Mel Robbins on Happiness and Decision-Making

one of my friends said to me back then they said you're either going to be a millionaire in jail I was that desperate to leave a situation that you know isn't right for you I think that is the hardest decision on the planet for most people it all comes back to what is the most important goal for all of us and I would argue that the most important goal that we can all aim at is our own happiness you have been at War internally with what the world was telling you how you should feel and knowing deeply that that's not how you feel about yourself I thought I was different in a good way and the system told me I wasn't realizing at 10 years old that the narrative that my school had given me that the only way to become rich successful and happy was through getting a on these exams was when I sold that first pack of cigarettes on the playground and someone handed me5 I could not unsee it hey it's your friend Mel and it is such an honor to be able to spend some time with you and I wanted to start by acknowledging you you're thinking what are you acknowledging me for I'm going to tell you what I'm acknowledging you for for your commitment to making your life better I mean I know that's why you chose to listen or to watch this today so welcome to the Mel Robins podcast family and thank you for being one of those people that is a Force for good on this planet and for making the Mel Robbins podcast one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world I'm Mel Robbins I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on confidence and motivation and I'm on a mission to inspireing Empower you with the tools and the expert resources that you need and that you deserve so that you can create a better life and today Oo we have an awesome expert and I'm really excited about this person because this is somebody I really admire in business you often write in and you're like Mel you know who is it that you look up to and you're about to meet somebody that I really look up to in business and you and I also talk a lot about the importance of having people in your life that are doing things that you want to be able to do and studying them and following them and learning from them and somebody that I look to all the time when it comes to business and podcast in particular is a guy by the name of Stephen Bartlett now that name may be familiar he's a wildly successful entrepreneur I'm going to get into that in a minute but he is really well known on a global basis for hosting a podcast called The Diary of a CEO it is hands down the number one ranked podcast across Europe it's climbing the charts here in the United States it dominates globally and I study this guy I've learned so much from him and today you're going to learn from him we are going to talk about the Art and Science of decision-making and I'm going to get into Steph's credentials in just a minute because they are crazy impressive but let's just pause and let's consider the importance of the Art and Science of decision-making and why this matters to you well stop and think about your life your life is the sum of your decisions and if you want to create a better life then you're going to have to make better decisions I mean if you just keep doing what you do now 10 years is going to go by and nothing's going to have changed and there is so much power in your decision- making in fact research has proven that you and I we make about 35,000 decisions a day let me just put that in context that's like taking a soccer stadium and putting a decision in every single seat and that's what you do every day and here's the thing about decisions decisions are kind of like dominoes they tend to trigger the next one right that's why you're sitting on the couch and you only intended to check one thing and next thing you know Boop that one decision led to three hours of Doom scrolling we're not going to be doing that I'll tell you why because there are tools that you can learn and use from some of the world's best thinkers and most successful people on the planet to help you make better decisions and you're going to learn some of those tools today like the 51% rule that really is going to help you if you struggle with perfectionism self-doubt and overthinking you're also going to learn about the two different types of decisions the speed of decisions and something that my friend Steven Bartlett lives by he calls it the first principles so let me tell you a little bit about my friend Steven Bartlett first of all this guy's only 31 years old and one of his companies was valued at $600 million he's also a Serial entrepreneur who advises and sits on the boards of so many Global Brands and he's going to tell you today and teach you the direct connection between the decisions that you make and improving every aspect of your life your health your relationships your business the other thing that I love about Stephen is that his story is so wildly compelling so we're going to begin the conversation with his story Steven grew up so poor that he was stealing food a fact he was hiding from his schoolmates he dropped out a college to start his first company and he has so much to teach you not only based on his own life and business EXP experience and success but also based on the wisdom that he has gained from interviewing hundreds of the world's most Innovative influential and successful Minds in business Sports Science all of it and one of the reasons why I admire Stephen so much is because you know how you can tell from afar when somebody is literally in a class of one meaning that they are the very best at what they do well that's Stephen because it's very clear to me that he's doing things his way and here is what I want you to take away from today's conversation you need to learn how to do things your way see you have your own unique story to tell and your own genius to share and in order to unlock your full potential you have to learn how to make better decisions decisions that align with what you want personally decisions that align with your creative and business ins instincts and decisions that help you become more of yourself wouldn't that be awesome you better believe it's going to be awesome so let's jump into the conversation I recently had with Steven burlett and because you're watching here on YouTube thank you thank you thank you for spending time thank you for being here with me please take a minute to subscribe Stephen asks his Watchers to subscribe this is I learned from him please subscribe I want 50% of the people that watch this channel to be subscribers because it helps me get people like Steven to you for free all right you ready good let's jump into that conversation that I recently had with none other than the amazing Steven Bartlett so first of all um I know you don't do a lot of interviews and I'm thrilled because selfishly you are somebody who I really admire and if there's a pace car in personal development you're it oh wow and so this interview is a huge gift for everybody listening because I am just curious about how you think and how you make decisions and what to use your word drives or drags you I personally think anybody listening at any age could take what you're about to teach us MH from your own experience and apply it to the beliefs that are holding them back and so I want to oh gosh show you this is a a photo of me in preschool when I was God it must have been three years old yeah three years old feels like a different person it's so strange looking at looking at my former self it feels like such a different person is it a different person that you're looking at uh he look so naive and so happy and I feel much more weathered well you are like like I've yeah I've walked the length of the earth whereas he just seems like he doesn't care about anything and I'm jealous of that well he did care yeah he did very SM one of the things I find Most Fascinating about you is that you experienced a lot of very challenging and painful things in your childhood and yet somehow all of the challenges that you faced as a kid have fueled success in some way and I'm so curious to understand how that happened someone once said to me there's two things no one wants to be in life um not enough and different and I think at some level I felt both of those things so that was certainly a belief that I had um I also was firmly believing in the social narrative that you know we're not moldable um our destiny is kind of pre prescribed for us and that started to pull apart all of that BS that most of us are conditioned with I mean we all grew up in the same like relatively the same system of Education in the same society and it programs us I think to limit us and one of them my great passions in life now is I firmly deeply believe that people are uh operating at 1% of their potential in all facets of their life and I'm like desperate to tell them that I'm desperate to show them that I can't tell them but I can encourage them to take that first step into a situation where they'll be exposed to counter interacting evidence that is my mission is to push people off the cliff so that they can figure out that they can actually fly you know in a world where Society has made them disbelieve in their own wings per se since so many of the folks listening are not going to know your story they know the accolades but they don't know your story I would love for you to just talk a little bit about how this all started I moved to the UK from Botswana when I was a baby um and we moved to an area called Plymouth in the southwest of England which is an all- white area it's a relatively middle class to lower middle class area with some areas of of poverty um you understand the value of everything in life by the context in which you see it and the context in which I saw myself was we were the poor black family in an allwhite area there must have been 1500 kids in my school and we were pretty much from what I recall the only black kids in the school so um sort of confounding that was my mother is Nigerian and she came to the UK can't read can't write I think she left school when she was 5 years old or six years old in Africa starts working on a stall um moves to the UK because she meets this you know this white man in in Nigeria and she undergos a ton of like racial abuse in the area and by the age of about 10 our life completely flipped because my mother had a what I can only describe as an addiction to gambling the lottery whatever if I any drawer in our house when I was growing up every single drawer was full of lottery tickets she would steal my maths book when I walked in the door and she would stay up till 3:00 a.m. in the morning going through it looking for numbers to then play in the lottery so I would lose my textbooks to my mother because she was trying to find some secret code within these books although my father has a good job and we live in this nice area all the money goes so we we basically get get to the point of bankruptcy and that's when things I think start to change cuz she spends all of her time in her Corner shop trying to make money trying to start businesses people are breaking into the corner shop at night to abuse her and steal her stuff so she decides just to sleep in there on this bag of rice in the back room and at 10 years old being the youngest of four kids I think my parents just assume that they've parented all the kids as kids as parents sometimes do the youngest is kind of like you know he's 25 24 23 10 like they're done and by the age of 10 if I woke up there was no one there and if when I went to bed there was no one there and so you have these two forces in my life you have a huge amount of Independence which comes from my parents absence and then you have this huge amount of Shame and insecurity because I'm the only black poor kid that I know I'm chemically relaxing my hair to try and be a white person I'm stealing stuff to try and buy the shoes that my friends have I'm going to Great Lengths to try and fit in to the detriment of a lot of things in my life no none of my friends know where I live because I lie about where I live none of my friends know I don't have birthday presents or Christmases because we just lie about that um and there's this subtle sense of shame in me and that shame drives me so I so desperately needed to find ways I could fit in that I can control and one of them was have it trying to find ways to have nice things with money and I remember very early on like at six seven years old going around my school looking for money which meant waiting for my teachers to leave the classroom at 3:00 hanging around and then going through every single drawer in a classroom and that was I was desperate and then I'd take that money and if it meant going down to the Sweet Shop so I could pretend I had the same sweets as the other kids I would do that and it was a desperation one of my friends said to me back then they said you're either going to be a millionaire in jail and that for me I remember where I was stood when he said that to me at 7 years old because I was that desperate which means if I need money and if I think money equals fitting in and belonging then I'm going to sell everything in the house I'm going to start businesses at 12 I'm gonna sell the cigarettes my mom K bought back from Nigeria in those black bags in the in the spare room I'm going to do whatever I can and from those experiments you end up building a ton of evidence about yourself I just had a different perspective on the world and by 16 I realized realiz that grades weren't going to get me where I needed desperately to go and when you realize that the system is telling you success and happiness is a result of getting an A on that exam that you can't get an A on you have to find another path and for me the other path was if I can persuade all of my peers in this school now to buy a ticket to this thing that I just came up with or to come to come to this website I just launched or buy coffees from this machine that I just put on campus these are going to be the adults with me so when we're all adults I'll just do more of that that was my reasoning and then with that I felt safe not to come to this school anymore so I stopped coming my attendants hit 30% they expelled me I take the expulsion form to my head teacher he says quote and I've been back to the school multiple times he's been on national TV to confirm this in the UK he said you're my little Harry Potter I keep you under the stairs because you've made this school a lot of money so he unexpended me and then in the last week of school they expelled me again because I just wasn't coming by then I had so much evidence that I didn't need this system well here's the part that I just find mesmerizing and that is that there are so many stories of people who have an experience of I don't belong this isn't working I'm not good at this anyway nobody cares and instead of going I'm gonna uh just do whatever I can to climb on top of this situation in order to control it that's what you did but so many other people in that moment light up the blunt or they start drinking or they don't go to school ever again and just start down the path of I must be a loser my parents aren't here and you didn't do that it doesn't sound like it's hard to take credit for something that's always come so naturally to you and what comes naturally to you questioning if what I've been told is the truth it's like the the one of the prevailing principles of my entire life my professional life everything is it's so natural to me to assume that things I'm being told aren't actually the truth and that the systems the um Society we live in the institutions the narratives that surround all of the above are true I just don't I just naturally don't accept that and that means that you do you go the extra distance to find out what is true about the existing systems I.E is me getting de on these exams does that mean I'm going to be lonely poor failure I didn't accept that to be true and so I did piece of work which was the experimentation in my own life to find out if those systems were and it turns out when you push on most doors like there's really nothing behind there most of I think most of our experience is a bunch of social um myths bunch of doors that we just haven't tried pushing on yet and I I at a very young age started pushing on those doors and when you start pushing on all of them and you realize that there's nothing behind them they lead to Nowhere um I think it develops into a habit where you start questioning things a bit more you start questioning like social norms about you have to do this at this age and you have to go to university and you have to pursue a care you and quitting is for losers and all of these narratives turns out most of them are BS and it is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping life's greatest rewards isn't his story fascinating and I want to just jump in and make sure you were really paying attention at that very last part because this is critical Stephen has always naturally questioned if what he was being told by the adults is the truth I mean just stop and think about that can you imagine if you did that in your own life right now I mean I'm talking about questioning all the things that you've been told that are true whether it's big or that it's small in your everyday life I mean just imagine for a second if you ask yourself is it really true that I'm too old to go back to school is it really true that I can't eat healthier is it really true true that I'm never going to find love again and here's what you're going to find as you start to question the truth right and what you tell yourself is that you can see that the truth could be of your own making like as you start to question it and you say to yourself wait a minute is it true that I'm not a morning a person or that I don't have enough time in the morning all of a sudden you're going to say well wait a minute why can't I get out the door every morning and take a walk why can't I get up 30 minutes earlier and start the day in a much more empowering way and that's just one tiny example and this notion of questioning what you believe to be true that is just your very first takeaway there is so much more in store for you but we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors and then we're going to pick right back up where we left off and Stephen is going to explain that once you start questioning is this even true next he's going to teach you how he started to figure out the truth for himself and why you need to do the same thing and a little later we will be jumping into those tools like the two different types of decisions the 51% Rule and the speed of decision making so stay with us welcome back I'm Mel Robbins I'm so glad you decided to keep listening because today you and I are talking about the Art and Science of decisionmaking and how you need to learn how to make better decisions and and you're getting a master class in this from somebody I deeply admire and that's Steven Bartlett now we were just in the middle of the conversation where Stephen was sharing about his childhood and how it just came naturally to him to start to question what all the adults were telling him so let's drop right back into the conversation with Stephen you start questioning like social norms about marriage and about you have to do this at this age and you have to go to university and you have to pursue a care you and quitting is for losers and all of these narratives turns out most most of them a BS and it is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping Life's greatest rewards and this has just developed in me over the years where now I believe that the answers I'm looking for in my life probably won't come from books systems teachers and schools because the world is changing at such a terrifying rate they will come from tuning in to how I feel in certain situations after trying some stuff if I had to synthesize the difference between how you coped with that situation MH and how so many of us cope which is to tune out or to numb out or to just create a narrative in our mind well that this is it I guess I'm just a loser I guess my parents hate each other and they hate me and nobody's going to be there for me you develop this really unique skill and this is what I really want to explore which is there was something in your need to survive that situation nobody's home older siblings not doing well in school the only black kid in your neighborhood lying about this that and the other thing you develop this unbelievable skill at a very young age to tune into how you felt in the moment and to actually trust it MH MH yeah that's not yeah I always thought I was and I don't know how to say this because people think it's a bit I know arrogant what I always I always thought I wasn't the things that the system said I was I thought I had loads of talent and potential I thought I was different in a good way and the system told me I wasn't when you put a kid in exclusion unit and you make him copy from a piece of paper and over and over again for hours and you make him look at a wall and you give him this report card where you grade him every day because you think he's naughty um I just thought I I thought the system was wrong and I thought I was right and I I became very good at tuning into that voice it's one of the things that I think is the most liberating thing for anyone who's looking for answers to do is instead of searching for answers in books and on podcasts and all of these things take a second and just ask yourself how do I feel this is a lot of what you talk about as well is your body will tell you long before your brain will and I heard you say this on my podcast which is ex exactly the way I always view it is we are all born with this internal signal called um call intuition um I just call it how you feel and as we grow up we're almost brainwashed by Society to tune out of that voice which is there and to tune into this external voice which is how you should feel and this how you should feel voice is you make a million pounds you have a nice car you should feel like this so we tune into that and we let that voice guide us but it just guides us to Nowhere good it guides us to midlife crises it guides us to health breakdowns when our body starts to rebel against the the decisions we've made I've developed through trial and error the belief that how I feel should also correlate to how I act and in the short term there's a shedding there's a mom stops caught speaking to you for two years there's a you lose a friendship group there's you might end up in the exclusion unit in school but if you can persist if you have the belief that that internal voice is actually guiding you to somewhere you should be where your health and happiness is then you will create a life at a very in a very short amount of time that's very closely resembles the one you've always dreamed of if you're very bad at tuning into that voice you you you'll you'll live with this sense of hopelessness and stuckness if you spent too long tuning into the external voice which comes from your parents from school from Instagram from University can I point something out about you that's really interesting you have known this since you were little I just had this insight about you that you have been at War internally with what the world was telling you how you should feel mhm and knowing deeply that that's not how you feel about yourself that is that is the story of my both my childhood and my life which it's just that belief that most of the obstacles that we stand in front of us are self-imposed there's this incredible video I I love watching whenever I need to watch it as a reminder of these self-imposed limitations I don't know if you've seen it they take a an ant and they put it on a piece of paper and they draw the circle around it have you seen that video oh and it just it they draw a circle and it just literally walks in circles it stays inside the circle right so they they draw the circle around it and it stays inside the circle and they've drawn it with a pen and objectively you look at it and go that ant isn't trapped it just believes it is because they've drawn this sort of limitation this figment of its imagination this circle around it they do the same thing with the spider in this other video and as they're making the circle smaller and smaller and smaller the spider accidentally steps over the the pen line and then they try and trap it again with the pen and for the rest of that spider's life it can never be trapped by the pen again so they chase it down the table drawing circles around it and it is free and it's the same thing I'm describing it's once you see behind the curtain and you realize that most of our limitations yours and mine are both these figments of our imagination that we've accepted to be be real and true and to stand in our way and that they're false there's very little that can take you back to that place but how does it happen well you have to step over the line when I hear you talk I'm like push my ass off that Cliff let's go tell tell me where the circle is Stephen because I want the light bulb moment that you have that is part of the belief system that you have cultivated and that you over and over and over and over and over again demonstrate with how you show up in life and so let's take a couple scenarios MH let's take an example in real life yesterday in the airport woman walks up to me and says Mel could you do a show on finding purpose in your 20s and I said sure what do you do for a living she said I'm a banker and I said well what do you like doing I love being with kids I'd love to be a teacher and obviously it's very easy to say to somebody that you've just met well duh then stop being a banker and go be a teacher I do feel that the reason why somebody wouldn't quit banking is they're afraid of what other people would think and here we go so what they've done there is they put the most important goal that any of us can have in the world below someone else's opinion and that's and that in there is the problem it all comes back to what is the most important goal for all of us and I would ask argue that the most important goal that we can all aim at is our own happiness and happiness is such a strange word so I'm using intentionally Ambiguously you can Define it for yourself but I think that should be the North Star and when that is the North Star anything that stands to compromise your chance of happiness is the greatest risk of all so you are by way of that decision a huge risk taker you are the biggest risk because you're staying in banking and it's a huge risk go and speak to people that have zero days left and You' got exactly wrong because the biggest risk is staying in banking yes when the greatest the biggest risk is not what people might say when you leave banking the biggest risk is doing another decade in banking and looking back with the retrospective Clarity that you had your priorities all wrong you cared about Sally and Jenny's opinion in the WhatsApp group not your own happiness and you had One Life to Live you know that breaks my heart and that's what I observe in the world I was I observe people um overstaying their welcome for decades and situations and risking the most important thing which paliative nurses like Brony wear talk about when they interview people on their last day of their life they just wish the number one regret of the dying is they wish they'd lived that they'd gone and been that entrepreneur they' taken those ballet classes in Peru they desperately wish they could have one more day to do it I'm not going to risk laying there with those regrets you can if you if you want to gamble that much with your life I'm not going to do it and I'm so attuned to the fact that I'm going to die someday and when you really understand that that's why there's a sandtimer on the shelf behind you there's sand timers all over my house it's the reminder that by the way buddy um your time is ticking away you can't see how much you have left and that gives you the required urgency to take on big challenges to quit quickly to leave situations that are compromising um your health and happiness and to go in pursuit of yourself and when people ask myself me you're 30 years old you started all these businesses you've done all this stuff I go yeah yeah yeah is I'm not going to risk my happiness you have this I'd say more than almost anybody I've ever met and I don't know you very well but I just watch what you're doing from this side of the pond and I've listened to enough of your interviews and read your books that it is very clear that your superpower is in making decisions that you know are right for you and this is and trusting yourself in that trusting yourself in the decision that you're making and trusting yourself in your ability to face whatever comes next there's two things that came to mind when you said that I was reading about Jeff Bezos who built Amazon um you know second most Valu highly valued company in the world I think it's worth $2 trillion dollar or something and in one of his shareholder letters he says there's two types of decisions in life you have type one decisions and type two decisions type one decisions are are the doors you can't walk back through take your time on those ones right like me you know resigning from my company but most decisions in life are actually type two decisions which are doors you can walk back through if you were wrong um most of the things that we end up mulling and ruminating over and worrying about a type two decisions he says make those decisions as fast as you possibly can um that's how you could get get to where you want to go faster in life and in business and I also thought of Barack Obama who I spoke with on stage many many years ago at this event in um sa Paulo Brazil and he was recounting the time he was faced with the decision to fly to Pakistan with those two haachi helicopters with about you know 50% certainty that Osama Bin Laden was waiting in that compound he was risking two Apache helicopters of American lives and he says on the big decisions in life like getting Osama Bin Laden you have to get to 51% certainty or as close as you can to 51 50% certainty and make the decision with the peace of mind that you made that decision in that moment with all of the available evidence and you have to let it go because we all know in life that the 100% certainty on these big decisions that everyone's seeking only exists in hindsight I want to take a highlighter and repeat that line that in life 100% certainty on big decisions it only exists in hindsight and you've had that experience haven't you where you look back and you say oh God I wish I would have or if I had only known but here's what Stephen's trying to get you and me to understand the information that you have now you didn't have back then if you had it back then you would have made a different decision but we're not talking today about making different decisions we're talking about how you make better decisions and here's what you have to understand you will never have 100% certainty and you cannot wait for it and this is what I'm going to now refer to to as the 51% Rule and you have to know about this because if you're somebody who is constantly overthinking or worrying or doubting yourself when it comes to making decisions in your life that's the formula you can only be 100% certain years after you make the decision but you will never be 100% certain before you make the decision that's why you have to use the 51% rule look for 51% certainty in the moment that's the goal because 51% certainty will stop you from overthinking and doubting yourself and I want to remind you something this is such an important Point overthinking is a decision doubting yourself is a decision not making a decision is a decision and think about how much time has gone by how often you doubt and overthink and you let perfect cism rob you of the ability to make a decision and just do something you've wanted to do that you didn't go on that trip you didn't say yes to that day you didn't start writing you didn't start the YouTube channel you've been thinking about it for me I've talked a lot about it in our conversations for years I didn't start this podcast that was a decision why because I was waiting for 100% certainty the 51% rule will help you get started so grab on that tool start using it and you better stick around because we're just getting started in terms of tips and tools and the Art and Science and when we come back Stephen has another story this one is about a father and a son who run a business together and the story will help illustrate the next tool that you're going to learn which is the speed of a decision so stay with us I'll be waiting for you after a short break welcome back I'm Mel Robbins thank you for deciding to stick around and listen to this conversation between me and Steven Bartlett today you and I are both learning about the Art and Science of decision- making how to make better decisions for you in your life from none other than Steven Bartlett and you've already learned two really important tools the first one is that there's two types of decisions type one and type two type one as Stephen describes them are decisions that are irreversible okay the second type of decision is a type two decision this is something that you can decide to change later and as you heard me say loud and clear almost every decision is a type two decision because almost every decision is reversible and yet you get so paralized because you think everything is fixed in stone as my daughter likes to say Mom it's not that deep okay your decisions not that deep now let's remind you of the second tool that you and I learned the 51% rule you're never going to be 100% sure and as soon as you're 51% sure it's a yes or 51% sure it's a no make the decision now we're ready with that quick recap to drop back into this conversation and Steven is at the part where he's going to explain something about the speed of a decision and I love the story he about to tell you because it's not only going to help you make a lot more money it's going to help you stop wasting so much time thinking things through you know I spent 10 years working in marketing and there's this one particular company which you'll know that is run by the father and the other part of the company is run by the son and the son's business started a little bit later but they're both in the same industry I'd go to the Father's Office every week and I'd present him new ideas and he'd spend six months nine months waiting for relle to get back from annual leave to sign it off and arguing about the details Etc I'd bring the same idea to the Sun that same day literally they live on the the offices are on the same street he would interrupt me halfway through he'd go and tell his assistant go and get Nikki he'd call the marketing team in tell me to repeat it he'd look at both of us without a contract his marketing team and me and say do this now and what he intuitively knew is what a lot of the successful people I interview know is that the biggest cost in life isn't a failed experiment being wrong about a decision it is the nine months the 10 years the 15 years you waste deciding whether to make the decision because that was a type two decision where if we were wrong okay 20K but the next day we're closer to conducting another experiment to find the right answer and I sat there for 5 years watching the son's business just gradually creep up on his fathers take over the fathers and I was in both boardrooms thinking it's just because he makes decisions at a much faster rate and his risk equation is reversed Daddy thinks the risk is being wrong in a decision son thinks the risk is not making a decision and his business grew sold the company the sun he now lives in Monaco in Dubai and he's got more hundreds of millions than anyone would ever know that's still there running the business and so that sense of urgency to throw open those type two doors is so deeply ingrained in me same way we run these businesses it's all about experimentation let me give you a personal example of a decision a type two decision that I think people think is a type one yeah one of the best things that you could do if you are in a relationship that sucks or is sucking the life force out of you is to break up yeah or if you're married to say out loud I want a divorce I'm miserable and the reason why that is a type two decision that people mistake for a type one is because simply saying this isn't working causes a change in the relationship for the better or for the or not or not or not but the only way that relationship is actually changing is if you make a decision to say the way that it is isn't working MH and so I personally feel like part of the the framework of of the type one and type two decision is insanely helpful and the issue for most of us is that we mistake those type two decisions 100% for something else and she can go back and be a banker of course that's true she can go back and be a banker she's she's door steing Mel Robbins in an airport and I I'm telling you now as a banker she's got a couple of dollars you know probably but she will probably become the dad in that example and ruminate over that decision for three years she might go and find try working with kids yesterday and find out it sucks yep and that's what the sun knew the sun would conduct the experiments right or wrong he was closer to the correct answer the problem is people never make the decision to get the feedback failure is feedback feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power they they never get the knowledge because they never want to fail so they live sort of in trapped and imprisoned in their current misery because they they've got the risk equation the wrong way around and they don't realize that urgency is part of the answer to the person that is in that conundrum I'm a banker I think I want to be over here how do you find out or do you have another Matrix for your that you use to figure out what you actually want in a moment where you're just engulfed with uncertainty my my natural reaction was to was to go back to the way I've built and run all my businesses which is ex scientific method which is the experimentation and I think that's the only way we find out in life but no one wants to do it if I had a seven-year-old kid and they said Dad I want to sell pen Lids I fantastic we we're going to that weekend we're going to go to the pen liid Museum and find out because failure is the feedback that you're searching for it isn't doorstepping Mel Robbins in an airport and on life matters of purpose and meaning Mel Robins in an airport can't tell you what your purpose and meaning is and whether it's kids or banking so failure is feedback feedback is the knowledge you're looking for and knowledge is power so therefore failure is the power you're looking for currently you feel disempowered and the only way that you're going to feel empowered and feel the power that you're seeking is to fail at the thing you're doing which is banking fail fail or fail at teaching fail failing at trying something new we can find the right answer in a world that is so nuanced and Ever Changing not by reading a book or doorstepping Melon in an airport but by running the experiment like a type two decision as fast as we can the world is only going to change faster and faster and faster than ever before which means the correct answer took these life questions how to structure a marriage how to work from home or office how to build a business all these things the correct answer is going to change so quickly that the you're not going to get it anywhere else other than conducting an experiment in your life which means taking that first step and all my whole thesis for why any of the companies I run will be be successful is because we outfil the competition any of my businesses I can tell you how many experiments my head of experimentation and failure conducted this week can tell you how many you know and I take this the same approach for my life which is in my romantic relationship how does that work in relationships I tell you so convention says for example that two people in a relationship I don't know have to sleep in the same bed at night but if you reason from first principles first principles basically like something that you know to be true about now and your situation which is if you reject all conventions nonsense and think that's other people's solutions for other people's times other people's situations so put simply a first principle of um mine and my girlfriend's relationship is that we have different chronotypes a chronotype basically dictates the time when you are activated you're creative what time you wake up in the morning when you get hungry does that mean like a night person versus a morning person yeah okay yeah and then that has implications for how you sleep so my girlfriend is a whale chronotype which basically means she goes to bed at like 9:00 p.m. she gets up at 600 uh that's you I'm an owl which means that I go to bed at 1: or 2 a.m. and I get up at about 8 or9 kind of just let it run as you know I don't set an alarm that's one first principle we have different chronotypes first principle number two is that so many relationships end according to ma Matthew Walker who's the Sleep expert about I think he said 10 to 20% of relationships can be linked back to sleep issues couples not sleeping problem properly which causes arguments all kinds of issues wow in their relationships he says 10 to 20% so we know that we need to get sleep maybe a third point is when you understand sleep cycles as I know you do the restorative sleep happens about 60 minutes into the cycle when you go into stage four which is REM sleep um so but also most of the REM sleep and those sleep cycles get shorter late at night so if I go to bed at 2: a.m. it's by 600 7 a.m. that my sleep cycles are really really short they go down from like 90 minutes to like 45 minutes all of my restorative sleep is happening between the most of it is happening between the hours of 6 and 9 so in that example if my girlfriend wakes up at 6 she can destroy 50% of my restorative sleep which is then going to put me in a terrible mood the next day so in days where she has to get out of bed early for whatever reason we have a spare room convention goes he doesn't love you right but first principles and thinking for yourself in a world that's always changing and you're conducting experiments to find the answer goes you're both going to be happier when you wake up giving your relationship more chance it's a same thing with me quitting University it's the same thing with all the stories I've told about quitting rejection of convention and I'm going to find out by conducting an experiment myself and in my partner I've got a good experimentation partner who understands that the goal here isn't satisfying external expectation as we said it goes back to how do we feel so yeah amazing so we have a sp I sleep in a different bed when I need it sounds like it's a great thing a great Rel it's a great thing because we don't have insec the insecurity comes from external narrative it comes from well if he's sleeping in that room over there then he doesn't love you of course I [ __ ] love you where did you get that nonsense from Instagram and it's the same thing with our lives you know where did you get that nonsense about you wanted to be a banker from your parents your parents or your friends yeah well some teacher in school said that would make you happy and Rich you didn't run the experiment yourself so you never got the feedback you didn't get the knowledge and now you're disempowered so wow that's how I build all my businesses it's how I run everything in my life is just the assumption that I probably don't know the right answer and Convention probably doesn't either but if I actually sit down with a blank piece of paper paper and I go first principles yeah which are the things that I care about the things that I know and what I actually want then I can make a decision for me you can reason up from that I want to go back to the Ant and the spider in the circle M how would you advise someone who's listening to this and they're like but I don't trust myself but I have a string of examples of how I've blown it evidence you have a string of evidence about how you've blown it yes so how do you how do you what would be like the just the next right step for somebody who's like I'm in I want to go off the cliff I want to erase the circle I want to sell the pack of cigarettes I really want a breakthrough yeah in testing what I believe about myself is there a is there a a way that anybody could kind of set up something like this yeah so I think the going off the cliff analogy is so terrifying that it's inaccessible and this is part of the reason why I think people don't act in line with the person they want to be because they see it as climbing Mount Everest they they they can see AEL Robbins at the top of the mountain but they can also see the 15 years of walking they're going to have to do to get to where they want to go and as near said on my podcast we are creatures that are discomfort avoiding we avoid discomfort you know I always wondered why I procrastinate in some things in my life um and he made a very compelling case to me when he came on my show near iel that it's because there's some discomfort I'm avoiding so the book I have to write I get to chapter 11 it's about something I'm not that familiar with I end up picking up my phone and doing the dishes I'm avoiding the psychological discomfort associated with the task become aware of the psychological discomfort and then break it down into little Pebbles so it doesn't feel like Mount Everest and for me that's how I've taken on some of my biggest challenges in life um it has to start with an action that sometimes feels count contrary to how you feel something you said as well right you can't rely on emotion to get you there but it's the the smallest step you can take to counteract your existing evidence about yourself 14 years old from me that was walking out on stage in front of my peers pissing my pants and running out of the room after delivering a talk I then went back onto the stage a couple of days later I ran out of the room and the piece of paper I was given my hands were shaking so much that I couldn't read it so I just made up the words y blurted out the words ran out got it okay um that the reason why I can then speak in Sal Paulo with Obama in a big arena of tens of thousands of people is because I put myself in situations whether small or big to CCT my existing evidence and something a friend once said to me recently was the reason we don't do that the reason we don't take that small step forward is sometimes the small step is so unbelievably embarrassing that we don't think it'll be consequential we're so ashamed by how small that step has to be for some people that's literally getting out of the bed and going to the toilet and there's so much a shame associated with that it feels so minute and inconsequential that we don't think it matters but it's everything that first step is everything it's the pack of cigarettes I think I can maybe even make this more Tactical for the person L thing so if you think about what Stephen's teaching you and you let's go to the example of the banker right who thinks she wants to be a teacher and I can imagine her on a standing on a piece of paper with a circle around her yeah and the first step is not quitting the banking job the first step which literally takes her out of that Circle and across the line can I guess what you're gonna say go for it is it using your evenings and weekends it could be that it could be Googling teaching certificate it could be using your evenings and weekends like it's literally one move out of the circle I always think this with people when they say to me they want to start a business and then they say to me six months later they want to start a business and then six months later I go I think part of the reason you're not doing it is because you see that the challenge as like Mount Everest and that's causing you so much psychological discomfort that you're channeling that energy into procrastination talking and deferring it what you need to do today is start the Instagram page this for me is one of my big hacks in life is the minute I go on Instagram click create new account and I just write the name the train has left the station and it's that that for me is is starting the business um but people don't see that as they think they have to launch this website and hire these people oh hold on I want to make sure everybody just got that so Stephen has launched and sold multiple businesses and invests in them and sits on boards and you are constantly leaning into new ideas and curious about things and what he just told you is that the way that he gets out of the ideation stage and the I should start a business stage or maybe I'm going to get into uh this collaborative workspace uh business until Community isn't that what it's called until Community um is he goes to Instagram and creates an Instagram account with the business name of the business he hasn't even started yet before the business plan before the other stuff this is what he's talking about if you look at my I've never WR a business plan in my life I don't know where that where people got get this business plan stuff from I've never written one in my life and I don't intend to start now if you look at my phone which is in the room behind you you'll see a bunch of Instagram Pages for businesses that I'm yet to launch because I just want to secure the Instagram page and I also see that as step one of setting an intention which is the easiest step one can make towards the direction I want to travel um so to the banker listening you opening your mouth and telling Mel Robbins that was your step one I just I just want and then step two is the next next thing this is how you started in social media MH so when you were 21 right weren't you 21 years old and so would you please tell give that example of how you just got started of you made yourself a promise 700 p.m. 8:00 p.m. what po what posting yes ah okay you see what I mean like this is an example of that yeah I mean so on the personal brand side of things and the content creation and the storytelling side of things I created an obligation with myself where at 700 p.m. every single day I would write a 140 character quote or make a video based on what had happened to me that day and it's of all the things I've done in my life it is the single highest yielding most valuable habit or discipline I ever instilled because um not only is that the thing that cured the trauma I had around relationships with my parents because at 700 p.m. every day I had to look down on how I'd behave that day the notes I'd taken the avoidant behavior I demonstrated in my relationships I had to summarize it and then I had to teach it um but also it uh improved my communication and my writing skills this's this guy called Richard Fryman who's this American psychologist who came up with this technique and they call it the Fryman technique they say it's the ultimate way to learn and to develop the idea is you learn something you then condense it down to the understanding of a 10-year-old as if you had to teach it to a 10-year-old you then deliver it to the world teach it to the 10-year-old and then based on the 10-y old's reaction you then go to the top and the whole principle here is your ability to summarize a concept correlates to your ability to actually understand it I was doing that I've done that for six seven years now that meant that all of my experience you know people say that I people use the word wise or they use these words that like they describe me as being older it's purely because I feel like I've got more wisdom out of every day that I've lived because of this introspection um it's the single greatest hack that any I could give to any young person or old person in the world is this habit of introspection and teaching in some regard so it walk us through how to do it what I would do if you want to do it the Steve bartett way that I did yes I do is I again I'm gonna say something here create a Instagram page or a Twitter account whatever you want to do don't need followers don't need to tell anybody exists and as you go through your day keep notes in your phone so you have an argument with your friend you respond negatively to a situation someone cuts you off in traffic you feel something what when you have these feelings write them down in the notes of your phone and at 700 p.m. every single night 600 7 p.m. every single night all I want you to do is to fit that experience into the confines of a 280 character tweet or post and I want you to post it and I can't tell you that cycle of having an experience summarizing it down to its to its Essence which is the true definition of understanding and then posting out and sharing it with the world and step forward is not so important which is getting some feedback on what you said drives you forward more I think in key areas of your life helps you understand your cycles and does the hardest thing which I think any of us can achieve which is heightens your self-awareness which has been this really elusive thing on the podcast that I've asked people over and over again how does one increase their self-awareness and I think I think this is the easiest way to do it in a reliable way I remember that day it sounds like a lot of work oh it's the it's the easiest thing it's it's and I think it's remarkably enjoyable I would not be in a relationship now at 31 years old and I've been in the relationship for 4 years super happy going to propose any minute now did she know that we to hold this I don't care she I've been she I say it a lot so yeah okay if I hadn't done that because there was this cycle going on that I I was a total puppet to and I didn't know the puppet master was my childhood trauma and I was just doing it every day i' would be interested in someone I'd pursue them they'd show interest in me I'd run off I didn't understand the cycle and then one day in the notes of my phone I wrote connecting to dots which is much easier to do when you're looking down on a piece of paper I wrote kind of feels like referring to the feeling in my chest that I got when this girl said she wanted to be in a relationship with me how I felt when I watched my father sat there and my mom shouting at him the minute the girl said she wanted to be in relationship with me I felt like a bird trapped in a cage and the only bird the first bird trapped in a cage I ever knew was my father and I go oh okay I learned love I learned the model of love from watching those two go at War and it's ingrained in me now and I'm just you know what I want you to do I want you to stop saying that what that you learned the model of Love yeah because you didn't you learned the model of misery yeah that's true yeah because they're yeah they're certainly not happy are they together they are which is crazy they're like they're like um co-inhabiting now I I believe because they've got no other friends and they're at a certain age they've just made the decision to cohabit which is you know not something I'd wish for myself but and what's your relationship ship like with them with my dad it's it's never been affectionate but it's good with my mom it's complicated it's very complicated how so um I still think she's got some issues with money which is difficult when your child now has a lot of it why she ask you for money yeah and I will buy she still have a gambling problem I'll buy anything I I still think her her sweet tooth is starting businesses that aren't going to succeed so I will buy them my deal with my parents is I'll buy you anything you need for your house holidays Health whatever food I pay for their food every week you name it Dentistry bills whatever but I will not pay to start a business for my mom because I watched for 25 years I start 25 businesses and I watched the impact it had on the entire family so I'll pay for everything else but I won't start a business unfortunately my mom only wants one thing she doesn't want the Christmas presents she doesn't want me to pay for anything else she wants me to pay for her to start businesses well if she's smart like you she'll just sell the [ __ ] that you buy her and use the money to find she tried that a few times and I clucked on to it so but but it's um it's an interesting subject because sometimes in life there has there's someone usually family or a friend where you have to say I love you but I also love myself and I my number one responsibility is protecting myself and now as this 31 year year old adult that's about to start a family of my own I now have the choice whether I let the cycle repeat itself and letting the cycle repeat itself would be doing the easier thing which is just sending this individual money so I said to my brothers and i' it's a rule I have for myself is I have to have a boundary even against my mom and especially honestly especially and as a mother I personally feel that it is really important that kids have boundaries with their parents it's the thing people struggle with in terms of interpersonal relationships the most which is that's my blood that is my mother or my father um it causes a huge amount of internal conflict and it goes back to that old plane analogy where you've got to put the oxygen mask on yourself be before you put it on the child or anyone else and that's that's what I do in my relationship with my mother I have a boundary and I've I've had that bound I think cruel not to have boundaries because yes because otherwise what happens is people continue to behave in ways that bother you yeah and you don't let them know yeah or you don't express a boundary but then you sit and judge and are angry at them and and so I think it's more compassionate and kinder to actually tell people how you feel and what you need and where their needs and your ability to support them begin and end I I completely agree and I think in doing so I'm inadvertently giving my mother an opportunity to learn a lesson that I think she's not been able to learn because for 30 years my father has propped up a situation to his detriment losing all of his money smashed up house verge of bankruptcy which she hasn't learned and so and neither has he by the way I've got so many examples in my life my best friend was he was 32 years old I was 25 I was living in a mansion He was staying in my spare room one day I say to him I say bro I love you and he talks about this I say you L ago and he at 32 years old my best friend on Earth had to go back to his childhood bedroom in Grimsby and it was painful it was sad and four years later he's a millionaire living in Dubai and I've got another friend who I one of my best friends who listens to this podcast all the time who was at my company and he was slacking and I fired him and I sat in the room cried with him as I fired him the guy is a CEO now he has incred successful company he's had more money than he ever has painful getting fired by your best friend painful getting kicked out the spare room it was honestly in hindsight the greatest gift I ever ever gave either of them and what I was robbing them of by propping them up was honestly unfair and so they had lessons they needed to learn and I tell you they learned them you know what's interesting about this is that we call it um that we're being kind to people and that we're taking care of them when actually you are helping somebody so that you don't have to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of telling them no yeah and when we do that we rob people of the possibility of who they could become 100% they're they're unrecognizable it baffles me unrecognizable and they thank me I apologize because I'm like I shouldn't have let you stay in the spare room for two years you know wow so wow um I feel like I have a master class in a million things from you you're very kind well what I love about listening to your podcast and uh just getting to spend time with you is I really love how you have the courage and The Bravery to challenge what is so in order to build a life and build businesses and make decisions that really Empower you like it's so obvious and yet I think none of us really take the time to stop and go wait a minute there are so many things that we do in life that we just blindly do without stopping to ask the question and I just want to thank you because there were so many things that made me stop and not only think but more importantly start asking myself different questions thank you you're a huge uh inspiration to me for so many reasons and I continue to learn from you and from a distance but it's a it's a great service that you're delivering for the world so thank you thank you oh I never know what to do when somebody thanks me when I'm interviewing them and so I guess what I'm going to do is thank you thank you for being here with me on YouTube I really love spending this time with you and I love the fact that you made a decision to watch something that can help you change your life and there's no doubt that if you apply the tools that you just learned and you learn how to make better decisions for you you will in fact change your life and one more thing I want to ask you please subscribe to this channel share this episode Stephen always ask his audience I learn this from him I'm making a decision to ask you for the support that I need because it helps me bring you amazing worldclass experts like Stephen at zero cost you got it good all right you ready for the next one I know you are you're going to love this next video do this every morning how to feel more energized focused and in control

one of my friends said to me back then they said you're either going to be a millionaire in jail I was that desperate to leave a situation that you know isn't right for you I think that is the hardest decision on the planet for most people it all comes back to what is the most important goal for all of us and I would argue that the most important goal that we can all aim at is our own happiness you have been at War internally with what the world was telling you how you should feel and knowing deeply that that's not how you feel about yourself I thought I was different in a good way and the system told me I wasn't realizing at 10 years old that the narrative that my school had given me that the only way to become rich successful and happy was through getting a on these exams was when I sold that first pack of cigarettes on the playground and someone handed me5 I could not unsee it hey it's your friend Mel and it is such an honor to be able to spend some time with you and I wanted to start by acknowledging you you're thinking what are you acknowledging me for I'm going to tell you what I'm acknowledging you for for your commitment to making your life better I mean I know that's why you chose to listen or to watch this today so welcome to the Mel Robins podcast family and thank you for being one of those people that is a Force for good on this planet and for making the Mel Robbins podcast one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world I'm Mel Robbins I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on confidence and motivation and I'm on a mission to inspireing Empower you with the tools and the expert resources that you need and that you deserve so that you can create a better life and today Oo we have an awesome expert and I'm really excited about this person because this is somebody I really admire in business you often write in and you're like Mel you know who is it that you look up to and you're about to meet somebody that I really look up to in business and you and I also talk a lot about the importance of having people in your life that are doing things that you want to be able to do and studying them and following them and learning from them and somebody that I look to all the time when it comes to business and podcast in particular is a guy by the name of Stephen Bartlett now that name may be familiar he's a wildly successful entrepreneur I'm going to get into that in a minute but he is really well known on a global basis for hosting a podcast called The Diary of a CEO it is hands down the number one ranked podcast across Europe it's climbing the charts here in the United States it dominates globally and I study this guy I've learned so much from him and today you're going to learn from him we are going to talk about the Art and Science of decision-making and I'm going to get into Steph's credentials in just a minute because they are crazy impressive but let's just pause and let's consider the importance of the Art and Science of decision-making and why this matters to you well stop and think about your life your life is the sum of your decisions and if you want to create a better life then you're going to have to make better decisions I mean if you just keep doing what you do now 10 years is going to go by and nothing's going to have changed and there is so much power in your decision- making in fact research has proven that you and I we make about 35,000 decisions a day let me just put that in context that's like taking a soccer stadium and putting a decision in every single seat and that's what you do every day and here's the thing about decisions decisions are kind of like dominoes they tend to trigger the next one right that's why you're sitting on the couch and you only intended to check one thing and next thing you know Boop that one decision led to three hours of Doom scrolling we're not going to be doing that I'll tell you why because there are tools that you can learn and use from some of the world's best thinkers and most successful people on the planet to help you make better decisions and you're going to learn some of those tools today like the 51% rule that really is going to help you if you struggle with perfectionism self-doubt and overthinking you're also going to learn about the two different types of decisions the speed of decisions and something that my friend Steven Bartlett lives by he calls it the first principles so let me tell you a little bit about my friend Steven Bartlett first of all this guy's only 31 years old and one of his companies was valued at $600 million he's also a Serial entrepreneur who advises and sits on the boards of so many Global Brands and he's going to tell you today and teach you the direct connection between the decisions that you make and improving every aspect of your life your health your relationships your business the other thing that I love about Stephen is that his story is so wildly compelling so we're going to begin the conversation with his story Steven grew up so poor that he was stealing food a fact he was hiding from his schoolmates he dropped out a college to start his first company and he has so much to teach you not only based on his own life and business EXP experience and success but also based on the wisdom that he has gained from interviewing hundreds of the world's most Innovative influential and successful Minds in business Sports Science all of it and one of the reasons why I admire Stephen so much is because you know how you can tell from afar when somebody is literally in a class of one meaning that they are the very best at what they do well that's Stephen because it's very clear to me that he's doing things his way and here is what I want you to take away from today's conversation you need to learn how to do things your way see you have your own unique story to tell and your own genius to share and in order to unlock your full potential you have to learn how to make better decisions decisions that align with what you want personally decisions that align with your creative and business ins instincts and decisions that help you become more of yourself wouldn't that be awesome you better believe it's going to be awesome so let's jump into the conversation I recently had with Steven burlett and because you're watching here on YouTube thank you thank you thank you for spending time thank you for being here with me please take a minute to subscribe Stephen asks his Watchers to subscribe this is I learned from him please subscribe I want 50% of the people that watch this channel to be subscribers because it helps me get people like Steven to you for free all right you ready good let's jump into that conversation that I recently had with none other than the amazing Steven Bartlett so first of all um I know you don't do a lot of interviews and I'm thrilled because selfishly you are somebody who I really admire and if there's a pace car in personal development you're it oh wow and so this interview is a huge gift for everybody listening because I am just curious about how you think and how you make decisions and what to use your word drives or drags you I personally think anybody listening at any age could take what you're about to teach us MH from your own experience and apply it to the beliefs that are holding them back and so I want to oh gosh show you this is a a photo of me in preschool when I was God it must have been three years old yeah three years old feels like a different person it's so strange looking at looking at my former self it feels like such a different person is it a different person that you're looking at uh he look so naive and so happy and I feel much more weathered well you are like like I've yeah I've walked the length of the earth whereas he just seems like he doesn't care about anything and I'm jealous of that well he did care yeah he did very SM one of the things I find Most Fascinating about you is that you experienced a lot of very challenging and painful things in your childhood and yet somehow all of the challenges that you faced as a kid have fueled success in some way and I'm so curious to understand how that happened someone once said to me there's two things no one wants to be in life um not enough and different and I think at some level I felt both of those things so that was certainly a belief that I had um I also was firmly believing in the social narrative that you know we're not moldable um our destiny is kind of pre prescribed for us and that started to pull apart all of that BS that most of us are conditioned with I mean we all grew up in the same like relatively the same system of Education in the same society and it programs us I think to limit us and one of them my great passions in life now is I firmly deeply believe that people are uh operating at 1% of their potential in all facets of their life and I'm like desperate to tell them that I'm desperate to show them that I can't tell them but I can encourage them to take that first step into a situation where they'll be exposed to counter interacting evidence that is my mission is to push people off the cliff so that they can figure out that they can actually fly you know in a world where Society has made them disbelieve in their own wings per se since so many of the folks listening are not going to know your story they know the accolades but they don't know your story I would love for you to just talk a little bit about how this all started I moved to the UK from Botswana when I was a baby um and we moved to an area called Plymouth in the southwest of England which is an all- white area it's a relatively middle class to lower middle class area with some areas of of poverty um you understand the value of everything in life by the context in which you see it and the context in which I saw myself was we were the poor black family in an allwhite area there must have been 1500 kids in my school and we were pretty much from what I recall the only black kids in the school so um sort of confounding that was my mother is Nigerian and she came to the UK can't read can't write I think she left school when she was 5 years old or six years old in Africa starts working on a stall um moves to the UK because she meets this you know this white man in in Nigeria and she undergos a ton of like racial abuse in the area and by the age of about 10 our life completely flipped because my mother had a what I can only describe as an addiction to gambling the lottery whatever if I any drawer in our house when I was growing up every single drawer was full of lottery tickets she would steal my maths book when I walked in the door and she would stay up till 3:00 a.m. in the morning going through it looking for numbers to then play in the lottery so I would lose my textbooks to my mother because she was trying to find some secret code within these books although my father has a good job and we live in this nice area all the money goes so we we basically get get to the point of bankruptcy and that's when things I think start to change cuz she spends all of her time in her Corner shop trying to make money trying to start businesses people are breaking into the corner shop at night to abuse her and steal her stuff so she decides just to sleep in there on this bag of rice in the back room and at 10 years old being the youngest of four kids I think my parents just assume that they've parented all the kids as kids as parents sometimes do the youngest is kind of like you know he's 25 24 23 10 like they're done and by the age of 10 if I woke up there was no one there and if when I went to bed there was no one there and so you have these two forces in my life you have a huge amount of Independence which comes from my parents absence and then you have this huge amount of Shame and insecurity because I'm the only black poor kid that I know I'm chemically relaxing my hair to try and be a white person I'm stealing stuff to try and buy the shoes that my friends have I'm going to Great Lengths to try and fit in to the detriment of a lot of things in my life no none of my friends know where I live because I lie about where I live none of my friends know I don't have birthday presents or Christmases because we just lie about that um and there's this subtle sense of shame in me and that shame drives me so I so desperately needed to find ways I could fit in that I can control and one of them was have it trying to find ways to have nice things with money and I remember very early on like at six seven years old going around my school looking for money which meant waiting for my teachers to leave the classroom at 3:00 hanging around and then going through every single drawer in a classroom and that was I was desperate and then I'd take that money and if it meant going down to the Sweet Shop so I could pretend I had the same sweets as the other kids I would do that and it was a desperation one of my friends said to me back then they said you're either going to be a millionaire in jail and that for me I remember where I was stood when he said that to me at 7 years old because I was that desperate which means if I need money and if I think money equals fitting in and belonging then I'm going to sell everything in the house I'm going to start businesses at 12 I'm gonna sell the cigarettes my mom K bought back from Nigeria in those black bags in the in the spare room I'm going to do whatever I can and from those experiments you end up building a ton of evidence about yourself I just had a different perspective on the world and by 16 I realized realiz that grades weren't going to get me where I needed desperately to go and when you realize that the system is telling you success and happiness is a result of getting an A on that exam that you can't get an A on you have to find another path and for me the other path was if I can persuade all of my peers in this school now to buy a ticket to this thing that I just came up with or to come to come to this website I just launched or buy coffees from this machine that I just put on campus these are going to be the adults with me so when we're all adults I'll just do more of that that was my reasoning and then with that I felt safe not to come to this school anymore so I stopped coming my attendants hit 30% they expelled me I take the expulsion form to my head teacher he says quote and I've been back to the school multiple times he's been on national TV to confirm this in the UK he said you're my little Harry Potter I keep you under the stairs because you've made this school a lot of money so he unexpended me and then in the last week of school they expelled me again because I just wasn't coming by then I had so much evidence that I didn't need this system well here's the part that I just find mesmerizing and that is that there are so many stories of people who have an experience of I don't belong this isn't working I'm not good at this anyway nobody cares and instead of going I'm gonna uh just do whatever I can to climb on top of this situation in order to control it that's what you did but so many other people in that moment light up the blunt or they start drinking or they don't go to school ever again and just start down the path of I must be a loser my parents aren't here and you didn't do that it doesn't sound like it's hard to take credit for something that's always come so naturally to you and what comes naturally to you questioning if what I've been told is the truth it's like the the one of the prevailing principles of my entire life my professional life everything is it's so natural to me to assume that things I'm being told aren't actually the truth and that the systems the um Society we live in the institutions the narratives that surround all of the above are true I just don't I just naturally don't accept that and that means that you do you go the extra distance to find out what is true about the existing systems I.E is me getting de on these exams does that mean I'm going to be lonely poor failure I didn't accept that to be true and so I did piece of work which was the experimentation in my own life to find out if those systems were and it turns out when you push on most doors like there's really nothing behind there most of I think most of our experience is a bunch of social um myths bunch of doors that we just haven't tried pushing on yet and I I at a very young age started pushing on those doors and when you start pushing on all of them and you realize that there's nothing behind them they lead to Nowhere um I think it develops into a habit where you start questioning things a bit more you start questioning like social norms about you have to do this at this age and you have to go to university and you have to pursue a care you and quitting is for losers and all of these narratives turns out most of them are BS and it is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping life's greatest rewards isn't his story fascinating and I want to just jump in and make sure you were really paying attention at that very last part because this is critical Stephen has always naturally questioned if what he was being told by the adults is the truth I mean just stop and think about that can you imagine if you did that in your own life right now I mean I'm talking about questioning all the things that you've been told that are true whether it's big or that it's small in your everyday life I mean just imagine for a second if you ask yourself is it really true that I'm too old to go back to school is it really true that I can't eat healthier is it really true true that I'm never going to find love again and here's what you're going to find as you start to question the truth right and what you tell yourself is that you can see that the truth could be of your own making like as you start to question it and you say to yourself wait a minute is it true that I'm not a morning a person or that I don't have enough time in the morning all of a sudden you're going to say well wait a minute why can't I get out the door every morning and take a walk why can't I get up 30 minutes earlier and start the day in a much more empowering way and that's just one tiny example and this notion of questioning what you believe to be true that is just your very first takeaway there is so much more in store for you but we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors and then we're going to pick right back up where we left off and Stephen is going to explain that once you start questioning is this even true next he's going to teach you how he started to figure out the truth for himself and why you need to do the same thing and a little later we will be jumping into those tools like the two different types of decisions the 51% Rule and the speed of decision making so stay with us welcome back I'm Mel Robbins I'm so glad you decided to keep listening because today you and I are talking about the Art and Science of decisionmaking and how you need to learn how to make better decisions and and you're getting a master class in this from somebody I deeply admire and that's Steven Bartlett now we were just in the middle of the conversation where Stephen was sharing about his childhood and how it just came naturally to him to start to question what all the adults were telling him so let's drop right back into the conversation with Stephen you start questioning like social norms about marriage and about you have to do this at this age and you have to go to university and you have to pursue a care you and quitting is for losers and all of these narratives turns out most most of them a BS and it is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping Life's greatest rewards and this has just developed in me over the years where now I believe that the answers I'm looking for in my life probably won't come from books systems teachers and schools because the world is changing at such a terrifying rate they will come from tuning in to how I feel in certain situations after trying some stuff if I had to synthesize the difference between how you coped with that situation MH and how so many of us cope which is to tune out or to numb out or to just create a narrative in our mind well that this is it I guess I'm just a loser I guess my parents hate each other and they hate me and nobody's going to be there for me you develop this really unique skill and this is what I really want to explore which is there was something in your need to survive that situation nobody's home older siblings not doing well in school the only black kid in your neighborhood lying about this that and the other thing you develop this unbelievable skill at a very young age to tune into how you felt in the moment and to actually trust it MH MH yeah that's not yeah I always thought I was and I don't know how to say this because people think it's a bit I know arrogant what I always I always thought I wasn't the things that the system said I was I thought I had loads of talent and potential I thought I was different in a good way and the system told me I wasn't when you put a kid in exclusion unit and you make him copy from a piece of paper and over and over again for hours and you make him look at a wall and you give him this report card where you grade him every day because you think he's naughty um I just thought I I thought the system was wrong and I thought I was right and I I became very good at tuning into that voice it's one of the things that I think is the most liberating thing for anyone who's looking for answers to do is instead of searching for answers in books and on podcasts and all of these things take a second and just ask yourself how do I feel this is a lot of what you talk about as well is your body will tell you long before your brain will and I heard you say this on my podcast which is ex exactly the way I always view it is we are all born with this internal signal called um call intuition um I just call it how you feel and as we grow up we're almost brainwashed by Society to tune out of that voice which is there and to tune into this external voice which is how you should feel and this how you should feel voice is you make a million pounds you have a nice car you should feel like this so we tune into that and we let that voice guide us but it just guides us to Nowhere good it guides us to midlife crises it guides us to health breakdowns when our body starts to rebel against the the decisions we've made I've developed through trial and error the belief that how I feel should also correlate to how I act and in the short term there's a shedding there's a mom stops caught speaking to you for two years there's a you lose a friendship group there's you might end up in the exclusion unit in school but if you can persist if you have the belief that that internal voice is actually guiding you to somewhere you should be where your health and happiness is then you will create a life at a very in a very short amount of time that's very closely resembles the one you've always dreamed of if you're very bad at tuning into that voice you you you'll you'll live with this sense of hopelessness and stuckness if you spent too long tuning into the external voice which comes from your parents from school from Instagram from University can I point something out about you that's really interesting you have known this since you were little I just had this insight about you that you have been at War internally with what the world was telling you how you should feel mhm and knowing deeply that that's not how you feel about yourself that is that is the story of my both my childhood and my life which it's just that belief that most of the obstacles that we stand in front of us are self-imposed there's this incredible video I I love watching whenever I need to watch it as a reminder of these self-imposed limitations I don't know if you've seen it they take a an ant and they put it on a piece of paper and they draw the circle around it have you seen that video oh and it just it they draw a circle and it just literally walks in circles it stays inside the circle right so they they draw the circle around it and it stays inside the circle and they've drawn it with a pen and objectively you look at it and go that ant isn't trapped it just believes it is because they've drawn this sort of limitation this figment of its imagination this circle around it they do the same thing with the spider in this other video and as they're making the circle smaller and smaller and smaller the spider accidentally steps over the the pen line and then they try and trap it again with the pen and for the rest of that spider's life it can never be trapped by the pen again so they chase it down the table drawing circles around it and it is free and it's the same thing I'm describing it's once you see behind the curtain and you realize that most of our limitations yours and mine are both these figments of our imagination that we've accepted to be be real and true and to stand in our way and that they're false there's very little that can take you back to that place but how does it happen well you have to step over the line when I hear you talk I'm like push my ass off that Cliff let's go tell tell me where the circle is Stephen because I want the light bulb moment that you have that is part of the belief system that you have cultivated and that you over and over and over and over and over again demonstrate with how you show up in life and so let's take a couple scenarios MH let's take an example in real life yesterday in the airport woman walks up to me and says Mel could you do a show on finding purpose in your 20s and I said sure what do you do for a living she said I'm a banker and I said well what do you like doing I love being with kids I'd love to be a teacher and obviously it's very easy to say to somebody that you've just met well duh then stop being a banker and go be a teacher I do feel that the reason why somebody wouldn't quit banking is they're afraid of what other people would think and here we go so what they've done there is they put the most important goal that any of us can have in the world below someone else's opinion and that's and that in there is the problem it all comes back to what is the most important goal for all of us and I would ask argue that the most important goal that we can all aim at is our own happiness and happiness is such a strange word so I'm using intentionally Ambiguously you can Define it for yourself but I think that should be the North Star and when that is the North Star anything that stands to compromise your chance of happiness is the greatest risk of all so you are by way of that decision a huge risk taker you are the biggest risk because you're staying in banking and it's a huge risk go and speak to people that have zero days left and You' got exactly wrong because the biggest risk is staying in banking yes when the greatest the biggest risk is not what people might say when you leave banking the biggest risk is doing another decade in banking and looking back with the retrospective Clarity that you had your priorities all wrong you cared about Sally and Jenny's opinion in the WhatsApp group not your own happiness and you had One Life to Live you know that breaks my heart and that's what I observe in the world I was I observe people um overstaying their welcome for decades and situations and risking the most important thing which paliative nurses like Brony wear talk about when they interview people on their last day of their life they just wish the number one regret of the dying is they wish they'd lived that they'd gone and been that entrepreneur they' taken those ballet classes in Peru they desperately wish they could have one more day to do it I'm not going to risk laying there with those regrets you can if you if you want to gamble that much with your life I'm not going to do it and I'm so attuned to the fact that I'm going to die someday and when you really understand that that's why there's a sandtimer on the shelf behind you there's sand timers all over my house it's the reminder that by the way buddy um your time is ticking away you can't see how much you have left and that gives you the required urgency to take on big challenges to quit quickly to leave situations that are compromising um your health and happiness and to go in pursuit of yourself and when people ask myself me you're 30 years old you started all these businesses you've done all this stuff I go yeah yeah yeah is I'm not going to risk my happiness you have this I'd say more than almost anybody I've ever met and I don't know you very well but I just watch what you're doing from this side of the pond and I've listened to enough of your interviews and read your books that it is very clear that your superpower is in making decisions that you know are right for you and this is and trusting yourself in that trusting yourself in the decision that you're making and trusting yourself in your ability to face whatever comes next there's two things that came to mind when you said that I was reading about Jeff Bezos who built Amazon um you know second most Valu highly valued company in the world I think it's worth $2 trillion dollar or something and in one of his shareholder letters he says there's two types of decisions in life you have type one decisions and type two decisions type one decisions are are the doors you can't walk back through take your time on those ones right like me you know resigning from my company but most decisions in life are actually type two decisions which are doors you can walk back through if you were wrong um most of the things that we end up mulling and ruminating over and worrying about a type two decisions he says make those decisions as fast as you possibly can um that's how you could get get to where you want to go faster in life and in business and I also thought of Barack Obama who I spoke with on stage many many years ago at this event in um sa Paulo Brazil and he was recounting the time he was faced with the decision to fly to Pakistan with those two haachi helicopters with about you know 50% certainty that Osama Bin Laden was waiting in that compound he was risking two Apache helicopters of American lives and he says on the big decisions in life like getting Osama Bin Laden you have to get to 51% certainty or as close as you can to 51 50% certainty and make the decision with the peace of mind that you made that decision in that moment with all of the available evidence and you have to let it go because we all know in life that the 100% certainty on these big decisions that everyone's seeking only exists in hindsight I want to take a highlighter and repeat that line that in life 100% certainty on big decisions it only exists in hindsight and you've had that experience haven't you where you look back and you say oh God I wish I would have or if I had only known but here's what Stephen's trying to get you and me to understand the information that you have now you didn't have back then if you had it back then you would have made a different decision but we're not talking today about making different decisions we're talking about how you make better decisions and here's what you have to understand you will never have 100% certainty and you cannot wait for it and this is what I'm going to now refer to to as the 51% Rule and you have to know about this because if you're somebody who is constantly overthinking or worrying or doubting yourself when it comes to making decisions in your life that's the formula you can only be 100% certain years after you make the decision but you will never be 100% certain before you make the decision that's why you have to use the 51% rule look for 51% certainty in the moment that's the goal because 51% certainty will stop you from overthinking and doubting yourself and I want to remind you something this is such an important Point overthinking is a decision doubting yourself is a decision not making a decision is a decision and think about how much time has gone by how often you doubt and overthink and you let perfect cism rob you of the ability to make a decision and just do something you've wanted to do that you didn't go on that trip you didn't say yes to that day you didn't start writing you didn't start the YouTube channel you've been thinking about it for me I've talked a lot about it in our conversations for years I didn't start this podcast that was a decision why because I was waiting for 100% certainty the 51% rule will help you get started so grab on that tool start using it and you better stick around because we're just getting started in terms of tips and tools and the Art and Science and when we come back Stephen has another story this one is about a father and a son who run a business together and the story will help illustrate the next tool that you're going to learn which is the speed of a decision so stay with us I'll be waiting for you after a short break welcome back I'm Mel Robbins thank you for deciding to stick around and listen to this conversation between me and Steven Bartlett today you and I are both learning about the Art and Science of decision- making how to make better decisions for you in your life from none other than Steven Bartlett and you've already learned two really important tools the first one is that there's two types of decisions type one and type two type one as Stephen describes them are decisions that are irreversible okay the second type of decision is a type two decision this is something that you can decide to change later and as you heard me say loud and clear almost every decision is a type two decision because almost every decision is reversible and yet you get so paralized because you think everything is fixed in stone as my daughter likes to say Mom it's not that deep okay your decisions not that deep now let's remind you of the second tool that you and I learned the 51% rule you're never going to be 100% sure and as soon as you're 51% sure it's a yes or 51% sure it's a no make the decision now we're ready with that quick recap to drop back into this conversation and Steven is at the part where he's going to explain something about the speed of a decision and I love the story he about to tell you because it's not only going to help you make a lot more money it's going to help you stop wasting so much time thinking things through you know I spent 10 years working in marketing and there's this one particular company which you'll know that is run by the father and the other part of the company is run by the son and the son's business started a little bit later but they're both in the same industry I'd go to the Father's Office every week and I'd present him new ideas and he'd spend six months nine months waiting for relle to get back from annual leave to sign it off and arguing about the details Etc I'd bring the same idea to the Sun that same day literally they live on the the offices are on the same street he would interrupt me halfway through he'd go and tell his assistant go and get Nikki he'd call the marketing team in tell me to repeat it he'd look at both of us without a contract his marketing team and me and say do this now and what he intuitively knew is what a lot of the successful people I interview know is that the biggest cost in life isn't a failed experiment being wrong about a decision it is the nine months the 10 years the 15 years you waste deciding whether to make the decision because that was a type two decision where if we were wrong okay 20K but the next day we're closer to conducting another experiment to find the right answer and I sat there for 5 years watching the son's business just gradually creep up on his fathers take over the fathers and I was in both boardrooms thinking it's just because he makes decisions at a much faster rate and his risk equation is reversed Daddy thinks the risk is being wrong in a decision son thinks the risk is not making a decision and his business grew sold the company the sun he now lives in Monaco in Dubai and he's got more hundreds of millions than anyone would ever know that's still there running the business and so that sense of urgency to throw open those type two doors is so deeply ingrained in me same way we run these businesses it's all about experimentation let me give you a personal example of a decision a type two decision that I think people think is a type one yeah one of the best things that you could do if you are in a relationship that sucks or is sucking the life force out of you is to break up yeah or if you're married to say out loud I want a divorce I'm miserable and the reason why that is a type two decision that people mistake for a type one is because simply saying this isn't working causes a change in the relationship for the better or for the or not or not or not but the only way that relationship is actually changing is if you make a decision to say the way that it is isn't working MH and so I personally feel like part of the the framework of of the type one and type two decision is insanely helpful and the issue for most of us is that we mistake those type two decisions 100% for something else and she can go back and be a banker of course that's true she can go back and be a banker she's she's door steing Mel Robbins in an airport and I I'm telling you now as a banker she's got a couple of dollars you know probably but she will probably become the dad in that example and ruminate over that decision for three years she might go and find try working with kids yesterday and find out it sucks yep and that's what the sun knew the sun would conduct the experiments right or wrong he was closer to the correct answer the problem is people never make the decision to get the feedback failure is feedback feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power they they never get the knowledge because they never want to fail so they live sort of in trapped and imprisoned in their current misery because they they've got the risk equation the wrong way around and they don't realize that urgency is part of the answer to the person that is in that conundrum I'm a banker I think I want to be over here how do you find out or do you have another Matrix for your that you use to figure out what you actually want in a moment where you're just engulfed with uncertainty my my natural reaction was to was to go back to the way I've built and run all my businesses which is ex scientific method which is the experimentation and I think that's the only way we find out in life but no one wants to do it if I had a seven-year-old kid and they said Dad I want to sell pen Lids I fantastic we we're going to that weekend we're going to go to the pen liid Museum and find out because failure is the feedback that you're searching for it isn't doorstepping Mel Robbins in an airport and on life matters of purpose and meaning Mel Robins in an airport can't tell you what your purpose and meaning is and whether it's kids or banking so failure is feedback feedback is the knowledge you're looking for and knowledge is power so therefore failure is the power you're looking for currently you feel disempowered and the only way that you're going to feel empowered and feel the power that you're seeking is to fail at the thing you're doing which is banking fail fail or fail at teaching fail failing at trying something new we can find the right answer in a world that is so nuanced and Ever Changing not by reading a book or doorstepping Melon in an airport but by running the experiment like a type two decision as fast as we can the world is only going to change faster and faster and faster than ever before which means the correct answer took these life questions how to structure a marriage how to work from home or office how to build a business all these things the correct answer is going to change so quickly that the you're not going to get it anywhere else other than conducting an experiment in your life which means taking that first step and all my whole thesis for why any of the companies I run will be be successful is because we outfil the competition any of my businesses I can tell you how many experiments my head of experimentation and failure conducted this week can tell you how many you know and I take this the same approach for my life which is in my romantic relationship how does that work in relationships I tell you so convention says for example that two people in a relationship I don't know have to sleep in the same bed at night but if you reason from first principles first principles basically like something that you know to be true about now and your situation which is if you reject all conventions nonsense and think that's other people's solutions for other people's times other people's situations so put simply a first principle of um mine and my girlfriend's relationship is that we have different chronotypes a chronotype basically dictates the time when you are activated you're creative what time you wake up in the morning when you get hungry does that mean like a night person versus a morning person yeah okay yeah and then that has implications for how you sleep so my girlfriend is a whale chronotype which basically means she goes to bed at like 9:00 p.m. she gets up at 600 uh that's you I'm an owl which means that I go to bed at 1: or 2 a.m. and I get up at about 8 or9 kind of just let it run as you know I don't set an alarm that's one first principle we have different chronotypes first principle number two is that so many relationships end according to ma Matthew Walker who's the Sleep expert about I think he said 10 to 20% of relationships can be linked back to sleep issues couples not sleeping problem properly which causes arguments all kinds of issues wow in their relationships he says 10 to 20% so we know that we need to get sleep maybe a third point is when you understand sleep cycles as I know you do the restorative sleep happens about 60 minutes into the cycle when you go into stage four which is REM sleep um so but also most of the REM sleep and those sleep cycles get shorter late at night so if I go to bed at 2: a.m. it's by 600 7 a.m. that my sleep cycles are really really short they go down from like 90 minutes to like 45 minutes all of my restorative sleep is happening between the most of it is happening between the hours of 6 and 9 so in that example if my girlfriend wakes up at 6 she can destroy 50% of my restorative sleep which is then going to put me in a terrible mood the next day so in days where she has to get out of bed early for whatever reason we have a spare room convention goes he doesn't love you right but first principles and thinking for yourself in a world that's always changing and you're conducting experiments to find the answer goes you're both going to be happier when you wake up giving your relationship more chance it's a same thing with me quitting University it's the same thing with all the stories I've told about quitting rejection of convention and I'm going to find out by conducting an experiment myself and in my partner I've got a good experimentation partner who understands that the goal here isn't satisfying external expectation as we said it goes back to how do we feel so yeah amazing so we have a sp I sleep in a different bed when I need it sounds like it's a great thing a great Rel it's a great thing because we don't have insec the insecurity comes from external narrative it comes from well if he's sleeping in that room over there then he doesn't love you of course I [ __ ] love you where did you get that nonsense from Instagram and it's the same thing with our lives you know where did you get that nonsense about you wanted to be a banker from your parents your parents or your friends yeah well some teacher in school said that would make you happy and Rich you didn't run the experiment yourself so you never got the feedback you didn't get the knowledge and now you're disempowered so wow that's how I build all my businesses it's how I run everything in my life is just the assumption that I probably don't know the right answer and Convention probably doesn't either but if I actually sit down with a blank piece of paper paper and I go first principles yeah which are the things that I care about the things that I know and what I actually want then I can make a decision for me you can reason up from that I want to go back to the Ant and the spider in the circle M how would you advise someone who's listening to this and they're like but I don't trust myself but I have a string of examples of how I've blown it evidence you have a string of evidence about how you've blown it yes so how do you how do you what would be like the just the next right step for somebody who's like I'm in I want to go off the cliff I want to erase the circle I want to sell the pack of cigarettes I really want a breakthrough yeah in testing what I believe about myself is there a is there a a way that anybody could kind of set up something like this yeah so I think the going off the cliff analogy is so terrifying that it's inaccessible and this is part of the reason why I think people don't act in line with the person they want to be because they see it as climbing Mount Everest they they they can see AEL Robbins at the top of the mountain but they can also see the 15 years of walking they're going to have to do to get to where they want to go and as near said on my podcast we are creatures that are discomfort avoiding we avoid discomfort you know I always wondered why I procrastinate in some things in my life um and he made a very compelling case to me when he came on my show near iel that it's because there's some discomfort I'm avoiding so the book I have to write I get to chapter 11 it's about something I'm not that familiar with I end up picking up my phone and doing the dishes I'm avoiding the psychological discomfort associated with the task become aware of the psychological discomfort and then break it down into little Pebbles so it doesn't feel like Mount Everest and for me that's how I've taken on some of my biggest challenges in life um it has to start with an action that sometimes feels count contrary to how you feel something you said as well right you can't rely on emotion to get you there but it's the the smallest step you can take to counteract your existing evidence about yourself 14 years old from me that was walking out on stage in front of my peers pissing my pants and running out of the room after delivering a talk I then went back onto the stage a couple of days later I ran out of the room and the piece of paper I was given my hands were shaking so much that I couldn't read it so I just made up the words y blurted out the words ran out got it okay um that the reason why I can then speak in Sal Paulo with Obama in a big arena of tens of thousands of people is because I put myself in situations whether small or big to CCT my existing evidence and something a friend once said to me recently was the reason we don't do that the reason we don't take that small step forward is sometimes the small step is so unbelievably embarrassing that we don't think it'll be consequential we're so ashamed by how small that step has to be for some people that's literally getting out of the bed and going to the toilet and there's so much a shame associated with that it feels so minute and inconsequential that we don't think it matters but it's everything that first step is everything it's the pack of cigarettes I think I can maybe even make this more Tactical for the person L thing so if you think about what Stephen's teaching you and you let's go to the example of the banker right who thinks she wants to be a teacher and I can imagine her on a standing on a piece of paper with a circle around her yeah and the first step is not quitting the banking job the first step which literally takes her out of that Circle and across the line can I guess what you're gonna say go for it is it using your evenings and weekends it could be that it could be Googling teaching certificate it could be using your evenings and weekends like it's literally one move out of the circle I always think this with people when they say to me they want to start a business and then they say to me six months later they want to start a business and then six months later I go I think part of the reason you're not doing it is because you see that the challenge as like Mount Everest and that's causing you so much psychological discomfort that you're channeling that energy into procrastination talking and deferring it what you need to do today is start the Instagram page this for me is one of my big hacks in life is the minute I go on Instagram click create new account and I just write the name the train has left the station and it's that that for me is is starting the business um but people don't see that as they think they have to launch this website and hire these people oh hold on I want to make sure everybody just got that so Stephen has launched and sold multiple businesses and invests in them and sits on boards and you are constantly leaning into new ideas and curious about things and what he just told you is that the way that he gets out of the ideation stage and the I should start a business stage or maybe I'm going to get into uh this collaborative workspace uh business until Community isn't that what it's called until Community um is he goes to Instagram and creates an Instagram account with the business name of the business he hasn't even started yet before the business plan before the other stuff this is what he's talking about if you look at my I've never WR a business plan in my life I don't know where that where people got get this business plan stuff from I've never written one in my life and I don't intend to start now if you look at my phone which is in the room behind you you'll see a bunch of Instagram Pages for businesses that I'm yet to launch because I just want to secure the Instagram page and I also see that as step one of setting an intention which is the easiest step one can make towards the direction I want to travel um so to the banker listening you opening your mouth and telling Mel Robbins that was your step one I just I just want and then step two is the next next thing this is how you started in social media MH so when you were 21 right weren't you 21 years old and so would you please tell give that example of how you just got started of you made yourself a promise 700 p.m. 8:00 p.m. what po what posting yes ah okay you see what I mean like this is an example of that yeah I mean so on the personal brand side of things and the content creation and the storytelling side of things I created an obligation with myself where at 700 p.m. every single day I would write a 140 character quote or make a video based on what had happened to me that day and it's of all the things I've done in my life it is the single highest yielding most valuable habit or discipline I ever instilled because um not only is that the thing that cured the trauma I had around relationships with my parents because at 700 p.m. every day I had to look down on how I'd behave that day the notes I'd taken the avoidant behavior I demonstrated in my relationships I had to summarize it and then I had to teach it um but also it uh improved my communication and my writing skills this's this guy called Richard Fryman who's this American psychologist who came up with this technique and they call it the Fryman technique they say it's the ultimate way to learn and to develop the idea is you learn something you then condense it down to the understanding of a 10-year-old as if you had to teach it to a 10-year-old you then deliver it to the world teach it to the 10-year-old and then based on the 10-y old's reaction you then go to the top and the whole principle here is your ability to summarize a concept correlates to your ability to actually understand it I was doing that I've done that for six seven years now that meant that all of my experience you know people say that I people use the word wise or they use these words that like they describe me as being older it's purely because I feel like I've got more wisdom out of every day that I've lived because of this introspection um it's the single greatest hack that any I could give to any young person or old person in the world is this habit of introspection and teaching in some regard so it walk us through how to do it what I would do if you want to do it the Steve bartett way that I did yes I do is I again I'm gonna say something here create a Instagram page or a Twitter account whatever you want to do don't need followers don't need to tell anybody exists and as you go through your day keep notes in your phone so you have an argument with your friend you respond negatively to a situation someone cuts you off in traffic you feel something what when you have these feelings write them down in the notes of your phone and at 700 p.m. every single night 600 7 p.m. every single night all I want you to do is to fit that experience into the confines of a 280 character tweet or post and I want you to post it and I can't tell you that cycle of having an experience summarizing it down to its to its Essence which is the true definition of understanding and then posting out and sharing it with the world and step forward is not so important which is getting some feedback on what you said drives you forward more I think in key areas of your life helps you understand your cycles and does the hardest thing which I think any of us can achieve which is heightens your self-awareness which has been this really elusive thing on the podcast that I've asked people over and over again how does one increase their self-awareness and I think I think this is the easiest way to do it in a reliable way I remember that day it sounds like a lot of work oh it's the it's the easiest thing it's it's and I think it's remarkably enjoyable I would not be in a relationship now at 31 years old and I've been in the relationship for 4 years super happy going to propose any minute now did she know that we to hold this I don't care she I've been she I say it a lot so yeah okay if I hadn't done that because there was this cycle going on that I I was a total puppet to and I didn't know the puppet master was my childhood trauma and I was just doing it every day i' would be interested in someone I'd pursue them they'd show interest in me I'd run off I didn't understand the cycle and then one day in the notes of my phone I wrote connecting to dots which is much easier to do when you're looking down on a piece of paper I wrote kind of feels like referring to the feeling in my chest that I got when this girl said she wanted to be in a relationship with me how I felt when I watched my father sat there and my mom shouting at him the minute the girl said she wanted to be in relationship with me I felt like a bird trapped in a cage and the only bird the first bird trapped in a cage I ever knew was my father and I go oh okay I learned love I learned the model of love from watching those two go at War and it's ingrained in me now and I'm just you know what I want you to do I want you to stop saying that what that you learned the model of Love yeah because you didn't you learned the model of misery yeah that's true yeah because they're yeah they're certainly not happy are they together they are which is crazy they're like they're like um co-inhabiting now I I believe because they've got no other friends and they're at a certain age they've just made the decision to cohabit which is you know not something I'd wish for myself but and what's your relationship ship like with them with my dad it's it's never been affectionate but it's good with my mom it's complicated it's very complicated how so um I still think she's got some issues with money which is difficult when your child now has a lot of it why she ask you for money yeah and I will buy she still have a gambling problem I'll buy anything I I still think her her sweet tooth is starting businesses that aren't going to succeed so I will buy them my deal with my parents is I'll buy you anything you need for your house holidays Health whatever food I pay for their food every week you name it Dentistry bills whatever but I will not pay to start a business for my mom because I watched for 25 years I start 25 businesses and I watched the impact it had on the entire family so I'll pay for everything else but I won't start a business unfortunately my mom only wants one thing she doesn't want the Christmas presents she doesn't want me to pay for anything else she wants me to pay for her to start businesses well if she's smart like you she'll just sell the [ __ ] that you buy her and use the money to find she tried that a few times and I clucked on to it so but but it's um it's an interesting subject because sometimes in life there has there's someone usually family or a friend where you have to say I love you but I also love myself and I my number one responsibility is protecting myself and now as this 31 year year old adult that's about to start a family of my own I now have the choice whether I let the cycle repeat itself and letting the cycle repeat itself would be doing the easier thing which is just sending this individual money so I said to my brothers and i' it's a rule I have for myself is I have to have a boundary even against my mom and especially honestly especially and as a mother I personally feel that it is really important that kids have boundaries with their parents it's the thing people struggle with in terms of interpersonal relationships the most which is that's my blood that is my mother or my father um it causes a huge amount of internal conflict and it goes back to that old plane analogy where you've got to put the oxygen mask on yourself be before you put it on the child or anyone else and that's that's what I do in my relationship with my mother I have a boundary and I've I've had that bound I think cruel not to have boundaries because yes because otherwise what happens is people continue to behave in ways that bother you yeah and you don't let them know yeah or you don't express a boundary but then you sit and judge and are angry at them and and so I think it's more compassionate and kinder to actually tell people how you feel and what you need and where their needs and your ability to support them begin and end I I completely agree and I think in doing so I'm inadvertently giving my mother an opportunity to learn a lesson that I think she's not been able to learn because for 30 years my father has propped up a situation to his detriment losing all of his money smashed up house verge of bankruptcy which she hasn't learned and so and neither has he by the way I've got so many examples in my life my best friend was he was 32 years old I was 25 I was living in a mansion He was staying in my spare room one day I say to him I say bro I love you and he talks about this I say you L ago and he at 32 years old my best friend on Earth had to go back to his childhood bedroom in Grimsby and it was painful it was sad and four years later he's a millionaire living in Dubai and I've got another friend who I one of my best friends who listens to this podcast all the time who was at my company and he was slacking and I fired him and I sat in the room cried with him as I fired him the guy is a CEO now he has incred successful company he's had more money than he ever has painful getting fired by your best friend painful getting kicked out the spare room it was honestly in hindsight the greatest gift I ever ever gave either of them and what I was robbing them of by propping them up was honestly unfair and so they had lessons they needed to learn and I tell you they learned them you know what's interesting about this is that we call it um that we're being kind to people and that we're taking care of them when actually you are helping somebody so that you don't have to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of telling them no yeah and when we do that we rob people of the possibility of who they could become 100% they're they're unrecognizable it baffles me unrecognizable and they thank me I apologize because I'm like I shouldn't have let you stay in the spare room for two years you know wow so wow um I feel like I have a master class in a million things from you you're very kind well what I love about listening to your podcast and uh just getting to spend time with you is I really love how you have the courage and The Bravery to challenge what is so in order to build a life and build businesses and make decisions that really Empower you like it's so obvious and yet I think none of us really take the time to stop and go wait a minute there are so many things that we do in life that we just blindly do without stopping to ask the question and I just want to thank you because there were so many things that made me stop and not only think but more importantly start asking myself different questions thank you you're a huge uh inspiration to me for so many reasons and I continue to learn from you and from a distance but it's a it's a great service that you're delivering for the world so thank you thank you oh I never know what to do when somebody thanks me when I'm interviewing them and so I guess what I'm going to do is thank you thank you for being here with me on YouTube I really love spending this time with you and I love the fact that you made a decision to watch something that can help you change your life and there's no doubt that if you apply the tools that you just learned and you learn how to make better decisions for you you will in fact change your life and one more thing I want to ask you please subscribe to this channel share this episode Stephen always ask his audience I learn this from him I'm making a decision to ask you for the support that I need because it helps me bring you amazing worldclass experts like Stephen at zero cost you got it good all right you ready for the next one I know you are you're going to love this next video do this every morning how to feel more energized focused and in control

Transcript for:Mel Robbins on Happiness and Decision-Making

Transcript for:
Mel Robbins on Happiness and Decision-Making