Table of Contents

The Book in Three Sentences

In this summary of The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett gives you a playbook for success. The book uses some of the most important lessons Bartlett learned as an entrepreneur and as the host of The Diary of CEO podcast and turns them into practical laws anyone can put into practice. Most of these rules are rooted in psychology or science and were created to stand the test of time.

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Introduction

This book is about the fundamental laws that will let you build amazing things and become amazing yourself. To achieve this, you need what the author calls the four pillars of greatness.

Pillar I: The Self – Before you can master something else, you first have to master yourself. The tools that will get you there include self-awareness, self-control, and self-history.
Pillar II: The Story – The best way to influence others is through a great story. For this purpose, you need the power of storytelling.
Pillar III: The Philosophy – The philosophy includes your beliefs, values, or principles that guide you in life.
Pillar IV: The Team – At their core, companies are groups of people. Who you choose to work with will determine how successful you’ll be. Building a company isn’t just about assembling a group, but about finding the right people with the right culture.

Pillar I: The Self

Law 1: Fill Your Five Buckets in the Right Order

To build great things and to reach your professional potential, you first have to fill five buckets. The more you fill those buckets, the bigger, the more believable, and the more achievable your dreams will be.

The Five Buckets:

Knowledge: What you know
Skills: What you do
Network: Who you know
Resources: What you have
Reputation: What people think of you

To do anything in life, you first have to acquire knowledge, skills, network, resources, and reputation. These buckets are connected to one another and they usually follow a set order. You first acquire knowledge at school. You can then apply that knowledge in the form of a skill. With enough knowledge and skills, you can grow your network because you become more valuable to others. Soon, you’ll have access to various resources. Finally, everything you’ve amassed will help you earn a reputation.

When in doubt, invest in your knowledge because the rest of the buckets depend on it. Our ego can get in the way and it might tell you to skip the first two buckets. Don’t listen to it because you’ll be building a career on flimsy foundations. Delay gratification, be patient, and spend time and effort building your knowledge and skills. Knowledge and your ability to apply said knowledge (your skills) is a superpower. Regardless of what happens, no one can take your knowledge away from you.

Law 2: To Master It, You Must Create an Obligation to Teach It

To master any skill, you must create an obligation to teach it. This is the best way to advance your knowledge. By teaching something, you’ll get feedback, you’ll improve, and you’ll create a community. This self-imposed obligation gives you something to lose or as the author puts it, having “skin in the game”. You might lose money or reputation, but stakes must be involved.

Additionally, mastering something requires you to do it publicly and consistently. The more you do something, the more you improve. Simplifying concepts so that anyone can understand them is your ultimate goal. This is known as the Feynman technique and it was named after the famous American scientist because he was able to distill complex ideas and turn them into simple concepts that even children could understand. If you can’t do this, it means that you don’t really understand the concept in question.

The Feynman technique involves a series of steps:

Learn: Research the topic you want to understand
Teach: Write the idea in a way that children can understand it
Share: Express the idea in a way that others can see it
Review: Determine if your idea was a success or not

Law 3: You Must Never Disagree

Any human relationship has some form of conflict. That conflict can strengthen or weaken the relationship. Healthy conflict happens when the people involved tackle a problem together. Unhealthy conflict happens when people fight each other. For the other person to remain receptive to your opinion, never start with a disagreement. Instead, start your refutation with what you agree on. Even if you’re correct and have a lot of evidence, disagreeing first will cause the other person to turn off your opinion and will not receive your arguments.

Law 4: You Do Not get to Choose What You Believe

It’s very hard to convince yourself (or others) that you believe something that you don’t. The fundamental beliefs you have weren’t “chosen” by you. As difficult as that’s to accept, this means that your beliefs change and evolve too. Holding beliefs is our brains’ way to preserve energy. Beliefs are a survival tool because they drive our behavior and tell us what to do under specific circumstances.

Our beliefs are based on experiences and biases. The problem is that we often accept something as true, even if that’s not the case. In fact, we don’t have evidence for many of our beliefs. We often rely on our senses to determine the veracity of a given belief. You’d think that for someone to change their mind, they would have to get first-party evidence, but even then, they might reject it.

To change someone’s mind, don’t suggest new evidence and tell them how this evidence will affect their lives positively. Also, don’t attack people or try to persuade them. Instead, let them explain their beliefs to you. Soon, they’ll realize how poorly they understand the subject in question and they’ll be more receptive toward an opposing point of view. This also works for limiting beliefs. By getting counteracting evidence, beliefs will change. You can confront your limiting beliefs by moving out of your comfort zone. Soon, you’ll get the first-party evidence you need to change your mind.

Law 5: You Must Lean into Bizarre Behavior

Leaning out refers to a phenomenon where you ignore situations that may be beneficial to you. This is refusing to accept new information and it stems from something called cognitive dissonance. The psychological phenomenon describes the clash that happens between your thoughts and your actions. When this happens, you have two options: you either give up or you justify your behavior.

Solving problems requires a certain level of humility because you need to discard your original hypothesis and embrace a new one. When something new appears and it challenges us in some way, this creates cognitive dissonance, so instead of leaning in and listening, we lean out and attack it.

Since change is happening at a faster rate than ever before, your feelings of cognitive dissonance will also increase. This is why leaning in is so important. When something disruptive emerges, resist the temptation to judge it. Be patient and ask yourself important questions, you might own the future. The riskiest thing you can do is to avoid risk altogether.

Law 6: Ask, Don’t Tell – The Question/Behavior Effect

Questions lead to active responses. In other words, questions make people think, which is what makes them more effective than statements. You can use questions to influence your behavior, so whenever possible, turn statements into questions. This is called the question/behavior effect and it’s much more powerful when you can answer questions with a yes or a no. This happens because answering with a “yes” brings you closer to the identity you want to embody.

Cognitive dissonance also plays a role here. If you think of yourself as a person who takes care of their health and someone invites you for a pickup game of basketball, you’re likely to accept the offer because that’s an opportunity to prove who you want to be. Answering with a “yes” or “no” doesn’t give room for excuses either, so you’re forced to commit one way or another.

Law 7: Never Compromise Your Self-Story

Mental toughness is one of the best qualities you can cultivate. Physical strength, intelligence, and leadership matter, but without perseverance, you might never achieve long-term goals. Your self-story is the most important factor when it comes to your goals both personally and professionally.

The stereotypes around you influence how you perceive yourself, who you think you are physically, personally, and socially is your self-concept. Your self story evolves over time and if you make it positive, you’ll be more optimistic and more likely to achieve your goals. To create a strong character, take a look at everything you do. Without realizing it, you’re always gathering evidence and you use that evidence to judge your own character. Every choice you make, as inconsequential as it might seem, contributes to your self-story.

Law 8: Never Fight a Bad Habit

In his seminal book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg introduced the idea of habit loops. A habit loop has three main elements. The cue is the trigger that leads to an act or conduct. The routine is the behavior itself. Finally, the reward is the result of performing said action. Instead of fighting a habit, replace a harmful reward with something less harmful.

Being stressed and tired can lead to bad habits, so make sure you get some rest. There are numerous tricks and hacks to break bad habits but focus on sleeping well before trying any of them. Furthermore, since our willpower depletes the more you use it, don’t tackle more than one habit at a time. Without enough willpower, you’ll feel annoyed and frustrated. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself or you’ll find it harder to start new habits or break old ones.

Law 9: Always Prioritize Your First Foundation

You can’t get another mind and you can’t get another body, but you must take care of them. Never take health for granted. Your health should always be your top priority. Everything else in your life depends on your health: your work, your relationships, your possessions, and so on. By accepting this, you’ll live longer and always enjoy all the other priorities.

Taking care of yourself is the ultimate form of gratitude. Once you get healthier, you’ll see a positive impact on every area: work, productivity, sleep, relationships, mood, sex, confidence, and so on.

Pillar II: The Story

Law 10: Useless Absurdity Will Define You More than Useful Practicalities

Being different and embracing an absurd public story defines your values for you. Describing your business based on absurd qualities attracts people. When you do this, you let those qualities speak for you and you don’t need a marketing team or an advertising agency.

To become a master storyteller, you must embrace absurdity, illogicality, costliness, inefficiency, and nonsensicality. The opposite is comforting to a certain extent, but it says nothing about who you are.

Law 11: Avoid Wallpaper at All Costs

Habituation is a neurological phenomenon that lets us focus on what matters and ignore everything that doesn’t. This explains why the human brain gets used to things. Your brain adapts and ignores certain stimuli to free up the mental capacity you might need for something else. Once you recognize something that helps you survive, you’ll go on autopilot to obtain that trying and you’ll ignore everything else.

Similarly, repeating a word over and over again makes it feel so confusing that it soon loses its meaning. This is called semantic satiation and is a form of habituation. This effect takes longer if the word (or image, since it also affects optical senses) has dramatic connotations. YouTube thumbnails that include worried or threatening faces will get more clicks because people are wired to pay attention to those expressions. Neutral faces, on the other hand, become “wallpaper”.

The process of habituation also affects sound as well. If you’re exposed to loud sounds for a while, you get so used to them you might fall asleep eventually. Likewise, you might also like something just because it’s familiar. This is called “the mere exposure effect” and it explains why we listen to the same song regularly. Just being exposed to something more often makes you think of it favorably. New things feel engaging, but old things feel repetitive, but what we need to like them is what some call” the optimal level of exposure”. This is a sweet spot between old and new which explains why the market is full of remixes of old songs, video game remakes, and movie sequels. Finally, we also get habituated to smells. If you stench, you’ll get so used to it that you won’t notice it after a while.

To go around the habituation filter, be specific and thought-provoking. Don’t follow the same tactics that everyone else is using. Be different. Also, don’t repeat things to make an impression because this will lead to a semantic situation and words will lose their meaning. If you want to make an impression, be polarizing. Whatever you do though, don’t become wallpaper.

Law 12: You Must Piss People Off

One way to bypass the “wallpaper filter” Is by using unconventional words and expressions. As Mark Manson’s best-selling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck clearly illustrates, cursing draws people’s attention. To stand out, polarize people. You’ll never stand out if people are indifferent to you or your work. Taking the safest path leads to mediocrity, so whenever possible be slightly disruptive. For every one that hates you, there’s also someone that loves you.

Don’t overuse this tactic though. People will get used to your message and it’ll become ineffective. Again, you don’t want to turn into wallpaper.

Law 13: Shoot Your Psychological Moonshots First

A psychological moonshot is a small detail that significantly improves the perception of something. Uber, the biggest taxi app in the world, has its own team of behavioral scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. They found the main principles that affect the satisfaction of their customers:

The peak-end rule: We judge an event based on two moments, its peak and its end.
Idleness aversion: Busy people are happy people. Examples include Netflix previews or the Google Chrome T-rex game that shows up when you can’t connect to the internet.
Operational transparency: Not having transparency creates distrust, skepticism, resentment, and disloyalty. Whenever possible, explain the behind-the-scenes of your operation.
Uncertainty anxiety: Customers don’t want faster delivery, they just want certainty. Lack of certainty leads to stress.
The goal-gradient effect: The closer we are to our goals, the faster we’ll move toward them.

The word moonshot comes from the Apollo 11 mission, the one that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. While Armstrong described the mission as “a giant leap for mankind”, a psychological moonshot is a figurative leap that propels you forward with the power of psychology. Psychological moonshots increase the value of your brand with cheap, small, and superficial changes.

Law 14: Friction Can create value

Sometimes, making an experience worse makes your customers want your products more. For example, energy drinks taste like medicine, but people buy them because they assume their chemicals are powerful. This is the case because humans are irrational in their decision-making. The product you create can be successful even if it doesn’t make sense.

Law 15: The Frame Matters More than the Picture

The way a product is packaged or named influences our opinion and value of it. Sometimes, adding something valuable decreases the psychological perception of the product in question.

Law 16: Use Goldilocks to Your Advantage

Anchoring is a type of cognitive bias where people focus on irrelevant information when making decisions. There are different types of anchoring and the Goldilocks effect is one of them. This is when you show two extreme options, as well as one in the middle. The most expensive option seems luxurious, the cheapest option seems risky, and the one in the middle seems attractive and reasonable in comparison. In other words, the middle option seems like the best because it combines the benefits of the other two. Providing options that range from cheap to standard to premium, you’re telling a story that affects your customers and helps them make a decision.

Law 17: Let Them Try and They Will Buy

Another cognitive bias is the endowment effect. This is when people overvalue something because it’s theirs. This is why technological companies let you test devices before you buy them. This creates an ownership experience and once you feel this, it’s hard for you to let go of the gadget.

Law 18: Fight for the First Five Seconds

When you tell a story to people, the first five seconds are important. You must captivate and surprise people through your stories. The first five seconds of your story represent “the hook” and it must be clear, compelling, and promising. If you can’t do this, people will tune out. The most common mistake is to introduce yourself or overexplain.

When you think about the story you’re going to tell, focus on your most indifferent customer. If you can capture their attention, getting everyone else will be easier. We are distracted easily, and our attention spans are decreasing steadily. This is why the first five seconds are so important.

Pillar III: The Philosophy

Law 19: You Must Sweat the Small Stuff

There are advantages to paying attention to small details. Even if you’re not the best at one thing, focusing relentlessly on small things can elevate your work and make it stand out. Behind some of Japan’s biggest brands (such as Toyota), there’s a philosophy called kaizen which means “continuous improvement”. Instead of making giant leaps, they focus on small, incremental changes.

A lot of people ignore the kaizen philosophy because they think that small things will never have an impact. Regardless of how easy some things can be, they can also be easy to ignore which is exactly what a lot of people do. Not doing something seems inconsequential, but this compounds over time and the results can lead to disaster.

The Kaizen philosophy also encourages people to be curious and motivated. While rewarding people with money for their ideas sounds good in theory (this is actually called motivation crowding), in practice, it only serves a purpose in the short term. As soon as you pay someone to do something, that kills the fun of the activity. People are passionate about their hobbies because there’s usually no money involved.

Law 20: A Small Miss Now Creates a Big Miss Later

Sometimes it’s easier to continue on the path you’re going on right now, even if it leads to mediocrity. The alternative is to correct the course now without seeing improvements for a long time. Eventually, though, you’ll start reaping rewards you never thought possible.

When we think of great work, we only think geniuses can achieve it. In reality, anyone willing to improve a little bit better every day will get there. Also, success sometimes requires you to deviate from the main path. This means things will get worse before they get better.

Law 21: You Must Out-Fail the Competition

To increase your chances of success, you must increase your willingness to fail. See every failure as a lesson to be learned. The more costly the mistake, the more you’ll learn. Don’t avoid failure because if you do, you’ll never become a true leader. Some of the most successful companies in the world (such as Booking.com and Amazon) have a culture of out-failing the competition.

Sometimes the biggest cost isn’t implementing something new and failing, it’s missing a big opportunity. Most ideas that fail are reversible and inexpensive. When it comes to making decisions, having 51 percent certainty should be enough to go ahead. Big decisions are rarely a matter of having 100 percent certainty. Perfect decisions only exist in hindsight. Indecision costs you one of your most expensive resources, time.

To try and fail more often than your competition

Remove bureaucracy: As bureaucracy increases, productivity decreases
Fix the incentives: Give incentives, not instructions
Promote and fire: You want the people who embody your company values at the highest positions
Measure accurately: Make the process of experimentation clear for everyone involved
Share the failure: Share the details of failed experiments

Behind every failure, there’s a valuable lesson.

Law 22: You Must Become a Plan-A Thinker

To move forward, forbid yourself from going back. Have a single path and give it your all. Plan Bs are a distraction and it’s the thing that can hold you back from success. Having backup plans sounds smart, but they also make you less motivated toward your main goal.

Law 23: Don’t Be an Ostrich

The Ostrich effect is a behavioral phenomenon. When in danger, the ostrich hides its head in the sand. In dangerous situations, people behave similarly. We do this to avoid unpleasant situations, but reality will soon catch up to us. As painful as it is, confront reality in all aspects of your personal and professional life.

To do this, the author suggests a four-step process:

Pause and acknowledge: Admit there are problems and take your time to create space between this step and the next one.
Review yourself: Think about your feelings and emotions. Try to articulate what you’re going through.
Speak the truth: Share what you found in the introspection part of the process. The worst you can do is not speak about everything you’re going through.
Seek the truth: This step usually involves listening and it’s often harder than it seems. This is discomforting, but it’ll give you the chance to learn and move on.

Law 24: You Must Make Pressure Your Privilege

Pressure is something you earn and a privilege you can have. To be clear, pressure is an external force, and as such, it’s outside of your control. Pressure is often hard and unenjoyable, but also has the potential to turn you into a better version of yourself. Pressure often leads to stress, but since pressure is external, how you interpret it makes a big difference. If you experience a lot of stress but don’t see it as harmful, you can lessen its effects.

You’ll never get rid of pressure entirely, but you can change how you feel about it. By changing your reactions to stress, you can capture its creative power and lessen its harmful effects. With this in mind, the author proposes a four-step process.

See it: This step is about bringing awareness to pressure and stress. Doing so will help you get feedback and learn.
Share it: Connecting with people you love when you’re under stress can help you diminish its negative consequences.
Frame it: See pressure for what it is, a signal that says that something is important to you.
Use it: When you feel pressure, stress becomes a tool you can use to succeed. To give something your best, you need stress.

Law 25: The Power of Negative Manifestation

Asking yourself “Why will this idea fail?” is one of the most important things you can do. It’s easy to be clear on why you’ll succeed, but step back and think about why you might fail. Just thinking about it might save you trouble in the future.

There are five reasons why we never ask ourselves this question:

Optimism bias: This is focusing on good things and ignoring all the bad ones. You want your idea to succeed so badly that you never consider the risks involved.
Confirmation bias: This is focusing on the information that supports your ideas while ignoring everything that doesn’t.
Self-serving bias: This is the belief that our success or failure happens because of our skill and effort. Assuming that your idea might fail forces you to confront the fact that you’re not as good as you think in certain areas. Also, you might ignore external factors that have nothing to do with you.
Sunk-cost fallacy bias: This is when we stand by a decision because we’ve spent time and money on it. Moving on implies losing the time and money we’ve invested in it.
Groupthink bias: Sometimes people don’t want to ask “Why is this a bad idea?” because they don’t want to express a different opinion to that of the group.

Pre-mortem (the hypothetical examination that’s the opposite of a post-mortem) is a decision-making technique that encourages people to think about failure as soon as possible. The idea is to think about a project as something that has already failed and you have to give reasons as to why that’s the case. Applying this concept to your everyday life can be transformative because it reduces the possibility of failure.

To implement the pre-mortem method, follow this five-step process:

Set the stage: gather everyone involved and explain the process
Fast-forward to failure: encourage everyone to visualize a future where the project in question failed.
Brainstorm reasons for failure: Write a list of reasons that could have led to failure. Everyone must do this individually to avoid groupthink bias.
Share and discuss: Everyone shares the list and you have an open discussion.
Develop a contingency plan: Once you’ve identified the potential challenges, you come up with strategies to avoid the dangers ahead.

Note that this chapter isn’t just about business. In fact, you could use the pre-mortem method in your personal life too. In order to address certain concerns early rather than late, the author suggests that you consider applying it to the following areas:

Choosing a career path
Choosing a partner
Making an investment

A successful person never shies away from having uncomfortable conversations.

Law 26: Your Skills Are Worthless, But Your Context Is Valuable

Bartlett shares four lessons about the value of skills:

Skills have no value, their value depends on how much someone is willing to pay you for them.
The value of skill depends on their context
The value increases depending on the rarity of a given skill
The worth of your skill depends on the value it can generate for others

To sum up, the skills themselves aren’t worth anything. The market decides how much your skills are worth depending on a series of variables, such as context or how rare your skills are. Since context is key, those interested in making more money will find it easier to transfer a skill from one context to another rather than learning an entirely new skill.

Law 27: The Discipline Equation: Death, Time, and Discipline

Confronting the fact that we’re all going to die one day is one of the most difficult things we can do. We like to think that death is something that happens to others because the mere thought of it makes us uncomfortable. Accepting our own mortality though can help us ignore distractions to focus on what matters.

Thinking about death makes us grateful for what we have, motivates us to achieve our goals, encourages us to spend more time with our loved ones, and makes us more generous. It also lowers our stress and anxiety. Accepting death gives us clarity in a world that’s noisy, complex, and teeming with distractions. When it comes down to it, succeeding or failing in all areas of life depends on how you choose to spend your time.

Humans have trouble understanding abstract concepts like the finality of death or the passage of time. With this in mind, the author came up with a mental model he calls “time betting”. He sees life as gambling where each hour we have left is like a chip. No one knows how many chips they have left, but we use one chip every hour and we can never get it back. How we allocate those chips determines the rewards we get. The only thing we can control is how we use our chips and this determines our success, happiness, relationships, mental health, and overall development. While you can never get back the chips you’ve already used, you can get new chips by taking care of your health. Once you run out of chips, the game ends and you can’t keep any of the things you’ve accumulated.

Time is one of our most precious resources. Use death not as a depressing moment, but as something that motivates you to be the best version of yourself.

No productivity technique can help you get the discipline you need. With discipline, any productivity hack will work. The author introduces the discipline equation and it has three main factors:

The value of the goal
The reward of the pursuit
The cost of the pursuit

To be disciplined, the value of the goal and the reward of the pursuit must be more important than the cost of the pursuit. To maintain long-term discipline, limit the obstacles that keep you from achieving your goal.

Pillar IV: The Team

Law 28: Ask Who Not How

As long as you trust the people around you, there’s no real reason to know or do everything yourself. Delegation can be liberating. When you find someone who’s more capable, experienced, and confident, let them do their job. You can excel at one thing and focus on that while you hire people who can do everything else.

Law 29: Create a Cult Mentality

Cults manipulate their members through a leader who won’t let them think by themselves. Companies, on the other hand, need employees who think independently. If you build a company that’s committed to a series of values, you get the best of both worlds: People are devoted to a common cause, but they also think by themselves.

There are four stages to building a company:

Cult or “zero to one” phase: the founders are so committed to an idea that they sacrifice everything to achieve their goals.
Growth: Problems related to overwhelmed employees and a general lack of resources crop up.
Enterprise: People find stability and balance
Decline: All companies deteriorate over time

Cults are a combination of:

A sense of community: There’s a clear vision and a sense of belonging
A shared mission: Members of the group share an identity
An inspirational leader: Leaders draw people in through confidence and grandiosity
An “us” vs. “them” mentality: Cults have clear adversaries

To build a company culture, you must:

Define its core values and vision
The culture must permeate all aspects of the company
Agree on standards people in the company must follow
Establish purposes outside of financial goals
Use strategies, vocabulary, symbols, and habits that are unique to the company
Develop a unique group identity
Celebrate progress
Encourage a sense of community
Allow team members to express authentically
Recognize that both employees and the entire group are exceptional

Note that cults are unsustainable in the long term.

Law 30: The Three Bars for Building Great Teams

Cultures and values determine the success of a group and they’re embodied by the leader. Creating a sense of strength and unity leads to success. No one person is bigger than the team. All members must embrace its culture and values and if they don’t, that means they’re not a right fit. The leader has to make bold decisions and these often come in the form of hiring the right people and firing toxic people. Keeping bad people can ruin your culture.

Bartlett shares a “three bars” framework. For every employee, he asks: If everyone on your team had the same values, attitude, and talent, would the standards be raised, maintained, or lowered? Bar lowerers must be fired, bar raisers need to be promoted, and bar maintainers need to be trained.

Law 31: Leverage the power of progress

The theory of marginal gains says that improving every aspect of an area or discipline would combine and result in something bigger than the sum of its parts. People want the feeling of progress, but since perfection is almost impossible, we can focus on small changes over time. Those small changes add up and make a big impact over time.

Big changes aren’t as important because they don’t give you a sense of progress, they seem distant. Small changes, on the other hand, are more likely to happen regularly and the sense of progress is so tangible that you feel the need to keep moving forward. By breaking down goals into something that’s small and achievable, you’ll soon be able to overcome bigger obstacles.

There are five methods to make progress:

Create meaning: If your work matters to you, you’ll make progress faster
Set clear and actionable goals: Team members must know what they need to do. Celebrate small wins.
Provide autonomy: Give team members the freedom they need
Remove friction: Get rid of all obstacles that stand in your way
Broadcast the progress: Recognize progress when it’s happening

Law 32: You Must Be a Consistent Leader

There’s no one way to approach leadership. To be a consistent leader, you must be inconsistent: Change your emotions as you see fit so that you get the best from every team member. You’re not just managing a team, you’re also managing emotions.

Law 33: Learning Never Ends

Editor’s note: This chapter only contains a QR code that sends readers to the author’s newsletter page.