when I called my mother and I said I'm dropping out of University and I was shoplifting those pizzas at 18 years old to feed myself it was like survival like I was either going to be successful or I was going to be successful there was not a plan B option the guest that we have today on the podcast is Steven Bartlett and he's one of the biggest names in business right now Steve went from being a completely broke College Dropout to founding a company called social chain which he then sold for like ludicrous amounts of money he was the youngest ever dragon on BBC's Dragons Den which for the Americans in our audience is sort of the UK version of Shark Tank and he's also the host of the ridiculously popular podcast of the diary of a CEO that has interviewed all sorts of really successful celebrities and famous people and also me I've sat with so many people and thought I will never be as good as you at what you do I wish I was capable of it but I'm able to separate out my admiration and my aspiration and Steve is also a successful author he's written a book called happy sexy millionaire that I've talked about on this channel and he's just released his latest book The Diary of a CEO the 33 laws of business and life we talk a lot about the things that made Steven successful I spent maybe 3 to to four years working in call centers I could have gone and got a more glamorous job but choosing a job at that early age that was focused on my Knowledge and Skills is the reason why I was able to launch businesses and do well at a young age we talk about some of the principles the strategies the mindsets and the tools that he's learned through his course of building multiple eight figure companies work life balance is a loot of nonsense right it implies that you're trying to balance the scales you're not you're trying to find Harmony which is where you feel good about your life Sten welcome to the podcast how does it feel to be in that chair this is a very unusual place for you to be it's so weird genuinely it's so weird it's funny because before we started recording I I asked you I asked if my chair was lower because there's something about looking at this Frame which I find quite daunting even though it's like my frame and it's my you know my backdrop it's daunting but I'm I'm here for it I'm excited nice I'm so looking forward to diving into into your story because you're normally the interviewer and I've been wanting to ask you a bunch of questions for the last several years since we first met oh gosh I feel like I've got I've got my chance um so to start with for the two or three people in the audience who might not know who you are I wonder can you tell us a little bit about the backstory and in particular I'm Keen to hear about what your school and University years were like yes it's called an unconventional path to success I moved to the UK when I was a baby from Botswana I was born in Botswana in Africa my mother's Nigerian my dad's English so my mother's black and my dad's white they're very very different people probably the total opposite my mother didn't get an education in Africa I think she left school at 5 six seven years old can't read or write my dad is an academic um who went to you know smashed every exam he was that was ever put in front of him so I'm somewhat caught caught in the middle in many respects of who I am we moved to Plymouth in the southwest only black family and the poorest family in the area and in my school pretty much huge insecurity and shame they stopped parenting me about 10 years old which creates this huge void of Independence and in that void I start experimenting I learn a lot about myself and what I'm capable of and that's kind of a consistent theme through my life school I decide at some point and I think because my two brothers Jason and Kevin are geniuses that this implicit narrative that school and grades will correlate to your outcomes I believed it and so I knew that going to school wasn't going to be the way that I got all those things that I wanted to get Financial Freedom all the nice stuff in life um so I gave up at about 14 15 years old I remember the conversation with myself where I realized it was going to have to be something else and at the time I was running these little experiments in school with businesses and they were working so my thesis was when I'm older these are going to be the adults with me so that the party that I organized the vending machine deal that I did these would be the adults with me so I'll do that when I'm old and that will be enough for me to get there go to university after being so I was expelled from school um by Mr let's call it Mr T and then I was unexpended by Mr sprinkle um he actually said this on TV a couple of months ago he came on what I lie to you walked down the stairs and he said on what I lie to you um he unexpended me because I made the school so much money I I was doing lots of deals for the school the vending machine deals the trips the school trips the parties and then I was expelled again in the last roughly in the last week of school um for attendance wasn't rude to anybody always been well-mannered couldn't couldn't do school couldn't hand in homework couldn't listen in class had to fall asleep in every lesson go to university believing it'll be different last one lecture drop out call my mom mom I'm dropping out she says if you do I'll never speak to you again I say I love you too I put down the phone we didn't speak for many years um at least not no sort of amicable conversation uh and then started businesses and then that's um for the last 10 years that's been my life 12 years been my life I've I've been watching your Vlog recently and you're constantly jumping from one thing to another the to-do list with like 34 items on it by like 11: a.m. that doesn't seem like the sort of person that can't like focus in school or doesn't want to kind of take boxes yeah I think there's and there's also often a misconception that I don't rate education because I don't love school or university but school and University aren't education they are institutions and systems I love education i f sleep last night listening to a video about artificial intelligence and Rockets right I'm I'm a self-educated that loves education if you zoom in on that kid that got expelled what you'll also see is he stole the psychology textbooks because he was so interested in them and he dominated the business class so much so that Mr Hughes kicked me off basically like almost expelled me in the business class because I wasn't letting anyone else do anything so if you zoom in you find someone that is absolutely obsessed with the things he likes and that is incapable of doing things he does not like and that is such an important trait my res my resistance to do things that I do not like I think is such an important trait for for us all to try and embody because what it means is you won't overstay your welcome in relationships in jobs in career paths that aren't serving you and we all have this wonderful sort of internal um signal or barometer in inside our chest that we just ignore we put it at the very bottom of the priority stack and we put above it Mom's opinion social expectation what that girl on Instagram will think and if that sits above the the signal and I call it a signal because it is a signal like hunger or thirst if if that signal of how do I actually feel sits at the bottom you will overstay your welcome in situations that you're not meant to be in my superpower is quitting with such ease and conviction and peace because the signal that matters the most is how do I feel right now and and that is useful tuning into that is really really powerful one of the one of the things that I um I took away from your first book happy sexy millionaire we can talk about the title of that a moment um but one of the things I really took away was the quitting framework yeah um I wonder if you can talk through that for people who might not have come across it I feel like you know it better than me but I'll but I'll but I'll pop it it so the reason I wrote the quitting framework is because I realized in hindsight that I was able to quit things e easier than most people let's take one step back why is quitting important in life we glamorize starting right but my observation was that the advantage I've had as I've said was being able to quit fast and with peace and ease and when you just think logically about starting something right or saying it's also the same with like saying yes and no to things in order to start something in life you actually first need to quit something else so you can't start a new relationship unless you quit the last one you're not going to start a new startup unless you quit the last one um you're not going to start a new career career unless you quit the last job so quitting and starting should be held in equal regard and there should be acknowledgement that they have a two-way relationship with one another they're both the actions of winners people say quitting is for losers and they say like starting is for winners in fact quitting and starting are both for winners that and the the most successful intelligent people I've ever met have an unbelievable ability to quit things that make no objective sense you're quitting that highp paying job to go and deal to go and do card tricks at table in Bristol Darren Brown you're quitting that amazing career as a lawyer um that your parents are now so proud of you of to go and spend the next 10 years going up and down the country in pubs and cracking jokes Jimmy car it just it objectively seems to make no sense but subjectively they've reached a certain level of ease so I I could relate to myself in the same way in the regard of if you look at what I've quit from like stop going to school because I realized that that wasn't going to going to be the the paper that I got at the end of the process wasn't going to be enough especially compared to my brothers quit University after that first lecture quit my first startup after two years quit my second one after about six years um and lots of little quitting in and amongst there um why was I able to quit with with peace in at times when objectively you would think I was a mad man for doing so when I was leaving so much apparently on the table and so I tried to make a framework a framework that other people could use to try and make their quitting decisions through so at the start of the framework you ask yourself am I thinking of quitting see the you know yes or no so if you are thinking of quitting the framework begins and I created these two subcategories which you can Define for yourself which I think is important to do you're either thinking of quitting something because something's really hard like it's difficult and then which would be you know you're running a marathon and you're on the 23rd Mile and you're doing it you know to raise money for a charity but it's really it's painful it's difficult it's it's causing discomfort or you're thinking about quitting something because it like it sucks and that's more of like an emot mental thing it's just it just doesn't feel good to you on an emotional mental psychological level so let's go down the hard route I'm thinking of quitting because it's hard the first question you should then ask yourself is is the hardship worth the rewards on offer so you're running that Marathon you're raising money for that leukemia charity you're on the 23rd mile but it's worth it the the hardship is worth the reward at the end of it if the hardship is worth it don't quit if the hardship isn't worth it then you should quit because the the worst thing to do in life is to do something that is hard and meaningless like those are those are where all the problems happen when I think about studies of the impact of not having autonomy in your work and working on a production line and not having meaning and purpose and what you're doing every day and how that impacts your health and disease Rises and your body that is the worst situation to be in let's go down the other side of the framework by the way do correct me because you know this framework better than I do spot on and we go the other side of the framework so you're thinking about quitting something because it sucks you're in a relationship your husband you know the the magic has just left the relationship you're in a company and there's problems at work but you you know you haven't yet had the conversation with your boss the next question becomes do you believe you could make it not suck right so in the context of a marriage um that might mean going to marriage counseling and having a difficult conversation and thrashing it out with your partner and you know going through those issues if the is no it so it sucks and you think you can't change that quit if you believe you could make it not not suck the next question to ask yourself is is the effort that it would take to make it not suck worth the rewards on offer so like you look at how that marriage might look if you were to resolve it you believe you can is it worth it is Dave worth it is the is the reward on the other end of that process to fix it sucking worth it if the answer is no quit you believe you could make it nut not not suck anymore but the effort it would take is not worth the reward on offer quit if you believe you can make it not not suck and the effort it would take is worth the rewards on offer stay and fight for it and that's my simple framework which is intentionally ambiguous one of the one of the laws in the new book um can't remember which one it is but it's it's all about the power of discipline near the end the discipline equation yeah death time and dis and I think a lot of people struggle with the idea of you know obviously discipline is good and you know there's the Muhammad Ali quote um I you know I I suffered for 10 years to become a champion what's that effect but then it's it seems to conflict some of the time with like this thing that you're saying of like don't don't do stuff that doesn't feel good necessarily so like how do you how do you square this like what is the balance between I'm going to discipline myself to get through school because like the reward of the other end could be worth it vers is I'm going to actually quit school and do my own thing which might feel better yeah so it's it's so interesting because I've never tried to make the link but for me there's a really really clear link between the two so in the book I started writing a chapter about time management which is something you know a lot about and the problem I had Ali was um I I started researching time management techniques looking up how I manage my own time and I encountered hundreds of time management techniques and as I'm writing this I'm going okay well there's so many and there's the promoto technique and the ABC d da da da and the time blocking technique I asked myself why is there so many techniques if if any of them worked for everyone there wouldn't be so many of them kind of like fad diets there's just a million endless list people are writing new ones because the current ones are failing them so they're going in search of new ones and people are writing new ones um and the reason why the old ones are failing them is because they don't have discipline any of these time management techniques would work if you could stick to them you know I say that like objectively I think they would um so where does discipline come from and why does discipline matter and then I so I started writing about death because I think you have to there's a really important relationship between our time and discipline because we could choose to do everything in a world where time was infinite but it it is the scarcity of time the limited amount of time we have which I talk about in chapter 19 of my first book when I'm talking about the roulette pieces and the the chips we wake up with every day we wake up with 16 chips left out of the 24 we've placed eight of them on sleep so through that framework it's important to allocate your time with a certain intentionality or you might regret the life you've lived so that's why Discipline matters because I only have 16 chips after spending eight of them on sleep so if I don't want to have a regrettable life I must need discipline as I go down my thought process here I started talking about death and the fact that if I'm a 35y old now I'm 30 now but I have 177,000 days left to live roughly if I meet the life expectancy of the USA um so I need to figure out in order to live a non-reg life how to be disciplined then I started to examine the areas of my life where I possess discipline and the areas where I don't and I was trying to establish a relationship between the two why am I really disciplined with going to the gym now um but I'm undisciplined in other areas why am I really disciplined with um I was speaking to Simon cnic the other day and I was telling him about this discipline equation and he was like yeah but Steve you know I don't love putting the bins out but at 8:00 in the morning I got out of bed yesterday and went and put the bins out and I was like no that makes perfect sense Simon because the discipline equation to me is this is super super rough at the start of the equation you have why that goal subjectively really matters to you like how much that goal really subjectively matters to you plus the psychological enjoyment you get through the pursuit of the goal y minus the psychological dissatisfaction and friction you get in the pursuit of the goal so if I put that in the frame of Simon cynic there and what he said about getting out of bed at 8: a.m. because he could hear the bin truck coming down the road I said to Simon what is the cost of you not putting the bins out there's two costs cost a is the bins overflow and then he's got nowh put his as they would say garbage course B is you can get fined so the the reason for doing it is high at the start of the equation the psychological enjoyment you get from it is is super low right and the friction is high but the Y is higher than all of it so the equation still balances in terms of incentives for you to get out of bed and do it because the you don't want to find an overflowing bins and that desire is greater than the friction is and in the context of me going to the gym I didn't go to the gym for 27 years of my life I couldn't find the discipline to do it I was like most people like I made the intention I announced it to the world I failed and I did that for three years I announced it to the world I failed and then the pandemic happened and I watched as the world was torn apart because our health outcomes were linked to our fitness and our current health and as I watched that in March 2020 through the screens and watched Italy be ravaged by this this pandemic and watched it come over from Wuhan and then start to creep through Europe I realized very unforgettably that there is this tectonic plate called my health which I'd never seen shake before and I was witnessing it shake globally vicariously and everything I'm pursuing and care about actually sits on top of it my girlfriend my dog my cat my my businesses that I've built my podcast my everything I care about it's on top of that so the tectonic plate of my health is my first priority if you remove my my my my health you remove everything you can take my other stuff it doesn't impact there's no relationship between them really but the health is the number one thing and that going back to my equation you can see how that influences the equation suddenly the reason the why for the goal to go to the gym and work out was so strong that it outweighed the friction and since for the last three years I've gone to the gym 82% of the time which is six days a week roughly um and it's stuck and it's now feels to be effortless because the incentive structure so clearly um aiming towards discipline nice um I really like that equation and as I as I was reading it um I was thinking that second component the um the psychological joy of the pursuit of the thing yeah that is the one that my whole productivity philosophy is based around ah um because for me discipline is like like having to rely on discipline to me feels like a negative thing it's like okay I'm I'm suffering but it's worth it whereas when I so when I when I read the chapter about health in in the Diary of CEO I was I was reading this on a flight to Florida to attend a Tony Robbins event and I was in a bit of like yeah I'm going to read the book and you had that chapter where you talked about health and it's it's it's the same stuff you talk about in happy second it's like somehow the reminder hit me so well that immediately I texted my assistant being like okay I need to take my health seriously and the system we're going to put in place is I currently don't enjoy going to the gym it's not fun I appreciate that it's valuable but for me that appreciation that it's valuable not actually the right direction therefore I need to make it fun therefore can we book me a personal trainer and give him the goal that like three times a week let's try and make working out fun and so we've got the first appointment tomorrow the next one the day after and it was a direct result of seeing that reminder where I was like [ __ ] got so amazing Ally That's so incredible so amazing because it's a strange thing to find in this book I think that I think it's like law number nine about your first Foundation just remembering that everything you've done Ali in your life like same seem for me is contingent on that yeah Health goes everything else just dies it's just and then so why don't we live our life with that as the first like priority in the list of things you know if it is the tectonic play it should be the first thing um but even thinking about that through the discipline equation that you can know something you can know something I was saying to Rich Ro earlier I know meditation matters because every guest is told me I don't do it because when I look through the lens of the discipline equation that it's not just about the equation it's self it's also about how that then Stacks against your other priorities so you can have the equation can be in your favor but in a world of finite time there might be other things that are even stronger in terms of forces of discipline so I know that meditation is good and I want I want to do it right it's like there the psychological enjoyment of it is may be not huge the friction is kind of high because it costs your time and stuff like that and it's a bit hard to just think of nothing or whatever the process is so it's like slightly in the favor of doing it but then in a in the context of 16 chips left when I wake up in the morning it's not going to win out over these other disciplines so all of the disciplines are also competing with each other to to get into the calendar yeah and I think when like in in your case with the health stuff it feels like when there's a clear emotional trigger that that's where it takes it from intellectual knowing to actual knowing 100% whereas for me I haven't yet had that with health um for some reason and so F I said this to rich in with meditation I said maybe I need a little bit more pain and I say this to I think I sometimes I don't always say it because it's not the most um empathetic thing to say in certain situations but it's become clear to me from doing the Diary of a CEO that change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of staying the same as they say um and Rock Bottom is a unfortunately a remarkable driver of transformation and changeing people's lives um that some of us need to to be for the why part of the discipline equation to suddenly go yeah you know yeah I think the same thing applies to uh people who want to sort of quit their jobs and eventually start a business as a side hustle all this stuff like for me when I read the 4our work week it was an intellectual knowing of like oh it would be nice to have a side business but when I saw doctors in real life absolutely miserable 10 years into their career and I was seeing them every day and talking to them and they were absolutely miserable and they couldn't leave the job because they didn't have it money that was when it became like like sort of deep a a deep within a grounding of like oh [ __ ] like I don't want to be in that position where I'm Shackled to a job I don't enjoy and that to me was the idea of hell so it's like that prompted so much action while I was at University and people would be like oh you so disciplined you're like building your business on the side or editing videos on the side like didn't feel like it took much discipline at all it was just like the pain of the the pain of the alternative was just so great I'm just like we're going to do this what I what I hear there as well is like the distinction between knowledge and belief one of them was knowledge the other one was belief and as I talk about in the book about like um flat earthers and stuff like that you can show them knowledge you can show them information you know but there's nothing that will in the case of someone that believes the Earth is flat the only possible way you could change their beliefs is if you took them up in a spaceship and showed them the Earth with their own eyes because first party evidence that we experience with our own eyes whether it's vicariously by watching someone you know and care and Trust go through it or you go through it yourself is the path to belief change and that's why I say sometimes like maybe you need a little bit more pain or there's a rock bottom you haven't yet gotten to with some of those more stubborn beliefs um because all your friends and advice and the podcast and the quotes you've listened to haven't been been enough but also when you think about self-belief how to how to build self-belief and confidence same thing first- party evidence looking in the mirror and saying like I'm beautiful and I'm I'm going to be this and that and the other none of it works as far as I'm concerned none of that works it's not stronger than the seven-year-old that told you you're a jackass and that what your dad said to you in the kitchen that time about your hair like that's a stronger group of evidence that's ingrained in your s story so the way that you counteract those stubborn beliefs you don't want to have is you have to go out there and you have to put yourselves in growth zones where you're going to be be conf where those beliefs will be confronted and you'll be given first party evidence that those beliefs aren't true knowledge isn't enough unfortunately it is sometimes when the existing belief isn't super strong and stubborn but if the Su existing belief that like I'm a bad public speaker and I can't do that is super strong then the only way to counteract it is with first party evidence which you'll get from stepping outside of your zone of comfort this episode is very kindly brought to you by hu I've been using hu I've been a paying customer of hu since 2017 since my year of medical school when I first discovered it and basically what it is if you haven't heard of it is that it is a meal in a shake it's got the perfect balance of carbs and fiber and proteins and fat and it contains 26 different vitamins and minerals all you do is add water or milk to the powder usually I use water you can shake it up or you can blend it I prefer to blend and then it becomes a fantastic option if you're like me and you're kind of busy and so you don't really have time for breakfast or lunch my favorite version is the heel black edition it's absolutely sick 400 calories 40 g of protein 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Hearn who was on the very first season of the podcast that was a sick episode that got so many R reviews as well anyway if you're interested in trying out hu then head over to hu.com deepdive and if you use that URL a it really helps me out but B you also get a free t-shirt and also a free Shaker that comes with your order so go to heel.com deepdive that'll also be linked down in the video description or the show notes and thank you so much heel for sponsoring this episode this episode is very kindly brought to you by Trading 212 now people ask me all the time for advice about investing cuz I've made a bunch of videos about it on the YouTube channel and my advice for most people is generally invest in Broad stock market index funds which is exactly what you can do completely for free with trading 212 it's a great app that lets you trade stocks and funds and ETFs and foreign exchange if you really want to and one of the great things about the app is that if you're new to the world of 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Store so thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this episode I did an interview with Professor Steve Peters this morning who I think has been on your pod as well really the chimp about the chimp Paradox and we talked a lot about limiting beliefs goblins Gremlins like the limiting beliefs that that imprint onto Us in childhood that is that is so hard to shake yeah um I wonder for you what are some of those limiting beliefs that you still struggle with limiting beliefs one of my limiting beliefs and I don't know how interesting this is is that I believe I'm not organized and so that shows up in my life and I've almost abandoned the will to change it and as my life has become more optimized towards the things that I'm good at there's less if we we think about the discipline equation there's less reason to change it there's less apparent reason to change it so growing up in my home it was a total mess and the doors in my house had holes in them like big holes in them because just over the years we're just like as you know four kids in a house parents aren't there smashed up the doors um it looked like the the house of a hoarder that's the environment I grew up in there's almost something quite deep within me where today as an adult I feel comfortable with mess because I grew up in Mass so I see that reflected in my behavior sometimes like I'm quite a messy person and it's a reflection of home so that's one of them for sure um I have lots of other like insecurities and um I think a lot of like hard wide not enoughness in me that's like deep within me that's so like I think I think growing up in you know it's funny cuz at the time I didn't know it but as I grew up as I grew up and I became an adult I looked back on how I felt going back to that signal of how you feel growing up in Plymouth in like 1994 where everyone is white everyone is like well most people are doing okay even my street was like middle class nice our house was just destroyed at the time um and you understand the value of things by the context in which you see them so like on a menu if there's three Stakes um then you'll assume that the top one is delicious and the bottom one isn't going to taste good and it's cheap and you'll therefore usually pick the middle one if you remove one of those Stakes decision making changes um in the same way I grew up in a Street full of in a context full of white people who had more money than me so I'd had more money than our family like the shame of when my dad was dropping me to school in that van in the morning praying that the traffic lights would turn red as far from the school as possible so so that no one would see the car we were driving in all my family um like all those things you reflect on those things and how like how enduring that feeling was throughout my life like no pretty much I think there was one kid think there's one kid in the like 16 years that I lived in that city grew up that knew where I lived imagine that because when people would droing me home I would tell them to drop me at the very top of the hill I would tell them a different street and I'd get out and walk k um and then there's no way I'd let someone at school come into my house and see that we lived in like you know in a mess um and you imagine just that subtle constant desire to avoid the shame you're feeling and to fit in chemically relaxing my hair until I was about 16 years old like if you look at the old pictures of me we're in the Vlog you see this kid that has like ke like I have straight hair and I'm like this fre cringe and I've got like the skinny top on with the skinny jeans all of that shame and insecurity I think it permeates throughout my life a little bit I think it's part of my my ambition and I'm drive and my drive if I'm honest with myself I think it's why I've I work hard and I think it's why I often ask guests if they're driven or dragged because I think part of me is being dragged I sometimes wondered this about you because especially like you know you guys have released a vlog now for three 3 weeks and just like every time I watch the Vlog I'm just like wow this guy is Relentless and in my mind I'm thinking you've already made the money you've already had the success you've got the biggest podcast in the world like what are you doing it for um so the reason I pause is because it's very easy to [ __ ] and I don't want to [ __ ] but it's also hard to know the answer yeah and I think most most of us we get used to giving an answer to that question but what I care a lot about whether it's true or not and so I think if I was to Hazard a guess at the truth I would say it's a multitude of reasons I would say on one hand there's no greater feeling than doing something that people appreciate and adds value to someone else's life there's no feeling like the feeling I experienced this morning when I walked into the office and the girl that grabbed me and said I just quit my job literally this morning I just quit my job and I told my boss in that job interview I was quitting and it's because your podcast I listen to this particular guest and they help me with this thing there's no metric that actually feels like as good for the human being as that the ego might love oh we hit three million sub million subscribers it's funny I walked into my team that day and go I realized none of us care that we hit 3 million subscribers I also don't care it's important that we use this as a metric to understand that we've done we've done well as a team but I realize none of us care because we're like figing we're feigning caring who cares if you hit 3 million subscribers it's one more than two 2 million 9 it's but it's nice to have Milestones where we celebrate that matters to me it matters to me that we're creating stuff that's helping people that really matters to me on the other end I do look at the metrics all the time as I know you do or at least you did yeah stop now okay okay think we had a conversation where you you I remember very vividly you're telling me that you were like you used to be like really obsessed with it all and it wasn't wasn't great it wasth so that's important that I do I still have a bit of that in me where like it matters to me how the episodes perform in terms of numbers I don't know I don't know why but um it does I want the episodes to do really well and I want I want things to grow and move forward and get bigger I want that um maybe that's the shame like the the kid again trying to be enough um why am I doing it I believe in life to be happy you have to kind of fulfill these five objectives in your profession number one you need challenge right things need to be become incrementally more difficult to the level of appetite that you can take that's why game in game psychology every level gets harder you you're not going to do the same cross word on the same difficulty over and over again you would lose motivation Daniel pink his book is behind you says this they they do it in studies if it's the same difficulty people who motivation so when you're building teams the the thing you've got to know as a CER or as a Founder is the depth of difficulty that every single member of your team is at and if at one point one of your team members isn't challenged enough they will quit you're about 6 months from them asking for a meeting okay so keep them one foot out of their depth and I have this mental model in my head of all my team members and I actually sat here this morning with one of them this morning at uh 9:00 a.m. this morning who I knew was too comfortable and my conversation with her this morning was give me 48 hours I'm going to return you to the state you were when we working together in New York where you out of your depth because I know that's what you need she didn't articulate that to me but I know it is I know the reason why she's like feeling this is a one of my companies one of my one of my companies is because she's not out of her depth anymore Factor number two to be motivated and enjoy your work is uh what I call the progress principle sense of Forward Motion it's one of the laws in the book as well when they interview people in work and say what's your best day in work Harvard Business Review found it was when it was on days where people had a sense of progress this is also what David bford speaks to um when he entered the British cycling team many people think of Sir David bford who took over that down andout British cycling team and made them the best to ever do it they attribute the success of that to the fact that he cared about these 1% marginal gains 100% that is a huge part of it but what sir David brood said to me which I actually think is more important because it's the macro Tailwind is when we found those 1% gains those small ways to improve something making the water bottle 1 cmet bigger the pillow softer the important part was the impact it had on people's motivation because quote we felt like we were going somewhere humans need that sense of we're going somewhere so if you're a CEO one of the most important things you should always do which I try and do a lot with my teams naturally is constantly remind the team of the fact that we are going somewhere it's a feeling in the room and so David bford told me that when he could get that feeling into the room of we're going somewhere because those one % gains the easiest to find it's hard to find a big gain in any Pursuit it's hard to in what you do and what I do finding those 100% gains it's an accident focus on the smallest things find it enjoy the win together which is like oh my God we just made this 1% better there's a trackpad glued under the table you're at right now and the trackpad is there because me and my team just found a 1% gain last week where during the conversation with someone sometimes they say amazing things and I want to write it down and just remember it because that might be the title the thumbnail the description or whatever and then after the conversation ends I forget forget it my team come up and say what do you think of the episode I don't have any notes cuz I've had to pay attention so you'll see a trackpad under the table where you are now can you feel it is it there maybe it was the trackpad they removed yeah there's a little velcro okay trackpad that we yeah that was the trackpad so all I do is I just tap it with my finger and what it's doing is that system underneath the table is listening to every word we say and it highlights it so the AI will highlight it and send it off to my team so afterwards I have all my notes and I just got to tap the bottom of the table good idea let's do that it's a great idea but but anyway that's an example of a 1% gain we found as a team and when we did that we shared it with the whole team and and we enjoyed it and we like this is so awesome and it created that impression that we're going somewhere we made progress today that's Point number two so you need to challenge yourself need to sense of Forward Motion number three I'm going to say is um I'm going to say you need to be pursuing a goal in your life that is subjectively Meaningful goes back to what we said earlier y if you interview all members of my team and there's hundreds of people people across different companies but if you just focus on the podcast team where there's 25 30 people every single person will give a different reason as to why they work here Holly will say it's because of this I'll say it's because of this will will say it's because of the the creativity and his love of production I don't care what your reason is as long as you got one yeah so you haven't got to give them all the same reason you haven't got to align on reasons they just got to find theirs and you've got to help them find their reason so that's Point number three the the if the goal is feel sub ly worthwhile to you number four which is super backed by science we just touched on it a little bit is autonomy and control feeling like you have control and autonomy of your work when people don't have that in their work physiologically they're more prone to disease um psychologically they have tons of um really difficult challenges um so having control and autonomy over what you're doing is integral to feeling like a free animal that's not in a cage and last one maybe the most important of all because we can all recount on times in our lives where we had the previous four but didn't have this one in the job and the work sucked is you've got to be working with a supportive community of people that you like um and that makes all of the other ones better makes all of the other four better notice that I haven't said you know I haven't said a particular career or a particular you know job or anything if I have these five things in my profession Steve will be balanced and I've applied these five things to psychedelics where I worked for a year invested in the company at Thai we took the company public um at a big valuation in June 20 2021 I believe um I've applied it to hu to my businesses to marketing to software with third web um I'm applying it to podcasting I guess a business uh I'm I'm applying it to DJing I'm applying it to the event businesses we we run um I'm applying it to my production company which we're doing shows on the BBC at the moment um so the the the subject doesn't matter it's less important than what people think I think everyone in this room and everyone list listening to this now could be could find their passion in a multitude of Industries if they had these five things the subject matter is less consequential because I wasn't born to be a social media CEO yeah didn't exist when I was born so how could I possibly how could that possibly be my passion but I have these five things I've had those five things for a long time as you were saying those five things those are all five things that I talk about in my book as well o cuz it's because mine is called Feelgood productivity it's about what are the factors that make work enjoyable and how do we add more of that into our into what we do so the framework that that I use is the three PS which is power play and people explain so power is autonomy control uh Power is also the sense of improvement and competence like you're getting better at the thing initially we we exploded this into like 10 different things like ah 10's too many to remember and then it was five because we had power play people progress and purpose and we were like oh but like five PS is a bit much as well and like Dan pink has already got the uh and then we turn it into to three 3ps and just sort of shoehorn in the subheadings in there and so power play and people play interesting please explain play so in um Power I fit in both autonomy and is it purpose I I fit both of them into there because you talked about the thing being something you well how did you describe it just a second ago yeah so so for so for us power is um kind of a combination of taking ownership autonomy control autonomy control and also um Improvement like leveling up prog progress like getting better at the thing and growing in the thing gives you that sense of empowerment of my five you've put control and autonomy and um progress kind of together in power yes exactly so play what's that play is one that isn't that is an any 5 um play is um approaching work in the spirit of play and I think that's not a thing that's required for something to be for for a job to feel meaningful but it's definitely a thing you know that second that second component of your discipline equation where the the pursuit of doing the thing is joyful in itself and there was so many stories that we found like Nobel Prize winners Richard feeman who was burnt out with doing physics and then one day he sees in the Cornell cafeteria he sees like a student like throwing a plate up in the air and he sees that the logo of Cornell University is like rotating at a slightly different rate than like the circumference of the plate and he's like huh that's weird why is the logo like wobbling at a different like than like the edge and he uses that to model like thermodynamic equations and stuff and ends up ultimately winning the Nobel Prize and he says in his autobiography afterwards that the thing that cured his burn out with physics because he'd been doing it for such a long time in World War II his wife had died was finding that that sense of play back in it that lightness and ease that you can approach work with to make it feel to make anything that you do feel more enjoyable so play was a big part in fact actually plays chapter one in the book because we're like we really want to lead with this philosophy that feeling good makes you more productive experiencing positive emotions in your work makes you more creative makes you less stressed on the case of Richard Fran there what was he experiencing in his work up until he saw that plate he was burnt out he was the work had lost meaning I guess yeah yeah cuz he' so his burnout period was like post World War II like he'd worked on you know the US defense thing he worked on like the nuclear bomb he'd he he he had this meaningful goal to work towards but then you know when he got his tenure professorship he was like uh his wife had also just died so obviously that kind of played played a role in it and he was sort of feeling like ah these equations that once brought me so much joy are now like they all feel meaningless there you go until he went back to the play thing so if number four in mine was was subjectively meaningful a goal that feel is subjectively Meaningful to you so that's where you kind of i f that's the play part that is sort of the play part um our final chapter is also about purpose um and just sort of alignment and choosing goals that align with your core values I didn't initially purpose was the very first chapter because it was like well starting with y but I think the problem with starting with y which I will talk to Simon about if I me I think the issue with starting with why is that it can often seem overwhelming if someone's in a normal job that doesn't feel that meaningful or purposeful you tell them to start with why and they're like well there's no there's no purpose beyond the fact that it's a job and it's like I I applied to 50 jobs and it's the one that I got and it's quite heavy to start with Y in that context and so we instead we end with why to be like hey once you once you've done all these things to make it not suck once you've Incorporated power and play and people into your work at that point you've done everything you can and now let's think about the purpose question exactly and if at that point it's still not working then maybe it's time to quit the job okay um and then people is you're point about people how exciting so you've got power so in the book you start with play play yeah Power purpose people yeah I love that I should have done alliteration so stupid alliteration makes things so much more easy to remember [ __ ] okay well it's publish now so I'm F it's a good book I've just taken so many notes I love I love highlighting Stu which one was you've read both of them and it's very rare for people to actually read these books because people buy them and they just don't read them like I'm guilty of that which one do you prefer honestly I uh H I actually think they were both very good at different stages of my life so the so the two takeaways I took from from the first one were basically the CH the time chip thing which I still use um and also the quitting framework thing which I still use yeah uh what I took from this one was a reminder to take take better care of my health the 11 alsoo laws you have about marketing were really helpful because I'm I was like highlighting the [ __ ] out of them being like sent to yob Senter Al is super helpful I'm my God like friction adding friction yes and it's like it was very specific to business stuff whereas in the first book it was more General General Life stuff it's where I was at I think no exactly it's where you were at clearly as well yeah so I think it's like different books hit you at different times yeah because I'm I I've never said this before but I like I'm almost a little bit shy about the first book now because it doesn't represent who I am now it's much more you know Broad and kind of Lifey and much more kind of opinions and Vibes whereas I feel like the second one the new one is much more Technical and much more like here's how to do it it's very specific I like the specificity of it yeah and and like you weren't you weren't hedging you were like you had an opinion on each one and I also liked how you named things and I was thinking oh [ __ ] I should have named more stuff in my book cuz you know there was a thing where instead of using the word manifestation you called it like uh plan a be a plan B was the plan a chapter there's two there's one negative manifestation like the power of negative manifestation another one where it's like plan a thinking you must be a plan a thinker yeah plan A thinking was like a plan a thinking what a good what a good way of repackaging manifestation in a way because I don't Vibe with the word manifestation and I suspect a lot of your audience don't either but plan a thinking I was like hell yeah I'm a plan a thinker well you did the whole literation thing so you you you beat me there with the whole play Power purpose ideas from each other because you can't name my five in terms of the titles right now but I can name your five your four play I can do them in order as well play Power purpose and people or did you put purpose at the end Pur at the end we call it alignment like well I remember yours yeah so that's the problem anyway uh yeah we spent so long trying to do like ABCDE e and like autonomy B like C for competence D for Drive e for something and it's like can we go to FGM like no let's just let's keep it simple I really missed that I really missed the fact that alliteration is important for these new ideas and Frameworks that could have been in the story section the power of alliteration and the power of Threes as well you know that whole thing about like you're you're an incredibly loyal passionate and empathetic friend for some reason when something is in threes PE the brain just I always speak in threes same we this is our our whole process for videos for podcasts for online courses we always think what is the three part a three part framework yeah you did that one through as well so good video podcast online courses there's there's a line I heard from a friend who works at uh mckinzy and he said that the trick that all management Consultants use is that the client will ask them a question and they'll say well there are three reasons and then while they're saying the first one they'll figure out what the second and the third one are power the power of Threes that's why we put purpose at the end within alignment because we wanted three p's and not four oh and so we have three in my book we have three parts and each part each part has three chapters n chapters in total guy this guy's got the three each chapter also has three subheadings initially we had like four or five like nope simplify only weird now it's a bit it's a bit it's a bit too meta um one thing that I I have a bit of a burn to pick with you okay because so I watched your first Vlog episode and I felt very inspired everyone on our team loved it we sent it around to each like oh my God this is so good inspired us to start a vlog and we were like yeah this weekly Vlog is a great idea it's like initially like we tried daily vlogging like last year but like daily is too much it's like we we were scrambling for Content but then weekly we were like that's a great idea and so we're very inspired after episode one and then I watched episode 2 and then I felt depressed cuz it was just too good and I was like why why why are we even bothering like what's the point our Vlog is going to be nowhere near as good as Stevens like oh dragon's dead it's like it's like half an hour long as well it's like normally our's stuff is really long and well if he was doing three minute Vlogs then at least we add more value but so much value in that as well and I felt that sense of comparison and I felt like oh what's the point and one of the things that you talk about a lot is as everyone does uh comparison I think I think in the first book like comparison is the root cause of our loss of self-esteem so I wonder if you can speak to that is is that something that you that you still struggle with this sort of comparing yourself to others and feeling as if like oh didn't do as good a job as yeah I hope I I now believe that I do I compare myself to others again I want to pause to make sure we all do I think that's the first thing I have to say is it's human too and I've thought a lot about this actually I'm just going to go on a little bit of a tangent I'll come around the houses and come back you when you said that were beating yourself up a little bit you oh like um it's important to the relationship you have with the feelings you have to understand that all of those feelings are there for survival reasons and your body and your mind is not against you it's very very much on your side the problem is we live in a world now where your body is misaligned with the world we live in so in the context of sugar right once the reason why we have sugar Cravings is because if if you came across berries on the Serengeti let's say 10,000 years ago eating those berries kept you alive so your brain is attuned to eat more of them the reason why we struggle to lose weight and lose belly fat is because the amount of belly fat you had correlated to how long you had left to live you know so your body has this the brain is trying to defend your weight so losing weight is difficult because if you go for a big run your body will then overcompensate with hunger and make you eat more so that's why they often say cardio is not a great way to lose weight you'll just end up eat more the body is on your side comparison is important really really important and useful and it's ingrained in all of us because we don't have time to make decisions about things in the real world so our brain is using shortcuts and comparison is a wonderful shortcut to understand what something means the value of something and it's hard wide into you to help you to survive as is your loving of sugar your need for status um again important for you to fit into your tribe if you were kicked out of your tribe then you would die your body would go into self-preservation your stress levels would go up you'd sleep less you'd live seven years less longer so all of these things that we fight with we shouldn't be fighting with ourselves it's just in case the world has changed and the body hasn't evolved to deal with it comparison's one of them it's it's ingrained in us um we all have it I'm sure I can compare myself every day to everybody I meet and I see this guy on Instagram with great muscles and I go [ __ ] Jesus what am I doing over here with this you know I'm doing that at all times and I have empathy with myself for that CU it's important to start with a place of empathy towards that and not like self- resentment okay so it's normal to compare ourselves it's not normal to live in a world where we see 7,000 people a day on a glass screen and the Brain can't compute that information it's not meant to it's not normal to have a fridge the brain wasn't designed in a world with with fridges do I compare myself yes um do I how I interpret the comparison is the key part so I look at things you've done over the years and I I go man That's So Dope we can do that I look at what Mr Beast has done and go I'm like studying this guy and I'm learning and I'm going man this guy's a gold standard and I'm learning from him and I'm you know I write about it him a little bit in one of the laws in the book about the first five seconds and and I look at Rogan and I go man this guy just sits there and does no preparation and then just like talks about like an ant hill with like this super smart person or he'll get his mate on from the comedy club that is insane how he does that so I hope I hope that my comparison results in inspiration and not like jealousy or resentment or any of those negative self-destructive unproductive feelings and I think that can be a practice I think you can realize that life really isn't like a z zeros some game and that like everyone can win um and that from from them winning they they can they can teach you something if you're there to listen most people lean out when someone is doing well so they'll like they'll attack criticize or um or try and diminish that because of the the dissonance it it creates what you described there as cognitive dissonance to some degree like what I mean by that is when something You observe is at odds with your sense of self-identity or what you believe about the world and it causes the psychological discomfort of you going that's really good like we're we're not going to be able to do that there's different ways you can deal with the dissonance one way is you can say yeah but he's got a team of 30 people that that is a great way to deal with the dissonance it kind of like diminishes what you've seen and it makes it makes her at ease right he's got 30 yeah but he's got 30 people or you could say something else right the harder thing to do and I think the most important thing to do is what I call in the book The um I'm goingon to get butcher his name but I'll call him the president of Israel did when Reagan who was his friend went to that Nazi um burial site and obviously being being Jewish watching Reagan who was meant to be your friend go to that burial site when reporters asked him you know what do you think of Reagan going to that where you know where there's there's Nazis buried and he says when a friend makes a mistake the friend remains a friend and the mistake remains a mistake what he's doing there is he's doing the hard thing of holding the dissonance separate like holding these two facts it separately he's not diminishing it he's not saying Reagan's not my friend or yeah but he didn't go to the barrel site where the bad Nazis would were buried he held the two things together and in doing that you have you you create enough space to learn and to observe and for nuance which is rare in this world the thing we're all doing at the moment is just diminishing the other side we're not listening so going back to it if you're able to hold that dissonance it becomes really productive and useful for you which most of us are not not able to do especially if we have low self-esteem or we have those other issues because the dissonance feels a little bit too close to home it actually says to us I'm not good enough and that's a very deep thing to experience in this in the light of someone else's success for their success to convince you that you were a scumbag and that what that seven-year-old said to you in school is true about your sense of self-worth is a lot to take so if you have low self-esteem I think reducing the dissonance by slamming the person being pessimistic justifying it away is much more likely so you interview a lot of kind of very successful people do you ever find yourself in that unhealthy comparison mode or have you gotten so good at the sort of comparison equals inspiration rather than comparison equals envy that it's just I've never sat with someone and thought man I'm so jealous of you but I've sat with so many people and thought every day I think I will never be as good as you at what you do I will never have the knowledge recall the intelligence the perspective the articulation I will never get there I will never be and I I wish I wish I was capable of it but I I'm able to separate out my admiration and my aspiration they are two different things which we often conflate I can sit with someone and go you're the go you're the best to ever do it you're so much better than me at that thing and also not then aspire to become them sure yeah um and I think actually that's that's because I at this f chapter of my life now like I'm okay with who I am so I can admire I can admire like I can just do the admiration part without turning it back on myself and saying what does that say about me and I I see it in my some of my friends one friend in particular that I have if I said to this one friend that I have in particular I go they go like what are you doing to I was like I just went to the gym immediately they will actually hear that as why didn't you go to the gym so I can't even have a conversation with them about like oh I went I we had it yesterday in the car she said to me um oh where have you been I said I just ran to the gym and then I and I watched her face and I she goes I'm going to be going to the gym soon and what in that moment what happened happened is she actually she heard my experience and she heard my discipline or she heard my goal and it it so where she is in her life at the moment is she's quite self-conscious and she's struggling with self-esteem so she what she experienced was extreme dissonance which was why didn't she heard her brain translated it to why didn't you go to the gym you're not good enough what I said was I just been to the gym this morning and that's again it goes back to the interpretation based on our self-esteem for these events that's an extreme example but it's kind of the same thing in terms of comparison that's the extreme example where someone can just tell you what they did and you actually hear why didn't you you're you're not good enough yeah nice it's good stuff um can we talk about your buckets so that you f filling the buckets in the right order um there's no alliteration there either I should have done alliteration yeah so I I really vied with that story um I wonder if you can you can tell the story of how how you came to come across these these five buckets yeah you know the person that I'm referring to and I have to say there might be a little bit of folk tail to this because this person said it to me and the individual that I'm talking about is um they're very good at storytelling but what they said to me was they were in San Francisco and might yeah they were in San Francisco and a sweaty man came came jogging past and this sweaty man was kind of like short on breath and he was explaining like that he was building rockets and doing these microchips and these monkey brains and all building tunnels and all of these crazy abstract things and then he ran off and as you hear that story objectively you go that is a lunatic that has escaped from an asylum but in reality it was Elon Musk and the only reason that when I say it was Elon Musk it suddenly becomes believable is because Elon Musk has spent his life filling these five buckets so Elon could say anything he could create any ambition and people would sell their houses to invest in his ideas because he is someone who has five full buckets the last one of which is maybe in question but five full buckets the first bucket is knowledge he's committed his life and there's actually a Side Story to this as well which is um when I met a famous monk in New York City I was with Jetty for the first couple of years of my life I was dealing with this kind of mental conundrum as to whether committing my life to building businesses which would ultimately enrich myself was that a worthier cause than me going back to the village in Africa and saving just one life with the skills that I have right like what was more of a worthy Pursuit so when I was in New York and Jay introduced me to this Monk and there's this big room of people I got to ask one question so I asked that question I said like if I could go to Africa and I was like 22 23 was young I could go to Africa and like commit my time to saving one life or I could carry on building these businesses which one is more worthy which one should I be doing and the monk said to me you cannot pour out for others that in which you do not have yourself and so what I interpreted from that is filling these five buckets first one is your knowledge which Elon certainly has a very full bucket it's important context here as well this first bucket of knowledge is is always growing bigger there's more knowledge to acquire it's like a bucket that is increasing in size as more knowledge is available first bucket is your knowledge the second bucket is your skills Nothing in life can ever empty these two buckets the the remaining three buckets that I'm going to describe can be emptied things can go wrong you can get fired from your job professional earthquakes but these first two buckets no one can ever empty them your knowledge and your skills and skills are really applied knowledge so when you learn something and then you apply it we call it a skill which is kind of what we've been talking about with like knowing something but then doing it is completely different you can read about exercise but then doing knowing how to do the squats and stuff comes from the application of the knowledge which is a skill these are the most important buckets in your life because when these overflow they fill the other three buckets of your resources um your network and your reputation now these three things can can these buckets can any time and if you're young and you're thinking okay which job should I take you should you should make the decision through this Frame because I talk about one of my team members in the very early stages of my entrepreneurial career who decided to leave our company because he was offered a great job title and a big paycheck which is reputation and resources but he hadn't filled his skills in knowledge bucket he' kind of like managed to convince someone that he was capable of being a CEO of a very big company even though he hadn't didn't have the Knowledge and Skills and it kind of it's quite obvious what happens there life will catch you out if you don't have the Knowledge and Skills to meet the situation you're in what I'm fortunate for is in my life I spent maybe three to four years working in call centers picking up the phone calling Dorothy at 9:00 p.m. to sell like you know artificial grass Windows Doors conservatories kitchens because it filled up these this Knowledge and Skills bucket profoundly I could have gone and got a more glamorous job but choosing a job at that early age that was focused on my Knowledge and Skills not that paid me more or that had higher status amongst my friends is the reason why I was able to launch businesses and do well at a young age so I would just impress upon people to really focus and prioritize those first two buckets especially when you're young and especially when they're empty yeah this is a a thing that I've I've heard from a lot of um a lot of entrepreneurs you know I asked the question of if someone's young and they want to start their first business what you recommend and a lot of people say that if you want to start a business it is very worthwhile getting a job at a startup first that has like fewer than 10 people because you will learn so much stuff and you're being paid to learn and the objective of that is for you to just you know as you you would say fill up those buckets or or like add stuff to them of Knowledge and Skills yeah and then when you start your business you're way way more ahead of the curve than if you just quit your job start a business completely from scratch and now you're having to fill the the the skills and the knowledge while also not having any money coming in that's like a harder place to be 100% And it's like the cheapest way to fail right it's the cheapest way to observe failure we talked about how beliefs are first first party experience them yourself with your own eyes like you saw your doctor friends unhappy um and we talked about the importance of like you know beliefs coming from experiments you run being outside of your zone of comfort a startup is that environment exactly cheapest way to fail cheapest way to get that information to see it as close as you possibly can in a big corporate you might be cloaked from it so many people so much responsibility the failure kind of happens somewhere at the top and it's you know you don't see the consequence of it and also sometimes there's not a consequence of it in a big corporate you know it doesn't cost the company there the lights um but in a startup you get all of that without the failure being you know it's a low low cost way to fail yeah nice um law 22 you must become a plan a thinker what is a plan A think er um I describe plan a thinking as really interestingly I'm like making a bunch of connections here because it kind of links back to what we said about discipline and prioritization you know our time is competing with a series of other things that we want to do um the problem is the studies and the stats show that if you give someone in a study an alternative you give them you even let them think about an alternative they are less motivated for the primary objective so the studies that I talk about in the book are they get people to sit down and they say this is the goal and if you do this goal you'll get a candy bar let's say then they ask the people to do the task in a second study they say sit down this is the goal if you complete it you get a candy bar but just think about another place here on campus that you could get a candy bar just the thought of where else they could get a c Cy bar distorts their motivation and reduces their motivation towards the goal so that the evidence is really clear when you have a plan B only detracts from your motivation and your commitment towards the plan a plan BS are detrimental in the context of motivation towards a plan a um and I reflect on my own life and again I didn't have a plan a when I called my mother and I said I'm dropping out of University and I was shoplifting those pizzas at 18 years old to feed myself um it was like survival like I was either going to be successful or I was going to be successful there was not a plan B option I couldn't I didn't have anywhere else to run to so I think that focus and you know I talk about um the story of the plane crash in the book which is always my one of my all-time favorite stories um that Focus enabled me it was just 10% more wind in the sales towards where I wanted to go and sometimes 10% is the difference it was just that you know on that day where it's really difficult and there's so many reasons to quit and if I had a comfy place to run to that would have played on my subconscious and maybe tempted me to run to run to that soft comfortable place not having that put that energy back into the mission and that's kind of what I speak about when I'm talking about plan a thinking it's it's removing the alternative so that you can use all of your energy towards the main goal yeah there's a remarkable power and focus um we've found this in our team recently like it's so tempting there's the infinite list of things that we could do and then we'll be like yeah let's do all of this stuff and then it's like we're making 1% progress in like a dozen directions but when we focus in like the one or two things that really matter then we're able to make more progress in those areas MH and so one thing we've now done we work in six week cycles and every week uh every every six weeks everyone on the team just picks one Quest the the one thing that they're going to do in the next six weeks that's going to move the needle in their particular area which we we we found super helpful um I love that again when I when I look at your Vlog and and what you're up to doing loads of different things um you've got the various companies you've got the podcast it seems like you're out at like random times of the night three podcast guests in one day and then like a 3,000 people like in the evening there's a lot going on how do you think about where you're spending your energy and focus so I have to say that I'm struggling with it so I think it's important because I think I think it's important to be honest like I've overextended myself definitely in my life I've done I've taken on too many things which probably means six to 12 months ago I said yes to things I should have said no to I like deferred them to a future Steve who I didn't appreciate I didn't appreciate the context he was going to be living in so I've definitely overextended myself um I definitely struggle with it I can do it in bursts but I can't do it consistently I can't be consistently intense so this chapter of my life is very intense I came off the back of Dragon's Den problem with Dragon's Den is it can takes my all my time away so everything has to fit into the residual time and the residual time is is n enough to record my podcast to run the businesses to invest to do all the things I have to do with in media and what whatever else so I'm struggling with it um the struggle means sometimes I'm falling asleep at 3:00 a.m. and I'm like I'm tense I'm like there's like an angst to me like I'm tense my brain is and then you know I'm trying to have a relationship as well so I'm struggling with it so there's a problem here so I want I want to say that because I don't want anyone to think I've got it cracked um the important thing that I can do to control it is to have a clearer framework of of what I say yes or no to um which goes back to our discipline equation thing and also goes back to this quitting and starting thing like you've got to be able to say no to a lot of things in order to say yes to them saying no and yes have an equal importance in life and then the bigger overarching thing which I think most people are aware of is there's actually just a few a couple of things that I'm I should be doing with my time and they tend to be the biggest things and the smallest things what do you mean so as a CEO of a company there's two areas where you can where only you can do the thing that adds value so it's like the big stuff right like strategy and all that stuff all the stuff in the middle everyone else can do there's people that can do that and then the small thing and I say small because it seems small not because I think it's small which is going over to berta's desk and saying happy birthday coming from me that means a lot to but I realized that and no one else can go over to berta's desk and say happy birthday from Steve and create that same impact that I have on her which is like letting her know that I know it's her birthday and it matters to me and that so I do the really big things and then I do the really small things and also within that there's I have like very limited amount of skills this is not me being like humble or whatever I'm very comfortable with the fact that most things I'm bad at maths organization I said to you messy operational stuff process stuff I'm bad at all of that stuff I never do it I never try Finance related stuff don't even look at it not my problem thankfully my older brother works on my company full-time now so and he's a math genius as I think I explained earlier but there's this little thing here where that's me that's where that's the thing that Steve is good at and that should be the thing where I'm allocating most of my proverbial chips in a day my 16 well let's say I'll give 9 hours let's say I'll give 12 hours to work a day my I should spend spend those 12 chips in work doing that thing that only Steve can do which is hard to explain but it's kind of like linked to marketing it's really an understanding of human beings and like um yeah and vision Vision stuff like knowing knowing it's a philosophy thing it's like I talk about the in the philosophy section in the book like that philosophy towards work which is the one perents the experimentation giving that philosophy to team of people so that we we we find the right answers before other teams is my thing team culture and team philosophy and then the marketing bits I'm good at as well but nothing else I don't need to be good at anything else because you've got you've got the podcast you've got flight Story You've got third web you invest in bunch of companies which require you to get input on them and attend board meetings and stuff like you know we do do a lot of one a couple of boards that M matter to me healing company um I did a tie for a year the Psychedelic business for a year and then yeah it like my professional things that are occupying my time and then dver yeah which you said at the start which is like yeah takes a lot of time so I guess my question is why bother continuing with flight story and third web and investing and all this stuff it but I mean from the outside it seems like Dar Vio is the main thing but obviously you're less public about what what goes on with the other businesses it's a very good question I have a disease of I have the disease of Entrepreneurship and I have the disease of self-belief and I have the disease of curiosity and as those three things Collide you need an antidote to the disease which should be focus and saying no to things and the someday shelf where I think I talk about my first I don't even know where I talked about it but just the Shelf where you have a great idea and you believe you can do it and you believe it matters and you just [ __ ] put it on the shelf and then if it jumps back off the shelf you pick it back up and you put it back on the shelf and then if it keeps jumping off the shelf maybe for 12 months then you go okay right guys right PRI priority um so with that with those three diseases disease of Entrepreneurship the disease of self-belief and the disease of curiosity um when things happen I have a desire to build in in that area so when the blockchain conversation began I had a real desire to build it's the same reason why I went into a tie life sciences and spent a year working on taking a psychedelic bit business public and learning about all of the clinical data around psilocybin and magic mushrooms and Camin and Iber gain and what going through all of the that research paper and then figuring out how I could use that to tell the story of the mental health movement through the lens of psychedelics and constructing everything I remember writing the script for the IPO video ipoed it's worth 3.2 billion and I was fascin this is what when I was talking about these five principles of loving work it doesn't matter the subject subject is inconsequential what matters is that um that I care and that's why because I have that disease and sometimes I can't I can't qu quell it so it turns into a company that's what happened with flight story in third web I I love marketing I love psychology in business I used to steal the textbooks for psychology and what is psychology in business it's marketing that's what it is and with third web I was fascinated by fascinated by the blockchain so I built started a company there called the smartest guy I knew started tracking to him about it for six mon once and then that led to third B if you had let's say I don't know an extra 500 million in the bank to what extent would How would how would you change how you spend your time such a good question um I would I believe I would and I might be lying to myself because we'll [ __ ] ourselves sometimes I believe I would stop um okay so if it was right now if you give me 500 million right now in the bank um versus I wasn't currently doing anything and I was starting from zero two different answers sure let me answer if I was starting from zero yeah if I was starting from zero and there was nothing in my life there was no podcasts there was no businesses third web flight three all of it's gone I would start a media company that does pretty much what D is doing and I'd make it um I would have loads of podcasts all around the world with lots of different wonderful creators that I believe are making the world better and have important opinions to share and I'd be running one of the biggest media companies in the world that's what I'd be doing because I say this because doing the podcast is my I a guy yeah and so I would just do more of that and for anyone that doesn't know what an i guy is it's a sort of a Japanese phrase for when you find the thing that kind of provides you with the most fulfillment in life when it meets these four criteria of and I'm might buter this so help me here Ali because I know you know it the first one is something you believe you can be good at the second one is something that pays you the third one is something you enjoy and the fourth one is something that you believe is of service to others now doing the podcast is the first thing I've done in my life that really feels like that it feels like it completes the I guy so if you gave me 500 million and I had none of these other things going on in my life I would do more of that okay what about scenario two where you do have all all the other things I would take the money and I would invest it into my companies I back myself I'd invest I'd get a hundred million today and I'd put it into flight story um and make that the greatest marketing business in the world the greatest sort of agency in the world take another 100 million put it into third web so we win that game we're playing there within web 3 um I take 100 million I put in D of a CEO um and within D we have this really nice philanthropy charitable initiative I'm doing this initiative with the Red Cross at the moment called this Cash Card thing so I'd invest in that for refugees and disaster stricken areas yeah I would need the rest I don't know put it in a bank or put it in a high growth fund had this um this Tony Robbins event I was at last week it was uh business Mastery it was really good um interesting very interesting from like a meta perspective of like how he does events and stuff but also some genuinely like really helpful like advice on growing businesses and one of the main objectives of the of the event was to take people from being operators to owners where an owner can have freedom F flexibility can can their businesses can grow they can build the Empire but they've got operators in place for the various teams and stuff doing the doing yeah and one of the things he was saying um was sort of splitting up people into three archetypes there's the archetype of the artist who believe in the work for the sake of the craft yeah there's the archetype of the manager/ Leer there's the person who loves to build systems then there's the archetype of the entrepreneur who loves the thought of building something from scratch and taking risks and making making all that happen and I very much resonated with the artist thing where my answer to if I if I won the lottery I'm like great all I'm going to do is learn cool stuff and make videos about it because that's my iy guy but it sounds like for you if you want the lottery you had like the lottery times five it sounds like you're more the entrepreneur that you enjoy the idea of like building companies and taking the risk and growing them yeah and I I'm I'm I'm an entrepreneur but I I can resonate with what you said about the Artist as well because if you look at the diio live show where we spent 700,000 and we made £700,000 so we broke even um it took several months of my life there was no Financial reward on offer but I love music same reason I've I've started DJ a year ago two years ago now um and I love the creative element of creating something that makes people feel something so if You observe what I do on a daily If You observe the conversation me and will who produces the Vlog had last night I mean we were sat where you're sat right so we were sat there and what I'm talking to will about I think a lot is like the creativity the story arc the art how I was talking to him about de at home or like the 16-year-old in Zimbabwe who clicks on the video and the experience and the way we want her to feel and that's like one of the things that I do in all my companies is I'm I'm like when you see our trailers for the podcast or whatever I'm heavily in ant is the genius right ant is a genius give him the credit um but I see every single one and I and we obsess over every single one if you came to my live show it's like I mean how do I describe it 40 person choir on stage with a huge band and visuals and the new show we've got sound effects and we I've spent the time on like the lighting effects to immerse you so you think you're going through the seasons of life so the room gets cold then it gets hot and then um and the projections across the wall and the violinist and the orchestra for this show that we've got and the choir and I've picked every song and and and how it all comes together to tell a story that makes you feel something so deep in your chest that you want to cry or you want stand up and you know almost you know that's the stuff I love that's the stuff I love and it links to my love of psychology somehow um I'm not good at like drawing or painting so when I thought of artists I thought of like drawing or painting or these Geniuses you see like Fred again who's like and is like a musical genius I'm not that but I love things I love knowing how the things we create impact humans at a profound and deeper level if that's creativity if that's what artists do then I can resonate with that um when I look at Elon I see like an engineer entrepreneur when I look at myself I see someone that like loves music and and the way that you can change a story arc to make someone feel something um and to move them in a way so my team know it like titles thumbnails uh trailer stuff story arc of the episodes any video any of my companies have ever made for any announcement ever um I do the story board I do you know and he's laughing will is laughing at my team CU I'm like obsessed with it yeah so whether I'm good at it or not is another question but I love it you know whether I'm good at it is I don't know but because art is such a subjective thing but I love that stuff and I actually I actually never related to being a creative I never thought I was creative ever but it's from and I don't even know if I quite call myself of creative yet yeah I don't rbe with the word creative either i' I've always thought of myself as optically creative I think I just take ideas from sources and connect them and apply my own synthesis to it which some people say is creativity but it doesn't like to me creativity feels like drawing an art which I've always been bad at if I wasn't an entrepreneur the next most obvious thing for me to be is like a movie director that's like or it would be a therapist now there is actually I I actually did spend many hours looking for a course I could do on a psychology degree that I could do that would allow me to become a therapist like six months ago oh not like not like not like when I was younger I mean like I'm like looking now for these like out of un where you don't have to go to the university you could do it at home because I'm so fascinated by people and why they do what they do as you can probably tell if you listen to the dire of CEO that I thought you know what it would be good to have some kind of qualification in that so if I wasn't a therapist and if I wasn't an entrepreneur then I would be a movie director because I loved how you can tell a story that Mak someone feel something how you create that story arc and surprise and yeah interesting um final couple of things I wanted to ask you about uh one is that you know something that I struggle with is that I'd love to get your take on is when there's lots of stuff going on um and it can sometimes like like balancing that with for example the relationship with my girlfriend seeing my friends seeing my family those things that are not in the work category but the work category can just take over because of all the trips and all the cool stuff going on and all the this person's in town it's grabbed dinner with them oh no that's date night like do you find how how do you manage that balance between the work stuff which is obviously continues to explode for you at a ridiculous level with like real life like friends family relationship how are you doing with it struggling uh I am I think I I was struggling I've I've created rules Like Mondays and Thursdays is just always date night and that's non-negotiable even if like I I've I've I've had to say even if Elon Musk is in town and wants to go on a podcast and my girlfriend can't do like anything other than Thursday night I'd be like cool prioriti Rel to my face myself anyway you are lying to my face if Elon was in town I want to come on my podcast I'd be like babe yeah baby it's got you can come and watch we can do we can eat while I do it like so thing I've been trying to figure out like what are the rules because I find having rules in place makes it easy to say yes or no to things yeah but again it's a it's a constant B it's okay to say it's a constant battle and you struggle with it I I I feel the same way I really struggle with it and I'm trying to make sure I've got a different decision framework for different goals in my life in some areas of my life you think about productivity as we would Define it you know within Society so you think about productivity and then you can measure it by certain okrs or metrics or whatever and then I've learned over time to apply different measurement framework to my relationship with my girlfriend which is no framework at all no no measurement at all and um and just going back to the like poker chip analogy the whole idea of you get these 16 chips if You' spent eight sleeping you don't want to you need to place them intentionally against your values and the things that matter to you so we both agree that our girlfriend and our relationships really matter to us so focus on the allocation that you're giving to the thing that matters to you and make sure it's in balance with the allocation of the other things that matter to you and when I say balance that doesn't mean it's equal but it means that you achieve Harmony so balance work life balance is a load of nonsense right it's a load of like it's really unhelpful because it it implies like imposter syndrome is a really unhelpful frame it implies that you're trying to balance the scales like 50 50 grams on each side you're not you're trying to find Harmony which is where you feel good in this context you feel good about your life you know you don't feel like you're sacrificing anything that's integral to your contentment and happiness that's what I'm trying to do I don't have balance at all I'm not trying to find balance I'm trying to make sure I'm in harmony with my relationship and that is an ongoing dialogue and that's ongoing check-ins to make sure that Harmony is there um but it's a struggle and it comes in Seasons this what a lot of people have taught me is that you don't have work life balance you have seasons of life and in this season of life you might be over indexing or over prioritizing this goal more but then when you become a dad Ali as I'm sure we will both become in the next you know 5 10 years if we want to um you're going to go into a different season of life and then it's going to shift a little bit and that's okay you know that's okay and I would also I think it's important because there'll be some people that are listening to this that are like happy workaholic fine good because the key word there in the North Star is the happy word so if you're a happy workoholic and you genuinely know you're happy you're not being dragged by an insecurity that you're you're you're quenching through this obsession with work if you're a happy peaceful content fulfilled workaholic all power to you you're killing the game if you're an unhappy workoholic there's a problem and you're out of Harmony um so also have empathy for yourself if you're a happy where garlic because the world will try and de demonize you oh my god Ally you're so toxic but [ __ ] him listen to the signal inside of you like am I happy and I think I'm a happy workaholic and I've created a harmony with my girlfriend where our relationship is good and I and I can be intense and the way I want to be in in my work um most of the time right now I mean I've overextended as I said but most of the time as me and we zoom out on you know the four years we've been together we're good nice does that help at all it does yeah it's helpful I think that's sort of how I think about it as well um sort of almost like you know balancing on a tight rope it's it's less about being rigid but it's actually about like swaying one way and another way and then rebalancing when you notice you're yeah you have a bad week huh you have a bad week and you'll know you've had a bad in terms of like you just [ __ ] H I've paid no attention to each other we feel disconnected you can you'll feel the frustrations lingering in the relationships something will happen in the bedroom like in the bedroom or the kitchen and it'll become so much of a bigger issue but it's actually because last week you were really disconnected that check-in process is so key yeah are you a good communicator with her um I think we are have definitely gotten better at that over time um we have like check relationship check-ins and stuff which are good systems cuz I like systems as to she which is nice uh and you know where we ask questions like how's the relationship been for you this week what's what are three things uh that you appreciate about me this week how' you do that oh we have we have an ocean page with a template this is out of control it's been going on for the last two years got the toggle it's actually really good and she was the one who put it together rather than me cuz you know I was it's so good yeah and it's like you know what's what's one thing I did that made you feel loved appreciated or respected and then so the first half of the review questions are like you know the nice stuff and then it goes on to you know what's one area in which you know you felt I did something that made you feel a little bit bad even if it's really minor you know let's just talk about it and in those check-ins the stuff that would otherwise feel too minor to bring up day-to-day because it's like oh it's minor it's like not bring that up it's like those little things there a good chance to bring those little things up and to discuss them in the in the light of day and usually we find that like having having a couple of days distance from it like when the thing if if the thing is very big we'll discuss it when it happens but if it's not you know we'll discuss it in a relationship review over dinner at like a nice place like I'm really curious here yeah who adds to the notion document and when so uh we so we it's a shared notion workspace where we're both on it and when we know it's a review date so Monday so like every other Monday is we try and do that's the review time in reality it ends up being like once every 3 weeks or so um so one of us will take the iPad or the laptop or the phone worst case scenario and then if it's a laptop or an iPad I'll type because I type faster if it's a phone we'll just sort of pass it around and take turns because phones annoying but we find so we we've got like the notes stretching back the last two years cuz we've been together for 2 years now and it's it's it's really nice looking back and we sort of like note down any sort of major disagreement we have we call it a gate like you know there was I don't know France gate and like tenie gate and you know stuff like that where it's like oh it's interesting to look back on these big arguments that we had and like the Le the takeaways from them to make the relationship better so interesting and then is there a conclusion to each question so if you say you know you said this to me in the Kitchen last week and it really irked me because it triggered me in this way do you then write a conclusion next to it or anything uh we write action points action points yeah it's like in future this is the thing like there was one time we went on holiday together I thought it was going to be a working holiday because I was like hey I've got I've got my book deadline this is a work holiday she was like cool you know that makes sense turns out my definition of work holiday is I work 14 hours a day and we we grab dinner together her definition of a work holiday is we work for 4 hours in the morning and then we go go sightseeing we realized that like 5 days into the holiday and so our action point from after the conversation and that was okay before every holiday we're just going to align on expectations I was I was talking to Mark Manson a a few weeks ago in LA and he was like cuz he traveled around the world with his fiance and he was like oh man the main thing is just expectation alignment bro that's that's what Moog out at the thing that episode that I did with the first one with moad taught me so clearly and profoundly he said we're happy when our expectations of how our life is supposed to be going are met and from that you can juuce we're unhappy when our expectations of how our life is supposed to be going are unmet so met expectations equals the billionaire in Mayfair getting a medium rare steak when that was what she or he ordered unmet expectations would be he ordered or she ordered medium rare and it came I don't know bloody like it doesn't matter the fact that you're in a a super bougie Mayfair restaurant getting a you know Kobe beef A5 wagu steak unmet expectations you get unhappiness and you go to Botswana where I was born hot ball AR expectations met for some of the people back in that in the village that I was was born in um the objective situation matters less than the subjective meeting of expectations unmet expectations in work in your team members in your relationship in yourself will will result in unhappiness and that's so important to understand because then you can influence it you can work on as it relates to yourself This is why gratitude is so powerful gratitude is for me it's like an adjustment of one's expectations um I I have this really fond memory of getting I'm not sure if I've Shar this on the podcast before or somewhere else of this fun memory of I didn't get on a plane and fly other than flying from Africa to the UK until I was like 21 so we didn't do holidays in our family the money wasn't there and I remember getting on that plane when I was 21 years old with my business part at the time flying to Thailand and economy and just being captivated by this concept of being in this tinan and we were going to attempt to fly to Thailand and I'm looking at the like safety manual I'm like it's amazing it's so such an incredible experience I was so happy on that flight fast forward fight fast forward 5 years I'm flying 50 weeks a year in 2019 F flying business in first class and all I'm doing is rushing on the plane throwing my bag up and pulling my laptop out as fast as I can before it takes off so I don't lose Wi-Fi and then that day I encountered the lady next to me on the plane he's probably on like a honeymoon or something she's like putting on the slippers and she's going Dam Dave Dave look at this catalog and they give you champagne and she's picking up and she's sipping it and she's old me and she's experiencing the joy that I used to experience when my expectations were exceeded and nothing has changed in my life other than my expectations have increased yeah and with that out the door has gone my joy so what I can do now and what I do now is when I get on the plane just before I step in I touch the top of the plane and I take a moment before I step on and just remind myself of the absurdity that I I'm I'm getting in this plane we're going to fly it somewhere and I get to sit in this comfy chair that reclines and when they bring over the sh that's so incredible you can influence your joy if you manage your expectations and you know as it relates to relationship the curse of the source of all unhappiness and relationship is unmet expectations that's one you could do that something about that yeah we need to compare more notes on this relationship thing there I'll send you my uh my review template yeah um final thing is how so to what extent do you get criticism and how do you cope with it all the time you're a very public figure I think like with especially with the Dragon's Den stuff you kind of became more mainstream than like a personal Improvement business podcast would normally get you it's an occupational hazard my friend said to me bigger the podcast gets I look over at Rogan and what he's been yeah and I go wow uh it's yeah it's a lot like what Rogan's been through I just could imagine what anyone going through but it's an occupational hazard and with the claps comes the booze and and all that stuff and I think the important thing is doing everything you can to stay true to yourself because then in the context of any feedback whether it's positive or negative you're anchored to something that Mak sense you're anchored to your own like your own certainty in your intentions and your values and why you do what you do so even when we put out an episode with Mo G out on the podcast about artificial intelligence yeah and I get I got like significant criticism for that because um can be seen as scare mongering oh so a lot of people thought it was scare mongering or clickbait or whatever else um I believe in the message I believe in what we said what we did and I know it's coming from a good place so when we receive that that critical feedback um I can I can receive it um knowing that we acted in line with um our own personal Integrity if that makes sense so that is the pursuit is like making sure why you're doing what you're doing is is true to yourself because then it's easier to um proceed forward regardless of feedback so what do you tell yourself like like if you see something on Twitter or something like do you do you feel this thing initially and do you tell yourself a story or like how how does that go it depends it depends it depends what the feedback is so when Dragon's Den airs um you'll get like a lot of people saying a lot of things and I think at the start I would I was more tuned into it I was more tuned into like reading the tweets as time has gone on I've realized that I need to put systems and processes in place that you as you'd call it to make sure that stuff doesn't infiltrate my pieace which me for me means don't read stuff don't search stuff friends don't send me stuff haven't searched my name in any search engine or any way you can search yourself in about a year now um and trying to focus on the feedback that you know is whether it's critical or positive the feedback you know is potentially valuable um as much as you can yeah and I this practice is more increasingly important as like you reach more people yeah knowing where to look for feedback and knowing where not to look for feedback I guess so but does it sting I mean like of course like I'll I I could open up a comment section on like my own Instagram and someone says something um and you your your initial instinct is to argue with the thing to try and like argue with the thing or to understand or to maybe win them over But as time has gone on the distance between experiencing seeing the thing and it my exper my response and emotion to it has reduced um which means that I can see something and go that's not true like I saw an article that said I was said um Steve is going to release a line of boxer shorts with his name on it and I remember like someone had sent it to me people don't send me stuff because they know just not to send me stuff like cuz we're just trying to keep focused here thinking I'm going to releas a line of box of shorts with my name on it and they're like yeah you registered the trademark for the Diary of a CEO and one of the categories in which my team had registered it was like clothing so the like the newspaper ran with a story that I was coming out with a a underwear line like a box like a boxer short underwear line with my name on it and you read that and then you like understand that that's gone out into the world and people believe that now that coming out with boxy shorts with my name on them um and that it will influence people but you also reflect and go there's nothing I can do about that and that is okay it is it comes with the territory and the choice I have here is to completely remove myself from the universe and go to Barley and like where I love love to go um or to carry on doing what I love to do and the choice I make is I want to carry on doing what I love to do brilliant stepen I think that's a great place to end this just wanted to say firstly thank you for being gracious and being interviewed on the Pod sitting in that seat and I think also like you know your work is just so inspirational to me to my team to basically everyone I know we sort of share the podcast episodes around when the Vlog started we were all sort of like watching that together because it's so inspiring seeing what you're building and the huge impact that you're able to have but I think on top of that like there was there was one comment when you know you and I were both speaking in charer in the UAE a few months ago a year ago something like that and you came and joined me and Gordon my videographer for breakfast and he was saying afterwards that wow what a Class Act Steven is because you were talking to him as much as you were talking to me and normally with like celebrities and stuff they they they'll ignore like the team members you know like Gordon's been in in a bunch in a bunch of situations where the videographer is kind of invisible and just the fact that you're so gracious with everyone around you I'm feeling emotional saying this is weird it's just so impressive it's it's so admirable and yeah just wanted to say thank you you're so sweet I I mean I don't know what to say um but but yeah I mean thank you so much for saying that I um yeah thank you for saying that I'm trying my best you know I'm trying my best to to be a good person and I I'm not I'm not always great at that like I'm not I sometimes let myself down I think about ways I reacted or days where I'm I'm tired and I I I didn't show up in the way I want to but I'm trying my best because it really matters to me what you just said trying my best to leave more people with that feeling that you you know your videographer was left with so thank you for that CU I do give myself a hard time about it sometimes you know like where I am in my life now it's like it's like I realize that everyone I meet I'm meeting everyone they know do you understand what I'm saying man so the girl that stopped me this morning as I was going into the office to tell me about quitting her job like that um it really matters that I'm patient with her in that moment and that I listen to her and make her feel you know as best as I possibly can and it and honestly it feels like it does feel like a responsibility and it's a responsibility I want to meet but I I know I'm like I'm human so I sometimes I'll fall short it's a new responsibility you know go back 10 years and and no one would have cared if I I'd done that either way and they also would never have told anybody if I did that so it's a new responsibility it's one I want to meet and it's one that I know is important um and it's a Fant honestly it's such a privilege that people care like such a privilege that someone would care to stop you and say something nice or to they would care that you join them or they'd want you to join their breakfast in the same way that we were saying like it's a privilege that you asked me to be on like to give you a quote for your book or whatever I hope I never lose that nice thank you I appre appreciate you so much what you do is incredible and the way you conduct yourself is a with the the grace you conduct yourself is a bar that I would like to meet so um thank you for having me on it's an honor that you wouldd have me on and yeah your team a reflection of how wonderful you are so as is usually the case so thank you and thank you for reading the books because good books you know no but thank you for that and you're one of those people that because I've not had much feedback on the book yet I'd love to know like that's why I asked you the question like what do you like about them which one you prefer I'd love to know more of that off camera so I'll send you my annotations oh please you have to take this one all right good stuff thank you so much thank you bro all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye