In the Netflix medical drama Pulse, there’s an arrogant young doctor who pushes around nurses and juniors, never thanks them and sees nothing wrong with that because he sees his role as purely to help his patients.

It’s one of those characters that’s been devised for you not to like.

So, we all smile when an assertive nurse refuses to prioritise his cases over others and when he asks why, she says: “Because you’ve got nothing in the bank.” Asked what she meant, she said that every time someone does something selfless or is kind, courteous or appreciative of a colleague, that becomes a bankable commodity.

It’s easy to get over-drawn in such a bank. A senior business friend of mine would ask her PA how politely friends or colleagues spoke with them. The friend was a CEO of a listed company. Everyone was going to be nice to her, so she would sense-check her view of people through the PA’s lenses.

A lot of important people genuinely believe they are decent people but behave quite disgracefully. About a month ago, I was invited to meet someone at his fancy Mayfair home because he wanted to do a couple of business deals with me. He used a soft and soothing tone to gush about some of the things I’d done in the past. And with that same wind of breath, he then barked out to summon a maid and when she came in, told her to bring him some fruits in a tone you’d only expect to hear from the owner of a badly behaved dog. When she went to fetch, he smiled and reverted to gush tone.

I suddenly remembered another appointment and quickly left.

As a lot of people who’ve dined with me at The Cinnamon Club and Roast when they were under my reins will know, I don’t have an unblemished past on this front and about four years ago, I finally fessed up about my short fuse in this column.  I wrote that around the time we had lost Mum, who had taken on the role of carer to Dad, who suffered from dementia.

I had just left Roast, so it made sense for me to take on the role as he wouldn’t have lasted in a care home. The shopping, cooking and cleaning were no problem – I had been doing those things for the family when I was a teenager. My real challenge was to not lose my temper. Quite often, Dad would ask me five times in the space of a minute what day it was and five times I would tell him. For me then, that was no where near as easy as it now sounds. Nor was it easy to deal with all the mood swings but I’m sure it made me a better person.

But all along, my account in this fictitious, notional bank was healthily in the black because I was always able to get on the good side of important and influential people and in turn, I got to do a lot of things I wouldn’t have expected to. No imposter syndrome here.

If credits in my account from people of higher ranking than me were worth say half what one from someone deemed junior were, or if I was subject to bank charges for bad behaviour, I wouldn’t have the gold card I imagined I had. I’d probably have my credit card taken away and have to live on a debit card.

When you get to the realisation that you’re not really the angel you thought you were, it’s time to apply for a new account.

Last week I wrote about how Mike Tyson used to beat himself up more than he beat up anyone else. What I didn’t say was that I’m the opposite. I was brought up to believe I could achieve whatever I set my sights on, that it was in me to do it. That (self) belief was reinforced when in my 20s I was doing some writing for The Sunday Times and interviewed someone who had become a billionaire in his first year in business (which wasn’t quite the fairy tale I was expecting – Dadi Balsara had done so by marrying a very wealthy lady and asked her for one million of her dollars so he could start a perfume brand called Miss Singapore, so not quite the rags to riches story I was hoping for).

After the interview, I asked him for one piece of advice to pole-vault my own many ambitions and he said that every morning, I should stare at myself in the mirror for a whole minute and say to myself: “I can achieve whatever I want to”. It was as if he knew my parents.

Anyway, I started doing it (try it – it’s not easy) and whenever he came to London, he would call me to check that I was indeed doing it.

To be over-loaded with self-belief has got me to places a south London street urchin who failed all his O-levels usually doesn’t expect. But there are also many things I’ve set out do which I haven’t achieved. Yet.

One of the drawbacks of having such a mindset is the realisation every now and then that you’re not as special as you may have thought you were – as I have found out yet again today. A little while ago I wondered if I should share the fact I was on a 264-day winning streak on the New York Times word game Wordle but on the basis that no-one likes a show-off, I didn’t.

I’m relieved I didn’t because in the London Times this morning, I read an article which started: “Do you think you are good at winning Wordle? Well, that’s very 2021. The real test is, how good are you at not winning Wordle? And that, it turns out, is a far sterner test.”

The article quotes a software engineer: “Wordle is so brilliant because it is so well calibrated. In six guesses, the game nudges you to the answer without totally giving it away.” Amused by my delusion, I was intrigued to find out about the surge in interest in Don’t Wordle where you only win if you come up with a series of words along the rules set out and successfully don’t guess it.

So, it’s time to raise the bar, to up my game. It’s Not Wordle time.

The other day one of my nephews asked if I knew Jay Rayner so I sent him an article Jay did 25 years ago which centred on the epic journey of opening The Cinnamon Club. One of the many ambitions we had in those days was to be the first Indian restaurant ever to be awarded a Michelin star but while we were in build mode, the brilliant Vineet Bhatia got there first. When Jay asked me how I felt about that, unflinchingly I replied: “We’ll have to go for two.” No wonder he called me a big mouth. If big mouthery involves having ideas beyond one’s station, I’m proud to be called that.

My lesson this morning from learning about Don’t Wordle is to resist being straight jacketed into pursuing conventional forms of success and realise that the more difficult route brings a greater reward.

Now when I stare in the mirror, I won’t seek to convince myself that I can do what I intend to do. Instead, I’ll start thinking of what I’ve not thought about, who I’ve not considered and how we might set new challenges for the new venture I’ve been planning for a while.

The Wordle comfort zone ends today. But I don’t want to just articulate what we’re not.   I’ll be launching a website soon. I now know how it will start.

One of the many weird things about me is that ever since I was a kid, I’ve woken up pretty much every day at 4am. In my childhood days it was to spend quality time with my Dad, who was also an early riser and would use that time to work on one of his books.

In my 20s, when I had a PR and publishing company, it would allow me to get into the office by 7am so I could have a couple of hours to work on things uninterrupted before everyone arrived because for much of the rest of the day when I wasn’t in meetings or at lunch, one or more of them would be at my desk with ideas, questions or just for a chat. It worked well until one day Danielle, an ambitious advertising sales rep for one of our two magazines, found out that I did this so she too started arriving earlier in order to gain favour and then anyone who didn’t have kids to drop off to school followed suit.

So then the whole point of getting up early backfired. I wonder if my Dad felt the same.

I then did what many business owners did when remote access to a company server became a thing and started the working day from home but again I hadn’t got my tactics right because with an espresso by my side, I would fire off e-mails at the crack of dawn about some of the various things on my mind so that when people on more normal hours got in, they could look at them then and respond accordingly.

But when it came to mailing work colleagues, they took to switching on early too because they must have thought they needed to reply straight away whereas my intention was to purely be in send mode for a few hours. Getting into receive mode disrupted my flow.

Now when I get up at 4, I resist looking at emails for a couple of hours until I’ve trawled, now with green tea rather than an espresso, social and news media and played an unhealthy amount of computer games. My socials know I have a mild obsession with boxing and today I was treated to an older Mike Tyson being interviewed by a young kid.

After some routine answers like “Never give up” when asked what his best piece of advice was, he finished off with this killer answer.

Kid: “Who’s been your toughest opponent?”

MT: “Me.”

That answer gave me my espresso buzz for the morning because that response, given without hesitation, speaks volumes. I did a search of what people made of that response (hey – it’s Sunday) and plenty came up, most notably this from a Pastor:

“That exposes a fight most people never see. At times, we become our own worst critic and our own worst enemy.

“We tear ourselves down in private, fight battles in our own mind and carry pressure no one else sees. The truth is the hardest fight. It isn’t always external, it’s internal.

“And if you don’t learn how to win within, no victory on the outside will ever feel like enough. Watch how you speak to yourself because the voice you listen to the most is your own. The strongest voice in your life is the one in your mind.

“Don’t be your worst enemy. Be your biggest advocate. Because what you allow in your thoughts will eventually show up in your words.”

Well said, that Pastor! Tyson’s face has always look troubled to me. Mohammed Ali’s didn’t. Steve Jobs’s did. All three are legends but only one looked as if they enjoyed life.    

I don’t think I’ve got demons in my head, though the way I’ve conducted my life to date with an unerring conviction that I can achieve whatever I set out to do could easily have placed some in me as I don’t often see through to conclusion something I fully believed to be possible.

A friend of mine once asked how many concept papers for businesses I’ve cooked up over the years are lurking on my pc which haven’t seen the light of day. There will be plenty but that doesn’t get me down because I add one small word: they haven’t seen the light of day – yet.

In my bookish late teenage year a book I read, re-read and bought copies for my friends of was Candide by Voltaire. Central to it is the character of Dr Pangloss whose optimistic view of human nature was captured in his catchphrase “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Interestingly, Voltaire wrote the book to ridicule this view rather than elevate it which suggests he, like Tyson, had his own demons to deal with.

I imagine that if they’d lived in the same era, they’d have similar lifestyles like the bloke you see in your local pub always on his own, always looking angry. It makes you wonder what they would say if asked what the point was of achieving greatness if you can’t enjoy it.

I imagine, in Tyson’s case at least, failure would be ruinous whereas for us Dr Panglosses of the world, failure is just something that has yet to be achieved.   

The best portrait photographers are those who spend time getting to know you. I once had the privilege of having mine done by David Bayley for GQ for a feature on people who have shaped Britain’s dining scene. I turned up at his studio at the allotted time, and we sat on a sofa chatting for the best part of an hour. What I didn’t realise then about what he was doing was that he was looking inside me, to get beyond the character brief the editor would have given him, to decide how he sees me.

Just as our hour-long schedule was coming to the end, he stood up and said: “Right – I’ve got you now. Stand over there.” A couple of minutes later I was done (Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, a much more worthy candidate, was up next).

Some years later, a session with another brilliant photographer called Franklyn Rogers was gifted to me by an art gallery in Shoreditch which I was just completing my term of chair as. He spent even longer – more than two hours – getting to know me. One of his questions was who in my life had made me the angriest and instantly I said my school careers adviser. I had applied to a sixth form college to do my A levels and when I arrived for my interview, I was given my file and asked to wait and pass it on to the lecturer who would meet me.

Naturally, I opened the file and read the report from Mr Williams, my school’s careers officer. I couldn’t believe what I read: “He’s coming to you about A levels but frankly, he won’t pass his O-levels so I wouldn’t waste time with him. He’s trouble.” Luckily the college let me in, I then got into the LSE and started to do the stuff I ended up doing.   

There are many people with similar stories, my favourite being that of Sir Tim Martin, whose careers officer told him he’d get nowhere in life. If you’ve ever wondered why is called giant pub chain JD Weatherspoon, it’s because that was the name of his career officer who did the same to him.   

Sir Paul Macartney has a new album out today at the ripe old age of 83. In an interview in today’s New York Times, he’s quoted as saying: “I’m just some kid who went to school, went to the careers master who said to me, you know, ‘You haven’t got qualifications and, there’s not … I don’t see a great future for you.’”

Franklyn Rogers told me a woman he’d recently done a shoot with was told at school the best she could hope for in life was to work in the local factory. She became the vice chair of The World Bank.   I suggested Frankly stage an exhibition titled: “People who refused to fail”.

This morning we’re all reading that for the first time, over one million young people in Britain can’t find a job or training despite 84% saying they want to. This costs the state £124 billion a year in benefits and associated costs – more than we spend on education.

For decades I’ve watched young people turn up for job interviews late, not really know anything about the company they’ve come to, don’t look their interviewer in the eye. About 15 years ago, I found out that only 44% of graduates from the University of East London ended up with graduate level jobs. I got to know the then Vice Chancellor there and asked him why he didn’t have preparation for employment and the learning of soft skills as core curricular activities so that the people from under-privileged backgrounds who typically attended there could have a greater chance of making it in life. His answer was – and I’m not kidding – “Iqbal, it’s not my role as an educationalist to teach people how to get jobs.”

Back to my old school. Early in my 20s, I became a published author and had a rising media career. One day I got a call from my old headmaster congratulating me on my early career gains and asking me if I’d like to become a governor of the school.

“On one condition,” I said. “Is Mr Williams still there?”

“Yes, and he’s also the teacher governor.”

“Then I’m coming.”

I spent most of that first meeting staring at Mr Williams. At the end we were all invited to the pub next door where I quickly pulled to him to one side and asked him how many young peoples’ lives he had ruined by writing references like the one he had done of me. His reply made me realise something I’d never considered. His main job was as the school’s PE teacher, and this role had been bolted on. No training, no targets – just a role the school was obliged to assign to someone.

If there are so few jobs around, why aren’t we using a bit of that £124bn to subsidise employers properly to take young people on? Why not use a fraction of that to help young people develop their entrepreneurial ambitions and become self-employed?

And why not use a bit of that to create an educational system that’s fit for purpose to give young people solid paths to be the leaders, workers and wealth creators they’re desperate to become and who our future needs them to become?  

One of my early grown-up jobs in my 20s was as a reporter for The Independent and one of my first assignments was to look into the awful conditions junior doctors had to work under. Some 40 years on, that problem still goes unresolved, probably worsened by student loans.

If you’re a regular user of the NHS, you’ll have seen how incredibly hard everyone works often only to be faced with complaints and insults. Those insults then get compounded when successive governments fail to deal with these long-suffering people who feel compelled to go on strike as we again see today and their opposition leaders spout solutions which they didn’t introduce when they were in charge.

I have an idea which I don’t see being promoted here and which could significantly ease pressure off the NHS if politicians had the guts to pursue.  When America introduced the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare), we thought that it was lucky that we had the NHS so didn’t need that.

The main measure of the act was to ban insurance companies from refusing health plans to customers who had existing conditions.  It was one of Barack Obama’s lasting legacies (though unsurprisingly Trump wants to overturn it).

What if we were to introduce something along those lines here? A lot of people I know don’t take private health care even though they are able to afford to because their existing conditions wouldn’t be covered so they’d be spending needlessly. The last major NHS survey found that 46% of adults have existing conditions. When it can often take months or even years to get an NHS hospital appointment, when there are undoubtedly a significant  number of people who could comfortably and happily pay for cover to get a rapid private consultation, when the poor and less fortunate sit in the same queue alongside the more affluent I wonder if we’re not missing a trick to ease up the waiting lists to make them easier on those who don’t have that option.

If we had a leader like Obama with the courage to guide health insurance companies (who between them are valued at £8bn in the UK alone) down this route, we’d be able to embrace the following positive consequences: the providers would see a flood of new customers signing up and the NHS would be freed up to serve those most disadvantaged and more likely to have compound economic consequences from huge waiting lists preventing them for working or leading a healthier life.

It would likely also have the following negative consequence: people who already have private cover will undoubtedly see a rise in their premiums, though some kind of governance against greed can surely be applied here. And although I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, I’m not able to calculate whether the rise in the number of memberships and a reasonable rise in existing customers’ premiums would offset the rise in the number of payouts (currently £4bn a year) will be anywhere near close enough to cancelling each other out.

But if we’re committed to honouring the founding principles of the NHS, if we really do believe that we’re all in this together and if we were ever to have another visionary political leader, wouldn’t the shake-up be worth it?

A magazine in Bangladesh asked me my views on authenticity. It was a useful challenge as I hadn’t realised what my views were until I wrote this!

When we were growing up in the 1960s and 70’s, unlike most Bangladeshi settlers here with modest means, our family and friends would take regular trips across the country – the Lake District, Dorset and a village in Sussex all come to mind because we were invariably the first brown people the locals had seen in real life. I remember we all walked into a busy country pub one evening and suddenly it was silent as everyone stared at us.

Somebody then came over to Mum and asked: “Excuse me miss, is that what they call a sari?”  Mum said indeed it was and explained how it was made. It was always very friendly apart from one visit to the seaside resort Littlehampton. We wandered off in different directions with a plan to regroup at lunchtime in pursuit of fish and chips. But after a few minutes, we heard Mum shouting at the top of her voice.

We quickly ran over to where we heard her and there was a sight we’ll never forget: she was berating a small group of skinheads who had clearly said something racially abusive to her. But Mum, a headmistress, was as confident as they come and with her tongue-lashing had reduced these thugs to quivering wrecks. We got there just in time to deliver the final line of her tirade: “YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE BRITISH EMPIRE!”

Watching the Tommy Robinson followers ooze their hate and vile on the streets of London last weekend made me wonder why we weren’t protesting in equal numbers to theirs, why were Muslims in particular being told to stay at home to be safe and indeed, why were there so few arrests.

In 1978, at the height of Britain’s Paki-bashing shame, the far-right National Front were audaciously parading their filth in areas with strong Asian concentrations like Southall and Brick Lane thinking Asians were a soft touch and wouldn’t fight back.  Little did they know that in community centres and gyms, young brown men were toughening up and in both those areas, they came out on to the streets and took battle because they knew they couldn’t rely on the police to protect their families and communities. With the support of a group called the Anti Nazi League, they fought the NF off their streets and they became safe again.

I would never have imagined that racial bigotry would today attract over 100,000 people to central London, to see thousands picketing hotels for housing migrants, to see our prime minister kowtow to it all and call us an island of strangers.

And to see our flags used as symbols of hate.

If Mum were alive today, I’d encourage her to use that spirit of Littlehampton to put the likes of Farage, Robinson and yes, Starmer, in their place.  As that’s unlikely to happen, it’s on us to stop being quiet.

In Jemima Khan’s wonderful film What’s Love Got To Do With It? this question is asked to someone who decides to end a casual relationship which turned out to be a poor fit.  

Let’s apply that same question to business.

What happens if you aim high and dismiss thoughts of missing? When I first met the late, great Lord Noon about 35 years ago he told me how he started his ready-made meal empire which eventually valued him at over £100m, I thought everyone needed to hear how it happened and so I wrote a big profile on him for The Sunday Times. He’d arrived in Britain from Bombay in the late 1980s and watched with curiosity the public’s obsession with Indian restaurants and clocked two things: having a curry would soon no longer necessarily mean a night out and people would be eating as much of it in their homes.

He surveyed the supermarket offerings in the chilled and frozen sections and found them way below restaurant standards, so he got himself in front of Sainsbury’s, Bird’s Eye and Waitrose and showed them the curries that they were currently selling their customers and his version of the same dishes. The response he received from all three was identical: “Yes of course your dishes are higher quality but try making them in a factory”.

He stunned them all with his reply: “I did.”

In turn, they each asked: “Whose factory?”

“Mine!”

“Why do you have a factory when you say you haven’t started trading yet?”

“Because I am going to win your business”.

And he did – all three signed him up.

Today, for businesses that are driving their profits by tackling the problems we face all around us like the destruction of our planet and rising social inequality, aiming low is not going to deliver a safer, fairer world. Just think Patagonia.

When Paul Polman, the poster boy for responsible business, became chief executive of Unilever in 2009, he set out his stall by saying be would double the sales of the company whilst simultaneously having its carbon footprint which sceptics struggled to believe possible, but he nonetheless achieved this ahead of the deadline he’d set himself.

So going back to the question that we started with, perhaps the answer is this: Maybe – unless we aim high, we’re all going to hurt.

How does something that starts off great stay great?

If you’ve watched The Idol, a TV drama about a tortured pop star, you probably felt the same as me: its fascinatingly risqué and entertaining first episode quickly plummets into sleaze, presumably to cover up the poor acting and weak story line. It’s probably the most slated thing running at the moment.

It’s the same with restaurants. In St James’s there used to be a space called Sake No Hana – an expensive place which had as its differentiator that it didn’t serve western wine, just the fermented Japanese rice wine called sake.

At first people flocked to it, in The Emperor Has No Clothes way. But soon customers complained so the owners then brought in Champagne, though just Krug at £30 a glass. It wasn’t enough so they then brought in a beer – at £20 a glass and then eventually a wine list. The restaurant kept the same name even though the claim was no longer true. Each year fewer and fewer people went. The owner had deep pockets and plugged the losses. He invited me to have lunch one day to give him some advice on what to do with it.

I told him he should shut it down. He didn’t like it, but eventually he did.

There’s a magic, a mystery, a largely undefinable art in making a restaurant great. In New York, Danny Meyer has the city in his palm by giving people what they want, just better than others do – the formal but friendly Gramercy Tavern, beer, wings and ribs at Blue Smoke, the burger brand that everyone secretly wishes they had created in Shake Shack.

London’s equivalent to Danny has for the last few decades been Jeremy King, who with Chris Corbin put exceptional service on a pinnacle at The Ivy, Le Caprice and then the Wolseley group. Food has always been the point for Gordon Ramsay and given the rate of knots at which he’s growing who’s to question him.

I can’t help feel, though, that we need to re-consider what greatness looks like and that starts by us understanding ourselves better. We have, in recent years, managed to simultaneously become both deeper and shallower – deeper in that we expect restaurants to treat their teams with respect (Darjeeling Express) and have the most rigorous sustainability standards (Fallow) and when they do, we join their queues.

Our shallowness erupts when groups like Big Mamma open another successful outlet where “experience” is key – theatre in how dishes are presented (Salt Bae is another example) to how places are designed so cleverly that by you making yourself look on trend on Instagram and Tik Tok, you are doing their marketing for them. That’s a clever business model.

And so what do we make of this? Here’s my prediction: in future, restaurants will be successful if they are both deep and shallow. But that’s not to confused with being deeply shallow.

I’ve never really shared this before, but I love watching boxing matches. Facebook knows this and kindly sends me clips of Tyson and Ali which I start my day by watching. I’ve even watched all five Rocky films and then yesterday I was staggered to know there was a sixth one called Rocky Balboa which I immediately had to watch, where he’s now much older, retired and has a restaurant (why does everyone want to have a restaurant?). To everyone’s dismay, he decides to do a tournament match with the current world heavyweight champion who’s around half his age.

His son tells him he can no longer hit hard enough, to which he replies: “It’s not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit.” That pretty much sums up the last few years of my career. A series of business ventures that I have wanted to get off the ground have fallen at the last hurdle and one thing I have never let myself indulge in is disappointment or dismay. To allow oneself to go that route is a trap, a downward spiral from which it hard to recover.

If other people let you down, it’s not your fault and with that realisation, it’s much, much easier to dust down and fire up again. If other people tell you your plans are misguided, it’s important to step back, kick the tires on your idea and if need be take on board any useful suggestion that might make what’s in your head sit more comfortably in someone else’s head – whether that’s a landlord who has a restaurant space available which many people are pitching for or a highly talented individual who you want to bring into your team or an investor you want to back you.

When I’m mentoring anyone who is experiencing doubt about themselves, I regale them with the story from my journalist days when I once interviewed someone who made a billion dollars in his first year in business. He said that every morning he stared at himself in the mirror for 30 seconds and say to himself: “I am going to achieve whatever I set out to”. Try it – it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I was lucky to have been brought up to believe I can achieve whatever I set my mind to, which puts me in a sort of place of privilege as I don’t have a glass jaw (boxing term) and which is why I do so much mentoring as I keep coming across people jointly facing self-doubt and ambition. It’s a joy to help people untangle the two and overcome perceived obstacles.

I think I shall quote Mr Balbao liberally from now.