Life Uncut - Make it 1% Better! Sweating the Small Stuff Leads to Success: Lessons from Steven Bartlett

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Hey Lifers! First up today, Laura's come to an interesting discovery about her anatomy...Britt has an update on her egg freezing journey and we're deeply thinking of anyone who is struggling with their or their partner's fertility at the moment.  We have a question for to ask yourself, your friend, colleague, partner or kids.How can I be 1% better?You can interpret this however you wish. It could be in your work life, towards your partner, personal growth etc.  Then, it's producer Keeshia's dream come true. Her favourite podcaster Steven Bartlett joins Life Uncut! Steven Bartlett is the host of The Diary of a CEO, one of the most listened to podcasts in the world. He's an incredibly successful businessman and entrepreneur. He's also an author and an investor on Dragon's Den (the UK version of our Shark Tank). In this interview we focus on the secret sauce behind what made Steven so successful, making incremental improvements, and embracing the art of effective communication. We chat: Sweating the small stuff - why the seemingly insignificant things matter  The power of never disagreeing - why "never disagreeing" doesn't mean sacrificing your opinion but instead fosters a culture of empathy and understanding. Pissing people off for success - why making waves and challenging the status quo can be a sign that your business strategy is working.  Unapologetic values & how these values can determine what we make of ourselves You can grab Steven's new book The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life by Steven Bartlett here! You can find Steven on Instagram Check us out on Instagram hereJoin us on tiktok Or join the facebook group here Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Wollamutta land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. Do you know what I just did? Farted.

no no is that a rhetorical question or do you really want me to guess i mean i don't think you will ever guess it so i'll just come clean i went to the bathroom it does have to do with the bathroom but nothing to do with farting i went to the bathroom i pulled down my pants and then i realized my underwear was on back to front but at no point this morning did it feel uncomfortable which says a lot about the state of my vagina no i think that just means that your butt's the same size as your vagina which is a problem it's a problem if the back of your underwear can comfortably support the front and the front of your underwear can sit at the back yeah there's some problems no i don't think it's a problem it just means you got juicy lips

i think that's what you know what it's actually the ruched ones you know the ones that like where it's meant to be a bit ruched in the bum crack it was just ruched in the front crack and not one single part of me not one single part of me found this experience uncomfortable until i looked down and i saw the tag at the front and i was like wow that's not the way that the underwear goes but god it feels good because you mean the ruching where it like makes it look like it all comes up like up into the butt crack the ruching out of the backside crack is currently at the front and you know what i didn't turn them around so you didn't notice that that was up your fanny no so not only is your fanny the size of your butt but it's tight lipped like that's not getting in

nothing's penetrating it's like a fort it's like a castle fort nothing gets in or out i just felt like my vulva was comfortably supported today well i'm happy for you it was cushioned between the ruching and you you obviously you have decided you like it enough to leave it i persevered well no i just it was the whole effort of having to take my shoes off take my jeans off and then turn everything around that i was like look we've come this far we've come this there is nothing worse like i find it so uncomfortable but i guess this is different people's vaginas they're different shapes but for me vulvas vulvas for me I find it wildly uncomfortable and I have a lot of problems with front wedgies that's my story well apparently I don't so yeah anyway I look it was a surprise

I know that things have changed down there in the last couple of years after two kids but it definitely was a surprise to look at my own underwear and be like oh that looks like that should be uncomfortable but it's not I love that for you thank you well I did something dumb this morning actually it was really annoying it should be my suck but I'll just say it now I went to get a coffee with Delilah in the morning before we come here take her out so she can do a poo I get my coffee and then I go to work for the day so I got my coffee she did a big poop I was also facetiming but at the same time in one hand so I had which is this is probably gross but I had the coffee in one hand like that and then underneath with my bottom two fingers I was

holding the poo bag oh yeah we've all been there you know what I mean so the top two fingers were holding the coffee and then the bottom fingers were holding the poo bag and my other hand had the phone you should have gone phone and poo bag not coffee and poo bag like that would have been a safer orientation yes well okay I think I did do that but then I went to lift up an auto bin to put it in the bin so I I had them both in one hand and I lifted it up to obviously I couldn't compute in my brain that I only needed to let go of two fingers to drop the poo bag so I opened the bin held the coffee in the poo bag over but I couldn't work out how to drop the two fingers you're doing too many tasks so I opened my whole hand and my coffee whole brand new coffee and the

poo bag went into the auto bin well I thought what you were going to say was is that you took a sip of your coffee and smacked yourself in the face with a poo bag that would have been a funnier story no I'm safe to say that didn't happen that's a shame you didn't teabag yourself with a bag of poo do you know what I have done before and this is this is actually I've got to stop doing this stuff but I fidget a lot as you guys know I'm always moving around I'm always clicking my hands and whatever I talk a lot with my hands so often I walk with the poo bag until I find a bin but I'll just be like spinning it around subconsciously even though it's producer Keisha's nodding she's like you always spin the poo bag I was spinning the poo bag around and it flung the bottom had a

it must have been a rock solid shit the bottom tore open and the poo flung out across my body and like just missed another human by about half a metre and then splattered against a wall. That was what I did. I was like going like this and it just – the bag must have had like a really loose seam and the poo rocketed across and nearly knocked someone out with a lot of shit. I was like, I'm so sorry.

They're like, whoa, you better stop spinning that around. I was like, I don't know what I was thinking. Wow. Okay, wow. Well, look, I don't know how we got here but here we are. I know you had a very big weekend. I mean we've gone from the highs to the lows here. but on last week's episode we were talking about your egg freezing second round journey and on

Saturday you had your egg collection and I know that that didn't go I mean I know because we've obviously spoken about it and I know that you wanted to talk about on today's episode Brit on Saturday sent a text message to both Keisha and I updating us on how that egg retrieval went and I don't think I've ever seen you so upset we both did have big weekends yeah but very different weekends you and producer keisha got drunk at keisha's birthday and i we were drunk we were drinking margaritas and brit sent us a message and i was devastated do you know what i did i looked back at that message and i was almost embarrassed because i was i think you can tell i was still so hey so what happens is you come out of your egg retrieval i had a general

anesthetic so you're still high but you're still computing enough of the information but you don't really realize you're high but looking back I could tell and um it did not go well for me which was really shocking because I I hand on my heart there's no part of me that thought it would be bad at all like this bad so two years ago I did it and I got 15 eggs you guys might remember and this time the doctor came in and I could just tell by the look on her face and she said I'm so sorry it didn't go well we only got three eggs well we actually got four but then one was dead you know like four came out and one wasn't good so we only got three which is I don't want to like I know there's other people that are listening that have probably got no eggs one egg two eggs

three eggs so I don't want to say you know this is so bad but it's not great and anyone that knows the statistics around egg retrieval and the success rate knows that three eggs is really bad so for the 15 eggs i got last time she told me that that might equate to one live birth so three's not amazing and um she just basically said we're gonna have to do it again yeah um as soon as i can do it again and i was just so upset because i think i wasn't expecting it i think if i had have known that it was likely it wouldn't have hit me as hard and you were really hoping that that would be the last time you'd have to go through this egg freezing process also it's it's expensive and it's painful and there's you know it's emotional yeah and it's not like not

that I was hoping it would be my last time in my head it was I was like oh I'll smash out one more collection not the 10 to 15 eggs and we'll be good and I immediately was so overwhelmed and upset and I took a video and sent it to Keisha and Laura to give them the update and I was just beside myself and I looked back at that when I came to a few hours later and I was actually so embarrassed that I sent that to you guys I was like it's such a shitty thing to do because it not at all I know I think it's because it was like you guys were you know at Keisha's party and I didn't really I didn't cross my mind I couldn't comprehend where what was happening I just think I needed to tell and I sent it to Ben too because I felt really upset that like I might not be able to give

Ben kids and like even when I watched it back I was crying at how upset I was like it wasn't me like I was watching it like that's so heartbreaking for that person but it was me but anyway yeah so it's look it's not the end of the world by any means and i'm gonna do it again and i think they're gonna pump me with a lot more hormones again like the original time and maybe fingers crossed i get more but basically all my follicles were empty little fuckers they were all empty so i mean i only had seven but only three had an egg in them and the rest were just like fake they were already baby little follicles and then they didn't even bring an egg yeah no they made it to the right size eventually so they were too small they got to the right size

but then they were still empty so you don't know that until you take them out I also just want to say like I mean I know we can often do this like when we be vulnerable and be upset and then you can have like that vulnerability hang up where you like feel almost ashamed or humiliated that you've let people see you be sad especially because you know I don't usually do that so I was like when I look back later I was like why did I do that but like no one I never want you to apologize and this is like as a friend but also just for everyone listening like it's so important that sometimes we share that part of ourselves because it's the only way that people actually know when we're struggling because like otherwise if you're always the person who shows up in

relationships and shows up being like I'm fine everything's fine if you embody toxic positivity in the moments when you're not fine you then don't get help because people just assume that since you've been saying that you're fine you're fine and like there is something that's really powerful in showing when you are not and it's okay to be not okay and that's when people come in to support you and I think that without doing that even the people who love you the most the people who are closest to you have no understanding about how much something hurts you or what you're going through because you haven't told them and I think sometimes we expect that people just understand without giving them all of the information to really really understand yeah and I guess the

reason I want to I mean the whole reason I documented the whole process was to make people feel better about it make them feel like they can take their own fertility into their own hands and you know if it's going to make you feel better to go and put your eggs on ice do it if you have never found out what your fertility your AMH level is do it but for me this is like a really real reminder and something I really want to drive home to people is that if you haven't gone and checked that out and I'm saying to like you know not in your if you want to be in your 20s sure go and do the blood test but if you're in your 30s you're not sure if you want kids or you're not ready or you've never done the test all I can say is just go and start the process it's just a

simple blood test to check your levels and get it going because the worst thing that can happen is you don't investigate it and you get to the point where you decide it's time and then you can't and for me my AMH was actually the same as three years ago so that's the level of eggs you have mine was the same it hadn't changed so we were expecting the same results but then to only get three which is highly likely it doesn't even result in a birth down the track is really shocking so i would hate for anyone to get to that point and wish that they did it sooner so it's just a if anything it's just a reminder to to go and check it out yeah because also i mean if i got this wrong when they thaw the frozen eggs not all of them thaw correctly is that right like you'll

lose eggs in the thawing process as well 100 because it's only one cell it's only this one cell so it's not overly stable to survive defrosting whereas when you make an embryo and freeze an embryo because there's so many more cells involved it's more likely that it's survived it's more stable so it's more likely to survive the defrosting and then take in the worm like when it's actually time for IVF which is why they say freezing embryos is generally better than freezing an egg if you can but not a lot of people are in that position you know a lot of people are doing this because they're single or for whatever reason yeah to try and like yeah safeguard the long-term strategy around like how they're going to be able to have kids yeah and

the reason quickly the reason that like if you have 15 eggs you know my specialist said that could be one birth is because half of them won't survive defrosting then half of them won't be good enough to take and then statistically speaking once it's implanted you know we know about miscarriages and we know all of this stuff so it's just it's obviously not something to live and die by this number but it's based off something right it's based off averages of people that freeze and inject into IVF so it wasn't great for me and it was very very shocking and I am super upset about it but I am going to do it maybe one more time and if the results the same I'll have to look a bit more closely at like actually thinking about IVF and things like that because you know I'm 36

and it was like a fucking slap in the face I was like wow I did not see that coming yeah I just want to add one thing in that it was a message that you sent to me yesterday and I actually like I'm looking I'm gonna deliberately not look at you in the eye right now because I know I'll get upset because when I read it I was like fuck that was just such an insight into how you're feeling about yourself right now and I really want to change that narrative you sent a message and I can't remember the exact words of it but it was along the lines of I can't even produce eggs like I'm such a failure that I can't even with the addition of hormones and all of this scientific support I can't even do that and it's so not fair to be thinking about yourself like that you know

we recently had Chloe Fisher on the podcast and that was something that she really battles with was this idea of like why the fuck doesn't my body work the way that it's supposed to it's not a failure of you it just it didn't go to plan this time yeah and I don't want you being down on yourself and being like you know I've left this so late in my fertility age or whatever it might be, whatever's going through your head, like you are not a failure because this process didn't work this time. But I also think that's such relatable feeling. Like I think anyone who's had a miscarriage or anyone who's on their fertility journey, but their body hasn't done what it's supposed to do. I think every woman who's experienced that has felt that feeling of

like, well, I'm failing as a woman, you know, I'm failing as this life purpose that I've been sold my whole life that, you know, I'm going to one day have kids. And, you know, for the majority of women who choose that if you are the one in five who have a miscarriage or you are the exponential number of women who struggle in their fertility journey it is like so common to feel like you are broken that there's something wrong with you totally and i i'm not ruling it out i will still try naturally on that one off chance that you know i drop an egg that isn't empty like a follicle that is there like i'm still going to try i'm still going to do another round it's not to say i haven't spoken to my specialist yet so it's not to say that

the next time isn't better yeah i mean we don't know if the next time's the same that's when it you know but i know you're right keisha and it's just like immediately you go to is like wow i just had 12 months of drugs happening in one month like 12 months of fertility to happen in four weeks basically three weeks and i still can't produce it with all the help of science there is a part of you that's like fucking how am i gonna do it on my own if science can't even help me but Ben's been so amazing I know this is me and my journey but it's not just me because you're in a partnership and with somebody that wants kids and obviously something you do take on you know and I have to consider him at a point but he's just like a dreamboat he's like it doesn't

change anything maybe we take a different route when it's time maybe you know there are always different options um and he's just been like an absolute dreamboat so that's my update sorry to be a downer. You're not a downer, you're just real. There's our headline. I'll change the name of the episode, hang on. Should we tell you what the episode's about? Yeah, and it is a biggie today. Now Keisha's jumping on because I didn't get to be here for this interview. What a shame, what a shame. We interviewed, well Keisha and Brittany interviewed Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. So Diary of a CEO, if you don't know all Stephen Bartlett, he is one of the biggest podcasters in the UK and Europe collectively. But you would have heard of it by now because

almost every week, apart from sleep, it is Keisha's vibe. So she has, I mean, I think if there was ever a Paul Pass that came in podcast form, it is Stephen Butler for Keisha. I don't even think it needs to be in podcast form. Well, I think in terms of podcasting for us, Stephen is one of those people that every podcaster can only hope they get to speak with because he's so good. He's so successful he's so intelligent he's an amazing entrepreneur an amazing businessman and he has been since his early 20s like he's just one of those overachievers he speaks to the biggest people in the industry around the world and he doesn't speak to people in a certain area like there's no ground he doesn't cover and there's no ground he doesn't touch on he's incredible we've

all listened to him for a very long time he's all been on our bucket list but Keisha in particular as I think she slipped off a seat a few times so this happened because Laura was up in Magnetic Island celebrating your dad's birthday and there was no Wi-Fi and so we actually had to do this interview at like 11 p.m at night because he was in the UK but I remember saying to Laura I was like Laura I just I don't even know if I want to do this interview because they say don't meet your heroes because in my mind I was like he could not possibly live up to the level that I have created for a human being of like he is just he's my favorite person to listen to I learned so much from him he's just got this phenomenal story he comes from like the opposite of privilege you know

everything he has done he has really done himself and he's so generous with that knowledge and he's got this real deep desire to kind of impart that knowledge onto other people so that they can make themselves better which I love anyway we got off this call and I turned to Brit and I was like I don't even know how but he was better than I ever could have wished we were given a really limited time frame with him which Brit and I definitely pushed the boundaries of thank you Stephen for me. We like doubled it. Just a little bit of a heads up. His Wi-Fi connection was not great. So the audio is not the most clear that you would expect, but you know what? We did what we could. What do you think was the biggest takeaway from the interview? I think there

were two main parts for me. Stephen really went into detail of how he thinks he's become as successful as he has. And it's all about sweating the small stuff. So he's all about the one percenters. And what I really liked about that is that if you apply that to your own life, It's like if you try to make your life or your business 50% better in the one go, that's a really hard thing to do. But maneuvering 1% is actually not that difficult. But it's the accumulation of those 1% changes that can make either you a better person or your business much more successful.

I really liked that. And the other part that I absolutely loved, it was from this new law that he's written about in his book, was that you should never disagree. I'm quite interested in the psychology of communication. and I think anyone who listens to Life Uncut would be as well because we talk about communication literally every episode and so he has this philosophy that for you to have a really good relationship or even a business relationship it could be a friendship going into a conversation and being like actually I disagree with you or I disagree with that you're never going to get the

outcome because they've scientifically shown that people's brains shut down and they're not as open to hearing alternate ideas if you're just like no I disagree with that so the way that he speaks about how you can kind of sidestep those conversations and have your point be heard and have the other person feel heard and understood. It was really, really, really good advice. I feel like women have been doing this to their husbands for years. It's like where you suggest something, but you lead them to believe that it was their decision in the first place. You're like, well done, honey. That's a great idea. I'm so glad you got there in the end. So glad that you came up with that. Another thing he talks about is the idea that you should

piss people off you have to piss people off to grow and to be successful and we talk about the why because I think most of us want people to like us and we want to go into a meeting or Instagram stories whatever we want to go in smooth calm get people on board if people agree with me and they like me they might follow me we might that that's going to lead to business growth but he turns that idea on its head and it's really interesting to hear why one of the things that Stephen does on his podcast with every single guest at the end he gets the guest to pose a question to whoever Stephen's next guest next week is going to be so the guest that's asking the question doesn't know who's going to answer it they just throw any question out there the next

week comes around Stephen gets the new guest to answer that question so we got Stephen to do this for us we were like let's put this on you let's make you do what you make everyone else do ask us a question and we'll answer it next week. His question was, I want you to ask each other how you could both be 1% better. Now I found this really interesting because it is a really hot take to sweat the small stuff because we're so often saying, don't sweat the small stuff. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. And his idea is it a hundred percent matters. So what is something that you can change in your life that will make you 1% better? I mean, before I get into the thing that I think would change my life more than 1%.

I do think that sometimes we look at people who are attention detail orientated. It's like it's a negative trait. There's such a perfectionist is the word that we usually use to describe people who are detail orientated, who do sweat the small stuff. And it's not really set it as a positive. I know obviously detail orientated

is kind of like what shows up on resumes. It shows up on applications. But I think people who do fixate and who do worry and sweat about the small stuff, that can also then turn into a negative and maybe it's because we then kind of think that those people labor or they harbor and they never make decisions or they're too wrapped up in their work or maybe they micromanage but I even know like for us and for where we've gotten with podcasting I think a big part of why it's been really successful is that we do sweat the small stuff

when it comes to the podcast like we have over time and even since very first days we've edited this podcast to make sure that it is only the stuff that we find the most interesting that makes it all that this is no but like we don't leave we don't leave like there's a lot of fat that gets left on the cutting room floor and I think that that is such an important thing rather than thinking people have the perception that podcasting is just you rock up in a room and you just chat and then you record for an hour and then you put that out I don't think many people are aware about the nuances that happen within many many businesses or businesses which is what makes them successful and it is the detail stuff that really counts you're right I don't think a lot

of people see that I think a lot of people see not for you but in life in general a lot of people see this extra attention to detail and sometimes it can be too much like in some jobs it can be not necessary for the task for sure and it can also be debilitated it can stop you from actually taking steps forward if you spend so much time worrying about something being perfect before you take the next step yeah it is often for a lot of people debilitating and it means they never actually get that project off the ground they never start their small business whatever it is because they're too busy worrying about something being perfect rather than it just being good and being enough to get it done. It's a very fine line. I think for me, two things that I thought about for this

1% had, I mean, two things. It was hard to narrow it down. That was a fucking list. How can you make your life 1% better? You're like, well, here is 70 things and it would be 70% better. Totally. But this is what he says, right? You write all these things down, but if you're doing 1% a day, it quickly adds up. 1% a week, whatever it is, you make one of these little changes and it makes so much sense but I think two things for me no-brainer put things in a diary more be more organized of course like that's so obvious to me but the other thing I think I should start doing and you hear almost every successful person say it is that they wake up earlier and they wake up at the same time of day without doubt you get more done when you wake

up in the morning now and that's not necessarily with kids obviously because life's chaotic but as a general rule of thumb no I think even with kids like the days where I've gotten them up and gotten them out of the house and gotten them to daycare you know when daycare opens 7 30 or 8 o'clock my days are infinitely more organized they are infinitely better because I've been able to get two hours of work done well yeah so I think for me getting up earlier so making that if there's no work the same time of day every day and routine so maybe it's now to start to whether it's 6 a.m 7am whatever it is to wake up and do my exercise first thing because I find I'm not as productive if I get up later three quarters of the day is gone before I'm getting my head together and my

shit together and then because my work day starts later I don't exercise that day I'll walk Delilah but I don't go to the gym I don't train properly I don't do anything whereas the days that I got up earlier I accomplish so much so for me it might be starting to get into routine set an alarm early every single day and getting my shit together in the morning I think that's my one percent I think my 1% pertains to more my relationships rather than my work but it affects everything and this is something that I think over the past six months I've become increasingly worse at as my workload gets busier I often will then stay up past when I finish my work just sitting on my phone on Instagram just scroll like doom scrolling right and I think sometimes it's because like that's

my ability to garner back a little bit of time for myself and it's completely mind-numbing I don't have to think about it and I'm just sitting on my phone and scrolling funny content something that Matt and I do when we're both tired and we both are kind of just like at our flattest we'll sit on the couch and we'll pull out social media and we'll be laying on the couch across from each other but we're both on our phones and we're scrolling and we've been doing it increasingly lately and also I have noticed the direct correlation to us like not being as loving towards each other you know like we've been stressed and I you know I talked about this a few weeks back like we're not in a bad place by any means but when you have little time and then

you choose to spend what little time you have scrolling social media as opposed to actually trying to have a conversation with each other and you can put it down to oh well it's 10 30 p.m at night what conversation are we going to have but we're not even trying because we're on instagram but you know what it's not even necessarily the conversation i totally agree and maybe there's a rule now that you put your phone away at 10 o'clock i know and look that's so obvious it's so easy and i know that every fucking podcast under the sun's like put your find a way after 7 30 p.m but we all still do it realistic everyone still does it everyone knows the things that we're supposed to do to be able to garner more quality time with their partners

and yet so many of us are still so guilty especially if you're in a long-term relationship and you've got kids of just using it as escapism well what i was going to say is not like i know that you said you know fuck what else is there to talk about at 10 o'clock at night but it's connection you could not say a word but maybe instead of sitting on other ends of the lounge you're spooning watching a movie, but there's physical affection, there's contact, there's intimacy without verbally communicating, which I think is super important. Like just that intimacy without talking works wonders. Totally. And the other thing is, is when you're in your phone, and I don't know if other people experience this, when you're in your phone, even if it's not

productive, if someone is talking to you or they're asking you a question, it's hard to completely go, okay, I'm going to stop what I'm doing. Even if what you're doing is totally non-productive, if you're watching a funny video or you're scrolling Instagram you are not fully engaged with what that person is saying to you so even if attempts are made to have conversations they're derailed by the fact that your attention is already spent elsewhere Keisha your one percent is not allowed to have anything to do with sleep I'm vetoing it now no pillows no sleep no she's like I have this amazing sleep spray which I have been we know about it he had an allergic reaction to it last night I don't know if I can keep using

it. Laura, I think I had two that kind of sprung to mind where I was like, I could be a lot better in these ways. One of them is definitely being more deliberate with my time, which is very much related to like the phone usage and being present and all that kind of thing. The other thing that I really sat and thought about is that in the last couple of weeks, and I don't know why in particular it has been in these last few weeks, I have found myself being very, very irritable and particularly lacking a bit of compassion in a sense where like if I'll get a work email that kind of annoys me or if someone you know hasn't done something that I've expected or there's so many different things that have happened in the past couple of weeks where I now I'm reflecting

back on those situations and being like do you know what I actually could have added a little bit more compassion and empathy to those situations and I would have been in a better mood from it by just realizing that sometimes people have things going on that you have no idea about and you just got to give them a bit of grace isn't it funny how your reaction to something can so fundamentally ruin your day and the other person walks away not even not even being affected by it you know whether it be fucking something like road rage or whether it be that an email has pissed you off like we can ruminate in our bad reaction to something in our bad mood and the person who may have been the instigator of that doesn't give a fuck does not care and

they've just gone on their life completely unaffected and we are the ones because of our reaction to a situation are harboring all that resentment or impatience or anger over something that really, if we had controlled our reaction, we would have had a better day long-term. 100%. And so that's where my 1% needs to be better at the moment. I think I just need to kind of maybe attempt to lose that irritability and be a little bit more water off a duck's back if little things annoy me, because I've found that in the last couple of weeks, they've just been little things, but there might be five little things. And so I'll be in a bad mood with myself. I'll be in a bad mood with everybody around me. I've definitely taken it out on my

boyfriend. Do you reckon she's talking about our work email? To be fair though, we have had a lot of email, particularly because of the live show coming up. There's just been so many little things that I'm like, yep, I need to turn that understanding back on and also just give people a bit more grace for things that I may not know that they're managing. I would love, before we get into this chat with Stephen Bartlett, I would love you guys as listeners to all have a little think about what is that 1% that you could do in your life, whether it be in terms of your work, I think that there's like, let's go for the 2%. What is it that you could do in terms of your work? And what is it that you could do in terms of your personal life

that you could change that would make your life 1% better? And I think that this is such an incredible tool that we can all use to make very small, but incrementally amazing and really beneficial changes within our lives. I think it'd actually be really cool to even do for families to do it with their kids. Like I think you can ask your kids these questions at school in their day a day. Like they obviously are going to have completely different answers, but I think Laura, maybe ask Marley if she can ask her, is there one thing today you could do you think that would make life better? It'd be so interesting. I think it's going to be a funny response too. It'd be so interesting to see what she said. Stephen Bartlett is the host of the Diary of a CEO,

one of the most listened to podcasts in literally the world. He's an incredibly successful businessman and entrepreneur. He's also an author and an investor on Dragon's Den. Now Dragon's Den is like the UK version of our shark tank. The reason for this is he's been the CEO, founder, co-founder and board member of four industry leading companies that collectively at their peaks reached a valuation of more than $1 billion. And this was all before the age of 30. Stephen, welcome to Life Uncut. Thank you for having me. We're very excited to talk to you. It's been a long time coming, but before we get into the chat, we have a tradition of our own and we begin every episode with every guest with an accidentally unfiltered your most embarrassing story do you

have one i have a few they all involve my mother i think my most embarrassing story is at how old would i where i've been about seven years old i climbed onto the roof and started running around on the roof naked with my brother and so my mom came home and she spanked me in front of girl crush on so this girl across the street and i read about it in my first book like this girl across the street was in my house and she was like making eye contact with me while my mother was spanking me naked in front of her and i like really really girl and from that moment onwards i never saw that girl again stephen why why were you naked though like that was a choice when you're seven you're always naked and yeah the spanking in front of the like imagine being

spanked in front of the person you fancy you have a crush on it's really you can't come back from that. I mean, speaking about your childhood, you weren't born into immense privilege. You weren't given, you know, a small loan of a million dollars by my father, like Trump was. So what was your life like growing up? Like what was your upbringing like? We came from Africa when I was two or three years old and we came here from Africa to the UK and we moved to pretty much all white area. We were pretty much the poorest family in that area. And we were pretty much the only black family that I can recall in that area. So we understand the value of anything by the context in which we see it. So if you go to an electronic store and there's three televisions, your brain actually

uses the really expensive TV and the cheap TV to understand the value of all the TVs. And it's the same when you go to a restaurant and you see like three steaks on a menu, you're actually using the context to understand that this one is really nice and expensive, this one's probably not going to be great, and this one's probably a nice balance of the two. And in the same regard, we do that with ourselves, the context in which we see ourselves determines the value. If there's no one on earth, I am both the prettiest, the richest, the fattest, the skinniest, everything, person on earth. It's all comparison and context. And so my comparison and context taught me that I was different and less than. And that's a very sort of deep feeling to have as a child, that sense of embarrassment,

shame and insecurity. So I grow up with this huge feeling that I am not enough and that I'm embarrassed and that money is the problem, is the root of all arguments. And that to fit in and be enough i need to become um like my rich white friends and so i did everything at that age to be my rich white friends i chemically relaxed my hair at the time i was wearing the skinny jeans and listening to arctic monkeys and the kooks when i didn't wasn't really into that stuff and then the other part of me was just doing everything i could to get money by any means necessary and as a young man that meant starting businesses selling things around the house doing deals with vending machine companies for my school by the age of 14 15 16 i'm running all of the

school trips in sixth form if we go into a theme park or we go we're having a party it's all coming through Steve I'm doing all the advertising for it and then I get expelled from school I get unexpelled because I'm making the school a lot of money go to university at 18 drop out after one lecture and carry on doing my businesses. So do you feel like the reason you're so successful now and the drive behind your success as a child even as a child businessman was to fit in? Yeah I guess in a way I think it's really the thing that invalidates you ends up being the thing that you seek validation from so if you're invalidated by how you look you probably grew up trying to seek validation from how you look and if you're feeling validated by by money or not being like

other people that'll become your your drive or the thing that's dragging you and in my case I certainly felt that the biggest problem in my life was that I was poor and not like my friends so the antidote to that is to become rich and like your friends so that's what I did that was my drive And that's why I think that's what my ambition was, to be honest, at that age. Stephen, I'm really curious about this because I think that when you're the type of person who wants to seek validation out of any type of situation or relationship, often when you actually get the success, it doesn't measure up to what you expected it to. So when you became successful, you know, your first business was very, very successful. Did you feel that sense of validation from that success or did the goalposts just shift? Yeah, so it tends to be the case with most people that, and this is quite an unfortunate thing, that if the force that's dragging you towards validation is really, really strong, for most people, they're going to require their hypothesis to fail them.

so that dream to fail them and when I say fail them I mean for it to not give you what you thought it was going to give you for you to understand that it wasn't the right dream for some people when the force isn't strong they can maybe vicariously learn it read a book watch a podcast and go okay maybe I'm wrong here and they can reflect their way out of it but in my case the shame and the insecurity and the desire to have money and to be validated was so strong that I needed to climb that mountain and get to the top and realize it wasn't the view I was looking for. So 18 years old, I write in my diary, my four girls before I'm 25. And at this time, I'm literally shoplifting pizzas to feed myself. Goal number one, a range of a sport will be my

first car. I'll make a million pounds before I'm 25. I'll have a six pack and a girlfriend. Did all of those things by about 23, 24. And it was a strange feeling of anti-climax and confusion as if someone had lied to me or something had lied to me because there was no confetti. There wasn't the euphoria that I was expecting. It didn't solve for or fill the hole. that i thought money or a car or whatever could fill and at some stage i come to learn in my journey that like really like if you don't believe and this woman came to my office once and she said this sentence she said what if you're already enough what if you already have everything you need and i remember thinking that is so stupid walking back to my desk and then it kind of

puzzling me but i it took me a couple of years really reflecting on what she said to realize that if you don't think you're enough now no goal or podium position or medal or public accolade is ever going to fill that because fundamentally one Stephen Bartlett is always going to be worth one Stephen Bartlett there's no amount of money that's going to increase my like intrinsic internal sense of worth so it's either now or never like if you defer your happiness or your sense of self-worth off into the future behind some goal it will always be off in the future and when I started to realize that having my dreams fail me because they didn't deliver on the euphoria I was expecting I realized that the ambitions I'd had in my life were fake ambitions and most of us are

living out fake ambitions and we don't even know we're living out fake ambitions I see it so much in young people when they come up to me after I've spoken on stage and they say I want to be a public speaker and I go what do you want to speak about and they go no I want to I want to be a public I'm like why do you want to be a public speaker well you know it's uh because they want the glory yeah and we confuse so easily aspiration with admiration we admire something so we aspire to be they're two very different things admiration is like i love what oprah winfrey does aspiration is i want to become oprah winfrey we should keep them separate you know you can admire someone without aspiring to be somebody and really when i dig down into that guy that comes up to me after

i speak on stage he doesn't want to be a public speaker he wants the admiration he just saw me get from the applause from the crowd because he is insecure and he's still trying to prove to his dad that he's enough and the problem is if you run down those paths you waste a ton of your life and it's actually really difficult to go down a path where you're not intrinsically internally driven by the rewards on offer so I think it's important for all of us to really ask ourselves that question continuously which is like why am I doing what I'm doing like truly why am I doing what I'm doing the crazy thing is when you orientate your life towards real ambitions things that deeply within you you would do regardless of applause that's when you set yourself up for

mastery and real success internal success like fulfillment psychological happiness but also real material success because that's where mastery comes from um and i think that's where my podcast is successful because it's something that i would do regardless of by the people listening it's funny we say the same thing we did this podcast for a solid year before we made a dollar and i remember we made our first five thousand dollars and we went celebrated we went out we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and everybody kept saying to us why are you doing it there's no money in it you're never going to make it anywhere and we just thought well because it's our passion and I really do think there's something in if you follow your passion the rest will come the success

that you've had now the money and the admiration the validation everything that you get everything that comes with it how has this changed the relationships in your life the instrumental relationships with people you might date with your family members your mom and people that you find maybe want to come into your life for the wrong reason honestly like not at all because the same were in my life other than my girlfriend 10 years ago the same people in my life now and I mean it helps me pay for stuff for my parents but outside of that there's been no change my five best friends and my five best friends they were my five best friends 10 years ago and I don't go to celebrity parties and schmooze I don't accept the invites to all of the fancy places I just don't see a huge

amount of value in that it's not going to do anything for me to go and hang around with a-list celebrities it's not the type of person I am honestly like I get to meet great people here here at my table on the podcast they come here to my house here in LA in our studio in New York but outside of that I'm just not interested in it I'm like well aware that it will do nothing for me I'm well aware that all of that stuff I don't own designer things I could own every designer thing if I if I let myself loose which doesn't doesn't do anything for me I wear the same outfit every i was about to say i don't think i've ever seen you in anything other than a black t-shirt well it works doesn't it

i wear this to work and then i go from work to the gym so and this is called 24 7 so it's like it's gym material so i've been the same with my trousers and my shoes that someone out for every day and i have 40 of this outfit represents something 40 versions of it if it ain't broke don't fix it exactly like i'm not playing that game i'm not trying to be a fashion icon you what I'm saying. It's not my game. I play other games. I play this game, podcasting. I play the business game, marketing game. I write. Those are the games I'm playing. So this can just be low cognitive expense. Love that. Well, speaking about you writing, you are releasing a brand new book. It comes out today. It is called The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws of Business and Life.

And Britt and I were very fortunately sent an advanced copy of this to read through, and we had all of 24 hours to do so. And something that I really, I was very interested by, we talk a lot about relationships on this podcast. And I think something that we have learnt to say with our partners is that at times you're going to have to agree to disagree. But in your book, one of the laws that you wrote

is that you must never disagree. Yeah, so we're all guilty of hearing something and I'll need your reaction to something, you know that's in conflict with our beliefs or something we didn't want to hear is to say i disagree and then to make our point and i just think it's important to realize that from a neurological perspective when you do that the other person's brain essentially shuts down and this is what they've proven in multiple scientific studies i spoke to tally sharot who's the neuroscientist that's done much of this research and they just scan people's brains and situations

where there's disagreement and the brain is basically shutting down and when there's agreement it's lighting up so if your objective is to persuade the other person of your opinion or to resonate or connect with another person disagreement is not the pathway that is not a bridge the bridge is finding similarities and this is what the brain says so instead of i disagree a much more effective approach if your goal is to be heard and understood and to further whatever you know subject matter opinion you have a much better approach might be to say something like i understand and hear what you're saying i also think or i understand what you're saying and then to make your opinion but you should fight desperately to keep their brain illuminated

because if you do that then you'll be hurt and understood yourself and this is why we get into arguments that sound like two broken records just shouting at each other because you're both i disagree no i disagree no i disagree both of your brains are closed off and so again it's difficult because when emotions come into play we all start acting on how we feel much more than the knowledge that we have about how to communicate so it's a discipline in every regard but think about it the only thing that stands in the way of you being prime minister of australia or the number one salesperson in the world or the greatest philanthropist that's ever lived is a bunch of human beings there's no other obstacles in life it's a bunch of other human beings saying yes to

you and if you want to be effective at getting humans to say yes to you you have to learn the simple skill of communication which is the skill of sales so it's important like it probably determines how far you're going to go in life whether you can persuade those human beings in your way of your ideas and your opinions so disagreeing is not a useful thing finding a way to agreeably disagree is super smart and it's been a game changer for me like I'm in a relationship it's difficult you know when your partner says something it's difficult to listen sometimes it's difficult to understand and it's difficult for the first thing that when my partner's you know upset for me to repeat exactly back what she said to me which is what I do to make sure I understand

and it's funny because I've been in relationships before where oh my god old Steve you say it to me once I hear it and I'll just come back at you you say it to me twice I'm leaving when my new relationship which I've been in now for four years my partner says something to me I listen to her and I repeat back exactly what I think she's feeling and thinking and the minute I do that the broken record player stops spinning and she listens it's this it's the most magical thing I've ever seen and it's the it's an experiment I ran in my relationship repeat back to them what they said to you and once they feel like they're understood they won't feel the need to say it again and then from that place they're open to hear what you have to say because they feel heard

and understood which is the foundation of communication that might be one of the best relationship bits of advice I've ever heard I've had Matthew Hussey on the podcast no don't tell Matthew Hussey that I I'm in a long-distance relationship my partner lives in Scotland and he's Swiss and I can't tell you how many times last night was a point of contention but how many times we say to each other you're not listening like you are not listening and they say something back and doesn't matter how many times I mean we have different barriers obviously we don't see each other physically and there's a language barrier but maybe this is something I need to take on and like we need to approach this in a different way I hear you I see you you're wrong

but let's look at it this way you don't say you're wrong disagreeing I know yeah Stephen one of the laws that I absolutely loved was this law where you said you must piss people off and I love that because I feel like without trying I probably do piss a lot of people off why do you think we need to go through life and have people pissed at us explain that a little bit so it's it's not that you should try and piss people off it is the thing that you should try and do has an unavoidable side effect of pissing people off so in any regard whether you're a brand whether you're trying to be heard and understood the byproduct of that pursuit is you're going to piss people life and here's what i mean if you're a brand and you're in you know let's take a i don't know a

makeup brand for example because there's some makeup on my table here i didn't wear it today but sometimes i wear it if i've got really bad skin but i thought you were looking very contoured this is just a great filter from this software that we're using but i do have this makeup better so say you're a makeup brand for the way that you pierce through a saturated market where everybody is saying the same things where everybody's saying we're environmentally friendly we are cost effective we're good for your skin all of your competitors are going to say the exact same thing therefore you're the consumers are all going to have heard the same messaging over and over again and there's this thing in our brain that is a prehistoric device that makes sure

we don't commit energy to things that we don't need to so it's the same reason why today when you woke up this morning you guided through your house and got ready without thinking you didn't have to think about where the kitchen was your brain through this process called habituation is deprioritizing that information and it's on autopilot the same happens with messaging in life so if you hear something every day like like and subscribe or you hear the same narratives every day or the same thing from your makeup company your brain is just filtering it out i call it the wallpaper filter it doesn't even know it's there so in order to be heard and understood in a world where your brain is literally filtering everything out that isn't important so it can

focus on the things that are you have to use language that beats that filter you have to have values that these makeup companies they have to i was talking about this yesterday to some of my team members in saturated markets you have to stand for something you have to create a situation where even with your podcast for example you're so different because there's so many podcasts out there that it's not i can listen to your podcast or this podcast it's your podcast or this podcast because your values are so distinct and so clear and so refined which is why you pierced a saturated market that it's not, I could listen to both. It's this one or this one, because there's 80% of people that would just never listen to you guys. But that 20%, because your values are so

clear and distinctive, they love you. And I think the best brands in the world that I've studied and founders that I've spoken to, they do, they piss off 80% of people. Their messaging is so clear. It is so unapologetic. It is so disruptive. We had Mark Manson on the podcast a little while ago, for those listening, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Do you think that this is a big reason obviously his book's incredible but a big reason he had such cut through at the beginning is because of the language he used in his title 100% you know I talk about that in my book that authors started swearing on the front covers for this very reason and when you've spoken I spoke to a couple of people that publish these books they said the same thing they

said we realize that a lot of people are going to be annoyed by the swearing on these books but the upside is that we'll capture attention and we'll make more sales so okay we're accepting the fact that 60% of people are going to walk through bookstores and be annoyed at us for swearing on the books. We accept the fact that some bookshops won't even put the book in there, but the 40% that do is going to be enough for us to make incrementally more sales than we would have otherwise. This is a point about messaging, language, personal brand. If you guys take to social media and you start making social media clips, and there's thousands of clips and there's a short amount of attention, the way you stand out is by beating that wallpaper filter, using

more provocative language than everybody else, by having more clear defined provocative values than everybody else, standing for something more than anybody else, being the person in the pub that is dancing on the table, not sat on the chairs. By dancing on the table, you piss some people off and some people like it. But the least, I'll say, I'll conclude with this, the least profitable outcome in life when you're building a personal brand, starting a podcast, making a brand or anything, is indifference. It is the worst place to be and indifference is where nobody cares this was written on the walls of my company back in the day make them feel something either way indifference when nobody cares you can't take that to the bank you can take hate to the bank and

love to the bank both of that's attention you can't take indifference to the bank and some people are scared like if you think about you know people that really break out if we think just think about some people that are like running culture right now or even trump you know that he's not indifferent it's on that outrage culture doesn't he yeah i feel like outrage culture is having a real moment but maybe it's not genuine outrage maybe that what we're seeing is people that just want to create some noise hate or love because the old any publicity is good publicity in your book you wrote and I'm quoting this in business sports and academia an individual's personal philosophies are the single biggest predictors of how they'll behave now and in the

future if you know someone's philosophy or beliefs you can accurately forecast how they'll behave in any situation from this I'm really interested in what some of your philosophies are and like how in the business world you have created values that have led to consistent behavior within yourself I've got I mean I've got so many important personal philosophies I would say that the most important one as I believe it now is to sweat the small stuff I genuinely believe like if people think the podcast that we've done is big this month I think we'll get about 35 million downloads um we just hit three million subscribers on youtube yeah same same congratulations funny thing is not because i'm a good podcast host and i said this on linkedin

the other day it's not because we have the most talented team in the world because when jack joined he was the first employee he'd never done this before he was a freelance freelancer that recorded stuff but he wasn't he never made a show before the thing is and the thing where i go that's our big philosophical advantage over everybody and this is the same in my businesses or anything that i get involved in is we absolutely care more about the small stuff than everybody else and that's an interesting right so like that's an interesting thing because you go like the table i'm sat at now is the table i record the podcast at underneath this table which you can't see there's a track pad an apple track pad glued to the underside of the table and when

i'm doing the podcast if the guest has something interesting i just click it you can't even see my hands i click it with my finger button using ai to my team and that becomes one of the titles and thumbnails we take 90 of those titles and thumbs now so 90 clicks that i did under the table we run them as ads on facebook before the episode comes out for seven days to find out which title and topic is the most important to lead i could tell you a million things we do they are tiny things small small things the temperature of the room knowing that when israel adesanya got here the song double up by nipsey hustle is the song that makes him emotional it makes him open up I could tell you a million of these tiny things that we do and it's all of these little things

that have added up that no one sees so people look in and when they do their sort of dissection of the diary of a CEO and I watch these on TikTok they're like he's a good host the trailers are great I'm like no no no no no it's all the stuff you can't see and that's and I can see it in the graph I can see the graph just changing because of these small tweaks so my personal philosophy as it relates to success is I'm absolutely obsessed with the smallest things the thing with the small stuff is things that are easy to do like saving one pounds of brushing your teeth are also therefore easy not to do so most people don't do them they don't think they're important i think they're really important and it's not just that the other thing about doing the small stuff

is it's easier to find a hundred tiny things than it is to find one big thing like i can't reinvent the wheel with podcasting i'm not going to find a new youtube or spotify am i i can find that it's very easy for a team and for me to find a hundred small things and that equals a hundred percent gain it actually is more when things compound it's much more than a hundred percent if you're thinking about compounding returns and also the science has shown and i've i've sat here with sir david brailsford who became the head of the english cycling team he went into that team when they were down and out and winning nothing and he turned it around to make them the most successful team in the world and he had the same philosophy he went and found out can i make the water bottles a little

bit bigger? Can I make the pillows in the hotels a little bit softer? And it wasn't just the accumulation of many, many 1% gains. He said to me, the most important thing from a psychological perspective, when you find small gains or any gains, is it makes your team feel like you're moving, like you have a sense of progress. And he goes, when I went into that English cycling team, we found all of these small little ways to improve. And suddenly this depressed team, quote unquote, we felt like we were going somewhere. So from a psychological perspective, You see our team here when we find a 1% game. The phrase 1% is the most popular phrase used in our team.

We have a head of experimentation, full-time job, a full-time data scientist on the podcast. Again, full-time job we got from Nike. And we have a channel in our group called the 1% chat, where we're all looking for 1% games. And when we find one, it's like a celebration. You know, and just to conclude there, Harvard Business Review went and interviewed people in work

and asked them when their most enjoyable day in work was. then they looked at those days and people had pointed at days when they had a sense of progress so from a psychological perspective it makes people motivated from a business perspective it adds up to change the game and i think all those small things equal a really really big thing that's my big personal philosophy and that for anyone that's like just starting in a podcast it is the best news i could possibly give you because you don't need to make some amazing hire we didn't you don't need to be super famous i remember my manager walking in one day and said had anxiety because no one wanted to come on the podcast and we needed to put it out this week and

i'm going have you got any friends you can call steve so i called this guy called dad who was a mate of mine bam is episode like seven no one was interested when you have 7 000 subscribers on youtube like no one's interested in it wanted to come on but the thing and if you throw that the last 90 days we've had a million more subscribers in the last 90 days so the laws of compounding say it goes really slow and ours did and then it went like the burj khalifa and honestly the thing i point out which means it's accessible to everybody is look at what you're doing every day and find a way to make it one percent better isn't that easy to do one percent i feel like that's what we're gonna have to call the name of this episode one percent one percent

better yeah um steven something i'd love to finish the podcast on is in the same way that you do your guests pose a question for your next guest without knowing who it's going to be what would your question be for all of us like listening to think about an answer between ourselves interesting so i want you to ask each other how you could both be one percent better okay i'm already thinking about it so i remember simon cynic one of the things that means simon cynic always do with each other my favorite episodes yeah we can we give each other critical feedback so he calls it like notes so we'll do something together i'll turn to him and say Simon how could I have been better today and he'll tell me honestly and I believe that a good

criticism coming from a good place is worth its weight in gold it's much more useful than a five star review so I would you two tell each other how you both could be better I love that as in you give physical feedback to each other yeah I love that because it requires uncomfortable conversations which I think are more important we're going to slide it back into your DM and let you know how we're going to be better Stephen we are going to let you go but I have one last question and that is if you possibly can do this out of every interview you've ever done has there been one that's really stood out where you've walked away and you're like I've learned so much I'm a different person now something that's sort of at the forefront yeah I'd say it was episode

101 with a guy called Mo Gordat it was actually the and he's not a at least he wasn't a famous person so when you find out that in 2022 i'm gonna say it was the most shared podcast episode in our country on apple according to apple they released the data at the end of the year an episode that episode was the most shared and that's a key thing shared that means one friend passed it to another he was the ex-head of google who left when his son died in a routine operation gave up everything he had in his life he was at the very top and said i'll give up everything i'm going to go and find out what happiness is. And he goes on this search to figure out what happiness is. And he taught me so many things about managing your emotions, happiness, and managing your

happiness as well. And one of the key ideas he said to me, which I've always thought about ever since is, he said to me, you're happy when your expectations of how your life is supposed to be going are met. And from that, one can also deduce that you're unhappy when your expectations of how your life is supposed to be going, go unmet. And I came from Botswana, right? Like two years old. In Botswana, a nice hot bowl of rice for many people makes them happy. You come here to London, and in Mayfair in London, if a billionaire's steak isn't medium rare like they requested, visceral anger. And you go, what's the difference?

You go, unmet expectations. And then look around the rest of your life with your partner, your boyfriend, your husband, your colleagues at work, the person that cuts you off in traffic. When expectations go unmet, you have unhappiness. so if we're aware of that and we reflect on that that means in some to some degree our happiness on a daily basis is controllable if we don't slip into unconsciousness and for me that means you know go back a couple of years i got on a plane for the first time to go on holiday at 21 years old i mean my family didn't have the means to go on holiday so i was 21 years old i was on this

plane to thailand and i get in the economy section and i just can't believe what i'm seeing this Tim Kahn is going to attempt to fly across the world. I'm in economy and I'm like, oh my God, I'm looking at the safety manual. I'm, oh my God, this is incredible. I'm blown away. I'm euphoric. My expectations are exceeded. Fast forward five years, 2019, I'm flying 50 weeks a year. I'm traveling in business class and first class. I'm rushing on these planes, throwing my bag up, pulling my laptop out in first class, just trying to get on my laptop before I lose internet connection and then one day i look over and i see jenny with her husband clearly on an engagement or something like they just got engaged she's like sipping the champagne she's putting on

the sleep dave dave look at this they've got robes she is over the moon that used to be me in economy where did that go where did my happiness go when it went out the door with my expectations I've got used to my life and through that process of what I called earlier on that habituation where we just get used to things in our lives unfortunately we get used to the emotions and the emotions leave too so if we want to hold on to that joy of life

and not let it go out the door when we become more and more successful like your podcast is going to take over the world and you're going to be there one day you're going to hit 10 gazillion subscribers and you're going to feel zilch because you're going to like if we're unconscious

we expect gratitude and euphoria to show up whereas the truth is about euphoria and gratitude is we have to it has to be a practice we have to like so when i get on a plane now i stop before i walk in the plane just when you get to the little door part of the plane i stop and i remind myself how absolutely unbelievably mental it is that i'm about to go and sit in that really posh section at the front of the plane and that steve bartlett six years ago was stealing pizzas to feed himself and working in call center isn't it absolutely mental that I get to sit here it makes happiness a key part of my life by doing that practice and we could all do that every day yeah perspective truly is the most beautiful thing it's definitely

the thing that I love the most from doing this podcast and speaking to different people these are the conversations people need to hear just to reconnect with reality and be present and grateful for what you've got but Stephen this has been one of those moments for us in our career we thought if we can ever speak with you on the podcast that's going to be one of those moments so we're definitely going to hang up from you and celebrate after we'll be cool on the podcast but we can't thank you enough for your time we know you're a very busy man so thanks for joining us today thank you so much you guys are great i'm so honored to be to be invited on and everyone's told me about your show and how special it is so i was really wonderful that i could come and speak

yeah of course they have that's why i don't really do podcasts right i didn't do that so a lot of people said a lot of nice things about you guys so i really wanted to do it so thank Thank you so much, everyone. The Diary of a CEO, the 33 laws of business and life out today everywhere you can get your books. Appreciate it. You guys know we don't finish an episode without our suck in our suite, the highlight, the low light, Laura Byrne.

You want to kick it off? All right. So my suck for the week last week, it was a hairy, scary, touch and go week there with little Lola Ellis Johnson. I just forgot my child's middle name for one second. No one ever uses a middle name. Lola Ellis. I actually don't even know if I knew that.

When you just said that, that was foreign in my brain. Because she's just Melon, Lola Melon Johnson. Totally. Why was everyone our age? They all had one of three middle names, Anne, Louise or Jane. I'm sorry, no one's had Mayo. Yeah. I don't have one.

Brit sits outside of like the norm, well and truly outside the box. But my middle name is Anne and my sister's middle name is Louise. Like we couldn't be bigger cliches. And this generation, our generation of children, every single person has a middle name May. And everyone says it's a family name. it was my nana's blah blah blah I get it every single every single kid in Molly Mae's daycare is Mae Ben goes to me so just so I understand does our kid have to be called Mayo it's a family name

I was like yeah that's how he's like interesting okay I feel like you might need to explain this for people who haven't heard you talk about it before because when I first heard I truly thought it was a piss take but it's not so if you haven't heard it my middle name is Mayo like the condiment why is it a family name rumor has it legend has it and i don't know legend has it that one of my relatives was involved in the mayo clinic which is the renowned medical clinic and so it was something that went off the back of that i don't know i just know that one kid each generation so my mom had it she's one of four and her mom had it and she was one of four so it's just like one of those things i don't know fuck my kid's gonna be mayo i hope they

never ask me why if my kid says mom why do i have mayo i'm gonna say you your grandparents use mayonnaise instead of lube please don't say that please don't tell them that that's terrible sex education imagine that legend going on through the next generation that's terrible okay well anyway look back to my suck for the week my suck for the week is lola had a terrible the ear infection started when we were in magnetic island we were told it was just like a viral thing she didn't need any antibiotics turns out the kid needed some antibiotics we just had like four nights consecutive nights of her screaming and being possessed like the devil like levitating up from the bed and then on the fourth night of that last week you did the exorcism no her eardrum

perforated overnight and I think anyone who's got little kid who's had a terrible ear infection it like absolutely peed with pain for her and then the perforated eardrums like all this gunk just oozes out of their ear so i came in in the morning and it was all over her pillow all down her neck pussy earwax that had oozed anyway after that happens and the pressure is kind of relieved they start to feel better really really quickly but also then their eardrum is open so you've got to be careful with antibiotics and you've got to keep them away from water and blah blah blah ear infections are sucky my sweet for the week is that yesterday we had some of our really close friends over for a lunch at our house my mom my mother-in-law was there you guys came keisha was

wildly hungover. Keisha brought Toblerone. It was such a beautiful afternoon. One of our really beautiful family friends, Falcon. So Falcon was Matt's minder on The Bachelor. And a minder is basically like he was Matt's chaperone. Well, they do exactly that. They mind you. Yeah. So when you are The Bachelor or you're a contestant on The Bachelor, you get given a minder. And it's the person who means that you can't have your phone. They can't stop you from getting access to the outside world. They basically babysit you. So Falcon was Matt's babysitter for the entire time that he was a bachelor and now he's gone on he works for Hamish and Zoe Blake he's their PA he's such a cool and interesting person and he is so beautifully generous and he organized this

unbelievably incredible gift so he organized his friend who is a chef to come and do homemade pasta with Marley she got to like create gnocchi it was all very Italian and very like it was beautiful but his name was Chef Gianni and he came and he just like brought so much food to the point where every single person that was there, like all our families and friends were sitting there with their pants undone. I had to undo my belt as a step one and then step two was I had to take my jeans down. All right.

What is your suck? My suck, I said it at the start but nothing's going to overtake it this week, is just my eggs or my lack thereof. That's it. I mean I've already spoken about it but it was just a real shock and I wasn't expecting it which made it worse. But I guess now moving forward the expectation would be there. I think I'd expect less.

so anything that I get that's more is a bonus so rough week and a lot of people messaged me I didn't say this at the start of the chat a lot of people messaged me their journeys with egg freezing and my heart goes out to all of you because not all of them are successful some people didn't even make it some people didn't get any some people you know lots of different problems so I guess just know that everyone going through it it might feel like you're the only person that is having these results but you're not there are so many other women that are experiencing this as well so my thoughts are with everybody going through it my sweet i'm not you know we don't have to revisit it but my sweet is a pasta the full course is a pasta it was like all my dreams

come true as someone that would have pasta for breakfast i frothed the whole thing brit's sweet was also falcon monte cristo my sweet is also falcon monte cristo keisha uh my suck for the week last night i was having a shower with my boyfriend and there's this thing about like Apartments in Bondi are disgustingly overpriced, right? My apartment doesn't even have skirting boards. It's got no fly screens. It is such a bare bones apartment, but I pay a lot of money for it, as we all do.

Anyway, one thing about the apartment, and I've just gotten to the point where I'm like, I can't live like this anymore, is that you have specifically five minutes of hot water. Yeah, that's rough. Woe to go. I cannot wash my hair in one go. I've got to stop the hot water halfway through and let the conditioner soak in. So what I'm hearing is you were trying to get freaky last night.

No, it wasn't like I was so hungover. It was not a sexy shower. It was just that two people needed to shower and he was in there for about three minutes before I got to the shower. And so I had to like shower in the cold. And I was just like, how am I 30 years old paying this amount of money for an apartment that I cannot even have a fucking warm shower in. That's annoying.

That's really upsetting. Do you know what else is upsetting? I would have thought that your suck for the week was the fact that there's all these photos of you with your face in a bucket and your ass out. I would have thought that was your suck. I blocked it out. To give a bit of context to that, I had a celebration

and this is my sweet. I've had two of the best weekends of my life back to back. You guys are big parts of that because we've hung out on both of those weekends. I have gotten to do things to celebrate my 30th birthday we're speaking about how I wasn't really a birthday person but I just have had such a beautiful reminder of how phenomenal the people that I have in my life are and so we went and had lots and lots and lots of mugs on Saturday Keisha celebrated it with bottomless margaritas and let me tell you it was bottomless by the end

of the night and I have seen the photographic evidence of that bottom Toblerone took a picture off me and I can't remember this but I've got a jumper on and I'm laying over my bed and yes look I did have my head in a bucket it wasn't my best moment and your whole my whole bare bum is showing and it's like it's not hot and anyway it looks great it was a good bum and the light was hitting it at just the right angle it was quite shimmery it was like a shimmery smooth tanned butt honestly if you were ever gonna have a photo of someone vomiting with their face in a bucket like it was a beautiful bum by the end of it she goes hey falcon monte cristo want to see masks yeah that was a particularly low point and i had the seediest hangover yesterday but

all worth it i just had i've had two of the best weekends of my life it's like you said it's the people you have around you people like falcon that just make you feel good after you leave your presence you don't even know him that well and falcon's the person you say over laura and i he's been every day with falcon is also keisha sweet anyway guys that is it from us today we hope that you loved the episode. We hope that you learned something. And like we said, please go and do the 1% chat with your family or with your friends or with yourself and figure out what is that one thing that you can change that will incrementally make your life better. And if you have loved the episode, share it with a friend, subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or

Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast. So that is always dropping into your feed the moment that it is released. And let Stephen Bartlett know that you really enjoyed him being on Life Uncut and then he might come and join us again. Tag him. Tag him, tag him. Share this episode. Tag, tag, tag, tag. No, yeah, please.

The thing that really helps us and the thing we really, if you do one thing this week is to share the episode. Put it on your story, tell a friend, word of mouth, anything, but we really appreciate you sharing the love. So don't forget, tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friends and share that love because we love love. And share that love. You really, really, like, brought it home today.

You get thrown so easy. I said one where different Laura's eyes were like. No, I was like, what are you doing? Why? And share that love. And share that love. I was just trying something new. Bye.

Bye-bye. We'll be right back.