The Wellness Scoop - Building Bridges In A Divided World

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

How do we create real change, build community, find a sense of togetherness and heal the divisions that currently exist in our society? A recent Harvard study concluded that 80% of millennials want to be rich and 50% famous, are we aiming for the wrong things and focusing so much on the big, on grandeur and impossible-to-reach goals that we miss the joy, the purpose, the connection of the small, the everyday, the local? We’re talking to independent Politician Rory Stewart about his experience here and the often toxic divides of politics today. 700 Tesco stores for frozen Gelong Thubten Podcast Episode: https://play.acast.com/s/deliciouslyellapodcast/f6f90e87-5875-40f9-981e-7899babfc209 Harvard Study Ted Talk: https://youtu.be/8KkKuTCFvzI Statistics on loneliness in the UK: https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/the-facts-on-loneliness/ Rory references Tempus Novo, an award winning charity that works with serving prisoners and ex-offenders: https://tempusnovo.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Good morning, everyone. So we've had an incredibly busy couple of weeks running around. We've started shooting our new cookbook, which is incredibly exciting. It's coming out next year. And it has been my first time bringing Skye properly to work.

So she's been on set with us every day, art directing, stealing all the attention, being a little teeny budding entrepreneur. And it's just been amazing getting to do that with her. I felt incredibly incredibly lucky and it's just been so so lovely having a kind of full week properly back in the swing of things yeah it has it's been pretty full on I've been buzzing around up and down the country to our different suppliers really excited with launching our frozen range into 700 Tesco stores right around now which we're super excited about so we've been busy getting ready for that and then I was in Italy for a couple of days last week, looking at a really cool bit of machinery for a potential new snacking product for next year, which is great.

And I suppose what's been binding it all together is we did an episode a little while ago with a Buddhist monk called Jialong Tubten, which I was really inspired by. And I'd always had great intention to meditate, but never quite had built the practice each day. And I think with buzzing around so much, meditation has really been the thing that's been keeping me grounded. And so we're gonna be adding a meditation section to the app that he's overseeing,

which we're super excited about. So that will be coming soon. Yeah, he's the most amazing man. If you haven't listened to his episode yet, I'll link it in the show notes. But his meditation has been kind of life-saving for keeping our sanity. It sure has. amazing man if you haven't listened to his episode yet i'll link it in the show notes um but his meditation has been kind of life-saving for keeping our sanity it sure has as you guys know obviously kind of that sense of community and sharing is is key to what we do and that's really what we want

to talk about on today's episode so on our podcast so far we've explored so many topics obviously around health and wellness and as we've gone through all these different episodes we have found a few common threads that keep coming up but that we haven't really gone into full detail with yet and that's loneliness connection and community and it's really become increasingly clear that feeling genuinely connected to those around us and to society as a whole has such a profound impact on our physical mental well-being but yet so many of us feel like it's so sorely lacking in our lives it's obviously a big topic because that connection isn't just to those around us, but to the world at large, to the culture, the politics, the world that we live in.

And I've been feeling how much that's been accentuated by the quite toxic and often incredibly divisive nature that currently lives within our political system. Obviously, that's especially true with Trump and Brexit. And every time you turn on the news, that sense of separation and divisiveness can be exacerbated by the anger that swirls around all the differing opinions and it feels as though we're kind of losing an ability to respect each other and coexist in a really lovely way. So this isn't a political episode but one in which we're going to explore how to feel more connected to those immediately around us, those with whom we share a common interest and a purpose but also how to feel connected to the world, to our society as a whole, and to those who we don't feel that

connection to, which means finding true respect for differing opinions and not letting that difference of opinion divide us, but instead bring us closer. So as some of you may know, both Ella and I came from political families. My mum and Ella's dad were both former members of parliament. And today we have a first on the Delishy Ella podcast, which is to welcome a politician who is trying to do it very differently, who has a fascinating background and who I'm a big admirer of. So welcome, Rory Stewart, and thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. So Ella and I watched a fascinating TED Talk a couple of weeks ago on a Harvard study on adult development.

And it starts with a chilling stat, which is that in a recent survey of millennials, 80% said their life goal was to be very rich and 50% said their goal in life was to be famous. And in the Harvard study, which is the longest ever conducted, it starts in 1938 and concluded just a couple of years ago, they look at two groups of men. The first group was a group of second year Harvard students, one of whom actually went on to be president. And the second group was a group of local disadvantaged boys from Boston, which is the city where Harvard is based. And they tried to find any common threads over the 75 years of the study of what makes us happy and healthy, irrespective of background or career achievements. And the conclusion was that no matter which background or achievements, what created a healthy and happy life was living with meaningful

social bonds, a sense of community and close relationship with loved ones. So having traveled the world a lot, having walked across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Nepal for two years and visited communities all over our country, what have been the common threads that you think help us create a greater sense of community, which can lead to these meaningful relationships? Well, the first thing is that I was very, very struck on all these walks by the sense that people, even I could turn up in a very remote valley in the center of Afghanistan, 10 days walk from the nearest road, and I could find a community where people felt such a sense of significance and dignity. And it was strange because many people in that village would never have been more than three or four hours walked

from that village in their lives. They would have lived in the village, died in the village, and yet they were getting such meaning and purpose out of that. And of course, for me, that was a really big challenge, because I'd spent a lot of my life traveling all the way around the world and somehow had convinced myself that the way to live was to see as many different places as possible. And I realized there was, you just sensed with people, and I feel this when I was working in Africa too, that you simply sense in the way that people carry themselves, the way they speak,

that there is a form of peace or certainty or dignity that goes along with knowing who you are and where you are and finding fulfilment in that and not worrying about the fact that you may not have been more than 15 miles from your village between the time you are born and die. And community is easier to create when we're collaborating towards a shared purpose.

An effective community needs that larger, shared, common purpose front and centre. But at the moment where topics, and so many topics are so divisive, as Ella mentioned earlier, Trump and Brexit, just to name two, how do we retain that sense of community with one another, even when we may strongly disagree?

Well, firstly, this problem in British society, which is that we're beginning to get into a very divided world, was not normal in Britain. In the United States, it's been true for many, many years that there's been a huge standoff between Democrats and Republicans. So if you do opinion polls, you discover that they have different priorities. Democrats, for example, prioritize health and education. Republicans prioritize security, terrorism, and the economy. And they often view each other as morally evil. So if I take my mother-in-law, who's an American Democrat voter, and I try to talk to her about Trump voters in Alabama and their views on guns, she will find it

very, very difficult to imagine compromising with them, dealing with them, working with them. In British politics, that wasn't true. In British politics, yes, people disagreed about the type of economic model they wanted to follow. In British politics, yes, people disagreed about the type of economic model they wanted to follow. But broadly speaking, we had the same priorities. A good example of that would be, there wasn't much difference between conservative and Labour voters on the importance of health. That'd be something that people would agree on. And we didn't traditionally view the other side as being evil, right? We might interpret them as being mistaken.

But generally, in the House of Commons, for example, people often worked cross-party. I mean, your own mother, Tess Jell, for example, was somebody who was deeply loved on both sides of the house. And she wasn't a figure who polarised or divided people. So what's so sad in British politics is that quite quickly, we have begun to really tear apart. And of course, the thing that's driving this sadly is Brexit. Brexit has found a subject which has divided us almost 50-50 down the middle. But is this single issue something that has started a precedent which will continue to divide us? Or is it something where I suppose we all hope

that once this is resolved, we can move on and we can create that tighter cooperation again? Well, I think we can come through this, but it's getting trickier and trickier and it's going to need a huge effort. Because some of this is the fault of politicians. In the Foreign Office, for example, I worked on societies like the Balkans, the war in Bosnia and Kosovo, in East Timor and Indonesia, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And what you saw there was societies that obviously had collapsed into civil war.

And the thing that everybody says in those societies is we weren't like this. We don't recognize ourselves. I mean, 10 years ago, we didn't know who was a Serb or a Croat or a Bosnian. We didn't know who was Shia or Sunni. We didn't know who was pushed to a Tajik. Many people would say, I went to school with these people. I had no idea which community they came from. But once the split begins, and once the politicians start kicking into that split, it's remarkable how quickly this becomes permanent. So the problem in Britain is that Brexit is already beginning to pitch young against old, Scotland against England, London against the rest of the country. And now people against Parliament is another thing that's coming up.

And if the politicians, and this is the thing that makes me sad about the way that sometimes some of the language Boris Johnson uses, also some of the language that Momentum supporters or Jeremy Corbyn use, is that they are dividing people into two. We're not two people. We're all humans. And I, as I'm sure anyone would find, is that spend an hour, an hour and a half talking to anyone, and of course you discover that they're much more than they're political. Pure Brexit.

Yeah, exactly, much more than that. But we've lost the ability to listen or think. Now, I'm particularly aware of this because I'm somebody who lives on boundaries between things. I was actually a Member of Parliament for a border constituency. I had half the English-Scottish border in my constituency. I'm half Scottish, I'm half English.

My mother voted Brexit, I voted Remain. I live in London, but I represent a Cumbrian constituency. So I'm a conservative, but I was somebody who was against a no deal Brexit and voted remain and push it. So I spend my whole life living on these boundaries. And what makes me so sad is that I feel on both sides, people being deeply right about one thing and deeply wrong about another and really unfair to their opponents, just refusing to each other, that quite kind of toxic language, and then that's obviously a big part of the media at the moment, it feels you turn it on and you immediately get sucked into that way of kind of communicating with other people. And as you said, this kind of inability to maybe understand and appreciate where the other person's coming from.

Yes. And you can see certain kinds of words, which maybe started with politicians start then are used by normal members of the public or the other way around so if i go on my twitter account if i vote in a way that people don't like i will have maybe a dozen people very quickly calling me a coward now i don't know what they mean by that right and of course there's not much point my tweeting back to them and saying, you know, what exactly do you think I'm afraid of? Why did you choose this particular word?

It's just a kind of word. That's all my performance, right? Or I'm a tracer. Or somehow I'm doing it for some corrupt reason. Or the possibility that, you know, we could have a reasonable disagreement, that we've both looked at the same stuff and we've come to a different conclusion. And it's actually a particularly interesting moment

because I'm an independent MP, so I don't belong to any political party. So I literally have nothing to gain voting one way or another. And do you think social media has fuelled this in many ways, though, where people got happy sending these things from behind a keyboard or from this anonymous place whereas now it is something that's kind of leaking into actually how we interact with each other in an actual human sense absolutely so i went to church on sunday yeah and i was taking my little two-year-old and my four-year-old to the loo and a lady in the congregation walked over

towards me put her head right next to my ear and then whispered really aggressively shame on you and i'm stuck my two-year-old my four-year-old i'm trying to get to the loo yeah and then i walk out of church and i'm crossing the road and i see this guy looking at me like this and i turn and smile at him and he turns me with a face full of rage and he just shouts whatever really really loudly yeah and then cross right now what i am certain is that they're on different sides this debate that the lady who said shame on you as a brexit voter the man who called me or whatever as a remain voter but they both really hate me i mean i am a yeah subject for this rage now i can try to be as sort of Buddhist about it as I like.

So I tried to say to this poor man who shouted at me in Sloane Square, you know, have a nice day, peace be on you, God bless you. But of course, it's difficult for me not to then spend the next few minutes sort of slightly shaken by some stranger coming up and screaming at you and i know because i've tried that if i were to try to say to him what are you doing you don't know me what do you got my kids with me what do you yeah eventually we'd have a sort of grumpy argument we'd be able to settle down yeah and uh he would sort of grumpily apologize and i'd grumpily apologize but yeah what's sad is that he perceives me as not somebody who might have looked at the same facts

and disagreed, but he perceives me as genuinely evil, that I'm somebody who's trying, you know, that I don't know, that I'm a supervillain. Yeah. Yeah, that you're deliberately doing something malicious. That it's his job to take me on, that he is sort of Batman and I'm the Joker or whatever that is in his brain. Yeah, and it feels very much like that is not helped by every time you watch Parliament.

That's the way that people are now talking to each other. And it almost validates it and makes it feel like it's OK to have that kind of language. And nobody listens. I mean, I gave a speech yesterday trying to reach out to brexit voters i mean i keep trying to argue for compromise so i i keep trying to say look if 48 people have voted one way 52 another then we need a compromise a sort of 52 48 compromise rather than a sort of endless yeah standoff but when i tried in the house of commons all the people i was addressing just turned away from me or started looking at their phones or started talking to each other. So I'm pleading with them, but I'm just not getting through. And I think now, what gives me hope, though, is that when I am out in the streets, when I'm walking London, so I'm now walking my way around every borough of London because I'm interested in being an independent mayor. And the thing that's interesting there is that people will cross the road and just talk about anything. And they're cheerful and I'll go to Brixton and somebody's a really really warm experience and actually we're talking about community and loneliness london has these extraordinary communities so that community around bricks market or the community i was in in gold is green last week or indeed uh bromley by boath and tower hamlets with the bengali community running a health center i mean

these are really strong communities with fantastic energy and volunteering yeah the question is is there something more that we can do to help and encourage and support that make people feel that that's part of your life one of the ideas i was trying to do i was wondering whether i could set up a website and see if um i could help make it easier for somebody to say i can spare two hours a week and i if I could help make it easier for somebody to say, I can spare two hours a week and I'd like to visit a older person. Because my instinct is that I've got a lot of friends who, yeah, would be happy to spend two hours a week visiting an older person,

but are more likely to do it if I can find the older person for it. Yeah. Facilitate it. Matching service for that, yeah. Yeah, find easy to match it up um and i think there's so much actually that this social media which could be a very you know obviously in some ways it's very isolating can also be very something brings people together one of the things that interests me too here is that with twitter i can have a conversation with somebody in brick lane and that can then be viewed by 600 000 people so that there is a sort of sense of that you can also use social media to bring more people into

conversation because the the internet has been good for for sharing information but not great for creating a deep sense of connection with with other people and so hopefully that is the the second wave so with these communities that you said that you felt this really strong sense of community and then going back to how you found that in really remote areas um in places like afghanistan what are the kind of things that you're seeing there that the rest of us could take from and start to build in our lives because i think so many people you know lots of people don't even know their neighbors and i think you do feel often like you're kind of floating around in this sort of big pond

and you don't feel connected to those around you. You know, you get on the tube in the morning and people don't really talk to each other. They don't really smile at each other. What can we learn that we can start to implement in order to bring us closer to those around us? These are very difficult questions. I mean, one thing I think that all of us feel is that a relationship is an activity, it's not a state. So it's important to find things to do together. So organising a Halloween party for the local community, finding ways to engage in a joint project could be, you could be actually

sometimes protesting something, you could be doing something joint project. You could be actually sometimes protesting something, you could be doing something about climate, you could be helping a neighbor. But it is important not to imagine that a relationship just happens by itself. I felt this when I was working in prisons, that academics would often say to prison officers, it's all about your relationship with the prisoner. That's not very helpful. But if you say, why don't you find an hour every week to sit down one-on-one with a prisoner on their bed, in their cell and talk about football, right?

Then actually the relationship comes, but you have to get away from sort of big abstract word down to what you're actually doing. I think it's the same with our children, that the point isn't to sort of put a big R relationship. The point is to build Lego together. And as we've discussed, community can be hard to come by. And a sad and unfortunate byproduct is loneliness. And stats say that 9 million people in the UK say they often feel lonely with young people between 16 to 24 being the most affected. What can we do to help

a greater sense of community for people who are feeling this way? And I think it's important to note that loneliness isn't just being on your own. You can also feel lonely in a crowd. I feel that very strongly. I mean, I spent 21 months walking alone across Asia. So, I walked every day 25, 30 miles. I stayed in 550 village houses and I didn't come back to the United Kingdom. And I never felt lonely. Even though two days would pass without my seeing another human being sometimes. Yeah. Did you find it difficult at the very beginning? Did that wane as you went or from day one?

From day one, it was fine because, and I think this is important, I'd chosen to be alone. Whereas I can feel much more lonely in a big city surrounded by people than when I'm in the middle of the desert. And what, but what's the difference between those? Why is that? And so what can people learn from that to be able to take themselves from a position where they may feel

lonely and maybe that is living in a big city into something where they feel content in in whether they are in the outer reaches of afghanistan or in the center of a big city i'm not a psychologist but i've had times in my life. I once spent, not very long, about eight days in a monastery meditating in silence without talking to anyone. And I did feel very lonely. And I felt lonely partly because I was completely unable to settle my mind. I was in a lot of pain. I found it very difficult to sit for 14 hours a day. And I think there what was happening is that I hadn't found something which I really believed in. I mean, if you're pushing yourself through 14 hours a day or something,

which doesn't quite feel right, and you're not talking to anyone and there's nobody to support you. You can begin to feel pretty miserable. So it kind of comes back to purpose. I think purpose is central for everything. But purpose doesn't need to be heroic purpose. So I, probably happiest in my life when I set up a small charity in Afghanistan, where I was sitting in the middle of a community,

we were clearing garbage out of the center of the old city of Kabul. And it was pretty straightforward. And then we set up a small art school. And I was probably happier doing that for two years than I did when I was a cabinet minister with a... I mean, this was actually very revealing to me. I was very, very lucky.

When I was in the cabinet, I was the Secretary of State for International Development, which meant that I was in charge not only of a huge budget, but it was 15 billion pounds completely under my control to help some of the very poorest people in the world. And you would have thought that was the most fulfilling purpose that you could ever have in your life. But actually, of course, the truth of the matter is I'm sitting at a desk in London. I am a very, very long way from the front line. I'm not in that clinic in Nigeria. I'm all about those human relationships. And I realized that I could have been equally happy setting up a pizza restaurant, provided the people that I was working with, I believed in. And provided I could be myself, that's the other thing. I mean,

I think purpose, purposes daily, or almost hourly ethical acts, the things that made me happiest in Kabul was being able to help somebody else out who was sick and help them get to a doctor in Delhi, which had nothing to do really with the purpose of what we were trying to do, which was build an art school and restore the centre of the old city of Kabul, but the freedom to be able to do that. And one of the problems in a lot of our lives is that our work, particularly in a formal office work, is very, very constrained by rules, by laws, by procedures, by HR, by what you can do, what you can't do, so that the human element is missing. So the frustrating thing about being Secretary of State for International Development is you can't actually think,

I've met a community that is in enormous need and wouldn't it be wonderful to build a well for them and I'll do it. I mean, I can do that when I'm running a small charity. But as soon as you're in charge of a government bureaucracy, you spot it and then there's a two and a half year process of paperwork, procurement, et cetera. I think what's so great to hear about that is that sometimes we feel like we are

so just beholden to whatever the politics of of the day is and that that change that we want is out of our reach but it actually shows that within all of us if we find that purpose then we can create such incredible change in the change that will be envied by people who may seem to be all powerful. But you absolutely feel that. I mean, you absolutely feel that with people. I mean, there are people that you meet, and I've met it with people who've been uniformed prison officers and have spent 30, 40 years working in a prison with such a sense of dignity, such a sense of a life well lived, such a sense of pride and confidence in what they've achieved. In fact, more there than I've ever seen with presidents,

prime ministers, cabinet ministers. I mean, actually, we mislead children. We make people think that the way to be happy or to make a difference is sort of grand i mean our schools are full of posters of nelson mandela or gandhi it was ridiculous i'm gonna be nelson mandela or gandhi and actually it's setting people up to fail in a way isn't it particularly if you're living in contemporary Britain. I mean, what are you doing? You're not leading a revolution against the empire or apartheid.

What one wants is a sense that at the end of one's life, one can look back and have a sense of shape, of pride, of achievement. And again, to return to my prison officer, I'm thinking of a particular guy who's now running a wonderful project called Tempos Novo up in Leeds, working, getting jobs for ex-prisoners. But really what drove him is he ran the local football team for prisoners. And it's about relationships. I mean, really what I suspect makes Val an impressive, confident person is that he can think about a dozen people that he's helped into employment

rather than the sort of thing that you might brand it at, which is transforming lives. Yeah, yeah. But it comes exactly back to exactly where we started with that Harvard study, which is 80% of people thinking what they want in life is to be rich and 50% of people thinking they want to be famous.

And actually, as you're saying, that's not really what's going to get you to the place where you're actually happy. It's feeling that you have a sense of purpose that's connected to people. 100%. And I think one of the things that I'm working my way towards desperately in London is to try to work out how being a mayor could be a way of encouraging community or of listening to people or of saying, I don't have the answers, you have the answers. What do you want to do with your neighbourhood? How can I help you do that? How can I help you connect with other neighbourhoods? How can I think about how you could structure youth clubs or how you could link a borough in inner London with a borough in outer London. How can I think about voluntary service? I mean, how do I get out of

the idea that being a mayor can't only be about making the tubes run on time. That's a really important job. I sort out the signaling on the Piccadilly line. But it's also about something more, something about what it means to be a citizen of a city and something more about what it means for us all to be citizens together. selling eggs that are stolen brixton market and the community working on mountain health in gold is green and the woman working in waterston's sutton are all part of a single yeah london i'm in a single community a single sense of what and i think it's so exciting in london because we are the most modern society almost on earth i, this was the biggest city in the world in the 19th century, right? We are absolutely the tip of the brow of the ship of history. I mean, this is the future being made here. And if we could make that future about people, individual

communities, we could harness the fact that we've never been so educated, we've never been so healthy, we've got so much to give. And yet, somehow we feel all the time we're less than the sum of our parts. And that must be because we're often setting ourselves up to fail. We're misunderstanding what it means to be human. Yeah. What's the biggest misunderstanding in that? I think it's, I think the biggest misunderstanding is that we think being human is about grand jargon. I think even a word like happiness is misleading because actually happiness is a lived activity. It's not a state.

It's a way of being. And it's a way of doing well and being well and doing well. And the problem for us as people is that we fixate on words like happiness, equality, poverty, sustainability, and they sound great. But what actually makes us human is the way that we work those things minute by minute, hour by hour in our lives. That's what actually, you know, we are, we're small, fragile creatures.

We live for, you know, a few decades. And we now are aware that we live in a world that's been around for many, many billions of years, and will be around many, many billions of years after our whole species has come. We have to live out our fragility in a particular time and a particular place and not try to set ourselves up with these grand words. Otherwise, we're setting ourselves up for madness do you think that partly then comes down again to kind of education and the way that we talk about it because as you said we focus so much on these big pictures on these big people and you then have that as well with the internet and people kind of aspire you know now to be kim kardashian or lady gaga but you know we look up to these huge people we want to be president and it's almost like we're not happy therefore in these kind of moments by moments in understanding, we have to work towards happiness and understanding we have to work on relationships. There's almost a kind of complacency. And because life become, you know, the internet and things like that does make life quite easy. Everyone kind of wants a quick fix, a quick click on something. And that's the

answer. I think that is it. I think there is an idea out there that to save the world, click here is a very kind of powerful idea. And it's something that I feel when I go to Silicon Valley and talk to people who've done well there, that they have an idea that somehow technology can fix our lives. I think the luckiest thing that can happen in someone's life is to find in their daily life something that actually begins to bring them happiness. Bring them purpose. Bring them purpose. That could be through their family. It could be through work. And in my life, I spent from the age of three to 26, all I did was I wanted to be a professional golfer.

And I dreamed of winning the Open Championship every day. and it fulfilled me with an enormous sense of purpose and I stopped and I went and worked in finance which felt so much more like a means to an end and I lost that purpose and it's the only time in my life now I can see that I wasn't actually happy technically I was I was I was doing really well but I just didn't have a purpose that I cared about and as soon as we started Delicious Yellow or we started the food products and our cafe and our app in in Delicious Yellow I the just overwhelming sense of purpose I feel and jumping out of bed and taking you, obviously understanding that there's huge rough that comes with the smooth,

but it is that purpose that binds a sense of, for me, not feeling lonely and also a sense of community for me. So one of the questions I'd have there is whether actually a lot of it isn't about people, the joy of building something together of the people that you work with and that you've got an amazing product but i suspect that what really gives you the sense of purpose and

happiness isn't only about the exact product and you have to feel proud of the product but the people you work with and building something absolutely you know we just had our 22nd employee in our office and start this, which is an enormous responsibility that we love. And we just found out that our junior finance person, it's his first ever job and he's training to be an accountant while he's at Delicious Yell and he passed his exam this morning. And that's honestly, those things give us more satisfaction than absolutely anything in the world his family moved over here from from pakistan when he was very young he did very well at school and now he's qualifying to be an accountant and he's just a amazing amazing guy and it is it is those things it's not the grand things of being able to either sometimes we get to speak in front of lots of people or we get to have amazing rewards that can come with what we do

it genuinely is the much what feel like smaller things or behind the the scene things that genuinely give us the most satisfaction but it takes a lot of courage to recognize that because what you're talking about there in in in relation to to the man you're talking about he's just become an answer is your love and admiration for another person and your pride in working with them. But it takes a lot of self-knowledge and self-confidence to really acknowledge when you're happy and when you're doing something that actually is working for you. Because we're a restless species.

So I completely, I made a bad mistake. I was running this wonderful charity in Afghanistan I really adored. And then Harvard University approached me and offered me to be a full professor at Harvard with my own chair and my own center to run. And I was flattered. I thought, wow, you know, I'm going to become a professor at Harvard. And of course, it was a terrible error. I arrived and I found university life, compared to running a charity in the old city of Kabul, very arid and static. And I'd cycle my little bicycle to and from and I'd teach my little class. And I just felt that I was in a sort of luxurious old people's home.

I didn't feel that I had any. But it was such a lesson for me because obviously what I needed to recognize is that although running a small charity that nobody had heard of with 150 people I really liked and enjoyed working with was actually a much much better way of spending my life than trying to be prime minister for example it's the ultimate example though of the when I culture that we live in you know it's always waiting for the next achievement and as you said failing therefore to appreciate what you're doing now and it's like because also we live in quite a world of comparisons particularly because of of the instance, we can see what everyone else is doing. We always feel like

we need to get to the next step, you know, whether that's the next stage in our life, whether that's the next step in our careers, almost like we feel like we've got something to kind of prove there's a sense of kind of ego and competitiveness in it. And as a result, I feel like we're so often unable to see when things are actually really good and we don't need more. So this is, I mean, I'm now going through this in my own life. I'm actually moving in reverse. So I'm moving away from being a member of Parliament Countenance and trying to move back to local politics as a mayor, because I actually think the real fulfilment in helping people in public

service is much more local, much more particular. It's much more likely to come talking to an Afghan trader about the problems that his son is having with the police on his doorstep in Lewisham than it is being at the National Security Council or sitting around the cabinet table. So I'm now on a journey from the big back to the small. I mean, I really think it's the small, the local, the particular, the real person, the real individual, which actually where change happens, not up at this sort of ground level. It's interesting because speaking to other entrepreneurs,

they always say that the most exciting part was, you know, it was never when they sold the company or when everything was kind of moving so smoothly. It was always the gritty of just getting going and trying to get that first sale or that first customer that's that's the most fun bit and I think I almost wish we'd enjoyed it more yeah because I look back at some of the kind of maddest moments we had in the frantic moments and you're always thinking about how do you get to the next step how do you get to the next step rather than appreciating the presence of now and yeah the fun of that well Rory this has been absolutely fascinating and thank you so much for

for sharing all of this with us and we always end each episode with kind of three things so people have listened to you and there's three things that they're going to kind of take away implement in their lives or just kind of food for thought what what would they be? I would say, be open to the possibility that actually the way that you change the world is not through grand sounding, huge projects, but through very particular local, very concrete things that you can see. So that'd be my first. I think the second thing is to get away from jargon down to the human. So get away from the idea that what you're talking about is how to change the world through a big idea like, you know, equality, down to how you live that out in the way that you treat another human being.

And I think the third thing is to try to remain vulnerable, to try to remain humble, to try to remain, if you can, and this is particularly difficult, I think, for middle-aged men, because we end up becoming really pompous and talking a lot, but to try to work out what it would mean to actually listen if we could really learn to listen amazing well thank you so so much thank you so much thank you and thank you guys so so so much for listening we will be back again next week cannot wait and have a lovely week, everyone. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada.

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