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