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
And the key part of this is not just to do the 1,000, but after every 10 or every 20, looking at the top 10 or 20% and saying, what did I do well there? Because you have to have the feedback loop. Otherwise, it's not just doing 100 reach-outs. You have to do 100 reach-outs and then look at what worked and then do more of what worked. And so for the parent versus the practitioner component of this,
even if you're starting out, you can have confidence in what you're doing because you derived the solution. And you can actually answer why you do something. So if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's. And so most people, I would say, parrot the vast majority of the things that they say because, and to be fair, that's how humans learn.
You're five years old, you say, what's that? They say bull and you say bull, you parrot it back and there we go, right? But when it comes to skills, you can describe what other people have said before, but if something goes wrong or what about this condition, you won't know what to do.
But if you derived it from the ground up and there's a great portion of this in the Y Combinator community that you, or the Silicon Valley community that you probably heard is maybe like, Three or four months ago, it was like founder mode. Did that get to the UK?
Oh, yeah. It was awesome, right? And so basically the tenet is that the founder always has special powers in the company because you know what built it. And so that is basically at its core the practitioner versus parrot. The people who came later are parroting why you do what you do. But you know what conditions you were in when you made this rule, and also you know how to break it.
and when to bend those rules. And so if you build something when you built it from those repetitions to distill out the few truths that exist, you'll know why those are the truths. Like, I'll give you a really simple example. So if we, you know, we've tried to learn YouTube and we've gotten better over time.
But in the beginning, I did this massive review and I figured out that the videos that we had that had three things at the beginning, proof, promise, plan, was the videos that did the best. And so then all of a Okay, all videos have to have proof promise plan right at the beginning, the first 30 seconds. Great. So we started doing that for a while.
And then we looked at the outliers among those and we were like, oh, well, we also, in some of the ones that did really well, also had some sort of visual picture of this plan. All right, so it became proof promise plan picture. Then we kept looking and we found out over more repetitions that if we also include some sort of pain or problem that's being solved, that also helps.
So proof, promise, plan, picture, pain. And so you're like, wait, if you keep adding to this thing, it's going to get really long. No, sometimes you can check multiple boxes with one thing. And this becomes the elegance of creation. Like, how can I check off three of these boxes with one sentence, right? And so that is, by the way, if you're like thinking about this, you're like,
do they really think about this when they're making videos? Yes, and that is the difference between a 10,000-view video and a million-view video. And it's understanding that level of nuance across the entire thing that creates expertise.
And also, when you're like, oh, this video flopped, when you're a beginner, you're like, these videos in general don't work or content doesn't work, rather than saying, this video didn't work, and here's why, because we did three of the five.
And so it's just like all of the, I mean, the devil is in the details and you only, you only, you meet the devil himself by doing the unreasonable amount of work. And then it becomes, it goes from uninformed lack of knowledge to informed optimism. Because first you're like, I can make videos and get rich. Then you realize that it's really hard to make videos that people watch.
And then finally you start to develop a framework of this is how I make videos that people watch. And when they don't watch it, it's because I didn't follow it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The aphorism.
So this is really interesting because with that Feynman example, it proves that the distillation of knowledge is not bidirectional. So you, Richard Feynman, can break it down to a child, but a child cannot then re-derive what Feynman has done. Interesting, yeah.
And so it's convenient for the transmission of communication and for teaching someone who's, let's say, coming new to an organization, here are the things, and these give you the decision-making frameworks around which, and it can give you directional guidance. Yeah. But that is the whole founder mode. That is basically a different way of getting to the founder mode idea.
That person derived this thing. And so when a problem arises, we can re-derive the next solution rather than trying to apply the aphorism to a new setting.
I mean, I'm sure you see it everywhere.
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