The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 64 - What You Need To Know About Following Your Passion: Patricia Bright

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment, Patricia Bright lays out the benefits - and the potential pitfalls - of following your passion. We always have to stay authentically in touch with what we love to do, and why we love doing it. This moment lays out how people can lose their way in following their passion, and how to avoid it. It’s a rare gem who can persevere with their passion to the point where it’s not only their work, but work they love to do and feel themselves doing. We’re so glad she did, and we think you’ll be glad she did too. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/tPEORY7Uhrb Patricia - https://www.youtube.com/c/PatriciaBright https://www.instagram.com/thepatriciabright/?hl=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

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 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 consistency you point to consistency as being the real um factor to your success but consistency must come from you know enjoying it because there'll be a lot of people listening to this thinking i want to be a youtuber i mean everybody seems to want to be yeah yeah but the insanity to do it as long as you did without the um guarantee of money must have come from somewhere there was no guarantee of money it was a hobby like if you're a painter you like painting at the weekend you're gonna paint anyway whether

someone pays you for your art or not you just enjoy doing it so I just enjoyed making videos that other girls watch and I could talk to the other girls so I didn't get paid for like four years but I was always uploading every weekend it was my hobby like it wasn't this is going to be my new job which is why I even struggle with it now and that I really want to enjoy it in the same way that I always enjoyed it and do I need to look for a new hobby and is now YouTube my job like oh I find it really hard to kind of balance the fact that this thing that was my my escape is kind of like my job like oh I find it really hard to kind of balance the fact that this thing that was my my escape is kind of like my job now there's a week I was talking to one of the guests on the podcast a couple of weeks ago about um this study where when someone gets paid to do a task they used to love doing they lose motivation for it and it's just mental they they do this study

where they give people this game people enjoy doing the game they then say we're going to ask you to do the game again but this time you're going to get paid the other group don't get paid and the group that got paid to do the thing they just enjoyed doing lose motivation doesn't it make a lot of sense you two stop paying me no i like those checks um that is insane it's you lose internal motivation when it becomes when when some of the um reason for doing it becomes extrinsic monetary so and this is a you know it's so wise oh my gosh it's tough isn't it it's really tough because people are like oh my god like what a privileged conversation it's not because like say imagine someone's like a a darts player or something right

but eventually once they get into the competitive sports of darts maybe it becomes a bit more stressful maybe they don't enjoy it as much maybe the the the challenge of doing it is now i've got to perform for my management and the the crew or whatever there's a dark crew i just made that up but that becomes like i don't know more pressure than the person who just wanted to play darts on the saturday night would feel and you feel that no no the reason being is that i'm i try to frame what i do as I've accepted that I have a huge desire to create stuff right that's it so as long as I focus on this process is creation this process is creation I'll be fine and that might mean saying no to work and no to sponsorships for a season so I can at least feel that creation because I'm very much like how do I feel about this which is kind of bad but

also it's allowed me to do what i'm doing feels like a good long-term strategy yeah right because if you're not asking that question in the short term how do i feel about this so many people and in fact i think the guest that just sat in that chair last um you end up gradually becoming someone you never intended to be and ending up somewhere you never intended to go so that constant asking of that question how do i feel about this today which as you alluded to means turning down money sometimes but you know thinking longer term about what you're doing and why you're doing i think is so critical so critically important you know we've got two guests that have come to watch this podcast today and sofia i said sofia you know she's she's

followed you for some time i said sofia Sophia, if you could ask Patricia any question, what would it be? She said to me, um, how did she find the confidence to make the leap from that sort of corporate career to going full time with this thing called YouTube? So for me, my confidence came from an Excel spreadsheet. So I am not a risk taker. I'm more of a steady and stable person, but I did a bit of maths. I did a bit of a projection. I looked at what my long-term potential earnings and lifestyle would look like if I stayed in the banking industry. And then I looked at what my numbers were looking like. You know, if I stayed as a creator, where could I take it? And even at that time, I had no clue I could get to where I am

today, but the numbers looked healthy enough. So I was like, okay, I'll take the leap. Even if I do it for two years, it could be okay. And I didn't just jump out. I kind of took a toe dip in and I didn't just jump out. I kind of took a toe dip in and I quit my job, but then I took another job that was part-time so I could make content and have a job as well. And you call your mum and you say, I quit my job. I didn't tell her. I didn't tell my mum. I didn't tell anybody.

What? You've quit your big banking job? Oh, hell no. I could never do that. So I knew my parents would be worried and scared should we tell them now no so mom i left my job they barely know what i do right now they're like i do this thing on the internet they're like oh well done it's fine yeah yeah so my mom but yeah so you you made that you took that leap into youtube um was there a moment where you think fucking hell this is this is moving this is

or was it just one step at a time slow and steady yeah slow and steady i was making i'd been making content for seven years and then i got to a million subscribers so I didn't have any of those really viral moments and I saw lots of people kind of steamroll ahead of me like go viral they were part of these groups and these crews and you know there was a time that there was a thing called the brick pack they were all there and I was just like in the corner by myself like prodding along and then inevitably like my time came and it took again that seven years to one million and then one more year to another million and a half and I then had my own viral moments off the back of myself and um but I never kind of took the step back to be like oh you've made it Because I never feel like I've made it.

Not even now? Not yet. A lot of people might be surprised by that. Maybe. But it depends on someone's personal definition of making it, right? And what's yours? World domination. What is mine? It's not just being popular on social media that's not my

complete definition of success right i think for me it's like creating things that i want to create when i want to create them and monetizing them and bringing value so if i say my overall thing that's it what that looks like i don't know just yet and you don't think you're there yet you don't think you're creating things that you really oh i'm doing it i'm doing it but i don't think i've had like one big thing yet does anyone have one big thing though i don't know i think that i you know i think if you'd gone back and asked patricia when she was at mmu what her making it look like, you would have said, you know, 100,000 followers. Do you know what I mean?

Free clothes, free food. Exactly, yeah. So maybe the goalpost is just moving off into the future. Maybe that speaks to what life is. It's just that journey as opposed to that destination, right? Yeah, yeah.