Transcription
I'm going to be honest. I'm pissed off. I'm annoyed that nobody told me what I'm about to tell you earlier in my career. And it all makes sense now. It makes sense as to why some people through history have been so unbelievably productive while other people don't seem to make much progress at all. And it comes down to this idea that I'm about to tell you, which is called signal versus noise. And I'm going to show you how to implement it into your life.
Oh, and also there's this essay that I read called Do Things That Don't Scale. I read it like a decade ago and it's changed my life so much. So many of you are building things and you need to know this essay. So stay with me. Stay with me guys. Okay? We can do this. Just give me 10 minutes of your time max. Okay. Okay.
I have to tell you this probably to share it with you but also probably because I've just learned something about productivity, entrepreneurship, building success which I can't get out of my head. I just had Kevin Olirri on the podcast who's a shark from Shark Tank USA and he punched me in the face with a point that he made about his experience with Steve Jobs and how Steve Jobs has this ability to understand what the signal is versus the noise. I used to work for Steve Jobs in the early '90s making all of his educational software. There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early '90s of signal to noise ratio. His vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. You're going to get those three things or five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80/20. 80 signal, 20 noise.
And as he was saying it, I realized that it's like very much the missing piece in my life at the moment. Because as a creative and as someone who has so many ideas, sometimes I think I waste my energy pursuing things that are not the signal, are not the most important thing to get done today. And I think we can probably all relate to the fact that sometimes we wake up in the morning with one particular plan and then our emails happen and WhatsApp happens and we end up drifting off into the noise and we've lost a day which is taken away from the signal because life is a zero-sum game. There is a finite amount of things that we can be doing. And it just made me think, "What the hell do you know what I should do?" What I should do is I should organize everything that I have to do today, every task that comes in into one of two columns. The signal column, which is the most important things, the things that I woke up this morning focused on, and a noise column. And so that's what I've done. I've just, as you can see over there on my laptop, I've basically organized my tasks today into one of two columns. There's a signal column and there's a noise column. And everything that comes onto my desk today and all the things that I have buzzing around in my head and on my to-do list are now going to fall into one of those two columns. Things that I have to do, things that I have to get done today because they're the most important stuff to move me towards my goals, and things that are noise. And the noise column are things that I'm going to delegate to other people.
I've actually used this clip that I'm about to show you of Johnny Ives saying this over and over and over and over again. Run the clip. "You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say, um, because I think he was concerned that I wasn't, um, he would say, um, how many things have you said no to?" And I would, honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things cuz I I mean, wanted to be very honest about it. And so I say, oh, I said no to this and no to that. And um he but he he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. Um so there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.
In my calendar, I'm going to have a signal and noise session every morning to figure out what the most important things to accomplish today are. Let's try this together and let's um stay in touch via via the comment section. When you wake up tomorrow, first thing you do when you wake up tomorrow morning is create two columns on a piece of paper or on whatever tool you use and put the most important things you want to accomplish that day into the signal column and then everything else into the noise column. Let's see how we get on.
I was just saying to Jamaima in there that I have this new idea for us to figure out how to make a really, really retentive podcast episode. We take the episode unlisted link, we put it in directio circle and from that we're going to get the retention graph back and then we're going to do the edit based on that. And this this is the first episode where we really like we really do it that way. And the reason I say this is because going forward in the future, if we find this to be useful, we can we'll we can change our processes. You see what I'm saying? And Jamaima's response to me was, I could see in her face there was concern that it would take too long and it would be too manual based on our current process because our current process runs like a military operation. So adding something into that process that would be a bit clunky, a bit manual, and that we haven't figured out, I could see was a bit of a concern.
As I saw that concern in her face, Paul Graham's 2013 essay sprung to mind and it's called Do Things That Don't Scale. What Do Things That Don't Scale means doing things very manually for your early customers. So, let me give you an example. When Airbnb, the founders of Airbnb, and I've interviewed uh Brian Chesky from Airbnb launched Airbnb, they noticed that their users were uploading really, really bad images of their Airbnbs to the website and that was impacting the customer's experience. So to figure out if this was an important part of the customer experience, the founders of Airbnb manually went knocking on doors of their users when they only had a couple of users. And they said to those users, "Can we come in and take professional photos for you?" I would go there and I'd be like, "Wow, the photos are terrible. This is actually a really nice house." And the host like, "Well, I can't figure out how to get photos onto my computer." And so I went home with Joe and we borrowed a camera from one of our friends and we knocked on the door. I'm here, the photographer. And they're like, "Wow, this is a small company. The founders also photographing my home."
Now, the founders of Airbnb knocking door-to-door is not scalable. You're not going to be able to do that with the hundreds of millions of users that they now have. At the start, it wasn't scalable. It was so unbelievably important that they did something that wasn't scalable and later they could figure out how to make it scalable. But if they had obsessed over it being scalable from day one, they never would have done it. They never would have then got the feedback from doing it and they never would have had the hundred billion dollar success that was Airbnb. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook manually pitched users at Harvard to join Facebook in the early days. It wasn't scalable. You can't scale that. And when I say scale, I mean you can't automate that process of Mark Zuckerberg manually pitching the three billion users that Facebook now has. But in doing so, he got from zero to one. He learned what he needed to learn and then he figured out how to scale.
And another example is one of the most famous companies in the world called Stripe, which is probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars now. It's a payment company. And in the early days, the founders Patrick and John Collison would literally go to their customers' offices, onto their computers and install the software for them. Absolutely didn't scale. You can't do that for a billion people. And this is really the point because so many founders, they understand that they want to reach a billion people. They want to be the next Airbnb, the next Meta, the next Stripe. So they think that they have to behave like Stripe, Meta and Airbnb behave now. They think they have to think in scale. And this is where they make the critical mistake because all of those companies I just named, none of them at the start were thinking in terms of scale. Whenever you feel like something that is unscalable is going to stand in the way of your team or you figuring out the answer to a very important question, you have to come back to this phrase, which is: Do things that do not scale.
Hey guys, it's me, Will. I edit these videos, the one you're watching right now here on Behind the Diary with Alex on our team. Now, my goal is to sneak in to every single one of these videos to ask you guys to subscribe because the more of you that subscribe, the better these videos get, the bigger the channel gets. But a few weeks ago, he said that if this gets bigger than the main channel, he will make me a millionaire. So, do me a favor. If you want to see Steve lose a million pounds, click subscribe. These videos get better. It's currently half 12 at midnight. Please subscribe. I really want to get this edit out. So, please, please subscribe. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.
LA is now my new home and it's my home because we want to build the business out here. So, here's the context. Flight Story is expanding into America. Our first studio is actually in Boston where Kirsten Holmes, who signed to Flight Story, records her show. Our next location is here in Los Angeles. And I think our next location will be in New York City, which will be our commercial office. Isn't this crazy? Look, I'm moving to America. That's the only suitcase I took. Other than this is why I wear black every day because if you just wear the same outfit every day, you can pack super light. People always take the piss out of me cuz I think they think I think I'm Steve Jobs. It wasn't a choice I ever made. It's just life gradually pushed me in the direction of the path of least resistance. And that ended up being just wearing the same outfit every single day. But we could run the maths on screen. Like if you just saved 20 minutes a day on choosing what to wear and then you saved one hour a week on let's say things like travel and packing. How much of your life would you save? Will Alex run the numbers? And listen, some of you get tremendous amount of value from picking your outfits and fashion and all those kinds of things. So knock yourself out. But if it's not giving you tremendous value, if it's not giving you more value than the time you would save would give you, then maybe that's a simple optimization, which is just simplifying your wardrobe a little bit.
Can I here in LA flying out to Cannes in the south of France for the creativity festival that takes place every single year. Every marketeer, every big creator, every media owner flies out there for this one festival. And I'm going to show you behind the scenes. And there's three lessons you're going to learn. The first is about failure and experimentation and why this is my absolute religion and why it needs to be yours. The single button which big creators press every single day and why you need to press that button too. And lastly, this framework called value for strangers which I preach to everybody, but it seems that almost nobody understands. Um, why do I do these things? I do these things for multitude of reasons. Reason number one is it's a great opportunity to meet so many of you guys that listen to the show. I have moments all the time when I meet fans that stay with me forever. So I'm hoping to have some of those moments today. Reason number two is it helps the business. So we make lots of contacts with platforms and partners that can help us build Flight Story. But also again in the sake of radical transparency, we get quite big fees for coming out here. This trip will make Flight Story about £200,000 because of coming out here. That money goes into the business. I think sometimes when people hear that you're making 200k from doing some talks, people think that the money goes straight into your pocket, but I'm building a business here. So, the money doesn't um come to me. Short-term sacrifice for long-term game because we're going to try and build a multi-billion dollar company. So, where is the team? Good luck. Very good to see you. Big fan of yours and been following your for many years. Can I take a selfie with you? Thank you. Thank you so much. My pleas. Nice to meet you. I want to welcome Steven Bartlett.
So the biggest risk in innovation that everybody is taking right now is not taking enough risk. What we all know for sure is that the world is changing. If you're 40 years old now, by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's worth of today's change in roughly 11 days. Logically, in order for you to keep up with that rate of change, your rate of experimentation needs to basically match that rate of change. You have to get really, really comfortable as an organization or as a creator or an individual with failure. When Jeff Bezos wrote his shareholder letter in 2015, he said, "In order for us to be successful, we have to be the best place on earth to fail." I've made billions of dollars of failures at amazon.com. They don't matter. What really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment, companies that don't embrace failure. They eventually get in a desperate position. The only thing they can do is make a kind of hail mary bat at the very end of their corporate existence.
So in our company, how do we do that practically? We have a failure and experimentation team whose KPI as they report to me every single week is the amount of experiments we've ran. Notice I'm not saying how many of them went well or really how many of them failed. It's purely the input which is the controllable, which is how many experiments have we ran. And our job is to ramp up the amount of experiments we're running because the very nature of it being an experiment means we don't know how it's going to go. Every success we've had, every breakthrough that we've had that's completely changed our trajectory as a as a business, as a podcast, as a media company, has come at the expense of nine things that went really badly. And Amazon, again, they said it's the one in 10 that pays for the graveyard. None of you know about Firef. You probably don't know about Endless.com. All of these things cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars, but you probably know AWS, which will make them hundred billion this year. The game here to find the correct answer before your competitors, no matter what industry you're in, is to fail quicker than them because failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power. Thank you very much. Thank you.
What you're about to see is something I encounter all the time. A girl comes up to me and says she wants to start a podcast because people told her to. That is not a good enough reason. If you're thinking from first principles, you'd start with questions, not conclusions. You'd ask yourself, "What do I have to say? Who is it for? Why does it matter? And what's the best platform to communicate it?" Only once you've answered those questions can you reasonably arrive at the conclusion that a podcast is the answer. That's what we mean by reasoning upwards from first principles. But too many people do the opposite. They reason downwards from a trend or a suggestion. They start with an answer like, "I'm going to start a podcast," and then they scramble to figure out what they're going to say, who it's for, and why it matters. That is backwards. If you start with the wrong answer, even the best execution won't save you.
All my comments are like, "You should make a podcast." And like now I feel inspired to. I just don't know like how to take the first step. Give yourself one year where you say to yourself, "I'm going to be really, really bad at this." And this is my testing year. And what that will do is it will take all the performance pressure off you, which will mean you'll do the necessary thing of trying enough shit to figure out what works. What ends up happening a lot of the time is you think that podcasting is two people sat at a table. If you just sort of relieve yourself of any preconceptions about what a podcast is, you'll probably end up making something really interesting. But don't even get rid of the word podcasting. Say, "I'm going to start a YouTube channel and I'm going to do I'm going to I'm going to give there's something that my audience like that I deliver on. I'm going to find the best way to deliver that." Okay. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you. Of course. What's your advice to everyone? Um, my advice to everyone is to go and follow you. Say uh follow Fizza Speaks. Fizza Speaks. Follow Speaks. As long as she's doing, you know, I don't know what content you're making, but I'm doing a quick talk on stage here for YouTube/Google, which I'm excited about. On my way there now, ladies and gentlemen, Steven Barber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
YouTube has the best data and analytics. And for someone like me that wants to be able to influence what I'm doing, you need to be informed by data and analytics. Now, in the the back end of YouTube, there's this like one button and you can click into the advanced section and and see this wonderful graph and it tells you every single minute how many people dropped off in that exact minute. And so I can go through every single minute of a 2-hour, 3-hour conversation and go, "Oh my god, yes, I asked a question about that subject or I spoke for too long." We've been able to learn exactly what our audience want. The game of YouTube for us became just listening. That informs next week's episode. And having that control as a creator means that your destiny is in your own hand. And it's no lie to say I spend two and a half hours still to this day in YouTube studio looking at the analytics.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for everything. I've been following you since the social chain. Right now, marketing and getting out there is a madness. I I when I speak to people one-on-one, I get business. What is the one piece of advice that you can give that will blow it away? I know you said experiment. I've got that down. But the one thing you know from experience, I always assume people aren't going to like the answer. It's not simple or sexy and it's kind of obvious. Okay. So I would only focus on LinkedIn. I do. I get only focus. Right. So how many times you post a day? Once a day, like consistently. Okay. So you posted every day this week? Yes. I posted um yesterday and got a post coming out today. And what type of thing did you post? Did you post videos, photos? So I post I posted a video. What did you learn about that video? I learned about how you can. That's a good question. How many comments? Wow. It got I think 12, 12 comments. Are you sure? Do I need to know my analytics? Cuz my head? It's the most important thing. If you don't have a feedback loop, you it's you're going to feel like you're not making any progress. I spend 2 and a half hours a day looking at the back end of my YouTube videos. 2 hours a day a day. Okay. And this is how you improve. Every single post is data and the information exists in the back end of every single platform. And that information tells you why people watched, what they clicked, when they stopped watching, what they said. All of that is information that can feed into your next post. So you have to produce, publish, and then pay attention and repeat that cycle. We spent pretty much all last I mean last night, the night before in our WhatsApp group talking about the analytics like we are at war with each other about these fucking analytics and this is how you improve. And so if you have the consistency, which you say you do, that the the end of your feedback loop where where there's a gap is are you learning from what you're posting? Every single thing you post is not about you and your business. It is value for strangers.
What's your mom called? Alison. Okay. Alison. So Alison will think everything you do is valuable. Okay? Cuz you can post what you eat for dinner. You go, "Oh, thank God." Right? But I need to understand him first. I feel like I need to know him first. I need to know what he. So that's who you establish your personas, which is what we do. So we have our four personas. And every single time we write a post, we say, "Which one of our personas are we serving?" But every single thing you post from now and forever, you need to ask yourself before you hit the post button, is this valuable to people? Do not give a fuck about me. Okay. And a couple times every day. Yeah. Steven, can I do? Are you okay with hugs? Is that is that uncomfortable? My team was telling me that you you ran a masterclass on YouTube. Oh, really? Yeah. Because you know how you can tell like they were all saying to me is like, "Oh my god, the number of people taking notes when Steven was talking." But that's what people leave with something. Well, I'm so passionate about it. I talked to everybody about why I'm so engaged with YouTube as a creator. I talked to everybody about the disruption of TV. Um, the percentage of my audience, about 33, 35% that are now watching on TV and how it's disrupting multiple industries at once. So, I'm super passionate about it. Yeah. Examples like you are are really the inspiration of why we go to work. Like our mission statement is to make it so that you're successful because you're doing something important and getting your ideas out there to an audience. A about finding that audience, but B, it's about actually creating the economic opportunity for you so you can keep doing it. And that's our mission. Sh.
I have come all the way from South Africa. I want to say thank you for inspiring me. Your book is like a Bible next to my bed. I don't watch movies on planes. I watch your podcasts. You couldn't afford even a ticket to get in here and I sat outside and waited. So sweet. You okay? Waited to actually meet someone from Google and just say that this was my dream to meet you in person. You're so sweet. I am so grateful. Your story is incredible and you have been my mentor without even realizing it. So just are you give me a so tears and all managed to break in. I love that. I love that feeling. Thank you so much. What are you doing for the rest of the day? Uh, I could fly home right now. I don't care. So sweet. I wish there was something I could give you. I don't have anything on me, but I wish there was something. I'll give you my hat. You can have my cap. It's a little bit sweaty, so don't put it straight on.
That is my dog, Pablo. And uh Pablo is very, very sick at the moment. He spent the last 8 weeks going in and out of the vet. Um, I'm so scared. And I think he's going I just tried to feed him and he throws up all of his food. Oh my god. Since I got him all those years ago, almost 10 years ago, I've never in my life seen him this skinny and this frail. He can't walk properly. He can't hold his food down. He uh can't control his bowels. He He's not moving much anymore. And it's really, really sad. He's been with me for the last 10 years and he's been everywhere with me. And Dragon's Den or the podcast or the businesses or whatever. It's all happened in those 10 years. And it's it's happened in a variety of different cities and locations and countries and Pablo's been there with me through it all. He's one of my oldest friends in the world and um got him as a baby and now I guess he's an old man. He's helped me in the last 10 years realize that a lot of the problems I faced or the challenges I faced weren't real problems and he's helped me realize that life can be so simple. Just like watching him mess around with like a Lucas aid bottle or splash about in the bathtub and have so much fun with such simple things has always made me realize it's been this great reminder that um life can be simple and we can find joy in simple things and I'm like contending with the realization that I'm going to have to say bye and it's not easy. Um, that's a good point. And yeah, through the last 10 years, at times it can be very, very lonely. And actually on many nights, many days, the only person that I've had through the weekends or late at night has been has been Pablo. You know, to be fair, I don't have that many friends and my friends don't live close to me. So, especially on weekends, it's mainly just been me and Pablo for the last 10 years together.
I am your best friend. You need to start realizing this because I can open cupboards. And then when I open the cupboards, do you know what I can do? I can open packets of 80% beef with wholesome fruit and veg. He's given me um fun. He's given me so much love. He's given me so much. So, it's difficult. It's difficult. As I've come to terms with the fact that I'm probably going to lose him soon, I um I'm really going out of my way to express my appreciation to him in all the ways that I can, you know, like I'll never properly be able to say thank you to him. And it's funny how like when you're confronted with that realization that you like deep down knew was going to happen, how much you wish you could just do it all over again. How much you wish you could have all that time over again. And how much you wish you could just you could say thank you over and over again. I guess that's what makes anything valuable in life. It's valuable because you only have a limited amount of it for a limited amount of time. It's all right, man. I love you. Thank you. And I'll see you next week.