#47: CLOSER with Steven Bartlett: Live in Singapore

0:00Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Who We Are podcast. I am so excited to finally share this one with you. You know how sometimes you have a conversation that stays with you, the kind that shifts something inside or makes you see things a little differently? That's exactly what this afternoon with Steven Bartlett felt like. When I first started Closer, it was about creating a space for real, honest, soul-level conversations. the kind that remind us who we are beneath all the noise all the doing and the roles we play Having Stephen with us in Singapore felt like that vision came alive in the most beautiful way We didn't just talk about work or success We talked about the things that really matter the moments that shape us the fears we carry and the truths we're still learning to live by And to every one of you who was there with us that afternoon Thank you so much for being there Truly your energy, your presence, the way you leaned in You made the afternoon what it was This episode isn't a full conversation But it's a glimpse into some of the moments that moved us most I hope something you hear in it stays with you And maybe even shifts something in you The way it did for me and so many others So wherever you're listening from Take a breath, lean in and come a little closer.

1:27This is Closer with Stephen Bartlett. You know, before we dive deeper into your journey, the businesses and the podcast, could you take us back to the very beginning, Steve? Because so much of who you are today as a person, as a leader, was shaped long before the world knew your name. So what parts of childhood, Stephen, still shapes the way you lead and live today? It's a really tricky question because we're all kind of, we're all kind of constructing a recollection of the past that suits and serve who we are today in some way and I'm most certainly doing that I would say the things that I've reconstructed to make sense of the way that I am are that I we were the only black family in an all-white area which is one reference point um the other thing is we were the poor family in the middle class area and then I'd say my parents just not being around and with the with those three things what I think you have is a young kid that really cares about fitting in and having money and being successful because that would be that would validate him you have parents that gave me so much space to conduct my own experiments to figure out how to validate myself which meant starting businesses when I was 12 and 13 and 14 and I think in that you end up having room to experiment and fail and failure is feedback and feedback makes knowledge and confidence if um if you interpret the failure well and knowledge is power.

2:52So I think really the defining, the reason why I'm sat here, if there was one thing, it would be that I, at a very young age, was forced to acquire self-belief. And that is like the most important force in the world, I think. I have heard you also contrasted yourself to your brothers, whom you say are geniuses, academic geniuses and you also mentioned that your edge versus them is your self-belief how important has self-belief and also the self-story that you tell yourself been a part of your journey i think so my brothers were really academically brilliant so when i say academically brilliant i mean my brother was on the he's a year older than me and he was on the front page of the local newspaper because he rewrites the textbooks in school to make them harder because they weren't hard enough.

3:39And that's, so that's Jason who works in my company now. My older brother is even smarter than both of us. I remember he fell in, he like fell in love with this Spanish girl when we were, when I was about 12 and he was 16 and he taught him, he said to me, I can teach myself to speak Spanish in four weeks. He was number one in the world on RuneScape, which was a video game that some of you will be familiar with. He's that smart. Like his brain is different. And so then you had me who wasn't good at maths, wasn't good at English, wasn't good at school, got kicked out of school, then unexpelled because I was making this school a lot of money.

4:13And so I think from a very young age, I'd like, I realized because I was comparing myself to them, that if I was going to be successful, like I assumed they would be, then I would have to go down this other path. Like university wasn't going to do it because I wasn't good in school. There would have to be this other way of doing it. And for me, that became business. And I say like, I say self-belief is the most important thing because I think if you were really clear on how hard it is to be successful in something, if you weren't somewhat delusional, a rational person wouldn't try. And so I was irrational.

4:47And that's kind of the extreme side of self-belief. I remember being 14 years old and genuinely believing that if someone told me to get to the moon within a week, my my default was there is a way and I think like like maths English I get it it matters but I think that macro tailwind of believing things are possible really can send you to incredible places and you and you learn that by edging out of your zone of comfort everybody in this room right now is in a positive confidence reinforcing spiral or a negative confidence reinforcing spiral where like you try something at 14 it kind of goes well and you get some positive feedback so you're more likely to try things and even if you don't do well in them you'll interpret them more positively and this starts this confidence spiral that goes up and up and up the opposite is also true you can find yourself having your confidence knocked at some point in your life by something or someone which means you're less likely to raise your hand and try something which means that even when you do you're going to interpret that it went worse and then this confidence spiral goes downwards.

5:58And talking about delusion earlier, do you think entrepreneurs and founders tend to walk the line, the fine line between vision and madness? How important do you think a healthy sense of delusion is for us as founders? Yeah, I no longer see it as delusion because I have realized this remarkable thing that the world is malleable, that you can bend it and you can play with it. And I've also now realized what it takes to do that. And it takes someone who, like a lot of this sounds a little bit cliche, but it first takes someone that believes that it is. So if you don't believe what I just said is true, forget it.

6:39Like if you don't believe that the world, your life is malleable, you can kind of bend it in the way that you want to, forget it. Stop here and do whatever you were doing before. But if you accept that to be true, as I've like realized now over the last 15 years, then one of the prerequisites of bending the world in whatever direction you want to bend it is in your heart of hearts, really wanting your life and the thing that you have in your mind to exist. And this is what people call passion, like really, really wanting it. Not you want to get paid or you want to be rich or you want Instagram followers, but like the type of delusion that means that when your mother disowns you, like my mother did, or you're shoplifting food, like I was shoplifting food, you keep going.

7:28You know, like Rocky, I was reading, I was just writing my book and I was writing this story of Sylvester Stallone. Do you know Sylvester Stallone? Yes. You know, the actor, the famous actor. And I was reading the story that almost nobody knows about, which is in like 19, I think it was like 1980, he was completely, completely broke and he was trying to be an actor and everybody was shutting him out. And he gets so, at one point, he's so poor that he makes the unthinkable decision to sell his puppy. Now he's in love with this puppy. His puppy's called Butkins. He makes the decision to sell his puppy.

8:01So he goes to a 7-Eleven superstore and stands outside the store until someone will buy his puppy off him for$40. He then goes home. And a couple of weeks later he sat on his couch and he sees the um Muhammad Ali fight with uh I think it's called Ray Jr. back then and so he sees the fight it's this incredible fight he writes a script for that fight which we now know is Rocky and he goes out and tries to get the movie studios to buy it and they offer him$25 ,000 but he can't be the actor because he's got a drooping face and he's got a speech impediment. He says no. They offer him$50 ,000. He says no.

8:38They offer him$200 ,000. This is a guy that has no money and just sold his puppy. And he says no. He says, I want to be an actor. Eventually, one movie studio said, we'll give you$25 ,000, which is much less than others were offering, but we'll let you be an actor. And that film went on to gross half a billion dollars and made him. And you just, as I look through history, this is what you see. You see that the most successful people in our society, the people that I spend my time interviewing, at some point early in their journey, realized that dignity or embarrassment was less important than their dream, than who they wanted to be.

9:17And that is the life force energy. I think that's required to bend the world in the direction you want to bend it. And are you willing to do that? Are you willing to be embarrassed? And all of these early days also shaped and developed in you, such drive, resilience. And I want to double click on your businesses. When you started social chain in 2014, and it grew to become one of Europe's biggest agencies and companies, you brought it to a valuation of hundreds of millions, took it public, and then you stepped away from the company. What was that season in your life like?

9:57Hmm. I think the most interesting thing here, and like generally, if you looked at the last 15 years of my life, the most interesting thing is when and how I quit things. And I'm 33 now, and I feel like I've lived so many lives because I think I'm very, very good at quitting. And quitting is not a glamorous thing. In society, if you go to a gym, I was at a gym this morning, you see on the wall, it says, don't give up, all that cliche stuff. But it's terrible advice. It's such terrible advice. I mean, even logically, we all know to start something new, which everybody celebrates and all your friends congratulate you for you have to quit something else you can't start a new job until you've quit another job you can't start a new marriage until you've left the last one so I think I think quitting is actually a much harder skill knowing when to quit and you know stop going to school when I realized that that wasn't going to get me to where I wanted to go which is why they kicked me out and then unexpelled me when I made the money university lasted one day started a company I did that for two years raised money and at some point I realized that we were wrong and my investors didn't want to go left, so I left and I started Social Chain, which was the vision that I thought we should pursue in that company.

11:07Did Social Chain for about six, seven years of my life, had hundreds of employees around the world. I'm successful now. Got tens of millions of dollars in my bank account and net worth and we're 10 days away from raising another 20, 30 million dollars to uplist to this big stock exchange, which would see the company rise to 600 million dollars in value. and I quit. And the reason I quit is because I think in life you have to, you have to, your relationship with uncertainty will define your entire life. And if you're like really bad with uncertainty, if you're the type of person that needs the answer, needs the branch that you're going to swing to, the type of person that can't jump off the tree without the branch being within reach, you'll end up overstaying your welcome in situations that are no longer serving you.

11:58And some people stay there for a year, five years, 20 years. In fact, when people talk about the biggest regrets they have in their life, when they're dying on their death beds, as some palliative nurses find out, the number one regret is the regret of not living the life that I knew I could have lived, had I not been so scared. And so quitting is this, you know, it's this unbelievable weapon that the most successful people I interview all seem to have in common is they're able to choose uncertainty over certain misery. And so that was it for me. I'd reached the end of my quitting framework. I was on the right side of my mental quitting framework where something wasn't working for me.

12:38It sucked. The next question in my quitting framework is, do I believe I can make this situation not suck? If it sucks and you believe there's nothing you can do to make it not suck, you should quit. But if you think there is something you can do to make it not suck. The next question becomes, is the effort it would take to make it not suck worth the thing on the other side, the relationship on the other side, the job on the other side? If you fixed it, would it be worth the effort to fix it? And in my situation, I figured I probably could fix it, but the effort it would take was no longer worth the rewards for me in that company, I'd lost control of my company.

13:22I no longer was the majority shareholder. The board of directors were calling the shots. And so for me, it was over and I didn't have a plan B. But sometimes you need to give yourself some space for the plan B to emerge. And that's what happened. And then that's really when I started the diary of a CEO and my other companies. I love that. And the quitting framework you share so extensively is also found in your first book. and that has been a very helpful framework as well. Stephen, you talk about plan Bs and having no plan Bs. One of the things you say that in order for us to be truly successful, we have to be plan A thinkers, wherein we have to burn the boats, no fallback plan, and wholly focus on what's on hand.

14:05Could you unpack that more for us? Yeah, I think the easiest way to unpack this is by telling you about a study that I read many years ago where they got two groups of students and they allowed one group of the students to think about other ways they could win the prize that they would get from completing a puzzle before they did the puzzle. So I think, you know, down the hallway, there's a vending machine which also sells this particular piece of chocolate. And then the other group, they didn't let them think about other ways they could get the reward. And all they did was time how long each group worked on the puzzle.

14:40And unsurprisingly, they found that the group that wasn't thinking about a plan B spent significantly longer trying to solve the problem than the group that had a second thought about how they could win that prize. And so I think sometimes as you see through history, when you hear about the wars that took place in Asia or Peru or South America, a lot of the great generals, they would sail into the region and then they would ask the soldiers to burn the boats. And they did that because they knew that if there's no way back, then all your energy is forward. And I think the same in my life. There's been so many occasions where I've made a decision to jump in a certain direction, like quitting university or quitting my companies, knowing that actually thinking through a plan B might not be the best thing for me.

15:24And that actually channeling all my force forward was the correct thing to do. You know, a lot of us think of growth and progress as working harder where we are. But you said that context matters more than skills, wherein a skill set can be worth$50 in one market, but millions in another. Why is that so? And how can we know as leaders whether we're playing in the right arena? Yeah. So it's just a realization that I had when I left my last company. So when I left Social Chain and I had this set of skills. So I had these social media marketing skills. And with social media marketing skills, you can do many things.

16:01You can go in, sell Pepsi, or you can go and sell fashion dresses, etc. You can go and start an agency business. And then I went to this, a friend of mine called Christian was a biotech entrepreneur, and he did about 10 IPOs a year. And so he was IPO-ing a company that's the leading company in psychedelics. They use psychedelics to cure mental health disorders. And he brought me into his company because I was really curious about psychedelics. And when I told him about the skills that I had, I had social media skills, I'm good at growing audiences and making content. He told me that those skills were unbelievably rare in biotech because it's basically all scientists.

16:42So when they made me the first offer to be a consultant for six months, it was worth eight million pounds. And it made me, I had this wonderful realization because I obviously accepted the offer and worked on a tie up until the IPO. But even while I was at a tie, we were trying to hire writers that could write about what we were doing and for content on social media. And typically in my last business, a writer would be paid maybe, let's say on the top end, about$50 ,000. At a tie, we were paying writers a quarter of a million dollars. And this is because they had, what life ultimately rewards you for is really like two things.

17:22The first is, are your skills in the industry rare and complementary? And this is what we call skill stacking. So if you want to be the best lawyer in the world, you might think that the game is to learn more and more and more and more law. But that is not what's going to make you the best in the industry or the most valuable person. When you look through history, the people that built the most exceptional companies and had the most success, they had this interesting, rare and complementary stack of skills. If I think about Steve Jobs, he's the prime example. Yes, he's an entrepreneur, but he's not the best in the world.

17:59Yes, he's a visionary, one of the best in the world, but arguably not the best in the world. Yes, he understands computers, but not as good as Steve Wozniak. But then he also had this other interesting range of skills like design and typography. And it just so happened, and I can see all the iPhones in the audience, it just so happened that what that industry valued that was rare and complementary was someone who knew this stuff, but also design and typography. That's why these iPhones were so beautiful, why they were so penetrating, why the UX design, why the fonts, the simplicity, why he removed the keyboard was because he went to that design and typography class when he was at university.

18:39So all of this is to say that if you want to be the very best in your industry, I promise you it has nothing to do with being the very best at one skill. And the mistake we often make is we double down. For so many of you in the audience, the thing that's going to propel you out of your industry and make you a unicorn in your own industry is going and finding adjacent skills in other industries. And actually, I wouldn't be sat here now. Like if you think about two of the entrepreneurs online that a lot of people follow. Two of them are me and my friend Gary Vaynerchuk. Do you know Gary Vaynerchuk?

19:12Yes, he was here. The reason you know Gary Vaynerchuk and me is because we both have one skill in our skill stack that is rare for an entrepreneur. It's not because I'm the best entrepreneur. There are far better entrepreneurs out there. It's because me and Gary Vaynerchuk had this really rare and complementary skill that most CEOs don't have. It is our ability to build an audience on the internet and that comes from the fact that me and Gary Vaynerchuk both ran the same business. We both ran social media marketing agencies. So is it a little bit coincidental that two of the entrepreneurs that you know in the world are those that ran social media marketing agencies?

19:49Well, it's because we have that in our skill stack. So we could build a digital stage for ourselves to convey our own messages and everything followed from there. But the entrepreneur out there that doesn't have that one thing in their skill stack but is a better entrepreneur and maybe has better advice and better lived experience, probably won't be invited here. And so in your own industry, I would do a lot of work to think about what the rare and complementary skills that your industry is going to value in the future. And it's not the obvious ones. Stephen, you have had the privilege of being on Dragon's Den as one of the dragons, and that is the Shark Tank of UK.

20:26You have also seen so many different founders, There's so many different pitches. And even you shared earlier how you made a snap decision to invest in a business earlier. What do you look for when you are looking to invest? Is it the market? Is it the model? Or is it the psychology of the founder? So interestingly, I made a test which I give to everybody who we hire, which is just the 33 questions to answer. And I also use this test on founders. These 33 questions endeavor to figure out if you're aligned with me, but also I've had my best executives in my company take this test. It scores you out of 100 and my best performing executives all score over 50 out of 100.

21:11However, a member of the general public, how many people are here now? About 290. Okay, so one in 200 people scores above 50. So which means that there's one person, roughly, in this audience that would score above 50 and therefore be very aligned to me and my company culture. And some of the questions that it tests for is one of them I mentioned earlier, which is when things go bad, which is something you can guarantee is going to happen in business often, whether you're an entrepreneur working in a company, things are going to go bad. How do you respond? and the way that we test people on this is we put them into real life scenarios that have happened in our business and we ask them to pick one of four options of how they would respond in that moment and i know you think like people would know what to say but the questions are really unobvious what the correct answer is and are they multiple choice yeah okay wow and so i'll give you i'll give you an example of a question um you land into new york city and you're filming with a major podcast guest the next day.

22:16You don't have cameras. It's July 4th. And you didn't realize that on July 4th in America, all the shops are shut. What do you do? You need cameras. This major guest is coming tomorrow. What do you do? And the options are you can call the guest and ask them to bring cameras. You can not tell them and hope you'll figure it out and find a way. You can film on an iPhone. And these are the kind of answers you give. And we ask, what would you do? And the correct answer in that situation, because it actually happened to us, is we'll figure it out and we'll find a way. You know, and some people that, you know, and so, or the fourth option is you cancel it.

22:56And surprisingly, it's about, the answers to that question are evenly distributed. About 30 % of people would just cancel it. A smaller percentage of people would film on an iPhone. Some people would ask the guests to bring their own cameras, which I think is embarrassing. and you don't know what they're going to bring so you can't really control the situation but the correct answer and actually what happened on that day when we landed into new york and we didn't know it was july 4th and americans don't do anything on that day is we figured it out we figured out and we had eight cameras that are the same as our ones in the uk there the same day and when mr beast was due on my show mr beast was a guest i wanted to have on the show for a long time and he calls me that morning after three months of planning and tells me he's missed his private jet and can no longer get to LA.

23:42My team is so indoctrinated under this belief that no means figure out. No means try harder. That Mr. Beast recorded the podcast with us that day at 3 a.m. in the morning, but we figured it out. And that belief, it's such a compounding force because bad things are gonna happen to you all the time. And so you can't control that, but what you can control is your response to those bad things. and you can cultivate a culture within an organization where you get excited by bad things. Because you know this is an opportunity that life has thrown at you to do things that most people, 74 % of people would probably not do.

24:23And that's beginning the compounding curve. So that's one of them. And the other one, I'll give you one more. I guess, you know, this is unpopular, but I guess hard work. Because people can say what they like. Like they can try and convince me that hard work doesn't matter. Hard work absolutely does matter. It just does matter. And I only hear that hard work doesn't matter on LinkedIn, but I don't hear that from the really successful people, the 500 people that I've interviewed. Not one of them has told me that sheer hours that you put into something really matters. And yeah, and there's something really, there's something to be said for giving something your shower thoughts.

25:07It's what I say all the time when my team asks me if I want to hire a consultant or someone that's part-time, my response is nearly always, I want their shower thoughts. So much of the work, the thinking, the creativity, the understanding goes on outside of the office when someone's walking the dog or at the gym or in the shower. So much of the processing that happens in your subconscious mind takes place when you're asleep, in the shower. And so to the point I'm making, it's just someone who's really going to be obsessed with solving this. Because again, it's personal to them. You know, Stephen, on that note also, you have built and grown businesses from teams from zero to 700.

25:46What has been your hardest leadership lessons on building teams, a great culture and company? I think the hardest and the most important lesson, if there's anything I say today that has a chance of changing the trajectory of both your personal life and your romantic life, but mainly your business life, it is this. It is the realization that took me 15 years to figure out that the whole game that I'm playing is recruitment. The whole game I'm playing is recruitment. Like think about everything you want to build in your life. Think about every good idea that's ever been had in your company. Every idea that my podcast has had that meant that it grew quickly.

26:29Where did it all come from? It came from a human's brain. Hiring and people is upstream from everything. But founders, remarkably in my portfolio, spend so long on their product. They spend so long on their marketing, on their ideas. they go to the office on Saturday and Sunday and think that's the way to win. But as I just said, the thing at the top of the stream should at least be getting 20 to 30 hours a week. It should at least be getting as much time as things further down the stream. But if you looked at the 50 founders that I've invested in, if you looked at their calendar, what you find is they might be spending one hour a week of the 100 or maybe at max five hours.

27:13the truly, truly exceptional founders that have built$100 billion companies that I've interviewed, like Brian Chesky, who built Airbnb, or my friend Daniel Eck, who built Spotify, they all say, like, when I was 20, I didn't think hiring and culture mattered that much. When I was 30, I thought it was important. And now at 40, I realize it's the most important thing. And if something is a priority, you don't just nod at me. I should look at your calendar and see that you've allocated your time against that priority because the greatest and only expression of a priority is the allocation of time.

27:48It is not you saying it. So when you look at my allocation of time, I just said to you on a Saturday, an 18-year-old kid that's interesting will message me and I'll send him my phone number and speak to him. I spend a disgusting, weird amount of time on hiring. I own a recruitment company. I have Spencer Stewart exec search firm working for me doing exec search across the United States. I have a chapter two company I partially own doing exec search for me across the United States. I have an in-house recruitment team led by a guy called Andrew. And I'm still spending my time when I landed in Singapore yesterday on the flight and tonight when I leave here, hiring people, interviewing, going on LinkedIn and sending cold messages.

28:32And even my CEO of my media company, she tells this story that I posted on LinkedIn saying I was hiring for a role. she sent an email she sent a response to it and within 15 minutes I'd booked myself into her calendarly and she was like it won't be him he won't he won't and it was me of course it's me it's the most important thing and I you know there's so many secrets I have in business like things that we do that give us like ridiculously unfair advantages that we found out that I would never tell an audience of people like there are there's so many things but I'm so comfortable saying this to people because people just don't, even if you say it, they still end up hiring their friend Dave because Dave wants to work here.

29:12It's remarkable. I'll say this to my founders in my portfolio. I'll say, in two years from now, you're going to come to me and you're going to say I messed up. And the reason you messed up was because when it came to choosing who you were going to build this company with, you didn't aim high enough. You aimed at people that you could manage because they were younger than you and less experienced and you were a little bit insecure. and you're going to tell me in two years time when we sit down that you regret that and it's caused you so many problems and that your business is on fire and now it's time to fix that.

29:41The right thing to do is to take a minute and think about who you want to join this company, like who you think could join this company, the caliber of person, and then burn that, throw it in the bin and aim up there. Go against your intuition. And this is like something that I've had to do even recently, I go against my own intuition. I think to myself, Stephen, you've been successful. People listen to your podcast. I think you could hire someone there. And then I remind myself that historically, I've always aimed too low. Even when I've had great people, I should have aimed even higher. Someone once said to me, when you're making an offer or you're hiring someone, they should be so unbelievably good that you're holding yourself back from laughing at the fact that you're inviting them to join you on your mission and that's what I did so I'm building this new holding company now we've raised 25 million dollars at a 400 million valuation and I and with this in mind I went on LinkedIn and I was like fuck it I'll message the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world asking them to leave those companies and come and join me And so that's what I did.

30:53I just went down LinkedIn. I sent 20 messages. These names are laughable. Like the former CEO of TikTok, Kevin, got a DM from me. And most of them won't respond. But maybe one will. And I only need one. And this is the game. The game is to aim way beyond where your gut tells you to aim in all facets, with your valuations, with the people you're hiring. And it will change your life. but this thing about hiring, the definition of the word company is group of people. That is what you're building, a group of people. Self-confidence is the collision of your current information with new information one step outside of your zone of comfort.

31:35And I posted this video recently, which is a really nice metaphor for this, which is this video of an ant. And they put this ant on a piece of paper and someone gets a biro and draws a circle around this ant. And for some reason the ant won't leave the circle. Like it won't run across the biro. And then they make it smaller and smaller and the ant is trapped. And you can see from your bird's eye view as a human that that circle is just a figment of the ant's imagination. That it's not trapped, it just thinks it is. And then there's another video, they do the same with this little spider. Put it on this piece of paper, draw a biro circle around it and it thinks it's trapped.

32:10And then as they're making the biro circle smaller and smaller, you watch the spider just step over the biro accidentally because it's so small. And then it just runs off the page. And the guy's trying to trap it again, and it can never be trapped by Byron ever again. It's realized that that is just a figment of its imagination. And this goes to all of you and me, because you and me have both drawn imaginary circles around us based on our childhood or based on people like us and how far they tend to get based on our parents and how far they've gone. And it's an imaginary figment of your imagination that is holding you back.

32:47And the only way one can discover that it was a figment of your imagination is to test that wall out to see if it's made of paper. It's to do exactly what the spider did and then you can never be trapped again. And then you're just in another circle, which you then have to step over again. And that is the story of my life. And this goes back to what I said about hiring. Or I said a second ago that I've looked back historically and realized that every single time I thought that was the level that I could hire someone at, I've been historically wrong. So now the assumption is that all of these paper walls that surround me are in fact made of paper and I need to push on them to check that they're real.

33:25I've been writing a lot about this idea of paper walls because it's so fascinating to me, but just history is scattered with all these examples of exceptional people figuring out that an idea was in fact just total rubbish. I'm wondering which one to tell you about. I think the founder of Zara is a good example. Because in the fashion industry, there was basically one way to be successful. It was to basically be a mystic. It was to guess what fashion people wanted to wear and then send it into production and wait nine months and hope that by autumn, the thing you predicted was going to be in fashion.

34:01And then you have the founder of Zara come along and say, why? Why do we do it that way? why can't I just look at the street see what's hot on the streets of Milan now and have it on a shelf in 14 days and people hit him with all the paper walls you can't do that we need production times we need designers it could never be possible and he asked over and over again yes but why but why but why but why and as you push on those paper walls you realize that they were just tradition and preference that no one had bothered to push on because they didn't want to be rude they don't want to upset the apple cart and i had this in my business recently where's alex alex is over there so me and alex we shoot this youtube channel called behind the diary which some of you might have seen and we've hired this animator who was at one of my other companies and he's based in the philippines and we need to publish every sunday right so we need like the animation to take two days and so i spoke to the animator in a group chat that alex and will are in and I said, how long does it take you to animate a 30 minute video?

35:02He said to me, it takes nine days. And I was writing the chapter about paper walls at this time. So I knew what to say. Something most people don't say. Can you guess what I said? I said, why? And do you know what he said? He said, because I've got an old laptop. He said, if I got a new laptop, which costs$2 ,000, it would take a day and a half. He said, most of the time is wasted rendering the video on this old laptop. So let's get this straight. $2 ,000 would save me seven days, potentially for the next 10 years working with this guy. But I never would have found out because people don't offer up.

35:44They don't know themselves that they're living in paper walls unless you interrogate it. And so this has become my religion. And it's so funny because Alex, he joined my team and he heard me talking about this idea of paper balls and he was on a phone call and the guy on the is like you know when you make those tele-sales phone calls and someone tells you something's going to take four weeks they need to speak to Dave and Joanna and he said to me and he can tell you the story himself he said he just said to the guy why and the guy explained he said well could you could you just I actually don't care about that so you could you just do it now he said the guy went yeah I'll be right back and did it now and think about the time you can save across every area of your life in your business, with your team, if you all have this culture of just assuming that the things you might be being told about delays and timelines and what is and what isn't possible might just be made of paper.

36:33You know, one of the questions that you shared that has been transformational for you, Stephen, is that what is the psychological discomfort that I'm avoiding? And that is, to me, interesting, thought-provoking and very counterintuitive because it's not something we would naturally ask ourselves. Why has that question been so transformational for you? Do you know the answer? Well, I got it from Nia. I stole it from his book. I interviewed him on the podcast ages ago in my old New York office. And he said that to me. And it really changed how I think about procrastination. Because I didn't understand procrastination before.

37:07Is Nia speaking today? No. Nia, I feel like you should make this point. Can you come and make this point? Can you come and make the point? You're much better at speaking about procrastination. Why would I try and put you there? Let's give it up on Nia. All right. Appreciate it. So this is super weird. I did not have this in my bingo card today when I came to hear you speak. Yeah, so this is a paper wall right now, what I'm experiencing right now. You can't just come to an event to hear someone super famous speak, and then he will call you to come up to speak. I did not plan on that. Let's see.

37:40So the root cause of procrastination, the root cause of distraction is not a moral failing. It's not some kind of flaw with your brain for the most part. Nothing is broken about you. But rather, distraction and procrastination begins from within. It's not just about our phones. It's not the pings, the dings, the rings. It turns out that distraction begins from what we call these internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. So boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, that is the source of over 90 % of our distractions. And so when it comes to why do I procrastinate, it's not that, oh, this is hard or, oh, I can't do this.

38:28It's that I don't feel like it, right? It's just a feeling. So to me, that's incredibly empowering that when I realized, wait a minute, this is just a feeling. It's just an uncomfortable emotional state. Then I can find the tools, to do something about that discomfort as opposed to just giving up. By scrolling it away, by clicking it away, by drinking it away, I can rather do things that move me towards traction rather than distraction. And sometimes when you hear a message or you read a book, like I heard this from Nir and read his book, you interpret it in a, I interpret it, the way that I interpreted it was essentially whenever I'm feeling procrastination, when there's something that I know I need to do, like you know you need to do that essay or that difficult piece of work or start writing the book, but you end up cleaning the house instead.

39:16Because the reason why that happens is because there's something about that task that is causing you some kind of psychological discomfort, like that emotional discomfort. And the way that I've learned from Nia to overcome that is by basically calling it out. So when it comes to writing my book, the reason why I'm cleaning the house and running the hoover around like a madman is because I don't know where to start with the book. I haven't done the research yet. And so without calling it out, in your head, it feels like Mount Everest. But the minute I start calling out specifically what it is that's making me feel uncomfortable, suddenly Mount Everest becomes this little pebble that I have to work on.

39:57And I did this, I've just started writing my book in Cape Town and I was procrastinating about it. So I remembered what Nia said. And as I was tempting myself to clean the house, I said, why are you avoiding this, Stephen? Say it out loud. And it was, again, I've not structured the book. I don't know what titles I'm going to use. I actually don't even know what the title of this bloody book is. I then also don't know, like, I need to do some research. I'm going to need to look back at those Diary of a CEO interviews and find the transcripts. And when I laid out all that, I go, okay, so what's the starting point?

40:24Well, the starting point, of course, is opening a document and writing the title. So that's what was my objective today. And that's not intimidating. And the minute you have some traction, you have the opposite of distraction. And traction was writing the title. So that's kind of like the way I inferred it. Is that like broadly accurate? That's perfect. And you're my best pupil. I love that you're doing that. So keep it up. Can I go now? Yes, you do. Thanks, everybody. Thank you so much. I appreciate you calling me out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I want to also ask you, Stephen, what your relationship with mortality is, because I know that you also have send timers, hourglasses, in different parts of your house and your studio to remind you that time is limited.

41:07Yeah, I think it goes, I mean, you can tell I'm an impatient person from the whole thing I said about paper walls and pretty much everything that I've said so far. You can tell that I think the allocation of your time is the most important thing. If you got eight hours sleep last night, which I hope you did, then you woke up today with 16 hours left and you can think about these hours I talk about this my first book kind of like poker chips roulette chips and you're stood above the roulette table of life when you woke up this morning with 16 chips and how you place these chips is basically going to determine all of your outcomes over the long and short term in the areas of your life that matter the most and what ends up happening is we we can become really unintentional with the placement of our chips.

41:55You place them on the roulette table of life and the wheel spins and you find out every single day what you've won from the bets that you've made with these chips. But it is the chips. Are you going to put two of them on your friends and family? One of them on that project you want to start? Or are you going to put four of them on Netflix? One of them on TikTok? One of them on some other social media app? It's the placement of these chips. And so I think a lot about, especially as I've gotten older, to be just incredibly intentional about placing them against things that I truly value that are going to move me in the direction of the person that I want to be.

42:28And this doesn't mean extreme productivity because, you know, I was in New York last week and I placed a bunch of chips on talking to my girlfriend for two and a half hours about babies and kids and all those kinds of things and family planning. And then we went for dinner and there's no like direct ROI from that, but it brings me closer to the life that I want and the values that I hold true. So it's just about being intentional. And I think the framework that you have 16 chips a day and the allocation of them is going to determine your life over the near and the long term helps you be a bit more selective and say no to the things that you don't want to do.

43:13If you could issue a challenge to everyone here, maybe one practice, one shift, or one experiment, what would it be? Yeah, the thing that I would say is the world is changing really, really quickly, and that can be incredibly anxiety-inducing. It also makes the correct answer, if you're an entrepreneur, a creative, or a founder, really difficult to grab hold of because the correct answer is also changing very quickly. And this isn't something that I just think and feel. If you look at futurists that plot the rate of change in the world, if you're 40 now by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in about 11 days.

43:52If you're 11 now, by the age of 60, you'll experience it in an even shorter time frame. The point here is that the correct answer to whatever you're doing in your career is going to change faster as we proceed through time in history because of the rate of change in technology. So what do we do about that? How do we find the right answer? There was a young lady that came up to me a second ago when I was backstage and she runs a jewelry business, I believe. Was it you? And you asked me, you asked me, didn't you? You said, you said, look, I'll sacrifice the photo. If you can just tell me like the one thing, the one thing that you need to know as a jewelry entrepreneur.

44:32The question, as I, as I heard it was, you said like, what's the thing? What's the one thing? And I said to you backstage, I was like, the question to ask me is more like, how do I find the thing? And I say that because the analogy I'd give is like, I can either give you a fish, I can tell you what the thing is today, and that'll feed you today. Or I give you the fishing rod, which means that you can go and fish for yourself forever. And the fishing rod here is the like, what's the process to finding the answer? How do I find the fish myself? And the answer in your business, but really in everybody's business here, is that you need to increase your rate of experimentation and failure.

45:13And like, what does this mean practically? So in your business, you're probably thinking about what to call it. And then you're thinking about, well, you probably know, right? But some people are thinking about what to call it. Like some people in this audience might be writing a book and they're thinking about what to title it. Some of you, and in your business, you might be thinking about the correct marketing channel. You might be thinking about the pieces to manufacture that will sell the best. You might even be thinking, do people want this at all? You have all of these questions. And what everyone in this room will do, I reckon 99 % of this room will do, is they will guess on every one of those decisions.

45:47And if you guess, and I'm like a serial experimenter, we've got a head of failure and experimentation in my team, I can tell you the variance sometimes on a guess is like 2 ,000 % variance. So you're back at the roulette table. You're just hoping that chance falls your way. The other approach, which is the approach that we take, is we completely kill the guessing. We call it killing the guesswork, which means when you're thinking about which pieces to sell, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a mock-up using ChatGPT of the 50 pieces I'm considering selling. And then I'm going to put$2 behind each of them as ads.

46:23And I'm just going to see which ones people click the most. And when they click it, they're going to hit a waiting list that says coming soon and I'm going to grab the email. And from that, I'm going to have 50 pieces of jewelry and I'm going to have five of them, which people are clicking 500 % more than these ones down the bottom, which I might have accidentally gone with if I was just guessing. And I'm going to do that same process across every decision. And I'm going to figure out before I take the risk or buy a thousand units of this piece or make any creative decision, what people actually want.

46:55And this is a new thing we can do now with the internet that we couldn't do 20 years ago. 20 years ago, we couldn't. I test everything. There's like almost nothing. Even my book that I've just written in Cape Town, I knew two years ago what the title was based on the hundred tests we ran with fake books. And the variance between the worst performing topic and the best performing topic is about 1 ,500%. So because I ran a$100 test, theoretically, my book is going to sell 1 ,500 % more copies than someone else who's just at the roulette table going with their vibes and romance. And that's really what it is at the end of the day.

47:35Like people get really romantic and they get really attached to being right. I'm attached to winning. And they're different things. They're different things. If you're romantic as a creative attached to the thing being your way, good luck. You better be some genius or lucky. But even geniuses I know, if you think about their original idea for their business, whether it's Facebook or whether it's Uber, their original ideas are so remarkably different to what they ended up making them a billionaire or super successful. They too have to have humility. So that would be my approach. And this is why in our team, we have an experimentation and failure team.

48:13It's this presumption that I don't know the right answer. And that's why when people ask me, some of you might've been asking me questions in a second in the Q &A, specific tactical questions, I can give you an answer, but that's really not the way you should be thinking about it. You should be thinking about like, what is the fishing rod? how do I continue to find this answer? And it is experimentation. All the great companies, Amazon, Jeff Bezos in his 2015 shareholder letter said, Amazon just needs to be the best place on earth to fail. Booking.com, the hotel booking website, they used to argue about what the correct answer was.

48:46And then one of their employees came to a talk and saw a guy on stage talking about Microsoft and how at Microsoft they do experimentation. So he went back to booking.com and built an experimentation platform where they could just test everything. And that is what they cite with being responsible for much of the success of booking.com. And once you have this mindset shift, you realize that almost everything you're producing and building creatively can be tested in some way. And if you're in a team, installing that culture of experimentation is so amazing. You know, like I remember Will, who's in my team.

49:24He's 23. He's in the team for a couple of weeks. And when he's pitching me an idea for this YouTube channel behind the diary, one of the episodes, he doesn't come to me and say, Steve, I think it should be this. He comes to me 23 years old because he's hung around us enough and goes, Stephen, I've ran all the tests. First words out of his mouth. I've ran all the tests. And here are the top five performers. here are the top five performing titles here are the top five performing thumbnails here are the video assets that have performed the best i think we should do that one that one that one based on the test and obviously in such a scenario when he's got all the evidence i say yeah i agree which makes his life easier too because we don't have to get into the six months debate which most companies get into and end up losing horrendous amounts of time it's a mindset shift to just always assuming you don't have to guess.

50:15The most valuable mistake I think I've made is not firing someone fast enough. So higher slow, fire fast. Yeah. And I think, I think we all know that in, like you all work in a company, probably at least 90 % of you work in a business. And if I, if I asked you to think about anyone in your company, just think of one person in your head right now, anyone. And now ask yourself this question. If everybody in the business was like that person in terms of their attitude, their work ethic, their culture, would the overall standard of the company be maintained, raised, or lowered? Now, if it would be lowered, you must remove that person from the company.

51:03If it'd be maintained, that's the case for potentially training someone. And if it'd be raised, you should promote that person because culture trickles down and it's most contagious downwards. Now, the mistake I made earlier in my career was there was one particular individual who was not clearly bad enough to fire. And this is the problem with like B players in organizations. They're much worse than C players because it's harder to fire a B player. It's less obvious. And so you can kind of gaslight yourself You can say, oh, maybe, you know, you can listen to the words that, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe.

51:39And you can spend years, as I did, kind of gaslighting yourself into thinking that maybe they'll figure it out or maybe they'll change. And it's the biggest cost in business. All the studies show that it only takes one bad apple to upset the basket. And that's the case in business. And so - A B-bet apple. Yeah, and it's actually the first time I experienced anxiety in my life. I was 20, 25. And I realized after two years that I needed to have a really difficult conversation with this person. and I flew to America, took this person to a coffee shop in America. They didn't, they were like, why are you in America?

52:11And they're like, why are we going for coffee? And I had a conversation with them and just said, it's just not working out. And they didn't take it well. But, and my other worry was that when I went back to the team, the team, because this was the leader of the team, the team are going to be destroyed and devastated and all this. I walked in, I told the team, they were like, oh, within five minutes, they're back to work. And then the next day, really interestingly, the junior manager, we all dress like this in my company, very casual. I mean, look at him. He came in wearing a suit jacket and it just showed me how suppressed that team had felt because of him.

52:46And he wore that suit jacket that day to say, to sort of take his leadership and his power back. And it was just the biggest mistake I've made was just not having the conversation sooner in business and in life. Stephen, as we close off the session as well, and based on your whole journey, you've experienced the highest highs, the lowest lows, you've been through the different struggles, the different wins that you have had. What, in your opinion, Stephen makes a well-lived life and what are your final words for all of us here today? I think surprisingly, almost nobody can tell you the answer.

53:21And this is maybe the great beauty of life is that nobody can tell you how to live it. And actually, one of the ways to definitely live it wrong is to believe that someone can tell you how to live it well. Because you're not like me and I'm not like you. You had a certain upbringing, you have certain DNA, certain markers and these little labels on your DNA that turn on and off based on your environment. You have certain trauma. You've seen certain things, which mean that there's a certain configuration of things that are going to make you happy, content and fulfilled. And it's not the same for the person sat next to you or me.

53:56So the internet, your parents, me, I can't tell you how to live a good life. That has to be something that you figure out by tuning in to how you feel. And the problem is most of us have learned not to listen to how we feel because often it's so in contrast to what the outside world is telling us. But if you think about what I said earlier about being a good quitter and my whole framework about something not feeling right and then asking myself those questions, the great, probably much of the reason I'm sat here is because my compass has always been, how do I feel? I didn't like school. It only took me one lesson at university to realize that I didn't like it.

54:33And even if my mother was never going to speak to me again, I wasn't going to stay there. I didn't like that business. I didn't like that second business eventually. And so tuning into that thing that we've all given from birth, which is how you feel, I think is the path to figuring out that answer for yourself. Returning closer to ourselves and that still small voice. Ladies and gentlemen, Would you please join me in giving up for the one and only Stephen Butler?