you were the vp of twitter

obviously donald trump has just been

booted off twitter permanently what do

you think about that

there's a 70 year long study out of yale

university looking at what

the the secret of longevity and

happiness is and the secret of longevity

and happiness

is

work the thing we spend the majority of

our lives doing

today's guest is an expert on exactly

that

how can you be an expert on work bruce

daisley spent the last

five to ten years studying what makes

work

joyous what makes it miserable how we

get burnt out

and what matters the most when it comes

to work he's been named one of the most

influential londoners in the uk has been

named as one of the most influential

britons

in the united kingdom bruce daisley's

book the joy of work became the best

selling business hardback book in 2019

he has his own podcast so he's one hell

of a talker as well

and as the world has transitioned over

the last 10 months to this zoom-centric

remote working lifestyle

i think now is a great time to ask

ourselves the question

what makes work enjoyable how can we get

the most out of work how do we avoid

burnout

and how do we maximize our motivation

bruce has the answers

so without further ado my name is

stephen butler and this is the director

ceo

i hope nobody's listening but if you are

then please keep this to yourself

bruce you were you wrote a i feel like

that's an understatement you wrote a

smash hit book about

work called the joy of work and i've

seen this book absolutely everywhere

it's been an absolute phenomenon

so you know considering the fact that

the world has fundamentally shifted over

the last

nine ten months because of this pandemic

and the way we work has changed so much

i wanted to get your view of this remote

working

zoom um sort of working culture that has

now

been forced upon us just before i let

you answer i'm gonna give a little

sentence around around my take on it

i hate it um and

when when in march when we were forced

out as a ceo for business to tell my

employees that we're gonna be working

from home

and we have this amazing office which

gives us all this community um

i know that about 50 of my workforce

liked the idea

but i 100 hate it for a number of

reasons what's your take

so i think at the outset i shared some

of your reservations

brony brown talks about this thing which

is collective effervescence

and it's a it's a good way she's she's

coined to turn for something you see

quite a lot in social science

that even the introverts amongst us

actually quite like being around people

in

in some scenarios and we get

far more of our energy from the tribe

were in and the people were surrounded

with

then would probably admit and so when it

first happened

look the defining thing about work for

me is laughing every day

i if i laugh every day and i you know in

the organizations i've been in

they've been at times incredibly

stressful we've had

you know at times when i was at twitter

there was just for

good reason there was like big headlines

demanding stressful scenarios

but either the sort of the dark humor

that you find in those moments

or the moments of levity that you can

just get if you're around people that

you trust

soldiers talk about this or firefighters

talk about this you know you can find

human

and i used to love that so the idea of

shifting to a world where

somehow we're plugging into the matrix

and we were losing

that camaraderie that kinship that we

get

from being around other people i wasn't

necessarily the

the biggest advocate of it i think

what's clear though

is that we've fundamentally moved into a

different world and some of those

preconceptions that we might have had

might have been partly ill-judged so so

so working through those things that

the number one thing we know uh 91 of

people say they want to continue working

in some capacity

when you look at the numbers of that

people say broadly say they want to work

at home

three or four days a week so there's

some firms saying

we're going to let people work one day a

week or two days a week at home

people workers want to work more than

that so

there's going to be some degree of of

balance and we're going to achieve an

equilibrium

so that's the demand side of it and in

fact when you look at all age groups

young or old there is a slight

difference so

younger workers have said that they were

they're happy at home but they they it's

close to how happy they were in the

office

and we can partly understand that a lot

of young workers don't have

home offices they don't have nice desks

they're

sitting on their bed or they're sitting

on the table that

sits at the end of their bed so they're

working in slightly different scenarios

but even they report they're more

productive and happier than

than that they were in a big open plan

office so

that's the first thing older workers are

significantly happier

if you've got a bit of space it seems to

correlate with you feeling really happy

so broadly all of the evidence suggests

actually

the experience of it has been at least

unbalanced positive so then you look at

the

the other side and i guess it's firms

and it's really growing evidence that

firms are recognizing that

something has fundamentally changed

bloomberg did something interesting the

business people

they did an analysis of all the earnings

calls so all these transcripts of like

big bosses reporting to shareholders

what they think is going to happen and

bloomberg say that

already about one in eight firms are

talking about making their

offices smaller the ft did something

where they said about half of british

firms

are already talking about their offices

being smaller so

whether it's that demand side or whether

it's that supply side almost certainly

we're going into something that's going

to

look and feel a bit different to what we

were used to before

if you had to guess um i i completely

resonate with that i think

even for our organization we realized

how much money i'll be honest how much

money we could save

by not having an office because it's not

just the rent it's the

the cleaning the electricity it's the

food in the cupboards

you know the maintenance of a what was a

20 000 square foot office in manchester

uh and you you stripped back those costs

and you know it was that you were forced

to realize that

it is possible for there to be another

way and i think at first we were

we were skeptical that our business

could run in

completely remotely then we realized it

could and then we moved into phase three

which was like

okay but what have we lost now and it

was it was it was definitely a phase

three thing because in phase two we're

like oh everything's fine

in phase three we're like now we've got

a problem because we've lost the

uh the sense of community that our

company was giving to our employees and

for a company like ours

community was a huge part of our our

value-add you know we are the sterile

stereotypical like millennial office

with like the slides and the ballpark

and the freedom

and um and a real sense of strong

community where pretty much everyone

lives together

and so in phase three of this sort of

this sort of mental journey

what we saw and i actually resigned just

after in about

september time what we saw was a bit of

an exodus of our employees because now

they're sad at home they're looking at

their to-do lists

and that they're now thinking the

remuneration or the value i'm getting

from this job

is this amount of money and i'm doing

these set of tasks so now i think i can

get more

money down the street at that place that

has no working culture

whilst i'm still going to be sad at home

and it will be a similar set of tasks

and it was it was astonishing it was

astonishing how many people

um are being completely honest because i

have no reason not to be honest we

almost never lost

good people the month just before and

after i left

we we lost our the largest number of

employees

we've ever lost by a fault factor of 10.

yeah

and it's fascinating so let's look into

that because you're exactly

you spot on these the big themes that

are emerging now firstly

how can you make people feel like the

part of something when

the old way they felt part of something

was the energy they had when they're

around people right you know

there is some buzz and and it's not an

exaggeration i've chatted to

some of the world's leading experts and

they say good workplaces do have a buzz

to them they have

almost like this tangible energy um and

i think

that's one of the challenges we've got

now if you've got a situation where

people on video calls back to back

and you know it might be not with the

big boss it might be with clients

they're dealing with or it might be

with customers they've got to keep happy

but if there aren't back-to-back

meetings with those people

then they can just feel well look that's

going to be exactly the same wherever i

go we're not going to have

the same energy and there's far more

evidence that

when people feel part of something

bigger than themselves

it's transformational so i've been i'm

writing something about resilience at

the moment a book about resilience

and what you discover is that actually

what you hear about resilience is that

people

tell you all these myths about

resilience that it's this individual

strength or it's this

it's this trait that we can do develop

and what you discover about resilience

is it's normally a collective thing it's

because you

feel part of a resilient community you

feel like you've got

the strength of others to draw upon you

feel like you can

tap into something one person in some of

the research i was reading

said you can't be a resilient on your

own and there's so much truth in that

now what does that mean for the way

we're working right now well if you've

got someone in

a bed seat or a studio flat or a flat

chair

and they're sitting on their own all day

and they feel lonely

it's almost certain that those reserves

of resilience are being

tapped and you know there's one thing

that psychologists

talk about all the time it's this notion

of of affect

it's sort of it's a fancy way of saying

mood it's a psychologist a way of saying

mood

and what you discover about affect is

that

the the mood we're in is really

influential on a lot of the things on

our experience of life

and the uh creativity and our sense of

collaboration

so scientists talk about positive affect

and negative affect

and positive affect best way i can sort

of frame

uh positive affect it it suggests that

like the mood we're in

transforms some of the decisions we make

and the best way i can frame that is

that

when you're a kid growing up whether

your main carer is a grandparent or a

parent or a

a guardian but you knew from the age of

four or five

you knew that it was a good time to ask

for something and a bad time to ask for

something

you knew based on the mood that your

carer was in that there was a good time

to ask for something a bad time but

affect the mood we're in affects uh

decisions

well the situation we're all going

through right now is not positive affect

it's a negative affect

loads of people are feeling burnt out

average person during lockdown has been

working about an extra 45 minutes a day

that's on the back of the average

working day has gone up by two hours in

the last 10 years

so people are finding themselves in this

lonely unaffiliated disconnected

sense of exhaustive burnout so it's no

wonder people are quitting their jobs

because they just don't feel like the

good version of them that they used to

feel like you know the contrast as well

so this idea of contrast where you can

remember how your job used to be

and if your job used to be a 10 and now

because it's because a central part of

what made it a 10 say the community or

the culture in the office or you know

that sense of camaraderie

or that sense that you know you were a

group of people working together towards

a goal now you're kind of

sat in your bedside on your own on the

end of your bed doing a to-do list um

if your company was a 10 because of that

culture and it's now dropped down to a

six

something in my mind makes me think that

those companies will actually hurt more

versus the companies that were like an

eight before and an hour a six

um and that's part of what i think with

with our company social chain because

culture was such

a big thing that people must be thinking

oh my god what the hell is this

um being sat alone and we try i think

you know i can't speak to the company

now because i'm no longer there but

i know there was ample efforts with all

as with all companies to do these like

zoom bingo things and that lasted a

month before everyone got

sick to death of that but you mentioned

the word burn out there

uh a very popular phrase a topic of

much mystique as well i think um i saw

your ted talk about the topic of burnout

and i saw your

your thoughts there i guess my my

question is what causes burnout

in your view yeah there was a really

interesting there was a

a really interesting book that just came

out last year and it was based on

a a successful article that had sort of

blown up on

buzzfeed by a woman called an helen

peterson and she talked about

she the premise of her article really

good article worth searching for

is the the millennials of the burnout

generation you remember that one i think

maybe you showed it right there's all

these matchy

matches and what she said is she said

and she'd encountered it as a journalist

she's thinking

i'm feeling something i wonder if i

could capture it and she was thinking

is there such thing as errand paralysis

so what

she means by that is that she was

getting to the end of like these

productive working days

and then she would get back to her flat

and she would she would open a bill

or she had she had something she needed

to do and she just

didn't have the energy this high

performing

really successful person didn't have the

energy to get those things done

and so she was thinking in her head is

this some sort of weird

um this sort of duality that you can be

really accomplished

at one set of things but you can't

others she started looking into it and

she realized

it's not that you're avoiding one thing

you're just exhausted

and her lesson was that any time we

teach

we treat our energy as infinite that's

when burn out comes

and it we so often do it we we treat the

idea that we can work

all the time and the best examples i can

give you are the ones where

we actually check in on ourselves so i i

used to find myself

day job working at twitter worked on

twitter for eight years i used to

uh when i was especially guilty of this

i used to have back-to-back meetings on

monday

what's the consequence of back-to-back

meetings your inbox is

is exploding it's it's absolutely

overloaded

and so i used to get home on a monday

night get myself a cup of tea

deal with all my domestic

responsibilities and i would sit there

and work and do emails for about

four hours and just try and catch up

with what i was doing

and i quite often i would check myself

and about nine o'clock

i'd be spending as much time changing

the music as i would doing emails

or one long email that's like a

two-pager who sends these emails these

criminals sending long emails but i'd

find myself reading this

you know that feeling where you read it

i'll just read that again

and then read it again and what you

discovered there's this science for this

it's called ego depletion

and the people who look into this say

that our brains are sort of

far more finite far more limited than we

might imagine our brains are far closer

if you want a metaphor for it our brains

are far closer to the batteries on our

phone

than the infinite broadband that we we

normally deal with

so your brain's sort of got a certain

amount of charge in it and when you use

it

and so the way you'll you'll witness

this is maybe you walk into

a situation and someone asks you a

question at the end of a long day or

whatever

and you're like hang on can you just

just give me a minute just give me a

minute or someone asks you something

really complicated just as you're about

to oh

okay hang on can we just give and

effectively our brains are sort of far

more finite

once you recognize that you start

thinking okay i wonder if that

should influence the way i think about

doing my job and

and of course burnout is one of the

things where we don't

treat our energy as finite it is

it is uh finite but we don't treat it

like that and the end result is then

we just feel like we're running on empty

we're running on vapors

and so when you look into it the world

health organization

uh recognize burnout as a real

phenomenon

and they say that burnout is is all

about

when our energy feels spent when we feel

emotionally exhausted

they talk about this other thing called

depersonalization where

when you're really burnt out you don't

necessarily

construe other people as full and

empathetic individuals but sometimes

you're a bit sort of

dismissive of other people or you're a

bit reductive of their motives or

you start seeing people around you as an

annoyance so in the old days if you ever

found that the person you sat next to

their chewing or their tapping was

driving you crazy that can be a little

bit of an exam

example of deep personalization so it's

a real phenomenon

it's uh i think to my mind it makes you

rethink

the way you work so if you knew okay the

most i can do every day

is eight productive hours of work and

you can

you know there are evidence to suggest

you can do more than that but if you

started treating it like that

and said maybe actually if i'm honest

it's not a

really high intensity productive hours

but maybe it's five or six really good

hours

and then you know other stuff is dealing

with email or dealing with

with phone calls it i suspect it would

change the way you made decisions

and you see evidence of this barack

obama used to have someone who followed

him round

who uh barack obama never chose his

lunch in eight years

because this person just made all his

decisions for him and

you see albert einstein said something

similar einstein used to wear that same

outfit every day

and uh it was because he knew when he

got to his lab when he got to

the the place he was making uh decisions

he knew that if he went there and he

hadn't

cluttered his brain with all these

little micro decisions

he was he just felt a bit more

imaginative inventive creative

so we see evidence of it in other

people's behavior but normally when it

comes to us we don't treat

our brains like that we don't treat it

like something we need to protect

our energy to protect we we tend to

treat our energy as infinite but that's

why burnout comes just

does the type of work you know you talk

there about eight hours or five hours or

whatever it might be

does the type of work you're doing and

the amount of intrinsic

motivation you have or joy you get from

it impact your

likelihood of being burnt out yeah

because like because that's what i

that's what i suspected in my life

because

the people that i've seen that get burnt

out and this is all anecdotal and

there's no scientific evidence really to

support

these these assertions but people that

i've seen get burnt out the most

typically typically especially during

the lockdown

working alone often often freelance um

often doing a repetitive task

usually doing things that aren't that

enjoyable and i had a friend actually

come here and sit on the sofa which i've

talked about i think in the last few

podcasts

and he basically told me that he was

feeling a bit burnt out um and

uh he was struggling to get out of bed

and go and do the

go and do his work in the morning he's a

he's a freelance freelancer

working on his own in his house he used

to work within teams during pre

pandemic and i i was saying to him like

think about the things that make your

work enjoyable and what other you know

what are the things about work that are

intrinsically and

motivating to you all those things have

gone right now so now you're just left

with

waking up alone sitting in front of a

computer

and maybe because your intrinsic

motivations or the intrinsic joy

of your work has been stripped maybe

you're now um

encountering burnout i think that

resonates with me as well to some degree

like

if i've ever got close to feeling

unmotivated or quote unquote

burnt out it was when i was doing things

alone pre-social chain

on my own just for money well there's a

couple of things there

so two things so like this i think is

all related to resilience

so there's two things there the first

thing is that the evidence we have

is that when we feel an absence of

control we do

we generally feel more burnt out so

let's think of examples and the research

on this some of the best research on

this is about nurses

so very timely for the moment we're in

right now when nurses

choose to work extra hours or you might

have known friends when you were doing

jobs before your career where you know i

used to work in fast food and some of

those dudes used to work 14 hour shifts

and you're like wow where did they get

the energy but they were electing to do

it

and the evidence we have is that when

people choose to do those things

it often impacts them less they they

feel like they've got control over it

so you know i these guys who used to

work with burger king king

at me with me and they were doing 100

hour weeks but because they were

choosing to do it because it was really

important for them to afford a car to do

things

they were what you discover is that when

you're electing to do it does

seem to give you some degree of

protection so control is a really

important part the more control

we feel over our lives so why might you

now be feeling burnt out because imagine

if your company has you on

40 hours of zoom calls a week or your

inbox is always

full or you've got a difficult person

you have to deal with a

client relationship who's phoning you

all the time you might be feeling the

absence of control

or your your friend who's the the

freelancer might be feeling like i'm

just

i'm not in control of things but there's

a couple of other really important parts

and they're about our identity and about

the the sense of community

and you get really good evidence of how

when we feel part of something bigger

than us and

feeling that connection being around

people is a really important part of

that

it tends to enrich us it tends to to

protect us and you see really good

evidence of this you see when people go

to hospital

if they have like a heart operation or

they have something serious when they

come out of hospital

the people who reported that they were

part of groups before

their chance of survival their chance of

avoiding depression

is massively higher than those who

live in isolation and look that's the

experiment we're going through right now

that

you might have wonderful friends that

are at the end of a zoom line or a

messenger link or a whatsapp

but if you're not around them and to

some extent some of the energy we get

from them is dissipating

and i think that's the challenge that a

lot of us are in right now

it's just a very lonely existence we've

got now all of the things that we found

nourishing enriching life-affirming a

lot of them have been taken away from us

now the challenge go on i was just gonna

say i was gonna say um

actually there's a lady that sat in your

in your chair yesterday

anna hemmings and she's an 11 time or

11 time world gold medal world champion

amazing olympian etc etc and she was

speaking to the fact that at one point

in her career

when she's when she she was training in

london to be a kayaker so she's like an

eleven-time world champion kayaker

right and then at one point in her

career they decided that they wanted her

to go to the olympics so she had to

learn sprint kayaking right

the coach was in florida so they took

her away from her team

in london and she had to basically train

on her own

via using an email that her her coach in

florida was selling her

and after doing that for a couple of

months she got chronic fatigue syndrome

wow

so she was out for two years she said

she couldn't lift her hands

and shampoo her and the thing that

brought her back was the realization

that taking away

her from her team as someone who was a

bit of an extrovert and got her energy

from people

had um set off a bunch of alarm bells in

her body

so the the reason that she managed to

recover and come back and

win more world titles after two years of

literally having this chronic fatigue

syndrome

was by realizing that and putting her

back with her teams

and changing her training which is wow

what a metaphor for what we're going

through

right and it shows how the mind is so

intrinsically connected to the body yeah

people don't think that

loneliness or removing you from your

tribe

can disable your body yeah or your

energy but although there's remarkable

amounts of evidence on that so there's a

woman in the u.s called

julianne holt lunchtime who's done like

a colossal survey

and she appropriates she says loneliness

is the equivalent of smoking 15

cigarettes a day

and so you know it has this big impact

on us and loneliness is

as bigger than obesity in terms of the

health impact it has on you

and that's what we're going through

right now and for all of these things

that we've tried to sort of create these

artificial intel alternatives

zoom quizzes and all manner and things

like that they just don't

have the same connection of

feeling surrounded with someone there's

some evidence as soon as you start

looking into these things it's

extraordinary

what an impact people have on each other

so these one

piece of evidence i went up to to oxford

to meet the woman who did this

research and she took groups of rowers

similar to

to the kayaker took groups of roads

first and there are oxford university

roads you've seen them the colossal

the monsters and she she put the first

group individually on rowing machines

second group she said okay i want you to

be on a

a made-up boat you know you're going to

sit on your rowing machines but you've

got to be in stroke with each other

and she wanted to see firstly what was

the different experience

what she noticed was that the firstly

they did about the same

exercise it wasn't like someone worked

harder than others but she measured the

endorphin levels

you do that by uh you put these arm

cuffs on people you sort of

you subject them to pain and then you

see how much pain they can take and

the endorphin levels of the people who'd

rode together was twice as high

as the people who'd rode alone and you

know you see this with choirs

people who sing inquired you know you

can grab strangers off the street

get them to sing some abba songs

together and you say to them at the end

of it

how do you feel they say i feel utterly

elated now that's not because singing

our songs on its own does it it's

because when you feel some connection

with other people

even strangers it seems to be

transformational it seems to sort of

elevate our mood and all of that has

been stripped from us

so you know if you've got i guess you

can try to do some approximations of it

but all of that has been stripped from

us and i think that's why

it's it's inevitable that we are feeling

flat energy-less we it doesn't feel the

same right now how do we fix that though

and this is i think it's going back to

the start of the conversation

why i hate it i hate the lack of

connection i hate the lack of community

i think are you an extrovert would you

say

oh god i really don't know i think on

one hand i'm a massive introvert yeah

i i i'm people know me i don't like to

do i don't like small talk i like to sit

alone for weeks on end

i like i went off to the jungle for four

weeks in september alone

went off to the costa rican jungle alone

so i like that although i

have this kind of like you know public

speaking and social media brand

so i actually don't know although a lot

of introverts like that ability to

switch on the public speaking side and

but i think actually the more you look

into the introvert extrovert thing it's

sort of

a compartmentalization that doesn't

necess the vast majority of people sit

somewhere and sure

exactly i'm the same as you um no but

these

uh i i think look the point you raise is

there's no easy substitute

but there is some evidence i saw an

amazing piece of research

and it looked at couples who lived

distance relationships

so you know in the uk distance

relationship means you're half an hour

an hour's drive from someone

in the us it means you're like a three

hour flight so they did a piece of

research 40

000 couples living distant relationships

and they wanted to know so these were

unmarried so they wanted to know the

ones who made it through a year what

what was the thing that made it through

a year and this was research was done

three or four years ago so it's not from

a different era of technology

but the ones who stayed with each other

for the long term

phoned each other every day and you know

when they

they were asked what you talked about

they said oh we just talked about

trivial things

so i think so many of us have got into

this frame of mind of thinking

well i liked her a photo and i sent a

quick whatsapp saying what i sent

a voice note horrific use of technology

but they said

but you know we think somehow we've

serviced the relationship by doing these

things

and actually when you come down to it

and maybe future generations will be

different

but it's it's often quite analog it's

that sense of feeling

seen and appreciated so i suspect face

time might work the same way

but so many of us are sort of are

overwhelmed with these performative zoom

calls right now where he's sitting there

with

like a celebrity squares a blanky blank

uh

array of faces in front of you i know

and i wonder if it's that sense of being

seen and being heard

that probably connects and cuts through

a bit more

yeah i think so yeah i just think work

is just so much

more than the work right i think

especially in the world in

the world we live in at the moment where

we're getting lonelier as a society i

was looking at the stats when i was

writing my book about

you know the the when they ask americans

for example how many people

they can turn to at a time of crisis it

used to be three people a couple of

decades ago now they're like medium

answer is zero

yeah and um i think it was theresa may

that appointed a

head of loneliness where loneliness are

for the uk and i've seen the stats so i

think work is one of the few sort of

i don't know institutions where it still

binds us together

um and we're not between four white

walls tapping glass to order food and

alone speaking to our nan through a

piece of glass so it's a shame that that

that community that part of community's

gone but anyway moving on

creativity something you've talked about

at length and

um for me i've i've always believed that

i'm least creative in the office i've

always thought

i'm more creative in the gym and in the

shower than i am when i'm when i'm sat

in a boardroom with a bunch of people

and i know this is something you've

spoken about so i wanted to get your

take on where we're most creative what

kills and causes creativity

yeah i mean look firstly i would all i

ever feel in all of these situations is

that i feel like i'm a

a vessel that's passing on other

people's knowledge so i've found myself

being consumed with all these things and

interested in their learning so

look let me tell you um what i've i've

discovered that

neuroscience is really intriguing the

most compelling thing about neuroscience

is when you look into it

uh neuroscientists used to work on

experimenting on animals

you know i'm not i'm not keen on that i

was like i was

you know in a protest group about animal

experimentation when i was younger

um and they used to look at brain

injuries so that used to be the main way

that neuroscience worked

and it's only the last 20 years that

brain scans have had any degree of

sophistication

but what they've discovered in like the

time that they've had brain scanners

is some of the things that they presumed

about the way our brain works

aren't necessarily right so let me give

you one example but they used to put

people in these brand new brain scanners

and they would watch what their their

brains did they give them a puzzle they

give them a

rubik's cube their brains would light up

in these sort of different places

and then they'd notice what happened

when people stopped

playing on the puzzle and their brains

would light up in sort of

loads of places as well and so it was it

was baffling

what's going on right now they'd say to

these people they say oh right sorry i

was

a million miles away i was daydreaming

so okay

right that's interesting your brain's

lightened up when you're when you're not

thinking about something when you sort

of switched off

and so the way that neuroscientists

categorize this broadly they say

these three systems of cognition first

one is like

when you're doing that rubik's cube or

when you're typing an email

it's called the executive attention

network so it's the main thing you're

focusing on

and then you'll know while your

executive attention network is watching

netflix or

while you're writing an email you can

also be aware of like the room you're in

that's called the salience network and

the third one the third

so there's three of these systems the

third one is that one when you're

daydreaming the one where you're a

million miles away

the one when you're in the shower which

is called the default network

but what we discover is that people

generally report

having their best creative ideas not

when they're frowning into their laptop

screen

but when they're in these default mode

uh situations so you might have it in

the old days

if you're on a train somewhere or on a

plane somewhere loads of people

i've got a friend who says she has all

her best ideas

staring out the windows of planes yeah

and so you know

if that was you then this year has been

an uncreative year

but um my favorite example of it is a

really famous screenwriter

called aaron sawkin he's written the

west wing he wrote

there was a um there was a film he had

on netflix just before christmas called

the chicago seven he's written all these

big things

very famous for zingy dialogue so he

wrote the social network film things

like that sort of

you know um really sort of really what's

better than a

million a billion like he's written all

these zingy lines and he's

realized that uh he has all his best

ideas exactly like you in the shower

he said he had he told hollywood

reporter magazine he had a shower

installed in the corner of his office

and he has eight showers a day and he

was asked by them

he was asked by them hang on is this

like some weird

ocd thing he said not at all i find that

when i

you know so i'll be sitting there

thinking of something

trying to come up with an idea but it's

only when i disengage my brain

to something comes to me an idea comes

to me and so

what you described is exactly what a lot

of

these people whose job is to be creative

have recognized

and as soon as you know that you start

thinking

wow okay i need to think differently

about

being creative because creativity can

then be when i'm sitting at my desk i'm

sort of

taking all this inspiration in

stimulation

ideas but then it's about disengaging

going for a walk

going for a cycle ride going to to do a

workout

might be the moment where the idea hits

you and i don't think necessarily we

think about that enough

you know if you go back to this idea

that your brain is a bit like your phone

battery

then some of those moments that

effectively can recharge your battery

can be the moments where creativity hits

you and inspiration hits you

so i think sort of rethinking the way

that we

treat a productive week of work of you

know these blocks of work

but then moments where you know it might

be your

personal is you go for a walk every

lunch time

that can be far more creative and

productive than you might imagine

well how do we make our work

environments more conducive with

creativity then is there a way or do we

just resign to the fact that

that's not going to be the best place

for our creativity and if we're going to

reach our creative potential it's

probably going to be away from the

office

i think it's about recognizing there's a

yin yang there's a balance

of work and and imagination

so i i always loved the example of um

charles dickens

charles dickens obviously um like

incredibly productive i think he wrote

15 novels

200 short stories he edited a weekly

magazine about a mile from here

you know sort of incredibly productive

we didn't work afternoons

and so charles dickens would sit down at

his desk at eight in the morning

he'd write for about four or five hours

and then he'd go and walk and he'd walk

10

10 miles every afternoon and that was

like

him lost in his thoughts you know

striding through

east london probably sort of imagination

popping

when he sat down the next day he had

loads of ideas and i think

some of us have eliminated that

sort of the brain fermenting ideas we've

eliminated that a bit so

you know it might be that your way to do

this yourself is just

to make sure you just got some down time

or you've just got some time where

you know you put music on but you turn

podcasts off or you just

you try and get a bit more balance in

how you're

uh using your energy so let's conclude

this point about work

and creativity say that i today

made you the ceo of a company that had

100 employees

um and you could design from scratch the

the working environment how often people

worked and some of the sort of

key sort of principles and foundations

of that working environment what kind of

things would be important to you based

on all you know

so let's look into what happened in

lockdown the first part of lockdown most

people reported

that their engagement went up and why

did their engagement went up

their engagement went up because they

were solving problems like we'd never

worked like this before

everyone was you know the first moment

you're getting on a zoom call or a

google hangout or

you're getting on these things there's

like you know even though you're in this

crazy situation

there's a degree of excitement fight or

flight almost right and

and so what do we know about that we

know that people felt that they were

involved in firstly a bit of team

collaboration but secondly they were

helping solve problems

and so you know the whole organizations

computer sales

have gone through the roof whole

organizations that had no laptop

computers

so they had to arm their teams with kit

and so people

felt really engaged by the fact that

they back to what we talked about

earlier

had some control they had a a bit of

influence

so number one thing that we discover is

the more that people feel that they can

have an

impact in their job and it might be

something similar simple

they're they're just responsible for a

couple of things themselves

the more that they feel that they've got

some agency some control themselves

they feel motivated in their jobs when

do we feel unmotivated in our jobs

when our boss tells us what to do but we

don't get

any input into it we don't necessarily

think it's

the best thing to do we're doing

repetitive things that don't feel very

rewarding

so the best thing that any of us can do

think well how can i make

teams feel small and teams feel like

they've got a shared sense of

accomplishment and pride in what they're

doing so that's what i would be saying

what you discover is 100 is a really

nice size actually any time a

company goes over 100 what your

discovery is

you lose a bit of some of that

camaraderie

you better almost there's a few

organizations that do this

when you go over 100 split it into two

teams because your

that sort of cohesion you get works

really well when we

we've got a familiarity with each other

and what happens is when you go over

that you start losing it

and you think we want we want it to feel

like it used to feel

it's never going to feel like that

humans don't work like that so

far better to say you know we've got two

teams that love each other but we're

we're working on separate goals so

keeping things small

is really critical and there's lots of

evidence of

the smaller you can keep things you

almost get the economies of engagement

compared to the economies of scale that

when people feel they're part of

something that they're having an input

into

their engagement is higher they they

they work more effectively

so i would say that would be the

defining part making people feel like

they've got things that they're

responsible for

and generally all of those things

encourage

active engagement what you find when you

look into some of the stats

they're terrifying so and when you

globally there's

an organization gallop to this workforce

survey

opinion poll company and they they do

this workforce survey and they say that

globally

13 of people are engaged in their jobs

when they look into it what i mean by

that is that these there's almost as

many

people there's about 22 of people who

would

actively disengage their jobs so by

actively disengaged

they kind of hate their organization and

they want to bring the downfall of their

organization

so anytime you meet some someone on the

tuber in the street they're almost twice

as likely to want to destroy their

company

as make it succeed but then the vast

majority of everyone else over 50

percent of people

are just disengaged they're not actively

disengaged

they're just passively disengaged so

work for most of us

is something is something that sort of

feels arduous we don't necessarily enjoy

we don't necessarily

value the decisions and you'll know as

someone who's

run a company where culture was the

defining thing you'll know that when you

get it right

it can be this superpower where you know

you're on

high octane fuel compared to you know

the energy can feel low otherwise and so

just getting those things right

generally is far more about

people feeling a personal connection

with the people that are around

feeling like they're contributing

something these things play a really big

part

we talked a lot about the joy of work

obviously the i guess the antithesis of

the joy of work is the misery of work

and at some point when work

feels miserable um people are faced with

this quite

um this quite confounding question which

is

how do i know when to quit and we talk

that we know i think there's so much

written about

how to start and when to start and

starting being the thing but obviously

the thing that comes before starting

usually is knowing the right moment to

quit

people don't quit sometimes and they

spend many decades in a miserable job

and

you know then their fear of quitting

almost becomes stronger because they're

getting more comfortable and more

entrenched

so i wanted i've not seen you talk about

anything about quitting before but i

just wondered if you had a take on when

the right moment to quit a job was or

i know it's an incredibly personal

nuanced thing but people

i can i was thinking then i was thinking

what are some of the things people

really want to know right now one of

them i'm sure is like i hate my job

i don't have control my boss is an

do i quit i'm gonna tell you a secret

for the past five years while building

social chain into a 700 person

global social media powerhouse i've been

using a service that i've never really

mentioned

some of you might know that service it's

called fiverr f-i-v-e-r-r

it's my little secret if i've ever had a

project where i've needed affordable

skilled freelancers to help me whether

it's building a social media application

that made my company three

million pounds or just a video i needed

editing or

help making a logo or making a website

i've used fiverr

now that my secret's out the bag here's

what i'm gonna do for you if there's a

freelance service you need or a project

you need help with a logo

a website a voice over a video you need

made anything at all

go to fiverr.com ceo i'll put the link

in the description

that's fiverr.com ceo

message me the service you want from the

website and every single week i'll

personally

send you the credit to your fiverr

account so that you can get that project

done

thank you to fiverr for the sponsorship

and for supporting entrepreneurs and

freelancers around the world

i'm looking forward to all of your

messages i've been working my way

through these

huel nutrition bars this week um as you

know i love the ready to drink cure

flavors but

you will have also got these salted

caramel bars

and i'm a big salted caramel nut which

i've been having and if you're if you're

someone that does like to chew

not just drink your food then i really

highly recommend the salted caramel

flavor there's also another flavor

called the raspberry white chocolate

flavor

which i've been very addicted to over

the last couple of weeks but again just

like huel it's nutritionally complete

you get all of your

your proteins you get essential fats you

get it's gluten-free as well

and you get 26 vitamins and minerals

from these bars

tastes amazing and i'm a big salted

caramel fan give it a go if you do

send me a screenshot on instagram or

twitter or linkedin and let me know what

you think

again as someone that skips meals this

is an absolute lifesaver

i was thinking what are some of the

things people really want to know right

now one of them i'm sure is like

i hate my job i don't have control my

boss is an

do i quit yeah look you know big

questions you probably could tell us

more than that

um yeah i think you know the uh the

critical thing about that is

is probably checking in with yourself

and asking you know do i feel any sense

of

reward by my from my job obviously it's

not a great time for anyone right now to

be

debating doing something that makes them

economically precarious

that so you don't necessarily want to

risk something that is going to

put you in a difficult situation but i

think you know evaluating our jobs

generally when you look into the

research when you say to people have you

had a good days

a good day at work it generally comes

down to whether people feel pride in

their organization

and whether they feel like they've made

meaningful progress in something they've

been working on

so meaningful progress actually can be

difficult right now if your job feels

like

you're the expert in emailing and

video calls you sometimes feel like

you've made no progress for weeks you

haven't done

anything for weeks and also if your

organization is struggling

this is a really interesting phenomenon

because some organizations pre-covered

were in

uh were growing so naturally when you're

an employee in those organizations

you're dragged up with it you're giving

promotions and pay rises and

there's the cash to fund that now

organizations are in decline or a lot of

them are hanging on

and so you're not getting a promotion

your pay's been frozen you might have be

on a pay cut

you might be furloughed and it feels

like suddenly you've gone into decline

in your career because the organization

you're in is

in decline um and i think that also

causes a lot of people to start to think

well

you know i might my whole life up until

this point has been about

progress and climbing the ladder why am

i going down the ladder yeah

i didn't do anything different or wrong

you know it's a really interesting

philosophical thing about that because

the whole idea of the career

at korea is the invention of the last 40

years you know

uh ancestors uh grandparents our

great-grandparents

never had the idea of a career where i

was going to be

accomplishing something and developing

and changing

you know the job you were going to be

doing next year was the job you were

doing last year well done

and the job that your kids were going to

do was going to be the job that you did

and the the this idea and it brings with

it a degree of insecurity

this idea that we will be on this

developmental path

is a construct look and it's a construct

that suits the

economic system we live in because it

makes us

all we strive to be accomplishing more

than we did last year and to be earning

more than we did last year

but it's a construct for the last few

years whether it's the origin of

happiness

i'm not 100 sure if i was going to put

two things alongside some of the things

that you've talked about

that sense of feeling part of something

feeling connected to other people

i think is a more robust route to

happiness than

feeling like i'm on a career trajectory

even though that can the the illusion of

that can be incredibly powerful

it's interesting because you know with

there's this thing called like gold

medal depression where like michael

phelps he

set these set these tarts one thing i

kind of investigated in my book is the

idea that

we think stability we think chaos we

think we live in chaos

and and in search of stability but the

moment we find stability i.e completed

goals

and um you know roof over our heads and

everything's normal we actually descend

into chaos

so in fact we're meant to keep this is a

philosophical idea i guess but

we're meant to keep our lives in forward

motion in that chaos because

when you look at people that have

achieved all their goals and they have

nothing left to accomplish

they so often fall into some kind of

depression and lack of purpose and

meaning

i think jordan peterson talks about it i

know benjamin said a lot about it that

you know much of um i was looking at the

stats around

life expectancy in the uk and the us and

over the last two years it's declined

for the first time ever

but and they say when they say why is

that they say because the opioid crisis

and say why is there an

opioid crisis and they say well because

there's a lack of meaning

and so i i began to realize that in my

own life

i think i'm meant to keep myself

my goals way out in front of me almost

unattainable um

and keep myself striving and i've even

seen it in my person which i've talked

about a little bit on this podcast the

days where

someone came along and said here's 50

million will buy a company or we're

going to go to the stock market you're

going to be a millionaire were the most

confusing days of my life

because i immediately didn't know what

my point was anymore

i wonder what there's something really

fascinating so there's a there's a study

of

olympic medalist a british study really

fascinating piece of work

it's called the great british medalist

study and um it was commissioned by the

british olympic association so they

wanted to know

what was the what was the creation of a

champion

and they did this fascinating thing they

did they gathered 20

what they called super elite athletes so

these are athletes you'll know them

all of them are household names they

don't name them in the study but it's

people like kelly holmes it's people

like

the big iconic names and uh these were

people that every time they went to

a championship they would win gold or

they would win

they would be right in contention then

they took a second group and they called

these elite athletes

super elite elite and these were people

who went to championships

but kinda didn't meddle or if they

meddled they meddled third

biggest difference between them these

ones had all received significant

childhood trauma the elite ones the

super early best ones had achieved

significant childhood trauma let's start

counting the cases

so kelly holmes she was bullied at

school she was

the only child of mixed race

ethnicity in her village she said she

experienced continual racism

tom daley his father died when he was

training

yeah um you know you look at countless

examples of these things the

andy murray was you know greatest

british tennis player maybe

greatest british sports person he was at

the dumb lane shooting the only mass

shooting

in british history so all of these

people have experienced significant

childhood trauma

and what happens is they tend to direct

their energy

based on what we know they direct like

they're fortunate

there was a coincidence that they were

gifted supreme talent

and what you discover is childhood

trauma normally correlates with

addiction

so if you know if it correlates with

anything it correlates with

obsessive behavior but both of them have

something in common

you're trying to fill that void and so

these people are fortunate that they've

been gifted with this

super elite talent that they can fill

the void with striving for something

and the people who ends up at addicts

with the same challenge don't but

they're still striving to fill that void

and so there is something in you know

it's it's almost inevitable that these

people who are striving for the elite

uh accomplishment hoping to fill this

this hole that sits inside them of

course when they get there they realize

it was all an illusion it's like a

mirage in the desert but you know there

is something in what you say

i mean i've got i just i mean completely

like i think

when i i sit here and speak to people

that are tremendously successful

and the one thing that i've seen in

common with all of them actually think i

said it to joe wicks when he was sat

here

two weeks ago was they all seemed to

have some real severe childhood trauma

that no one else has experienced

and even in my i said to joe i said you

know my i've got a friend who's a

billionaire

he's not happy but he has had this deep

obsession since he was a kid because of

some things that happened with his

father and his father making him feel

that he just wasn't enough or he wasn't

adequate enough

which has made him obsessive about

success to the point where it's

unhealthy

um and he's got there now he's a

billionaire but he's not happy at all

he's he's you know he's tremendously

unfulfilled the same with eddie han i

went and eddie holmes on this podcast a

couple of weeks ago as well

and he he is the most relentlessly

obsessed person i've met

um just non-stop eat to the point where

he'll say to his kids like

he'll he'll tell his wife and kids that

they are second priority to his box to

being a boxing promoter

you ask him where that's come from he

said you know my dad my dad always made

me feel like i wasn't enough

it's really interesting though because

it depends i'm intrigued then

how these people pay it forward because

andre agassi

supreme tennis player great tennis

player married to the greatest the

up there equal greatest tennis players

for all time uh he's married steffi graf

and um and he says that his dad bullied

him constantly

like his dad was never happy he's the

only place his dad who was

a persian iranian cab driver could

afford to own a tennis court was in las

vegas

so they moved to las vegas and his dad

bullied him into becoming a tennis

player

and andre agassi fantastic autobiography

wrote about how much he hates tennis

hates it with every single bit every

fiber in his body

and he says i will never do to my kids

what my dad did to me

and so it's like this really interesting

origin of

success is the thing that propels you

this driving force that propels these

people

who just keep going relentlessly is it

something missing rather than something

extra and i think that's the interesting

conundrum

i don't think it's predictable and this

is the thing because i think you think

okay well if someone has trauma

they're going to become successful or

they're going to become an addict

or if someone has a

upbringing that lacked empathy from

their parents then they'll become an

or a serial killer

but in the case of joe wicks he was he

talked about how he had you know he

looked at

the doors in his house and they all had

fist holes in them his dad was an

addict his mom had these problems and

and he is the single most empathetic

person i've ever met

you know when they announce the third

lockdown he does a livestream crying his

eyes up because not because of him he's

fine he's saying i can i'm feeling the

pain

of people losing their jobs right now

and you think well if your dad was

you know you grew up in a home full of

domestic abuse right and violence

how can you become the most empathetic

person that i've ever encountered

genuinely genuinely empathetic this guy

like i've never seen

you know um i you know because everyone

says about you know pee with joe

and they all like send him the memes

every time there's a lock down of him

like putting his shoes back on or

whatever but the guy

gets really down really really really

down

because he knows that other people are

hurting never seen anything like it

however here's my question so we talked

about childhoods um

making people very interesting there's

one guy in particular who is

notoriously had a very um interesting

childhood which made him a certain way

donald trump and his father um

you know the story of donald trump and

his father being you know um

you were the vp of e-m-e-a

of twitter um obviously donald trump has

just been booted off twitter permanently

what do you think about that but also i

wanted to ask you where if you were jack

dorsey in that at that time would you

have made the same decision

number one it's so incredibly hard and i

think

the i mean i always felt lucky i worked

four years at youtube

before twitter and the time that i

worked at youtube

there was a lot of um mass shootings and

there's always mass shootings in the u.s

but there's a lot of mass shootings and

the phenomenon at the time was that a

lot of the mass shootings

it was being discovered that the people

had youtube channels

and so i remember sitting in a meeting

with lawyers in the

san bruno headquarters of youtube

watching them

debate what the the right moral thing

to do was in these fascinating to watch

things that were being invented

challenges that no one had conceived of

five years before now you've got these

things and so you're watching all these

things going on

and um and so you know when twitter was

invented when twitter was invented it

was a way

15 years ago it was a way to text all of

your mates at once

and so there was a short code and it was

a way it was

it took like your msn messenger status

and it sent it to text messages that was

the idea before everyone had internet

connection on their phone

so that it feels like a different

lifetime now

but just an illustration to be 15 years

on from that

debating whether you d platform the most

powerful most well-known is he the most

famous person in the world maybe the

most famous person in the world to

de-platform that person

is such a journey to be on and i know

the people

i mean i know jack i know uh the the

other person who made the decision

and i know that they don't make any of

those decisions lightly you know it's

like

it's really uh weighs on them but to my

mind

it was a singular situation where

firstly i saw some people on social

media saying

um saying that this was an illustration

that the employees of tech firms were

woke

and it's just really interesting

equivalents because six people died

in that event and if you watch back all

the footage

of what led to it then it

it doesn't take a huge leap of logic to

say

i can see why that created that so six

people died and i think

it was at the end of a long period where

increasing numbers

of the tweets by the president and the

people associated

were being labeled with this isn't true

and you you do reach a point where a lot

of critics were saying

where does your responsibility kick in

here do you have no responsibility for

what your platform is being used for i

think knowing the people concerned

that that was the last thing they wanted

to be to be in the position where

they were making a decision angela

merkel has come out saying

she's she feels uncomfortable with it

and i can definitely imagine that

everyone in twitter

felt uncomfortable with it it was one of

those difficult things everywhere you

went for the whole

trump presidency people would say um

what are you doing why are you not

taking this down and of course you know

the first thing you've got to say is

irrespective of anyone's opinion and

that's the only way you can look at this

that this is an elected leader of a

country

and so you know irrespective of anything

else

for a private company to be saying that

we

we take an opinion which transcends

uh the election result is a really

uncomfortable one

so i know that it would have been a

really careful decision i think a really

deliberate decision

jack's been on podcasts and any places

uh i'm joe rogan

talking about he believes that bands

shouldn't be forever

so who's to say that you know there

wouldn't be a root back

on these things but i do know that the

decision

was probably made

carefully reluctantly i think

i think it's the right decision i think

is the right decision and i think the

timing of it was probably right

i i would be you know it felt

it felt at the moment it took place

it felt like the intensity of dialogue

and the toxicity of dialogue was

reaching such a stage

that you know six people already dead

it's just like

this could get this can escalate even

further and i have to say

since it's happened it does feel to me

like a bit of the stress in the room has

gone

someone said something uh about i think

president-elect biden said um the you

know a natural order of things you don't

think about your leaders

every day you kind of know they're there

you've got context that they

have an awareness but you know this

sense of peril where you're thinking

about your leader and what might happen

every day

just contributes to bad mental health

it's not a healthy place for us to live

in

so you know i would guess that there

would always be a route back

for people even if they've had a

permanent ban

jack said that but i i do think it was

the right decision

i i am i'm really not sure i think

i consider myself as someone that's on

the left i guess to some degree or maybe

left to center left but

um i it does make me feel a little bit

uncomfortable because you're right it

sets a bit of a presence for the future

in terms of how we deal with um