Lessons In Creating A Successful Life - Steven Bartlett | Modern Wisdom Podcast 301

Steven Bartlett is the Founder of Social Chain, an entrepreneur and an author. Building a business, buying fast cars and becoming a millionaire is the peak of some people's dreams. But does achieving that actually satisfy you and create success? Or does it leave you hollow inside? And is it possible to achieve material success alongside meaningful fulfilment? Expect to learn why £13 in a chicken shop feels more satisfying than Social Chain being listed on a stock exchange, why Steven's billionaire friends are miserable, how to develop the skill of quitting, why Steven left dinner to do a bodyweight workout in his hotel room and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Happy Sexy Millionaire - https://amzn.to/3chanMf Follow Steven on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/steven/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindset #entrepreneur #success - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The most intrinsically rewarding way I could probably live my life was to resist my labels. Elon Musk or Kanye West, I don't love all of their ideas, but the thing I love and admire most about those individuals was they didn't let their past or a label or anything define, define them. And that inspires me. I think that's a free way to live. I think everybody, the vast majority, 99% of people don't live freely. They live confined by words that, you know, their mum or dad or themselves have given them.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  First off, mate, I need to say thank you for dinner because the last time that we were together, we were overlooking downtown Dubai and you invited me and a buddy out for a really wonderful evening dinner. But then as you left, I was in the toilet. So I haven't actually got to say goodbye. So thanks for dinner, mate. And also welcome to the show.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. I left abruptly because I had a flight to catch that night and my suitcases were actually downstairs. So when my PA grabbed me and said, you know, you've got to go now, I just, I quickly scrambled and exited the building. But yeah, thank you. It was good to, good to meet you and catch up with you and such. And I'm excited to be on your podcast today.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me too, man. So why did you write a book? You've got a lot of stuff online already. Like, why do you need a book as an outlet?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  There's a couple of, you make a really good point. We live in an era of, you know, instantaneous feedback and I'm a, I'm a connected from birth. I'm part of the connected from birth generation where I've had, you know, some form of online connection for my whole life and things have got even more superficial and ephemeral as I've, as I've got older. So you're right, I've got millions of followers online. If I've got a message to communicate, why don't I just do an Instagram story or something which gives me that sort of instant feedback? And I think in fact, that was paradoxically why I needed to write the book because of the way that the world was, is heading and the, the lack of meaning and how shallow and surface level things are getting. And for me, the book, the book is the antithesis of that. It is depth, it's meaning, it's something

• 1:56Speaker 00

  you, you spend two years doing and then once you're done, you still have another year's wait until it's published. And it was a chance to really, there's so many things with books that I came to learn that you don't get with social media as well. One of the real big things, which I think changes the way you create your ideas, is you, because you don't get instant feedback or pretty much no. Not a lot of feedback at all. There's no comments section. You write with a certain level of freedom, which is quite rare these days. So I got to go deeper than I've ever gone before. I know that if I write a page, it's not going to be discussed instantaneously. And I think that allows thoughts and ideas to connect in a different way. So just for me, it was a bit of an experiment, to be honest, something I put off for a long time.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  But just to conclude that point, there was one day where I looked at my diary from when I was 18 years old. And in the front page of it, I basically written that I wanted to be a happy sexy millionaire. And I read that when I was 26 and I built this massive business and I was traveling from one country to another. And that was the moment where I thought I wanted to write the book because it dawned on me how dumb I was to aim for that and how many other people are.

• 3:04Chris Williamson?

  An interesting point around the instant feedback. I had Seth Godin on the show and he said that about a decade or a decade and a half ago, he removed comments from his blog. Remembering he's one of the biggest bloggers on the planet. And people say you can't remove comments from your blog. It's a blog. You're not allowed to do that. And he was like, well, I know if I leave comments on, I'll just add an extra caveat here and a little bit of a justification there because you're writing to preempt what people are going to say back. And I think, yeah, the low tech solution of just words on a piece of paper is good. The title as well, Happy Sexy Millionaire. Were you tempted to call it just be consistent for a really long time?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  No. So the title, as I say, comes from when I was 18 years old. So I'm an 18 year old kid. I arrive in Manchester and I decided I'm going to drop out of university. I know what I want from my life. It's for me, it's pretty non negotiable that I'm going to become, one way or the other, a very successful multimillionaire at a very young age. That was, it was always from the age of 14. I was, I got to the point of 14, 15, where I was so convinced that that was going to happen with no evidence and no understanding of the future world that I would face. But I was so convinced. So I arrived in Manchester 18 years old, realized that this degree wasn't going to give me what I needed to to get to where I needed to go. And I dropped out and then wrote in the first page of that

• 4:23Speaker 00

  diary, which I posted on Facebook, if anyone wants to check it out. I just wrote four goals that I have for Form 25. A Range Rover Sport was going to be my first car. I was going to make a million pounds before I was twenty five, I was going to work on my body because I was super skinny. And I was going to have a long term relationship with a girl. Four very simple life goals. I wanted to be sexy and rich because I thought that would make me happy. And that's, that's where the, the book starts. Where does that self belief come from? It's a great question, and I think I'm always super scared of indulging in like hindsight bullshit, where you, you look back and you say, oh, this, this and this, and this is why I am the way I am. I think largely like seventy percent of the time, eighty percent of the time, we don't know.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  But if I was, was to hypothesize logically, my belief comes from generally, other beliefs that I have, the answer is clearly evidence, right? Some form of evidence that you have and, and what you sort of derive from that evidence. And the example that I give, and I think I give this example in my book as well, is I talk about if I was to try and make you believe that I was Allah or Jesus Christ right now, and I held your, your mother hostage at gunpoint and told you to, to take that belief on, the only way I'm going to believe, the only way I'm going to release your mother from gunpoint is if you start to believe that I'm Jesus Christ, right? You, you couldn't believe it. You couldn't genuinely believe it, even if everything was on the line. And so I, I used to think about that.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  And so, okay, well, if that's, if we can't, if we don't actually choose our beliefs, we choose our faith, right? We, we can have faith in something or somebody, but we don't actually choose our belief. Where are they coming from? That in that same analogy, if I take this bottle here full of water and I turn it into wine, and then I start levitating, your belief might start to change as it relates to me being a deity or something. And so you, if you take that back and you say, okay, so if our, if our beliefs are based on some kind of evidence we have and what we derive from that, maybe our self belief is too. Maybe, you know, maybe we're compounding a set of personal case studies in our life that are telling us that we are capable of something or that we're not. And it tends to be the case that from the things that I've read anyway, that the positive

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Case studies upwards are slower. So I can, I do one thing. I speak on stage in front of 10 people. I'm like, okay. And then I can do 15 the next day. But when it compounds downwards against you, when your self-belief or any belief compounds downwards, it's rapid. You go on stage and speak in front of 10 people. They heckle you, you forget your words, you never go, you're trying to get back to that stage again is, it's tough. And so I think from a very young age, because of my parents' absence, they weren't around when I was, when I was younger and I was growing, I was basically raising myself from about 10 years old. I, I learnt this very important connections, the connection that I hope my kids one day have, which is if I'm going to get something, whether it's dinner money or the nice pair of shoes that I want because I'm broke and all the other kids have them,

• 7:12Speaker 00

  it's going to come from my own actions and behaviour. And you learn that at 10 years old, that if, if you're going to get shoes or football, you know, whatever, lunch, it's going to come from something you do. So that sense of independence created, created, helped me create a bunch of case studies for myself and some social factors, I think, are what gave me my sense of self-belief. That would be my, that would be my guess.

• 7:34Chris Williamson?

  I think that you're right, and it highlights something I've been thinking about for a long time. We presume in 2021, because people conflate the words confidence with extraversion and being charismatic and outgoing. All of these words move in the same sort of fields, but confidence isn't the same. Confidence isn't given, it's earned. Naval Ravikant has this quote where he says, self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself, you'll always know. And a lot of the time, I think people want the self-belief, the outcome, the I can achieve anything mentality, when they have zero evidence that it's going to actually happen. And this is where small wins come in, right? Clean your room, make your bed, do the little things and build up. And that's what you've said, the progressive overload.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is one of the, this is why I've always been, I've always had this allergic reaction to. This idea of like pure play visualization, because it's it's such a dumb thing to me. This idea that there's almost this emerging culture where people will get up in the morning. They'll repeat these three affirmations and it's kind of like my analogy of just saying that you think I'm Jesus because your mom's gonna die. Like they'll look in the mirror and say, I am strong, I am powerful, I am whatever. And then they'll they'll write on their little list of visualizations that I'm gonna be a millionaire. And like, but they haven't built any personal case studies. They don't actually believe at all what they're saying. It's just a bunch of nonsense, like in their own self-esteem values, just a bunch of like wishy washy. The difference is at eighteen years old, I believed I was capable.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  And I used to say to people at the time, I was like, if you tell me that I have to go to Mars this week. My brain defaults to like, find out how to make it happen, not it's not possible or why won't it happen? And for some, I had that because of a set of case studies that preceded that moment. And some people don't. And this is why, like, yeah, I'm I'm quite against the whole secret. Lifestyle that some people live where it's it's all about visualization and and not enough about, you know, small compounding efforts in the right direction. Yeah.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  We're in the same page there. What does the things that invalidated you when you were younger or the things which will validate you when you're older mean?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the quote from the book is the things that invalidated you when you're younger will be the things you seek validation from when you're older. And you could you could, that can be anything, right? So for me, I was, imagine this, I come from Africa as a two year old kid. And you put me in an area where everybody is richer than me. Everybody is has a different hair hair color than me. Everybody has a different skin color than me. You put me into a street where everyone's house is perfect, right? Perfect, like out of a movie. And mine has six foot grass and fridges and TVs in the in the in the front garden, back garden. The front window of my house is smashed. So this is already a kid that has some kind of insecurity at that age as well. And so I was invalidated by that.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  I was invalidated because the things that made me feel invalid or insecure were like money. And the fact that I could never have a girlfriend or have a girlfriend come over to my house because it was a shithole. And so as I got older, you get to eighteen, you're like, I'm gonna try and fill that hole. And so the things that had invalidated me when I was a kid, which was like female attention or money or whatever it was, became the things that were most valuable to me in my perception to to. To seek and to chase when I was older. And you see this, no matter who you speak to, whether it's your dad invalidated you by, you know, giving you the impression that you could never be like him, or you weren't good enough. And then, you know, most of my billionaire friends, I think two of my billionaire friends, and I haven't got that many of them, both of them

• 11:08Speaker 00

  have almost an identical story where their dad invalidated them when they were younger. These are two billionaires you would know. And they spent their, you know, their early years ruthlessly chasing that validation from somewhere.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that in the meritocracy quantifiable metrics of success world that we live in now, that we can look at someone that has the billion pounds, but the completely uninternalized, unactualized sense of self-love and consider them a success, because we never get an externalized scorecard of their internal state?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is like a lot of the work that I'm sure you do, but like what I try and do with my podcast as well is, I've had, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to me was I was an 18 year old kid, 19, 20, maybe, 19 or 20, probably about 20 years old, and I got to meet the guy I wanted to be.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  Who was that?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Imagine that. So I can't say his name.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  But he is a young billionaire. So I got to meet the guy that I wanted to be when I was that age. He was, he was like a couple of years older than me, maybe seven years older than me. He had his nine sports cars, right? So he's probably, at the time, he's probably 29 and I'm 22. Mansion billionaire, like young kid running a business, whatever. And I got to meet him and I got to get to know him. I got to go to his house. I got to have private conversations with him, conversations with him at 5am. And I got to go around his house and look at all of the things that I thought I wanted from my life. It's probably the most important experience I ever had. I got to go into his Louis Vuitton room upstairs and look at all of the Louis Vuitton bags he had. Nine rooms full of fur coats, Louis

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Vuitton, one trainer room, which is bigger than my house now. And it's all rainbow, like perfectly color coordinated all the way around the room. And then I got to go downstairs and speak to the guy for hours. And he became a friend. He's been my friend for about five or six years. And miserable.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Miserable and um

• 13:09Speaker 00

  probably the last person I'd actually want to be. But on the surface he had, he was the mousetrap. He was everything I was chasing, everything I thought I wanted. But when I got to go behind the scenes, the last person on planet Earth that I want to be, deeply miserable and tormented. And he wants to be normal, normal, in his own words. He said to me one day, he sometimes goes to supermarkets and puts stuff in the trolley just to act like he's a normal person. And, and he doesn't actually buy this. And it's just, I was just like, fuck. You know, you've got it all wrong. Stop. And, and this is again, part of the inspiration for the book, which is like, I got to see that stuff before I, I, I got to, you know, run down that hedonistic treadmill and it, and it helped me turn back.

• 13:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Can you tell us about this story about the cushions in the chicken shop? And the satisfaction for millions of pounds? I really like that.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I remember this day very vividly. I was actually, I didn't write about, write his name in, in the book, but I was with my friend Anthony Logan. I think you might have met Anthony.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  We did in.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Did you meet Anthony Logan? Yeah, I was sat next to him. I was with, yeah. So I was with Anthony Logan in Manchester, this, this place called Living Room. And um, I was really, really broke at this point, to the point where like, I genuinely on a day to day basis didn't have a pound to, to feed myself. So I was taking every day at a time while I was trying to start my business. And I went into this place called Living Room, which is this like takeaway place, this food place. And I'm sat there and I put my hands, I think, I think a pound coin fell out of my pocket. And as I went, reached down to, to retrieve it, um, more, there was so much more money down the sofa. And I just went around all of the sofas in this, it's like restaurant place. And I managed to retrieve about 13 pounds in total. And I, it was like the best day of my life.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  And the point I was at in my life, where I was living in Moss Side, in a, above a Chinese takeaway, in a house that was battered and full of rats, finding these pound coins in that, um, in that restaurant that day felt like a gift from God. And I, an absolute euphoria. And I think what I write about in the book is that day, that moment where I found that 13 quid, which meant that I could eat for maybe the next 10 days or so, was, was like 30 times more euphoric than the day I woke up in that five star hotel in Manchester. And I looked at my phone and someone had texted me saying, oh, the company's now public. And you know, you do the mental math about how much money that means you now have.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And I just felt total, totally numb. And I contrast those two moments in my book. And this is where I kind of start to introduce the idea of like, you know, bring the Stoic philosophy into play and and why, and contrast and, and why those moments felt so different. The day that I became, you know, a multi multimillionaire versus the day that I found thirteen pounds in a chicken shop.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I, were two completely different days. One was euphoria and one was anti climax. It's actually when you expect something to be a certain way, when you expect it to be euphoric and it's not, it actually becomes a negative, which is interesting. So when, when you, and this is the whole idea of like, I mean, this is a general principle about expectation and reality. Like the difference between what you expect and what you, what you get is your level of satisfaction. And in that moment, I was, I've always expected that day where I became a multimillionaire to be confetti in marching bands and euphoria. So when it wasn't, and when it came in below my expectation, it was actually a big negative. Yeah, until I, yeah, until I did some mind games.

• 16:34Chris Williamson?

  Can we sink into that time? How do you get yourself to a place where you can leave your company? This is, as you say, a young kid who's never really had money, who's never really had quantifiable metrics of success. A lot of people would struggle to give up the good for the great. Is quitting a skill in that way?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, quitting is definitely a skill and it's really underrated. I think, you know, people spend a ton of time. You know, words are really shitty. This is one thing that I, I really came to learn in my book is most of the time, which when we try and answer difficult life questions, we get trapped in words. And like, I love you. Do you love them? Is this your passion? We, we, we forget that these are actually human words that some other guy made and attach some definition to that they felt or they were trying to describe in their life at that time. And so it's like crazy, as I'm writing this book, I'm, I'm trying to answer these questions. And then like, most of the time, the question is answered by questioning the question. Something we just never do. We accept words, right?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  And to get to your point about quitting, one of the things we hear in society, which has really held people back, a set of words is I like quitting is for losers, right? Your quitting is seen as this really, really bad thing. You don't, you just prevail. But. But then they glamorize starting and starting is seen as this, you know, this, you know, amazing, to be admired adventure that people go on, whether it's starting a business or a hobby or whatever. And but the crazy thing is the often unappreciated, but very important, necessary thing you do before you start something else is you quit something and quitting and starting go hand in hand, right? In all facets of our life, like a monkey swinging through the jungle in Costa Rica, they have to let go of the last branch in order to grab the next. Quitting in itself is just as much of a skill as knowing when and what to start. And in my life, quitting

• 18:25Speaker 00

  visions have quite literally defined me, quitting school, quitting university, quitting my first company, Walpark, where I'd still be now, trying to make it work. Quitting social chain more recently. And I see quitting as a skill. In the book, I talk about this quitting framework I've devised, which will hopefully give people a bit of a guardrail or sort of a, yeah, a bit of a flow chart to consider when they're deciding to quit something. I've quit effortlessly my whole life and I've never known why. I've never known why quitting has always been so easy for me. But but when I got time to write out what my brain is doing, it started to make very logical sense. I'm very, very logical in the way that I think and quitting has always been

• 19:08Speaker 00

  easy. So I presumed it was some kind of logical flow chart. And that's what I

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the process?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  So if you're thinking about quitting something, whether it's a relationship or a job or whatever, and I wish I had my book in front of me, because it's, it is quite an extensive, oh, I do. You're actually leaning.

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  We're gonna drop down by about an inch and a half, get the book out. And then we've got the

• 19:34Speaker 00

  So I want to run you through this because I actually think it's really important. And I've never, nobody's ever given me this before in my life in terms of like a framework for deciding when to quit something. And it's also something that I would love to like, I would love to debate with people because I was alone in a jungle when I wrote this. And here we go. So the chapter's called, I quit my job, and it's chapter 11 in my book. And I've drawn this very useful little flow chart you can see here. So the first question is, are you thinking about quitting something? Right? And you, that's either yes or no. If the answer's no, you're, why are you looking at the fucking flow chart? If the answer's yes?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Go to the next chapter now. If the answer is yes, I ask you, why are you thinking about quitting? And there's typically two reasons why people are thinking about quitting. And I make these words intentionally ambiguous. So because something sucks or because it's hard, right? And if it sucks, that for me means it's toxic, it's it's it's intrinsically unfulfilling, whatever it might be in your own definition. If it's hard, it's because it's a challenge, right? You're not qualified to do it. It's difficult, like running a marathon, you're in the 22nd mile or whatever. If you're trying to quit because it's hard, is the challenge worth the potential reward? This is kind of the question I've always asked myself. So in the hardest moments of my business, in which were always in the first years,

• 20:53Speaker 00

  it was really, really hard, but the potential reward in my mind was worth the hardship. So if the answer to that question is yes, don't quit. If you're doing something hard that isn't worth the potential rewards, quit, right? Let's move to the other side of the flow chart. So you're thinking about quitting because it sucks, which is actually where I found myself in with my company. It started to suck, right? It wasn't hard, it sucked. Do you believe you could make it not suck? Question I asked myself all the time. Do I think I could go and have the meetings I need to have with the board and with other people to make this company for me, the company doesn't suck, it's a great company, for me, the experience for me and what I want out of my life not suck? If the answer is yes, you then ask yourself that question again, which is,

• 21:36Speaker 00

  is the effort it would take to make it not suck, that travelling around the world persuading you, worth it? Yes or no? And so if it's not worth it, if you think that it would require a year of your life, a million conversations, a gazillion conversations, and it's not actually worth the rewards to put that effort in, then you quit. If not, don't quit. Do the work, fix it, and you get it right. However, I got to the point where I thought that the effort it was required to make the experience for me not suck anymore wasn't actually any worth the rewards anymore. I was an 18 year old kid that started, you know, 20, I started that business at 21, started the business at 21, got really diluted. As you get diluted as a young guy, you lose, you give up control, you can't take back.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  You know, shareholder control, the business had got bigger. I didn't have the control I wanted to have over the the the top level things. And I also owned a small piece of the company by this point. And so you have those two factors there where it's it's going to be take a lot of effort to change it. But the rewards on offer for you as an entrepreneur aren't actually that great anymore. So this led me to this part on the flow chart where I was thinking about quitting. I didn't believe that anymore that I could make it not suck. And the effort to make it not suck wasn't going to be worth it. So I ended up quitting. And this is a framework you can basically use for everything, I think. It's simplified enough for you to, you know, make it work for you and to make sense for you and and hopefully for the reader as well.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Having just come out of social chain, how did you decide what you were going to do next?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  It's a really good point. It's a really good point. I am, I, I, I went off to the jungle in Costa Rica to spend some time alone with my thoughts, which is actually when I started writing the book. And I think it's chapter 10 or something in the book where 10 or 11, where I start thinking about that. And I realized that the tempting thing to do is just to go and do the same thing again. But there's a number of problems with that. You know, one of the things that I discuss in the book that makes humans intrinsically motivated is challenge. And the challenge of doing the same thing again, when you're the type of person that I am, is is not very, not very challenging, to say the least, right? And the next thing that played on my mind was why, why I would go and do the next thing again. And it's because of comfort. It's because I have this label that's been given

• 23:53Speaker 00

  to me as by society and by my past and by my accomplishments, which is social media CEO. And there's this temptation to next to then spend the next 10 years of my life living out those labels, right? To to think that's who I am and to to play the follow the implicit instructions of those labels. And I I dwelled on that and thought that this is probably why a lot of people get themselves into these like midlife crises where they they lose their intrinsic joy for their work and they they they start to question who they were because they let society or their past or their mom define who they are. And then they just played that role until they got to. Forty one years old, they're working at KPMG and they're thinking out, jumping out the window. And so I thought the most, the most intrinsically rewarding way I could probably live my life was to resist my labels and to go back to these, because labels as well,

• 24:38Speaker 00

  they're just a bunch of really unhelpful words that we give ourselves to make ourselves make sense. So I thought, you know, go back to the fundamentals. What am I? Right? Who is, who am I? I'm a guy with a bunch of skills that loves so many things. I don't have one singular passion. I have tons of passions. I like music and playing with my dog and my niece and I like art and I like video games and FIFA and football and business. I didn't like social media. Like, I'm not a, I didn't come out of the womb. My passion wasn't social media. Social media didn't exist when I came out of the room. So how could that be my innate passion anyway? But there's principles about that job and that I did like. I liked working with teams. I liked having a big ambition. I liked the challenge. I liked storytelling. And these are things that can, can apply to any industry.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  So I resisted my labels. And over the last, since I've left, about nine months, I think it's been now, six or nine months, somewhere in that region. I've just resisted my labels. I wrote a book. I've learned to DJ. I'm, I've got a big theatrical show that I've sold that in Manchester, written and directed by me. The music's done by me. I've been working in one of the biggest biotech companies in the world, in the mental health space for the last six months. A $3 billion biotech company. I've been working at Huul, which is the fastest growing, like consumer, fastest growing e-commerce company internationally in the UK. I'm on the board there. I'm about to accept another board role at one of the fastest growing companies in a completely different industry, in the beauty industry. And why the fuck not? I, I thought to myself that like, you know, this is why, this is how I would behave if I truly resisted my labels. And I, and my inspirations that

• 26:08Speaker 00

  happened in some of my rooms in this house, Elon Musk or Kanye West, I don't love all of their ideas, but the thing I love and admire most about those individuals was they didn't let their past or a label or anything define, define them. Elon, you know, Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and Kanye started as a producer and they said, you're a producer, you can't rap. I mean, not only rap, he put on shows and clothes and shoes and choirs and everything. And that inspires me. I think that's a free way to live. I think everybody, the vast majority, 99% of people don't live freely. They live confined by words that, you know, their mum or dad or themselves have given them. And those words are restrictive. And why be restrictive? I'm gonna die anyway. It doesn't fucking matter.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think I think one of the central themes of your book is to remind people that much of what we're told by the culture at the moment will not make them truly happy or fulfilled. Identifying that is great, but how can people actually rid themselves of those internalized values that don't serve them?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  I think one of the easiest ways to do it, if I had to just give a simple way, it's like to constantly question the question. Maybe that's my single greatest skill or gift. I say gift because it's not that intentional. It seems to be, it just seems to be what happens when someone presents me with something. A good example is my book promo. So we're doing my book promotion today and I said to my publisher, like, you know, they said, oh, what we do is we get like an envelope and we put the book in an envelope and send it out to people. And I was like, but this, you know, that that's not necessarily a great idea because we want these influences to post. What we'll do is we'll print hundred dollar bills and Chris, if you get your box, it will have your face on it. It comes with this

• 27:56Speaker 00

  like Miri's happy, this big like Instagram of a box and we'll send, we won't send a hundred, we'll send a thousand. And they go, oh, no, but that's not how it's done. Why would you do that? And I'm like, well, think about it from a psychological perspective. If I see something three times in a short period of time, if we can get them all delivered on the same day, we get the world's biggest influences to like this is, and but they go, no, but that's not how it's meant to be done. And then they're like, oh, no, but you can't print money. That's like illegal. You can't put them in. And that moment there is that is a perfect metaphor for the slow, the slow, almost subtle force that you'll face many times a day in your life of life, just saying like, stick to the blueprint, like and stick

• 28:38Speaker 00

  to convention. And it's that little bit of resistance where you've got to turn and say, no, we're going to do it this way. And for me, that was at 16, when I decided that school wasn't going to get me to where I wanted to go or university day one, where I call my mom and I say, mom, listen, I'm dropping out of university. And she says, I'm not going to speak to you until you go back. Didn't speak to her for two years. Those and subtly, it was when I started to promote the book. And if you look at Instagram today, We probably had, I was trying to do the numbers, I was like, probably had £500,000 in free marketing today alone, sent out a thousand books, I reckon I've been tagged already, you know, today, what time is it, it's like 5pm today and most of my friends haven't got it yet, maybe 500 or 600 times, these influencers, some of them have 3 million followers, that one moment of resistance where life, in this case, my publisher, was like, no, no, no,

• 29:22Speaker 00

  no, that's not the way it's always been done, and having the conviction to resist and think in terms of first principles is the most important thing for me. And like, I've built the case study now, so you can't tell me otherwise. And a lot of people haven't built the case studies, like, you built the case study for yourself, it's much easier to resist in those moments and to rely on your first principles. But, uh, yeah, I've built the, so you, there's no going back for me now, I can't unsee what I know. So it's thinking in terms of first principles, and very honestly, that's just about questioning the question. Every, like, when you come to promote this podcast, you will do what you did last time. That's what like most people do, and I do the same thing. And like, what I do with my team now is I'm like, what is the like 1% marginal gain? What is the like one new idea

• 30:05Speaker 00

  based on first principles to try and get that 1%? And that's a, that's a mental philosophy, which is continually like questioning the question and trying to think of new ideas, even though it requires much more sort of mental effort. No.

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  I agree, man.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  If you do that in your life, you'll, you'll, you'll go somewhere else. If you, if you're able to do that in your life, it's just tough. And it's apparently scary. And I say apparently because in fact, the most scary thing is not doing that. But trying to, trying to persuade people of that is probably an argument I won't win, just like the Jesus bullet mother head analogy I give, like, trying to convince you that the fear, the thing that you should fear is not taking a risk, is a battle I probably won't win.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, my TEDx talk, which I recorded a couple of weeks ago, had a section in this which is quoted from mutual friend of ours, George McGill, although I wasn't able to actually reference him on the slides, but I quoted him directly from an episode I did in your old office upstairs.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  And Ollie was filming it. And, um, it's talking about the fact that I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to be normal. By being normal, you are by definition aiming for average.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  You regress to the mean by doing what everyone else does. By doing what everyone else does, you get what everyone else has got. Normal people get normal results. Weird people get weird results. You call it questioning the question. I call it assessing assumptions. Like, we all have assumptions about the world, about how things should be done, about the way that we're supposed to release a book, the way that we're supposed to release a podcast, construct a conversation, all of these things. But when you assess your assumptions, and its first principles is now the sort of buzzword of the last few years, popularized by Shane Parrish and Elon Musk. But what I find interesting about what you just said there is that it's innate, because what a lot of people want, it may have been

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Maybe it's not innate.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  It may have been developed, but that it's something that's built into your source code. Because there are people who struggle to rebel, and there are people who find rebelling a little bit easier.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it might be somewhat connected to my self-belief, because, and like what you've just described there, where you said, you know, everybody wants to be extraordinary, but everyone also wants to be normal, is like, it's like, because of risk and reward. Like, we all want no risk, which is being normal, you know, safety, do, like, stay within the sheep pen. And then we all want a gazillion pounds and to live an extraordinary life, which is the reward. So like, of course, we, none of us want risk, but we want to optimize reward. And like, I think that maybe that ability to question, you think, what does it take to think from first principles and to write your own script? It takes fucking guts, for a start, because you are quite literally rewriting a new blueprint.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  It's like walking down, you know, I used to live in the woods, and I'd walk this path every single day to get home. And then I look, I look up and I look up the hill, and I think, well, I actually live there. So why am I walking this path, which is going to be like a mile down this way, then it's going to cut right? When I theoretically could just cut up this hill and go straight to my house. And this is like a metaphor for life again. It's like, well, but this is the path. And there might be snakes there and there's not like a carved out, smooth, you know, way for you to walk. And so what does it take to go up there? It takes a sense of adventure. Where does that come from? That comes from probably nurture. It takes some self-belief. It takes the conviction and the confidence to be wrong, which again probably comes from self-esteem.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Right? Because if I walk up this path and I get up there and I, you know, everyone laughs at me and says, well, there's a big fence, you fucked up. That takes a certain sense of self-esteem. People don't want to risk their self-esteem, especially when they have a weak self-esteem. So maybe it's more niche than I think, but what I'm saying is now it feels innate. I can't, I can't pretend that I. Yeah, but and I don't choose it on a daily basis. Like the argument with my publisher, it felt like that was the right thing. And it was, I was fighting for what I knew was right. I wasn't think, I didn't sit back and think, okay, let's think first principles here. And then start like writing out on a piece of paper. That's what I mean by it feels almost innate now. It's so second nature to me to question the question and to not accept questions when they're asked.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  And the one I talk about in the book, I think there's a chapter on it. I say, I think, because I'm not, sometimes I'm not sure if it's a chapter or just a section. Which is, no, it is, it is a, it is this chapter. It says, mum, stop asking me about love. And it's like you come home and your mum says, oh, you're dating Melanie, are you? Yeah. Are you in love? And that moment of like, oh shit, now I have to answer either yes or no. And I, my definition of love has to be exactly the same as hers. And if it's no, then fuck, what's wrong? Right? But and if it's, and then like, but if it's yes, then that means I'm getting married. And the unnecessary pressure to like slide into one of these binary boxes. Doesn't help my relationship with my girlfriend. Do you know what I mean?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  So why we, why do we fuck around with these questions when they're like really unhelpful? And, and what's another thing I uncover in the book, which is like how invalid question, so many of the questions we ask ourselves are.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  You know, I think I say in the book is the example, what number is blue?

• 35:19Speaker 00

  And it's a perfectly reasonable question because you know what numbers are and you know what blue is. So what number is blue? And it's the same thing. Are you in love? Have, is this your passion? You know what you are? You know what passion is? So are you, just because you can put to like, just because you can ask a question doesn't make it mean it's valid. All worth answering, all worth stressing over, all worth overthinking over. And like 70% of the young kids in my DMs are messaging me because they've trapped, they're imprisoned by a question. That society is trying to make them answer. Steve, I'm 22 and I haven't found my passion. And they're like, they're like, some of them are like verging on suicidal because of these questions, genuinely.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  You look like you've, I'm like, bro, fuck, I don't know what my fucking passion is either. Just like, stop asking yourself shitty questions and like, follow your, your joy and do what stuff like, and less than stuff you don't like. And that kind of foundational thinking and not this sort of binary, jump in this box, um, thinking is, is freeing again. And it lets you live a more, you know, peaceful life.

• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  If people shouldn't be trying to find their passion, what's a better question that they should be asking themselves?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  So the problem with the word passion is it's, it's inherently binary. It's like inherently too binary, but it also comes with a definition that you don't actually know, right? So like, a good example would be, a good example is like the word, like love or passion, like I love my dog. I love Marmite. I love my girlfriend. I love my mum. Lamborghinis. I love, love, love, love, love. We spray this word around so like, ubiquitously that we don't actually know what it really means. And it means different things, apparently, in different situations. And so if someone comes to you and says, do you love Jenny? And you think, well, fucking like, oh God, you know, I, I don't know what you mean. I have to understand your definition of that.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  To understand if I can fit in the box you've just asked me to jump in. Um, with the passion question. I tend to ask myself in my life, it's like, am I enjoying this? You could ask yourself, am I happy? Do I, um, do I feel good? These are like more foundational questions which are subjective. And it doesn't require me to know your definition of the words and then to fit into it in a binary way. That's probably what I ask myself in my life, which is like, does this feel good? And as it relates to my time at social training, at the end, it didn't feel good anymore. And as I say in my quitting framework, I didn't think I could change it. And even if I could change it, I didn't think it would be worth it. So super easy decision, not brave, not courageous, brave to stay. Imagine something not feeling good, you don't think you can change it.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  And you, you, you think you might be able to change it, but the rewards of changing it aren't worth it. And you stay, that takes courage. I don't have courage. Like people say this when I dropped out of university, oh, you're so brave. No, no, no, no. Brave would have been staying in a situation I hated and toughing it out. That's courage. You know what I mean? So again, this is a, the war of words and how it ruins people's lives.

• 38:21Chris Williamson?

  I get it. I think the main thing that I learned from 1984, reading that is the volume of your vocabulary and the accuracy of the words that you use directly influences the quality of your thoughts. And what you're relating to here is that any word is just the nearest approximation for a notion that you have in your head. All of the things, all the things, the emotions, the concepts that you're trying to convey. You find the nearest possible term linguistically, apply it to that. And then try and get across something which is subtly slightly different. We all, Schadenfreude, German has some wonderful words that we don't have. And this is one of the interesting things about hearing them because you go, oh, that's almost like

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  a thing that I didn't know. It's like a thing that didn't exist until there was a word for it.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  And this is exactly, yeah, exactly what Elon talks about with Neuralink as well. And why they're, you know, he talks about the loss in communication, but also how if in terms of like computers and the bandwidth they have versus like our vocabulary. I think it's the same thing. The most foundational thing that I, the most foundational vocabulary I have, if you were to call it a vocabulary, is like how I feel and my sensory experience. And then you're right, I try and communicate it with another person using these words that we've all agreed mean something, but you've experienced one thing, I've experienced it, and we've said that the word is love, is that the same thing you're, and there's a loss in, there's a loss in translation there. And that's why I try and take, I try and take, take it back to foundational things, which is like, how do you feel?

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Cause maybe that's your first language, and maybe it's the language which is easiest to articulate for most people. Like, we know, we have, we're quite good at understanding how we feel, but these societal Instagram movie magazine inspired words like bay and love and passion, these ones are confusing for me. And there's a greater loss in translation when they come with all this baggage, and especially when they're really important words like love and passion. These are the most important decisions we make in our life, and we've distilled it to four letters, and we all have to say yes or no. This is a risky fucking game to play. And, and that's why I wrote the book, the chap, the chapter in my book about like, mom, stop asking me about love, because I'm like, this is not an interesting, this is a dangerous and risky, a useless question to ask me.

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

  Talking about Instagram, how is following Kylie Jenner a type of self-harm?

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is something that I thought about a lot in the, in the book, because, you know, I've got a lot of Instagram friends, a lot of girls that are Instagram influencers that I've known for a long time, and they seem to have a 5X greater prevalence of mental health disorders. I've always wondered why that was. Then I spoke to Johann Hari, the, you know, the famous author of Lost Connections, and he, the nine real reasons why people are getting depressed and anxious, and it started to make a bit more sense to me. And then I went and did my own reading and studying for my book. And a lot of what I was looking at is how our mind works and how it makes its decisions, and how it makes these split comparison oriented, oriented decisions that we needed to make in order to survive, you know, 10,000 years ago, when a lion's running at you, you think, okay, fucking run.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Or when something happens and you, you can't over-process or turn to, you know, Deep logical thought to find answers, you have to make split decisions. We see it today. The studies show that if you present someone with three steaks on a menu, one's really expensive, one's middle and one's cheap, they'll think the top one's too bougie, the bottom one's a shit steak and the middle one's probably the one. So they'll pick the middle one. If in a TV shop, they give you three TVs on a wall and there's, you know, the, the top one's X, super expensive, the same thing, they'll, they'll pick the middle one. And even in more other ways that, you know, this thing I write about in the book where they did a study, they said, would you be willing to drive, I think it's an hour to save £10 on a £200 jacket or an hour to save £10 on a £10 jacket.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  It's an hour and you're saving £10, but the way people make that decision is totally different. They think, well, I'd rather drive the hour to save £10 on a £20 jacket, but it's an hour of your time and a £10, these aren't logical decisions and the same applies for Instagram. We make very, um, and another example that I'd like to give is, I remember when I got my first phone, my, my Nokia brick phone and I could play snake on it. I remember feeling like the bees knees in school. Going into school, I had polyphonic ringtones. I was the man, my big aerial. If I had that phone today, how would I feel? And I pondered that question, you know, like if I, if I had that phone today in a, in a, in a world full of iPhones, how would I feel? I would feel ashamed because the value, the, the phone hasn't changed. The Nokia phone is the same,

• 42:59Speaker 00

  same game, same ringtones, everything, but the context in which it exists has changed. And that, and the human mind changes as it does with the menu and the TVs, the perceived value of that thing. And this is what's happening on Instagram is, I know me, I look in the mirror every single day. When I look down into this phone, I'm making very snap comparison oriented judgments about my own value, my own appearance, my own body, based on what I see, but what you're seeing is fake. I speak to a cosmetic surgeon and he says, oh my God, this is the best era ever for my business because girls are coming in with photos from Instagram. He said, I've never had more Instagram references ever for surgery in my life. And now they, they all want to change their bodies.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  He said, the biggest rise we've seen is girls coming in with a photo of Kylie Jenner or the Kardashians and they want to change the shape of their body. And also the Facetune CEO says he's sat on a goldmine because people are looking at Instagram. The brain does what it does, lazy as hell, comparison orientated. It's telling you that because she looks like that, you are a piece of shit. You can't avoid that. That's what I said, there's a chapter called Fire Your Mind. You can't stop that. You can't tell me, I'm going to stop doing comparisons. This is why like half my quotes I know don't actually help. Because you can't just say stuff like the Jesus analogy. You can't just tell yourself to stop comparing. It's a survival mechanism. But unfortunately, in the era we live in, that is killing your self-esteem. It is, it's toxic for your mind.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  And that's why I say, stop keeping up with the Kardashians. I think that's one of the chapters, chapter four.

• 44:30Chris Williamson?

  There is a statistically significant increase in cosmetic surgery called the Zoom boom of lockdown face. And it's because of the amount of people that have been looking at themselves for six hours a day plus on video conferencing calls. And yeah, plastic surgeons have been reporting that. T John's from up here, Mr. Esho, Dr. Esho is from up here in Newcastle originally. So I've been sort of following his work for a while as well. One of the things that I thought was really interesting-

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Can I just say something on that as well?

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Like, think about the term fat. Like, it doesn't sound like a comparison, but then remove everybody from planet Earth. And suddenly you're not fat. You're the prettiest, sexiest, richest person on Earth. You are by definition enough, suddenly, just because I removed everybody else. And we don't actually realise that most of these adjectives or descriptive words are just comparison based. And I would be the sexiest man alive if I could just kill everyone else.

• 45:30Chris Williamson?

  You would also be the unsexiest man alive. You would also be the fattest man alive. You would also be the this. And this is naturally what happens. You come from a hierarchical background ancestrally and you compare, who am I above? Who am I below? You continue to aim up, you continue to kind of dispose of the people that are down. Do you find that creeping in with yourself? But obviously you do this self-work, the same as me. We spend a lot of time doing gratitude journaling and internal work. How do you, when you notice that creeping in, that ego, that self-talk, that destructive monologue? What do you do?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  It's a good question. So it's a really interesting one because there's so many contradictions here. Like, I'm someone, and I discussed this in the book, I really, in fact, the 20th chapter is kind of trying to answer the contradiction between believing that you're enough whilst also striving for so much more. Always felt like a contradiction I just couldn't understand. And then again, I, as I get into the chapter, it's actually just a, I'm making a mistake with a bunch of words. Enough sounds like, you know, this idea that I wasn't enough, sounds like some kind of like internal measure of my self-worth that came from somewhere. And the truth is, it did. It came from my perception of the outside world and external validation. I thought that when I was

• 46:44Speaker 00

  broke, I was less than. And so I strive to be more than, or to get to the point where I was enough. And in fact, the whole time, I've always been the same. There's never been a change in my intrinsic inherent value. That was just external, like, status games that I was playing in my mind. So I wanted to get myself to this point where I knew that I was enough, because that was, that's the foundation you need to chase the right things for the right reasons. For example, my friend, who I described earlier, the billionaire friend with all the clothes and houses and the sports cars, this is a guy that doesn't know he's enough yet. So he thinks by getting a room full of trainers and color coordinating them, that will make him enough. So he started chasing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. The most important thing for me was getting myself to that point where I knew that intrinsically, no matter what I did, no matter how successful I

• 47:28Speaker 00

  become, my inherent value doesn't change. And then that has become the platform to be competitive and chase and be aggressive at the things that really matter to me. And that's the phase in life where I'm at now, where when I'm chasing something, when I want to be number one at something, or I want to be the best at something, I'm largely doing it, not completely, I'm largely doing it because the prize at the end of that is worthwhile intrinsically for me. So I can channel that, like, ambition and that competitiveness and that desire to be number one and to win,

• 48:03Speaker 00

  but knowing that when I get there, or if I get there, because a lot of the time I set myself goals that I don't think I'll ever even achieve, the journey will be intrinsically rewarding. That's been a big thing. And as you say, like, do I find myself in moments seeking external validation, or?

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Not thinking I'm in a hard say, yeah, but just like 90, 95% less than I used to. Maybe more, maybe 90, 97% or something in that region.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  I'm really glad, I'm really glad to hear that, man. Like, it's really encouraging to know, especially coming from the background in the industry that you were in, right? Like, you were weaponizing the platforms that you're now criticizing. Your company was built off the back of that.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  And that insight obviously has enabled you to transform more effectively personally. I've got a story actually that you told while we were out at dinner. And this kind of highlights, I think, what you're talking about here, that you're prepared to do things just because you want to win at them and you're prepared to put effort in. You were talking about, I want to say that you were at some sort of conference or maybe a race event. And you and your friends were competing about who could get the most calories burned on their Apple Watch. And you noticed one of your friends on a Sunday night at the end of the week was in the gym training. So you decided to excuse yourself and then go and run sprints on a set of stairs nearby?

• 49:24Speaker 00

  I was, I was at dinner with like Philip Green's family, the very notorious billionaire. I was in Monaco. They'd invited me for dinner. First time I'd met the full family.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, very important dinner in this beautiful, beautiful restaurant in Monaco. And me and my friends have spent 10 weeks, every week competing against each other, six friends, to see who can do the most calories. But then also you can compete individually at the same time. I'd never lost. I never lost. I wouldn't allow myself to lose. So for nine weeks I hadn't lost. I'm in the 10th week. I'm at the dinner. It's 11 o'clock. It shuts at, the competition closes at midnight. I look down and I just see Don McGregor, my old business partner, who's in the group. I see him doing a workout at 11, quarter past 11 or something like that. And I'm at this dinner. And yeah, I have a personal philosophy where like. I'm not going to voluntarily lose. Something else might be the reason I lose, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be a decision that I'm making. It is a decision.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  So I said, just gonna, I said to the team at dinner, I said, I'm just gonna excuse myself, just gonna walk back to the hotel. Fucking sprint back to the hotel across the street. I'm up in the fucking, the bathroom in the hotel. And I put my phone recording and I start recording a video for them in the group and I start doing a HIIT workout and I'm screaming at the phone. I'm telling them, I'm saying, never try that again. You never try and do me like that again. And I beat them and I never lost, I never lost that competition. I've competed against all of them individually for 10 weeks and then the whole group collectively. And I wouldn't lose and I don't let myself lose because for me, it doesn't matter. But it's, it's you're setting a personal philosophy for yourself every single day and every decision you make. I talked to my team about that, but I also talked to them individually. Like, I'm like, are you going to allow that thing to be part of your personal philosophy? Like the way that you conduct yourself.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  So for me, in that moment, had I let myself lose, like made the decision I was gonna lose, then somewhere in my brain, I think that kind of thinking then creep into other areas of my life that are probably more important, especially as they compound over time. So I just make the decision that I'm not going to choose to lose. And that was that story, but it's an insight into the way that I, the way that I think.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  I love that story, man. That's why I remembered it. What do you think Stephen 10 years from now would tell Stephen now?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  I mean, the only way that I could answer that question is by going back the other way and saying like, what would 28 year old Stephen have told 18 year old Stephen? So because that's all I know now, right? So that's the experience that I can draw upon and he, I would have told 18 year old Stephen. Like, it's funny because I ask people this question, like really successful people, and they all tend to answer the same way. They all said.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Are you gonna do the same thing? Are you gonna fob me up with a repurposed answer from them?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Like I, I asked Ria Ferdinand last week, I asked Ann Middleton and they all say nothing. No, Noel Clark was the one I asked, they all say nothing because it might like. Upset, you know, the domino effect of the thing that led me here. But for me, it would have just been more conviction. It would have been like experiment even more and fail faster. I think, you know, I'm 28 now. I think I could have got to where I am now by probably about 26, 25, 24. If I just failed faster, had more conviction. And then the other thing is focus. So, and it's almost like a bit of a paradox for me to know. It's almost a bit of a contradiction for me to say to experiment more, but to focus.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Right, but when you choose your experiments, you double down and you move fast and hard and aggressively in that direction. And the worst possible case scenario is doing loads of experiments, but with with low focus. Right, so now in the phases of my life that I'm in, every experiment I do, I pick more selectively. And I apply more focus, whether that's in my business, my personal brand, my podcast, whatever it is, my book. And that's the point of conviction. I think it will get me there faster. It will allow me to achieve more and it will accelerate my personal development. And bring the day where I'm my best version of myself one step closer. Although that that day will never, never arrive.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  It's always going to keep moving away. Man, thank you so much. It's been, it's been long overdue catch up since we were last together in Dubai.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Thank you, bro. You're killing it and I love, I love what you're, what you stand for. It's such a powerful podcast that you have. And I think you're getting the, you're getting the credit that you deserve for the content you produce. And it's not, it doesn't take long for, I think, someone that's making great stuff. There's a bit of a lag on it sometimes to get the credit they deserve for what they're producing. And your consistency is inspiring as well, because that's the thing that I think sort of comes before great success. It's just someone that shows up every day and just, you know, follows, does something that they love. So if I could bet, if you were a stock and I could invest, I would invest.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, my dad used to say, form is temporary, but class is permanent. And I've always, I've always held that with me. Happy Sexy Millionaire will be linked in the show notes below. Usually when I talk about the book, I like pick it up like this. But it's currently at the Royal Mail depot for me to go and collect. So I'm going to do that before it closes. Yeah, what a bastard. So I'm going to go and collect it. But man, congratulations, really well done. Seeing someone who's young from the UK, swimming in the circles that you do and. Personally, for me as well, utilizing a team the way that you do, personal branding team, small, focused. It's really inspiring in the right form of the word, right? It's somebody who's grinding through the operations,

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  who's being very open and transparent about the things that they do and about their failures. And long may it continue, dude. I think the UK is lagged behind in this sort of arena, whatever you want to call it, this sense-making insight, sort of entrepreneurial vision world for far too long. And it's our language, right? So if you're part of the, if you're part of the sort of the new age of the British Empire, then so be it.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so true. No, you're so, you're so, you're so right. And you know, at some point you get the temptation. People say, oh, go to LA. They try and persuade you to go out there and.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  You're going out for a month. Don't say that. I know that you're going out for a month in a couple of weeks' time.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Well, maybe we'll see.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  No, it's good. It's really good to see people from the, from the UK like yourself that are like creating global platforms because we're told in the UK to just focus on people around, you know, nationally. So it's nice to see, you know, you've got killer, killer guests coming on your podcast and that's a testament to, to, you know, what you've been able to build here. So well done. It's amazing.

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, brother. Look, until next time, man, we will catch up. Good luck with the rest of the book tour. Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including Steve's fantastic podcast. Go and check it out. But for now, man, thank you.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thanks.