Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Tiny Daily Habits That Rewire Your Brain - Jake Humphrey & Damian Hughes

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

I sat down with Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes — the guys behind one of the biggest podcasts on the planet — and what they told me completely reframed how I think about success. Forget the big goals, forget the hustle porn — turns out the only thing separating the best in the world from everyone else is a handful of tiny, almost embarrassingly simple daily habits. Jake Humphrey is one of Britain's best-respected sports presenters. Formerly a Premier League presenter at BT Sport, Jake has covered events ranging from Formula 1 to the London Olympics and was the youngest-ever presenter of the BBC's Match of the Day. Damian Hughes is an expert on high-performing cultures. A trusted advisor to businesses and sportspeople around the world, he has been praised by the likes of Richard Branson, Muhammad Ali, Roger Banister, and Alex Ferguson. Get their brilliant new book Micro-Habits: Tiny Changes That Supercharge High Performance here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/476360/micro-habits-by-hughes-jake-humphrey-and-damian/9781529976205 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Be a spark of blind. If you're the spark of light, you get more chances to bat. If you're the spark of light and things go wrong, people are rooting for you. We underestimate the importance of what we can do as individuals, particularly in a world where there's 24-hour revolving news, where the world seems so big and so muddled,

we just think, well, how can I impact the world? I'm just an individual, there's nothing I can do. Well, the first thing to remember is if you go back through history, it's either individuals or small groups of individuals that have always changed the world. You start up being the light in the room. You walk into a room and you act like a thermostat, not a thermometer. A thermometer just tells you the temperature.

A thermostat goes in and thinks now, man, I'm changing the temperature. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is Jake Humphrey and Damien Hughes. They are Sunday Times best-selling authors and hosts of the high-performance podcast. But they got a best-selling book. It's called Microhabits. Tiny changes at supercharged high-performance. So guys, loving you coming in. I love the podcast, by the way.

We should talk a little bit about that as well. You've got over 400 conversations on high performance, but you've spent a year decoding what makes extraordinary people tick. I actually, I think one of you handed me the book. I can't remember how I actually got the book, but I remember reading it on the way home from London. So I think either you or your publisher gave me the book. and I thought the book was awesome.

It was a little bit like atomic habits in some ways, but better in other ways because there was like real intense stories in the book. And so let's go to some of these Olympic champions, world class coaches, entrepreneurs, military leaders. What surprised you guys most about high performers? And you can each take the question. Well, first of all, thanks for having us on, Anthony. It's a real privilege to get to chat with you.

and thanks for reading the book as well. That's always a privilege. We came up with the idea that we've done over 400 interviews with these incredible people on the podcast. And one of the things is we often talk about great abstract ideas like motivation or having a vision or drive. And what we wanted to do was sort of drilled down into what are the small things that anybody can understand,

what leads to motivation, what leads to greater drive. So we started exploring small behaviours that we'd seen that, I mean, you referenced Atomic Habits, we sat down with James Clear who had this great line that the heaviest weight in the gym is always the front door. So James had spoke to us about, it's often just finding one small step you can take that has that catalyst effect for others.

So we spoke to Charles Dewey, the Pulitzer Prize winning author who shared with us that he'd spent 15 years researching his book, communicators and we said distill 15 years of wisdom down into just a simple habit that any of us can take away and he spoke about every conversation is either a social, emotional or technical conversation so he sums it up as one of three H's every conversation is either a request to be heard to be helped or to be hooked and if you can work out which of those three conversations you're having with the other person what we find is that you connect so much at a deeper level

the trust, the cooperation, the generosity that you feel with that other party become so much more significant. So that's an example of a micro habit where anybody can start a conversation and work out very quickly. Is this a hug, a hear, or a help one? Yeah, Anthony, I think really micro habits is a self-help book for people that don't like self-help books. And in some ways, I almost felt embarrassed that we were charging people right for this

book because it's so obvious. But I think we live in a world where we've been told for years. that you have to have a big goal, you have to have a big ambition, you have to have a dream, you have to write it down, you have to have the big thing on the horizon, the B-Hag, we call it in UK business, don't we, big, hairy, audacious goal. And I think we oversubscribe for that. And we under-subscribe for the fact that we've interviewed now, as you mentioned, 400 people on the high-performance podcast, including yourself.

And wherever we have these conversations with people, it becomes absolutely clear that the reason why they've got to where they have in life is the behaviours that they've taken on board. So the best example from the book is that Tom Daly originally started off by drawing a picture of himself on the 2012 Olympic gold medal winning position as one of the British diving hopes for 2012. He would have been about seven or eight years old at the time because he was a very young kid and his coach said to him, you know, like, that's fine. You can think about that. But drawing a picture of it and dreaming of doing it is never going to get you there. What will, though, are the small, daily, actionable things. So every day, when you start your day, or you to write down three things that's going to get you closer to me.

a gold medalist at 2012. So it would be turn up for training on time, do some extra stretching, listen to my coach. Those three things are going to, they're not sexy and they're not exciting and you can't market them really, but they're going to get you much closer to your end goal than that big, ambitious poster on the wall that tells you can you can achieve a thing you always want. And that's really why we wanted to write this book, because we wanted it to provide genuine value for people. And it's stuff that anyone can do. You know, Jake, when we did the podcast, I don't know if you guys remember this, but you talk to me about your show.

It was almost vectored into something that was going to be entirely different. You know, what was the version of your show that didn't happen? And what is the origin story that still shapes the two of you in terms of how you interview? Because I think it's very important to the book. Yes, so well, I remembered, Anthony. Well, so I originally came up with two ideas for high performance or for the conversations I wanted to have. at the time I was working as a sports broadcaster

who in the UK hosting Champions League football, Premier League football, the Formula One. And one of my ideas was called One Last Thing Before I Go. And it was a conversation with people who were in end of life care. But it had to be people who weren't ready for the light to be turned off. People who were still ready to attack the world, who had a reason to live,

who had an ambition to remain alive. And I recorded some of those episodes, and quite frankly, they were just too painful to continue. They were impacting me to a point that I couldn't really cope with them. But I also wanted to talk about the things I'd learned while doing elite sport presenting for over 30 years. And what that was, was that when I was hosting the Formula One, I didn't really care who won the Grand Prix. When I was hosting football, I didn't really care who won the football match. Was it Arsenal? Was it Manchester United? Was it Manchester City? I didn't

mind. What I loved about that was how did these people get themselves to a place in their life where they can find an edge over others? And I kind of wanted to talk about it, but I didn't, but I knew that it wasn't the kind of thing that a TV channel would commission. So a friend recommended a podcast. But then I was super nervous because my background is on Kids TV. And I thought, people are just going to laugh at this former Kids TV presenter attempting to have conversations about high achieving individuals managing to find their non-negotiable behaviours.

So I met Damien, luckily. He was talking to a professional football team and I went along to watch the talk that he was giving to the team. We met and it started from there. And the entire premise of the show at that point, in my head was let's explain to the world how you've got to work harder than everyone else, how you've got to be, you know these days, Anthony, and this is a world that you frequented for a long time, the alpha male world of work harder than everybody else, beat your chest,

push yourself to your limits, get up earlier, go to bed later, drink your electrolyte drinks, get in the gym, push, push, push, push, on one day you'll be happy. It's only when we started having conversations. You left out the Viagra, Jacob. Well, exactly. The Viagra is also an extension ingredient to that happiness. Yeah. What we realize from all these conversations with these high achieving people is a lot of them do all those things, but they're not very happy.

And it's this lack of happiness then became fascinating for Damien and I. So really what we've now distilled high performance down to is finding joy in what you do because are you a high performer if you're not loving it. But also high performance is very simple. It's doing the best you can where you are with what you've got. If you can live a life doing those three, those three things, then you can't be far wrong. And often we overcomplicate what high performance really is. The reason I brought this up, number one, you have to be flexible with your achievement. You guys found a niche, but you were going in a couple of different directions before you got there.

I think we have to be honest with ourselves in terms of what we're good at or what we're not good at. I think you're very good at understanding that. But then the second thing, which I, you know, I really took from you guys. And again, this is, you know, something that James also writes about in a time. habits, if you just change a few things, right? Getting up early. Talk about something in the book where if you just shift your morning alarm by 15 minutes. Damien, what happens? Tell us about the chemical reaction of that small change. Well, one of the things that we know is that feeling that we have some degree of control over our circumstances is one of the big pillars to sort of

happiness and high performance in any way. So that idea of then being responsive rather than reactive just reinforces that sense of autonomy and control. So choosing to set your alarm a bit early and therefore getting up in a calm state, maybe making time to eat breakfast, spend time with your loved ones, maybe leave the house in a calmer manner rather than rushing out, is all elements that then put you in a place where your executive functioning, your reasoning and your higher levels of thought are able to be accessed rather than constantly being on the back foot and reacting and triggering those fight or flight responses.

I mean, I'll give you a good example from the book, Anthony, that we interviewed an amazing comedian in the UK called Sarah Pascal and she spoke about how for years when she started her stand-up career, she would be sort of waiting behind the curtain to be announced and she would be convincing herself that people in this order don't think women are funny, they're going to hate me, they're going to not think I'm as good as the last person that stood on the stage. And it occurred to her one day.

She thought, who is this thought process actually helping? So she decided to adopt a philosophy that's been around since the 1950s from the psychotherapist Carl Rogers of unconditional positive regard. Rather than be paranoid that everybody is out to get you, she decided to be pro-noid and assumed that everybody was out to help her. So she started telling herself a slightly different. revised story that these people have left the house tonight when they could have watched TV so they've

come out for live entertainment these people want to laugh these people want to like me and she found that just that small tweak in what she was talking to herself allowed her that when she got out on the stage she was far more relaxed she was far more confident and she was able to create that connection far faster than what she's been doing previously and that to me is a encapsulation of a micro habit in action it doesn't cost you a penny it's small enough to understand, but it's speedy enough that you can implement it right away and see the results quickly. Thank you for tuning in an open book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot

more coming. And now back to the show. There's so much packed in that. But the battle, and again, what great theme from your book is the battle is inside your own mind, right? Ultimately, Right. By the way, you know, I've tried stand up. I'm two for three. My first stand up, I was like, oh, this is awesome. I got to do it again. And then I flop the second time. And I literally had sweat rings under my arms. And I was like, this is terrible. And I had to go do it a third time. But it is your belief in yourself that gets you going. You know? Why did you decide to attack that? I think it's one of the most difficult things in the world. Yeah. If you're in public speaking or you're doing a podcast. like the two of you guys. I mean, you got to go, I mean, by the way, you guys are funny. I mean, I'd listen to, I haven't listened to all 400 of your interviews, but you guys are funny.

You're cheeky, you're witty. Okay, but you know, you have a serious podcast which has wit to it. But in a stand-up situation, you're there, and everyone there knows you're there to be funny. So there's a incremental amount of pressure in that situation that's very different from the conversation that you and I, the three of us are having right now. And so for me, it's very daunting.

It's very pressurized. Can I pass on the tip? We had a comedian that we interviewed called John Bishop. There's a film recently come out called Is It On? I don't really saw it. We'll have that in it. But it's based on John Bishop's story that he was a guy that was working in the pharmaceutical industry for years and his wife left him.

And she said that it'd become boring, that he'd become too corporate, it'd become a corporate drone. So she left him, took the three kids and he would have them every weekend and then on a Monday he'd hand the kids back over to his wife and no, he wouldn't see them again for a week. So to cope with the sort of trauma he was going through,

he started taking himself out into his local city where he went to a comedy club and he realised that he could get in for free if he agreed to do the open mic night. And it was from there that he started sort of just talking about his real life, his real life situations. And he tells a lovely story that one night he was in there delivering a set

and his wife was in with a friend. And she didn't know he was doing stand-up comedy. And she said that in that moment, the spark the person should fall in love with was stood in front of the stage talking to her. And they rekindled the relationship and started again. But John talked with this great story that he said, one of the tips that he'd learn,

and I thought if this is going to help you with your stand-up career if you choose to go back into it, was he said, when you walk onto the stage, say nothing for ages, but move something like he would pick up a chair or a microphone stand. And he said, just that brief period of time, you direct everybody's attention to you and the anticipation of what you're going to say next has them on the end of the mind. All good stuff. I'm going to try it again, of course. I don't know if I'm going to ever be super good at it.

But I think the funniest people are the ones that are saying the truth, guys, right? Because when you say the truth, a lot of people can't handle the truth. And they, strictly, if you say it with some level of much. What do you talk about, Anthony? Is it based around your history and U.S. Talk about life and talk about raising kids and talk about my White House career. And, you know, by the way, I could give you five interactions with Donald Trump because it would be peeing in your pants because it doesn't even sound normal.

But then you know it has to be because normal everything, abnormal everything is. Okay, so I want to go to some of these interviews, guys, if you don't mind. Usain Bolt to Matthew McConaughey. What are the main, I mean, you write about it. So tell us, what are the main universal habits that consistently separate the top performers? Because you would think, Usain Bolt is different from Matt McConaughey. But in so many ways, they're very similar. Tell us how.

The thing that links for Anthony is that they've understood the power of being the light in the room. And to throw in another guest that's joined us on high performance, it was Will I Amu who came on and said, be a spark of light. He said, if you're the spark of light, you get more chances to bat. If you're the spark of light and things go wrong, people are rooting for you. We underestimate the importance of what we can do as individuals, particularly in a world where there's 24 hour revolving news, where the world seems so big and so muddled, we just think, well, how can I impact the world? I'm just an individual.

There's nothing I can do. Well, the first thing to remember is if you go back through history, basically, it's either individuals or small groups of individuals that have always changed the world. So I have a reminder to anyone that listens to high performance is you start up being the light in the room. You walk into a room and you act like a thermostat, not a thermometer. A thermometer just tells you the temperature. A thermostat goes in and thinks, no, man, I'm changing the temperature. And it's a beautiful way to live.

So it's kind of impacted the way that we live. So if I walk, if I take my kids, I've got a 10 and 13 year old, if we go to the park and there's five or six benches around a play area and there's one person on one bench, I will go and sit on the bench next to the person and just spark up a conversation. everyone knows something that you don't and I think all of these high performers that we have on the show they have become explorers they're constantly looking for information they don't have

but Usain Bolt let's talk about those two Usain Bolt's coach wants to him you're going to have to learn how to lose before you can learn how to win and that was a totally confusing concept for Usain Bolt but he went to get a guy who was so nervous in his first race

that he could barely tie his shoelaces together because he was shaking so much to winning an Olympic gold without even bothering to tie up his shoelaces because he was so confident. And that ability to realize, I know that if I push myself to the limit and I lose,

then it can happen. But if I push myself to the limit is the only way that I'm actually going to win this race. And I think back to Matthew McConaughey, it's kind of an identical lesson said in a very different way where he said to us, just don't leave crumbs. You know the great George Bernard Shaw poem where he says,

I want to be thoroughly used up when I'm gone? That is how these people are living. There's sparks of light in the room. They're thermostats. They're givers of energy. They change how people around them feel. They're optimists. No matter how bad a day can be,

they believe that tomorrow is going to be a great day. So they get out of bed and they go again. They're kind of like they're playing the lottery all the time. They're buying tickets every single day. And it only takes one lottery ticket to pay out once a year. And you're doing pretty well. It's so well said. So talk about building a better future,

are young people, okay? And what I love about you guys is that you're sharing your book during this national year of reading in the UK. And let's talk about lifelong learning. Because everything that you just said is true, Jake. But then there's also this spark of intellectual curiosity where I think, I'd like to think I'm a different person than I was at age 21, you know, 41 years later. Talk a little bit about that. Talk about the need for people to constantly read and constantly try to improve themselves. Well, I grew up in a neighborhood similar to yours on, so blue-collar neighborhood in Manchester

in the north of England. So my dad was a boxing coach. So I grew up surrounded by sort of these incredible physical specimens, guys that were going on to Olympic games and, you know, boxing, world titles eventually. So the message that I took out of that environment, though, was it was about the power of education and being able to be a sponge,

whether that you were choosing to go after elite performance physically or in my dad's case, he pushed me down the route of academia. He realized that I wasn't particularly good at boxing, but he said that you can always go and learn. And it was very much that idea about being a sponge, not a rock, This is one of the things that we've heard from so many of our guests that there's almost two ways you can go and experience anything. You can either go and be curious and spun you and seek to soak up as much information as you can.

Or you can be impervious to that information and just let it wash over you. I sometimes think of, there's a great book by a guy called Andrew Lou Goldham. He was a Rolling Stone's first manager and he tells a story in the 60s. He took Jimmy Hendrix into a club in New York and there was a guitarist he went to see on there, who Andrew Lugland said, this guy was dreadful. It was obvious in the first couple of courts that this guy didn't know what he was doing.

And he said, come on, let's leave. And Jimmy Hendricks said, no, I'm staying. And when he said, what on earth he's staying for? He said, this guy is that bad. He might do something by accident that is a spark of genius. And I sometimes think of that example that even somebody as elite as Jimmy Hendrix

was open, he was open to learning from anybody that was putting themselves in the arena to do something with it. And when we think about this national year of reading, I often, like, look, there's all kinds of quotes in there that leaders are readers. But this idea that you've got some of the finest minds on the planet have distilled all their years of wisdom and experience, and they put it in a page of a book.

And it's there for you, if you want to take that mindset of being a sponge and going to soak it up and be able to assimilate it into your own life. I think it's sad, you know, Anthony, that we stop exploring at some point in our lives. There was a bit of research done where researchers went into a lot. classroom of three roles and said, put your hands up if you can sing and every hand went in the air. And then what's into a classroom of 13 year olds, asked them the same question and two hands went up. Because everyone added, well, put your hands in, put your hand up if you can sing, well. They assumed that's what they were asking.

And I think what are problems with life is that we assume that if we're not good as something, then we need to stop doing it. Or there's a moment where we stop exploring or seeing what's next. And I think it's such a shame. My message, particularly for young people, is that in this world where you're given so much negative information, The reality is you've never lived at a greater time. You've never been able to access every book ever written on the internet within moments of wanting to read them.

Like that literally wasn't possible for the previous generation. It's possible for this generation. You know, you're the great tutoring that AI can provide us as well. So is it totally right? That's also a game changer. And, you know, we've created a high performance foundation, Anthony, working in schools right across the UK. 100,000 young people at the moment are getting lessons from high performance.

where they sit in the classroom setting and they watch video content from the guests join us on the show. So when you've got leading internationally famous figures, teaching lessons to young people about open-mindedness and being inquisitive and being resilient and being an explorer, I think we're, I think we want to suffer. Well, I greatly appreciate you both. Okay, we are down to the five words in my podcast. So it's, I'm going to give you the word. You have to give me. one word. You're going to get yourself tight. You're going to get yourself tight here. Ready? So if I say the word reading, you say what? Growth. Okay. If I say the word mindset, kindness. Okay. Habits. Everything.

Discipline. Consistency. High performance. Available. What I learn from the two of you, high performance is repeatable. If you use all of those words that I just said. So it's Jack Humphrey and Damien Hughes, ladies and gentlemen, bestselling authors, micro habits, tiny changes that supercharge high performance, but also an award-winning podcast called High Performance. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book. Thank you, Anse. Thank you for having us on me. It's been a privilege.

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