The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett XX
[0] Did you know that the DariVosio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[1] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life, and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[2] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[3] And along with the Dyeravisio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV plus.
[4] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a Cio channel.
[5] right now.
[6] You talked about, I think I don't know if this was before we start recording, but this, the curse of, you know, I remember a conversation I had with a young lady who was a lawyer and she was clearly dissatisfied in her job.
[7] And it transpired that the reason she was a lawyer is because that's what she had been good at in terms of A levels, then university, and also her mum and dad had said, like, that's a good job.
[8] And she was almost on the verge of a middle life crisis when she spoke to me because she was so good at this thing that it kind of dragged her off into the future and she was now that that was her identity so many people listening to this now will resonate with that in various ways they would have become a banker because their parents were bankers and they were really good at maths what have you found out about those people their satisfaction and really what they should be doing I guess is there something else they should be doing instead is should we be dragged by our our competence in something Well, no, as we talked about before, I mean, competence can be a devilish curse because you can get the A's and hate the work.
[9] You can get high performance, but actually hate the activities.
[10] For anyone, if they want a really great career, the why is important, like to think about do you really believe in the purpose of what you're doing?
[11] That's important, no question.
[12] The who is important, no question.
[13] If you hate the people you're working with, that's always a bit of a problem.
[14] but the what trumps the who and the what i in the end like what do you actually filling your days with so if your friend as a lawyer it's like which give me a day talk to me about a day what's the day look like what are you doing at 10 o 'clock on a monday morning what you're doing at 3 p .m on a Thursday afternoon that's the what are the actual activities themselves so if anyone's the other things what always trumps the who and the why which is why we've got nurses and teachers who are so disengaged they believe in the why they really love the people on their shift but the day -to -day reality what they're doing, doesn't fit them.
[15] No one's paying attention to it.
[16] There's no manager helping them.
[17] There's no teams.
[18] All the stuff we talked about before that goes, is anyone paying attention to what I have to do every day and whether or not it fits me, which bits do, which bits don't, how do I lean into one another?
[19] What does collaborate?
[20] All that stuff is missing.
[21] So the why is there, the who is there, the what is wrong?
[22] So if I say lawyer, that could be an entirely different experience for, you know, everybody that's a lawyer.
[23] So one lawyer could be doing a completely different thing, different working hours, work from home, working a great team with weekly check -ins.
[24] And another lawyer, although it's the same job title, could be in an awful corporate office, two -hour commute every day, on their own in a tiny cubicle.
[25] Yes.
[26] So to anyone watching or listening, the first thing to do is assess.
[27] Like, where are you at?
[28] Which really means how much love do you have in a week?
[29] Do you have a loveless job?
[30] How would you do that?
[31] Well, the simplest way to do it is just take a blank pad around with you for a week, draw a line down the middle of it, put loved it at the top of one column, and loathed it at top of the other.
[32] And this is easy to do.
[33] Most people have never done this.
[34] And all you're going to do is you're going to imagine that your day is made up of many, many different threads.
[35] There's a fabric of a work day, which is a bit like a tapestry on a wall.
[36] When you're far away, it looks like just a picture.
[37] But when you get closer, there's many, many, many thousands of threads.
[38] Well, the same is true of any day.
[39] you've got a thousand different activities moments situations context like just stuff just hits you like and it's little baby five minutes two minutes seven minutes five minutes two minutes seven minutes but these are threads some of them are white some of the black some of the gray some are green they lift you up a little they down a little but some of them are red so in the book here i talk about red threads activities that when you're doing them all that stuff we talked about before the flow the energy the instinct of volunteering the i'm in my essence the the feeling of an ape mastery the those moments They could be like two minutes here, seven minutes here, ten minutes, but there are red threads.
[40] And your life is sort of putting on a show for you every day going, what about this thread?
[41] What about that thread?
[42] What about that thread?
[43] What about that thread?
[44] And the most successful people in any job, of course, they identified their red threads really well.
[45] And then they weave them into contribution.
[46] Now, we can talk more about how they do that.
[47] But it starts by going, take a black pad around with you.
[48] Think about the clues to your red threads.
[49] What do you instinctively volunteer for?
[50] While you're doing something, does time fly by?
[51] When you're done with it, you feel.
[52] sort of an sense of mastery, a sense of being up, not down.
[53] And then take it around with you for a week.
[54] And anytime you find anything that fits those criteria, scribble it down.
[55] And anytime you find the inverse, before you're doing something, you try to procrastinate or hand it off to the new guy, because it'll be developmental, you know, or you're doing it and the time drags on like a snail.
[56] And it's like, you thought it'd be doing it for an hour, but you look up, it's five minutes.
[57] And we've all got stuff like that.
[58] It's like, ah.
[59] And time and love have a weird relationship.
[60] You know, it's like when you're with someone that you love, that whole day goes by in 15 minutes.
[61] And yet before you're with them, like time just stretches out and you're with them and whoa.
[62] Same issue with an activity that you love.
[63] If you don't love it, you keep trying to do this.
[64] And then when you're doing it, it's like, how's it this long?
[65] Scribble it down and the loathed it.
[66] And so get to the end of one week, just one regular week and see what's in the loved it column and what's in the loathed column.
[67] If there's nothing in the loved it column, Well, then you have to stop and do it again next week and pay attention.
[68] And if you get no red threads, two weeks in a row, and this is really easy to do.
[69] No one's ever told people how to do it, but it's really easy to do.
[70] You're two weeks in a row of no red threads.
[71] Then you've got a loveless job.
[72] And the bad trade for anybody is somebody going, well, my job doesn't have to love me back.
[73] I'm making the money.
[74] I'll just stick it out.
[75] I'll pay my dues or I'll earn the money for three, four, four, five years.
[76] Then I'll, you know, five years, then I'll, as though you emerge the same person after five years of loveless work.
[77] You don't.
[78] You are psychologically damaged.
[79] You're a different person.
[80] After five years of loveless work, you're damaged.
[81] And the people, weirdly, who feel it the most are the people you're supposedly supporting at home.
[82] You think the people around the dinner table don't know that you come back every day on your loved it, loathed it list, although they wouldn't say it this way.
[83] There's nothing on the loved it column.
[84] They know, they can feel it.
[85] People often worry about don't bring your personal stuff to work.
[86] It's way more powerful the other way.
[87] People bring their work, their emptiness, that alienation at work, back home.
[88] So if you're two weeks in a row, nothing, then you have to stop and you have to, in a sense, apply the loved it, loathed it to the rest of your life.
[89] Just take that around and see whether you can find any red threads anywhere in your hobbies as a mother, as a father, as a friend, in your community, in your faith, I don't know.
[90] Write one love note to yourself, which is simply I love it when and then finish the sentence and the thing after the word when has to be a verb that you're doing not I love it when people praise me or something I love it when I what just write one sentence it's amazing Steve how many people adults can't be articulate about describing something that they love I know it sounds really weird but you ask people we've done this so many times you ask people you know tell me what you love or tell me your strengths are Oh, I love people.
[91] Which people?
[92] What are you doing with the people?
[93] Give me a verb.
[94] Any verbal do.
[95] Let's start with a verb.
[96] But we've trained people for so long to be divorced from their own emotion or believing that basically their emotion could be rewired if they just work at it and show enough grit or whatever.
[97] And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's real.
[98] You and your emotional reaction to things is real.
[99] So I would say to people, first of all, do that, love it, load it.
[100] And then try to write one, maybe even, too.
[101] Love that.
[102] It's a silly word, but I love note to yourself.
[103] I love it when I do what.
[104] I love it when I do what.
[105] What many people will actually find is that if you hate lawyering, it might well be that you're the wrong kind of lawyer.
[106] It might not be that you have to ditch your degree.
[107] It might be that you can start to rewire or re -sow, re -weave your job so that it has more red threads in it.
[108] So if you do that for a week and you find there are a couple of things on there, actually, there are a couple of love dits.
[109] There are a couple of specific things where I'm like, ooh, ooh.
[110] Well, when you have that, first of all, pay attention to it.
[111] Things that are not paid attention to, they wither.
[112] So every day wake up, it's the advice I would give you or you might give me. Every day wake up and just try to, rather than what I have to get through, what's the to do list I have to get through?
[113] Why don't you wake up every day?
[114] Yeah, you may have a to do list, but wake up every day and go, what red threads can I weave today?
[115] Because they're going to be not 75 ,000, but there might be five.
[116] What are the five?
[117] start there and then over time what you'll find is you can start to maybe go well next week actually I'm going to pick one day it's going to be all red it's going to be all red one day then you might go because people start to lean into it they might go well could you actually do more of that for this client and this client and this client and you're and then maybe you learn a competency like somebody who's really good at creating emails that people open you might go eloquah we'll teach you eliqua we'll teach you that competency because you've got something that you seem to be able to write text that people are actually open.
[118] That's kind of interesting.
[119] I know that's not in your job description, but you seem to keep doing it.
[120] And so we'll teach you now a new competency, a new software program.
[121] And lo and behold, you start doing that over time and you get to the place where the most successful people get to, where we look at the most successful people and we go, had they find that job, it seems to fit them so perfectly, had they find that job.
[122] And of course, they know, they didn't find it.
[123] That's totally the wrong verb.
[124] They made it.
[125] They took their red, to use that metaphor, they took their red threads seriously, and then they didn't imagine someone could read their mind and tell them what their red threads are because only you know what these things, the little moment, situations, contexts are that really lift you up.
[126] But then they took them seriously and wove them ever more deeply into the fabric of what they do.
[127] Now, sometimes that might mean stop being a lawyer.
[128] You know what?
[129] You've worked, you tried this now for six months, and there's nothing there for you.
[130] you.
[131] Okay, well then that's really tricky.
[132] Now you have to change your entire focus and hopefully your loves will be your guide.
[133] But we actually know over here, I don't know the number for the UK, but 73 % of Americans say that they have the freedom to maneuver their job to fit themselves better.
[134] That's a lot of people.
[135] And yet only 18 % of us do.
[136] Because if you ask people, do you have a chance to use your strengths every day?
[137] That number is 18%.
[138] So you've got 73%.
[139] In psychology, we call that an attitude behavior consistency problem i know i can do it i don't so that's people are watching a lot i'm in the wrong job maybe maybe you're one of the 27 percent you're in the wrong job all right before you get there though try to i pick out your red threads anywhere and no one can do it with you that's the thing that it's like you want to go hey nine year old let's start you on this life skill early because even at nine you know better than all your teachers do about this part anyway about the red threads part and that way when you wake up you know your mom's going be a dentist be a dentist be a dentist and you're like mom there's a whole language actually here that talks about dentistry and whether i love it or not and i'll keep walking on down that path but i'm actually supposed to look really carefully about which bits of any job really lift me up and give me a sense of mastery kids have more of a language as they say in the book they have more of a language about geometry than they do about this thing I was just talking about.
[140] So your parents are so powerful and they're so scared and they want you to not be a layabout and they want you to be able to get a job and they're so scared for you.
[141] But what they've not done and even the best teachers are sort of scared for you.
[142] Come on, Stephen.
[143] And no one really goes, wait a minute, how do you make sense of your own emotion in your own life?
[144] What do you lean into?
[145] What do you not lean into?
[146] What are the words for that.
[147] Is there any detail around that?
[148] Or what do you like about people?
[149] What are you like doing with the people?
[150] You imagine how early you could start with that.
[151] And that wouldn't mean that it's Pollyanna.
[152] Like, we're still going to put people in the wrong jobs.
[153] I built a company that was focused entirely on people's strengths.
[154] And I still put people on the wrong job because people are super complicated.
[155] But at least we'd have a framework and a set of shared understandings about what we were even trying to do.
[156] I don't know.
[157] I think there's, for all of us, there's stuff we can do.
[158] You don't have to change the company.
[159] You don't have to change all the HR policies.
[160] You could, any one of us could start right now to do what the most successful people do in terms of weaving red threads into their work.
[161] Did you know that the driver's CEO now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[162] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[163] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[164] And along with the Dyer of a CO channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[165] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a CEO channel right now.