Steven Bartlett spends his days interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs on his podcast, The Diary Of A CEO, and at 30, is the youngest-ever ‘Dragon’ on hit TV show Dragons Den, so it's safe to say he knows a thing or two about success, ambition and hustle.
Indeed, even Steven himself admits that up until a few years ago, he was a broke, university dropout, living in one of the worst parts of the country, alone, with nothing but ‘a laptop and a dream’. With a bit a hell of a lot of grit and determination, Steven became CEO of one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, Social Chain, a social media marketing agency that was valued at €186m (£160m) in a public listing in 2019. He's also become a social media sensation with 2.1m followers (and counting) who devour his empowering and inspiring daily mantras. Every week, without fail, one of my Whatsapp chats is alight with commentary about his latest podcast, and how inspiring it is. Now, the financial guru is partnering with NatWest to help people have a smarter approach to managing their finances and help motivate them to achieve their financial goals.
So how, as we enter into one of the bleakest periods of austerity, can we emulate Steven's entrepreneurial spirit? GLAMOUR posed our most burning questions about navigating the cost of living crisis whilst still smashing our financial goals and entrepreneurial dreams to Steven and here are some valuable life lessons we took away:
Ensure that your goals are intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically
Intrinsic motivations come from within, while extrinsic motivations arise from outside of us. When you’re intrinsically motivated, you engage in an activity solely because you enjoy it and get personal satisfaction from it. When you’re extrinsically motivated, you do something in order to gain an external reward, such as money, recognition or in the avoidance of trouble, such as losing a job. And the science couldn’t be clearer on this, when our intrinsic desires lose, so do we. It’s clearly so unbelievably important to know what you actually want, who you actually are and to be able to tell the difference between the person the outside world wants you to be and the person your inside world has taken years for you to become. The reason this is my first and most important goal-setting advice is because if you set goals untrue to you, you’ll also struggle to find the motivation you’ll need to succeed at it and will likely experience burnout.
Whatever your goal is, you must be religiously consistent
Time is everything, it’s our most important currency. Starting as soon as possible and being consistent is the magic to unlocking the invisible but defining rewards of compounding interest, efforts and success.\
You’ve got to be willing to fail if you want to succeed
And not only be willing, but welcome failure as the greatest learning opportunity. I personally owe so much of my success to my failures. Failure always takes me to a greater destination, allows me to grow and understand the direction I was really supposed to go in.
Stay calm and cash in.
As we enter the cost of living crisis and many people feel pressured to put their entrepreneurial dreams on hold, it's time to take risks.
Anyone with a true entrepreneurial burning desire to create and build will know that no matter what, these things can’t be put on hold. My general disregard of what others think, or what “I’m supposed to do”, is the reason I’ve been able to achieve the goals I’ve set myself over the last 10 years. None of my major decisions have “made sense” to people that don’t truly understand my ambition.
For me, taking no risks will end up being your biggest risk. You have to risk failure to succeed and if you’re always avoiding risk, you’re risking missing out on life. But of course, if you have dependencies and responsibilities it’s all about weighing up the risks and chatting to your bank about what your timeline looks like. But I would also add that there will never be a ‘right time’, if you wait for that you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life. If you look at the last 3-4 years we’ve gone from one period of great societal uncertainty to another and I can’t imagine it changing significantly any time soon.
There is so much written about the courage it takes to start a new job, a new relationship, a new business or a new passion. Not enough is written about the equally important, courageous and confounding thing you usually have to do before you start something new - quitting the last thing. I assure you, quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill. Knowing when to quit, change direction, leave a toxic situation, demand more from life or give up on something that you know your heart isn’t in and move on is a life-defining skill that people who find fulfilment, love and success - people who win at life - have intuitively mastered. Every time I’ve quit, people have called me crazy but every time, without fail, it’s led me to more fulfilment, better love and higher success. Every single time.
“During a cost of living crisis, it feels like the government didn’t read the room.”
Probably Mo Gawdat, in episode 101 of The Diary of a CEO. He’s a happiness expert who also used to work as Head of Google X. He explained to me that Expectation is the Curse of Happiness, and actually created a formula for happiness that has stuck with me ever since. I tell everyone about it and reference it probably every single day. He explains it so much better than I do so I would recommend going and listening but yeah, that really changed the game for me.
NatWest have partnered with entrepreneur Steven Bartlett to launch a brand-new ‘Money Motivation’ series to help people get motivated to set and reach their personal goals. The series is available to watch at natwest.com/moneymotivation
