The More Successful You Are The Longer You'll Live! Will Storr

You shouldn't raise your children to believe that they can be Beyoncé, because the chances are they can't. (bell ringing)

Will Storr is an award-winning author of six critically acclaimed books. His ideas are disruptive, challenging, and life-changing. And some of them will make you feel incredibly uncomfortable.

People don't like to talk about this stuff. The 99% of self-help books never mention genes. They, they want to promote the idea of, "Well, I can be whoever I want to be," but a huge amount of who we are is who we were born as. That myth of you have full control over yourself as a human being, that's the problem. It's not about embracing your flaws, it's about accepting your flaws. Our lives are full of status pursuit. The more status that you earn, the better everything else gets. But that was true 10,000 years ago, it's true today. The brain is highly attuned to where we sit in a pecking order. The lower we are down in that pecking order, the more unhealthy we became. If you take two smokers, the one higher up is less likely to die of a smoking-related disease than the one lower down.

That's mental.

It matters massively.

How do we advance in the status game?

There are kind of three general types of status games that we can play. First game is a-

Without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (laid-back music) Will, first of all, thank you for being here. Um, take me right back then to your early years, 'cause I think wh- when I was reading through your different books here, throughout them you have glimpses of your own perspective, and it-

Mm-hmm.

... hints back to what I read about your, your early years.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so take me back, right back to the start, you know, before the age of, let's say, 12.

Mm-hmm. Okay, so, yeah, um, I was brought up in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, um, middle class family, very Catholic. Um, it was quite a Victorian, um, strict, superstitious religious upbringing. Not the happiest upbringing, I have to say.

Why?

Um, because my parents were very strict, my father was very strict especially, um, and, uh, they were very much in the grip of their ex- kind of, Catholic belief system, which I just didn't never, like, always baffled me even as a kid, just like, "What? How, how," you know? How can you believe this stuff? And I went to a Catholic school, so, s- so... A- and I was quite a, I don't know, I was probably a diff- if you were to ask them, they'd say I was a difficult child, um, because I was pushing against that all the time, you know? I thought it was crazy, I wasn't very good at authority and rules, so it was a bad fit, I would say. Um, and I think that's what's, you know, one of the things that, that's kind of driven my interests into adulthood. My, y- you know, my, my, my second book, The Heretics, was looking at why do otherwise smart people believe, end up believing these crazy things? 'Cause my parents are smart people, but, um, yeah, you know, they believe in heaven, hell, Satan, all of that stuff. I, I think that's how my childhood has informed my interests as an adult, trying to figure out how, how that happens.