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 that was, you know, we'd taken 40 out before the sale, and then we obviously got the sale. So like, I don't need to work. I like to work. And I try to spend, I look at, you know, I had this boss that told me this and was one of the catalysts for looking at life this way. She said, I had just had like a good weekend or something. And I came in like chipper.
And she said, well, you must've had a good weekend. And I was like, yeah, it was good. And she said, this was like an offhanded comment. She said, I'm pretty sure the key to happiness is living as many days in a row like that as you can. And it was actually like really operational. Like I could, I was like, I can use this. Like, what are the good days?
How do I live as many of those days in a row as I can? And so I've, you know, I've been attacked for like saying that I don't really enjoy going on vacation very much. And it's because like, I just want to get, I just want to get back to doing the thing that I really enjoy doing. And I remember we, Layla and I went to Mexico this year for a week.
And it's always during the week of Christmas because no one works and it drives me nuts. And I've just like, I've just given up trying to get, you know, work. Because even if my team will work, because my team will, because they're crazy too, other teams won't. And vendors won't. Anyway. And so while we were there, all I came out with was like, this is for other people and not me.
Comma, and that's okay.
Can I throw something out that I think might, like, so this blew my mind. So I was in around that same period of time, because I talked to everybody I could to try and get context on this. And so I called a friend of mine up, or not friend, I would say acquaintance that I got connected with, who'd sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars. Really bright guy.
And one of the questions I asked him, I said, so how do you drive meaning from your life? And he said an answer that really, really shook me, which doesn't happen that much given my world view. He said, why do you think that life needs to be meaningful? And it was just this really interesting question, which is basically that I had an unspoken demand of the universe. Life should be meaningful.
I should be happy. And so it's the shoulds that we don't even know that we think and say that are the ones that change us the most, like hardcore.
And so my favorite quote of all time, which is probably at the front of a few of the books that I have and will probably be the one that will be on my tombstone, is a permutation of an Orson Scott card quote, which is, we question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question.
And so I would say that a lot of my entrepreneurial career, even just human journey has been, what are the beliefs that I so, so inherently believe that I don't even see them? I don't even think about the should. And so when he said that to me, I was like, whoa, I have had this inherent demand of the universe that my life be meaningful.
And now people would hear this and be like, they have their shoulds and they're going to say, well, it should be meaningful. And I'm like, why? According to what? And if we look at history, history pretty much sweeps everyone under the bed, like within a hundred years. And within a thousand years, basically everyone and the people that we remember, we remember some of their works. And we go...
100,000 years in the future or 10,000 years in the future, probably unlikely that we will be remembered in general. And that is solving for the idea that we need to be remembered. Again, we have to. Why? And so my solving has been for degrees of freedom and responsibility. So what are the things that I can control?
And I will do the very best of my ability to try and do the things within my control to ideally make other people's lives better and my own in the process. Now, that is a choice rather than a, I demand that of the universe. And this gets really abstract and heady really fast. And so I will try and bring us back down to earth. But by demanding that life be meaningful, by demanding that I be happy,
when I understood that I was demanding these things and pursuing them, that they were outside of me, by saying, I need to do this, that I created inherent space that I could never gap or I could never close. And so by trying to forget or eliminate The demand is where it was the first time that I experienced those things.
And so I try to keep them out of my head to the greatest degree possible so that I can be inside of them. That sounds weird. Rather than in pursuit.
and so that um and so the times where i derive the most joy from my life if i'm if i'm optimizing for that which is i wouldn't necessarily say that i am optimizing for joy um i think williamson was like you definitely optimize for purpose or meaning or something like that and um i i kind of reject a lot of it mostly because i do what i have been rewarded for doing in the past and so because i have a behaviorist view of the world which is that everything boils down to behaviors um
Why do I do these things? I do these things because when I have done them in the past, I have enjoyed the result. And so I continue to do things that I've enjoyed the result of. And if other people have done things that they enjoy the result of, then I encourage you to keep doing them.
And I also encourage you to not project that other people need to also do those things and that they will experience the same result as you because they might not.
Yeah. Oh, yes.
Well, that is my, yeah, I mean, I make it for them.
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