Stephen Bartlett
speaker
413 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Stephen Bartlett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Two, the worst ones. Or that they don't want to solve and they suck. And so you basically become a filter for the worst things. And that's why it feels like a fire every single day in the business because you're the only one who can make the tough call because no one else wants to choose between these two impossible choices. And you're like, why is it so hard?
And the thing is, is that it literally never stops being hard. It's that the currency that you pay for and the hardness changes. And so... you know, a lot of people have this envisionment of like the Rocky cut scene of like, it must be hard for business. But I don't think that's where the hardship comes.
I think the hardship is that at every level of business, there's new sacrifices that you didn't know you were going to have to make. Because if it was just, oh, I have to work long hours, there's tons of people who work long hours in their business and don't grow. And it's usually because they're unwilling to have a hard conversation. It's a different currency, right? They have to take on risk.
It's a different currency. They have to... They have to make some sort of bet that they otherwise wouldn't have had to make. They have some sort of legal issue that they encounter. They have an employee who tries to sue them for some sort of mal-whatever. All of a sudden, you're like, wait, all of these things are happening, and they happen on a regular basis.
And at each level, you unlock new levels of glass that you get to chew through. And so this is why most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, don't actually quit. They fizzle. So it's not a big bang. Usually it's, they just, they stop seeking. So either they get content at the level that they're at and they just don't strive for more. And sometimes they say it just wasn't worth the trade.
And I respect that. If you're like, you know what, I'm at a million dollars a year and I don't want any more. Fine. You won. Congratulations. Like you won at life. But most of the times they don't really quit. They just stop trying. And then they just either coast or it just fizzles into nothingness.
And that's just my experience of having, and I'm sure you've seen this, having gone through like cycles of entrepreneur. It's like seasons. It's like, oh yeah, I came in through, even like in the media and influencer space, whatever. It's like. There's a bunch of guys that 10 years ago, it's a different landscape now than it was 10 years ago. Some people adapted.
Some of them were like, I don't like the, they just, they just, they weren't willing to chew the new glass, which is how do I learn TikTok? How do I learn? But man, blogs were so good. It's like, yeah, and they're not anymore. I talked to an entrepreneur really massively, many hundreds of millions a year in sales. And he was like, dude, we were killing it on infomercials, so TV.
And he's like, we just, you know, we really just have to crack YouTube. And I'm thinking to myself, like, dude, it's 2024. Like you needed to crack YouTube 10 years ago and he had the resources to do it, but it was just a different kind of hard.
And so most of the hard is one, a level of uncertainty that goes into it and almost certain immediate failure because the first thing you're going to do will probably not work.
And again, it's the iterations of when you get into the new domain, you have to transfer your generalized knowledge, which is that as an entrepreneur, I will know that this doesn't work probably because I only know four things about it and I need to know like 400. And so I will get my first shot and I need to get directionally correct and then just keep doing more of that.
And so I gave the consulting way of learning kind of like a new space. But if you want to learn a new skill, The fastest way that I do it that's outside of courses or anything is tremendous volume of activity.
So whether that's like, I want to take a lot of sales calls, I want to do a lot of outreach, I want to make a lot of content, I want to do a lot of customer success calls, whatever it is, you do 100 of those. And then you see, what are the top 10% of these? Okay, what did these top 10% have different than the other 90?
And then I say, okay, well, these ones had these three things that were different. Let's try and do those three things on the next hundred. And then because of the variety of life, there's going to be some new variables that exist that you look at the top 10% of the next hundred.
And you're like, okay, we did those three, but there's also two more things that happened in this 10 versus the other 90. Now let's do all five of those things. And over time, this is how you develop a checklist for making banger content and banger videos. And I'm sure like there's this clip, David Perel talks about Chris Rock's creative process.
And he says, how is it that you see Chris Rock at Madison Square Gardens and it's just like 60 minutes of just fire? You're like, how is this guy so funny? And it's because what you don't see is the many small clubs and the first club that he goes to and does a whole hour long set and has like 50,
three moments that people laugh a lot about and he's got like five minutes that are good and the other 55 minutes basically suck and so the next time he goes to a club he takes those five minutes puts them at the front and then he tries all new material for the next 55 minutes and he gets another five minutes and he continues to repeat this process and put the new stuff at the front until eventually a 60 minutes of uninterrupted laughing and then people are like oh my god he's so talented i can't believe that he can just stand up there and talk into a microphone and make everyone laugh
cross age boundaries, cross cultural boundaries, cross all of the boundaries that you might imagine, how can he be so funny to everyone? That's how. How can that guy be so good at writing? Well, he looked at the stuff that he wrote, he found the best stuff, made it into the few things that he always does, and then kept writing. And that fundamentally is the process of learning anything.
And it's usually not one thing. It's many small things that, when added together in aggregate, create the outsized returns. Sorry, that was a little pompadour. I just get violent about skill acquisition because that's what it takes.
I want to do my best shot at operationalizing what you just said for somebody who's listening. When we encounter this issue, we have a specific process that we go through. And so we tell the founder, I want you to make a Google Sheet, really simple, and I want you to have the time slots from 5 a.m. to midnight, however long you work, in 15-minute increments.
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