And one of the thoughts that continually gets me to the gym and continually makes me show up and work hard is, and if you're good at it, if you're great at it, then you might just be great at everything. But for me, that really is the meaning of life. On this week's podcast, we're going to do something very different, something I've never done before, but something that you've requested time and time again. This week I posted online asking you to ask me any question about me, my life, my business, whatever you want to ask me.
And I promised that in return, I would give very brutally honest answers. My team went through all of the questions that were submitted and they went through and picked the ones that they thought were most interesting. They've written them in my diary here, so I'm going to start from the top and answer these questions with the objective of giving you the most valuable, honest advice that I possibly can. So that further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett and this is the Diabeseo.
I hope nobody's listening. If you are, then please give this to yourself. OK, so the first question is, what is the most important lesson that this pandemic has taught you or reconfirmed for you? And for me, that is, it relates back to a podcast I did at the start of the year, and it's that uncertainty is not predictable, but it's prepareable.
And I don't actually think that's the word, but here's what I mean. What I know for sure, and this relates to everybody, is that your life is, of course, going to be full of a lot of joy and amazing things and breathtaking moments and rapturous moments of ecstasy, right? But it's also going to be riddled with moments of unexpected, uncertainty and chaos. Joy is much easier to handle.
You just kind of let go and go with it, right? The good times. You have not a lot of action or thought required, but uncertainty and chaos require a real rigid set of principles. And for me, those principles over the last 12 months have become acceptance, optimism and action.
And these three principles have a real linear connection to the outcome you're seeking. Without acceptance, when bad things happen, there's no optimism. Without optimism, there's no action. And without action, there's often no victory, or at least victory is delayed and hard times are elongated.
So in bad news visits, whether that's being unexpectedly fired from your job or dumped by your partner or evicted by your landlord or losing a loved one, in the case of a pandemic, you have to do everything you can to stick to these principles despite the intense cloud of natural emotions that will try to convince you and me otherwise. And you know, like I do a lot of sort of introspective thinking for a living. And even I am not immune from letting emotion get the best of me in times of a intense chaos. I like no matter how much I've read or written in my diary or how many podcasts I've done, even I fall victim, especially in the short term, to all of those emotions and sometimes to the instructions those emotions give you, which will lead you to a pretty dire outcome.
So you know, you get dumped by your partner, you immediately think revenge, right? You get fired by your boss, you think, you know, I'm going to sue them, right? I fall for those traps too. I don't think I don't necessarily think it's the aim of all humans should be to try and avoid those emotions in that thinking because I think it's quite impossible.
But it's to be better at the response, right? To shorten the time that those emotions sit with you and to be better in your reaction. I want to clarify that acceptance, when I talk about acceptance, it doesn't mean being emotionless. It can often mean the exact opposite.
You have to accept how you're feeling, accept what's happened, and importantly, retire from trying to change the unchangeable or from wallowing in regret. And you have to do everything you can to get yourself to a place of optimism. Right? People typically, especially in hard times, don't like to delegate responsibility to themselves.
So as hard as it can be, you have to find and create hope for yourself and have faith, just like everything else has in your life, that this too shall pass. And then you have to use that optimism to drive you into action, which is for me, the third principle that I've learned over the last 12 months. If your partner's dumped you, it's time to dust yourself off and get yourself into the gym to fight back. I don't mean fight back as in bomb their house.
I mean fight back in a mental capacity to stop stalking their Instagram, to triple down on your friendships and your meaningful relationships, to stand tall in whether the unavoidable emotional storm and have faith and acceptance sit by your side. The opposite of these principles, of course, is like denial is pessimism and is in action. And these are the principles of a baby gazelle that's decided to fall asleep with its toes dipped into a crocodile infested waters. This is a decision to lose twice.
And when I say L, right, I mean loss. And when unexpected chaos happens like this pandemic, which smashes our businesses and destroys our social lives and apparently steals a year from our youth, the first L we take is involuntary. Shit happened and you didn't choose it. Totally out of your control.
I get that. But the fateful decision to choose denial, pessimism and inaction as our response is a voluntary second L. You're choosing to increase the chances that bad times will become even worse times. You can make the choice not to lose twice.
The first L wasn't your choice. The second L, well, that's the byproducts of how you choose to respond. Acceptance, optimism and action. And I guess the second lesson I've learned this year is a lesson in the importance of prioritization.
You know, this advice of which people often given I've given of protecting your time and saving your time really feels somewhat incomplete to me now because it's like the first half of the sentence. You've got to then ask yourself, saving time to do what? Saving time just to spend more of it doing the wrong things. Saving time to spend more of it being more productive just so you can get more work done.
I guess better advice is to prioritize better. If you told 19 year old Stephen Bartlett just to save more time, he probably would have said no to a couple of things and then just spent that saved time working alone in his office all weekend and that advice would therefore lead him to a less joyful, more depressive existence. And if you told 19 year old Stephen Bartlett to prioritize better, the first question that comes to mind is what are my priorities? And my long-term priorities, as I think is the case for all of us, are ultimately linked to the things that make our life meaningful, which are friends, the joy of work, our relationships, that satisfaction of pursuing our goals, the challenge, achieving greater freedom, knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge, health and fitness.
And I guess I would have reviewed the allocation of my time through that lens. I would have saved time only on the things that aren't connected to my macro priorities and reinvested it in better places. And this year, because we've been forced to realize what matters in many cases, I guess now I'm not trying to save time just for the sake of spending it more on optimizing my productivity. I realize that that's an incomplete sentence and really the most important thing is just to prioritize all of my time better and allocate it to those things that ultimately.