Ep. 76 Why You’re Struggling With Motivation And How To Fix It With John Amaechi OBE

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1:01hi friends grace from the working hard podcast here when you're stretching every dollar a little goes a long way and warm-up business is here to help they make it easy to order what you need from tech and cleaning supplies to everyday essentials all at low prices and with helpful tools like spend tracking and tax exempt purchasing for eligible organizations because when your operations are smooth your impact can be bigger visit business.warmart.com to get started i'm incredibly lazy but i played in the nba because i built systems that stopped me John Amechi. Amechi has spent years studying the world's highest performers in the sporting and corporate world.

1:33He was also the first Briton to play professional basketball in the NBA. I told them 45 minutes after I first put to a basketball, yeah, I'm going to play in the NBA. And how did you get there? You can actually work out, depending on your postcode, the number of minutes you have on this planet. You've got this period of time to be remarkable, to be impactful, to be purposeful, to be joyful. Don't waste those moments. We're so inundated with so much information on how to live your life correctly and even most joyfully and most profitably. Really productive people. It's no good reaching your goal as a husk.

2:07I hope you're not doing that because it doesn't work. I know. If you ask human beings, 95 % of people will say I'm highly self-aware. When you do a little bit of probing, 10 to 15 % are actually self-aware. You need to know not just who you are, but how you're met by the world around you. How can we stay motivated? This is a nerd out area. What qualities would you say all the greatest leaders have in common? To be a great leader, you have to.

2:42It is an understatement to say that John Amache has had a career that has taken him places. Not only is he an organisational psychologist, an OBE, a New York Times bestselling author, a fellow of the Institute of Science and Technology, a professor of leadership, a non-executive director of a FTSE 250 company, and the founder of his own organizational psychology consultancy, APS. He was also, more surprisingly perhaps, the first Briton to play professional basketball in the NBA League, a move which saw him leave his hometown of Stockport for the world of professional basketball aged just 18. And whilst playing, he was the first ever NBA player to come out as gay.

3:19Never afraid to stand up and speak out, his book made me question a lot of things I thought I knew about myself and the way I kind of live and work. Ametji has spent years studying the world's highest performers in both the sporting and corporate world and I am so looking forward to everyone hearing his amazing techniques. I learned so much in this conversation and I am sure you will too. Before we get into this conversation which is very much worth the wait please go and rate the podcast, five star preferably but you can write it what you want. This helps us hugely to get incredible guests on like John Amici and to be able to have really memorable, life-changing conversations like this one.

3:58Thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure. Thank you. I'm very excited for this conversation. I'm going to go straight into talking about your early life. You speak a lot about growing up in Stockport, but I know that you were born in Boston. can you tell me a little bit about kind of the story of your early life i don't actually remember very much of being of growing up in boston i was only there for i think we left it when i was three and so i remember very very big spaces the house that i lived in i think mostly just comparative to a smaller me and i don't remember anything all i know about that period is what my mother told me about that period.

4:40Stockport, obviously, is home for me. And so I still think very fondly of it, despite the fact that it was a, well, the black family moving in was very unusual in Stockport. And so even that kind of rocked the environment that was quite a, you know, parochial, suburban pleasant but homogenous space i hated school back then i know that much but we had a wonderful family life are the bits that i remember about my family life back there are the holidays so we'd go to a caravan in in rill it's kind of mandatory if you grew up in the northwest you'd go to somewhere like rill and there was this place called the rill sun center back then which was a a pool that had a wave machine and it just smelt of fried fish greasy chips salt and vinegar and chlorine but we loved it we'd go there spend an entire day there jumping in and out of the water and eating fish and chips it's amazing yeah that does sound amazing wouldn't mind it now right right not not the healthiest approach but but we my mother created experiences for us um every summer we'd do something that was an experience so that was a common one but then ice skating was another one and she she bought us all matching we call them tea cozies but like a gilet and we wherever we went we'd have badges that she would sew on so we went to uh you know the blue john mines which is a quarry and we'd stick a badge on for that and so we'd have badges for all all the things that we did like swimming badges yeah that's so great that's a really really kind of lovely tidbit into your mother and who she was you speak about her a lot in your work can you tell me how important her role has been in your life and who you are today ever present um she passed away died of cancer a long long time ago when I was in my 20s, but is ever-present.

6:53She's a very good example, I think, of what most of us of good conscience want to be to other people, the idea that we survive by lingering in the memories of other people. And so there isn't a day goes by where I don't think of something that she would have told me. One of my students, I teach University of Exeter Business School, and one of my students, a grad student, said to me of my last book, which she was forced to read. they're all forced to read it uh she said you know you're not the star of your book and i was like okay that's a provocative way to start right she said your mom's the star of your book and she's absolutely right and most of the things i write are stolen directly from her or at least attributable it's that kind of ever presence it's sad in a way because it's a constant reminder of what you don't have but it's also kind of wonderful because she's always there right sat in the background of my memory.

7:46Yeah, and it sounds like she really is in terms of the way you think and the way you respond to things and the way you kind of, as you said, even ever present in your work as well and what you're seeing as you're growing psychology now, it originating from things that you kind of received from her. What were the most memorable things that she kind of told you, like these things that have stayed with you constantly? well fundamental things about aspiration so she was the one who who told me a phrase that i use now all the time for people the idea that the most unlikely of people in the most improbable of circumstances can become extraordinary i believed her and i think part of my mission is to make sure that other people believe it too this is not about the idea that anybody can do anything because i think that's fanciful right this idea if you forget what it's called but people who do that thing where they think if i if i say this in my head it will happen yes i don't believe in that because I think there are some limitations.

8:42I am six foot nine and old. I can't be an astronaut. I'm also bad at maths. So these things mean no to astronaut. But there's a world of possibility even now available to me as long as I'm willing to put in the effort, make the plan, develop the skills, deal with some setbacks and the mundanity of being brilliant at something eventually. Right. That's so interesting because I often think about how I also don't believe in manifestation. And yet also at the same time, there are a few things that really resonate with me. And what I personally have ended up with as kind of my view of a manifestation that like works or resonates with me is the fact that when you're saying, I'm going to be this, I am this, and I will be this, and kind of very much affirming the fact that you are something.

9:34What I do think that does is it allows you to see where you are currently not in a place that would welcome that. So, for example, if you're talking about financial abundance and you're talking about kind of being very successful and financially free and all of those things, when you're manifesting that, for me, what does seem to resonate is the fact that when you start saying, you know, I am financially free or even things like I am this job role that I specifically want those things start popping up that kind of highlight where it wouldn't be possible now and your kind of current restrictive patterns that stop you from being in that place I feel like I just explained that in a really roundabout way no no no there's so much of that that I my head always does a little like where's the science in this and so but there's really good science in this right the idea that if you can visualize beyond a number what you want in the future because i think many people when they manifest what they're doing is picking a number right instead of thinking what is this there's a there's a term in science fiction called a future history and it creates this picture of the future that is so vivid that it's as if the author has been there and witnessed it and is telling you about what they saw so it's not thin it's not just there is a pill there is a flying car it's vivid and rich and if people can create that vivid and rich picture of what their life is then they can work backwards and say, what needs to be true for that to happen?

11:06To your point, what are the things around me right now that aren't helping me get there? But also what additionally might I need to do or shift in order to get to that picture of the future? So I think that's so true. And I think you've just explained it in a far better way than I had. The reason I think that is kind of so true and the reason that resonates with me so strongly is because actually the only form of manifestation that I do and that I found really, really useful is exactly that. It's writing a current diary entry or a diary entry in the present, but for the future. So say it would be today, it would be the 2nd of February, 2025.

11:43And I'd be writing about my current life, my current achievements, my current situation. And what that always highlights to me is actually that can't happen because then all of these things would have to happen and actually those things are things that I don't want which I think is a really helpful tool in kind of being able to take away the idealization of what you want and actually being able to realize okay as you say like brilliance comes with being mundane and brilliance comes with like monotony and needing to be really kind of repetitive in a number of things and actually then if I looked at my next year and thinking I actually don't want to do that every single day.

12:23To me, that's always been so helpful or a professional bio a year in the future. I often do that. So it's kind of like, you know, Grace Beverly has done this, this, and this. She's, you know, well known for doing this and I'll do that for like five years in the future. That to me is one of the most powerful things, not necessarily of manifestation, but of kind of, I don't know, placing yourself in the future and allowing yourself to kind of not just reverse engineer what that would have to look like like could i do these 20 things no but i could probably do these three yes it's also a reward right the the idea that your your buyer will be not flattering but certainly will be more than who you are now so there's a way of you're going to do all this hard work to do something incredibly difficult so you might as well reward yourself by at least giving yourself that wonderfully vivid picture of what it's like so you can kind of bask in the enjoyment of it while you know what you're in for right to get there some some slog some boredom some challenge some conflict but you can still see this picture you see this a lot with people they fail because their image of what they want for the future is either wildly unrealistic as in it's not really even science fiction it's it's a fantasy beyond that or there's nothing to grab hold off because it's a number i want to make a million pounds i want to i don't know there's a postcode you want to live in and it's just not enough right drag you through the tough stuff that you need to do to get there right absolutely it has to be stronger and it has to be more of a micro look at things as well like here are the five things that would actually even get to that point rather than just like wishing on a star with that when your mind is is sore from your efforts and you are trying to get off to sleep, you need more than just a cold number to grant you a bit of recuperation.

14:14You need to close your eyes and see that image of the future, that five-year-from-now bio. I love that idea. You need that. Otherwise, it's just too hard a slog for many people. Before we come on to talking about more of that kind of psychology aspect, which I want to spend a lot of time talking about, I want to talk about your move into the NBA. moving from the UK into the NBA wasn't that kind of realistic, common, you know, seen as a regular career move. Can you tell me a little bit about how that even came about? So I was walking down, I used to go into Manchester rarely. Manchester, Stockport is only, what, four or five miles away from Manchester, but now it's kind of eaten up by Greater Manchester.

15:00But back in the day, it was a big trip to go into Manchester. And I would go into Manchester only to go to the central library it's amazing venue where you could get any book you wanted and i would go and i would go to central i'd be pick up books and then go to it wasn't called greg's it was called the martins but essentially it was greg's and um now i'd buy steak slices and i would get books and i would just my arms would be full of books and steak slices by the time i finished my trip to manchester that's what it was all about for me 17 years old and i get stopped a lot of times people stop me and they say incredibly i'm sure it's interesting to them but it's incredibly dense to me because i know that i'm tall so when people say wow you're tall it's like yes i know i'm tall um and a man came up to me and stopped me and i was about to be disinterested right because he was going to say something stupid and instead he looked at me and he said well what he didn't say was more important first he didn't say you should play basketball which i hate people tell me that today as an old man with a white beard i very clearly should not be playing basketball i should be taking care of my hips um and then he didn't say that and he didn't say you know do you want to play basketball because i would say no i've got books and steak slices i don't really want to be eating my exercise right he said you'd be great at it and it was such an interesting moment for me because no one, no stranger had ever told me I would be great at something.

16:30And it was instantly intoxicating. And I, by the way, I didn't know what basketball was. I had no idea. It's just, you could be great at something. He gave me a card or something and I contacted this person who wasn't him and I ended up playing then. And the other part is I arrived in this horrible urine smelling community gym in Chalton, South Manchester. It was wet. I stood outside and I could hear basketballs bouncing in the gym. And I stood outside in rugby kit because that's the only kit that I had for, and plimsolls. And I don't want to go in because it's strangers, random people. And I walk in and everything stops.

17:12Basketball bouncing on the floor away from us. And they all run towards me, which in my experience is a bad thing. but instead they run towards me and they're like you're on our team and my heart was just this is the most amazing experience and then i immediately felt guilt because i was like you don't realize i'm right i've never done this i don't know what this is we start to play my first experience is that someone throws me a basketball and it hits me square in the chest i miss it clapped my hands missed it i pick it up sheepishly we continue to play nobody said anything it's really interesting nobody said anything like you're terrible or no look on someone's face to indicate to me that i was doomed i caught it the next time felt like that was an achievement and then after the third time i catch it they're like shoot the ball and i suddenly realize i don't know what that means what is shoot the ball i'd watched other people throw it into the thing but No one had told me how to shoot a basketball.

18:07So I threw it up. I missed by about six feet. And one of the kids looks at me and then looks at everybody and goes, that's his first shot. And he only missed by six feet. And what amazing maturity, right? We call that a growth mindset nowadays, the idea of reframing failure. And I thought, I am never leaving this space. And people don't realize I don't like to exercise. I'm not interested in exercise. I don't like to sweat. I like books. And I like pie. We have a lot in common. That's what I like, right? But I sat in this place, and it was like, it stinks in here. It's freezing cold. It's wet outside.

18:43I have to take two buses to get here, and I'm never leaving this place. I sat with them at the end while they're undoing their basketball boots, and they start talking about the NBA. It's this place where the best players play. In my brain, all I did was I didn't know anything about money or professional leagues. It was just the idea that it's America where the sun always shines that I thought, ridiculously. So it's like, I can have all of this nice, lovely feeling, but be where the sun always shines. I'll do that. So I told them, 45 minutes after I first put to my basketball, yeah, I'm going to play in the NBA.

19:17And they looked at me and said, yeah, of course you will. Ridiculous. That's what it's like to have proper teammates, right? People who, there was no sense of jealousy. To this day, there's no sense of anything other than, and indeed, they don't take any credit. there's lots of people who try and take credit for like my early career but they don't even though it was there and i've written about it constantly their inspiration are you still in touch with them yeah yeah i used to we used to still play every once in a while nowadays looking after hips right so i'm always just worried that something bad will happen if i try and move that fast but yeah we used to play regularly on a wednesday and have a pint of Guinness afterwards but they're still we're still in touch and many of their children now play and are grown-ups so and how did you get from that first session to actually as you say manifesting your position in the NBA I didn't know how to get there I just knew that I couldn't go directly there because I was bad I was terrible so instead I went on a mega bus type thing of its time down to London to place, I think, the Fulbright Commission.

20:24I'm not sure if it even has an office here anymore. Right, the scholarship program. Yeah, and they have books there where you can get access to every high school in America. And I knew I needed to go to high school because I was bad, because the only way I could stay there in America is to get a scholarship. So I had to get good enough to get to high school, and then high school I had to get good enough to get a scholarship. So we made a plan of how it would happen. didn't turn out to be quite so straightforward. But we found this book full of high schools, and I went through, and I realized this is pre-internet for people listening.

21:00So it was writing letters, actual letters. And so I went through, and every four or five pages, I'd stick a pen in, and oh, there it is. School in Roanoke, Virginia, school in Toledo, Ohio, school in New York. And I sent them all the same letter. I just wrote 3 ,000 letters to America saying, Hi, my name's John. I'm 6 '8", as I was at the time, and black. Can I play for your team? And I sent those letters off. I assumed I'd get a lot of responses because I assumed that I was as uncommon in America as I am here. But apparently there's more tall people. So I got three replies, two of which were no's.

21:43One was a lovely no. One was an awful no, like why would we want foreign talent? Sure. And then one was a, we'll give you a go. And that was in Toledo, Ohio, which is not the most exotic place that a person can go. But I had a coach there called Ed Heinzel, who took care of me. And so you went over at what age? I was 18 by the time I went over. My mother wouldn't let me leave until I did my A-levels. I did not do incredibly well in my A-levels. But you did them? I did them as told to. I still was in this phase where I didn't like school or academia. Just quickly, why do you think that you enjoyed books so much and didn't enjoy school or academia?

22:24Yes, because I think school sometimes is designed to make you hate learning. Right. Whereas books are worlds of learning. You just dive in and in order to really enjoy what you're watching. And it is watching, even as you read it, what makes books great is that you're watching it in your head it's not that you're reading the words you're watching it in your head so this whole world is playing out there and it makes you curious about things that you can explore at your own pace so lightsabers it wasn't lost on me in my bedroom with a torch that when there was two torches the light passed through each other and so how do lightsabers work so here i am as a person who doesn't care about physics, trying to understand wave-particle duality.

23:14And actually, recently, Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson were doing a podcast where they were talking about the fact that actually there is a way that light can interact so it does bounce off each other like lightsabers would. So that's why reading is so different. You get to self-explore. When I was a kid, there were these books you could buy where you'd have a decision point. And if you wanted to do this thing, you would go to page 48 you want to do this thing you want to go page 36 and so it's this idea that learning becomes something that you get to explore for yourself and it's done in a world building kind of way rather than just learn these things for no apparent reason so you got to ohio what was the learning curve like there because i can imagine going somewhere where basketball is also a very common sport, played, I'd assume, in most high schools.

24:08And you're coming from somewhere where someone told you one day to go to a basketball club. You went there, separate to your school, and then traveled to the US. What was that like when you arrived? I can imagine it was a very different experience from your experience in Stockport. It really was. I got off a plane in Toledo, Ohio in the summertime, and the temperature was 1000 degrees. I thought I had moved to a desert planet. It was unbelievably hot. The plane doors opened. It was so unreal. I got to get my bags and then got through that part. And I was met by the coach who's talked to me and he was lovely and warm with a big bushy mustache.

24:49And I couldn't understand a word he said. He was lovely, but a Midwestern accent because for, for in Britain, we are, well, at least we were, what we got was Hollywood accents, that West Coast accent that we can kind of decipher. And I couldn't understand him. So I spent the first probably 10 days of my experience just nodding and smiling at him, hoping that whatever he was saying, I could see he's offering this. And I'd be like, yeah, that's great. Thank you. It was just horrifying. And then the sport part i'd done a couple of days of practice a week to play a game on the weekend i arrived and they showed me the gym it's a 2000 seat arena the community comes to watch them play unreal we were expected to run on a track we were expected to lift weights and i was like this is this is proper work because i still like booked and books and pie and there was none of that It was discipline.

25:49It was meal plans. It was proper work. Yeah, it was an amazing learning curve is not right because I just strapped in and did as I was told. And that's the only reason I survived because I knew that I had one year to get a scholarship. And if I didn't do it this year, I'd come home. And I told everybody I was going to play in the NBA. I wrote it in my high school yearbook in England. Right. So you had a commitment to keep. And people laughed then. So now it's like, I have no choice. I have to do this. I got a scholarship to Vanderbilt University. I spent a year there with my roommate, a guy called Matt Maloney, lovely bloke.

26:25And he and I were both pulled into our coach's office. He did not think that we were very good. And he told us that if we wanted to play, we should transfer to a Division II or III school. I was in a Division I school, which is high-powered stuff. And we didn't believe him. So we went our separate ways. he went to university of pennsylvania and i went to penn state uh i went to penn state because i was promised nothing there and i thought it was believable it's a people don't realize what it's like to to be recruited if you've got any talent at all and i was okay i i was recruited by one university where i showed up in in the university i was directed to the gym a 20 000 seat arena suddenly the music starts playing and you can hear a game going on and they've created a tape with my name in it.

27:10John Amache gets the ball, three seconds, two seconds, he shoots, he scores, and the crowd goes wild. They created this image of talking about manifesting of the future. And I thought, that seems unrealistic. And so I didn't go there. It was so attractive. I thought, that's... I'm going to be let down. It feels like the child catcher, right? This is too good. And suddenly the gates will close, and I'm trapped. And then I went to Penn State, and it had this 6 ,000-seat arena, which is small for a university. It was all right, but nothing special. And the coach came in and sat with me, and he said, if you're willing to work really hard, and only if you're willing to work really hard, we think we can help you become a player.

27:49But if you're not, this is not the place for you. I was like, that man's telling the truth. So I went to Penn State. It was an amazing experience. Played there and didn't get drafted. Drafting is where the best players are selected. It's devastating to sit there watching television, watching television and watching the names of people you played against and played better than and off they go to the league i didn't get drafted so i had to go through what they call free agency which means you show up and you just try and work your way onto a team and i did that in cleveland and ended up starting in cleveland my first year and that was my trip to the nba which ended after one year because i just wasn't good enough i needed more skills so i ended up coming back to Europe before I eventually got back to the NBA with Orlando which was my as much as there was one it was my heyday yeah it's so funny because when you hear about people's stories and you hear you know that professional bio we were talking about you hear they did this they did this they did this you always hear such a surface level approach um or kind of story of what how they got there but also you know as you say the first time you were in the NBA you showed up and tried to get in you were there for a year and then you had to leave because in your words you weren't good enough what were the biggest things you learned in that time that have stayed with you now in terms of the kind of I guess probably the perseverance that you had to have to really end up making it I was very fortunate that I was surrounded by good veterans they call them older players and so a lot of the stuff that I learned wasn't on the court I learned about the fickle nature of fandom the idea that you can have a great game and if you lose they can still hate you you can have a great game and even when you win they'll love you today but if the next if the very next game you have a bad game they'll hate you again this is really interesting to watch how these people would want to hug you coming off the court on a thursday and then on a saturday they'd be like boo and they'd want to throw something at you so it's really interesting to understand the nature of fans as distinct from friends or followers or something else more profound.

30:05But also I had really good veterans who taught lessons without even knowing it, I think. I came in with a rookie. He was a longstanding player in the league, eventually. He was drafted, he was high profile, really talented. And I came in with him. He came into the, you know, into the arena underneath and we drove in and i followed him in a in a car that i'd bought a few years earlier and had not changed it was all right it was but you could very distinctly tell i wasn't one of the players who was on the very big contracts following both of us was a veteran player called michael cage and he saw that this guy had bought himself another new car this was the second new car i'd seen him in and michael looked at him and said is this a new car said yeah, he said, give me the keys.

30:52He drove him back to the dealership and made the dealership take the car back. I was like, wow, look at that. As a young player, you don't realize there's tax. You don't realize that you've got to make this money last, not just for this year, but for your pensionable future, right? If you want to have a lifestyle similar in the future, I was like, you don't need this. You just need the one car. That's all you need right now. I thought, what a wonderful example of, because it's not really, it's not related to the court, right it's just you as a human being don't make the same mistakes that i've seen others make i thought it was so so lovely and so bold give me your keys for taking this back so there are versions of the saying that's like the good news is that nothing lasts forever the bad news is that nothing lasts forever and i always think about that because i think that first of all it's so true in entrepreneurship that you know i experience a lot you can have the best day ever it can be followed by the worst day ever it kind of goes round and round and round but I think so true as well especially within sports I mean with everything but within sports and that kind of real need to know yourself and to get to know yourself and get to know your values because as much as the bad things will not last the good things also yeah will return to normal like you can't constantly be on this high whether it's a emotional high whether it's like the top point of your career what goes up must come down and that kind of psychological need to know yourself well enough that you will be okay whether it is up or whether it is down i think it's such a profound point because you don't think about it as an athlete when you're younger you don't think about the fact that what your body can do today it is likely once you reach the age of 23 24 it won't be doing the same things right i retired at 35 in sport which is why my body is not in great shape but so i had a really long career but and i was very highly aware of it in my 30s when essentially every after every practicing game i had to immerse myself up to my neck right in an ice bath just to be able to walk but when when i was young and this story was back when i first started and no concept that that it would be over or that 10 years would go like that and i wasn't really thinking about what's next i had a different thought about what's next because i knew it would be about my head it would be about psychology i knew i'd be a psychologist but i know that lots of other athletes they don't think about what's next in any way that's profound and they often don't imagine to your point that what's good won't last forever and it can be an ankle twist it can be a tiny thing that means you're done i spoke to a young woman the other day she's a football player and her everything is great and she played for a national team she played for on the premier league teams here and then she doesn't because she gets a scan of her heart that says she's got a heart disorder that's while it won't stop her from living her life it would be incredibly damaging if she continued to play at that level.

33:59And so just one second, all that she worked for has shifted and changed and she's had to adapt. And so what has knowing that shifted for you psychologically? Part of it has made me want to do stuff that can be more enduring. So my brain, I think, is in pretty decent shape and is likely to be in better shape than my body for a while. and so how can i do things that sit in my new sweet spot which is not movement but agile mind instead of agile body so it's it's done that how can you find joy in activity still is one of the things that i've i've kind of shifted from i have a bike now i have an e-bike i mean i weigh 150 kilos so getting up hills is not as easy as you'd imagine i mean it's hard for me but it's created this world for me where i you know i i go up very early in the morning because i you know i just don't want to do with the traffic.

34:50But I'm grinning like an eight-year-old on my bike as I ride to the top of Greenwich or I ride out to parts of West London from Central London. So I try and find, I suppose that's what it's taught me. A, I've got to keep moving so that my brain keeps working well, but also just for the joy of it. And then find something that I can do that's really legacy worthy with what the faculties I have left. Right. And also the things where the journey itself or the doing itself are have the value rather than the kind of end goal that's a really important point yeah because i half the time on my bike i have no idea where i'm going i'm just riding and then when it's enough i feel like it's enough and i head back but it's just joyful and how did it feel when you did end up retiring from the nba oh amazing amazing it did feel amazing i was so it hurt it hurt my back hurt my knees hurt everything hurt you're 35 years old and you're looking at i was 35 years and i'm looking at at these 20 odd year olds and they're saying yeah that's that's the game let's go out i'm like i'm gonna be in an ice tub for the next 40 minutes and i don't i can't have a drink during the week i can't have a drink and then practice tomorrow just one drink i'm done and then all of a sudden i was like i can now do the thing that I know I'll be really good at.

36:14He's a very average basketball player for an NBA player. It still makes me better than most people. Yeah, I would. But sometimes I have to remind myself that there's only been 4 ,000 of us who played in the NBA ever. And so whilst I'm incredibly average amongst that pantheon, I'm pretty decent. But still, it's distracting me with that. Like, yeah, really proud. really happy to be there but still when i ended i was like i'm i can find something where and it's nothing to do with me as yes studies have helped but fundamentally i think my brain just works in a way that it helps to solve people problems really well often without me doing much intervention other than listening pausing and what seems to come out is the right response so i've now got a job that's just effortless in some ways uh that feels important too because i do reflect on the fact that i if you boil down your job to its core components sometimes it can be quite chastening it can help you really think about it and when you boil down basketball i put a ball in a hole for a living and i did that about 40 of the time yeah and those were good days and you suddenly realize oh my goodness you boil down other jobs i worked in the nhs for 10 years and you look around at porters you boil down their job they ensure people who need urgent help get to the place that they need at the right time and then they do it in such a way that they feel less scared think of some of the nurses that i know and they do some of the the filthiest and dirtiest and or but they uh or also they're giving support to the family members as well as often quite ornery and frightened patients.

38:01So yeah, I sometimes look at my old job and think I've got some making up to do.

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39:05You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. you and how did you move into psychology i started to study while i played there's a lot of downtime in professional sports right so people often marvel at it but fundamentally if you're going on a plane from orlando to portland for example you've got six hours there where you can either play cards. I never learned how to play cards.

39:50Or I could study. So I'd have not the whole six hours, but four hours to do a bit of work. And so I took courses, distance education. The MBA helped with that, found me somewhere that would help me do that. I wanted to make sure that by the time I finished, I would be ready to go. And you speak a lot about productivity within psychology and the use of your time and how important getting these things right are. Could you talk to me a little bit about your saying that you cannot be part-time with your time? Yeah. I think people, they don't understand, and I didn't as a younger person perhaps too, but you don't understand how important it is to utilize your time effectively and purposefully.

40:39And this is not about burning yourself out and working 15-hour days, I don't think that that's important or good or useful in the longer term. But sometimes we fritter away time kind of half-dabbling at stuff. And one of the things that basketball teaches you is not to do that. So I would go to a gym when I was practicing in the summertime, not around my team. And if I got there and I started working out and I realized I was distracted and what I'm doing is kind of half-hearted, I would leave 20 minutes in I would leave knowing that the next time I came I would have to make up for that and do an hour of really solid work but it made me rethink how I'm going to use my time I'm not going to use my time in a way that is forgettable and not not taking me towards anything that's really valuable that's what it means don't be part-time with it don't dabble with the moments because we have a finite number of them you can actually work out depending on your postcode the number of minutes and hours you have on this planet based on the average age of death.

41:45And knowing that the early part of that time, you're not doing much advanced thinking when you're a baby or a toddler or even into your primary and secondary school. And the latter part of that, you're probably not doing your most stuff too because many of us, we don't keep all our faculties as we get older. You've got this period of time to be remarkable, to be impactful, to be purposeful, to be joyful. don't waste those moments and and that doesn't mean you can't do the frivolous i i i sit down and laugh my ass off watching family guy every once in a while and i love it and it's it is in and of itself a good but then there's time when i want to do when i'm with clients when i'm with people who need my support if they're getting an hour of my time they're getting all of it there is no one else i'm going to remove the world around them and there will only be and they will know that in this hour there's only you there's nobody else and this is for you and there's something about that that i think is a gift to other people and to yourself to have these properly purposeful connective moments and how do you recommend that people keep that intentionality around their time and kind of full concentration on one thing or you know being one place or whatever it might be, when we're now in a world of so many distractions and not just distractions and kind of billion dollar companies that are vying for your attention pretty successfully a lot of the time, but also on top of that, multitasking is so heavily rewarded and encouraged because we're kind of taught that we have infinite capacity to make money.

43:28If only you're doing all of the 10 000 things which you could be doing and you are lazy if you're not doing or so the narrative goes yeah it is hard because there's so many terrible messages out there about people i'm too old for tiktok i know this but i am on tiktok and i enjoy it very much there are mornings where it's three o 'clock in the morning and i realize i've been watching tiktok for three hours and so it's not that i relatable it's not it's not that i am perfect in this right And I recognize there's a consequence to it and on and on and on. There are people on these platforms who will tell you that if but for the fact that you, if you only woke up at four in the morning and if only, you only need, there's one bloke who's such an idiot whose, his idea is you can have three days in one day.

44:17I go four o 'clock in the morning until nine and then I go from 10 until, it's like, no, you don't. And I'll sleep when I'm dead. Right, right. But why have that kind of life? But instead, just consider, what is this for? If that image that you had, it's so wonderful. I love this five-year-hence bio. If each one of the people listening had that five-year-hence bio, and then they just thought, is this taking me towards this or away from it? My three o 'clock in the morning TikTok things, they are fun. I learned about black BSL the other day, the idea that there's a language differentiation in sign language.

44:58So this is what's popping, which I think is amazing, right? It's just, I think that's amazing. So it is of value, but it's not necessarily taking me towards where I want to go. So it's something to be limited, right? Not to do that once a week, but to just keep that as a limited thing. And then my bike in the morning, is that taking me? Yeah, actually, because it's keeping me healthier, keeping my heart taking over. it's joyful all of that advances me towards that picture i have for five years from now and it really is helpful for you to proportionally allocate then the frivolous the joyful the purposeful the meaningful the important but dull it helps you prioritize all that stuff i think that's so interesting and i love that idea of kind of proportionate allocation when it comes to your time because I think that we're so inundated with so much information on how to live your life correctly and even most joyfully and most profitably and like all of these different things the hardest part of all of that is the reality of the fact that we're also human and you can have all of the best intentions of being you know fulfilled every day and doing the right thing and waking up early because it makes you happy even though you think it doesn't and all of these different things but that proportionate allocation is that reality it's the it's not about spending a hundred percent of your time doing what you're saying and kind of being completely fulfilled and making sure your brain's working and making sure you're even ticking off the things to that five-year bio it's you know that 10 15 20 percent of that might be the things that get you to that bio happily because you've not felt like a racehorse all of that time or an athlete all of that time and i think that's so powerful and really actionable as well yeah it's no good reaching your goal as a husk you arrive there physically and psychologically emotionally unable to enjoy what you've now achieved.

47:06It's awful. I'm telling people all the time, I heard this phrase online, or I saw this phrase online, you can't pour from an empty cup. I love it. I use it all the time. Fill your cup. You must fill your cup, because especially in the context of leadership, which is what I teach, I'm telling people as leaders to do really effortful stuff, to pour from their cup, and you can't do that if you're not filling it up with something. And I don't mean in that episodic way, And I hope you're not one of those people who does that. The idea that you'll burn yourself to a crisp for six months and then take a nice holiday thinking that makes up for it all.

47:40I hope you're not doing that because it doesn't work. I know. It doesn't work. I'm well aware. Thank you. You've got to find stuff on a regular basis. And for really purposefully, especially for entrepreneurs that listen to you, I'm sure it feels like it's indulgent. Right. But it's not indulgent. when you decide to not wake up until 10 on Saturday because you've really busted it all through the week, or you have a morning where you would normally go for a workout, but you're so exhausted because you had an 11 o 'clock late finished meeting or whatever, that time you give yourself in the morning to just, I'm just going to change my alarm.

48:16My alarm goes off at 5.15, and there are plenty of nights when I say, actually, based on today and what's going to happen tomorrow, I'm going to give myself 20 minutes more. I'm giving myself an hour more, and that's what I'm going to do. productivity and self-care are seen as these two opposing schools of thought whereas actually self-care is productive you cannot have productivity without self-care and you cannot have self-care without also being productive and doing things to reach your goals or whatever it might be and I think that it's exactly that it's the ability that changing your alarm that in quote-unquote indulgent activity is not just not indulgent it is an essential part of the success.

49:00And I think that the point that I really internalized that and the point that I made sure I was filling my cup weekly, often daily, you know, you can't always have it how you want, especially within kind of entrepreneurship, because you will be humbled immediately. The more that was kind of dotted throughout my week, throughout my life, just the alleviation of kind of all of it. And I think that I was so obsessed with the fact, or with trying to do it right, that actually trying to do the noble thing was actually incredibly unproductive. And I think it's that need to internalize the fact that burning yourself out is not productive, and therefore a certain amount of work is not productive.

49:45And I think also we forget the fact that productivity is not about length of time spent. It's actually about the smallest amount of time spent to get the maximum effort. And I think that in a world now where we seem to be, or we're told we're constrained only by our time for how much money we can make or how successful we can be in all of these things. And just whether we can have three days in one, that's the only thing that dictates whether we're going to be successful. It's the unlearning of that myth, and not just the unlearning, but also then the integration into every day and the true internalization that self-care is productive is so life-changing and it's hard to know.

50:24And it's hard to keep reminding yourself. I have to remind myself every single day, self-care is not indulgent, it is essential and it is productive. It's the only way, it's just, it's bizarre really, because many of these, and I hate this term, but many of these alpha type men, I heard somebody else talking about alphas i wish this was my original thought but it's like when somebody tells you they're an alpha you should believe them you should just say yes because alpha is a type of radiation and it's a type of radiation that's so weak that it doesn't penetrate into the body but if it gets inside the body it does tremendous harm so you believe them but alpha is also a type of program it's a type of program that's so buggy it shouldn't be released to the public.

51:09And so when somebody, when a man tells you that they're an alpha, believe them, knowing those things are true. So amazing, right? So amazing. But we've got to break out of this because it's many of these people, they love sports. How have they missed the primary lessons of sports? Do people honestly think that sports people spend most of their time doing activity? We don't. We spend most of our time stretching, proper nutrition, psychological training, ice baths recuperating is what we do not not crashing which is what most entrepreneurs do i think they do these days that start ridiculously early um end ridiculously late and then they're gone as in they just they don't really even fall asleep you just kind of you're gone and then you're wrenched out of that to awakeness again and then you do it again whereas really productive people they recuperate what do i need to do to recuperate is today a day where what i need is the ridiculous nurse of family guy to recuperate is today the day i need yoga to recuperate is today the day what's the thing that will help me today to recuperate is today the day i went to um i joined ronnie scott's uh jazz club i love and i and i've been going just randomly to nobody i know particularly to watch other people be that expert that a group of artists are looking at each other while they're performing and they're just kind of nodding at each other to take over for a moment it's like watching a proper team in action right and it's just amazing so what do i need today to recuperate so that i can really kick ass if you're really interested in winning and that is one of the most toxic things about entrepreneurship is the fact that you can have every well-meaning bone in your body in terms of those things and actually the very nature of it is so fickle you know until you're at that stage where you're not going to fall over no matter what and that really doesn't exist as we've learned with you know huge companies not and not working out and all of these different things but is the fact that like I consider myself really quite good now at knowing my boundaries and knowing my limits and when people ask what happens if you don't take off this in a day or what happens if you like how do you do that alarm all the time or whatever it might be I know that the only way I am able to do that is because I also know when I'm not able to do that and I don't do it and like I trust myself enough to know that that's not a lazy approach that it's a needed approach and I've built that kind of trust with myself over time but I think one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship and most toxic as I say because I do genuinely think it's that push and pull toxic kind of elastic band behavior is that you can have all of those best intentions.

53:53And actually, if your business needs that, that day right then, and this kind of idea of having no boss is a complete lie, it's the customers, it's the investors, it's whatever it might be, then it needs that. And you can say, these are my boundaries. And it's going to say, cool, well, I'll just die then as your business or whatever it might be, which is so tough. And you have to be able to have those parameters around it as well and kind of those rules for yourself that you're able to say okay i wouldn't usually do this now but it is needed what what gives today you know because i agree with you there there's sometimes even for my business right there's sometimes like you know do we can we say no to this you know this is a client that's in a different time zone i'm gonna have to get up at four o 'clock in the morning to do this but even there we think what is the what is the what is the pull to that push right right so yes okay because it's so urgent you're a great client you really need us four o 'clock in the morning which means a three o 'clock start to be ready for that four o 'clock but something must give somewhere and if it's not that day it's going to be the day afterwards because if it's not then something bad will happen if you can embrace as an entrepreneur that your best decision making is not possible when tired your best self is not possible with your colleagues because when you're when you're tired and i don't just mean kind of i didn't sleep well but that kind of enduring in your bones tired that comes from not being taking care of yourself you resort to your limbic system to to the part of your brain they call it the lizard brain the part of your brain that's just not great at doing anything other than fight fight freeze it's just not great at anything else so you're going to make poor decisions because you know one thing about entrepreneurship and i'm no expert there but agility of your mind sophistication of thinking is often what grabs you through the difficult times not just bold right and your lizard brain only does bold bold and and binary is what that does my lizard brain is very bold and binary right and and that's you know every once in a while it'll come out right but most of the time it's gonna serve you wrong so just give yourself a chance Right.

56:02So it really is that internalization of the fact that like, yes, you can do that now and you probably do need to do that now. And that is really annoying and that goes against your boundaries and all of these things. But if you do that now as well and do it well and go ahead, but know that you're going to have to not do something some other time. And the majority of people only learn that the hard way and that's fine, but you do need to be able to internalize and learn that. And I think that's one thing that I've definitely kind of spent a lot of time being like, okay, you can't break it completely.

56:28Like you have to take these rules into account. And that kind of you can't pour from an empty cup analogy. It's like, no, you can keep trying to pour and you will keep trying to pour. Literally nothing of value is coming out. Exactly. It's just air. And then the people around you have to pretend that something is coming out because it's just air and you're not doing your best stuff. We have a time back rule in my company, a weekly time back. so there will be times when some of our trainers will be training late into the evening but the next morning they don't start we schedule in a way that you start later now you can still get up at the time you want to you don't have to go and do yoga or anything but you can't work cannot work and it's not because we want to be nice to everybody we want to be pleasant but that's not why it's just i know we've got this this one called gina who's just in the last year it's like there's nothing she can't do it's awesome to watch nothing she can't do and because of that there's more and more stuff that she's being asked to do and we watched her a little bit and we're like hmm that's gina minus 10 right there now she's and still awesome nobody else would notice but we noticed it's like yeah let's just adjust this yeah because i want gina for the next 10 years right that's unrealistic in most companies right because somebody's gonna see her and go must have you but i want her for the long term i don't just want her to be this flash of wonder yeah for 18 months i want her to and i want when she leaves for her to know that this is the kind of person this is the kind of place where we saw you grow thought you were brilliant didn't want you to burn out yeah how can we with this in mind stay motivated over long periods part of motivation well motivation is is a number of different things it's a cool area so one of them is for our personal motivation, the more vivid the picture you've got of what you want, the more stepwise it is.

58:16So five years is really good, but it can be a bit esoteric for some people. And so have you got like a four-year or a two-year just to give you a bit of in-between, especially if you're, I can imagine your five-year plan is quite ambitious. It's got quite a lot that's more than perhaps what you're doing now. And so most people, that might be enough for you, but many people, they need, I just need an interim step here that gives me a little bit of a closer to home picture. I need to be able to see it tomorrow. Like I need to know what tomorrow looks like accordingly. And I do too. I love what needs to be true and I break it down.

58:50I know what I want to be in five years. I knew I was going to be a psychologist when I was seven years old. So I knew and here I am. I'm not quite the kind of psychologist I'd imagined at seven. I like to believe it's a little more sophisticated now than then. But what needs to be true, I bring it back to the kind of month on month basis so that's one thing you can do the other thing is people is part of what motive inside of an organization even if it's just you and a couple of entrepreneur friends the connectedness between people is really important for motivation the idea that you know people who are going to keep you accountable accountability buddies right the idea that you say you describe your vivid idea of what you're going to do and what it takes to get there this quarter and you've got somebody who's saying is the way you're operating right now really with what you said you want to do so it's not me telling you how to behave it's just you told me that you want to do this and i've noticed you're not really doing this you can do with anything right so if you wanted to i don't know there's probably people getting ready for their beach bodies for the summer this is as good as it's going to get for me but if you've told everybody yeah i'm going to lose a bit of weight i'm going to have a regimen i'm going to work out a good friend would tell you not you're fat or anything else but they would say hey weren't you telling me that you're going to work i've noticed you know you haven't been on your mic for like a month now it's part of that motivational piece and then the other part is for for bosses is that one of the biggest motivates for the people around you is is just is you your authentic connection interjected regulation is what it's called it's not important but it's um there's a continuum of motivation most people think you're either extrinsically motivated i'll do it if you pay me enough or intrinsically motivated i'd do it for nothing I've never met anybody who's intrinsically motivated and will do it for nothing, really.

1:00:37Because you always get something, even working in a charity shop, if that's what you're doing on a weekend. It's for something. But in between, there's these other stages. And one of them is something most of us are familiar with, the idea that in school, we did really well in a subject that we didn't care about because we loved the teacher. Mr. Greg, for me, my biology teacher. And he was incredible because I hated school. I hated it. secondary school. It's a different school now than it was then, but back then I hated it. It was like Hogwarts without the magic. It was a grammar school. The teachers wore robes.

1:01:15Hated it. But Mr. Greg, every once in a while, I would walk through the corridors, and it's a really difficult thing to be surrounded by other people and yet completely alone. And that's what school felt like to me. I was surrounded by people, all of them, below my shoulder height, but none of them who really interact with me in any way that was pleasant. But Mr. Gregg would see me and stop me and ask me how I was, and he wouldn't let me go just by saying fine. And it was like five minutes, once every two weeks or so. And I thought, this built this connection with him. I was like, I would never do anything that got in the way of this connection I had with this one person.

1:01:56And so when I sit in his classes, He was so excited about mitochondria and cell walls and stuff I didn't care about. And all I thought was in this class is how I ensure that I keep that connection. That's so important. And bosses forget that they have this power. This idea that an authentic connection to the people you work with will allow them to do often the boring, dull stuff. Because I can't speak for you, but in my organization, I get to do a lot of the sexy, interesting stuff. right at the coalface, right at the innovation edge. And other people have to QA documents. Other people have to create PowerPoint slides.

1:02:33Other people have to do a boring analysis that I get to describe to a client and do stuff with. And that work, dull and mundane as it is, gets done at high quality because we maintain this connection, motivation. Yeah, that's so interesting that you say that because I would say that one of the things I've struggled the most with the companies growing and being way more people than I ever would have expected is the fact that I like to be close to and actually close to the people that I work closely with. I find it very hard to work closely with people and not know about some of their life and how they are and what's going on and all of these different things.

1:03:10And I do, on a completely personal level, how would you say that that is maintainable at a level where you're seeing more people every day than you would be able to know everything about? Yeah. I mean, you won't be able to get the comfort of all the knowledge that you might have otherwise had, or it certainly won't come as immediately. But I think sometimes you have to remember about being patiently curious. the idea that with a smaller group of people if you're only surrounded by a handful a couple of meetings with people and you spent a lot of time with a small number of people you've you've learned oh the names of your kids and or your partner and and the holiday you went on you get all this stuff immediately with more people you'll have more fleeting interactions but as long as you're willing to divulge to share a bit of you they will want to share just a piece but you'll you'll just have to be patient about the fact that i've only got this one small piece but the way you honor it is by holding on to that piece because lots of people what they do is they just want to learn a fact about a person because they think that's what connecting is and then the next time they meet they've forgotten the name of the kid that they told them about or they've forgotten that oh yeah the last time we taught your kid was feeling unwell like that's the bit that's important not the depth of it but the idea that you cherish the piece that you have and what qualities would you say that all the greatest leaders you've spoken to taught interacted with all have in common they all want power to be a great leader you have to want power it's uncomfortable isn't it it's like oh it feels ugly but it's so important you have to want power there are two different Well, there's multiple types, but there's a theory out there that talks about two types of power that leaders want.

1:05:02One is a personalized power, and one is a socialized power. Personalized power is the idea you want power because power is good. You want power like Smaug the dragon wants power. They want to have it underneath them like gold bullion, and they want to lie on it, and they want to kill anybody who comes to take any piece of it. and then there's a socialized power approach which i think is the most appropriate which is you do want power and in part is because it will enhance your status and in part because it fulfills your sense of achievement and ambition so it is it's not that it has no personal component but it's also because what can i do with this what could this bar do in the furtherance of a shared goal how can i make sure that i use this thing not hoard it and lie upon it and sequester it but how can I use this power that I have for some other good whether that is you know some of the work that you do in your books to try and help people see past some of the ridiculous stereotype ways of being an entrepreneur or a life that is miserable in pursuit of something glorious right and a different way but that's what it's about but I think that's why it makes me uncomfortable the assertion that to be a good leader you need to want power I'm not saying like not by any means saying that that's kind of completely irrelevant to me or whatever it might be but it feels like then if you're saying that all of the best leaders have this kind of insociable desire for power then it stands to be true that you must want that to be a good leader do you think that's the case through all stages of like an organization do you think that power then for different people means kind of different things in the way that power could be your own power of financial freedom or power could be the ability to make choices what to do with your time or whatever that might be yeah all of these are different ways that power will manifest and that's why i was saying it's absolutely appropriate that you want power in the form of money to allow you to, in terms of commerce, to allow you to not have to worry about that thing.

1:07:21But what does that free you up to do? When my business, it's difficult to convince people sometimes to do things in a evidence-based way. There's lots of charlatans out there telling businesses to operate in ways that aren't real and can't work. And so it took us a while to get some traction back in the day for my organization, for APS Intelligence. And it's amazing what happened when we suddenly started to be successful it just freed my mind up from worrying about this mortgage is it going to get paid our offices we're going to have to move office or whatever else and now i can refocus on other things so it's actually it removed a distraction is what the use of that power has done and that's allowed me to focus on other people right and that makes complete sense i want to reframe it slightly and ask then if someone wants to be a better leader what would you recommend are the qualities that they build i'm not sure these alpha males will respond too well no to needing more power no this is my concern i agree so it but it's how you want to use the power you have that's the important part so so don't for those listening don't fixate on i i don't want to want power just know that you can't enact change without it right in any way Not on the micro level, not on the macro level.

1:08:36Your book doesn't get written because you know how difficult it is to get a publishing deal and how to get them to behave in your deal to make sure that you can get your book where it wants to be. None of this happens unless you've got some clout. So you can call it clout or power or something else. But there are other qualities that it's important to have. Lots of people believe in kind of tenacity and drive and ambition. These are important qualities. Compassion and empathy. These are important qualities. they don't exist on separate tiers either it's not either or the combination is what makes right powerful there's this theory called social identity theory which talks about the idea that leadership isn't about the components that must be in place within an individual it's about reimagining the collective what is it that we want to achieve and when you think about it that way i can see how other people can push themselves forward and be contextual leaders and deliver and my job is to facilitate that environment where others can thrive and to cede that power to people who have earned earned the kind of the right to now they've shown that they'll deliver effectively they'll show that they'll do it in the right mindful way right so wanting more power can be not just about wanting more power over the people you work with but also about increasing in the amount of power they have so that you as a collective have more power yeah you'll have done this in meetings most good leaders have done this in meetings the idea that that i'm not the expert in the room on this particular thing and so what you do is you lever your power say actually um my colleague and i were just talking about it the other day go ahead could you and what you've actually done is you've literally poured some of your power through your voice into somebody else right so that they have more credibility just for the instant because you know they don't need it for the long term but just for that moment to break in yeah so there's lots of cool ways that you could use your power that aren't just ugly and i want to end by asking you because i think there's a huge amount of interesting and actually very actionable psychology that you kind of clearly carry with yourself every day and impart on other people um i want to ask out of everything what do you think is the best piece of advice that you've been given or that you would give to the masses to be able to kind of use in that every day know yourself my mother when i told her i wanted to play in the nba after 45 minutes of a practice she said one of the most frustrating things i'd ever heard son would you recognize your soul in the dark it was so i was i mean even as i say that my ears are getting hot because I was so mad that she said what does I've just told you I'm gonna play in the NBA just tell me yes it's amazing would you recognize your soul in the dark and it's like no I don't know what you're talking about and she was this idea that many of us we go through life so focused on what we want to do that we spend no time thinking about who we are and that if we stripped away the the labels of I'm six foot nine I'm black I'm a man I'm a brother I'm a father, I'm a whatever it is.

1:11:50You strip these things away and you suddenly realize you couldn't describe yourself any differently than any one of the people around you. But that's so key. Knowing yourself is key to success in life because many people are self-sabotaged by things that they just never acknowledged existed. I'm incredibly lazy. It's a fundamental tenet of who I am. But I played in the NBA, and my days are busy and productive because I've built systems that stop me, because I am obedient also. So if it's in the diary, I will do it. Know yourself is so important. Most people don't. If you ask human beings, they will tell you 95 % of people will say, highly self-aware.

1:12:35Now, we automatically know that's rubbish right because 95 is not that's just not real but there's a wonderful researcher called tasha yurik and she does studies on self-awareness and she finds of that 95 when you do a little bit of probing about 10 to 15 are actually self-aware that's the first damage that comes the idea that you think you're self-aware but you're not and the second damage comes because people who are self-aware are often what they call internally you talked about before knowing your values and your principles internally self-aware they aren't externally self-aware they don't realize that their values don't meet the world in the way they think they do the example i always give is is the person you meet who says the thing you need to know about me is that i'm direct and honest it's like they know their internal values but everybody listening to this has met that person that man usually and we all know that that person is cruel and callous and careless because his version of direct and honest comes across to others in a way that is not direct and honest, but cruel and callous and careless and thoughtless.

1:13:40And that's why self-knowledge is so important, because you need to know not just who you are, how you're met by the world around you. Well, I think that's a very powerful place to end. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure. Thank you. This has been fantastic. And I also would just like to say that if you ever need another business idea you should start a sleep stories business because you have the most calming voice I have ever heard in my life thank you and as someone who listens to a lot of sleep stories I think they need you in the business I will do I will consider it my team I do send them to sleep so well thank you so much thank you

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