Martin Lewis: How I Built Britain's Most Trusted Brand — and the Price I Paid

0:02Martin Lewis: You cannot market trust. Trust only comes from being trustworthy. When a struggling 90-year-old grandmother with onset dementia is paying the maximum for her energy bills because she can't access the system and doesn't understand what to do, that is all of our problem. That is society's problem. How hard do you want to push? How much do you really want to be the number one? Do you really want to be that successful? Because there's a cost to it.

0:31Jake Humphrey: What does it feel like to be the most trusted person in Britain? And to understand better than anyone what that trust actually demands? If high performance stands for anything, it really is all about trust. You trust us to go beyond the success stories, to get behind the achievement and to find the truth about what it really costs. And there's no better guest to explore that with than today's Martin Lewis. The campaigning journalist, and that's exactly how he describes himself. Not an entrepreneur, not a website owner, a campaigning journalist who built Money Saving Expert into the most trusted consumer platform in the country.

1:09Jake Humphrey: And who spent his career putting billions of pounds back into the pockets of ordinary people. But where does that drive come from? What made him so determined to put trust at the heart of everything he does? And what has carrying that mission and that responsibility really cost him? this is the story behind that mission and the man behind the money saving expert

1:37Martin Lewis: so one of the things that i try and do with everything is you know i talk to my team when we're writing something and i explain to them that we must always consider that anybody reading or watching is selfish not in a pejorative way of selfishness but in the idea that No one's actually that interested in money stuff, but they're interested in their money stuff. So for me, high performance is getting people to do things that improve their lives and also trying to get policymakers and regulators to do things that improve their lives at the same time. And achieving that would be my definition of where I am right now of high performance.

2:12So where did you learn that trick about talking to the individual,

2:16Martin Lewis: not talking to the masses? I made it up. Did you? Most of what I did was made up. and look after university I worked in city PR and then I trained got a postgrad in broadcast journalism I am a journalist by trade very proudly a journalist a broadcast journalist by trade but then I came up with the concept of money saving on a very tiny little tele channel built this little web platform and I'd worked it and I'd used all of that to really build the research that went on. And what had been going on before in my world of personal finance journalism? Well, Alvin Hall had been around, who some people may remember, who was very much a stop spending expert.

2:55Martin Lewis: Whereas I am a how to play the system, how it works, make sure you understand it, embrace the complexity. That's always, especially in the early days, that was my motto, it's complex. So let's embrace that and turn it back on them. And that was what turned me on then. And now more it's about the consumer campaigning. And so I did that and I built that and I had to make it all up. I never read anybody else's books. I still don't look at other websites. So to try not to take ideas that are coming elsewhere. And when I first set up the website, if you're talking about where it all came from, I remember I spoke to a good friend of mine who dimes out on this now because he's in that industry about the site.

3:32Martin Lewis: And he said, oh, you've got two things wrong. So what have I got wrong? He said, first of all, nobody wants to see a face on the front of a money website. You know, these are meant to be professional. And I was like, but I think people want to see the whites of the eyes of the person who's doing it. And he said, and you haven't got any adverts. I said, well, I'm not having anyone pay me what to say. And so those was his advice. I didn't listen as I never do. And it happened.

3:58Jake Humphrey: but I think that speaks to that really intangible but incredibly powerful force of trust people trust you so when we were researching this I was struck by the the Covey example of what trust means which was reliability credibility and intimacy people feel they know you and that's then divided by the self-awareness of where you spend your time is it about making yourself rich or is it about helping other people? And I think you tick all of those boxes in an incredibly powerful way that for listeners, if we understand that trust can make you happier, it makes you more productive, it helps in relationships, I think it's a topic worth exploring if you don't mind.

4:42Martin Lewis: So I sat at an energy summit run by David Cameron when energy prices were going up. If only they were going up where they were then now. you know this is a fraction of what we have today and one of the bosses of the big energy firms said prime minister we need your help people don't trust us and therefore we're not getting the information across that we need and we need your help and we need everybody in this room to help make sure that customers trust their energy firms and David Cameron nodded and said yes, yes, absolutely, we need to look at that. And I put my hand up, and I was at the end of the room.

5:25Martin Lewis: I wasn't quite as big as I am now, if you know what I mean. I was at the end of the room, put my hand up, and I was ignored, and I kept my hand up, and nothing came on, and I kept my hand up. And then eventually, he turned to me, and he said, yes. And I said, I just want to say, having heard the call on trust, I will do everything I possibly can to ensure that nobody trust you because you are not trustworthy. The latest data shows 56 % of whatever it was of people who come to your call centres are given incorrect information. I will not tell people to trust you until you become trustworthy. For me, you cannot market trust.

6:08Martin Lewis: Trust only comes from being trustworthy. It only comes from a track record of doing the right thing, or at least trying to do the right thing. And there is a differentiation between the two. As long as people are trying to do the right thing, that's good enough because there's a perfection. And so, I do actually think energy companies have become more trustworthy since then because they've had to the way regulation works and things that go on. They're charging way too much, but at least, I mean, I'm not saying they are trustworthy, but they've become more, it's all relative. In terms of when they say something to you, it now works in that way round.

6:43Martin Lewis: And I've talked before about the fact I have a professional paranoia. And to anybody starting out in an enterprise, I would really say this. I once did a talk for a friend with some young entrepreneurs and they were starting out. And someone asked me about, you know, what shortcuts? And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. Stop. Shortcuts might help a small business to be a bigger business. But if you want to be a big business and you've taken shortcuts, you're going to kill yourself for future. Because if you are throwing away that trust early. You have to be trustworthy from day one. Do not think that if you get really big in 20 years time, people aren't going to look back and say, but hold on, in the first year, didn't you do that?

7:24Martin Lewis: That's what you really are. So you have to do it right from the moment that you start, if you're setting out to have an entity or be trustworthy in that way. I have a massive professional paranoia to a ridiculous level that drives my team mad, drives me mad. The best example I can give you, we had a deal with the telecoms provider once, it was best in market deal, it was a broadband firm, I won't give the firm, it's not fair to say. When we negotiate a voucher incentive to sign up for the site, it must always be one that is paid automatically or not claimed, or I won't have it. So we negotiated a voucher incentive for the site, but the company was also giving its own voucher, which was a standard deal for non-direct, so for going to any other site, which had another voucher which you had to claim.

8:20Martin Lewis: So you had a voucher you had to claim and then you had the extra one on top we had negotiated that you didn't have to claim. Fine, we live with that, that's a standard term and condition. I then found out, because somebody told me, that the amount that we got paid if somebody clicked through us and didn't claim their voucher from the broadband firm, we'd get more. So we would be paid more money if people didn't claim their voucher, even though of course we'd go and tell people to claim voucher. And I said, we can't do the deal. And they said, what do you mean? And they said, you're not going to incentive, you're going to encourage people to, I said, we can't do the deal.

8:58Martin Lewis: I do not want anybody thinking we have a perverse incentive. And even though over my dead body will we act in a way to discourage people from claiming their voucher? The fact, and they're like, nobody will know. It doesn't matter. Someone somewhere will know, and that is not right for us. Now, that rule still stands. I'm not saying at some point, because I don't vet every single deal that goes through. Something like that hasn't gone through. But when I heard of it, it was a red line for me. And so actually, we just said, we won't take that extra money.

9:34How did you come to this realisation that trust is almost the, that is the thing?

9:41Martin Lewis: Because I didn't set the website up to make money. I had no way of making money when I set it up in the first place. That was never what the intention was. I never said, you know, I get asked to do talks as an entrepreneur all the time. I rarely do it. And if I do, I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. It just wasn't my goal. You know, and I think I am, my goal was to be a campaigning broadcast journalist. journalist, you know, and it came through the financial sector. That's what I do. You ask me, what do I do? I'm a journalist. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a website owner. I'm not any of those things.

10:12Martin Lewis: I'm a journalist and I'm a campaigning journalist. That's who I am. So it's not that I went, how do I manufacture to be the most trusted person out there? It's just that I'm a campaigning journalist and I act like a campaigning journalist and I try and be a-party political, very political, but a-party political. And that paranoia, I hate people saying I've done something wrong. Nothing upsets me more than when someone questions my motives. I don't care if people call me the C word, right? But when someone questions, yeah, you're only doing this because you've got a vested interest or something.

10:50Martin Lewis: I mean, that's what makes me see red. And the nature of the site and the nature of your work now,

10:56Jake Humphrey: as you say about the campaigning, is very much around what I see about righting wrongs. And I'm interested in going back to that early age where you noticed inequality around you, partly because of the school that you grew up in.

11:11Martin Lewis: Yeah, so I rather bizarrely grew up in a special education school because my father was the headmaster and it was a boarding school and we lived on top of it. So I did learn at a very early age privilege, You know, the privilege that I had to have good mental capacity and to be able to learn and not to struggle. I remember crying at the age of 15. I won't mention the individual's name because it's not fair. There was a boy who had spent three years learning to tie his shoelaces. He had severe restricted mental capacity and he tied his shoelaces and I was there the first time he did it. and I think there are very few people in this world who will climb a mountain that high right I mean I could still feel it now and and and you know that that's you want a definition of high performance that individual three years to tie his own shoelaces and the day he did he just went yes and and most of us who were there who were who were not one of the know our eyes as my eyes are going now at the memory of it.

12:21Martin Lewis: So that's high performance. And high performance is always an individual thing, what you're prepared to do. And it's based on your aptitude, your capacity, and how much you want to do so. So yeah, growing up in that environment taught me a lot, as I say, about privilege. The birth look that I'd been born with that I didn't have to struggle to learn to tie my shoelaces. You know, I could never learn to play the piano. I wasn't born with that gift, but tie my shoelaces were fine and other things were fine. I wasn't a consumer campaigner when I first started. the money-saving stuff. When I first started Money Saving Expert, my view was, and we actually had a car sticker that said it, you know, a company's job is to screw you, our job is to screw them back.

13:02Martin Lewis: It was really adversarial. Is that what you really felt? You know, companies spend billions of pounds on advertising and marketing and teaching their staff to sell. And consumers get no buyers training and no financial education and it's an imbalanced market. So actually, a little bit of aggression from consumers, never personal aggression. I don't mean it in a bad way. But instead of saying, no, I'm not going to let them do that to me. I'm going to find it. I mean, there was one bank account. I think it was Barclays. It was a terrible bank account. But they were paying people 100 quid to sign up for a bit, even if you didn't switch properly.

13:37Martin Lewis: Because this was before they put in all the criteria that stops me doing things like this. So I put in my email, and this was in the early days before we hit a million people, but it's still pretty big. I said, everybody go and do this. And we closed that bank account in three hours, which meant all the people who it wasn't a good bank account for didn't get it, but everyone got the 100 quid. And that was the use of the information to go there. Then I had a shift and the shift came, I met a friend of a friend who was a mental health caseworker who told me they loved my website. I said, I don't use it for me, I use it for my clients.

14:09Martin Lewis: And that was a bit of an epiphany moment. In the early days, my view was, look, if you do this and you succeed you win and if you don't that's your problem you lose and you'll get ripped off and that's a I have a very different view on that now with you know one in four people in the country having a mental health problem at some point in their life and people who have mental capacity issues you know and stress because you've had a new baby or the onset of dementia or you're just you know work is really hard at the moment or you've just suffered a breakdown and there are all those moments in all of our lives where we're not as capable as we usually are.

14:44Martin Lewis: And actually, I'm now a much greater believer that there has to be systemic change to protect people rather than just relying on some individuals to protect themselves. And that's been a shift since probably about 2000 when I first started. How did we end up in this position then where society is kind of stacked against people in so many ways? Like we have to rely on people like you and be really agile and really smart not to sort of get turned over? I think it's always been like that. I think we're just more aware of it now. And I think some of that is the democratisation the internet brought.

15:21Martin Lewis: I think the internet was incredible for enabling people to look up instant resources and find out information about what they want. I mean, it's been an incredible force for good as well as a force for bad, the internet out there. And I do think that that awareness, you know, you had programmes like That's Life. which were consumer empowerment. You had Watchdog, which I was a big fan of, and I think it's an absolute tragedy that the BBC, our public service broadcaster, has reduced that to a concession on the one show. I mean, I think it's a disgrace during the cost of living crisis that there is now no mainstream consumer programme that is in primetime BBC.

15:56There is on ITV, but there isn't on BBC.

15:59Martin Lewis: And I would love the competition. And it always did something different. Watchdog's curative. It looks at people who've had problems. I'm preventative. My whole aim is to try and prevent the problems in the first place or get redressed when they have happened. When there is injustice by design and it's bred into the system and they're doing it full knowledge, that's when I kick into action. And that's when it's a story. You know, PPI,£40 billion, systemic, scripted mis-selling to rip off the most vulnerable in society. Deliberate, deliberate, calculated, selling people a near worthless product.

16:34Martin Lewis: doing through scripted, very clever mis-selling, not even telling people they got the product, saying when people ask for a loan, you'd be told, yes, you're a fully insured loan. And the fully insured meant we're sending you a second product on top that's actually where all the profit is and we're not even breaking out the fact we're selling you a second product on top. And that's why£40 billion was paid back on that. That's where I like to kick off. Human error note.

16:57Jake Humphrey: But then when we hear the passion in your voice around the anger, at that kind of systemic injustice. I'm interested in the source of it for you, of what ignites that anger to want to put yourself out there and challenge the system. I think sometimes when you understand it,

17:19Martin Lewis: when you steep yourself in it and live and breathe, and you know that the people who design these systems are also steeped in it, and then you just think, you bastards, you've deliberately, deliberately done something to profiteer. And you're taking that off many people whose lives are going to have a much worse impact. I'm not anti-capitalist. I believe in making money. I believe in entrepreneurship. I believe in all of those things. But I think you want to be able to sleep at night. So when I did bank charge reclaiming, which you got a billion pounds back, which was like the predecessor to PPI reclaiming, which was even bigger.

18:00Martin Lewis: And in the early days of both of those they were running simultaneously. And I did template letters at the time rather than the tools we use now. I think we did 6 million template letters for bank charges and more on PPI. I mean, enormous numbers. And I met someone later who worked for a debt charity. So I probably met them in about 2010, 2011. And they said they had worked at the banks in the early days of my bank charges and PPI template letters. And what she said to me that was fascinating, she said, do you know that about 20 % of your letters, and they know what mine are, about 20 % of your letters where it says your name, your address, your details, people would leave that in.

18:37Martin Lewis: They wouldn't delete the your name, your address, your details. And 5 % of your letters, people would just send the letter in without adding their details. So people would post a template letter, they'd print it off the site, they'd say your name, your address, nothing personal, your case and they'd post it. And I find that one of the most fundamentally depressing things of my entire career. So here we are with Britain's biggest financial institutions having deliberately, systemically, and no one's gone to prison for it, no one's been prosecuted criminally for it, deliberately, systemically ripped millions of everyday people off who were already needing to borrow at that time.

19:23Martin Lewis: And 5 % of the people who had those products who were trying to get their money back had such limited mental capacity or functional literacy that they did not understand that they needed to put their details in a template letter. I mean, that is criminal. That is criminal. And you sit there going, well, someone, someone has to do something. Someone, you know, and I remember the later days of PPI alongside which we negotiated to make sure that when they were putting a close on it, the FCA made sure the firms put money in to help the vulnerable people claim because it's just too difficult for some people.

19:58Martin Lewis: But I mean, I don't know about you, but I find that just, that is a tragedy. And we have to, you know, I talk about lots of things. I talk about energy. We don't have a social tariff in this country, right? Now, I'm a great supporter of a social tariff. What that does, it says, look, we've gone for a competitive model. We've gone for a model of market competition where energy switching should make it cheaper. Now, without being rude to you two chaps, if you could save 20 % on your energy bill and you had to take action and you two didn't, well, that's your problem. You're both perfectly capable of doing it.

20:29Martin Lewis: But when a struggling 90-year-old grandmother with onset dementia is paying the maximum for her energy bills because she can't access the system and doesn't understand what to do, and therefore she pays more to boil a kettle than I do, that is all of our problem. That is society's problem. and the easier the finances and the service of my life gets, the more I feel the injustice for people who are going the other way around. So I think that's probably the correlatory relationship. It's very interesting you feel like that though because most people feel more content, happier, more relaxed if they've got a few bob in the bank and they've been perceived as successful by the outside world.

21:08It's very interesting that your emotion is quite different.

21:14Martin Lewis: I, look, having money in the bank is great. it doesn't make you happy but it certainly takes away many of the negatives and it gives you a safety net and it enables you to look after those that you love and that's incredibly important it's not about the money so much I you know it's probably a weird bit of me fighting that there's an injustice that people can be as wealthy as me in the world right but I mean I'm very glad I am I'm not saying I'm not saying not and it's what means that I choose what I do I don't have to work. I never have to work a day again in my life. So nothing I do anymore has anything to do with because I need to go and make money.

21:49Martin Lewis: I choose what I do and why I do. And that's the greatest luxury and the greatest freedom that you can possibly have, that your life is your control. And interestingly, I do tend to think most people who've made a lot of money tend to be the ones who won't stop work because they're driven. So there's a virtuous circle going on there. I think some of the guilt comes because I remember in the pandemic, my head on my desk crying you know weeks on end and the messages that were coming in and the desperation at people's lives and there'll be people sitting out there and i go why don't you just give them money because it doesn't work because no matter how much money you've got it'll take you five minutes it'll all be gone i put money into charities and organizations to try and help and i work it that way you know my big charity my money mental health charity is all about trying to change the system to improve people's lives direct handouts to a few individuals you know it's just spitting in the sea it's nothing.

22:42Martin Lewis: But I do feel when you're reading that, and because I'm the money-saving expert, because I'm steeped with dealing with people's financial issues and I don't have them myself, I think that helps drive some of the guilt that comes from it. When I sold the website, and I'm still in charge of all the content and strategy, people think I'm still there, still drive them all mad every day as executive chair these days. But when I sold it and I was going to be publicly rich. And I phrase that quite deliberately because I had an asset worth many millions of pounds and I crystallized that asset, de-risked, and then had cash of the same amount.

23:20Martin Lewis: I wasn't any richer the next day. I just had it in a different asset class. And the site had already been very profitable beforehand. So I was already doing very well financially. But the knowledge, because I'd grown up, I don't come from a rich background in any way, the knowledge I was publicly going to be very wealthy. And I was worried what people would say. You know, I was torn between, would I have a reaction from people that, great, I want the guy who talks to me about what to do with my money to have done really well with his money. Or are they going to say, well, how can he? How can he have any clue about our lives?

23:55Martin Lewis: And it makes me laugh these days because I'll get people who talk about, but they'll talk to me about politics. Oh, you get it, Martin. But then Rishi Sunak or whatever else with all their millions in the bank. Like, how can they ever understand it? And I go, well, it doesn't preclude you from understanding it. It doesn't preclude you as long as you work hard and you care. And it also gives you the ability to put money into trying to help people, that which I do both in my day job and in my charity funds. Was there ever a moment where someone came to you and said, look, you can make three times the money on this website by doing this?

24:24Martin Lewis: Yeah, loads. I mean, people talk about when I sold, I refused. And I sold not to make money, which will, people say, yeah, of course you do. I didn't. I didn't. The pressure was too big. I couldn't run it. I couldn't control it. I wanted to focus on what I was doing. I wanted to de-risk. So that was probably the biggest financial incentive with de-risking as opposed to making money. It was a de-risk. But also, I mean, it was just too much. I couldn't cope. My mental health was struggling from it. I just needed to get some of the pressure away. And selling was incredibly pressured. but I went to a corporate finance advisor, which is what you do in these circumstances.

25:03Martin Lewis: I know he wanted to do a beauty parade and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not interested into selling anybody who sells products. I'm not interested in anybody who's got products and a parent down the line. I want somebody who will sign up to my editorial code, which is effectively an ethical charter that says money-saving expert. And it's still, as long as I'm there, it's still valid and still legally bound. We'll always do what's in its user's interest first ahead of its own financial concerns. We will never date a mine. We will always be free to talk even about the parent entity. And all of those things were in my absolute red lines for sale.

25:39We only had one buyer because all the others,

25:42Martin Lewis: and some of them, you know, the talk was four or five times what I got. And I got a lot of money. And four or five times a lot of money is a shed load of money. But that was, I didn't want to know. And he said, don't tell me. Don't tell me how much they want to give because I'm not interested.

25:58Jake Humphrey: Can we explore the topic there that you said about the weight of responsibility that you bore? Because I'm interested in that trust element that we spoke about. As you grew the business and you started to have to trust other people to have the similar ethics and the similar drive and desire for red lines that you had, how did you learn to do that to cascade the idea that it's your reputation that you're putting in other people's hands?

26:24Martin Lewis: I tell you what, very interesting. one of my former senior staff who came from a very commercial place it's not as difficult as you think actually and I think this is probably his lesson is more important than mine I want MSE and the work I do to be trusted because that's my core belief set which is pretty inarguable that's what I believe in, that's why I do it that's what it's about, simple I want it to be very successful financially as well core belief set, do the right thing so a hired guy, came in very senior I'm not sure he'd want me to mention his name so I won't do it. But he came in from a very commercial place and he was very senior in the organization.

27:02Martin Lewis: And we talked after being in two or three months. And I said, look, you need to understand that my most important thing is we always do what is right. We always do what is right for our users and we must protect that above everything. And I was expecting this hugely the voraciously commercial person, he said, well, my view is we must always do what is right for our users ahead of anything else. He said, because our biggest financial asset is the trust that people have in the site. And therefore we cannot, we cannot do anything that breaches that. So from his purely commercial perspective, his idea was that for longevity of the brand, I hate thinking of the brand, but the longevity of the brand and the organization and the site, he came to the same conclusion as me.

27:53Martin Lewis: And we worked incredibly well together because we had this really shared aim, even though we had entirely different belief sets which were driving us to it. So that was never that difficult on the trust. I mean, the stress bases, the responsibility is, I mean, I find it very difficult. I'm always very careful how I talk about my mental health, so I don't go into my mental health in detail. But often I'm very well and then I have periods where I'm not very well. And one of the first periods where I wasn't very well, in fact, the first period where I wasn't very well, was actually coincided with bank charges that we talked about earlier.

28:30Martin Lewis: And I had three people in a week call me a god. And they go on the tube, you're a god to me, I do everything you say, I've got everything back from bank charges, and it broke me. This is when you talk about the compliments, but it absolutely broke me. I just, I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I kept saying, you're a god, I do whatever you say. I couldn't cope with it. And I know it sounds, it's just, it's a lot of pressure to throw on somebody. These people you've never met, you know nothing about, and I want to do the right thing. And you're going, but you're not even telling me I read everything and I made my decision.

29:05Martin Lewis: You're just telling me I'd do it. And I'm always about empowering, in my head I try and empower people to give them the information and guidance to make the right decision. But I don't want to make that decision for them. The pandemic was very difficult and coming out in the cost of living crisis, they were very difficult for that reason. Do you just, I mean, the number of people, the phrases, you know, killer phrases. I rely on you. I do everything you say. You know, I mean, I find it, I hope there's not an arrogance in me saying it, but I find that so difficult. and then I go through everything I've done wrong in my life because I'm a human being I've done lots of things wrong I mean nothing what you know but lots of things I feel guilty about I remember the person I was really shitty to at university right and I just think oh god that was a horrible thing I did to that person I remember this and that and oh my god they're going to start talking about it and and everyone you know so the more people put you up on a pedestal the more you think oh god I'm just going to not you know something's going to happen that breaks that and I don't want to break that trust because what I do I think is really important and I would you know I wish and the bigger you I've got the more difficult that is so there is an incredible pressure and I and I find it well that struggle to difficult with it is an under exaggeration I can't deal

30:23Jake Humphrey: with it at times I can't deal with it so would you share with us though because I think there's lots of people listening to this will feel pressure in different guises however it shows up would you tell us some of the methods you have learned of coping under pressure I've been asked

30:37Martin Lewis: that question before and honestly no I won't because I'm crap at it right and I don't want

30:41Jake Humphrey: anybody to learn from me I do what I can what about your biggest mistakes then look I try and

30:47Martin Lewis: learn the breathing stuff I'm not very I try my breathing I can't do meditation right I mean sleeping is quite tough all of those things I try and talk myself through it I've had therapy I've done all of those things but when it's bad it's bad I my main coping mechanisms huge amounts of exercise, lots of walking on top of the exercise, always be in a book. That's one of my big rules. So for me, it has to be, I only have two types of books. It must be either science fiction or fantasy or historic fiction. It cannot be anything that could trigger thoughts about my world. And I must always be in a book.

31:25Martin Lewis: What I mean by that is if I'm struggling and I'm stressed, I can't start a book. So my rule is at any one time, I must be in a book that I'm enjoying, because then if I'm struggling and stressed, I can stay in it. So whenever I finish a book, I always get into another book absolutely as a priority. So I'm always in the middle of a book. That's one of the few tips that works. And find distraction, find anything that can take your brain away. I don't care if it's playing a game on your phone, which is something I do. I'll find a game that will buzz your brain. But distraction is very important. But the problem with that is That's personal to what I deal with.

32:01Martin Lewis: Some people have depression. I don't have depression. Mine is anxiety-based. I have anxiety. And we all need to find our own different things. I've been to universities and I've done talks on how to be successful. I say there are four things. Talent, but I think a lot more people have talent than they know. Hard work and all those people who say, oh, I only do four hours a day and I've been really successful. I just think it's bullshit. I think most people who are really successful work really hard. I mean, I spent a decade working 90 hours a week. You know, that was just what I did. That's how I got here.

32:33Martin Lewis: When I was building the website myself, that was what I was doing. Focus, I think, is incredibly important. Laser light focus. You can't be the best at everything, try and be the best at one thing. And then the final one I say, which is absolutely unquestionably the most important one, luck. And anyone tells you there isn't an element in luck in what they do, again, is just lying to you. You know, and there's all the, the harder I work the luckier I get no well it's not true there are lots of incredibly hard-working talented focused people who have not been successful and that's another reason for the whole pay it back because I'm aware I've been incredibly lucky but the the tip that I need to say within all that is do you really want to be that successful because there's a cost to it there's a cost to pushing as hard as I've pushed and as hard as other people have pushed and I look at some of my incredibly bright contemporaries from university who haven't on paper been as successful as I have.

33:30Martin Lewis: And who perhaps, you know, everybody, when we were leaving, I was at the LSE, there were lots of people who were really driven there. Everyone who was leaving thought they really wanted to be successful. And there were many who within probably three or four years suddenly went, actually, I can make a good income and I can work nine to five and get a good income and I can have a nice life afterwards. And that's all going to, and that's pretty good for me. I'm not sure I want to push through it and I was there going zone zone zone I think in balance at the age of 51 if I were to compare myself to some of them I think if you add up the total happiness that each other have had they're ahead on the happiness score so I think people need to how hard how hard do you want to push how much do you really want to be the number one in in what you do on the big picture.

34:18Martin Lewis: Most people can't be, so a lot of people will fail. And even if you do get it, I'm sure there are some people you'll have met who've had great journeys to top level success and high performance and haven't had to pay for it. But I've certainly paid for it in quite a lot of ways. And you're locking yourself away doing spreadsheets for many hours when other people weren't, missing out on social life, missing out on interactions with families, certainly my 30s in the drive stage of my career, and the impact it's had on my mental health with the responsibility that's come with it. I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me.

34:48Martin Lewis: I just think it's a choice thing. I also think it's a really important thing to talk about because we're a podcast that tries to peel back the layers to reveal the truth. There are plenty of other podcasts and social media platforms telling young people, work 24 hours a day, don't take a break, be relentless, have the hustle, do something on the side, push yourself to the limit, work up, be the hardest worker in the room. And I think it never takes into account luck. And then it leaves us in a position where there are people saying, well, I've done all those things and I still haven't achieved anything.

35:20And then it actually leaves people feeling far worse than feeling better. It's not a form of empowerment to tell everyone else that it worked for me. It's a form of empowerment, as you're saying, to say that actually this comes at a price. It does.

35:32Martin Lewis: And I can only talk from my experience. I'm not saying it will be that way for everyone. I'm sure there are some people who've made that path through. But most people I meet who've been successful have had real sacrifice for doing it. you need to just make that choice of whether that's right for you and I you know happiness I don't think there's enough focus on happiness as a form of success are you a trailblazer a risk taker maybe someone with countless tales of epic adventure well I'm not quite there yet but I'm working on it even the boldest among us started off small right daring themselves to reach greater goals every day and if you're looking to take on a challenge like that, the Defender is too.

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36:57Jake Humphrey: So when you look back at you leaving LSE with that peer group you described, did you consciously decide that you were going to sacrifice happiness to go after this? And I'm interested in if you were to go back there then i was incredibly driven at that point i mean people who went to

37:16Martin Lewis: university with me some of them i'm sure will say i was unbearable while i was at university so i um i left school i was i was relatively shy and quiet at school um i you know i had never been diagnosed this but i was post-traumatic stress for for many years i you know i didn't never left the home really until i was 18 right so i didn't go out didn't go to party Did you help? No, it was the 80s. It was the 80s. You know, I went back to school after my mum had been killed and nobody said a word to me. It was the 80s. You know, so I couldn't leave the house because I hadn't been in the house when she was killed.

37:57Martin Lewis: So no, I didn't. And I had no life. I had no teenage years until I was 18. Nothing. I mean, this is not an exaggeration. I went, I'll tell you, just so you know, it's worth saying the story the story and I saw I um never been to a party I'd always made excuses why I was busy and I wasn't I was sitting at home because I couldn't and I got to about 17 and I was just coming out of my shell and thinking actually I want to go and socialize and be with people and I got invited to a party by a girl I shared the bus with and who you know and she said why don't you come? And you'll know people. So I really wanted to go to her party.

38:39Martin Lewis: And then I thought, what do you wear to a party? I'm 17. I'm like, I don't know. Am I meant to wear a suit? Am I meant to wear jeans? I just, it sounds like I did not know because I had never been. Because since two days before I was 12, I had not been anywhere. And I didn't know. And my sister wasn't living at home and I didn't trust my father and my stepmother, right? I didn't think they would know because I'm 17 and think, oh, you won't know. And they were like, we'll drive you, let us know what, because clearly I'm not in a good place as I look back on it now. And I bottled it. Didn't go, couldn't go, I was too scared.

39:22Martin Lewis: So I, when I was 18, I mean, I really, really had no experience of anything of going to school and being depressed. Right, not clinical depression, depression, causal depression. And so I left at 18 and then I had this sort of eclectic year where I went to Camp America and worked on a summer camp, which was pretty hard. I was incredibly homesick until the last couple of weeks. I had this wonderful moment in a pantomime they did where I was meant to be the backstage sound guy and one of the women from the camp who was going to be playing the fairy godmother wasn't there. This was a week to go. And they said, could you just read her nines?

40:00and I was very shy and I'm still very shy.

40:02Martin Lewis: I'm just now a performer. There's a difference. And they said, will you read the lines? And I went, I said, okay, I'll read the lines. And something broke in me. And instead of going staccato, so I said, I went poof and I came out and I performed it. And everyone was falling around laughing and they said, will you do that tomorrow? Will you do it? So I went, okay. I've never been on stage before, never done anything like that. And I did that and I just thought, wow. and then I worked as a VDU operator with a lovely group of graduates who took me out to pubs and nightclubs for my first time I mean I didn't know what you did in the pub so I had and I was quite honest with them which I wouldn't have been with my school friends and they took me out and said come with us and then I worked then I worked as a salesman which is I mean I think anyone who wants to work in business should have to do compulsory service as a salesman I think it should be mandated.

40:55Jake Humphrey: What were you selling?

40:55Martin Lewis: Caravan awnings. Doesn't matter what you're selling, you're selling. Right? And it was all about learning to communicate, incredible communications lesson. And just before that, I'd worked in a bar to learn more about, so I worked in a bar. And then I went back to Camp America, second time with a totally different confidence level, became head of staff entertainment, doing shows all the time, doing that type of stuff. And then I turned up at university and I'd flipped like a pancake. So from having been this shy person and never been out, I was flooded with this exuberance and confidence, I would say bordering on arrogance, but it wasn't bordering, it was just arrogance, right?

41:32Martin Lewis: And I could do anything. And first week of university, I put myself up to be rag chair of the uni and I got it. And I put myself up to be up to three other posts. So I had three posts within my first week at university, you know, and I was into the student politics. And by the end, I was student president and I was, you know, the loudest and, and, you know, overbearing person in the university. I mean, I cared about what I did. I loved what I did. But boy, was I out there. And so it was a very different phrase. But the flip like a pancake is the best way I can describe it. But you aren't kind enough to yourself, right?

42:05And that's obvious, the way that you sort of talk and the little things that you say. When you talk about being arrogant in university, I sit here listening to that harrowing story of the previous years and think, oh my God, you deserved to be that person at university. Maybe. You were making up for lost time. Nobody knew it. Yeah, but we now know it, don't we? So you can actually look back on that now and go, yes, I was out there. Yes, I was loud. Yes, I was brash. Yes, my voice was heard. Yes, I impacted the people around me. Because you'd spent five years not leaving your house. No. That was the moment.

42:35You deserve that, man.

42:37Martin Lewis: It stayed with me. The best example I can give you, because you should always have some colour for this, this was slightly later when I went to do my broadcast journalism post-grad. And again, I'd been president of my uni at this point, and I'd been quite successful. so I had some more confidence but I was still on that absolute you know nothing can touch me phase whereas we went and my friend Kerry tells this story and they all laugh at me all the people who did my course who were still many of my great friends so we went on the course and it's a broadcast journalism course and we're amongst all the journalists signing up there's about two three hundred people in the room and we're going and it's just a sign up day the course starts the next day so I said I met one of the other persons signing up and I said it's a shame we can't all go and meet each other isn't it and he said He said, yeah, but I mean, how are we meant to know it?

43:19Martin Lewis: There's no mobiles on WhatsApp or anything like that at this time. Well, I think there were mobiles, but there's no commute. And he said, how are we meant to do it? I said, oh, it's fine. I stood up. I said, everybody on the broadcast course, I have a very loud voice, I'm not doing it. Everybody on the broadcast course in 30 minutes were going, and I named the local pub, we will be there, we'll see you there so we can all beat before the start of the course. And just everyone stopped and looked. and they all go how did you do that? I mean obviously it's easy and how many people turned up? everyone there you go there are loads of lovely things for people to think about from this conversation I think one of them is that we're not fixed you know there will be people listening to this who are maybe more towards the broken than the okay place right and I think it's important for them to hear your story and to understand that things don't last forever necessarily and that you can not necessarily fully recover but you can get back to a place of happiness well more so than that and you know i'm a patron of a bereavement charity for young children and i've unfortunately had seen children who are the children of some friends of mine who've lost their parents very sadly and one of my messages now when i look back at what happened to me i mean apart from the fact get cancelling well for heaven's sake get cancelling have someone to talk about there are great techniques for dealing with grief.

44:43Martin Lewis: Nothing will fix it, but they will enable you to handle it better. But a lesson I have for anyone with grief at any age is do not tell yourself off for smiling. I cannot tell you enough. You lose someone yesterday. You've had the biggest tragedy in their life. If something happens that makes you smile, the reaction on that day is to stop yourself because I shouldn't be styling. Screw that. Screw that. The most important thing, you know, as someone who went through childhood trauma, the most important thing is grab every smile you can. And if it comes, do not fight your smiles down. Do not ever try and make yourself less happy than you could be.

45:30Martin Lewis: And do not feel guilty about being happy. I mean, make sure it's appropriate if there's somebody else there who's having a different moment. But don't fight your smiles down. And if I could go back and tell that hideously hurt young boy anything, it was like, just go and try and be happy. You know, don't feel. And I did. I felt my responsibility was to mourn and be miserable. And I think we need to change our attitudes and we need to be open and we need to talk. I'll give you one final story if you like. And when I worked on the summer camp, and I'm Jewish and it was a Jewish summer camp. I worked on the summer camp and unbelievably, there was a little boy in the division that I was working on.

46:12Martin Lewis: This is the next year I went and I was a senior counsellor and we got a call, the division head and I, and we were told that unfortunately, his mother had just passed away of cancer and his father had passed away the year before. And the new parents, and he was 11, nearly 12, which is exactly the same age as me. and myself and Keith who was the division head they said one of you needs because of the way the the rules one of you needs to be with when he's told and one of you needs to pack for him so we tossed a coin for it and I won I got to pack right which I was very grateful for so pack for him and we packed him away and then he came back to the camp a week later then the next thing on the on the Friday night they did this very low-end religious service and the rabbi who was taking the service, said, now some of you will know that this boy has come back, you know, and said his name.

47:07Martin Lewis: Every eye, there's 400 kids there, turns to him. And I'd all like to stand up and do it. It's an 11-year-old boy and be silent. And I was sat near him and I saw his face just crumple. And I got a wave of anger. I just walked over and I picked him up, picked him up carried him and just walked him out of there and you know and I you know I apologise to to the rabbi later who was fine but it suddenly realised and I just I said the last thing he needed was 400 people pointing at him you know I had nobody talk to me but nor do you want to be standing up and say oh there's a boy who's now an orphan which is effectively what was said and attacked and we just went and sat and chatted so you know smile when you can yeah absolutely Thank you so much for sharing so much with us.

47:56You started this conversation saying... You've gone as well. I have gone, yeah, about five times so far. I do think, though, you know, this podcast is called High Performance and I think sometimes people come to it for serious life lessons and how do I better myself. I think sometimes just open, honest vulnerability is actually what high performance is. And I think you are a perfect example of someone of someone who's willing to sit and share as much as you have because I think it is really valuable for other people. Thank you for having me. Thank you. It's a real pleasure.

48:35Damien. Jake. What a fascinating and special guy he is.

48:39Jake Humphrey: I feel really privileged that he was prepared to make himself so vulnerable in our company. Yeah, I mean, first of all, huge thanks to him for opening up in the way that he did. But also I think it's a great reminder that we can have an opinion of someone because they've sold a business for millions. We can have an opinion of someone because they've been outwardly successful or they're on the telly and we see a lot of them. But actually, let's just lean into everyone around us because so many of us are struggling in ways that no one sees as Martin is, as Martin has. You know, we're all kind of multi-layered, multi-faceted individuals.

49:14So the best thing we can do is just be kind and put empathy at the forefront to understand other people.

49:19Jake Humphrey: I know the line that really resonated with you when we sat down with Dr. Rung and Chatterjee was, you would make the same decision if you'd lived the same life they had. And I think when you look at Martin, you can see all the outward signs of success. But actually, you've got to have lived the life he's lived, the childhood trauma, that sacrificing of his teenage years, the drive and the relentless ambition he had in his 20s and 30s to get where he's got. And like he said, you've got to ask yourself, is that a price you're prepared to pay? And I think when we're witness to the price that he's paid, it allows us to have a very different perspective on traditional views on high performance.

50:02It's a reminder that if you're going to chase those traditional views, like often what Martin's talking about there is the cost, and he said it at the end there, didn't he? High performance doesn't come for free. And if we can find happiness, if we can find calm, understanding, empathy, then I think that's high performance. And I'm really pleased, actually, that when you look at the person that he described, he didn't go to parties and didn't have any friends and was a broken child. And he might never be fully mended, as he admits, but the person who's in front of us today, to be able to talk in the way that he is, I think it's testament to just how far he's come.

50:39I mean, I was moved throughout that whole thing.

50:42Jake Humphrey: Yeah, and I think there was a message I want people to take away from here, was what Martin embodies is the power of trust. And you can relate to trust in lots of different ways. Like he's trusted us to come and sit and share his story in an honest, responsible way, just as people trust him to give information about their financial security in an honest, consistent way. And I think when you start looking at the stats on this, there's a great neuroscientist called Paul Zak that's done a lot of research on it that says businesses tend to be more profitable when people trust each other there's one start that says when people feel just 10 % more trust in their bosses that's the equivalent of having a 36 % pay rise relationships are healthier personal and professional when trust is there and I think there's a big part of that which is that intimacy letting people see you for you on your terms and Martin's demonstrated that but I think that's a lesson that any of us can take away and apply in our own world be who we're supposed to be absolutely and as he said he wasn't the the young broken boy he is the person we see in front of us today and he's an impressive individual thanks to him thanks to you no thank you mate i've loved it thank you to martin honestly i didn't expect to be moved in the way that i was during that conversation especially when he spoke about the drive of losing his mother and the campaign for just this runs through everything that he's done in his adult life.

52:14Jake Humphrey: I think what it shows is the things that drive us the hardest are usually rooted in something very personal and very human. And it was his advice about grief, that you shouldn't tell yourself off for smiling and you should grab every smile you can, that's one of the most quietly powerful things I've ever heard on this show. If this one's moved you, why not consider sharing it? Someone in your life may need to hear it. well until next time thanks for joining us here on high performance