Barry Hearn's 10 Life Lessons - Handpicked

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0:48hi there you're listening to high performance with jay comfrey and professor damien hughes now there's two things that i know the first one is that sometimes you haven't got an hour or hour and a half to spend listening to one of our episodes. And the other thing is that there are over 200 amazing high performance conversations in our archives. And I know that many of you have come to this podcast recently and you don't know the gold, the life lessons, the magic that exists. So what we like to do is myself and Damien take it in turns to handpick some episodes that have really sort of resonated with us, things that we feel we've grown and learned from.

1:25And today, Professor Damien Hughes you are in the hot seat. Oh I'm looking forward to this one Jake. The episode that I wanted to talk about the origins of it are worth sharing that I was I love reading I'm one of those uh bookworms that just love devouring books and um I was reading Barry Hearn's uh life story and chapter one is his top 10 lessons that he's learned through life and as I was reading it I remember texting you saying this guy could be the best interview that we've had on the podcast where we actually don't have to do any work we just have to ask him to outline the 10 lessons and we just sit there and listen so I sent them over to you and you said well let's see if we can get him on and then a couple of months later we were actually sat opposite the man himself and the lessons that he taught us were brilliant so that's what really stands out for me and I thought it's worth us just exploring a few of them so what have you done have you picked a few of the different lessons or do you want us to hear a bunch of them what are you thinking?

2:24Yeah, what I was thinking was, if I share the ones that stood out for me, we can sort of talk about it in more detail. So his first lesson, if you remember when he sat there and he spoke in his sort of growly East London accent, he told us that he believes that it's better to be lucky than good looking. So your first rule for life is it's better to be born lucky than good looking well it's so true you know i mean because without that little bit of luck and no matter what you might think how bright you are or how well qualified you are we all need that bit of luck we need we need to now to take advantage of that so why did that stand out to you particularly well one of the things that we both often really careful of on the podcast is survivorship bias where people that so you can always tell the people that haven't listened to the podcast because they'll say to you oh it's about successful people telling you why they were successful and the reality is that the vast majority of our guests will often recognize the role of luck or good fortune in their career you know like we don't control where we're born the parents we go back to the postcode that we grow up in all those factors are predetermined before we're even born And I think when you hear somebody acknowledge that, it opens a way to tell you that this is somebody with humility, this is somebody with a sense of perspective.

3:49And it's somebody that isn't high on their own supply. And I think the fact that Barry could talk about the role of luck is reinforced by one of my favourite authors is a guy called Dr. Richard Wiseman, who is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. and he wrote a brilliant book on it called The Luck Factor, where he talks about how lucky people are simply people that believe they're lucky. They believe that good things happen to them. So what that does is it opens up the brain to start spotting opportunities rather than threats or possibilities rather than probabilities. And to me, Barry is a great role model for somebody that believes that they're lucky and therefore sees opportunities, both personally and in his business life.

4:33Wonderful. What was the next thing he said that got the professor's ears peaked? Well, this is a message that any parent of young children will probably have echoed themselves. But hearing Barry Hearn tell us that we need to take control over our life and our circumstances and our fate is probably more effective than our words. Let's listen to it. Well, it's a little bit like the work ethic one, really. But sitting on the sofa comes in different stages. You can start off by being lazy. What worries me today, especially amongst some of the youngsters that I see, is that there's not enough get up and go.

5:13And a lot of that is society's problem. The kids weren't born like that. You know, maybe they didn't get enough parental guidance, maybe. Maybe they didn't get enough activities at school, maybe. Maybe they got in with the wrong crowd who'd failed earlier, I don't know. But for whatever reason is we need to get people motivated to do something. If the facilities don't exist, I'm a big believer in government spending on sport, which I don't think is anywhere near enough. I think we should be spending the same amount of money on sport as we send on defence. There's a percentage of gross national product that we allocate to overseas good causes.

5:53And yet we've got 30 percent of children undernourished in this country. All these things I can't live with. I don't see the rationale to it. But when you look at kids, it's depressing sometimes. And it may be not their fault, but it's very easy to get in that rut. Gang culture, peer pressure against kids. We talk about carrying knives and things like that, you know. Hardly ever did I see a knife growing up. See, a lot of people were tough guys. A lot of people could fight, but they weren't. You know, there wasn't the drugs and all that sort of stuff as much as there is today. And this is an issue that's got to be dealt with because these kids got, if you take away someone's dream, I had a dream, you had a dream.

6:35We all had dreams when we were growing up. What worries me about today's society is not enough kids have a dream. So this comes back to a very common theme on this podcast, which is that ability to deal with setback, the ability to cope with failure, the importance of keeping on going. yeah so if you remember jake when he told us really powerfully the story on christmas eve when his business was about to face bankruptcy and he was looking for sponsorship and he went to a hotel chain desperate to try and save his business and he described it in such an evocative way of going back to the station and the snow falling and having to have the conversation with his wife that they were maybe going to have to cut back and times were going to get a little bit tougher but he then says about how this guy came up with not money for sponsorship but how he could offer hotel rooms and he could sell them on and that saved his business four o 'clock i got off to train at slough and it started to snow it was like a dickens novel walked into it my heart wasn't in it at all got in to see mr hearn he said what have you got for me i said and i started the sales pitch which i'm generally quite good at but this was awful my heart it was i'd had too much of a battering.

7:48I'd lost too many deals. Finished it in 20 minutes. Quite honestly, I was an embarrassment to be there. And he looked at me and he said, it's Christmas Eve. It's 4.30 Christmas Eve. I went, I know. He said, you must really need this. And I said, tell the truth. I said, I do. I really need this. And he said, well, I've got no money. And that was like someone kicked me straight in the lower regions. I thought, well, that's it. I can't do more than I've done. I've given it the best shot. I've had two years of absolutely nightmares and I've shouldered it on my own. Probably a mistake. So I just thought, well, I'll go out with some class.

8:28And I said, well, Mr. Hearn, thank you very much for seeing me. I appreciate it's Christmas Eve. Let me wish you and your family a happy new year. I turned around to walk out the door and he said, but I've got hotel rooms. I said, what does that mean? He said, well, I've got no money. I said, no, I understood that bit. He said, but I've got hotel rooms, he said. And at that time, Trust House 40 had Sandy Lane in Barbados, Plaza Athenay in Paris, Waldorf in London. They're great hotels. He said, I will give you£300 ,000 of hotel rooms, but no money for this sponsorship. And we shook hands. I left.

9:04By the time I walked back to Slough Station, I'd sold the lot to mates of mine in the travel business at a 40 % discount for cash. I got 180 grand. That 180 grand saved my life, saved my business, and saved me, more importantly, show me that you're never completely finished. You know, while you're breathing, there's fighting the old dog. That was a 12th round knockout for me in my world. But it taught me lots of things. It taught me that when you're in situations like that, the situation will define you as a person as well as you will define the situation. and you learn more about yourself in adversity than you'll ever learn in success that's a great example of somebody that's just willing to keep finding a way that things don't happen in that linear straight line but he's going to explore different avenues different possibilities and i think that applies to all of us whatever it is whether it's coming off the back of exam results that haven't gone well whether it's a business deal that we haven't got or we find ourselves in a bit of a call this hack in our career.

10:10Barry Hearn talks to us about the power of just keep trying, keep putting yourself out there, keep being curious. He's like a dog with a bone, isn't he, Barry? And the ability to just keep going, to think that tomorrow it might be the day that everything changes. Go on, give us the final one. Well, there's two I'm going to combine because they both come back to the same point. One is that pressure is only felt by those who fail. But then the one where he says that life is going to end in tears, so you might as well smile for the rest of it. They both speak at the heart of an optimist, an eternal optimist, somebody that sees the best, sees the bright light, even on the darkest of days.

10:48Let's listen to him talk about the power of optimism. Let's talk about failure because lesson number four is pressure is only felt by those that fail. What that really means is that people make excuses for their own weaknesses. We've all got weaknesses. But it's very tiresome for me to hear people say, oh, yeah, I couldn't handle it. Yeah. I'd rather keep my mouth shut. Firstly, I would never tell anyone if that was the case with me because that's something inside me to sort out. And secondly, it's probably lacking appreciation that we've all got an opportunity in life to do something and it won't always go right.

11:33So don't start crying around me. Go out and do something about it. And if you do fail, make it one time you fail and use that as a springboard to succeed. We're going through the motions of waiting to die. So deal with it. And you do know, I think, life begins with smiles and ends with tears, doesn't it? That's one thing you can't change. so there's no point when you can't affect anything don't give it a moment's thought because that moment is a wasted thought and you could be thinking about something else now this is a brilliant way to end this short episode because people say give me one thing that combines all the people that have been on the high performance podcast and what they're really asking is give me a shortcut to finding my own version of high performance and we both agree that optimism is that thing it's they optimism is that thing the people who sit and have these conversations with us have that ability to just find the positives yeah definitely and they're prepared to gamble they just keep seeing that the next meeting will be the one that changes my life the next course I do is the one that is going to ignite that spark of passion the next person I meet might be my business partner that I can go and conquer the world with they're constantly coming into a situation open to possibilities rather than closed to probabilities.

13:00And so just to prove to our listeners that we're not high on our own supply, I think the final point I'd like to leave them with is when we asked Barry to give his assessment on us as interviewers, and he described us as distinctly average. Perfect. And he's quite right. It was a great conversation. I mean, that clip where he says, I'm unbeatable. You can dim me. You can damage me. You're never going to beat me. If you would like to hear the full conversation with Barry Hearn, a man who made his fortune in snooker, darts, pool and golf, then all you need to do is track down episode 168 of the High Performance podcast to find the rest of those lessons that he believes has carried him all the way through life.

13:45Damien, really enjoyed that. Yeah, I did as well, Jake. I love doing these kind of retrospective looks into the archive. They're great. And don't forget, if you want more from High Performance, you can download the High Performance app Just go to your app store, search for High Performance, and use your exclusive code, HPAPP. That's H-P-A-P-P. And of course, on the app, you can find every single episode we've ever recorded. Thanks for listening.