Everything 2020 Taught Me (Part 1)

It’s coming to that time of year when everyone starts to reminisce about the year that has just been and thinks about the changes they can make to have a better, happier future... The thing is though, this year has been different to any other that has gone before! It’s been difficult, it’s been a struggle, it’s been heartbreaking! Within the hard times of life we tend to learn more about ourselves and who we are. For that reason, I’ve decided to host a two part end of year special podcast episode to take a look back at the biggest lessons I’ve learnt during one of the hardest year of our lives and how we can try and make 2021 a better year. Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  I think one of the greatest lessons from 2020, but also one of my objectives looking forward into 2021 is that it will make your life more special, more grateful and more precious. Oh my fucking God, we have to, we have no choice. But

• 0:21Steven Bartlett?

  we're getting to the time of year where everybody starts to look back and where everybody starts to look forward. The long reminiscent Facebook posts and the New Year's resolutions that ambitiously set goals for 2021. And on today's podcast, I'm pretty much going to do exactly that. I'm going to look back at one of the craziest years that I think we've all probably ever experienced and look forward to a year that I hope will be much better. What are the lessons I've learned? What are the lessons that we can learn? And how can we make this next year better than the last? So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:11Steven Bartlett?

  2020. This year has been a year of increased perspective, changed perspective. I've got friends who have lost loved ones, friends that have lost their parents. I've got great friends who are still debilitated by COVID symptoms and partial brain damage six months after they got the disease. And I've got friends that have lost their businesses, that have lost their livelihoods and that have lost their careers. And one of the lessons I've learned this year is that, you know, when the sun is shining and everything is going our way, we don't learn an awful lot. In those idyllic moments where everything we thought about the world seems to be unfolding exactly how we expected it to, it's like we were right. The sky is blue and the sun is hot and my life is predictable. That's how it feels.

• 1:56Steven Bartlett?

  But in a year like 2020, the opposite happens, the opposite becomes true. We have too much to learn too quickly. Everything we thought about our lives and how our lives are supposed to unfold is thrown into uncertainty and the very foundation in which we've built our life upon seems hard to trust anymore. All of this readjusts our perspective for better and depending on how you take it for worse. And we're left with a new perspective, which is less easy to sneak up on us, if that makes sense, a perspective that's less easy to surprise us, one that's less complacent, more focused, more focused on what actually matters and who actually matters and less

• 2:36Steven Bartlett?

  focused on all the things that don't. If you're under the age of 30 or 35, this was probably 2020, the first time you've experienced what they call a black swan event, at least in your adult life. And if you don't know the concept of a black swan event, it's, it's an event that is unpredictable and an event that results in severe, widespread and often global consequences. For example, the Great Depression, many, many decades ago, or the Spanish Flu in 1918, or World War I and World War II, or more recently, the dot com bubble 20 years ago in 2001. This generation haven't had a moment like

• 3:18Steven Bartlett?

  this in their lives. And I'll be honest with you, it really fucking shows. The sheer disbelief by our generation that something like this could naturally happen to our cushy, predictable, privileged lives is almost nauseating. I deeply believe this is why, if you go on social media, you'll see all of these wild conspiracy theories. Facebook itself is only, what, 16, 17 years old? We've never had a major black swan event in the era of mass social media adoption. And the generation that use social media haven't collectively lived through really excruciatingly hard times like many of our grandparents have at any point in their adult lives like this. How could this possibly be happening, they

• 4:01Steven Bartlett?

  cry? It must be 5G internet. It must be Bill Gates. It must be the Illuminati. Can you imagine if a black swan event like this, like the Spanish Flu in 1918, a pandemic that killed about 15 million people, which is 30 times more people than COVID-19, a disease that predominantly affected young, healthy people? Imagine if we had Facebook.

• 4:25Steven Bartlett?

  We know so much about science now and we still, we still engage in this widespread stupidity. But back then, we knew so little, we were incredibly superstitious and deeply religious. Can you imagine the nonsense that we would have believed? The nonsense that we would have shared and tweeted and sent in WhatsApp groups as screenshots. This is a point about perspective. This year, we gained a very important new perspective, one that highlights the fragility of our lives and the society we live in, and that brings that sort of unavoidable realisation to the fore, that we're, that we're mortal, that we're not going to be around forever, that we're going to die, and that life is riddled with unpredictable but certain chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not our jobs, not our businesses, not our dreams, not our loved ones, not our health.

• 5:10Steven Bartlett?

  And as I say this, I understand why you might be tempted to be consumed by negativity, because it sounds kind of pessimistic. But I want to suggest the opposite. I want to suggest optimism and I'll explain why for me, all of this has brought a level of optimism and excitement and also gratitude into my life. If none of this stuff is guaranteed, if all of the things that I've just described aren't guaranteed, if life is to be as short as just a bunch of years, of which many of us feel like we've just been robbed of one, then, oh my fucking god, we have to, we have no choice but to start living. We have to start living. All this procrastination, all of this self doubt, all of this fear, all of these things

• 5:54Steven Bartlett?

  suddenly seem like ideas contrived by a mind that doesn't understand we're all up against the clock anyway, that we're all going to become stardust, that only a few things really matter, our health, our happiness, the health and happiness of our friends and family and those we love. What an absolute shame that so many of us, you know what, including me. Haven't given life everything have allowed my narrow perspective to lead me astray. Many of you have, if you've followed this podcast for a little while, have followed my life. I'm young, I'm quote unquote, successful in business, I'm happy, but even I, even I haven't fully lived my life.

• 6:37Steven Bartlett?

  I've held myself back in moments through fear, I've not spoken up when I should have, I've not told people how, how much they really mean to me while I've had the chance. I've let fear make decisions on my behalf, I've procrastinated, I've engaged in pettiness, I've been consumed by a Twitter troll who is trying to provoke me, I've treated good people badly, I've overvalued superficiality and undervalued meaningfulness, I've hurt people who have loved me and I've avoided responsibility. The perspective I've gained about the true nature of life and the fragility of this thing, the world and the society and this thing called health, which are the foundations which we're all trying to build our lives upon, has made me realise how dumb all of this

• 7:21Steven Bartlett?

  stuff really is, how stupid I've been to hold these grudges, to hurt people I love, to hurt myself and to make decisions based on what I think will make society like me more, not what I think will make me like me more or win approval of those that actually matter. One of my best friends in the entire world, someone I've spoken to more days than not over the last seven or eight years, called me this month and told me some very special news, he's just found out that he's having a baby. And I have lots of friends that have babies, but you know, even my brother has a baby, two of them, but this guy is a guy that's especially close to me, so close in fact, that it's one of those moments where like, finding out that he was having a baby almost made me feel like I was having a baby.

• 8:06Steven Bartlett?

  And it was, it was like I was processing the news, yeah, that I, that I just found out that I'd gotten someone pregnant. And this is going to sound really fucking crazy, right? But um, it's just one of those perspective shifting moments on top of what's already been an incredibly perspective shifting year. And as I said, this is going to make me sound crazy, but. I was on my way to the gym. It was about 2am in the morning. If you know me, you know that I work out at crazy, crazy times. And he'd called me, he's on another time zone in another country. So he called me pretty late London time. And as I was walking towards the gym, listening to my music and walking through the streets, and I think I've shared with all of you before, the fact that it seems to me that all of my ideas come either in the shower, or when I'm walking, or when I'm in the gym. I wrote in my diary, a couple

• 8:50Steven Bartlett?

  of phrases, and I write these phrases as prompts, so that I can develop these thoughts later, and also so I can remember to tell you all about them. I wrote, hurtling towards death. Okay, this is a very, think about it, your friend tells you, he's pregnant, well, he's not pregnant, but his partner's pregnant, and you write these phrases in your diary. Hurtling towards death. Next phrase. Receding hairline. Next phrase. What the fuck is everyone doing? Next phrase. Why are we half living? Next phrase. How dare you? And next phrase, create these memories. So I'm going to go through those phrases, just one by one quickly, and tell you why I wrote them. So the first one is hurtling towards death. We go through lives not realising that we're getting older. And we don't realise

• 9:31Steven Bartlett?

  that time is passing, right? We don't see age happening because we're there every day looking in the mirror. So and it's so gradual, we don't see our parents getting older until we leave home and then come back and see them. We don't see time moving on. And so we don't really feel like we're aging. And also, our friendship group ages together typically. So we don't really, again, feel the effects of getting older, until you have those sort of significant life moments. And because this is one of my best, best, best friends in the world, so close to me that it actually feels like I'm now a dad, or expecting, it made me realise that I'm getting old, and that I'm moving into a different

• 10:07Steven Bartlett?

  phase of my life, and that I'm aging, and that I don't have forever left. Sounds like a weird thing to say. But as I've said in this podcast before, I genuinely believe that 99.9% of us make our decisions as if we're going to live forever. The next point I wrote was about receding hairline. Listen, my barber had given me a bit of a dodgy shape up that week. And he'd cut back my hairline. And I was looking in the mirror, and I was thinking, I don't know whether the barber's done this, or I'm just getting old. And it was another thing I was thinking about that week. I was thinking, I'm getting older. And as someone that Has always considered themselves to be young and a teenager. I'm also on my path to approaching being 30 years old.

• 10:52Steven Bartlett?

  And all of these little things start to make you think ahead. This is probably why people have these like midlife crises, right? And then the next thing I wrote, which was upon the conclusion that I'm getting older is what the fuck is everyone doing? And this is maybe the most important point of all of them, because when you realise, when you have those moments where you realise that time is ticking and that age is a real thing and that we're not here forever. All of these stupid decisions to waste time and waste time on the wrong people and jobs we hate, doing things we hate, become incredibly stupid. And I was walking through the streets of London and I was looking over at a guy slumped in this bus stop, wearing this high vis jacket.

• 11:35Steven Bartlett?

  And I was just thinking, bro, you're getting old.

• 11:40Steven Bartlett?

  What the fuck are you doing? And I know that's a really naive thing to say, because it assumes that that person has choice and that they're making the wrong choice. And life isn't always as simple as that. But it was just this moment of realisation that like, if everybody were to realise that their, their life was actually on a clock. And this is why I'm holding this sand timer right now, if you're watching this on YouTube. And why I have this sand timer in my house and I had one in social chain, was because it's just the reminder that sometimes I need that time is real and that I'm getting older and to instil a sense of urgency into my life. The next thing I wrote is why the hell is everybody half living? Which is kind of linked to that point, which is if you understand your own mortality, if you really believe in it,

• 12:26Steven Bartlett?

  if you really believe that you're not going to be here forever, which is a lesson that this year's taught us and that baby news teaches us. And a receding hairline might teach you, you make your decisions through a different, a different paradigm, a different perspective. And the next thing I wrote was how dare you? Because after really starting to realise that life is finite and really having a moment where this news and COVID and my receding hairline had made me start to embrace the fact that time was so fleeting and so special and so precious. I felt almost offended by myself, but also the action of others, that we're not doing more to respect the time we have. And then the last thing, which was a more positive conclusion, was create these memories. And

• 13:09Steven Bartlett?

  Lockdown in this year have robbed us of the ability to create the memories that I think we'd all hope to. And as I've gotten older, and you know, I think I shared on LinkedIn and Instagram, a graph showing that in our later years, we spend less time with friends and less time with external family and secondary family, and we spend more time on our own. I've realised the importance of memories. It seems to have hit my friendship group all at the same time. We're all about, we're all, I think the youngest is 28 in my friendship group, and the oldest is 33. And we're at that stage where we're starting to realise that the most important thing that we can do, or spend our money on, is have memories, great memories with great people that we'll

• 13:50Steven Bartlett?

  never forget. And my conclusive point was, you know, I'm potentially going to lose one of my friends a little bit as well, right? So this friend who's having a baby is now going to have greater commitments, which means it's going to be a little bit harder, potentially, maybe this is an excuse, to create memories with that person. We're not going to be able to travel away to different countries on a whim, like we could over the last couple of years. And it just made the desire and the value of the memories we have, but also, as I say, the desire to create more memories even greater. And it's funny, we all have these buckets in front of us in life, and these buckets have a bunch of different labels on them. One of the labels and buckets might be called career success, or family, or friends, or meaningful relationships. And then some of

• 14:34Steven Bartlett?

  these buckets are rusty and dirty, and they have stains on the edges, and they have a label on the front of them that says toxic, right? And, and those buckets, those ugly buckets are material things, and social media validation, and meaningless relationships, and fear. And we spend our lives trying to figure out which buckets we're supposed to be pouring ourselves into. When I was young, and I was that insecure kid that wanted to be white, and wanted to be rich, and wanted to be loved, because I guess I didn't feel any of those things. I was so focused, and so compelled to pour myself into all of the grotty, toxic buckets. And as I got older, and more recently, as the

• 15:16Steven Bartlett?

  pandemic struck, I think we all started to realise that when shit really hits the fan, when our perspective is forced to learn. 2020 style lessons, there are only really a few buckets that are worthy of us, that are worthy of our time and that are worthy of our investment. And caring about something is a really, really expensive commitment. If you want to have a better life, right? You have to care about less things and you have to invest all of the care that you save into the things that you care about the most. And that prioritization is a lesson that I hope will stay with me forever. If there was a silver lining to this year, it was, it's that, it's the understanding what I should be caring about.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  And I think it's essential for you to remember that, that quote from, I think it's Marcus Aquilius where he says, "The attention you give to any action should be in due proportion to its worth, for then you won't tire or give up. If you aren't busying yourself with lesser things beyond what you, what you should, what should be allowed." I think that's the quote. And there's the other quote by Marcus Aurelius where he says, "Stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, live your life." And those two quotes, again, they're stoic philosophical assertions, but they're two quotes that I've scribbled in my diary this week. 2020 showed us how precious life is.

• 16:44Steven Bartlett?

  So next year, do not, do not let fear win. You have to be spontaneous. You have to book that flight. You have to apply for that opportunity. You have to learn to say, "I love you more." Even when your ego gets in the way, as it often does for me, right? You have to read those books. You have to start that business. You have to find the urgency to stop procrastinating. You have to block that asshole from your past that's dragging you backwards. You have to learn that new skill, that language, that passion. You have to take that risk because if 2020 has taught us anything, it's that we all have to learn to live while we can. And the next point in my diary is about productivity.

• 17:25Steven Bartlett?

  And one of the biggest productivity revelations I've had this year while working at home. I've been trying to juggle a million things as we all have, and I haven't had the structure that has guided me over the last five years of I'm used to having an incredibly busy travel schedule and I'm used to waking up every morning and just seeing my diary completely full of meetings and appointments and I just kind of follow the, my diary as if it's like Simon telling me to do something, right? But I haven't had that this year. And so it's meant that things have been a bit less structured, a bit more unstructured. And so one of the productivity hacks that's really changed the game for me is I've started

• 18:04Steven Bartlett?

  working directly from my personal calendar and not from my to do list. I worked from my to do list for a long, long time and it felt great. It feels good to tick that thing off and my little to do list goes ping, which is some kind of psychological reinforcement. My mouth maybe salivates or something, which means that I've done something well, right? But I've been well aware for a long time that I still waste a tremendous amount of time. A task will take the amount of time that you, that you give to it and to do lists don't have that time constraint. So they lack that sense of urgency, that sense of priority and accountability and quite honestly, a sense of consequence. And if, you know, if I don't do the thing on my to do list right now, nothing really happens. So I can spend my time off on YouTube and doing other things.

• 18:48Steven Bartlett?

  And I, we all tend to do the, the task right before there is a chance of a negative consequence of not doing it. And to do lists, I have to be honest, they still have a place, right? If you need to write something down to get it out of your head or because you might, you know, forget it, then by all means do so. I, I'm still using my to do list, it still has a place. But once they're down on that list, what I would recommend, and the thing that's really had a massive multiplying impact on my productivity is you then plug it into your calendar. A little bit of a secret here, which a lot of people don't know, a couple of my friends know because they're all using the same app. I actually built an app this year when I started having this problem of not having a structured life. It's called Time Block and it's not yet in the

• 19:33Steven Bartlett?

  App Store, but me and my friends use Time Block. It's an app that I built with a developer. And it's basically a to do list with a calendar on top, in essence. It just does exactly what I wanted to do. And you actually see every time you blocks a task in, you see it like the block filling up. And it's quite a cool little app that I've used, but you can just still use Google Calendar or whatever app you use. And so I put the, the task, the to do onto my calendar. And it gives me an idea of how much time I have to do that particular task. It creates that sense of urgency. And it's been genuinely a game changer for me this year because the year has been so unstructured and because there's no start and finish to our days. And I think, I think, I think people refer to this as time blocking.

• 20:14Steven Bartlett?

  I think it's a fairly well known concept. It's funny because I've noticed that when I'm busy, I don't time block. It doesn't cross my mind. I'm too busy. I'm being dragged by my calendar. But in moments where I lack structure, like the weekend, or when we're all working remotely during a pandemic, I, I have to time block. If there's a probability that I could get very little done because of distraction, like on the weekend, where there's less structure, but more chance of distraction, then I literally have to put all of my tasks that day against my calendar. So Saturday and Sunday, typically I block out all of the time because there's a high probability. I'll just lay in bed, watching YouTube videos or on my emails or scrolling social media. We're all guilty of it.

• 20:56Steven Bartlett?

  I literally put everything in my calendar on Saturday and Sunday. I put in, go to the gym. And I put in two hours to do that. Then I put 30 minutes into eat lunch to walk my dog, everything. Because, because without that, I won't be productive as I possibly could be. If you do this already, great. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, here's a little word of warning. You have to be kind to yourself. You have to be empathetic or you will fail. Here's what I did the first time and here's why I failed. I started my day at 7am in my little calendar. I said, right, at 7am, I'm, I'm going to wake, wake up and do this. And then I'm going to work all the way right through till midnight, right? The person in charge of putting that in my calendar was me right now in this moment.

• 21:41Steven Bartlett?

  The person that actually has to do it is future Steve, right? And so in order to be successful, you have to appreciate the person who will be responsible for following the calendar, which is future you. So I literally now I'm empathetic about future Steve. I'll say, okay, future Steve, you can have a break here where you just literally do nothing. I literally put in nothing. You can have a break here where you can literally just scroll the internet and go on social media and watch Manchester United play. And that's been so, so important. I have to be empathetic towards future Steve or I'm not being realistic. And if I'm not being realistic, then I'm setting myself up to fail. And I wanted to share that with you because this year's been so unstructured and we don't quite yet know what 2021 looks like.

• 22:24Steven Bartlett?

  But one of the biggest productivity hacks and one that will stay with me for the rest of my life is this idea of time blocking. Give it a try. The next point in my diary is about creating a greater sense of urgency. I've mentioned the word urgency a few times in the previous point, but I want to really double down on it because I think it's, it's a huge revelation that I've had off the back of 2020, but also as a consequence of running the business I have for the last three years. With everything I've said, I think one of the greatest lessons from 2020, but also one of my objectives looking forward into 2021 is to try and create a greater sense of urgency in my life. And you, some of you may be familiar with that concept they call Parkinson's law, which is that old adage that our work expands to fill the amount of time that we allocate to it.

• 23:09Steven Bartlett?

  Put simply, if you have two weeks to write a paper for school, it will take you two weeks. If you block out all Sunday to clean your house, it will take you all Sunday. If you give something unlimited time, it will risk taking forever. But when you're pressed by a deadline, we don't procrastinate. And Creating urgency in your life, whether it's in your business because you're a business owner of a global business, or you're a 16-year-old that's just trying to have a better life, is incredibly important. And by the way, when I talk about this concept of urgency, it's very easy to misunderstand what I'm saying. Being more urgent isn't about being busier, or about being more stressed, or about being more intense in your life, or about burning yourself out. It's a completely different concept. Being more urgent is about demanding

• 23:54Steven Bartlett?

  from yourself that your most important goals are attained and achieved as soon as possible because they are your priorities. And by doing this, you'll naturally prioritize what matters and remove all of the tempting distractions, fear excuses that absolutely don't. You know, I saw this phenomenon in my business over the last 10 years. Time and time again, I witnessed on many occasions, on one particular occasion where I'm thinking about one project that our team wanted to launch, it took 18 months because there wasn't a deadline. And on some occasions, projects would just never materialize. I remember a few years ago, I had an idea which I brought to the team and I put, I think like 15 or 20 people on an email chain. And I told them this like really interesting, I thought it was interesting,

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  hypothesis I've had, which would result in us building a very innovative tool that would, in my opinion, really shake up our industry and as a consequence, make us a ton of money. I explained why I thought it was so important and I gave it to this, this, this group of people to, to create. And three months later, I go back to that email thread and the group of people there are still discussing it. They're passing it around. They're waiting for someone, somewhere to return from annual leave. Tom is waiting for Ben and Ben is waiting for that guy, et cetera, et cetera. The idea had made absolutely no progress. And to be completely honest, I was pissed off. At that point, I was fighting this war that a lot of CEOs or company owners will

• 25:22Steven Bartlett?

  fight when your company scales and you start to lose certain philosophical values, which made you agile and are very much the reason why you got there in the first place. And my company had gotten big and I had to start to trust people even more and more to get things done and to maintain those cultural values. And for whatever reason, at that time, I clearly hadn't created the sense of urgency that our teams needed to achieve truly great things. And I look back at that email thread as I observed that good idea going to waste because of a lack of urgency and a lack of accountability. And I made the decision that I was going to just do it my fucking self. And I was going to do it myself immediately. So that weekend, I went into the office alone and I went on

• 26:06Steven Bartlett?

  Fiverr, which is a website I've used over the last couple of years to build projects remotely or with external freelance support. And I asked a guy who was based abroad to work with me that weekend to build this tool. Forty eight hours later, I was completely done. The tool was built. And I took that tool that I'd built back to the email thread where those 50 or 20 people were still discussing it. And quite honestly, people were blown away, absolutely blown away because the hypothesis I'd had had been proven to be true and it worked. But it gets even deeper. A week later, I made a video announcing this tool to the world, which we called Likewise. And you can actually go and check out at

• 26:48Steven Bartlett?

  like hyphen wise.co. I think it's still there. Or just type in social chain likewise on Google. And we posted it to the world that, you know, we had tested our hypothesis, we built this tool, and we received thousands and thousands and thousands of inquiries. And not just for a week, not just for a day, but for years. We, two years later, we were still getting an inquiry pretty much every single day because of this one tool. And I'm going to be honest, that tool genuinely made us millions, millions and millions and millions. It changed the game for us and it changed the game for us for at least two years. It took mighty- A lesson and it taught me a lesson. And from that point on, I set up a WhatsApp group called

• 27:34Steven Bartlett?

  Move Fast and Make Things and I put six people in that group. And the only rule I set of that group was that everything we did in that group, every project we tackled, we only had two weeks to complete it. So no matter what, what the project was, no matter how grand the ambition was that went into that, that group, we only had two weeks. And I'm telling you, this is when Parkinson's law, which I mentioned earlier in the previous point, really proved itself to me because we managed to achieve remarkable things in no time at all. We managed to think of an idea and launch it within two weeks, including the video that we'd made, including building whatever the idea was, including building the technology in two weeks, just because of that urgency.

• 28:14Steven Bartlett?

  It, it, it made us, the six people in that group, break down walls that we, that typically we, we all often create that aren't really there. It forced us to reject excuses and it, it made us, it gave us no choice but to find a way to make something happen. And if you think about that in the context of your own life, if you think about all the ideas you've had, all the goals, ambitions, passions, dreams, imagine, just imagine for a sec, how many of them could have changed your life? If only you'd applied that same sense of unapologetic urgency and sort of accountability to it. If you'd said, do you know what? This really, really, really matters and it matters more than pretty much everything else right now.

• 28:57Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm going to start now and complete it in a fraction of the time that I think is possible. Imagine how much you could have accomplished. We can really use Parkinson's law to our advantage. Because I've, I've got this sort of renewed perspective off the back of 2020. I started thinking more and more about urgency and more and more about how urgency isn't a way to, to burn people out or to,

• 29:24Steven Bartlett?

  to, to, to, to force something through. It's really a way of, of. Acknowledging to yourself what matters more than anything right now and decluttering all of the stuff that risks getting in the way, the distractions I talked about, the fear, the excuses, the, well, we can't because, or the pessimistic attitude that some people will sometimes bring to you when you tell them your idea in your personal life, or when you say it in an office, they'll say, oh, and it's not possible because of X, right? It dismantles all of that and it leaves you with no choice but to attack. The Stoics, who I study a lot, the Stoic people, the Stoic philosophers, had a, had an expression, which kind of links to the first point that I made in this, in this podcast today, which is memento mori, which is a reflection on their own mortality.

• 30:09Steven Bartlett?

  And that was their reminder, it was their reminder that they are mortal, it was their reminder that they should always be pressed by a deadline and that that precious deadline was the shortness of life. We all have a deadline, but as I said in the first point, we tend to live without one and therefore we don't get much done and we, we have regret and unfulfilled dreams and those things. That's the same urgency I'm talking about. And the Stoics used to say, Marcus Aurelius used to say, that you can leave life right now. So let that determine what you do and say and think. And they didn't say that to create panic or to create a sense of like negativity or fear of death. It was to create priority.

• 30:51Steven Bartlett?

  It was to create urgency and it was to create gratitude. As wonderful as it, you know, it would be to, if there was no such thing as death, I, no, I'm going to take that back. I don't think it would be a wonderful thing if there was no such thing as death. But we can use death as a tool. Even when I start talking about death in this podcast, I realize that there's a bunch of people at home that are literally squirming at the thought, even the word, because a lot of people fear death, right? And I remember, once upon a time, specifically when I was religious up until the age of 18, I feared death too, because I didn't know where the fuck I was going to go, right? And when you're brought up in a religious home, there's a high probability you're either going to burn in hell, which is what, you know, you, you spend a lot of your time thinking about, or that you're going to go to this place called heaven. That doesn't sound that fun anyway, because everyone's a bit too nice, right? So I didn't really know where I was going to go. And

• 31:36Steven Bartlett?

  it was, it was in fact, when I stopped, when I lost my religion and I became, I guess, agnostic, because I don't think there's any such thing as an atheist, really, that's also too much certainty for me. When I became agnostic, that I no longer feared death. I became really, really comfortable with it. But I think you can use death as a positive thing to spur you forward. And I, as a reminder, as I said in the first part of this podcast of what's truly important and how to therefore use your time accordingly. And if anything, 2020 has taught us, it's, it's been loss. It's been, it's been a year that's been full of death. We, I think we've lost about 1.6 million people and everybody knows someone that's lost someone. We've been reminded about our own mortality.

• 32:19Steven Bartlett?

  So in, in 2021, next year, be urgent. Urgency might just be one of the greatest acknowledgements that you know how precious, fleeting and special your life and time is. And in turn, paradoxically, it will make your life more special, more grateful and more precious, because it will fill your life with more things that actually matter and declutter of it, of all the things that don't. Be more urgent. That's one of my goals for 2021 is to be a little bit more urgent and people that know me think I'm already urgent, so fuck me. Okay, so today I'm going to close my diary there. If you're not already subscribing, hit the subscribe button. If you're on YouTube, hit the like button, leave a comment, leave a review.

• 33:03Steven Bartlett?

  It means the world to me and I read every single review. I always look through at the names that have just subscribed on the backend of the YouTube channel. At the start of January, I'm going to publish part two of this conversation and we'll continue to look back at 2020 and to look forward at 2021. Tune in next week for that episode.