The science behind changing your habits

25:44And maybe that's a big decision that you need to make. Others will realize that they're spending time in meetings that just really aren't productive, that they're not sure that it's useful. So maybe you need to do something. Maybe you need to do something differently. So do you have any like practical tips on how people can do scrolling on Instagram, for example, that thing just appears in my hand and I'm just there deep in the Instagram. I'm like, how did this even happen? So it's not even, it's almost like non-conscious. I even set an alarm that says like, when you've reached an hour of Instagram every day and like some days it's like 11 o 'clock and it's like, you've had one hour.

26:16I'm like, I've only been away for three hours. I've been away five minutes. Yeah, sometimes that happens. I'm like, I've been away for half an hour. It's like, oh, I must've been using it last night before bed. So like, it's crazy. And I seen this thing online. There's like a box. You can put your phone in and lock it. I've got one of those. Do you? Yeah. I smashed it with a hammer. Cause you lock your phone in there and like you can't access it for like two hours, but I definitely would just smash it open. And I'm like, I need to know what's going on on Instagram. What does the science tell us about breaking that?

26:43I mean, in honesty, I think if you can delete the app, you should go for it, which I can see you crowding. What if it's your business? No, but separate them. So if you can, even if it's an old iPad or an old phone, if you can afford to have an old iPhone for your personal and then for your business is the one that you invest in and they're held separately, so you're consciously choosing to, you're constantly choosing to be on Instagram. And I think that's the problem. Doomscrolling, people aren't consciously choosing to be on it. They're basically picking it up and it's the fast brain is making the choice.

27:15What you want it to be is that, OK, I now have to go and get this other phone. So now, OK, consciously you're thinking, do I really need to doomscroll on Instagram now? Or am I actually going on it where I'm going to enjoy it or it's going to be productive for me? But digital detoxes are hard, just like coming off alcohol, drugs or anything else that's addictive. But definitely, definitely worth it. so it's if the the point that you've made there is it's putting that little thought in i know that there's the app that there's an app where you can input all your different apps that you don't like on your phone in it and every time you go on them it's like are you sure you want to go on this and it just counts down from three and that just makes you go oh no yeah forget it so it's it's about putting these brakes in to stop it being the system one is it right system one is fast system two is slow exactly so so what we're doing is increasing the cost of going on instagram so So the example of having it on a separate device means that you have to actually go somewhere else, pick it up and make a conscious decision.

28:10The app that's telling you, are you sure you want to do this again is increasing the cost and it's making salient to you. So it's making it very obvious to you the choices that you're making might not necessarily be right for you at the moment. So both of those. And I think that's a really good example. That's a really kind of good analogy for any habit that you're trying to change. How can I, if I want to break a habit, how can I make it more costly to do it? and also how can I increase the benefits of not doing it on the other side and make the good behaviors easier so you know if you want to go to the gym in the morning and if you're somebody who hates going to the gym having your your trainers and your tracksuit laid out so that there's actually no excuse that as soon as the alarm goes you're not kind of procrastinating okay where are my clothes and you're fumbling around you make it as easy as possible to actually get there if the gym if you're somebody who's lazy should be very near your house rather than far away so again you don't have the cost of the time of getting into the car all excuses that you'll reach for when you're feeling when you're feeling tired my gym's close by and i still drive there it's like it's like a two minute walk and i'm like it's cold i'm driving to the gym i've never walked to the gym ever to be fair probably should just run there shouldn't i yeah i i have to have the gym within five minutes otherwise i won't go i had one once it was half an hour and i just didn't never went because then it's like oh it's going to take an hour there and back and an hour there by the time i get there i've all these yeah i've all these things to do so i think it's also worth kind of thinking about your lazy self.

29:25So when you're lazy, when you're not feeling well, when you're feeling tired, what are the things that will actually make it much easier for that person? And also, if you can, starting the habit when you're feeling bad, which sounds counterintuitive because we all wait for the day that we feel great. But you're never going to have problems showing up for yourself when you feel great, are you? It's those horrible days. So if you kind of say, yeah, look, tomorrow is a day where I'm planning on going out with my friends. I'm probably going to be slightly hung over that's the day I'm going to go to the gym because my baseline is going to be I show up to myself yeah yeah so there's um there's an example like in my world what I do most of the time is I script and I can easily tell myself that I don't feel inspired that I don't feel creative that like you know to script because what I have to do is sit down and just stare at a blank google doc and it's just going to come out of me but I find that if I actually break that and I sit down I finally I then become inspired does that make sense it's that first thing it's like the hardest thing is getting to the gym once you're there it's okay it's great it's that little making myself just sit down and open a google doc and not clean the house or whatever have you got anything to like help people take that first step well what you describe is really in line with the pomodoro technique have you heard of this so this is where you can there's an app for it now but you used to be able to buy like a tomato i'm sure you can still buy it that had a 15 minute timer and that you sit down to work and you put on the timer and when the timer goes off you're meant to stop You're meant to stop, take a five minute break and walk around.

30:51And what people find is that if you're scripting, if you're in the middle of something else, if you're in flow, the brain really hates that. So it's itching to get back. So that 15 minutes is all you actually need to get you going. So instead of saying, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to work for four hours today, you say, I'm just going to do 15 minutes and see where it goes. And usually, if you manage to make a start, if you manage to write a few lines, the brain will bring you back because it will want to finish that section. it's very hard if you're a writer if you script if you write songs if you're creative to stop when something is um is half done it's the best feeling in the world that flow and like it is it is yeah like once it's like coming out of like just pours out of you but like you say it's you got to get to there and it takes five ten minutes so rather than thinking i'm going to script for half a day now you think i'm just going to do a script for five ten minutes yeah and see where it goes and you leave the time so you don't fill the time so you basically say look I have a day free today so I'm going to start my day with 15 minutes I'm going to put on my timer and I'm going to get straight in and I'm going to give myself a chance and then timer goes off you take your break and you make a decision about whether whether or not you stay because one thing that I tend to do is put it off put it off and then it's so the deadline and my own enforced deadline that doesn't exist is approaching so then it's like I've got to do it all now in six hours and it's it's not the best work as a result I think as a plan people can leave it what we call the compromise effect where you don't say I'm going to show up I'm going to do a full day's work and I'm going to commit myself to doing nine hours even though you know that you've never done nine hours before.

32:18I do that every day and I've never done nine hours. But you say there's three levels of work there's nine hours which is the maximum there's four which will put me on average and there's 15 minutes that will put me at low and actually once I do one of those I'm happy with myself and you took that off and most people will end up hitting average most people will end up pinning the four hours in flow with that model. Because again, if you think about how you train your brain, none of us actually want to be below average. So once we hit average, we're happy to kind of to walk away and say day done.

32:47Okay. And do you find that with a big goal in mind, that being average and consistent will get you there? I do. I do. I mean, we've already mentioned that you just need to be slightly better than what everyone else is doing. And the good thing about if you're creating something is you just need to be slightly different as well. So most, all of us are unique so hopefully you can actually leverage that uniqueness to bring something new but the one thing that people don't do is show up consistently so if you're one of the people who's showing up consistently if you're creating consistently if you're learning something consistently you will get to where you want to be you just can't break that consistency last time we recorded to me and you were having some real dramas with your accountant so how's that been going mate they're sacked so drama sorted um they're a big corporate firm um they didn't really reply to my emails very quickly like took a week or two at times um and they charged me way too much i mean i've got pretty simple taxes and yeah they were charging me thousands they saved me some money but yeah um i had to move on slow and expensive pretty much yeah this is one of the reasons that we're really happy to be partnering with tax app it's a tech platform that makes self-assessment simple whether you're self-employed like me a freelancer or a director like demo big dog instead of sending endless emails bills and spreadsheets to your accountant you just connect your bank answer a few questions that are only relevant to you and your tax return can be ready in as little as 15 minutes.

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35:49That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. the next thing i want to talk about then and then run up to that is the planning the planning fall it happens every time we all do it um the planning fallacy so you you speak about this and i think this is the other end of what we're saying me like being scared to start it's like another way of putting off starting in a way yeah i mean so if you so we're in london today so if you drive around london there's loads of roadworks and if you did if you did a survey i'm willing to bet you, they're all overrunning or they will all overrun when they get to their end.

36:26And that's what the planning fallacy is. As human beings, there's kind of two things that go into our planning, the cost and the time it will take. And when it comes to governments, they're really bad at thinking about what the cost is going to be and really bad at the time. Individuals get the cost right. So we're good at estimating this is how much it's going to cost us in terms of pounds, but we're really bad in terms of time. So what that means is that if you decide that you want to write a book today and you say, I'm going to leave six months, it's probably not going to be six months because you're going to procrastinate.

36:56Things are going to get in the way. You're not going to show up for yourself. So how can you change that? Well, you can kind of think about adjusting the time to take into account the planning fallacy. You might know what your own factor is. The literature says it's about one and a half. I'm twice the time. So if I told you who would take six months, it would take a year. So I'm below average on performance and planning fantasy but if you actually monitor yourself and say something's going to take me a week and then realize it takes you two weeks it allows you actually be really honest with yourself and one thing that we know about people when they run over time is that they're much more likely to quit so getting this right is really important i think when you're when you're planning for a think big goal so what you want to do is come up with a time that's going to take you there give yourself some time yeah for me if you want to be like grace double it time and a half is the average human So you're probably somewhere in between the two.

37:48But yes, give yourself more time. But then how do we stop ourselves? Like I work to deadlines and I do 90 % of the work 24 hours before the deadline. I know you're the same. Oh, definitely. I went to uni with you. So it's served me well during life. Yeah, well, that's it. It's got so bad that whenever we have lunch, like Sunday lunch with my family, my mom's like, yeah, lunch is at one and I'll turn up at like 1.30. She's like, it was actually at 1.30, but I knew you would be late. So yeah, we should probably incorporate that into the podcast. Yeah. So if you, are you married? No. Okay. So when you get married, you're gonna be the one who's late to the altar.

38:16Probably. Well, true story, true story. We were at the, his son got - I can see you sing, which story is he going to tell? There's so many, cause I was late to a wedding and the bride was outside at the church door and she gave me the biggest desk there. And I'm like, I'm so sorry, let me just squeeze past you. Who starts weddings on time? English people apparently. No, Jimmy start like three hours late. So yeah, I was not ready. He was late to his son's baptism, well, like to the sort of warmup and the - The practice session. The priest, vicar. the priest the priest was like you best not be late tomorrow and i was like he's gonna be late it's the only time you've never been late yeah so your son like i said changed you that's true late for everyone else don't give a crap yeah so but how do we then if we allocate 50 more time how do we then make sure that we don't just not work leading up to that i think that the kind of micro goals within the big goals come into this so writing a book is a really good examples so you probably have like 10 chapters 20 chapters so the goal should be around the one chapter so the smaller the thing that you're doing the more accurate you're going to get a planning so if you can break down this big task into lots of lots of different small chunks and if you do that kind of within like a three-month rolling window it does actually set you up for success it's when you try to plan something that's really really long that we get it grossly wrong small things will do better can you give us an example of like how you would break apart a task into like a goal into small things?

39:40Yeah. So, I mean, when I was writing Think Big, the first thing was like the chapters. So how many chapters there were. And when the publisher takes you on, you've already written down the outlines. This is what I promised for them. And then what I would do is I would say, I have to write what I call a chunk. I have to write a chunk in a particular morning, which means that I write the headings just of all the different sections and a few words underneath that will actually guide me. And for me, I'll have lots of different goals of that size. So I write the chunks for chapter one to 10, so that's 10 different mini goals.

40:13And then each chunk of text that you see within Think Big, that I can say that's going to take me two hours. So I need to sit down and kind of write the very first bad draft of that in two hours. And it allows me to schedule my writing in a way in these kind of very micro chunks that keeps me moving forward. And what happens then is that some days I just don't show up for the micro goal. So everything moves forward a bit but because i've left some buffer time at the end it doesn't actually actually collapse the goal for the publisher um so for you i think the tactic of everyone telling you that everything is is a half an hour um it's a half an hour later earlier or later than it is it's actually it is a good thing yeah yeah until you realize it and then you just start showing up yeah yeah so i'm i'm bad at this so at the start of the year i'm like these are what i want to achieve this year i want to make 90 videos blah blah blah and now halfway through the year i've made like 30 videos and I just everything I do is a failure then do you know what I mean yeah it's like I'm just beating myself up all year basically I mean I I wonder about new year's resolutions because I think something like 85 percent of people fail on their new year's resolutions it's really it's a it's a really large number and I think that might give us permission to fail so if we're all failing then no one's a failure right so in some ways maybe starting at a different time of the year like starting in two weeks off of January is is the right time or starting in February.

41:30Just before. Yeah, yeah. Or starting just before. So you're not in the starting blocks with everyone else. You're not really paying attention to who's actually failing around you. But then I think the other thing is that you do need to commit to once a month, just asking, sitting down and saying, what did I give time to this month? What did I give attention to? And am I actually doing things that will serve me in the future? And I think if the answer is no, that you just left January go or you just left February go and you didn't do anything that invests in you in your future self be honest with yourself about that just okay i'm not investing i'm not investing and that's going to have consequences and then once people kind of make that salient once they make it make it obvious to themselves it does change their patterns of behavior and they start showing up again so you talk about i want to bring it back to the big goal because i want someone who sat at home after this to be inspired and to go away with like a bit of a roadmap to go in yeah you know i want to change the world and this is how i'm going to do it we know that there's the setting the goal there's six other stages well the six stages total sorry so there's five others is that right so yeah you're spot on so once you have your your once you've taught big and you have your think big uh think big goal there's time then spent thinking about what are the small things that you need to do in order to get there they're the steps and this is what we're talking about that you should actually plan so don't plan time around the big goal because you're probably going to get it hopelessly wrong have an estimate of of years but these small things that will actually that will get you there that will allow you to chunk it up but then you know one of the things that I think where Think Big is different, it's really honest and says, even though you've done all that work, it's January, it's the new year, we're all kind of doing that work.

43:00The chances of you sticking are really small. So what you need to do then is think about what are the things that will actually stand in your way. Well, one is time, which we've already covered is time sinkers. So really making sure that what you're spending your time and what you're giving your attention to gives you benefits in the future. Maybe that means you have to take away some of this instant gratification that you're getting now, but you definitely should eliminate things that are making you miserable. And then I followed that with a chapter that's called inside. And these are the kind of the biases that are inside myself that are going to hold me back.

43:32And, you know, you can think about confirmation bias as being one of them. As individuals, we love to be told that we're right. And we seek out people who have the same views as us. And you can just go on X now, or you can go on any other social media platform and you can see that groups of communities tend to find each other who think the same and very rarely talk to each other but we're seeing what negative things that's doing in society right because people aren't talking to each other and nothing is being resolved through their eyes exactly they think everyone believes what they believe exactly and that's a different podcast but we do this to us as individuals we seek out people who we like who we feel comfortable with and we very rarely seek out people who actually will disagree with us give us critical feedback and one one thing that i say and this confirmation bias is one of the ones that i tackle and think big is the best gift you can give yourself is to find people who are diverse with respect to perspective and background who you can talk to them about a problem that you're having or a block that you've actually fixed and get their advice and if you have enough diversity in that group you're going to get some pretty good advice because you're going to get it from different angles but also the benefit of that is that that group because they're diverse will see different opportunities for you so they'll help you move ahead and they'll help you move ahead faster so So when you read the inside chapter, what you can expect is for me to point out the biases that are most likely holding you back, but also give a solution.

44:52And I also ask you to experiment with the solution and see if it works for you, because the one way that I can get you to stick to some of the recommendations that I give is not by telling you them. I mean, why would you listen? Why would you listen to me? I'm one person, one voice. But by seeing that they work for you. So seeing this feedback that it's actually working. Then the hardest chapter for me to write was outside. So what do you do if you face biases that are kind of outside yourself? So people who are prejudiced. And I talk about those type of things that people will face. So how they can actually put themselves in a situation and set them up for success.

45:25But I also talk about biases that people face just because of randomness. So we never think about it. But if you show up for an interview or if you show up to pitch for venture funding, there's certain times of the day that are better for you to actually talk to people. You definitely don't want people to be hungry. And, you know, if you don't believe me on that, There's really good evidence on judges in the United States that show that you get much longer sentences if you show up for a hungry judge. So you can't give the judge a sandwich, but maybe you can think about ways in which to feed the people who are in front of you.

45:55And I also talk about days of the week in which it's better for you to ask for a pay rise or to pitch for funding. And again, it might seem quite random, but human beings have different moods that are kind of predictable across the week. So you want to be sitting in front of your boss. What's the worst day to ask for a raise? Friday. Is it? Friday, surely not. Very easy. It's very easy to say no as a boss on Friday. I don't have to see you tomorrow. You need to make it as hard as possible for them. Monday morning. Monday morning, 9am. I'll be back at 12 o 'clock to see if you've got my contract sorted.

46:26I'll be here all week looking at you. Yeah. Typing on your computer just staring at them. People don't want to say no. People don't want to say no. And the biggest mistake we make as human beings is not asking again. So if you ask me for something today, and if for some reason I brought myself to say no, bearing in mind that we all want to be seen as nice people you coming back again and asking me for something else something similar in two weeks kind of three weeks time slightly different framing I'm much more likely to say yes but people don't do that because of ego so if you if you tell me no I'm probably not going to come back because of ego whereas the best sales people will know give a break come back with something slightly different and then the person is much more like you said no to me three times you need to say yes now yes that's how people you know and I guess that's what I try to do.

47:10I like the idea for the readers of being very honest with them about what happens if you do face bias and prejudice, but also being honest with the readers that there are actually ways you can tip the odds in your favor that are completely random, that are down to emotions and putting that evidence out there for them to try themselves. And then I talk about the environment. So we've already talked about digital detoxing. And so I give people strategies to digitally detox, but also about the environment that we surround ourselves with. So certain colors bring creativity certain colors make you feel um more powerful so thinking about the colors that you actually put around your environment what's a powerful color red that's that's my favorite color but i thought mcdonald's have like loads of red and orange to make people leave their shops more quickly get out is that true yeah why do they want you to leave because you know in nature like red is like danger and like yeah so it's meant to make you just want to leave much so you get in buy your stuff and then you don't hang around in mcdonald's or that you get out so that's That's why it's like all red inside apparently.

48:07But if it's a powerful colour, I'll be wearing a red t-shirt on my next podcast. It's linked to power. And also the people who you put up around you. So, you know, there's evidence to show, for example, for German women, seeing Angela Merkel in a picture is going to make them feel less like imposters and much more powerful. So figuring out what works for you in the environment can be really kind of cool ways to get productive. Airflow matters a lot. So whether or not you actually have air circulating in the room, the lighting matters. so if you ever find yourself um in a police station there's a reason that they dim the lights as a way to get you to tell the truth but it also makes you more creative so it's good for the criminal because they can come up with kind of better better lies to tell if you really want to concentrate having those having those sharp lights or very bright lights is is something to to consider but like all of think big i don't believe the one thing will work for one person so i think we're all different human beings red might make you feel more powerful and maybe for you it's purple and you'll only know that if you actually start um if you actually start experimenting and the last thing is resilience the one thing I'll say about resilience is I do think often when we talk about success we focus on the journey and the steps and kind of how to move people towards goals but we never talk about these kind of human skills that make us much more likely to get there and resilience and grit are the skills that people should actually focus on if they want to sustain the journey.

49:29You talk about it almost like it's like a cup that's full and you deplete your resilience over a day. Yes, all of us have a certain level of resilience and some of us are, I'm sure some of us are born with more as compared to less, but it's easy to top up your cup if you think purposefully and it's easy to avoid depletion if you also are quite conscious about where you put your time. So in the resilience chapter I talk about ways in which you can have depletion so the two of you comparing yourselves to each other will be a really bad way for you to feel good about yourself and to feel resilient but comparing yourself to your past self and then making sure that your future self does more is a really good way to think about moving forward in the think big journey and a lot of the things that I'm asking people to do aren't time consuming they're just kind of tricks in how we actually see the world and how we see ourselves that would allow you go through it with just more resilience.

50:22So you talk about, you know, is it the end of the world? And like, is this something I can kind of recover from quickly or whatever? You know, you frame it with, could you explain actually the three ways that you, when something bad happens to you or there's a situation that comes? Yeah. So I think it's good to look back over the weekend, the kind of negative things that happen and think about, I got over it straight away. It took me a moment, but I managed to get over it relatively quickly. or actually I was still worried about it weeks later. And I like to do this exercise for people who say that they're not resilient.

50:55Firstly, so we can kind of get a baseline of whether or not they actually are not resilient. But it shouldn't be that you take weeks to get over things that really don't matter. So if you can imagine yourself interacting with people and somebody isn't that nice to you, it's probably their problem rather than yours. But when you're in that situation, it's very easy to internalize that, take it on. So it becomes your problem. I don't think this means that you should be treated badly in life. But I think if it's somebody who you meet for a moment who don't have any say in where you're going in the future, trudging it off is much better for you and you leave them with all the negativity that they're carrying around.

51:31It's the same, you know, if you don't get promoted, which is a really big thing, or if you don't get venture to back your business, it can be really negative in the moment. But then you could say, OK, what can I actually learn from this? I'm not going to dwell on it and I'm going to actually move on. And there's really good evidence to suggest that people who are really self-aware, recognize what actually gets them angry, recognize what gets them sad, recognize what gets them upset and are able to kind of rationally say, OK, should I really be upset in this moment? Is this person worth it? Is the area of life actually worth it?

52:03If they can shrudge it off and learn from that and kind of move on from it, they're much more resilient as compared to people who can't. So the example that happened to me, I make a video and I make a stupid mistake in the video whereby I was using a bottle of Prime as an example for a price point on something, which is like a drink that my lads love. And I made a remark about how expensive it was. And on screen, I showed a bottle and actually it was a pack of 12, not one. So my point was that I got it wrong. But, you know, in my head, so 75 ,000 people watch that in like six hours. in my head i'm like oh my god the whole country hates me like they all think i'm an idiot but no no seriously like it speaks to my my credibility of someone i talk about numbers and i can't even figure out that it was a 12 pack and not a one yeah i'm still thinking about it now and i carry every mistake i've ever made on the channel in my head and it builds and builds and builds to the point where there's almost a crippling anxiety around posting in case i make a mistake yeah i don't know how to get past that oh it sounds like me back it sounds like perfectionism Yeah, it just sounds like you have perfectionist sentences.

53:09I mean, there's really good evidence to show that perfectionism is much worse for productivity than people not showing up late because of what you just described. People get stuck. So I think really you have to work on that, which is going to be hard. But thinking about any mistake that you made, can I learn from it? Is there a moment for me to be open with your listeners, which you are? I mean, you're talking about it today on the podcast, which is vulnerable. and then you move on. And what you'll find is if you're thinking about the mistake in your mind, you just need to say to your brain, tell me another story, tell me another story, tell me another story, something else.

53:45How about this time when you did that? Yeah, no, I want to focus on something else because I think all of us think that our brain is giving us feedback that really is rational and considered and are things that we should actually notice, but it isn't. I know it's not. It's been conditioned for our life. So you need to recondition your brain that when you make a mistake, you say, okay, yeah, I made a mistake. Now, what am I going to do about it? well I'm going to own up to it I'm going to learn from it I'm going to move on and if there's four people out of the 75 ,000 people who are going to write negative comments then that's them they're carrying around negativity in life and that's not me and when you are dealing with money and when you are investing money you will make mistakes and when you are on a journey and trying to like move yourself forward you will make mistakes and it's you say about you know in your book it's our fear of failure or embarrassment that prevents us and it's like when you actually get confirmation of that you know it it can almost put you off ever doing it again if that makes sense so you see you let you're you're basically like your audience of 75 000 people and you're picking out the four moments where things are going wrong you have confirmation that you make mistakes you're a human being you know that's that that that that's life but all the other times you didn't make mistakes are calling them into your mind so i'm saying like what about what what about that moment in the podcast where i smashed it that everybody loved what about something that i said that actually will really help people when they're older.

55:01And disconfirming evidence for perfectionism is a tactic that works. So when you're kind of beating yourself up over mistakes, it also works for imposter syndrome. I have a lot of that. Oh yeah, how do you get past imposter syndrome? I feel like a lot of people have that problem. So I always say with imposter syndrome, because I've asked about it all the time, if you don't suffer from imposter syndrome, you probably are a narcissist. so to be in a room where you are sitting in a room full of people where they know different things to you they know more than you perhaps and you actually say yeah these people are what me spending my time with it's really normal to feel like an imposter and actually seeking out places where you feel like an imposter is a great way to grow sitting in rooms you know I and I often say one of the biggest keys to my success is being able to sit in rooms with people who know way more than me about topics that I've never studied.

55:52And I just say, I don't understand it. Can you explain it in a way that I understand over and over again? And that really, really helps you. Yeah, that really helps you grow as a person. So I think if you suffer from imposter syndrome, it's kind of two things that the evidence they do. One we've just discussed, which is look for disconfirming evidence. So if you're sitting in a place where you really feel like you don't belong, but you can't deliver in the way that other people in the room are saying, actually, I've done this, you know, 10 times before. What are they? And then your brain will start telling you the one time that you messed up and you say, no, I don't want to hear that now.

56:23I want to hear the other times. Let's run through them. Some people find it a good idea to write these things down so that when they are in that situation that they can call on them. But for me, what I think works even better is having a buddy who knows that you have imposter syndrome, perhaps they have imposter syndrome as well. And you actually do that for each other. So, you know, I could call you and you would say, look, Grace, these are the 10 times where you actually did this well. You've got this today. And I think what's really cool about literature on belief and overcoming imposter syndrome is that it doesn't matter whether it's you who goes to battle with yourself, which is really hard, or whether you have a friend who you really trust, who's the one who gives you the belief, that can actually push you forward.

57:02And that's why when we talk to kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, often they'll say, my mom really wanted me to do it. My dad really wanted me to do it. My teacher did. And they really supported me. Even when I didn't believe in myself, their belief is what pushed you through. So if you want to be successful, we've talked about networks you should also have this kind of tight group of friends or or your spouse or your parents who really believe in you and will pull you up when you're not believing in yourself you spoke about a professor that that was the opposite of that to you yes that kind of almost derailed you before you even began it's funny because i think even when you're aware of biases you always fall into them into them into them yourselves but yes even though you're like a scientist on that well yeah you know you just don't realize it's happening to you You know, if somebody is kind of negative towards you, they'll never usually be really negative as soon as they meet you.

57:53It will take it will take some time. But yes, no, when I when I joined LSE, one of my mentors at the time and we got on incredibly well, which makes the story much more, much more unusual. Really, really kind of planted seeds of kind of negativity that I wasn't necessarily doing so well and actually came out and compared me to another gentleman who was working at the LSE and said, you know, he's somebody who's going to go incredibly fast and you're not. And what I really hate about that is I really internalized it. And because of that, I started kind of messing up maybe a bit more, doing less, not showing up for myself.

58:26And it was kind of one day when I spoke to some other people, three actually, this is kind of my rule of three, that what you really want to do is get, and this helps you get the signal from the noise, I guess, in what people say, but talk to a few people to get feedback and say, do you kind of recognize me in that? And they said, no, that I started kind of upping my game again, which is really depressing. Now I work on myself so that when people are negative towards me, I don't internalize it as much and that I can actually keep going. But then it really got me down. And then what was interesting when I compare myself to that gentleman, which I continue to do, which is a really bad thing to do, I ended up moving faster than him kind of through the rungs in the end, which showed that this professor who I call negativity in the book, professor negativity was wrong.

59:10But for me, that's a lesson of who do you surround yourself with? are they people who push you forward or kind of pull you back and I think maybe you can't cut out the people who are pulling you back but definitely managing them is really important because you'd be surprised if you're someone who you look up to like my professor negativity somebody in your family who you really care about who might not necessarily want you to succeed to the level that you might want to succeed or other people who are role models to you can really get under your skin and affect your actions you might not even realize it's happening I've never considered calling up a mate and being like how do you view me like i think you should get it together sort out stop complaining about frying frying drinks on his youtube channel hey you've got one of the biggest youtube channels in the country stopping a melt this is the coolest exercise you can do though you can email people who know you well and say look i really want to like change some things for this new year can you give me three things that you think i do really well and three things that you think that i should work on and you know it will pinch you if you have mates who are honest with you um and kind of take it seriously it will pinch you if people say things that maybe you thought you were good maybe that's it show up on time stop being late all the producers look at me like yeti stop being late um do you talk to yourself ever do you give yourself like words of affirmation i ask because in like but i played basketball for like my whole life and i played in university teams and times when we've lost in the final and I haven't had a good game like I really take it to heart and then I don't want to talk to anyone I get home my partner's like what's wrong I'm like we lost don't talk to me for like three days and then until I get on the court again I carry it with me like I'm like you need a good game to prove yeah I need a good game so now like sometimes it helps my like you said support my teammates might be like oh look dude get at halftime they're like do you get your head in the game I'm calling you're better than this and they'll be like yeah I'm better than this but sometimes I just trash talk and I'm like I'm that guy I'm amazing I'm the best so like do you talk to yourself and be like I'm the best I can do this but I'm gonna start because if that works for you then I am I'm gonna go home and say but yeah no I do I do like mantras so I think if things aren't if things aren't working out I write them on post-its and kind of and stick them up which again is another way saying them is is is another way that has kind of been linked to getting people to getting people to move move forward I think when things aren't going well I like this too shall pass which I think is quite a nice what this this too shall pass i thought you're speaking french i thought i thought

1:01:42i don't know that word this too shall pass yeah i think i think i think when negative things are happening two things happen first if we get really stuck in them and it takes all our attention and we've already focused about our attention should be on um things but we also think that they're going to last forever so i think when if i'm going through something and it's negative i'll kind of say, yeah, this is going to, this is going to pass over. And in the meantime, there's all these other positive things that are happening in my life. So usually in the situation that you describe, if something negative happens, um, along with having some mantras that might help me, I think, okay, what can I actually control in this situation?

1:02:16And I just try to let the, let the rest go. Um, and then, and not, not necessarily worry about it. Okay. So prime gate, as we're calling it now, the biggest, the biggest event of my life. Um, I was really struggling with that. And then my missus messaged me and goes that movie that you watched showed the boys the other day was a 15 and i was like oh god i was like leave me alone my resilience cup is empty leave me alone and i was listening to your audiobook and you were like just go to sleep basically because it you know you were like you go to sleep and you think about it with the fresh eyes and it's that thing yeah i think you should go to bed and wake up and then it's like you've got a whole new cup of resilience and if it helps you i watched loads of 15 movies when i was a kid and i turned deaf behind yeah there you you know it's not i mean think about how bad how bad are the consequences it was a horror movie it's called like um stories to tell in the dark or something i haven't seen and i found it on like a list of like movies for kids and i was sitting there i was like holy shit this is terrifying and i was like it's a kid's movie it's fine and then she looked it up and she was like yeah it's a hard 15 whoops it is character building yeah build that resilience exactly yeah go to bed sit on that yeah exactly yeah but look so one thing okay i was having a conversation with a previous guest the other day actually timothy armu who was like he journals a lot and he he showed a journal from when he was first starting about and he was like i'm at that place now that i said i wanted to be then yeah he just shared that moment and i was thinking two years ago Damien would say he wanted to be right here doing this but in this moment I don't feel like that how do we know when we've got to our goals so I think if you can do that it's an amazing way to live your life I I just don't have the patience for journaling and I and I say that in the book I wish I had that record of of things that I've done I think in the absence of that just writing down public speaking is a goal for me and making sure that you acknowledge it when it comes because I think the problem for us as human beings is that when we set off on a journey if we don't define our goals well, we never celebrate them.

1:04:21And actually, even if we define them, we're quite bad for celebrating them because we've updated ourselves by the time we actually realize that goal. And that's really bad for mental health and it's really bad for happiness that you're achieving things that you really wanted to achieve that you strove for and you're not necessarily pausing to celebrate them. I'm awful for that. But you should. I'm like, next goal, 100k subs, dash the plaque, go. But it will motivate you to actually stop, pause and say, look what Damien did in the last five years and now he's going to do exactly the same amount and perhaps a bit more because he's learned a lot of lessons from the previous five years.

1:04:56So for me, if you can't bring yourself to journal, which I think is the best thing to do and putting in the details, writing down the things that you're aiming for and making sure that you celebrate them when you get there and celebrate them big with people, but also yourself. Just sit down and go, wow, I actually, I did well. I said I would do something. I went on the journey and I actually managed to accomplish it. Yeah, it's funny you said the plaques on your YouTube views because I remember when he first started and he got like a little plaque which said, congratulations, you have like 10 ,000 subscribers, whatever.

1:05:23And then he said, one day, if I get like a hundred thousand subscribers, they're gonna send me like a gold plaque. I can't remember what it was, silver plaque. And then he - Do they actually send you a physical? A physical, it's beautiful. I love that, good for them. And then he didn't even make a big deal about it. I'm like, we should be going to Vegas to celebrate this. Like I remember three years ago, he was like, one day I'm gonna get this plaque and I got it. I actually made a piece of paper that said, cause when I was like starting, my missus was like, she's like big on manifestation. And I'm just like, no, just get out of my way.

1:05:48let me work. And she was like, she was like, write on a piece of paper that you're going to get a hundred thousand subscribers and stick it on the wall. And I did that and I stuck it on the wall. And then every day I walked in and I was just, it was just like a foregone conclusion at that point. It was going to happen. Like I knew it was going to happen from the moment I started the channel. And I'm not that kind of guy. I'm not the kind of guy that's like, I'm going to smash this. I'm going to smash that. I have a lot of doubt. Then I replaced that piece of paper with the silver plaque and it's there.

1:06:16And I walk in, I'm like, what the fuck's going on today? what do I do today do you know what I mean where do I go but there is a gold yeah there is a gold a million yeah so the you know the there's really good evidence about the Olympics the bronze the silver and the gold that the bronze and the gold are equally happy so when they're standing on the podium when they actually take happiness over all of these athletes but the silver are the most miserable and they reckon that the silver is the most miserable because they're looking at the gold saying that they lost out whereas the bronze the distance to gold is too far and they're actually not with the other people who lost the podium I got on the podium So maybe that's, maybe that's, maybe that's what's going on.

1:06:50It's a big jump a hundred to a million because it's 10 times and it's like, and when you're like a UK finance channel, that's a big, that's a big leap, you know. Yeah, you'll do it. Yeah, probably. And then we go to Vegas. Yeah. Okay, good man. I feel that you - It's official, that's written in stone. We're going to Vegas when we get to a million. I feel you should go to like Atlantic City for silver though. You should do something. Atlantic City? Yeah. Okay, well, yeah, I mean, it was ages ago now. And I think I thought in my head that when I got to 100K, I'll be a made man. I'll be set. And then I got there and I was like, oh, I still have all the same problems and I'm not that rich.

1:07:21Do you know what I mean? In my head, I hadn't framed what it meant. I just thought, oh, 100K. I thought, oh, I'm going to be driving a Lambo. It's a huge accomplishment. So you should absolutely, absolutely celebrate it. But it's common that as we go along with our goals, we realize them and we update what we want to do. So then you want more. You might get a more expensive lifestyle. So you want more money in order to finance it. So it doesn't feel like enough. And I think pausing and actually kind of celebrating is a really nice thing to do. But do, please do celebrate. I think it's the most important.

1:07:51Yeah, exactly. You're on a treadmill, come off for a second and then get back on. Is it too late to celebrate the Silver Platte six months down the line? No, definitely not. No, you should go. Definitely not. Vegas? Atlantic City. Vegas? Or Reno. I feel that it should be a step down and then Vegas is the... Vegas would break me financially and emotionally. Do a video on why not to go to Vegas for loads of money because it's a bad investment. It's all gone, guys. If you missed anything in that episode, don't worry. We do a really good summary of everything that's gone on and what we discussed in our newsletter.

1:08:23You can sign up using the link in the description. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. It really makes a difference and lets us know what we're doing right. This is not financial advice. The reason it's not financial advice is because it's not tailored to you. Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, this is almost a guarantee. Remember, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So your money is always at risk with investing. Also, remember other fees may apply. I'm Damo. I'm T. This episode was recorded by Jack Hobbs. It was produced and edited by Ruth Edwards.

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