The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

What I do is what I've seen in the book here In a path of the jungle I explain The starting point is Get a blank piece of paper And write down who you want to be What behaviours do you want to have?

The biggest point in the book Is to define yourself Because now you've got Self-esteem can rise Just on that alone

As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED Talk.

And one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED Talk was when you start talking about internet browsers.

And so what I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment.

So how would Stephen King write this paragraph? How would Maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences?

And that made it a creative exercise again.

Her new book is called Bitter Sweet and it is about allowing ourselves to feel sadness, to grieve that it is in many ways healing.

There's a book, Paradox of Choice by Barry Swartz, and he's the less is more, right? And what's interesting is that we have more options today than say my grandfather had in his day, but it's, we have less satisfaction in the choices we make because we believe we have endless choice.

And it's literally the opening of my book.

I read in your book, you know, there's certain pain points we encounter where we realize, okay, I can solve this problem.

One of the quotes from your book is that about failure being a data point, not an endpoint.

There's a whole chapter where I talk about money because money is the most trapping thing.

I've written it on a postit note because I was on a plane and I looked at it and I had done everything on my dream list.

I read this book by Seth Godin called The Dip. Yeah, I don't know if you've read it, but it's funny. I went back to read it like many years later and it's actually a relatively simple book.

David Epstein, who's the author of a range and sports genius, friend of mine.

The Jungle Book that we had in the Soviet Union is very different ...

I think ... it's a book called How to Be Black. It's a very, very funny book.

And, you know, this book I have here, Make It Work, Lessons from Life and Business, She Means Business.

Soloway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order, it's from the perspective of the parent's behavior to the child as a function of their birth order.

Soloway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key personality traits. One of which is open to experience.

Cahill Gibran in The Prophet, when he's talking about children, he says that children are living arrows.

You've been through so many things. And many of those things, I mean, so many of those things are in this book, the first half.

When I wrote that chapter, which turned out to be the first chapter in the book, because it was, I wrote it because I wanted to practice writing to get myself into the rhythm of writing the book, not knowing where that chapter would be. And when I wrote it, I realised it had to be the start of the book because it was the seminal day of my life.

Your podcast is called Midpoint. Your book is called The First Half.

And then all at once, as soon as you just get that one video that goes viral.

That is I think that's the chapter where I talk about The Eighth Wonder of the World.

Yeah, that's it with Warren Buffett and my dog Pablo being an opposing investor.

And I genuinely, I think I learned that lesson when I wrote the book.

And it just goes to show that it's not those key critical big decisions we make to drop out. It's that like, yeah, it's that the compounding small almost irrelevant decisions.

Starting with Leonardo da Vinci Who I wrote about He grew up in a small village He was left-handed illegitimate His father doesn't legitimate him He was gay, he was distracted And so he has demons driving him As he runs away from the village of Vinci To go to Florence

He was making millions of dollars in helping others achieve their dreams. New York Times bestselling author. School of greatness. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

When I wrote my book, The Mask of Masculinity, I remember thinking to myself, this probably isn't going to sell 100 million copies. It's about how men can be vulnerable. Like most men don't want to buy that book.

I just felt like I needed to put it out. My book agent wanted me to do another book about business or marketing, but I couldn't do it. Even if I make no money, this has to come out of me because if it can help one man heal their internal relationship with themselves and then heal the relationship with their family and their marriage, it's worth it to me.