Padel With Max Verstappen, Reacting to Losing £50m and Entrepreneurs' ADHD

0:00So welcome back to Secret Leaders. Today, Chris and I are just in the studio having a catch up on all things interesting, us and entrepreneurship. so Chris what did you think of our James Watt brew dog founder interview well I mean I don't really get to drink beer very often in interviews yeah that was fun and it was like quite late in the evening so I I absolutely love that and I actually did watch it back afterwards and I was just getting so into it so fantastic um I mean fascinating dude really to have achieved that height of success and actually still seem incredibly like down to earth and normal I love all the fisherman stuff like do you follow him on social like he literally is just like constantly in his fisherman boat.

0:38Like, he's just, you know, fishing for prawns the other day up in Scotland. Random. Yeah, and he's... I mean, not random to him, but random to us. Yeah, and he's permanently saying that if he had failed at Boodog, he just wanted to be a fisherman again. I always wonder with statements like that, whether it's like, is that just like a media statement? Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah, it sounds amazing. But he's obviously sold his company, has more money than he ever needs, and he's starting another one. So like all entrepreneurs, he's obsessed with entrepreneurship. By the way, he just reminded me, he did mention that he once almost lost 50 million quid.

1:11And at that time, you were waiting for a big payout from your agency, millions of pounds in the ether. Has it arrived? Yes, it has arrived. Yeah. You feel a little bit more relieved? I was freaked in the moment because I was a little bit. And he told that story. And I don't know, someone had seen me outside stressing. I said, like, give me five minutes. I need to send my bank details through. And I came back in here, just sent my bank details throughout there. And then he was like, there was a time where I sent money. and I sent it to the wrong bank account. I was in here being like, wait, I mean, I love the podcast, but...

1:41If God could ever send me a louder message, it's right now. Maybe I should listen to this. So I like freaked for like 20 minutes from the episode. But yeah, it did arrive and amazing outcome finally to put to bed. Amazing. What do you do with that money? Have you got a plan for it? As in, you already had money, you're already wealthy. So when you have a new load of cash like that, is it like nice? Is it a new problem to solve? like because once you've got money you kind of feel the next question is like well i should do something with the money or what or i'm assuming you don't just let it sit in savings so what does one do well i mean from my perspective i was always unsure as to whether i would get that additional money so like you say like i had i certainly i don't i'm not particularly money driven and i'm not someone that necessarily thinks about flashy things regularly like i've got quite simple tastes and so it's nice to have it because it's assigned a recognition to myself and i think to the world that I should have been paid the money for the work that I did over those 10 years and all the rest of it so it feels great but for me like it just basically goes to my uh wealth manager and he manages it and there's not a huge amount that I'm sitting here saying like I need a boat or I need a car like I don't need any of that you know so for me it doesn't make a material difference uh I have said it to you before though like I am in this wavering point of my life where I'm like, I can tangibly feel my ambition has dropped, you know, from what it was when I was younger.

3:03Do you reckon, we didn't talk about this at all, but do you reckon that has anything to do with now having completely retirement money? So therefore you really don't need to work now. Do you reckon that's actually accidentally fucked you up in a subconscious way you don't realise? Or has set me free. You know, as in like, I don't know, I said this yesterday at the business show, like, uh i i you get to a certain point and unless you're loving the work that you do if you have if you have money then i don't know why you're you're crucifying yourself all the time to work the hours and so forth there's a great conversation we have with you know with nicola like if you can why wouldn't you optimize towards like more sport time with friends if you have kids time with your kids like family time with the family like time with dan yeah and and other things um and you know for me i'm in this place where i'm like i could actually very comfortably have a couple of quiet years and i'm sure i'll come roaring back but it's always it's also okay to have a bit of seasonality to the ambition but definitely since i was a youngster the ambition is is is wavering a bit you know i think that's fine i think that's fine as well and i think what's nice and healthy about it is recognizing yeah and also maybe this maybe it's a moment in time and maybe it's not but you know it might just be how you're feeling right now it might be attached to the money coming in it might also be attached to just like you say working so much for so long and being like what you know hold on a second why am I on autopilot still yeah I actually I don't know I mean this isn't like podcasty chat but I would say that my biggest regret of working that hard for that long was that I definitely lost friend I definitely I haven't lost friends but the depth of my relationship with some people isn't as deep as it would have been had I not worked like that and I always do reflect on that and I think I could spend a couple of years intentionally building those friendships they would love it I would love it and I would have more time than they would to make those things happen um and so so yeah like I don't mind having a quieter period I guess I guess something else you could do is maybe intentionally go after building relationships with people that you always looked up to that you know could be really interesting to bring new insight and new depth to your life.

5:15Well, I played tennis because you obviously sort of semi-introduced us at Founders, but I played... I like to call that a semi. Yeah. I met Michael Acton-Smith at Founders and I genuinely didn't know who he was when I was talking to him. And then he mentioned something about how he had loved playing tennis the week before. And I was like, I'm obsessed with tennis. I then played him for a few hours on Wednesday. We hung out for a bit. And then found out that he runs a multi-billion dollar brand. I mean, I knew by then who he was, but we didn't talk about work. So this is Mike Werton-Smith, the founder of Calm, for anyone who doesn't know.

5:49Yeah, but we didn't talk about work. Like, very briefly, he was like, what are you up to these days? And I kind of told him that I was doing the creator stuff, but I was actually taking a lot of time off. And he was like, oh, amazing. I feel like maybe I should be doing something like that. And it was a great, great afternoon and quite chilled vibe. Okay, so you play tennis with him. You've been playing quite a lot of paddle recently, no? Pretty paddle obsessed. to the point of view where I nearly let the ADHD entrepreneur get the better of me, and I nearly launched a paddle company. And then I just found myself in the throes of it and suddenly was like, what are you doing?

6:24You just like paddle. Just play loads of paddle. Stop trying to own the thing that you're going to, which I know a lot of people have with hotels. They're like, they go to a hotel, and they say, well, amazing if I own this place. And then it's like, no, it wouldn't be, because when your drink was late, you'd be, for fuck's sake, sort the staff out and actually it would kill the whole thing so yeah playing enormous about paddle really enjoying it and i feel like that's like meditative uh for me at the moment just like hanging with friends and and and playing um i haven't played paddle in ages last time when i was in south africa for a month i played paddle regularly came back to the uk i was like right that's it i'm so into paddle now haven't been playing it takes quite a lot of time i don't live near anywhere that has paddle and you know they're in these like quite actually paddle down the road from here really get the team yeah Maybe we should play after one of our sessions, actually.

7:10But yeah, I haven't played in a while. And I'm going to Red Bull headquarters in a few weeks. And my meeting is with the commercial director, the head of performance, and the marketing director, or the CMO. And the meeting is a paddle game at their HQ. I could get on board with doing that business. How cool is that? Literally, they're like, we've got a paddle court, because Max Verstappen apparently is obsessed with paddles. So they built him a paddle court there, because that's where the drivers have to basically stay the whole time. And so now they just do their business meetings instead of in meeting rooms in paddle courts.

7:44That's so cool. I wasn't thinking how bad a business meeting would be while playing paddle. I don't know. It's probably mostly for show. Unless the paddle was shit. It's probably mostly for show, but it's really cool. No one's ever offered me a paddle game. I mean, meetings are just meetings. This is so interesting. I need to take you out for a paddle game and talk about podcasting. yeah so founders of the day so founders is your founder community that you've run for many many years now which is actually a very exclusive group to join you have to be invited in uh i was there with you on the weekend it was amazing and i met uh hector from unplugged ceo of unplugged he runs this network of cabins around the country and the business is called unplugged and you have to i remember we spoke about how often you put your phone away and we were talking about how incredible it is that people go and have full digital detox.

8:35I got obsessed with him and his business and talking to him and you're his best customer. He was like, he's like, Dan loves the same cabin. He was like, it's very strange, but Dan loves the same cabinet, always tries to go to the same cabin. They don't always have it available. It really winds me up. This summer I had to go all the way. What I want to do, basically, I've got a cabin that's like 45 minutes away from my house. So, so close, but you're in total nature and you're completely unplugged from anything. So if you've got a young child and you're going on your own that's just so convenient yeah um but the more popular unplugged gets because i keep bloody telling people um the more booked up these cabins get so this summer when i was like i need to go to an unplugged the only one they had was in sussex or are you going solo um this summer was the first time i went with my wife okay um it was a very different experience was actually really nice going again this end of year with my wife I think going to unplugged so a cabin in the woods for three nights on your own, no phone, no internet so you turn up and you get a they give you a Nokia 3210 and so you can text you know what I do is I get there I text my mum and I text my wife and I say if you need me you can text me here obviously it's so annoying to text on those phones nowadays so you don't bloody text loads but it's like that's my emergency number if you need to get a hold of me you can do that my phone is going in a box I'm locking it and I'm done Is the box outside the room?

9:54The box is in the room, but you have the key and whatever. And actually, to be honest, last couple of times I went, I just used my phone. I kept it on airplane mode. But the important thing here is, just to say, I can tell my whole team, it's the best time when you're a parent, the best time for you to go is during the week. Because nursery or school is on. So the burden you're leaving with someone else is actually kind of similar to a normal burden. It's just like the school run and it's not that bad for three nights. So weekends are kind of out once you're a parent. So that means you're going during work time.

10:27So also what's amazing about this is you can literally date your team. You can't contact me. But like, there's no point. I won't see the message. So it's a really like, it's a really interesting thing. If you were to go to a hotel and say, I'm on holiday, people would still message me. I'm going on holiday next week. And I guarantee I get loads of messages. You will, but you got better habits than me. I would respond. You just have two phones. One phone is networked into your life. and one phone is networked into your wife. That's literally it. And then you just don't pick up the other phone. And I broadly believe...

10:57Which one does your mistress use? Christ. I broadly believe that the one that only my wife and my family have, like if someone desperately needed me at work and it was so important they couldn't work out themselves, they'd find a way. They'd find a way and they'd maybe get a hold of Lou's number and then come through. But I do, I was so amazed by the reaction of all the entrepreneurs in the room who were like, yeah, unplugged is the most amazing thing ever because we put our phones away. And I was thinking, but you could just put your phone away. Do you know what I've just remembered? What? I've just remembered that A, you haven't got your birthday present yet, have you?

11:29From? Me. Oh. And B, the reason I just remembered this is because you were like, well, people want to find a way to get through to me. They'll find a way to get through to me. I just remembered that I messaged your brother to get some very important information out of him so I could get you the perfect present. Never fucking responded. He didn't reply. No. So it's not actually that easy to get a hold of you, it turns out. Well, he's very good at it as well. Your presence is actually sitting in our office and having a chance to give it to you yet because we were getting out drinking and all that stuff.

11:53Anyway, so it turns out people around you are not that good at helping me get a hold of you. Anyway, with Unplugged, the best thing about it is you're telling everyone else you can't get a hold of me. And so you are literally alone with your thoughts, which might sound terrifying. It's insanely interesting. It's not like you're sitting there meditating, by the way. I have a very practical tip on this for everyone listening. If you stop replying to people, eventually they will stop expecting a reply true and so like if you just remove yourself from 99 conversations people will just learn to have those conversations without you present and eventually you know in case you know you course correct occasionally um but yeah that's that's the best advice i could give and i think that's good the thing is i actually like that depth of connection with people so i think there must be like a personality trait difference between us because I don't know that Maybe I'm a psychopath Well it just doesn't That just doesn't That doesn't motivate me It doesn't like Make me feel Oh I want that in my life at all But the flip side is Maybe it's because I am just so extreme About things I will as you know Respond to people very quickly And like I'm on Like everyone is always like How you say fast I just am like that Like my ADHD Serves me to be like All over all the things All the time I also then will go somewhere like Unplugged The cabin Yeah Unplugged And unplugged This is a great plug For unplugged Yeah But I would go there multiple times a year and get the extremity of the other addiction, which is no one can contact me at all.

13:16Yeah. And I'm completely alone. What are you doing? You're three days in a cabin, no phone. What are you doing with yourself? I don't tell us everything. Different times. Very good. I got the joke. Different times. I actually, you know, no internet is what I'll say on that point. So no internet, no imagination. I mean, there's a lot of questions I have as a follow up. Right. Okay. I would say, sometimes I do the most amazing amount of work ever so I'm not necessarily always just going because whatever sometimes I'm going because I need creative inspiration for work and I will bring um these like giant post-it notes these like tabletop a3 post-it notes basically and I have this whole thing and I stick them to the walls all around so I end up looking like one of those you know like mad scientist yeah yeah but I write things all over the walls because it's my cabin for a few days anytime I've got an idea or anything like write it over here and over God, if someone was to see you from the outside.

14:05Yeah, mate. Honestly, you look like a psycho doing that. But that doesn't tend to happen. No one does see you. So sometimes I do that. And sometimes, you know, at the end of a year, I'll think about, okay, I'll do a yearly reflection. So every year for the last few years, I've created a manifestation and reflection guide. Spent multiple days creating this guide for myself. I then sent it around the founders community. Everyone absolutely loved it. Then turned it into a lead magnet for heights. So when we launched, it was one of our main drivers of new email addresses was this manifestation and reflections guide.

14:36Ali Abdel found it, used it, did a whole video on it. And this came from the cabin? This didn't come from the cabin. I did this previous to the cabin, but the exercise itself takes four or five hours, and it's hard to find those four or five hours in London and whatever else. So I'll start a retreat at the end of the one I'm going on in in December, I'll start my retreat by doing that for four or five hours. And by doing that, I will think, you know, it's a set of questions and I will, I will intentionally have space after that to then really deeply think about what I want to do next year. What are the holidays I want to go on?

15:14Um, who do I want to spend time with more than other people? Cause now my life is so busy. I've got multiple businesses. I've got multiple business partners. I've got my wife, I've got a daughter. You can't do all of the things. So like being really intentional, what, you know, for For example, next year, I want to go on safari. I want to do it with my mum, and I want to do it with my daughter and my wife, but I'm worried that if I delay that any longer, maybe my mum won't be able to do it as well. And so, it's being intentional. I want to do that. I want to take my daughter skiing, because she'll be three turning four.

15:42So I want to go on her first ski holiday. There's all these things I want to do. And then there's all the practical things as well. And so, I can only do that if I'm really thinking, what are the must have things over the year? and for me to do that the cabin and the space to like just sit and be present yeah it's it's powerful the downside of coming out the cabin is obviously you then get a ton of emails and a ton of everyone's been trying to contact you and trying to keep up and that first day back can feel a bit anxiety inducing if you haven't kept on top of things which you won't have done by nature yeah do you like relate to what i mean do you get anxiety from sort of spending time away I didn't not these days no but I obviously ran a business when I was a youngster that didn't have much money and therefore like I feel like in the early stages of your career you're fueling the business with your blood sweat and tears literally you know you're you're plastering over the gaps that you'd otherwise pay to plaster you know and so at that stage like for sure you know if you were to ask Louise Louise would say like in our first couple of years in a relationship first five years Chris would just work through every holiday you know he'd be on the whole time and then as time has got gone on i've become better at realizing that if i ran a business that required me to be on the whole time i'm not really running a business i'm like a glorified freelancer and so like i think that i intentionally these days set rules around like if i'm going on holiday i will call all of my business partners and i will say like i'm not accessible on holiday unless it's like a fucking emergency and by an emergency like the the place is burning down type thing and then just set the rules with you set the rules with business partners and then i put the phone away and so like my hope is that when i open my phone in two weeks like i've not been bombarded with nonsense they you know they've got on with their lives and it is what it is and i think that i'm obviously at a later stage in my career than what i was when i started and so i think that i think that entrepreneurs in general often think they're like superheroes and feel like they need to solve every problem.

17:41But I feel like in many ways, by solving every problem for everyone else, you are teaching them to not solve their own problems. And so I think course correction is obviously key. But if I leave everyone to their own devices, some course correction, they just get better at their jobs. It's quite interesting. I can't relate to what you're saying. I'm not as good as this. So do you ever get the insecurity that you become so good at it, you're pretty much redundant in your own business? I feel that honestly, the thing you should be aiming at is making yourself redundant in the business because there is there is no better feeling than the business running and working around you and things happening without you having to do it and i think that is like in a classical sense i feel that's value creation and i feel like from a personal perspective i am optimizing these days for as much time as possible not working as working and so if the business is working without me the dream that sounds like business enlightenment 101 i'm feeling at the moment um you're actually kind of shining from it you're um you're like i would say that one of the things i always like looked at on your channels was that you quite intentionally don't set new year's resolutions oh yeah true why is that um i kind of feel like resolutions two things one resolutions kind of end up making me feel guilty i probably don't end up keeping them for too long and then you're all like oh god you know i'm doing the thing that i said i wouldn't or whatever so there's almost like a a negative connotation to a resolution which seems to me to to play into you know negative bias in your head which sends you on a negative spiral and then secondly i think that um they broadly don't work the science of them is that right yeah the science improves that most of these don't work no so i think a much more interesting like you know obviously they do for some but broadly speaking they're not you know they're not so weird because i would have thought like i swear scientifically people who are more directional are more successful well that's very different right so that's kind of the thing a resolution is I'm going to stop doing this and I'm going to commit to doing that.

19:32Like I've been giving up smoking since I've been doing resolutions. Well, sounds like it's working then. It's a good example. Yeah, give me a beer and then I'll... Yeah. So instead I do a word for the year. So what I think is really interesting is having a single guiding force. Again, this might be because of my ADHD. I know if I have too many things, I'm going to distract myself. Also, when I was at my worst, my absolute depth of despair, my company had failed. I had insomnia. I was really depressed. I had chronic anxiety. I knew that I had to change my life. What was the word? What back then?

20:10I'm trying to bloody remember. Recovery. No, do you know what? I was going to say the habit. So I learned how to build habits. Right. And to build habits, you've got to go slowly. You've got to pick one thing. And the one habit that I picked back then, first, first, first, was gratitude. because there's a lot of science around gratitude. So three things that went well today is the scientifically proven, it's one of the only scientifically proven concepts in psychology, full stop, which is mostly a pseudoscience. But gratitude practice can be proven with fMRI technologies in neuroscience. So literally changes your brain and makes you more positive.

20:43So practically someone listening, what can they do? So practically someone, what I did was I, because I'm a nerd, I went and learned Martin Seligman's course on positive psychology. If they're not going to do that. If they're not going to do that, just learn gratitude practice or the three things. It's called the three things gratitude practice. It's literally as simple as three things that went well today. And that's it. And I practiced that every single day for three months. And I noticed that I was feeling more positive. And then I introduced going for a daily walk. And then, and then, and then, and now years later, I've got tons of daily habits that are just second nature to me.

21:17What else you got? Well, before we get into that, I'll answer the first question, which is my word for the year. So I learned that I don't do well with multiple things. I want to focus on one thing. The most likely and positive way to create change is to look at things in decades. So actually to live an intentional life, back to your point, to try and become the person you want to be, you want to change or you want to improve or whatever. I found that having one word will bring me back to something. And this year's word was creativity. And the reason is because last year, I'd got so into the weeds of my business, it wasn't going well.

21:50Heights, it was like flat, and everything was crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis, and problem, problem, problem, and it was stagnant, and I was sucking, and I hated it. And for context, for everyone, Dan probably doesn't talk about this enough these days, but business is like 3x this year. It's gone very well. It's gone very well. Wild. So this year, partly responsible, as I need to change this stuff. So creativity was my word. I put creative process into heights. I did, you know, learning to DJ. I've done so many different things that I don't otherwise... You can make our soundtrack moving forwards.

22:24You don't want that right now. Right now, it's an earsore. But the point with creativity is realizing that I am a creative person, and I'd sucked that part out of my life by doing too focus on the crisis of my business, and that that wasn't going to serve me. So having that word, all it meant was, I still go about my day-to-day life, but occasionally I'm just like, oh yeah, what am I even doing this month that's creative? Nothing. Well, I better go and do something about that. It helped in business and it helped in my personal life. And I've found it to be really helpful. People that I suggest this to, who pick one word for their year, can keep coming back to that one word and create a driving force in their life that actually takes them on a better path.

23:00I like it. Yours should be, stop smoking. Two words. What is quite fun and very helpful for us is by coincidence, where we film our podcast, cube is also where I'm learning to DJ. Where are you DJing here? Literally there's three rooms over there on Tuesday night with a bunch of founders. So when you're not in one of these rooms with me, and we spend a lot of time in these rooms, you're in another room here DJing. Here DJing with a whole bunch of other founders. With other founders? Why is this all new to me? Have you told me this before? Don't think so. Count me out. See? So you're obviously big into your fitness.

23:39And I obviously see a lot of your posts now that are talking about fitness, but also like protein intake and being more intentional about health. Like, how's that going? Yeah, it's quite interesting. Actually, last year at Unplugged, I read Outlive. It's another good thing you can do at Unplugged is read massive books and take notes. So I read Outlive by Peter Attia. It's all about longevity. And I decided to just follow his protocol because I've been too focused on aesthetics. let's say and that kind of stuff means that i go to gym a little bit and then i don't get the you know the outcome that i want and then i give up and all this kind of stuff so this is much more about thinking about uh what what you want to be able to do fitness wise at 100 so imagine you're going to live a long and healthy life what do you need to do and so um i've been following his protocol three or four times a week weightlifting and two times a week some kind of like you know zone two exercise for an hour or so and um because james watt was saying that he thinks that to be at the level you need to be to be a successful entrepreneur you're like a performance athlete what do you think about that yes i think it's a great insight to be fair i think if you can't take care of your brain and body you probably don't have the responsibility like capability of taking care of your your company and your i would like to say to other people that i think it's all a lot of nonsense personally like i feel like my i was never healthy well this is the this is the opposite side of the argument right how many people do you see like proper like fat american ceos are running unbelievable companies i think you can be healthy you can be fit you don't have to be a bloody performance athlete and i think entrepreneurs calling themselves performance athletes i always do find quite funny because like they managed to go to the gym a couple times a week and they're like oh my god well i'll tell you what longevity specialist i tell you what we had We had an exciting...

25:24The other day we launched Germany and we decided to go out at heights and we decided to take the team out and celebrate it, whatever. And we all went to one rebel, which I've never been to before. It's great. It's so much fun, but Christ was I... It's like a rip off of Barry's. Yeah, totally. Was I not a performance athlete that day? I mean, I just look pathetic. On the treadmill? Or was it boxing? On all of it, yes, boxing. Okay, yeah. So boxing, then tread, boxing, then tread, back and forth. Yeah. And like, let me just say that my team seemed much more like high performance athletes than me.

25:50yeah fair enough yeah i was just like old fucking fat dad loser in the corner yeah i mean i think it's very important to stay healthy but i just think the way that it's like the vernacular right i think the way entrepreneurs now everyone like reads a bit of brian johnson and everyone's like suddenly like scientifically know everything about everything and everyone's like i self-identify it's high performing athletes it's just hilarious flip side to that yeah look at james watt and his company and then look at us yeah i i mean you you you build a billion dollar company and tell me what a high performance athlete should or shouldn't do or look like yeah i think that's i think that's true i also do think underlying mate the guy is fucking drinking beer all the time and managing to run a company that size you gotta be quite high performing to manage that and don't get me wrong i like james we had a few beers and basically like rolled out of here and didn't work again for about a week yeah and i would say that it's interesting that some companies i think you've got really impressive entrepreneurs who are in harder companies i'm not saying specifically to us yeah but i think it's a little bit like survivor bias on that one yes because i think he's really impressive i think the company's amazing but at the same time i think that time and place is part of the equation of a billion pound company you know i know so many entrepreneurs that i think are fundamentally brilliant and they're sort of stuck a little bit by the business they're in and so when they sell those businesses i expect them to go on and do massive things afterwards yeah And so the test for James would be if he does it again, then he's unquestionable.

27:16Yeah, yeah. I feel like this is your roundabout way of saying that you don't identify me as a high performance athlete. Nor myself. Nor myself. I mean, God, no. Okay, hope you enjoyed this kind of different chatty format for this week. Next Tuesday, we've got the founder, one of the most powerful women in the UK, actually, the founder of Mumsnet, one of the biggest social media networks in the world, Justine Roberts, joining us. And Chris, see us out. Yeah, well, I'm going on holiday. So don't get in touch with me. Don't call me. Don't message me and I'll see you when I'm back. Yeah. And don't message me because I'll just be tempted to find a way to get a hold of Chris.

27:51So until next week. But do remember to like and subscribe and rate us five stars on all the audio channels. Thank you very much. We'll see you next week. I'm Chris. I'm Dan. And this was Secret Leaders.