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i tested positive for the coronavirus and that is why you didn't hear from me last week
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i said i was going to do this podcast every single monday we got off to a bit of a rocky start because during last week's podcast i
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actually had the virus and i didn't know and it turns out my pa had the virus my cameraman who's over
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there also had the virus my whole team around me tested positive for the virus at the same time and none of us knew
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and in terms of the experience that i had with the virus i had one or two tricky days there was
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one day in particular last week where i had mild flu symptoms and then i started to get this really
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bizarre muscular pain in my back and i remember it being three or four a.m in the morning and i'm lying in bed
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thinking how do i stop this pain in my back and i ordered um ibuprofen and i think like painkillers on
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delivery which were delivered to my door at 4am and that night i remember pulling my pillows off my bed and sleeping on the
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floor of my bedroom to try and straighten out my back weird symptoms to get i know um but that's the virus
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the symptoms are so unpredictable and crazy my assistant lost her taste and smell which is quite a popular one
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jack had a bunch of cold symptoms and things like that as well but thankfully we all recovered and that
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isn't always the case and a lot of people especially people that are a little bit more vulnerable and have pre-existing conditions aren't always
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that lucky but it made me reflect it made me reflect on the craziness
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of the world right now isn't it nuts isn't it absolutely bonkers what's happened over these last seven or eight
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months all of the lockdowns all of the restrictions the travel restrictions the the redundancies the the battles the
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political battles it's absolutely crazy it's been the most crazy seven months of my life without
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exception and hard times as much as they suck in the moment they
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teach us important lessons and there's some lessons which i've learned more starkly than others which i
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wanted to talk about today the things that i've been writing about here in my diary and i'm going to start
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there this week i'm going to share one of the key lessons that i've learnt with you so without further ado i'm stephen
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butler and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody is listening but if you are then please keep this to
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yourself
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okay so the first thing in my diary this week is just a lesson that i've learned because of this pandemic and because of all the
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restrictions and the lockdowns i've just written in my diary learn how to contrast in the right
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direction let me explain what i mean you know i had this moment this week where i started really thinking about
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all of the things that i miss and to be honest i keep slipping back into these thoughts you know in the uk and in the us at the
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moment what we're seeing is the government start to talk about further restrictions and returning to the lockdowns that we had
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in march and every time i hear these stories and i go on twitter and i see the headlines i start to reminisce
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over my old life you know and i miss going to the theater i miss how fun my
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weekends with my friends used to be i miss you know as a big manchester united fan i miss going to old trafford and watching my team play
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i miss new york city which is where i lived before all of this craziness happened and
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before they shut the borders and stopped me getting back in i miss speaking on stage i used to
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travel around the world speaking to thousands of people in every corner of the globe i miss being in the office
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with hundreds of our team members building the business together i miss my old life but i'm sure i'm sure that
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many of you listening to this have reminisced over your old life and the things that you miss in the last few weeks and months pretty
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you know unavoidably and typically when we do this in a more subconscious way
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without really thinking about it we arrive at a place of sadness a place of
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self-pity a place of grief at least i know i did you know and i almost honestly
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this is kind of embarrassing to admit you'll understand why i think this is embarrassing now that i say it i almost started feeling sorry for
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myself and this for the love of god is why you have to
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interrogate your own thinking and let me just interrogate exactly what
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i've just said to you about all of the things i miss and let me try and reframe all of those things through another perspective
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when this global pandemic happened i was a 27 year old guy who was able to go to the theater go to
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old trafford and watch my favorite team play whenever i wanted to i lived in a beautiful apartment in new york city
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eating at the best restaurants in the world traveling around the world in business class getting paid to speak to thousands of people on stage whilst running a
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global business that was full of my friends the thing that took me from that is a
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global pandemic which has killed over a million people and it's devastated people's livelihoods it
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stripped them of their generational family businesses and it's plunged them into desperation
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right now many people can't even pay the bills feed their kids many people can't even
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bear the thought of their future meanwhile all of my family are healthy i have work
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i have freedom i can feed myself right now there are more people than ever praying for the family praying for
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the health praying for the opportunities and praying for the life that i have right now and that you have
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right now and then and when you start to think about it like that
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it changes things and if you think about it like that you'll probably arrive at the conclusion that 2020
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shouldn't make you feel sorry for yourself it should make you feel so unbelievably grateful
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and this is the power of contrast when you contrast your life in the wrong direction you can make yourself
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miserable like i did you know i was on the verge of wallowing in self-pity because i couldn't go to
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the theater anymore because i couldn't go to old trafford and watch my because i didn't get on business class
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flights and get to fly to every corner of the world even [ __ ] privileged [ __ ] like me can make the mistake
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right so i can't imagine how easy it is to make this mistake for everybody else when you contrast your life
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up as i was doing to the life you had back in march to someone more fortunate than you to
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someone that's prettier than you on instagram or to someone that looks more successful than you from the outside you'll quickly
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arrive at a place of self-pity and ungratefulness which is the quickest way to unhappiness but if you contrast your life down to
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the billions and billions of people that would do anything to be in your shoes that would do anything to have the health of their sick parents back
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to have a warm home to have a fridge full of food to have a secure job then you'll arrive at gratitude and
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honestly gratitude in my life has been one of the best ways i've ever known to be happy the world we see
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and how we see it is a direct result of contrast and the contrast games that you play every day if you
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stroll through the corridor of a hospital and you peer into the the wards and you peer in and look at the different patients
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what you'll see is people sick and suffering and in some cases unfortunately dying and suddenly because of that contrast
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you'll feel so grateful for your good health and we i do this all the time you know i had this problem a couple years ago with one of my ears where i
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woke up one day and there was this faint ringing sound in my right ear and at first i thought it was nothing i thought
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it would pass but after two days my ear was still ringing i go on google i google it
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comes up as something called tinnitus or tinnitus right and it and i'm reading through these forums of people saying
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that they've had it for their entire lives it came out of nowhere and it ruined their lives
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it stopped them from sleeping it made them depressed it stopped them from focusing it fundamentally changed their lives and
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after 10 days of my ear just ringing non-stop faintly i came to terms with the fact
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that i was gonna have this for the rest of my life and i couldn't stop thinking about it because when your ears always ringing
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it's hard to ignore right and i couldn't sleep properly and i started to worry
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and in that moment after two weeks of one of my ears ringing i can't tell you how much i
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longed and wished for my normal hearing back for just normal ears for that ringing to
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cease and it made me feel so ungrateful that it took an element where my ear
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would just ring constantly for me to suddenly feel grateful for my eyesight my ears the fact that i can
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walk that i have ten fingers that i can think and that's the way that contrasts work you know the same applies for the
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technology in our lives those old nokia brick phones were the best thing ever in a world
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that didn't have the iphone in it and your life right now in the midst of the pandemic in what
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month are we in october is such an amazing privileged life
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in a world where you can't remember your old one the one you had back in march this year taught me that the grass will
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always look greener on the other side until you start watering the side that you're on right now and that's really all you can
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do contrasting up is just such a deadly sin that we all need to avoid especially in moments like this
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we all have to be aware conscious and mindful of how we're contrasting because the world is a crazy place and there's
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no guarantee that it's not going to get crazier right and if you continue to contrast up you'll contrast
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yourself into depression and despair and misery and self-pity like i nearly did like i nearly did when
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i started reflecting on my old life and telling myself all of all of the things that i missed not the things that i have
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having control of your contrast can fundamentally change the way you see the world and if it can change the way you
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see the world it can change how you feel and if it can change how you feel then
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it can change your life let's move on
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i have a secret to tell you and this is the second point in my diary this week it's a secret that i only found out
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and started to deeply understand recently when i say recently i mean the last 24 months it's a secret that i
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really started to understand honestly being completely honest with you when i got rich and when i got
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rich friends and those rich friends pulled back a certain curtain and allowed me to see
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behind it i'd always heard about this i'd always heard that there's another curtain i heard joe rogan did a
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a podcast with um kevin hart and on the podcast kevin hart talks about meeting jeff bezos and
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realizing that there's this other level there's this other curtain which some people have access to
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and the more wealthy that i got and the more you know wealthy people that started to to surround me i started to understand
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what kevin hart meant and i started to understand what that secret is here is the secret
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access to information and information itself that is the real
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privilege in this world that's the thing if your rich parent gives you money
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that's like them giving you a fish right but if they pull you into the family business and show you how it works
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they're giving you a fishing rod money is efficient life and information is a fishing rod and only one of those things
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will feed you for a lifetime and when you get to the level that i'm at now and you have access to a new level of information you're
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associating with a different level of person you realize how much you didn't know before and you didn't know
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because you don't know what you don't know it they are unknown unknowns and so back then i was kind of naive i
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just thought i knew everything and where i'm at now i started to wonder
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why no one told me this stuff the stuff i know now about wealth and finance and about how these systems work
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and you start to realize why the rich get richer and why the poor stay poor information and access to
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information obviously there's a ton of systemic issues which are controlling things but for me
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information and access to information is the single biggest one when i made my first million i started
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studying wealth right and i started studying investing in finance and i started to get really obsessed with how
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i could turn the money i had into a lot more money i started speaking to more millionaires
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and billionaires i started spending more time with billionaires and i got to see what i refer to to my close friends as
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money games the games that they play and how they double triple and quadruple their money just by having certain information and
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this is information that most of us don't have we aren't given we aren't let in we aren't allowed to see behind the curtain
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and these are games that i never knew when i was broke games they didn't teach you or me in school games that really rich
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people have no incentive to teach you because they're too busy playing them the people that sell money and those finance courses on
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instagram they aren't rich right they're selling new courses on instagram if they knew a better way to make money they wouldn't be
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spending their time selling you courses on instagram but there's another level there's another level of information
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which is what i think kevin hart was referring to when he spoke about being able to peer in behind the curtain and you know i'm gonna really
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disappoint you here after what was probably one of the biggest build ups that i've ever done on this podcast because i don't have enough
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time in the hour or so that we have on this podcast to teach you everything that i've come to learn
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and to be honest even if i did i don't think that's the most valuable thing that i could give you in
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this hour that we have together today just like money is a fish right me telling you today's information is also
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a bit of a fish because things change quite quickly in the world and even if i could tell you everything i knew now
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about money games it would at some point expire it would very quickly change i think the
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most valuable important fishing rod that i could give you in this hour is in fact a change of mindset
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i think if i can get you to realize that your monetary future value and how rich you'll be in
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your life is perhaps somewhat equal to the value of the information you have in your brain then maybe maybe just maybe you'll start
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to value information and learning and the pursuit of knowledge even more and in the world we live in we
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all have access to the to the same information pretty much but most of us still don't understand
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the true value of it one of the greatest privileges i think i could ever give to my future kids
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is to teach them the value of learning gaining experience acquiring information and
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self-education which is something we can all do now because we all have google right we all have the internet we all have social media we will have youtube
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you know you're doing it right now some of you that are watching this online i think we tend to over value short-term financial
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incentives and undervalue learning opportunities which will give us that long-term value advantage
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and all of the young people and even some of the slightly old people that i get a chance to mentor
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this is one of the key lessons i try and teach them is to be able to spot short-term value from long-term value
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you know and i'm going to go off peace just a little bit here and i'm going to tell you a bit of a personal story um that happened to me actually quite
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recently uh and this is the you know this podcast is the home of the truth so make sure you do keep this to yourself i
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had a a young person in their early 20s asked to come and work with me and when i say work with me
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i don't mean you know in the same building as me i mean with me and because of the lockdowns and the way the world is
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all of my sort of real close team are literally working with me in my home or in you know in a small um co-working
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space and this was a in my opinion a fairly unique opportunity right because we're gonna be
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sat together pretty much every day and they were so persistent that eventually i ended up offering them
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a job and i offered them a job on the same salary the same wage that they're earning right now in their current role
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and i offered them a guaranteed pay rise in 60 days time and they effectively
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turned the offer down because they wanted a little bit more money now and whatever i say from this point
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onwards is going to sound petty and biased and bitter i have no other way of saying it i'm just gonna be
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honest with you honestly from what i know about their situation and from what i know about where they
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wanted to go in their career and as impartially as i could possibly be that was a [ __ ] stupid decision just
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just purely based on the fact that if you sit next to me or someone that's fortunate enough to have the access to the
00:16:01
level of information that i have access to someone that is willing to give you that information and information that's probably going to
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help you fulfill the goals that you have [ __ ] a 2k pay rise that information can
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quite literally make you a millionaire too and i've seen it make people millionaires you know much of the reason
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why i'm sat here as a millionaire is because i got to sit next to people who had gone on the journey that i
00:16:24
wanted to go on and that's what i mean we tend to overvalue the short-term financial
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incentives and undervalue the learning opportunities which will give us long-term value knowing how to make spot
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the difference and knowing which is which will change your life and sometimes you have to play a long game you have to delay that
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gratification you have to hold off on that 2k pay rise because the situation you're in is giving you real long-term value your long-term
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future will be better if you make long-term decisions or your life will be slightly better in the
00:16:54
short term if you make short-term decisions but then your long-term future is compromised and that's what delaying gratification is you have to learn to do
00:17:01
that in your careers too i'm gonna close off this point by telling you the easiest simplest change that i've made in my
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life to radically radically increase the amount of information and the amount of good quality information that i'm
00:17:12
exposed to one small change but before i tell you we're going to play a little game just imagine for a second that you could
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pick up an imaginary phone in front of you and you could just listen in to the world's smartest minds
00:17:23
the world's smartest minds in in fitness in business in finance spirituality and philosophy just imagine
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imagine if you could be a fly on the wall as they discuss ideas as they seek to understand the
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world and as they talk about what they know and as they play their money games and enrich themselves imagine how transformative
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that would be imagine how much that information would change your life it would change your health your happiness and probably your wealth
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and imagine if all of that that access to information was free
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it is free that's twitter that's social media that's youtube you can literally watch
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and listen to the smartest people in the world think discuss and ideate so that's big the question you have to be honest
00:18:05
why the [ __ ] do you still follow jenny from 10 years ago who you do not give a f about as she publicly complains to some
00:18:11
customer service rep on twitter about her t-mobile data plan being expensive and slow or
00:18:16
kylie jenner as she publicly advertises the results of her plastic surgery and demolishes your self-esteem in the process all that
00:18:23
clown on facebook that tries to convince you that 5g internet the coronavirus and bill gates were all
00:18:28
part of some illuminati conspiracy theory why are you choosing that information why are you allowing
00:18:34
junk to seep into your mental diet where is that information going to take you
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information is the privilege and you have to be the gatekeeper and the unapologetic defender of the
00:18:46
information that you consume i've said this before and in fact it's proven to be so important in my life
00:18:52
that i'm gonna keep saying it until i feel like you're listening to me who you follow online especially if you're
00:18:58
someone that spends hours of day on the internet and social media like i do is the single biggest influence on your life for the love of
00:19:06
god follow better and unfollow faster my trick which i'm going to give to you
00:19:11
is i basically mute everyone 90 of the people on my instagram are muted probably near 95
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percent i just don't see their stuff i don't see their stories i don't see their posts because usually it's actually not that helpful to me
00:19:22
50 of the people on my twitter are muted and i'm muting people because just like you there are real world
00:19:28
consequences of you know unfollowing friends and people and family and things like that so i just mute them
00:19:34
it's a nice middle ground where they don't know and they don't need to know right and if i start talking [ __ ] online i
00:19:40
give you permission to unfollow me to please subscribe to this podcast but i give you permission to unfollow me too
00:19:47
and this has changed my life honestly it's the simplest thing the simplest decision that has had the single biggest impact
00:19:53
on my life i'm definitely smarter happier and more professionally capable because of it
00:20:00
so if there is a small thing that you can do now to really change the most important influence on your life it's to
00:20:06
go through your social media timelines and every time you see someone who isn't contributing
00:20:11
towards the values or the information that you want to consume boom mew but and here comes a very
00:20:18
important caveat you have to be careful not to unfollow or mute people just because they disagree with your opinion
00:20:24
a few years ago if i saw someone in my timeline that overtly supported like a different political party
00:20:30
or had a completely opposing opinion to mine all just like strongly disagreed with issues that i really care about
00:20:36
i would just unfollow them boom bye felicia and i think i did that because i didn't want to feel the frustration that
00:20:41
i felt when i logged in and saw their posts and tweets and also i didn't want to keep biting and arguing
00:20:47
and debating with them online but when you think about that decision logically it's a pretty terrible
00:20:53
decision all i'm doing by doing that is narrowing my world view and i'm building reinforcing this echo
00:20:59
chamber around me which is full of people who believe everything i already believe
00:21:05
and the fundamental truth that we all have to have the intellectual strength to believe
00:21:10
is that often there really is no right or wrong everything is really just a bunch of perspectives that's what the world is
00:21:17
full of very very few things are a case of right or wrong we'll probably all agree that the sky is blue
00:21:23
but as it relates to the way the world should be run our political opinions how people should be treated there's typically quite a lot of
00:21:28
variants and those perspectives that perfectly agree with yours are actually
00:21:34
the least valuable they're not going to challenge you or broaden your perspective or teach you anything
00:21:40
only the perspectives that differ from yours can do that whether they differ because they're you know a little bit more developed on your
00:21:46
opinions or because they disagree but it's not easy and i'd be lying to you if i pretend
00:21:51
that it was i've genuinely and i this is a weekly battle i've genuinely struggled to keep people on my social media timelines within my
00:21:58
social media bubble that say things i really disagree with and that support ideas that i despise
00:22:04
but i also think if i'm being completely honest with myself i'm better off because of it listen i'm
00:22:10
not i'm not going to let ryan on facebook tell me that 5g internet caused coronavirus but i am going to fill my social bubble
00:22:17
and my circle online with people who honestly disagree people who can respectfully
00:22:22
explain why they disagree and people who view the world differently to me
00:22:28
you know i i hope this is the last time that i make this point on this podcast but it just keeps coming
00:22:33
to the front of my mind so if you've not cleansed your social media following please do it now i really really hope
00:22:39
this is the last time i feel like if i can convince you to do this now today this week
00:22:45
it will be for some of you the greatest thing i was ever able to do for you the greatest
00:22:50
gift i can give you for listening to this podcast also you know turn all the unifications
00:22:55
off all of them but we'll save that topic for another time
00:23:00
okay so the third point in my diary is about changing the shape of your brain you can change the shape of your brain
00:23:07
what a load of nonsense over the over the last couple of years i've heard a lot of people people that i respect a
00:23:12
lot including tom bill you who came on this podcast tell me that you can quite literally change the
00:23:18
shape of your brain and at first i'll be honest i thought this was potentially some you know some of that self-development
00:23:24
fluff and nonsense that we read a lot about you know the hocus pocus nonsense [ __ ] um and i
00:23:30
thought to myself how could you possibly change the shape and composition of your brain without having some type of evasive
00:23:37
surgery but i hold my hands up it turns out i was wrong and i wasn't just a little bit wrong i was really really
00:23:42
really really wrong over the last few months as i've gone on the journey of writing my book which is coming out called happy sexy millionaire
00:23:48
the unexpected truth about fulfillment love and success which you can get right now on amazon i started to develop a bit of an
00:23:56
obsession with neuroscience and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go do too deep into the science because you don't necessarily
00:24:01
need to know that stuff but i'm to tell you about some of the things that i learned on that journey and particularly one thing that changed
00:24:08
my life and here it is our brains are malleable just like play-doh and our experiences
00:24:15
determine their shape this process is almost best compared to physical exercise where you know 30 reps today isn't going to
00:24:22
make you super muscular and big right but 30 reps every day for a year will and the same is true for your brain the
00:24:28
science says that whatever you focus your mind upon be anger or self-doubt or fear your brain will eventually
00:24:34
literally change in shape and i sound like i'm talking nonsense i can hear myself saying this it sounds like
00:24:39
some hocus-pocus magic but i promise you this is the truth and listen i'm if you know me you know
00:24:44
i'm just as immune to self-development nonsense and fluff as you are so i only share things with you that i think are
00:24:49
fundamentally true and that's supported by some kind of evidence let me give you an example if you're a compulsive
00:24:55
warrior the science shows that your brain will quite literally change to become a finely tuned anxiety and
00:25:01
worry machine you'll get your brain will become tuned for worry and i've looked through the research i've looked at before and
00:25:08
after pictures of brain scans of people who've overcome worry and addiction and negative thinking about themselves and other more
00:25:14
serious psychological conditions and honestly blew my socks off i've always believed that we are you know we are what we think
00:25:20
but the science shows us that we quite literally from a neurological perspective become what we think you know i read
00:25:26
this great piece online by this neurological expert called brian penny and he has this lab
00:25:31
where they've worked on being able to predict the age of your brain just by looking at it on brain scans
00:25:36
and your brain age is associated with increased mortality risk cognitive decline
00:25:41
increased risk of dementia and overall general poorer physical functioning they can
00:25:47
literally see how a life change that you make a decision you make in your life will change the shape of your brain over a
00:25:54
number of years they can see how a person that gives up x y or zed then has a completely different brain
00:26:00
just a few years later just like how if you stopped going to the gym or you started going to the gym you'd have a completely different body a
00:26:07
few years later and they've identified a number of methods just simple everyday choices and cognitive
00:26:13
tools that science suggests can positively change the shape of your brain i'm just going to tell you about
00:26:18
one of them today and it's the one that fascinated me the most it's called observation without
00:26:24
engagement this is basically what they call self-observation which is a pretty big part of meditation if you've
00:26:30
ever meditated you'll understand this and it really helps you do exactly that it involves like mindfully observing
00:26:36
your thoughts and your feelings and your bodily sensations the best example i can give you is you
00:26:42
know if i asked you to observe right now how how tense your body feels
00:26:47
instantly you might you know take a step back and start focusing on your sore toe or the tightness in your chest or that
00:26:53
headache which you didn't notice before but you can only notice when you start to observe yourself if i ask you to observe your thoughts
00:26:59
and your feelings you can also do that too you might start to think about the things you're worrying about or that
00:27:04
particular unsolved situation in your life or about your family's health because of this virus the things that are going on
00:27:10
subconsciously which you didn't really notice about that big decision on your future which you're procrastinating making
00:27:16
the point is you can take an observer's perspective on your anxious thoughts on your feelings and on your bodily sensations
00:27:23
you don't have to try and live inside of the problem all the time you don't have to live inside of your feelings or your emotions
00:27:29
and when you do this don't try and engage you're not supposed to try and fix it just observe let me give you another metaphor
00:27:35
which i think explains this best it's called the clouds metaphor imagine your thoughts and feelings or bodily sensations
00:27:41
as just clouds that are floating through the sky and sometimes those clouds are dark sometimes they're angry sometimes it's you know raining
00:27:48
and sometimes they're light and sometimes they're calm and thin but you're not the clouds you're the
00:27:53
blue sky who just observes the clouds as they're passing without engaging in them you simply observe and you let them pass you by and
00:28:01
as the 20-something ceo of a big company who knows that every time i look at my emails and my whatsapp in the
00:28:07
morning there's gonna be a ton of unpredictable yet unfortunately inevitable [ __ ] not just small
00:28:13
[ __ ] severe [ __ ] i'm talking ruin your day [ __ ] [ __ ] that can rear its head from any corner or person
00:28:19
in a global business of 700 people as as that guy this mechanism has quite literally saved
00:28:25
me i really really believe that and from my conversations with dom who's my business partner who's been with me this whole time you know which i
00:28:32
had on this podcast in chapter 10 where he described that running the business made him an alcoholic made him anxious
00:28:38
and made him experience some pretty severe mental health problems i genuinely believe
00:28:44
that this this technique was the fundamental difference between me and him self-observation which is something that
00:28:50
for some reason i've always defaulted to we both had the same intense stressful experience over the last 10 years
00:28:56
but in his words i survived it and he nearly didn't he said right and this is a horrible
00:29:03
thing for me to talk about he said he considered jumping in front of a train and killing himself because things at one point were so
00:29:10
almost unbearable and the difference is here it's in your mind and the mechanisms you rely on to
00:29:16
deal with your portion of unpredictable life [ __ ] which is coming your way whether you like it or not i've said in this podcast before that i
00:29:22
viewed the hardest moments in my life as as really a video game i naturally and
00:29:28
again i don't want to take too much credit for this because it's not something that i did consciously i naturally adopted this strange
00:29:33
video game mindset where i would almost see the situation i was in like a game of chess like i was removed
00:29:40
from it when things got really really hard i told myself without thinking about it that this was all just a game yeah like
00:29:46
a like a game of chess and i'm not the pieces on the chessboard because they can be killed i'm the
00:29:52
person responsible for moving the pieces and whatever happens i'll be fine just
00:29:57
like you know like a game of call of duty i'm not the character in the screen running with the gun
00:30:02
the one at danger of standing on a land mine i'm the person holding the controller sat at home and even if i stand on a land mine or
00:30:09
two that's fine i can just restart and rejuvenate and you know go again
00:30:14
and for me this perspective which is very similar to what i've described with this self-observation
00:30:19
was the most liberating thing in my whole career it allowed me to develop my own calm within any form of chaos and it
00:30:25
allowed me to think clearly without being clouded by emotion and if you're a ceo if you're running a business
00:30:30
that's so incredibly important and i genuinely also think that my business partner don was inside the game
00:30:37
he was the pawn on the chessboard he was the soldier running through the battlefield in the call of duty he was taking
00:30:42
the enemy fire so he internalized that pain he internalized the stress and he became the conflict
00:30:48
and honestly nobody can survive that nobody not even me but fortunately for whatever reason i
00:30:54
was removing myself and that helped self-observation isn't just handy for
00:31:00
increasing your like self-awareness it genuinely provides you with a sense of detachment in the most challenging situations you'll find
00:31:05
yourself in instead of being controlled by the situation and the thoughts that come with the situation
00:31:10
and all of those feelings it gave you gives you this ability to hold out in front of you to observe it
00:31:16
and to let it come and to let it go without impacting you too much and the brain research they've done on
00:31:22
this topic completely supports this they've studied the part of your brain that becomes active
00:31:28
when you're drifting from thought to thought and overthinking and worrying and they've seen clearly how this can
00:31:33
have a detrimental impact on your personal well-being and over a number of years the shape of
00:31:39
your brain they've then also observed how that attachment which you can achieve from self-observation and that video game
00:31:45
mindset where you become the sky not the clouds can quiet that part of your brain
00:31:50
and there's one particular study that shows that people who meditate have reduced activity in that part of their brain versus
00:31:57
people that don't meditate and listen when we talk about meditation i was a bit of a skeptic on the whole topic meditation doesn't have to be sitting
00:32:04
with your legs crossed humming to yourself right it can literally just be taking a few minutes out to relax
00:32:09
and pause and for me meditation is usually in the form of a massage it's the time where
00:32:14
i can stop i can pause and i can detach and that for me is crucial crucial
00:32:20
crucial for everybody no matter what walk of life you're in you have to find your paws
00:32:25
and listen this isn't going to stop you getting anxious or worried or stressed but learning the habit of self-observation
00:32:31
and that video game mindset and becoming the sky as i'll call it will allow your problems to come go and
00:32:37
limit the impact they have on you without having to always engage in them and therefore making them worse than they have to be
00:32:43
without making a mountain out of what could have just been a molehill
00:32:48
for the next point in my diary i've just written less answers and more questions you know so much of the the
00:32:54
self-development career progression advice that i got when i was younger told me to speak up more
00:33:00
you know make sure i'm heard and to get my point across whenever i can and i'm telling you the older i've got and the further i've
00:33:06
traveled in the business world the more i've learned that that's really shitty advice in the real world it's
00:33:11
impressive to know an answer of course but it's also impressive to admit that you don't it's impressive to say and to have the
00:33:18
sense of yourself to say i don't know to say you're probably right to say
00:33:24
that's not my area of expertise to say i don't know but i'm going to find out or just to remain silent the least
00:33:30
impressive thing you can do is speak for the sake of speaking we all know people like this and they typically do that because they are insecure
00:33:37
and because they think if they have nothing to say then they're not very valuable we all have this contribution reputation
00:33:42
let me call it a contribution score you won't know what your contribution score is but you'll probably know the score of the people around you the
00:33:49
people in your friendship groups and in your family you'll know that person within your friendship group or a colleague at work
00:33:55
that just seems to speak for the sake of speaking and most of the time when they add something to the
00:34:00
conversation people kind of like roll their eyes and you know and they think to themselves that was a really dumb thing to say
00:34:06
and it gets to the point that before they speak everyone in the room presumes it's going to be something dumb again or
00:34:12
weird or unhelpful or irrelevant i think you'll know that person and that is because their contribution
00:34:19
score is low that is what a contribution score is it really really matters because if you
00:34:24
constantly speak for the sake of speaking or you you know you speak when you're not informed on a topic
00:34:29
people will gradually stop listening to you they will receive your id ideas with a pre-conceived bias
00:34:37
that you're probably going to say something that doesn't matter and so your ideas suffer even if they're good because of that
00:34:43
preconceived bias and that preconceived opinion of what you have to say so even when you do have something valuable to add
00:34:49
everybody will disregard it they'll pre-devalue it before it's even come out of your mouth and that's because just like a credit
00:34:55
score we all have a contribution score and in that case it's because you've ruined yours by always feeling the need
00:35:01
to chime in even when you don't know what you're talking about even when you shouldn't if you don't know the answer to
00:35:07
something at least know the value of admitting that you don't or staying quiet as someone that's you
00:35:14
know had the pleasure and sometimes displeasure of working in boardrooms and in creative brainstorms and in intense investor meetings with
00:35:21
big personalities and sometimes competitive personalities for the last decade i've seen how someone you know can ruin their contribution
00:35:28
score by constantly feeling the need to say something or add something when they don't know the answer and when this isn't their field of
00:35:34
expertise and i've also seen the opposite i've seen people who will sit and listen humbly and just observe and
00:35:39
often learn and the people that walk out of the room with their respect and contribution score intact to always
00:35:45
those that are secure enough to admit that they don't know and to in many cases stay quiet and the ones that lose respect
00:35:52
are those that try and pretend they know something that isn't in their field of expertise or that they know something about
00:35:57
usually because they're insecure and this is why as a general rule for life it's always better to have more questions than you have answers and to
00:36:04
be able to admit when you don't have the answers your contribution score really really matters and i think you come to learn that the
00:36:09
further you go in your career it's the thing that for me made investors believe me you know this this notion i think they
00:36:16
have in their head which is when stephen speaks it's probably something informed and something worth listening to
00:36:22
it's the things that you know makes employees trust you as a ceo it's a thing that as a colleague earns
00:36:28
respect and ultimately if you have the humility to learn to listen in areas that are outside your expertise
00:36:35
it'll be the thing that expands your knowledge and again that that will change your life
00:36:40
and this brings me to the next point in my diary and i've written in my diary what are some of the most important questions
00:36:46
i ask myself regularly and i when i say this i mean in all areas of my life if it's more important to know the right
00:36:53
question to ask them to have the answer what are the questions that you should ask yourself every single day
00:36:59
and um the first one in my diary is which part of this situation can i
00:37:04
control you know as a ceo but just as a human being that's living life like we all are there are so many times where i
00:37:11
encounter a situation of conflict or stress or chaos um and i'm desperate to fix it and i
00:37:16
start committing energy to trying to solve the problem usually and this is something that i've come to
00:37:22
learn there's really only like three or four things that i can control in this situation and if i know what those things are i
00:37:29
can invest my energy in those levers in pulling those levers and that gives me the best chance of
00:37:36
getting out of the situation it also is a great tool for liberating yourself from all of the stress
00:37:42
of worrying about things that are completely outside of your control and that you can do nothing about and i've done this over the last two
00:37:48
years in particular where i will hone in and i will sometimes even write in my diary the two or three things in the
00:37:54
situation i'm in now that i that i can control gives me that clarity it liberates me from stress and it focuses me
00:38:00
on the things that will actually help me get out of the situation i'm in and the second question which i
00:38:06
ask myself religiously at least once a day and is actually held as a permanent point on my to-do list
00:38:11
is what am i avoiding right now this is something that i i dare you to try and ask yourself every
00:38:17
day because for me understanding what i'm avoiding helps me overcome it and as near ielts said on
00:38:24
this podcast we are creatures that seek to avoid discomfort so there's nearly always a reason
00:38:30
why i'm procrastinating or avoiding something and if i can become conscious about that thing and the
00:38:35
psychological discomfort that's making me avoid it it helps me to overcome it and usually the things we
00:38:41
avoid are actually really really important and that's part of the reason they're causing us discomfort so that's a
00:38:47
question that i recommend everybody asks themselves every day make a list of the things you want to ask yourself the first is what part of this
00:38:52
situation can i control and the second is what am i avoiding the third is what would my idols think about
00:38:59
this decision and this is a question which i religiously ask myself when i'm facing a big life choice because i think we all
00:39:06
understand the values and the principles that our idols lived by we study you know we study their lives we
00:39:12
read their books their podcasts whatever we understand the way that they think but when we're in a situation when we're
00:39:18
facing a big decision sometimes we kind of relapse back to our own innate fear-driven
00:39:25
decision-making mechanisms and we lose sight of how our idols the people we want to be like
00:39:31
would make that decision so every time i make a big life decision i almost like interrogate
00:39:36
it against what i know that my idols would do because my idols are my idols
00:39:42
because they have values that i admire and so if i can kind of sense check my own decision-making
00:39:48
against what i think they would do which is sometimes easier than knowing the right thing to do i tend to make a better decision
00:39:55
and the next question i religiously ask myself is what would future steve think of this decision and this question is super handy to ask
00:40:01
yourself whenever you can because future you is going to pay the price for the decisions you make today
00:40:07
so future you is quite a selfish person they want to be they want to have a six-pack they want to be super smart they want to be rich
00:40:13
and that is almost all of our north star our future self and so if you ask yourself genuinely ask
00:40:19
yourself the question what would future steve the happiest version the best version of me
00:40:24
think about this decision i'm about to make to eat this entire double pizza to myself
00:40:31
usually that allows you to see if this decision you're about to make is in line with your values
00:40:36
and the next question that i like to ask myself regularly is if i'm saying yes to this thing then
00:40:42
what am i saying no to i think it was steve jobs who once said that it's only by saying no to things
00:40:47
that you can concentrate on what's important in your life and i love this line because it really helped me to realize the potency of that
00:40:54
question be it in our relationships or our career or in our health or in our mental health um i think it's important and i think we
00:41:01
need to reflect on what we hold most dear now in this moment in order to live a life and to attain a future
00:41:08
that is in line with our values and we need to become aware of how a yes decision is going to prevent us from doing other things
00:41:14
that we also consider to be relatively important it's a question that appreciates that you can't do everything and be
00:41:20
everything and that life is about prioritization prioritizing the things that are most important and so before i say yes to
00:41:27
something i like to consider all of the things that i'm saying no to as a consequence
00:41:32
of that yes it helps me to make better decisions today and it's a sign a signal and a nod
00:41:39
to how much i respect the limited amount of time i have and the last question which i've written
00:41:46
in my diary that i ask myself religiously is a much more direct question which is
00:41:51
does this thing align with my values you know people often make decisions that don't align with their values i know that i do
00:41:57
it every day and there are tons of reasons people do this you know they uh they binge on alcohol
00:42:03
they they smoke 20 cigarettes a day they have big mac you can't have a big mac pizza
00:42:08
they have big mac burgers and domino's pizzas religiously even though they know that their future values of health and being
00:42:14
around to see their kids grow up and those kinds of things are in conflict with those short-term detrimental actions
00:42:21
and often we do this because we don't stop to ask ourselves this simple
00:42:26
question and we don't really stop to think about this simple question which is how does this short-term decision
00:42:31
align with my long-term values next time you're doing something and it doesn't feel quite right and it
00:42:37
feels a little bit naughty ask yourself how it's serving what you value most in life and that
00:42:43
having you know the obsession i have now with continually cross-checking
00:42:48
the decisions i'm about to make versus the person i want to be or the life i want to attain
00:42:54
has been transformative for me honestly it's really really changed my life and i'm going to throw in a bonus question i did say that was the last one
00:43:00
but i'm going to give you a bonus question which i've just i've just been thinking about it's a little bit cliche but i promise you it's
00:43:06
helped me overcome you know some of the most fearful moments of my life the question is what's the worst that
00:43:13
will happen if i attempt this and i remember being really really young 16 years old when someone first asked me to speak on stage
00:43:20
and then 17 and then 18 and then the stage is getting bigger and the audience is getting bigger i remember one day
00:43:25
speaking in barcelona in front of about 10 000 people and being stood backstage and starting to feel a little bit of that
00:43:31
anxiety which we all feel and i i for some reason just like the video game mindset which i've talked
00:43:36
about in this podcast i default to asking myself what is the worst thing that can happen
00:43:42
and i don't just ask myself that question in the cliche way that friend might turn to you and say i genuinely run through the process of
00:43:48
what you know what is the worst thing that can happen i could walk up on stage and as i'm walking on stage
00:43:54
i trip on the first step i fall i smash my face my trousers come down people see my
00:43:59
underwear and my you know my willy and i walk up on stage and then i deliver the worst speech in my life
00:44:05
and people start walking out and throwing stuff at me and i walk off stage and and to be honest it's nearly always the
00:44:12
case that the worst thing that can happen isn't actually as bad as you think we tend to you know before we
00:44:18
confront it and rationalize it that way and look at it in that way we tend to i guess think it's death i
00:44:23
think i think we think we're gonna die and everyone's gonna hate us and and then you ask yourself this sub question which is if the worst thing
00:44:29
that i think could happen happens what is the long-term impact of that on my life
00:44:35
and even if i fell on the step hit my you know hit my eye walked on stage with a bleeding eye and then did the worst speech of my life
00:44:41
it doesn't actually have any long-term impact on my life okay i wouldn't get booked to speak there again but the
00:44:47
the material long-term impact of my life is pretty much nil and so it doesn't make sense to be
00:44:54
fearful because the worst possible outcome has no long long-term impact on your life
00:44:59
and for me that's the question that i really hold dear and it's a question that i still turn to in moments of intense pressure and fear
00:45:06
um fear of failure and i think it's a question that can change your life if you're a very fearful person those
00:45:12
are my questions and i i am i think it's important to have questions and be armed with questions because as i
00:45:18
say in life it turns out that having the questions is much more important than having all the answers
00:45:23
okay so the last point in my diary this week is it's just a sentence and i'm going to read that sentence to you the thing that invalidates you when
00:45:30
you're younger will be the things you seek validation from when you're an adult and this is um this is something that it really took me
00:45:36
about 30 years the 28 years i've been alive to learn um when i was younger as a lot of you will know if you've listened to this
00:45:42
podcast before i came from a background in a family that didn't have a whole lot of
00:45:47
money right we were pretty much bankrupt for my whole um my whole childhood at least the last
00:45:52
part of my my my time living at home we lived in a house that was beat up um the window on the front of our house
00:45:59
was smashed for a good decade so you know you'd get the draught coming in from outside we live my back garden
00:46:04
the grass in the background is about six foot high and there are fridges and tv sets and all kinds of nonsense in
00:46:11
there in fact the back half of my house was actually knocked down because i think at one point my mom thought we had
00:46:16
the money to do a renovation but we didn't have the money so they just the builders just knocked the house down and just left it as a derelict
00:46:23
house so one of the the doors you know which used to go into one of the rooms was actually would just actually take
00:46:28
you outside and we just removed the handle so that no one could really break into our house the front of our house was the same we
00:46:34
had you know the grass was you know a good meter and a half high at times and it was fairly embarrassing um growing up as a
00:46:42
black kid in an all-white school who already felt a little bit different with my curly hair knowing that our
00:46:49
house also looked so marked you know remarkably different and that my life was remarkably different
00:46:54
from a financial perspective we didn't have um christmases and birthdays by the time i was about 10 10 11 years old because
00:47:00
of the financial situation we're in and i know that it created a real deep insecurity within me i remember
00:47:06
christmas days sat in my brother kevin's room on the floor as we joked about the things we were going to pretend we got for
00:47:12
christmas you know like and i have to make i have to to bring context to this right like i know now as
00:47:19
an adult that this was a terribly naive selfish immature way to think
00:47:24
i know now that i should have been looking at all the things i did have which was a loving family two parents that were together and loved
00:47:30
me a roof over my head food on the table i know now that those were the important things but back then
00:47:35
when you're a young little kid who doesn't really understand the world you feel sorry for yourself you engage in self-pity and i did and i
00:47:42
would go to school embarrassed and i would go to school and lie about our financial situation and it
00:47:48
made me insecure it invalidated me you know it was one of the the biggest worries or you know
00:47:54
insecurities i had as a kid and so at 14 years old i started to really really value money money for me
00:48:01
just felt so important the lack of money we had in our life was the reason that i had so much shame it
00:48:06
was the reason that my mum and dad would scream at each other so much about our house and about our finances and
00:48:12
about christmas and about all of these other things and money was the problem so i grew up thinking
00:48:18
and pretty obsessed with attaining money or if i went to university at 18 years old dropped out started a business to try and make loads of money
00:48:24
and then when i finally got money set 21 22 years old i had a really unhealthy relationship
00:48:32
with it and i went to nightclubs and i spent i think one year like 50 60 000 pounds on champagne in a nightclub
00:48:39
at 22 23 years old just to try and impress people and then i went out to the countryside and bought
00:48:45
this seven bedroom mansion with a tennis court at the bottom of the garden and two living rooms and an outhouse and
00:48:50
big gates and a 100 meter driveway just to try and impress people and this
00:48:57
is this is a force in our lives which will ruin our lives if we don't understand it and the thing
00:49:03
that i came to learn after literally like 25 years and after being a puppet you know the
00:49:08
puppet master being this thing that happened to me as a kid after being a puppet that didn't know why he was doing what he was doing but
00:49:14
was just buying these tables and nightclubs and buying material things and trying to show off to people
00:49:19
i came to learn that the thing that invalidated me when i was younger had become the thing that i sought
00:49:25
validation from as an adult and that will be true for you no matter what it is no matter if it's romantic affection no
00:49:32
matter if it's validation no matter if it's money no matter what it is the thing that invalidated you
00:49:37
when you were younger will be this the thing that you seek validation from as an adult and until
00:49:43
you understand what that thing is it risks being the number one thing that can ruin your life i've like gone
00:49:50
through every like corner of my childhood to try and understand the things that made me
00:49:56
feel invalid in order to understand some of the forces that are in play in my life right now as an adult and
00:50:02
honestly it has liberated me i wrote in my diary one day the reasons i'll go broke
00:50:08
and it was pretty much this it was because i was broke when i was a kid and because that
00:50:14
developed a really you know psychological issue with money where money for me became
00:50:20
a plaster it became the thing that would make me feel the opposite to whatever shame is
00:50:26
and i just think it's so important for everyone to to think about the things that happened when they were young
00:50:32
and to understand the forces that invalidated them because if you don't understand them and if you can't make them conscious and
00:50:37
hold them out in front of you and examine them they will control your life subconsciously somewhere
00:50:43
and honestly i've got to be honest do i think i'll ever really overcome this unhealthy relationship i
00:50:50
had with money i don't think i'll ever truly overcome it completely because it is so deeply hard-wired into
00:50:57
me at a time in my life when i was so impressionable and when every emotion
00:51:02
just seemed to cut more and carve into me but that's not really my aim my aim
00:51:08
isn't to overcome it my aim is to become conscious of it and if i can become conscious of it it
00:51:13
has less impact over me and fortunately where i'm at in my life now i don't make those stupid dumb decisions all of the
00:51:19
time sometimes i make dumb decisions like i'm not gonna pretend i'm some [ __ ] like profit that you know lives their life
00:51:26
perfectly and always makes decisions that are in line with their values sometimes i do things to impress people
00:51:31
but it's like 99 less than i used to and that's because i'm holding out
00:51:36
my sort of psychological relationship with money in front of me and i'm able to look at it and i'm able
00:51:42
to question myself and interrogate my decisions against this known flaw that i have in my psychology steve
00:51:47
why are you trying to buy a rolls royce you don't really like rolls royces you don't know anything about them because you think oh yeah
00:51:54
because you think it's going to impress somebody because you think somewhere deep inside
00:51:59
of you that child that had nothing will feel more fulfilled if he has that range rover or
00:52:05
that rolls royce or that mansion and whenever i go to make these big
00:52:10
decisions now it's the first thing i think of so i
00:52:15
don't think i've overcome it but i've definitely been able to understand it and if you can understand
00:52:21
it if you can understand the thing that invalidated you and your kid that's as good as overcoming it and that
00:52:29
will help you stop seeking validation from it as an adult
00:52:36
and that that will change your life
00:52:53
[Music]
00:52:58
oh [Music] you