--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It is such an honor to be able to spend some time with you, and I want to just start by acknowledging you. You're thinking, what are you acknowledging me for? I'm going to tell you what I'm acknowledging you for: for your commitment to making your life better. I know that's why you chose to listen or to watch this today.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. And thank you for being one of those people that is a force for good on this planet and for making the Mel Robbins Podcast one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world. I'm Mel Robbins. I'm a *New York Times* bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on confidence and motivation. I'm on a mission to inspire and empower you with the tools and the expert resources that you need and that you deserve so that you can create a better life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Today, we have an awesome expert. I'm really excited about this person because this is somebody I really admire in business. You often write in and you're like, "Mel, who is it that you look up to?" You're about to meet somebody that I really look up to in business. You and I also talk a lot about the importance of having people in your life that are doing things that you want to be able to do, and studying them, and following them, and learning from them. Somebody that I look to all the time when it comes to business and podcasting in particular is a guy by the name of Stephen Bartlett.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now that name may be familiar. He's a wildly successful entrepreneur. I'm going to get into that in a minute, but he is really well known on a global basis for hosting a podcast called *The Diary of a CEO*. It is hands down the number one ranked podcast across Europe. It's climbing the charts here in the United States. It dominates globally. I study this guy. I've learned so much from him, and today you're going to learn from him. We are going to talk about the art and science of decision-making.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm going to get into Stephen's credentials in just a minute because they are crazy impressive. But let's just pause and consider the importance of the art and science of decision-making and why this matters to you. Stop and think about your life. Your life is the sum of your decisions. If you want to create a better life, then you're going to have to make better decisions. If you just keep doing what you do now, ten years is going to go by and nothing's going to have changed. There is so much power in your decision making.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In fact, research has proven that you and I make about 35,000 decisions a day. Let me put that in context. That's like taking a soccer stadium and putting a decision in every single seat. That's what you do every day. Here's the thing about decisions: decisions are kind of like dominoes. They tend to trigger the next one. That's why you're sitting on the couch and you only intended to check one thing, and next thing you know, that one decision led to three hours of doom scrolling. We're not going to be doing that. I'll tell you why. There are tools that you can learn and use from some of the world's best thinkers and most successful people on the planet to help you make better decisions.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You're going to learn some of those tools today, like the 51% Rule. That really is going to help you if you struggle with perfectionism, self-doubt, and overthinking. You're also going to learn about the two different types of decisions, the speed of decisions, and something that my friend Stephen Bartlett lives by. He calls it "first principles." So let me tell you a little bit about my friend Stephen Bartlett.
--:-- Mel Robbins: First of all, this guy's only 31 years old, and one of his companies was valued at $600 million. You know the popular show here in the United States, *Shark Tank*? Well, the British version of that show, Stephen was the youngest judge in the history of the show. He's also a serial entrepreneur who advises and sits on the boards of so many global brands. He's going to tell you today and teach you the direct connection between the decisions that you make and improving every aspect of your life: your health, your relationships, your business.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The other thing that I love about Stephen is that his story is so wildly compelling. We're going to begin the conversation with his story. Stephen grew up so poor that he was stealing food, a fact he was hiding from his schoolmates. He dropped out of college to start his first company. He has so much to teach you, not only based on his own life and business experience and success, but also based on the wisdom that he has gained from interviewing hundreds of the world's most innovative, influential, and successful minds in business, sports, science—all of it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One of the reasons why I admire Stephen so much is because you know how you can tell from afar when somebody is literally in a class of one, meaning that they are the very best at what they do? That's Stephen, because what's very clear to me is that he's doing things his way. Here is what I want you to take away from today's conversation: you need to learn how to do things your way. You have your own unique story to tell and your own genius to share. In order to unlock your full potential, you have to learn how to make better decisions. Decisions that align with what you want personally, decisions that align with your creative and business instincts, and decisions that help you become more of yourself. Wouldn't that be awesome? You better believe it's going to be awesome. So let's jump into the conversation I recently had with Stephen Bartlett.
--:-- [Transition to interview]
--:-- Mel Robbins: First of all, I know you don't do a lot of interviews. I'm thrilled because selfishly, you are somebody who I really admire. If there's a pace car in personal development, you're it. This interview is a huge gift for everybody listening, because I am just curious about how you think and how you make decisions and what, to use your word, drives or drags you. I personally think anybody listening at any age could take what you're about to teach us from your own experience and apply it to the beliefs that are holding them back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One of the things I find most fascinating about you is that you experienced a lot of very challenging and painful things in your childhood. Yet somehow all of the challenges that you faced as a kid have fueled success in some way. I'm so curious to understand how that happened.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Someone once said to me there's two things no one wants to be in life: not enough and different. I think at some level I felt both of those things, so that was certainly a belief that I had. I also was firmly believing in the social narrative that we are not moldable, that our destiny is kind of pre-prescribed for us. I started to pull apart all of that BS that most of us are conditioned with. We all grew up in the same relatively same system of education and the same society. It programs us, I think, to limit us.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: One of my great passions in life now is that I firmly, deeply believe that people are operating at 1% of their potential in all facets of their life. I'm desperate to tell them that. I'm desperate to show them that. I can't tell them, but I can encourage them to take that first step into a situation where they'll be exposed to counteracting evidence. That is my mission: to push people off the cliff so that they can figure out that they can actually fly, in a world where society has made them disbelieve in their own wings, per se.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Since so many of the folks listening are not going to know your story—they know the accolades, but they don't know your story—I would love for you to just talk a little bit about how this all started.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I moved to the UK from Botswana when I was a baby. We moved to an area called Plymouth in the southwest of England, which is an all-white area. It's a relatively middle class to lower middle class area with some areas of poverty. You understand the value of everything in life by the context in which you see it. The context in which I saw myself was we were the poor black family in an all-white area. There must have been 1,500 kids in my school. We were pretty much, from what I recall, the only black kids in the school.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Confounding that was my mother is Nigerian. She came to the UK, can't read, can't write. I think she left school when she was five or six years old in Africa. She starts working on a stall, moves to the UK because she meets this white man in Nigeria. She underwent a ton of racial abuse in the area. By the age of about 10, our life completely flipped because my mother had a, what I can only describe as an addiction to gambling—the lottery, whatever. If I opened any drawer in our house when I was growing up, every single drawer was full of lottery tickets. She would steal my maths book when I walked in the door and she would stare till 3:00 AM in the morning going through it, looking for numbers to then play in the lottery. I would lose my textbooks to my mother because she was trying to find some secret code within these books.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Although my father has a good job and we live in this nice area, all the money goes. We basically get to the point of bankruptcy. That's when things I think start to change, because she spends all of her time in her corner shop trying to make money, trying to start businesses. People are breaking into the corner shop at night to abuse her and steal her stuff. She decides just to sleep in there on this bag of rice in the back room. At 10 years old, being the youngest of four kids, I think my parents just assume that they've parented all the kids as parents sometimes do. The youngest is kind of like, he's 25, 24, 23, 10—like they're done. By the age of 10, if I woke up, there was no one there. When I went to bed, there was no one there.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: So you have these two forces in my life. You have a huge amount of independence, which comes from my parents' absence. Then you have this huge amount of shame and insecurity because I'm the only black poor kid that I know. I'm chemically relaxing my hair to try and be a white person. I'm stealing stuff to try and buy the shoes that my friends have. I'm going to great lengths to try and fit in, to the detriment of a lot of things in my life. None of my friends know where I live because I lie about where I live. None of my friends know I don't have birthday presents or Christmases because we just lie about that. There's this subtle sense of shame in me. That shame drives me.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I so desperately needed to find ways I could fit in that I can control. One of them was trying to find ways to have nice things with money. I remember very early on, like at six or seven years old, going around my school looking for money. That meant waiting for my teachers to leave the classroom at three o'clock, hanging around, and then going through every single drawer in the classroom. I was desperate. I'd take that money, and if it meant going down to the sweet shop so I could pretend I had the same sweets as the other kids, I would do that. It was a desperation.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: One of my friends said to me back then, they said, "You're either going to be a millionaire or in jail." I remember where I stood when he said that to me at seven years old, because I was that desperate. If I need money and if I think money equals fitting in and belonging, then I'm going to sell everything in the house. I'm going to start businesses at 12. I'm going to sell the cigarettes my mom brought back from Nigeria in those black bags in the spare room. I'm going to do whatever I can. From those experiments, you end up building a ton of evidence about yourself. I just had a different perspective on the world.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: By 16, I realized that grades weren't going to get me where I needed desperately to go. When you realize that the system is telling you success and happiness is a result of getting an A on that exam that you can't get an A on, you have to find another path. For me, the other path was: if I can persuade all of my peers in this school now to buy a ticket to this thing that I just came up with, or to come to this website I just launched, or buy coffees from this machine that I just put on campus—these are going to be the adults with me. So when we're all adults, I'll just do more of that. That was my reasoning. With that, I felt safe not to come to this school anymore. So I stopped coming. My attendance hit 30%. They expel me.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I take the expulsion form to my head teacher. He says—and I've been back to the school multiple times, he's been on national TV to confirm this in the UK—he said, "You're my little Harry Potter. I keep you under the stairs because you've made this school a lot of money. So you're un-expelled." Then in the last week of school, they expelled me again because I just wasn't coming. By then I had so much evidence that I didn't need this system.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's the part that I just find mesmerizing. There are so many stories of people who have an experience of "I don't belong, this isn't working, I'm not good at this anyway, nobody cares." Instead of going, "I'm going to just do whatever I can to climb on top of this situation in order to control it," that's what you did. But so many other people in that moment go light up the blunt, or they start drinking, or they don't go to school ever again and just start down the path of "I must be a loser." Your parents are here, and you didn't do that. It doesn't sound like.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It's hard to take credit for something that's always come so naturally to you. What comes naturally to you? Questioning if what I've been told is the truth. One of the prevailing principles of my entire life, my professional life, everything—it's so natural to me to assume that things I'm being told aren't actually the truth. The systems, the society we live in, the institutions, the narratives that surround all of the above—I just naturally don't accept that. That means that you go the extra distance to find out what is true about the existing systems. Is me getting D's and E's on these exams mean I'm going to be lonely, poor, a failure? I didn't accept that to be true. I did a piece of work, which was the experimentation in my own life, to find out if those systems were true.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It turns out when you push on most doors, there's really nothing behind them. I think most of our experience is a bunch of social myths, a bunch of doors that we just haven't tried pushing on yet. At a very young age, I started pushing on those doors. When you start pushing on all of them and you realize that there's nothing behind them, they lead to nowhere, I think it develops into a habit where you start questioning things a bit more. You start questioning social norms about you have to do this at this age, you have to go to university, you have to pursue a career, quitting is for losers—all of these narratives. Turns out most of them are BS. It is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping life's greatest rewards.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to just jump in and make sure you were really paying attention at that very last part, because this is critical. Stephen has always naturally questioned if what he was being told by the adults is the truth. Just stop and think about that. Can you imagine if you did that in your own life right now? I'm talking about questioning all the things that you've been told that are true, whether it's big or small in your everyday life. Just imagine for a second if you ask yourself: Is it really true that I'm too old to go back to school? Is it really true that I can't eat healthier? Is it really true that I'm never going to find love again?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's what you're going to find as you start to question the truth. What you tell yourself is that you can see that the truth could be of your own making. As you start to question it and you say to yourself, "Wait a minute, is it true that I'm not a morning person or that I don't have enough time in the morning?" All of a sudden you're going to say, "Well, wait a minute, why can't I get out the door every morning and take a walk? Why can't I get up 30 minutes earlier and start the day in a much more empowering way?" That's just one tiny example. This notion of questioning what you believe to be true is just your very first takeaway. There is so much more in store for you, but we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors. Then we're going to pick right back up where we left off.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Stephen is going to explain that once you start questioning, "Is this even true?" next, he's going to teach you how he started to figure out the truth for himself and why you need to do the same thing. A little later, we will be jumping into those tools, like the two different types of decisions, the 51% Rule, and the speed of decision-making. So stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. I'm so glad you decided to keep listening, because today you and I are talking about the art and science of decision-making and how you need to learn how to make better decisions. You're getting a masterclass in this from somebody I deeply admire, and that's Stephen Bartlett. We were just in the middle of the conversation where Stephen was sharing about his childhood and how it just came naturally to him to start to question what all the adults were telling him. So let's drop right back into the conversation with Stephen.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: You start questioning social norms about you have to do this at this age, you have to go to university, you have to pursue a career, quitting is for losers—all of these narratives. Turns out most of them are BS. It is in taking them on that you find yourself reaping life's greatest rewards. This has just developed in me over the years. Now I believe that the answers I'm looking for in my life probably won't come from books, systems, teachers, and schools, because the world is changing at such a terrifying rate. They will come from tuning in to how I feel in certain situations after trying some stuff. Put very simply.
--:-- Mel Robbins: If I had to synthesize the difference between how you coped with that situation and how so many of us cope—which is to tune out or to numb out or to just create a narrative in our mind of "Well, this is it. I guess I'm just a loser. I guess my parents hate each other and they hate me and nobody's going to be there for me"—you develop this really unique skill. This is what I really want to explore. There was something in your need to survive that situation. Nobody's home, older siblings, not doing well in school, the only black kid in your neighborhood, lying about this, that, and the other thing. You develop this unbelievable skill at a very young age to tune into how you felt in the moment and to actually trust it.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Yeah, that's accurate. I always thought I wasn't the things that the system said I was. I thought I had loads of talent and potential. I thought I was different in a good way. The system told me I wasn't. When you put a kid in an exclusion unit and you make him copy from a piece of paper over and over again for hours, you make him look at a wall, and you give him this report card where you grade him every day because you think he's naughty—I just thought the system was wrong and I thought I was right. I became very good at tuning into that voice.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It's one of the things that I think is the most liberating thing for anyone who's looking for answers to do. Instead of searching for answers in books and on podcasts and all of these things, take a second and just ask yourself, "How do I feel?" This is a lot of what you talk about as well—your body will tell you long before your brain will. I heard you say this on my podcast, which is exactly the way I always view it. We are all born with this internal signal called intuition. I just call it "how you feel." As we grow up, we're almost brainwashed by society to tune out of that voice, which is there, and to tune into this external voice, which is "how you should feel."
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: The "how you should feel" voice says: you make a million pounds, you have a nice car, you should feel like this. So we tune into that and we let that voice guide us. But it just guides us to nowhere good. It guides us to midlife crises. It guides us to health breakdowns when our body starts to rebel against the decisions we've made. I've developed through trial and error the belief that how I feel should also correlate to how I act. In the short term, there's a shedding. There's a mom stops speaking to you for two years. There's a you lose a friendship group. You might end up in the exclusion unit in school. But if you can persist, if you have the belief that that internal voice is actually guiding you to somewhere you should be, where your health and happiness is, then you will create a life in a very short amount of time that very closely resembles the one you've always dreamed of.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: If you're very bad at tuning into that voice, you'll live with this sense of hopelessness and stuckness. If you spend too long tuning into the external voice, which comes from your parents, from school, from Instagram, from university...
--:-- Mel Robbins: See, can I point something out about you that's really interesting? You have known this since you were little. I just had this insight about you: you have been at war internally with what the world was telling you how you should feel and knowing deeply that that's not how you feel about yourself.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: That is the story of both my childhood and my life. It's just that belief that most of the obstacles that stand in front of us are self-imposed. There's this incredible video I love watching whenever I need to watch it as a reminder of these self-imposed limitations. I don't know if you've seen it. They take an ant and they put it on a piece of paper and they draw a circle around it. Have you seen that video?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and they draw a circle and it just literally walks in circles. It stays inside the circle.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Right. So they draw the circle around it and it stays inside the circle. They've drawn it with a pen. Objectively, you look at it and go, "That ant isn't trapped. It just believes it is because they've drawn this sort of limitation, this figment of its imagination, this circle around it." They do the same thing with a spider in this other video. As they're making the circle smaller and smaller and smaller, the spider accidentally steps over the pen line. Then they try and trap it again with the pen. For the rest of that spider's life, it can never be trapped by the pen again. They chase it down the table, drawing circles around it, and it is free.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It's the same thing I'm describing. Once you see behind the curtain and you realize that most of our limitations—yours and mine—are both these figments of our imagination that we've accepted to be real and true and to stand in our way, and that they're false, there's very little that can take you back to that place. But how does it happen? You have to step over the line.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. When I hear you talk, I'm like, push my ass off that cliff. Let's go. Tell me where the circle is, Stephen, because I want the light bulb moment that you have that is part of the belief system that you have cultivated and that you over and over and over and over again demonstrate with how you show up in life. So let's take a couple scenarios. Yesterday in the airport, a woman walks up to me and says, "Mel, could you do a show on finding purpose in your 20s?" I said, "Sure. What do you do for a living?" She said, "I'm a banker." I said, "Well, what do you like doing?" "I love being with kids. I'd love to be a teacher." Obviously it's very easy to say to somebody that you've just met, "Well, duh, then stop being a banker and go be a teacher." I do feel that the reason why somebody wouldn't quit banking is they're afraid of what other people would think. Here we go. So what they've done there is they put the most important goal that any of us can have in the world below someone else's opinion. That is the problem.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It all comes back to what is the most important goal for all of us. I would argue that the most important goal that we can all aim at is our own happiness. Happiness is such a strange word, so I'm using it intentionally ambiguously. You can define it for yourself. But I think that should be the North Star. When that is the North Star, anything that stands to compromise your chance of happiness is the greatest risk of all. So you are, by way of that decision, a huge risk taker. You are the biggest risk taker.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, because you're staying in banking and it's a huge risk.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Yes. Go and speak to people that have zero days left. You've got it exactly wrong because the biggest risk is staying in banking. The biggest risk is not what people might say when you leave banking. The biggest risk is doing another decade in banking and looking back with the retrospective clarity that you had your priorities all wrong. You cared about Sally and Jenny's opinion in the WhatsApp group, not your own happiness. You had one life to live. That breaks my heart. That's what I observe in the world. I observe people overstaying their welcome for decades in situations and risking the most important thing.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Palliative nurses like Bronnie Ware talk about this when they interview people on their last day of their life. The number one regret of the dying is they wish they'd lived that life. They'd gone and been the entrepreneur. They'd taken those ballet classes in Peru. They desperately wish they could have one more day to do it. I'm not going to risk laying there with those regrets. You can if you want to gamble that much with your life. I'm not going to do it. I'm so attuned to the fact that I'm going to die someday. When you really understand that—that's why there's a sand timer on the shelf behind you. There are sand timers all over my house. It's the reminder that, by the way, buddy, your time is ticking away. You can't see how much you have left. That gives you the required urgency to take on big challenges, to quit quickly, to leave situations that are compromising your health and happiness, and to go in pursuit of yourself.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: When people ask me, "You're 30 years old, you've started all these businesses, you've done all this stuff," I go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm not going to risk my happiness."
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'd say more than almost anybody I've ever met. I don't know you very well, but I just watch what you're doing from this side of the pond. I've listened to enough of your interviews and read your books. It is very clear that your superpower is in making decisions that you know are right for you and trusting yourself in that—trusting yourself in the decision that you're making and trusting yourself in your ability to face whatever comes next.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Two things came to mind when you said that. I was reading about Jeff Bezos, who built Amazon, the second most highly valued company in the world, worth a trillion or something. In one of his shareholder letters, he says there are two types of decisions in life: Type One decisions and Type Two decisions. Type One decisions are the doors you can't walk back through. Take your time on those ones. Like me resigning from my company. But most decisions in life are actually Type Two decisions, which are doors you can walk back through if you were wrong. Most of the things that we end up mulling and ruminating over and worrying about are Type Two decisions. He says make those decisions as fast as you possibly can. That's how you could get to where you want to go faster in life and in business.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I also thought of Barack Obama, who I spoke with on stage many years ago at this event in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was recounting the time he was faced with the decision to fly to Pakistan with those two Apache helicopters with about 50% certainty that Osama bin Laden was waiting in that compound. He was risking two Apache helicopters of American lives. He says on the big decisions in life, you have to get to 51% certainty, or as close as you can, and make the decision with the peace of mind that you made that decision in that moment with all of the available evidence. You have to let it go. Because we all know in life that the 100% certainty on these big decisions that everyone's seeking only exists in hindsight.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to take a highlighter and repeat that line. That in life, 100% certainty on big decisions only exists in hindsight. And you've had that experience, haven't you?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Where you look back and you say, "Oh God, I wish I would have," or "If I had only known." But here's what Stephen's trying to get you and me to understand. The information that you have now, you didn't have back then. If you had it back then, you would have made a different decision. But we're not talking today about making different decisions. We're talking about how you make better decisions.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And here's what you have to understand. You will never have 100% certainty and you cannot wait for it. This is what I'm going to now refer to as the 51% rule. If you're somebody who is constantly overthinking or worrying or doubting yourself when it comes to making decisions in your life, that's the formula. You can only be 100% certain years after you make the decision, but you will never be 100% certain before you make the decision. That's why you have to use the 51% rule. Look for 51% certainty in the moment. That's the goal because 51% certainty will stop you from overthinking and doubting yourself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to remind you of something important. Overthinking is a decision. Doubting yourself is a decision. Not making a decision is a decision. Think about how much time has gone by, how often you doubt and overthink, and you let perfectionism rob you of the ability to make a decision. You didn't go on that trip. You didn't say yes to that date. You didn't start writing. You didn't start the YouTube channel. You've been thinking about it. For me, I've talked a lot about it in our conversations. For years, I didn't start this podcast. That was a decision. Why? Because I was waiting for 100% certainty. The 51% rule will help you get started.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Grab onto that tool, start using it, and you better stick around because we're just getting started in terms of tips and tools and the art and science. When we come back, Stephen has another story. The story will help illustrate the next tool you're going to learn, which is the speed of a decision. Stay with us. I'll be waiting for you after a short break.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. Thank you for deciding to stick around and listen to this conversation between me and Stephen Bartlett today. You and I are both learning about the art and science of decision making, how to make better decisions for you in your life from none other than Stephen Bartlett. You've already learned two really important tools.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The first one is that there are two types of decisions: Type One and Type Two. Type One, as Stephen describes them, are decisions that are irreversible. The second type of decision is a Type Two decision. This is something that you can decide to change later. As you heard me say loud and clear, almost every decision is a Type Two decision because almost every decision is reversible. Yet you get so paralyzed because you think everything is fixed in stone. As my daughter likes to say, "Mom, it's not that deep." Your decisions, not that deep.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now let's remind you of the second tool that you and I learned: the 51% rule. You're never going to be 100% sure. As soon as you're 51% sure, it's a yes, or 51% sure, it's a no. Make the decision. Now we're ready with that quick recap to drop back into this conversation. Stephen is at the part where he's going to explain something about the speed of a decision. I love the story he's about to tell you, because it's not only going to help you make a lot more money, it's going to help you stop wasting so much time thinking things through.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: You know, I spent 10 years working in marketing and there's this one particular company, which you'll know, that is run by the father and the other part of the company is run by the son. The son's business started a little bit later, but they're both in the same industry. I'd go to the father's office every week and I'd present him new ideas. He'd spend six months, nine months waiting for Rochelle to get back from annual leave to sign it off and arguing about the details.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I'd bring the same idea to the son that same day. Literally, their offices are on the same street. He would interrupt me halfway through. He'd tell his assistant, "Go and get Nikki." He'd call the marketing team in, tell me to repeat it. He'd look at both of us without a contract, his marketing team and me, and say, "Do this now."
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: What he intuitively knew is what a lot of the successful people I interview know: the biggest cost in life isn't a failed experiment or being wrong about a decision. It is the nine months, the 10 years, the 15 years you waste deciding whether to make the decision. That was a Type Two decision where if we were wrong, okay, 20K, but the next day we're closer to conducting another experiment to find the right answer.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I sat there for five years watching this son's business just gradually creep up on his father's, take over the father's. I was in both boardrooms thinking it's just because he makes decisions at a much faster rate and his risk equation is reversed. Daddy thinks the risk is being wrong in a decision. Son thinks the risk is not making a decision. His business grew, he sold the company. He now lives in Monaco and Dubai and he's got more hundreds of millions than anyone would ever know. Dad's still there running the business. That sense of urgency to throw open those Type Two doors is so deeply ingrained in me. It's all about experimentation.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Let me give you a personal example of a Type Two decision that I think people think is a Type One. One of the best things you could do if you are in a relationship that sucks or is sucking the life force out of you is to break up. Or if you're married, to say out loud, "I want a divorce. I'm miserable." The reason why that is a Type Two decision that people mistake for a Type One is because simply saying "this isn't working" causes a change in the relationship for the better. Or not. But the only way that relationship is actually changing is if you make a decision to say the way that it is isn't working.
--:-- Mel Robbins: She can go back and be a banker. That's true. She can go back and be a banker. And yet she's doorstepping Mel Robbins in an airport. I'm telling you now, as a banker, she's got a couple of dollars, probably. But she will probably become the dad in that example and ruminate over that decision for three years. She might go and try working with kids tomorrow and find out it sucks.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: That's what the son knew. The son would conduct the experiments, right or wrong, he was closer to the correct answer. The problem is people never make the decision to get the feedback. Failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power. They never get the knowledge because they never want to fail. So they live trapped and imprisoned in their current misery because they've got the risk equation the wrong way around and they don't realize that urgency is part of the answer.
--:-- Mel Robbins: To the person that is in that conundrum — "I'm a banker, I think I want to be over here" — how do you find out? Do you have another matrix that you use to figure out what you actually want in a moment where you're just engulfed with uncertainty?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: My natural reaction was to go back to the way I've built and run all my businesses, which is the scientific method: experimentation. I think that's the only way we find out in life, but no one wants to do it. If I had a seven-year-old kid and they said, "Dad, I want to sell pen lids," I'd go, "Fantastic, we're going to the pen lid museum this weekend to find out." Because failure is the feedback that you're searching for. It isn't doorstepping Mel Robbins in an airport.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: On life matters of purpose and meaning, Mel Robbins in an airport can't tell you what your purpose and meaning is and whether it's kids or banking. Failure is feedback. Feedback is the knowledge you're looking for and knowledge is power. So therefore failure is the power you're looking for. Currently you feel disempowered. The only way you're going to feel empowered is to fail at the thing you're doing — banking — or fail trying something new. We can find the right answer in a world that is so nuanced and ever-changing not by reading a book or doorstepping Mel in an airport, but by running the experiment like a Type Two decision as fast as we can.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: The world is only going to change faster and faster, which means the correct answer to these life questions — how to structure a marriage, how to work from home or office, how to build a business — is going to change so quickly that you're not going to get it anywhere else other than conducting an experiment in your life. That means taking that first step.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: My whole thesis for why any of the companies I run will be successful is because we outfailed the competition. In any of my businesses, I can tell you how many experiments my head of experimentation and failure conducted this week. I take the same approach for my life, including in my romantic relationship.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How does that work in relationships?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I'll tell you. Convention says, for example, that two people in a relationship have to sleep in the same bed at night. But if you reason from first principles — something that you know to be true about now and your situation, rejecting all conventional nonsense that's other people's solutions for other people's times and situations — you can find your own answer.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: A first principle of mine and my girlfriend's relationship is that we have different chronotypes. A chronotype dictates the time when you are activated, creative, what time you wake up, when you get hungry.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Does that mean like a night person versus a morning person?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Yeah. My girlfriend is a whale chronotype, which means she goes to bed at 9 PM and gets up at 6 AM. That's you. I'm an owl, which means I go to bed at 1 or 2 AM and get up at about 8 or 9. I don't set an alarm. That's one first principle.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: First principle number two: so many relationships end, according to Matthew Walker, the sleep expert, about 10 to 20% of relationships can be linked back to sleep issues. Couples not sleeping properly causes arguments and all kinds of issues. He says 10 to 20%. So we know we need to get sleep.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Third point: when you understand sleep cycles, the restorative sleep happens about 60 minutes into the cycle when you go into stage four, which is REM sleep. Most of REM sleep and those sleep cycles get shorter late at night. So if I go to bed at 2 AM, by 6 or 7 AM my sleep cycles are really short — they go down from 90 minutes to about 45 minutes. Most of my restorative sleep is happening between the hours of six and nine. If my girlfriend wakes up at six, she can destroy 50% of my restorative sleep, which will put me in a terrible mood the next day.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: So on days where she has to get out of bed early, we have a spare room. Convention goes, "He doesn't love you." But first principles and thinking for yourself in a world that's always changing, conducting experiments to find the answer, goes: you're both going to be happier when you wake up giving your relationship more chance. It's the same thing with me quitting university, all the stories I told about quitting. Rejection of convention. I'm going to find out by conducting an experiment myself. In my partner, I've got a good experimentation partner who understands that the goal here isn't satisfying external expectation. It goes back to: how do we feel?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Amazing.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: So we have a spare room. I sleep in a different bed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it sounds like it's a great thing.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It's a great thing because we don't have insecurity. The insecurity comes from external narrative — "Well, if he's sleeping in that room over there, then he doesn't love you." Of course I love you. Where did you get that nonsense from? Instagram. It's the same thing with our lives. Where did you get that nonsense about you wanting to be a banker? From your parents, your friends, some teacher in school who said that would make you happy and rich. You didn't run the experiment yourself. You never got the feedback. You didn't get the knowledge and now you're disempowered.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: That's how I build all my businesses. That's how I run everything in my life — just the assumption that I probably don't know the right answer and convention probably doesn't either. If I actually sit down with a blank piece of paper and go to first principles — the things that I care about, the things that I know, what I actually want — then I can make a decision for me. You can reason up from there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Got it. Thank you for that. I want to go back to the ant and the spider in the circle. How would you advise someone who's listening and they're like, "But I don't trust myself. I have a string of examples of how I've blown it."
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Evidence.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. You have a string of evidence about how you've blown it. What would be the next right step for somebody who's like, "I want to go off the cliff. I want to erase the circle. I want to sell the pack of cigarettes. I really want a breakthrough in testing what I believe about myself." Is there a way anybody could set up something like this?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I think the "going off the cliff" analogy is so terrifying that it's inaccessible. This is part of the reason why I think people don't act in line with the person they want to be — they see it as climbing Mount Everest. They can see a Mel Robbins at the top of the mountain, but they can also see the 15 years of walking they're going to have to do to get there. As Nia Rael said on my podcast, we are creatures that are discomfort avoiding. We avoid discomfort.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I always wondered why I procrastinate on some things in my life. Nia Rael made a very compelling case that it's because there's some discomfort I'm avoiding. The book I have to write, I get to chapter 11 about something I'm not that familiar with, and I end up picking up my phone and doing the dishes. I'm avoiding the psychological discomfort associated with the task. Become aware of the psychological discomfort and then break it down into little pebbles so it doesn't feel like Mount Everest.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: For me, that's how I've taken on some of my biggest challenges. It has to start with an action that sometimes feels contrary to how you feel — something you said as well. You can't rely on emotion to get you there. But it's the smallest step you can take to counteract your existing evidence about yourself.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: At 14 years old, that was walking out on stage in front of my peers, pissing my pants, and running out the room after delivering a talk. I then went back onto the stage a couple of days later and ran out of the room again. The piece of paper I was given, my hands were shaking so much that I couldn't read it, so I just made up the words, blurted them out, ran out. The reason I can now speak in Sao Paulo with Obama in a big arena of tens of thousands of people is because I put myself in situations, whether small or big, to counteract my existing evidence.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: A friend once said to me recently: the reason we don't take that small step forward is sometimes the small step is so unbelievably embarrassing that we don't think it'll be consequential. We're so ashamed by how small that step has to be. For some people, that's literally getting out of bed and going to the toilet. There's so much shame associated with it. It feels so minute and inconsequential that we don't think it matters, but it's everything. That first step is everything. It's the pack of cigarettes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think we can make this even more tactical for the person listening. Let's go to the example of the banker who thinks she wants to be a teacher. I can imagine her standing on a piece of paper with a circle around her. The first step is not quitting the banking job. The first step, which literally takes her out of that circle and across the line — can I guess what you're going to say?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Go for it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is it using your evenings and weekends?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: It could be that. It could be Googling teaching certificate. It could be using your evenings and weekends. It's literally one move out of the circle. I always think this with people when they say they want to start a business and then six months later they still want to start a business. I think part of the reason you're doing it is because you see the challenge as Mount Everest and that's causing you so much psychological discomfort that you're channeling that energy into procrastination, talking, and deferring it. What you need to do today is start the Instagram page.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: This is one of my big hacks in life. The minute I go on Instagram, click "create new account," and I just write the name — the train has left the station. That, for me, is starting the business.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Hold on. I want to make sure everybody just got that. Steven has launched and sold multiple businesses, invests in them, and sits on boards. He is constantly leaning into new ideas and curious about things. What he just told you is that the way he gets out of the ideation stage — the "I should start a business" stage — is he goes to Instagram and creates an Instagram account with the business name of the business he hasn't even started yet. Before the business plan, before the other stuff. This is what he's talking about.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I've never written a business plan in my life. I don't know where people get this business plan stuff from. I've never written one and I don't intend to start now. If you look at my phone, which is in the room behind you, you'll see a bunch of Instagram pages for businesses that I'm yet to launch because I just want to secure the Instagram page. I also see that as step one of setting an intention, which is the easiest step one can make towards the direction I want to travel.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: To the banker listening: you opening your mouth and telling Mel Robbins that was your step one.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then step two is the next thing. This is how you started in social media. Would you please give that example of how you just got started? You made yourself a promise — 7 PM, 8 PM, what post, what posting?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Yes. This is an example of that. On the personal brand side of things and the content creation and storytelling side, I created an obligation with myself where at 7 PM every single day I would write a 140-character quote or make a video based on what had happened to me that day. Of all the things I've done in my life, it is the single highest yielding, most valuable habit or discipline I ever instilled.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Not only is that the thing that cured the trauma I had around relationships with my parents — because at 7 PM every day, I had to look down on how I'd behaved that day, the notes I'd taken, the avoidant behavior I demonstrated in my relationships, I had to summarize it and then teach it — but it also improved my communication and writing skills.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: There's a guy called Richard Fryman, an American psychologist who came up with a technique called the Fryman technique. They say it's the ultimate way to learn and develop. The idea is you learn something, you then condense it down to the understanding of a 10-year-old as if you had to teach it to a 10-year-old. You then deliver it to the world, teach it to the 10-year-old. Based on the 10-year-old's reaction, you go back to the top. The principle is: your ability to summarize a concept correlates to your ability to actually understand it. I was doing that for six or seven years.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: People say I'm wise or use words that describe me as being older. It's purely because I feel like I've got more wisdom out of every day that I've lived because of this introspection. It's the single greatest hack that I could give to any young person or old person in the world — this habit of introspection and teaching in some regard.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Walk us through how to do it.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: If you want to do it the Steve Bartlett way, create an Instagram page or a Twitter account. You don't need followers. You don't need to tell anybody it exists. As you go through your day, keep notes in your phone. You have an argument with your friend, you respond negatively to a situation, someone cuts you off in traffic, you feel something. When you have these feelings, write them down in the notes of your phone.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: At 7 PM every single night, all I want you to do is to fit that experience into the confines of a 280-character tweet or post. Post it. That cycle — having an experience, summarizing it down to its essence, which is the true definition of understanding, and then posting it and sharing it with the world — drives you forward. Step four is getting some feedback on what you said. It helps you understand your cycles and does the hardest thing any of us can achieve: it heightens your self-awareness.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Self-awareness has been this really elusive thing on the podcast that I've asked people over and over again — "How does one increase their self-awareness?" I think this is the easiest way to do it in a reliable way.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I feel like I have a masterclass in a million things from you.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: You're very kind.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I love about getting to spend time with you is I really love how you have the courage and the bravery to challenge what is "so" in order to build a life and build businesses and make decisions that really empower you. It's so obvious, and yet I think none of us really take the time to stop and go, "Wait a minute. There are so many things that we do in life that we just blindly do without stopping to ask the question."
--:-- Mel Robbins: I just want to thank you because there were so many things that made me stop and not only think, but more importantly, start asking myself different questions. Thank you. You're a huge inspiration to me for so many reasons and I continue to learn from you, even from a distance. It's a great service that you're delivering for the world. So thank you.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Thank you. I never know what to say when somebody thanks me when I'm the one that's talking to them, but I will accept that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to thank you for taking the time to be here with me. I want to thank you for sharing this, for spending time listening to something that can improve your life. Also, in case nobody else tells you today, I want to be sure to tell you that I love you. I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to make better decisions. It's through your decisions that you create a better life. So go do it. I'll talk to you in a few days.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I know you don't do a lot of interviews, so thank you for sitting.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I know you're already tearing up. You're watching. Wow. That's a challenge. I can imagine. You just shifted in your chair. Do you notice that? He just shifted in his chair. He's actually getting nervous.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: A little bit. Just a little bit, yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No. You look suspicious, Mel.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: I do?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Oh, hardly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Like, do you think I have some trick up my sleeve?
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: No, I don't know. I have no idea.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No, what could I possibly ask you about that would make you nervous? I want to go back to one more thing that you said. And I can't remember what it was.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Menopause.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Don't blame me. I don't think — God, there was something that you said. And I can't remember what it was.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Don't touch the table.
--:-- Mel Robbins: All right. We're done. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
--:-- Stephen Bartlett: Of course. Excellent. Wonderful job. Thanks, guys.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. This is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
