The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - E45: I Have NEVER Shared This Before.

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

In the first episode of 2020 of The Diary of a CEO, I share a very personal extract from my diary 8 years ago which I’ve NEVER shared before, and discuss the time I’ve recently spent alone in the Indonesian Jungle. I also explain why it’s important to...

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 Amazon 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. 2020. Fuck me. I can still remember where I was when it hit the second millennium in the year 2000. I remember being in Plymouth, which is in Devon, a small countryside location in the southwest of England, watching the fireworks on the side of a hill with my dad. And I was seven or eight years old, 20 years ago. It's so crazy to me. It's crazy to me. I can't get my head around it. You know, so much has changed in that time. And when I say changed, I don't mean my material circumstances. I mean my fundamental beliefs about the world. At the age of 8, 7, 9, 10, up to the age of about 16, I was a horrendously insecure kid, right? And I didn't know it at the time because I overcompensated with confidence.

I was a kid that was growing up in an all-white city, basically, in an all-white school of 1,500 kids. I was black, I was broke, and I had a massive fucking afro in a school where people were typically middle-class and rich, and all of them were white, and they all had perfectly straight hair, and you know what I mean? And I just, and the fundamentals of the way that I view the world have completely transformed in that space of time. And my circumstances have too. And you know what? I think in many respects, the reason I've seen such a transition in the last 20 years is because of those insecurities. It's propelled me in a certain direction. Being broke and feeling inadequate and like I wasn't enough propelled me to overcompensate

by being enough. And that's taken me here. And I can't begin to describe to you if we're talking about 2020, how much is going on in my life right now. As you know, I run a publicly listed company called Social Chain and we've been on a pretty crazy acquisition spree over the last couple of weeks buying really interesting companies that will move us forward and integrating them into our group. I'm currently also writing a book and I spent the last couple of weeks in an Indonesian jungle in Bali called Ubud, finishing off that book. And I wrote about 10 chapters while I was sat by a lake in a hut in a jungle, completely alone, right? And lastly, I guess, I have a very special announcement. This year, in April, we're hosting the first ever Diary of a CEO live event in Manchester, and it's an absolute labour of love.

Really something different. Like nothing I've ever done before. A challenge to myself, a challenge to my team, and really a creative endeavour that I'm doing because my heart tells me to. Not because I care about the money. We will make no money from this event. I'm almost certain about that. And if we do, I'm almost certain, again, I've got to speak to my team to make sure we cover our costs, but that money will go to charity. I'm doing this as a creative expression, something different and a way to challenge myself. And here we the podcast it's 3 26 a.m i'm in manchester in the uk i'm in a hotel room my dog is snoring on the bed in the room next to me it's wednesday um i've got to be up for work in about three hours i'm going to the gym and then

i'm uh and then i'm straight into it and i'm steven bart, and this is the diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. You know, I was really thinking long and hard about how to start this podcast because this is a special podcast. It's the first podcast of 2020. And so what I did is something that I've never, ever, ever done before. You know, this podcast is called The Diary of a CEO, but what you're listening to is my modern diary. And obviously I'm producing a podcast here. So my diary is, you know, in essence, the thoughts that I'm having that I think are valuable to the world. But before this diary,

there was another diary, a diary that existed eight years ago when I was 18, 19 years old and starting out in the world as a university dropout, trying to achieve success, get a girlfriend, find out what happiness was. And for the first time ever in the history of my life, I'm going to share with you what I wrote in my diary eight years ago today. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, how does he have his diary from eight years ago? A lot of my friends know what I did eight years ago. I went on Facebook in the notes section and almost every other day, I would write a note about what I was thinking, feeling, and going through mentally and within my life. And I would save it. So if you go into my Facebook now, you can see, if youlength diary entries in 2012, 2011, 2013, right? And so to commemorate this being the first podcast of 2020, I'm going to read to you word for word

without changing a single fucking word. And bear in mind, I never thought anybody would hear this. My diary entry from eight years ago. Are you ready? Here it is. The 16th of January, 2012. So I went back home at New Year's and my mum found out that I wasn't at university, even though I've told her several times and she's flipped out. This has sent a shockwave through my entire family in typical Esther fashion. Esther's my mum. Which has led to everyone questioning what I'm doing. Seeing it affect my dad has led me to question myself too. And that hasn't happened in a long, long time. Me questioning myself has shocked me. Surely I would never question me. And this has made me question myself even more because the

type of person that questions themselves is certainly, certainly unfocused. If I am all of those things, if I am unfocused, if I am uncertain, maybe I should be questioning myself. I am motivated to work harder, yet I'm not working harder. It's a strange situation. I'm just not sure about anything right now. This weekend, I'm meant to be meeting a potential investor in London and that's stressing me out as well because I don't know how I'll get there. I know I'll do fine when I get there, I just can't figure out how I'll get to London. I have such a small amount of money right now. I'm literally bouncing in and out of not being able to eat all the time. My dad sent me a couple of quid and I spent that on food but maybe I shouldn't have bought that

food. I could have just brought a loaf of bread. Some of it also got taken out by a charge from the bank and now I only have a couple of quid left and I need to get to London. I'll try and jump on a megabus and not pay the fare. Fingers crossed. I was really interested in this girl called Poppy and then she asked me to go to London with her for some thing but she just keeps wasting my time. She doesn't reply to my messages and for some strange reason she's unfollowed me on Twitter which really fucks me off. I figured she's just literally a time waster and I don't need that right now. I'm currently unemployed again. I got suspended from Late Room's call centre for gross misconduct

brackets pretending to be taking phone calls in the call centre, but really I was on my mobile phone in my pocket making designs for my website. I'm not getting any female action whatsoever. Full stop. Awful. Full stop. These posts are always so negative it's quite ridiculous. I wonder if they'll ever be positive. All I can do is breathe in and breathe out and keep going I guess and hope that one day things will be better. I really want

that Hannah Thompson girl. She's so hot. I know it won't happen though. Realistically she's not my kind of person. It's just lust. I cannot believe I'm to turn 20 this year. That is extreme. I can't believe how these years pass you by. And funnily, I'm happy from almost everything in my life. Even though my situation is absolutely dire. Even though I'm living in this boarded up house in this shithole area, I'm happy. I'm happy for about 90% I think. If I could just shake this money problem, I think I'd be 100% happy. I think I'd be almost the person I want to be. But I'm happy for about 90%, I think. If I could just shake this money problem, I think I'd be 100% happy. I think I'd be almost the person I want to be. But I'm still making the same mistakes

every opportunity I get, and it deeply upsets me. I now have an iPhone, and I got it just because I wanted to impress people. Lame. That is a lame thing to do when you are a nothing burger, as Kevin O'Leary, my favorite panellist on the Shark Tank would say. I really need to step my life game up. I read a quote this week and it said that life at its best is a series of challenges.

A big enough challenge will bring out strengths and abilities that you never knew you had. Take on challenge and you will bring yourself to life. So there's three things that I need to do. Sort out my money issues, try and keep as tidy and organized as I possibly can and spend more of my work time actually working. I know that if I just keep going, if I just keep walking up this hill, if I just keep focusing on putting one foot after the other,

I will get there in the end. And I think there is a place where my mum and dad are both happy and a place where I am too. And that was the end of my diary entry from 2012. And when I read through these diary entries, it really takes me back emotionally. It like takes me back to exactly how I felt. And it's funny because, you know, when people ask me in interviews today, did you ever doubt yourself? Did you ever have moments of weakness or whatever? I always answer no, because that's almost how I remember it. But when I go back through and read these diary entries, man, it was fucking hard for me. And, you know, with hindsight and that sort of retrospective

clarity, we, as entrepreneurs or as successful people, we paint the journey as being maybe easier than it actually was. We recall it in more sort of glamorous ways. And we always recall it without the feelings of like uncertainty and not believing in yourself. And that is the truth. That is my truth. Clearly there were moments in my journey where I really wasn't fucking sure I said it. I said I wasn't sure about anything and um I don't know if that's helped anybody at all out there but um I just felt like that was the right time to share that and maybe going forward in this podcast I'll share a bunch of the other diary entries from 2012 2011 when I was starting out too because I think in some respects they'll bring some of you comfort and if they do then for me that would be entirely worthwhile the next point in my diary this week is something I wrote in my diary when I was sat in the jungle

in Indonesia by the lake in the middle of a thunderstorm inside my little hut reflecting on the last decade and I actually wrote this in my diary just as it turned 2020 at midnight a couple of minutes after midnight and it was just what I felt in that particular moment. I wrote in my diary, don't spend your life preparing for life. And maybe I should have written, don't waste your life preparing for life. I think one of the biggest mistakes specifically ambitious people make, which is caused by having a bit of a destination mindset where you think that once you get to that destination, you'll be happy. Once you get to that mountaintop, that promotion, that car, that pay rise, that whatever it might be, that girlfriend,

whatever it might be, when you have that destination mindset is we spend our lives constantly in preparation. And if I look at the last 10 years of my life, if I look at the last decade, I spent virtually the whole decade telling myself that I was preparing to be successful, free, and happy. You know, I now run a company worth hundreds of millions. I'm well paid. I don't need a thing at all. I achieved the dreams that I set out for myself at the start of this decade. Surely this was the thing I was preparing for.

Then why the fuck am I still preparing? And what the fuck am I preparing for now? Because I'm still preparing every day, right? There was this great quote, which I read from one of the great sort of ancient Greek philosophers that says, the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and costs you today. Your whole future is uncertain. You must live immediately. And this really is a very sort of relevant quote to that, the way that I want to live across this next decade, because I haven't been living immediately. I haven't been living presently. I haven't been in the moment. I've constantly been in the future. And when you're in the future, you're not here, right? The future also never comes, right?

Some of my closest friends, and this is incredibly personal, but I guess this is what this podcast is for. I've witnessed them spend the best part of two decades in preparation to be happy, right? Some of my closest, closest friends on planet Earth. They spent the last two decades in preparation of happiness. And because of this, they slowly, I watched them slowly fall into this mixture of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and burnout. And this forced them out

of preparation. And in forcing them out of preparation, in making them stop preparing for life, it forced them into happiness. They went and got a partner. They went and finally got a social life. They went and found meaning. They went and got a dog. They started just going on walks for the sake of it. They started meditating. They started doing the things that they enjoy. They went and lived. And in doing so, I think they realized this incredibly formidable truth, which is if you live life believing that happiness is somewhere in your future, you always will. And if your happiness depends upon a tomorrow, it always will. And that's why we all have to live immediately.

I've spent a lot of time in this podcast talking about the fact that I don't think we believe we're going to die. I don't think any of us live as if we think we're going to die. I think that if we could see an hourglass on our desk of the years that we have left, even if it's 50 years, we would live in fundamentally different ways. If there was an hourglass on my desk and I could see the exact amount of sand grains that I had left to live pouring out, there is no way I would spend two hours arguing with a fucking troll on the internet. There is no way that I would spend time doing things that I don't want to do to impress people or to keep them happy. There is a huge fucking probability that I would be saying no 10 times more. And I just, I ask myself sometimes, why can't we live

immediately now? Why can't we live like that now? We know death is guaranteed. We just don't really believe it, right? The science says it, so we know it, but we don't believe it. And knowing and believing are two completely different things. So what does living immediately mean, especially when you're an ambitious person? For me, it means balance. It means that you can reach for something without it being at the expense of yourself. And the changes that I've made in my life, you've probably seen. I've started saying no to things that are professional commitments

in order to make sure I take care of myself and to make sure that I live now. Because the truth is, I, like a lot of you guys listening to this, right? You're gonna spend the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years of your life striving, irrespective of how much you accomplish. You will strive forever. I will strive forever. I will be in preparation for some goal forever.

And the risk of that, which is an inherent thing in me, is that I will strive and prepare my life away. I have to, I have to live now. And so, you know, you've seen a number of changes in me if you followed me closely. You've seen, you know, me spend more time with my girlfriend. You've seen me commit more to things that are passions, that are intrinsically motivating to me. You've seen me spend more time reading. I went to a fucking jungle in Indonesia by myself for 10 days and virtually didn't use much technology at all. These are drastic changes I've made in my life. And oh my God, it's great to live, you know?

It's great to strive and live at the same time. It really, really is. And I really wish that for you. You know, believe me, I've done both. I've done both in excess, and balance is the right answer. Okay, this is a really, really weird one, so bear with me on this one. Two years ago, a guy called Liam, I won't tell you his company name or his second name or anything else, I'll just tell you his first name. A guy called Liam popped up in my discovery section on Instagram and I clicked onto his profile and in his bio he had uh his company was called social something

bear in mind my company's called social chain his company was called social something and the reason I clicked onto his profile was because the quote he posted was something that I had said, but it had his face and name on it. So I clicked onto his profile and his whole profile was things I had said with his name on it and his face on it. His bio was the tagline of my company. I clicked through to the website of his company and he had copied and pasted word for word everything from the social chain website, from our company website onto his, including the case studies of the work that we've done for our clients, clients like Coca-Cola and some of the biggest brands in the world. He just copied and pasted them and put them on his website. And he was using all of my words, word for word on all

of his social media channels, right? This is where it gets even more fucking weird. He was wearing a top that I wear, not a normal black top, a top with a particular logo from a very, very niche brand. You can imagine how that feels, right? Slightly unnerving. Two years ago, I messaged him and I said, bro, like what the hell is going on here? Like you've copied every, at first he tried to deny it, but eventually he panicked a little bit and told me that he would delete it all and fix it. The conversation admittedly did get heated back then two years ago, but he did within the next couple of hours, delete everything. He said, give me a day to change the website. I'll remove everything, et cetera, et cetera. And we left it there. He changed, he fixed it all, deleted it all. And he left it there. And when I say deleted it all,

I mean, hundreds of posts where he used my exact words and pretended they were his. So two years passes and yesterday I'm sat on Twitter and a girl tweets me and she says, a girl called Charlotte tweets me and says, hey Steve, this guy, Liam, the things he's saying on Twitter sound a lot like you. Are you copying him or is he copying you? I can't figure it out. And I click on the little username thing and it takes me through to a profile and it says you are blocked, right? So this guy had blocked me and it's the guy from two years ago and he quickly unblocked me because of that tweet from Charlotte and I got and he dm'd me and said hey mate I'm not really copying you you can check out my profile

I clicked onto his profile now that I was unblocked and every single tweet was copied from me every single thing and then I clicked onto his LinkedIn every single thing was And then I clicked onto his LinkedIn. Every single thing was copied word for word. Everything that I said word for word was copied. I went on his new company's website. He copied our company logo once again. His website, the terminology was now different, but he'd copied our company logo again. We'd spoken two years ago, right? And he vowed never to copy everything I did ever again. But here he was copying me again. And when I say copying, I have no problem with copying. I copy people, right?

You're inspired, you steal ideas and things like this. But I would never copy someone word for word, everything they say. I would never do that. For me, that's creepy. And it made me feel slightly uncomfortable. And here's what happened inside me. And I always like to describe how I felt on this podcast. For the first 10 seconds, I was,

fuck sake, Liam, you fucking, you know, like fretting and cussing and whatever else. Not at him, but just at myself. Like, who the, what the hell is going on here? The second phase of my feelings, which lasted again, another 10 seconds, was just feeling really uncomfortable. And what I mean, when I say uncomfortable, I mean freaked out because I had this conversation with him and he's back again using my exact words. And then I arrived at a different state, which was like real genuine curiosity.

And I said to him, I said, Liam, and I'm going to read you the exact conversation. I took a screenshot and I put it into my diary. So I'm going to read off the screenshot. I said, Liam, can I just ask a question, a genuine question out of interest what were you thinking like what is the what is the issue you're having what are you struggling with and I said Liam that's a genuine question and he said to me do you promise you won't share this with anybody I said which part and he said my answer to your

question I said I genuinely genuinely won't it. I won't share your name. I just genuinely want to know what it is you're struggling with. And I genuinely want to see if I can help. He said to me, so I've put in three years of hard work, long nights, dedication to my business. And I don't feel like I've got to where I want to be. And then I look at the likes of you and you've made it big with the likes of your vlogs, with the company success, with everything, your millions of followers, and I'm here still struggling. So I guess I saw you and I think if I copy you, then I can fast track my own success. You've made it look easy. Steve, can I ask you a question? Was it hard for you too? And in that moment, everything fell away.

Any anger that I could possibly have was replaced with this, like, I'm getting emotional now talking about this, which is crazy. It was replaced with this like total overwhelming feeling of compassion. Because I know what it's like to struggle. I really know what it's like to struggle. I know what it's like to doubt yourself. I know what it's like to put in years of hard work and not make enough progress and to feel inadequate and look at other people on social media and for their lives to look so easy and perfect and flawless and yours to look so flawed

and tough and impossible. I know what that feels like. And I just, yeah, everything fell away. That's the only way I can describe it. And there it was. He was a young, insecure kid trying to get it, trying to make it for his own reasons. And so was I. So was I one day. He's exactly who I was. He's slightly misguided in his approach, but he's just like I was. And I spent the next hour and a half talking to him, trying to give him as much advice as I possibly could. And really the central advice that I could give him was that the reason why people become special, the reason why they get big, a lot of the reason

is because of their uniqueness. In fact, I've always thought that our uniqueness is our power. I think it's the only thing that you can give the world that nobody else can. Therefore, if channeled correctly, maybe the most valuable thing you can give the world. And here's what I said to Liam. I said, Liam, this sounds like a crazy thing to say, but you shouldn't try and be your idols. We are the generation that have confused admiration with aspiration, and we'll never find ourselves our own happiness. You'll never find yourself or your own success

until we accept that we can't have anyone else's life or success or journey, but our own. And we have to also realize that if we focus on our own, then our own life will feel like more than enough. There was no Bill Gates for Bill Gates to emulate. He had to carve out his own path to find his own greatness. Each of our idols' uniqueness is their power. They had the conviction to disagree, the confidence to persevere, and the braveness to go against the status quo. The thing we celebrate, Liam, is their individuality, their

lack of conformity, and the audacity of their strongly held beliefs that black was equal to white in the case of Martin Luther King, their vision for pocket computers and more connected worlds in the case of Steve Jobs, for driverless cars and personal spaceships in the case of Elon Musk. These ideas couldn't come from people that mimic others. So my advice to you is don't aspire to be your hero. Stop trying to mimic people you see on social media. Strive to be yourself. Visionaries and great people are to be admired, not to be imitated. Trying to be someone else completely is a surefire way of becoming nobody at all. That person is taken. The only great person you can become is the greatest version of yourself. And that's a pretty great person. And here's the crazy thing. When you stop trying to be everybody else, and once you start being the greatest version of you,

people will look up to you, Liam, and they'll make the same mistake that you made today. They'll try and be you too. And if you listen to that and you think that was a pretty rehearsed speech, then you would be absolutely right. That is the speech that I gave in part to my secondary school, when my secondary school,

which expelled me, by the way, kicked me out, invited me back to do a speech. That's part of the speech I gave. I did so much reflection into myself as to the things that made me most happy and most successful and really what the commonalities were.

And this overriding truth was that the closer I came to being me, the more successful I became. The closer I came to being me, the more happy I became, the better friend I was, the more attractive I was. And it all really started with getting really fucking comfortable with being me. I guess this is in part where we see such staggering suicide rates amongst communities

where people are having to force a character. They're having to force a mask onto their face every day. We've seen that within the LGBTQ community, which have been incredibly oppressed for decades and decades. And it's such a depressing way to live, such a sad, sad, sorrowful way to live, to live with a mask on. It's also not a productive way to live. It's not a successful way to live. And that's the decision that I saw Liam making was to live with a mask on.

It will make you so fucking unhappy. There's this philosophical book that I read, which is like a psychology philosophy book. And it talks about if you succeed in pretending you're someone else, in living someone else's life, you become full of despair because you abandoned your true self. But if you don't succeed in becoming that person, in copying them, if you don't succeed in becoming Steve Bartlett, right, you also end up in despair because you fail to abandon yourself. And really, the only non-despair, comfortable place that you can exist is being your true self

and really accepting you for how you are. Blemishes, cellulite, five foot, 12 foot, whatever it might be. The most happy, rewarding, productive, sane place to live is within your true self. This isn't about success or making millions. This is about living a happy life. And once upon a time, and this is really my closing point here, is I would have taken that personally. And by looking at that whole situation with a different perspective, I came away not feeling angry, not feeling like I

was going to take him to court and sue him or anything, but feeling like deeply fucking compassionate towards him and wanting to help him. Not taking things personally is a superpower that we can all develop, trust me. And in the world we live in with thousands and millions and trillions of internet trolls trying to get a reaction from you, trying to make you, you know, lower yourself to something, it's an incredibly important superpower. It's more super now than ever before. And really, I guess there's three steps that I'm going to try and live by going forward. I'm going to be conscious about why I'm feeling what I'm feeling. And I'm going to question myself whenever I feel

the urge to react to a situation. I'm then also going to rationalize the importance of the situation. Most shit doesn't matter. And I kind of talked about this in last week's podcast, where I talked about fishing for rocks, thinking that they're fish. Most things in life don't matter. In fact, like 99.9% of it does not matter, especially from the context of your deathbed. Nothing really matters. So rationalizing it also talks yourself down from really engaging in an emotional way, which is costly to you. You never win, right? And the third point is trying to put myself in someone else's shoes and understand why they're doing or saying what they're saying. And that's really what happened here. I just asked the question, I said, Liam,

why are you doing this? What's the problem? And because I let down my fucking anger for a second and just asked him, it completely changed everything. It removed all the resentment, all the fucking negativity out of my body instantaneously, and it replaced it with an overwhelming sense of compassion. And really, you know, it's a massive fucking compliment. So I just wanted to share that with you because for me, it just shows how a slight sort of reframing and a slightly different, more empathetic approach to situations can result in a more empathetic, you know, compassionate, positive outcome for you and for them. Something to consider. The next point in my diary this week is about the podcast sponsor, which is Boost by Facebook. They are a dedicated one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, for CEOs, for small businesses, job seekers, and anybody with ambition that's looking to thrive in this digital economy.

They launched with the aim of creating a place where all of us can understand this new world of digital and social. It can be incredibly intimidating. My mum, I was talking to her about Boost with Facebook the other day, she doesn't know how to use a phone. She doesn't know how to type and she's trying to run a business in 2020 and compete against people that do. Boost is a place for people like her where she can learn more about the digital economy, about features and skills and training and all of the things that matter, the things that might level the playing field for her as someone that doesn't know about this new world that we live in you can learn more

about this at facebook.com slash boost with facebook uk and if you do check it out drop me a message and let me know how you find it i always pop on there every now and then to to try and make sure i'm staying ahead of the curve but yeah do let me know how you find it okay so changing direction completely i've just written in my diary for the next point some people will like you some people will hate you some people simply will not care you can only sell to the first two but not to the third and let me give you some context as to why i wrote that. Once upon a time in social media, and bear in mind, I've been in social media for the last decade, deeper than any man could possibly go. Social media made us pretend that we were absolutely perfect,

that we had perfect lives, that we were perfectly happy, that we were perfectly wealthy, that we had everything. And this was like the first evolution of social media starting in maybe 2010 and going to about 2007, right? And because everyone tried to conform with this idea of perfection, it created this void, this empty space where anyone that was brave enough to admit that they weren't perfect, to show their truth, their mental health struggles, their unfiltered makeup-less selfie, their raw unglamorous life, their truth, right? They filled that void and they were particularly interesting. And authenticity and being authentic became so incredibly interesting

from about 2017 onwards. And social media is still forcing us to conform. And that's again creating a massive void. It's forcing us now to all be, speak, and even think the same at threat of being cancelled. We've seen this historic rise in cancel culture where people like Kevin Hart are being cancelled for things they've said online, or Elon Musk, or this person, or whoever it might be, are being cancelled for things they said online. They're having their careers torn down, rightly or wrongly. It's once again created, as I said, this huge void, a huge empty space where people who are brave enough to think for themselves and then speak their minds are just fascinating.

They are the centre of attention. They are the platform that all conversations revolve around, both for those people that agree or disagree with them. And as a society, we throw stones at these people. We try and tear them down, and we're amazed that our stones don't seem to deter them. They carry on carrying on, despite the majority of people showing them public hate and scrutiny. And I think, I think there's a side in all of us, even if we absolutely despise that person, and even if we don't want to admit it consciously, deep down that somewhat admires their ability to behave with such undeterred resilience in the face of so much public scrutiny. Because, you know, from childhood

and from secondary school, we're taught survival, we're taught social survival, and we're taught that the safest thing to do is to conform, to buy the shoes that everyone else is buying, to get the hairstyle that the cool kids have, to be one of the gang. And then we're propelled into adulthood wired to fit in, wired with this belief that we can score points by being politically correct, by being socially expedient. Social media and the internet have exacerbated this to the point where a world that was once 25,000 miles long is just a millisecond long. Meaning that a social cause happening in Australia, like the bushfires, becomes a social cause for those living 10,000 miles away in London immediately. Meaning that ideas around equality or gender, like gender being non-binary, becomes

accepted and written into law in some countries within years of the conversation gaining pace, not multiple decades like it once would have. We think together and we think faster than ever before. And if you think with the pack, you get rewards. You get likes, followers, nice things said about you and messages that massage your ego and boost your sense of belonging, I guess. And there's really not many rewards that feel greater than that these days, right? Even if we look at Maslowian's hierarchy of needs, all of those things rank pretty high. Thinking together has become the game. And again, this has created an empty space. And there's a couple of people dancing around and living and thriving and taking, making the most of that empty space, like Jordan Peterson, like Piers Morgan, like Kanye West, like Donald Trump, like Katie Hopkins. Because they're so defiant against the

stones we throw, they are uncancellable. They're doing unbelievably well in their own endeavours. Piers Morgan is wiping the floor with every single TV host right now. Kanye West with every single rap artist. Jordan Peterson with every single author in his category, and Katie Hopkins with every single racist. Anyway, there's something to learn here. I'm not saying be a dickhead, but there's a void to fill, and it can be filled by being brave enough to be an original thinker with the right intentions. Indifference is the least profitable outcome. It's the least profitable place to exist. And this is a lesson for marketing, for personal branding, and for storytelling more generally. I don't want to fill that void for filling that void's sake,

but I know that if I was to become my truest self, right, and I really was to speak my mind, I would fill that void. And I'm pretty sure that if you became the truest version of yourself, you would fill that void too. Something to think about. Changing direction again. Okay, so the next point in my diary is something I wrote again when I was sat in the jungle in Indonesia.

I wrote, sometimes you find what you need where you least want to look. And this really relates to solving some of the traumas and the unhealed issues from your past. Everybody listening to this podcast right now can think of a friend that is repeatedly going through the same pattern of hurt and pain and disappointment because there's something within them that they haven't confronted. And even in my career and in my industry, one of the biggest killers of great companies that really nobody's talking about is the unaddressed trauma of the founders of the company. The childhood traumas, the things that happened when they were kids, their insecurities. And that leads to poor decision-making, ego running the show, and toxic leadership at all levels. And in many respects, I've always believed that we're all just

slightly wrinkled children playing out the stories, experiences, and traumas of our childhood. I studied psychology for about two and a half years. And one of the things that completely blew my mind was how much the first seven to 10 years of our life impacts everything for the rest of our lives. Our relationships, how much we love people, our ability to show affection, our leadership style, everything. It blew my mind. And as a leader, in order to run a very stable ship, you must be stable within yourself, right? In order to run a family, you must be stable within yourself. To have a friendship, you must be stable within yourself. You can't really have

a stability in your life without having stability within. And on several occasions, and I'm going to tell you a very personal story in a second, okay, so bear with me. On several occasions when I was a consultant before I started my business, I was a consultant for about a year and a half, I personally watched three great startups with huge potential fail because the founders had issues that dated back decades and in some cases to the playground when they were 11 years old. And I'm going to tell you one particular story. When I made this podcast, at the very start of this podcast, I told you to keep this to yourself. So please keep this particular part to yourself. I was a consultant for a guy in London and he just raised about 19

million dollars in investment and he brought me in to advise him on social media, on marketing, and really my job was to work alongside the CEO and advise him. I didn't have a manager, I didn't have a team, I didn't have a day, I had to be in the office, I didn't have working hours. I could come in whenever I wanted to and guide the CEO however I saw fit. And I really was just this external pair of eyes. And this guy was one of the most insecure people I've ever met. The worst leaders. He was so controlling over his team. He wanted to sit in this big glass elevated box, you know, above everybody else in his own space. Inherently obsessed with material things and showing off and impressing people and there was this one particular day where he comes up to me and whispers in my ear he says

Stephen I'm gonna order some prostitutes to the office do you want to join me in the back room right this is a guy that was had hired me to be his consultant asking me to come to the back room to spend time with prostitutes, if I put that in a PG way, with him. And upon rejecting his invitation, he said something really fucking strange to me. He said, what if I call them whores? Does that make you want to join me? And I looked at him with this like fucking weird, perplexed confusion on my face and said, why would that make me want to join you? And he said, I don't know, there's something about the word. I just love using that word. It's kind of like powerful, like you have control. And I didn't ask any of the questions. But a few days after that, I handed

my notice in. Although I didn't work there, I still had a notice period within my contract. I had 30 more days to work. And within those 30 days, he said a few things that were really interesting to me. The first was, I overheard him having this wild tirade with the COO of the company, telling the COO how much he likes being called boss, again, because it gives him this sense of control. And then on the last day, the last day that I was due to spend there, he got very, very drunk. And he started explaining something to me about his childhood. He started explaining to me that when he was 10 years old he got bullied so badly on the playground that quote the bullies felt sorry for him and stopped bullying him and then he told me that the majority of people that

bullied him were girls and that they never showed any interest in him whatsoever. And it all made sense. Here was this toxic, controlling, narcissistic CEO who was weirdly and despicably obsessed with calling prostitutes whores. This weird fixation with that word because it finally gave him everything his childhood didn't. It finally to, felt like it gave him control. And really this whole company, which by the way was funded by his rich dad, was just another way for him to try and live out the childhood he always wished he had,

to have control over people, to have control over women. Long story short, he went bust. All 19 million that he raised from his dad and his dad's friends down the drain. And when he went bust, the story came out in the papers and the stories that his employees told, the 50 of them that stepped forward to tell the papers, was quite frankly horrific. The stories I have don't even scratch the surface. And here's the crazy thing. His business wasn't a bad idea.

It's crazy to me that things that happened to him two and a half decades ago on the playground are still ruining his life today. And it's so, so clear to me that the one advice I should have given him as a consultant was to go and get coaching, go and get therapy, go and get professional help. Even if you're not aware of a particular trauma or issue, a lot of these things are unknown unknowns. We should all go and get therapy, especially when

we're in positions of power. We're all fucked up in different ways. And if you're listening to this and thinking, no, I'm not fucked, I'm different, you're probably more fucked than everyone else. We're all fucked. And understanding how we're fucked and putting things in place to make the most out of our uniqueness and our journey and our trauma and our issues, I think should be the winning strategy, not denying that we're fucked. That's the kind of approach I've taken in my life and quite honestly, some the the most progress I've made was unlearning behavior not learning anything unlearning things that my childhood taught me were true things that held me back things that were destructive for my relationship my career for my management whatever it might be what have you got to unlearn

for the last point in my diary today I've just written hustle porn stars and their secrets for success. As I said at the start of this diary, when I read out my diary entry from eight years ago, it's crazy how I look back and I remember my journey as one thing. But when I read my diary, it was definitely something different. You know, I look back and think I was happy the whole time, there was no stress, I was never doubting myself, whatever, whatever. But when I read those diary entries, I realized that I have this like hindsight bias, which is at play in my mind. Successful people with that hindsight bias that also lack self-awareness or humility, or that are literally just deceiving you, right? That don't understand the full range of factors or don't want

to admit the full range of factors that made them successful. Things like luck and timing and privilege and circumstance that are responsible for the success of all of us, even me, right? And I'm a kid that came from fucking nothing with bankrupt parents to where I am now. And even I can admit that luck, timing, circumstance and privilege as it relates to the roads

and the bridges and electricity and the system and electricity and the, you know, the system we have in this country. These all played a massive part in me being able to do what I've done. The people that don't realize this are responsible for 99% of the oversimplified, toxic, dangerous hustle porn that misleads young entrepreneurs and young ambitious people, people that are starting out in their journeys. It really fucking misleads them. Working hard at something matters, being intelligent matters, and other personality traits can be real contributing factors, but there are too many hard-working intelligent people with great personality traits that fail to take such a

reductionist approach. Obviously, obviously, the hustle porn stars that are selling you this stuff have two objectives. Objective number one is to make themselves seem uniquely special, gifted, or entirely responsible for their success so that you listen to them. And number two is to sell you something that seems both simple and achievable so that you buy it. Both objectives result in this crazy, dangerous, toxic, reductionist approach to a very complex subject. And the truth is, success is a complicated, very individual thing. Something you can't put into a box. You can't put a time frame on it. You can't get it overnight. You can't get it in three years guaranteed. You can't get it guaranteed at all. You can't fully control it. There is no morning routine to make you successful, okay? My mornings start differently every fucking day. Sometimes I'm

up at four o'clock in the gym. Sometimes I sleep till 1pm on the weekends. You know, there's no fucking morning routine. There's really no secrets either. In fact, if there's any commonalities whatsoever, they're the obvious things. They're the, if you work hard, that does matter. If you're smart, that does matter. If you're not an arsehole, that does matter. And there's no fucking shortcuts, because if there was, I swear to God, we'd all be taking them, right? It's all bullshit. But bullshit that sells, because simple sells. And simple sells a lot better than complicated and real. And success is both complicated, it's individualistic, and that's the only real version of it.

But nobody wants me to fucking say that because it doesn't sell. Everybody wants the five-step formula to overnight success, the three-step quick way to become a millionaire, the morning routine of the billionaires, like all of that fucking bullshit. Ugh, yuck. Anyway, avoid that, please. Work hard and be nice to people, okay? And keep your fingers crossed. And have rich old grandparents. I'm joking, I'm joking. I'm not. Once again, as always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It means the world to me. It's the, you know, it's the most enjoyable thing I do, I think, these days in terms of

content that I produce. And I cannot wait, I cannot wait, cannot wait for the Diary of a CEO live. Please make sure you're there, right? We only have about 700, 800 seats. Please make sure you're sat in one of them. I promise you it's going to be a really awesome experience. And I'm so excited to meet all of you in person. A lot of you listen to this and we've never met. So I'm really, really excited for that. And yeah, I don't let people down and I really won't let you down. If you do like this podcast, if you have enjoyed this episode, please do give it a five-star rating. That really helps. And what helps even more is if you subscribe and you follow it because I get to see those numbers and it really is um a driving force for me to do it in fact the reason why i recorded this podcast at 3 a.m was actually because someone tweeted me when i was in the bath

at 1 a.m telling me how much they enjoyed the last episode so i thought you know what fuck it i'm gonna stay up tonight and record this it's now 5 54 a.m okay so i'm meant to be picked up to go to the gym in 16 minutes by my best mate that's dedication right give it a subscribe give it a follow thank you so much have the best week ever and i'll see you again here in a couple of days time you