Audit your inputs

I think it's a dangerous slippery slope, and I've seen it myself at times, and others. This is not about me, it's just a general observation. I've seen it in myself and others where people almost don't actually build a true self. Right, so it is Sunday afternoon. A new routine I have, well, as of like last week, is I work in the morning. Sunday's my non-training day in terms of gym and running. And then recently I've got into golf. Not to a severe level, but that probably will be the next the next phase. Obviously I can do it for a long time to get good at golf, but driving range with one of my friends and angel investors who has sold businesses, is very successful, is also in e-com and consumer stuff. Um, yeah, I'm just rambling and dropping some thoughts in these car videos. I feel like they're the perfect time to just think about shit, and instead of rambling to Claude or whatever I do to an obsessive level, probably because of my severe, I don't know, ADHD OCD-ness when I overthink topics and stuff. But just drop some on here. It's also like 40 degrees, so excuse the sweat. Yeah, I've worked today, I've been out for a walk already, and now I'm out for driving range for probably like 2 hours. Why is he going so slow? Jesus Christ. Some drivers literally drive 3 miles an hour around here. It's quite crazy. I don't really understand it. But yeah, I think I've spoken about this topic before and it's come up again recently because I see it in myself so much. And you know, this isn't any groundbreaking shit. I'm not saying this is some new amazing concept or idea, but the fucking importance of your environment and who you hang around with and therefore what you set as the normal level in terms of where you're trying to get to in your life, whether that's in health or business or just generally what's possible. And I'm not by any means saying I'm better than anyone, or the people I hang around with better than anyone, because you have to caveat everything these days because half the world gets offended by everything. Um, but what I mean by that specifically, and for me I've always said I've been very affected by that, I think I made a video before about the importance of environment, you know, it's kind of expanding on that but using my recent few months of traveling around as an example. So I was in the UK for like 6 weeks, right? Um, as I said before, it was just a bit of a mess, you know. I don't have a place there anymore, I was in Airbnbs, wasn't in routine, whatever. That just really messed with my head and I just got into a bad space. I felt less ambitious, I felt less clear on things, was obviously less productive. And I came away honestly thinking, wow, that made no sense. I thought I had to be there, and I kind of wanted to be for a lot of things as well. Um, But the difference for me— fucking idiot driver— in the UK now is most of my inner circle— inner circle— most of my network and my good friends don't live in the UK anymore, you know, for a range of different reasons. I still love London. I have a lot of space in my heart for it. But one thing that's very true, and again, there's obviously nuance, there's exceptions to everything, I'm just, you know, sharing my own experience, is The mindset on average is very different in, in London and the UK compared to what it is in more, I guess, entrepreneurially dense areas such as Dubai that I'm now in. And I think sometimes people, whether intentionally or unintentionally, or whether they're aware of it or not, kind of downplay the exponential impact of that. So to give a specific example, right, And again, I'm not— I'm preaching to the choir here a bit because everyone knows this, but I think it's worth— it can't be understated really. Like, if you fucking hang around all the time, whether through work or just your general friendship group, with people that have a default view of questioning why you would do something or why something won't work or why that's ridiculous, then inevitably, quite obviously you will do less of those things and you'll set your bar less high. And this is obvious, right? People often don't think about the actual impact of that, especially over time. Even if you're a founder, right? If you hang around with people that either are founders and just have a slightly, I don't know, less expansive, open-minded view of the world, or people that aren't founders, which by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with not being a founder. I have loads of my best mates at home that are not into business at all, and I fucking love hanging out with them. I'm not saying that. I'm saying in the interest of if you're someone that does have lofty goals and that really matters to you, then you have to audit your environment and your network and at least who you get influence into your business from, really. Um, and then if you hang around obviously with people that have normalized having a £50 million bootstrap business or, you know, whatever, just having a big business that they built from scratch, they're in their 20s, their 30s, whatever, which I'm very fortunate in an entrepreneurial sense that a lot of my friends and friends of friends and just network in general are those people and have, you know, built real things from scratch. And I'm talking real businesses, not just, you know, fucking crypto rugs or whatever, which is obviously a subset of society that is that, which I think the former type of person often assumes that anyone, or a lot of people that made money especially when younger, must be dodgy or whatever, or must be a scammer. And it's just not true. There are obviously exceptions. And if you hang around with those people, as I do a lot, and you know, there's more of that here now for me than there was back in the UK, and again, nothing against the UK or London, I still love London, a lot of London, particularly in spring, summer, but just purely on like the density of people with that similar mindset, Dubai has been definitely better for that. Um, and to give an example, I was out watching the Champions League last night. I mean, this is a trivial example, but it's just one of many. Um, we bumped into this guy that I'd never met, not going to say his name, be careful how much I share, but, um, you know, normal guy, friendly guy. He offered to buy us a drink. Um, I think one of my friends knew him, but I didn't know that they knew him, whatever. Turns out he was one of the early team at one of the biggest businesses, one of the biggest brands probably ever in the UK. Um, you know, he'd made a shitload of money, probably north of like £50 million, in fact, like comfortably north of that personally. Has multiple businesses here, here now. He's got one brand that started again that said was doing like 50 million in revenue bootstrapped. Um, he's involved in property, other stuff. And that is relatively common in certain circles, right? And they're still like normal people. I'm not saying they're any better or worse than anyone, but like, that person is a contact in terms of my mindset or anyone's mindset, right? It's far more impactful when you're trying to build something and saturate your mind with what's possible rather than what might not be, than say just bumping into someone else that, you know, has a normal job. And again, nothing wrong with that. My brother is that, a lot of my friends at home are that, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them are happier. But I'm just purely talking in the sense of if you are someone that has genuinely lofty goals and you feel that burning desire to do more, then yeah, you want to hang around with people that have normalized like 0.01% success. Um, and I think it's— while it's sometimes hard on the ego, I think it's better compare up than compare down. And I've reflected a lot on that myself. But anyway, yeah, that's just one example, like a live example from yesterday. The guy I'm going to play golf with now, also a friend— obviously last night I didn't know this person until I met them, but the person I'm going with now, I already know, I've known them for years. Um, you know, they've built and sold two businesses, they're in their mid-30s now, then they have another business. You know, they're financially set for life, you know, 10 times over already.— and I've learned a lot from them about plenty of things. And I knew that person years ago, originally through my podcast, to be fair, which is one of the benefits of having a podcast and also one of the reasons I would actually recommend putting yourself out there to some degree, which a lot of people don't understand if it doesn't pay you as much in the short term. Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of examples, right? I'm just giving a few. I guess what my point is, is for me It's so insanely exponential. So I talked about environment before. I think they kind of go hand in hand. But environment, like your physical environment, whether it's like a nice flat with an optimized environment, etc., which to be honest mine right now isn't, but maybe more on that later. But also like the pool of people and brains that you are putting yourself in day to day, but also putting yourself in the vicinity of day to day, i.e., moving to a place where there's a higher density of founders, which to be honest Dubai right now has got to be probably up there. I'd say like New York I would imagine is another one. Austin, Texas seems like a fucking sick place to live. I'd be super up for going to the US when we launch the brand there, which I would love to do at some point in the next year or two. But yeah, I just think, I mean, this is fucking obvious stuff, right? This might be a completely pointless rambling video, but I was really thinking about it because I think especially in your mid-20s, I would say, which is when I noticed kind of, I don't know, being a bit more aware of that, which means like 4 years ago now. I think you become susceptible to just playing it safe, potentially. And if you hang around with too many people that even if they're well-intentioned, and often parents are one of them, family members are one of them, certainly in my case. You know, even like, even investors actually. Not necessarily mine, but I've seen it before. Even investors or, you know, advisors or employees can somewhat influence your mindset to make you think that, ah, maybe your goals are ridiculous. Maybe this isn't possible, like how could we possibly be, I don't know, I have friends that are doing 20 million a month with their brands, right? That would have felt incomprehensible to me a few years ago. But now, we're nowhere near that, as I've made clear, but like now I think that's possible. Because I know and have seen proof of people I know that have done that in a few years that were previously, you know, at my current level or whatever. And there's many, many levels to it, of course. But I think if you don't actively seek out engagement and getting to know these sort of people, which in itself I think is a skill— I think I've always been quite good at that, which is why I often joke that I'm the least successful person in my friendship group. I joke about it and I say it flippantly, but there's also a lot of truth to it. And I think partly that's because I've been good at— I don't know, just good at networking. I never do it in a formal way, you know. It's just through the pod was a big help, putting content out online. I think being honest about stuff and authentic, which sometimes to my detriment but actually has had a massive gain in like building trust with people in, in this space. Fuck, I lost my train of thought. But yeah, I think the biggest thing you need to avoid is the trap of assuming mediocrity and, you know, being average in your field of choice is the most likely outcome. Because I guess statistically it is the most likely outcome, but partly that's because in my view 95% of people just assume that, oh, the great the great success or the great life or the crazy business that everyone knows, that must be for someone else, right? That couldn't possibly be for me. But by default, you're, you're counting yourself out of the race in that way. Like, I think the mindset— my mindset has always been— and even though I've, you know, shared my struggles a lot around comparison and not being— I'm doing well enough and stuff, but my mindset is always ultimately like my foundational baseline mindset has always been, why not me? And I believe myself a lot, but I've also This is maybe kind of the point of this video. I've also found myself getting— particularly over the last few years when I think I found certain stuff hard, I've had to grow into a new role and bring more people and opinions into the business and so on, which has a lot of benefit, I'm not saying it doesn't— but one side of that, without being specific, is I've often felt my natural inkling to be super ambitious and super bullish and run things in my way has sometimes been influenced by what I think are more traditional, safer views on how to do things. And that's been by other founders I've met who are also successful, just have a different way of doing things, advisors, people with opinions I've met, employees, ex-employees, whatever. And sometimes you then begin to question your own ambition. Oh, maybe I'm being naive thinking we can get to, I don't know, 20 million a month if you just launch in the US, right? That's quite a slippery slope and quite dangerous, I think, because if you've built up that mindset from the start, and I think I was always super backed myself, especially in my early 20s, probably to a very arrogant, cocky degree, which I think, to be honest, has some merit at the start. And then I got a bit more life experience with some failures and so on, and it probably dampened it a bit, but it was still there, that like the raw dog of fuck me, I can do this, I can scale to the moon. It still is there for me, but again, I think it's been more challenged over the last few years. Not because like, oh, reality's hit me or whatever, although I do think the market's been harder than it was when I first started e-com, which I've shared. But largely because I think when you get older you meet more risk-averse people. Nothing wrong with that in general, but like the part that is wrong with that is people that I think squash ambition a little bit or squash your innate entrepreneurial instincts of how to do things. I guess what I'm saying is there's two sides to it. You want to make sure you build that mindset and that network so you believe you can do things, you see it's possible factually, and that's always step one, right? And fortunately for me, I had that at a very young age. Well, I say very young entrepreneurial age in my journey, my early 20s. I've built a great network and so on, and I saw that it was possible. And I've always been fortunate enough to be surrounded by people naturally as a result of building those networks. But also intentionally by putting myself in those rooms, whether it's online or just meeting people through friends and so on. But then you also need to make sure that that mindset doesn't get squashed by inevitably the— it's not like everyone in your life is going to have that mindset, is my point. And often if you expose yourself too much to people that think smaller or, you know, more normally, or kind of conform to normality or mediocrity and reject your, I don't know, intensity or passion or desire to be the 0.1%. Or they view it as toxic or ridiculous somehow, which is normal mindset, to be honest. I think particularly in the UK, it's a bit like tall poppy, like, why would you do that? The kind of default view is that wouldn't work rather than why can't it work, right? You know, the kind of consume over create mindset, whereas founders very much create over consume. So yeah, I think you have to be aware of that, and I've felt that a lot in the past 2 years due to probably just becoming less good at auditing my, my— who I accept opinions from and who I listen to, right? And I think that becomes harder as your team grows, where naturally you're going to have more non-entrepreneurial people hanging around with you. Again, you need those people. I'm not disputing that everyone has to be an entrepreneur, whatever. What I am saying is you should always stick to your principles and core foundational beliefs of like what you believe is possible for yourself and your business, even when naturally, of course, other people around you, whether that's your team, investors, advisors, other friends, other founders, family members, are gonna always probably default to a more conservative, smaller-minded view. And I don't just mean in terms of numbers. I mean in terms of how success is achieved, because I've really seen a pattern. And again, I'm fortunate enough to have met a lot of incredibly inspiring and successful founders and just people and operators in general. And that includes some of our investors who I've learned a lot from, you know, other people I've met in the industry, whatever. Like, not just founders is my point. Um, and there's kind of like two ways to do things if I had to broadly paraphrase, right? There's the more traditional way, which is maybe— again, I'm going to sound cliché, but like in terms of like how to build a consumer business, right? You've got the more traditional view, like everyone's in the office, slightly more kind of corporate view, etc. And that can work, I'm not disputing that. There are plenty of examples of that working. I think there are more examples of that working better in the past than there are now, personally. But of course a lot of that works. And then you get the more probably contrarian view of like You know, there's founders now, some of which I've met, who, you know, have £100 million revenue businesses and they've got 10 people and they're extremely lean, they operate fully remotely, they've never worn, you know, a shirt in their life, they, you know, maybe operate entirely off one team meeting a week and Slack, and that works for them. And I think AI and technology and social and everything has made that genuinely far more viable My point here is both views— and they're, you know, just two easy examples at opposite ends of the spectrum— there are plenty of ways to build a successful business. And I think generally as a founder, especially when you build up experience, you maybe learn what has worked and hasn't worked for you. You know what your style is and what gets the best out of you, and therefore your team and your business. And that can often clash with even other successful people. People who say, well, this is how I did it, so I'm not sure that would work. But that's where, again, I think you have to know yourself enough to not be too influenced by opinions or input from people or general schools of thought that, as much as they can work or have worked for others, might not be best for you, even just in terms of enjoyment. Because I think that's the other thing that you have to be careful of, is a lot of people genuinely just only know their way of doing things. Maybe they, I don't know, you know, had a more traditional upbringing, got 3 degrees, then started the business or whatever. Again, just using an easy simple example, whereas someone else might have never even gone to uni. They self-taught all their entrepreneurial stuff through, you know, Facebook originally and now fucking YouTube and TikTok, and they've built a successful business that way. And both can work, like fundamentally If the economics work and you enjoy what you're doing and it works for you, then there's no right answer is what I'm saying. And you shouldn't be overly influenced by people on that side either. I guess what I'm genuinely saying overall is I think deep down everyone knows themself. They know what their real ambitions are. So don't let those be squashed or influenced negatively I'm not saying don't listen to other opinions, of course they're valuable, but I think over time, especially when you get a bit older and you have more experience, you know what your ambitions are. And there's only so much advice from others you can take that shapes that. So you should get around other people that feel that way or share that mindset and can influence positively your route to achieving your goals. And then secondly, I think it's super important to also build up genuine self-awareness around what makes you tick. How do you like to operate? Are you someone that wants to be in an office, you know, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week? Or actually, do you get the best out of yourself when, I don't know, you're on your laptop 4 hours a day in a cafe, the rest of your work is, you know, done on the phone while walking, you like to, you know, you prioritize wellness because that gets the best out of your brain, and whatever, you get my point. But I think both those things are super important. I think it's a dangerous slippery slope, and I've seen it myself at times, and others. This is not about me, it's just a general observation. I've seen it in myself and others where people almost don't actually build a true self. They don't really know what they want. They're probably just copying what everyone else said. And then where that gets more dangerous, like I alluded to earlier, is when you're a bit older and you haven't really defined your own lane, you maybe haven't started your own thing, then you just default to what everyone else does. And separately Maybe you do know what you want, but you don't really— you haven't really worked out your own perspective on what's the best way to get there for you. That might be living in Bali, working fully remotely. And if, fuck me, if that works, then there's nothing wrong with that. Yet, like, general societal perception would be, that's not serious, or like, that can't be a real business. But like, I literally know guys you'd meet on a laptop in, I don't know, cafe in Bali and I'm not exaggerating here, who look borderline homeless, you probably wouldn't take seriously if you're a certain type of maybe more traditional person. Yet they've got a literal £60 million a year business that spits off £10 million EBITDA with no investors, right? So they're fucking winning. They love their life. Yet the guy who wears a suit to the office every day and makes a £100K salary and thinks he's a big shot might meet that guy and assume that, oh, what does he know? He's not serious. He's on a laptop and he wears a vest, right? My point being, never judge a book by its cover because of what I just said. Like, some people operate just in a completely different way, and that's how they get the best out of them. And yeah, you just have to know what you want and your preference on how you get there, and seek and take inspiration, but audit who you're taking it from and audit your environment both physically and network-wise, to make sure you don't wake up in 10 years and realize you spent, or you wasted, majority of your life operating in a way that wasn't true to you, which actually ironically is probably always going to get worse results out of you anyway. So yeah, I'm off to play golf. Fuck me, I feel like that was slightly incoherent, but I hope the point lands. I think it's really, really important. The main two things, like I said, Know what you want, know how you actually want to get there, and audit the inputs over time that are influencing all of that. Because there's plenty of ways to win, and I've seen that more and more over time by meeting more super interesting and successful and inspiring people. So yeah, I'm just sharing my learnings. Hopefully it's useful. Subscribe to the pod. I'm gonna keep documenting stuff. Filming quite a lot recently, to be fair. Um, I've just decided, fuck it, as I've said for years, I actually really like looking back on this stuff. And if no one watches it, I'm not that bothered. But if you do, I appreciate it. Hopefully it's useful. Still get messages from people, and crazily, people coming up to me, like, to a surprising degree given my audience size, in, you know, certain circles. And I always appreciate that, and it's good to know that stuff I put out has some sort of useful impact on at least some people. And yeah, enjoy the rest of Sunday. We'll chat in a bit.