??Seek the 1%

The most important lesson I learned from my favourite podcaster, Steven Bartlett

Happy Monday Friends,

This week, I went to?Steven Barlett’s The Business and Life Speaking Tour. Steven is an entrepreneur and host of the popular podcast?Diary of a CEO. It is a 2.5-hour lecture series where Steven shares the most valuable lessons he has learned while building good businesses and in pursuit of leading a purposeful life.

The lecture was packed with little nuggets and insights. I took more than 20 pages of notes. But, I can distil all those notes to just a single insight:?Seek the 1%.?Let’s unpack this:

Most of us have heard about the?1% rule?made famous by James Clear through Atomic Habits. It is the idea that the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and organisations that consistently maintain a 1 per cent advantage over the alternatives. You don’t need to have the next original idea; you just have to be 1% better.

On Friday, Steven was speaking to an audience of 5000. According to him, it is the largest he has ever seen in this series. Sydney had a year’s worth of rain that day. But, people were there after a full workday sitting from 8-11:30 pm recording, laughing, asking questions, taking pictures and notes.

So what made us all sit there for three hours? Certainly, it was the lecture and the money we all paid for the tickets. But think about sitting for 3 hours in a university lecture, and you would know that even the most engaging professors fail to keep fee-paying students in class for 3 hours.

There were a 100 subtle things that people didn’t even notice that made us all stay. That whole talk was, in fact, a masterclass in design. Here is how :

The Space:

The space was made hospitable through relaxing lights, soothing background music, and managing the carbon dioxide levels in the room.

Imagine 5000 people breathing in a closed theatre for 3.5 hours. It can get quite stuffy after a while. But that wasn’t the case. I didn’t see a single person snooze or leave in the middle of the talk. In fact, there was a parking shortage and an Uber surge at 11:30 because of all the people leaving the venue after the show.

The Talk:

The talk was very well-paced. Not too fast, not too slow. The slides were visually colour-balanced. There was a well-timed break. It was humorous and engaged the crowd.

The Secret Sauce:

In the talk, Steven mentioned that he and his team are relentless in the pursuit of 1 % gains. He hires the 1% of people who have a unique combination of skills and seeks help from coaches who can give them a 1 % edge in life, business and relationships.

He mentioned his team obsesses over the tiniest of details. They measure the effects of dots, exclamation marks and quotes in podcast titles. They research the music that makes guests open up, the air fresheners and the balance of carbon levels inside the podcast studios that help people to keep talking. In short, He and his team turn every stone to find a 1 % gain with every iteration with all the businesses.

Listening to his stories throughout the talk, I observed that Steven has designed his life around collecting 1% gains in perhaps every area of his life. He surrounds himself with the 1% high performers most of us look up to. He reads what his inspirations are reading and listening to. He conducts experiments that only 1% are willing or humble enough to take a crack at. He takes action that only 1% are willing to take.

When we think about success, we think about it in romantic ways. The overnight success, the lotteries, the Forbes 30 under 30. We glorify it because it makes us justify our own excuses for not executing for simple 1% gains. Here I was in the presence of a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient, and not once he mentioned hitting a big jackpot. He talked about little accidents, clever emails, collaborations, friends, luck, his amazing girlfriend, the A players in his team, Manchester United and the soaking rain outside.

We could all see how calm he was, knowing that his best work and relationships wouldn’t come from landing on the next big thing. They will come from collecting 1% gains over a longer period of time in all that he does and plans to do.

Seeking that 1% gain is, I believe, the gold standard for thinking about all areas of our life. The dream career, the dream job, and the loving partner will all happen one experiment, one conversation, one action at a time.

Have a great week.

Love,

Wajiha

Thanks for reading The Joy of Making. Subscribe for free to my substack to receive a new edition straight to your inbox every week.

What I enjoyed this week :

Podcast:

Morgan Housel talking about?smart things smart people have said.

Morgan’s podcast is also one of my favourites. Short, concise and full of wisdom.