The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Played Moment: Hard Work Doesn't Equal Success…Try This Instead...: Former Netflix CEO
Fri, 27 Dec 2024
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Full Episode
What about hard work? Does it matter?
Well, since you ask it so simply, I'd say no, or it certainly is not the most important thing. In fact, I think hard work leading to success is a myth that, and let me Let me give you two examples, okay? The first is to qualify what I mean.
I work with a lot of, as he spoke earlier before we actually began the session, about how younger people are different places in their life than older people, especially with career and how they think about it. And earlier in my life, I used to do triathlons, you know, the races that combine swimming and then biking and then running.
And back when I used to do them, they don't do it quite the same way anymore. It would be a mass water start. You have four or 500 people who the gun sounds and all 500 of them plow into the water simultaneously, not a phase start. And as you can imagine, it is a shit show. You're getting kicked and your goggles are being knocked off and you're being held underwater.
And you quickly realize that if you want to be able to survive in this mass start, you're going to sprint. for those first four, five, 600 yards to get yourself far enough in the front of the pack that you have open water. And in my opinion, work life is kind of like that.
When you're younger, when you don't really know what you're doing, when you have to go down a lot of false ends, because you're not productive, you better work your ass off. You better sprint. You better work three times harder than everybody else in the company. So it's essential.
But ideally, you get yourself far enough ahead that you recognize, I can't go at this pace for the entirety of the triathlon. I needed to, to get myself some breathing room, but now I can back off. So yeah, at certain points in your career, you need hard work. At certain points in the trajectory of your business, you need hard work. Your fundraising, you can't say, oh, we're closing the round.
I'm taking vacation for two weeks. Oh, we're doing M&A. I'm gonna be, I'm only gonna work a couple hours. No, you're gonna have to grind it. But that's not the answer. All right, one more little story, which is part two to this. which is why I say that it's a myth for hard work. So during one part of my career, I lived in Europe. I was doing international marketing for a big software company.
We had an office in Paris and I lived in Paris. But I was meeting every week with the marketing people in our other branches. So probably four days out of five, I was flying fly to Copenhagen one day, then I'd fly down to Milan, then I might fly to London, then I might fly to Madrid in one week. So I spent a lot of time at the airport. And because I'm sometimes not that organized, I'd be late.
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