The Wisdom of Steven Bartlett

This post is a throwback to last November’s Pentawards Festival, a day jam-packed with insight, ideas and inspiration. I’ve already shared my five top takeaways from the day, as well as the advice I took from the jury Q&A on how to win a Pentaward, but I wanted to do a whole piece on the session with Steven Bartlett.

Head of Pentawards, Adam Ryan, opened the day with a 30-minute interview with Bartlett and it was a truly startling conversation. He has a calm intensity that draws you in, and an inventive approach to his work and life that has you thinking about his words many months later.

For me this is what stood out.

1. Get better at quitting things

He believes our culture praises people who start things but doesn’t give enough recognition to those who are brave enough to quit things. Just look at the business books next time you pass through the airport; there will be a handful urging you to start a business or giving you advice on how to do it, but not one on the why and how of quitting one.

Bartlett believes many people spend far too much of their lives persisting with projects, jobs, relationships, businesses, and so on that aren’t the best use of our time. He urges us to treat the time we have with greater care.

I know of people who take this a step forward and regularly consult a clock that tells them how long they probably have left to live. That might be too morbid for many of us, but the point is good: time is too short to waste on something that’s not working.

2. Stop letting invalid questions dominate your life

Is it love?

What’s my purpose?

Have I found my passion?

Bartlett believes questions like these that can’t be answered factually are invalid, and we’d be far happier if we stopped trying to answer them and instead posed more tangible questions.

It’s an interesting point of view. I wonder if the point is that many of us spend too long thinking about questions that can only be answered by emotions, not reason. It’s another useful reminder on how best to use our time.

3. Conduct more experiments (ideally get AI to do it)

Bartlett is of course best known for The Diary of a CEO podcast. What we don’t know is how scientifically he approaches it. Every single element is tested mostly using AI, he employs a Head of Experimentation. He urged the audience to experiment more.

It feels like a use of AI that, by underpinning or disproving our hunches, could point us more reliably in the right direction, and one that most of us are still in the very early stages of exploring.

4. Fight for your sleep

Bartlett recently started wearing a health tracking device. So, when he ate a hotel’s cookie before bed one night and then woke up feeling like he’d hardly slept he was able to see why: despite being in bed for his eight hours, the sugar in his blood had allowed him less than an hour’s restorative sleep.

It was a salutary reminder of how easy it is to lose sleep without being aware of it, and encouraged him to focus even more on getting enough sleep.

Put simply, he believes the single greatest determinant of his performance in his work, and life more generally, is the amount of sleep he gets. So, he’s obsessive about it, ensuring ideal conditions in his room, not setting an alarm, and scheduling no early meetings (he admits he’s fortunate to have the power to do this).

It clearly works, and I left the talk resolved to get more sleep. I’ll plan in my eight hours, close the novel sooner than I want to, and keep the blue screens far from bed – but I’ll still keep setting an alarm to get up for events as interesting as the day I spent at the Pentawards.