Jake Humphrey on why high achievers aren't that different

0:00This is Britain's growth moment. Do you want to be part of it? On 26th of March, 750 of the UK's most ambitious founders, CEOs and investors will gather in London to shape the future of mid-sized business. The company's driving our nation's success. The Business Leader Summit 2026 isn't just another conference. It's a day built around the three forces that define growth, ambition, policy and capital. And as one of our valued podcast listeners, you can be there in person. To secure a discounted ticket, visit the events section of our business leader website and use this code. BL podcast, all one word, all uppercase.

0:41We look forward to seeing you there. How you do anything is how you do everything. So if you're living a life where s*** keeps going wrong in the moment, don't look at the fact that you were five minutes late for that meeting. Look at what you didn't do 12, 24, 36 hours before to make that meeting go as well as possible. So instead of saying, oh, I didn't get that job, I must have done a bad interview. Did you do a bad interview or did you do bad prep? In my time hosting high performance in that room where it happened is a master. It's just human connection. It's where everything lives and dies.

1:11Don't be a d***, right? It's the fundamental rule in business and in life. If people like you, they'll do business with you. I ended up in Formula One and then after that, football. And what I really loved was that finally I was around Formula One team owners, football team owners, elite high performance athletes, business people, investors, consultants and suddenly I was I sort of was in these rooms I never thought I'd be in and the biggest takeaway for me was that these people are nothing special like they don't really have any skill that me or anyone listening to this podcast or anyone growing up in my village didn't have.

2:00Hello and welcome to the Business Leader Podcast with me, Graham Roddick. And me, Josh Dombrak. In this episode, I'm delighted to say we're going to be joined by Jake Humphrey, who is, of course, the host of the High Performance Podcast and is also a business leader expert columnist where he writes regularly for us about high performance across business, sport and other fields. He's also just launched a new podcast series called The Room Where It Happened, where he's interviewing business leaders about key moments in their career and the story of their business.

2:34I always wanted high performance to be as much about business and entrepreneurship as it was about sport and entertainment. But one of the really interesting things that I've discovered having created that podcast is that when you build something for a certain audience, and at the beginning, we had lots of sports people on, it's actually really challenging to pivot to a different audience. Or when you have a lot of sports guests and you suddenly bring on a business guest. I think a lot of people that would naturally lean towards business podcasts wouldn't hear it, wouldn't see it. And of course, it meant we were then getting some really great potential sports people and entertainment people that we couldn't record with high performance because we were doing a different sort of guest.

3:14And I also felt like I record high performance with Damien, who loves sport. He loves entertainment. He loves cultures. He loves behaviors. He's not really very interested in entrepreneurship and business. So I thought instead of trying to probe our business conversations into an existing product, why don't I create something totally new? And one thing that I've always really believed strongly, right, is that we all feel that certain rooms are like off limits to us, and that we're just not the kind of people that will ever get access into those rooms. You know, certainly growing up in Norfolk, where I lived, my mom was a teacher, my dad was a charity worker.

3:52any business conversation was totally not accessible to me you know my family my family I'd almost go so far say are anti-business like whenever you talk about money my parents sort of like turn their nose up they're pretty full-on socialists they don't really like the the capitalist western culture I suppose they're not big fans of the things that we lord and hold dear right in the in the modern business world and it's actually only a few weeks ago I was talking to my mum about investment rounds and unicorns. And she said, don't even talk about it. I don't know anything about it. And I'm not interested.

4:25So that was the like, that was the world I grew up in. And it was like, it was never even a conversation about what goes on in those rooms where big business deals get done. But through failing my A-levels and stumbling and faltering, I ended up in Formula One and then after that football. And what I really loved was that finally I was around Formula One team owners, football team owners, elite high performance athletes, business people, investors, partners, sponsors, marketeers, PR people, consultants. And suddenly I was, I sort of was in these rooms I never thought I'd be in. And the biggest takeaway for me was that these people are nothing special.

5:03Like they don't really have any skill that me or anyone listening to this podcast or anyone growing up in my village didn't have. They just kind of went out and got on with things. They got on with creating businesses and building brands and taking chances and risks and believing in themselves. And it was a really powerful moment for me. And I kind of then had this realization that there aren't successful people that know all about business from minute one. And then people like me, there's just people. And therefore, if I can do one thing, it's to try and open some doors for other people. So when I was working on Formula One, my biggest dream and drive really was opening up that world to the audience who were at home watching on the BBC.

5:41I then tried to do the same in football. I then obviously tried to do the same with high performance, like opening up the lives of these high achieving, successful people. And then I really wanted to open up the door to business. And all of those things conspired to help me come up with the title, The Room Where It Happened. What I've noticed over the years is that when businesses do amazing things, it often isn't the thing that's in the public eye. It often isn't the thing where there's a load of press photographers taking photos of that big launch or that big moment. It normally doesn't get accompanied by a press release.

6:12It line to it, helping them with their launch. Most of the seminal moments in business happen behind closed doors, sometimes with someone totally on their own, just sitting there and thinking. They're not lauded, they're not high profile, they're never spoken about, they're never discussed. But when you sit down and speak to the kind of people that we've had in the room where it happened, they open up about the rooms they were in, the moments that only in hindsight were hugely significant in their career. And those are the things that I wanted to talk about. It's such a great format and it really gives people an opportunity, kind of like you've described, to really go inside these people and maybe listen to, you know, a different side of them as leaders.

6:49But, you know, just for a little bit of colour, I guess, for people, obviously there are episodes available now, but give us an idea or a bit of a flavour of the kind of people that you're talking to on the show. Okay, so we are recording in two days' time with Richard Branson. And I think the room that he's going to take us into is actually, obviously one of the biggest things he ever did was launch Virgin Airlines. But from speaking to him and his team in the build up to this conversation, I think he wants to take us into the room where he had to try and convince people that he was going to sell Virgin Records to, well, actually not even convince them, just tell them that he's going to sell Virgin Records to fund the airline.

7:22And the reason why I'm so interested in that moment is because that's a moment where a lot of people would have been looking at Richard going, this is a bad decision, don't do it. So how did he have that self-belief to go for it? How do we all build a mindset where we take these big risks and these big decisions? What was his vision like? Like, was he thinking one year in advance? Was he thinking 10 years in advance? Did he really believe that it was going to be as successful as it was? How convinced about it did he have to be before he made the decision? You know, was it 51 % towards the airline?

7:51Right, I'm going to go for it. Or did he kind of wait till he was 90 % sure it was the right thing? All of those are going to be the kind of questions that I'm going to ask Richard in a couple of days time. And then other guests we've had, Will Shue, the founder of Deliveroo. And again, we didn't talk about the fundraising and the first order and all of the things that he's spoken about on almost every other show I've ever heard him discuss. He told us about the time when he came home from delivering pizzas, because in the early days of Deliveroo, he was Deliveroo. Like, you know, he took the orders, he drove on the scooter, he delivered the pizza to people's houses.

8:20It was a cold night. It was wet. It was raining. He came home and he was getting a bit flustered and hot and strangely got stuck inside a scooter helmet and kind of just like lost his shit basically and was like laying on a bed in a small rented flat, unable to get this scooter helmet off his head, shouting at his flatmate who he was living with at the time about the fact that he was overwhelmed and stressed and everything was too much. But I think that is such a powerful vision for people who now see Will Hsu as the founder, creator and CEO of like a business that has altered the way that we order food in the UK.

8:52So I love that conversation. Another one that people can hear is me talking to a guy called John Eckbert, who went into a room and tried to convince a family to do something they'd never done before. So the family were the Morell family, who a few years ago or quite a few years ago, they had five sons and their sons were getting ready to go to university. And the mum and dad, Jerry Morel and his wife sat their sons down and said, look, you've got a choice. We can give you a few thousand dollars each to go to college, or we can put these few thousand dollars into a business and set up a business.

9:21And the sons all decided at the same time that they would like to set up a business together. So they set up a local restaurant and they named it after their sons. It was called Five Guys. So that was where the business began, which is also an incredible story of its own right. But then every Tuesday, the Morell family still come together and they still kind of have like a family meeting, really, about the direction of five guys at their offices in Washington, which I think, again, is a brilliant image. But John Eckbert, along with Charles Dunson, who's a huge and very successful British businessman, they went to Washington and met with the Morell family one day and basically just said to them, we would like to take five guys outside the US and make it Europe wide.

10:00They didn't want to do a franchise model. They wanted to own and run their own restaurants on behalf of Five Guys. So that needed some convincing. But the biggest thing was that the Morell family had never done this before. So they kind of had this big family meeting whilst John was sitting there waiting for the answer. I don't want to spoil the whole conversation, but there's a moment where Jerry Morell, the dad, says something. And it's like, I think we've got a deal. And they had made a decision that as soon as there was a chink of light, this deal might happen. They were going to stand up and immediately shake hands to try and get it done before anyone changed their minds.

10:30that's exactly what happened and you know the only reason they got in that room right was that they went on to the five guys website and filled in a form for a meeting they didn't even have like a special in and like for all the people listen to this they went on the five guys website and just wrote hello can we have a meeting please with the morale family sometimes if you don't do that shit that you think is ridiculous and is never gonna be successful then you never get anywhere sometimes you have to do that kind of stuff the simple things are sometimes the most powerful so those are just a few examples of what people can expect if they tune into the show with these moments it's interesting just hearing them all there how many of them did the guests know at the time were big moments and how many of them it was only many years later that they realized actually that was a key moment yeah i think it varies really i mean one of my favorite episodes so far is danny weiner who's the founder and ceo of hex clad another brilliant story he gambled all of his money which wasn't very much when he was in his 40s and 50s to set up hex Hexclad from his garage.

11:28Hexclad's now one of the fastest growing cookery brands in the world. But he managed to, well, he just reached out to Gordon Ramsay on Instagram and Gordon said he liked the pans and they arranged a meeting to see whether Gordon would partner with them. And they've done a really deep and creative collaborative partnership with Gordon Ramsay. But Danny tells the story and the room he takes us to is actually a car, a beaten up old Range Rover Sport and the day that the phone call goes and he's waiting to speak to Gordon Ramsay. That's the moment he takes us to. When he was sitting in that car, he knew the significance of that moment for sure, because this was like a big yes or no moment from Gordon Ramsay.

12:02Greg Mafi is another episode we've had. He was the chairman of Liberty who've just bought Formula One or bought Formula One a few years ago for a few billion pounds. For the first time ever, someone takes us into the negotiations to buy Formula One and how they managed to remove Bernie Eccleston from the sport after his stranglehold over that sport for so many years. Again, Gregory knew that was significant without question. But I think I would argue that Will Hsu didn't know that it was especially significant that he had a scooter helmet stuck on his head. I would argue that Al Barrett, the founder of the Grenade Bars, who at the time was making protein powder and supplements to help people lose weight when he came up with the idea for the Grenade Bar.

12:44I think the day that he bought a plate in from home along with a knife from home and cut up some bar that he'd been working on secretly for a couple of years. I don't think he had any idea that a few years later he would have sold a billion grenade bars it's that classic old Steve Jobs quote isn't it you only really know how significant these things are when you stop and look back and I could do it with my own career like I was asked to host the Super Bowl for the BBC I think in about 2007 I didn't really want to do it I sort of had bigger aspirations than two o 'clock in the morning on BBC two for a sport I didn't know very much about but the head of sport at the BBC told me a couple years later he said that was the day that I knew if we won the rights to Formula One, which we were negotiating at the time, that I'd ask you to host Formula One, which led to football, which led to me sitting here now, arguably.

13:26So it's a good reminder that all you can do is your very best in every situation because you never quite know where that situation is going to take you. That's such a great message. And I want to actually just pinpoint on one of the conversations that you've already mentioned, the Greg Mafai interview. And for people who may not know, you've kind of touched on, you know, they take us inside the negotiation room when it comes to buying Formula One, but he is a former CEO of the Liberty Group, which owns Formula One, Live Nation, Sirius XM. He was also the CFO at Oracle and Microsoft in a past life.

13:56And I'm intrigued, you know, Jake, when you're preparing for a conversation like that, as an interviewer, was there anything that surprised you? Anything that you kind of think, oh, well, there was a narrative that I read about that doesn't actually match up when I'm talking to the man? Yeah, I think what I really enjoyed in talking about is how you have wins and losses in the same negotiation. And actually the best negotiation is where everyone kind of feels that they won, but kind of thinks maybe they lost and they're not really sure. So he painted this beautiful picture that you'd sit around a table and then when you were stuck on a point, everyone would leave the room.

14:26He'd go off to his own room with his own people. Someone else would go off to their own room with their own people. They'd kind of work it out and then eventually come back. And you just have to accept, he was saying, that some things you just have to seed on. You are not going to go into a negotiation with your list of things you want to win and win them all. But I think the other point to pick up on there, Josh, I think is also really important is it's easy for people like me and you and people that might be listening to this to go, well, Greg Maffei, like he's had the biggest jobs in the biggest corporations in the world and done billion dollar deals, right?

14:55But the things that he does to make those deals successful are exactly the same as the deals that you and I are doing and that people are doing every single day because life is in negotiation, right? I had to negotiate with my daughter this morning who wanted to look at her phone before she went to school. The only way to deal with a 12 year old who's desperate to look at her phone before she goes to school and then told us in the car she was going to buy a can of drink from the shop for breakfast, right, is to get together with them on a human level and try and sort of work them out. And that's exactly what he had to do.

15:23He had to sort of look at someone like Bernie Eccleston and instead of thinking, this is what I want for Formula One, he had to think, well, what is it that Bernie wants in this moment? What is it that CVC want in this moment? You know, how can we make sure that everyone feels like they've won? And I think I might have said this when we met last time on your podcast, the word sell comes from the old English word selling, which is to give not to take and this idea of giving is i think is really powerful and for a long time before i had an interview with someone like greg i would be such super nervous about messing up or being caught out or not being well enough prepared and then actually i kind of i kind of changed when i realized that greg also wants to have a really good conversation right all of us want the same thing all of us just want to have a great podcast if you're doing a deal with someone and you're trying to buy and they're trying to sell well they do want to sell because they're sitting at the table.

16:13If you're trying to sell and they're trying to buy, well, they do want to buy because they're having a conversation with you. So I think it's this understanding that everybody actually is after the same thing most of the time in life. You do have to set boundaries and you do have to have red lines. And one of them in my life is you don't go and buy a can of Tango before you go to school, Florence, right? But it's also about connecting on a human level and saying, why do you feel the need to do that? It transpired that's what our friends do. Well, then we had a conversation about, do you want to just follow what everyone else does when you know it's a bad decision.

16:42Come on, let's elevate ourselves a little bit, which you maybe don't want to hear on the way to school, right? When you're about to become a teenager. But it's a long-winded way of saying that these are just normal people going about normal things, stumbling, finding their way. But what Greg is a master at, and everyone I've met in my time hosting High Performance and now Room Where It Happened is a master at. It's just human connection. It's where everything lives and dies. Human connection. If you can get that right, if you can just don't be a dick right is the like fundamental rule in business and in life if people like you they'll do business with you right so just don't feel and i see them all the time arrogant kind of like wanting to prove themselves and want to just show you how great they are like you show me how great you are doesn't make me like you anymore show me how how wonderful you are and i might like you a little bit more so i think that was a good message from greg really just be a human being and try and empathize with other people how does that show up day to day for people i think it involves asking yourself whether you're seeing the world through your eyes or through other people's eyes i think i think it's probably easy for me because i think i'm a natural empath right so i had struggles at school when i was bullied and i remember my parents going in to see mr pew my english teacher and he said well the problem is your son kind of understands how other people are feeling and most 13 year old boys just don't have the emotional intelligence or really care about how other people are feeling.

18:03And I see it with Seb today. My son is exactly how I was. All he wants to do is please other people all the time. Sometimes that can be your downfall. But I don't think you go far wrong in life, right? If you try and put other people's needs and wants above your own, particularly in business, particularly when we've traditionally been in this world of business where it's all about a show of strength, right? I think that's important. I think the other thing that we're slowly coming around to is this idea of holding your beliefs lightly. I think that the best people now who are operating in business are people who can change the way they see the world, the way they see their business, the way they see the staff and the demands that they make of people.

18:45And I guess we learned that in COVID when people had to work from home. And so suddenly being a boss that demanded everyone's in the office just wouldn't cut it. So you had to hold your beliefs lightly and you had to evolve. but I see it more and more now with the way that the world is changing geopolitically, the advent of AI, the growth of misinformation. I honestly think that the average person in any organization will be more productive than the most productive person in that organization in five or six years with the advent of AI. We're all going to be doing so much, but AI is going to be doing the heavy lifting for us.

19:17So it's about holding your beliefs lightly. It's about being flexible and agile in the way that you see the world and understanding that not only does the world change but the things that people need in that world changes but most of all it's realizing that everyone was just a kid once like you were dreaming of having a life and having a career and that's all they're now living out and I think the final bit of advice I'd give people is we were joined on high performance once by Dr Rangan Chatterjee and I asked him a similar question really which is how do you sort of deal with people who you find are difficult and it comes back to the same theme and what he said was remember if you'd have lived the life they've lived you'd act in the way that they act and I think that's a really good bit of advice because I think sometimes when you're in these kinds of situations and people are acting in a way that you don't like it's easy to get triggered and twisted up and riled by those people but when you think well they're just living out the their own lived experience they may well have had aggressive parents.

20:12They may have had challenging relationships. They may have been bullied. They may have been let down. They may have been lied to and deceived. So those are the reasons why they're being like that. So I need to lean into that, find out why they're being like that and help them realize that that's not going to be the outcome of this situation. Jake, there was a really, really pointed moment in your interview with Will Shue. The CMA was looking into an investment from Amazon and it was a deal that took about 18 months to get cleared. And obviously, it was very, very close to going out of business.

20:43And he kind of just kind of subtly said, he never shared how he was feeling with anyone else except for one friend. It's really, really lonely at the top. And that's something we hear from all of our members and all the people we talk to. But why is it so important to have someone or multiple people to lean on as a leader? Because you can't do it all on your own. I just think that I think it's the single most important thing is to try and avoid the loneliness trap of leadership. And how do we do that is a sort of recurring challenge. I think for me, the answer anyway is to have people that I lean on outside of work, because I think that there is still this need for a leader to look like a leader, right?

21:26I think it's important that you're an emotionally connected leader, that you're a vulnerable leader, that you accept when things went wrong and go wrong. and you allow people in your organization to come up short often. I remember Toto Wolff on High Performance saying, we blame the process, not the person. Very powerful because it allows people to make mistakes, right? And find their limits. But I also don't think that what people want from me anyway as a leader is to constantly be coming in and telling them all of the things that I'm concerned about. Like in all honesty, I lie awake two nights out of seven in the week because things at night seem so much scarier than in the day.

21:59whether it's 300 people who work for Whisper, and no matter how stable and great and growing your business is, if you've got 300 people responsible for decisions that you're making or decisions that your CEO and, in our case, someone's making, that definitely keeps you awake. The growth of high performance keeps me awake sometimes because it's great and I'm working out how we can ride the wave. Other times because it's not where it should be and I want it to be. The changes in the world, both in terms of business for me and in the way the world's changing for my kids. You know, what the hell's going on with conversations about nuclear war in three of all different parts of the world at the moment?

22:34So I don't want to go into work every day and start telling all of those things to all the people that I work with, because I also want them to kind of have this sense that the person who's working with them knows the direction of travel and he's got their back and is supporting them. But I think you do have to find the outlets. And actually, I had a message from a guy today on Instagram and I get them quite regularly saying, I don't have anyone to talk to, my mental health is suffering and I'm in a downward spiral. and my advice is always the same you if you don't yet feel able to go and seek professional advice you need to have someone that you speak to you need to have someone in your life so there's a guy who lives in my village I live in a little village in Norfolk and there's a guy who runs a vet's practice right his name's Ian and he is so valuable for me because he doesn't operate in my world which is really great like I think everyone in my world sees the same things because we come from the same background and we have the same dreams and we have the same knowledge, right?

23:26He has a totally different knowledge base. So when I tell him I'm struggling with something, he goes, well, have you thought about this? Nine times out of 10, I've not thought about that because he sees the world a different way. So sometimes if you are so heavily involved and invested in the people around you at work, you need to stop and try and find someone outside of that sphere. And I think sometimes we're tempted to only take counsel from people who are in a similar space to us, but actually people who are in a totally different part of the world are really valuable and then just find the shit that you love to do so I've got a couple of grey laggeese on my lake who've laid five eggs a few months ago nothing makes me feel better than going and sitting watching waiting for these bloody goslings to hatch um I've got a little greenhouse where I'm growing a load of fruit veg and bits and pieces in the greenhouse as in that today I've stuck a photo up on my socials and said just because something is not cool doesn't mean it isn't good um so find those little things that also put a smile on your face and they don't have to be all the sort of stereotypical things that that people often like to talk about on their socials find what find what puts a smile on your face and gives you some clarity you spoke at the start jake about how a lot of people you come across at the top of their fields are not that different to to people everywhere are they unique though in terms of how productive they are and how well they manage their time i've been struck by your interviews and brilliant columns you've done for business leader that the productivity and time management comes up quite a lot whether it's taking the time out to rest uh taking the time out to be creative or in the total wolf's case for example being so focused on managing your time well that you eat the same thing for uh lunch every day is it something unique in these people i think i think that it what is unique is um is that when they are switched on they are really really switched on i think what they've realized is that the true magic to success in business and actually in life is the attention to those tiny details.

25:22And it's a habit. You know, I saw some research recently that said that we spend 43 % of our life on autopilot, right? Which means that 43 % of the time, we're not consciously thinking about what we're doing, right? Whether it's driving a car, going for a run, I don't know, collecting the kids from school, cooking dinner or whatever. But actually, the reason why that is really important is because when we're out of control of our conscious movement, it's easy to slip into bad habits. Therefore, the only way to stop that from happening is to be really strict about finding good habits and sticking to them.

25:53Like habit formation is the absolute secret source of these high achieving people because they all have the same feelings that we have. You know, I remember speaking to a CEO who said he hated going to the gym. So therefore, the only way that he would do it was to arrange to go with a friend. So he made it social. So that was his trick. I spoke to someone else who said that they were always late for stuff in the morning. so the only way they managed to counteract that was to lay all their clothes out the night before pack their bag the night before we had Shane Parrish on the podcast who wrote the Farnham Street blog he called it positioning so if you're living a life where shit keeps going wrong in the moment don't look at the fact that you were five minutes late for that meeting look at what you didn't do 12 24 36 hours before to make that meeting go as well as possible so instead of saying oh I didn't get that job I must have done a bad interview did you do a bad interview or did you do bad prep like this idea of positioning is a really important thing and I think these high achieving people that we speak to on high performance have often discovered that it's about how you do anything is how you do everything.

26:53Like as soon as you start to do little things in your life, a bit of shit, it bleeds into everything else. And actually it does matter. So if you're the sort of person that closes down all the tabs on your desktop, right, when you finished working, so it's nice and neat and whatever, it doesn't feel like much in the moment. If you're the kind of person that makes your bed first thing in the morning, when you get out of it, it feels like nothing. If last thing at night, and this is something that we saw on Instagram, Harriet and myself, was this person put a video on Instagram saying, if you make your kitchen look like a restaurant kitchen, like how they cleaned out at the end of a service shift, it would be transformational.

27:26And Harriet said, right, from now on, our kitchen, at the end of the day, because it can be carnage, right, with busy lives, leave it looking like a restaurant kitchen for in the morning. Those things don't feel like very big things in the moment, right? But actually, they are constant tiny reminders to you that that is the level that you do shit. That is the, that is the attention to detail that you bring to the world because it's no good bringing a massive attention to detail when you're doing a huge business pitch. But then when you get home at night, kicking your shoes off, leaving them on the floor, eating some food, leaving it by the sofa, not putting the bins out, like all of that stuff makes you feel like you're the kind of person that doesn't quite get things right.

28:05And I think it sits at the back of your brain. Whereas that attention to detail is a daily reminder that you're the person that pays attention to tiny details. So Van Halen used to have in their rider that they wanted the brown M &Ms removed from their dressing room, right? And obviously you can look at that and think, absolute bellends. People basically said they were divas, they had odd preferences, like look at the excesses of rock stardom. These guys have absolutely lost it. Some people in the world have got nothing to eat and there's a band refusing to eat brown M &M's. But David Lee Roth then did an interview in like 2011, 2012 at some time, where he basically said, if you're going to work with Van Halen, we don't want you to be the kind of promoter that doesn't read the rider properly and misses something significant like that.

28:50So if they found brown M &M's in the M &M's in their dressing room, it was actually just a sign that their promoter hadn't paid attention to detail. So if that's the case, how well have they checked the sound equipment to make sure Van Halen sound absolutely shit hot when they walk out? How careful have they been about making sure health and safety has been adhered to so that no one gets injured when they're performing? Like those huge, huge sort of like Van Halen size rock gigs, without attention to the smallest detail, that massive event isn't successful. And I think that is such a powerful story.

29:22And I'd repeat it because I just think it, I think it really matters. And I think it's an underrated, I think it's an underrated part of business and of life. Jake, I want to come back to a topic that you've spoken on quite a lot. You've kind of spoken about the role that luck's played within your career. And again, if we look at kind of some of the interviews that you've done for The Room Where It Happened, you've got Danny Winer who talks about how Gordon Ramsay is actually quite lucky to be able to get that conversation with him. And Will Shue kind of just casually mentions that luck was involved in success but you need to be able to spot the opportunity how key is that for people to really really trust their instincts and kind of be able to back uh themselves to take an opportunity or at least to to entertain that yeah um i think the luck is a very it's a very powerful um conversation to have in a context like this because i know that there are lots of people who will say you know gary player as that famous quote isn't it the harder i work the luckier i get there's a bunch of those sort of quotes that kind of they downplay the importance of luck and they remind you that actually it's about it's about more than that it's about you know how hard you work what is it seneca luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity if indeed seneca did say that doesn't sound very seneca like but that's who people attribute that to i think it's nonsense actually i mean i think you know luck literally comes down to the country that you're born in and the time that you're born in you know i love podcasting if i was born 40 years previously it doesn't fucking matter if I love podcasting.

30:51It didn't exist. I love being a TV presenter and working on Formula One and in football. Well, if someone hadn't created Formula One, there wouldn't have been a job. If I was born into a tiny village in a third world country where just surviving was enough, I would never have been able to follow my dreams to become a TV presenter. If I was born into a family where my parents were abusive, or if I was born with some serious physical or mental issues, then a lot of the things I've done, I wouldn't be able to do. So it kind of frustrates me often when people downplay the role of luck. And I think I know why people like to say that luck isn't the reason why they've been successful.

31:30It's because if you tell people that you're lucky, then you're not able to monetize luck. You're not able to use luck as a kind of a way of making people believe they should follow you and buy into your, you know, your scheme or your system. I see all the time people trying to sell these bloody online courses. As soon as you start saying, well, obviously, the most important thing you need to be successful in business is luck. Someone probably is not going to spend a couple of hundred quid buying your online course. Right. So I think we have to be really careful downplaying the role of luck. But then I think more importantly than that is remembering that without optimism, I don't think that you make the most of those opportunities that come along.

32:08you know I'm an absolute firm believer that for a lot of people some people sadly it's not the case but for a lot of people there are opportunity you know sometimes I get frustrated when I talk about things on social media and someone will fire back with something like yeah but you were lucky enough to learn a lot of things from Eddie Jordan when you did Formula One or oh yeah but you've got a production company that you built with 300 people so of course it's easy for you and I sometimes I don't I sometimes feel like replying and saying yeah but I wasn't born working with Eddie Jordan and Formula One.

32:38I wasn't born as someone who owned a production company. You know, I had a lot of love in my family and was very lucky, but I didn't have any huge opportunity. I just went to a state school in the Norfolk countryside and I was very lucky, right? But also I was an optimist. And I guess one of the most powerful things for me was realizing that failing my A-levels, which led to my first bit of work experience, was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me. And I guess I feel very lucky that that happened because it's a great reminder for me that when things look like they're a disaster or a problem or a roadblock or an issue, like, well, the greatest thing that ever happened to me was the worst thing that ever happened to me at the time.

33:23It turned out to be the best thing. So I just hate this idea that we've all got the same 24 hours in a day and that everybody can do it like that's not the truth you know there are some very challenging circumstances for a lot of people but also your behaviors if you do get the opportunities your behaviors will make the difference regarding whether you take those opportunities or not few people if any jake have been able to talk to and explore leaders and successful people at the top of business and sport as much as you have so i'm really fascinated to know what they can learn from each other both sport from business and business from sport so i said actually to i'm i know the ceo at liverpool Football Club, a really great guy called Billy Hogan.

34:01I sent him the high performance episode with Triple H, Paul Levesque today and just said, I think there's loads that you'll be able to pick out of this. I think that the biggest thing that business can learn from sport is that you're selling an experience to people, right? When someone goes and watches a Liverpool Football Club game, obviously the result matters, but they're buying an experience. When someone goes and watches a WrestleMania, they're buying an experience. And I think that we live in a world now where we want things a little bit less than we ever wanted them before but i think we want experiences and we want to connect into human emotion greater than ever before so i think the biggest thing actually that business can learn from sport is how you stir the soul if i've got a t-shirt for sale right and it's a black t-shirt and i say it's ten dollars and someone might go okay i'm not sure but if i go i've got this t-shirt for sale you know and it's um organic cotton and it's been ethically sourced and my dad ran an amazing t-shirt company in the 1920s and I've used exactly the same patterns that he used and like it's a recreation of something incredible if I think of the businesses that I love an example of a business like that is private white VC you know they operate from a beautiful mill in Manchester where they've been making clothes for decades I think adding stories adding experiences stirring people's emotions is the most important thing that we can do in business and often people ask me why they think high performance and the whisper group have been successful i think that we are masters at at stirring people's emotions at getting people excited it's the thing that i love most about sport is that you can take people from the world they're in and put them into another world entirely in the space of just a couple of seconds um very few things unite and divide like sport does it's absolutely incredible and business can learn a lot from it jake thank you so much for your time is there anything else you want to add on top of what we've spoken about?

35:51No, I don't think so. I mean, I think the biggest thing that I want to leave people thinking about really is, you know, I think we live in a world where there's so much criticism, so much negativity, there's so much bad news that it's very easy to think that it's never been harder, it's never been more challenging, you know, whether it's the geopolitical climate, whether it's the cost of living, whether it's the advent of AI and all the criticism and negativity around how AI is being used and what it's going to do to us. I think it's easy to get brought down, knocked down. But I would honestly say, I don't believe that the world has ever been more exciting.

36:25I think the opportunities are greater than ever before. People come to me all the time and say, I really want to be on the television. And my first answer is, I say, well, why not? Why not you? Like someone has to be creating content in a few years. And then I say, but by the way, don't just look at television. Like when I was 18, you had, if I wanted to be a broadcaster, let's say I had to get a job. The only way to be a broadcaster was to get a job. It's not the case now. Create a podcast, set up a YouTube channel, do something on your Instagram. You know, people are buying into people more than ever before.

36:53People are able to connect and reach and discuss their views and their ideas with people around the world more than ever before. The world is smaller than ever before. Technology means that information is cheaper than ever before. The cost of entry for most businesses is lower than it's ever been before. So be optimistic, be optimistic and understand that actually you don't live in the worst time. I honestly believe that largely we live in the best time.

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