E11: I have a huge announcement to make...

In this chapter I have a huge announcement to make, one that I've not revealed to anyone outside of my immediate team yet.. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Hello again. It's great to be back. Last week on the podcast, we delved into Dom's incredibly inspiring diary. The feedback from that chapter has been tremendous, and I think I speak for Dom when I say we've both been pleasantly overwhelmed by the amount of tweets, direct messages and posts we've both received. Following that chapter, many people approached Dom and shared their own personal battles with him. And I guess that's part of the beauty of this format because honesty begets honesty. And we live in a world where that raw honesty is so rare, where everybody is sharing their best life and the edited, filtered, highlight reel of their life.

• 0:39Steven Bartlett?

  And this podcast will never, ever be about big names. And we might have big names on, and we've got a few coming on, but that's not the point. The podcast is about big stories told honestly. And this week, we're reopening my diary and I'm going to apologize in advance because I've not processed most of the scribbles in front of me. So if I stumble, it's because I'm working these things out for myself as I go. And because as you know, there's no scripter here, there's no writer.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  It's just me, myself and my thoughts. In the next chapter, the one after this, I've got another incredible guest coming on who a lot of you will actually know.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  And this guest is guaranteed to take us on a journey that we've not been on yet. I cannot wait to share that with you. Lastly, I've been repeatedly asked this week where and how I record the podcast. And just to give you a bit of context, it's currently 3am here in my house in Manchester. I record the podcast from my phone, using a mic that just plugs into my phone. I'm sat in my boxes, in my laundry cupboard, with the lights off, under the stairs. It doesn't get much more real than that. Okay? But without further ado, this is chapter 11 and I'm Steve Bartlett. This is the diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  Personality defines you. Okay, so this point in my diary was a real, real revelation. And this point is for anybody that's looking to someday start a business, someone that's currently within a business or someone who has started their own business. This was a conversation I had with a really good friend and it allowed me to sort of diagnose why Social Chain as a business has been successful. For context, for any of you that don't know the business I run, I run a company called Social Chain Group and it's a group of companies. There's now 200 members of staff and that's grown from zero to 200 in the space of about three years. We have five offices around the world.

• 2:47Steven Bartlett?

  We work with the world's biggest brands, everybody from Apple to Coca-Cola, you name it, right? We're super, super young. When we started, we had virtually no experience in this, you know, this agency world. And so I've tried to define and diagnose how we managed to do that in an industry that is incredibly, incredibly competitive. And I was sat with a friend who runs a different type of agency business in the same city and we were discussing this. And here's what I figured out. So his business is, it's not in the marketing world, it's in a slightly different arena. And mine is in the marketing world. And I was sat with him making the point that the personality of your business is what

• 3:31Steven Bartlett?

  will make you stand out. And I said, from day one, Social Chain has been the guy in the pub dancing on the table. And here's what I mean. When you walk into the pub, you look over, you see someone that's dancing on the table. Everybody else is sat down and there's that one person dancing on the table. The pub represents the industry, right? The people that are sat down sipping their drink, looking at the person dancing on the table, judging them are the ones that never get noticed, right? The person dancing on the table gets noticed. And what tends to happen is the person gets on the table and starts dancing, 50% of the pub absolutely hate him. They hate him partly because they...

• 4:14Steven Bartlett?

  Envy his confidence of being able to get on the table. They hate him because he's different and in life, people will always hate you when you take a different route. The other fifty percent of the pub love him. They applaud him, they follow him and eventually they're all on the tables, all of them dancing. And when they get home, they tell all of their friends that they saw someone in the pub dancing on the table. Social Chain has always been the person in our, in our industry, dancing on the table. When we started out, we had unbelievable hate because we were doing things differently. Unbelievable hate, to the point where members of our team would cry when we logged into Twitter because Buzzfeed and the major sort of papers were doing these hit jobs on us, right?

• 4:57Steven Bartlett?

  Because we were just doing things completely differently and we really didn't care. We were dancing on the table. The other fifty percent of the tweets, which is naturally the ones that you ignore, because you know, we all only see the hate, were people praising us, they were applauding us, saying we were geniuses. But because we were the object of contention and because we were the one on the table, over time, we were the ones that accelerated out of our industry. We were the ones that drove the most attention, um, picked up the most business, won the most awards, and became the most notorious for what we stood for. So taking you back to my conversation with my friend, sat in the hot tub with him, I said to him, tell me three things you think of when you think of Social Chain.

• 5:40Steven Bartlett?

  And he said, you do things differently, um, you're always fast to do things and um, you always do things fearlessly, which are sort of three of our key values. And he asked me then to ask him the same question in return. And all I could think of was you make nice designs. I couldn't think of two other things because his agency didn't have a personality. His business doesn't have that, that personality as such, um, that. You know, ours had in the early days, which made ours break out. So if you're operating in a saturated industry, a pub full of people, and you're just stood in the corner sipping

• 6:23Steven Bartlett?

  your drink, no one's ever gonna know you're there, you're never gonna break out. So if you run an agency business, or really any type of business, your personality will define you. And funnily enough, my advice to that friend was that he should, next time he receives a budget from a big charity, let's say, take the budget, give all of the money away, right? Give the ten thousand pounds away to charity, and then put up a landing page, for example, that says, we gave all the money away to charity to make this website, da, da, da, da, da, da. Come up with some creative concept around that, and then make a sixty second video explaining what you did. Push that out on social media. If you do that

• 7:04Steven Bartlett?

  once a month, you're gonna tell the world why you're different, you're gonna, you're gonna show the world your personality, and it won't take long for people to think, oh, you know, that's that agency, they do things that way, that's what they're known for, they're notorious. Funnily enough, Drake this week did exactly that. He took a million pound budget he was given from his record label to make a music video, he gave it away and filmed himself giving it away. And I, so this week I messaged my friend, and anybody that thinks I'm lying about this, everyone around me knows this story now, because I've told them, right? And there's many screenshots, et cetera, et cetera, but I don't really care. Drake went and did that this week, and he broke the internet, because Drake

• 7:49Steven Bartlett?

  did things differently, and Drake was able to therefore define his own personality. Interestingly enough, a couple of days after having that conversation with my friend, I met a different person who knows both me and him, and I asked that person the exact same question. I said, name three things you think of when you think of Social Chain. He said the exact same three things my friend said. And I honestly got goosebumps, because it just struck me how clear and defined our personality in the industry we operate is in. And that's the reason why we're here. And so my job is to protect, you know, our business's personality, and make sure it's notorious, it's defined, and it's clear.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  Interestingly, again, I asked my friend when we were sat at this restaurant, this is my second friend now, to explain what he thought of my friend's agency business, and he literally said the same thing. He said, they make really cool, clean, black and white design, and he couldn't think of anything else. And in that moment, I was converted. I was convinced that in a saturated market, where there are so many people who are reporting to be able to do a very similar thing, and the barrier to entry is really just owning a laptop, you will be defined by your business's personality. And also, sort of linking to that, your business's personality will then define your culture, and your culture will define your work, and your work will define your success.

• 9:17Steven Bartlett?

  Personality defines you. The next point in my diary is something I've put off for my whole life. I've written in my diary, personal organisation epiphany. I've been unorganised my whole life, right? And when I reflect on my life, personal organisation has cost me tremendously. And your organisation is a habit. And I've told myself for the last couple of years that I don't have time to be organised. And what I realised this week is the reason why I don't have time to be organised is because I'm unorganised. It's as simple as that.

• 9:59Steven Bartlett?

  I have, over the last couple of years, put people in place around me to help deal with my total lack of organisation. So I've got a personal assistant, I've got a cleaner that sort of keeps my house tidy and things like that. But the problem is, that sort of mentality towards life of being unorganised and leaving mess behind you and not sorting things out is really, really, really sort of destructive. I looked in my bag earlier on this week, and it's just this duffel bag full of wires and receipts and cords and... A scratch card, I can't remember doing a scratch card, there's a sock in there. It's that, it's a total, total mess. And when I think about the organisation of my life, if it wasn't for these people around me,

• 10:43Steven Bartlett?

  my life would look exactly like this messy tangled up duffel bag. And nobody can tell me that I would operate better with this sort of tangled wire state of mind and this tangled wire life. And so this week, I finally tried to confront it. I'd heard for years and years and years that some of the most effective people are those that make their bed in the morning. So upon waking up this week, I made my bed every single day and I'm continuing to do so. And I keep my room completely clean, not because I have to, because my cleaner will come anyway. But because I think that will be the sort of, that's, you start as you mean to go on. And if I make my bed, hopefully I'll continue that attitude throughout the day.

• 11:28Steven Bartlett?

  And it really is a habit that I'm trying to break that I've always had. I reflect on my life since being in school and I, and I try and calculate how much my lack of organisation has probably cost me. Benjamin Franklin said, which I, which I'll always remember, for every minute spent organising, an hour is earned. And I kind of crunched the numbers in my diary this week. I imagine I lose about two hours a day being unorganised. And you might think that sounds like a lot, but I completely believe it because if you're not organised, that has a knock on effect to how you start the day. You miss meetings which you have to reschedule. You, you, you overlap on meetings if you've not done the work for those sort of situations.

• 12:12Steven Bartlett?

  You then get into bed probably at a really bad time, which again causes a knock on effect. So I believe that I'm probably losing about two hours a day being unorganised. That is seven hundred and thirty hours a year. And in the last sort of fifteen years since I've been at school, that's eleven thousand hours I've lost since I've been at school, which is almost a year and a half of time that I've lost, right? And think about what you can do in a year and a half. I've lost a year and a half because. I've in the short term just thought, okay, leaving that there or not sorting that out now or letting that be a mess is fine, but you don't see that compounding force over time, right?

• 12:57Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not just about the amount of hours you've lost, it's the way that that could have compounded in your favour had you been more organised. So all being organised for me is a very, very serious thing now, and I'm really making an active effort to to be more organised. And that starts with small things. It starts with, you know, doing the bed in the morning, getting up out of bed, having a shower, brushing your teeth, having your breakfast, going to the gym, taking the dog for a walk, all these things, right? And funnily, they're all weirdly connected. When I do my, when I make my bed in the morning, my routine then seems to happen. So I I'll go and I'll brush my teeth and I'll have a shower and I'll iron my clothes

• 13:40Steven Bartlett?

  and I'll have my breakfast, I'll go to the gym. And it all starts with me doing my bed, which is bizarre. I can't actually figure out how this has happened, but every day I've done my bed, I've then followed my routine. Historically, because I've been in rushes and I've forgotten stuff and I've been in hotel rooms, I would have forgotten my toothbrush, which meant that I didn't brush my teeth, right? I go into the day, I'd try and brush my teeth at lunchtime, but the problem is, if I forget at lunchtime, then my teeth go a day unbrushed. And I'm just going to be completely honest, right? It's not the nicest thing to hear, but if I go for a day with my teeth unbrushed, again, over time, that causes me other problems. That means that I have to go to the dentist and I lose more time there and I lose more money there.

• 14:21Steven Bartlett?

  And if I think about the cost in money terms that I've probably wasted, I imagine with the lifestyle I have now, a lack of organisation probably costs me minimum thirty pounds a day, right? And that is forgetting my rail card, right? Leaving, you know, because my bag was a mess and I didn't move it into my my work bag. That is losing something, right? Losing my losing my hat, right? And you guys know that I wear hats all the time. So in the last three years, if I've lost thirty pounds a day, I've probably lost about thirty to forty thousand pounds. Organisation isn't a joke. Organisation is required if you want

• 15:02Steven Bartlett?

  to be your most effective. And I've spent so much time trying to optimise my time. And the the secret that I found to really optimising my time and maximising who I am starts with making my bed in the morning. I challenge you to try it. And it's incredibly funny how your whole day seems to fall into place if you make your bed. So yeah, personal organisation is not a joke. The next point in my diary is a bit of a curve ball to the sort of stereotypical motivational inspirational message you'll probably get. And I've just written, work really hard, want it so badly, and fail anyway. In popular culture, a lot of the sort of like

• 15:46Steven Bartlett?

  Instagram motivation, Twitter motivation, motivation Monday stuff says, work hard, you know, want it badly, and you'll get there. You've just got to stick at it. That is not the truth. You can work really, really hardly. You can want it more than anybody on the face of the planet wants it, and you will fail anyway. I did. In my first business, I failed. I started businesses when I was fourteen years old, and they failed too. And I tell you, I really, really, really wanted it. Reason, having a reason does get results. And those, it tends to be the case that those that have the strongest reason do stand the best chance of getting the results, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee it. You know,

• 16:29Steven Bartlett?

  I know a kid that really, really, really wants to be an entrepreneur. He really wants to be a CEO. He's got these big ambitions. He wants to invent this product and take it to the world. But having a sort of a bit of an idea of what that might take in terms of skills to persuade and to pitch to investors and to build a team and all these kinds of things. I'm going to be completely honest, because that's what this podcast is about. This kid doesn't have it. He just doesn't have it. And it becomes, it's a, it's a struggle for me, because this kid has listened to all of my content. He listens to the podcast. He listens to everything I put out there. And he's kind of misconstrued it to mean that if you just try hard enough and you want it bad enough, you can get it.

• 17:14Steven Bartlett?

  The problem is fundamentally, this kid has a few sort of personality disorders and he struggled in a few areas. He's unable to speak to people, he's unable to solve problems pragmatically and logically. And so he's going full steam ahead into a business which he doesn't quite have the experience or the capabilities yet to to take on. He's trying to take on one of the biggest brands in the world. He lives at home with his parents, he's got no money.

• 17:48Steven Bartlett?

  He's, he's not got the ability to get money, he's. And you see the picture I'm trying to create, and I don't want to be a hypocrite because I was that kid, right? I was an eighteen year old kid who really believed in myself, who really wanted it, who had no money, who had bailiff letters piled up on his desk. He was shoplifting food to feed myself. So when I think about the sort of our circumstances, if you looked at them on paper, we were very similar people, but I had some natural talent, right? I had a bit of experience when it came to organising things and building events and raising, you know, raising interest for things and pitching and telling stories.

• 18:28Steven Bartlett?

  I'd, since I was seven years old, I was organising my peers and I was, I was a leader, right? So how do I possibly tell this other kid who on paper looks very similar to me, that he shouldn't do what I did? Because I genuinely, at the very core of me, believe that he shouldn't. I genuinely believe that. I know him, I've met him. He's shown up at my office at four, five, four, five AM in the morning. I've met him, he's done this multiple times, right? He is not ready to be doing that, right? And I often say to young entrepreneurs, do it and fail and learn, but he's not even ready for that.

• 19:12Steven Bartlett?

  He's not ready to fail and learn, right? And so I wrote some notes in my diary this week to try and help myself understand how to address this situation. When my message tends to be, try it, fail, learn and you won't regret it. How on earth do I then say to someone who knows my story, actually, don't try just yet. Go and get some experience. Don't try and be Steve Jobs today. You're not there yet. And the funny thing is, when I told this kid that, he interestingly

• 19:47Steven Bartlett?

  did again what I had advised, which is he ignored my opinion. And that's what I tell people to do, right? I tell them to make it's your life, it's your choice, it's going to be your regret. So you get to make the choice. And I was trapped in the sort of like Frankensteinian world that I created. And I think, fuck, what have I done? I hope I never ever

• 20:09Steven Bartlett?

  convey the message that entrepreneurship and these kinds of things are for everybody, because they simply are not for everybody. Everybody has their thing, which will make them their most happiest and deliver them their most fulfillment. And of course, the journey is part of that. But also, I don't want you to undergo tremendous negative stress trying to take on Steve Jobs and Apple when you're unable to hold a conversation with another human being. Do you know what I mean? And what I've sort of realized is that if you really, really want it, naturally that creates drive and the drive will be there. And then if you have the drive, it comes down to you having the persistence, right? And persistence is a combination of patience and determination, which is kind of the fuel, right?

• 20:54Steven Bartlett?

  It keeps you going, the fuel. And the amount of fuel you have dictates the distance you'll be able to go through the assault course, which is the journey. As you heard from Dom's diary, the journey of making yourself a successful person or achieving your ambitions is a long undetermined, like undetermined length assault course, right? And if you have enough fuel because of the persistence and the determination, which derive from the drive, which derives from the passion, you'll get through the assault course. However, your natural ability, and in this kid's case, he doesn't have the natural ability. And when I say ability, I mean talent and experience will determine how long your assault course is.

• 21:37Steven Bartlett?

  Because some people will have to learn more, more skills and have to go through more to get there, right? And unfortunately, some people have to go. Further, so they require more fuel than others and and it often gets to a point where I'm, you know, I'm the most unrealistic person you'll ever meet. I pride myself on being unrealistic. It's in my fucking Twitter bio that I'm unrealistic. But I'm not delusional, okay? These are two different things. And if your assault course is a million miles long, and you don't have the fuel to go a million miles, then don't run the assault course. Don't run the assault course. Do a different assault course that is at least somewhat perceived

• 22:21Steven Bartlett?

  to be achievable, because you will hurt yourself, you'll waste your life in trying to do so.

• 22:28Steven Bartlett?

  Devil's advocate to myself, right? The the upside of running an assault course you think you can achieve is you'll learn more from doing so than anything else in your life. By trying and running into that assault course, if it is somewhat achievable to you, and getting to the end and failing, you'll learn a shitload. But running a a one mile of a million mile assault course won't teach you much. Okay, I think I've got that off my chest. I'm literally hot and flustered by sharing that with you, but it's just something that I've really battled with because, yeah, it's something that I've not really um had a huge amount of time to think through. This is a quick fine note in my diary. I've just written three words, right?

• 23:09Steven Bartlett?

  And they are three different things I think all of us should do everything we can in our power to stay away from. The first one is caution. Um, from my own experiences, people with caution live unfulfilled lives. And I've just embraced from a, you know, a very, very early age that very, very little is going to kill me other than life, right? So you're all gonna die anyway. The greatest danger that we all fear is going to be realized anyway. I promise you that. None of us get out alive.

• 23:48Steven Bartlett?

  So practicing caution in this thing called life is literally the most stupid thing you can do. It is it is the biggest risk. You sometimes think about, you know, Taking the path less travelled or doing things that other people haven't as being the risk. No, the risk is going through this life with caution. There is nothing, nothing that is going to deliver you more guaranteed regret than being cautious. The next thing is about being pessimistic. We all know those people that try to find what's wrong instead of trying to find what's right. They look out the window at a sunset and all they see is a dirty window, right? They see the dirt on the windowpane. Those people are destructive.

• 24:33Steven Bartlett?

  They will ruin your life. At all opportunities, I beg you, I beg, beg, beg, beg, beg you, remove those people from your life. It may be hard in the short term, but long term, you can change the trajectory of your life by letting go of that baggage. And lastly, which kind of links to the point that I just made in the previous note, is about realism, and it also relates to caution. Don't be realistic. Don't be realistic with your dreams. Don't be realistic with your life. A sense of what realistic means is totally subjective to all of us, right? We're told what realistic means by school, by parents, and as we're growing up. If you want to live your very best life, stop being realistic. One thing

• 25:18Steven Bartlett?

  I'll never forget is the story that Will Smith told about the Wright brothers. And everybody that has been transformative to our world and to our society wasn't realistic. It wasn't realistic to think we could bend a sheet of metal into a tube and fly it across the Atlantic Ocean. Thank God, there are people out there that are unrealistic when it comes to the change they can affect in the world. I implore all of you, at all opportunities, to be unrealistic. And that's why I have the word unrealistic in my bio, because my life is a journey of me being unrealistic and trying to see how that lack of realism leaves a dent in the world.

• 26:00Steven Bartlett?

  Your reaction is your result. Again, a super quick point, but this week I I got a couple of messages from various people and the the sentiment was generally the same. They had undergone tricky circumstances. They had had a death in their family. They'd been fired from work. One girl had been rejected from her apprentice, which I've just uploaded on onto my Instagram. I've just put the screenshot up. And she was beating herself up about it, right? As people naturally do when they undergo unfortunate circumstances. And the thing that we all know in life is that the circumstance is beyond our control, right? I like every time I wake up in the morning and I do the job that I have to do, I walk into work and I promise

• 26:40Steven Bartlett?

  you, I get five pieces of unexpected, bad, fucking news that I have to deal with. And as you know, from listening to the podcast, that's my world, that's my life. It doesn't have an effect on me anymore. But I also know that that circumstance that I'm handed by life isn't the outcome. That's not the bit I had much to do with most of the time. How I respond in those situations is my result. Your reaction is your result, not the circumstance. And if you can start to really believe that, you'll live a much more happy, future-thinking life, and it'll stop you from living in the past. Back in the day, when I used to get

• 27:22Steven Bartlett?

  bad news, I would think the bad news was my result. I would think that the the circumstance that I didn't have anything to do with was my outcome. It wasn't until I started to see it as a, I guess it's a bit of a Christmas cracker. And every day I wake up, I pull the Christmas cracker and a joke and a toy comes out. I can't help the toy I get. You know, I didn't pick it. But my perception on that toy and how I deal with the toy, how I play with the toy, how I how I respond to that situation is really my result. I can either be, you know, unhappy that I didn't pick a different Christmas cracker. I can beat myself up. I can blame other people. And all those things lead to less satisfactory outcomes. Or I can pull the cracker, I can put the hat on. Okay, I got a bloody pencil

• 28:07Steven Bartlett?

  again. But that's fine. You know, I can write something with that pencil and I can perceive that situation to be positive. Um. And finally, you know, your reaction is your result and the result can be whatever it is you want it to be if your perception is positive. And that's also why that pessimism is one of the most corrosive things I've identified in my, my journey, um, the, the last three years that I've been on. I think it was Will Ferrell that said, um, no, it was, um, who's the guy from with the mask on? Jim Carrey, that's it. It was Jim Carrey that said, all of us have the story that our eyes see and the story that the world gives us, right? So there's this one story going on around us.

• 28:52Steven Bartlett?

  And all of us have this second story. That's our perception and we run that second story over everything that's happening in our life. So if something bad happens to you, that's one story. The second story, which dictates what that means to you, is your perception and you run that over the thing that's happened to you. So your boyfriend might dump you, you might get fired from work and upon getting fired from work, that's one story. The story you run over that is that it was unfair because you were so good and they just were out to get you, right? That is a destructive, unhelpful story. It's a blame-filled story. A more productive story might be, how can I be better? I wasn't good in this situation.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  It wasn't for me. I understand that. How can I be better in the future? How can I make a better job choice for myself? And that is a productive second story to run over the circumstance that has happened to you. Your reaction is your result and your perception will define your reality. The next point in my diary is a bit of an announcement and this is an announcement that I've not told anybody other than my immediate team just yet. And that is that I will be moving to New York permanently. Let me explain. So when I say permanently, you've got to understand that the nature of my life and the way that I my calendar works, my schedule, I can't be anywhere permanently, right?

• 30:18Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna be everywhere always, but I'm moving my base from Manchester in the UK to New York. I currently live in Manchester, I'm gonna live in New York. Here's in in a short sort of in a short way, here's why. Our teams here are tremendous, our leadership team here is tremendous, they are capable of solving problems without me. Honestly, most of them are significantly smarter than I am, they don't need me anymore. I'm a support system for for many of the leaders, I offer my opinion, my advice on the vision, on keeping that specialness, on making sure that we dance on the table. And I'm being a bit of a soundboard to the the sort of managing directors, the directors of the company.

• 30:59Steven Bartlett?

  But they don't need me in the same way that the New York team, I believe, need me. And so when I think about my time spent and where my time spent would would return the greatest value, the answer to me is clear. The answer is in New York, we have offices in London and in Berlin and in Munich as well, but all of those teams have the the sort of the the leadership within them, the managing directors within them to flourish. In New York, we don't currently have a managing director, although we do have a room full of incredibly inspiring leaders. I think my value there will deliver the greatest return on investment and the prize, obviously, in the American market is tremendous.

• 31:41Steven Bartlett?

  And we have the ambition to be a global, truly, truly global agency. To fulfill that mission, I have to be there, that's what I believe now. On a personal level, I've spent my whole life putting myself just outside my comfort zone. And within the UK right now, because of, you know, the the incredible leaders within the business who are who have taken on the leadership of the business, I'm closer to my comfort zone. By going into the U S market, where we don't have the reputation, we don't have the amazing thirty thousand foot, you know, office and the slides and the ball pool and all the teams and all the data systems and processes and all of these things.

• 32:26Steven Bartlett?

  It's a new challenge. It's a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous challenge. It's something that will make me go through tremendous pain, it will make me struggle, and it will make me, hopefully, and I have no doubt in this, come out the other end, because that's what I I've always done, and that's the way that I'm built. Me moving to New York is a decision to take on that challenge, a desire to take on that challenge, and in doing so, further all of us as a global family. I believe that if I move there, I will help all of the other teams around the world by doing so, because, you know, some of the the brands and the clients we can achieve there will be global brands. Right now, the UK team are so good, you know, they're the ones that are delivering much of the work out to the

• 33:10Steven Bartlett?

  US, and I hope by being there, we can send some work back the other way as well. So this is a big decision. It's a decision I think will will probably come into effect in about April time, because again, my calendar is just absolutely rammed. And so I have to start booking my time a little bit more sensibly. What does it mean again for more sort of personal elements of my life? I've got a dog. My dog will will come with me, which is pretty sad news to a lot of people, I imagine, because there's a few people in a in the UK teams that are in love with the dog, Becky, you know who I'm talking about. He'll come with me at some point. I think I'll leave him here for for some time, to

• 33:50Steven Bartlett?

  spend time with my with the wonderful people within the the family here. I don't have a girlfriend. I'm completely unconnected in that regard. I've always been a free spirit. I've always been a lone wolf. And it's time for that challenge. It's it's it's time. It feels it feels completely right. I want the pain. I want the struggle. I want the uncertainty. I'm built for it. Deathbed thinking. I wrote this note in my diary and I've shared this thought across my social channels this week. But if you haven't heard it, even if you have in fact, it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Here's what I wrote. Deathbed thinking. In order to become someone, you have to stop being everybody.

• 34:34Steven Bartlett?

  This is probably one of the hardest things to do in today's world because society naturally rewards conformity. And it talks shit behind the back of anybody that doesn't. And it's not just haters talking shit, it's your best mate, your family, your colleagues, your partner. In my personal situation, it was my mum talking shit about me, as you know. Didn't speak to her for two years when I told her that I was dropping out to start a business. And it wasn't until I proved that I was right, or that my hypothesis, or my ambition was going to work out, that she came back to my side. And right now, there's that one thing your gut is telling you to do, something you would love to try or something you want to do more of. But you care too much about what people think and you started to believe too many negative voices that have told you.

• 35:14Steven Bartlett?

  And their own subtle bitchy way that you can't do it anyway, so you better stay in line and you better conform. I knew when I started making videos and I started doing my podcast and I started putting myself out there in the world, that people would talk shit about me. And they do, but I also knew that it would only ever matter if I gave a fuck. And thankfully, I don't and I, I don't, I never will. Deathbed thinking. Stop making your decisions based on other people's opinions and start making your decisions now from your deathbed. On your deathbed, you're not going to give a fuck about their opinion. That famous study done by Bonnie Ware, where she interviews people on their deathbed, proves that the biggest regret of the dying is living a life that wasn't true to themselves. Please don't make that mistake.

• 35:59Steven Bartlett?

  You can imagine people on their deathbed have a retrospective clarity that none of us have right now. Believe them. Letting other people and their opinions win is a guaranteed way to regret your decisions then. And it's going to be your regret because it's your life and it's your happiness. And so it has to be your choice, your regret, your life, your happiness, your choice. Deathbed thinking.

• 36:26Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so the last point in my diary today is about family and relationships. I tend to always end the podcast on family and relationships.

• 36:35Steven Bartlett?

  The note I've scribbled in my diary today is, why haven't you gone and seen your niece idiot? My niece has been born for a little while now. I think she's probably about a month and a half old and my whole family has made the time to go and see her but me. And it really does chew away at me because the reason in my mind that I haven't done that is because I've been busy. And again, it's bullshit, isn't it? It's just a lie we tell ourselves because we prioritize things that are important to us. And the things we focus on, as my friend Sam Budd once told me, are the things that grow. And if I want to have a good relationship with my family, then I've got to focus on it. And I've got to invest in it and put time into it.

• 37:17Steven Bartlett?

  Business will never be more important than family. It will just never be the case. But what I've struggled with is prioritizing, right? Because business will always present me with urgent, immediate tasks that need to be solved, right? Whereas family will virtually never, until it's too late, speaking quite frankly. And I don't want it to have to be too late for my family to be a priority of mine, you know? And so this week on Tuesday, I'm going to pop down to London. I've got a couple of meetings there. And then after my meetings, I'm not going to get back on the train. I'm going to go across and travel across to see my brother and my little niece. I've become like a dad. I'm like showing this picture of my niece to everybody in the fucking street.

• 37:59Steven Bartlett?

  So, you know, I'm tremendously proud. I've just got to put in the time and I can't, can't, cannot wait to meet her. And the next point connected to this is about relationships.

• 38:10Steven Bartlett?

  Over Christmas time and January, I went out to India and Sri Lanka with my ex-girlfriend. Some of you will know she used to also be my personal assistant. It's a long story. Go back to chapter one if you want to hear more about that. And I went out there, I guess, in a bid to rekindle things. Over the last few weeks, we've been chatting and unfortunately, we've come to the decision that it doesn't make sense. She lives in Australia. I guess we tried to make it work at distance, but again, it just doesn't make sense for various reasons, which I won't go into. She's a wonderful person. I will always love her and I'll always be here for her and she knows that. But it just hasn't made sense for various

• 38:53Steven Bartlett?

  reasons. So here I am again, back on my ones with my dog and you guys.

• 39:03Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much for listening to chapter 11. It's been again, a sort of cathartic, wonderful journey for me to offload all of these thoughts to you. Hopefully you've gained something from listening. If you could be so kind, and I won't ever ask a tremendous amount from you, please, please, please, could you leave a review in the app store for me? I really, really, really appreciate all of your five star reviews. They, they bring a little bit of light to my, to my life and I've read every single one. And feel free to tweet me your thoughts on the podcast to my, to myself on Twitter or on Instagram. If you do tweet me, I will follow you on Twitter, which is also an upside, I guess. And we can chat via DMs, etc. Reach out to me, let me know what you think and

• 39:45Steven Bartlett?

  you guys will help me hopefully solve some of these challenges, specifically on the point of family that I go through. I want this to be a two-way, you know, two-way thing. It's not just me sat here in my boxers talking to you. Hopefully you can use Twitter to talk back to me. Thank you so much. I cannot, cannot, cannot wait to share next week's guest with you. Probably one of the most interesting guests we've have ever had in terms of their story and their level of success. So it's gonna be amazing. I promise you that. And I will see you in chapter 12. Thank you.