Moment 4 - How I Discovered A More Grateful Perspective

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this episode I look back on a trip I took to India where I got to take a look at what life is like in the slums of Mumbai. This entire experience shifted my perspective completely and yet the most surprising thing about what I was seeing wasn’t the grim reality of poverty, but the unshakable fact that these people were happy. I walked away from those slums with an entirely new perspective on the privilege we have been given from birth, and this is where I introduce how I discovered a more grateful perspective Full episode - https://g2ul0.app.link/uPvHRJw80fb 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.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  I went to India for fourteen days. I got to see a lot. I went to the Taj Mahal, I did the touristy stuff. And I also went and saw how the people live. I went to the slum in Mumbai. I went up a mountain, I went through jungles. I saw it all. I witnessed things I never thought existed, I guess. I had my perspective changed forever. We've all seen pictures of slums, right? We've all seen the movies. But I promise you, you have no idea what a slum is like until you go there. I was sweating with the heat. I was overwhelmed by the sound and my eyes saw mess, rubbish and raw sewage like I've never seen before.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  The slum is, I guess, the most entrepreneurial place on earth. The whole of India comes there, dumps their rubbish there. And the people that live in the slum basically recycle it to make a living. And so I saw men, children, women recycling TVs to extract the copper from the wires so that they could sell the melted down copper to the world. I saw them doing the same with rubber, turning tyres into rubber pellets to sell to the world. It's the most resourceful place on earth. But it's the most heartbreaking in the sense that these people are living in conditions you could never even imagine. I will never forget the moment I saw a three-year-old kid

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  run up to me whilst playing on this pile of rubbish. And he squatted down in front of me and he pooed and then he peed. And as he got up and began to run away from me, I saw him trip and I looked over to see what he tripped on because it's, I mean, the whole place is a tip. And he tripped on the body of a dead rat. And this kid was completely naked. And I remember just thinking, taking pause for a second and thinking, where the hell are these, this kid's parents? It was just incredible. The place was just incredible. There were, you know, things in there that I couldn't even articulate. And people just sleeping all over the floors.

• 2:14Steven Bartlett?

  I walked past one room which was so hot, I had to step away and take a breath. And I asked what was in there and it was just a hole in the ground and they said it was a bakery. That hole in the ground is a bakery. They said there's a man in there baking right now. I promise you, the heat in that hole in the ground was hotter than anything I've ever experienced. But the people there, and this is really the message, and this is why I wrote slum gratitude in my diary. The people there never asked me for a thing. They didn't ask me for a penny. They didn't beg me. They didn't ask for food or money or anything at all. And more shockingly, more shockingly than anything at all,

• 2:58Steven Bartlett?

  the people were really, really happy. And obviously, that's just an observation, right? I don't know how happy they were. Didn't ask them. But when I looked through my camera album, specifically with the kids, there wasn't one kid in any of my photos that wasn't happy. That wasn't smiling, didn't have a massive smile on their face. And as I walked through, I saw people that were laughing and playing and playing games and they'd got a stick and they were playing cricket. And I walked away from the slums weirdly not feeling sorry for anybody in there because they didn't feel sorry for themselves.

• 3:39Steven Bartlett?

  And then I reflected upon my own society here in the UK and how often we complain about so little and really how complaining and being negative is a very, I guess, subjective thing. We complain because it's relative to the world we live in. And because I've been there and because I saw that little kid soil himself and then run and trip on a dead rat, my perspective of what is complain worthy has shifted forever. I've built a tremendous amount of gratitude for the things that I have, but I've also realised that it's really not about the things I have at all. It's actually all about my perspective on the things I have

• 4:24Steven Bartlett?

  and my perspective on who I am, where I am, and that's what I call slum gratitude. I walked away from the slums with a tremendous amount of gratitude and a new perspective on how to be happy within myself. If I had to guess, if I had to guess, I would guess that the people I saw in those slums are happier than the people I see in this country every single day. The people I see posting on Instagram and Facebook, and I think that says something. The next thing it really taught me was about the privilege we've been given from birth, and how many of us, just by being born in a part of the

• 5:07Steven Bartlett?

  world where we have a roof over our heads, we have a parent or parents, we have internet, we have all of these things, schooling, education, we have tremendous privilege. And every time you make an excuse, you are disrespecting the privilege you were given when you were born. And I really want to embrace that personally in my own life and see what I've been given as a lottery ticket to be and achieve anything I want to, because those people in those slums aren't making excuses because nobody's there to listen. And in my own life, I'm just like everybody else, I make excuses sometimes. And it's very easy upon coming back to the UK to fall into the trap of the old behaviours and the

• 5:48Steven Bartlett?

  lack of gratitude and the thinking, you know, at times that I'm disadvantaged. But I'm truly, truly blessed, and we all are. If you're listening to my podcast right now, I promise you, you have more than the great majority of this world have. Don't disrespect your privilege.