Jake's Notebook | with Learning to Live Well, Not Just Do Well

0:00Hello, greetings, how you doing? Welcome along once again to my notebook. If you've not listened before this is the place where every week you just get the real me these are my innermost thoughts they're sometimes the things i've struggled with sometimes the breakthroughs i've made random thoughts i've had on a plane train or line bike but i just hope they help you on your journey because i know that so many of us feel that everyone else is mended and we're a bit broken and therefore they're fine and we're not and it's not true we're all just doing our best so here i am with my hello cup of coffee let's just have a sip of that no i've got a new coffee maker for my birthday from harriet and i'm absolutely loving it um so i've got my coffee i've got my trusty notebook and this is the most unscripted unpolished unfiltered podcast you're going to hear from me and the reason i do this is because note making has been an essential part of my life for over 20 years i'm constantly just writing down the things that are in my head and so much of my success and my learning and my growth has come from making these notes and i'm loving the reaction to this podcast so before i get going please hit follow and if you think this might benefits someone else in your world, please forward them this conversation.

1:07And who knows, maybe my notebook might just make a difference in their lives. But let's get to it. And episode six of my notebook. Here we go. So I wrote down, talk about James Clear. And I wrote this down because I often think now about the notebook during the week when certain things pop into my head. And I saw something from James that really reminded me of the powerful conversation we had with him a few years ago on high performance and he said goals will help you win once systems will help you win repeatedly and i made this mistake for so many years in my life for so long i thought if i set myself a big challenging goal then i would get there and i would be successful but of course what happens at the end of that is you either achieve the goal and then you're not sure which way to turn so you lose motivation because you've achieved what you set out to achieve and you haven't felt any joy because suddenly you're thinking about the next goal or you don't reach the target that you set yourself you don't hit that goal and you lose motivation that way as well because you feel like you've failed or you've come up short you know i've been promising harriet i'm gonna have a six pack for the best part of 30 years and it's not the right way to do it so actually setting goals is not a bad thing but it will only equip you to win that particular game if you can create systems if you can create habits that they'll help you to win repeatedly every action that you take is a vote for the person that you want to be so the time you got out of bed today was a vote the what the thing you ate for breakfast was a vote um the conversation you had with yourself in your head was a vote how you spoke to your partner your children your friends your parents it was a vote whether you go to the gym or not in your hour-long lunch break or after work is a vote the time that you decide to go to bed is a vote and at the end of your day at end of your week, your month, your year and your life, where you get to is an accumulation of the votes that you make.

2:57If you make too many bad votes, you will not head the direction that you want to. If you make good votes, then you will. And the reason why this is so important is because I think people think that achieving great things in life is big leaps in a certain direction and it isn't true. It's about these small, almost unseen decisions that you're making again and again and again every single day and you need to vote well um the reason why i think this is on my mind and this is not a plug for the new book but damien and i have got a new book coming out in january 2026 called micro habits you can pre-order it now if you want to but that's not what this is about but the reason why i mentioned that is because i think sometimes i hear other people talking about these things and i think do you really believe this or are you just saying this because you think it's valuable for you, because you can sell some program or some training guide or whatever.

3:50The reason why I'm talking about habits is because I 100 % believe it because it changed my life, focusing on these small, almost unseen decisions. And that's actually the reason why we've decided to write the book Microhabits based around this. And what I would love you to do to begin with, I would like you to just change one thing about your life. Not loads of things, just change one thing for me it was getting out of bed 15 minutes earlier it meant that my morning I wasn't chasing my tail it was it meant that I was able to have my coffee light my candle think my thoughts for the day prepare for what's ahead of me and then by the time Harriet and the kids are up I'm present I'm there you know it sets me off on a good track and you know a bit like a Formula One car when it comes out of a corner before a long straight if it messes up the exit of the corner it carries that lack of speed all the way down the straight I felt like that um I felt like that actually about my life.

4:40I felt like I was getting up at the wrong time and it was messing up my entire day. So that's the first thing I want you to understand from this quick conversation. Goals will help you win once. Systems will help you win repeatedly. And so I'd love you to have a think about the systems that you can put in place every single day to get you closer to where you want to be in life. Okay, next point. Success without well-being is a failure. Success without well-being is a failure. Please hear that because I see so many people who are seemingly successful and very unhappy. And I would ask you whether they are actually successful.

5:22I have sat across from so many people in my career, certainly in the last few years, hosting these podcasts. And they're at the top of wealth. They're at the top of fame. They're at the top of success. and they are not happy because they have this constant need to do more, to find the next win. They've got an emptiness inside them. And I think that without the emptiness, they might not have achieved what they have. But that doesn't mean that they've been successful because they're not happy. And this phrase was told to me by Mika Hakunem, who I spoke to in Monaco a couple of weeks ago. And he worked with a guy called Aki Hintze during his Formula One career.

5:59And it was such an interesting part of the conversation with him because he said that no one had ever spoken to him about well-being before all they'd spoken to him about was driving faster driving harder training more in the gym being better prepared getting your strategy right he said no one had spoken to me about the fact that if my wife is happy if my kids are happy if my parents are well looked after if my finances are in a good place i will drive the car faster and the reason why i want to mention this is because i think that we need to stop being so driven by opinion and more driven by empathy in this world there's a lovely phrase from the American politician Bill Bullard.

6:34He said, opinion is the lowest form of knowledge because it takes no understanding of anybody else. Empathy is what we should all be striving for. Opinion is the lowest form of knowledge. And we live in an opinion driven society. You know, my old job was working as a football presenter. And one of the biggest challenges I had was that I was expected to draw controversial opinions out of the pundits I was sitting next to. I was expected to make sure we had conversations that would do amazing numbers on social media well how do we know that that player that 18 year old that's in their first season in professional football isn't struggling with their mental health how do we know that that referee who might have made a slightly erroneous decision during a football match hasn't got an issue at home how do we know that they're not going through divorce proceedings or they might have a child who's not very well that's on their mind you know we need to start having more empathy in this world and it's an absolutely vital tenant to being a high performer.

7:29We need to have an understanding that people are doing their best and that wellbeing is the most important thing. It's the most central thing. And if we don't have this mindset of wellbeing, then I think we live in this world where we're on this hedonic treadmill, where we keep on telling ourselves that the next success is going to be the thing that makes me happy. The next achievement is going to be the moment that I feel content right i have spoken to those people who've been there and it does not ring true you do not suddenly have this moment of epiphany where everything in life makes sense you need to find happiness in the now in these moments because actually 95 of our life is not great joyful victorious moments standing on the shoulders of others being lauded for how great we are 95 of life is just getting on it's just getting to work it's just getting through it's managing to get to the end of the day that's the majority of life so we have to find the joy we have to find the happiness we have to find the flow in those moments and if high performance if room where it happened if jake's notebook stands for anything it's reminding you that we're all just doing our best you know what do i believe for high performance is doing the best you can where you are with what you've got those are the three most important things and i really want you to i really want you to understand that in fact you can see in a couple of weeks there'll be an episode coming out on room where it happened with will ahmed the founder of whoop i bloody love that guy we had such a great conversation and he realizes how important well-being is and i i want to applaud him for putting well-being at the heart of his business and changing many people's lives it's a brilliant conversation actually about how he got to where he got to he started off saying that he was sitting at university as an 18 year old and he had his dissertation on his left hand side and he had an 80 page business plan on the right but knew very little about actually creating a business and that the first$400 ,000 he raised was the hardest.

9:18I think it's a great conversation. You can hear that in a couple of weeks on the show. But yeah, success without wellbeing is a failure. So you might be successful, maybe you're not, but are you putting your wellbeing at the centre of your success? I wrote down this week, and I remember when I wrote this, I was on the train coming up from London and I was triggered because I had a look at the, and this podcast, this notebook is all about total honesty, right? so I'll tell you what happened. I decided to look at the number of views that Chris Williamson's podcast gets on YouTube and it was like a huge number so I thought how does that compare to ours and let me just say it wasn't quite such a high number.

9:58I'm talking about high performance here and it honestly triggered me and it for some reason and I don't let these things get to me very often but that one really did and so I thought about it for a minute and then I thought to I need to stop chasing what doesn't matter, right? Because what really matters on high performance is the quality and the value that is in those conversations. It actually isn't about the outcome. I need to stop chasing the things that don't matter. What I need to do is focus on the things that I believe. I suppose I feel like this quite a lot of the time. Like, am I good enough on my social media?

10:35No, I'm probably not. I've got like stacks and stacks of videos that I've taken over the last few months and I haven't posted them and then I see other people posting videos and they look really polished and really good and the stories are great and it grows their own personal brand and I think oh my god I don't know which way to turn I feel like I feel overworked I feel overwhelmed um and this does happen to me every few months I get this sense that I should be and could be doing so much more and I can't work out why I'm not and how other people seem to have so many hours in the day to do all of these things and I don't have those hours um but then I um And I remember years ago, I read something and it went along the lines of, it's a privilege to be tired from the things you once begged the universe for.

11:19It's a privilege to be overwhelmed by the growth that you used to dream about. It's a privilege to be challenged by life you created on purpose. It's a privilege to outgrow things that you used to settle for. And I thought about that actually this week. I was like, well, maybe it is a privilege that I've outgrown just being a TV presenter, regardless of what I'm presenting television programs about. Maybe it's great that I've outgrown that. Maybe it's a real privilege that I'm challenged by other people's numbers on their podcast or their socials or their YouTube because this is what I wanted, right?

11:56I created this life on purpose. maybe it is a privilege to be to feel overwhelmed by the fact that everyone else is doing well and I don't think I'm doing as well as them and it is a privilege to be tired actually from the fact that the work that I'm doing on Rumour It Happened and High Performance and with my production company is all consuming so I think I need to rewrite that story in my head right instead of looking at people that are ahead of me and wondering why I'm not there maybe I need to realize how far I've myself and the reason why i wanted to talk about this is because um i think if my notebook isn't vulnerable and honest and tell you exactly how i feel then what's the point in doing this because i know there are many people feeling the same way as me and if i just sit here and go yeah i'm delighted with how things are going across the board you know because people are saying to me all the time oh man your podcast's amazing the numbers are incredible i love the stuff you do on social media your linkedin posts are really inspiring what you do with the high performance foundation is incredible and there's me going thanks so much on the inside going oh I don't feel like that I feel like I could be doing so much better I feel like I just feel like I don't have my house in order you know I just feel like other people really understand the direction of all parts of their life and their businesses both at work and at home I just don't feel that's me um and i just think it's important for me to say that actually um so i think it's really important that we all stop chasing what doesn't matter we don't compare ourselves but i want you to know that i also struggle with this okay um before i go one last thing hold your beliefs lightly and the reason why i put this in was because i've just come back from um a couple days in the Cotswolds with Harrier and the kids and we sat down had dinner on Saturday evening and I ordered a Negroni which used to be my drink of choice and my wife's face she's like sorry you're drinking alcohol and as many of you know if you follow me on my socials or you listen to me wherever you'll know that I don't really drink and I've been pretty vocal at times actually about how anti-alcohol I am and I know because the research tells us that alcohol is poisonous for every cell in your body right but that actually doesn't mean that we should at all times never partake in your drink and i'm actually glad i did because you can have that opinion about having a drink but maybe also sometimes a drink is perfect and that's really my final message today is not to be so rigid in your thinking it's something i still need to work on and still need to learn because it's impossible to learn what you think you already know right it's impossible to learn what you think you already know and if you go through life feeling you know everything or feel that you've got your fixed position on how things should be how can you grow how can you develop how can you learn how can you adapt how can you change and that is where the real joy comes from living a life of exploration and uh that's why every now and then actually it is okay to have a drink um all we're doing is our best right and sometimes we shouldn't sometimes we should and it's up to you to make up your own mind but i thought i would share that with you having been kind of vocal in the past about how anti-alcohol i am i think i'm not anti-alcohol i am pro balance that's what i would say and that pretty much brings me to the end of today's episode of high performance um i got some lovely reactions actually last week to reading out um a page from the daily stoic and i'm going to do the same today um because i think this is really important so i'm going to finish i'm going to finish with this a benefit should be kept like a buried treasure only to be dug up in necessity nature bids us to do well by all wherever there's a human being we have an opportunity for kindness and that's from Seneca and that is page 310 of the Daily Stoic by one of my heroes Ryan Holiday and this is what you need to think about the first person you meet today passing acquaintance or friend doesn't matter the context positive or negative is an opportunity for kindness or as different translators have taken this line from Seneca to mean an opportunity for benefit but that's for both of you.

15:58You can seek to understand where they're coming from. You can seek to understand who they are, what they need, what forces or impulses might be acting on them and treat them well. And you also be better off for it. The same is true with the second person you encounter. And the third, of course, there's no guarantee that you're going to have the favor return. That's not your concern. You're going to focus on what you can control. In this case, the ability to choose to respond with kindness. And that is where I will leave this week's episode of the notebook thanks to you for listening if possible um i'd love you to be kind and hit follow hit subscribe or pass this episode on to someone that you think might find it valuable and um please reach out and let me know what you think of these conversations it makes a big difference to me um that's it from me in my office with my coffee and my notebook i'll see you next week