Snippet 27: Steven Bartlett: 5 Reasons Why You’re Unhappy At Work (And How To Change It)
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I've sometimes wondered this about you because especially like, you know, you guys have released a vlog now for three weeks. And just like every time I watch the vlog, I'm just like, wow, this guy is relentless. And in my mind, I'm thinking you've already made the money. You've already had the success. You've got the biggest podcast in the world. Like what are you doing it for? So the reason I pause is

is because it's very easy to bullshit. And I don't want to bullshit, but it's also hard to know the answer. And I think most of us, we get used to giving an answer to that question. But I care a lot about whether it's true or not. And so...

I think if I was to hazard a guess at the truth, I would say it's a multitude of reasons. I would say on one hand, there's no greater feeling than doing something that people appreciate and adds value to someone else's life. There's no feeling like the feeling I experienced this morning when I walked into the office and the girl that grabbed me and said, I just quit my job. Literally this morning, I just quit my job. And I told my boss in that interview why I was quitting. And it's because of your podcast. I'm listening to this particular guest and they helped me with this thing. There's no metric here.

that actually feels like

as good for the human being as that. The ego might love, oh, we hit 3 million subscribers. It's funny, I walked into my team that day and go, I realize none of us care that we hit 3 million subscribers. I also don't care. It's important that we use this as a metric to understand that we've done well as a team, but I realize none of us care because we're feigning caring. Who cares if you hit 3 million subscribers? It's one more than 2 million. But it's nice to have milestones where we celebrate

That matters to me. It matters to me that we're creating stuff that's helping people. That really matters to me. On the other end, I do look at the metrics all the time, as I know you do. Or at least you did. Yeah, stop now. Okay. I remember very vividly you telling me that you used to be really obsessed with it all. And it wasn't great. So that's important. I still have a bit of that in me where it matters to me how the episodes perform in terms of numbers. I don't know why, but...

It does. I want the episodes to do really well and I want things to grow and move forward and get bigger. I want that. Maybe that's the shame, like the kid again, trying to be enough. Why am I doing it? I believe in life to be happy, you have to kind of fulfill these five objectives in your profession. Number one, you need challenge, right? Things need to become incrementally more difficult, right?

to the level of appetite that you can take. That's why in game psychology, every level gets harder. You're not going to do the same crossword on the same difficulty over and over again. You would lose motivation. Daniel Pink, his book is behind you, says this. They do it in studies. If it's the same difficulty, people lose motivation. So when you're building teams, the thing you've got to know as a CEO or as a founder is the depth of difficulty that every single member of your team is at. And if at one point, one of your team members isn't challenged enough

they will quit you're about six months from them asking for a meeting okay so keep them one foot out of their depth and i have this mental model in my head of all my team members and i actually sat here this morning with one of them this morning at 9am this morning who i knew was too comfortable and my conversation with her this morning was give me 48 hours i'm gonna return you to the state you were when we working together in new york where you're out of your depth

Because I know that's what you need. She didn't articulate that to me, but I knew it is. I know the reason why she's like, hmm, feeling... This is one of my companies. One of my companies. It's because she's not out of her depth anymore. Factor number two to be motivated and enjoy your work is...

what I call the progress principle, sense of forward motion. It's one of the laws in the book as well. When they interview people in work and say, what's your best day in work? Harvard Business Review found it was on days where people had a sense of progress. This is also what David Brailsford speaks to when he entered the British cycling team. Many people think of Sir David Brailsford who took over that down and out British cycling team and made them the best to ever do it.

They attribute the success of that to the fact that he cared about these 1% marginal gains. 100%. That is a huge part of it. But what Sir David Brailsford said to me, which I actually think is more important because it's the macro tailwind, is when we found those 1% gains, those small ways to improve something, making the water bottle one centimetre bigger, the pillow softer, the important part was the impact it had on people's motivation because, quote, we felt like we were going somewhere.

humans need that sense of we're going somewhere. So if you're a CEO, one of the most important things you should always do, which I try and do a lot with my teams naturally, is...

constantly remind the team of the fact that we are going somewhere. It's a feeling in the room. And so David Brailsford told me that when he could get that feeling into the room of we're going somewhere, because those 1% gains are the easiest to find, it's hard to find a big gain in any pursuit. It's hard to, in what you do and what I do, finding those 100% gains, it's an accident.

focus on the smallest things, find it, enjoy the win together, which is like, oh my God, we just made this 1% better. There's a trackpad glued under the table you're at right now. And the trackpad is there because me and my team just found a 1% gain last week where during the conversation with someone, sometimes they say amazing things and I want to write it down and just remember it because that might be the title, the thumbnail, the description or whatever. And then after the conversation ends, I forget it. My team come up and say, what do you think of the episode? I don't have any notes.

because I've had to pay attention. So you'll see a trackpad under the table where you are now. Can you feel it? Is it there? Maybe it was the trackpad they removed. There's a little Velcro. Okay, so that was the trackpad. So all I do is I just tap it with my finger. And what it's doing is that system underneath the table is listening to every word we say.

and it highlights it so the ai will highlight it and send it off to my team so afterwards i have all my notes and i just got to tap the bottom of the table idea let's do that it's a great idea but but anyway that's an example of a one percent gain we found as a team and when we did that we shared it with the whole team and it and we enjoyed it and we're like this is so awesome and it created that impression that we're going somewhere we made progress today that's point number two so you need to challenge yourself you need a sense of forward motion number three i'm going to say is um

I'm going to say you need to be pursuing a goal in your life that is subjectively meaningful. It goes back to what we said earlier. If you interview all members of my team, and there's hundreds of people across different companies, but if you just focus on the podcast team where there's 25, 30 people, every single person will give a different reason as to why they work here.

Holly will say it's because of this. I'll say it's because of this. Will will say it's because of the creativity and his love of production. I don't care what your reason is as long as you've got one. So you haven't got to give them all the same reason.

You haven't got to align on reasons, they just got to find theirs and you've got to help them find their reason. So that's point number three, if the goal is feels subjectively worthwhile to you. Number four, which is super backed by science, we just touched on it a little bit, is autonomy and control. Feeling like you have control and autonomy of your work. When people don't have that in their work, physiologically, they're more prone to disease. Psychologically, they have tons of really difficult challenges.

so having control and autonomy over what you're doing is integral to feeling like a free animal that's not in a cage and last one maybe the most important of all because we can all recount on times in our lives where we had the previous fall but didn't have this one in the job and the work sucked is you've got to be working with a supportive community of people that you like

And that makes all of the other ones better. Makes all of the other four better. Notice that I haven't said a particular career or a particular job or anything. If I have these five things in my profession, Steve will be balanced. And I've applied these five things to psychedelics, where I worked for a year, invested in the company of Thai. We took the company public.

um at a big valuation in june 2021 i believe um i've applied it to uh huel to my businesses to marketing to software with third web um i'm applying it to podcasting i guess it's a business uh i'm applying it to djing i'm applying it to the event businesses we we run um i'm playing it's my production company which we're doing shows on the bbc at the moment um so the the subject doesn't matter it's less important than what people think i think

Everyone in this room and everyone listening to this now could find their passion in a multitude of industries if they had these five things. The subject matter is less consequential because I wasn't born to be a social media CEO. Didn't exist when I was born. So how could that possibly be my passion? But I have these five things. I've had those five things for a long time.