Chris Williamson: Stop taking life so seriously. No one is getting out of this game alive. And in three generations, no one will even remember your name. And if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your problems for a moment and find some joy, I don't know what will because there'll never be a time when there's no problems in life. And that's why this time in between Christmas and New Year is a really wonderful time to plan big dreams and goals for the year.

Steven Bartlett: So, let's talk about that. Chris Williamson is one of the world's leading podcast hosts and thinkers. And now he's back educating us on how to build discipline, turning goals into results, what's stopping us finding love, and what makes a good man in today's society?

The single best question to work out what you should be doing next year, what would have to happen by the end of 2026. For me to look back and consider it a success and it usually comes down to only a few things. The first one is in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. So setting the bar unrealistically high does not increase your performance. Like you probably lose 20 lb and get a boyfriend. You can't do that and move cities and start a new business. So, make the assumption, I can do no more than I'm doing now.

Second thing, if your life was a movie and the audience were watching, what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do with your life? It is obvious. Leave the relationship. The job is not working for you. The killer's hiding in the cupboard. Because if you're not careful with how you design what it is that you chase after, you can spend your entire life realizing that you climbed a huge ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall.

Chris Williamson: And is there anything else? So there is a wonderful upside in trying to conquer and trying to achieve mastery, trying to really drive yourself to go and do stuff. But I'm not like your feelings, just hustle and grind until your eyes bleed either because one of the biggest lessons I've taken away from this year is suppression isn't the same thing as strength. And it's a good thing for guys who feel their emotions to show that they feel their emotions, right? Like I've been at some of my lowest points over the last 12 months. It felt like my better self was slipping through my fingers. I realized my emotions are legitimate and denying myself that is not helping anything at all.

Steven Bartlett: My audience care a lot about changing their life for the better. And I think at this time of year, change is front of mind for everybody. Everybody's thinking about New Year's resolutions, who I want to become in 2026. But when you look at the stats, 23% of people quit by the end of the first week of January, their New Year's resolution, the thing they aimed at. Roughly half of people will quit their New Year's resolution, the change they sought by the end of January. and only about 9% of people will keep their New Year's resolution for the full year. So I guess my opening question to you is does this time of year matter at all? Is it a useful productive time to be thinking about change in your point of view?

Chris Williamson: I think the world is split into two camps. Uh one camp says there is no difference between January 1st and December 31st. Like why wait? It's December 10th, just do it now. and the other camp likes the idea of there being a culturally appropriate moment to stop doing something and start doing something else.

Most people need to realize that they're already spending tons of time worrying about the future in the past. They're going back to this thing that they regret. I wish I'd done this differently. Oh, I I have uh uh rumination about something that occurred. Then they're concerned about the future. They're thinking, "I'm uncertain about this thing that's going to happen." So, you're already worrying about the past. You're already doing reflection and planning just in a very unstructured way where you don't get to choose when it hits you in the face.

This is a culturally appropriate moment, like a scheduling appropriate moment for you to just step in and think. In between Christmas and New Year, life tends to slow down a little bit. It is a good moment to check in. There is no special magic super secret squirrel source in January 1st. But it is a good moment to check in because life tends to slow down a little bit.

Steven Bartlett: I guess the the question that everybody should be asking themselves is what should I aim at? And and is there such a thing as aiming at too many things? What what what is a good goal for change?

Chris Williamson: Yeah. It's very overwhelming. Uh if you realize, wow, I can do anything I want. That's absolutely terrifying. One thing I would say, this is your opportunity to change anything behaviorally. You can change anything you want. Not everything you want. Right? That's the problem. You can become anything you want behaviorally, but you can't be everything you want.

So, you need to pick a small number. The single best question to work out what you should be doing next year. what would have to happen by the end of 2026 for me to look back on 2026 and consider it a success. it usually comes down to only a few things. Setting the bar unrealistically high does not increase your performance. Imagine that you went into a buffet and you made your plate as big as possible. He said, "I want all of these things... and my stomach is going to expand to be able to fit it." That's not the way that our stomachs work and that is not the way that our workloads work.

So, first rule, in order to pick something up, you have to put something down.

Don't assume that just because you've loaded more onto your workload plate, your work capacity will expand to be able to fit it into your stomach. Make the assumption I can do no more than I'm doing now. I can switch stuff, but I can't add more in. And in order to pick something up, I have to put something down. That's a really important thing because if you're using motivation and enthusiasm to work yourself through your goals, your goals are predicated largely on a fuel source that you don't have control over.

Steven Bartlett: I think that's a really important point because when we think about the goals we'll start setting at this time of the year, all of them are asking for more time or more energy. Like pretty much all of them ask for I want to start running. I want to start going to the gym. Whereas, as you say, that means I'm going to have to take something off the plate. And we don't think about subtraction at this time of the year. Typically, we don't think I'm going to spend less time with my friends. I'm going to cut out Netflix. We think of addition.

Chris Williamson: Let's go through a bunch of uncomfortable questions people can ask themselves.

How would I spend my day if I wanted to make 85year-old me as miserable as possible?

What is it that I did over the last year that made me right now feel it's this constriction.

I don't like my relationship with my phone. I don't like how uh my mornings aren't very productive. Uh I've noticed that when I'm with my friends, I'm not very present. I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on my own. I tend to isolate when things get difficult. I've noticed that I've got into the habit of not telling the truth when people ask me a question. I've noticed that I've got into the habit of not advocating for my needs when I should do.

If your life was a movie and the audience were watching up to this point, what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do with your life? They would be it is obvious. Leave the relationship. The job is not working for you. The killer's hiding in the cupboard.

Steven Bartlett: So, if this was a movie and the audience was screaming at you. What would they be screaming?

Chris Williamson: You're already doing enough. Stop whipping yourself into submission, thinking that your happiness sits on the other side of the next set of goals that you're going to achieve. You've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy. So if you haven't made it now, if this isn't when life is going to begin, then when when when are you going to start?

There's this uh wonderful idea of the the deferred life hypothesis. Deferred life hypothesis is basically the sort of common belief that our life hasn't yet begun. That what's happening now is a sort of prelude. And upon reflection, what a lot of people realize is that this prelude that they run through was a mirage that sort of faded as they approached and they were actually just running toward the end of their life.

People are holding their happiness hostage. They're in a holding pattern like a plane that can't land for some reason. It's like what if that what if that never changes? What if your problems in life are never ever going to go away? Problems are a feature, not a bug.

Steven Bartlett: The other thing that I I love that you talk about is what it when we talk about metrics of success, you talk about observable metrics and hidden metrics of success.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. So, a lot of the time we'll trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Something that's observable would be your job title, what your salary is per year, how many people know you, your bank balance, the size of your house, the car that you drive.

Since the only way that your success can be judged is outwardly. So naturally we trade something which people can't see for something that they can see. For instance, lots of people would trade a longer commute for a higher salary. The length of your commute is one of the most correlated uh stats with your happiness. Longer commutes reliably make people more miserable. And what's the hidden metric that you've lost by doing that? Well, that's less time with your family, with your wife to connect, that's less time to pursue your own passions.

But after a while, you have to admit if you already live a comfortable quality of life and you trade it, you you trade your happiness or your your peace in order to get more, you're making a bad choice. Which I think links to the story of the Mexican fisher.

An American businessman was away on a holiday in Mexico and he got taken out by a fisherman and he asked the fisherman, "So, what do you do each day?" The fisherman said, "I spend each morning out on the water. I fish a little. I catch some food. I take it home and I sit in my house with my wife and my family and we eat what I've caught for the day." The American says, "That's stupid... what you should do is you should get a bigger boat and then you could catch more fish and then you could go sell it at the market... then you could create a canning factory and you could export it back to the UK and you could have a huge business." Fisherman said, "Why would I do that?" "So well then you would be able to retire and fish a little on a morning, catch some fish, and then spend the afternoon with your family."

And it's the same lesson as Paulo Qua's The Alchemist, which is this young boy goes on a huge big journey and he finds out the thing that he was looking for was in the back garden all along. But that's an unteachable lesson. And the big lesson behind The Alchemist is going on a massive journey to end up back where you started is not the same as having never left. You have to go to the top of the mountain to get up there and go, "Damn it. I thought that was going to be the answer."

Steven Bartlett: You mentioned there that goals you set 10 years ago are still some of your most important today. What are those goals that you cherish the most?

Chris Williamson: I'll give you mine. Okay. No phone in the bedroom at night. charge it outside. It's an instant 15% quality of life increase.

Because when you start your day, if you use your phone as your alarm, you roll over, you turn the alarm off, and immediately you're looking at your phone. You haven't got up, you haven't got moving, you're not hydrated, you're not seeing sunlight in your eyes, you are hit in the face by the world telling you what's happening as opposed to you having a tiny little microcosm of peace.

It also means if you can't sleep, you know, you can just roll over and pick your phone up and now you're two hours into a YouTube scroll hole. That's who you truly are. By the way, people think that who you are is, you know, your journal entries. No, no. Who you truly are are the videos that you watch on YouTube between 10 p.m. and 12:00 p.m. at night when you can't sleep. That's who you really are.

Chris Williamson: No alcohol for 6 months. This is a big one.

But if you take alcohol out for about six months, what it forces you to do is think, do I really want to go to that party? I'm actually having to anesthetize myself of the people that I'm around. Like, if you can only bear to be around your friends when you're drinking, that's probably not a good indication. And if your friends only want you to be around them when you're drinking, they're not friends, they're drinking partners.

I stopped drinking at 30 years old. And then at like I don't know maybe I was at 31. I thought, you know, I'll have a drink again. It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn't get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the the domino effect it caused. I got worse sleep that night. I ate more poorly the the next day... I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym.

Dude, so many people want to build habits. They want to build meditation routine. They want to go to the gym more consistently. They don't realize that the thing that's stopping them from doing that is sat at the bottom of the glass of wine that they have four nights a week.

Steven Bartlett: What about matters of productivity? Do you think much about this? Because again, this time of year, people are thinking about procrastination, productivity. And I think a lot of the guilt does come from feeling like we're unproductive.

Chris Williamson: Absolutely. Yeah. There's a wonderful idea called productivity dysmorphia. So, it's the inability to see your own success. It's like uh to acknowledge the volume of your own output. So it sits at the intersection of burnout, imposttor syndrome, and anxiety.

Basically like the pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while robbing us of the ability to savor any of the successes that we achieve along the way. But a lot of people have this sense of productivity debt. They wake up every day feeling as if they're already behind. And only if they dominate their entire day perfectly can they drag themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output. And only then can they go to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. This means that you your set point is loss and the best thing that you can do if you crush the day is get to a draw. You never win.

Chris Williamson: As far as I can see, there's two main reasons for procrastination.

The first one is you don't know what to do. So, you have this big book in front of you, but nobody's ever written a book. they've written a sentence and then that sentence has accumulated over time into pages and paragraphs. You do what's called a next action. So, I'm procrastinating over a task. What is the next physical action that I can do that pushes me toward that goal? I need to write an email. Well, you better go and open your email client. If you don't have your email client open, it is impossible for you to send the email.

Second thing, you know what to do, but you don't know how to do it. So you can sit down in front of the spreadsheet and you know that you've got to do a VLOOKUP on this spreadsheet. We have no idea how to do a VLOOKUP. Um Chat GPT, Google, ring a boss, ring a friend.

So for me, when I look at my procrastination, it occurs due to usually one of two things. Poorly defined next physical action... Or a skill issue.

Steven Bartlett: You mentioned a word earlier on. You you said the word briefly. I guess this lonely chapter idea is a consequence of what will happen when you go in pursuit of a big goal. Explain to me what the lonely chapter is.

Chris Williamson: The lonely chapter describes a time in your life where you're so developed that you can't really resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you've built a new set of friends.

For instance, you have decided to stop drinking. You can go out with your friends that want to go to the pub, but you feel a little bit ostracized. So your change is creating some friction between you and them. If your friends don't grow at the same pace as you, you don't speak the same language.

And it's very uncomfortable because it's tempting to go back to the old life that you're used to. The initial sad reality is that on your journey of personal growth, at some point you may need to leave a group of friends behind who aren't growing at the same pace as you.

And I I wish that they paid more attention to it. Seems to me that on every hero's journey, as soon as they make the commitment to go from where they are to where they want to be, their self-belief never waver. In my experience, that's not the way it is at all. Like your entire journey of personal growth is just steeped in doubt and self-pity and uncertainty. It's not sexy. It's not cool.

And this is exactly why it's so much easier to just go back to your old patterns. And I think the reason that I love this lonely chapter idea is that it it names something that a lot of people feel is a bug, not a feature of personal growth. I can promise you that every single person who has gone from a place where they didn't want to be to one where they did has had to go through this lonely chapter.

Chris Williamson: That's the region beta thing. So um the region beta paradox. Imagine that if you were going to travel less than a mile, you'd walk it. If you're going to travel a mile or more, you would drive it. Paradoxically, you would travel 2 miles quicker than you would travel one mile. You jump in the car.

And what this suggests is that if we only act when things cross a certain threshold of badness, worse things can be better than better things.

For instance, the person who lives in an apartment and there's a little bit of mold... and the housemates's kind of a bit weird, but it's really cheap and not too far from their work. Uh, someone's in a relationship and their partner's not abusive... but they're not really that fired up. Or the person who's got a job and their boss is a bit of a dick and it doesn't pay that well, but it's really cushy. All of these people would be better off if their situations were worse because it would galvanize them to go and do something.

And this zone of comfortable complacency that people get into is where they can sit for a very long time. Things aren't bad enough to be bad, but they're nowhere near good enough to be good. You sit in this sort of gray zone, this sort of like productivity purgatory.

Steven Bartlett: I'm going to I'm going to ask you a question. Can you think out loud when you hear this question? Are you happy?

Chris Williamson: It's complex question. I have to work hard to be in a good mood sometimes. Uh well, this year has been a particularly difficult one for me because I got kicked in the nuts by health. America's a wonderful country, but everything's trying to kill you. I lived in a house that had toxic mold. I got mold poisoning.

And I spent a long time, the best part of two years, with two jobs. One was the show, the other was trying to fix my health. My only two goals for this year at the start of this year were don't let the show drop and fix my health.

So I really was humbled, like kicked in the nuts so many times. It felt like a cosmic joke. It felt so unfair. going to bed at 7 o'clock at night for six months, unable to sleep because I was wired but tired because my cortisol was inverted. Cortisol was higher at night than it was in the morning. So no matter how long I slept, I was never able to feel rested in the morning.

So mold does typically three things. Uh energy, mood, and cognition. So it makes you tired all the time. It makes you low mood. And it makes you forgetful. Like there was a day when I looked down and I forgot how to tie my shoes. I was forgetting words, forgetting the names of friends.

So this year has not been a year where I've been trying to maximize my happiness. It's one where I've been trying to sort of survive. And I did it pretty much silently.

Steven Bartlett: We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. And the question left for you is quite relevant. What is the most important component of human joy and endeavor that you believe must be preserved in priority?

Chris Williamson: Oh, wonderful. I think agency.

I think the belief that you have the ability to impact your surroundings. Uh because the opposite of agency is you basically holding your hands up and saying, "I'm at the mercy of the world. You happen to life. Life doesn't happen to you."