The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - 6 BEST Pieces Of Business Advice That Made Me Millions
Episode Date: October 25, 2021This episode, we’re doing something a bit different and I answer the questions that are most pressing to you. Over the past few weeks, more and more people have been reaching out to me for my advice... and my opinion on the issues that matter most to them. We’re covering everything from how to best focus your time, imposter syndrome, what character traits it takes to build a successful business, how to reach out to successful people for advice, and what motivates me to get out of bed in the morning. Thinking about things so directly helped put them in a bit more perspective for me, and I hope they can for you as well. In this community, we’re all about helping everyone, no matter who they are, to be the best version of themselves. We’ve had some incredible stories in the last few weeks, and we’ve got more to come. But I thought it would be important to pause, reflect, and take a step back. In the process I’ve found more clarity about some things important to me, and I think after listening to this you will too. Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
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Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want
to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can
say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would
expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America,
thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack
and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United
States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard
in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And
thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I get so many questions
from all of you guys in my DMs, in the comment section on YouTube, everywhere. So I want to try something new. I'm going to start answering some of those questions
that I've historically answered privately in public, so more of you can gain access to those
answers. I asked everybody in my Telegram community to submit videos of questions that they want
answered from me. And in this video today, I'm going to answer those questions with total, total
honesty. And these questions range
across business to personal questions to questions about relationships and mental health and
challenges that you're facing. So here is the first question you asked me this week.
My name is Daniela. I'm 18 and I'm about to enter my first year at uni to study economics.
I have a lot of commitments. I'm running a business with my business partner. I'm making
music. I'm learning languages and I'm playing sports. And I worry that my focus is
split. How do you suggest I move forward? Do you think I should grit my teeth and balance everything
to the best of my ability? Or do you think I should prioritise and sacrifice for better quality
output despite loving every single thing? I'm looking forward to your response. Thank you so
much for listening. I think the single biggest lesson that I learned when I was starting off early in my business
career was the importance of focus. And I had this drummed into me by one of my investors one day
when I came to them and presented this new idea, which was in addition to the current company that
I was building. And they hit me really hard with this like verbal whip and told me, they said,
Steve, focus is everything. And that stayed with
me. I was annoyed at the time because naturally when you're a creative person and a very inspired
person, as many of us are, you have so many ideas. And the problem is you can't take on all of those
ideas at once. And any attempt to do so compromises each individual idea. So if you have three ideas and you're giving them 33% of your time each,
the chance of mastery or success in any of those things
is drastically, drastically reduced.
And especially when it comes to business,
if you're giving anything less than 100% of your focus
to your business,
you can rest assured that there are very competent,
probably better funded competitors out there
that are giving 100%.
Focus and your
time is the only currency that you have. So making the decision to invest only a part of your time
and focus into what you're doing is a decision to reduce the chance of a really successful outcome.
And here's another thing. So I don't know how solid this is as advice, but honestly, when you're young
and you're broke and you're bootstrapping, focus matters even more. So for me, what I would do when I think about the 50 years of my career
is at the very, very start, I'd go very, very, very narrow and I'd try and succeed in something
that will be the gateway, if it is successful, to me being able to build my resources, my financial
resources, my team,
so that I can focus on multiple things. And that's really the trajectory I've taken in my life.
I, at 18 years old, focused on one thing, one business idea and really nothing else. And when
I say nothing else, I also mean a lot of personal things were sacrificed. I focused on that for
about seven years in total. That business became a success. I now have resources to allocate
against multiple things that I want to do, which frees up more time so I can start companies now
and not even be the CEO of these businesses. But when you're starting out in life and your career,
that's not a luxury you have. So my advice for young people would be to do everything in your
power to focus. In business, what we do is we operate in sprints, which means when you have an idea, you assemble a team around it and you focus them for a
dedicated and predetermined period of time, say three months or six months,
only on that idea to give it its best possible chance of success. And after those six months,
you assess it and you make very brutal, very honest, very ego-free decisions whether to
continue or not. That's how I like to think about focus and projects and how to make the decisions
around allocating your time. What you really should do if you want to give an idea its best
possible chance of success, if you want to give DJing your best possible chance of success or
writing that book or becoming a content creator, is you should look at the task and dedicate the
next six months to doing that and only that. If you allocate time to other things in that period, you're reducing the chance
of a positive outcome for that one thing. And I tend to see as well, especially young entrepreneurs,
when they have multiple businesses and multiple things they're pursuing and multiple things
they're trying to master at the same time, as the phrase goes, they become the master of none,
which means they kind of stumble through life never really achieving any real substantive success
Because they've spent all of their life trying things in a half-arsed timid way
If you want to be successful if you want to get mastery in anything that matters to you
Here's where discipline really really matters. You have to install into your mind something. I call this someday shelf, which is
Inspiration comes to you. You have a new idea when you're walking down the street or in the shower. You think that's
brilliant. That will be a multi-gazillion dollar idea. We all do it. If you want to be successful,
don't then add it into your successful idea. Don't then try and contend with two different ideas and
give 50% to each. Put it on the someday shelf and see if it nags you the great ideas will sit there on that someday
shelf and they will nag you and if it nags you for long enough six months for a year then maybe
it's time to take action but my mind has a someday shelf on it that has hundreds and hundreds of
hundreds of things on it and if something sits there for more than a year more than six months
and it's still screaming at me and it doesn't dissolve away and collect dust on the Sunday shelf and disappear into the back,
then I pull it forward and I put a plan in place to give it the sprint it deserves to resource that
idea and give it its best possible chance of success. Hiya Stephen, my name's Chloe and my
question to you is, what do you believe to be the most important character trait that a person has to possess in order to achieve a hugely successful business? I would
love to know. In terms of character traits to build really successful businesses I kind of think of it
in stages and I think of it in stages of the business's life. The question here is about the
character traits it's not about skills or talent or resources it's about character. So at the very start of launching your company, the most important character trait is self-belief,
is believing that you can. Because businesses, they feel like Mount Everest at your doorstep
and they look like incredibly daunting tasks that you typically don't have a ton of experience in
overcoming, right? You've never climbed Mount Everest before. You don't have the resources, you don't know how to get up there, you don't have the experience
to rely on. So there has to be somewhat an extreme level of delusion slash self-belief to even want
to start doing something you've never done before. And then when it comes to creating really
innovative things, you're bringing something into the world that even the world hasn't seen.
So that's where having a belief that this thing can exist
and having that self-belief is also incredibly important.
This is just kind of the inception point of the business.
And when you go out into the world and you start telling people
about your amazing business idea and how successful you think you're going to be
and that you're going to be able to change the world in some type of way
or solve a problem in a new way,
you're going to get tons of positive feedback from your friends maybe,
but also a ton of resistance.
Whenever one of my friends starts a company and they ask me for one piece of advice,
I always say the same thing. I say there's going to become a day in your company where things are
just awful, where it's so unbelievably painful. I've never seen it not happen. So I can say it
with such a high degree
of conviction that it is going to happen to you. So let's not argue about, you know, how we stop
it happening because it'll find you at some point. Let's start thinking now about what it takes to
overcome that day. It requires a ton of resilience. It requires a ton of self-belief. It requires a
certain temperament where someone defaults to logic and reason and not emotion because when
emotion arrives in on that
day then your decision making will go down and you'll make really bad poor decisions that often
exacerbate the problem but the first encounter of the 35 packages of bullshit will build evidence
that you can overcome and I think that will compound in your favor over time I think self-belief and
resilience are probably the number one and number two character traits of anybody that wants to be Wildly successful in business and then quite honestly
Everything else is outside of character traits. I mean, of course it matters to be really really nice. Of course it does
That's that's a
Factor that will increase your probability of success. Of course it matters to be you know
Have a great sense of humor, but I think those two are at the very core of what it takes to be successful
Especially when you're a startup and then everything beyond that is quite often luck is quite often outside of your control
especially in industries like technology and when you're building products because the question then
becomes okay I was resilient I had belief but does the market care and is their product market fit
do people want to use my website my social network my? Do they want to use my product that I've invented? And that's somewhat outside of your control. However, what is
in your control in that phase, let's call this phase two of business, is your humility and ego,
which will often show up stubbornly trying to prove that you were right. And entrepreneurs like
me in the past have been
too romantic about our initial hypothesis, about how we thought our product was going to be used,
how many people we would use it, the problem it would solve. And you look at your product and you
see clearly in the data that people are using it in a different way. They want a different thing
that is outside of your original thesis, your original hypothesis. And some people at that
moment, they'll stubbornly try and push their original idea,
their hypothesis into existence.
Let's increase the marketing.
Let's educate the user base.
But really, if you're humble enough and you're not attached to your ego,
you're attached to the outcome and success of the business, you'll say, let's pivot.
Let's change what we thought was true to fit what we now know is true
and that's where i think humility and and and a little bit of experience because i think
experience generates humility comes from you know when i sit here on the podcast i speak to people
like tom from monzo and other founders of these massive companies that have disrupted industries
one of the things they consistently say to me is, I now know it was 10 times harder than I thought. And we were like 10 times
wrong in our initial hypothesis about how this business would play out than I originally
realized. Throughout all of this, as I've said multiple times in my podcast, from day one to
the day that you exit the business for a $500 billion, sales is everything. Sales is at every
single touch point. And also, especially as your
business gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it's incredibly important to be self-aware because
there's going to be a million things that you're actually not that good at that need to be done
within your business. There's going to be a million things, whether it's finances or, you know,
typing into Excel sheets or it's creative or it's whatever. And so many entrepreneurs I know,
especially young, inexperienced entrepreneurs that I know, fail late in the day. Their business explodes at first and then plateaus and then
declines because they didn't realize that they needed to put in place another CEO. Because for
them, the ego here of replacing themselves and giving someone that very prestigious, very lauded
title wasn't worth it. I can also think of the opposite. I can think of
companies like Gymshark, like Huel, like Tala, Grace Beverly's business, where those founders
have said, you know what? There's someone better to run the company. It's super successful. I'm
going to get out of its way and I'm going to spend all of my time doing something else that I'm
uniquely positioned to do. This is an incredibly important skill. And even in the companies that I
found now, I say to myself, am I really incredibly important skill. And even in the companies that I found now,
I say to myself,
am I really capable of being the CEO?
Is that really where I should be playing?
And in the two businesses that I've founded
since leaving social chain,
I am not the CEO
because that is not what I'm best at.
And I'm more attached to the outcome
and the success of that business
than I am of having that title,
which might get some brownie points
from people that don't really matter anyway.
Hey, Stephen, hope all as well. So my question is with regards to imposter syndrome have you any feedback with regards how to deal with that have you experienced it yourself and
just how to go about like getting out of that mindset and acknowledging that you are potentially
as good at your role as what people think you are and you're not bluffing it or fluking
it and so on thank you so here's the thing I think we all feel deep within us the same feeling
anytime we're in a position that feels a little bit outside of our comfort zone sometimes that
feels like a little bit of nerves in your chest for example when I go up on stage and I know there's
10,000 people behind the curtain of course I feel that in my chest. Of course I have that tingling,
that sensation that they call butterflies.
However, I don't interpret it as being fear,
as being a signal to escape or to avoid the scenario.
My interpretation, which has grown over time
and our interpretations are influenced by our beliefs,
the stories we tell ourselves
based on the evidence we have,
based on our experiences.
And my evidence, my interpretation tells me that I'm ready,
that this feeling is normal and I'm supposed to feel this way.
People sometimes, because of their experiences and the evidence that's created
and the stories that's made them believe about themselves,
will tell themselves that that feeling is fear, that they should run,
that they are ill-prepared, that that feeling is there
because they aren't competent enough to complete this task. So what I'm saying is we all get the feeling,
but the story we tell ourselves is ultimately what creates what some people call imposter syndrome.
For me, if you look at my life, I've kept myself one step outside of my zone of comfort for my
entire life. Of course, I've never been a dragon on Dragon's Den. No one in their first year has
been. I'm looking to my left and seeing Peter Jones, who's been there for 17 odd years, and Deborah
Meaden to my right, who's been there for 15. I am new. However, I'm supposed to spend my life
in situations where I am an imposter. That is the sign of growth. If I'm ever spending too long in a
room or situation where I don't feel to some degree like an imposter,
I am in the wrong room. And if I am to grow, and growth is an incredibly important part of being
stimulated and motivated and being fulfilled, I have to change rooms. For me, in my life,
I've spent my entire life trying to escape my zone of comfort and keeping myself one foot outside of
that zone of comfort. And when you do that, what you find is that zone of comfort expands, you take
one more step, and it expands again.
Every person that's ever done anything for the first time,
whether it's Ed Sheeran singing to a group of people before
or Barack Obama doing one of his speeches
or Usain Bolt running in a track,
when they first started,
they were inexperienced and incapable.
So you should expect and welcome that feeling.
It's a feeling you're supposed to have.
If you're somebody who wants to spend your entire life
Growing and progressing and learning
Which are all things conducive with fulfillment
You should always feel like an imposter
If you're not, I would assert that maybe
Maybe you're playing it too safe
Maybe you aren't challenging yourself enough
So for me, what people call imposter syndrome
Isn't evidence that you're in the wrong situation, one that you aren't supposed to be in. It's clear proof that
you're in the right one. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. I'm supposed to spend my
entire life doing things that make me feel somewhat like an imposter. That is the answer
to a happy, fulfilling, progressful life where I'm striving forward
I'm trying things I'm challenging myself and I'm pursuing goals that are worthwhile we should all
feel imposter syndrome so if you're not then it's time to challenge yourself more
hi Steve my question to you is starting off in an industry in my case healthcare and medicine
how do you approach someone at more senior level and at a level that you want to be at?
To ask them for mentorship or to be able to help you along the journey that they've been on?
Is there anything that you could say, do or offer them that would make them more inclined in taking you on board?
Thank you so much.
The answers to these complex, especially professional questions as it relates to asking and progressing, are always so simple, yet we complicate them. And that would be my answer,
genuinely. It would be, the person you're speaking to, put yourself in their shoes. How busy are
they? What are their interests? What do they want? What could you say to them to make them give you
something very precious to them, which is their time? And like, if you can't answer that question,
I, you know, it makes me slightly concerned because that's an inability to put yourselves in the shoes of somebody else. And that is life, that is sales, that is every single day,
that is empathy. So say there's somebody at the top of my organization and I want them to mentor
me, or there's someone even outside of my organization and I want them to be my mentor.
The first thing I do is I, you know, if it really helps you actually pretend to be them write it
down on a piece of paper what their life looks like let's just do Steve Bartlett you're asking
Steve Bartlett to mentor you so Steve Bartlett's day is he has an unlimited things that people are
asking him to do he's getting thousands of ds on social media. They're all asking him for
stuff. They're asking him for time to go for a coffee, to pick his brain, to be on his podcast,
to speak at their event, to do their show, whatever it might be. So that's probably a really dumb
place to join the noise. Super saturated, probably, you know, he's probably got a PA defending those
inboxes. We're not going to fucking try that. That would be a stupid thing to do let's find the least saturated channel probably quite honestly probably the post or probably you know look at his channel
hierarchy probably twitter there's probably less people there a channel where he's he's um he's
showing like he's responding more but there's there's less people competing there for his time
so we might go for the post or for twitter so let's now pretend that you've got his attention
you've sent something in the post you've written a tweet. You've written a twitter dm. You've got his attention
Once you have his attention, you need to convert it and to do that. You need to understand his psychological incentives
You have to know what I want. You have to solve a problem that i'm looking for you have to appeal to my ego
You know steve. Oh my god. I've listened to every single podcast, right?
You have to understand the dynamics of my life. I know you have absolutely no time. I am this person, right? And that's an
appeal you're making to maybe my empathy, to my care. I am this person. I'm 18 years old. One day
I hope to, you know, build a business like Social Chain. Because I've listened to every single one
of your podcasts, it would literally be my dream if I could just stand in the background of one episode one time,
I promise I won't say a word, it would literally change my life, right? So what you've done there
is you've appreciated, you're not asking me for much, you've appreciated the fact that I'm busy
by saying, I'm just going to stand in the background, which means you're asking me for zilch,
nothing. And then you might end it by saying, and off the back of it,
my friend works at this newspaper or this magazine
or has this blog.
I'm going to write a full transcript of my experience.
This would be, and then again,
you're telling me that I'm going to get something in return.
Right?
And then I look at it as a proposition.
You've touched my ego.
You've made me, you know, care through empathy.
You've asked for nothing in return of my time.
And you've offered me a reward, which is you're going to put it somewhere. You're going to write it somewhere.
You're going to help me by extending the reach. For me, that's kind of the broad structure of a
perfect cold email asking for something from someone that has no, you know, right to give it
to you is incredibly busy and is being asked a lot. The worst possible case scenario. Let me give
you the worst possible case scenario.
Hi, Steve, someone mentioned you the other day,
which means that you don't know who I am
and you've not bothered to do your own research.
I want you to mentor me.
Let me know when to start.
And then you've ended that
with the let me know when to start or whatever,
which is a total presumption
and it's sort of disrespect and disregard of my time and my ability to make that decision and then yeah and also what you've done with that
message because it's so short and ill-conceived you've proven to me that you're lazy and that
you're not creative and that you're probably not someone that's going to bring much value to my
life and that's genuinely how it works in my life i swear to god i get ds from young people. They literally say, R, letter R, space,
there, any jobs go in.
You've perfectly ruled yourself out
with that message of ever working for me ever.
Because you've told me
that you're both uncreative and lazy.
In only a couple of words,
it's a remarkable thing to achieve
with such few amounts of words.
You've told me you're lazy and uncreative you will never work for anything that i do
in my entire life if i ever see that message and it shows that you don't actually give a
fuck either like you didn't even go on the website to see if there were jobs going or you didn't you
know and so that's the that's the antithesis of creativity, attention to detail, care, and ultimately success. And, you know, for
some fucking reason people still do it. What are the three things that you would look out for to
know that you're on the right path for success? So the first thing is definitely enjoyment. If
you're not enjoying it, especially at an early stage when it's going to be most difficult,
then the chance of you being successful is
somewhere below 1%. That is the single most important thing. Are you enjoying it? If the
answer is no, then honestly you should quit because it's only going to get more difficult.
And the thing is, we also tend to shy away from things we're not enjoying. We tend to procrastinate
away from them because they create psychological discomfort. So if you're not enjoying it,
you're probably also going to do a pretty shitty job at it. It's hard to show up for
something every single day that you're not enjoying. The second thing is, at the very start of your
business, there's not going to be a ton of evidence that it's going well. There's probably not going
to be a ton of revenue, probably not going to be a ton of users, but there will be evidence of
progress, evidence that you're getting better,
evidence that you're making marginal gains. And for me, and even with this podcast, I don't
necessarily look for results today or more viewers or more downloads or more revenue. What I'm looking
for is, is this thing getting 1% better week over week? Because it only then takes 100 weeks for us
to be 100% better. And that means we're moving in the right direction and lastly I would say you're
looking for some kind of validation of your hypothesis so in the context of this podcast
my validation would be am I getting feedback from people and from the data that they are enjoying
the format and the concept are they coming back next? There might not be thousands of people yet.
There might just be 10.
But are those 10 people inviting one more
and making my audience 11 people?
And there's always some evidence,
even at the very, very start of your business,
especially if you've built it in a lean way
just to test your hypothesis,
that your hypothesis is being validated,
that your product does have market fit,
that people are enjoying the content you're creating. And that can act as a tailwind to create belief, to create enjoyment and motivation,
which will spur you on to carry on going. So to summarize, are you enjoying it? Are you making
marginal gains, i.e. progress? And lastly, has your hypothesis shown some evidence that it is correct is their product
market fit are people enjoying what you're making are they coming back again hey steven the gang um
nice to uh hook up with you um my question is um i've been watching a lot of your podcasts a lot
of your motivation does help me a lot um i've struggled over the years with anxiety, depression. I've gone through a bit
of a bout of it lately. I'm just wondering where you get your motivation from, what makes you tick
and what makes you get out of bed every day. I'll get there. I'm looking for other avenues and
you're inspiring me every day and just wanted to know really what motivates you and drives you.
So it's kind of ironic that within your question lives the answer to your question.
You said at the start of that, that you listen to this podcast, it gives you value and it's helped you.
That's the reason why I get out of bed in the morning. Purpose.
And so for me, the thing that drives me in any sort of discipline or pursuit or ambition or hobby that I have,
it's very, very simple. And I've said this many times before, it has to be a worthwhile goal
that's challenging that I can pursue with people I love. And what you said about how this podcast
has helped you is the reason it's worthwhile to me. Of course, it's challenging. It takes tons
of my time. The production takes a lot of effort, but it's a worthwhile challenge.
So it's one worth pursuing.
And lastly, I get to do it with people that I actually love.
And that's just a real fundamental thing about human beings
because you can be pursuing a goal
that means the world to you, a goal you love,
a goal that feels incredibly worthwhile and meaningful.
But if you're doing it with people that are toxic
in a toxic environment, it then becomes unworthwhile. It
loses its enjoyment. And the people you're pursuing a goal with are intrinsically attached to the
motivation to pursue it. So the thing that gets me out of bed and the prism in which I make my
decisions through in my life is, is this a worthwhile goal? Worthwhile is totally subjective.
It's how it makes you feel inside here. Is it a challenge?
Because the science says if something isn't challenging you, your motivation will decline.
And are you doing it? Are you pursuing it surrounded by people you love? That'll make it a
way more enjoyable, way more sustainable pursuit. Thank you for all of your questions. And if you
want to put a question to me, the details on how to do that are down below in the description.
I hope you enjoyed this new segment and I can't wait to answer your question next week.