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 so he's walking through the crowded streets of what looks like a New York City with Morpheus leading him. And he's drawing on about something that he's supposed to learn. And he says, Neo, were you listening to me? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? And Neo was looking at the woman in the red dress as Morpheus is talking. And then he says, look again.
And he looks back at the woman in the red dress, and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his head. And in that moment, he's like, freeze. And he explains that... You're either one of us or one of them. And they are the people who are sentinels sent to destroy us.
And so what appears to be the woman in the red dress is actually an agent from the system meant to destroy the opportunity that you're in right now. And so I love the woman in the red dress so much because it's so real. Because you're in this thing, you're in this relationship with your business. And you're like, you know, this girl seems great.
And then you get to know her and you find out she snores when she sleeps. And all of a sudden it's like, you know, you see the sweatpants and no makeup in the morning and you realize that sometimes she's moody, whatever. But you start to get to know. You're like, I don't know if we're going to get married, but like, you know, this is kind of where we're at.
And then you see a woman in the red dress. And you're like, you know what? I think that's the girl. And so you quit this relationship with your business and you get into that relationship. But then you realize that that girl has crabs, she has a crazy ex-boyfriend, and you're like, oh my God, I didn't want to deal with any of this stuff, right?
And so my CFO, so it was one of the first people that you're like, oh my God, I hired that person, it changed everything. So my CFO in gym launch had taken four companies from zero to 100 million. She had done over 40 M&A transactions. Her largest one was 5 billion, super experienced. She was at the very end of her career. And she was like, I'll take this one last ride with you guys.
And so, you know, mind you, Layla and I, I'm 26 or 27 at the time. Layla's 23, 24. And we're sitting across the table from a very experienced business person being like, please help us. And so one of the things that she taught me that I will never forget is she said, the grass is always greener on the other side. You just don't know that it's fertilized with shit, right?
And she's Southern, so she had this deep Southern accent. She's like, there's always shit. Shit everywhere. And so she's like, I've been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have shit. And so you just have the shit you don't know about and the shit you do know about. And you're in this business, and so this is the shit you know.
And that has been so profoundly impactful in my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle, really hard for me. I mean, I gave you my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in. And so like the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me. And I've made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors.
And I can say truthfully that this 2024 was the first year, and this is now 2025, the first time in my life where I haven't experienced FOMO. So fear of missing out. And it was one of those things that I just always had. I would see somebody doing it, and I was like, oh, man, I should be getting into that. I shouldn't be doing this. I should be doing that.
And it was one of those things, kind of like being happy, where you don't realize you're happy. You just look back, and you're like, you know what? That was a really good year. You kind of see it in retrospect. What I realized was that now when I hear someone say, oh, my God, I crushed it with this thing, I think— That's amazing for them. I'm sure there's tons of problems that I don't know about.
And that's amazing. But I'm going to keep doing this thing because this is the only thing I know how to do pretty well. And I'm just going to keep compounding my information advantage against everybody else who thinks this is easy and wants to get into it. And so I think that that any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple decades.
And in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay focused on that thing for the whole time. And I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to. And I measure commitment or I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives.
And so if you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is the ultimate commitment because you've limited literally every alternative besides this person. And so I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5x, 10x their business if they simply gave themselves no way out. This is what I'm doing.
And I'm, I mean, the term, you know, burning the boats, but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring my life such that I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives.
And I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this cycle and make it past the split where you go crash and burn and then restart the doom loop or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want.
I think entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like we can understand what we should do. We just don't do it. And I think that's why we're so much better at giving advice than we are at following it. So most people, if they just followed their own advice, they'd be successful. And so with this kind of valley of despair, I call it niche slapping.
Which is like when you have three things going on, it's like, let me like slap you into just picking one. Because the thing is, is that any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. Because it's actually, in my opinion, an exercise in arrogance to assume that you doing three things is somehow going to beat somebody who's doing one.
And I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing. And you think a third of your time is going to beat theirs? No, it's not going to happen. I think it's arrogant. And so there's actually like an underpinning of ego underneath of this. And I say this as somebody who did this. So like when I had the launch business, I also had my six gyms.
I also had a chiropractor agency and I also had a dental agency. And so I would introduce myself and be like, oh, I own lots of companies. But I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio.
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