Steven Bartlett Business Quotes

Stop telling yourself you’re not qualified, good enough or worthy. Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do.

if you want to keep someone’s brain lit up and receptive to your point of view, you must not start your response with a statement of disagreement.

The most convincing sign that someone will achieve new results in the future is new behaviour in the present.

THE FIVE BUCKETS 1. What you know (your knowledge) 2. What you can do (your skills) 3. Who you know (your network) 4. What you have (your resources) 5. What the world thinks of you (your reputation)

Healthy conflict strengthens relationships because those involved are working against a problem; unhealthy conflict weakens a relationship because those involved are working against each other.

The Law: You must never disagree In the midst of a negotiation, debate or heated argument, try and remember that the key to changing someone’s mind is finding a shared belief or motive that will keep their brain open to your point of view.

Stories are the single most powerful weapon any leader can arm themselves with – they are the currency of humanity. Those who tell captivating, inspiring, emotional stories rule the world.

When you find yourself disagreeing with someone, avoid the emotional temptation, at all costs, to start your response with ‘I disagree’ or ‘You’re wrong’, and instead introduce your rebuttal with what you have in common, what you agree on, and the parts of their argument that you can understand.

Being able to simplify an idea and successfully share it with others is both the path to understanding it and the proof that you do. One of the ways we mask our lack of understanding of any idea is by using more words, bigger words and less necessary words.

In 2019, I advised a large global B2B company to ban the job title ‘salesperson’, to stop using the term ‘sales’ and replace it with a ‘partnerships’ team. More people responded to their emails, and their sales rose by 31 per cent. As I suspected, a job title with the word ‘sales’ in it, primes the people you contact to believe you’re going to pester them to buy something they don’t want – conversely, the framing of the word ‘partner’ suggests the person is on your team.

Step 1: Learn First you must identify the topic you want to understand, research it thoroughly and grasp it from every direction. Step 2: Teach it to a child Secondly, you should write the idea down as if you were teaching it to a child; use simple words, fewer words and simple concepts. Step 3: Share it Convey your idea to others; post it online, post it on your blog, share it on stage or even at the dinner table. Choose any medium where you’ll get clear feedback. Step 4: Review Review the feedback; did people understand the concept from your explanation? Can they explain it to you after you’ve explained it to them? If not, go back to step 1; if they did, move on.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others.

This third law – to never disagree – is the critical skill that will allow you to become an effective negotiator, speaker, salesperson, business leader, writer – and partner.

your success will be defined by your attitude towards the small stuff – the things most people overlook, ignore or don’t care about. The easiest way to do big things is by focusing on the small things.

the art of becoming a great communicator, conversationalist or partner is first listening so that the other person feels ‘heard’, and then making sure you reply in a way that makes them feel ‘understood’.

We usually start our professional life acquiring knowledge (school, university, etc.), and when this knowledge is applied, we call it a skill. When you have knowledge and skills you become professionally valuable to others and your network grows. Consequently, when you have knowledge, skills and a network, your access to resources expands, and once you have knowledge, skills, a valuable network and resources, you will undoubtedly earn a reputation.

Framing isn’t about lying and deception; it’s about knowing how to present your product or service through the most factual and compelling lens. For example, it’s more appealing to say a food product is 90 per cent lean than to say it contains 10 per cent fat. Both are true, but one frame is more psychologically alluring. These examples illustrate an important but too often forgotten principle in branding, marketing and business: reality is nothing more than perception and context is king.

1. The Peak-End Rule: The two moments that matter most The peak–end rule is a cognitive bias that describes how people remember an experience or event. Simply put, we judge an experience according to how we felt at its peak and at its end, rather than by some perfectly aggregated average of every moment of it. Crucially, this applies to both good and bad experiences! Businesses and brands take note: customers will judge their entire experience on just two moments – the best (or worst) part, and the end.

Participants collecting stamps as part of a café’s reward programme buy coffee more frequently the closer they get to earning a free drink;

we subjectively accept evidence to be true based on our experiences and biases.

Those who hoard gold have riches for a moment. Those who hoard knowledge and skills have riches for a lifetime. True prosperity is what you know and what you can do. LAW 2 TO MASTER IT, YOU MUST CREATE AN OBLIGATION TO TEACH IT This law explains the simple technique that the world’s most renowned intellectuals

Amazon follows the same fail-faster religion. Jeff Bezos, founder of the trillion-dollar e-commerce platform, sent the following memo to his shareholders when the company became the fastest ever to reach annual sales of $100 billion: One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organisations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 per cent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

The Law: To master it, you must create an obligation to teach it Learn more, simplify more and share more. Your consistency will further your progress, the feedback will refine your skill and following this law will lead to mastery.

Research has shown that cognitive dissonance is most painful for us when we encounter facts or evidence that destabilise or conflict with how we see ourselves, that undermine our identity and confidence in ourselves, or that make us feel in some way threatened.

The American psychologist Elliot Aronson, who studied this phenomenon, famously assembled a discussion group of pompous, dull people. Some of the participants were made to endure an arduous selection process; others were allowed to join immediately, without expending any effort. Those who were given the runaround reported enjoying the group far more than the ones who were simply let in. Aronson explained what was happening here: whenever we’ve invested time, money or energy into something and it ends up being a complete waste of time, this creates dissonance, which we try to reduce by finding ways of justifying our bad decision. Aronson’s participants focused unconsciously on what might be interesting, or at least bearable, about being part of a deliberately boring group. The people who had invested very little effort in joining therefore had less dissonance to reduce, and more readily admitted what a waste of time it had been.

The truth is, in every interpersonal conflict in your life – business, romantic or platonic – communication is both the problem and the solution.

The late spiritual leader Yogi Bhajan once said, ‘If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.

Skin in the game’ is an important psychological tool to harness if you want to accelerate your learning curve in any area of your life. Having skin in the game raises the stakes of your learning by building deeper psychological incentives to perform a behaviour. The ‘skin’ can be anything from money to a personal public commitment.

Skin in the game’ works because across several global studies it’s been demonstrated that human behaviour is more strongly driven by the motivation to avoid losses than to pursue gains, which is what scientists call ‘loss aversion’. Give yourself something to lose.

The Feynman technique revised So, if you want to master something, do it publicly and do it consistently. Publishing your written ideas forces you to learn more often and to write more clearly. Publishing a video forces you to improve your speaking skills and to articulate your thoughts. Sharing your ideas on stage teaches you how to hold an audience and tell captivating stories. In any area of your life, doing it in public, and creating an obligation that forces you to do it consistently, will lead you to mastery.

The person who learns the most in any classroom is the teacher.’ James Clear The Law: To master it, you must create an obligation to teach it Learn more, simplify more and share more. Your consistency will further your progress, the feedback will refine your skill and following this law will lead to mastery. You don’t become a master because you’re able to retain knowledge.

You don’t become a master because you’re able to retain knowledge. You become a master when you’re able to release it.

The reason my stage fright eventually vanished – to the point that now I feel 99.9 per cent less nervous when speaking in a packed arena or live on TV – is simply because I carried on speaking on stage. And doing so gradually gave me new, positive, first-party evidence that replaced the existing evidence I had about my on-stage abilities – the more I spoke on stage, the stronger my confidence in this new evidence became, and with it, the belief in my inability and the fear it created diminished.

Do the thing you fear, and keep on doing it. That is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.’ Dale Carnegie

This, for me, is maybe the most important fundamental truth about belief change and how to increase a person’s self-belief – even your own; beliefs change when a person gets new counteracting evidence that they have a high degree of subjective confidence in.

The Law: You do not get to choose what you believe

If you want to change someone’s belief, don’t attack it, make them a direct witness to positive new evidence that will both inspire them and counteract the negative effects of their old beliefs. Unchallenged limiting beliefs are the greatest barrier between who we are and who we could be. Stop telling yourself you’re not qualified, good enough or worthy. Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do.

Flight, hotel and insurance aggregator websites understand that friction can create value. They found that faster search times on their websites often resulted in fewer sales. They now artificially increase search times and show all the sites they’re searching in an attempt to convince you that they’ve done a thorough search, so you don’t have to look elsewhere. This tactic has resulted in more sales, better retention and higher customer-return rates.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on seemingly irrelevant information (the ‘anchor’) when making decisions. In the context of the Goldilocks effect, by presenting two ‘extreme’ options next to the option you’re hoping to sell, you can make the middle option appear more attractive or reasonable.

When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend and the mistake remains a mistake.

In 1903, the president of a leading bank had certainly leaned out when he told Henry Ford – the founder of Ford Motor Company – ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.’ In 1992, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, had clearly leaned out when he said: ‘The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a pipe dream driven by greed.’ And the former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer had certainly leaned out when he laughed at Apple and said, ‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.

What they were all missing was the psychological frustration at the heart of the problem – people didn’t want faster delivery – they wanted less uncertainty about their delivery.

This shows that even hygiene uncertainty can be rectified with a psychological moonshot, and offers further evidence that it’s nearly always cheaper, easier and more effective to invest in perception than reality.

When I interviewed Rory Sutherland, he said: It’s hard to increase customer satisfaction by making a train ten times faster; it’s much easier to increase customer satisfaction by using psychological principles to make it feel ten times more enjoyable. I don’t think governments like the UK government would need to spend £50 billion on faster trains if they just made the Wi-Fi work better while you’re on it. It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years won’t come from improvements in technology, but in psychology and design thinking.

Do not wage a war on reality, invest in shaping perceptions. Our truth is not what we see. Our truth is the story we choose to believe.

Your philosophy is the set of beliefs, values or principles that guide your behaviour – they are the fundamental beliefs that underpin your actions.

The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.

knowledge, skills, network, resources and reputation

an investment in the first bucket (knowledge) is the highest-yielding investment you can make. Because when that knowledge is applied (skill), it inevitably cascades to fill your remaining buckets.

When deciding which path to take in life, which job to accept or where to invest your spare time, remember that knowledge, when applied (skill), is power.

There are only two buckets that any such professional earthquake can never empty - it can take away your network, it can take your resources, it can even impact your reputation, but it can never remove your knowledge and it can never unlearn your skills.

As Leonardo da Vinci asserted, ‘One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment.

As Leonardo da Vinci asserted, ‘One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others.

In aviation there’s a principle called the ‘1 in 60 rule’, which means that being off target by 1 degree will lead to a plane missing its end destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown. This concept also applies to our lives, careers, relationships and personal growth. Just a small deviation from the optimal route is amplified over time and distance – something that feels like a small miss now can create a big miss later. This highlights the need for the real-time course corrections and adjustments that the kaizen philosophy provides. If we are to be successful, we all need simple rituals to assess our course and make the necessary small adjustments, as frequently as possible, in all aspects of our lives.

THE TEN STEPS TO BUILDING A COMPANY CULTURE 1. Define the company’s core values and align them with aspects such as mission, vision, principles or purpose to create a solid foundation for the organisation. 2. Integrate the desired culture into every aspect of the company, including hiring policies, processes and procedures across all departments and functions. 3. Agree upon expected behaviours and standards for all team members, promoting a positive work environment. 4. Establish a purpose that goes beyond the company’s commercial goals, fostering a deeper connection for employees. 5. Use myths, stories, company-specific vocabulary and legends, along with symbols and habits, to reinforce the company culture and embed it in the collective consciousness. 6. Develop a unique identity as a group and cultivate a sense of exclusivity and pride within the team. 7. Create an atmosphere that celebrates achievements, progress, and living the company culture, boosting motivation and pride. 8. Encourage camaraderie, community and a sense of belonging among team members, encourage mutual dependence and a collective sense of obligation, reinforcing the interconnected nature of the team. 9. Remove barriers and enable employees to express themselves authentically and embrace their individuality within the organisation. 10. Emphasise the unique qualities and contributions of both employees and the collective, positioning them as distinct and exceptional.

SET THE STAGE: Gather relevant team members and clearly explain the purpose of the pre-mortem analysis – to identify potential risks and weaknesses, not to criticise the project or individuals. 2. FAST-FORWARD TO FAILURE: Ask your team to imagine that the project has failed and encourage them to visualise the scenario in vivid detail. 3. BRAINSTORM REASONS FOR FAILURE: Instruct each team member to independently generate a list of reasons that could have led to the project’s failure, considering both internal and external factors. It’s important that this is done independently and on paper to avoid groupthink. 4. SHARE AND DISCUSS: Have each team member share their reasons for failure, fostering an open and non-judgemental discussion to uncover potential risks and challenges. 5. DEVELOP CONTINGENCY PLANS: Based on the identified risks and challenges, work together to create contingency plans and strategies to either mitigate or avoid these potential pitfalls altogether.

The Law: Avoid wallpaper at all costs Words really matter, and the fate of ideas, politicians and brands can be decided by them. Knowing how to communicate in a way that cuts through, grabs attention and beats our habituation filters, will be the difference between success and failure in many endeavours in our lives.

A 2008 study in Appetite found that the group of volunteers who tried not to think about eating ate more than the group who didn’t. The first group exhibited what is called a ‘behavioural rebound effect’. Similarly, a 2010 study in Psychological Science found that the group of smokers who tried not to think about smoking actually thought about it even more than the group who didn’t. This reminds me of a small piece of advice my driving instructor said to me when I was 18: ‘Steven, the car will go where your eyes are looking. If you want to avoid crashing into the cars on the side of the road, don’t focus on the cars on the side of the road, because you will veer towards the parked cars on the side of the road. Look forwards, into the distance, where you want the car to go.’ This seems like a fitting analogy for breaking and making habits: you will end up doing the thing you’re focusing on, so don’t focus on stopping smoking, don’t fight it; focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with.