You Only Have 20% of Your Life to Make an Impact - Here's How To Make It Count | Adrian Gore (E430)

0:03Adrian, welcome to High Performance. Thank you. Great to be here. The reason why I was so excited about having this conversation is because I think in this world, we think there are two types of people, people with incredible talent who do incredible things and people with less talent who seem to do less incredible things. But your book, The Four Principles, Multiply Your Impact in Life and Leadership, I think is testament to the fact that really what you're saying here is life is not actually about talent it's about understanding the world better and if we can understand the world better and and understand the core principles for high achievement then it almost sounds like anyone can achieve great things i think that's true i mean the central question in the book is why some people create amazing impact and others with similar talents often better talents you know more talented, more intelligent maybe, actually do a lot less.

0:56So there are other factors that drive impact than just kind of core abilities and talent. And therefore, I'll show you a view, I think that the key issue is I think not anyone can achieve anything, but for a given set of talents, the ability to make dramatic impact is much more powerful and easier than people think. And that's how kind of we got to the four principles. Before we start talking about those four principles, just a little bit about you for people that aren't aware of your own business journey. I mean, if they want to find out a bit more about you, then as soon as they type your name into the internet, it's, you know, as is the modern world now, all it wants to talk about is your net worth.

1:32I mean, that is very high. It wants to talk about your business successes. That is hugely impressive as the founder of Discovery, which over here in the UK, we would recognize as Vitality Insurance, one of the biggest insurance businesses on the planet. So I really wondered why you decided to write this book. It's a great question. I mean, a lot of people have said to me, why not a book about discovery, you know, kind of the story of the business? But it's actually the four principles is our story. You know, it's kind of, it's the why rather than the what, you know, of our story. We built a business very much based on people.

2:09We never consumed a lot of capital. So we never raised a lot of capital to build a big business that was really built on the quality of amazing people. And I was early on obsessed with what makes people exceptional. And we had this, one of our values is liberate the best in our people. You know, we wrote that very carefully with a real belief that there's greatness in everyone. And that sounds kind of fluffy, but truthfully, as a business leader, how do you get the best out of people? And that obsession became something that over decades, I kind of, my team and I kind of looked carefully. We developed ideas and ways of training and developing people.

2:43and that is the book. You know, all of that thinking is really our story. So I wrote the book about our business in the sense of the why, you know, kind of the purpose and the principles around getting the best out of people. I think the transactional story of a business is interesting but it's less impactful. You know, I'm hoping that the book actually gets people to excel. I mean, that's the idea. I think we have as a team and I'd love to see that extrapolated. And I think, you know, when you talk about setting up and running a business, that's not for everyone. But finding your own edge, I think is for everyone.

3:17And I think that's why this conversation is so interesting, because it doesn't matter the business people are in, the stage of life that people are in, they can learn a lot from this. And before we get into the four principles, I think it's really worth just understanding the sort of bit of the groundwork of a book that it sounds like has been about 30 years in the making, not 30 months in the making. And I think the best way to explain this to people is, you know, if they get the latest bit of tech, then it also has the latest software. Yet we're all walking around with brains that don't have the latest software, right?

3:51Well, that's the core. I mean, that's the core finding in a sense of the book that we are miscoded, you know, and that's the issue. You know, for sure, IQ, education, privilege, all of those things are multiplier effects. And if you have them, you're lucky and you should be grateful. But the miscoding is a wonderful thing because it turns out we miscoded for the world we're in. And that's recoding or remedying that coding is a much greater multiplier. That's the issue. We evolved on the savannas for like two, three million years ago, hunter gatherers, where there was scarcity to food, physical threats, being eaten by a lion or whatever.

4:33and we lived in simple linear clans, small groups of people, you know. Today we're completely the opposite, abundance of food, and that's a problem, that's what our business tries to deal with, you know. We live with systemic threats, so threats of systems breaking down, government, governance, healthcare systems, you know, war, things that are kind of systemic. And we live in complicated networks, cities of millions of people, organizations of tens of thousands of people. But you know, the thing about physical threats is an interesting one. You know, if you look at some of the stuff we did in the book, you know, the life expectancy of people is a lot.

5:09People died young and they died violently. I mean, our fossil record is like a record of catastrophe. If you look at all of these findings, like the tongue child or Lucy, you know, these famous finds, you find they were killed terribly. I think the tongue skull is like an eagle that, you know, kind of smashed the skull of this person and ate their brain or their eye or whatever. So we lived terrible deaths. but I'll tell you what is always intriguing me you know you think about it kind of academically but childhood mortality was I think 50 % of children die before they were five so statistically most mothers would have experienced massive loss yeah you know virtually everyone would have experienced the loss of a child so this is an environment where all we did was seek out danger you know around every corner we seek danger today that's the opposite we don't have that we don't have that problem you know in a world that actually requires the opposite.

6:03So this miscoding has led to kind of an undermining of, in the book, four categories that I think are fundamental to impact. Kind of attitude, how you use time, how you are motivated and driven, and importantly, how you make decisions and take actions. And so to an earlier point, this is not about the simplicity of anyone can just make it. I think anyone can, but to an extent, the potential of really multiplying impact, if you can recode on these things is massive. Because we truly are, to your analogy, we've got the wrong software and it can be changed. So interesting, because I often think we make the mistake of thinking that we were born the day that we arrived on the earth.

6:46But actually, our ancestors who've been around for decades, we are all their lived experiences as well. And the people that survived were the people who were anxious, who were fearful, who did spot the danger. There were people who didn't and were very happy, but they were eaten. We are the guys who are nervous and worried. But you know, the important point is that these changes, the agricultural revolution 12 ,000 years ago, the industrial revolution 250 years ago, the technology. We're going through AI now. That I think is going to be a complete different issue. But if you think about 5 ,000 years ago, 3 ,000 years ago, that's 150 generations.

7:25I mean, it's quite scary. That's only 100, if you lined up your ancestors, 150 deep, it's not a lot of people. It's from here to across the street. That should take you back. There's not enough time to change your coding. You know what I mean? So these changes took place 12 ,000 years ago. We are still living with millions of years of coding. We're not coded for some of the things we deal with today. It's not a complete miscoding. I don't want to overstate that. But in the key issues of performance, I think we are. we'll be right back after a quick word from our partners okay well let's take these ancient brains then talk about how they can exist in this modern world and let's talk about disciplined optimism first of all how would you define disciplined optimism one of your key tenants in the book it's not optimism as in being happy and being naively happy and you know running down the streets with a smile on your face it's about the discipline of seeking positive signals.

8:23That's the core issue. The coding is that we seek the negative and we see them everywhere. The research we did, there's some great work on this stuff, but empirically they found that we missed 50 % of the positive signals. So if you present it with 100 stimuli of opportunities and threats, you'll see, and assuming they're 50-50, you'll see the 50 threats for sure. That's in your coding. You're alive to them. But the 50 opportunities, you'll see 25 of them. So you're missing out that 25 opportunities. And that's the issue in a world today where you're not facing threats every day. Impact is about spotting opportunities.

9:04You're missing half of them. So disciplined optimism is about in every situation trying to say, where are the opportunities here? It's not about simply being happy. It's about trying to create a positive mindset around where opportunities in every situation you face. And that's a fundamental issue because I think impact is about spotting opportunities and exuding on them, which is another part of disciplined optimism. So for people who might be listening to this and thinking, well, I know that I'm a pessimist. I know that I always see the negatives. I know that, you know, I spot the danger before anybody else.

9:37What can we say to them to help them rewire their brain to be a disciplined optimist? I think firstly, firstly, the prejudice about being an optimist is it's seen as naive, you know? So pessimists, you know, have a great place in society, being realistic, being conservative. That's our coding. We kind of laud, like realists, you know, and I get this all the time. I say, you need to be realistic now. You know, enough of all this, you know what I mean? But the point is, I would say getting rid of that, that preconceived idea, which is in our coding, that being pessimistic and looking at the risk only is a good thing.

10:18It's not because you're missing all the signals. So it's not about forgetting them because I think that's unrealistic. You know, see those 50 negative things, but can you find the 25 positive you're not seeing? So it's not about saying to that individual who's a pessimist, you know, back up and get happy. That's not the issue. It's more tactical issue of kind of use discipline to try and find out in every situation. of the opportunity. So am I missing something on the opportunity side? The fear people have is if you do that, they feel that exposing themselves to risk, I'm not going to see the negative.

10:53You're seeing the negative. It's coded in you. You will never miss those negative signals. I mean, I'm an actually about training. That's our training, risk management, pricing risk. I can see that stuff. But am I seeing all the positive? Probably not. So it's kind of a change of attitude, I think. It's not about being a happy optimist. It's a more tactical principle. I think one of the other risks with pessimism, and again, you talk about this in the book, is that it can be pervasive. You know, if you have a group of pessimistic people and a group of optimistic people, the optimists can be pulled down often by the pessimists.

11:27And actually in your book, you say pessimism is knee-jerk, it's lazy, and it's primitive. Well, it's primitive because it's in your coding. Optimism is a sophisticated emotion in a way. It's not what we normally do. But you raise a very good point. The other critical issue about success is today any bit of success is about working in a network, whether it's a sports team, whether it's an organization, whether it's a political party. You're working in a complex network. You're not on a small clan of people. And the research we did for the book shows quite clearly that when you have kind of positive signals in a network, when you're working with people, you get better participation, You get better diffusion of information, better collaboration.

12:12It's hard to get a network to work on negative things, to your very point. So spotting opportunities and then executing on them is why you get this multiplier that's dramatic when people actually are optimistic in a disciplined way. The ability to spot and execute is fundamentally different. I've never seen in my, there are many times I've done some really stupid things and not laid well, but I've never seen kind of a negative pessimistic approach with a team of people or an organization of 15 ,000 people work well on negative signals. It doesn't work. Can we talk about the famous broken window study which points to the fact that if you live in a world where you feel pessimistic or negative about your surroundings it genuinely impacts people's behaviors, right?

13:00You talk about that in the book. You also talk about the fact that you took on a challenge as Discovery to change the way that people felt about the city that they were living in. Would you tell us the city, tell us the challenge, and tell us what you did? So I head office in Johannesburg. It's a big city. It's a complex city, five, six million people in the area. Just massive, a whole lot of issues that have got to be dealt with. But the most visible one that upsets people around the world is potholes for some reason. I mean, it's physically dangerous. You know, if you're a cyclist, cars get damaged.

13:32We're a motor insurer as well. So we see the damage, but it's emotionally absolutely devastating for people. It's kind of a physical manifestation of decline. You know, it kind of people from that feel this declinism, which is an actual human instinct, incidentally, that we see declinism. Things are getting worse. And this is physical evidence of it. It's a good example of disciplined optimism. Our team kind of had this view, you know, exactly this. This is a terrible thing. What are we doing? And we flipped around and said, what if we fix these things? You know, we're going to fix a whole lot.

14:03We're not going to fix one of them. This is going to be a, you know, it's kind of like a moonshot idea. Forget about the reality and the realism. What if we just fix all the potholes? You know, it's a bad idea. We've seen some technology that does it. Some guys had approached us earlier about it. They had some really good pothole technology of how they fix it. And we invested in these trucks and these teams. And we began fixing these potholes. And today, I think to date, we've fixed close to 380 ,000 potholes. I mean, it's quite unbelievable. And I know, I've been out on the road with the guys, you know.

14:37It's amazing to see. When people see, in the early part of doing it, when it was unknown, the people would drive past us and be absolutely exhilarated by this because it talks to the point you've made. It's not just about the pothole and the physicality of you fixing a pothole in my home. It's kind of, we're on the mend here, you know. Things are going to get better. That ability to shift the curve, you know. I'd rather be at the bottom on the way up than at the top on the way down, You know, it's a slope of the curve that determines how people feel. And that pothole fixing has that ability to pull the slope up.

15:10You know, suddenly there's hope, this kind of positivity, starting to work through the network. And for our own people doing it, our own organization, there's a feeling of like nation building, you know. It's a perfect example of kind of how through a network, through positive signaling, you can create a much bigger change, you know, in how people think about things. And in countries with challenges, you know, I've led in South Africa, which is a beautiful country, but considerable challenge and often despair and hope. And, you know, the ability to create those positive signals is a fundamental leadership attribute, I think.

15:42And in the book, it's a fundamental principle of impact. And the other thing that I didn't realize actually until I read the book was the impact of negative things on us as human beings, that when something negative happens, the emotional impact is double the impact of something positive. So if something positive happening to you is a plus 10, something of a similar level that's negative is a minus 20. I mean, it's a really deep impact. I had no idea about that. It's an amazing, I mean, this is the Nobel Prize when you work with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, this idea of loss aversion, that we are much more programmed to fear loss than to appreciate gain.

16:20It's back to the same thing because of the physical threats. We worry about loss all the time. you know so that is an incredible driver of behavior so as soon as you give people a sense of something to lose they become motivated they're not motivated by potential gain that's a critical issue so the first lesson in the book is disciplined optimism at the end of this part of the conversation what sentence would you like to leave people thinking about for how they can put disciplined optimism into their life right now what's the first thing that you think they could do I think to rid themselves of the view that pessimism is realism.

16:59You know, there's something appealing about it. I think an attitude will change. And then not, and critical point you made earlier, not to believe you need to be empirically optimistic to get this to work. It's not that. It's a simple tactic of spotting the positive. Brilliant. Right. On to the next lesson. And the book, I think, is fantastic. The four principles multiply your impact in life and leadership. And as soon as you open the front cover, it lays out the four. And the second of the four principles is focused urgency. Why your perceived time to make an impact is shorter than you think.

17:33Now, this is a very interesting one for me because I'm a little younger than you, not a lot younger. I'm 48 this year. And I feel like the last 10 years of my life, my boy, you met Sebastian. He's here today. He's 10 years old. I feel like since having children, for whatever reason, someone has turned up the speed up dial on my life. and I know that a lot of our audience have this same problem. A lot of them are a similar age to us and they reach out to us saying, I feel I'm running out of time. Have you seen Hamilton, the play? Sure. There's that moment where they sing where Alexander Hamilton says, there's a million things I haven't done.

18:06Yeah. I feel a lot of our audience have this same sense of time passing by. So can we talk about this focused urgency? And it's so interesting in the book that you explain why we feel like time is speeding up. Well, time is not linear. We know that. We think it is. We think every year counts the same. We know through Einstein in quantum physics and whatever, time is a function of gravity and speed. Well, because 60 seconds is a minute and a minute's an hour, so we think it's linear, right? And the year is once around the earth. Yeah. But the question is how you perceive time. You know, that's the issue.

18:37So time is linear, you know, for our relative speed and gravity for all of us. But for us individuals through our journey, as you get older, the years get quicker. I've never met anyone who doesn't agree with that, who doesn't agree that years get quicker. They kind of say, well, I was busy. I know it's not that. The issue is a year in perception is a function of how long you've been here. So when you're a year old, the year is 100 % of your life. When you're 10 years old, like your boy, it's 1 10th of your life. When you're 48, it's 2 % of your life or thereabouts. So the years are shorter, they're perceived to be shorter over time.

19:12So it's actually, you kind of burn time very quickly and then you asymptote towards death. That's what happens. So at 48, what's great about this is we're both in the last 20%. It doesn't really matter. You burn the first 70 % of your life by the time you're educated. You go on my logarithmic scale. People typically get 40. Say, if I say to a 40-year-old, how much of your life have you lived? They will say I've lived half. How do they calculate it? Well, I say 40 divided by 80. I'm going to live to 80, say. It's half. But if you're on my perceived, not mine, I'm saying the book, the research we did, is you need to recalculate that.

19:49The first year counts one, the second year counts a half, the third year counts a third. Your 48th year counts one over 48. So you must add that up, divide that by one plus a half to one over 80. That's how much you've lived. This is one of the scariest things that we've ever discussed on high performance and we've recorded well over 400 episodes of this show. But it gets to this issue of the rule of 20, we call it in the book, that you've got 20 % of your life to make a difference. That's the impact zone. You get educated, and as I said before, you may go to beautiful universities and have all that privilege.

20:20You may not, but that's where you get to 75%. But then it's that 20 % when you present yourself in that 20 % that determines your impact. The rest doesn't matter. And just to be really clear for people, we're talking here about I effectively have 20 % left because of this concept of logarithmic time. The time is now going so fast for me compared to when I was younger that now I'm in the final 20%. The perception of it, the feeling of it. The perception. Yes. Not the amount of time left on earth, but the perception of my time left on earth. If I put a clock next to you, well, you've got the full years.

20:50I was timing you, but how you perceive it, how you travel through time, our hypothesis is it gets faster as you get older. And anecdotally, you can speak to anyone. Your boy, a year now for him is a long time. It's a long time. He's been about three weeks of holiday or the month of the summer holidays. What's he going to do to himself? Do you remember as kids we say the summer holidays lasted forever? What do you do? I give you three weeks now, they'll be gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. like this, you can feel it. So it's that 20%, sorry, the 20 % there, but the 20 % in the middle is 75-25. The retirement here is small.

21:23That 20 % is your impact zone. And what you do with that time is critical. You don't have any time. And it's an existential problem. It's not soluble. In the book, health is an important issue because it makes you more effective. The only thing that is a remedy for effectiveness is knowledge. Of course, knowledge is the opposite. The more you know, the easier it is to know more. So every unit of knowledge, that next unit of knowledge is actually easier to acquire than the previous one. So it's exponential. More knowledge leads to quicker knowledge acquisition. You feel that like at university, your first year is a killer and then you start to move.

21:59So it has the opposite effect. And impact is how much time you've got and how much knowledge you've got. If you had infinite knowledge, you don't need any time, right? You do it right now. If at infinite time, you could be a fool. You'll do it at some point. It's an optimization between the two. So to an extent, the only thing that lets you get that 20 % most effective is to be healthy if you can. You need that energy. So is that because your physical health also has an impact for your mental health? And it gives you more energy. So your work rate is. If you're unhealthy and you've got all kinds of chronicity, your ability to work is less.

22:33So simply just a utility issue, it's that you're healthy. You look fit, so you're probably working like you'd work at 20. Knowledge is a much more interesting idea, but you've got to inculcate, and that's the point of the principle, you've got to inculcate a sense of urgency. That's something I, from the get-go in my career, I had this innate concern about time. I don't know why. I've always been urgent. There's no time. I've got to move. I still feel that today. Does that take away the enjoyment in some respects, though, if you're always focused on the urgency of it? I don't think it does. I mean, I think that it's about focus.

23:13The very point, that's what I call the focus urgency. It's not about doing everything urgently. What's important to you? And it comes to work-life balance, which I cover in the book. I think that work-life balance is, once you understand that 20%, you can't spend eight hours sleeping, eight hours at leisure. and you've got to optimize your time, whatever's important to you, whether it's being a parent or building an NGO or building a business or sports, you know, a sports career, whatever. You've got to focus that time on that issue or else you're not going to get there. And if we focus on our physical health, I would imagine 90 % of the women and the men listening to this conversation are in this 20 % window of urgency.

23:55If they focus on their physical health with more clarity and more urgency, and if they focus on being a lifelong learner and not imagining that the days of learning new information are over, does that slow down the concept of the time passing? No. Or does it just mean that, no, okay, that's depressing. It means there'll be more, yeah, there's no way. I don't think. I mean, you always feel that time passing, but I think that it allows me to get impact for that given time. I think I want to talk about a story in the book, if I may, at this moment, because I think that urgency is a really powerful tool.

24:27I know that in my life on a couple of occasions things have happened that I didn't see coming and that's forced an urgency which has forced an answer and I've got to the answer a lot quicker and I actually think urgency is a really powerful thing for human beings because exactly as we've just been speaking about we have this concept of all the time in the world which we simply don't have can we talk about the day that you received a letter at your business which forced urgency on an incredibly aggressive scale? So we'd started our business in the early 90s, and the business grew incredibly quickly.

25:02It was kind of really, this was like exciting stuff for the stock market and whatever, as we kind of were taking the business public, as excited about the scale of the business. I mean, you were a real South African success story. Yes, and people were excited about it, and we're going to now list the company, take it public. And concurrently with that, the laws of insurance started to change to much more kind of almost sickness funds where everyone has entry, you can't price risk accurately. So that's the actual complexity. Our entire business model, we kind of pioneered the idea of medical savings accounts.

25:34So part of your, in South Africa, there's no NHS. So everything is funded in health insurance, primary care, going to the GP. So we had these medical savings accounts. It was an amazing set of breakthroughs that I think our team achieved. Everything in that law was kind of nullifying that. And to an extent, you can't just recover from that because you start losing healthy lives. It's called the death spiral. The sicker lives always stay, and then your prices go up, and then the fairly healthy lives leave. So you get into what's called the death spiral. So that set of laws posed a dramatic threat to us.

26:09And did you see them coming? We saw them coming, but they were not as... And we interacted, to be fair, to regulators. It was a complex process of dealing with that. But effectively, the day after we listed the company, we were headlined about, you know, government warns, discovery, you know, and we had a, it looked like we were really, we were absolutely, we were finished. And we looked at every single option. And I remember one of my smartest guys in our team said, listen, I don't think we can survive this thing. It looks unlikely. Wow. So this kind of government diktat, you believed at that point would kill the company.

26:41And how long do you think you had to kind of save the company or do something? We had about two weeks to respond to kind of some of the issues. And it's unbelievable, I think, about the rate of development of our thinking. You know, we eventually came up with a structure that just accelerated us. That's quite unbelievable. And it gets to both the urgency but also the first principle. As soon as you say there's an opportunity here, as soon as you stop running, you know, from the negative in Sallison, This is it. What do we do to, are there not opportunities here? And to an extent, we interpreted or we used the regulation in a way that gave us a different structure that gave the organization a competitive advantage.

27:24And while government's intentions in this, I think, were completely noble, they wanted a much more egalitarian system, et cetera, it's a good thing, our competitors were egging this on because we'd really decimated them. But we turned around this thing and the organization just started to eat up market share, you know. So the issue though is I think in that principle is when things are forced upon you, urgency happens. In a time of war, you get massive development, this kind of thing. But the art of impact is to create that urgency yourself, to find ways because else you don't get that impact because most people don't have that force on them.

27:59So you've got to find ways to create that urgency. And that's the idea of focus. What's important? How do you get that urgency? And what ways have you found to create focused urgency? In the organization, it's on short challenges, 90-day challenges. I see a lot of organizations with business plans that never manifest. Ours is like 90 days. We get things done and we roll in a 90-day cycle. The other thing that we do and I think great companies do, and Apple is famous for it, these like annual launches. You've got a year. It's amazing what happens when that deadline starts coming. There's going to be a countrywide launch.

28:37Same happens in the UK in Vitality. We continue to evolve. And it's not based on we've got an idea or some event-based stimulus. It's actually the deadline of a launch. As soon as you've got that deadline, it's amazing how things change. If you don't have the deadline, my experience, it doesn't happen. We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners. well this plays very nicely into the third pillar from the book which is this idea of declared goals so as soon as you declare a goal you are of course creating a deadline um i think that the general concept of goal setting is that it's a bit mundane it's a bit boring it's a bit corporate it's all about hitting your kpis um why is actually declaring a goal publicly so important because it gets to the point you made before the loss aversion as soon as you set a goal and you declare it in some way that it's visible and it's there you've got something to lose and as soon as you've got something to lose you evoke loss aversion if you're without the goal all you've got is potential gain it may happen you don't know what it is without the goal so you kind of go through life maybe something happens when you set a goal suddenly you've got something to lose i'll tell you one goal i didn't realize how declared it was, is writing this book.

29:57As soon as you, that goal, I'm now, I'm out there. The amount of work I've done to get to this podcast, you know what I mean? I've killed myself. Really? Because it's a goal that has to be of a certain quality. So setting a goal is critical. But the one thing I found, and I don't know your view, but the one thing I found in our research shows is that the idea of goals, people know them, but they don't set goals. Goals are set for them in that first 75 % of their lives. You've got to get certain marks at school to get into the degree or whatever course you want to do. Then you've got to get into the first team in whatever sport.

30:33So goals are there, but they're not yours. They were set for you. Very few people I find in that 20 % where they make an impact actually set goals. In corporates, I set these mundane goals. I know that. Corporates dull great skill. They really do. Because we set goals for remuneration, so we know we're going to hit them. loss aversion we set a goal that you can really lose you know something that you've got a chance of not making in fact great goal is one that's just outside of your ability you know that creates loss aversion and that drives an energy that i mean i'm a ceo i'm working hard to write a book is not the it's not the best use of time yeah you know but i've grafted like a dog to because of that loss aversion.

31:18I don't mean then in a, in a, what's the word? Counter-verbal, I'm saying in a real sense. I realize there's something at stake here. I've got to make this count, you know? So while I agree with you, people have goals. I don't think that's the kind of goal setting that evokes loss aversion. Quite the opposite. People set goals and now they're going to make. That's not a goal. You've got to evoke loss aversion. And what is this, how do you set a loss aversion goal? I think you set something that is important for you. That's towards, It's hopefully a noble purpose. And then do you announce it? Well, I think it's declared means that in some way it's visible.

31:52You know, I don't mean that in the country. You have to really, I did a five minute mile. I remember reading about it because you did. I remember you put it on LinkedIn, didn't you? And you said, I'm going to do, I mean. No, that's lunacy. I was about to say, that's not just a declared goal. That is ridiculous. That's an idiot. But the point is, the point is putting it out there. It's amazing what that got me to do. And this was your publicly announced, I will run a mile in five minutes. Yeah, our team had this, you know, vitality. Our whole idea is physical activity and kind of that's amazing what the data shows.

32:22So we felt this would be incredibly, what's the word, it would open up the dialogue and narrative about, you know, goal setting in any sense. And it did, we had an amazing time. But for me personally, I had this coach, I was up at five in the morning. Turned out I'm not capable of it. I was 58 years old at the time. I got to like 5.35 or thereabout in Johannesburg, which is high up. I thought I'd go down to Cape Town and do the run, which is faster. You know, I had to see, but I never had it. I mean, I tore a calf muscle doing it. But I'll tell you what's amazing. My running went through, I've never been the same.

32:55I've never been the same. I did the Boston Marathon now at 3.30 or 3.31. That's pretty fast for my age. So you found something. I found something. Forget about, this is not relative here. It's not relative to my ability. I've never been the same since that goal. Never been the same. And the goal was too far for me. I couldn't have achieved it. I'm not a great runner. I don't have that ability. But the truth is, it got me into a completely, I learned about myself. I learned about running. It's an amazing thing. Hey, just set a goal. Go and, you know, it's an obscure thing. But you've got to set goals in some way that are visible.

33:31Any of our classic version. I don't think most people do set goals. That's my view. In their 20 % to make an impact. I don't think they do. One of the interesting things about hosting a show called High Performance and talking about these kinds of things on a weekly basis. And we've been doing this now for seven years. We've had 250 million plus downloads of our show. So a quarter of a billion people have listened to these kinds of conversations. And the result of that is regularly me getting messages from people saying, I don't feel I've achieved. Often they're of a similar age to me. I feel like there's the next step I haven't taken.

34:06And one of the questions I ask people most often, just DMs over Instagram and stuff, is how safe is the life around you? And it's amazing half of them they stop and think about it and go, actually, yeah, I'm so safe and so comfortable. I tell myself I want this goal that's out of reach, but do I really because of the comfort? And your story is a really interesting one for someone that was looking to find the discomfort to grow. And you didn't achieve the goal you set out to achieve, but you certainly grew. But it's not just people like you and I, you know, who are like ambitious amateurs. There's some research in the book, and I thought this was incredible, about golf.

34:45And the greatest golfer in the world is impacted by the psychological concept of loss aversion. Yeah. Tell us about it. I also found that research unbelievably. Yeah. Because golf is on any sport at that level. You know, people are at their absolute extreme, you know, skill and pushing. But what that research found was done was a sophisticated study that got rid of all the covariates and selection looked at the core issues, looking at PGA golfers, that they find they putt statistically better for a par than they do for a bogey. It's an amazing finding because if you miss a par, you lose, it's perceived as a loss.

35:26Whereas if you get a birdie, it's perceived as a gain. So putting for a par, there's loss aversion. Putting for a birdie is a potential gain. And just that difference. so their mind is more focused for putting for a par because they don't want to be embarrassed and get a bogey right whereas a birdie is almost like well if I get this it's a bonus but at that level you would think and they are, I'm sure they think that but when you look at the data they're not as good but you imagine if Tiger Woods on a couple of holes at every single competition of his career had had the mindset that I'm putting here for par not putting for a birdie that probably shows you'd have done better a lot better would have made millions of pounds worth of difference to his career I don't think you can change it sorry do you not think well the conclusion sorry the conclusion of that I felt was that when you're dealing with a Tiger Woods or a PJ golfer or any sportsman at that level they are maxing out what they can do but you can't cheat loss aversion you can't that's why it's so important to set those goals unless you've got something to lose you can't rise to that to that level Even at that level, it's so small, the difference.

36:41But between your example of someone sitting at home being fairly safe and not putting anything out there versus someone putting something at risk, the difference in impact is it's a multiplier. It's a two times multiplier. Yeah. I remember, so aside from this, I have a production business called Whisper Group. It's an independent production company. It would be the biggest independent production company in the UK, probably top five in the whole of Europe. and when we produce a lot of live sport and when we went into when covid happened 99 of our business was producing live sport for various broadcasters and i remember calling my co-founder who's our ceo and i said like what's happening he said they're shutting everything down and we had never really taken money out of the business so i thought well we'll be fine my next question obviously was well obviously we'll be okay and he said well we'll last a few months because your power when business is good is your offices and your headcount and all of the things that cost a lot of money.

37:38But the minute something like COVID happens, that's what can kill your business in a matter of days. And at that moment, we decided that not only would we urgently lean in and support all of our people, but also we would rewrite the business and be not just sports, but also a documentary maker and an entertainment program maker. We went into COVID, and I'll get these numbers slightly wrong, but with about 60 staff, we came out of the COVID pandemic with 150 staff. We're now nearly 400 staff. And we make documentaries for every single one of the OTT providers, Apple, Disney, Amazon, Netflix. We work for all of them and produce two of three of the biggest entertainment shows in the UK, as well as still doing all the live sport.

38:26Without the urgency of COVID, whisper group would look no different i don't think to how it looked in 2020 absolutely so i also couldn't fully understand the power of this idea you felt that loss coming and you have no that intensity 100 100 well look that's my experience of running a production company but there's a couple of really great bits of evidence in the book that i think people would find interesting the first one can we talk very briefly about the apple watch experiment that you did at discovery because this absolutely lays plain the importance of of averting a loss so we we were trying to get people to be physically active and we did a fantastic kind of venture with apple where the idea was that you get the watch almost for free that was the idea that's of course not affordable so what we did is create a structure where you pay for the watch over two years kind of you know the price divide about 24 every month but the the key issue was if you're physically active, the payment in that month is zero.

39:25So to an extent, if you meet your physical activity goals in the month, you don't pay for the watch. Inadvertently, it creates, we didn't realize it at the time, I think, of its power, but it was a loss of framed structure. You know, you got the watch and you had something to lose. And it's amazing, the data, we did some amazing, we actually launched that data here in the UK around the fact that people are, I think, 30 % or 34 % more physically active and they sustain that a lot of these programs people do something and over time it kind of you know the half-life is pretty quick the data was unbelievable and and the reason for it was loss aversion people have something that they perceive they've got yes so you made them feel like the watch was theirs theirs but you can lose it that kind of subliminal force it just has an amazing effect on people and for people that are listening to this thinking i just don't have this in me i don't feel that i've got the ability to to find an edge to get to this limit you cite the olympic skier jesse diggins in your book this conversation about superhuman grit and i think that plays nicely into what we're talking about doesn't it yeah well i mean the issue that you find is that no matter how hard you're working you can work harder you know i don't mean that in a color sense i mean you've got a goal and if lost a version there you can get there i was struck by that new york times article about her what she went through you know she ended up in And, you know, I think came second.

40:43She was blind, couldn't hear anything, you know. That level of pushing to get to a goal that sports people do is unbelievable. Most people in that 20 % of their lives don't push at all, really. You know, I've done some work with Tim Noakes, a great sports scientist. He developed this idea of the governor theory in running. You know, that effectively fatigue is actually your brain just telling you, I don't like this. I'm going to feel tired. It's not a real physical issue. You can push harder. And he asked the question, if you came second, why didn't you die? You know, you didn't push hard enough.

41:14I mean, it's just, it's an existential question. It sounds callous, but it's an intellectually quite powerful argument. If you're still alive, you didn't push hard enough. Jesse, as you heard, pushed nearly to death, but that's the point. And I think when you set a goal that's important to you, you can work a lot harder than you think to get there, a lot harder. Again, I think most people in their careers, and I don't mean this in a callous way, aren't pushing to the extreme. You can push harder. And again, I think setting a goal, and a goal that's authentic, that's noble to you. Because I think if it isn't, you can't push hard.

41:47But if it is and it's out there, I think that loss aversion lets you do amazing things. And I think that's an important point to make is this is about setting something that matters to you. Because I think what we don't want to do is talk about pushing yourself to the limit, breaking down, finding an edge, sacrificing everything you love, sacrificing relationships, sacrificing family, sacrificing time, sacrificing happiness just to achieve a goal. What we're really talking about here is if someone's listening to this thinking, there's something I've always wanted. There's something I know would bring such joy and happiness to my life.

42:18And it could be being with my kids more. It could be regenerating a relationship with an elderly parent. You know, it could be traveling the world. If it's something that you really want, then you have it in you. So we've created a foundation for my performance. And the phrase we use for the young people we work with is it's within the message we give them is everything you need is already there yeah and i think that's really what you're saying like this is in human beings already yeah you put across totally in my view this is not about how do i make money or you know it's about what it is that's important to you and how you use you know your life which is shorter than you think to get there that's what it's about because i think ultimately you don't want regrets you want to feel you were the most you you could have been so totally this is not about you know and inauthentic or making, working for a company and making them richer.

43:07It's none of that counterfeit stuff. It's real, what makes a difference to you? And I think the worst, that's my, always been my fear, to kind of live a life of regrets that you get to the end and I didn't spend enough time with my kids, you know. What's important to you? That's the issue. But then max it out. The final theme then in the book that you talk about is the Pareto tale. Tell us about that. Well, the Pareto tale is really the culmination of all. Those three principles get you into the tail. The tail is how you make decisions. That's the issue and how you take action. The issue here is that people, we kind of code it to think that things are uniform.

43:42We taught at university, you know, the bell-shaped curve. We have things all in the middle and there's things on the other side, two tails. In a network world, that's not the case. You can never find it anywhere. Everything has a power law, a long tail. Small number of things in the tail determine the whole system. You see that down in the stock markets. A few companies with AI, five or six companies, are a big share of the entire market capitalization of the entire capital markets. You know what I mean? So as you get a more network world, you get a longer tail forming. You get power laws forming, 80-20, et cetera.

44:15Pareto is one of the distributions, but I like the term of the Pareto tail. I was an Italian economist, et cetera. But the Pareto principle of a small 80-20 rule, it's not always 80-20, but that idea. But the principle thing is a small number of things make a difference. But the key issue here, which I try to get across in the book, is your own life is a highly networked system. So if you look at all the decisions that you make every day and action you take, right, and you plot it on a chart about low impact to high impact, what you'll find, I mean, I've done a million things today already, decisions.

44:48I decided to wear the suit. I wasn't sure if it was casual or not. I had a cup of coffee. There's a million things I've done that have no impact at all. There's a few in the tale. I started Discovery one day. I married my wife. We had children. I saw it with your boy. That's a tale event. Those things in the tale are what determine your life. It's a fantastic, it's a great conclusion because what it shows you once you've got a power law is it doesn't matter how badly you've done. It doesn't matter what's happened. You can change the system in the tale. Just a few things in the tale change your impact.

45:22so you know that's the it has a whole lot of in the book I go through a lot of different implications of the tail theory but I think the strength of it is a few things in the tail make the difference and the question is how do you get to the tail and that's the first three if you're setting goals if you're focusing your time and being urgent and if you have the right positive spotting opportunities and executing one of them you end up in the tail and I gave the story in the book called The Epiphany in the Bath, the whole vitality idea. I was sitting in the bath and the idea came out and it led to this global business.

45:58But actually the story of the business is not what we did after the bath. It's how I got to the bath, you know. And how I got to the bath, our team wasn't my own issue, was all that other stuff. We were so fired up with this goal of making people healthier that when someone gave this idea of selling our health insurance into these gyms, we flipped around and said, what if the gyms were free for people in insurance? You know what I mean? What if we made them healthier? So kind of that obsession with this urgency, the goal setting, and this feeling of anything's possible. We are looking at every opportunity led to that epiphany.

46:33The actual rollout, and I'm very proud of it. Our team is very proud of it. But it was getting to the tail that kind of gave me this obsession with, you've got to be in the tail as a leader, in every way. If you're running that tail and pushing that distribution to the right, you're not getting the impact you should get. And one of the challenges I think for people is how do they know if they're in the tail? Like how do they know if they're in that rare air, if they're in their final 5 %? Because often we spend our life assessing where we are against everybody else and if we think we're 1 % above everyone around us then we must be doing fine.

47:06I think that's one of the challenges I think actually as human beings is this constant comparison of other people rather than understanding that they have no bearing on our own journey. Yeah. the tail is relative to all the other things you do so it's a personal set of actions and decisions you take you never know you're in the tail i think i think you do when when we launched vitality i knew this was you know when i left my job and started discovery you must have a similar story i knew this was i remember holding my daughter up she was just born i thought this is an idiotic thing to do leaving a well-paid job on my own you know what i mean yeah that was a tail event But the issue is no matter how much you're in the tail, a tail will form.

47:48That's the Pareto, the statistical dynamic. So if you're really pushing the tail, the whole thing just moves to the right. You follow? Your tail gets further. It's an amazing thing. So the whole thing is to be pushing the tail all the time. And that's why, you know, coming back to your earlier, your starting point, you can be smart and you can have all the talent and education and whatever. But if you can get into the tail, it's a 20 times multiplier. That's what the book shows, you know, six times two times two. If you look at it mathematically, that tail is 20 degrees of freedom away from where you are in the average.

48:23If you get into that tail, that's the 20x, and that trumps intelligence and education, and that's why it's in all of us. You've just got to get into the tail. So despite all the things you've achieved and all the success that you've had, and this book certainly counts as one of those successes, is your is your drive as great as it's ever been do you feel a bit like alexander hamilton there's a million things i haven't done i do feel that but i think i'm feeding it through things like writing a book it's putting something out there i think that if i didn't do that i would whittle away with good intention before we finish we have our quickfire questions and you'll know this our quickfire questions are in partnership with Vitality.

49:07Because I've known a guy called Greg Levine, who works for Vitality here in the UK. I've known him for many years. And it was really interesting. The very first time I met him, I was talking about your business and I was talking about high performance and realizing that we both stand for exactly the same thing. Our show, and I think your business as well, is all about outcome, not income. The income will happen, but it will only happen if the outcome is great. And I think you're helping to change lives with the work you're doing. I like to think we're doing the same thing here. So I'm really pleased that our quickfire questions are in partnership with your amazing business Vitality.

49:42And you know, and we know, because you find this out from your amazing customers, is that the habits are the things that make a difference in life. The habits are the things that stack up and they multiply. So we're going to run through a few of your habits to find out exactly what you've done in life that has made a big difference. So the first one of our quickfire questions in partnership with Vitality is what are the three most important non-negotiable behaviors for you in your life? Time with my family. Yep. Physical activity and sleep. I put them there. I'm shooting from the hip. Very good.

50:22Those are them. What is the greatest advice you've ever been given? Don't peek in the trick. explain that well the last year of school is matric wherever you call it you know you have so many people who peak at school first seen this brilliant marks and then they live a a mediocre life they can't you know it's part of like the i'm a i'm scared of mediocrity there's no elitism in my thinking it's more fear of mediocrity i think it was like that just don't peak in the trick. What is the one habit that's changed everything for you? I think short, intense exercise. I know that sounds kind of, what's the word, inauthentic or simple, but it's not.

51:06It's given me the ability to manage time better and to be really fit for everything. I actually fit in. I do one fast kilometer in the morning. It's mad. I've, you know, gun it out of the door and I'm back I warm up slightly but I'm saying the ability to manage time because that's the one you know as per the book that you can never get back you know so I have to make sure that I use it carefully and uh you know that that kind of created a whole cascading of just using time well have you ever heard of Shane Farnham no he's a guy that wrote the Farnham Street blogs again he's a conversation on high performance that you'd really enjoy because he's his whole thing is about positioning.

51:46He's like, if you don't get a job, you didn't have a bad job interview. You didn't prepare for the job interview two, three weeks ago. If you did bad in your exams, you didn't have a bad exam. You had bad positioning. It's exactly what you're talking about. Your early morning kilometer is your positioning for the day. And everything leads from there. What's the one goal that you still have that you haven't yet set out loud? I need to form it better. But I think our organization about making people healthier, the global goal of that and its scale we're working on now, hopefully you'll see that play out in a more clear form.

52:25But the ability to make people live longer, healthier, is going to be the key issue for societies. There's no money for national health. Governments are in debt. The ability to compress morbidity is going to be one of the biggest social issues. So we have that in what we do with AI, with data, the ability to make an impact on people. We've got to get the goal right, I think. It's exciting. And before we say farewell, a lot of the things that we've spoken about today are about the human being and the human mind. We're moving into a world of AI. And actually, if I look at the things that we've spoken about today, the disciplined optimism.

53:03AI is very easily disciplined because it just works relentlessly, not just to the same level, but to an ever-improving level. Focused urgency. It is as urgent as we are as human beings. It operates ever so fast. This idea of being derailed by a loss, AI doesn't suffer from that problem. If AI was a golfer, it would play the birdie putt exactly the same way as the par putt. So the concepts that we've spoken about today, how do you feel that they will be impacted by the growth of AI? I think that AI may allow us to be in the tail more. leave more of the grant work, the info gathering, the analysis to AI, and let us with our creativity use that power.

53:50Of course, it has massive threats to humanity. We've heard a lot about that. That's a non-trivial risk, I believe. But at the same time, I've chosen an optimistic view of embracing this. And can it help me in my role be much more on the tail? I think it can. One of the great things about Vitality is that they're not just there when you need them most, but they're there for you all the time. Which person in your life has been there for you all the time, not just when you needed them most and why? My wife, I would say unequivocally, you know, kept me on the straight and narrow, you know. Someone who cares about you tells you when you're out of control, you know, you being, you being, you know, does, supports and keeps you on the straight and narrow, definitely my wife.

54:39What's your biggest strength? I think the ability to seek positive. Not to be an optimist. I think the ability to see the positive. It's a relative comment. I'm not suggesting it's better than others. It's something I've worked hard on. Your greatest weakness? Procrastination. I like to mull things over and drive people mad. Inspired by the book, The Four Principles, multiply your impact in life and leadership what's the one change you've made to your life in the last few years that you think has helped you to maximize your impact in life and work i think that five minute mile demonstrated the power of stretch goals to me you know and gave me a the running is irrelevant it actually gave me a much more clarity about the power of these things what they do you know the other stuff implicitly knew yeah but the power of that goal of that, of kind of setting those things as you get older and as you go through a journey.

55:41It was quite, I think, for me, quite an epiphany. Among the interesting conversations we've had on this show is we had a guy called Nick Cox, who at that time was the academy manager at Manchester United. And you'd find that very interesting if you get a chance to listen, because he talks about the importance of those stretch goals on the young minds. You know, by the time they got to Manchester United, they were all good young footballers. They all had good technical skills and you would have said a lot of them had good mental strength and resilience so their job then was to test and reward so you can stretch these young people to the breaking point as long as they're rewarded afterwards and he said as soon as you had games on really bad pitches or games where you specifically employed a bad referee to make all of the wrong decisions or when you purposefully played them against kids two years old or without telling them they were playing against older kids he said that's when you really understood.

56:31So this idea of having a stretch goal, I think is very interesting. And the final question to leave people pondering on, what do you believe is the one golden rule for people to live their own high-performance life? I think the principles about getting to an impact, but I think that impact needs to be noble and authentic. I think impact without an authentic purpose is hollow. so the principle is about getting it back but my sense is the golden rule is having a purpose in life in a business that is a that is authentic and powerful that when you put your head down at night you feel good about it i think authenticity and purpose are two of the most important things that we can be chasing um that's it for the quickfire questions just to remind you that vitality on average help their people who are insured with them to live up to five years longer So if you would like to live a longer and healthier life, then you can find out more about Vitality at vitality.co.uk.

57:33And that brings us to the end of our conversation. Thank you so much, Adrian, for letting me read the book. It is a fascinating and brilliant book, and I've read many over the years, and there are so many things in here that I want to take away. And I'm already, I was talking to Seb on the train on the way in this morning about some of the lessons. So thank you so much for the book, and thank you for coming on High Performance and sharing those lessons with us. Thank you. A real honor. Thank you. I think the big thing that stood out to me from that conversation with Adrian is this idea of living our life with intentionality.

58:04You know, he talks about the urgency. He talks about the fact that almost all of us watching this video right now are in the final 20%, which is kind of scary. But actually that final 20 % can be offset by this idea of living with urgency and living with an intentional mindset. You know, we spoke during that conversation about golf and I remember interviewing Matt Fitzpatrick, one of the world's top golfers, a few years ago. And Damien and I were talking to him about his practice. And you know, he told us that he's got a little book and every single shot he's ever played when practicing, he's written down in this book.

58:36And it's not just about writing down what he did. It's about practicing with intentionality. So I remember him saying that before a major, he'll see golfers chucking the ball in the rough and then practicing getting the ball out of the rough. And in his mind, in Matt Fitzpatrick's mind, doing that is just training your mind for the fact that during the tournament, you're going to end up in the rough rather than training your mind for the fact that actually in the tournament, you're more likely to be on the fairway. So why don't we get the ball on the fairway and actually practice the kinds of things that life is going to throw at us.

59:06And I kind of got that feeling actually from the conversation with Adrian. I really liked how he took the lessons and learnings into the things that he's done with his business, whether it's repairing roads, handing out Apple watches, announcing his own five-minute mile. But I also really enjoy the fact that so much of what was in the book and so many of the things that he spoke about are based on psychological research, the kind of things that Damien loves, the kind of things we talk about so often on this show. So I think my big takeaway, and certainly I felt this when I was talking to him, is that I think I can still do a better job of being intentional.

59:41You know, when he spoke about getting up every day and doing a fast kilometer, I definitely firmly believe that the most important thing in life for getting to where we all want to get to is positioning. It's not about delivering when we get to the place where we have to deliver. It's how we position ourselves to deliver well when we get there. So I mentioned my son a few times who plays football. Like if he has a bad game of football, it's not necessarily about having a bad game of football. It's about what have you done in the week? What have you eaten? Have you trained? Have you worked hard?

1:00:08Have you thought about the opponents? Have you watched the people you're playing against? This idea of positioning ourselves and getting ourselves into the ultimate place for success is far more important than having to deliver in that moment. So I thought it was a great conversation. I hope that you really enjoyed it. His book is out now so you can get your hands on it and have a read. Thank you as always to Vitality as well for being part of the High Performance family. We're really proud that they partnered with the show. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and don't forget, keep on checking back for more episodes like this where you and I can just sit, listen and learn about how to optimize our own lives, but optimize it in a healthy way, not optimize it in a toxic way.

1:00:47Please make sure you share this conversation with anyone in your circle who you think could benefit from hearing the wisdom of Adrian Gore and hit subscribe. Make sure you like the shows and I'll see you next time for another episode of High Performance.