giving 110% to each. So when I said boring at the start of this, I'm honoring the fact that I know focus. And focusing on consistency and compounding and doing more of the same stuff is, in fact, the path to the top. There's this really interesting boring section in the middle of it when you've got to just say no a lot. And they always say, you know, when you're unsuccessful and things aren't going well, say yes. And when you're really successful and things are going well, say no. I'm saying no to everything. And it can feel a bit boring.

I guess what you're describing in the example of the. The British podcaster is selling out, right? Which is you've achieved a level of notoriety, or you have a number of followers that is now appealing to other companies and advertisers, et cetera, and you say they dangle money in front of you.

It's the focus, the selling of the focus that I think is the worst thing. Charlie Munger, one of the greatest investors of all time, says, never interrupt compounding interest unless you absolutely have to. That's one of the great rules of investing. Never interrupt the process when something is compounding. And he interrupted the process.

Process, yeah.

By shifting his focus.

Yeah.

And that's. That's the chapter of my life I'm in. And it's. It's difficult to speak to teams. In fact, your work on thinking about Infinite Games and Finite Games really helped me because you've then got to build a system that is built for a long, long chapter of your life.

Yeah.

You've got to build a company culture, and you've got to energize your people and inspire them away in a way which is built for 10 years, not 10 months. And that's what I think a lot about is how do I keep these people with me for the next decade? How do I keep their enthusiasm up? How do I keep them in a sustainable culture?

Did you always know this? When did you learn this? When was the conversion to being finite driven? You know, hitting a number, hitting a score. If I get this amount of money, that'll make me happy to now recognizing that sort of boring is actually a strategy.

So it was reading your book in fact. So reading about finite and infinite games changed my first business in a quite profound way because I realized that we were aiming at things like becoming the best in, in our industry when we wanted to be number one, make the most revenue or whatever. And I realized that there was a both a lack of fulfillment that would come with achieving those goals, but also it wouldn't stand our company the best chance of succeeding over time because we were unsustainable, we were too intense. We were focused on short sighted goals, we had short sighted incentives. And then in 2000, I'm going to say 2019, I stood in front of my company, presented a new way forward which I called www.which was our world goals, which means outside of our walls, our welfare goals, which is the people inside of our walls and come from the world welfare. Oh, and our work goals, which is the work we do for the clients that we have. And these goals were all infinite in design. And just because of that, it, it meant that we were designing our company to go for multi decades. Motivation increased, staff attrition fell. In terms of people quitting.

Our incentive structures changed, our client work changed, we took on different clients that could go with us over the long term which are more lucrative. And that's kept with me ever since. So thank you.

Oh, I love that. And thanks for being an example of what an infinite minded company looks like. So there's a detail in your own growth and your own history as an entrepreneur that I find really interesting.

You know, I'll give an analogy. Some people, I've had people come up to me and say, can you help me? Can you give me advice? I want to be a public speaker. And I say, well, what do you want to talk about? And they go, I haven't figured that out yet. And sort of you realize they've got it in the wrong order, which is you find yourself compelled by an idea and then you figure out a way to spread that message. Public speaking being one of them. It was always weird to me that somebody says I want to Be a public speaker. I don't know what I'm speaking about. And I think we see that very often in, in, in business owners, which is I want to make a lot of money. I want to be my own boss. I'm looking for a business I can start, right. And money very often is the driver. If I hit this number, I'll be happy for this. If I hit this number, I'll feel successful, be successful, whatever. And I'm very curious about your rise. When you first, you started your first business before you went public, what was the motivation, what was the drive as. I mean, how old were you when you started that business?

I was 21 when I started that business. It was a pivot from a business that I started when I was 18. But yeah, 21, when, when it was founded, when it was registered as a company.

And what was the ambition, what was the drive?

There's a, it's multifaceted, so there's a personal drive which is to become rich. Yeah, and that was very clear to me. I needed to become rich.

Why?

Because I was deeply insecure and riddled with shame and you know, being the only, pretty much the only black kid in an all white area. Growing up, we were the weird family in my view. We, as I said, we lived in a derelict house and values often decided by comparison. So, you know, if you look at where I was getting my value from, you've got a perfect house next to ours, a perfect family on the other side. You have another perfect white family with lots of money next to ours. Then you have this derelict house with me and my black family inside of it where the grass is six foot high. Everything about my context, my environment told me that I was lower value. It told me that I wasn't enough. So the things that invalidate you when you're a kid often become the things you seek validation from as an adult. And for me, I was invalidated by our lack of money, by no romantic interests, by my family being quite bizarre, my mother being particularly.

Interesting. And that's what I wanted. I wanted normalcy. So at 18 years old I write in the front page of my diary that by the age of 28 I'll make a million pounds. A range over sport will be my, my first car. I'll get a six pack and a girlfriend. And that was my orientation and my North Star in life. That was if I did all of these things, then I would be successful. And that was my, that's the path I set out to achieve. And by 23, I had a Range Rover Sport was my first car. I had multi multiple millions in the bank account. Had a girlfriend and I was working out and you know, I didn't feel great to say the least.

So then, so 23 or 23 years old is a pretty young age a. To be a millionaire. But, but then to have achieved one's goals on paper.

Yeah.

And not feel successful.

So what happened? Like, so you achieve these things and then what happened?

I realized that I'd been lied to by some kind of narrative. When I say lied to, I don't mean someone had lied to me. A narrative had lied to me at some point along the way. A narrative had told me that upon our company going public that morning when I went over to my phone in the corner of the room that a marching band might appear and maybe all of those people that called me the N word or bullied me when I was a kid would appear and apologize and say how great I was or something. You know, I was, I was, I was confused about. I was confused about the nature of fulfillment and who I was and why I wanted what I was. And I was riddled with fake ambitions. I think that's what I came to learn over the years was that my ambitions were fake. They were, they weren't ambition, they were insecurity. And there's a big distinction. And most of our lives are dragged by insecurity and shame. They're not driven by ambition. And when you just. It's a tragic truth that most of us are going to have to have. Our, our ambitions and our, our narratives fail us before we realize that they're, they're, they're illusions and they're mirages and they're, they're false. It's. It's something that I think a lot about. How do we get people to realize that these limiting beliefs and ideas that are driving their lives are illusions before they have to undergo the pain to realize that themselves? Even a little bit earlier when someone offered to buy our company for a very big eight figure number. Me going home and going on rightmove.com to look at the houses I could buy, then going on auto trader and look at the car that I could buy. And looking into the image on this screen and realizing that I would be somewhat emptier, I'd be somewhat poorer for buying these things. And I couldn't quite. It was an emptiness that I could feel inside of me. And then I met the guy that I wanted to become. I always think about this. I went and met the guy That I wanted to be. Friend of mine was still a friend to this day. Billionaire. Seven Lamborghinis outside of his house. I slept in the Louis Vuitton room, which was just this big room surrounded by these bags. Spent time with him that night till 5am and he opened up to me and deeply, deeply lonely. Asked me to sleep in bed with him that night. This is a 35 year old man, one of the most miserable people at a fundamental level that I'd met. And that is who I was striving to become. So I had to go in search of something else, a new set of values to govern my life.

Well, you said, you described this as fake ambition.

Yeah.

So then what's real ambition? Because you did make the distinction. What's real ambition? If this is the fake ambition.

Yeah. So real ambition is, is, is driven by your intrinsic desires and passions and interests. So, you know, like I DJ now and I do this podcast. These are things that I would do irrespective of remuneration. They're attached to my, like, intrinsic motivation.

The things that you would do for free.

I would. You might not do them for free unless you're fortunate enough to have surplus income, but they're the things that, you know. Yeah. You would choose to do if in a world where you didn't, you didn't have to worry about money. So fake ambitions are driven by the pursuit of rewards and validation. Like I wanted a Lamborghini and I wanted to Range Rover Sport. Even though I'm not interested in cars. Real ambitions sound like I want to go and play the violin in the hills of Peru, because I love the violin. It makes me feel great, you know, and it's funny because I used to think that if I realized I was quote, unquote enough, it would, it would remove my ambition. A lot of people think this. They think if they, if they go, I've had, you know, people like Gary Vaynerchuk and other people I've interviewed say that if they, they're scared to go to therapy because, because of what it might change in them, because of what it might remove, they think it will steal their ambition. It doesn't steal your ambition, it steals your fake ambitions. And it gives you and it gives you enough space to focus on your real ones.

You have achieved a tremendous amount. And I think what's. What I enjoy, what I really enjoy about spending time with you is for somebody so young, you have a tremendous amount of perspective and wisdom. You know, I'm getting older now and I sort of, I'M now that person who I remember older people would say to me, but wait till you. Wait till you appreciate what the world is like when you're older, you know, And I'm like, that person now looks back and be like, oh, I wish I knew that. You know, do you have a sense of what you still have to learn at this, you know, at this age, looking forwards or. Or is that an unknown to you that you're gonna have to trip over and, you know, fall on your face to find out?

So outside of parenthood, which I've come to realize that I, I'm not, it's one of those things that I realize I'm not gonna know anything about until it happens. I would say romantic relationships, I still have a ton to learn there. I would say I'm still slightly confused and insecure as it relates to self worth. I do spend too much time obsessing over metrics. And I know that there's still a fundamental link between my self esteem and my self worth and these metrics and numbers, which is interesting. I sat with someone who wrote the book about status or status. I don't know how you guys say it over here. And he says, we all play status. Status. What'd you say?

I'm just kidding.

I'm gonna say status. We all play status games. I was under the opinion that I'd stopped playing them. I'd sold all my fancy things. I didn't have designer stuff, so I assumed I'd stop playing status games in my life. And he made the case to me that your games just change billionaires. It's, you know, when you're, when you don't have a lot of money, the logos are bigger when you become a billionaire, it's smaller logos, but bigger yachts. People with cameras, they play. You know, if my cameraman walked in now, he'd start talking about the cameras in this room. And we all have these different games we're playing and I'm playing a different set of games now. And I don't want to be a slave to the game. I want to be conscious of the things that I'm doing and making sure that I don't find myself in a similar position where I'm trading happiness for. I think I'm trading happiness for my self worth. That's still, still an ongoing challenge I have. And then I have other challenges. Like I have a lot to learn about emotional regulation.

Tell me more.

I find it easy to get annoyed at things. I'm never angry. I don't shout it's not my style, but I find it easy to go specifically as it relates to work things. You said this on stage. Do you remember when we spoke?

Yeah.

You said, I get very, very annoyed at small details not being right as it relates to work and standards. And that's something that I know that I want to improve. I want to be able to take a little bit of a pause before reaction.

You said you still harbor insecurities and have self worth issues based on hitting metrics. Say more about that. Like where, where do you feel like. Like where does if you. You're happy, you wake up every day with gratitude and yet it seems paradoxical or oxymoronic that you, you still struggle with self worth issues related to metrics.

Yeah, I, I don't. It seems paradoxical, but it's not because both are definitely true. So it's definitely true that I wake up every day with this like deep sense of gratitude and disbelief at my life. Like it's every day. But at the same time my obsession with being successful, like making things better, finding marginal gains everywhere to the point that it frustrates me. And this obsession with like climbing and being better feels like it's still rooted in, in the same old issues from my childhood. And it's just about being. For me, it's about being conscious of that and having a healthy relationship with that pursuit. And again, it being driven and not dragged.

Tell me a project that you've been involved in professionally that you absolutely loved being a part of. It may or may not have been commercially successful, but if every project you ever worked on was like this one, you would be the happiest person alive. Something specific.

The Diary of a CEO. The podcast.

Okay, so what, what specifically about Diary of a CEO?

Yeah, it's the, it's. I mean, the Japanese refer to it as your ikigai. Right. Something that I think I can get good at. I believe it's helping other people. It's remunerative for me and I enjoy the process. So it ticks all four boxes in that regard. Seems to be my ikigai, as the Japanese would say. And this is definitely the thing that I found in my life that that checks all these boxes. A lot of my businesses, I know that I'm running them for commercial incentives. It's ticking a curiosity box. But it's really, for a commercial means an end. But the diary of a seer would be the one.

Is there a particular guest or episode or series of guests that, that capture that feeling better than anybody else?

So Many of them, obviously, all of our ones. When you. That third episode we had for me is a perfect example of that, where you have a human being, you get to meet a human being at its. At its. That human being's essence. You get to learn things that are resonant and that make you feel like your struggle isn't because you're inadequate. It's because you're a human too, and you're given a path through your struggle. There's humor in there. There's, you know, a range of emotion in there. Those are my. Those are my favorite things. And if I go right down to when I was a kid, I was. I was strange. I would go on first dates and I would ask them deep questions about their childhood. If I had a tour guide and he was telling me, I remember in being in Peru, and the tour guide was showing me buildings, and for seven days I showed no interest. And on the seventh day, he started talking about how different cultures that he takes on the tours have different levels of happiness. And he had my undivided attention. And he said to me that on that seventh day says you haven't paid attention for six days. And on the seventh day, when I started talking about people, you tuned in. That is, it's just clearly in school, you know, two lessons that I went to and didn't get expelled from were psychology and business. All the other lessons, my tenants hit 31% and that's why they kicked me out. So I would steal the psychology books because I wanted to take them home and read them. So I've always had a focus on human beings and why they do what they do. And so this is just proven to be the perfect solution to that.

What is, Tell me. An early specific, happy childhood memory, something I can relive with you.

Running around in the garden with my brothers playing, having a water gun fight.

Was that one water gun fight you're talking about or something you did on regular?

One particular one. I can't remember.

Okay, tell me about what.

What?

Of all the magical things, and I know you had a weird childhood, but of all the magical things that happened as a child, what is it about this one thing that. That you're choosing to tell me about it now?

Freedom of any worries. Just felt. I just felt the sun on my son, on my body running around through the garden. Our house at this point wasn't dilapidated. My parents were still on in reasonable terms with each other. And yeah, it was freedom. It was sunshine. I was away from school. I didn't really like School. It was freedom. And that freedom is something I've pursued my whole life, absolutely in an unrelenting way where I do believe you've done.

Things where you played in the garden before, you did things where you played with your friends, where you had a sense of freedom. You know, what was it about this one where you're playing with your brothers.

That just seems to be perfect that day. I don't know why. Just seems like everything there was ease, and there was so much dis. Ease in my childhood. There was so much screaming and shouting. This particular day just seems to be very easy. Everything there was, you know, everything was there. The son was there, my family were there. They seemed to be happy. The house wasn't. Was fine, wasn't any worry, and I was free. And that freedom is really why I'm an entrepreneur. I'm just very. Not very good at being constrained in any way. I'm a remarkably good quitter. It's one of my greatest skills, is being better than everyone I know at quitting.

Say more about that.

I just think I'm a really, really good quitter. I reflect on my life, meaning, you.

Know the right time to quit or you just quit too quickly, you quit too easily.

Know the right time to quit. But it's more sort of intuitive and instinctive than that. Quit with such ease and such little worry about the path forward or what. I'm the path behind me.

And. Yeah, that's really it. I think quitting. The real skill of quitting isn't necessarily knowing because you can't know, but it's. It's knowing that you can't tolerate the. The current situation. It's knowing that uncertainty is a better hand to have than misery.

But what about. There's a young generation now that quits very easily.

Yeah.

You know, and they seem to be following your counsel, which is, this sucks. I could go talk to somebody, but they probably won't listen to me. So what would be the. What's the point of going to talk to somebody who, you know, doesn't care about me anyway? I'm just gonna. Like. Everything you're saying can be rationalized and used to justify quitting regularly to the point of too much and too easily. Well, I think, like, where's the nuance?

I think the key point. The key point of difference is. I'm saying when you. When you think about the fight to change something, you have to weigh up the rewards on offer. You don't lead a fight to change something in your job. If the rewards on offer are still at the other end of that. A job that you absolutely hate, you know, or if you think that all the effort it would take would still leave you with a job you hate. You fight for something when you believe that the fight is worthy of the eventual cause. And so if you're a Gen Z and you're 19 years old and you've got working conditions you don't like, but you believe it's possible that change in this organization is achievable, and if you achieve that change, it wouldn't suck, then you fight for it. But I don't believe it's right to fight for something where you know that even if you win, the rewards aren't worth the fight. So that's kind of what I'm saying. And to be fair, what you're describing is Gen Zs who just don't like a situation so they leave. And I believe it's the nuance as well as it relates to Gen Z's and working culture is when you're young and I talk about this as well a little bit, my book is you should really be focused on filling these first two buckets which are your knowledge and skills, irrespective of, I believe, the resources, the reputation and the network you get from the role. I think those are the most important things. I talk about these first five buckets in your life, knowledge being the first one, which is what you know, skills, which is what you can do, resources, which is what you have, the network, which is who you know and your reputation, which is what the world thinks of you. It's really those, those first two buckets that are gonna, are the most important. And it's all five buckets that are gonna decide the course of your life. The example I give is of my friend in San Francisco was, was in his front porch and a guy comes running towards him sweating and you know, and saying he's, he's building these rockets and putting these chips in people's brains. Then he runs off. And when my friend told me that I was like my first knee jerk reaction was that is a psychopath that had escaped from an asylum. My friend said it was Elon Musk. And the minute you know that it's because of Elon's reputation and all of that. Those five buckets that he's paid into. The world is, the world is that, you know, the world is his oyster. And I think young people, what sometimes they'll do is they'll choose reputation or they'll choose resources, which is money or Remuneration in any regard or they'll choose network. Being working with with in a place that you know is a surrounded by cool people versus knowledge and skills. And I would implore all young people to focus on jobs that give them knowledge and skills. The first, the two buckets that no one can ever take from you. No professional earthquake can empty those buckets.

Tell me some feedback that you got.

For example, the diary of a CEO team, which is 30 people. We now have 360 interviews.

Yeah.

Because I read things in an exit interview for a different company and I go, I had no idea that person felt that way. Why didn't I ask? Yeah, yeah, I had absolutely no idea.

So is that why you built in the 360? So you can get that information before the exit?

And also trying to dissuade people to join the company before they, before we interview them. You think, you think of interviews as a place where you're selling yourself. Because of these interviews and because I know that our culture is so clear and non negotiable in many respects, I really try and dissuade people from joining at the very start now.

So what do you say?

I'm just very honest about the way that we work and the expectations is we're a team that are absolutely, absolutely sweat the small stuff in every regard. We work in the office, we have, we have what we call freedom within parameters. So these are the parameters of our working environment. We're in on Mondays, we're in on Fridays, we're in most of the time. And then you're given freedom to make your own decision. So if you're not in today, I have no idea where you are. No one's going to ask you if you're not in for three days, I, I have no idea where you are. No one's going to ask you. You're totally trusted in that regard. But we need these parameters because we believe in synchronous collaborative work as well. And I laid out this manifesto to my teams which I sent to them, basically saying that we're going to be in the office. But the key thing was explaining why the underlying values and principles as to why we're in the office and how that links back to us achieving these big ambitions that we all want to win at. And in there it says you will do the best work of our lives sometimes in a coffee shop or in a beach. And we'll do some of it in, in the office. It's a, hopefully it's a nuanced thing and I really, I'm really clear on that. The, my biggest thing in teams and company building is culture. Like, I, I, the older I've got in business, the more I've realized that my job is simply to hire the best people in the world and buying them with a culture that makes one plus one equal three. And it's my obsession. It's. I'm so obsessed with it, you wouldn't believe it. I'm absolutely obsessed with it, which is how to get a group of people to behave in a manner that is conducive with best outcomes. And that's also links to my obsession with psychology. And I write a lot about this in my book and I've studied it a lot, and I've spoken to the best, you know, managers in the world at big sports teams and their players. And I've learned so much in this department.

I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm channeling my inner Steven Bartlett.

Oh, listening.

I'm just sort of sitting here and letting you do your thing.

That's my thing.

What I think is interesting, which is I love the, I think to tell somebody up front that we sweat the small stuff. Right.

What I'm curious about you as a leader. As you grow as a leader, especially when scale starts to show up, you know, when you have, you know, 30 people becomes 50 people, 80 people becomes a thousand people, you know, where you don't actually know everybody's name anymore and you don't recognize everybody's face. You don't, you know, you walk through a hall, you don't even know the people who work for you.

Yeah. You know, I've been there.

I've seen you sweat the small stuff. And you and I are very, very different in how we sweat the small stuff. And I'm very curious, how do you know the impact on your team, the way you sweat the small stuff, like what ripple effects it has? I'm not, I'm not criticizing sweating the small stuff. I think that's great.

In what regard?

Are they able to sweat the small stuff when you're sweating the small stuff for them?

Ah, okay.

So shall I give you a real life example? Yeah, it's the example. I mean, we talked about it a little bit, but when we did our charity show at the Royal Festival hall, the mix on the music was all wrong. The music overshadowed our voices, which is the intro music before we came on. And I knew it and you knew it. And we said to the team, that needs to be fixed. And you sat in the audience and kept pushing and kept pushing and kept pushing. And I was watching you sweat the small stuff. I don't know if you noticed, but I sort of, like, walked away. I went and did my own thing. And not because I thought, oh, Stephen's got this under control. It's because the way I do that is different. And my attitude is. And it's not right or wrong. And this is what I think is interesting, which is I sweat the small stuff by saying, in no uncertain terms, this must be fixed before we go live, and that I expect them to fix it. Like I've said my thing. It's a team of professionals, know what they're doing. And then I leave it be. But I watched what happened. I don't know if you know, this is because you were sweating the small stuff. It increased the level of stress.

And the people who are professionals, who know exactly what they're doing were now became vendors. Moving a level up and moving a level down because you told them to, not because they said, I think I'm going to try this and see if that works. They became order takers.

We got the product. But my question is, at what cost? And for one night, whatever. Right. But when it's your own team, the question is that sustainable? And how does that make somebody feel over the course of time when. Absolutely create a culture where you expect them to sweat the small stuff. And the analogy I'll give is a military analogy where there's something called commander's intent, where the commander says, I want this accomplished, and then walks away. And it's up to the team to figure out how to get it done and to get it done to the satisfaction of the commander. But the commander doesn't say, have you tried this? Do this now. Try this. Wait, that didn't work. Do this over here. Right.

And what they're doing is building confidence and leaders in their wake versus order takers and.

Creating an environment where confidence might actually not grow.

So that specific example is a good one. So I arrive in the hall. We've got an hour to go.

Done multiple shows. Myself. The last one I did, there was real issues with sound and acoustics.

Yeah.

So that's on my mind.

Got it.

I sit down. They play it. Nobody seems to. This is my.

This is not my team.

Yep.

So I have no idea about their behaviors, whether they are. Whether I can say something to them. And it will change instantly. I don't have that level of confidence. I've never met these people before. I hear it, and there's A clear issue with the audience.

Yeah, it's bad.

And I said, I know that. The last time I let that slide, I then woke up in the morning to 27 messages across LinkedIn and Instagram of people really unhappy that had spent 70 pounds to come to a show. That's front of mind for me. That LinkedIn message, that essay that girl sent me from Glasgow, who had traveled down from Glasgow to see this show. Then, because of an audio issue we had, she sent me an essay telling me she had a bad time. That's weighing on my mind. So I communicate that I think it needs to be better. They play the new sound and I still think it's not good enough.

Correct.

It seems like some people around me think it's good enough.

Yeah.

It doesn't meet my standards yet.

Yeah.

So I say, it's not quite there. They play it again. It's not quite there. It again. Seems to me that people around me are okay with that standard. It's not okay for me.

Right.

For me, it has to be there. They play it again. It seems to me like some people around me would at that point say, that's good enough.

Yeah.

Not for. Not for me.

Yeah.

Because I'm thinking about Rebecca, who sends me the LinkedIn message with the essay tomorrow morning when she comes out. And she couldn't have heard it. And she's traveled from another country. We had people coming from other countries. So my decision was I will. I will sit there and I'm not telling these audio people to do. Because I've got a clue what they're doing, and I'll just say when I think that I can hear the audio clearly. And eventually it got to a point where it was about 80% and they said, we'll continue to work on it. And then I walked away.

Yeah.

And that's. That's. That. That's the. That's how I am, is I. I am. If you work with me, you'll know that there's a standard. And I've seen, you know, you asked me the question, how does this impact the people around me? I genuinely believe that. When you look at the podcast trailers.

Yeah.

That we have. You've told me you think they're the best.

Yeah.

And you said to me as well, that your team are trying to emulate. That's. That's what it is. It's. We sit there sometimes on Sunday night till 2am tweaking one second. Because we. That is both a controllable thing, and it's the thing that most Teams don't care about. They go to bed. They walk away, for sure. So it's my. It's my belief, and I say this a lot in the book, that fighting for the most used phrase in My office is 1%, because we are. It's our religion. If we were to get hoodies, they would say 1% on the back of them. We believe that it's the small things that most people don't care about that are the things where the most accessible and important gains are made. So that audio, for me, was one thing I could control. It was getting that right an hour before the show. And when we walked out, it was perfect.

It was. Do you want to know how I dealt with that situation? Because I dealt with it simultaneously with you. I was also very, very unsatisfied. And it had to be good for all the same reasons. I know people are traveling in. People are paying good money. I know it's a special event. And you and I have the same very high standard that we want people to walk away going, that was so worth money and two hours of my life. And I'm so, so glad I went. Like, I want them to feel that they got the better half of the deal. Every time I went to the senior person there, the one whose reputation is on the line for putting the show on, and I leaned into them and said, this is not good. I said, this has to be better.

So I didn't know who they were.

Right.

I had no idea who any of these people were. So for me, I was like, I can't trust people that I've never, ever met professionally to deliver upon a standard. When it's when I was like, the people that are coming are tagging me on Instagram. So that's the moment. And had I not had a show recently where there was an audio problem and there was a big backlash, which I had to answer for.

Or if it was my team. When I turned to my team and I said, we have to get this right. If I'd said that to my team, I could have walked away.

But if I say that to a team I've never met, I'm going to.

Sit and make sure so I'll tell a story. So I did this thing for the Disney Imagineers a bunch of years ago. I was just giving a talk about why and start with why. And they wanted to see what it meant to start with why. And so I picked a random guy in the audience to do a why discovery with. And I picked up somebody with gray hairs because I Figured he'd had a little experience and kind of knew his thing. And unbeknownst to me, I found this out afterwards. The guy I picked his nickname in the company, and I'm not even sure if he knew this was ice chips because he was a cold bastard. So I picked on ice chips, and I started asking him to give me a specific example of what it meant to be an imagineer, like why it was so important. And he told this story over the course of many minutes. I'll give you the very quick version of a new ride that he had overseen the building of. And he went to see the opening of the ride. And at the opening, there was a guy in a wheelchair with his kid waiting to go on the ride. And he said anywhere in the world, everyone would see a guy in a wheelchair with his son. Only at Disneyland do we only see a father and his son at Disneyland. We don't see. And we've made it. Like, you talk to people who are in wheelchairs, just how seamless and how easy Disneyland is. And his intensity is because it mattered so much to him that that person never felt like a guy in a wheelchair, that he only felt like a dad with his son at Disneyland. And we're all crying. And in an instant, everyone understood why he was such a cold bastard. It's because to him, the stakes were that high. In an instant, those who worked for him, who 10 minutes before hated working for him, now loved working for him. In an instant, more people wanted to work on his team because they wanted to be held to that standard. And.

I think that people with high standards should obviously continue those high standards. But I think there's value in sharing a specific story of a specific person. Maybe it's a girl from Glasgow or the converse, something affirmative that helps people understand why you come in like a bull in a china shop, because it makes them want to support you. And I don't mean you. I mean a leader. And it makes them proud to lift the quality of their work and push harder for that 1% rather than feel that no matter what they do, they can't do anything right. And I've been on your side. I've been the one who's come in and said, no, no. And I've sat there and pushed and pushed and pushed. And it was only until a lot later in my career that I learned that what I was doing is making somebody feel that they can't do anything right. And I appreciate you said it's different for folks on your team.

Yeah. Because so the reason, when I was talking earlier about these exit interviews, you'll notice that I said I switched from the diary of a CEO team, which is about 30 people, to saying another company's exit interview, because no one's ever left. And part of the reason that I think no one's ever left the diary of a CEO team in the four and a half years that we've started, since we started the company, no one's ever quit the company is because we're so grounded in our sense of purpose, to the point that every day we start with our Impact chat, which is the. The screenshots or the messages we've received from people all around the world, or we watch a little clip of someone that's come up to us in the street and said about their darkest time and how what the work we're doing has. Has been pivotal to them. The team will watch the episodes. They all. We all spend an hour every week going through the most meaningful points of feedback we've had. We all. I feel this sense of responsibility. And when we're talking about. When I show the metrics to the team, which we do. We did this week, it's all framed against Impact. It's all framed against Joanna, who came up and told us about the loss of her son. And so. And it feels like this responsibility that we're holding as. As a. As a unit together, which means that the work, like. And also, you know when I talked about the trailers and stuff. Yeah. I said Saturday night, 1am yeah. One of my things is you sit in the trenches with. With people.

Yeah.

So when. If, if. If I'm asking Ant to make a correction last minute because something. One word in the trailer isn't quite hearable. I'm gonna sit with Antoine on Saturday night. I'm not gonna tell Ant to make that edit and then go to bed or leave. So I will sit in the studio, even if I'm useless, just to show that we're doing this together. That's so important to me. And when we're thinking about that moment in the theater at the charity event, there's part of that in it as well, which is there's the trust issues that I have because I don't know these people. There's this fear of Rebecca's gonna send me the LinkedIn message and we're gonna ruin her trip if she can't hear it. And then there's this third point, which was I actually think I'd be more of an asshole to say something and.

Walk off the Thing that I so appreciate about the way you've built the diary of a CEO, the company is how. And I think a lot of companies don't do this, which is you are very clear about what it's like to work here. And you're gonna say you're setting expectations upfront. This is what it's going to be like. If you don't like that, please don't work here because this is what it looks. And it's a lot more sophisticated than we. Work hard, play hard. Like, which is nonsense. I've never believed in that. As an aside, you know that both of that sounds very, Both of those sound very unhealthy. Working hard, you know, it's like, work smart, play always, you know, but that's an aside. And then the expectations are set. And if somebody doesn't like it, then they knew that up front. And I, and I think that very often what happens when companies are interviewing, they're selling themselves just as the potential employee is selling themselves, and they make it out to be incredible. And we have fun all the time. And it's amazing and it's. And it's fun all the time and it's easy all the time. Well, that's not how any company is ever. And so what I love is the way you set expectations up front.

And you know what as well, and I love that.

And then you, and then you simply say, I'm going to hold you to the standard that I told you about.

On day one and.

Or day negative one.

Do you know the most motivating thing I think for people in work is, and I've come to learn this is, Is progress.

Yeah.

And when the reason why, maybe Sophie, my assistant, who's been with me for eight years, pretty much my whole career, hasn't left is because she feels like she is on a rocket ship.

Yeah.

And when Harvard Business Review interviewed 1500 employees and asked them what their best days in work were, it was always the days when they had a sense of progress. And I know that progress comes from those 1% marginal gains. David Brailsford, when I, when I interviewed him, he talks about how the, you know, making 1% gains improves your sales numbers or your performance on the bicycle in the Olympics or whatever. But the more important thing that no one understands, he said to me, is when you create the impression amongst a group of people that they are going somewhere, that they are moving. He says that was the thing that changed our, our fortunes. When he became the head of performance at the Olympic cycling team and took Them from being the worst cycling team of all time to the best ever and holding all the records. He said it was the sense of progress, this sense that we're going somewhere together that did it. Not the gains, the psychological sense of progress. And so we call it the progress principle, which is. Yeah, I think I reflect on that and go, this is why. I think if you spoke to the 30 people individually and said, is this. And we kind of do this in our 360feedback now, is this the best job you've ever had? I think 95% of them would say yes, because we feel together collectively like we're going somewhere. And more importantly, it's somewhere we want to go, somewhere that matters and it's.

Something other than money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because progress can be like, look at our growth. Because I think a lot of companies would do that. Right. Okay, let's. I just. I just want to be. I'm just being clear for people that we're not talking simply about, no, you know, hockey stick.

And I think if you want to make people happy and work, they need challenge.

Yeah, right.

This is why, in game psychology, games get increasingly more difficult. You wouldn't do the same difficulty of crossword over and over again. You want a sense of challenge to keep you engaged. Daniel Pink, who I interviewed, talks about challenge being critical to motivation.

Yeah.

They need that sense of forward motion, which is the progress principle, that sense that we're going forward together. So you've got to keep people challenged. Healthy amount of challenge. And it's different for everybody. You know, we're all swimming at different depths already, so it's just that one step forward, into that discomfort zone, you want to be working with a group of people that you genuinely believe care about you, which means that they care about you beyond the professional output.

You want autonomy in your work if you have a sense of control and freedom, which I believe that the people in my team do, although we have high standards and high expectations.

And lastly, maybe most importantly of all, you want to believe that the place you're going is subjectively worthwhile. So for Holly and my team, if you asked her why she loves this job, it won't be the same as why Sophie loves it or why Will loves it. Totally different reasons, but they've all got a reason, and it's a worthwhile reason. And if you have those five things and your team members, I think it's hard. It's hard to lose people that when you have all those five things going for you.

The thing that I think Distinguishes you from other, not just young entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and business people is, you know, there was this 80s 90s model that was formed that perpetuated up until today about the hard nosed, you know, business leader who you know, believes in progress and growth, you know, pushes people because we, we have high standards and in, to some degree is, is always there's a lack of vulnerability because the vulnerability is weakness.

Yeah.

And.

You still represent a lot of the, you know, you're successful, you're young, you're, you have ambition, you're driven, you believe in very, very high standards. And yet you are very comfortable being very open about your struggles, your uncertainty.

You know, crazy screwed up childhood, you know that you are very open about unresolved issues, struggles with relationships, feelings of inadequacy still unhealthy, connections to metrics to some degree that you're still working through. And you're very comfortable presenting yourself as a work in progress.

And you know, I want to, I think that the message that you spread and the fact that you have been as successful as you are, as young as you are, I think quite frankly, and I sort of pushed you on this a little bit at the beginning, I actually do think that you are leading a new movement. What the future of business and business leaders could look like and should look like.

That the two are not mutually exclusive, that being a human being goes along simultaneously with commercial success. It's not either or, they go together, in fact they're healthier together.

Yeah. And I, I just want the best outcome in my personal life, my mental health and in my business. And it's my belief that high standards are non negotiable if you want to be successful. And it's. And again, why does success matter? I've explained that in part, but I've explained why the success of the team also keeps people motivated. And in my personal life, if I want to be happy and successful in my personal life, then I also need to be open and I need to be honest and I need to be a human being honest with myself first and foremost, which allows me to be honest with others, allows me to be open enough to have relationships with a woman who you know, can connect with me. So I hope that the byproduct, everything you've detailed there is because I'm trying to be.

I'm trying to be successful. I'm trying to be successful in myself and in my business. And by the way, I know saying that I have high standards in work is like, I know some people will think it's like A toxic thing or whatever. I'm like well aware of that. But I also have studied hundreds and hundreds of successful teams. I've interviewed 10 Manchester United players under Sir Alex Ferguson and the biggest CEOs in the world, all of them. And I know that. I know a couple of truths. I know that people do want to do the best work of their lives, the right type of person. I know that there's no company or great team in the world that's ever got there without high standards and unnegotiable values.

The best companies in the world, the best leaders in the world, it's not that they just have high standards, which they do, but they make it abundantly clear the culture that you're walking into.

I've also ran the test. So, like I've got multiple companies that I have this bird's eye view on and I see these, these. I see the companies that have high dissatisfaction that I'm an investor in.

Yeah.

I'm on the board and I see the. It tends to be the case when there's lack of clarity, regardless.

Yeah.

Either way, if it's remote working or if it's in the office five days a week, that the biggest disease is lack of clarity. Yeah. And then people can choose. And the worst company cultures in companies that I invest in are the ones where they have weak leadership in terms of giving clarity and setting expectations, regardless of what the expectations are or regardless of what the working dynamics are. And so with my thing in my companies, if I'm the CEO, if I'm driving the company, you're going to know, you're going to know exactly what's expected of you. You're going to know exactly what our cultural values are. And I'm going to defend it like no one has ever defended it that you've ever seen. And if you speak to people that work for me, like the CEO of one of my companies called, the companies called Flight Story, he will recite moments where I acted totally against the company's short term objectives in a way he could not understand. To defend our values and our culture of kindness.

Yeah.

Even though we needed this person and we're going to lose a client if we let this person go. Me finding out that they did something to a junior member of the team, they spoke to them in such a way which I think is unacceptable. I removed them. Which means we lose the client. Fine. And I remember the conversation that day with Oliver saying, I'd rather not have a company with my name attached to it than allow that behavior to exist anywhere in any of these walls, it's a violation. And if we allow that violation, it's like a frog in a frying pan. It will slowly creep on you. It's like a disease. So this is why I said earlier on I'm obsessed with culture, because for me I'm clear and it's unnegotiable. And we do the best work of our lives. We do great, great stuff. We really do. We out fail all of our competition, which is really the key to becoming successful, I think, especially in a world that's changing at lightning pace and is only increasing in pace of change.

What does that mean?

Like, you know, so if you, I remember reading about, I think it's Ray Kurzweil, he's the, you know, eminent futurist in the world and he says because of the rate of change, if you're 11 years old now, you're going to experience.

A year's change in. If you're 10 years old now, you'll experience a year's change in 11 days by the age of 60. Ray Kurzweil says that we'll experience 20,000 years of change in the 21st century, which is 100 times more than the previous rate of rate of change in the previous century. We're going into a world that's changing faster than ever, where books and typical sources of information aren't going to give you the answers. So how do you find the answers to key questions in podcasting, marketing, business, sales processes when the world is changing so quickly? Well, you have to be failing faster than your competition. And that's a philosophical thing, it's a behavior thing, it's a culture thing. How do I get my team to out fail the competition? If I, if we do, then we're going to arrive at the right answer continually faster than everybody else. So if I, if I, you know, because podcasting is a good example.

I can show you on my phone now the diary of a co translated into every language in the world. A two way conversation. So you're speaking in Simon Sinek's tone, but in Italian. I can show you that on my phone right now because we've done it. I can show you the tool We've built to AB test 40 thumbnails at the same time before the episode comes out. And then when it comes out, it tests eight every hour and it's like, you know, so with. We have, I just appointed this week ahead of experimentation and I know that these, and it goes back to my obsession with these 1% games. I know we're going to fail our way faster to the right answers across the businesses that I run. And that's why I'm sure we'll be number one. Because our rate of failure is significantly faster than every other team. Because of culture dynamics, a lack of bureaucracy, empowerment, smaller teams incentivizing the experiment, not the outcome of the experiment. Conducting type 2 decisions faster than everybody else, decisions that are reversible. Realizing that time is, in fact, usually the biggest cost in decision making, not the outcome. And that's. That's the way we operate. And it's always worked for us. And it's. I feel like I have. I feel like in that regard, I have like a. I feel like I have a secret. I feel like I have a secret to business, which is most people are, you know, that they're messing around and trying to make big steps forward. My obsessive belief is that it's the tiniest small steps forward that are discovered through failure and higher rates of experimentation that make all the difference.

And it's little. It's little because little. Little failures are not a big deal. I think people are so afraid of failure, but the problem is they're thinking. They're thinking of large steps, small, big decisions. Small, quick things. Small, quick things. Constant, constant improvement.

I sat. I. Over the years, I spent 10 years working in marketing. So I would sit in these boardrooms with CEOs, and there was this father and son. They run two different brands under the same company. Gonna call it Dad's Brand, Son's Brand. Now, when I took an idea, if I, you know, there was this one moment where I figured out a loophole in Instagram where we could grow a following cheaper than anybody's ever grown it before. And I took it to the dad and the son. The dad, I present the idea to him. He's arguing about the cost. He's da, da, da, da, da. He wants evidence. Nine months of him deliberating whether to proceed with the idea. I take the idea to the son. The son would always say he'd hear the idea. He'd say, jenny, go and get Nicky and the entire team. Call them into the room and say, steve, repeat what you just said to me. And I'd repeat the idea and he'd say, we're gonna do it now. No contracts, no worry about the money, how much we're going to get paid. He says, we're going to do it now. And what. And we'd conduct the experiment. And in that particular case, it gave them 13 million Instagram followers. Now, why do I say this story? This is not a one off. This would have. This happened for five years with me working with the dad and the son, $2 billion companies. The conclusion of the story is the son's business overtakes the dad's business and is now the biggest business in the space. The moral of the story is the son intuitively knew that the cost wasn't the 20k. The cost was time wasted, procrastination and the missed opportunity. He also knew that in the grand scheme of things, that really what mattered more was getting on to the next experiment. And Amazon are the prime example of this. The fire phone that this. They have a graveyard of failed experiments, but then they have AWS and you have to. And it's one in 20 and you don't know when it's coming like a slot machine. So it's really getting 320. The sun knew we needed to get on to the next experiment. If that experiment had failed the next day we're on to the next experiment. And then he. So he's going to conduct 20 experiments in the nine months that the dad is deliberating one experiment. It was the rate of experimentation. And I just watched him wipe the floor with his father. And people that know me will know who I'm talking about, wipe the floor with his father because of speed of experimentation. So I think about that a lot now. Get all of the things out of your way that are slowing your rate of experimentation and measure it. And I mean, the Kaizen philosophy, which I write about at great length in my book, is a prime example of this. It shows it's all about empowering the people at all levels. And innovation isn't the job of the. The C suite. Empower the people on the production line, incentivize them and measure the amount of experiments they're conducting. And then in the case of Toyota, who are still leading the world in auto production, you'll get 100,000 times more ideas from all levels of your company than your Western counterparts, which will drive efficiencies, drive profits up, drive costs down, reduce the amount of absenteeism, defects in the cars and everything else. And with the Kaizen philosophy in particular, which is this idea that everybody at all levels in the organization is responsible for innovation. And it's a flatter organization where you just have three levels where you have like management team leader and then leader. They've proven because they've taken over other companies like GM. Back in 1970, they took over GM, installed their culture. And a factory in America that had 12 defects per vehicle, had 20% absenteeism rates, had a backlog of 5,000 grievances from their employees, became GM's best production facility in the world, with the same workforce, with the same people. They put in a firing freeze. And it was just culture. They went from being the worst GM plant in the world to being the best GM plant in the world with a change of culture, which was centered on empowerment, removing levels of bureaucracy, giving people the knowledge that they needed, and listening to people as well.

Here's what I've learned sitting with you.

And I find this last bit absolutely magical, which is.

That you are. Everything about you is a work in progress. And what I mean by that is you apply the same philosophies to yourself as you do to your businesses, which is constant improvement, constant improvement, constant self evaluation, constantly looking for something new. And the reason being is when it works. You know, those little glimmers, because they're glimmers, because you get a little break to see it work and then you're back in it. That those little glimmers feel like.

When.

You'Re in the backyard in the garden with your brothers with the sun shining, and it's just effortless and the family is functional. And the constant improvement, the constantly working on it, is for these glimmers of magic.

And the motivation is the sun on your back with your friends. And you've spoken about this, which is the way you.