The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - E44: The lessons we MUST learn before 2020.

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

2019 has been a world-wind of a year for me, and this week’s episode of The Diary of a CEO is all about reflection. Alongside this, I discuss why you shouldn’t waste time on people that don’t deserve it. Furthermore, I explain why it’s critical for us t...

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. If there was ever a time for mass public reflection and inflection, it's probably now, at the end of a year and at the end of this decade. And this podcast, as I'm sure you know by now, is the home of reflection and inflection. And that's exactly what my diary is full of today. 2020 is just around the corner, a couple of days away. And those resolutions, those goals, and those ambitions are all being set. It's an incredibly ponderous time of year, if I say myself. And so today, we're going to do exactly that. We're going to reflect and inflect.

Here are my thoughts. Here's my diary. Without further ado this is the Diary of a CEO and I'm Stephen Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself. Okay, so the first point in my diary this week is about fishing, but really it's more of a mantra for 2020. It's a perspective improvement that I want to make based on the behavior that I exhibit that I'm least proud of. I've written in my diary, in 2020 I'm going to stop catching rocks. Here's what I mean. Our misery and our lack of productivity and generally our wastage, I think comes from having a priorities issue. I think most of our misery comes from having priorities issues. I think we care too much about things that do not matter. And I think life has this remarkable way of tempting you into spending energy, emotion, care, and time, everything that matters, on things that absolutely do not. The best example of this is like internet

trolls. When you start engaging with an internet troll, that is a lose-lose situation. Even if you prove them wrong, you've just lost maybe an hour of your time, your energy, your emotional state in doing so. These trolls, and I'm just using trolls, internet of your time, your energy, your emotional state in doing so. These trolls, and I'm just using trolls, internet trolls as a good example, they bite on your fishing rod and stupidly you exert copious amounts of energy trying to pull that fish onto the boat only to realize that it wasn't in fact a fish, it was just another fucking useless rock, right? And that's why I've written in my diary in 2020,

I'm going to stop catching rocks because I keep catching rocks. I keep spending my energy on things that are completely worthless in the grand scheme of things. And when you pull that rock on board, you've just spent valuable time and energy on something totally worthless that has consumed you, your energy, your time, and in some cases, your happiness. I actually noticed I did this this week. I put something out on social media and then someone came back to me and said, social media is totally valueless and it's never helped anybody ever. And it's never helped any company or brand. And obviously that statement is inherently untrue. Like obviously that, you know, that's a stupid thing to say. And what I

should have done is just fucking ignored the stupidity, right? But what I did is I responded to the tweet, right? And that's not, you know, a huge amount of wastage. But what then happens is they reply with something equally stupid, right? And their response was, name one example of one brand that's been helped on social media. And then I take the bait and I run off on the internet and I run off on the internet and I'm finding screenshots and rattling through examples and data to try and prove this troll wrong, who has literally no intention other than like arguing, right? And that is a completely terrible use of my time. And then I went back and forth. And before I know it,

45 minutes has gone and I've proved some internet troll wrong, even though they never admit they're wrong. They now know they're wrong. I've lost 45 minutes of my life, which I will never, never get back. And then when I click onto this person's profile and scroll down, they are just the home of stupidity. The tweet below the first tweet at me was,

mental health isn't real, right? And that was the moment that i've i realized that i just spent the last 45 minutes to an hour wrestling to get a rock on board thinking that it was some kind of fish or that there was some inherent reward in pursuing winning this argument or you know or this point and i just don't need to do that. Life is going to keep tugging at your rod every single day. It's going to keep trying to get you to engage in meaningless, pointless bullshit. Comments on your Instagram and social media channels, notes on the fridge at work, you know, like passive aggressive bullshit, things that clash with your values. These are all the

things that are best at provoking that huge energy reaction from you. And in 2020, here's my advice. We know for sure life is going to keep tugging on your rod, but only pull on your rod and try and catch that fish when you know it's a big fish worth catching. Let all the fucking rocks go. Stop catching rocks. At the end of your, you know, fishing expedition, all those rocks you spent your time and energy fighting for are going to be worth absolutely nothing. They're not going to feed you. They're not going to feed your family in any way, but the fish will. And I guess life in many respects is that fishing expedition. At the end of my life, how grateful am I going to

be because, you know, I defeated one internet troll who was a fucking idiot. How grateful am I going to be for catching rocks? Zero percent. But again, shit like this is because we don't fully embrace the fact that we're going to fucking die someday. And life really is finite. It is going to end. In the fully embraced context that we're all living on a short, unknown sand timer, it's absolutely bonkers that we would spend any of our sand on catching meaningless, worthless rocks and not spend that time focusing on things that actually matters. It's absolutely bonkers. If I truly believed, and if I truly knew, and if I could see that sand timer on the desk in front of me, which contains the amount of days shown in sand pouring down with the force of gravity that I have left on

this earth, would I have just spent any sand on that moronic internet troll? Absolutely not. But I don't realize I'm going to die and I'm not living like it. I'm living like I'm going to live forever and most of us do. Every time we spend time catching these bullshit rocks, we are saying that we don't appreciate that life is finite, as simple as that. In 2020, I am going to try and change that. That's my first sort of mission for 2020. And I think you should sign up to that petition too. Let me know. Okay, so the next point in my diary is a little bit of a personal one, or at least it had a very sort of personal impact on me. And I wasn't sure whether to share this, but generally, when I'm not sure if I should share something or not, it means that I definitely should.

And this podcast is the medium where I share these kinds of things. You've made a pact by listening that you'll keep this to yourself. so I hope you do. Here's the story. I was speaking at a conference in New York about a week or two ago and I delivered my presentation. It was predominantly on influencer marketing in the future of social media and after my presentation there was great feedback from everybody and it's a presentation that I'm particularly fond of because of the reaction it gets, but it was also a bit of a new presentation. And after the presentation, I received an email from a lady that had been present at the talk. And she said, you referred to influencers as girls on one occasion,

and you valorized Elon Musk. And I got up and I left. And the email was in essence saying that I was in some way like misogynistic or sexist or had some kind of, you know, negative gender perspective towards the opposite sex. And I fucking shit myself. I was terrified, I was confused, I was offended all in equal measure. You know, anybody that knows me knows how far that is from the set of values that I hold and how much I've done in my personal life and in my professional life and as a leader and as a friend to fight gender and really sort of any inequality I see for my whole life it's just the nature of who I am for some reason and this is potentially a stupid naive thing to say being a minority being the only black kid in a school of 1500 white kids growing up in bloody Cornwall which is you know 99% white

and being a minority myself that has given me this like strange inherent empathy towards inequality in any form. And that's, and so it's so like personal to me. And then I read on Twitter that she had done some tweets about it as well, basically saying the CEO of a social media company has used the word girl. And he's been valorizing Elon Musk. The tweet said that I'd done it for an hour. So I'd valorized Elon Musk for an hour. And listen, I've watched the Me Too movement play out. I've seen the important and very significant and very accurate movement around gender issues play out over the last five years in particular on social media. And I've also seen and been part of the positive change, whether that's within my own organization

or within the content that I produce. And my whole strategy since I was, you know, 18 years old and started my first business and started employing people was I will never be accused of those things if I just focus on being a really good human being, or at least the best human being that I can be. That was my strategy. And to think that just for a second, because I use the word girl to describe an influencer, which I will get into the context of, right? I was now being tarred with the same brush as these business leaders that have done atrocious things

and that have rightfully lost their jobs was quite honestly terrifying to me. And I really wanted to take that moment as like a learning moment to see how I could be better, but also to learn more about the context of the world we're living in. I am a business leader, a male business leader in today's current climate. And let's not be like, let's just call a spade a spade here. If there was ever a moment where male business leaders, rightfully, right? Let me use that word

because it's a very important word because there's been a lot of male business leaders rightfully, right? Let me use that word because it's a very important word because there's been a lot of male business leaders, even in my own city, that have been atrocious jackasses, right? So rightfully have been under scrutiny, it's now. And so honestly, I need to be even more conscious than I already am. I need to be even more careful about the words I use and I need to be even more conscious about the words I use and I need to be even more conscious about the actions that I exhibit because, you know, I have a tremendous responsibility and we're living in a very, very sensitive time. Just to give you context, me and my team then spent an hour following that email re-watching the whole talk. It was thankfully videoed and I did offer to send the video to this lady if she wanted

to rewatch it herself. She said that I called girls influencers, right? So in the presentation, I used the word influencer 47 times. I used the word girl once. And when I use the word girl, I'm referring to a campaign, which is called Girl Gang. That's the banner of the campaign by a big brand. So I use the word girl to describe a 16 year old girl who is part of the Girl Gang influencer collective. That's the name of it. There's no other way of saying it. I couldn't have navigated away from that. And when I got the email, I did say to my team, I'm so surprised that I've used the word girl because I don't do that. I've like programmed myself to try and avoid these words that are at all demeaning or, you know, are at all belittling in any way. And in her tweet,

she'd said that I'd spent an hour, quote unquote, valorizing Elon Musk. We went back through the video, I'd spent 23 seconds. And I didn't say I wasn't valorizing Elon Musk. I said his public sentiment, when you compare it to Mark Zuckerberg, is drastically better. And I showed the stats on the screen. At no point do I really take a side there. And again, that shows the sensitivity of the climate we're living in. This is a consequence, ultimately, and I'm just going to be honest, this is a consequence of toxic, despicable male behavior largely and and and we've gotten to a point because there's been so much outing of toxic predominantly male behavior where the world is incredibly sensitive to to traits or patterns that might suggest that too that's the nature of

the world i can't change that all i can change is myself and i don't know why i've shared that with you but i just i felt like i had to get it off my chest because for me, over the last week, it's been a real learning moment for me. Okay, so the third point of my diary this week, changing topic completely, is how to get teams to work hard. The surprising truth. In life, there are two types of norm, really. There are social norms, right? And then there's market norms. Each have a completely different set of rules. Social norms encourage community. That's things like reciprocity. If someone does something nice for you, you should do something nice for them. It's like a society social norm that we all follow. A good example is,

you know, if someone does you a favor, you aren't obliged to pay it back immediately. You will pay it back at some point, but then, you know, you don't give them an invoice when they do you a favor. However, with market norms, like professional norms or like, you know, work norms, on the other hand, it's much less emotional in context. It's a transaction, isn't it? So if you do something for someone, then you invoice them or you expect payment immediately. And social and market norms usually don't mix very well together like family and you know business doesn't work well together and everybody says it's incredibly hard to work with a loved one or a partner and this is why

because the norms are clashing and I read about this study which involved assigning three different groups to do tasks. Some were paid a little bit of money, some were paid a lot more money, and some were paid nothing at all and they were just asked to do it as a favor. Studies continually found, and this particular study found, that people who were paid the most were more productive than people that were paid less. But, and this is a fucking astronomical but, the people who weren't paid anything were the most productive of all the groups. The people who were just asked to participate as a favor were the most productive. They weren't paid a penny. They were operating under social norms, not market norms. And that was reflected in their behavior and their performance.

So the real like the takeaway from that is when people are operating under social norms not the constraints of an employee employer relationship or that like monetary contract they perform better when market professional or business norms become part of the scenario however social norms continued to fade away in all of the studies. Researchers like switched the experiment and instead of giving participants money at all, they gave two groups different gifts and then they gave the third group gratitude. They just said thank you and this changed things again. Now, instead of getting paid, people just received gifts or a thank you, right? And all of the groups

performed equally. When researchers tried mixing money with the gifts, performance dropped again. And that's pretty crazy when you think about it, because all you have to do is mention the cost of the gift and people will revert to market norms and poor performance. Once this has happened, it's impossible to return to social norms. Other research has shown that if people are exposed to thoughts about money at all, they will be less helpful to people who request assistance. Money, it turns out, is a very costly and ineffective way to motivate people. Money is, of course, very useful and, shall I say, required in many ways, but social norms cost less and they work better than market norms.

If you want to increase national productivity in the United Kingdom or America or in any other country, maybe we should analyze the social contract we make with our teams, with employees, and this has to go both ways. So this isn't a case of paying people less or not paying them at all, it's introducing more of those like family values, that gratitude, those social norms, the reciprocity, which is helping them for free without expectation of return as well as them helping you for free. And if we reanalyze how the social contract of our teams, of our sports teams, of our groups, of our clubs, of our friendships, of our families are designed, I think we'll have much more willing groups around us. Companies occasionally try to do this. They often refer to their teams as families. State Farm has the slogan, like a good neighbor.

And these are inherently attempts at generating good feelings and social norms within their customers. The thing is, if companies succeed in cultivating that kind of cozy relationship with their customers or employees, they will rightly expect it and need it to be reciprocated. That means you can't just call your employees a family or your team a family and then not treat them like one, right? And just hope that they treat you like family. It has to go both ways. And in the case of State Farm, playing hardball with customer due dates and imposing fines and things like that will break the whole spell, making customers disillusioned and hostile. Nevertheless, social norms do build loyalty and they do engage people. It can be worthwhile, especially for companies, professionals, employers, freelancers, to cultivate those social norms

with everybody they interact with. If you are part of a team or involved in a team, focusing on cultivating those social norms can have a defining impact on your team and on your ability to achieve an objective over time. It's certainly something that I'm incredibly focused on as a leader, as a friend, as a family member in 2020. Not everything needs to be about money. We can reciprocate in other ways and when we do, the science says we're more likely to get the results that we're looking for. Okay, so the next point in my diary, number four, is super, super short and I'm not going to give any context on this whatsoever. It's just three lines. I've written in my diary,

the people that are hardest to walk away from are often the people we need to walk away from the most. Most of our emotional harm is caused by parents, best friends, and family. It's time to put your happiness over your history. Okay, so the next point in my diary is about laziness, and I guess procrastinating and being undisciplined. But what I've written is, the labels we give ourselves are only true because we believe them. Here's the thing, when you don't fully understand a person's context, or you don't understand your own context, or you know, what it feels like to be them every day, or what it actually feels like to really be you, when you don't really understand or know yourself. It's very easy to impose these abstract, rigid expectations on yourself or on someone else. A good example is like homeless people. You know, we say that all homeless people should put down

the bottle and get to work. You know, never mind that most of them have mental health symptoms and physical ailments. They're fighting constantly to be recognized as human, never mind that they're unable to get a good night's rest or a decent meal for weeks or months on end. And there's this crazy hypocrisy, which I won't go into, which I've noticed, you know, even in our comfortable, easy lives, most of us can't even go a few days without craving a drink anyway, or purchasing something irresponsible. But no, homeless people have to do better, right? That's what we do when we don't understand. But they're already doing the best they can. In context of their world, they're doing the very best that they can. According to clinical

social psychologists, if a person's behavior doesn't make sense to you, if your own behavior doesn't make sense to you, instead of labeling yourself something, which in and of itself is a dangerous thing to do, it's probably because you are missing a part of their context, a part of your own context. It's really that simple. We resort to labels to try and explain things we don't understand. We say someone's lazy, they're a procrastinator, they're a perfectionist. We label ourselves lazy or a procrastinator or whatever

because we're missing our own context. When I was 15, my school and my schoolmates, 100% of them thought I was lazy without a shadow of a doubt. You know, trudging into only 30% of my lessons, usually late, always without my homework or any type of book, pen or pencil. And it's fairly easy to jump to the conclusion that that's a lazy kid. And that's what people, you know, that's the conclusion they jumped to about me because they were missing very important context. The context was that I was actually working really fucking hard. I was building businesses. At the age of 14, I started my first business selling Japanese clothes to the English market. After that, I started another business called Excite, which ran all of the major under 18 events in the southwest of the UK. I was also negotiating

deals with our sixth form and local coffee machine and vending machine companies so that our school finally got paid. And all of the vending machines in sixth form were deals I had done and the school got 20% of the revenue on from machines that they were historically paying for. I was organizing all of the internal sixth form events, the school trips, the away days, the parties, everything. And I was working a job on the side in sales. I was incredibly busy. I was incredibly hardworking. The reality is I was outworking everyone,

all of my peers back then. And in all honesty, I still do that today. Nobody, nobody calls me lazy now but the metric in which society was judging me is no longer what it was. Back then it was classroom attendance and grades and now it's professional success. How can the laziest person that my school teachers and my school friends knew now be the least lazy person that my school teachers and my school friends know. What's changed? There's really two things that have changed. The metric in which we're measuring, right? We're no longer measuring classroom attendance and the context we have,

right? People now have the context on me, but people didn't then. And we dismiss so many talented people with high potential because we don't have context. And we do that every time we walk past a homeless person on the street. We dismiss them and stick a label on them because we don't have context. People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior because putting off work sure does look lazy. It looks, you know, like a lack of motivation to the untrained eye. Even people who are actively doing the procrastinating can make the tremendous mistake of calling their behavior laziness. You're supposed to be doing something. You're not doing it. That's a moral failure, surely, right? You have a problem. This means you're weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn't it? No, it really doesn't.

Psychologically, no, it doesn't. It means there's context missing. Do everything you can to avoid that label and do everything you can to try and understand the context. What studies show is that if you're procrastinating, this could be a number of things. It could be A, anxiety about your attempts at doing this task not being good enough. It could be B, confusion about the first steps to take to start on this task. But either way, there's something about that particular task that's causing you some kind of psychological discomfort, a psychological barrier. There's context missing. Because in fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well. I.e. you are more likely to look lazy when you're clearly

not a lazy person. So instead of sticking a label on yourself, which is deeply, deeply dangerous, which science shows repeatedly will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually become another psychological barrier, you have to understand your own context. Instead of walking past that homeless person and just sticking a label on them because it's the easiest thing to do, the most helpful thing for you, for your relationship with them and for them is to understand the context. In 2020, every time I catch myself

mentally repeating one of these labels, I've spent the last decade telling myself, I'm going to call bullshit on myself and I want you to do the same. Here are some of the labels I tell myself frequently. I tell myself that I'm unorganized. I tell myself I'm a perfectionist. I tell myself that I'm emotionally cold. And these are just some of the labels I've given myself that are becoming self-fulfilling prophecies in my life because I'm

refusing to acknowledge the missing context. And in those instances where I've really drilled into the missing context, specifically in like the relationship ones and the being a cold individual emotionally and romantically ones, I've managed to overcome them just by understanding the context. And that's often what therapy does. And it's why I recommend therapy to everybody. It's why at Social Chain, our company, we give opt out free mental health therapy to everybody. Something I'm tremendously proud of and I think is so important. A life with no labels is the most free, productive, successful, and happy life any of us can dream to live. Live that life. Predictably irrational. The sixth point in my diary. You know, I saw Darren Brown this week in New York, the famous illusionist this week in New York,

and his whole set is designed on the basis of using our unconscious, often irrational behavior to misdirect us into believing things, right? And I was reading this book called Predictably Irrational, and it talks about how fundamentally we are all pawns in life. Most of the time, we don't even understand what's really going on and why we're making the decisions we make. We think we're in the driver's seat in life. We think we're steering the course of our lives, but we are wrong. We're really the victims of our own instincts, our own impulses, our own insecurities. And, you know, we procrastinate, we underestimate, and we fear, and we draw on comparisons and make decisions based on comparisons without even realizing that we are.

And I've been reading this book called Predictably Irrational this week, and it perfectly illustrates how much of our decisions are made by unconscious forces. And the truth is, we aren't aware of these forces in our lives, and they impact our careers, our relationships, and everything in between. The book shows how people don't usually look at things in real terms. In fact, we don't look at ourselves as we are or in real terms. We look at ourselves relatively. We look at ourselves in comparison to something else. The way we see things is relative to and dependent on the context in which we see them. By manipulating the context in which something is seen, you can change the choice somebody makes. For example, as you know, a chef might put a really

expensive steak on the menu, and what that does is it drives popularity for the second most expensive steak on the menu. With three TVs on sale in like an electronics shop at three different prices, people tend to pick the middle one, right? These people are behaving irrationally, but their irrationality is predictable. And that's why the book is called Predictably Irrational. Relativity can help us, and it does, you know, seeing something relative to something else, but it can also make us totally miserable. And we see this happen when we compare ourselves unfavorably to others. We get envious. We feel less than and we exhibit symptoms of like mild depression. This is part of the reason social media is so good at making people feel so miserable. People follow aspirational people.

They don't follow dumb, ugly, unfashionable, poor, boring people. They follow for inspiration and for admiration reasons without realizing that the relativity games their mind is programmed to play are causing them to feel inadequate and inferior and unworthy and like they are missing something. It's no surprise that in the social media age, cosmetic surgery has absolutely exploded. In fact, the one area of cosmetic surgery

that's seen the fastest growth over the last couple of years isn't the face because makeup can handle that. It's the shape of our body, right? That's the area of cosmetic surgery that's seen the biggest explosion. And the Kardashians and Instagram have made the shape of our bodies more important than ever before. And the main way that I think we can remedy this, probably the only thing we can do is to reduce the size of our circle of comparison and to make healthier comparisons. And that includes your digital online circle. This means reducing the scale of what we're comparing ourselves to and also

the truth of what we're comparing ourselves to. This is in part, and I've banged on about this a lot, why I unfollowed and muted people at scale across my social media channels. And I muted people that didn't provide me with healthy, relative comparisons. I kept inspiration. You know, I kept people that were driving me in positive ways. I keep people who drive me to pursue things that are full of internal substance and have like substantive values, but i don't follow fake perfect people living superficial lives anymore um because they will make me strive for an equally shallow life that does not serve me according according to every major study right that's my definition of social media self-harm is following a bunch of people who are perpetrating and pushing these

shallow empty values onto you and this is just another reinforcement for me as to why it's so incredibly important on every like important metric to really really think about in 2020 the circle you have around you not just in real real life, but your digital circle. Those people you follow that you think are harmless, Kylie, like why anyone in their right mind would follow Kylie Jenner on Instagram just like boggles my mind. When you've read what I've read and you've seen the studies I've read by Professor Tim Kessa and others and Johanna Hari and, you know, even this book, it's so blatantly clear that doing that is an act of self-harm and one that I hope we can get rid of next year. Unfollow Kylie Jenner. Okay, another really super short point in my diary

this week, but something that comes up a lot in my life. I've just written, there are two things people and professionals in particular should stop focusing on. Number one, people copying you. Let me just tell you a quick story. People copy social chain and me all the fucking time, right? And I'm equally, you know, getting ideas and inspiration and copying other people. That is life. What someone will never be able to copy is the true inspiration behind what you do. And ultimately, that real, raw, un-mimicable inspiration behind what makes you special is not something anyone can replicate.

That is also your inherent value. And anything that can be easily copied is not valuable. So don't sweat it when your competitors or others copy you. I see young business leaders and I see inexperienced entrepreneurs exerting huge amounts of energy to complain and to publicly complain about being copied. It's just a pointless, meaningless fight to have. And I'm proud of myself because a couple of days ago, someone sent me something which was clearly, you know, had been copied from me by someone else, a competitor of ours. And it just, I felt nothing. I felt no, genuinely,

and you know I'd be honest, I felt absolutely nothing. I don't care. Because I know deep down, I'm secure enough in myself, in the value that I have, in my company has, to know that you can't copy it. The thing that has value, you can't copy. So that's just a word of advice for you as a professional. When you like unavoidably, undoubtedly get copied in your life, just know that the thing that has the value can never be copied. And point number two here was about not fearing change in business and in your professional life. So many people say to me every time there's a social media update, and by the way, I post all the social media updates on my channels. They say, oh my God,

is this going to kill your business? They've been saying that to me for five fucking years. Back in the day, 95% of the revenue we made was from Twitter. Today, 0% of the revenue we make is from Twitter. Our business exists because we are so good philosophically at change. Every time something changed, whether it risks destroying my own business model or not I'm excited it changes for everybody and what change does is it closes one door and swings open another and that new door has no one walking through it yet right so it's more valuable than the door that's just closed typically so my attitude towards change has always been excitement I don't give a fuck if

change is going to hurt our business because the opportunity that change creates, I believe with the healthy perspective, is going to drastically help our business. And that's always been my genuine perspective. And I just, I wanted to share that because often I see online people trying to fight change because they're threatened by it. And it's a losing, losing strategy. Innovation and change is coming for all of us like a bulldozer in our rear view mirror. It's going to run us over and we can sit and we can dwell and we can cry as we're crushed under the bulldozer's weight, or we can see it coming and adapt. We can switch lanes, get out of that lane and start working hard in a new one because the only thing, as they say, that is inevitable is change itself.

And the last point of my diary this week, I always end on relationships and love. I don't know why I do that, but I always do. So thanks for sticking to the end of this podcast. Point number eight was the process of a bit of reflection and inflection this week. Here's the context I think is important. The reason why this came to me as an idea and the reason why I wrote it in my diary is because I've had a lot of shitty relationships, right? And right now, as I said in my podcast, I'm in a good one. I'm in a good relationship with a good person and it's just starting out so it's not probably even a relationship yet but I'm in a good situation. And I reflected on some of the bullshit I told

myself historically. I reflected on some of the blame that I carried out when my relationships didn't work historically. And I came to this conclusion. There are probably only two possible reasons why any of us are having a shit love life or we're single. The first reason, right, is we've not met the right person yet. And the second reason is you're not the right person yet, right? The first requires time and patience. The second requires self-awareness and self-development and in some cases therapy, right? We've all got friends who we know that are single because they've not met the right person yet. And we've also all got friends who we know are single

because they're not the right person yet. We watch them go through that same cycle of disappointment time and time again without having the self-awareness to address the underlying issues that are causing their romantic encounters to be so short-lived. The disappointment our friends experience often creates more insecurities and therefore more issues ensuring that that cycle of disappointment is more guaranteed to continue than it was before. It's further reinforced.

And in my case, after spending 18 years watching my parents ferociously argue with each other every day, subconsciously, as I've said on this podcast before, I learned that relationships were like prison. They felt like prison to me. This meant that at 16 years old, when I met someone I liked and that might have been the right person, I literally rejected them the minute it became anything serious. If I hadn't done the work to understand why I was doing this, there is no doubt in my mind I would have let that unaddressed issue carry on and create a pattern throughout the rest of my life, ruining my chances of a healthy romantic relationship, irrespective if I met the right person or not. And then later in life I've met the wrong person a few times. And even though I was now the right person, I kept,

you know, finding people that were incompatible to me. It took me so many years to understand myself and really to fix myself, but it changed my life in tremendous, tremendous ways. Blame is so incredibly easy. And when you're insecure, taking responsibility risks hurting an already fragile self-esteem and ego. So typically we resort to blame. It's the easier, more comfortable option. Looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for your own bullshit is hard, but it's the only way to break that cycle. If I had one wish for this year, it would be that some of my friends, some of the people closest to me were finally able to break that cycle. If you know anybody that you hope will break that cycle this year, this coming year, then just send

them this podcast and hopefully they'll, if they get this far into it, they'll take the indirect message. And the last point in my diary this week is a new one for me, but it's incredibly exciting. The podcast now has a sponsor. And as two weeks ago, I told you that I wanted to do this podcast twice a week and I want to invest more into it and improve the production and the content and everything about it so that it's better for you. So we started looking for a sponsor and the areas I started looking in were really the tools and people and products that I use to make my life better as a podcaster, as an entrepreneur. And I came across one, it's called Boost by Facebook. As a lot of you know, the majority of my business and the success of my business has been because of social media. And if you're a young entrepreneur or a

business owner or a job seeker, it's incredibly hard to navigate social media and Facebook and understand all the opportunities and the changing landscape in real time constantly. So Facebook have made this platform called Facebook Boost, which is for job seekers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, which is a one-stop shop dedicated to you, aimed at giving you the resources and the training for free that you need to survive in this crazy digital economy.

Since it launched, the aim of Boost has remained pretty much the same, to support small businesses, strengthen local economies, and to help build stronger communities. And you can learn more about that at facebook.com slash boost with Facebook UK. Check it out. I've been on there this morning and I've picked up a couple of ideas which I've just posted on my LinkedIn actually, but I think it's awesome. And it's a sponsor that I'm super proud to have. Thank you so much again for listening to this week's podcast. Here's some things that you need to know. I'm going to release a podcast on Christmas Day,

okay, which is a first for me, but it's a Christmas Day podcast. Hopefully you can listen to it that night. And it's just specifically about Christmas and that time of year and really that day. And then on Boxing Day, I'm going to a jungle for 10 days on my own. More on that soon.