
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Steven Shares His Secret Diary: Dealing With Liam Payne’s Death, My Big Relationship Issue, These 4 Words Saved Me!
Sun, 24 Nov 2024
STEVEN’S DIARY IS BACK! It’s been a long time, since I’ve done this. In this episode I talk about heartbreak, grief, business challenges, relationship struggles, advice from Sir David Brailsford and protecting my mental health - all of it is unfiltered. When I first started The Diary Of A CEO, the central idea of the show, was to read my personal diary every week – I believed that It might be interesting to get to see inside the very personal diary of someone that was running a business with hundreds of team members, at 25ish years old, while contending with all of life’s problems, relationships, mental health challenges, mistakes, business issues, family problems, and more. So late on Sunday night once in a while, I would pull up a microphone in my old apartment, and I would read through my diary for 45 minutes or an hour. The Diary Of A CEO took on a life of it’s own, I went from reading my diary, to interviewing other people about their diaries, to speaking to experts about all the problems that I cared about. But every single week, someone will come up to me and tell me they found value in those early episodes, and they’ll ask me if I would ever share my diary again… So this weekend, I finally decided to give it go. This episode is my diary. The original, Diary Of A CEO. Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb 🚀 The 1% Diary is live - and it won’t be around for long, so act fast! https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-reads Watch the Guest episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes Four tracks composed by: https://www.instagram.com/eejebee/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of Steven's diary?
It has been a long time since I've done this. Many, many years ago when I first started The Diary of a CEO, the central idea of the show was to read my diary every week.
I believed that it might be interesting to get to see inside the very personal diary of someone that was running a business with hundreds of team members at 25 years old while contending with all of life's problems, relationships, mental health challenges, mistakes, family problems, and more. So late on a Sunday night once in a while, I would plug in a microphone in my old apartment
and I would read through my diary entries. The diary of a CEO took on a life of its own. I went from reading my diary to interviewing other people about their diaries to speaking to experts about all of the problems that I found in my diary.
But every single week, someone will come up to me and tell me that they found value in those early episodes, and they'll ask me if I would ever share my diary again. I've thought about it for years and years. And this weekend, I finally decided to give it a go. So what you're listening to today is my diary. The notes I've taken in the last few weeks. The original diary of a CEO.
I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Here's the first thing that I've written in my diary this week. Pedals over podiums. I was driving through the streets of Los Angeles a few weeks ago with a really good friend of mine.
It was late afternoon and the sun was hanging low in the sky, painting everything in shades of amber and gold. As we navigated through the ebb and flow of Los Angeles traffic, the distant hum of the city filled the car, a blend of honking horns, muffled conversations, and the faint melody of a street performer playing somewhere in the distance.
We were on our way to a football match on the other side of town. My friend in the passenger seat was the founder of a huge fashion business that's absolutely skyrocketed over the last couple of years. It's one of those brands that's become so popular that I know so many of you listening right now are probably wearing.
His designs have walked runways, graced magazine covers, and become staples in wardrobes all around the world. But as we set off, I couldn't help but notice an unusual, almost palpable tension inside the car. Normally our drives are filled with laughter and lively debates, but this time there was a heavy silence punctuated only by the engine and the occasional sound of cars speeding past.
You know that feeling when you can just sense something weighing heavily on someone's mind? He stared out the passenger window, watching as palm trees and billboards flew by. Finally he turned to me. His voice, usually so confident and assertive, was tinged with vulnerability as he broke the silence.
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Chapter 2: How did Steven's conversation with Sir David Brailsford influence him?
But, conversely, when we anchor our attention in the present moment, regions of the brain associated with focus and task execution, such as the prefrontal cortex, become more engaged, which enhances our ability to perform at our best. Sir David's approach teaches us a fundamental truth. Ironically, when we focus too much on the outcome, we end up sabotaging the very actions needed to achieve it.
We become distracted or paralyzed by the weight of our expectations. But by narrowing our focus to the here and now, by mastering each stroke, each moment, we align our actions with our intentions, setting the stage for success. My friend's greatest risk in that car that day wasn't his numbers stagnating. It was him being distracted by the numbers and losing touch with his customers.
If he just focused on the art, the value, his creativity, the very things that had gotten him there, the numbers, the podium, would take care of itself. So whether you're an athlete peddling towards the finish line, or an entrepreneur navigating the turbulent waters of business, an artist crafting your next masterpiece, or simply someone striving to find balance in life's complexities,
Remember, focus on the pedals, not the podium. Success isn't a destination. It's a journey comprised of countless moments where we choose to be fully present. The podium, the accolades, the achievements, the milestones are merely the byproduct of our commitment to mastering each moment, each rotation of the pedals.
I always tell people, you wouldn't plant a seed and then dig it up every few minutes to see if it had grown. So why do you keep questioning yourself, your hard work and your decisions? Have patience. Keep watering your seeds. Funnily enough, this week I stumbled across a video that reinforced the idea of thinking of pedals over podiums.
It's a video of Johnny Ives, the head designer from Apple, who worked alongside Steve Jobs, Apple's visionary founder, at a time when Apple were in real trouble at the very beginning. Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple. The company had struggled and he'd been rehired as the CEO.
In the clip, Johnny Ives talks about how a dying company like Apple saved themselves, not by trying to save themselves or thinking about the outcome or problem they were in, but by focusing on the pedals, the thing they could control.
Our job isn't to make money for Apple. Our job is to try and make the very best products that we can. Now, we trust if they are good, and we trust if we're competent and we do our jobs in trying to describe them, and if we're competent in making them. they will be attractive and bought, they will be bought in volume, and that we will eventually make money.
I'm aware that that can sound like an easy thing to say given our vantage point right now, but that's actually what we said in 98 when the company was struggling. You see, we didn't say that the goal was turnaround. Because if we'd said the goal back in the late 90s was to turn the company around, that's all about money.
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Chapter 3: What does 'focus on the pedals, not the podium' mean?
Team, as most of you already know, at the close of today's stock market, Apple's market cap surpassed Microsoft's market cap. As I once said in a company email sent a long time ago, stocks go up and stocks go down and things may be different tomorrow. But I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.
And
So it is again. Walt Disney used to say to his team, we are only as good as our next picture. Well, we are only as good as our next amazing new product. Back to work, Steve.
When I read this letter for the first time, I had a huge sigh of relief because just like you, I get anxious about the future. I can fall into worry about outcomes and I can waste energy thinking too much about the podium. In fact, it's in areas of my life that I'm most successful. that I seem to worry the most. And this doesn't just apply to business, it applies to life itself.
I've observed that people that focus on what they want, the podium, instead of what they have to offer, the pedals, rarely get what they want. But the people that focus on what they have to offer, the pedals, usually get what they want, the podium.
I.e., the people that end up on the podium are the ones that were most focused on the pedals, and the people that never focus on the pedals never end up on the podium. In the good times and the bad, when the numbers are up and the numbers are down, focus on the pedals, not the podium. And if you do, in time, the podium will take care of itself.
The second thing I've written in my diary this week is quite a personal one. I've just written, you and your partner are both probably wrong. And this point is really about love and relationships. For several nights in a row, I'd arrived home to my apartment in the east of London at 11pm. Then I collapsed onto the soft, 12-foot sofa in my living room, its cushions enveloping me like a tired hug.
And there I lay, savouring the sweet, sweet sound of doing absolutely nothing. The ticking of the clock in the corner of the room, the only reminder that time is passing. This is a grueling part of the year for me professionally. Whenever my long-standing assistant turns to me with that familiar look of concern and warns me about the months ahead, I know I'm screwed.
My calendar right now is hilarious. In the next three months, it has me flying to every corner of the world, from the bustling streets of Bangkok and Thailand to the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles to the desert horizons of Kuwait, sometimes for three major events in the same day. The constant echo of airports, the roar of jet engines, the rustle of boarding passes.
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Chapter 4: How can entrepreneurs maintain relationships amidst chaos?
I found myself giving them support and advice, and as the words rolled off my lips, the advice that I was giving them ended up being the exact advice I needed to hear myself, because I too was facing a series of difficult professional challenges in my businesses, challenges that were keeping me trapped in a cycle of overthinking.
The unrehearsed, late-night advice I gave to both of my friends that I also desperately needed to hear myself, get to acceptance as fast as you can. I said this because in moments of bad news or heartbreak or rejection, much of what I think is actually happening is we're mourning the loss of a future or an identity that we created in our own minds, that we had begun to live in.
but that never really existed. In the case of my friend going through heartbreak, it was abundantly clear to me that the source of much of his pain was actually his inability to accept that the imagined, idyllic future he had created with this person had been lost.
I'll never forget when Mo Gordat said to me, So happiness is very predictable. OK, if you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation. And so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than.
So it's really mathematics that your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be.
And from that, I always deduced that we are unhappy when our expectations of how our life is supposed to be going go unmet. And in this scenario, both my friends and I had unmet expectations of how we thought our life was supposed to be going.
It's become abundantly clear to me that the vast amount of pain I experience in business or life or love and everything in between is actually just my own resistance to situations that I find myself in, usually when my expectations go unmet, often situations I frankly couldn't have foreseen or controlled, sometimes even situations that I'm completely unresponsible for.
Bad news arrives, and then we fight against it in our own mind. And in doing so, we create our own suffering. We get fired from work. We get cut off in traffic by a bad driver. We get a bad diagnosis. We get dumped by a romantic interest. Someone writes something horrible about us online.
The pain is the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years of us refusing to accept the situation we find ourselves in. Trying to reverse an injustice. Trying to correct the past. Trying to rewind time. Acceptance of reality, especially of circumstances that cannot be changed now. is the best medicine I've repeatedly swallowed to have less bad days and less suffering.
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Chapter 5: What advice did Steven give to his friends in crisis?
Maybe your narrative is that people should settle down at 30, maybe yours is to avoid failure, maybe your narrative is that technology is bad, that veganism is good, or that marriage is important and that people on the other side of the political aisle are evil.
These narratives become the bedrock of our careers, our identities, and our lives, making them exceptionally hard to escape, and they are self-reinforcing. We're often compensated and validated and applauded for continuing to believe in them, which reinforces their hold over us.
However, in work, our greatest opportunities arise when we step back and recognize the broader narratives that society is collectively trapped in. Visionary entrepreneurs excel at identifying these societal and industry narratives and understanding how they limit us. They dare to imagine a better narrative, a new idea, a new paradigm that others have yet to believe.
These individuals become legends and world changers and billionaires, not because they are successful at the current narrative, but because they change it. Steve Jobs is such a prime example of someone who was able to see the flaws in narratives that everyone else believed.
It sounds kind of strange, but I always think about his bizarre decision to exclude Adobe Flash from Apple's iOS device as a prime example of this. In the late 2000s, Flash was the standard for delivering rich video content on the web. The industry was so deeply entrenched in the prevailing narrative that Flash was indispensable for videos and animations and interactive applications.
However, Steve Jobs saw beyond this prevailing belief. He recognized that Flash was plagued with security vulnerabilities, consumed excessive battery power, and was not optimized for the touch interfaces that he wanted the world to adopt with his iPhone, his iPod, and his iPads.
Despite facing massive criticism from many, including people in his own team, and including the CEO at the time of Adobe, who said it was an extraordinary attack, he held firm in his convictions. This move not only set Apple apart, but also rapidly accelerated the entire web industry's shift towards more modern, efficient, and open technologies.
By challenging the entrenched narrative, Jobs redefined computing and the way that we interact with digital content forever. But this was the story of Steve Jobs, someone that seemed to be able to see into the future, that knew our current narratives were so flawed, that Adobe Flash needed to die. That to humans, design and typography really mattered. That digital music was the future.
That we wanted an app store. That physical keyboards on phones sucked and took up too much space that could be used for other things. That our devices shouldn't have removable batteries. they needed touch screens, no headphone jacks, and that everything could be stored in the cloud. How was he able to see the future, to think so disruptively, so clearly, with such conviction?
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Chapter 6: How does acceptance play a role in handling bad news?
That's when your intuition starts to blossom, and you start to see things more clearly. To Steve, spending time in the clouds allowed him to hear his intuition. In one interview, he said, Intuition is a very powerful thing. More powerful than intellect, in my opinion. It's had a big impact on my work.
And finally, the wonderful Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs' biographer, whom I interviewed on this podcast a few months ago, said, Steve Jobs' way of looking at problems was a direct result of the meditation techniques he practiced.
It is no surprise to me that one of the most visionary entrepreneurs of our lifetime had a dedicated practice where he spent time in the clouds, with a clear mind, tuning out of the noise so he could tune in to his intuition. Maybe we all should. I wonder what messages that your intuition has been trying to tell you but hasn't been able to because you've been so busy creating ever more noise.
As I sat on the lake that day, rain pattering on my shoulders and head, words that I read many years ago from Guru Ram Dass came to mind. The quieter you become, the more you can hear. And my life has continued to prove this to me. Silence, boredom and space aren't empty.
they are full of answers and I need to spend more time in the clouds listening to silence and all that it has to say get out of the trenches and into the clouds the last point in my diary this week is a point that I never thought I would um never imagined that I'd be sharing with the world I literally just got goosebumps when I when I started speaking um
It was 10.49pm on Wednesday the 16th of October. I was sitting at my computer at my kitchen table in my high-rise apartment. The familiar late-night hum of the city was my only acquaintance, and the lights beneath me like a galaxy of tiny stars. My French bulldog Pablo lay at my feet, snoring softly, a comforting, familiar sound in the stillness of the night.
The rhythmic tapping of my keyboard was the only other noise as I flowed through my work, My phone lit up beside me. It was a message from Georgie, the CEO of my media company. Her text read, Have you seen the news? My heart skipped a beat. Before I could reach out to pick up my phone, another notification appeared. This time it was from my personal assistant. Oh my god, it read. I froze.
My fingers hovering above the keys. A wave of apprehension washed over me. What could possibly be so urgent at this hour? My mind raced through a dozen scenarios. None of them were good. Taking a deep breath, I opened a new browser tab and typed in bbc.com, expecting to see some sort of breaking news headline. Nothing. Confused, I navigated to Twitter.
The homepage felt like it took a lifetime to load. And there it was. The headline that made my stomach drop. Liam Payne, dead at 31. I stared at the screen, my mind unable to process the words I'd just read. It was surreal. Impossible. I reread the headline several times, hoping I'd misread it. I checked the account that posted it. Verified. Reputable.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of peace in Steven's life?
Liam's death breaks my heart. I can feel my eyes filling with tears as I say these words. What he needed most from the world was love and kindness and grace. When people need this most, they often get the exact opposite. Because their behavior is strange, their behavior is atypical. It is hard to understand.
Robbie Williams, the legendary artist who rose to stardom at an early age and struggled through some of the same addictions that Liam spoke about publicly, called me after Liam's passing and offered some words of wisdom, some words of comfort and understanding. He also said publicly,
Chapter 8: How does being in the public eye affect mental health?
We don't know what's going on in people's lives, the pain they're going through, what makes them behave in the way that they behave. Before we reach judgement, a bit of slack needs to be given. Before you type anything on the internet, please have a think. Do I really need to publish this? Because what you're doing is you're publishing your thoughts for everybody to read.
And even if you don't think that celebrities and their families exist, they fucking do. Skin and bone are immensely sensitive. As individuals, we have the power to change ourselves. We can be kinder. We can be more empathetic. We can at least try to be more compassionate towards ourselves, our family, our friends, strangers in life and strangers on the internet.
Even famous strangers need your compassion. One of the things I've come to learn by doing the Diary of a CEO and interviewing so many people is that people's pain and their sadness and their trauma rarely looks like pain, sadness and trauma. It looks like anger. It looks like hate. Sometimes it looks like laughter. Sometimes it looks like addiction. And addiction isn't for bad or crazy people.
Addiction isn't a bad choice that they make. Addiction is a symptom of pain and trauma. And we're all searching for ways to feel less pain. For some of us, the pain and trauma is so unbearable, so inescapable, that the ways we choose to not feel it become destructive in and of themselves. But it isn't a choice to self-destruct. It's the opposite. It's a last-ditch attempt to survive.
And we never heal from pain we refuse to acknowledge or try to escape. We can't pornography our pain away. We can't drink our pain away. We can't smoke our pain away. We can't drug our pain away. Because these escape mechanisms will just become our new pain. We have to confront our pain. Losing Liam has shattered a comfortable illusion that I lived under.
But in the fragments of that illusion, I found a sharper, more vibrant appreciation for every single moment, every connection, every person that I love. The last text messages Liam shared with me were photos of art that he'd created. These incredible, powerful pencil sketches.
And as I sat there in the early hours of the morning scrolling through years of messages, the artwork, the unreleased music, the loving encouragement he gave me whenever I faced a challenge in my life. The love letters he wrote to his partner that he shared with me.
All of it served as the most horrible reminder of the talent, of the person, of the son, the friend, the father, the boyfriend that the world has lost. And in that moment, I felt so overwhelmed by the urge to text you, Liam, even though I knew that you were gone. I hoped you'd read it. I hoped you'd reply. So I typed the words out anyway. I love you. I'm so sorry that I didn't do more.
One more phone call, checking in for no reason at all. One more conversation about how talented you are and how the world needs your gifts. One more message, one more laugh, one more hug. I knew you needed help. I didn't know how to help. I'm so sorry that I didn't do more.
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