Steven Bartlett
This week on the pod we’re joined by Steven Bartlett, the self-made 27-year-old CEO of Social Chain, a leading global media agency, which he started at just 22. Jake and Damian delve deep into Steven’s unique philosophy, hearing about his relentless self-belief and entrepreneurial mindset.
TRANSCRIPT
DAMIAN: Yeah, that question does often intrigue me, Steven, that um, that idea of “How are you clever?” So Howard Gardener’s argument is that, he tells what the multiple intelligence is, and some kids are physically gifted, some are verbally gifted, some are socially gifted, physically gifted. You’re somebody that checked out of education at 18, and then have gone on to be phenomenally successful without it. So tell us more about that.
STEVEN: Yeah, do you know I really love that question “How are you clever?” Um, because it's something that I've looked back on my life and tried to answer, and I'm really cautious of giving a egotistical, arrogant answer shines too much light on my own skills and ability. Because I know the role that timing and luck have played in the success of the business that I run now. And timing and luck weren’t there on my first business, um, but they were on this one. But looking back on my life, so expelled from school when I was 16 for not attending, my attendance had hit 30%. And the reason why I was expelled and wasn't going to school was because I was preoccupied running various businesses. One of the businesses was for the school. So I was responsible for all the school trips, um, and events for sixth form, when I was 16. I was doing the consent forms, finding a city to go to, a theme park, handing out writing, collecting the money for school trips, um, to the point where the school had given me a whole wall in the school just to advertise events or things that I'd come up with. I also done all of the, the deals for the vending machines in the schools because I'd overheard a conversation between a girl called Kylie Stokes and Natalie, who were the heads of the sixth form, where they were trying to find which vending machines to buy. And I interjected and said, we don't need to buy vending machines. We have 2000 paying customers in students in this school. They should be giving us vending machines for free and giving us the profits. So I went to the, went to the, uh, computer room at break time. By lunchtime a guy had showed up in our school who’d got one of my emails, with a tape measure just to measure them. Turns out the email that stumbled into the hands of the CEO of that business who, uh, went to a school and was looking to give back. And so still to this day, the deal we have is we make money from all the vending machines in the school, and we got them all for free. I was doing all of these things, but they still expelled me because, on one hand I was entrepreneurial, on the other hand I was a misfit because I didn't fit into, um, their idea of what a good student or success looked like. How am I clever? Hard question. Not good at math, not good at English, not really good at anything as it relates to school. My grades were so bad that I forged the grade certificate. So that's probably the…, my dad's just found that out. But the certificate I gave him was forged because my brothers were all straight “A”. So I felt bad. I think I have always believed that I could. And that, as a force for learning new things and making yourself seem smart, is remarkable. That as a force for achieving things and putting yourselves in situations that you're not qualified to be, in is unbelievable. So if there was one thing I’d say it's that I always believed I could, even when there was no reason for me to believe such a thing.
DAMIAN: That really fascinates me because, having worked in sort of like deprived areas of Manchester, which is where I'm from, one of the things that often intrigues me is a quote from Mother Theresa, where she says the real tragedy of deprivation isn't the physical deprivation, but it's what it does to your hopes and your dreams and your ambitions, because if all you’re surrounded by misery, that's all you assume life has got on offer to you. So, as a 16 year old boy, you know, interloping on these deals for vending machines and organizing trips abroad and things like that, where did you learn you could?
STEVEN: So this is a really interesting question as well because typically you think that something good happened, and then I developed this self-belief, but I actually think it was the opposite. I think by about 10 years old, my mum got so consumed with running her businesses, which all failed and still fail to this day - for 20 years it made our family completely bankrupt.
DAMIAN: What were those businesses in?
STEVEN: She would try this, she would try anything. So she would, she tried a hair salon, and the problem my mother always had is, someone could walk in and tell her that the grass was greener for people running corner shops, so my mum would be like, OK, I’m going to open a corner shop. She'd go and try and do that as well. The hair salon would fail. And when the business of her corner shop started to get tricky, she'd be influenced by the grass appearing to be greener elsewhere. So for 20 years she just started 20 different businesses, and it ruined, it ruined our family. It ruined our childhood. Our house was a, I’ve said on my podcast - the front of it had smashed windows for a decade and a half, in a middle class area. And this is probably the real psychological thing, which I never really go too much into, when you're the only black kid in a school of 1500 white kids in a countryside and you're living in a middle class area, but your house is, the grass is six foot high at the back and there’s fridges in the garden, and the front of your house is smashed, and you're arriving to school in a beat up horrible car that has door hanging off it, the sense of inadequacy that creates, and the hunger to be like everybody else and to be normal and to have money becomes this driving factor. That's not necessarily a healthy thing. But, um, that coupled with the fact that my parents were never, my dad worked in London which is four hours away. My mum was so obsessed with running her businesses that she slept on the floor of her shops, meant that there was this void of independence. Everything I was going to have was a direct result of my own life, and I was so hungry to have it because I felt so inadequate that off I went into the world at 18 years old, writing in my diary that I was going to be a millionaire before I was 25, a Ranger was going to be my first car. I was going to have a girlfriend - because when you live in such a house, you can't get girlfriends by the way - um, and that I was going to work on my body image. This was all because I, when I reflect and like, there was something missing in me. I was inadequate.
DAMIAN: That's the lesson that a lot of people come to later on in life in terms of recognising this locus of control, that if it's going to be, it's down to me.
STEVEN: Yeah.
DAMIAN: And you’ve learned that very young.
STEVEN: Because when, when you wake up in the morning, and all the kids around have Rockport shoes on, and you look around and no one is going to give you Rockport shoes. You're not going to get anything for Christmas, you're not gonna get anything for your birthday. So how are you going to get these Rockport shoes that you desperately need, to fit in, because you're already black and have curly hair? So Rockports are more important to me than anybody, but no one's going to give them to me. So you start selling shit on the playground. And I started selling cigarettes and I started selling sweets and I started doing things that maybe weren't so good to get money. And so my locus of control came from the fact that I realised very early that nobody was going to do anything for me.
JAKE: You know, what I think is really interesting here is a word that I didn't even realise was important to success until three or four months ago. I went to see a CEO of a big multinational corporation that turns over about 3 billion pounds. And I foolishly went to ask him to be on the board of Whisper Group, right? And he said, listen, I'm the chairman of this huge company. I can't just come and be on your board, but you know what, the fact you've, out of the blue, called my PA, come in and met me and then asked me to be on the board shows you've got the single most important thing I think that you need for success, which is courage. And when I hear you talking about being the black kid in school, standing out, having people walk past your house, going who lives there? Ah, that's that guy Steven from school. And then the next day you get up and you walk into the school playground, you walk in to the classroom, you take the responsibility to find your place in that environment. The one thing that, the one word that keeps standing out to me of that is courage. And I don’t know whether you realise how courageous you were to keep doing that.
STEVEN: I've probably never thought of it as courageous because it was survival, right? To me it was as a kid, you were just trying to survive.
JAKE: Now, look at everything you've done since then, to the point where you're sitting here now, and reframe it with courage.
STEVEN: Yeah, it is. It's a good word, but you don't realise that you’re being courageous when you're trying to survive. You can't be consumed with the thought of courage and bravery when you're just trying to survive and get through and fit in. And um, it wasn't until I was 18 that I find all of these character traits that I built from survival allowed me to like release all of those people from a past life that I’d tried so hard to fit in with and then go after being Steve, go after who Steve could be. And that foundation made me think that I genuinely could do anything, and this is the belief I have now. I genuinely believe I can do anything. And in fact, my favourite quote is those who think they can, and those who think they can't are both usually right. Because when I look back at my life, I'm like, there's no real reason I should be here other than the fact that I knew I would be - simple as that. I knew I would be. My diary that everyone in this, you know, everyone in my company’s seen, and everyone that follows me has seen says that I was going to be a millionaire before I was 25, not I would like to be, or, “I was going to be”. There's no other version of this life that I was going to lead.
DAMIAN: Well, there's something very powerful that, isn’t there, about feeding that into your subconscious and because your subconscious doesn't understand the difference between future and present reality, which is why we can, our worries can often appear very real to us cos we’re anticipating things…
STEVEN: Yeah, of course.
DAMIAN: …and yet you've harnessed that in a positive direction, rather than make it a worry. You’ve fed into your unconscious mind this idea that, I am going to do this with a sense of certainty.
STEVEN: There was no doubt in my mind…
DAMIAN: So do you still do that now, then Steven, do you still blight your diary now with these projections?
STEVEN: I don't, I don't write goals down that I want to achieve, because they're so internalised, they’re so clear in my mind I don't need to write them. I don't need to wake up in the morning and say to myself in the mirror, I know where I want to go in my life, and I cannot see another ending to my story. If this doesn't go how I want it to go with my life, the great things that I want to accomplish, then I actually don't know what else to say to that sentence, because that's the only thing that's going to happen in my life. And I’ve felt that the whole time. I don't know where that comes from. When I think about belief and self belief, often people will tell you, Oh, you just believe in yourself. Wake up in the morning, say your affirmations. But that's not how belief works. And I've, I've said a few times that if I got your, your parents, and I held a gun to their head and said, I'm going to kill them unless you believe that I am Jesus Christ of Nazareth, there's nothing you could do to, to believe that, because that's not how belief works. So just telling someone to believe in themself is just wasted words and naivety. Belief for me is something that you build based on evidence. If I suddenly turned wine into water, you might start to believe that I'm Jesus, and you have to build that evidence within your own life. Because of the void of my, my childhood and my parents not being there every day I was building this evidence that Steve, you wanted Rockport shoes, and look, you've got them, and the thing that drove that outcome was you. So I did all these small things which are compounding in belief. So now I think, Steve, if you want to go to the moon, could you make that happen? 100%. My brain doesn't go, oh no, this isn't possible. What if I fail? My brain goes like, what's the path of there? Not, it there a path there? What is the path there? It's definitely possible. We just need to figure out how to get there. And I think that's, that's my advice to people that are lacking self-belief is, it's really about building evidence in your own life by taking these small steps every day. And, and Jake talked a little bit about this, which is just, you know, just do. And that's how I think you build belief. I spoke in front of a couple of people when I was 16. It went really badly. I was shaking so much that I couldn't, read what it’s saying. And you fast forward 10 years of me just doing that. And I'm on stage, you know, in Brazil with Obama for 15,000 people. I'm doing arenas in Barcelona with 9,000 people. How did I get there? Just doing, you know.
JAKE: This kind of comes back to the fact there's no secrets, right? There is no secrets. So there'll be people listening to this now who hear you talk beautifully and passionately about your self belief and they’ll think that's great for him, but I haven't got lot. Um, he knows, he obviously knows something. I don't. That's the other thing to really say to people is if you're listening to this and you don't feel, and not many people by the way will be listening to this with your level of self belief. Like, that is remarkable. Even I wouldn't say I believe like, like you really believe. It's fantastic. But those people that are listening and they think, ah, he’s got it, and I haven't, what do you say to that?
STEVEN: Okay. You said, you said that there'll be people that are listening that are thinking he knows something I don't. What I would, my rebuttal to that would be that it's not that I know something you don't necessarily, it's that I did something you didn't, which was I put myself a little bit outside my comfort zone at some point, and then I failed or succeeded, and I carried on going in that direction. And so it wasn't that I was born with this great wisdom, or that I could even speak like this. I couldn't speak like this. This is all, uh, my 10,000 hours in doing this every day.
JAKE: It’s learnt.
STEVEN: I wasn't articulate, I couldn't spell. I still can’t spell to be honest, cos I've, I've not done my 10,000 hours. I can’t do maths. I sound so smart now. And people are like, Oh you must've been born like this. My mom can't read or write. She still can’t read or write. I remember being 12 years old and teaching her how to read the Bible. I don't come from there. But I did. And so this is one of the big things that I'm always scared of, is people looking at me and saying, Oh he's smart or he knows stuff. It’s, I know this stuff because I did, you know, when I started. And I learnt, and I got a little bit better. Then the next day I got a little bit better. But if you take it back, you know, a decade and a half, I was holding a piece of paper in front of 40 people, my hands were sweating so much, and the piece of paper was shaking so violently in front of them that I couldn't read the words. So I remember just making up the words. That's the journey I've gone on just by…
DAMIAN: But then that’s a really interesting relationship with failure as well, because I think picking up on Jake's point that there’ll be people here that would do it and would fall over, would have that moment of shaking and stop at that moment, and go “I can’t speak. It's not for me”. What’s your relationship with failure like then?
STEVEN: It's a, it's a lot easier to, to accept failure, when you’re so unnegotiable about the outcome that you want to achieve. I would rather be trying and failing than concede for a life that wasn't true to who I wanted to be. So failure is, it means very, very little in that context because when you have no choice and when you're so clear that you don't want to live the same life your parents lived, watching my parents scream each other for six hours a day as a kid was miserable. I didn't want to be miserable. So what is failure? Failure in fact would be the concession. Failure in fact would be leading that life. Everything else is an attempt to success. You've really got to understand what failure is. For me, failure was getting a nine to five job in a miserable working environment and not being able to go holiday with my kids and screaming at my, my partner about money. That was failure.
JAKE: You’re totally right about reframing what we think of failure. Like if we all, if the three of us went to the gym, right. And I said, right Steve, get the 25 kg and try and do, er, eight curls. Right? And you managed six. What would we say? F*** me! Well done, man, you managed six on 25 kg, and that's heavy. That's failure, because you've got to the point where you can't lift anymore, but we look at it and go, wow, well done, that's great. Because we've been trained in our minds to think that that type of failure is a really good failure. Whereas if you can look at every failure in your whole life - business failure, relationship failure - and look at it like that, like you’ve found your limit. So next time instead of six you're going to do eight, or instead of your business failing on this occasion, next time it's going to succeed…
STEVEN: Yeah.
DAMIAN: Well then that's what fascinates me. That that's innate in you. That's almost organic. You've learned that through experience, whereas…
STEVEN: You know what it is, I've always, I've always said that I was very, very logical. I remember when I sometimes think logic beats intelligence to some degree. I remember this, this really example from when I was younger and we were working in my Mum's restaurant, which was one of the 20 businesses. And um, we got tips, me and my, me and my two brothers, and they’re mathletes, which means they're the top 1000 in UK mathematics, like geniuses, rewriting the textbooks. And there was, the tips were thrown on the table. And I looked at the tips, and my brothers were there, like, calculating, let’s add it up. And I looked and I saw that there was one of each coin three times. So I thought let's just all take a coin. Do you know what I mean? There was three 50ps, three 1 pound… and there was three of us. So I thought let's just all take one coin. I, it was almost this moment where I thought my brain looks at something in a very logical fundamental way, not necessarily the most intelligent way. And sometimes when you look at things just from these like logical first principles, you're able to see much clearer. I think the same thing applies for my business. It's why I quit my first startup. Because if you looked at it very logically what was happening with our first company, there was a bigger opportunity elsewhere, but nobody else could see that. So I quit at 21 years old and started Social Chain. Same at university to be honest. Arriving at university in my first week to study business because I thought that university was this place where they teach you actually business stuff and how to run a business and how to be a business person. And in the first week looking across the room and seeing everybody sleeping on their desks and the guy at the front saying, we're going to learn how to make a poster here. And me asking me these really fundamental questions, which is, if I'm going to be an entrepreneur, who am I going to show this degree to? The second one is, I'm going to end up in the same place with the same certificate as this girl sleeping on her desk, and is that going to work for me or against me? And so I only ever went to that lecture because I had made the decision that I get very like, impulsively, or very logically that this wasn't the place that was going to get me to where I wanted to go. So I dropped out, straight after that lecture, never went back.
JAKE: And I think that is a really good lesson for, you know, probably the same as you, a lot of people will come to me on social media and say, I really want to work in TV, I've just started a media degree. What’s your advice? My advice is always the same. Don't expect that media degree is going to get you a job. Be different to everybody else, and if anyone listening to this that is at this point where they're looking for - they may be 18, 19, they're looking for their thing - my advice is always don't do what 16,000 other media students are doing every year, which is leave university with a degree, go for an interview and go, there's my degree. Find thing that separates you from everybody else, write stuff for free for your local paper, record again and again and again, you either to camera if you want to be on a the telly, or using a microphone if you want to be on the radio, and then go to your friends and ask them to be searingly honest about whether it's shit or whether it's good, and keep on doing it. And then when you go in for your first interview, instead of just saying, well like everyone else, I've just done the same route, you can say, well I've done this off my own back. This is what I've done. This is what separates me from everybody else. And that is absolutely the biggest lesson I think, isn't it? If you're like everybody else, you end up where everybody else is, yeah?
STEVEN: Yeah.
JAKE: What do they say? The final mile is the one that gets walked the least?
STEVEN: Yeah.
JAKE: Cause everyone stops.
STEVEN: Yeah.
JAKE: I would love to know what the culture is like at Social Chain, because I listen to your podcast, right? It's challenging. You ask hard questions, right? You put me as a listener of your podcast on the spot. Are you like that to the people in Social Chain? Is that you every day?
STEVEN: Yes, yeah, I'm very, very clear in what I believe and what I think we should be doing even if it's not been done before, if there's not a road map or a reason why. There’s like an innate sense of logic to me. And if you walk into Social Chain’s offices in Manchester, you should know within five to 10 seconds that this is a uniquely different place, a place that isn't built on convention.
JAKE: How is it different?
STEVEN: I mean, I mean you walk in there, there’s a hundred metre jungle where birds are singing, people are happy, people are walking around doing whatever they want. There's no hierarchy. You wouldn't know that I was the boss. You have no idea. I sit wearing my cap, in my shorts with the interns, you know, unlimited holidays. You don't have to tell someone when you're booking off a holiday and explaining the rationale why you're doing that because I don't have to do that. So why would anyone else have to do that? There's this kind of like sense of trust, which is innate in the company where if you need to pop out today, and you don't come to work, you don't have to explain yourself to somebody. You know, I, I, this has all come from this, and there's a f***ing massive slide and trees and 15 dogs running around and um, there's a happiness team. So there’s five people that work in the happiness team. There's a Happiness Director. Eh, we pay for your mental health therapy and we have, you know, between 15 and 20 people seeing the therapist full time. Everybody has a therapy appointment, including me, that's opt out, to de-stigmatise it. So I go to a therapist, if I don't want to go, I have to opt out.
DAMIAN: Which sounds like an intriguing place. But how do you decide then who gets into that?
STEVEN: So one of, one of the real, probably the most important thing about working with Social Chain is, and this is why I hear the manager say, Oh, they’re a real Social Chain person. And what they mean by that is like, they're a nice human being. They're not manipulative, they're not in it for themselves. They’re a kind, nice human being. And it doesn't take long in an environment of nice human beings, where nice human beings are doing the hiring, for someone to stand out as not a nice human being. I hate everything, and I will not allow anything which is like if you put a post-it note on the fridge saying “Who stole my milk?” or if you post into a group chat at Social Chain saying, “Who's taken my pencil?” This is like, this is my kryptonite. Everybody knows this. So there's none of that. So it's the reframing of what that moment was, someone took your pencil because they were doing work for the company, right? They’re not selling it on eBay or trying to stab your family with it, you know. So that kind of compassion and that empathy and that kindness is the foundation of this environment. And then from that, if it's a nice place to be, you can trust people, and you don't need to give them shit if they’re 10 minutes late for work or an hour late for work. You can trust, cause you know that they'll, they'll, they like being here. And that's kind of the way that I made it, probably because I couldn't work anywhere. And so obviously when I'm constructing a business is, I need to build somewhere where Steve Bartlett would work.
JAKE: But you still need high achieving individuals that have driven and passionate
STEVEN: Of course, of course.
JAKE: You can't just fill a business with nice folk.
STEVEN: Yeah. I mean, that's the other point which is you need to be talented.
JAKE: How do you instil the work ethic, by example?
STEVEN: I guess that’s probably the way. You can't tell anybody to work hard. That doesn't seem like a good approach to take. But there’s a culture of trust and, and hard work, and getting the work done. And that's, that's how Social Chain’s always grown.
JAKE: See, I remember talking to Rio Ferdinand about being at Manchester United, and I was really interested in how a new signing, or in your case a new employee at Social Chain, understands the way it works. And I remember saying to Rio, it's like you know what did Sir Alex Ferguson used to say to new signings at Man United, and he looked at me kind of perplexed, and went “He never said a thing about that”.
STEVEN: Yeah, it's the culture, right?
JAKE: We were the players. We set the tempo in that dressing room, and you would be welcomed in with open arms. It would be, you’re a Man United player. We'd be watching like a Hawk when they put the shirt on in training for the first day. Is this player good enough? Can they mix it with us? And the whole agenda was set by the players. When Owen Hargreaves signed for Man United, half time whistle went and he started walking off towards the tunnel. And one of the players ran past him and went “Owen, run into the dressing room. We all run into the dressing room. You don’t show the opposition you’re tired. Get in the dressing room.” And he was like whoa, man. It never was mentioned by the manager.
STEVEN: I think, I don’t know this is it, but I think it was mentioned by the manager - 20 years ago.
JAKE: Yeah, and then it becomes the…
STEVEN: the culture.
JAKE: Because culture has to come from somewhere.
STEVEN: It does. And that kind of culture comes from a leader who is sure. And what ha, same with Social Chain, I probably was involved operationally in the headquarters in Manchester five years ago when there were six of us, and I was very, very clear – to, to, neurotic, obsessively clear - on who we are and what we do. And then a seventh person joined, and then an eighth person joined. And when the culture is strong, the newcomer becomes the culture. If the culture’s weak, the culture becomes the newcomer. Right? So at Social Chain we’re super clear on what we are, in what a Social Chain person is. So now I'm five years in, I don't have to tell people because they're joining 200, in the case of the global business 700 people, that know. So if they fall out of xxx, Katy Leeson our managing director will say, that's not what a Social Chain person does. We established this years and years ago. And I no longer need to say it because now my disciples per se are, um…
JAKE: That's a big number though for creating a culture, 700 odd people, isn't it?
DAMIAN: Well, there's interesting research on that, isn’t there, that says that we can only hold in our heads a heads 150 people at any one time. Then after that the culture then starts to get disseminated. So how have you sort of bridged that…
STEVEN: Good question.
DAMIAN: … to get beyond that 150, and make sure the culture lives?
STEVEN: So when you think about it as a global business, they are cultures within each country. So like the Social Chain in New York team, there's about 50, 60 people there. They are, the culture’s perfect. We actually score it. We asked people various questions about the development, the happiness, the people they're working with, and they’re like a nine out of 10, on average. In the UK it's a little bit bigger. So it's about an 8.3 out of 10, and as cultures get bigger, we do see a little bit of a decline. But it's kind of like microcultures. So I don't think any one team is more than a hundred people. I'm very conscious of what you're saying. I'm conscious of the fact that things get a little bit too diluted at a point. But the happiness team has been a revelation for us.
DAMIAN: I see your role as being almost symbolic then, that you have to lead by example there because you're can’t go and speak to all 700 people, getting into the detail that you were when you first launched it. You spoke about your diary, and you shared that diary with people, of your ambitions and things like that. So what are the symbols of the culture now that you embody when you lead by example?
STEVEN: Do you know, I think this is really interesting. There's almost a parallel between a conversation that me and Jake were having about the, about social media and abuse and, and the Caroline Flack, um, um, tragedy that took place where a platform or an environment can bring out the best or worst in people. And it's actually the, the infrastructure, the way that the environment is designed that brings out that certain darkness or toxicity in someone. And it takes me back to when I was in San Francisco building social networks when I was 21 years old, with Michael Birch who was the founder of Bebo.com. I remember building a little social network where on one hand during the day my users would do very normal things. There would be teachers, nice people, lovely people. Then when they went home at night, they would be vulgar. And it was the same person. He would go home and expose himself. And it made me think that, you know the creepiness and this, this, this, these horrible things are in all of us, right? We're all creeps, in the right context. In the context of this social platform, it was because it was anonymous that he was being so vulgar at night time. And I think about the same thing with social media. The reason why people are, how they are on social media, and so toxic and disgusting, isn't because that's the full entirety of their character. It’s because of the environment. You are rewarded with likes and follows and retweets for cussing someone out, and going at a celebrity, because then you're, you know a tough guy. And also the algorithm, uh, magnifies that which has already been magnified. So, indifference and indifferent messages, of me telling Jake he has nice, he did well today, it's going to do nothing. I'm not incentivized to do that. I'm incentivized to rip him apart. And I think about the same in company culture. I'm not able to be there and tell them what to do. But I can create an environment which is conducive with kindness, where kindness is incentivized, where every single Friday we have a massive wall, which is just the wall of thanks. And we go off it. You pick something off, you start in front of the team and say, Jenny, here's a bottle of Prosecco. Um, thank you so much for helping me with my finger when I cut it in the kitchen. And you can create an environment where kindness is the thing you're rewarded for, not bitchiness. And that is a lot of my job. I can remind people on the walls. We have things written, and I can, I do my broadcast every month called Full Disclosure. But it's, it's, it's focusing on the environment that you're putting those people in. I can make the same people be arseholes, I guarantee it, if I change the environment.
DAMIAN: So again, when we go back to that belief thing, so I love this idea. I mean one of the big arguments that I often make is that people dismiss what you're describing as soft skills. And my argument is it's the soft skills that lead to hard results – that being kind creates an environment where people then go the extra mile and things like that. To take you back to your childhood in Plymouth, and you were clear that you didn't want a nine to five, you didn’t want that frustration, of a life like that. Where did you learn that kindness gets you results?
STEVEN: There's a few things. You have to be in a situation where someone was somewhat unkind to you. I remember a few occasions, and they were all in early jobs that I had where I was working in call centres and someone could be so mean to me or leave a passive aggressive note about something I’d left out on the side, and the impact it had on me and how much it made me hate work. The other thing was, I could do nothing about it. When you're an employee, especially a junior one, you can't complain about someone above you. You know, you have no control. So when I have, the, finally have the chance to do something about work place bullying or that kind of thing, I have a “no tolerance” approach to it. No‑one is going to do it. No-one is going to let me know that it happened and everybody knows that that works for me. There's no passive aggressiveness. In fact, it sounds pretty crazy, but if someone posted in one of our internal groups, even now and there are 700 odd people around the world, and they say eh, “Which thief stole my pencil?”, I will, I'll call you, no matter where I am on planet earth I will call you.
JAKE: What would you say?
STEVEN: Can I ask you why you said that? And explain to you that callng your colleagues a thief, even if it was a joke, is not what we do here.
JAKE: Can anyone live a high performance life?
STEVEN: Great question, that I've never thought about! It would be a lot harder for some people. I think that your early childhood and what happens to you, and maybe a genetic element, makes it slightly easier for you to deal with the consequences of living a high performance life. I think some, in some respects, I'm somewhat diseased. I think the way that I, I'm able to operate is, is it is some kind of like mental illness.
JAKE: Are you happy?
STEVEN: Yes. Yes. And um, I realised quite recently that I've always been, but I didn't think, I didn't think I was yet.
DAMIAN: So how did you reframe that?
STEVEN: I thought, again because of my upbringing, that I couldn't possibly be happy until I was filthy, filthy rich and on private jets. And then it was the day where someone came up to me and said, “We'll buy your business for tens and tens of millions”. I went home, went on Rightmove, Autotrader, on my mother's life. I loaded up at Rightmove and Auto… That's 18 year old Steve showing up to get the rewards that he worked - he thought he was working hard - for. And just feeling this total sense of anti-climax, and almost looking at these things and thinking, do you know if I buy a mansion in the countryside I actually think I’m going to be poorer in a sense. Then going through about six months of saying, so what were you doing all this for? You know you were doing it for something, but you had told yourself you were doing it for material rewards. What was the, what was the actual reason? And then when you come to terms with the fact that you'll never get there, your question becomes the case, so this must be there. And then I started to realise that in fact you, you, you were as happy now as you were when you were 18 stealing Chicago Town pizzas living in Moss Side in Manchester. You were as happy then as you are now. And as Jake said when he came on my podcast, that nothing has changed. And in fact the only thing hanging over you that might've made you miserable was the thought that you couldn't possibly be happy cause you haven't got there yet. And then, okay again, when you realise that there doesn't exist, and there is, if you think that there is some place in the future, it’ll never be where you are now, you know, you're, you're forced to, to, to realise that this is it, and this is great, and I'm enough and I have enough. I'm as successful as I need to be, and I just need to fill my life with more things that make me happy.
JAKE: There’s one thing I think about, right. I remember listening to a podcast of yours once where you spoke about, you've been pushing for success so hard, you’ve sacrificed relationships.
STEVEN: Yeah.
JAKE: Right. Are you single at the moment?
STEVEN: No.
JAKE: Good, because do you know what, I, and I firmly believe as we sit here now and we talk about, you know how lucky we all are now, and how blessed we all are and how well things are going, right. It all ends. And I am an absolute firm believer that what is left at the very end is your relationships. Don't do all this at the expense of relationships, because that will be a regret, I think.
STEVEN: I completely agree. It took me a long time to realise that. Maybe I've only realised that in the last 12 months, and now I’ve started to evangelise about it. I’ve tried to tell all of my little, the hustle porn stars that I think are following me in my wake, to not sacrifice their friends, family and girlfriends.
JAKE: Listen, we always finish with some quick fire questions. Nice and speedy. Three non negotiable behaviours that you and the people around you must buy into?
STEVEN: Optimism, kindness and resilience, I'd say. Yeah, I say resilience because people think of the xxx as being xxx. That’s not how I see it, is being able to handle when things don't work out the way that you might have wanted them to go, but keep moving forward regardless, not being defeated by what happens to you, not becoming what happens to you.
DAMIAN: So what advice would you give a teenage Steven just starting out?
STEVEN: You were right, when you thought that you could, regardless of grades and regardless of not having the silver spoon or anything, you were right in that. Yeah. And that actually didn't matter. What mattered more wasn't your material circumstances, it was the circumstances of your mind.
JAKE: How important is legacy to you?
STEVEN: Not that important, to be honest. That's not to say that I don't want to help as many people as I can. But legacy, I'm okay with dying, and never being here again. How did I feel a hundred years ago? Great. I was dead then. So I don't care about like, I don't care about death, I don't, I, I'm like, I have this great thing, this opportunity called life. Do my best, and then my time will come and I'm dead. And do I care about statues when I'm gone. No, I won't be here to see them.
DAMIAN: So what one golden rule would you pass on for our listeners, that are interested in living a high performance life?
STEVEN: I think it would, it's heavily inspired by the time I've spent with Jake Tate, which is just that really all of your goals and all of your ambitions and everything you might want to achieve, live in believing you can and making it one tiny step in that direction. Sometimes it feels like ambitions and goals are like a big mountain. And they are in many respects, but the mountain has moved one like small pebble at a time. And that's the, that's the way way to get there. And honestly, it's all, it's all about your mind and your thoughts. So instead of trying to work on, you know, moving the world, I think you should really work on building evidence in yourself and getting more positive in your thoughts by taking one pebble away at a time.
JAKE: What a lovely way to end. Thank you so much.
STEVEN: Thank you so much for having me.