The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - E14: John Vincent - Building A Restaurant Empire

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

In Chapter Fourteen, I'm honoured to invite John Vincent, Co-Founder of hugely popular healthy eating fast food chain Leon. Having built an empire of 52 restaurants, I wanted to find out what drives him and the lessons he's learnt along the way. Tragically, John's father passed away a week prior to our conversation, and he discusses what his fathers influence has taught him.

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 time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you

that listen to this show let's continue john vincent co-founder and CEO of the European restaurant chain, Leon. 53 restaurants and counting. This podcast is deep. It's introspective, personal, and at times it gave me goosebumps. John created Leon in his father's image. John named Leon after his father. And the week before I sat down with him to do this podcast, his father tragically died. When you dedicate your life to creating something for someone and then they die, how do you feel? How does he deal with the inevitability of bad news every second of every

day that running 53 restaurants brings him? How did he build Leon? What was the sacrifice? What is his truth? What does he need to tell you? This conversation with John has terrified my ego. It changed my perspective and it reminded me of what actually matters. You have to listen. Without further ado, this is chapter 14 and I'm Stephen Bartlett. This is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. John, thank you so much for joining me. It's a great honor to meet you. I'm a big Leon fan. Thank you. Yeah. So Leon is my way of staying in shape and being good to meet you. I'm a big Leon fan. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so Leon is my way of staying in shape and being good to my body.

I'm living a very busy life and it was very interesting to read about the inspiration from Leon. I read that it came from you being left with very little choice as to what food you ate when you were having business meetings. Is that correct? I was working, Henry and I were working

basically as business consultants for a company called Bain & Company. We were advising a lot of boards on how to, you know, with their strategy. And we worked 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. And, you know, the choice was cold sandwiches or it was fast food. It was late night pizzas, late night takeaway. And we were getting fatter and fatter, to be honest with you. And more and more ill.

And so we thought, shit, there's got to be a better way of feeding people. I used to love McDonald's as a kid. Really? I remember being so excited that my mum booked me a birthday party there. I remember being on the floor in the hall, kicking my arms and legs in it with joy that I was actually going to go to McDonald's. And then, you know, then I realised, this stuff ain't good for me. So I thought, why don't we, you know, I'm sure people have heard about it,

why can't we reinvent this stuff so it's just as tasty, but it ain't killing us? And that was the idea. Well, thank you for creating it, because you've certainly helped me keep in shape somewhat while I've been running my business. Leon now has, is it 40 restaurants around the UK? I think 52. 52?

52, including, I think, three in Holland. Okay, so 52. Getting to that point, I grew up working in my mum's restaurant, and I was seven years old. And I remember scrubbing the floors and using a knife to take the old paint off the restaurant walls and then painting the walls through my summer. What I experienced from running my mum's restaurant or at least one, you know, the salad bar was incredible pressure and stress. And, you know, you've got thousands got thousands hundreds of thousands tens of thousands of customers some of them aren't very nice complaining immense heat in the kitchen as well

i hated being in my mum's restaurant you have 53 of them what's the hardest part about having 53 restaurants i'm on a whatsapp group called two or so what is called risks to trading and the other one is emergency comms and on things like risks to trading i probably although i've dutifully turned my phone over i bet you when i turn it over there will be a pump that's broken somewhere on that whatsapp group or a coffee machine which is 86 which means it's broken and the intense practical operational stress, as you say, as you experienced on an important level, that is just replicated now 52 times.

I do sometimes look at people who maybe run hedge funds or people that run internet businesses. And I do think, wow, what must it be like to not have those physical challenges that you experienced in your mum's restaurant? It is an incredibly difficult industry. And we ultimately, our job is to work with people who are necessarily on living wage, often young people. And it is an incredibly tough job to, and I think we achieve it, but incredibly tough job to keep all of those people

motivated when shit happens. Because I promise you that with 52 restaurants, there is something going wrong at any point. And that could be a small thing. It could be a big thing. So I think one has to be Zen about it at some point. If you become affected emotionally by everything that goes wrong and every mishap or every setback then you could make yourself very ill running 52 restaurants a lot of people will make themselves ill over very minor things their boyfriend has uploaded a photo on social media she a girlfriend has liked someone's photo you know this kind of sort of like menial thing which kind of allows you you know makes you think that unhappiness or at least some you know, this kind of sort of like menial thing, which kind of allows you, you know, makes you think that unhappiness

or at least some dissatisfaction is subjective. How have you learnt or become able to deal with so much bullshit, so much unpredictable bullshit at scale? I think the first thing to say is that it is never possible for me to suggest that I am some kind of guru or Jesus who does it continually. So the first thing to say is that anybody who attempts to disassociate themselves from that stress will find themselves failing at some point. That's the first point. I'll give you an example of that.

My dad died last week, last Wednesday. And, you know, I was continued, as you would expect, to's the first point. I'll give you an example of that. My dad died last week, last Wednesday. And, you know, I was continued as you would expect to be affected by that. And my wife was talking to me about something to do with the arrangements and also telling me that she had, her brother was coming a bit later that night with the family. And I remember looking down and someone had given one of our raps a three out of 10. And in that moment, with all the pressures that were going on with my dad, I got pissed off about it. And I ended up in that moment with all the pressures that were going on with my dad i got pissed off about it and i ended up in that moment actually having a row with my wife about it i mean why i was around with my wife or taking it out on katie because she was accusing me of not listening to the fact that her brother was going to be a bit late with her phone i shouted at her right and i

hate that i actually hate the fact that social media pervades people's lives so much so that i cannot escape it you know as long as i've got internet connection i'm going to be bombarded with shit reviews i'm going to be bombarded with customer complaints and i think to some degree we need to recognize the fact that we are with technology building ourselves a bit of a horrible world where one finds it difficult to escape from that but having said that you know i'm finding a lot of insights in the work that i'm doing with the leon well-being director called julian hitch around understanding some of the taoist which is traditional chinese philosophy and some of the zen philosophy that informs the martial art that I've been learning

for the last three years called Wing Chun and a lot of the lessons in there around Taoism and Zen around disassociating yourself emotionally from the crap I think I have learned from and if there's anything that I can suggest to any of the people listening to this, it's really to learn to die every day. There's a verse in the Tao Te Ching which says, die every day, which means recognize the fact that we are all as low as water. The wave is not really separate from the ocean, if that makes sense. The wave looks like a separate thing thing but within the next three seconds is going to submerge back into the water and i think we need to recognize the fact that we are all like waves we're all nothing we're all as level as the sea and i think that there's a certain

mental ill health that has been developed in the west by thinking that we are something other than that, by thinking that we're somehow special or the fact that we need to be different and special and disconnected from other people. And I think I find most comfort in realizing how insignificant and reassuringly insignificant I am. And that helps me. We live in a world where, as you said, everything is designed to make us feel significant, right? The sort of fundamental design of social media is to reinforce us in some way that we are what we said was smart or funny or worth sharing. What, in your perspective, are the dangers, and you've touched on a few of them there, of our kids and your kids growing up in this sort of social media world?

Well, I think it's like, it's the old phrase, isn't it? If you put a lobster or a frog even into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you slowly boil it, then it doesn't realize it's being boiled. And I think our kids are being slowly boiled and they don't realize it. And I went to a conference the other day where they were talking about how babies are going to be chipped and that mothers and fathers will be allowed to have lower taxes and lower insurance if they allow their babies to be tracked from a health perspective. Because, of course, it will reduce the NHS bill. And, of course, it will reduce the policing bill if we know where everyone is and i think we all have to recognize the fact that we will be sold in very what seem to be very rational terms very economically viable terms to track our

own health to accept being monitored in terms of our whereabouts and our physical health and i think we need to recognize that that's shit and that's not good. And I think that the dangers are that on the one hand, we will lose our freedoms that I think are very dear at a practical and an emotional level and spiritual level for people to actually have freedoms. And the other is that we will start to believe our own storytelling and ego.

And I think when you talk, Steve, it's really interesting about we are constantly, you know, told to create our own online brands, to curate our own online brands. You know, I know perhaps when one of my daughters takes a photograph to go on Instagram, maybe it takes an hour and she chooses one photograph out of a thousand. That doesn't happen often, but I've seen that happen. And so therefore people think that what they see online is somehow real and true. And we pretend that social media is a window into truth. And unfortunately it is a window into artifice and the more artifice and lack of truth that we pervade and popularize the more mental health disorders will be created and i think it's based on the other idea the fact that you know people talk about i and we talk about ego we talk about the people that we are but i think we need to recognize that we don't exist by which i mean the steve bartlett or the john vincent

they're both just constructs or Barack Obama. Barack Obama is just a construct. Barack Obama is a set of stories that have been told, set of media, imagery, media, storytelling. And as we think about our own individual identity, it's worth remembering the we that we think exists is based on a whole bunch of myths that we've told ourselves so first of all we're in the car and someone says steve and then you keep hearing this name steve and you're like fucking hell this is getting ridiculous they keep mentioning this word steve what is steve and then eventually you realize shit they think that i'm separate from them that's weird of course i'm not separate from them but That's weird. Of course, I'm not separate from them. But hey, I better start believing it. And then you go to school and they call out your name in class.

And they say, Steve, and you put your hand up. That reinforces his idea that you're separate. And they say, Steve, you've won the history prize. And you go, hey, Steve's good at history. Now, whether it's true, half true or not true, you create a sense of who you are. It's mostly not true. The Steve that we have in our mind or the John Vincent that we have in our mind, it's a set of myths, a set of stories that we tell ourselves and we tell ourselves because we attach identity and constancy to it what's the danger of us doing that the danger is that we start to become very unwell and we stop being happy now so if i think about the major lessons they are do not seek happiness from a future occurrence do not defer happiness to this magical island that exists that

once we arrive at this magical island we will be happy and do not associate your happiness with money do not associate it with fame do not associate it with recognition from third parties because as soon as we put ourselves into a situation where we are deferring happiness into the future, we are clearly off-balanced in the present moment. And if I look at the tribes people that I meet, certainly the ones that I meet in Africa, and the ones that my friends have met in Brazil, they are rooted in the present moment.

They are absolutely conscious and present now. And the problem with living your life abstracted online or abstracted in the future means that you are off balance and you are not getting fulfillment from the now and you know the martial art that i do wing chun is predicated on fulfillment coming from the practice not from the result of the practice not from one day I will win this fight, not one day I will have this glory. I hear what everybody is asking themselves, which is how do you be present? I read your Twitter bio

and it says that you're taking a break from Twitter to be more present. So I was going to ask you about that. So how do I be more present in a very, very busy digital world where notifications are bombarding me and everything is about the future and making plans and schedules and things like this so we're talking very practically aren't we is that what you mean okay so yeah i think there's a practical

element and then there's a sort of mental element the mental element is to start by not valuing anything so by which i mean recognize the fact that ultimately the very act of breathing the very act of trusting our subconscious processes to drive our immune system or the process of making sure that we're breathing only value that so that will immediately put you into a situation where all you're valuing is the things that are literally within your own body as soon as you value a prize that you might get or what a girlfriend might think of you you are putting yourself in a much worse position from point of view of your own mental health and almost act as if you're dead and i think some people might think this is a bit strange so bear i think people are going to have to bear with me here but if you say i am dead

i've died it allows you to suddenly revalue the things you really then want to value so if you start with a starting point that says nothing nothing is of value i am dead you then start adding back the things into your life that are only the absolutely critical things and what are those things to you on the practical side i would say breathing is the most wonderful way of becoming present and physical based meditation so some people may have downloaded the headspace app or some people might have found that you know those sorts of things in terms of meditation help i would say from the point of view of what we've learned in wing chun the physical movement even literally walking and breathing and allowing your body and your mind to synchronize and breathe as you do it. Something literally as simple as going for a walk and consciously breathing as you do and walk away from your phone, walk away from any devices and be in touch with nature.

As in it could be a tree in a park in Manchester. It could be a small bush that you find on the estate where you live. But literally find something. It could be a small frog. It could be a spider. It could be a tree. But just observe that. That's a very practical thing that people can do. How do you pair running a business, which is, you know, making a lot of money and

being an entrepreneur and pursuing scale in business with the pursuit of valuing nothing and not putting importance on things like money. So I remember a couple of weeks ago, one of the podcast listeners asked me a question. He works in a company at the moment, and he's been on a journey of kind of figuring out what's important, meditation. And he's almost arrived at the point where he believes that what he's doing every day is to generate money and success, which he doesn't think is important anymore, but he's now caught in that. And he wanted to speak to me about what's important. And, you know, he almost feels like he's become something or driving towards something that he knows won't make him happy. Yeah. So there's kind of two questions.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think what's really interesting is that the purpose of Leon is not deferred happiness. So let's take an example. Fuji had an objective to kill Kodak. That was their mission. A, that was future-based. And B, as soon as you've killed Kodak, what do you do then? Do you have no mission? And so the purpose of Leon is to eat and live well, starting with ourselves now. So the very purpose of Leon, the very mission of Leon is not deferred to the future.

It's something that we can start now positively in the present moment. So everybody at Leon is not thinking our job is to increase the share price to X or the market capitalization of the company to a billion. That is not what leon people think and i think it's there's a book called the bhagavad gita which is a hindu script which has been talked about in a book called the great work of your life by a yogi called stephen cope and i'd really recommend people to read this because what it says is that fundamentally happiness and fulfillment comes from mastery as i said before being in the present moment. Now, the money that Leon requires is the byproduct of the mastery, and it is not the objective. Business Award. And Sajid Javid, who was, I think that was, excuse me if I haven't pronounced his name right, the business minister stood up and said, oh, the purpose of capitalism is to make money.

But oh shit, we better make it sustainable. And I realized as I was going up to accept the award, that it's like looking down the wrong end of the telescope. If we were a Brazilian tribe, we wouldn't wake up in the morning and think, I know, let's make money. And then once we've made money uh we've killed the you know the ants and the monkeys and we've poisoned the rivers and we've chopped down the trees let's give back let's go to a charity auction buy some you know wayne rooney signed

shirt and give back that'll make us feel good and we'll stick that up in our garage in our mansion right we wouldn't think like that as a brazil tribe. What we would say was let us protect the purpose of our activities must be to protect the soil, to protect our lives, to protect the tribe, to protect the ecosystem. But we need to do it in a way which is economically sustainable and that is how we need to think about capitalism we need to look down the other end of the telescope so your friend who wrote to you or your podcast listener i'm making money is the prerequisite for sustaining the good so we need to start thinking about it the other way around what is the purpose of the company is the purpose of the company noble does it make us support life on this planet and does it support fulfillment and happiness and can we now make that financially sustainable as a second question that's how we have to look at it and that's how i'd encourage your listeners to look at it interesting when i

was 18 years old i thought that life was all about me buying a Lamborghini and I remember writing in my diary when I'm before 25 I want to be a millionaire I want a Range Rover to be my first car and two other things which were equally as empty and then upon getting to the age of 25 and multiple people have you know tried to buy my business and yeah there's been a number of offers along the way I found myself when I first got the first offer and finally thought you know what there's a chance that I could make a tremendous amount of money I googled cars and then I googled big houses but 25 year old Steve realized in that moment that cars or houses wouldn't add to my happiness at all and actually my fear was that if I bought a nice car,

a nice house, I'd actually be more unhappy because that would send me off on a path of definitely not knowing what, what was important. What advice would you give to 25 year old Steve about what he should be focused on that isn't financial. And you've done it there, but I,

if there was like one or two very specific things that i should focus myself on um someone told me once that a lot of sort of purpose and fulfillment comes from like personal challenge it comes from doing good for others what are those things to you that if there was one thing let's say that i had to focus myself on that's not buying a nice car a nice house what would it be i think it's being liking yourself because a lot of people i know that are billionaires they kind of hate themselves they're on their mega yachts and they've got someone to walk their dog and they've got a personal trainer who they they see religiously every six months and i think that unfortunately there are a lot of billionaires that separate themselves either they separate themselves from their true friends the friends that haven't kept up with

them financially and they end up in this rather sort of i think sort of sick kind of world of billionaires if you see what i mean all with the same values and i would say being able to sleep at night and looking at yourself in the mirror we have a is it jujing a phrase in in in wing chung called jujing which is face yourself and i think the ability to face yourself with real comfort and that absolutely does not come from money of course if people are listening and they say well fuck you i haven't got any money and it's fucking difficult yes it's absolutely difficult when you haven't got any but there's a threshold beyond which money does not buy you happiness money can take away some of the struggles that provide stresses to many people, but it's not a linear relationship.

After that point, the more money you have, sometimes there's a negative impact on your happiness. You start, there's something in the Kabbalah tradition called bread of shame, which is basically about if you've got money that you haven't necessarily earned, or it's come as a windfall to you because your business has been overvalued or whatever you don't feel good about it and bread of shame people tend to spend

on i hate to say it they spend money on cars or even hookers or whatever because actually they don't feel spiritually good about the money they've made and i would say that unfortunately society has manipulated our fight or flight response. It's manipulated our fear response. And that when I was at P&G, which is a consumer products business, step one of the advert was create the fear. Isn't it embarrassing when you've got dandruff on your shoulders? Isn't it embarrassing when people can see a sweat patch underneath your arm? Isn't it terrible when people come and see you've got a dirty kitchen?

That is all. And step one was create the fear so i think what your listeners need to understand especially if they're young is that adverts are trying to make them fearful that's the purpose of the step the first bit of an advert and then people will pile in with the solution don't worry you can have this anti-dandruff shampoo don't worry it's got these amazing little micro pigules called called some made up scientific name that means it's going to work so constantly we are being bombarded with advertising that is manipulating us and i think we have to separate ourselves entirely from those sorts of images

impressions and not let our ego be manipulated by those messages you touched on a second ago about hate that three out of ten you you got for the raps from that person that reviewed online obviously not true your raps are amazing but that's beside the point how do you deal with hate not just online but much closer to home from friends family i imagine when you said, you know, to people around you that you were going to start this restaurant, there was a lot of funny looks or people that were giving you false good wishes. How have you learned to deal with hate?

Does it go away at a certain level? Thank you, that's a good question. Because clearly you've not quite managed to master it yet. What a total stranger said about your food which you knew wasn't necessarily true and you know it's the internet caused you to have an argument with your wife 100 i have to come back to the phrase of judging people's actions by their insecurities not your insecurities and it was one that i was told about 15 years ago and it was really it massively sort of rang true to me around how often our if our response to hate is anger then that really is our own fear which has

caused that anger and so i in a moment where someone might say hey i've rated your rapper three out of ten on by the way i bet mcdonald's could have done a better job if i'm a knackered to be honest with you yeah be hungry maybe see there's so much other personal shit going on and d if i think things are unfair i know that that's something which triggers me so i've got uh there's something called the enneagram which is a wonderful personality profiling tool which i'd recommend anyone listening to go ahead and look at e-n-n-e-a-g-r-a-m and i'm a number eight which is protector or challenger and so and the protector or challenger doesn't like things that are unfair so 80 of the time the number 8 is Nelson Mandela and if triggered they can be Saddam Hussein

so there is a element of in my personality for whatever reason because of my makeup, my childhood my development or lack of development I know that I can get angry if I think there's a lack of love or a lack of fairness

and where does that come from? I think that i can speak about my dad just died i think i mentioned that did i mention that and i think that my dad was a man of immensely high integrity at the same time he loved his life he loved he loved poker and horse racing and snooker and sailing and and i loved him and i loved the things that he stood for and one of the he was quite a gentle man and quite a shy man and often i used to look back at him being sometimes overshadowed by people with larger personalities and i used to think that was unfair does that make sense and i used to think that certainly at work maybe he was dominated by third parties I think or people with bigger egos than him and I think there's an element of me wanting to become this

number eight protector or challenger almost to make sure that that doesn't happen to me does that make sense or almost trying to protect my dad if if that makes sense. And I think Leon, I think you've spoken in the past about potentially entrepreneurialism not just being something to admire, but something to pity. Or something which is maybe an illness. I think that we all do things to maybe counter things or impressions and stories we've been inadvertently told as children. And I once sat down with an acupuncturist on a massage bed, and she said, wow, everything you do is driven by your dad. And I was like, oh, don't give me that kind of cliche bullshit. And I thought, oh, my God, the whole business is named after my dad.

Do you know what I mean? The whole business is an attempt to say, hey, dad, we can do this. Our family can do this. We can have a business. We can grow something big. We don't have to be fucked over. And I think that probably some of the stories i told myself as a kid whether they were true or not definitely wanted me to be the big avenger they wanted me to create something powerful and worthwhile but something in tune with his values of integrity and fun you know

i want people to look at leon and go shit that's they're the real deal they've got integrity but they're a fucking laugh do you know i love the food they're fun and they're creating a world that's actually worth living in and the more you know even in the last week since my dad died i've been thinking more and more shit i really did build leon to be him and to mirror his values and yet to create something that he was proud of. It's only weird that until someone dies, you realize the energetic imprint that they've had on you, if that makes sense. And talking about death itself, what's your view of death? I think it's something which we are conditioned to be very afraid of in the West

as something we don't talk about. It's like pooing. Are you scared of it? I would say I am sort of midway between the two as in i definitely think that i suffer from the same psychosis or fear of death that most people have in the west but when i travel to africa i feel i might have mentioned this phrase before but reassuringly insignificant you know when i'm out in yeah and you cannot see any buildings and you can just see for as far as the horizon 360 around

you and you can see the lions you can see the animals and the insects you see that insect dying there and that insect being born over there i do find it reassuring how small and irrelevant we are and i think that the more we attach ourselves to our self-worth the more we fear death because the more we tell ourselves that we are somehow separate from universal consciousness or somehow separate from each other or separate from sounds new age but separate from the universe. And I think the more we recognize the fact that we are, that the apple is really not separate from the tree or separate from the leaf or separate from the root or separate from the soil.

You know, there's this great thing that says, yeah, Adam and Eve started fucking up when they started naming things as separate. So the tree was separate from the apple and reality is not, it's just part of one thing. The same way, as I mentioned before,

the wave is not separate from the ocean. And for me, conceptually and physically, when I'm sailing or I'm out on a great expanse, I find death much less frightening and much less of a thing to be scared of. Interesting. I wrote in my diary this week, what you're scared of will define you.

And we're all scared of something. Most people are just scared of the wrong things. When you hear that, there's two questions I have, which is the first is what are you scared of? And how do you think what you're scared of has driven your life? Really fascinating.

I think that's a really hit the nail on the head there both in terms of you know being scared what is what defines us plus we're scared of the wrong things i think we had a leon well-being event in january and we went around the room and said okay what would your superpower be if you could have one because in effect a superpower to some degree is the thing we'd like to have to counter our what we are scared of. And I said my superpower would be the ability to flick a switch and to get business people, politicians, individuals, whoever, to switch from acting from fear and ego to switch to acting from love. And that is the thing that I am most scared of. I am most scared of big companies and big governments.

And we see it happening in quite a few governments in the world, quashing love and quashing freedom and quashing spirituality and humanity. And I see organizations making the wrong decision because the organization is fearful or because they're not valuing the individual or not valuing love and it sounds like a very macro thing to be afraid of but it is the thing that angers me and of course if it's angering me it's because it's coming from as i said before fear or scaredness that i have and that is the thing that frustrates me most about the world when newspapers write things that are not true and hurt people emotionally or they

without any remorse so i think it's people acting without love and people acting from fear or greed or ego the thing that scares me most because it scares me on a human level and it scares me on a kind of socio-political level because i don't know how we're going to get out of some of the shit that we are in if institutions like that don't act from love on a more granular level what keeps you up at night i think that sometimes i suffer from stress that affects me at a physical level and sometimes i literally don't feel very well at night so i feel at my best when i am not in the uk when i'm on a small island in Greece or I'm in Africa or I'm in Brazil, those are the times that I sleep best at night.

And I think that I suffer. And this is why the Wing Chun, the martial art, the Kung Fu martial arts, he's doing so much for me is I literally physically sometimes feel so exhausted that I can't sleep. If that makes sense. So for me,

I don't have worries that go around in my head at three o'clock in the morning I find that I'm having a physical response to the thousands of small things that have accumulated through the day if that makes sense sure how about you what keeps me up at night I guess it really depends on the week a lot of the stuff that keeps me up at night is fear of not reaching my own potential, which is something that I think there is so much that I could be doing. And there are so much that I need to do that I don't want to sleep because I could use that hour to fix one of those problems or to achieve one of those things.

I'm generally not a worrier. I have no credit of my own because I've not done anything to create who I am really I don't tend to worry about things too much I think that drives from a lack of fear of losing it all I'm genuinely not scared of losing it all I came from a place where I had absolutely nothing and I was fine and happy then so I feel okay with going back to that place I'm not okay with other people losing their jobs but I'm okay with losing my own if you know what i mean and then i worry about really petulant things that i imagine all like ceos worry about you know how someone in the office feels or someone hands in their notice at work that might get to me one day and stay with me for a week or having to dismiss someone

might literally keep me up and thinking that's true if i have to get rid of someone who i know is not performing but i really like yeah that has kept me up but not in the last year that's true if i have to get rid of someone who i know is not performing but i really like yeah that has kept me up but not in the last year that's the one thing that affected me the most was someone that had been with me for a long time having to go and see them and to let them know that they wouldn't be in the team anymore was the one thing i can cite as giving me the most i'd almost say anxiety to the point where I found myself laying in this little thing. I have the little bathtub thing I have on the terrace at nighttime,

trying telling myself to focus on the leaves because I just needed to like center myself and be more present because I was thinking too much about the future. And that's never too good. And did you, having done that, would you find it easier next time? Or did you, was it more of an easy... It doesn't seem to get...

I mean, I've done it multiple times and it doesn't seem to get that much easier. I mean, from the first time till now, it's definitely easier, but it's still incredibly hard. So that's one of the things that I just hate. It's the worst part of my job. And just very quickly, I know that this is about achieving your potential. Sure. Do you think it's possible to achieve your potential? No.

And one of the things that I've posted up on my Instagram, I think it was yesterday, in fact, was I've learned that I have to be at total peace with the fact that I will never get there. In fact, there is the journey and therefore I am already there. I'm trying to live it. This has probably been something

that I've really embraced over the last six months and everybody that follows me on Instagram will know is really believing in this idea that i'm already there i'm already enough i already have everything that i want and need and being completely honest i've always known that i was there when i was 18 and i was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself in moss side which is notorious for the gun crime and living in this shithole with no electricity, I was really happy. And I was really content.

How do you shop for pizza? That's clever. You go in, what you do, you walk in and you go straight up to the person behind the till, you ask them something because then they don't think you're scuttling around trying to steal pizzas. Then you go get the pizza.

You're like, and you're just as smart as you can. So, you know never it was just because i would i'd not eaten for like days on it so i would go into takeaways and hope that someone had left some scraps there and take those it was just tough times you know but the point was i knew i was as happy then as i am now and that's one of the things that i'm most grateful for because I didn't pin my happiness on attaining something. But I was told by Instagram and these new influences in the world that I would become happier or, you know, something when I got money and stuff. People have to understand that there are so many unhappy people who have. I cannot. I spoke to someone the other day.

She said, I have killed myself online. I am so happy. Right. She said, I won't say who it was because she's reasonably well known but she's like that person person x is now dead and i couldn't be happier do you want me in terms of the stress of the stress of having to be this person the stress of having to post these glamorous shots they were all fake he said i hated it in the end but i'm so much happier now i'm hopefully going to be nobody again and i think that that's

what people need to understand there are a great you're talking about you know if i think about some of the things about wanting needing to have a simple life a life that's focused in the present recognizing the fact that you can you can do anything but you cannot do everything and i think that anyone who has creatives achieved lasting fulfillment has achieved it by just saying this is who i am i'm really cool with it and i'm not trying to be these other seven things i could be because we're so imaginative we imagine the banker the john that is running greenpeace the john that is playing at glastonbury next week all of those are valid parallel universes we could possibly i couldn't do the glass and we think we probably could do any or maybe on parallel universes we could possibly i couldn't do the glass and we think

we probably could do any or maybe on the triangle we could possibly do any of those but we can't do we could only do one of them and i think that finding peace in that and finding simplicity and replacing fear of missing out with love of missing out i think is definitely the way forward and it's also the thing that i've come to sort of investigate in myself is why do I want to be John at Glastonbury playing the triangle? Is it because that's what would give me fulfillment or is it because I've been somehow told that being John at Glastonbury would make me happy? And it's the same almost, I think with entrepreneurship and why I think I personally don't think it's for everybody. I think that I, part of the reason I do this podcast is because I want to make sure that the people that follow me, that I know that are

just not, this would, my lifestyle and what I do would not make them happy. I want them to know that it's not all roses and wonderfulness and happiness. Like I'm happy because i'm doing me but in doing me if you try and do me you might lose you 100 and that's like an entrepreneurship has been glamorized yeah i remember that you know the social network movie absolutely you see mark zuckerberg there billion users all this money all these things do you think entrepreneurship is for everybody and explain the short answer is no but i guess it depends what we mean by entrepreneurship. Because if we say entrepreneurship is... Your life.

What you do. I would say I am... At this scale, you do it as well. I would say that entrepreneurship, if it's defined as imaginatively creating new opportunities and innovating, I think anyone can do that without having to be John Vincent. And you can do that by being a PA to a marketing director. You can do that by being a salesperson working in a factory. You can be the person that puts their hand up and says,

hey, I've worked out a much better way of making this widget. That's entrepreneurship. And I think that at the very least, society should offer everybody the opportunity to be entrepreneurial in that way. The ability to contribute, the ability to be creative, the ability to be listened to, to be an intrapreneur within any organization or any business. And I'd love everybody to be a leader. I'd love there to be six billionpreneur within any organization or any business and i'd love everybody to be a leader

i'd love there to be six billion leaders in the world where everyone puts their hand up and suggests ways to make things better but that doesn't mean to say that everyone has to be the person that starts a company and i think you're absolutely right and i think you've alluded to it or said it explicitly which is the life that i lead is purely the product of my history, what I love, what I'm scared of, what I want my superpowers to be. And I think it's really dangerous to have role models sometimes. It's really dangerous to think I'd like to be like Richard Branson. Or I'd like to be X or Y. One of the things I think, and you've just said it there, is that my generation and younger generations, of we live in a social media record chamber, are confusing admiration with aspiration.

That's a good point. So they look at Mark Zuckerberg and think, I want to be Mark Zuckerberg. But you're not Mark Zuckerberg. Your brain is not Mark Zuckerberg. You weren't brought up in the same way that caused Mark Zuckerberg to have the internal desires. And also, would you want to be Mark Zuckerberg right now being called in front of Congress and Parliament to explain why you didn't admit that 50 million users have been nicked? I mean, trust me, I cannot tell you how unnecessary. It's like, be careful what you wish for, right?

It's the phrase, which is be a good version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else. I think he's absolutely right. What's the cost of being john vincent c of leon i think i'm i hope my kids aren't listening to this but i want to die a little bit earlier than i think i would have done i think the stress that it puts on me is probably meaning that my cells are reproducing uh not as perfectly as they should be i think that my gut health isn't as good because i'm stressed i'm killing all the good bacteria So I think the cost is a very physical and emotional one. And I sometimes wonder whether I am,

I sometimes find it very difficult. People might be very surprised with this, but sometimes I find it difficult to feel good. I sometimes find it difficult to not think of myself as a failure. And that doesn't happen often, but you know, you have to check yourself, but I have, there are times when I think, shit, I'm as a failure and that doesn't happen often but you know you have to check yourself but I have there are times when I think I'm such a failure you know I've got 52 restaurants or I still haven't achieved x or y or I still haven't got the freedoms that I wanted to have

so I think the cost is physical and the cost sometimes is like a bit like you were saying about fulfilling your potential i sometimes have to tune way back into the lessons of wing churn or daoist and zen philosophy in order to stop myself not feeling down about what i haven't achieved katie she's your wife nice girl yeah i read about how uh you met her she was wearing a fake wristband she said your research is good yeah i know right uh you said so her she was wearing a fake wristband she said your research is good yeah i know right uh you said so you've gate crashed but i won't throw you out if you snog me yeah i think if that was you should be employed by six man or maybe you are i don't know oh look he's not funny she just texted me she was sure she says oh she says what would helen

write like for a birthday that That's not very profound. But you've been married for 15 years. And this is, I guess this is my last question. But married for 15 years, doing what you do and all the stresses and all the bullshit that's unpredictable. Every time you look at your phone, she might be, as you said, talking to you. And you might be a million miles away because you've just received some news in your emergency WhatsApp group about something's on fire. Does she understand what's the impact that running this business and running businesses like the one you run has had on the relationship? And speaking more selfishly, as a single guy that's failed in relationships, I think because I run a business, what advice would you give to me? So three questions there, but answer how you like.

So does she understand? Yes. Yeah. That's what the second one. Second one was what has been the impact on the relationship because of Leon? And the third one was advice for myself. So let's start with, does she understand? Katie is the most amazing person.

She is a broadcaster, journalist, business person in her own right. She's got her own production company. She presents the prom. She used to be an ITV newsreader. She's a DJ on Radio 3, presenter on Radio 3. And I couldn't, you know, she's been on Strictly. She's done all sorts of stuff. I cannot. She's the most amazingly, wonderfully spirited and talented person. And so she has her own adventures, right? So it's not like she's there dutifully cooking for me when I go home. So I think it's, she absolutely is of a similar spirit to me. So she totally gets it. She totally understands.

Is there a buck coming? I think there's a buck coming. yes you can see it i'm sure there are times when she thinks oh john please just relax and stop stop going over the same stuff in your mind about should i do this should i do that i definitely allow my business life to pollute my home life and i would like to be more disciplined about that. So I've tried locking my phone in a little red metal box on a Friday night. Right. I've tried saying, right, I'm going to clear all my work stuff out of the study at home. But my brain is always thinking and it's often thinking about work. And so I think her frustration is she will literally say oh what should we do tonight and

she has to ask me four times because my brain is just thinking about a business problem I would love for that not to be the case I would say for you I can't I haven't got much I have unfortunately I haven't got many silver bullets for you but I think suddenly you will find a woman who fits, who's got her own confidence, interests, and strength of character so that you are a partnership of equals. And I think you'll find that. And I think you'll find that they will love the bits of, they'll recognize they can't love you in slices. So, you know, Katie says of, they'll recognize they can't love you in slices.

So, you know, Katie says, look, I know I can't love you in slices. I know that, you know, living with you is fun. I know that living with you is high intensity. I know that living with you is rewarding. And I'm going to put up with the stuff that pisses me off. And I think it comes back to, in relationships, the same same thing we talked about earlier which is a lack of perfectionism some people have like a list of 10 things that they want a partner to have and i think most people do well if you get five and a half and i think understanding that and that there is no perfect partner there's no perfect person

there's no perfect relationship i think both of us love each other enough to recognize that. Thank you so much for your time today. I know you're an incredibly busy man with your 50th year restaurants, and I've taken more of your time than I should have. But it's been a really interesting conversation. How have you found it? Amazing. I think you're a really nice guy.

I think it's fascinating the journey that you're on. And it mirrors so much of the journey that I'm on. And I'm sure that I'd like to reciprocate and interview you at some point because you sound like an amazing person. Thank you so much. And I will leave all of the links and stuff of where to find you if anyone wants to reach out and contact you. It's been an absolute pleasure. And you're a very fascinating person. And I think I've learned quite a lot or at least built on a lot of the things I was thinking from having this conversation with you.

So I appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this chapter. It means the world to me. If you can, please do subscribe to the podcast and you'll be notified the minute it's released. I'm often quite bad at letting you know when it's out on my social channels.

So this will give you a bit of an advantage. Also, if you have a couple of seconds, please do leave a review for me in the app store. Everybody that reviews the podcast and tweets me, I promise you, if you leave your handle in the review, I will get in touch.