Master Human Nature & Hack Your Way To Success - Steven Bartlett (4K)

• You are a guy who likes stories and ideas, and so am I.
• The frame matters more than the picture.
• The impact of perception creates value in marketing and product design.
• You do not get to choose what you believe.
• The beliefs we hold shape our experiences and can limit our potential.
• To change our beliefs, we need to expose ourselves to new evidence.

you are a guy who likes stories and likes ideas so am I so today I want to go through some of the best ideas that I've learned from you over the last year or so.

First one: The frame matters more than the picture. What's that mean? I think often in life, whether it's marketing, innovation, or when we're building companies or products or making content, we fall into the trap of thinking that the thing we're creating in and of itself is doing all the work to tell the story.

But when I looked at tons of studies, when I looked at Apples and art galleries, and when I looked at Coca-Cola studies that they did where they put Coca-Cola in one glass and Pepsi in another glass, and then did a different study where they showed you which one was which, it's so clear that much of the work is being done in psychology, not in reality.

What I mean by that is if we just think about the Apple Store. Every electronic store you've ever walked into in your life is kind of like a crazy jungle of wires, right? That's how electronic stores always were. What Apple did differently, which helped them to justify the cost of a $22,000 smartphone, was they gave the iPhone space in the shop. And we intuitively know that real estate is expensive. So the space that the object is given actually pours into the value of the object itself.

In an Apple Store, because it has two feet either side of it, the frame in which it's presented is telling you that this item in the middle is high value. You've always seen that kind of framing in an art gallery where you have one-off special pieces. The other thing I think is so critical to what Apple does so well is they only show you one of each device and they keep the rest in the back room.

If we think about scarcity creating value, things that are perceived to be in limited supply, like pieces of art, are seen in higher value. The frame in which you present something is doing so much of the work to communicate the value of the thing within it.

Even in the Pepsi-Coca-Cola studies—which are super famous from back in the day—people would rate the Coca-Cola drink more highly when it came in the can and they could see what they were drinking. They would say, "That's the better one." But when they removed the can and told people that the Pepsi was a Coca-Cola, or they had blind cups with nothing written on them, people chose the Pepsi.

The frame in the story there is making people believe that something tastes entirely better. So it's not just about value, it's about taste and sense, and really at its core, it's psychological.

There's a story from Sam Harris that I love, which kind of takes this from the business marketing into the personal development space. He says after you finish the workout, CrossFit or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or intervals or whatever, and you're laid on the floor panting, making a sweat angel, you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat, and you're hot, and the vision is blurry—everything, right?

That sensation, although objectively being quite uncomfortable, your felt sense of it is satisfaction; it's pleasure in a way. It's a very kind of masochistic type of pleasure. But if you spontaneously had that happen while you were sat in traffic, you'd be terrified. Yeah, you would ring the ambulance and you would say I'm dying, this is a heart attack or a stroke or whatever.

So the frame that we place around our experience largely determines our experience. And the question becomes why? As I talk about a lot from looking at some studies that they did on mice in a maze where they put chocolate at the end of the maze and then set the mouse off, they scan the brain of the mouse as it's going through the maze the first time, and it’s firing like crazy—so much activity in the brain as it’s sniffing everything and scratching everything. Eventually, it finds the chocolate.

The second time in the maze, they scan the mouse’s brain, they put it back into the same maze with chocolate at the end of it, and it glides through the maze with no cognitive activity appearing to happen at all. It's gone into autopilot.

When we think about the amount of cognitive load that the brain would encounter every day, just when I'm in this room, the number of things that I would have to think about, or to save cognitive capacity, tune out of what we know, is that the brain is taking shortcuts. The frame and the anchors around the thing you're looking at provide tons of shortcuts.

Even in the case of what I talk a little bit about as well, is if I gave— in these studies they gave people three options: do you want to go to an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome? In that study, people go, "I want the all-inclusive trip to Paris."

But in the second study they say, "Do you want an all-inclusive trip to Paris or an all-inclusive trip to Rome or an all-inclusive trip to Rome without coffee?" People suddenly choose the middle option, the all-inclusive trip to Rome. It's purely because this third option, which has entered the frame, has tricked the mind to think, "God, if they removed coffee from the all-inclusive trip to Rome, the all-inclusive must be way better, because they haven't removed it from the trip to Paris."

A slight thing. And we see it again on menus, and in electronic stores with TVs, and if you go into a steak restaurant and there's three steaks, people will typically choose the middle one because the cheapest one and the most expensive one are telling you a story that the cheap one is probably not good, the expensive one is a little bit too bougie, and that middle one, which is anchored in the frame, is probably the nice happy medium between the two.

This is happening all throughout our lives. We're taking shortcuts using the frame to tell us stories of the thing that sits within it. People don't think about the frame; they think about the thing they’re creating. But great artists, great innovators, your Steve Jobs of the world, your Teslas of the world, they obsess about the frame. Because it's hard to check. Like if you think about, we want to make an advance on people's perception of our product, the thing we've created, all the content, it's really hard to do that in reality.

Like it's really hard, as Rory Sutherland says, to make a train faster or to make an iPhone better, but it’s easy to play with the frame to change the story in the consumer's mind.

Yeah, this is where differentiating yourself with whatever you choose to do. People get captured. They obsess over the actual thing itself, whereas there are all of these other ancillary, extrinsic, sort of diffuse differences that you can use. And yeah, it's why I've spent so much money to make this look pretty because when people look at this, it's filmed in a different aspect ratio, right? It's not filmed in 16:9; it’s filmed in a custom version of cinemascope, right? It perfectly fits.

And anybody that's watching on an iPhone now, turn it to a wide screen and you'll see that it perfectly fills, there are no bars at the top, there are no bars at the sides, it’ll even get cut off by the circle of the bezel of the iPhone. That’s how perfectly curated this is for the mobile viewing experience.

Should I say what I think the most impressive thing that you do is that’s so tiny and it's actually just four characters long? Hit me. In terms of the frame is you write in the title 4K. Nobody cares, right? Objectively it’s not going to change the content, the experience of the content itself but when you say 4K it’s actually telling a much bigger story.

It's actually saying high quality, high production value, and really like the second order thing is there really worth your time. Yeah, we’ve invested a lot in this just four characters. It's taking in your YouTube title, but it’s speaking about the quality of what I’m about to watch and I think that is probably doing a tremendous work on retention. And you just write 4K in little brackets.

Yeah, but it says so much. But I think that when you’re looking at trying to compete with like you say, you’re limited by the reality of transistor size and circuit board capacity and all the rest of it. If you look at the difference between an iPhone and, I don't even know what the other ones are—Samsung, or an LG or something—if you look at the differences, the Samsung and the LGs had features and they had speed and megapixels and all the rest of it. The iPhone is still catching up to, but what don’t you get? You don’t get the experience. You don’t get the status that’s associated with it.

And all of that is the alchemy that Rory talks about.

Alright, next one. You do not get to choose what you believe. How is that the case? This is one of the most, I think, probably the most important things I’ve discovered over the last couple of years, because our lives are essentially beliefs that we’ve accepted as being subjectively true, whether they are objectively true or not.

Our lives are run on this instruction manual of these beliefs that we’ve inherited. When we’re thinking about belief change, which is what we need to do to, you know, pick up a healthy habit in the gym, or to build a business, or to persevere in any context, it all comes back to like, okay, how do I change something that’s limiting me? How do I change a limiting belief?

There’s a big sort of contingent in the self-development community that say you can go and look in a mirror and you can recite things to yourself and the brain will believe those to be true. So there’s a whole contingent that say just think about something and you'll believe it. But when I reflected on that in my own life, I ask myself how many of my beliefs have I actually chosen?

I used to be religious up until I was 19 years old. I believed in some kind of God, Christianity, and I zoomed in on why that belief fell away. What was it? And really what happened for me, and what I’ve come to learn, is that there isn’t a single belief I have that I’ve chosen.

The experiment I’d ask anyone to run that’s listening to this is think of a belief you currently have in your life, anything you have, and ask yourself the question, could you un-choose to believe that right now? If I put a billion dollars on the table of Elon Musk’s money and I said, “I’m going to give you this billion dollars if you don’t believe this hypothetical two pence coin that I’m holding if you believe it’s a 5p coin.” Very simple, there’s a billion dollars on the line.

And the reality is you couldn’t. You couldn’t for a billion dollars. Or if I held someone you love at gunpoint. You couldn’t change any belief you have. You could lie. I’m not talking about faith and hope; I’m talking about actually believing it’s true.

So if we all agree upon that, and I ran some surveys with people where I asked them this question, about 20% of people originally thought they could choose their beliefs, and then when I ran that survey almost 99% of people realized that they're not choosing their beliefs.

Where are my beliefs coming from? Well, all of our beliefs, in my view, are based on the evidence that we’ve acquired, usually through our first-party senses, sometimes vicariously from observations, and sometimes because they’ve come from authority figures and figures in our lives that we trust. It's evidence that we’ve accepted as truth. It doesn’t mean it is true, but it’s evidence we’ve accepted.

Therefore, if you want to change your beliefs, what's abundantly clear is you have to go and put yourself in situations where your existing beliefs are counteracted with new evidence. So when it comes to speaking on stage, or when it comes to learning how to be a podcaster, or when it comes to self-belief or whatever it is, you have to go and collide with new evidence.

Ryan Holiday’s got this amazing quote where he says, “Self-belief is overrated; I prefer to use evidence.” Yeah, exactly that! It goes back to that quote I said from David Goggins, right? You do not become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

Outwork your self-doubt, and ultimately hoping that you’re going to be able to believe you can think your way out of a thinking problem is like believing you can sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction, right? You have to give yourself something else that’s going to step change where you’re at.

I was hypnotized last week after we met, and I said to her before she hypnotized me, I said, “Can I ask you a question? Do we get to choose what we believe?” And she actually said, “Yes,” and I think she interpreted it differently. She’s a very, very famous therapist called Marisa Peers. Did you video this? Is it going out on the internet? Yeah, amazing!

30 minutes, she’s hypnotizing me to not eat sugar again, okay? To have a better relationship with sugar. Okay, yeah, right. And it was interesting because she takes me back to my childhood and then confronts me with the information that my inadequate lunchbox made me feel insecure. It made me feel a ton of shame growing up ‘cause I never had anything, like we didn’t have food or money or those kinds of things.

So really my relationship with sugar now is it resembles power, control, and fitting in. The fact I can just order whatever I want and eat. So she took me back there and unwired that, but what she’s actually doing is she’s giving me new evidence because she takes me right back to that kid and she’s basically whispering into his ear a new story.

And so I actually think that the principle that we don’t get to choose what we believe still holds true, but with hypnosis—which seems to be the outlier—they’re giving you new evidence that counteracts your current beliefs. That’s all she did.

Interesting, yeah! So an important sort of caveat is that new evidence doesn’t necessarily need to come from the external world; it can come from telling yourself a new story about the things that you already believe that you believe. And that’s what hypnosis is. It doesn’t need to be first-party evidence that you encounter with your eyes; it can be someone else that’s very, very skilled in taking you to that belief and smashing it.

I love when this happens, so let’s think about the two things that we’ve said so far: the frame matters more than the picture; you do not get to choose what you believe. What we’re talking about here is that your beliefs are largely determined by the frame that you place around the current moment, and that frame, given professional help or a powerful hypnotizer, can end up being moved in a way that also moves your beliefs.

Yeah, right? That’s very interesting. When you think of hypnosis as like someone tricking you into thinking you’re a monkey, and then you start clucking, it wasn’t that; I was well aware of where I was and everything going on. But she took me back to a hill I sat on when I was four years old, looking into my lunchbox, and I felt like I was there.

And then she told me a different story about that moment when I said earlier that we’ve interpreted as subjectively true. She gave me a different interpretation on my lunchbox, and that was the key thing. She gave me new evidence about an old interpretation of an old situation, and that’s what hypnosis does as an outlier.

But for those of us that can’t access hypnosis, the other way to counteract our beliefs, as I said, is you have to go and put yourselves in situations where you’re going to be presented with new evidence. It’s interesting with belief change; you’ll accept evidence that is complimentary.

As I said to you, if someone says you’re more looking than you thought you were, it’s shown in the studies that people are more likely to move in that direction. If I said you’re worse looking than you are, people are less likely to move in that direction.

So even framing the new evidence as good news is a useful tool for belief change. The other thing is, if we have 95% of the same beliefs, I’m significantly more likely to accept one from you. So when we need to embody a new belief, going and getting it from a source we trust, which typically isn’t our mother because we understand the bias there, but someone that we believe and trust in is a useful tool for belief change as well.

And yeah, I studied this really, really deeply. I looked at why you could go up to a child and say to the child, “I just saw a pink elephant flying,” and they might believe it, but you couldn’t say that to an adult, and they wouldn’t believe it. Have you seen those studies that were done—very unethical studies, I think—in the 60s and 70s where they took two groups of children and pushed onto one the fact that they stuttered and they would bring it up all the time and they would point at them and point at them, and these kids developed lifelong stutters throughout their entire adulthood because they were told, “You mustn’t stutter! Be careful, you’re doing it again, you’re doing it again!”

Yeah, we’re reinforced by what happens in the world. That’s labeling theory for you, right? And that’s a form of stereotype threat where you’re told implicitly that you are something, therefore you accept it to be true and start to embody it.

I tell you what I found that was really interesting: people are more prejudiced against those with different accents than those with different skin colors. This shows up again and again in the data, and it didn’t really make sense until I spoke to this evolutionary anthropologist, and he said, “Well, think ancestrally about how novel it would have been to have met somebody with a different skin color. It’s the tribe from the next valley over, right? It’s not somebody with a different skin color, but they’ll speak slightly differently; they’ll have slightly different words that they use.”

So we are predisposed to be very prejudiced against someone who might look like us or might not, but sounds different; and it makes kind of sense. So, you know, if someone’s not sure, not believing this, think about what happens when someone walks into the room with a different skin color than you have, but the exact same accent that tells you so much about where this person’s from, the background that they grew up in, all the rest of it.

And let’s say someone walks into the room who has the same skin color as you but a vastly different accent. They’ve got a Scouse accent, or they’ve got a Texan accent, and you go, “Wow! Like this person is very different to me.”

I just think it’s professional prejudice. Any kind of prejudice, so like just the affinity that you have with the person, that’s, yeah, and it shows up as in especially in the UK, which is a very class-based system, right? America’s dominated by race, but the UK is—I only learned this when a friend came over to the US from the US to the UK, and he says, “You guys talk about people being posh all the time.” It’s like, that’s never a term that I’ve ever heard. I know what it means; it’s never a term that I’ve heard used in America.

Never talk about someone being posh. It’s interesting because prejudice is such a context-dependent thing, whereas if you’re looking for a hundred-meter sprinter, you know, I, you know, I’m looking at you. If you’re looking for, say, you can go through different classifications and say, who would you want? Who would you be most happy or have the highest affinity to in different contexts?

And it varies. I’m really fascinated as well by like self-prejudice and the power that that exerts over us and how in the studies that I was reading, if a person—‘cause there’s a stereotype that women are worse at math—they did these studies where they just asked you to tick your gender before you do the test, and performance dips in women that have to tick their gender. Same with black people; their performance dips if they’re just reminded of their own identity, if they have to write their name. The performance dips.

So they did some studies where they got people to change their name and performance increased. It goes to show that there’s a stereotype threat going on within us internalizing it at all times.

And then the most importantly is that when they removed those stereotype threats before doing a test, performance was equal; there was no deterioration. And I think about that from labeling theory and the harm grades are causing all of us because me getting E and D's, yeah, it’s a miracle that I didn’t interpret that as I’m an E person and then show up in life in such a way.

There’s this similar quote from Anthony Vino: it’s more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader. And I really, coming from a British background, I rail against this sort of zero-sum crabs-in-a-bucket tall poppy syndrome mentality. And yeah, a lot of people might feel that, right?

That you are able to say things to yourself that you would never dare to say probably even to the worst enemy that you’ve got out there, and you’re able to kind of create this designer drug, perfectly curated curse. You know exactly the scabs to pick; you know exactly the pain points; you know all of your shame, and you’re able to point at it a thousand times a day and remind yourself of it.

And it’s so strange; it’s more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than it is to be our own biggest cheerleader. I wish that wasn’t the case.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately; I’ve not actually spoken about it. But in trying to help some friends solve some of their personal problems in their lives where they seem to be in a downward self-esteem spiral or are down with a discipline spiral, it’s always hard to give advice. And I’m actually cautious about being a fixer. Something Simon Sinek talked to me about: sometimes you just need to sit in the mud with people.

But one of the observations I’ve had is that the path out of that despair is by keeping commitments to yourself. And this kind of goes back to what you’re saying about the self-story and what you think about yourself every day.

I think when I’m trying to give friends advice these days, what I say to them is the rewards you get in terms of self-esteem and self-story, what you think of yourself, will be correlated to the size of the commitment you keep when no one is watching.

So if you say to yourself, I’m going to do this when no one is watching, we don’t think it’s important to keep those commitments. We think lying to ourselves has, there’s no punishment for that.

I actually think the greatest consequence in life is not keeping commitments to yourself, and I think that compounds to, as we talked about, where do beliefs come from? I think it compounds as personal evidence, which is deposited in this instruction manual of who you are and how you behave and how you show up and what you’re capable of—all those tiny little commitments.

And then I think you can get into a downward commitment spiral because of that, because you think you’re a—you know, you don’t have faith in your own word, you don’t have faith in anything you do, and this causes a downward spiral.

So isn’t it really lovely to know that maybe the way to turn that into a positive upward reinforcing spiral is just keep that tiny commitment you made to yourself today? Yeah, like you don’t have to move Mount Everest; you don’t need to go on an ayahuasca retreat.

How about when you said you were going to get in bed at 10:00 p.m.? You do that, right? And you stack that. You talked about Alex Hormozi’s quote about stacking evidence—stack those things for a week. Honestly, I’ve seen it in my friends and their lives have changed.

The commitments we keep to ourselves, if we say those are the most important things for compounding that evidence in our favor, everybody can start there today. Like yesterday’s out of play, but then the next thing you do in the next hour, can you keep that commitment to yourself?

That’s what I think a lot about. I think life is much more simple than we often make out.

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Mark Manson quotes here, “The person you have to spend the most time listening to in your life is yourself. Try not to lose their respect.” And self-respect and self-esteem I think largely comes from having faith in your own word.

So if you were to treat yourself like a friend you are responsible for helping—which is Peterson’s advice, right?—let’s say that every time you invited a friend out for lunch, they turned up late or didn’t turn up at all; they didn’t text back; they just kept not holding to their word. After a while, you wouldn’t believe in them. You wouldn’t be friends with them, and you’d stop inviting them out to lunch. You are that friend to yourself.

How on Earth do you think that you’re going to be able to move mountains and get out of that relationship that you don’t like and move countries or change your career when you can’t not hit snooze even though last night you promised yourself that you weren’t going to hit snooze?

It’s how people that are able to do extraordinary things have been able to get there; they’ve just started off unbelievably small, right? “I’m just not going to hit the snooze button.” “I’m just not going to use my phone before 9:00 a.m.”

These are controlling your thoughts, are unbelievably difficult and require a lot of meditation and maybe psychedelics. Controlling your actions is relatively easy, especially stuff like don’t pick your phone up before you’ve gone for a walk. Just try that in the morning, sunlight before screen light, as Huberman says, and that’s the easiest way to control your thoughts.

Yeah, because there’s a two-way relationship between what you do and how you feel. Absolutely! So if you want to change how you feel, focus on what you’re doing. If you want to change what you’re doing, focus on how you feel.

But you said about extraordinary people there—this is what Chris Eubank Jr. said to me, which really stuck with me. He said, “My dad flew me to Cuba, and we had a training camp out there and they surprised me. They put the heavyweight champion of Cuba in the ring with me. He’s not, he’s like a middleweight or something. He gets in the ring; this heavyweight storms across to him, knocks him so hard he flies out of the ring and hits the floor, dead leg. And he’s laying on the floor.

He said to me, ‘I looked up at the ring and I saw this massive Cuban heavyweight stood there.’ And he said, ‘I realized in that moment that I had to get back in the ring, because if I didn’t it would let the demons in.’

And another instance of when he talks about the demons more specifically was on his story about the treadmill. He goes, “If I’m running on a treadmill and I get to mile nine and I get complete cramp in one of my legs and I know I’ve told myself I’m going to run 10 kilometers today, he goes, ‘I will have to limp the last mile even if no one’s watching because I can’t let the demons in.

And if I let the demons in, they’ll show up in the 11th round of a championship fight when there are 50,000 people watching me in the audience and I know deep in my self-story that I’m the type of person that quits when things get hard, because I got off that treadmill at mile nine when no one was watching. It would modify my self-story.

The commitments we keep to ourselves and what we do when no one’s watching is the most persuasive evidence that governs everything we then do every day thereafter. And for me, this was a huge revelation in my life because you know you can look at certain people in your lives that are struggling in certain situations, and oftentimes it’s a result of continually unkept commitments to themselves.

Yeah, I don’t know anybody who has done extraordinary things that isn’t keeping their word in that way, right? Consistency doesn't guarantee that you're going to be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you're not successful.

Let me unpack this; some people are remarkably good at keeping commitments in some areas of their lives and hopeless in others. So they'll have kind of dual self-esteem.

They'll be incredibly, you know, confident and secure in their work, but in relationships or whatever else, they'll be ground zero. And I’m very much one of those people that has areas of my life where I have immense commitment, and you’d say, “I’m such a disciplined person,” and then other areas of my life where I res—being hypnotized out of sugar, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I actually haven’t eaten sugar since as well, so it did kind of work.

I have no desire to have sugar anymore!

Hell yeah, so no, I know exactly what you mean. And this is something—how you do anything is how you do everything—is a lovely quote and a lovely idea, but it piles an awful lot of pressure on you, right?

And it’s very easy, especially as we said, it’s more socially acceptable to be our own biggest critic than our own biggest complimentary. Given that if you mess up a little bit, that can quite quickly spiral. “Oh, I—Chris said that I shouldn’t check my phone before I go for a walk in the morning, therefore it means that I might not as well go to the gym, and I might as well break my alcohol streak,” and I’m—you know, all of these other things.

Finding this balance of being robust enough and delicate enough with yourself to say, “Okay, I know that you tried well. Let’s get back on the horse again tomorrow.” It’s a delicate balance, right? Holding yourself to high standards whilst also being sufficiently supportive.

And this is the same in business. It’s not—you don’t break trust when you don’t do what you said you were going to do; you break trust when you don’t do what you said you were going to do and you don’t own up to it, take responsibility for it, and point it out.

So in business, there are often times where you say something to your team, and for whatever reason, mitigating circumstances, that thing can no longer happen. Trust isn’t broken at that point; trust is broken when you then don’t sit in front of your team and say, “This is why this didn’t happen.” And at the same, I think applies to yourself.

You’re going to miss some things in life, but taking responsibility for it, staying empowered, and not saying, “Oh, I couldn’t do that because” or “I needed to,” “No, it was your priorities,” “It was the priorities and the decisions you made.”

So when I miss my commitments, the saving grace for me is I go, “I did that. That was me. That was a choice that I made.” And if it’s a choice I made or didn’t make, it’s a choice I can make in the future.

What you see in that chapter is you see alibis of responsibility; you see blame, you see excuses, and you see disempowerment in the form of language like, “I couldn’t because…” or “I needed to…” or “which I think is scary language.”

What’s the difference between parrots and practitioners? Just something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I’ve observed the most successful, intelligent, creative, innovative, apparently original people in my life and people that aren’t even in my life, and the consistent thing amongst all of them and in my businesses is that those that are truly exceptional and that over any extended period of time, when you zoom out, achieve disproportionate levels of success, start with this kind of boring drudgery of obsession over their craft driven by this deep passion and curiosity.

I mean Jimmy Carr is a prime example of that. Leaving his potentially lucrative career to go and tell jokes for no money for ten years. Derren Brown left a great potential career and pathway to becoming very, very successful in a sort of typical sense to go and do card tricks on a table in Bristol.

Everyone’s story, when I—people that I admire, that are the masters of their craft, were these deep practitioners. And then you have this other type of person, which I call kind of the parrots, where they observe these people in the learnings that these people have given them, and they kind of just regurgitate what they’re hearing, but they never do the time to practice it, so they never get to that deeper level of understanding.

And as they say, you know, to learn something, you read about it. They often say to understand something, you write about it. For me, I think to understand something in this context, you do it, and you do it in this iterative pattern for many, many years, and your depth of understanding once you’ve done something is unparalleled, and that’s the foundation for great creativity.

You see it with Fred again. What a guy, man! He’s, in my mind, he’s an absolute genius; he’s a [__] savant. For those that don’t know who we’re talking about, Fred Again is a classically musically trained DJ who’s put his hand to like tech and house music, I suppose, but will also happily get up on the roof of his flat in Hackney or wherever it is and play a completely solo set classically on piano keys. You see the conviction of that and you see the first principal nature of his work where he’s doing something we’ve apparently never seen before.

Of course, he’s taken inspiration points. He’s using equipment that was already made before he was born, but he’s pulling the pieces together in new ways, and that’s what creativity is. And that kind of creativity belongs to people that have gone right down to that first-principal level you’re talking about—Elon Musk, you’re talking about your Kanye of the world and Fred Again, where he’s pulling things together in different ways and expressing himself without the constraints of convention.

That’s what pioneers and practitioners do, and parrots can never do that because they don’t understand the seafloor; they just play with the boats on top of the water. There’s a quote that I’ve fallen in love with: "The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding."

Yeah! Dude, the magic you are looking for is in the work you’re avoiding. And every single time that there is something in front of me that I feel like things aren’t coming my way sufficiently quickly, I’m not making the progress that I want, it’s because I’m [__] about over here. And there is a large frog in front of me that I need to eat.

I need to spend another half-day reading a book; I need to spend some more time researching online and upping my skills in this particular area. I need to do whatever it is. Can I—? You know what’s interesting is most intelligent people I’ve met, the most successful people I’ve met as entrepreneurs and practitioners never really read books.

Even in Elon Musk of the world, I know he watches movies and stuff. He gets his inspiration points from many areas, but thinking about the great CEOs that I’ve met and the great founders and the great artists I’ve met, there’s almost a, you know, I think I said this to you earlier on, that knowing too much can be a real disservice to innovation and creativity—like knowing too much information.

Whereas this sort of practitioner pathway, where you naively stumble through new territories, seems to be more conducive to the real pioneers. I wonder whether that’s the curse of knowledge in a way. You familiar with this?

Yeah, Stephen Pinker’s idea of the curse of knowledge—that when you start to learn things, you can’t understand that other people don’t know it, and you also lose the learner’s mind in some regard. Which is you’re not lucky—like you said about coming into this room. There’s a million bits of information that you could be focusing on, but you’re not focusing on those; you’re focusing on the ones that matter.

And I think that when you start to kid yourself that you know what you’re talking about, you’re no longer quite as open to these new ideas. I would say the difference—our industry—what we largely traffic in are anecdotes and insights, right? And they can come from experience. But I also like exposing myself to new ideas from other people, and the quickest way to do that—actually no, this is a lie. The quickest way to do that would be to permanently be going for dinner with interesting people, but that’s like an unsustainable life.

It would be like two hours of dinner with Douglas Murray, then Jimmy Carr, then Steven Bartlett, then it—like that would just be my existence and I’d just hear, “Oh yeah, and that’s cool,” and “Oh yeah, what about that?” and “Oh, I’ve never thought about this before.” Like that would be the way I’d do it, but in lieu of living this perpetual dinner life, reading books is a good second for me.

Yeah, it’s a good second. I just think about the things that I couldn’t even express in words with my vocabulary that I know about the art of marketing and human psychology and why people do what they do—the experiences that are all fundamentally intertwined in the mistakes that I made in the journey of getting there.

Now in a book, I might give you like the four paragraphs, but the rest of the iceberg is the foundation of the thing that sits on top of it. And you think about podcasting. We both came into this industry, I’d say, fairly late compared to like the rest of the industry, right?

But because of that, there’s a naivety to it which allowed us to do new things because we didn’t read the book. I think some of the radio industry is struggling with that transition. Dude, you’re seeing it in America. The late-night show hosts are trying to pivot from heavily scripted, heavily supported by writers and a production team and researchers and all this stuff, and then you put them down in their garage with a MV7 bus-powered microphone in front of them, and you realize, oh, like these people don’t have any skills beyond being able to be very good at reading the script.

And that’s a massive skill—I couldn’t do that. You put the script in front of me, I’m going to fall to the floor. But yeah, what’s the takeaway here, though, for someone listening to this now, and they’re a young person and they’re at the start of their career, or even if they’re not necessarily a young person?

For me, the takeaway is to go and fail at something that’s high-value in the future as soon as you can, with the least amount of potential cost to yourself. It’s like to go and practice. If I had kids now, I would tell them to go and join an AI startup that’s well-funded. That’s what I’d tell them to do.

A small group of people where they’re going to be close to the information and the evidence, and I’d tell them to go fail in a high-value future industry. That’s the thing I would do. If you want to be a master, but then okay, they have to pick an industry that they are innately passionate about—not that you won’t go for a decade with Fred Again or Jimmy Carr or Derren Brown’s curiosity if you don’t.

You’re not innately captured by that thing. But I think we are looking for cheat codes. I think much of the reason why people probably listen to our stuff is where we want the three tips: how can I growth-hack my personal development?

You meet anyone like you; you meet Jimmy or you meet Darrin, and you go, oh, 15 years, no money, and busking—the pal. Think about this. I wonder, and I ask myself this question a lot. I wonder how much of the development that we really value in ourselves isn’t because of our own agentic, highly sovereign approach to marshalling our own life?

I wonder how much of it just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older. You know, this was going to happen anyway, and maybe I sped it up a little bit, and maybe I can, you know, create a nice story about why it happened.

But the most wise people I know, it’s very rare that I meet somebody who is much older than me that doesn’t have wisdom that’s come along with it, which suggests that wisdom is just there for the ride, right, as a byproduct of aging. But, yeah, I would say takeaways from this: aim to focus on executing.

So the four disciplines of execution, really interesting analogy that’s used. The word “strategy” is in the top 10 of all LinkedIn words in bio descriptions, and “execution” isn’t even in the top 1000, right? Because it’s much easier to strategize than it is to execute.

But if you—this is a term—you can tell people that really know business when they use it. One of a few terms, talking about someone being a real operator, right? You go, oh, okay, say no more. Like, I know they’re someone that will get things fixed, right? That they’re able to take charge of whatever the challenges that are in front of them.

And our mutual friend George Max has got this beautiful idea. I’ll ask you this one actually. So the way to work out who the highest agency person in your life is—have you heard him do this before?

No? Oh [__], brilliant! Okay, so you are trapped in some South American jail, right? And you’re about to be transported somewhere where no one’s going to be able to get you back. Let’s say Colombia, Argentina, somewhere, right? You have 24 hours and you only have one phone call to ring somebody to come and get you out. Who’s that person that you ring?

Oh, Prince William! (Laughter)

Right, okay, I feel like you’ve broken the game a little bit there. I don’t think that was perfectly fair; do you know my framework, though? It was find someone that is both a smart and influential member of the royal family, yeah, and that cares enough about my predicament.

Yeah! So, but that—the framework that you come up with there is if you don’t know the future king of England, is someone that is able to think on their own, that doesn’t need instruction, that is going to be able to solve problems at a very high level under pressure, very quickly. You know, just all of the things that you want in a friend.

Yeah, it’s so true! And it did—you whittled it down to five people instantaneously in my head, and I was deciding between them, but I thought I don’t know if they can pull enough levers.

Yeah! Prince William!

Yeah! You’ve got an idea that’s kind of similar—you must become a plan A thinker. Yeah! And just on that last point, it just popped into my head then—I think what I’m saying here is that no matter what you’re aiming at over the next ten years in your life, I think this horrible realization that bucks the trend of every Instagram quote you’ll ever read or every course you’ll ever buy is that the fast way is the slow way, because the slow way is the only way.

Like I stood behind Fred Again this weekend as he did his show at Ali P to 10,000 people, or whatever it was, and I’m looking at this guy going I want to do that; I want to be able to do that. But my better sense from interviewing all these smart people knows that it’s not a case of me doing a quarter; my brain now goes, are you willing to put 20 years of silent, boring drudgery and obsession into doing that?

My brain goes no.

So separate out the aspiration from the adir. I’ve got to show you this; I’ve got to show you this. So Mark Manson put this quote up a few months ago, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it: “The most important question you ask is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”

Anything worthwhile is going to require some degree of pain and struggle. So if you’re oriented toward the pain and the struggle, you’re probably going to be more aligned with what you’re capable of accomplishing rather than if you just orient towards the pleasures.

So good! Because we say find the thing which you enjoy the most, but really what you’re finding is what is the pain you’re prepared to swallow the most? Nothing worthwhile is going to come without discomfort.

You know, even for me—and you love doing the show, love speaking to all these interesting people. People get to fly around the world and all, but I would be lying if I said I love writing show notes or doing research in Guatemala airport at 3:00 a.m. because I’m on a delayed flight and I’ve got a flight, I’ve got an episode tomorrow. Like, it’s grind; it’s grind that I care about, and it’s grind that I can do that other people couldn’t do. But it’s not not grind, right?

This goes to the discipline equation, which, yes, you might be—I’m familiar!

Glad! Hit it! Hit it, because that really embodies it, that Mark Manson quote about the pain you’re willing to encounter.

I was figuring out why there are some areas in my life where I’m disciplined and other areas of my life where I seem to lack discipline. Kind of what I was saying earlier about being a dualistic type of individual. And I came up with this discipline equation that I’d love to interrogate with you because I’ve not thrown it at enough people to know that if it’s true or not.

So, discipline equals the importance of the goal plus let’s just say the importance of the goal to you, so the subjective importance of the goal—how much does that goal matter to you?—plus the psychological enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal, right? So as you pursue the goal, how psychologically enjoyable or reinforcing is that for you?

Minus the psychological cost of the pursuit of the goal. So I can run you through some examples. Simon Sinek said to me, “Well, Steve, I take the bins out at 7 a.m. in the morning. Yesterday I didn’t want to do that, but I did it.” So I go, “Okay, let’s run that through the framework. What would happen if you didn’t take the bins out?”

Under that sort of underpins and defines the importance of that goal? Well, he’d get a fine, and he’d end up with an overflowing bin out the front of his house, so the why is high. The psychological enjoyment of pursuing taking the bins out is very low, right?

And the friction of getting out of bed at 7 a.m. is high. But thankfully, the why is so strong that regardless of the fact that the pursuit, the enjoyment of the pursuit is low and the friction is high, the behavior still occurs.

Going to the gym, learning to DJ—in all areas of my life—I can run it through that equation and go, okay, so in the pandemic, the reason I’ve been going to the gym for three years straight now is because my why surged. The percept of the importance of that goal surged.

I saw how our existing health correlates to our health outcomes and I realized for the first time in my life this clear thought that I couldn’t unshake—that my health is my first foundation. It is this table that everything I love and care about sits upon. So that has to be my number one priority, reflected in my schedule.

So that changed; that went up. The psychological pursuit of going to the gym is kind of enjoyable; there’s a bit of a dopamine release there, and it’s fun to do that! It feels good for my self-esteem. And the friction associated with it is low unless I go to a gym where people know me and I spend the whole time talking.

Then what happens if I’m put in that situation? So I don’t go to the gym? The discipline equation changes. So part of the reason I made a big investment in a company called Until is because I can have somewhere I can work out and focus on the workout genuinely. That’s one of the things that actually changed my relationship with the gym.

I nearly threw me off the habit. The psychological cost was that, so how does that sit with you? It does. There you go, you’ve got the discipline equation!

Death Time and Discipline. Yeah, what’s the death part? So like when I started writing that particular chapter in my book, to understand discipline, you have to understand the scarcity of time. Because, you know, so I started because I was going to write a chapter about time management. People want to know how to manage their time.

And as I went through the hundreds of available time management techniques, I realized that the productivity techniques—the time blocking, all this one, two, three, four, the ABCs—the reason why there are so many time management techniques is because none of them work unless you have this underlying thing called discipline.

It’s the same in the fad diet industry. That industry will always churn out new things because there’s an underlying issue, which is discipline. So it’s kind of a mirage industry. So the chapter pivoted and started focusing on discipline.

Well, the next thing was time. Why is time important? Round the numbers. If you’re—how old are you now?

35.

Okay, so you have, if you reach the average age of an American, you have just over 177,000 days left to live. And I think all of that goes to show that time is the currency we’re playing with in every moment of our lives.

It’s a sense point of our influence. I talk about the roulette table of my life. It’s the frame I think through where we wake up in the morning with these 24 chips. If you spend eight hours sleeping, you wake up with 16 chips left, and how you place those chips on this roulette table that sits in front of us just before the wheel spins every day determines all of our outcomes in our lives.

So I’ve chosen now to put to allocate two chips to this little piece here called fitness. The roulette table spins, and I get my returns. As I went down that chapter, I realized that in the context of time and death, and time management—the most important question to answer, the fundamentalist discipline—is how can I allocate more of these chips to the things that are in line with my values?

Where does this thing called discipline come from? If it underpins everything we do, it even underpins what you just said there with Fred Again in that Mark Manson quote. The reason why Fred Again is doing that is because his discipline equation is in line.

If for whatever reason you just tipped any part of that equation, you could knock him off that discipline. Yeah! With my DJ equipment, was on the floor of my spare room, I did not DJ; use it. The minute I put it on my kitchen counter and had it one button away from being able to practice at any given moment, I put it right in front of me.

Same thing for any creator. If you’re starting to do a YouTube channel—and this is a life hack here! Do you remember—you might have had this in your house when you were younger—radio infrared remote sockets. It’s like a single remote, it’s like 10 bucks on Amazon, and you leave the wall socket on at all times and you run it through one of these additional sockets and then you plug your [__] into that thing, and it’s like 10 bucks, right, on Amazon.

My entire studio at home is run through one of these, so I go in and I just press one, two, three, four and everything comes on. Because when I was first starting out, it was super effortful for me to set up the camera and I’m going to do the thing, and I’m already trying to learn to do YouTube and it’s terrifying and I’m looking into this black lens and it says precisely the same as your DJ kit can’t be on the floor if you want me to practice as much as possible.

Make it in the way, put it in the way of things. It’s almost harder for me to DJ than it is for me to avoid it if it was on my kitchen counter. So I would sometimes be going into the kitchen to eat something and just, oh, press the button, and just I’m off! Four hours later, I've just done a four-hour DJ practice.

Yeah! If you think about, give me something in your life you’re disciplined at, and we’ll run it through the equation. Something you’ve shown great discipline at?

Recording the podcast.

Recording the podcast! Does it really matter to you? Yes. Is there psychological enjoyment from the pursuit? Yes. Is the friction high?

What’s the level of friction?

Four out of ten.

Four out of ten? But if we added up the first part of the equation, how much does it matter to you out of ten?

Ten.

And how much—what’s the psychological enjoyment of the pursuit?

Nine!

So I’d say we’re about 19.

Takeaway four!

And because it’s positive, the behavior will occur. You can do that as a minus four, right? The behavior will occur if at any point the friction gets really high and for whatever reason, if the pursuit of it or the why behind you know, the subjective meaning behind it falls, the behavior will not occur.

I’ve heard you do this with your meditation practice, yeah.

Yeah! Exactly why I’m not meditating!

Yeah, exactly! My why isn’t strong enough. I haven’t quite had the psychological enjoyment from it as well. Sometimes we need a little bit more pain, right? It’s a robust way to frame it, I guess. If Alex was sat here, he would say we might say a lot of people are driven by pain rather than pleasure.

Right, 100%! And that’s the why part; the chip on your shoulder accounts for so much. It can account for so much, right? You know, somebody who had really bad periods of mental health, they suffered with anxiety attacks and it lost them something, or somebody has scorned them and they go, “Oh, okay!”

And then they decide to commit themselves to mental health and improving the texture of their own mind; that’s coming from a place of wanting to prove other people wrong. Well, whether someone is driven or you being dragged is impossible to tell on the surface.

And I’ve sat in my podcast over and over again and asked people, “Are you driven or are you being dragged by something?” When I say dragged, I mean some kid on the playground at seven years old told you you’re a scumbag and you’ll never be anything, and you’re poor.

And then that’s dragged you, that insecurity and that shame has dragged you to entrepreneurship, into becoming a millionaire. Driven is what Gary Vee describes to me, where he says his mother loved him so much and she encouraged him so much that he had that drive to prove her right.

Whatever force it is, it comes down to why, which is the start of the equation, and in T of shame as aid, the only black kid in an all-white area, pretty much the poorest family in our street. Definitely, a dilapidated house in the context of a wonderful area—deep shame and insecurity about not being enough drove me like you, like I was an obsessed hungry dog for—it’s still doing it now in the back room somewhere.

You know, one of my favorite quotes I’ve heard from you recently is this: “I was riddled with fake ambitions. My ambitions were fake; they weren’t ambitions, they were insecurity.” Most of our lives are dragged by insecurity and shame; they’re not driven by ambition, and it’s a tragic truth that most of us are going to have to have our ambitions and our narratives fail us before we realize that they’re illusions and mirages and they’re false.

100%. And I have a belief sometimes that a lot of people disagree with, and I think this is typically one of them because people want to take control over their success. They want to have that sort of power over it.

But I remember sitting with Eddie Hearn, and I remember what Will Smith said, and they can all very clearly articulate the reason for their motivation and their drive. They live in a world where every media reporter will say, “Oh, you’re so amazing! Tell me how you’re motivated every day.”

It’s not the case. I actually question how much choice they have over that motivation. In the case of Eddie Hearn, he lived in the footsteps of his father, Barry Hearn, who pulled up to school in these Rolls Royces. And he was known as Eddie Hearn’s son; he’s competing with his father. He’ll say it. I’m driven; I’m dragged by the insecurity of being Barry Hearn’s little son, and I want to outdo him.

It’s the same with some of my other billionaire friends, and it’s the same with Will Smith, where he’s being dragged by that insecurity and shame. So the key thing, because that’s not always a bad thing, right? In every context of life, it might make you arrive at financial freedom sooner than others. But you just want to make sure that you’re cognizant of it.

At least in my life, I realized at about 24 years old—all right, let me interject; when we had an offer from a very big company to sell the business, I went home that day and I googled mansions and Lamborghinis on Auto Trader.

And I looked into that screen and felt a deep sense of emptiness, like I’d been betrayed by somebody, like someone had lied to me. And it was true; someone had lied to me. 18-year-old Steve had told me that that would fix everything. And as I played out it arriving on my doorstep, I realized that I would be poorer if I bought it—some—I’d lose something; I’d lose my company and the community and the love I had, but I’d lose something else.

Then I went through this six months of existential crisis of like, “Okay, so if it wasn’t for that, if we weren’t obsessing like a dog, what the [__] was I doing it for?” And my fear—this woman came into my office one day and she said to me, “Just imagine for a second you have everything you’ve ever wanted.”

She goes, “Because the truth is you do.” There’s no goal that you haven’t completed that you need to complete to be worth more. And I remember walking away and thinking, “What a load of rubbish!”

Two years of dwelling on that thought and I arrived at this conclusion: I think because I was scared of this idea that losing my drive would lead to no ambition. But it’s very much the opposite. Losing your insecurities and your shame that are dragging you doesn’t dissolve your ambition, it dissolves your fake ambition and creates room for your real ambitions that are internally intrinsically motivated.

So instead of wanting a Lamborghini and a mansion, I wanted this whole set of other things. When I realized that the Lamborghini and the mansion were never going to make Steve Bartlett worth more than one Steve Bartlett, I deeply in me, I genuinely think part of me thought that if I got a Lamborghini and a mansion, Steve Bartlett would be worth two or four Steve Bartletts.

But your currency is one of one. And so in that moment, once I’d realized that nothing was going to change the intrinsic value of me, I could focus on things that I would do regardless of that perception of value fluctuation, like starting a podcast or learning to DJ or doing a musical up and down the country or joining a psychedelics business, just to learn for a year about mental health and psychedelics.

And the funny thing is, if we think about Fred Again and Derren Brown and all of those people that achieved mastery from a decade of dedication, that’s also the path to real mastery when you’re not being dragged.

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The thing that’s interesting to fold in here that I think is useful: Most people have more pain than they do anything else, especially when they’re starting out.

I don’t think when you very, very first begin a pursuit, you’ve got this perfectly balanced desire to maximize your guy and show up in the way your logos being spoken forward is supposed to. It’s not people took the piss out of you from being different in school, or your parents didn’t believe in you, or they coddled you too much or you don’t feel like you were given the opportunities that you should have gotten or you failed yourself or other people failed you.

That’s [__] power, right? And you know what it can be as well? It can be a tiny thing, a throwaway comment about lunch money. “Oh yeah,” and that taught you a story going back to what we said about evidence about money and other people, and that has just dominated your self-story for the next three decades—a story you learn about money.

So I think that that fuel is toxic, especially when used for a long period of time, but I reckon you can get a good five or ten years out of it. And I think that to get yourself past the activation energy to go and do something in the very, very beginning, it’s all well and good for you or me to sit here and say, “Ah, you can find the balance in the way that everything works.”

Like we’ve been through that fire; let’s neither of us kid ourselves about what got us here in the first place. It was [__] resentment—right? I had a desire to prove everybody that had ever picked on me in school, every person that thought I wasn’t going to amount to anything, everyone that had ostracized me socially; I wanted them to regret that decision.

Don’t get me wrong. And it’s only been after a long, long, long time of realizing that actually if it wasn’t for the fire that they’d given me, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now, which is a place that I’m incredibly proud of. So I should thank them!

Oh, that’s a [__] interesting realization. And here’s the risk though, and what I came to learn is it will take you somewhere, that drive, but it’s not guaranteed to take you to happiness.

And the obsession of being dragged by an insecurity like the one you’ve described and the ones that I describe is so overpowered that it might mess up your priorities. And I think at a deeper level, humans, regardless of their—we need these fundamentals to be happy. We need that sense of connection; we need relationships; we need all of those things.

And in my case, I work seven days a week in that Bloody office. I would come in even when I didn’t have anything to do because there was a deep sense of sort of self-esteem associated with my work. The cost was, I didn’t speak to my family for two years. The cost is, like even as I sit here, I haven’t spoken to my mom for months. Like we’ve fallen out. The cost is, I have a very small group of friends.

And the cost is I’ve spent years struggling in relationships. And I’m now 31; I’ve managed to get in a relationship and reprioritize my life urgently. But the cost I see in a lot of people I meet is, okay, they’re successful in one of nine metrics of happiness, and I sit there—I’ve sat there with some of my close billionaire friends; they got all nine cars that I’ve ever dreamed of turning up outside, and they tell me at 4:00 a.m. by their indoor pool that they’re deeply unhappy and ask me to sleep in their bed with them that night because they’re lonely.

I don’t disagree! I don’t disagree that if you scale this for long enough, it’s not good for you, right? But it is so potent at getting that activation energy in the beginning.

And just don't kid yourself: you can find the balance in the way that everything works, but you’re still gonna need to lean into the unfounded beliefs of others that might hold you back. So barriers; but as human beings, we are indeed flawed creatures.

But allow me to close with a quote from Jerry Seinfeld: “It is the only truth and the only way to live; if you can make a mistake, sit down and eat it.”

Oh, dude, you’re gonna die!

Thank you very much for tuning in! If you enjoyed that episode with Steven, then press here for the full-length three-hour long podcast with Alex. His mind-blowing new ideas will definitely complement your daily life. Go on, press it!