Jake's Notebook | with Everything You’re Good At, You Were Once Bad At & Meeting Stelios In Monaco

0:00Hi everyone, how you doing? Welcome back to my notebook, the place where every week you get the real me, my innermost thoughts, the things that I'm struggling with the breakthroughs I've made, all shared with you on this podcast. to help you on your journey. As usual, I'm in my home study here in Norfolk in the east of England with a cup of coffee, my trusty notebook, and the most unscripted, unpolished, unfiltered podcast I make. So why the notebook? I've had a few people reaching out asking why it matters to me so much. And it's because note-making has been a vital part of my life for over 20 years.

0:33It's the root of so much of my success, my learning, and my growth. So I hope over the next 15 or 20 minutes, this carries some value to you listen please reach out and share what you want more of on this show before i start can you do one quick thing for me just hit the follow button it'll take you five seconds it means that i know that you're listening um not many of you have hit follow yet and it's so important to help grow this show it means we can keep delivering you this kind of content honestly subscribing makes such a difference to us so if you can spend a few seconds doing that I'd be so grateful and let's do it let's open the notebook okay so the first thing that I wrote down this week is Marcus Waring and the reason I've wrote down this Marcus Waring quote which he delivered for us on an episode of High Performance probably three or four years ago is that I've had a very cool week I'll tell you about the week in just a moment but the quote from Marcus Waring was a simple one it was advice that he was given by his dad and what his dad said to him was Marcus if you hang around with shit for long enough eventually you start to smell like shit and it was his dad's way of explaining to his son that the people that you choose in your circle are absolutely vital for your success in life and there there are other people that have spoken about this um Epictetus had a great line about how important the people around you are you know the people around you right let me just be really clear.

2:00The people around you are the invisible architects of your life. There is proven scientific evidence that if you hang around with people who drink a lot, so will you. If you hang around with people who are overweight, you will become overweight. If you hang around with smokers, you've got a much higher chance of being a smoker. And Epictetus said it brilliantly. He said, we become what we give our attention to. And attention is contagious. So if you do spend enough time with the bitter you will start tasting the same poison if you spend time with the disciplined the curious and the kind their habits quietly will rewrite your own habits so choosing your circle like your future depends on it is important because your future does depend on how you choose your circle and the reason why i wrote that down this week was that i felt really lucky i had i did two interviews this week so we record um the room where it happened which is the podcast that this notebook has spawned from in our studio in Regent Street in central London.

3:00So when I first started podcasting back in 2019, kind of coming into the pandemic, I recorded almost every episode from home in Norwich. Damien, my co-host on High Performance, lives in Manchester, so he would be up in Manchester. And once a week we would dive on to Zoom or whatever, and we would chat away to each other for a couple of hours with a couple of guests. And that's what High Performance was. and then we moved into a studio because i by the way in the businesses that i've built whether it's whisper the production company the companies i've invested in growing high performance to the size it is now with a team of you know 20 odd people i really believe in steady growth i really believe that organic growth is the way to run a business successfully rather than this very popular approach now of taking a big injection of cash early on then hoping that you can pay back your investors I think it removes this sense that you've done it yourself often and I think it puts so much pressure on on young entrepreneurs and young business people so after filming at home we moved to some really nice studios actually near King's Cross and for a few years we'd use those but they were just like a rented space we'd kind of go in we try and make it as much like high performance as possible but you know when you've got big names arriving it didn't it never felt quite right and now we record in this beautiful building on Regent Street there's a building it's called Fora which is Latin for a meeting place and Fora are a company that have like serviced offices around London and they are absolutely bloody gorgeous and we're in one of those and that's where we get together two or three days a week actually I tend to be in London recording this kind of stuff and a few days ago we were joined there by Will Ahmed who is the founder of whoop and as you know i wear a whoop i've interviewed will before but interviewed him over zoom i loved sitting in a room with a guy who's built a business worth billions from university now i don't want to ruin the conversation because the conversation will be released very soon on room where it happened but he tells this story that he's sitting there in his university halls of residence and he said i've got my dissertation on my left and i've got an 80 page business plan on my right and I've got to make a decision and naturally I then say well where did you even get the idea to create a business plan and he said that while he was doing his physiology degree because he was really interested in sports he went and did a business course in the evenings to learn about business and on that course there was loads of people who could give him advice but he still had to learn as he went he still had to read books he still had to go and knock on the door of people who had built businesses created brands raised money and just to put this into context having said at the beginning that I'm not one that likes to raise money to build a business obviously tech businesses like whoop are different because you need the money up front he has raised almost half a billion pounds can you imagine I was thinking can you imagine waking up in the morning with half a billion pounds of pressure resting on your shoulders other people's money that they've given you to do something with but interestingly what he actually told us was that the first 400 000 the first chunk of money that he wanted to raise was the hardest chunk of money he's ever raised so with that in mind i wanted to show a really nice phrase which is well there's two actually the first one is everything you're good at you were once bad at and i want you to think about that for a moment um and i wrote that if i just look at my diary

6:40so I wrote Marcus Wearing and then the next thing I wrote actually was how good you become is how long you're willing to be bad and then the third thing I wrote is everything you're good at you were once bad at so let me talk about those for a for a moment how good you are at something is how long you're willing to be bad I think this is really important right because the truth is that almost everything in life that is exciting and that is challenging and that we really feel like we want to do at some point feels like it's failing um it's known in psychological circles as the messy middle and everything that you embark upon will always have a moment where it looks like a fail uh rosabeth rosabeth moss canter i believe was the name of the psychologist that coined this phrase canter's law is that everything looks like a failure in the middle like the start feels really exciting the end obviously feels obvious and you know the end's going to be amazing what about the middle the middle is where the doubt creeps in the middle is where the work feels heavy the middle is where the progress looks invisible and you know what that is the part where about 80 percent of people will walk away from their dreams what what i want you to understand is that if you can hold steady in that moment when it looks hopeless where everything seems silent and not sometimes it is it seems silent but actually it's quietly starting to change because the middle isn't failure that is the forge the middle is the is the part where actually you find out whether the thing that you're embarking on is going to be a success or not right but the only way to get to that point is for you to be willing to be bad at something and will ahmed openly admitted that he was bad at raising money it wasn't something that he was very good at he wasn't he said he wasn't very good at being able to like sell the dream of whoop so he would go into a room and it just wouldn't happen for him and he had to really fight and scrap now this is a business worth over three billion at the last reckoning this is a guy who from his university dorm in his early 20s has built a business that a huge amount of people now use but the truth is he had to be willing to be bad for a long time until he got to the point where he was going to be good.

9:00And that's why I want you to think about everything that you're good at, because so often the human brain, and I speak about this often, the human brain has this negativity bias, right, where you think to yourself, well, I'm not really good at anything really. But actually, I want you to look at everything that you do. Eating food, you were once pretty bad at that. Now you just take it for granted. If you drive, driving a car is something that you scare the living daylights out of you remember those first early lessons where you're sitting next to the driving instructor going three miles an hour in a 30 thinking how can i be let loose with the car being a parent i'm sure those fellow parents listening to this remember that moment that they let you leave the hospital and you think to yourself you you're actually going to let me leave hospital with a child that i have no idea how to keep alive and then you think when you have your second child you remember everything from the first child and you never do and you end up with that same feeling on over again you can't believe that you forgot everything so how good you become at something is how long you're willing to be bad so if you're listening to this right now and you're in this moment where you're where you're struggling and you don't feel that you're very good at it please remember that your greatness in that space is reliant upon you going through this period and actually if you look back at your life from the friends that you've got from parenting from work from even from play from playing tennis or football or cricket or snooker or dancing whatever it is you were bad at all of those things at one time so please understand that failure is a comma it's not a full stop and I what I felt I sat in the room with Will and as I say I've met him once I had dinner with him in London once and previously I interviewed him over zoom when he was in Boston which is where the whoop headquarters are I felt so energized sitting in that room having a conversation with Will and I obviously am well aware that high performance as a brand is one percent of what Whoop is but this sense that I want high performance whether it's the Room Where It Happened podcast the other shows that we produce or high performance itself the whole reason for creating this is to try and bring value to people's lives to try and help people and the messages that I get every single day from people who are struggling with their mental health, wracked with self-doubt, embarking on exciting journeys.

11:16All of those messages remind me that we're having an impact. Obviously nothing like the impact that Will is having, but that conversation was a reminder for me of the importance of doing something where you feel like you're of service to other people, which is exactly how Will feels. And it's also a reminder that you can be of service to others and build amazing businesses out of this stuff. we live in a world now where so much of the content that we see on social media is about how you can help yourself how you can feel amazing how you can be the master of your own destiny how you can be wealthy focus on how you can bring value to others focus on how you can be of service to other people and you'd be amazed at what you can build if that's going to be your approach and this idea of everything you're good at you were once bad at um this really came to the for for me two days after we interviewed Will so we interviewed Will last week on a Wednesday as you know I always shoot home so I made sure that I shot home on on Wednesday night and the reason why I shot home after the record despite the fact that the next day I had to um head off abroad um is that one of my rules in life is family first and I think it's so valuable and vital to stick to these family first rules there's a great video actually that you can watch online of Blake Lively talking about Ryan Reynolds just saying he always comes home even if he's covered in makeup from the studio sometimes he's covered in fake blood sometimes he's covered in real blood but he races home to be with his family and I am um I'm kind of similar so I shot home on Wednesday night because I just love those little snatched golden moments with the kids before bed or first thing in the morning and then on Thursday flew to Monaco and obviously I know Monaco well my good friend and business partner David Coulthard lives there I spent a lot of time I'm working there when I was on the Grand Prix circuit working for the BBC, which I left so that I could put family first.

13:05And that was a painful decision. And I can talk about that sometime if you want me to. If you want to hear that story of walking away from the BBC, send me a message. But we went to Monaco and we interviewed Micah Hackenden, which you can hear soon on High Performance. But we also went to the villa of Sestelios, the creator of EasyJet. So as you go into Monaco, you come to the kind of penultimate, maybe the final corner of the Grand Prix track called Rascas. And it's called Rascas because there's a bar called Rascas on that corner. And you take a right at Rascas and you head along the harbour edge and you see this huge white building in front of you.

13:45And you go in and it is polished marble floors, security guards in reception. There's a spiral staircase to the left next to the lifts. And we went up those and into this office. that was like pure white everything was white through the office and out onto this most unbelievable roof terrace i mean it's got some lovely exotic plants a small gazebo and some outside furniture i mean by the way it's massive it's like the size of a four-bedroom house this roof terrace and it it overlooks monaco harbor i mean bloody hell it's a location if you watch the stellios interview on youtube you'll see the location but we sat down and started having a conversation and this is a guy right let me be really clear Stelios came from wealth okay his dad was a shipping magnet so he had money and he went into the shipping world and he made a success of his first shipping business I think Stelios took it to be valued at over a billion in the end but crucially he felt like everyone just looked to him as his father's son he wasn't a success in his own right because he was just taking on his dad's business and it wasn't very impressive to others therefore it wasn't something that mattered to him and this did matter to him whether that's right or wrong he cared what other people thought so he created an airline the airline was easy jet it's one of the biggest businesses in the world and that's why the phrase everything you're good at you were once bad at springs to mind because he had no idea what he was doing but crucially a bit like will he knew he wanted to be of service to others he knew that airlines were ripping people off he knew that the standard of customer service was poor he knew that airlines were purely looking to make as much profit as possible regardless of the customer and he looked at easy jet in a totally different way you know it had to be a budget airline but it didn't mean that it had to be a cheap airline and i can't tell you how brilliant his story is from how they created the easy jet logo to creating easy land at lutein airport to the drama of the first flight but also the stunts that he pulled i mean i'll give you one really quick one so british airways decided to create a low-cost airline and it was in stellios's mind it was a direct attempt to put him out of business right and there is a law against that if you're a big business you can't use the size and scale of your business to to cause issues for other people and so british airways created an airline called go to to kind of take a big chunk of the low-cost market and so on the very first ever go flight delios booked some tickets for him and some of his execs they british always couldn't stop them they paid for the tickets they bought them they turned up but they turned up in bright orange boiler suits handing out free flights on easy jet to customers on the go flight and the amount of column inches and newspaper coverage that got was incredible he just has these brilliant stories he was very close to richard branson so a lot of it is directly from the Richard Branson playbook but again it's a really good example like I said at the beginning from the Marcus Wearing quote or my line from Epictetus it's about the people that you hang out with so I know Sostelios is really lucky that he can hang out with Richard Branson and get tips but I promise you there are people in your life that you can hang out with who will change the way that you see the world they will change the way that you see the world remember what I said at the beginning spend time with the bitter you'll taste the poison spend time with the disciplined the curious and the kind and their habits will quietly rewrite yours so I really want you to look over the next few days at who you hang out with who do you spend time with and this can be really scary I know but there's a brilliant book I'd recommend that changed my life when I was younger called feel the fear and do it anyway by Susan Jeffers feel the fear and do it anyway and I'm not saying that you need to do what Robin Van Persie did which was write a letter to his friends saying I'm going in a different direction I can't hang out with you but I'm saying in the same way that your friend's habits change your life your habits will change your life because if you walk into a room as the thermostat if you change the temperature in a room then the people who don't like the warm confident positive you will slowly melt away drains don't like the company of fountains pessimists are repelled by optimists so I want you to walk into a room full of self-belief, full of confidence, with a dream, being optimistic, not talking small, not discussing gossip.

18:13I want you to be the most positive, optimistic person that you know, and you will find the other optimistic, ambitious, creative, dynamic, fun, kind, friendly, brilliant people will suddenly surround you because I promise you that 99 % of people are cheering you on and if you're struggling at the moment or if you've got some doubts or some fears or you don't know which direction to take start talking to people start asking the question and you will be amazed by the amount of help that people want to give you i want to finish this episode by reading a really quick line from um a book that i look at every single day uh the book is the daily stoic by the brilliant ryan holiday and what he does is he gives a quote from a Stoic and then he writes about it in the modern language.

19:02Now, I haven't got my reading glasses so I'm just going to turn on my light so I can see this. Bear with me. Sorry for being disorganised. Right. Here is the quote from the Daily Stoic that I want to leave you with. What is your vocation to be a good person? Is a question that Marcus Aurelius asks. And the Stoics believed, above all else, that the one job on this earth is to be a good human being it is a basic duty yet we are experts at coming up with excuses for avoiding it so to quote bill belichick bill belichick is a famous american football coach do your job that's your only obligation in this life to be a good person and the way to do that i believe is to surround yourself with other really good people so pay Pay attention to those in your circle that aren't taking you in the right direction.

19:59I hope that you really enjoy the Will Ahmed and the Sir Stelios episodes when they come out on Room Where It Happened. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me. I will open my notebook again in another week. What you want more of, what you want less of, please shout out. Please let me know. I'm going to go back downstairs, top up my coffee, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks for listening, and please hit subscribe or follow. It makes all the difference to us. Big love.