Business Book Review: The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett
Each of Steven Bartlett’s 33 Laws is a standalone lesson in leadership. Master them to master your business and life.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 368 pages
Publisher: Ebury Edge
Released: 2023
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
The Diary of a CEO author is the entrepreneur and marketing expert who has the world talking (and listening). Outside of his success from a tender age, Steven Bartlett’s podcast of the same name skyrocketed up the charts. According to Apple, it was the number one podcast in the UK on Apple Podcasts in 2023.
In his book, Steven Bartlett spills all his secrets - or 33 laws of business and life. As Barlett points out, it’s not a book about business strategy. Because, business strategy changes like the seasons. The Diary of a CEO is said to be about fundamental, enduring laws for building things and yourself.
There’s value across all 33 laws, but here are my top takeaways:
Fill your buckets in the right order
As the first law, Bartlett presents five buckets that are the sum of your professional potential:
What you know (your knowledge)
What you can do (your skills)
Who you know (your network)
What you have (your resources)
What the world thinks of you (your reputation)
The five buckets are interconnected. Importantly, you cannot pour from empty buckets.
The investment in your knowledge bucket is the highest-yielding investment you make. Your knowledge applied becomes your skills. And your skills cascade into all remaining buckets.
Your first two buckets, unlike the others, can never be taken away from you:
“Those who hoard gold have riches for a moment. Those who hoard knowledge and skills have riches for a lifetime.”
To master it, you must teach it
Teaching, as Bartlett highlights, moves your learning from passive to active:
"The late spiritual leader Yogi Bhajan once said, ‘If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.’"
“If you want to master something, do it publicly and do it consistently. Publishing your written ideas forces you to learn more often and to write more clearly. Publishing a video forces you to improve your speaking skills and to articulate your thoughts. Sharing your ideas on stage teaches you how to hold an audience and tell captivating stories. In any area of your life, doing it in public, and creating an obligation that forces you to do it consistently, will lead you to mastery.”
Throughout history, before social media, the most significant leaders knew this.
You must lean into bizarre behaviour
Even when you don’t understand something, lean in anyway:
"When you don’t understand, lean in more. When it challenges your intelligence, lean in more. When it makes you feel stupid, lean in more. Leaning out will leave you behind.”
As education entrepreneur Michael Simmons highlights, the rate of change is rapidly increasing. If someone is 40 years old today, the rate of change they experience in 2024, when they’re 60, will be four times what it is now. What feels like a year’s worth of change occurs in three months.
Avoid being wallpaper at all costs
Don’t blend into the background of your marketplace. Doing what everyone else is doing, the way they normally do it. Your audience is habituated to ignore you:
"Wallpaper’ as I call it – the overuse of popular terms, phrases and calls to action to the point that the brain habituates to them and tunes them out – is the enemy of effective and successful storytelling and marketing.”
"Habituation is an in-built neurological device that helps us to focus on what matters, and tune out of things that our brain doesn’t need to focus on.”
Repetition isn’t key. The cherished marketing principle of repetition is compelling in principle. But, researchers have explored this idea. Assessing the relationship between frequency and exposure of an advertising message and its meaningfulness. And it’s represented by an inverted U.
Fight for the first five seconds
You must earn your audience’s attention. Bartlett, as an advanced YouTube expert, understands the importance of this. Retention on most videos drops almost before you’ve even gotten past your intro. In the first five seconds, your audience’s habituation filters will decide. Will it tune you out as wallpaper or give you their attention? This applies online and in person. You must earn their time.
Out-fail the competition
Embrace failure not just as it comes, but seek it out:
“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
All failure becomes feedback
Booking.com has gone as far as appointing a ‘Director of Experimentation’. You champion the importance of failure, failing often and measuring your experiments:
‘We believe that controlled experimentation is the most successful approach to building products that customers want."
More Favourite Quotes
Science, psychology and history have shown that there is no graph, data or information that stands a greater chance of positively influencing those humans than a truly great story. Stories are the single most powerful weapon any leader can arm themselves with – they are the currency of humanity. Those who tell captivating, inspiring, emotional stories rule the world.
As Leonardo da Vinci asserted, ‘One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others.’
The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett. Available on Amazon.
