317. He built his company around happiness, but was he happy? With Richard Clarke

0:00Richard Clarke did what every founder dreams of. He built a company, spent 10 years growing it and sold it. Surely that would make him very happy indeed. I should be the happiest person on in the earth. And I fell into the biggest happiness trap that there that there is. That is, I'll be happy when and you pin your happiness on some future event. I'll be happy when I get three A's in A level when I get my degree when I get the pay rise. So I thought I'll be happy when when I exit that trap pinning your happiness on a future event, the exit, the payout, the

0:39Richard Clarke:Today, everything sorted. Richard felt the weight lift off his shoulders the day he signed. And in that moment, he felt something else. Real grief. The kind you'd feel watching your own kid leave home for good. Richard spent 10 years studying what actually makes people happy at work. And he turned it into a framework leaders now use to fix unhappy teams. He built his own company around it with Team Happiness as the number one KPI. Then he sold it and really tested his own framework. Today we're asking, is there really a formula for creating happy workplaces? And if so, where do you even start?

1:15And along the way, Richard's going to bust one of the most repeated myths in making employees happy, Google's famous 20 % time. Turns out actual Google employees have never really heard of it.

1:26Richard Clarke:Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Richard Clarke studied behavioural science, built a software company around team happiness as its number one metric and sold it last year. He now teaches leaders the five things every person needs to be happy at work. And today he's telling us exactly what you should do and what you should not do to have a happy workplace.

2:03Richard Clarke:So let's join Richard and Al right after this very short break. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident and is completely flipping useless. Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

2:44My name is Richard Clarke. I studied behavioural science at university and I've always been fascinated by this concept of happiness. And first, my own personal happiness. I travelled the world, went to 50 odd countries, worked in many of them. looking for this secret. And then in 2014, I founded my first company. It was a software company called Secret Source. I figured that the secret to being a successful company would be in the teams, in making a great place to work. And I thought the best way to measure if I was being a good leader was to measure their happiness. So I built a team and our number one KPI was team and client happiness.

3:36And I sold that company last year. And nowadays I teach leaders all the things that I've learned over the last 10 years on how to make companies happier places so that your team perform at their best. Now, a bit of a left field question here, but you mentioned the word secret source I see the play on words with source code open source all that kind of thing was that intentional when you first started it of course yeah yeah it was I'd been doing it I've been project managing teams in India for for many years before that and this was my own company and I wanted to um I was it was an outsourcing company basically we provided teams for other other for people in um in the UK and I've got to give the credit wasn't my wasn't my idea it was my wife's uh idea and we were playing around we're on holiday and we were playing around with ideas for the company she came up with it and so i liked it many people have said over the years it's a great name let's talk about happiness um i sense that you've got a very good idea what makes people happy not just fluffy stuff but you've got some kind of like codification or some framework for it so should we kick off by what makes people happy and then we'll get into your framework for that.

4:51There are lots of things that make you happy at work, like thousands, thousands of things from whether you get paid a fair salary, whether you get free food, they will do influence your happiness to whether you've got a good boss, whether you've got autonomy, whether you're learning, whether you've got purpose and stuff like that, thousands and thousands of things. And depending on which expert you speak to, they'll categorize it into three things three areas five areas 13 areas 24 areas i i personally like there's a the u.s surgeon general they did a big study about they did a report about three or four years ago big well um their guide to well-being and they split it into five areas and uh i like five areas because i can remember five and it's big enough to cover most things so yeah there's five five areas you need to be you need to be happy at work without going into too much detail so first one is safety so that they call them needs everyone needs these things and if you have if these needs are fulfilled then basically you'll have well-being and you'll be happier at work so the first one is is safety that's your that's your real basic one you need to feel safe that you're not going to get bullied you are not going to get hurt that um you're going to get paid at the end of the month your job's safe and also psychological safety i'm sure your listeners all know what psychological safety is um but it's really important um to be happy at work and i feel that you can't really be happy if you're not don't feel safe at work you can't really be happy so that's the right your basic basic level then you've got community um you need to feel part of a team that's achieving something that you couldn't achieve yourself.

6:46So you feel some part of something bigger. That's the whole belonging thing. You hear a lot about belonging and how belonging is so important. That's the community. Then you've got autonomy. You need to feel that you've got some control over how you work, like the way you work, when you work, and then in your job, how you work. So a bit of ownership and you're not being micromanaged. then you've got opportunities for growth so learning you've got to feel that you're you're learning and going forward in your career but not just learning randomly not just doing a two hours training every week but actually feeling that what you're doing is is advancing yourself and your career and then you've got purpose you need to feel that your work has meaning and that you're recognize for it.

7:33Now, those are your five things. Now, everybody's different. So some people need more purpose in their work. Some people need more community and it changes through your life as well. So young people, they need more opportunities for growth, right? That's what's really important for them. And they'll sacrifice other things for it, even salary. But you get a young kid, yeah, autonomy becomes the key because you want to be home uh to help your partner you want to be home to see those um when they get back from school and stuff like that so um everyone's different changes through your life but they're those five basic things everybody needs a little bit of all of them so you can't take away any of them from anybody now i have a question now in the um in the richard clark hierarchy of happiness that we've just created there yeah you did say that they they flux but is the one particular thing that you think is the foundation for it pretty much at any age i think safety um i think you even in you even in your just in your life i listened to i listened to your podcast yesterday actually on uh on financial safety when people feel that they're financially safe they um they feel better they feel freer to make different decisions um and i think i think that's the that's the key one everybody needs safety so if you can't afford to pay the rent if you can't afford to buy the kids your kids what they their clothes they want it's it's different and nothing else really matters so let's talk about the opposite of struggling to buy your kids money and i'm not going to delve into your particular situation but just generally speaking, I see a lot of founders who exit and so they're ticking off safety.

9:24Yes. Community. Yes. Autonomy. Oh, more than anything, because they've now got half a million or 10 million in the bank and they can do whatever they want. I suspect that people who exit might be struggling for the opportunities for growth and the purpose. What's your thoughts on seeing people do this kind of thing so i would disagree with you on the community so um you're you're a founder you're in a company you've got all this great team around you you feel you're building something and then suddenly you're by yourself at home and you don't have that team around you and you're not you're by yourself that personally i that's what i miss more than anything is is this the community and that sense of belonging to something bigger.

10:13But then, yeah, purpose, yeah. You go through it. I've talked about this a lot. The purpose, the founders, when they sell their company, they suddenly think, oh, what do I do now? I've got the money. I've got this freedom to do whatever I want, but where do I want to go? And that's quite disorientating. It's quite, yeah, nobody has any sympathy for you, but it's something that I found difficult. I found difficult. I remember listening to the founder of Yo Sushi, Simon, I'm going to say Zeteczno, can't remember his surname, blonde hair. Another guy, did some really funny, fun stuff, yeah. Yes, yes.

10:57Didn't he like, didn't he duet with the blockheads at one point or something? He was just like a ridiculous guy. I don't know. I read a story right at the beginning. He wanted to make his brand seem bigger than it was. So he wants to put sponsored by or supported by. So he just wrote to the biggest brands he could think of that wouldn't be able to reply in time. So he wrote to Mercedes and Nissan or whatever it was and said, right, I'm going to put your name on my banner in front of my shop. Let me know if that's not all right. So I thought that was quite a clever thing to do here. let's keep with that because the story he told us when it was a manchester business show and he stood up on stood up on stage and he said basically when he sold it he went to the cash machine to check his balance and it said like 10 million pound or something and he had to turn around the person behind him the queue go have a look at this have a look at this and he was so excited about it he wasn't showed off he was just excited about it um but then obviously founded remorse came in and set in he's like what do i do with my life let's talk about this idea of having a bit fun with it then so this sounds dangerous to me if i want to be have a bit of fun with something at work in order to either be happy myself or make others happy that sounds like that could backfire a little bit have you got any thoughts on that i think there's um a misconception of what happiness is so i my theory is that you've got this this base level of well let's say contentment right you wake up in the morning and you think you know what my life's my life's all right okay you don't mind going to work um and you're happy with it and then throughout the day it it flux it fluctuates above and below that line right have a nice meal have a nice meeting get a new client it goes up have something bad goes goes below which the fun the fun bit you can keep pushing it up that's like going and buying new clothes every weekend yeah that will that'll lift that those peaks higher and higher and higher but that doesn't help the contentment what you need to do is to lift that contentment so that that's higher um so founders focusing on fun yeah just that do it definitely but you can't forget the the basics otherwise yeah people would be miserable sticking with this idea of contentment and happiness i think there are a lot of people in very boring jobs who would go if i got paid an all right wage and all i could do was sit all day on scroll facebook then i'd be happy at work but that that goes against a lot of the foundations of your of your framework doesn't it i would say they won't be unhappy at work so they'd be like at the the lowest level they could be without burnout or um they just play like four out of ten do you know i can just about go to the office i don't have to pretend i'm ill type stuff but that's not a great place to be honestly is it you do need to feel that you're actually doing something in the world you're helping somebody and you do need to feel that you're part of a team Let's go to the other extreme.

14:11Those people who say they're only happy when they are head down, working, working, working 80 hours a week. We're not trying to denigrate those people or take away from it, but is that just what they believe makes them happy or what's the psychology behind that? That's really interesting. There's a great study by the NHS, right? I think it was the NHS. If it's not, it's another public health service somewhere in Europe. And they looked at levels of burnout compared to overtime. And so they found out that they're not correlated. so but what is correlated is um unsolicited overtime and burnout so if you choose to work long hours you don't tend to get burnt out if you don't choose then you do get burnt out i know i've met lots of people who love working at 80 hours a week but whether they'll sustain it once they have a small child i would challenge challenge that having had a small child but um Yeah, no, I think they can be happy.

15:22It all depends on where you are in your life, what your priorities are. But those people who regard working 80 hours as a measure of success, yeah, not sure about those people. I'm always busy, don't have time to do this type thing. Maybe. So there's one other group of people who seem to be quite unique, and they're the people who thrive on things like challenging environments. So whether it be something not quite as life and death like cold calling, but they really enjoy it, to those people who work on North Sea oil rigs, which even the thought scares the hell out of me. Are they just using the same framework you've just developed there?

16:06Why are they happy in their work? It sounds terrifying to me. that's really interesting so i spent some time with a charity a couple of years ago and they send people to the front line to help on the front line of disaster zones war zones right and they're called out at short notice they go there if there's been a flood if there's been it's like it's awful terrible stuff um but they are really really helping okay and those people they are really happy at their work for that for that bit for the for the purpose side but they were struggling on other and in other areas and and what they were struggling with was they felt they had, they felt they had no autonomy because they had to be on call 24 hours.

17:03They, some people in the work couldn't drink in case they were suddenly called and had to drive somewhere. They couldn't have a night off because just in case they were called. So I think everyone is, has the same five needs, but people have different amounts of needs of those five needs. Autonomy is one of the five pillars of your framework. Yeah, yeah. What, US Surgeon General's framework? Sorry, the US Surgeon General framework, which we're now calling the, what are we calling it? The Clark Hierarchy of Happiness, I think. That's right, yeah, yeah. That's what we are calling it. It's got an acronym as well, yeah.

17:47I need to double check. that wasn't really the acronym yeah yeah yeah yeah um with with this framework autonomy is a big one yet when we were all forced to work from home then we had autonomy over our lives some of us didn't have to work at all because we're furloughed yet that seems some of the unhappiest time for some people so how we reconcile this how do we allow enough autonomy to go and do what you want but not so much you feel lonely so i this is the whole like work from home versus hybrid versus remote which is which is best and honestly every day just because of who i follow and stuff every day i'll get a different report saying which is better and why hybrid is better than remote why remote's better than office why office is better than all of them type thing before pandemic our team were really close we used to come into the office four or five times a week we used to go out every thursday we used to um go to the cinema often on a on the weekend and they were very close the team was really really close then came the pandemic we had to work from home in spain we were at home for it was february march through to at least september we weren't allowed october we weren't even allowed back into the office and then even after that people didn't they only sort of tripped into the office once a week.

19:14And I've, I felt that we never ever, we didn't regain that community. Now they've, we've asked our team a number of times, would you like to come back to the office? And they say, no, we like the autonomy. We like the remote work. Now, all the studies show that being a remote worker isn't great for your mental health but also all the studies show that if you give someone something they value it more if than if they never had it in the first place so if you take remote working away from them they feel like they're losing a lot more than they're gaining by going back to the office and also people are very good at they're not very good at valuing long-term benefit over short-term benefit.

20:03So they don't, they don't see that. For me, the whole work from home, I think it's some people are better, work better from home and I can handle it. Some people can't. Some people like a bit of mixture. I prefer hybrid. So it's a funny one. I think it's give and take in that one. You get more autonomy, but you lose community and that will benefit some people, but won't benefit others. So

20:31Richard Clarke:School might soon be out for summer, but Marketing School is here to stay. And it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Genuine marketing legends Neil Patel and Eric Su bring you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years in the trenches. With nearly 100 million downloads, probably a million of those are from me actually, and over 2 ,500 episodes, Marketing School delivers bite-sized marketing wisdom you can implement immediately. Whether you've got a new website, you're established business, you're going to learn the latest in SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, conversion, optimisation and genuine online marketing strategies that work today.

21:08Richard Clarke:So if you want real world marketing tactics from practitioners who are still in the arena building and scaling businesses, this show is perfect for you. And if you're considering using AI, which I think you should, then the latest episode looks into why AI often costs companies more than the employees you replaced. Yeah, definitely go and check that one out. Listen to Marketing School wherever you get your podcasts.

21:33I want to hear your views on this. This isn't necessarily me asking you how to fix it. Just if I was asking your advice on this. Imagine that there is a manager or I am a manager. I'm at work and I'm not particularly happy. But because I'm a good manager and a good guy, I want to make my team happy. So I'm not particularly happy myself. I don't have those those five ticks on your freight on the framework but I really want my team to be happy is this even possible yes yeah I think it is yeah it's difficult it's difficult I come across this a lot like I'll I will give talks and someone will come up to me afterwards and they go I really want to make my team happy but my boss is a right insert word of choice and so what they tend to do what I've seen is people do is they try to shield their team from the boss so they take everything which makes them unhappy but they get some satisfaction of making their team happy so it's all about the the secret it's not actually that difficult the secret is you know those five things um you then ask your team how do they feel about those five things which one are they missing and then you just provide it for them if your team say look we're missing autonomy because you keep scheduling meetings and like dinner when i'm working stop scheduling meetings all right don't give them a bottle of wine to say thanks just stop scheduling meetings it's really that simple you know what it's so funny when you said it's really that simple and i was like yeah it really is isn't it yeah it really really is so why why are we over complicating this then as managers and leaders what are your thoughts do you know what from speaking to lots of managers they just don't understand it um i i'm just thinking about 20 30 years ago i'd wake up in the morning and I go, I don't feel very good.

23:42Um, but you didn't know why it was right. You didn't know why it was because you didn't know about eating healthily. This was the eighties. So, uh, this is pop tarts and, uh, uh, Magi noodles. Um, and I didn't know that eight hours sleep was really that important. But when, once you learn about good food and the importance of sleep and the importance of what exercise to do. If you wake up in the morning, you can go, oh yeah, I feel a bit rubbish today because I didn't sleep. I went to bed at two o 'clock in the morning or because I ate that terrible McDonald's at 11 o 'clock last night or whatever.

24:25And what I found from leaders is that they go, oh, right. So it is that simple. They just don't understand what the five needs are. They sort of get, they, they read the blogs. Oh yeah, I've got to give them autonomy. I've can't micromanage. I, I, they've got to learn something and they've got to have purpose, whatever that means. Um, they know all these things. They hear all these words just coming in, but there's so much of it. They don't know which one they have to do or when they have to do it or who it's for or how to do it. And so what I found is that leaders, once they understand these five things and they just get it in their head, when someone comes to them and go look I'm really not happy and they go why aren't you happy and then they tell them they go you're not learning enough are you right how about we fix it doing this or how would you want that and then so just having that knowledge really helps and I don't think many leaders have that knowledge.

25:19Richard let's imagine that I have a company I have a number of employees I know they're not happy I can tell from the service I can tell by looking at their faces they're not happy. I say to you, Richard, come in, fix this for me. Talk me through practically what steps you're going to take to fix this for me. Okay. Let's talk about a company that I visited in October last year. Okay. Their team weren't unhappy, but they wanted to make them happier. They knew that they weren't doing enough and they didn't know what they had to be doing. So firstly, I spoke to the leaders and they said, why do we need, what can you do?

26:05And I said, well, the most important thing you can learn is that you as leaders have the power to make a difference and to make your team happier. if there's one thing I want you to learn it's that you you can do something right it's not out of your control and they said okay okay show us how to do that and I said well I'll need your team so we had a day with their team with the leaders of their team and the whole team and we sat in a room there were 30 of us and first thing that we do is I teach the I teach them the five areas, give them some stories. I go, okay, so this is what makes me happy.

26:48Okay. I'm getting, I'm understanding it. And then what we do is we send out like an employee engagement survey, like really, really similar, 25 questions, um, and five questions for each, each need. Okay. Do you feel you're, uh, given freedom to work the way you want to? Um, uh, do you have a clear idea of how to get a promotion, things like that. And they all link to a specific need. They're all done anonymously. And then they are presented on a big screen, on a spreadsheet to everyone in the room as an average. And then the leaders will see, they will see how their team is feeling, right? And so this is, for example, this company, they saw on the autonomy level their team were marking really low and and the manager said to me i do not understand that okay i give my team loads of autonomy um i trust them they i don't micromanage i don't think that's true so we said right okay explain so then we got the team to explain why they'd put that.

28:08Now, this requires a certain level of psychological safety. So this team had a very high level of psychological safety. They felt they could share it. If you don't do it, you can do it anonymously. You can ask that questions and then they fill it on and it comes up on the board and nobody knows who's filled it in. But what they meant was they come into work in the morning and their managers would then just schedule meetings with their team throughout the day. Okay. Um, and they said, we have no control of, we don't, when we arrive in the morning, we have no idea when we're going to work because you schedule in a meeting from 11 till 1130.

28:51Then I go, okay. And then I have my lunch and then you schedule it. So I'd never get, I'd never know when I'm going to get two hours or three hours to actually do my work. And it's infuriating. And I said, well, yeah, well, we need to speak to you. And they go, but we can't work because you keep scheduling things. And they said, well, what do you suggest? They said, well, stop scheduling in meetings. We said, we can't do that because we need to meet with you. Okay, well, let's have, give us half the day. so they they agreed as a team between the managers and the workers that there would be no scheduled meetings between 10 and two o 'clock all right so then people could have lunch when they wanted because it was originally between 12 and 2 and then some people said but i have lunch at 12 so that would only mean so they scheduled it between 10 and 2 and the interesting thing happened was that they had almost 50 % less meetings after that because the managers, because then it was slightly more difficult to schedule in meetings around their own schedule, probably with their managers, they started writing emails instead or sending a message in Slack.

30:07So one, it made the happier and two they got less meetings as a as a so that that's that's what that's what we do it's very simple find out what their needs are and then fix those needs once people listen to it they go oh it's really it's that that simple i don't have to give purpose to them or have to increase yes you do but only if they need it because a lot of a lot of businesses a lot of founders they they a lot of people already have purpose in their work they already feel they're giving something so you don't need to focus on that if they're people already feel they're giving a meaning any other tips or things that you've found during your consultancy days or even your business owning days that would really make a difference there's so many things we've done there was one time when we our team this was this was with our team and we did our and we did this We did this exercise with our team every six, nine months.

31:08We'd all get together, they'd fill it in, and then we'd analyze it. And one year, they said, look, we don't feel we have any purpose in our work. We don't feel that our work has any meaning. And so we communicated this to our clients because we were an outsourcing company. We provided five, seven developers to companies in the UK. And therefore, it was difficult for us as a company to give them meaning because they'd have to understand the meaning from the final client. So we spoke to the clients and one of them, all they did was they said, OK, thank you very much. And they went off and they spoke to all of their clients and they said, what's one thing that Jose has done in the last couple of months that's really made a difference?

32:01right and record just record me a little video and then since then every month in their monthly meeting they they show also a a little video from one of their clients saying this you adding this feature has saved me x hours or made this so much easier and ever since then he's still with us by the way ten and a half years later um with us it's not my company anymore but anyway he's still at secret sauce and um yeah he's never he he's never said he's never said he doesn't feel meaning in his work anymore so just little things like that i want to make you a little more uncomfortable by saying it didn't work so tell us all the things that you tried that just didn't work i was obsessed when we started the company i just wanted to try everything right so anything that i saw in any blogs anything from silicon valley i i just tried it in our company and so morning pictionary during covid that didn't go that was didn't really go down well the the britney spears um dance-a-thon that we did uh during covid to get everyone up out of their chairs yeah that one didn't go down very well either.

33:22Lots of silly things like that. But probably the best one was Google's 20 % time, right? So you know at Google, apparently all the staff get 20 % of their time to work on their own projects. And if it works well, it becomes a Google product. Our team at the time, we saw it and we talked to our team. They said, yeah, that'd be great. We could work on that. And so we introduced Google's 20 % time. And we said, Fridays, you can go and work on your own projects. Three weeks later, we abandoned the whole thing because most of the team had no ideas. So they didn't know what to work on. And they felt really gave them a lot of stress trying to think of something that would be useful.

34:10And those that did have ideas didn't really like working by themselves. so they didn't do them because they prefer to work with their team on the actual clients projects however from that they did say do you know what we really enjoyed not having meetings on friday so we then then worked with our clients to say right no meetings on friday and they didn't have any meetings and they said do you know also we did like finishing early so from that experiment we got to no meeting Friday which then became half day no meeting Friday and um and that and that's that stuck that's 30 for years yeah that's really cool and you're right because gmail I think came out of a 20 percent um and 20 percent it kind of ticks I'm looking at them all now it ticks all the boxes purpose learning autonomy I didn't community uh-huh I see now wow so looking back at it doing a post-mortem on that what we're saying is you kind of you got four out of the five but you didn't have the community is that what you're saying you were for our team yeah that was true yeah now this is going to be a bit controversial about uh six months ago i met some ex google employees right two of them very pretty high up when they left and i said to i said to them i met them separately at different events and i said to them what what tell me about this 20 time one of them said what what's 20 time never heard of it hi um the second one said uh yeah i think i have heard of i think the it team do it yeah and the third one said he knew about it when he arrived at the company but nobody mentioned it so after three months he said to his manager yeah um when do i get to my 20 percent time and he said oh yeah sass days i don't think it's everything it's cracked up to be but they did say that google was amazing at other things so they did um they did balance it out with with other things i want to ask you about what it's like to be a founder who exits now i know there's probably a lot of things you can't actually answer or talk about i don't know whether you're in earnouts i'm not interested necessarily whether you're in at this point but for the majority of founders out there it feels like you've done what they want to do you've built a company you've had a whale of a time building it you sold your company you exited your company that's what we're all striving for so we we think you must be the happiest person on the earth what's the reality of that situation i should be the happiest person on in the earth and I fell into the the biggest happiness trap that there that there is and that is I'll be happy when and you pin your happiness on some future event I'll be happy when I get three A's in A-level when I get my degree when I get the pay rise so I thought I'll be happy when when I exit um because then everything will be sorted I don't have to worry about this I don't have to worry about that.

37:23And it is great. Yeah. That, that day when, when, when it's everything signed and you feel a big weight lifted off your shoulders because you're no longer responsible for 30, 40, 50 people. However, at exactly the same time, you have this deep sense of loss of, oh that's my baby I I suppose my daughter's just left for a gap year um and she just headed off to Peru and that feeling when she walked through customs at the airport was a very similar feeling to the day I signed like oh they're gone now I don't have any more control of this and this is this is really sad for me um and also what what's next i sort of had planned that i was going to do more speaking and i was going to do um more consultancy teach people what i've learned over the years and i had i thought that was going to solve everything and you know in a way it does but I'm doing it alone it's not as good as doing it with other people um so it's sort of bittersweet I'm getting I'm I've been uh alone I've been uh by myself now for whatever three four months and I'm slowly adapting to this new reality I do I do my own it's a I'm a happiness geek so So I do my own happiness check-ins.

39:10So I assess myself. So about a month afterwards, I thought, do you know what? I am unhappy. Now I'm not as happy as I used to be with my work. Why is this? And I went through the five areas and I looked at it and I realized I had a purpose. I want to teach people how to be happier at work. I really, really strongly feel that. And I have autonomy, but it was community. I had no, I didn't feel part of a community and I didn't feel that I was part, I belonged to something that was achieving something bigger. So I took a positive step. I now work with a local charity and I'm helping that local charity one day a week.

39:56I'm now working with other people in person, speaking to them, really speaking to them so I can see their face, not through a Zoom call. And we're doing stuff together. And that at the moment is solving that area. So yeah, selling a company is great, but nobody has any sympathy for me. So, but there are areas that I wasn't ready, I wasn't prepared for. What a phenomenal place to leave it. Thank you so much for your honesty. Thank you for your knowledge. If people want to book you to speak or to consult, where's the best place for them to go? So if any of this has resonated with you and you want to learn more, I have written a short e-book.

40:46It's like 20 pages long and it gives you the basics of the science of happiness and what you need to do. And you can find that on my website. That's richardclark.eu and just go there and as a click of the button at the top, you can download the ebook or if you wait a bit a pop-up should come up and just put your email in and then you'll get it that's richardclark.eu um yeah and then you can find me on linkedin if you if you search i did this yesterday richard clark happy um then i you'll find me so yeah love to chat to you if you're interested please reach out on linkedin i'd love to chat help you out yeah

41:26Richard Clarke:share my knowledge that was richard clark and if you're a founder dreaming of the exit that conversation should probably scare you a little bit but in a good way. Richard didn't sugarcoat it. Selling didn't fix what he thought it would. It just moved the goalposts. So here's what to actually do with that. First of all Richard identifies the five needs. Safety, community, autonomy, growth and purpose. Richard's simplest fix at his own company wasn't some grand initiative. He was asking one team what was missing and cutting meetings between 10 and 2. That's the whole model. Second, don't assume you already know which need is missing.