Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett E38: A Simple Mindset Secret + Less Routine, More Life About this episode The last couple of weeks have been the most professionally challenging of my life and I divulge all in this week’s episode of The Diary of a CEO. Alongside this, I discuss the importance of having an internal locus of control, and how important constant...
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:08 Steven Bartlett? The last couple of weeks have been the most professionally challenging of my entire life. My diary is full of random notes, ideas, thoughts and epiphanies, and I'm really looking forward to unpacking all of this and sharing it with you today. It's currently 5am in a hotel room in Manchester in the UK. It's Sunday night, well, I guess Monday morning. I haven't slept and there's still very little sign of that happening today considering the workload I have to accomplish before the morning. We've got a lot to talk about. I've got a lot to tell you about. We've got a lot to think about. So without further ado, this is the diary of a CEO and I'm Steven Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
0:58 Steven Bartlett? The first point in my diary, I think is something that's going to get me in trouble. I'm almost certain someone is going to tell me not to put this in the podcast, but this is the medium in my life where I get to be most honest with the world. And I think this is something that's worth discussing. I think it's sad if we've gotten to a place in society where we have to all be too politically correct that we can't even discuss an idea. Here's what I've written in my diary. "I think that some people within my community, the community that I have always identified with, the black community, are too quick on some occasions to play the race card, specifically as it relates to career, success or achieving your dreams. And I'm worried that this perspective will hold those people
1:41 Steven Bartlett? back." Yes, I know what you're thinking. I'm probably not allowed to say that, but here's what I mean. Over the last couple of years, I've observed black social media, I think they call it black Twitter. I've also observed people very, very close to me in my personal life. And one of the things that's disappointed me the most is how quick some, not all, some black people within my community are to attribute events that have happened to them to their race. And I, I know- For a fact that all of the science shows that that kind of default position to have isn't productive. I am not by any stretch of the imagination trying to imply that racism isn't real. Let's just get that out there.
2:25 Steven Bartlett? Prejudice, racism and other systemic issues relating to race, gender are very, very real things. And we're, I genuinely believe that nearly all of us, I'd really say all of us have prejudices. I think we're actually all colour prejudice. I think we're actually in part, probably all gender prejudice to some degree. I think that it's almost impossible to live in this world of societal media brainwashing and not to come out with some kind of stereotypes or prejudices of your own that might in some cases have an impact on the decisions you make on a day to day basis. Racism is still a huge problem in today's world. It's a huge problem in our lives, in our politics, in our workplaces. And if you're a young black man walking the streets of America, it might just cost you your life.
3:11 Steven Bartlett? Anti-black hiring discrimination is as prevalent today as it was in nineteen eighty nine. And a third of people, minorities and black people, report to have been bullied or subjected to insensitive questioning because of their race. Almost fifteen percent of women and eight percent of men have stated that racial discrimination has caused them to leave a job. It's crazy, it's real, and it's something that has to be addressed. However, I've witnessed black people in my life, in my networks and online, and even at home, telling me that the reason they're not where they want to be in life is because they are black. And even if there are discriminatory forces working against you, and I genuinely believe that there are, and even if those discriminatory forces make it harder or slightly harder for you to get to where you want to be, to attribute your lack of success or progress solely to one factor,
3:56 Steven Bartlett? I think as a perspective or a worldview is unproductive, dangerous and self fulfilling. Race is a factor, but it's not enough of a factor to prevent you getting there. I'm actually more convinced that the mindset that race will prevent you getting there is more detrimental than the discrimination itself. But it's not just black people that engage in this type of external determinism. If you go to my hometown in Plymouth, everybody there thinks that the reason they don't have jobs or the reason that they're not successful is because of immigrants, because of black people. And it's almost, when you think about it like that, it's almost a bit of a cycle where we're pointing external forces for the lack of internal progress that we've made, and that is the behaviour that I'm against in the black community. And the reason I use the word disappointment when I describe how this makes me feel is
4:41 Steven Bartlett? because I think this attitude or this default position isn't conducive with success, happiness or good mental wellbeing. I think that if you go through life thinking that life is happening to you and not because of you, you'll be more miserable. And the science supports that. That's why I've always, irrespective of whatever prejudices might be playing out in my life or holding me back, I've always chosen to adopt the default attitude that I'm responsible for my life, in my relationships, in work and everything in between. I've chosen to have an internal locus of control. The word locus is Latin for the word place, and this refers to whether one believes that the outcomes of things that are happening to you are controlled by your own actions or by external factors. If you have a very
5:26 Steven Bartlett? external locus of control, you might think that a deity, a god, fate, karma, randomness, or some type of external power determines what's going to happen. If you have an internal locus of control, then you think your fate is in your hands. In other words, you're a go-getter, a self-starter. You have that sort of personal autonomy because you are in control. And a huge amount of studies have concluded that people with that internal place of control, that internal locus of control, have increased positive wellbeing. They have lower stress, they experience less depression. It's also heavily connected to being more successful. Do you think that the events in your life, getting hired or
6:07 Steven Bartlett? fired, falling in or out of love, moving from one city to another are due to your actions or some outside power? How you answer that question, according to science, will predict your job satisfaction, your stress levels, and how high up in an organisation you're likely to climb. Research has also found that having an internal locus of control makes you experience less depression. So it's in part no surprise that African Americans and Latinos are significantly more likely to experience serious depression than, say, white people. It also says that people with an internal locus of control that believe the things that are happening in their life are due to them do better in school. They deal better with stress, they're more actively able to find solutions to problems,
6:49 Steven Bartlett? they are more satisfied in their jobs and at work, they are more orientated towards achieving their goals. And so I went through a number of online studies this week when I was on a plane, and it turns out that hypothesis is correct. Black people report having a more external locus of control than white people across a number of studies. And I really, really think that this is something that isn't just holding black people back per se, but it's holding a lot of people back. And I think it's almost impossible, as a young black man growing up in this country, especially in the case of me, where I grew up in a school with 2,000 white people, to not feel in some respect by media narratives, by things you see in the news, by things
7:31 Steven Bartlett? you read online, that we are supposed to be or considered in some respect inferior by others. And so the job of building our self-esteem and our self-confidence and our self-image is really an inside job, because if you look outside and if you look into society or the media, you don't get the best stories, right? So even, you know, even watching all the young black football players in this country go overseas and get booed and the Italian crowds jeer at them like monkeys, I grew up to that. I grew up to reading that and wondering why that was happening to us and not to white people. And all of these little dents, I think, do have a role in building and constructing your self-esteem, but I just call black people to take back control and to take back that
8:13 Steven Bartlett? responsibility that I know is so important to become successful and happy. There's no doubt in my mind that this opinion has been somewhat influenced by the experience of my childhood. My mother was the only black woman that I really ever saw. We grew up in a very, very white area and a very white neighbourhood, we went to a very white school, and my mother was very intent on the fact that the reason why her properties were taken away and why we were ultimately effectively bankrupt was because of her skin colour a lot of the time. She would often blame her being black for what had happened to us. And interestingly, even though I was young and impressionable, I just never agreed. I just thought my mum had made some business mistakes. And that, I think, has sat as a chip on my shoulder as I've grown up. I think as I've observed black Twitter and black social media blaming skin colour for everything at
8:57 Steven Bartlett? times, and I literally mean that, everything at times it feels like, I've had that same sort of allergic reaction to that narrative because I think it's unproductive to dwell and attribute control to some kind of disadvantage. And if we really believe that everything that's happened to us was caused by some kind of uncontrollable outside force like prejudice or discrimination or whatever it might be, we're unable and we're unwilling and it's unnecessary to perform that internal analysis, that internal reading of yourself, which is required and conducive with learning, improving and not making the same mistakes again and again. And that's certainly what I witnessed at home. The next point in my diary is slightly less controversial. I've just written "video
9:41 Steven Bartlett? game state of mind", and here's what I mean. We play video games with such disregard for opinion, with such freedom, with such fearlessness, right? But many of us play life with such caution, with such fear, with such nervousness. One of the things that's helped me succeed over the years and weather dark times in business is that video game state of mind. I've gone through hell running my business, as most entrepreneurs do, and I really, really mean that. I've gone through a hell I couldn't quite articulate or do justice in this podcast, so I won't try. You'll have to take my word for it. I'm remarkably good at dealing with hell. I'm remarkably resilient. And that resilience comes from a state of mind and, quite honestly, experience. When I say experience, I mean having so many case studies of surviving
10:25 Steven Bartlett? hell that hell feels manageable. And there's moments where I've genuinely questioned how any other human could possibly deal with the level of hell I've had to endure in certain moments. I'm sure there's people dealing with worse, right? Especially in a professional sense. But that's just how it's felt at times. In the process of going from an 18-year-old, broke, rejected, minority dropout that was shoplifting food to feed myself, to the CEO of a global business which employs 700 people around the world and makes hundreds of millions in revenue, I've said to myself frequently, "How could it get any worse than this moment? How could any professional challenge ever be greater than this gigantic, urgent one that stands before me?" It's been that hard. But my video game state of mind has helped me weather that storm.
11:10 Steven Bartlett? Let me give you some context. Every time, I think all of us weigh up a risk in life. I guess the equation is, is that risk worth it considering the potential downside or the chance of failure or loss? Another way of saying this would be, what matters more? The upside of this opportunity or the avoidance of this potential loss? This is why people stay in jobs they hate. They don't pursue that exciting business idea. They, they play it safe because as they perform that equation in their head, they conclude that the upside potential is not worth the potential downside. Studies have shown that for most people, and that's the key word, most people, the fear of losing a hundred dollars is more intense than the hope of gaining a hundred and fifty dollars.
11:52 Steven Bartlett? And from many studies and observations, it's been proven that for some reason in humans, losses feel like they loom larger than gains. Most people are in fact loss averse. Will do anything to try and avoid a loss more than will do anything to try and make a gain. So it's clear, if you want to be the fearless person that takes the risks you need to take in order to reach your full potential, we need to find a way to minimize our perception of the downside potential or the potential loss, as I might call it. If you believe jumping off a cliff will result in a one percent chance of you flying and a ninety nine percent chance of death, you just wouldn't jump. In the same way, if you believe leaving your shitty job, starting a business, leaving a toxic romantic relationship, traveling the world will be fatal, most of us won't do it.
12:35 Steven Bartlett? As loss fearing humans, we're happier with the devil we know than the devil we don't. We're held down, suppressed and wasting our true potential because of the perception of what might go wrong and our internal desire to avoid wrong. And that desire to avoid wrong significantly outweighs our desire to attain a reward. However, when we play video games, and I might just be just speaking for myself here, we typically play with such little concern for loss without any regard of what the people in the game will think of our choices and with total freedom. Because we know if we steal this car and run people over in Grand Theft Auto, we won't really go to jail. Or in Call of Duty, if a sniper shoots me in the head, I'm not really going to die. This realization that the worst possible outcome in a video game is not something
13:19 Steven Bartlett? to be feared, creates an environment where we can be so risk taking, so careless, so free, so indifferent to what people might think of our decision making, that it almost at some times might verge on being a little bit reckless. The same is evident in gambling psychology. When the money is imaginary, people gamble differently. I don't want you to to go broke and I don't want you to run people over with your car, but I do believe that risk taking is an integral part of reaching your potential. For years, when things have gone wrong in my business, in my life, when I've had tough challenges or when I've been faced with the prospect of dropping out of university or quitting jobs that would throw me into uncertainty, I've always said to myself, to people around me and to my loved ones, a few words
14:01 Steven Bartlett? that for someone living in the comforts of the Western world are especially true, I've said, Steve, life is just a video game. None of this will actually kill you. Those were just words, but they came from a genuine, deep mindset that I have always had. And being able to detach myself from the irrational thoughts that any one professional decision or any particular failure will be fatal is one of the key things that I think has made me more successful. It's made hell and hard times manageable. It's allowed me to develop calm within any chaos. And as we know, stress impacts your health, and it certainly meant that even when shit hits the fan, I stay remarkably stress free and therefore healthy. I've had this video game mindset for as long as I can remember.
14:44 Steven Bartlett? It's why I was completely content, happy and optimistic, even when my mum had disowned me, when I was penniless, stealing food and living in the worst part of the city in a partially boarded up house. I thought none of this would kill me. It's just a game. And that coupled with this inherent self-belief meant that I also thought the situation was temporary. I'm not going to be able to reprogram you in this short podcast. But I think there's things you can do to develop more of a liberated, video game, risk, comfortable mindset. The first is reaffirming to yourself really crystal clearly what you want from your life and how you want it to look and feel. And really, how much that matters to you. By doing this, we're increasing the perception of the upside potential.
15:27 Steven Bartlett? If your goals feel clear and worthwhile, you'll be more willing to take the risk to attain them. Growing up for me in a family that was, as I said, effectively bankrupt, it appeared that money was the root of all my problems. It was the reason we didn't have nice things. We never really had a holiday. We never had Christmases or birthday. It was the reason I felt embarrassed at school. It was apparently the reason why my parents argued. It was the reason why I felt inadequate at times. It was the reason the windows on the front of our house remained smashed for almost a decade. So the pursuit of financial freedom as an adult to me was always so worthwhile, so necessary. To me, it was non-negotiable. It was the avoidance of my childhood. It mattered to me too much. I didn't and don't want my life to be like that, like it was when I was young.
16:12 Steven Bartlett? I just won't allow it. I'm crystal clear that I want to be wealthy. I want to have the freedom to choose, the freedom of free time and the luxury of enjoying my work. That matters to me because I've experienced the pain of the opposite. I've experienced the pain of not having any of the above. It was the pain of my childhood. The truth is, we're all scared. Some of us are just more scared of the wrong thing. I'm more scared of not trying. I'm more scared of reliving my childhood with my kids. I'm more scared of regretting not reaching my potential. Being crystal clear on what you want your life to look like and reaffirming why that matters to you is an important way to increase the perceived value of the reward.
16:54 Steven Bartlett? Secondly, in order to reduce your perception of the downside of taking a risk, you need to work on having a healthier relationship with failure, a less negative, more rational perception of what failing at any particular task will mean to your life. This means taking fear of failure from your subconscious, where it's running the show of your life unaddressed, to the conscious, where you identify it, where you can analyze it, where you can address it. When your body feels that fear, grab it. If someone asks you to speak on stage and that's something that instantly fills you with feelings of dread or fear, pause. Make yourself aware of it. Write down how you're feeling. Grab it, look at it, rationalize it. What specifically could happen? If you speak on stage and it goes badly,
17:39 Steven Bartlett? why does that undesirable outcome scare you? Are you actually scared of speaking on stage? Are you just scared of something else? Is the fear of speaking on stage just the manifestation of a deeper fear? Are you really just scared of feeling inferior? Or of other people's opinions? Or of being vulnerable? And where does that come from? How do I address it? What is the important thing that I can do right now to get past that fear? What decision can I make to change it? And what actions am I going to take? Asking yourself as many questions as you can about your apparent fear has been scientifically proven to help reason your fear, to help reason your anxiety and your negative thoughts away. It helps us to reduce the perception of the downside when it comes to taking risks, and that pushes us closer to that video game mindset.
18:24 Steven Bartlett? And this in part is why therapists and psychologists spend so long asking you open-ended questions. Knowing your feelings and the real, true root cause of them helps you understand your actions better, which in turn can inform your future choices, make you feel less helpless, more in control, and it gives your subconscious devils less control over you. It gives you that video game mindset. And after all, life is just a game. None of this will kill you.
18:52 Steven Bartlett? The third point in my diary this week, I've just written, is routine the enemy of happiness? Here's the thing. Daily routines, which we all have, become weekly routines, then a monthly routine, and then a yearly routine. Then your life can quite easily become routine, where this year looks a lot like last year, this month looks like last month, and this week looks like last week. I keep seeing posts, videos, and books about creating the perfect routine. It's become a bit of a sort of cult aspiration in the self-development, personal development community. And I understand that consistency and discipline are important, especially as it relates to success and structure and professional performance. However, I worry that the pursuit of establishing the perfect routine... In our lives, by doing this, we're inadvertently giving up life.
19:37 Steven Bartlett? Surely the joy of life, or at least part of it, is in fact the opposite to routine. Surely the joy of life is exploration, being spontaneous, meeting new people, stumbling across new things that you didn't expect to stumble across, unplanned adventures, and being free enough to be continually inspired by new things. Relationships die when they lose their excitement, and they lose their excitement because of too much routine and not enough life. Maybe the same applies to your life generally. Maybe too much routine will kill the excitement of your life. Think about it. You probably get up at the same time every single day. Your journey to work is the same every day. You spend your day in the same office every single week. Your work is eight hours every single day.
20:20 Steven Bartlett? You eat similar things at similar times every single day. Maybe you shouldn't have a perfect routine. Maybe you should aspire to be more imperfect, more unplanned, more spontaneous. And before I continue my routine bashing, I want to acknowledge that I think it's a routine can play a very positive role in our lives. It can help to create structure in areas that require structure. Yes, brushing your teeth every morning is a good, healthy routine to have. There's no doubt about that. And routine can give your day and week a more ordered and more calm feeling, which is great for your mental health. They can simplify your schedule and personal life to make them less chaotic and complicated. However, I do believe not only are we at risk of optimizing our life away with technology,
21:04 Steven Bartlett? with things like food delivery apps, which I've talked about in this podcast before, even social media, taxi apps, all these things that make life less human, they make you less active and more lonely. But we're also routineing our life away by seeking too much rigidness and structure in our lives. How can you truly, truly live a fulfilling, challenging, exciting and unconventional life if you do the same thing every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year? If you can't distinguish this week from last week, how can a reasonable person expect this week to feel exciting? I think having less routines gives you more flexibility. I think it reduces. That monotonous feeling of day to day life, I think it reduces the sameness of life.
21:48 Steven Bartlett? I think it opens you up to the possibilities to adjust your activity to your mood. I think it can lead to new streams of creativity. One of the things that has been widely discussed is how routine kills creativity, probably because it doesn't expose you to enough inspiration. I think not having routine can make your life overall more exciting, more interesting and more enjoyable. And I think that matters. So I think that begs the question, how can we change our routines? How can we have less routines? One of the great ways to do that is to go and travel, is to just book a flight and go. No planning, except maybe the reservation of the hotel or hostel you're staying in the first night. Interestingly, even when we travel, we all value the knowledge of locals.
22:33 Steven Bartlett? And the reason we do that is because they take us away from the tourist trail. They take us away from the tourist routine. They take us to exciting, raw, real cultural magic that we won't get from following the status quo, from following the tourist routine. And that's exactly what having less routine will do for you in your life. It'll allow you to find that excitement, that real raw inspiration of life. Secondly, you can move somewhere different. You've got to be brave to do that. I understand that. Make you feel uncertain, but I think it's so, so important. You could hang around with different people. You could work somewhere new. You can change the times you do things. You can change the way you work. You can ask your employer, I know this is again a bit of a luxury,
23:17 Steven Bartlett? but you can ask your employer to give you at least one day off a week. At Social Chain, we've now allowed all of the team members in the business to write their own contracts because we want them to be able to establish their own routines, which means that you can decide how many days a week you work, what times you work and those kinds of things. You can change your eating habits. You can leave the TV off. You can change your social habits, the how you socialize. One of the things I'm really interested to do and that I've implemented since the last podcast with Joe Wicks is I've started sending voice notes to all of my friends now. And that's a real change in my sort of social habits. I used to just send these text messages, of course, like we all do. But just by sending voice notes, my social habits and my social sort of connection to my friends, to my family, to people like you that follow me on my podcast or my Instagram or wherever else,
24:02 Steven Bartlett? has increased and it's made a big difference in my life because I then get voice back. And that sense of connection has been sort of heightened with everybody that matters to me in my life. And lastly, You can read differently and you can follow people differently. The following point is another point in my diary this week, so I'll refrain from that for a second. But you can just read different things, consume different information. We're all creatures of habit. We watch the same YouTube channels, we watch the same news providers, we listen to the same podcasts. Don't leave me. But even with a small change like that, you can bring creativity and excitement and inspiration and a feeling of freshness into your life just by changing what you consume. Watch a documentary you wouldn't normally watch, read a book you wouldn't normally read,
24:45 Steven Bartlett? go to an improv class that you would never normally go to, break your routine, enjoy your life. A guy called Henry Van Dyke once said, as long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, no new dimensions of life will emerge. Less routine, more life.
25:04 Steven Bartlett? The next point in my diary is interesting, right? This podcast is highly hypothetical and then people sometimes say, we've got no evidence to prove that. I don't care. I don't care about evidence here. Sometimes I provide supporting studies and things like that. Sometimes I'll read around the things that I'm saying, but a lot of the times I'm just talking out loud. I'm thinking out loud and, you know, by tuning in, I guess you've decided that you want to listen. The next point in my diary I've written, why we hate unsuccessful people. I get so much niceness from my social networks, from people around me, from people that meet me when I do public speaking and things like that. I get so much love, but of course, like everybody, once in a while, someone will say something horrible to me. Someone will try and tear me down.
25:46 Steven Bartlett? And this week I had a guy message me from an anonymous account and he was just trying to discredit anything that I'd ever achieved and my success generally. And honestly, I'll be completely honest with you, as you know, I always have been within this podcast. I didn't give a fuck. I genuinely didn't care because the things he was saying were, you know, 100x untrue and they were quite easily provable if I just responded, but I chose not to. But what I found interesting was my own analysis of why someone would go to the effort of sending me those messages. And it got me thinking about the nature of hate and the nature of why people hate success, right? I think the first thing to acknowledge is that people think success is often a zero sum game.
26:28 Steven Bartlett? If you don't understand the concept of a zero sum game, it means that if I win, you have to lose. Whereas success, you know, we can all win, a lot of people can win, right? It's not necessarily a zero sum game. But if you've ever experienced heartbreak, if you've ever had loss or anything really upsetting happen in your life, i.e. if you're human, you'll have observed this almost counterintuitive phenomenon that is sad people turn to sad music. I've felt rejection and heartbreak a number of times in my life, and you know, something I'll probably continue to experience, especially in the romantic sense. And I always turned to Sam Smith, Adele, and other sad music for some bizarre, unexplainable reason. It kind of makes no sense to me. You would think upbeat music would be your preference when you're feeling down. But this is a psychological
27:12 Steven Bartlett? phenomenon that has been proven to be true. And here's the thing, the same reason why we like sad songs when we're sad, I think, is the same reason, or a similar reason, as to why people don't want to see you winning when they're not winning. When you're sad and you're listening to sad music, psychologists show that you're seeking to identify with the emotions expressed by the music, or by the meaning of the lyrics, or by the artist. And studies show that identifying with that feeling of the artist in this way seems to help you sort out your own feelings. It seems to help you rationalize them. In other words, the sad music is giving you a chance to connect, to relate, to address, and most importantly, to feel that how you're feeling is understood, is more normal, is shared, and therefore is
27:56 Steven Bartlett? more tolerable. So if we apply the same thought process to success, if you're feeling unhappy with your lack of success, for some, not for everybody, there can't be anything that would make you feel worse about yourself than someone your age, with your skin color, from your background, from your city, being a hundred times more successful than you. Would anything make you feel more inferior? Would anything provide you with more evidence that the difference between their life and yours is in fact something in you? Much like listening to an upbeat song when you're feeling sad, we just can't relate. We can't seek refuge in them. We can't share this experience with them because they're living a different one. We don't feel like our life is understood, or our lack of success is justified in their
28:40 Steven Bartlett? existence. Their success destroys the platform that our lack of success feels justified on. In the same way sad songs help us justify and validate our situation, miserable people help us validate our own misery. And that's why they say misery loves company. Misery wants other people to be miserable too. Depending on our upbringing, our experiences and ultimately our perspective, we all feel envy in different ways and everybody listening to this podcast, whether you want to admit it or not, you are jealous. We all have jealous, it's a human thing. But the difference is the type of jealousy that you exhibit and the impact that that's having on you. I think there's really, there's several types of jealousy. The first type of jealousy is, I guess depressive envy, which is like you see someone successful and you say to yourself,
29:24 Steven Bartlett? I feel like a loser compared to them. When someone you know does better than you, it often feels like you are a loser, a failure or inferior. You think that their success reflects your failure. The other type of envy that I've seen and that I've experienced is hostile envy. And that's when people think that you've manipulated or you've cheated your way to where you are. Because the other person's success has resulted in you feeling that you can't stand them. You may want them to fail. You enjoy hearing about successful people getting divorced, going bust, getting arrested, or even having accidents. There's this thing in psychology called Schundefroy, which is the pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune. It's tempting when you have this type of envy. Because
30:08 Steven Bartlett? if the other person fails after succeeding, we feel better knowing that we have both lost. And the last type of envy we all experience is when you just look at someone. I call this benign envy. When you look at someone and just say, that's impressive. You applaud their success and you're happy for them. This is a, almost a neutral kind of envy. You observe someone that has succeeded or done well and you admire them and give them the credit they deserve for what they have done. Benign envy leads us to pay attention. It leads us to learn. Because we think we can emulate what they have done too. And we often do. It's the most productive, healthy, optimistic form of envy and a state of envy that we should all aspire to. Here's, let me give you some truth for a second. Even
30:52 Steven Bartlett? I, as someone that is, you know, considers myself to be successful, especially for my age and where I'm at in my life, I experience envy. All types of envy. It's something that I've actively tried to work on over the last couple of years and that I'm making great, great progress on. I remember back in the day being incredibly envious of Justin Bieber for a number of the reasons stated above. I thought that he'd got it easy. I thought that this super good-looking, super young person who was the same, it felt like a similar age to me, had this great unfair disadvantage. And being at the time, a 16-year-old kid that was living at home with my parents, not doing anything with my life, really, that envy, that feeling of sort of jealousy and animosity was heightened. And I'll be honest, as I've said in this podcast, there was one
31:36 Steven Bartlett? day where I saw this video of a six, seven, eight-year-old Justin Bieber busking on the streets in Toronto, which completely changed my perspective. When I saw that video, I thought, oh, my God, this guy has worked hard. He deserves this. And that removed a lot of the hostile envy I experienced when I was a little bit younger. As I've grown older, I believe so much in the upside of applauding people and being happy for success, that my state and my opinion towards successful people has radically, radically changed. We tend to envy people the most who we can compare ourselves to. And your social comparison group is the group which you really measure yourself on. So it's quite easy to become envious of a colleague, or a sibling, or a classmate, or one of your in-laws. We envy every achievement that we think is possible
32:21 Steven Bartlett? for us, but we don't feel comfortable or confident in achieving. For example, you might not envy someone who wins a Nobel Peace Prize, because that feels like it's out of your league. But you do envy your colleague that gets that promotion in the same industry as you. And we're all more likely to envy someone that we think has achieved their success through unfair or undeserved means. That sense of injustice heightens envy. But here's the truth, and here's the important thing you need to know. When your envy is depressive or hostile, it in fact is toxic to you. It will hold you back. Envy is driven by negative, automatic thoughts about what someone else's success says about you. And these negative, automatic thoughts are often hugely irrational. There's different categories of negative irrational thoughts. One of those
33:06 Steven Bartlett? categories is mind-reading, where you say to yourself, people think I'm a loser because they've succeeded. We all know the truth is people aren't really thinking about you, right? They're thinking about their own lives. But that sort of negative irrational thought results in envy. You might start discounting positives. You might say, he succeeded, which means that what I do isn't worth anything. Again, totally irrational. Some people label, they say, here's a success and I am a failure. Some people personalize, they say, her success reflects personally on me. Some people awfulize, they say, it's terrible that they got this recognition and I didn't. Some people turn to fortune telling as an automatic thought. They say, I will never be able to succeed. And some people have an all or nothing thinking sort of mindset, which drives envy into them,
33:49 Steven Bartlett? where they say, nothing I do works out. Really? Nothing? Aren't there some things that you've been doing and you've been able to achieve? Things have been rewarding you, but your narrow all or nothing mindset has driven envy into you. I get envy. Everybody gets envy, as I've said. And I've been working incredibly hard to reprogram my automatic thoughts and ensure that the nature of my envy is positive, productive, learning orientated and optimistic. And I believe that will change my life and I believe it will change yours too.
34:20 Steven Bartlett? The next point in my diary is a better relationship with social media. And I've scribbled a bunch of notes below this headline. I might sound like a bit of a broken record here, especially if you've listened to this podcast before or if you follow me on social media. But I want to give a little bit more to this topic because I think it's life changing. And I've experienced firsthand how this has changed my life. Here's the thing, what would you do if I told you that there was a service that allowed you to learn from the thoughts of the world's smartest minds in real time? To understand the creativity of the world's most creative thinkers? Or to tap into the inspiration from the world's most inspiring people in real time 24/7? Imagine if it was free.
35:03 Steven Bartlett? Well, this is what social media can be. If you make the very imperative, very important, crucial decision to unfollow fake, materialistic, negative, pessimistic, superficial people and change the relationship you have with social media, this is the magical potential social media has to change your life. But mind-bogglingly, hundreds of millions of people still choose to keep up with the Kardashians than to feed their mind with the nutritional things it needs to grow healthy values. I know this sounds like I'm pushing my myopic, narrow worldview onto everyone, and I'm not, although in some ways I am. It sounds like I'm saying everyone should live and aspire to live like I do. But that's not necessarily the case. I've spoken often on this podcast about the work of a guy called Tim Kassar and the
35:48 Steven Bartlett? 22 supporting psychological studies about junk values, and Johann Hari's talked a lot about it as well. What you consume impacts your values, and your values impact your happiness, your joy, anxiety, depression, and your major life decisions. There's a well-known expression that says, "If you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room." And I think that expression is trying to suggest that your learning won't be maximized in a room where you know the most. But maybe the same applies for your social media usage. Following smarter, more intellectual people is an easy way to ensure that you're the dumbest person in the virtual room. There was this amazing moment last week where it just dawned on me as I was on Twitter and I was observing two people I highly respect discuss a deep philosophical idea.
36:33 Steven Bartlett? And it dawned on me in that moment, what an absolute luxury, what a privilege, what an opportunity it is just to sit and watch and learn from these two people in real time, from their virtual conversation, even though they're both 5,000 miles away on opposite ends of the world. This is what social media can be. I was a fly learning on the virtual wall, and social media had given me a front row seat to watch the modern day, you know, Plato and Aristotle intellectually have it out. What an absolute luxury. These social media platforms have given us front row tickets to the show of the world's greatest minds. But unfortunately, most of my generation would still rather attend the circus down the road. Don't disrespect the privilege.
37:14 Steven Bartlett? The last point in my diary, I just kind of kept open. I've written one word, which is just family. I think, you know, I turned 27 about two weeks ago and the thought that I'm still not giving enough time to family and to really, you know, quality time with really good, close friends is something that's loomed over me almost every episode in this podcast. And I've almost been unable to make real progress in this area. I still don't call my mum enough, bless her. And I feel like somewhere in me, I'm acting like my mum's gonna live forever. And I don't want to learn this lesson about the importance of family before it's too late. You know, Kanye talks about in one of his songs, people never get the roses while they can still
37:56 Steven Bartlett? smell them. I don't want to be showing up giving my mum the roses when she's no longer here.
38:03 Steven Bartlett? And it's hard. It's hard. It's really, really hard in my world because everything feels like more of a priority in that moment. There's so much urgency. There's so much on the line that all of my time seems to be directed at the moment to the immediate challenges of today. And I think in some respects, I've started to fantasize about a time where I won't have such urgent demands on me, a time where I'll be able to go and see the person that I'm dating or my mum, or, you know, I'll be able to have a more healthy, rich, romantic love life or family life, or I'll be able to be a great dad. Not that I have a kid yet, but you know what I mean? And this is quite honestly, one of the real downsides and I guess sacrifices of being an
38:46 Steven Bartlett? entrepreneur is, and life generally, you just can't have everything and you have to pick what matters to you. And when people have continually asked me what my goals are for the future, I think they're expecting me to say a revenue figure or a status position or a job title or something or amount of followers that I have. And every single time I'm asked that question, especially in the last year, my response is just balance. My biggest aim for the future is just more balance and to have a more balanced life. Listen, don't be, don't feel sorry for me. I don't need your, your sympathy in that regard because I'm happy and I'm fulfilled and everything. But I'm looking forward at my future. I want to make sure that I have the
39:26 Steven Bartlett? balance required to be happy. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It's been a great sort of cathartic experience as always, and I'm super, super. Pleased that this week the podcast was number one across three categories. We went to number two in the overall charts. And for me, that's the sort of the reinforcement that this is bringing value to somebody somewhere. I'm super, super keen to get to a thousand reviews on Apple podcasts before the end of the year. So I'm going to incentivize that a little bit. As some of you might know, we're holding an event in Manchester called the Diary of a CEO Live. And the format of this event is we're going to get five of the cities, the regions, most impressive CEOs, leaders, business leaders, professionals
40:10 Steven Bartlett? with the most inspiring, interesting stories. And we're going to put on a bit of a cultural experience surrounding those five individuals. And I'm super excited about it. I will announce the guests very soon. There were some real, real killers. A lot of them have never even done anything publicly in terms of press too much anyway, or interviews. But this is going to be a real amazing event. It's going to infuse music and art and culture and really celebrate aspiration, success, ambition, and the true nature of succeeding in any pursuit. So here's my sort of incentive. If you go to the podcast store and give me a rating and leave your Instagram name every single week for the next, I think it's eight or nine or 10 weeks, I'm going to pick two people that have left a rating in the podcast
40:52 Steven Bartlett? store, left their Instagram handle, and you're going to get free tickets behind the scenes as well to come to the Diary of a CEO Live. This is an event that I have no desire or intention to make a profit on because I'm going to spend all the money making this fucking awesome, because that matters more to me. And everyone will have the chance to buy tickets when they go on sale. But yeah, super excited for that. And also, we're getting very, very close to having the book ready. And the book, which I'll talk about a little bit in the next podcast, is the culmination of all my life's learnings and knowledge. So super excited for that, too. Thank you again, and I'll see you again next week.
Previous E37: Joe Wicks - Changing Millions Of Lives in 15 Seconds! Next E39: Jamal Edwards - From Media Student To Multimillionaire Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
