Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett How We Built A $200m Company At 27 Years Old About this episode - How to quit, why quitting matters and my quitting framework
- Dealing with uncertainty instead of certain misery
- How I built a £200m company at 22 years old
- How I got 1 million followers on Instagram
- The life changing art of taking responsibility
- An unpopular opinion about the Virus
- Bad binary answers to complex problems
- Racism will hold you back even more if you let it.
Follow me:
https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? It feels so good to be back. This is season three of The Diary of a CEO. The only difference with this season is it's our last season. From now on, The Diary of a CEO will run continuously. Without seasons, we're going to record one episode every week, minimum, released every week on Monday morning. This podcast started a couple of years ago. When I was the 25-year-old CEO of one of the UK's largest and most exciting companies, we'd grown from just two people to 700 people. I was young, I was insecure, I was naive, I was single, horny, curious, and living an intense, unique life at an age where nothing could have prepared me for it. At an age where I was trying to figure out my own.
0:42 Steven Bartlett? This podcast was about my diary and my pursuit to figuring myself out and understanding the world as I went. And like you, I just wanted to live a better life. I wanted happiness, I wanted love, I wanted success. But I figured out that you can't live a better life until you know what a better life is, what that actually means, what it looks like. You can't achieve happiness, love, and success if you don't understand what those things are, or what they aren't, or if they're even real. And so here we are. This is an unfiltered, honest, rare part of the internet where I share my diary with you and I ask some of the world's most interesting people to come here and share theirs too. And the stuff they share is the things they don't usually share, the truth, the stuff
1:26 Steven Bartlett? you can really relate to. I'm not going to let people sit with me here in my new studio in London, I hope you like it, if they're going to bullshit you, if they're going to give you that typical PR manufactured nonsense that they usually give you. My job is to take you deep when we look into my diary and when I have guests here to take you deep when we look into theirs. But if you've listened to this podcast before, I'm sure you already know the score. 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.
2:04 Steven Bartlett? I just quit my job. I was the CEO and founder of Social Chain, as a lot of you will know. And Social Chain is one of the most remarkable, exciting, fast-growing social media companies in the world. I genuinely believe that. There's no company, in my opinion, better at social media and doing what Social Chain does than Social Chain. And I'm gone now, so I can be impartial about that. I started the company at 21 years old from a desk in Manchester. The company is now a huge global beast with 700 team members, hundreds of millions in annual yearly revenue. It's listed on the stock exchange and it's doing better than it's ever done before. That company made me everything I am. It made me a millionaire. It really positively challenged
2:45 Steven Bartlett? me for seven years of my life. It made me better. It made me cry, laugh, scared, dream. It made me happy. And then I quit. And when I told the world I had quit, people understandably just couldn't understand. Why would you leave a company that's doing better than it's ever done before, has a brighter future than it's ever had before? You must have been kicked out, they presumed. You must have some grand plan, they hypothesized. You must be stupid, they asserted. Nope. My relationship with the board and the company is better than it's ever been. It's great. I have no grand plan. Maybe I'm stupid. Here's the thing. At 16 years old, I stopped going to school because I didn't think school would give me what I needed it to in order for
3:29 Steven Bartlett? me to become who I wanted to become. And ultimately, I was kicked out of school near the end. At 18, I dropped out of university after just one lecture with absolutely no plan. At 20, I left my first startup completely out of the blue, again with absolutely no plan. And now at 27, I left my successful global business, my job, my salary, and everything that comes with it with absolutely no plan. Madness, right? So much is written in personal development books and the internet about the courage it takes to start a new job, to start a new relationship, to start a new business, or to start a new passion. Not enough is written about the equally important, equally courageous, equally confounding thing you usually or nearly
4:14 Steven Bartlett? always have to do before you start something new, which is quitting the last thing. I've just spent the last month out in the Costa Rican jungle with monkeys, literally living with monkeys, writing my book. And the characteristics required to quit are somewhat analogous to the way that I saw those monkeys swinging through the jungle every single morning. You can't grab hold of your next branch until you have the conviction required to let go of your last. Those horseshit, yet very popular cliches that tell you quitting is for losers, or that you must never give up, as you see it plastered all over Instagram, don't help anyone. They trap you in a toxic narrative that quitting is a weakness,
4:56 Steven Bartlett? an easy way out, or worse yet, that quitting is failure. Quitting, like starting, is a real skill. And it will turn out in all of your lives, as it's turned out in mine, that quitting is for winners. A large part of the reason I've been successful, the reason I'm the happiest person I honestly know, and the reason I've avoided overstaying my welcome in toxic, soul-destroying relationships and situations, is because I have a solid, mental, almost subconscious framework for quitting. If you have a quitting framework of your own, you, like me, can quit in peace without the anxiety, the worry, or wasting years of your life consumed in wishful thinking that things might change when you know they won't. I don't quit because things are hard.
5:39 Steven Bartlett? In fact, the difficulty of a challenge often correlates to the rewards on offer. So, difficulty, for me, in my life, has been a sign that I should keep going, that I'm in a growth moment, that I'm going in the right direction. And so I live in search of increasingly harder challenges. I often say that my professional mission is to fill my life with excruciatingly hard, but definitely worthwhile challenges, challenges I know are worth the sacrifice. And I tend to believe that if you do hard things now, you'll have an easy life later. If you do easy things now, conversely, you'll have a hard life later. And so I've lived my life, as you can probably tell, if you look at the way that I've made my decisions, seeking chaos. It turns out that's my happiness, and I avoid stability.
6:24 Steven Bartlett? It turns out that's my chaos. But I do quit because things suck. And at the point that a situation sucks for me, for whatever reason, right? And many situations start well and then turn out sucking. And I no longer believe that I can stop the situation sucking, or because the effort required to stop the situation sucking is no longer worth the rewards, I believe, that are on offer. Then I quit. And that is the crux of my quitting framework. For me, I'm totally, deeply in love with this company. It gave me all my friends, pretty much all my friends. But for what I wanted out of my life at this moment, for what I intrinsically deeply
7:06 Steven Bartlett? want from my life, to feel the way that I need to feel every single day, I felt like the direction I want to go in wasn't the same direction that Social Chain could take me in. I didn't think Social Chain could give me it. And that sucked. And so I quit. And I quit with a few reminiscent solitary tears. I sat at my laptop that day and cried because as I looked back over the last six, seven years, right back to the days where I was shoplifting Chicago Town pizzas to feed myself, where I was at war with my mother because I dropped out of university and I was struggling to keep a roof over my head, I was grateful. I was so grateful for the people that had believed in me, for the memories I have and for the lessons I've learned and the journey to every corner,
7:49 Steven Bartlett? stage and boardroom in the world that this business has taken me. As a famous hip hop philosopher once said, it was all a dream. Despite the tears and what they might make you believe about that moment, I quit with total faith that this moment was the right moment, the right moment for me to move on. I quit in total peace. And I quit guided by the clear direction of my own internal voice, a voice that has served me well my whole life when I've allowed it to speak, uninfluenced by what society or my mum or any other external force expects of me, without the need for a plan. And here we are, happy, peaceful, and unemployed.
8:32 Steven Bartlett? There is a fucking pandemic outside. And can you think of a time in our lives where any of us have experienced this much compounding uncertainty? Right now, we don't even know when we're going to get our lives back. We don't know when we can plan our weddings, when we can socialize with big groups of our friends. And for some of us, those worst affected, we don't know when we're going to be able to pay the bills, return to work or find new work in some cases. Your ability to handle uncertainty will quite literally define the quality of your entire life. That's what my life has taught me. The older I've gotten, the more blatantly obvious this has become. If you're trapped in a job you hate, or in a relationship that drains you, or you're stuck in a place that depresses you,
9:13 Steven Bartlett? the certain misery of your current situation should never be considered a better option than the uncertainty you'll encounter if you go in search of more, of better, of happier. Never, ever accept misery because it's comfortable, or because it's familiar, or because it feels safe. Never. I don't care how people pleasing your situation might be. I don't care how proud it might make your mother. I don't care whose fucking feelings are going to get hurt if you decide you want more. I don't care if it's going to be really, really hard for you. I don't care. If it's hard in the short term, that doesn't matter more. Like I said, you have to do the hard shit now to have an easier life later.
9:56 Steven Bartlett? If you do the easier stuff now, you're choosing, choosing a hard life later. And I know the feeling, trapped by comfort and dying a slow death. As humans, we're hardwired to panic in uncertain situations. It's an unfortunate consequence of our innate survival orientated programming. Studies show that. Studies show that the less information you have on a decision or a way forward, the more the limbic part of your brain takes over. And that's the part that you don't want taking over. That's the part where your emotions live, where anxiety and fear are generated. Uncertainty will make you anxious. It can paralyze you into inaction. This neurological disposition, which, you know, which hasn't evolved out of us unfortunately, and as part of our wiring was really, really
10:39 Steven Bartlett? handy tens of thousands of years ago, when we were cavemen and women straying into unfamiliar territories at night, and when we had little information about what laid around the corner. Because back then, being fearful in uncertain situations ensured our survival. But today, these mechanisms aren't helpful in the context of the world we live in, and the decisions we have to make every single day. It has been clinically proven that the most successful people in the world are able to override that innate mechanism and shift their thinking to a more rational place. They're able to use a logical framework, not irrational emotions, in times of great uncertainty, where life demands you to make decisions without all the evidence, which is most life, which is every day. And if you want to be more successful, happier and find better love, you too need that logical framework for dealing with uncertainty.
11:23 Steven Bartlett? Overthinking and the procrastination it creates stem primarily, in my experience, from trying to make perfect decisions in a world where perfect decisions only live in hindsight. I had the pleasure, when I was in Brazil, of meeting Barack Obama, and he's one of my idols, and I think a political legend, and he said, "You don't have to get to 100% certainty when you make your big decisions. You can just get to 51%. And when you get to 51%, make the decision and be at peace that you made the decision based on the evidence that you had available to you at that time. 51% is enough. It's enough to be at peace. 100% doesn't exist.
12:04 Steven Bartlett? If you can make more decisions at 51%, you'll get feedback faster on the outcome of that decision, you'll therefore learn faster, and therefore you'll progress faster." And the opposite is true. If you wait for 100%, you'll make decisions slow, you'll lose time, you'll lose the chance to learn, and you'll lose the opportunity a lot of the time. And the truth is, as I said, 100% doesn't exist. 51% certainty has to be enough for peace. 100% doesn't exist. Think of uncertainty as the gap between the miserable current situation you find yourself in, and the unknown happy situation you want to get to. It's a place you have to travel through time and time and time again in all areas of your life, if you want fulfillment, if you want love and you want to be more successful. It's the...
12:49 Steven Bartlett? It's the most vulnerable place on earth because the lights are off. There's no sat nav and the destination is unknown. There's usually an untrustworthy blueprint. However, when you've reached the end of your quitting framework, whatever your framework might be, and it's clear that your current situation sucks and that you're not going to be able to change that, or it's not worth changing it, and that your life is leading you towards inevitable unhappiness, you have no choice but to embrace the fact that uncertainty is the only way out. And that the certain misery of your current situation will never be a better option than the uncertainty you'll encounter as you search for more, as you search for better, and as you search for happier. When successful people tell you how they got successful, they never seem to mention luck.
13:32 Steven Bartlett? Because if they tell you the role luck played in their success, it seemingly takes something away from them. It takes the intention out of their genius. It takes the correctness from their brilliance. It takes a sense of purposeful wisdom from their story and it replaces it with the truth. And the truth is that luck played a huge role in their success. But luck, if they talk about luck, it isn't as easy to sell shit to you. Complicated and intentional sells well. If it's intentional, I can teach it to you. If it's complicated, I can charge you for it. You're not going to buy their course, follow their page, or go to their seminar if they talk too much about luck. But the truth is luck, timing, a good fortune play a huge role in every entrepreneur's success. So when I'm talking about my success, I have to start there. I was lucky.
14:17 Steven Bartlett? I started a social media business at the perfect time, a time when social media was this wave coming into shore. And I just happened to be surfing that day. But there was a lot of other people surfing that day. And some of them had fancier surfboards and some of them had more experience surfing. And some of them had richer parents, but they didn't get here. And so as wonderful as it is to admit for my ego, there was intention, there was skill, there was hard work and there was talent involved. So let me just talk about some of those things. Let me start with skill. In chess, you become the best in the world by mastering that one skill. However, in our careers, in our lives, in our entrepreneurship journeys, things are much more multifaceted and complex and layered. They're almost never defined by mastery of just one skill.
15:02 Steven Bartlett? They're defined by our ability to be pretty good at a bunch of uniquely complementary skills. And this is what they call skill stacking. Complementary but unique skills are incredibly important. Let me explain what I mean. Steve Jobs, the company he created, Apple, I'm sure you all know Apple, right? He's a great example of exactly this. At the heart of Jobs' skill stack is a passion for design, be it fonts, packaging, architecture. Steve Jobs spoke about how one calligraphy class he took at Reed College contributed to his success, a class he wasn't going to take. He said, if he had never dropped into that one single course in college, the Mac, which we probably have all used, would never have had the beautiful typefaces it had, multiple typefaces, proportionately spaced fonts.
15:46 Steven Bartlett? This one rare skill and the wider design skills, which none of his competitors had, would ultimately set Apple and Steve apart in a way that would revolutionize his entire industry and ultimately your life, my life in the world. He was never the best in the world at design or calligraphy, but he developed that keen understanding of the winning design principles. And by combining those skills with his unique, deep insights about people and what they want, and his tech knowledge, and his rare strategic mind, and his salesmanship, and his leadership skills, and his business skills, he was able to build a company that focused on advancing technology through beautiful design. That's the unique complementary bit that made him different. That company felt different, better, it felt more valuable. Because Steve's skill stack was different, better,
16:29 Steven Bartlett? and ultimately more valuable to the end consumer. Jobs wasn't the best in the world at any of the skills within his skill stack, but the complementary and unique nature of his skill stack made his company the best in the world and made him, undeniably, the best in his industry. For me, the skills that set me apart as an entrepreneur were first and foremost, my social media skills. And then that was helped by my public speaking skills, my general common sense, my people skills that allowed me to think and predict the future and how people would behave. And then my sales skills, which underpinned all of that and allowed me to go on stage or go on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter and sell those ideas to the world. There isn't any other social media CEOs in this country that were able
17:11 Steven Bartlett? to build an audience for themselves of millions and millions of people using their social media skills. And then with my ability to go and speak on the world's biggest stages and sell eloquently and envision what the future would or wouldn't look like with conviction, I was then able to make my voice heard above all of the others using social media. And when you have the loudest, most persuasive voice and a high level of technical knowledge, not the best in the world, but high level, in an industry which is largely driven by the power of authority, sales, social proofing, personal branding and opinion, you'll quickly rise to the top as I did. My industry valued that unique skill stack. And so people like me and of course Gary Vee, a friend of mine, who share a very similar skill stack, both
17:53 Steven Bartlett? rose to the top of the social media marketing industry in our respective countries, even though neither of us are admittedly the best in the world at any one skill. We're not the best public speakers in the world. There's better people. I know better people at public speaking than me. We're not the best salespeople in the world. I know better salesmen. We're not the best entrepreneurs in the world. I know better entrepreneurs, if I'm being completely honest with you. But we don't need to be, and that's the point. Being, you know, good at five unique and complementary skills will take you much further in your life than mastering one. In your life, in your career or in your business, you have to ask yourself that question. What are the unique complementary skills, the unique complementary and rare skills that would allow me to rise above the rest? And instead of mastering the shit you're already good at, which a lot of people tend to do, go out and work
18:38 Steven Bartlett? on those things. To me, that's the secret.
18:43 Steven Bartlett? Next, I feel like I've got to mention hard work. You know, there's been a lot said negatively and positively sometimes about hard work over the last five years. And I know that if I post on my social channels right now, telling you that hard work will help you become successful, someone's going to call me a prick. Because linking hard work to success apparently also unintentionally links laziness to a lack of success. And that makes people feel like shit. So they hate it. And I'm not one of those, you know, toxic hustle porn stars that's going to try and encourage you to stay up all night and reject your family and not feed your kid and sacrifice your mental health to build a business. I think I basically tried that and it was a really fucking bad idea, if I'm honest. I had to make drastic changes in my life to save myself.
19:27 Steven Bartlett? I got to 23, 24 years old and I realized how empty, miserable and pointless my life would be if I sacrificed everything for money, success and status. And then when I got there, I had no one, no family, no partner to enjoy it with. All of those material things would mean nothing if I over invested in them and under invested in the people I would enjoy those things with in the future. A stupid, a common and a regrettable mistake that you should at all costs avoid making. But I would also be lying to your face if I told you that hard work doesn't matter. If I just spent the last seven, eight years of my life working tirelessly to get where I am today, and I told you otherwise, I would also be dishonest. And that's also a prick thing to do as far as I'm concerned. Hard work does matter.
20:11 Steven Bartlett? It undeniably increases your chances of success. But if it costs you your mental health, if it's dumb hard work where you're not actually working because you're burnt out, unmotivated and tired, then it does absolutely nothing but waste your time. Then you should just sleep or go on holiday or walk your dog or see your nan, you know. Nobody can tell you the balance. That's your job, right? No, no Instagram hustle porn star can tell you how hard or soft you should be working. So you have to listen to yourself, not to nocturnal Instagram hustle porn stars. But the number of hours you smartly, keyword, invest in your future, the greater and probably the sooner you'll reap the rewards. I overworked everyone I knew.
20:57 Steven Bartlett? And it came at a great cost to my happiness at one point, I have to admit. I looked around and there wasn't many people left and I could have arguably got. Probably got here without such an obsessive relentless sacrifice. Who knows? If you know where I came from, you'll probably understand why I was too desperate to take the risk. But yeah, hard work mattered.
21:23 Steven Bartlett? Hard smart work. And, and, and let me, let me say one last thing.
21:30 Steven Bartlett? Talent. There's a lot of myths surrounding the concept of talent and I don't really buy into the talent myth as much as many people do. Everything that seemed to really make a difference to my success was in some ways a skill, right? A sword I had to sharpen over a series of years or decades, all my lifetime. You know, I'm not smart, you know, like these book smart kids in school that I knew, you know, I, I'm not school smart. I'm not grade smart. My spelling is shit. You know, if you've seen my posts online, you've probably seen spelling mistakes. My maths isn't great. I'm not a natural genius, if those even exist. And the only thing I can point at and say, yeah, that thing there really helped is my unshakable, natural sense of self belief.
22:12 Steven Bartlett? But even, but even that isn't a talent because I know if I'm being honest with myself, if I was brought up in a different household, in a different time, in a different country, I could quite easily not have believed in myself. But that self belief is this, in my life, it's been this formidable tailwind that has pushed me forward through my entire life. Right? Self belief is the crowbar you need to crack open new skills. I remember the first time I, I spoke on stage when I must have been, what, 14 years old and I was shaking. And this speech that I was meant to deliver was quivering in the harm, in the palms of my clammy hands. And you, you fast forward 10 years and I'm speaking in Brazil in front of tens of thousands of people alongside Barack Obama, despite,
22:53 Steven Bartlett? despite the evidence to say that I wasn't capable back then, some, something, somewhere inside me believed that I could. And that belief got me through. It got me through every piece of evidence that tried to tell me otherwise. It got me through all of the hard stages. It got me into, into boardrooms. It got me into a life that I love.
23:16 Steven Bartlett? And in a life that on paper, I didn't have the qualifications or the right to be living. So that's my talent, real, unnegotiable self-belief. But yeah, if I'm honest, a lot of it was luck, fortune and good timing. But then I'm not trying to sell you shit. But my book is coming out soon. Happy Sexy Millionaire. You can get it now on preorder on Amazon. Yeah, luck. I recently hit 1 million followers on Instagram and I did one of those corny posts, thanking my followers for their support. But it wasn't one of those number one helium balloons with, with a glass of champagne or prosecco. It was just a quick Instagram story thanking the team that had worked with me over the years to get me there. And following that post,
24:01 Steven Bartlett? I received hundreds of direct messages from other creators, from some of you, from followers, from fans, from even from some distant family, asking for tips on growing their Instagram channels in the same way. And whenever I'm asked for tips on how I've achieved anything in my life, my brain probably does what your brain does. I, I mentally like rummage around looking for some kind of easy secret or hack or, or cheat or, or, or something that I can share that will be actionable and, and simple. And people gravitate towards easy because easy sells. It sells much better than hard, right? And much more than patient and much better than real. In sales and marketing, if you can create the perception that something is easy and it will
24:43 Steven Bartlett? yield high returns, it will sell like hotcakes because we all want a small investment to produce large returns. This is why most of the clickbait headlines you see and most of the get rich quick schemes you see plastered all over social media and the internet often have a headline that will try to convince you that you'll get a big return for little effort. You know, you've, you've seen the ones, six pack abs in seven minutes, or how I made a million in 30 days. On one end of that sentence, you have a big return, a big prize. And on the other end, you have a relatively easy investment asked of you in order to get that big prize. The truth is, it is simple. But it's also really fucking hard.
25:25 Steven Bartlett? Astonishingly, and this blows my mind, but it proves the point in, I think, a very succinct way. In the first 800 posts I did on Instagram, I got 10,000 followers. In the next 800 posts I did on Instagram, I got an additional 1 million followers. In fact, I got 200,000 followers from just the last 10 posts that I did. And if you look at that graph, it starts slow and then it goes fast. And that's exactly what consistency looks like in the real world. The results are slow, invisible, and then fast, invisible. Consistency, the small things, the small seemingly insignificant things are compounding for or against you in every aspect of your life, right now, your teeth.
26:10 Steven Bartlett? If you don't brush them today, no different, slow, invisible. If you don't brush them for a year, you're going to be screaming in a dental chair as the dentist rips them out at the end. And the end will be fast and it will be visible and it will be painful in this case. And this is the power of consistency compounding for or against you. It's happening right now in all areas of your lives and you don't even know or see it happening, but it's definitely happening. I was consistent on Instagram, posting almost every single day for years, even when I didn't feel like it. And when I posted, I looked at the analytics, I learnt, right? And then I used that new information, that learning to conduct an experiment, to try something new. And then after my experiment, I looked at the analytics again, I learned and repeated the cycle, slowly, slowly, invisibly getting better.
26:54 Steven Bartlett? And that is the great thing about consistency. It means that you get to continually try, learn, fail sometimes, and slowly invisibly improve. So you can start shit at something like I did, but with consistency, you're consistently learning, tweaking and making marginal gains. And after five years of that invisible improvement, you'll go from being pretty bad at something to pretty damn good. Consistency is the simple, hard answer to pretty much everything you want to do. It's really that simple.
27:26 Steven Bartlett? The older I've gotten and the further I've travelled in the business world, the more glaringly obvious it's become to me that the key difference between the people in my life that are the most fulfilled, the most romantically prosperous and the most successful, and on the other hand, the most unhappy people, the most romantically ineffective, the most broke, is their willingness and their ability to take responsibility for their lives. You know, human beings are just experts at taking responsibility for great things that happen to them. You become a millionaire, yeah, that was me, I'm self-made. You write a great book, yeah, all my ideas. You win a bet, yeah, I knew that was gonna happen. But when life delivers misfortune, when it delivers failure, when it delivers hardship, for many, taking responsibility becomes an impossible task. You know, who
28:11 Steven Bartlett? wants to take responsibility for not making rent, for getting fired, for gaining weight, for failing their driving test, like I did the first time, for being dumped? Nobody. Because admittance of fault, admittance of failure, or admittance of weakness, or inexperience, or naivety, turns an uncomfortable mirror on yourself in a way that a fragile ego or a delicate self-esteem can't always bear. You may remember, I had a guy on this podcast called Nia Iyal, and he was the author of a book, Indistractable, which tried to teach all of us how to spend more time doing the things we want to do. And he pointed out to me and taught me really, that we're not pleasure-seeking humans, we're actually discomfort-avoiding humans. And, you know, so turning that mirror on yourself and taking
28:53 Steven Bartlett? responsibility, for many, is just too uncomfortable to bear, from a psychological perspective. And you can see it all over social media. You can probably see it in your own friendships. You might even see it in your own relationships, or unfortunately, within your own family, people who default to blame. And it's been evident in my career that responsibility is a remarkable, remarkable life hack. And the older I've gotten, the more cognizant I've become of how I deal with taking my responsibilities, because, you know, I'm just as flawed as everybody else. Sometimes I like to blame shit. Sometimes I don't like it to be my fault, even when it is. You know, relationships, you're having a bad day, you're having an argument with your girlfriend or something like that, and you know you're wrong, but you don't want to admit you're wrong because your ego showed up that day.
29:36 Steven Bartlett? And instead of saying, you know, Tom pissed me off, right? What I've tried to do is mentally and consciously refrain that sentence to, "I pissed myself off because of Tom." And suddenly, when you do that, it makes it my responsibility. But in doing so, it gives me back control and therefore it allows me to do something about the mood I'm in. Right? If I go around saying, "Tom pissed me off, it's Tom's fault, it's Tom's responsibility, he did it." And I was just, you know, this puppet who's being emotionally manipulated by the unpredictable roller coaster that is life. I have no control in that scenario when I mitigate and give up my responsibility. And therefore, what is the point in me trying to do something to change the situation or improve my circumstances? I am helpless.
30:18 Steven Bartlett? You know, and if I tweeted this, someone would probably try and counsel me, they'd definitely call me a prick again. Taking responsibility has become selectively controversial, which is so bizarre and seemingly political. I say selectively controversial because we all agree that some people in our society should be held responsible for their actions. Criminals who are in jail for murder. But we dare not apply that same standard of personal responsibility to someone that is clinically obese, ever, never, regardless, never. Someone who's been fired from their job, ever, asshole boss, shit company, or someone who's gone bankrupt. Oh, unfortunate. They can take no responsibility for that. That is something I disagree with. Of course, there's important nuance in all of these examples, right?
31:03 Steven Bartlett? A rich person's efforts aren't necessarily to the causal factor of their wealthy lofty inherited wealth. And a poor person's efforts, conversely, aren't necessarily to blame for being poor. But equally, that doesn't necessarily mean that either party shouldn't take responsibility for the situation they find themselves in regardless. And this is a controversial idea, right? It's a political one for some reason. Radical responsibility is for the brave, for those that value progress over ego and for those that care more about the future they want than the present they have. And I can't tell you enough, if you are someone who has great ambitions and wants to be happy and wants to be fulfilled and wants to live a life on your times, you have to take hold of your life. You have to take hold of your potential.
31:48 Steven Bartlett? You have to take hold of your responsibilities. Who wants an unpopular opinion about the virus? Absolutely no one, right? If you haven't noticed, there's a deadly virus raging through our population. It's real, it's killing people, it's tragic, it's awful. But, and here is where I might be cancelled again. Not that I've been cancelled before, but I think probably in the course of this conversation today, I've probably been cancelled maybe at least once. I don't know what the fuck we're doing with all this locking everybody up business. I understood the lockdown originally and it makes sense when it's in context of a plan, but this locking everyone up indefinitely and destroying the economy strategy, I think, is deceptive. I think the government are lying to all of us. What exactly are we waiting for?
32:33 Steven Bartlett? Logically, what is it we're waiting for? And when I've reasoned this and gone over this multiple times with multiple friends, even on Twitter, I did a poll on Twitter asking the world this question. What is it we're waiting for? And I provided four options. I actually only can think of three options, right? Option number one is for the virus to magically disappear. Option number two is for a vaccine and option number three is for herd immunity. And if we go back to option number one, which is the virus is going to magically disappear.
33:01 Steven Bartlett? How? How? How? Viruses don't magically disappear. And when you think about the world we live in, locking everyone down in this country, but allowing people to fly in and out constantly and fly all over the world, right? Means that there's no point locking this country down. The only conceivable way that I think we could get the virus to magically disappear all at once is if you lock down the entire world all at the same time for about 30 days, right? Because there's going to be a little bit of spreading between families and households that will keep the virus alive. But I can't see, outside of a global orchestrated lockdown, how option one, the virus will magically disappear is a useful or a possible optional solution. So let's move on to option two. Option two is a vaccine, right?
33:46 Steven Bartlett? And I think when I did the poll on Twitter and I asked people what we're waiting for, what they think we're waiting for, this was the most popular answer, was a vaccine. But here's the problem. The World Health Organization, who are in charge of advising countries and advising us on the strategy that we should adopt, have said that you can't wait for a vaccine because a vaccine isn't guaranteed. And if you look at every coronavirus that has ever come before, SARS, for example, there is still no vaccine and that virus is 18 years old. So waiting for a vaccine is against history and it's against the advice of the World Health Organization. So I think we should also rule that one out, right? And then you have option three, herd immunity. The approach that Bojo, Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister here in the UK.
34:32 Steven Bartlett? Slipped up on TV and told us he was aiming for when he said that maybe we could just take it on the chin or words to that effect. And since then, because of the public backlash, he quickly reverted from that position and never mentioned the word herd immunity or taking on the chin ever again. But when you look at the strategy and you look at the options we have, that is what we're doing. That is what we're doing. We're opting for the herd immunity approach. And maybe, I'm not asserting my own opinion here, maybe it is our only option. Maybe it is, but maybe our politicians and our government are too spineless to tell you that. That's what I believe. I can't see another option. Can't be the vaccine, it's not going to vanish. So what are we doing here?
35:15 Steven Bartlett? And what I want from our political leaders is I want a bit of honesty, regardless of the social backlash. That's what leadership is. You lead, you don't follow. I think our government are lying to us. The more you see the world's problems in a binary way, police versus people, black versus white, or left versus right, men versus women, or poor versus rich, the less effective your solutions will be to solving those problems. The world we live in now has become more polarized and binary than ever before. Social media and broadcast media have completely obliterated the chance for nuance, for healthy debate, and for respectful disagreement.
35:55 Steven Bartlett? And social media and its unrelenting commitment to virtue signaling ultimately forces you through threat of digital punishment or cancel culture to pick a side and to defend that side and all of its predetermined, prepackaged worldviews unquestionably, like an enslaved sheep, like a enslaved, brain-dead sheep. And if you dare to disagree on even one of your side's sacred views, then that means you're one of them. And if you're one of them, you must believe and carry all of the beliefs, labels and predetermined views that they carry and therefore be treated as such. In 2020, thinking for yourself is
36:35 Steven Bartlett? controversial. It's dangerous. It's not worthwhile because speaking objectively might just cost you your job. It might cost you your family. It might cost you your life. And most of us don't even know that we've lost our ability to think and speak for ourselves because the influence of the crowd and the influence of our side and the virtue signaling that comes with it is so fucking strong and tempting. But, but when you think about it, the truth is that if everyone around you agrees with your views, all of your views, then they're probably not your views anyway. Over the last six months, we've had some of the most crazy times I've experienced in my short life in our society. We've had the Black Lives Matter movement. We've had this, you know, global protests all around the world. And we've had political warfare on top of a
37:18 Steven Bartlett? pandemic. The single most powerful content that I've produced in that time, the most valuable ideas I've shared were ideas that were brave enough to disagree, even when it was seemingly unpopular to do so. And even when I faced the likelihood of being cancelled or losing a client because I shared those ideas. You can't solve complicated nuanced problems with simple binary narrow solutions. And the compulsion to view complicated things as simple and binary will ruin all parts of your life. You see it in everyday life. You see this obsession with binary all around us. You know, you start dating a guy and your mum calls you and she says, is it love? That's a complicated, almost undefinable thing, right? Love, right? The way you feel about
38:03 Steven Bartlett? someone. But your mum's binary question forces a simple yes or no answer, which probably doesn't exist. A better question, one that allowed for nuance and appreciated the complexity of the situation would have probably gone like. How do you feel about him? Right? That allows for nuance. It appreciates complexity. And until we can bring nuanced respect and appreciation of complexity to our conversations online, in our workplaces, in our homes, in our WhatsApp groups, we will never find answers. We definitely won't agree upon the solutions and will keep asking the wrong questions. Because I've shared some things on my social media channels over the last couple of months, which are somewhat unpopular, let's say.
38:45 Steven Bartlett? Some people leap to the conclusion that I disagree with the movement or the idea or the underlying cause or the, you know, the just reasoning behind it. Ah, you know, I don't, I'm black. I fucking hate racism. I felt it, just like many of you have.
39:02 Steven Bartlett? But when this all began, I was honestly horrified by the binary, narrow-minded narrative that played out online. You know, trying to shame people into posting on social media about racism or Black Lives Matter, or the George Floyd incident is not fair or helpful. It's a unfortunate consequence of the virtue signaling, narrow, cult-like, polarized world that we live in. And if someone doesn't choose to post on social media, that doesn't mean that they don't care. And it doesn't make them a bad or evil person. Think about it. We all watched the same horrific video of a black man being asphyxiated to death by a white police officer who had his knee on his neck for nine minutes, right? As he pled for his life and asked for his mother. It touched every empathetic human being deeply, on an emotional way on planet Earth. Trust me.
39:47 Steven Bartlett? However, we will all naturally deal with what we watch in a completely different way. Of course. Because we're all different, right? We all know different things and we all respond in different ways. That's an expectation that we have of everybody around us in normal life. But suddenly, in these moments, we demand conformity. Everyone must believe and do what I've done, or they are evil. What a stupid way to think. Some people took to social media immediately. Some people spoke to their friends privately. Some people listened and tried to learn. Some people were so overwhelmed and confused that they couldn't find the words. And the truth is, we don't need everyone to talk, especially when everyone doesn't know what they're talking about. But we do need everyone to listen. Think about it.
40:30 Steven Bartlett? Public social media posts aren't the only way people process how they're feeling. In fact, when you think about it... Public social media posts are actually quite a bizarre, unnatural way to protest intense, genuine, personal and complicated emotions. People that post less aren't more racist. That's a stupid, naive way to think. Maybe they're just less tempted by virtue signaling. Maybe. Let's remember, the goal here, the fundamental goal, isn't to trend on social media, or to be politically correct, or for our followers to think that we are great, kind and full of virtue. It isn't to humiliate anyone who disagrees or doesn't understand. The goal is change. And people who are genuine about the issue know that that's the goal. And I'm, I'm gonna be black forever. And my kids, they're gonna be black forever when they're
41:13 Steven Bartlett? born. And so all I really care about isn't all this noise and virtue signaling and fighting and whether this person's nailed or not. All I care about is change. And there are many important pathways to change. One is self-reflection. And we saw a lot of that. One is political pressure. We saw a lot of that. One is protesting. We saw a lot of that. One is educating yourself. And we saw a lot of that. Any quick and easy action like social media posts and Instagram stories, that endeavor to solve such a complex and systemic issue are probably not going to be a meaningful and effective action, right? We can all admit that. I'm not saying they don't help. I'm saying it's not going to solve a systemic issue. So if someone's first reaction wasn't a tweet or an Instagram story, maybe they were thinking a little deeper. Having
41:53 Steven Bartlett? the ability to even consider nuance, to consider complex, impartial thoughts, and to be less narrow with our perspective is a superpower in 2020. In this crazy, polarized digital world where we so desperately need more virtue and way less signaling, I beg you to stop attacking anyone that doesn't perfectly conform to the set of beliefs that your cult espouse. You shouldn't unfollow them if they believe something you don't. You know, a lot of people, on my LinkedIn especially, chose to unfollow me because of my post about Black Lives Matter. The, the, the smart thing to do, the intellectual thing to do, the thing that's conducive with progress is to respectfully engage. And to engage to understand, not to win, not to convert,
42:35 Steven Bartlett? not to humiliate. I beg you, I beg you to think for yourself. As I go on the journey of trying to think for myself a little bit more, to have clear and consistent- Distant values but loosely held, broad minded beliefs. And I know for a fact, and this is, this is something which I don't think anybody can deny, that if, if we could all apply this approach, this standard to society's pressing problems, we would have less pressing problems. If we were able to understand someone in their world and where they're coming from, we would live in a better world. And if we approach our opponents with a sense of love, there would be less evil. And that, that's the world that I want to live in.
43:17 Steven Bartlett? That's the world that I'm fighting for. You know, racism scares me, but not for the reasons that you might expect. There's something about racism which people don't talk enough about, I think, which I think is holding people back. I'm not scared of the prejudice. I'm not scared of the discrimination. I'm scared of how the conversation about race and inequality will make young black people feel about their future. I think the conversation, although it's helpful and although racism is very, very real, also stands a chance of convincing young black people that they have lost before they've begun. And this isn't just true about racism. It's true of all forms of discrimination across all of the world. And it's intrinsically linked to this idea of labeling. If you label somebody, if you label a young black man as a failure or
43:59 Steven Bartlett? disadvantage, they, according to the science and psychology and research, may just start to believe that. And young people who are part of minorities or underserved groups will start to live their life believing that they have a disadvantage and in some ways, living that disadvantage. It's why I've spoke so much about the importance of having that internal locus of control, about taking responsibility. And when you, when you're brought up believing that you live in a society where you, you start with a disadvantage, it's difficult to take responsibility. And maybe rightly so. I'm not saying racism isn't real. Racism is very real. I've experienced it through all of my life. In fact, I've experienced it more, the more successful I've gotten. You see it more. When you stand in that first class line to get on the plane and someone just cuts in front of you and then they turn and say, sorry, I didn't
44:44 Steven Bartlett? think you were stood in this line. But when I get on the train to London and I'm sat in the first class carriage and the train attendant walks up to me after walking past everyone else and says to me, presumptively, this is first class, mate. He didn't check my ticket. He didn't check anyone else's. He just walked up to me and told me that this is first class, mate. I understand racism. I know it exists. I've seen it all around me. But the biggest thing that's helped me to overcome the inevitable racism that lives in our society. And I do say it's inevitable because of the way that our world is wired. I do think it's fairly inevitable. I think discrimination in many forms is inevitable. While you have such strong influences in movies and TVs and media and social media,
45:25 Steven Bartlett? the inevitability of racism has had less of an impact on me because I've not allowed it to. I've not allowed it to be my excuse. And I think and I worry that that is a possibility for some people, a possibility that I quite honestly understand. It's the same with your grades in school. Getting a D or an E isn't the end of the world, but it can be if you then live your life believing that you are a D, that you are an E, that if you give yourself that label and then you start walking into job interviews feeling like an E, or you start applying for jobs that you think an E deserves. The label can do damage too. And this is why when I'm speaking to minorities and all of you minorities that are listening,
46:05 Steven Bartlett? anyone who considers themselves to be part of an underprivileged group that might be disadvantaged in some way, you can't be defined by that disadvantage. The minute you believe you are, you become defined by that disadvantage. And that scares me. Of all the things in racism in the world we live in today, that is the thing that scares me.
Previous The Diary Of A CEO Trailer Next I Tested Positive... Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
