Simon Cowell has recalled how he was "really unhappy" before his son was born eight years ago.
Before the arrival of Eric, the music mogul and TV personality behind Britain's Got Talen and The X-Factor said he was "obsessed" with work and admitted to being a workaholic. It got to the point where Simon felt like his life was '99 per cent work' and he eventually stopped enjoying his career, he told the Sun.
“I was obsessed with beating the competition," he said. "I took it to a ridiculous level and I would get really down about that stuff, to the point I was depressed.”
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The 63-year-old recalled how he would come up with "ridiculous ideas" during his drive to work, such as the 'six-chair challenge' for The X-Factor which ended in December 2018. “Should we have ended the show sooner? Maybe. We could have done, yeah,” he said in the newspaper.
“That last year was very much an ego-driven thing. We had to be better than everyone else, but I didn’t enjoy it. I was really unhappy. But now Eric is around, I don’t work through the night anymore.
“If he hadn’t come along, God knows what would have happened.” During that period in his life, Simon previously said he was "terrified" of burn-out from running his production company.
However, he was forced to put his health first and spend more time with his son. Because he reduced his workload, he was able to spend more time with Eric, picking him up from school and enjoying dinner with him every night.
Simon's story comes just after he launched his latest project earlier this week. On Wednesday, StemDrop launched, which grants TikTok creators worldwide access to exclusive music "stems", providing an incentive to produce their own versions of a brand-new song.
The project, led by Swedish record producer Max Martin and backed by Cowell and Syco Entertainment along with Universal Music Group, has been described by Universal chairman and chief executive Sir Lucian Grainge as inviting “a new evolution of musical collaboration, curation and artist discovery”.
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