Decoding Steven Bartlett’s Singapore fireside chats

47,000 words of raw insights, three stages, and the paper-wall ideas that changed how I build my business—now free to download (link below).

From 18–19 September 2025, I attended three Steven Bartlett events in Singapore. Steven is an entrepreneur, investor and podcaster, host of The Diary of the CEO.

I paid $200+ for the fireside chat Closer. Deeper. Unfiltered, was invited by AWS to The Founder’s Playbook (an invitation-only session), and paid $500+ for VIP tickets to his Shopify-sponsored keynote.

The insights were so valuable that I spent over 40 hours downloading, cleaning, and transcribing every word, which is 47,000+ words in total because I knew I would want to reference them forever. At some point, I realised this gold should not just sit in my hard drive.

I spent two days in rooms where Steven held the floor without forcing it, where silence worked like a spotlight and stories landed like instructions.

Before I publish the deeper breakdowns of his frameworks in the coming weeks, I want to tell you what I saw when I watched him think out loud, move with precision, and treat each question not as a cue for performance but as an invitation to be useful in public without pretense, which is the same standard I hold myself to as a creator who built a one-person business from the wreckage of layoffs, identity crises, and a daughter’s therapy bills that once outpaced my rent and forced me to decide whether I was going to keep begging gatekeepers or finally build something that would outlast mood, algorithm, and fear.

When Steven talked about embarrassment as the price you pay for entry, I felt the memory of walking through Singapore in a skirt while strangers stared and cleaners tried to chase me out of bathrooms.

I remembered the first post where I said my name, my story, and my stance on camera without editing out the tremor in my voice. That was the day the right people started to arrive and the wrong ones filtered themselves out, and it taught me a law I now teach my clients, which is credibility grows in direct proportion to your willingness to be seen before you are comfortable and to remain seen when comfort disappears.

He also spoke about pushing on paper walls, those limits that look immovable from a distance but collapse the moment you press against them. Zara built an empire by collapsing the wall of “fashion must take nine months.” Suitcases stayed wheel-less for centuries until someone asked why.

His own animator claimed it took seven days to complete an episode until Steven pressed and discovered it was really a bad laptop. Two thousand dollars later, the timeline shrank to two days.

Sitting there, I realised how many paper walls I had accepted in my own business, like believing I needed a team, polished branding, or a viral moment before I could grow. None of those were real because the walls were paper.

Over the next few articles, I will be decoding Steven Bartlett’s fireside chats in Singapore through my lens as a creator-operator in the B2B arena.

Across three events, I transcribed more than 47,000 words, and inside those transcripts are recurring themes that matter if you are building a business today, like how self-belief spirals upward through small bets, why quitting is not failure but a trained operating skill, how skill stacking creates asymmetric advantages in crowded markets, and why persuasion begins with listening rather than speaking.

These are not abstract theories, they are frameworks Steven used to build companies, attract talent, and turn his voice into one of the most influential in the creator economy.

If you want the fast lane without the fluff, my programs exist to help you build these same muscles inside your brand, your leadership, and your revenue model. This is the same ruthless clarity I brought to my own life when I chose visibility over validation and turned my story into the most reliable asset in my business.

In the meantime time, I have decided to share the full transcripts with you for free, 47,000+ words from all three events.

You can download them here.

See you next Sunday.