Moment 25 - This Is How You Fulfil Your Potential: Matthew Syed

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Everyone wants to find success, achieve their dreams and fulfil their own potential, so why do some act and others not? Matthew Syed is a world leading mindset expert who can answer this very question. In this moment clip, Matthew explains the psychological reasoning between what separates those who succeed and those who don’t and shows us exactly how we can fulfil our true potential. Episode 84 - https://g2ul0.app.link/fJMwfHFJWjb Matthew: https://twitter.com/matthewsyed https://www.instagram.com/matthewsyed... https://www.matthewsyed.co.uk/ 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.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  One thing I certainly do want to talk to you about as well is how as an individual, because we've talked a lot about companies and teams, how as an individual, one is to reach their, this is a super broad question, and I hate asking broad questions because you tend to get broad answers, but how as an individual, one could reach their potential? Or what are some of the fundamental things that block people from reaching their potential? We've talked about a fear of failure. We've also touched on the idea that people don't start because of that fear of failure, and they don't get the feedback loops. But what are the other common sort of threads that you see in the reason why people never get near their potential in life?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  So in addition to those things, so fixed mindset, fear of failure, risk aversity, all the things we've addressed, the other thing I think is I've become more interested in, it's related to what we've said, but I think it's different, is what you might call initiative, or agency, or proactivity. I remember having an idea, this is in the 1970s, early 1980s, I was going to Toblerone competitions and carrying this very heavy bag, blue Holdul, Ascot Holdul, and thinking, my goodness, this is really doing my back in. And it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many

• 1:23Speaker 01

  people had who were travelling a lot is to put wheels on luggage, right, wheel suitcases, which we all have now. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea, right? You've got to say, right, I'm going to try and design something. I'm going to try and sell it to a department store. I'm going to try and market it. I'm going to try and buy a shop. I'm going to have to pay rent. I'm going to have to go to the bank and get some debt. That is a, there is a massive difference between a dormant passive idea and one that you act upon. Another example, I lived on Richmond, on a road

• 2:04Speaker 01

  in Richmond, when I first moved there in my mid twenties, and it had no off-street parking. What I didn't realise is that in Richmond, parking is a nightmare, because all the houses have less parking spaces than there are, sorry, there are more, there are less parking spaces than there are houses. And so people park on the street and then they get taken up, and you end up having to park 10 minutes away. Few doors down, I noticed at the top of the road, there's a house with a parking space that is always empty. I thought to myself, yeah, I should knock on the door. Or I should, I should write them a note. And so I'm willing to pay rent or to, or to buy it from you. But I never got around to doing it. And, and then a few years later,

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I was at a house party, and this person said, oh, I used to live on Montague. Well, oh, really? That's interesting. I lived there too. He said, yeah, I had the house at the top. I said, what with the parking space? And he said, yeah, what I never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it. And I thought, that idea was in my head and I never acted on it. Why? Because there is a, there's a fundamental inertia in a lot of us between, you know, it's easy to have an idea. It takes a bit of, you know, I remember when I was injured in table tennis and, you know, I wasn't practicing, I wasn't doing anything. I was sat at home. You know, just posting a letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do. You have to go all the way to the post office. What's the psychology?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  You have to buy a stamp. You know, oh, man, it was like, oh, I'm struggling. You know, this, this, the psychologist I've got interested in recently is a guy called Michael Fraser. He's a German, really interesting guy. And he looked at the unification of Germany, right? After the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, you know, the, the West German business were like, this is fantastic. We're going to have this pool of really keen workers. And it just didn't work out because the East German, um, generalizing a little, but the East German workers had worked, had worked in, in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses. And so if a machine broke down, instead of taking action to fix it, they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  If they needed the telephone number, they would wait and they wouldn't act on it. And I think that being able to, Richard Branson, you probably know, I mean, I, I got to know little, you know, he talked about how, I mean, I think this is probably slight, well, he, he, this is the way he tells it, you know, Virgin Atlantic, he, he was flying to the British Virgin Islands, uh, to meet his girlfriend. Uh, he has a stopover in Miami. They're bumped off the flight, they delay it to the next day and everyone sat there going, this is a disaster. Then he thought, well, hang on a second, I could charter a private plane, which were in the airport. So he took the initiative, probably a few people had that idea, what about chartering a private plane? But he actually picked up the phone

• 4:55Speaker 01

  and said, right, how much will it cost to charter a plane? You know, $10,000. He then went round to all the people with a blackboard saying, you know, flight, this is the amount per ticket. Some people bought it, they managed to take the flight. And then when he got home, he rented a Boeing and went from there. And I think that proactivity is absolutely critical. You go to school for all those years, you get to 16, but what about going out there? And you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be. In my day, when you came out of university, some people would be in the same career for life. And you take that decision without going in asking people, what was it like in this job? Could I perhaps work for a day in this job? A lot of people I went to university with

• 5:40Speaker 01

  took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like. Now, you as an entrepreneur have this in spades. I want more entrepreneurship in schools. I want proactivity instead of learning business studies concepts. This is another experiment by Michael Fraser. Instead of people doing an MBA, he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action. He calls it the action cycle. Those entrepreneurs compared to a control group, you know, had 25, I can't remember the exact amount, but five times more successful businesses or 20% higher profits. It was published in Science Magazine. So, you know, I think that's a really, really big deal.

• 6:23Steven Bartlett?

  That's a mindset. I just can't get over this idea that you saw that car parking space and you didn't knock on or send a letter. And I'm trying to understand, linked also to what you then talked about with Richard Branson at that airport with the with the blackboard going around and trying to sell this airline that he'd just come up with. What is the mental, like cultural, mental, psychological difference between the people that sat there and thought, I'm just going to accept this situation as is like you did with the driveway, or like the other passengers who had just been cancelled did? And the person that takes the initiative, what is it about them? And what is blocking? I guess a better question is, what is blocking those that are sat there on the airport floor thinking,

• 7:08Steven Bartlett?

  fuck, my life is over. Or I can't find a car parking space. What is blocking them? And is it? This is my hypothesis. There's some kind of mental equation we're all doing very, very quickly. That's weighing up the effort it would take. And also our perceived outcome of success, our perceived chance of success in endeavor.

• 7:27Steven Bartlett?

  And coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth it or possible.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I don't think that's what's happening. I would reject that hypothesis. I don't think people make a rational calculation. I think it's more habit. Once you're used to doing things, once, if you've been at a school where, and some people are lucky enough to go to school, where you are encouraged to make things happen. To, you know, some schools, you know, they are actually asked to start a business, to pick up the phone, to engage with other people as they seek to do something. You begin to, it becomes a habit. The idea of writing a letter and dropping it, it's like, no big deal. That isn't a barrier for me. It becomes a, it becomes second nature. I can tell you from this parking space, I was, you know, I was just in a, it was just pure inertia.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  I hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset. I did, I mean, that took me a long time to learn as well.

• 8:23Steven Bartlett?

  And you think, I'm just thinking about how I would teach someone to be proactive.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  I, so I've thought a lot about this too. And I, you know, I think you get people to do it. So what Fraser does in his courses, he keeps linking ideas to action. You're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it. He calls it the, the active ingredient. So you get into a habit of, so, so one, one of the entrepreneurs, so, so he's done these experiments in Europe and in Africa. But in one of, I mean, he tells great stories about it, but it's such a long time since I read the papers. So I think habit, doing it again and again and again, you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if, if we just continue to go with the flow. We're not prepared to, to break it from time to time.

• 9:17Steven Bartlett?

  Then you're kind of just a puppet to the course of life, I guess, in some respects.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Right. And I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams. You had the dream, but think about your dream. That would remain dormant in your head had you not acted. These are distinct phenomena, the idea and the action. You can have ideas and dreams without acting on them.

• 9:49Steven Bartlett?

  I just, my, yeah, so I get a lot of DMs from people. You can imagine the DMs are, I've got a great idea. And you know that 99% of the people you speak to are never going to do anything about it. Because the hardest part is, is doing, it's just day one. It's like, think of the name of the company. But they, they just, well, I call them sofa entrepreneurs. They have the idea on the sofa. It never makes it up out of the sofa. And that's like 99% of people. And I wonder what the barrier is between like, starting. I, I, I sometimes hypothesize that it's because of this culture of perfectionism and this culture of needing to start at a perfect point with all the resources, all the knowledge, all the contacts, the right team, which is not the case.

• 10:31Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, if you look at how Ben Francis started his business or I started mine, it's Googling on a computer, how do you build a website? And doing that for three months. But I, but I always, I always wonder, I think we could, we would, we would unlock so much potential if we were able to get people just to the starting blocks. And we can't, they're all in their sofas.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, yeah, I, I, yeah, I, you describe it brilliantly. A couple of things that might be worth throwing in. There's a guy called Mike Barton. He was the chief constable of Durham Police. And he kept getting rated the highest by the independent inspector of the constabulary. And I remember, I was really intrigued by this. So I, I talked to him and met him. And he said that. If he could, he would ask every wannabe police officer to take one year off to start a business and for it to fail or to succeed, just so they started learning, using their own initiative, because that is what great policing is about. Stanley McChrystal, Stanley

• 11:34Speaker 01

  McChrystal was the head of the task force in Iraq after the invasion that were trying to quell the insurgency of al-Qaeda. And at the time, it was a real, you know, it was a top-down model, people at the bottom were passive. If they wanted to get anything done, they had to go up the chain of command, get sign off and it would go back down. So lacking agility and not really using their brains. And he pushed authority down the chain of command. People could, they could, as it were, initiate action against al-Qaeda targets if they thought it was sensible to do so. And it had a big, big effect on the success of the army, the number of operations, but also the percentage of successful operations. So I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of different people who are, who are

• 12:17Speaker 01

  working along the lines that we're talking about right now. But for me, education is a key. And I'd like to see more work done in schools to really equip young people with this active ingredient.