Sweating the Small Stuff with Steven Bartlett (Part 1)

0:05Stephen Bartlett has a unique ability to get people to open up and talk about things they probably haven't talked about in public before. I should know. He did it to me. So I invited him on to a bit of optimism to see if I could get him to do the same. He's quite remarkable. He started building companies when he was just 18 and took himself from being a broke university dropout to a millionaire by the age of 23 and one of Britain's most influential entrepreneurs. He's been one of the regulars on Dragon's Den, the British equivalent of Shark Tank. And most importantly, he's become a voice for the modern entrepreneur.

0:47In part one of our two-part conversation, Stephen proves himself to be vulnerable, introspective, and curious. Not just about how he achieves, but why he feels the need to achieve in the first place. This is a bit of optimism.

1:08So the best part about sitting down to do a podcast with you is that you are never on the receiving end of these things. And you have made quite a career out of getting people to say all the things they don't want to say. And now here you are on the receiving end. Yeah. It's terrifying. Now you know how we feel. I'm not going to start with, here's how nice I am. I'm not going to start with, I'm going to ask you a question. Most people lie about the answer and I want you to be honest. How are you? I'm not going to start there. But how are you? How am I? I'm good. Interesting chapter of my life.

1:49It's an interesting chapter of my life, I think. Things feel more balanced than ever, if that makes sense. And when I say balanced, I don't mean in any equal proportion. I just mean quantities that make me feel good, right? And I feel like I'm in a bit of a boring phase of my life in an interesting way. Define boring. Just this kind of straight compounding phase of my life where nothing huge happens, but in fact, everything is happening. Because it's boring. It's the same. It's showing up every day. It's discipline. Does boring mean routine or does boring mean you're bored? It means there's not a huge variance in the amount of experiences, but it's intentional.

2:26So it's maintenance. Yeah, focus. Focused.

2:33That is counter to your personality. And what I mean by that is you are sort of an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. You dropped out of school, went into business by yourself, sort of lived the entrepreneurial life. And entrepreneurs, their mentality, the creativity, the excitement, the joy doesn't suit maintenance, which is why entrepreneurial minded folks struggle in a corporate environment. So does that mean you're changing? Does that mean that you're in a position of no creativity? You're not feeling challenged? Like, bored is a very interesting choice of words. Yeah. So let me just take my podcasting business.

3:12It's about 30 people. It's called The Dario of a CEO. And everything is going up and to the right. So this month is our highest downloads ever. We're going to do about 35 million downloads this month, 400 ,000 new subscribers on YouTube this month, Spotify, everything's going up and to the right. And I know that it's in those moments, because I know this from, I'd say, two and a half decades of observational analysis of my mother, of successful people, of Joe Rogan, of all the people that were big and then fell off. I know that it's in those moments when temptation to lose focus is the highest.

3:42So it's in those moments when everything is going great, that you need to have this kind of boring patience with the process. and it's this slow iterative 1 % finding of marginal gains that feels boring because I'm not accepting huge new opportunities that might divert my focus. I'm doing in fact what I think Joe Rogan did so well which was do the same thing for 15 years and don't allow yourself to be swayed by temptation which is as I said optimal when things are going well. Give me an example of a person or an organization that you believe gave into temptation. The biggest YouTuber in our country in the UK had, let me say, 3 million subscribers.

4:18He was the king of YouTube. He was the king of in-depth conversations. He was the king of the algorithms, et cetera. He got so big that he got so many opportunities. He got an opportunity to start a fighting channel. He got the opportunity to start a gaming channel, a football channel, a second football channel, a gambling channel. He took those opportunities. He got an opportunity to move to another platform called Twitch. He took that opportunity. He lost focus. you slowly saw this descending of his ability to reach people his message he lost sight of also his authenticity and would take opportunities based on their lucrativeness not the resonance that i had with him in his audience and i just watched him go from being the king to being now completely you know he texting me the other day and asking me for a loan because he's his whole team have left him and i i diagnosed that moment against someone like a joe rogan who doesn't get credit for really the consistency and staying power and i go it was in the moment when temptation was highest, that he should have made the toughest decision, which was to focus.

5:13And I talk about that a little bit in my book, these moments in my life where I had such high temptation to lose focus. Or my mother, who I watched start 25 businesses between my age of 10 and 20, and I watched how she was never successful because whenever something showed any sign of success or failure, she would be swayed by a narrative that there's greener grass elsewhere. And watching your mother, like our family, we were virtually bankrupt for my entire childhood. No birthdays, no Christmases, no driving licenses, living in a derelict house, purely because of my mother's lack of focus. Even the one business she started, which is this restaurant that went remotely well, she was immediately swayed by someone down the street telling her that an estate agent's business was better.

5:53And then I watched the restaurant crumble as she tried to give 50 % to two things when both of her competitors in those industries are giving 110 % to each. So when I said boring at the start of this, I'm honoring the fact that I know focus and focusing on consistency and compounding and doing more of the same stuff is in fact the path to the top. There's this really interesting boring section in the middle of it when you've got to just say no a lot. And they always say, you know, when you're unsuccessful and things aren't going well, say yes. And when you're really successful and things are going well, say no.

6:24I'm saying no to everything. And it can feel a bit boring. I guess what you're describing in the example of the British podcaster is selling out, right? Which is you've achieved a level of notoriety or you have a number of followers that is now appealing to other companies and advertisers, et cetera. And you say they dangle money in front of you. It's the focus, the selling of the focus that I think is the worst thing. You know, Charlie Munger, one of the greatest investors of all time says, never interrupt compounding interest unless you absolutely have to. Like that's one of the great rules of investing.

6:57Never interrupt the process when something is compounding. And he interrupted the process by shifting his focus. And that's the chapter of my life. I mean, and it's difficult to speak to teams. In fact, your work on thinking about infinite games and finite games really helped me because you've then got to build a system that is built for a long chapter of your life. You've got to build a company culture and you've got to energize your people and inspire them away in a way which is built for 10 years, not 10 months. And that's what I think a lot about is how do I keep these people with me for the next decade?

7:27How do I keep their enthusiasm up? How do I keep them in a sustainable culture? Did you always know this? When did you learn this? When was the conversion to being finite driven, hitting a number, hitting a score. If I get this amount of money, that'll make me happy to now recognizing that boring is actually a strategy. So it was reading your book, in fact. So reading about finite and infinite games changed my first business in a quite profound way because I realized that we were aiming at things like becoming the best in our industry when we wanted to be number one, make the most revenue or whatever.

8:00And I realized that there was both a lack of fulfillment that would come with achieving those goals, but also it wouldn't stand our company the best chance of succeeding over time because we were unsustainable. We were too intense. We were focused on short-sighted goals. We had short-sighted incentives. And then in 2000, I'm going to say 2019, I stood in front of my company and presented a new way forward, which I called WWW. Which was our world goals, which means outside of our walls, our welfare goals, which is the people inside of our walls, on our work goals, which is the work we do for the clients that we have.

8:33And these goals were all infinite in design. And just because of that, it meant that we were designing our company to go for multi-decades. Motivation increased, staff attrition fell in terms of people quitting. Our incentive structures changed, our client work changed. We took on different clients that could go with us over the long term, which were more lucrative. And that's kept with me ever since. So thank you. Oh, I love that. And thanks for being an example of what an infinite-minded company looks like. So there's a detail in your own growth, in your own history as an entrepreneur that I find really interesting.

9:07I'll give an analogy. Some people – I've had people come up to me and say, can you help me? Can you give me advice? I want to be a public speaker. And I say, well, what do you want to talk about? And they go, I haven't figured that out yet. And sort of you realize they've got it in the wrong order, which is you find yourself compelled by an idea and then you figure out a way to spread that message, public speaking being one of them. It was always weird to me that somebody says, I want to be a public speaker. I don't know what I'll speak about. And I think we see that very often in business owners, which is I want to make a lot of money.

9:36I want to be my own boss. I'm looking for a business I can start, right? And money very often is the driver. If I hit this number, I'll feel successful, be successful, whatever. And I'm very curious about your rise when you started your first business before you went public. What was the motivation? What was the drive? I mean, how old were you when you started that business? I was 21 when I started that business. It was a pivot from a business that I started when I was 18. But yeah, 21 when it was founded, when it was registered as a company. And what was the ambition? What was the drive? It's multifaceted.

10:12So there's a personal drive, which is to become rich. Yeah. And that was very clear to me. I needed to become rich. Why? Because I was deeply insecure and riddled with shame and being the only, pretty much the only black kid in an all-white area growing up. We were the weird family in my view. As I said, we lived in a derelict house and values often decided by comparison. So, you know, if you look at where I was getting my value from, you've got a perfect house next to ours, a perfect family. On the other side, you have another perfect white family with lots of money next to ours. Then you have this derelict house with me and my black family inside of it where the grass is six foot high.

10:47Everything about my context and my environment told me that I was lower value. It told me that I wasn't enough. So the things that invalidate you when you're a kid often become the things you seek validation from as an adult. And for me, I was invalidated by our lack of money, by no romantic interests, by my family being quite bizarre, my mother being particularly interesting. And that's what I wanted. I wanted normalcy. So at 18 years old, I write in the front page of my diary that by the age of 28, I'll make a million pounds. A Range Rover Sport will be my first car. I'll get a six pack and a girlfriend.

11:19And that was my orientation and my North Star in life. That was, if I did all of these things, then I would be successful. And that's the path I set out to achieve. And by 23, I had a Range Rover Sport. It was my first car. I had multiple millions in the bank account. I had a girlfriend and I was working out. And, you know, I didn't feel great, to say the least. So 23 years old is a pretty young age, A, to be a millionaire, but then to have achieved one's goals on paper and not feel successful. So you achieve these things and then what happened? I realized that I'd been lied to by some kind of narrative.

11:54And when I say lied to, I don't mean someone had lied to me. A narrative had lied to me at some point along the way. A narrative had told me that upon our company going public that morning, when I went over to my phone in the corner of the room, that a marching band might appear. And maybe all of those people that called me the N-word or bullied me when I was a kid would appear and apologize and say how great I was or something. You know, I was confused about the nature of fulfillment and who I was and why I wanted what I was. And I was riddled with fake ambitions. I think that's what I came to learn over the years was that my ambitions were fake.

12:24They weren't ambition, they were insecurity. And there's a big distinction. And most of our lives are dragged by insecurity and shame. They're not driven by ambition. And it's a tragic truth that most of us are going to have to have our ambitions and our narratives fail us before we realize that they're illusions and they're mirages and they're false. It's something that I think a lot about. How do we get people to realize that these limiting beliefs and ideas that are driving their lives are illusions before they have to undergo the pain to realize that themselves. In that chapter of my life, even a little bit earlier when someone offered to buy our company for a very big eight-figure number, me going home and going on rightmove.com to look at the houses I could buy, then going on AutoTrader and look at the car that I could buy, and looking into the image on this screen and realizing that I would be somewhat emptier.

13:10I'd be somewhat poorer for buying these things. And I couldn't quite, it was an emptiness that I could feel inside of me. and then I met the guy that I wanted to become I always think about this I went and met the guy that I wanted to be friend of mine he's still a friend to this day billionaire seven Lamborghinis outside of his house I slept in the Louis Vuitton room which was just this big room surrounded by these bags spent time with him that night till 5 a.m and he opened up to me and um deeply deeply lonely asked me to sleep in bed with him that night this is a 35 year old man one of the most miserable people at a fundamental level that I'd met and that who that is who I was striving to become.

13:45So I had to go in search of something else, a new set of values to govern my life. You described this as fake ambition. So then what's real ambition? Because you did make the distinction. What's real ambition if this is the fake ambition? Yeah. So real ambition is driven by your intrinsic desires and passions and interests. So, you know, like I DJ now and I do this podcast. These are things that I would do irrespective of remuneration. They're attached to my like intrinsic motivation. The things that you would do for free? you might not do them for free unless you're fortunate enough to have surplus income but they're the things that you know yeah you would choose to do if in a world where you didn't you didn't have to worry about money so fake ambitions are driven by the pursuit of rewards and validation like i wanted a lamborghini and i wanted to range over sport even though i'm not interested in cars real ambitions sound like i want to go and play the violin in the hills of peru because i love the violin it makes me feel great and and it's funny because i used to think that if I realized I was quote unquote enough, it would remove my ambition.

14:46A lot of people think this. I've had people like Gary Vaynerchuk and other people I've interviewed say that if they're scared to go to therapy because of what it might change in them, because of what it might remove, they think it will steal their ambition. It doesn't steal your ambition, it steals your fake ambitions. And it gives you enough space to focus on your real ones. You've achieved a tremendous amount. And I think what I really enjoy about spending time with you is for somebody so young, you have a tremendous amount of perspective and wisdom. I'm getting older now. And I sort of, I'm now that person who I remember older people would say to me, but wait till you appreciate what the world is like when you're older, you know?

15:23And I'm like, that person now looks back and be like, oh, I wish I knew that, you know? Do you have a sense of what you still have to learn at this age looking forwards? Or is that an unknown to you that you're going to have to trip over and fall on your face to find out. So outside of parenthood, which it's one of those things that I realize I'm not going to know anything about until it happens, I would say romantic relationships. I still have a ton to learn there. I would say I'm still slightly confused and insecure as it relates to self-worth. I do spend too much time obsessing over metrics.

15:57And I know that there's still a fundamental link between my self-esteem and my self-worth and these metrics and numbers, which is interesting. I sat with someone who wrote the book about status or status. I don't know how you guys say it over here. And he says, we all play status. Status? What did you say? No, I'm just kidding. I'm going to say status. We all play status games. I was under the opinion that I'd stopped playing them. I'd sold all my fancy things. I didn't have designer stuff. So I assumed I'd stopped playing status games in my life. And he made the case to me that your games just change.

16:25When you don't have a lot of money, the logos are bigger. When you become a billionaire, it's smaller logos, but bigger yachts. People with cameras, they play. if my cameraman walked in now, he'd start talking about the cameras in this room. We all have these different games we're playing and I'm playing a different set of games now. And I don't want to be a slave to the game. I want to be conscious of the things that I'm doing and making sure that I don't find myself in a similar position where I'm trading happiness for my self-worth. That's still an ongoing challenge I have. And then I have other challenges.

16:52Like I have a lot to learn about emotional regulation. Tell me more. I find it easy to get annoyed at things. I'm never angry. I don't shout. It's not my style. But I find it easy to go, specifically as it relates to work things. You said this on stage. Do you remember when we spoke? You said I get very annoyed at small details not being right as it relates to work and standards. And that's something that I know that I want to improve. I want to be able to take a little bit of a pause before reaction. You said you still harbor insecurities and have self-worth issues based on hitting metrics. Say more about that.

17:27Like you're happy, you wake up every day with gratitude, and yet it seems paradoxical or oxymoronic that you still struggle with self-worth issues related to metrics. It seems paradoxical, but it's not because both are definitely true. So it's definitely true that I wake up every day with this like deep sense of gratitude and disbelief in my life. Like it's every day. But at the same time, my obsession with being successful, like making things better, finding marginal gains everywhere to the point that it frustrates me. And this obsession with like climbing and being better feels like it's still rooted in the same old issues from my childhood.

18:04For me, it's about being conscious of that and having a healthy relationship with that pursuit. And again, it being driven and not dragged. Tell me a project that you've been involved in professionally that you absolutely loved being a part of. It may or may not have been commercially successful, but if every project you ever worked on was like this one, you would be the happiest person alive. The Diary of a CEO, the podcast. Okay, so what specifically about Diary of a CEO? Yeah, I mean the Japanese refer to it as Yurukagai, right? Something that I think I can get good at. I believe it's helping other people.

18:42It's remunerative for me and I enjoy the process. So it ticks all four boxes in that regard. Seems to be my ikigai, as the Japanese would say. It's definitely the thing that I found in my life that checks all those boxes. A lot of my businesses, I know that I'm running them for commercial incentives. It's ticking a curiosity box, but it's really for a commercial means, an end. But the Dario of a Seer would be the one. Is there a particular guest or episode or series of guests that capture that feeling better than anybody else? So many of them. Obviously, all of our ones. That third episode we had for me is a perfect example of that where you have a human being.

19:20You get to meet a human being at that human being's essence. You get to learn things that are resonant and that make you feel like your struggle isn't because you're inadequate. It's because you're a human too. and you're given a path through your struggle. There's humor in there. There's a range of emotion in there. Those are my favorite things. And if I go right down to when I was a kid, I was strange. I would go on first dates and I would ask them deep questions about their childhood. If I had a tour guide and he was telling me, I remember being in Peru and the tour guide was showing me buildings.

19:51And for seven days, I showed no interest. And on the seventh day, he started talking about how different cultures that he takes on the tours have different levels of happiness. And he had my undivided attention. And he said to me that on that seventh day, he says, you haven't paid attention for six days. And on the seventh day, when I started talking about people, you tuned in. That is, it's just clearly in school. You know, two lessons that I went to and didn't get expelled from were psychology and business. All the other lessons, my tenants hit 31 % and that's why they kicked me out. So, and I would steal those psychology books because I wanted to take them home and read them.

20:21So I've always had a focus on human beings and why they do what they do. And so this is just proven to be the perfect solution to that. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory, something I can relive with you. Running around in the garden with my brothers playing, having a water gun fight. Was that one water gun fight you're talking about or something you did on the regular basis? Just one particular one that I remember. Okay. Tell me about what of all the magical things, and I know you had a weird childhood, but of all the magical things that happened as a child, what is it about this one thing that you're choosing to tell me about it now?

20:52Freedom of any worries. I just felt the sun on my body running around through the garden. Our house at this point wasn't dilapidated. My parents were still in reasonable terms with each other. And yeah, it was freedom. It was sunshine. I was away from school. I didn't really like school. It was freedom. And that freedom is something I've pursued my whole life. Absolutely. In an unrelenting way. I do believe I'm - You've done things where you played in the garden before. You did things where you played with your friends, where you had a sense of freedom. You know, what was it about this one where you're playing with your brothers?

21:22Just seems to be perfect that day. I don't know why. It seems like everything, there was ease. and there was so much dis-ease in my childhood. There was so much screaming and shouting. This particular day just seems to be very easy. Everything was there. The son was there. My family were there. They seemed to be happy. The house was fine. Wasn't any worry. And I was free. And that freedom is really why I'm an entrepreneur. I'm just not very good at being constrained. I'm a remarkably good quitter. It's one of my greatest skills is being better than everyone I know at quitting. Say more about that.

21:52I just think I'm a really, really good quitter. I reflect on my life. You mean you know the right time to quit or you just quit too quickly, quit too easily? Know the right time to quit, but it's more sort of intuitive and instinctive than that. Quit with such ease and such little worry about the path forward or the path behind me. And yeah, that's really it. I think quitting, the real skill of quitting isn't necessarily knowing because you can't know, but it's knowing that you can't tolerate the current situation. It's knowing that uncertainty is a better hand to have than misery. But what about, I mean, there's a young generation now that quits very easily.

22:29Yeah. And they seem to be following your counsel, which is, this sucks. I could go talk to somebody, but they probably won't listen to me. What's the point of going to talk to somebody who doesn't care about me anyway? Everything you're saying can be rationalized and used to justify quitting regularly to the point of too much and too easily. Well, I think - Like, where's the nuance? I think the key point, the key point of difference is, I'm saying, when you think about the fight to change something, you have to weigh up the rewards on offer. You don't lead a fight to change something in your job if the rewards on offer are still at the other end of that, a job that you absolutely hate, you know?