Steven Shares’s His Secret Diary: Dealing With Liam Payne’s Death, My Big Relationship Issue, These 4 Words Saved Me!
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IT has been a long time, and since of them this many, many years ago, when I first arted the diver CEO, the central idea of the show was to read my diary every week. I believe that I 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 twenty five 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 department, and I would read through my diary trees, the diary of a CEO took on a life of its own. I went from reading my diary to interview 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're ask me if I would ever share my diary again.

I've thought about IT four years and years, and this weekend I finally decided to give this a go. So what you're listening to today is my diary, the notes i've taken in the last few weeks, the original dara CEO, i'm even bought them. And this is the dar of a CEO.

I hope no boy's listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself. He's the first thing that I ve read in my diary this week peddles over podiums. I was driving through the streets of last 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 amer n.

Gold as we navigated through the urban flow of los Angeles traffic, the distant hum of the city pilbara, 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 near the side of town. My friend in the passenger seat was the founder of a huge fashion business that's absolutely skyrocket over the last couple of few years. It's one of those brands that becomes so popular that I know so many of you listening right now.

We're probably wearing his designs have walked runways, Grace magazine covers and become staples in war, dropped 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 puntuated only by the engine in the occasional sound of car speeding past, you know, that feeling when you can just send something wearing heavily on someone's mind.

He stared out the passenger window watching his palm trees, and Barbara flew by. Finally, he turned to me. His voice, usually so confident and assertive, was tinged with vulnerability as he broke the silence.

Do you ever worry that what you are doing will stop growing.

will decline or will fail? He asked softly. The question hung in the air between us as my brain scrambled to read between the lines by this question, I assume that the business had porters life until might have started to stack me.

Perhaps the uncertainty this had created was looming like a shadow over his achievements, costing doubt in his mind. Before I could respond, he shifted the conversation. I was talking to a michel friend, Jenny, the day the one with the podcast I noted, knowing exactly he meant.

even he's a little bit concerned. His podcast growth has been flat and .

he's questioning everything. My friend continued as he spoke, my mind flash back to a conversation I had years ago. I said, David browser. D, coincidentally. So David had been on my mind because I open to him the day before, and we were actually on our way to meet him at a preseason manchester game. N, L, A.

At that exact moment, for those of you who might not be familiar, said David Brown's foot is the master mind behind british cycling transformation from mediocredito global dominance. He was now leading performance of manchester under the new in your ownership many years ago when said David took over his performance track of british cycling. They hadn't want an olympic medal in nearly century under his leadership, they didn't just win.

They dominated, securing multiple gold medals and told to france Victories. But what struck me most when I first met I, David, wasn't his impressive ve list of Victories IT was his intense focus on mindset and psychology, which i'm now convinced is what made those Victories possible. I remember sitting across from him on my kitchen table as he cradled his mug in his hands, the steam rising in, calling in the air.

You know, he began staring his coffee, thought fully this poo on making a soft clinging nose against the israel. When our cyclist became fixated on the podium, on the medals, the glory, their performance suffers. He paused, taking a slow step. It's a suttles shift.

but is profound. The podium exists in the future, a aced beyond dara media control. The more the hibs ss over standing on that podium, winning that medal, the less attention may pay to the one thing that actually matters, the present moment, the rotation of the peddles beneath them.

He leaned closer, his gaze steady and honest, his voice Carrying the way of hard on the wisdom.

So we changed our approach. We told them to forget about the podium. Instead, focus entirely on the peddles, each rotation, each breath, each muscle contraction. This is where success is truly forge.

At the time, his words resonated with me so deeply, the simplicity of focusing on the immediate, the tangible, that now IT was a lesson at transcend cycling, one that can be applied to any endeavor pursued by any of us in any of our lives back in the car, as my friend continue to explain his fears and uncertain ties, the echo of thd Davids insight seemed more relevant than ever.

So I turned to my friend, offering a small smile of reassurance, and I said, don't worry about the podium focus on the peddles. I went on to explain what that David had taught me and how, by falling into outcome over thinking, he would be distracting himself from what he needed to do to turn his business around. I told him, when we allow our minds to drift too far ahead, we risk this connecting from the present, which is where our power, inspiration and creativity lies.

Studies on mindfulness, a practice rooted in staying present, show that those who focus on the now rather than an uncertain future, experienced less anxiety, greater focus and improved performance across a variety of different tasks. And a neuroscientist to my pog cost has shown me, the studies prove when we become preoccupied with potential outcomes, like whether will win a race or if our companies going to die, the brain's default mode, network, D M N, becomes highly active. This network, which is involved in self referential thinking, which is basically thinking about yourself too much, can lead to over thinking and heighten stress, which puts you off performing at your best.

But conversely, when we anchor our attention in the present moment, regions of the brain associated with the focus and tasks execution, such as the preferences cortex, become more engaged, which enhances its our ability to perform at our best, said 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 are line 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 that had gone in him there, the numbers, the podium, would take care of itself.

So whether you're an athlete pedling towards the finish line, or an interpreter ur navigating the turbulent waters of business, an artists crafting your next masterpiece, or simply someone striving to find baLance and lives complexities, remember, focus on the peddles, not the podium. Success isn't a destination. It's a jinny comprised of countless moments where we choose to be fully present.

The podium, the acclaims, the achievements, the milestones are merely the by product of our commitment to mastering each moment, each erosion of the peddles. I always tell people you wouldn't plan to see IT, and then dig IT up every few minutes to see if IT grown. So why do you keep questioning yourself, your hard work in your decisions? Have patients keep watering your seats funding enough? This week I stumbled across the video that reinforce the idea of thinking of peddles over podiums.

It's a video of john y. Eyes, the head designer from apple, who worked alongside Steve jobs, apple's visionary founder, at a time when apple, we're 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 C.

E. O. In the clip, john y, i've talks about how a dying company like apple saved to themselves, not by trying to save themselves or thinking about the outcome of problem they were in, but by focusing on the peddles the thing they can 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 are competent and we do our jobs in trying to describe them. And if we're competent in making them, they will be attractive in bolt, they will be bolting volume and that we will eventually make money.

I'm aware that, that can sound like an easy thing to say given advantage point right now. But that's actually what we said in ninety eight when when the company was struggling. You see, we didn't say that the goal was turn around because if we had said the goal back in the late nineties was to turn the company around, that's that's all about money.

When Steve came back, that's that's how he articulated what the goals of the company needed to be. And this wasn't some suttles. This wasn't an exercise. Instead of clever work meeting, this was describing profoundly different attitudes and approaches to what the problem was the end.

And just to add another later to this, sir David and Steve jobs didn't just have got this mindset when they were trying to tie a bad teams company around. They also thought like this when things were going very well. In fact, when things are really good or really bad, IT seems people have a great attempt to start obsessing over the wrong things.

I found a letter that Steve jobs sent to his team in two thousand and ten on the day when apple became the most valuable company in the world, overtaking microsoft for the first time. And here's what Steve jobs told his team, may twenty six, two thousand and five, fifty nine pm. team.

As most of you already know, at the close of today's stock market, apple's market cap surpassed microsoft 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 I was worth a moment of reflection today.

And so IT is, again, while 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 size 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 most successful, that I seem to worry the most.

And this doesn't just apply to business and 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 peddles rarely get what they want. But the people that focus on what they have to offer the peddles usually get what they want.

The podium, I E, the people that end up on the podium of the ones that were most focused on the paddles, and the people that never focus on the paddles never end up on the podium in the good times, in the bad, when the numbers are up and the numbers are down. Focus on the paddles, not the podium. And if you do in time, the podium will take care of itself.

The second thing ever in my diary this week is quite a personal one i've just written. You and your partner are both probably wrong at this point, is really about love and relationships. For several minutes in a row, i'd arrived, came to my apartment in the east of london, eleven pm.

Then I collapse onto the soft twelve and sofa in my living room. It's cushions enveloping me like a tide hug. And there, ray saverin, the sweet, sweet sound of giving absolutely nothing, the taking of the clock in the corner of the room, the only reminder that time is passing.

This is a growing part of the year for me professionally, whenever my longstanding assistant turns to me without familiar look of concern and warned me about the months ahead, I know i'm screwed. My calendar right now is hilarious. In the next three months has been flying to every corner of the world, from the bustling streets of bangkok, thailand, to the scaling city escape of los Angeles.

That the horizons of code, sometimes for three major events in the same day, the constant echo o of airports, the roar of the engines, the russia of boarding passes for the next few months. This is the soundcheck to my life. My company flight has just launched flight studio, our new media company, which is entire, launched a series of new shows.

We've also launched flight books, our new book publishing company, signing almost ten authors so far. My fun flight fund has some eight thousand applications to sort through. My podcar schedule is crap.

My speaking and event schedule is overflowing. We're building a new software company called flight cars based in annan, cisco, which is meant constant meetings with spotify, youtube, apple and more. We just taken a new twenty five thousand square at headquarters in central london called flight hq, which were halfway through building my talent recruit company. Chapped to two was occupying a lot of my thoughts.

I'm judged a total of forty companies that have either invested in via flight fund all founded, including a company I co founded a few years ago called third web, which has now raised roughly thirty million dollars and was recently valued at one hundred and sixty million dollars and is based on some friends, is go with a team of fifty. The list goes on. Bo, who? I know what you're thinking, Steve, you chose all of this chaos.

Don't you dare ask for sympathy. Don't you dare complain about IT. I accept all of that. This world wind is self inflicted.

And i'm still trying to figure out why me, as someone who says that I care about peace, has seemingly done everything to erica. The possibility of i'm so fucking confusing. I think we all are what we stay and what we do. And the forces that police pass dragons and drivers are impossibly hard to understand.

But when my life gets more chaotic like this, I become a different person at home from monday to friday, and distant, a little empty, desperate for nothing, silence, solitude, sometimes just delay horizontally on this massive beige couch and do absolutely nothing. But there's a problem i've been with my part of almost six years now. We have a great relationship.

SHE is the love of my life, my future wife, if I decided to get married, and the mother of my future. But the most frequently recurring issue in our relationship is this mutual frustration from me that he doesn't understand my world, and therefore he is not giving me the expectant amount of empathy, Grace, patients or space. And conversely, from how that I don't understand her world, more specifically, her needs for quality time presents, love and attention.

And on that day, just like the night before and the night before that, as I lay there like a dead body at seven thirty P M, doing absolutely nothing, I heard the soft shuffle of her footsteps on our stone floor. He approached me. She's started speaking to me about a variety of different issues, concerns and topics that were on her mind.

Her voice was gentle, but tinged with the weight of unspoken feelings. IT was late at night, the shadows long and the world asleep. My dopamine was completely depleted from my brain.

My coaches, all levels have been all time high from having to perform all day, perform as a CEO, a founder speaker, a podcast, a manager and author and investor. The mental exhaustion pressed on me like a physical weight. I looked up at her and I said, I can't do this right now.

I've had a really long day untired. I'd said the same thing the night before and the night before and the night before. I'm gonna honest with you because I think it's important.

After all, this podcast is called the diary of A C. E R. We had a disagreement that night. Our voices remained calm, but attention was a quiet storm bring between us. I went to a separate part of the apartment, and I closed the door behind me.

The feeling I had in that moment is one of pretty much had my whole life and relationships as a highly ambitious work holy. I felt misunderstood. I felt like I wasn't being given the empathy, space and Grace that I deserved. I felt unappreciated, and I was wrong. But that's how I felt.

What i've come to realize is that if you're an entrepreneur, you're a CEO, if you're a manager in a high intensity company or you're a team member in a high intensity team, or if you're just someone who's striving to change your life in a radical way by pursuing a goal that's consuming you, your romantic partner will likely never truly understand your work. They will never truly understand your stress, your worries and your constant over thinking. The most you can hope for is that they understand that they do not understand.

There is least some empathy and accepted ignorance in them, accepting the fact that they don't understand. But you also have to avoid the temptation of gas lighting your partner, something i've certainly been tempted to do time and time again. You need to have empathy for their inability to understand so often in not just this relationship, but in previous romantic relationships.

I fAllen into the trap of thinking that my pot was in considering all, or thoughtless, because they didn't truly understand how unbelievably taxing, all consuming and sometimes stressful my job is. Accordingly, when I get home from work after a difficult day, or when I was consumed by a business chAllenge, I would be surprised by the apparent lack of understanding, space and empathy. Even though I hadn't really bothered to explain that to them, I kept IT to myself.

I was expecting hard to read my mind. And the truth is the truth. I didn't have the sufficient amount of energy of cognitive reserve to realize is that even in those moments at all moments, my partner has needs to, no matter how busy or successful or stressed I am at home, everyone's needs need to be met.

And besides, why on earth would they truly, truly understand IT is not their email inbox. IT is not their deadline, is not their tough decision. It's not their chosen responsibility.

I chose this responsibility. I chose this mission. They are a passenger in the car of my dream.

IT is not their dream. I set the SAT nav. I should be grateful that they've chosen to come along for the ride. Being misunderstood at home is one of the Prices you pay for the growth that you chase. But here's the twist that I took me years to learn.

Although IT doesn't feel like IT IT is a hidden gift that your partner doesn't fully understand, if they did, home wouldn't offer a retreat from work. IT would be an extension of IT. I appreciate the fact that I can walk through the door on a hard, unpleasant, growing day into a home brimmed with smiles, happiness and free from professional pain.

So if this is you, if the shoe fits, keep going. protective. Al relationship, have mutual empathy.

The third thing that I ve been ten in my diary this week, get to acceptance as fast as you can. I got home at night elephas. I threw my keys down and I walked across my apartment.

I pulled open the balcony door to let some of the cool, humid thunderstorm airing. And as I SAT down on a kitchen store, my phone started to vibrate repeatedly. I pulled out my phone in the corner, ID said George, one of my best friends, I answered.

And before I even spoke, I just knew that was bad news. One of those moments where the silence seems to say more than words. When he did speak, his voice was heavy, each word weighed down by despair.

He shed some really sad news. His company, which had spent the last decade building the company he had become known for, had collapsed the countless hours, the sleep less nights, the dreams he had all gone. After ten years of hard work, head lost at all, and his team had lost their jobs, he was effectively bankrupt.

The business had failed. I spoke to him for the next hour on the phone, and after I turned off the lights and headed up to my bedroom as I was walking up the stairs, I assumed IT was George texting me to say goodnight. And maybe thank you for the conversation.

But to my surprise, as I look down at the notification, IT was a completely different best friend, and I don't have that many best friends. The message read, can you speak? Listen, it's so unbelievably rare that anyone would ask me to speak.

So when they ask to, unfortunately, it's always some form of crisis or bad news. I am seen as the busy friend, the one with no time, the one people don't typically want to bother. But i've tried hard to change that ever since my conversation was time in cynics where he said something that is so unbelievers ly true.

When you find darkness, you, whatever how you ever you want to define your darkness, you know, you feel alone, you feel like nobody can help you, you feel like you have no cy, you feel like a lack of control. And the first thing that a lot of us should do is reach out to a friend and say, i'm struggling, or I need help, or am lonely, or am depressed. I'm sad, whatever, whatever the feeling is. There's no .

greater .

honour. There's no great honor than being able to serve a friend in need.

And on this store me tuesday night, IT seemed like I was experiencing the one of that Simon senate described all at once. I stopped middle spiral staircase slumped into a dark corner a halfway up and called my friend ryan. She's broken up with me.

Brian is one of my best .

friends in the world, and he'd been in a relationship for the best part of a decade. He had built a life with this person. He had grand plans to have kids with her, settle down with her by a house with her, and spend the rest of his life with her. In my conversations with both of these friends, I found myself giving them support and advice.

And as the word 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 over thinking. 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 heart regular rejection, much of what I think is actually happening.

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 heart break, IT was abundantly clear to me that the source of much of his pain was actually his inability to accept that the imagine I delic future he had created with this person had been lost. I'll never forget when more god that said to me.

So happiness is very predictably. And 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 be documented in a mathematical. 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 reduced 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 cleared to me that the vast amount of pain I experienced, business or life for love and everything in between, is actually just my own resistance to situations that I find myself in. Usually when my expectations go and met, often situations I Frankly couldn't have foreseen or controlled, sometimes even situations that i'm completely unresponsive 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 bad driver. We get a bad diagnosis. We get dumped by a romantic interests. Someone writes something horrible about us online. The pain is the hours, the days, the weeks and months, the years of us, refusing to accept the situation we find ourselves in, trying to reverse and 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.

In a brain study LED by a scientists called heady koba in two thousand and ten brain scans revealed that when people asked to approach their emotional responses with acceptance, rather than reacting instinctively, something remarkable happens. They saw a notable reduction in the activity of the amygdala, ten referred to as the brains of emotional alarm system. The image plays a central role in processing fear and others DRAM emotions.

So the drop in activity suggests that acceptance can actually calm emotional activity, which is often why we suffer so strongly. You know, I don't know what about to say as a consequence of beijing, but in the season of my life, what I value more than most things is peace, something that I think deep down we all want. But when you look at how we live our lives with noise, stress and chaos, clearly something that few of us have designed our lives to create peace isn't necessarily aware that I highly prioritized twenty five years old.

But I think by being in the public a lot more now and just by getting older, it's made peace more of an important priority to me. And peace to me really is defined as that sort of state of calmness and equity, that's free conflict, that free from stress. Being in the public eye in many ways, has been the most intense crash course and acceptance I could ever have imagined.

Going from complete anonymity to having an animation inc. Number of people listening to this podcast each month, and then joining a hit BBC one T V show dragon stand during the same period force me to confront a reality I wasn't prepared for. The constant flood of opinions, judgment and miss information about you being in the public.

Guy brings with that an interesting new reality at any given moment. If I wanted to, I could dive into an endless abyss of negativity. I can find thousands of comments or articles about myself that are true or untrue, but are hurtful either way.

And i've had to learn to accept this is part of the territory. As one of my dear friends said to me, this is now an occupational hazard of your life. And this is especially true in today's world, but even repetitive sources will sometimes run with half truths.

What i've had to come to times with is that I can't control what people say or think. I have to accept that they will always be noise. I have to accept that trying to chase every false suit, every criticism, where every helpful comment is not only impossible, it's self destructive. Trying to control these things will hurt you more than these things being the public.

I has taught me that true acceptance is about letting go of the need for control, and it's in that acceptance where I found the peace to keep doing what I love without being consumed, without anger and without anxiety, the anxiety and worry, and over thinking that I couldn't seem to get hold of when I was first catapulted into the public eye. Do you ever fantasies about running away? I do.

If peace is what i'm after, surely I should escape to a secluded beaches and island somewhere. I could buy my own island, build a little home right there on the water. I imagine i'd fly my friends out, and we'd spend days in the sun working out, making music, right? Nothing but time and freedom and peace.

When I get drawn off into these fantasies of a perfect apparent peace, i'm reminded that I would mean giving up on so many of the things that I absolutely love doing, the things that fill me up and chAllenge me, the things that make my life so painful and worth living. I think humans really need five core things outside of the basics, connection, food, water. Now I think the first thing we need is to feel chAllenged.

I remember having Daniel pink, the motivation scientist, on my pot cost in the early days of the darva, and I remember him telling me that in a study of video game is scientists found that an optimal baLance between the game player skill level and the games level of a difficulty keeps game players deeply engaged. This is the reason why video games have levels and increase in difficulty. You don't actually want to play your life on easy mode.

And conversely, you don't want the frustration from a life that is too difficult. You have to maintain your own equal liberum of chAllenge in the studies. When you reach your chAllenge equal, liberum plays into a state of flow where they are fully absorbed in the game.

All of this applies for my life, and all of that applies for yours. You and me both need increasing chAllenge. If you're listening to this right now and you're one of the people considering quitting your job, for many of you, this will be the reason you feel like you're playing the same game on the same level every single day.

Secondly, I think we need a feeling of autonomy, the feeling that you have freedom in control. Thirdly, you need a feeling of progressive ford motion studies show this to be true, and I think forward link that forward motion needs to be towards a subjectively meaningful goal. And lastly, you need to be working towards IT with a supportive group of people that you like.

My life continues to teach me that these five core components are hardwired into wide DNA. They are evolutionary survival mechanisms deep inside all of us to ensure that our species continue to build to dry forward, to conquer importing goals, to lean into chAllenging tasks and to do IT with our tribe. If your ancestors didn't have this in that DNA, they wouldn't have created the magical devices you're streaming my voice on right now, the skyscrapers we live in working and the airplanes we fly on the past.

This desire to you, you're born to create, to build, to accomplish together. So with this in mind, I end up concluding that I am living my life in the way that I should be. And even if I did run away, I would end up searching for meaning by creating something.

And if my creations were successful and appreciated, I would end up back in the same situation. I mean, now peace isn't absence of hard times. Is your capacity to accept hard times of remaining in the longer m pursuit of your most important goals.

And that's where I arrive back at the need for acceptance. Life is going to suck, sometimes more so than you or me would like. But that is, Frankly, the Price you have to pay for the love, dreams and happiness you chase.

To imagine such a world without the bad news, the heartbreak, the pain, is to imagine a world without love, reward and meeting. So whenever bad news arrives, your job isn't to think your way through IT to blame a tackle, criticize. It's simply to get to acceptance as fast as you can. And i'm not saying IT will be fast and i'm not saying IT will be easy. I'm not saying we can just decide to accept something to move on because the reality is acceptance comes in waves. One day you'll feel like you've made peace and progress with the situation on the next day that hurt the frustration, that doubt the why me sneaks right back in male Robin who came on the darvas o told me that one of the most freesia habits she's adopted is say the words out loud. Let them every single time he feels herself being aggravated, let down or annoying yed by someone or something, which is pretty much every single day for the average person.

The let them theory is based on a simple truth. The fastest .

way to take .

control of your life is to stop controlling everyone around you. You have no idea how much time and energy and attention you are wasting trying to control other people. You have no idea how much energy you are burning through thinking about, worrying about, obsessing about what other people are doing, what they're not doing, what they're feeling, all of which you have a zero control over.

When SHE said this, to me, i've GTA be honest. I think I thought that was nonsense. How can two simple words be so powerful? But then I tried IT with a few minor alterations. When I find myself annoyed, an extension situation, and I feel attention in my body, the first thing idea is to .

take a deep breath .

in and a long, slowed breath out.

My girlfriend is a breath back practitioner, and he tells me every single week that a long slew deep exile activates the paris sympathetic nova system, which helped to calm the body by reducing heart rate and lowering your stress levels. And after i've done that, then I say, either in my head or out loud, I wish them well. I don't know why, but this simple exercise has proven to be an instant circle break up for me.

Anytime I find myself falling into a bit of a spiral, it's really a decision to let go, to refuse to allow a person or situation to consume more of your final energy, to be empathetic towards them and whatever they might be going through, which is important, and to jump straight to acceptance so that you can get back home with your life. I wish them well. Acceptance is as much about letting go as IT is about holding on.

It's about letting go of the need to control this situation that you can't. And it's about holding on to the belief that even in your darkest moments, there is often a hidden gift that is seemingly impossible to see. My life over the last couple of years has taught me that worry doesn't take away tomorrow's troubles.

IT takes away today's peace. You cannot stop the waves. Frankly, you wouldn't want a life without tides, but you can learn to surf.

So get two acceptance as fast as you can. The next note i've written in my diary is one that I think so many of you will relate to. I've written, I need to spend more time in the clouds. Last weekend, I went fishing for the first time in my life, and he taught me something that's completely changed my life.

IT was a sunday afternoon, and I found myself in a little boat, or being gently in the midst of huge lake ox future, the sky was full of rolling grey clouds, and as is typical of british weather, the rain was pelting against my Green waterproof. Overall, my girlfriend and I weren't during a station weekend at a place called the steel manner. The manner offered a men you of various activities.

And purely because we've been so growth in a reality T. V show on netflix recently called out last, where twenty people have to survive and hunt and live in nature for as long as they can to win a million dollars. I thought IT would be a great idea to pick the fishing activity, because if he and I ever needed to end for ourselves in the wilderness, knowing how to catch your own food might come in handy, so that we were on this little, tiny pedal boat from this very big lake, costing our lines out and, unsurprisingly, catching absolutely nothing.

This has been the first time in a long time that I had SAT and done absolutely nothing. The first time in a long time that I had allowed myself to become totally bored. And as I SAT there, bowed out of my mind, dropping into this meditation state, so many of the answers that i've been searching for in my life, in my work and in my business seem to emerge out of seemingly nowhere.

The share volume of epiphany I had while SAT automatic lake LED me to an even bigger, overarching epiphone y, which I needed to share with you today. Because for some of you, this might inspire you to reorganize your life in a way that helped you to become the creative force you need to be to reach your goals in the very, very strange times we living in to understand what i'm about to say, you need to understand three separate underlying principles that came to me that day on the lake principle. Number one, clouds and trenches.

I've been thinking a lot about this idea of clouds and trenches, the baLance between two modes of work, and how critical IT is to spend the right amount of time in each mode. The trenches aware, the hard focused work happens, the business meetings, the podcast recordings, the investment decisions, the flights, the speech is the company building, the interviewing people to join my businesses, the zoom calls, all the action. This is the trenches.

U. N, I both know them well. The clouds, on the other hand, away, you step away from the ground, not the kind of stepping away where you go and get paralytic drunk.

Can I be there or distract yourself by playing video games, but truly disconnecting, thinking, walking, running, maybe reading, listening, doing nothing, fishing, dreaming. It's the space where creativity and innovation are born, where your intuition can be heard. Most of my best ideas have come from time spent in the clouds.

They haven't come from board rooms and brain stone. They've come while I was rolling through the hills on bali on a moped alone at night, running on a trade melin cambodia or SAT on a small boat, praying, waiting for a fish to tug my line. Principle number two that came to me on the late that day is this idea of your unique value point.

One of the most fundamentally but poorly appreciated principles of life is that no matter who you are, a creative, an entrepreneur, manager or even a health care professional, you will be paid, recognized and rewarded for your ability to do something valuable that most other people aren't doing. Take this pod cost for example. There are millions and millions and millions of podcast out there.

But the reason you choose to listen to mind is because there's something that we do differently, something you value, that is hard to find elsewhere, that valuable point of difference is ultimately why we're rewarded. In this case, are your attention. The greater the difference you offer, the harder IT is defined.

And the more that IT is valued, the more valuable you and your work becomes. Therefore, the more you'll be paid and the Richard, you will be in business, we call IT a USB a unique selling point. But for me, it's more about the unique value you bring. It's not just about being able to sell something. It's about delivering real hard to find value.

This idea of having a strong U V P unique value point was brought into focus for me this week as I watched with my jaw on the floor as elon masks space sex, large, a fifty story rocket, the biggest to have a launch, wearing some two hundred tones into the air, and then quoted media with two metal chopsticks, unfathomable space sexy value is so rare and so large, made space acts, nearly a trillion dollar company. The second principle of U V P is something that most people building a create or company don't fully understand. Almost ten years ago, when I thinking about this concept of unit selling points for an article I was writing for the hinged m post, I asked the owner of my local corner shop in manchester, U.

K. Why he thinks customers choose shop. He gave me this long list of reasons that included things like great customer service, clean shopping eyes and lots of different types of milk.

But in reality, as a customer of his, I choose that shot because it's the closest proximity and therefore convenience. Is that only real unique value point? And if a new corners shop open, the closer, unfortunately, Dennis, you'd lose me as a customer forever.

Hold onto these two ideas of the clouds and trenches and your u VP. As I introduced the final point, principal three is the accelerating pace of change. The world is changing at a pace faster than any time in human history.

Futures rate as well famously said, we won't experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty first century. We will experience the equivalent of twenty thousand years of progress. The rate of change is accelerating so fast that the solutions to today's problems will be outdated faster than ever before.

If you're forty years old today, by the age of sixty, you'll experience a years change at today's rate in just three months. If you are eleven years old today, by the age of sixty, you'll experience a year's worth of today's change in just eleven days. In simple times, the correct answers to the business, professional marketing or personal questions that you care so much about will change at lightning pace, and therefore so will your unique value point, technology, markets and the world will move on faster than you can blink.

This phenomenon is often referred to his acceleration of business cycles or creative destruction. The easiest way to see this playing out is to study the rate in which create companies rise and fall in the modern economy. By looking at this data, you can essentially see how long A U, V, P, A unique value point, lasts.

In modern times, there was a two thousand and eight study done by a company called inner sight that showed that companies are rising and falling than ever before. In one thousand hundred and sixty five, the average company, he stayed on the S. M.

P. Five hundred list, a list that ranks the biggest five hundred companies in the world for thirty three years. By two thousand and eighteen, that number had drunk to seventeen years, and by two thousand and twenty seven is projected to drop further.

They predict the company will only be on that list for a around a decade at this rate by the time on fifty companies will only be on the S P. Five hundred list for a few years, maybe even a few months before they are disrupted in full of that list. However, even these forecasts presume that A I isn't going to further turbo charge disruption, which I certainly think that already is.

I think by the time on fifty, some companies, especially technology companies, will last just months on the S P. 5 before they disrupt。 And over the last few decades, were seeing the rise of new companies and the fall of companies.

Accelerate incomes. Apple outgoes code and black and nokia incomes, netflix out those blockbuster incomes ChatGPT outgoes. google. Maybe this isn't how things used to work.

Companies used to stay big and powerful for multiple decades or even centuries, because the unique value point was so strong. But in a changing world, in a technological one and an A I one, everything changes. So as creative as entrepreneurs, professionals, how do we keep up? And that is where principle number one comes in.

That's where the clouds come in. You have to spend more time in the clouds and less time in the trenches. This is what the lake whispered to me that day.

More time dreaming, more time disconnected from the trenches, more time alone with ourselves to stay inspired, to create new ideas, to disrupt ourselves, to innovate, to tune. When we're in the trenches, we are standing so close to the painting that we can see the picture. Stepping away gives our mind the space to wonder, to connect all dots in new ways and to find new valuable points of difference to explore and experiment with.

All of these principles have made me conclude that one of the most valuable but unobvious things I can do for my companies is to do nothing. More often, one of the best things I could do for my relationship, which is also something that I am building, is to do nothing. So I can think about the relationship.

I need more time in the clouds, thinking, dreaming, letting my mind wonder, because that's where true creativity, value and connection is born. Over the last year, i've taken no time off. I've worked nonstop in the proverbial trenches, but i've had this haunting feeling because of this.

I missing something, something that quietly whispering to be discovered, something that will only reveal itself if I pull myself up into the clouds. But I ve struggled to give myself permission to spend time in the clouds because everything feels so busy and urge, and an important in the trenches. Right now.

I have this strange feeling of guilt that if I stop, i'll lose everything. I have a feeling of complacency that associated with stepping out of the trenches and into the clouds. But there is another voice I call IT wisdom that is demanding that I do because the clouds have something important they need to tell me.

I know all of these analogies sound a bit bunkers, but I also know that some of you be able to relate to the feeling i'm describing, the feeling that you'll missing some hie inspiration or message because you made yourself too busy to hear IT for a second. Allow me to get a little bit esoteric. We are all, in one way or another, can find by the narratives we construct around our lives.

Maybe your narrative is that people should settle down at thirty. Maybe yours is to avoid failure. Maybe your narrative tive is that technology is bad, that veganism is good, or that marriage is important, that people on the other side of the political isle are evil.

These narrow ties become the bedrock of our careers, our identities and our lives, making them exceptionally hard to escape, and they are self reinforcing or often compensated and validated and applauded for continuing to believe in them, which reinforces that 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, eller, identifying the societal and industry narratives and understanding how they limit us. They dare to imagine a Better narrative, a new idea, a new paradise that others have yet to believe.

These individuals become legends and world changes and billion's, not because they are successful at a current narrative, but because they change IT. Steve jobs is such a prime example of someone who was able to see the floors and narratives that everyone else believed. That sounds kind of strange, but I always think about his bizarre decision to exclude adobe flash from apple devises.

A prime example of this in the late two thousands, flash was the standard for delivering rich video content on the web. The industry was so deeply entangled in the prevail ing narrative that flash was indivisible for. Videos and animations and interactive applications.

However, Steve jobs were beyond this prevAiling belief. He recognized that flash was plagued with security vulnerability, consumed excessive battery power and was not optimize for the touch interfaces that he wanted the world to adapt with his iphone, his ipod and his ipads. Despite facing massive criticism from many and including people in his own team and including the CEO at the time of adobe, who said IT was an extraordinary attack, he held a firm in his convictions.

This move, not only the apple apart, could also rapidly accelerated the entire web industries, shift towards more modern, efficient and open technologies by chAllenging the entrench narrative jobs, redefined computing and the way that we interact with digital content forever. But this was the story of Steve, someone that seemed to be able to see into the future that new, our current narratives were so flawed. Ed, I do be flash needed to die.

That to humans, design and typography really matter. That digital music was the future that we wanted. An APP store, that physical keyboards on phone sucked and took up too much space that could be used for other things, that our devices shouldn't have removable batteries, ies, they need to touch screens, no headphone jacks, and that everything can be stored in the cloud.

How was he able to see the future to think so disruptively so clearly with such conviction? Well, that turns out he spent every day in the clouds. What most people don't know about Steve jobs was that he was deeply influenced by meditation of mindfulness practices.

These practices played a significant role in shaping his creativity, his leadership style and the innovative products that apple became known for. Frequent meditation helped jobs to cultivate a heightened level of focus and mental clarity, which was crucial in his creative process. And he said at himself, if you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is.

If you try to calm IT, IT only makes IT worse. But over time, IT does come. And when IT does, there's room to hear more settled things.

That's when your intuition starts to block him 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 world to Isaacson. Steve jobs biographia, who might interviewed on this poor cost a few months ago, said Steve jobs way of looking at problems was a direct result of the meditation technical he practiced. There 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 shared, 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 shoulder in head. Words that I read many years ago from during rambus came to mind.

The quiet you become, the more you can hear. And my life has continue to prove this to me. Silence, bottom in space on 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. I never imagine i'd be sharing with the world. I literally just got pew bumps.

I when I started speaking. IT was ten, forty, forty nine P. M. On wednesday, the sixteen of october, I was sitting at my computer, at my kitchen table in my high rise apartment.

The familiar late night home of the city was my only acquaintance, and the lights beneath me like a galaxy of tiny stars. My french bodog pabo lay at my feet, snowing softly by comforting familiar sound in the stones of the night. The ethnic tapping of my keyboard was the only other noise as I flowed through my work.

My phone set up beside me. There was a message from georgie, the C. E. O of my media company, how tax read? Have you seen the news?

My heart skipped to be before I could reach out to pick up my phone. Another notification appeared this time. IT was for my personal sistine.

Oh my god, a red. I throws my fingers hovering above the keys. The wave of apprehension washed over me.

What could possibly be so urgent at this hour? My mind raced through a dozen scarious. None of them would bid. Taking a deep breath.

I opened a new brows .

at tab and typed in BBC 点 com， expecting to see some sort of breaking news headline. Nothing confused. I navigated twitter.

The home page, felt like IT took a lifetime to load. And there IT was the headline that made my stomach drop, lean pain, dead. At thirty one, I stared at the screen, my mind unable to process the words I just read.

That was surreal, impossible. I reread the headlined several times, hoping i'd misread IT. I check at the account I posted IT verified we're peaceable.

I clicked off the tweet and disbelief in such his name, not looking for confirmation that this was true, hoping for confirmation that I was a hoax. But the avalanche post that I saw told me that I was all too real, even as I speak these words into the microphone. Now I have this wave of goose bumps that spread across my body.

On june the first twenty twenty one, leon was a guest on my podcast. We had a raw, open, honest conversation about life, his struggles with fame and his mental health. After the cameras to stop rolling, we stayed chatting for a long time, make change numbers, and later that night he text me, expressing that he was still on a high from the conversation and sharing some of his new music, which we had discussed after the recording.

I was just about to do dragon stan and step one, step further into the public eye, something he knew more about than anyone. We were both basically the same age, interested in many of the same things. And so over the next three years, we became good friends between two thousand and twenty one and two thousand and twenty four.

I spent time at his house on multiple latians, learning about his world, his dog, his love of all, his admiration for his son back, his manager, his dreams, his new music can he struggles. We did boozing lessons together when he visited major and dragon stand recordings. We went to the gym together in london when we were both in town.

We invested in a company together, had many dinners, nights out, trained for football matches, and had a big england euro party together in manchester. He felt like her Younger brother to me. I loved him because he was so kind, he was so pure hearted, he was so funny, and he was so hopeful that he could overcome all of the chAllenges that he was troubling with limes, death breaks my heart.

I can fill my eyes filling with tears as I say these words. and. What he needed most from the world was love and kindness and Grace. When people need this mass, they often get the exact opposite because their behavior is strange. That behavior is a typical IT is hard to understand.

Robby Williams, the legendary artist who rose to start up an early age and struggle, some of the same addictions that lean spoke about publicly, called me after limbs passing and offered some words of wisdom, some words of comfort and understanding. He also said publicly, 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 judgment. A bit of slack needs to be given before you type anything on the internet.

Please have a thing. Do I really need to publish this? Because what you're doing is your 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 and life, and strangers on the internet, even famous strangers need your compassion.

One of the things that i've come alone bidin the darvas o and into doing so many people is that people's pain and their sadness rarely looks like pain, sadness and toruma IT looks like anger, IT looks like hate. Sometimes IT looks like laughter, sometimes that looks like addiction. And addiction isn't for battle 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 unescapable, that the ways we choose to not feel that become destruct in and of themselves. But IT isn't a choice to self destruct is the opposite. It's a last ditch attempt to survive.

And we never heal from pain. We refused to acknowledge to 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 up 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 the illusion, I found a sharpener or viBrant appreciation for every single moment, every connection. Every person I love.

The last text messages liam shared with me where photos of art created these incredible, powerful pencil sketches, and as I SAT there in the early hours of the morning ing years of loving, encouraged, he gave me 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, a friend, the father, the boyfriend that the world has lost. And in that moment I felt so overwhelming by the urged text studium even .

though .

I knew that you were gone. I hope you'd .

read them.

I hope you would reply, so I type the words out anyway, I love you. I'm so sorry that I didn't do more.

one more phone .

call check 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. 我 定 了 好久。

I'm so sorry, but I didn't do more.