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hello listen before i start i just want to pay a little bit of homage and also a tribute to the guests that i had joined
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me last week on this podcast the feedback that i got from that conversation for those that had the
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resilience to listen for the full two hours and if you haven't i genuine genuinely implore you too
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because the value of that conversation and the diversity of the topics we touched on i genuinely believe are life-changing
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i've reflected continuously throughout this week on that conversation we touched on everything from depression to
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anxiety to burnout and it's really developed to me you know what one of the things they say is that
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the teacher is the person in a classroom that gets the most value from a conversation and in that context
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i as the interviewer who got to sit there and listen and prod and think through my own sort of selfish curiosity
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i think i got the most value out of that i certainly learned a ton about myself the world and some of the problems that i've had throughout my
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life so if you haven't and you do get the time i implore you to go back and check out that episode
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and in fact that episode has it's inspired this episode in many ways one of the
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things that you guys have said to me in my dms on your stories
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in the reviews everywhere my emails you said to me one of the things you enjoy most about this podcast
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is when i'm a little bit more raw and when i i'm a little bit less scripted per se
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not that i'm ever really that scripted but when i'm a little bit more off the cuff when i talk about my own anecdotes my own life and my own stories and so
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this episode this chapter is going to be exactly that it's predominantly centered on my
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anecdotes my diary is full of things that have happened to me this week personal stories from my friends and the
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lessons that they've taught me the lessons they've taught me about myself about my life and about how to build a
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better future so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the divers ceo
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i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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so for the first point in my diary this week i've literally just written means to an end syndrome let me explain what i
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mean every single year i set myself the same goal in february and the goal is simple it's to get in
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good physical shape and every year thankfully i achieved that goal until september
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and by october my motivation to work out to eat well and to be healthy seems to transform from this like
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tangible object that i can hold on to to sand slipping through my hands by january the following year
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all hell has broken loose in my diet i'm basically fat compared to how i usually am my my energy is lower my sleep isn't as
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good i just don't feel my best anymore then february comes around again and march comes around
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and i set myself the same goal to get in shape and the cycle repeats itself this has happened to me i'd say every
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year for at least the last five years in a row and i've not been able to understand from a psychological perspective
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why this is happening and with all things in life until you become conscious of what's causing you to
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behave the way that you are you're merely just a puppet and the puppet master
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remains this unknown force this experience you had at some point uh you know a facet of your psychology one
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that usually doesn't have your best interests at heart one that usually can't be trusted a puppet master that certainly isn't
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working for you he's working for your insecurities or for your for your ego or for trauma that you've experienced
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the same cycle unfortunately started to repeat itself this year i mean i started the year fat january
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time i was pretty fat compared to how i usually am walking can feel the little rolls on my belly shaking as i walk and i'm wearing
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slightly baggier clothes by august i was in the best shape of my entire life right because of an obsessive focus
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on the gym i was going seven days a week i was calorie counting one day i did 5 000 calories
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and by september my motivation started as it always does to just fall away
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i noticed that i wasn't charging my apple watch anymore i noticed that i'd started to miss the gym i started to eat junk food again
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this lasted for about two weeks this year but this time i started to be a bit more
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conscious about it i told myself what i was doing and i started examining my own psychology and saying literally saying
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to myself steve you're doing it that cycle is repeating itself you're eating [ __ ] you're lacking motivation
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fortunately i've just written a whole chapter on the topic of motivation for my upcoming book
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so i because of the research that i had to do to write that chapter i understand the psychological principles and the forces at play that make someone
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motivated or unmotivated and armed with that and my own sort of critical self-analysis which i attained from
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being more conscious about what i was doing the fact that i was eating junk food and i'd i could feel my motivation waning
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i finally understood why this is happening to me maybe maybe this is happening to me
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isn't the best way to describe it why i'm doing this to myself or not doing things to myself that i should be
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doing and touchwood i finally overcome it it's november and i'm still working out for the first
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time literally in my life i'm still eating well and i'm still focused on my health goals and this is the first year ever that i
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can remember in the last five really in the last decade where i've been just as committed to working out now and to being healthy in my entire
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life than i was during the summer so let me tell you how i did this and let me tell you what i understood
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about my own motivation because i know it's going to speak to you in your own way let me rewind every year around february
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march i say the same thing to myself and i set myself the same goal let's just stop there right and take a
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look at what i just said because there's a real clue in that first sentence why does this goal pop up in march
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the answer quite an obvious one because summer is on the horizon and you've got to ask yourself again you've got to criticize yourself there
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and say well why does summer matter well because you know summertime is a time where
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we wear less clothes we're a little bit more vulnerable our bodies are on show more and then you can ask yourself okay so why is that relevant well it speaks to
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the nature of my motivation my motivation wasn't to work out it wasn't to be healthy because i want
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long-term health benefits or to or to feel great about myself as embarrassing as this is to admit my
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motivation was so clearly clearly to look good for
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summer let's just break that down a second look good for summer looking good
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as a goal is measured by just one thing the public's opinion of me ladies opinion of me that's what we call
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an extrinsic external goal success of that goal will be achieved when the public think i look
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good the next part of that sentence right was for summer the next part of my goal was for
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summer which is a measurable time frame so once summer is over
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the job is done so the motivation behind that goal was both extrinsic and held within a time frame so when i
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dropped that social media pic of me topless in mykonos or wherever i went this summer mykonos and costa rica looking good
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during summer and when i got the compliments the likes the followers the praise and when summer passed unsurprisingly
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so did my motivation job done my goal my reason my why was attached to summer
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and also public opinion and both had been fulfilled so as i pulled into october and i tried to find
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the motivation to go to the gym it was gone going to the gym suddenly felt so pointless to me and i had no idea why it
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just did even when i managed to get to the gym my workout was quite honestly pathetic it was short it was like
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25 30 minutes of me predominantly texting and i didn't know why i just thought i wasn't feeling great
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like you know like a boat that had suddenly been unanchored i was now just drifting
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unconsciously without intention or real motivation or without conscious realization into
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the winter months into bad habits into fat steve and the minute i realized this this year i was able to completely
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reset and sort of re-anchor my motivation into things that were intrinsically internally motivating and
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without time frames i set myself the goal of going to the gym just because it makes me feel great
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and because of the energy it gives me and the positive impact it has on my sleep and because you know i love showing
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myself how self-disciplined i am i get a real weird feeling of joy by
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going to the gym on a day when i feel like [ __ ] because for me that's kind of overcoming my mind
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right it's like beating um the the negative or the the weaker parts of my mind that
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are trying to dissuade me from doing something that's in line with my long-term values and honestly also people don't like to
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say this but the positive impact it has on my sex life i didn't really know how to say this without sounding like a [ __ ] dick but
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i have never been there in bed
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and and just generally how good it makes me feel all year round all of these things have
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no finish line they're not extrinsically or externally judged by the public they're the opposite of the extrinsic
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short-term goals i set myself in march they're intrinsic they are never ending they view life not
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just as a bunch of recurring seasons but as one season one season from now until the
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day that i die the season of life and that that is the season that it's incredibly valuable
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and important to be healthy and to look good for as james clear says you
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know we tend to believe that we'll be more successful or happy or prosperous if we put more intensity into our lives
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you know like the intensity that i showed in march every year in the lead-up to summer you know like crash diets and sprinting towards our goals at
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the expense of everything else staying up for weeks and weeks and weeks on end to revise for that exam but the truth is we don't need intensity
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if we have a little bit more consistency had i just stayed in good shape in september october november december and
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january if i just gone to the gym maybe twice or three times a week throughout that period and avoided a bit of you know the junk food
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which i binged on um periodically through that period i wouldn't even need the intensity for the rest of the year i wouldn't need to
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starve myself obsessive in my diet and go to the gym seven days a week sometimes twice a day in fact
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intensity for me is often a sign that we lacked consistency in the past and i think
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and i've said this a couple of times in this podcast before but until you know right and this is not easy i'm gonna
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make this sound like it's an easy thing to do but it requires the same sort of critical self-analysis and
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that i've demonstrated that what you would have seen from what i just said is i interrogated my rationale so i said
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you know why does it why do i always get motivated in february in march and then i said well because you know someone's around the corner and then why does summer
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matter well because other you know extrinsic reasons and if you go down that rabbit hole with humility and with the attention of not defending
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your ego but finding the truth then you might understand what's motivating you but until you know what's
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motivating you you won't know where you're going or why you're going there or who's steering the ship what force in
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your life is steering that ship and i'd predict that 99.9
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of your motivations are misguided or somewhat unconscious you don't really know why you're doing
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what you're doing i think most of the time you have no idea what the driving force behind your behavior is the same applies
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for me but until you do until you have the self-awareness and that humility you need
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to interrogate your thinking and the lack of ego to identify why you're doing what you're doing whether it's superficial driven by
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insecurities from your childhood because you're seeking validation like i was or other you will never actually be
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in control of your life something else is and if your goals are extrinsic
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someone else's okay so the next point in my diary i've just written here journey back to human let me explain
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i find it so ironic but somewhat unsurprising if i'm honest that most of the new age techniques that were aimed
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to sort of improve our mental health and overall well-being are largely based on
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old age principles of how our life used to be tens of thousands of years ago and in the process of writing my book i
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i went back over the last i'd say three decades to see how humans and neanderthals lived
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their lives to understand why this is it's almost like as we developed as humans and as we
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started to rely on agriculture and farming and we stopped living in our tribe it's like we took a wrong turn
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and we filled our lives with over stimulation and with like alcohol and caffeine and poor nutrition and
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loneliness and convenience right and i think based on the alarming growth in mental health conditions like depression
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anxiety addiction and even other conditions like loneliness and i'd say purposefulness right
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i think it's time to turn back and the question i guess i often i'm forced to ponder is
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what is what is a human being what are we what are we meant to be if we take away
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all of this social pressure take away instagram and all of the noise and all of the pressure to conform what are we who are we and how are we
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meant to live and infrequently i'll find myself trawling through google
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as i did as i you know when i went over to costa rica and i spent the time in the jungle i found myself trawling through google in
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history trying to understand humans and it's unsurprising that the natural lifestyle of humans
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back then consists of everything that therapists and nutritionists and mindset coaches and psychologists
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preach about when you're feeling like [ __ ] today let's start with probably the most
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obvious it should be the most obvious and it's definitely a one of the things that's causing depression in a lot of people
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it's this lack of human connection back then 10 000 years ago we lived in our tribes surrounded by family and friends and
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johanna hari who came on this podcast and is actually coming back on this year that's a little exclusive for you wrote a life-shifting
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book called lost connections on this exact point and if there's ever a book i've read in my life and i'm not here to plug your hannah harry just for you know
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because he comes on the podcast and stuff like that the reason he comes on this podcast is because his book i'd say in the last
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three years has had the biggest single impact on how i see the world right
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the fundamental conclusion of that book is we need each other that is non-negotiable i i've read a
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bunch of studies and i've seen a bunch of ted talks on youtube where they've done a study over a century and they followed like a hundred
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or a thousand people and the people that don't establish meaningful relationships in their lives
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die earlier they get more sick and they have a worse quality of life i didn't used to think this stuff right
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right i didn't think this was important before i mistakenly thought that if i got rich really really rich everything else would
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fall into place so when i at 18 years old my whole life was centered on this north star which was getting filthy rich
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at the expense of everything and i sacrificed everything for that and i i gotta be honest because this
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that's what this podcast is for i felt that loneliness i didn't actually like weekends because
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they were so empty for me i didn't have anything to do i'd i'm sure some of you can relate to this you
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know especially you hustle porn stars out there that are running your businesses weekends were just this big [ __ ] void in my life
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there was nothing to do so i just went to the office my entire life at that point when i was 18 19 20 was focused on money work business
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and after developing this habit of like forced self-induced loneliness for about five
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six or seven years it had really really stuck i was a
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self-diagnosed recluse one that spent all of his time in the office on my laptop making more money even
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though i already had more money than i you know could ever possibly need and at some point thankfully i realized
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the never-ending pointless insanity of my situation what was the point in having all of this
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money and if i didn't have any meaningful relationships to enjoy it with life is uh it's a multiplayer game it's
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not a solo experience and i i got to see how miserable some of my quote unquote successful
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friends were by just being behind the scenes in their life one of the i guess the positive things that happened to me when i became
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successful quote unquote was i made a lot of successful friends and those friends in many cases were way ahead of me and
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and what they did for me is they showed me what my future would look like if i carried on how i was
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i got to see behind the scenes behind their lamborghinis behind their mansions and i realized that life had lied to me
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you know of course progress and success and striving towards goals matter like of course right it's
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it's made me fulfilled to some degree but not at the expense of all the other things not the expensive meaningful and
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frequent human connection the other thing that i observe when i when i sort of reflect on on how our ancestors used to live is just
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the sheer simplicity of their lives you know they lived together in in caves and these simple huts they were
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hunters and gatherers they used basic tools which they had made to track
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and hunt birds and wild animals they cooked their prey around a campfire they fished they collected berries and fruits and
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nuts their goals were so significantly more intrinsic and survival focused than ours are today
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they were focused on taking care of themselves and one another a very simple life it's a very simple purpose
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without all of this [ __ ] [ __ ] that we have today without instagram without politics trump fearful news cycles without
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two hour work commutes right to get between four white walls to lock ourselves in a cubicle without stress
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without traffic without obsessive worrying and notifications and emails and
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inbox zero pressures and social pressures and expectations of how your life is meant to be going without all of that [ __ ] a simpler life
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which results in a simpler mind which is so frequently the thing that you know
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psychologists and therapists prescribe to all of us when we have illnesses today to simplify our lives
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but simplifying our lives seems to go against society's mandate that expects you to be
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so much that expects career success from you that expects financial success material possessions that expects
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psychological perfection that expects physical fitness and health social status to push yourself out of
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your comfort zone to climb the ladder to have perfect relationships at the same time to demonstrate the perfect
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behavior all while living living in a healthy perfect clear mentally stable mind this level of
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like obsessive perfection and you know accomplishment seeking and validation hunting
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isn't conducive with simplicity not in the world we live in today absolutely not it's either one or the
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other in many respects so instead of living you know a simple life we kind of burn ourselves to the ground
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and then we escape off on holiday which is usually based on simplicity which is you know laying down
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out in nature and relaxing and doing very little it's like you know there was a quote from a guest that i had on this podcast
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a couple of years ago i think it was when i had a chat with the ceo of leon the restaurant chain and he said
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you should never cut down the rainforest and then donate to the bees and this is exactly what this strikes me as
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you're cutting down your own rainforest in order to donate to your own bees ruining yourself so that you can raise
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the funds you need to fix yourself it's like it feels like insanity and i'm super guilty of this i have to admit
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so one of the things that i've tried to introduce into my life is a little bit more simplicity scenarios and context that simplify my
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life and every day now i go for a walk there and back to the gym and i listen to my music something i didn't do before i just got
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an uber and the other thing that's really helped simplify my life is just playing with my dog pets like kids are amazing for
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simplifying your world because they live in such a simple world like my dog can spend an hour absolutely amused and
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obsessed by like a lucas aid bottle or like pretending he's hunting it's like such a remarkable thing when you
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contrast it to the complexity of the world we live in if you're looking to simplify your world briefly
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try it if you don't have a dog get a dog but try it try going into their world my niece and
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my dog are fascinatingly simple and they're unassuming and they're unpretentious and i want to
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live more in that world sometimes and i think this is why some people are also so incredibly obsessed with nature
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all this simplicity seems to calm the mind you know it sort of re-centers your soul and the next thing you see if you look
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back at our ancestors and how they lived their lives is exactly that they spent literally all of their time in nature that's where they lived they
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lived in nature during that i'm going to get this word wrong right but during the mesolithic
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period i got it right 12 000 years ago they lived nomadically in camps near rivers and
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near other sort of large bodies of water and today like a bunch of dumbass over
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developed monkeys we live in these concrete jungles alone between four white walls the time i spent last month for pretty
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much the whole month living in the costa rican jungle was the most wonderful tranquil experience of my life it was the most
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human experience of my entire life making time in nature has to be a central part of my routine now
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it's a really [ __ ] good decision especially for someone like me that lives in a big
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busy traffic ridden noisy chaotic city and lastly the key thing i see when i look back at
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our ancestors was exercise and nutrition we me you us our generation
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are the most inactive sedentary group of humans of all time according to the data our lifestyles are gradually becoming
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more and more still more sat down at our desks glaring into these illuminated glass
00:21:10
screens and office blocks we don't need to hunt and gather anymore right like our ancestors did which was a huge source of their physical activity
00:21:16
and exercise because we've got delivery and ubereats some guy will bring me
00:21:22
any food that i want to my door in 25 minutes and i'll be honest with you it's not always good food it's usually you know full of sugar and
00:21:28
artificial substances and things like caffeine which move our mood one way or the other
00:21:33
and also back then we would literally carve and scavenge for the tools that we needed to make our food today
00:21:39
amazon prime that [ __ ] will be here tomorrow i've included this sort of terrifying graph in my book that shows
00:21:44
the gradual decline of human activity i've placed it against the graph of obesity and sugar consumption
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and it makes for a pretty alarming read right we're not living like humans anymore we live like lazy gluttonous gorillas he would
00:21:57
increasingly rather go under the knife on a surgeon's table to change our appearance than make a simple lifestyle change not
00:22:03
very human at all is it so no wonder we don't feel so human these days if this is how you're living certainly
00:22:10
how i was living then you should expect to not feel great because you're not living in accordance with your own
00:22:15
natural way of being it's crazy it's crazy that the new age cures for our new age problems all seek to take us
00:22:22
back 10 000 years meditation and digital detoxes are there to still our mind healthy nutrition to cut
00:22:28
out modern junk foods therapy friendships and human connection to read us of the loneliness and to
00:22:33
connect us back to our tribe these feelings of loneliness and anxiety and depression are often according to the science and
00:22:39
my own personal experience nothing more than a calling from our body to get back to our tribes
00:22:45
to be a little bit more human not to find ourselves but to rediscover who we were
00:22:50
who we are as humans and if you're struggling in any way here's some advice give it a go try and
00:22:58
live a little bit more human for me as a sort of mentally busy career-obsessed recluse it fundamentally changed my life
00:23:06
i know that for sure and i genuinely believe that it might be the thing that could have the greatest impact on yours
00:23:13
okay so for the next point in my diary i've literally just written humans have no idea what they want which kind of ties a little bit into my first point
00:23:20
but it's very very different i want to tell you a story one of my very very good friends i won't name him
00:23:25
because that doesn't matter and i keep referencing friends on this podcast i'm slowly losing friends so my
00:23:30
my circle is getting a little bit smaller i'm just joking one of my good friends came to my house last week for a little bit of a catch up
00:23:36
and he sat on my my sofa over there and he asked me um a couple of questions about myself and i
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turned to him and i said listen how have you been and somewhat instinctively as we all do he replied yeah good and you know
00:23:50
when you're my mate i have to be honest i [ __ ] hate that response give that response to someone in like
00:23:56
business or when you're in a networking event or something like that nobody has been yeah good nobody
00:24:03
life fortunately and to be honest unfortunately isn't that simple definitely not in the middle of a global pandemic where our lives are locked down and
00:24:09
stripped back and have been completely shifted nobody's yeah good so i instinctively replied to him which is a habit i've got
00:24:15
into recently especially with my close friends no how have you really been and almost
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instantly literally almost instantly he went yeah yeah i'm pretty burnt out to be honest with you and
00:24:26
that's kind of surprising because you know i'm really lucky and i stopped him there and the reason i stopped him there is because i've just spent the last
00:24:32
month studying the topic of burnout for my book and i wanted to check i wanted to check if he like
00:24:38
pretty much everyone else i've ever spoke to fit into the pattern and the category that almost everybody fits into when
00:24:44
they experience burnout i said to him when you say you're feeling burnt out but you're surprised
00:24:50
because you're lucky what do you mean by lucky and he said well you know because you know i've got all the things ticked off i've got the
00:24:56
money i've got the car i've got the house and then i stopped him again and i said that's why you're burnt out because your own self-confessed
00:25:02
definition of career or life luck and success is extrinsically purely extrinsically motivated
00:25:08
and as i said in last week's podcast on almost every occasion where someone is doing something that they're motivated to do by largely extrinsic or
00:25:16
external reasons whether it's money or status or fame or likes or followers or to obtain like
00:25:21
material objects where the intrinsic internal rewards like joy and personal fulfillment
00:25:26
a sense of purpose or a sense of belonging are limited you will inevitably lose your motivation
00:25:32
you'll struggle to get out of bed and you'll self-diagnose yourself as everybody seems to do as being burnt out and let's just take a
00:25:39
look at the world we're living in right now because it adds a really important layer of context to all of that this pandemic has robbed all of us our
00:25:46
lives and our work of things that made work and our lives intrinsically enjoyable you know that feeling of striving
00:25:52
towards a shared goal the social value of being part of a team in an office that sense of belonging it gives you
00:25:58
the sense of forward motion and progress and purpose and accomplishment and to be honest in our personal lives
00:26:04
socializing and days out and family and friends and travel and this robber the pandemic covert 19
00:26:09
has left most of us with just the work wake up zoom to-do list sleep wake up to-do list
00:26:16
sleep it's left us with just the extrinsic stuff and to be completely honest
00:26:21
the only thing that makes doing a lot of the extrinsic stuff like work worthwhile is the promise of all the intrinsic
00:26:27
stuff socializing community purpose that it promises you that it gives us
00:26:32
but right now it's not giving us that we're largely alone not enjoying ourselves much we don't
00:26:39
know what the mission is we don't know when we're going to be out of this situation so our work feels heavily extrinsic therefore pointless
00:26:47
we're doing it to pay the bills we don't have our colleagues around us anymore that sense of purpose and mission is gone therefore we lack motivation
00:26:53
therefore we feel burnt out the more i've tried to understand the complexity of humans the more i've realized how simple
00:26:59
predictable and alike we all are and our motivations don't tend to be that dissimilar with
00:27:04
such fragile emotional unconscious beings that think we're strong resilient unique
00:27:10
and in control we're not we're all going through this [ __ ] together making the same mistakes predictably
00:27:16
because we all have a very very similar innate psychological wiring and the same psychological factors are
00:27:22
running the show our working lives have been completely knocked out of balance and the work is just that now it's work
00:27:29
social chain my company the company i founded and recently resigned from you know it was renowned for its culture
00:27:35
for its sense of community for the sense of purpose and that intrinsic pleasure it gives the people that work there for
00:27:41
the joy of you know the dogs in the office we had about 10 of them to be honest we had a happiness team that would make sure every day when
00:27:47
you're in the office you're feeling good therapists that were there for you in the office every single day we had this sense of mission and purpose
00:27:53
that we were building this business and forward motion and uh it was going great because the business was growing it still is but it
00:27:59
was growing and that gives you purpose as well but when a pandemic and a lockdown strikes all of that stuff
00:28:05
is taken away all that intrinsic stuff the enjoyment is taken away and something that was fundamentally
00:28:11
designed from the ground up to give you as much joy as a job could possibly give you becomes a bunch of people alone in their boxer
00:28:17
shorts on their own little islands doing their to-do list every day chatting once in a while on zoom or over
00:28:23
whatsapp or in shared company groups work becomes work nothing more that combined with the lack
00:28:29
of structure that everyone has in their day now results in long ass working hours and that has a huge impact on your sleep and
00:28:36
and all of these things and all the other problems sends you straight into a place of purposelessness low motivation
00:28:43
and when all that happens we we say it's burnout and i think everybody's experiencing a bit of burnout right now
00:28:49
you know every year at christmas uh come it's widely known according to the data
00:28:54
companies experience the highest amount of staff turnover because you know as those sort of new year's resolutions and all the introspection
00:29:01
occurs people decide they want to go work somewhere else they want a new challenge they want something else for their lives and we always see the same thing as
00:29:06
social chain and this year we saw that behavior happen a few months into the pandemic
00:29:12
quite a few people quit more than we've ever had in the middle of the year ever before and part of me knows that this is
00:29:18
because social change pretty much every company lost some of its intrinsic value that community and purpose and fun
00:29:25
and when it loses it and when all you have is the extrinsic like paying the bills a lot of people go looking for pay rises and if you've worked at social
00:29:30
channel i'm telling you you can get a pay rise it's got a good brand people want people that have worked at social chain and when people to
00:29:36
start to sort of enjoy their work less they arrive often at the conclusion that social change is maybe part of the issue maybe social
00:29:42
change is the reason i'm not enjoying my work as much so they go in search of that purpose somewhere else and people have been
00:29:48
leaving other companies and in their droves to be honest and wanting to come to social chain and people have left social chain wanting to go
00:29:54
elsewhere and this is something that's happened not in social chain alone across every business across the whole country so if you're feeling like [ __ ]
00:30:01
in your job if you're feeling a bit burnt out if you're lacking motivation you're feeling i know stagnant this is probably a large part of the
00:30:07
reason but going back to the conversation with my friend which is where this this started before i went off topic there's another important layer to
00:30:13
address here my friend like me had a relatively psychologically
00:30:18
rough start to life with family issues and issues with his peers it robbed something from his self-worth
00:30:24
in the same way it did for me it made him insecure in the same way it did for me and listen bro i know you're
00:30:30
listening to this because this guy he's one of my very good friends he never misses an episode he always gives me great feedback i know you're
00:30:35
listening to this right it takes one to no one everything i'm saying about you could be
00:30:40
said about me too i too as everyone knows grew up with insecurities that made me try and ball out on social media they
00:30:47
made me buy all the champagne and every night club i went to made me pull up in sports cars right in his case it's made him particularly
00:30:54
intent on showing the world that he is worthy and that he is successful the clue of course is in the fact that when i asked him to
00:31:00
define what luck or success meant to him he said a bunch of material things something some insecurity taught him as
00:31:06
it taught me that his success would be judged by the outside world's opinion of him and as i said in a previous episode of
00:31:12
this podcast the thing that invalidates you as a kid whether it's sort of lack of self-worth or a lack of affection or
00:31:18
a lack of a sense of belonging will be the thing you seek validation from when you're an adult and you know failure when both he and i were
00:31:26
young was not being worthy not feeling as worthy as our peers me for my own reasons and
00:31:31
him for a bunch of different reasons and because that was our definition of failure that
00:31:36
was the thing that failed us that's what you know that was the the worst part of our lives then our definition of success now
00:31:43
is the opposite think about it if failure then was not feeling externally valid or valuable or worthy
00:31:48
success now is feeling externally valid worthy and valuable so we we both got big cars nice houses
00:31:56
lots of champagne and we proceeded to tell and show the world all of it i guess subconsciously in the
00:32:02
hope that it would validate us and we designed our lives to focus on achieving extrinsic externally motivated goals like money success
00:32:08
status and the science is clear on this and my own personal experience it couldn't be it could be clearer on this particular
00:32:14
topic according to the science you will experience less joy more despair increase your chances of depression anxiety
00:32:20
and sign yourself up for a hamster wheel existence where nothing is ever enough of anti-climax and of
00:32:26
lack of purpose and if you design your life where your north star is all of this sort of extrinsic meaningless [ __ ]
00:32:33
you're designing out all of the things that actually internally matter like meaningful relationships the two are kind of
00:32:38
mutually exclusive the things that you enjoy for you for your own reasons for your own internal
00:32:44
sake meaningful hobbies and passions and subsequently the chance of being fulfilled happy and free from all the mental
00:32:50
health issues that will inevitably show up if you live in such an externally driven way you know at 18 years old
00:32:57
as a lot of you will know i wrote in my diary that my goal was to buy a range rover um
00:33:04
i wrote there in my diary that a range rover would be my first car that was my goal and that was a goal
00:33:09
that was born out of insecure naivety i guess
00:33:15
definitely a lot of insecurity and it was a goal written because i wanted to impress people and i wanted girls to sleep with me
00:33:22
right a goal born out of the fact that i wanted to be validated and fulfilled and i thought somewhere in me that a
00:33:28
range rover would make me feel secure in myself i got the range rover it was my first
00:33:33
car mission accomplished it impressed people but when you think about it it didn't make
00:33:40
me feel secure in myself all it did was highlighted
00:33:45
but i wasn't it was the consequence of insecurity so paradoxically the day i achieved my
00:33:52
goal wasn't the day that i bought the range rover it was the day three years later when i
00:33:57
sold it when i no longer felt that i needed it that was the point where i was securing
00:34:02
myself and that was the goal i was trying to achieve and you know going back to my friend for
00:34:09
a second you know he's just to give you a context of how he's working he runs his own business but he works alone
00:34:15
very similar to how a freelance would work doesn't have like a team of people around him just kind of working alone at home at the moment
00:34:21
and you know the world has done just a phenomenal job of glamorizing the idea of being your own boss and being a
00:34:26
freelancer but nobody seems to talk enough about how miserable this often is and let's just factor all of the things that
00:34:32
i've touched on on in this podcast up till this point about you know extrinsic goals and the things that make
00:34:37
life meaningful you know the joy of working in a team of people with a shared mission on work that you intrinsically enjoy
00:34:43
doing with as much intrinsic motivation as possible all of this stuff is often the absolute
00:34:48
antithesis of freelance work where you often work alone without a team on someone else's project for
00:34:53
someone else's purpose just for the extrinsic reason of money or paying the bills right
00:34:59
on top of that you have all of the other [ __ ] being on japan no work life balance no work life separation no clock
00:35:04
off time i'm gonna call this freelancer depression we're gonna try and make this a thing freelance and depression
00:35:10
it's something that people who evangelize about being your own boss and going alone and all of the freelance lifestyle never
00:35:15
seemed to mention that much and to be fair this pandemic has made us all freelancers to some degree it's
00:35:20
robbed us all of that intrinsic rewarding stuff i i guess i just want to i just want to tell you one more thing
00:35:26
now that i've left social chain and i'm technically unemployed i was i sat on the sofa it was actually
00:35:32
yesterday with my it's actually yesterday night before i recorded this podcast with my assistant and she turned to me and she asked me a question she said do you miss all the
00:35:39
travelling and the chaos of your old life and i said to her like what do you mean what do you mean and she said well you
00:35:44
know you used to be up at 3am every day running all over the world pitching and speaking on stage and for a second i paused and reflected
00:35:53
and the thought of doing any of that stuff now [ __ ] repulsed me
00:35:58
i couldn't think of anything worse but i mean this is a big but i absolutely
00:36:05
used to love it i absolutely used to love it made me so fulfilled but now you couldn't pay me to do that and the
00:36:12
reason for this the reason for this sort of monumental shift in my mind is because when i was at
00:36:17
social chain i was working with people i loved attached to a shared meaningful purpose and a mission and we were building
00:36:22
something amazing together when you remove that and ask me if i want to run around the world catching five flights a week and living in hotels
00:36:28
50 weeks a year it seems totally bizarre and repulsive and pointless it seems like such a sacrifice for nothing i would
00:36:35
hate to do that and it brings me back to the moment in my life where you know i think i've talked about this on the
00:36:41
podcast before where i was technically freelance for the first time it was after i was 21 years old i just exited my first startup wall park
00:36:48
and i hadn't started social chain yet i was being paid i've got to be honest with you about 70 grand a month by companies all over the world
00:36:54
to help them as a consultant run their businesses to advise their marketing and i was in this i was in um i turned
00:37:00
to my mate dom in our penthouse apartment in manchester on the 20 we own three floors up there i'm not bragging i'm just providing a
00:37:06
bit of context which i think is important and i told him exact quote if i go downstairs right now and i send this one
00:37:12
email i'll make 20k straight away and i just can't find the [ __ ]
00:37:18
motivation to do it and i don't know why it's 20k that's what i said to him verbatim exactly and the reason
00:37:26
was because at that point even at the point where i was making 5k a month consistently something as extrinsic as a little bit
00:37:34
more money was not motivation enough it would have no intrinsic material
00:37:39
impact on my life so the cost of walking down some stairs and writing an email felt greater than the reward
00:37:46
but when i you know when i think about the moment i went from being a freelancer to when social change started
00:37:52
i was working with people i loved on a shared meaningful mission to build something [ __ ] a flight of stairs i was flying to the ukraine at
00:37:58
2am on the off chance that someone might work with us and i did that like a dog for
00:38:04
seven or eight years i didn't have a motivation problem when i was a freelancer it wasn't a motivation problem right as
00:38:11
people often sort of self-diagnose it wasn't a lack of motivation that stopped me walking down the stairs in my
00:38:16
penthouse and sending that one email that would make 20 grand i had a purpose problem and the same applies to the conversation i had with
00:38:22
my pa you know when i think about sprinting around the world pitching speaking living in hotels and sacrificing my life now
00:38:28
it feels so [ __ ] pointless because i've left social chain so i'm i guess i'm detached from the
00:38:33
purpose and the mission that i had then and i i finally understand for the first time in my life
00:38:39
why people who looked at my life back then and often said to me you know how did you do it you know why did you
00:38:44
sacrifice everything are you crazy when do you sleep all of these questions um are you okay i used to get asked all the
00:38:51
time um how did you find the motivation all the time to to run the business and all of these things why you know sleeping in the
00:38:57
office in the weekends why did you work so hard it all makes sense now because when i look back
00:39:02
without the attachment to that mission that i had then to me it it looks bizarre i'm asking old stephen
00:39:08
why the [ __ ] did you do all of that because right now i can't feel that purpose so all i can feel is the sacrifice
00:39:15
but i guess that's that's how you behave i guess that's how you behave when you have a deep sense of purpose in the work you're doing so i guess my conclusion is
00:39:21
this the answer to loving your work and being as being the best at it which i think
00:39:26
that i eventually became within my company is working with people you love striving towards a shared worthwhile goal
00:39:33
for your own intrinsically rewarding reasons and if you can do that i think you'll also do a pretty good job
00:39:39
of avoiding burnout you'll do you'll do the work of your life for sure like i did at social chain
00:39:44
and you'll remain fulfilled the whole time that little insight helped me so i
00:39:49
really hope it helps you and so the next point in my diary is one that i haven't fully developed yet my
00:39:54
thinking on so i'm kind of hoping i can do this out loud with you together what i've written is one of the hardest things in life is to avoid a good
00:40:01
opportunity so that you have time to devote to great opportunities and since i've left social chain and i'm now
00:40:07
technically unemployed but i have a great reputation i have a great track record um i gotta be honest my inbox every day
00:40:14
is full of just amazing opportunities but the amount of time that i have every day has remained the same
00:40:19
i have the same 24 hours and i'm being bombarded with offers and jobs and opportunities to do
00:40:25
this and that and the other and i know that if i choose to accept any of those opportunities i'm doing it at the expense of something
00:40:32
else which i've talked a lot about in this podcast and so one of the real challenges and
00:40:37
one of the real sort of talents that i'm trying to foster in myself is being so clearly attached to my long-term values and goals and where
00:40:44
i want to go and who i want to be that i'm able to look at a really good opportunity
00:40:49
whether it's financial or you know other or status or whatever it might be or for my personal brand or whatever it might be
00:40:55
and say no now and and to do that you have to have real faith
00:41:00
in yourself but you also have a have to have a real attachment to who you want to become and your long-term
00:41:05
goals and it's something that i'm genuinely struggling with because never in my life as i said have i had more
00:41:10
people in my inbox asking me to become directors and ceos of their companies and offering me shares to come and help them
00:41:15
and so i just wanted to share a few things which i which i have written in my diary about how i make the decision
00:41:21
and whether to take an opportunity or to not it's fairly fairly simple the first one as i said
00:41:27
is by being super clear on the person that i want to become in the future and the first check i can do is is doing
00:41:33
this opportunity going to move me closer or further away by costing me time to becoming that person
00:41:38
and the next one which i consciously ask myself all the time now is if i become that person that i want
00:41:44
to become in the future by remaining loyal to that sort of long-term image of who i want to become and my values
00:41:50
will this opportunity come back around and for about 90 of the opportunities about 95 percent
00:41:55
it will definitely come back around in even greater abundance and value if i become the person i want to become
00:42:01
and the last thing i do is i attribute a financial value to an hour of my time and i've read a lot about this naval's
00:42:08
talked about this at length as well and philosophers and you know people that i respect in the business world have told me about this
00:42:13
as well what you want to do is think of a really big number for me it's about ten thousand pounds
00:42:18
i say to myself that one hour of my time is worth ten thousand pounds and my rationale for that is based on
00:42:25
what i was able to create with my time historically so you think about social change in the business and what it became and how much it's worth
00:42:30
when i go through and think about how much each year added to that value i can quite
00:42:35
comfortably say you know a year of my time is worth say 10 million or 20 million quid and when you
00:42:40
think from that framework and when you really attribute huge amounts of value to your time you're able to cut things
00:42:46
out quickly that don't meet that value it's something that i genuinely recommend everyone does i'm not saying attribute 10k an hour to
00:42:52
your time but even if it's a thousand dollars start there say my time one hour of my time is worth a thousand
00:42:57
dollars and if you think through that lens i swear to god the opportunities that
00:43:02
will come to you the ones that you'll accept will be of significantly more value and ultimately that means you'll spend
00:43:08
more of your time more of your hours on things of higher value and then that's what your life will become high value
00:43:15
give it a try the next point in my diary i understand is quite a controversial one um i've just written marriage monogamy
00:43:22
and me listen and i've spent a lot of time in this podcast talking about relationships and my views on marriage and the
00:43:27
relationship struggles that i've had and before i say what i'm going to say i want to appreciate the fact that this is
00:43:33
a completely nuanced subjective topic but here's my thinking i'm 28 years old
00:43:38
and i don't know i don't believe that marriage is the right answer a couple of reasons let's just start
00:43:44
with some fundamental principles pretty much every every way that i think is based on first principles i don't think for a star
00:43:50
that the law and that religion have a great track record on pretty much anything historically and i think that
00:43:56
marriage is a construct that's been passed down from one generation to another throughout our society without real
00:44:02
interrogation because we've all done that and i can literally predict um the dms that i'm gonna get which
00:44:09
which tell me that i'm naive and that i don't understand which like listen probably true right but that's the whole
00:44:16
point of like me scrolling in my diary i like this to be a two-way thing where you can just message me and say steve you're an idiot
00:44:21
and you do you guys do you i get the messages you don't understand the world fine that's probably true i know it's true i don't understand
00:44:27
everything and that's part of the reason i'm doing this but getting back to the point um for me the concept of marriage
00:44:33
when you look at the fundamentals of signing and assigning this commitment and going to a church and the
00:44:39
legal and religious ramifications of some marriages it just feels really insecure it's like
00:44:44
if i love someone why do i need a contract why do i need to go to church why do i need to get the law involved if i
00:44:50
love someone what has any of that got to do with courts and contracts if i love someone
00:44:56
and if i'm secure enough to believe that they love me too that they won't they won't leave me
00:45:02
and sometimes i think it's a bit like trapping a cat in a corner because when you're in a marriage and when you're in a situation which feels kind
00:45:09
of imprisoned or like you can't leave um i think issues might become somewhat magnified
00:45:16
right you know the worry and the anxiety of not being able to leave because of that rain or that contract or because of
00:45:21
the way you set up your life i actually think it might make issues bigger than they are and it's something that i've really
00:45:27
pondered you know i have a track record in my life of really like interrogating stuff i interrogated
00:45:32
school to the point that i stopped going in university to the point that i went to one lecture and decided that it was a completely broken concept and i'm
00:45:38
starting to do the same with marriage and people will hear different things when i say this right largely based on
00:45:44
their own opinions in life and their own experiences and this comes from my own experience probably largely largely from the experience of watching
00:45:51
a very dysfunctional toxic marriage that my parents had and i'm not saying marriages can't be brilliant some of my friends have the
00:45:57
best marriages some of their parents have the most amazing marriages too i'm just saying as a one-size-fits-all
00:46:04
concept i think it needs a little bit of questioning um i i'm all down for the commitment i
00:46:11
think i'm still developing my ideas there on monogamy but the commitment part isn't the thing i have issue with it's the like marriage part the law the
00:46:18
contract and all that nonsense i want to talk about monogamy too because oh this is going to be controversial but
00:46:24
um i'm also not completely convinced that we're meant to be monogamous
00:46:29
i'm not completely convinced that we're meant to have one partner like i'm down for it because i understand the way that the world is
00:46:35
wired at the moment um but this might be the most controversial thing i've ever saw in
00:46:41
this podcast but i think if we all i think of a huge
00:46:46
amount of us are honest with ourselves and this is based on the behavior we exhibit we would probably sleep with someone
00:46:52
else that was smoking heart we don't because we value the relationship and we don't we know that the relationship is worth
00:46:59
more than a one-night stand with someone else and we're mature enough to
00:47:05
understand the consequences of our actions but i think if you were to anonymously poll people
00:47:10
and say listen would you sleep with someone else that was hot if it had no material impact on your marriage
00:47:16
i think if we're being honest with ourselves a lot of us would but i think 99.9 of us wouldn't want our partner sleeping
00:47:21
with someone else and this all of this speaks to the fact that i'm not sure as humans
00:47:27
as men as women we are innately meant to be monogamous i think that
00:47:32
society has played a huge role in that i also think that over the the coming
00:47:37
decades i think you'll see real shifts in this probably not with me because i'm not going to get to the point where i i'm
00:47:43
down with someone i love sleeping with someone else if i'm completely honest but i think it's broken
00:47:48
i think marriage is broken i think like university it's broken you know if if i told you there was tvs for sale at
00:47:53
a shop on a corner but 50 of the tvs failed you wouldn't go and buy a tv and it's the same for marriage
00:47:59
50 of marriages fail and if you think about the concept of marriage it's till death do us part but 50 of the
00:48:05
time it's not till death does this part it's till that girl slides in your dms and you meet her and
00:48:10
you bang her and then you you know your marriage falls depart or that guy slides in your dms and you go for a coffee with him and your boyfriend
00:48:15
finds out and your husband finds out he dumps you the concept seems broken and i but i don't know the answer i don't know
00:48:21
what the alternative is i know that it's going to have to be commitment-centric but i feel that maybe when it comes to
00:48:28
my life i'm not going to seek marriage i might try and create some kind of new age urane arrangement with my partner where we're
00:48:35
committed to each other where we have the party the celebration which i think is [ __ ] awesome by the way but we don't sign all the contracts and
00:48:41
we remain as two separate you know independent humans that have come together in the middle through love
00:48:47
without religion or without the law it's just an idea some of you will
00:48:53
disagree let me know what you think in the comments section below or let me know what you think in my inbox or my
00:48:58
my twitter because this is a super controversial topic and it's one that we're going to be talking about i think next week with a very um awesome
00:49:05
person who is also developing his opinion on this i don't want to give the the
00:49:10
don't let the cat out the bag on this one but trust me next week is going to be one hell of a conversation the last point in my diary this week is
00:49:16
kind of linked to a lot of the stuff that i've said throughout this conversation this chat today about
00:49:21
extrinsically living your life through society's image of how you should be living i've just written that fitting in is a
00:49:27
curse and the more you can be you the more happy you will be the more you fit into society
00:49:33
the less free you actually are i think about my time in school and you know and we've all had that
00:49:39
experience in school where we want to wear the clothes everyone's wearing we got our hair cut the same way we listen to the music that is cool to
00:49:45
listen to and how like trapped that way of living is in fact what i've come to learn as i've gotten
00:49:51
older and as i've gone through life and i've become my own person and i've taken some of these shackles off is the closer i've gotten to being steve
00:49:58
who steve actually is the weirdo that i naturally am and that you naturally are the
00:50:04
expressing myself in a way that is true to myself in the words that i want to without worrying about who's going to cancel me or judge me
00:50:09
or my friends or friends might say you know fake friends whatever the more happy i've become the more successful i've become it's made
00:50:16
this podcast interesting right because i am myself there's this isn't acting this is what i think and how i feel every
00:50:21
week and i don't think about the impact of it the closer i've got into not fitting in
00:50:26
to being who i am the more happy i've become and i think it's just something to really reflect on because
00:50:32
there's so much of our lives that are sort of imprisoned by this idea of conformity and fitting in and being one
00:50:38
of the girls or being one of the lads or you know wearing those clothes or those shoes or being you know
00:50:43
being socially accepted and almost on every occasion i can't think of one reason or one instance where that is an
00:50:50
intrinsic intrinsically motivated thing to do and so the science says as we've talked
00:50:55
about in this podcast that will lead you to the despair the lack of joy the depression anxiety and and in many cases to mid-life crises
00:51:02
when you realize that you've been living your life on someone else's terms for someone else's reasons i'm on a mission whether it's through
00:51:07
this podcast which is my diary my thoughts or whether it's through everything else that i produce do or the work that i
00:51:14
pursue whether it's how i dress whether it's through the diary of a ceo live show that i'm doing to really [ __ ] be me to think for
00:51:21
myself and thinking for yourself isn't easy we think it is and this goes back to the point of us thinking we're in control
00:51:28
and getting to the bottom of what your motivations really are i'm really really trying my my very very
00:51:34
best at all times to just be steve and if there's anything that's had
00:51:40
a bigger impact on my success my happiness it's exactly that
00:51:45
isn't it weird when we think about our goals for the future we often say that we want to be x we
00:51:53
want to be like x person we want to be like x thing when really we shouldn't aspire to be more like our
00:52:00
idols we should be aspiring to be even more ourselves the unfiltered uncaring
00:52:09
unassuming intrinsically motivated version of ourselves maybe that's the secret maybe this whole
00:52:15
podcast is has led to that conclusion maybe this whole series is about that maybe that's what life is about maybe
00:52:21
that's the meaning of life maybe the meaning of life is exactly that you start
00:52:27
in the womb you pop out life tells you you are something it tells you to conform in the classroom on the
00:52:32
playground and maybe we're not just on the journey to being more human
00:52:38
but we're on the journey to being ourselves maybe that's what it's all about
00:52:43
being more human and being more like yourself
00:52:52
thank you so much for listening to this episode of the diary of a ceo listen if you're on the podcast store or
00:52:57
you're in spotify or you're listening to it in some kind of app do me a huge huge favor leave a review
00:53:03
and hit the subscribe button if you're watching this on youtube right now i need another favor i need you to
00:53:08
hit the like button and if you'd be so generous to leave a comment one person that does this will be
00:53:14
joining me in march at the diary of a ceo live show in manchester and you'll be coming
00:53:19
backstage and meeting me and the other members of our team thank you so much for listening i'll see you again next monday
00:53:31
[Music] you
