Right, so I recently read this book,
The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws of Business and Life
by Stephen Bartlett.
And I loved it so much that I wanted to share
my eight favorite lessons from it.
Eight powerful laws that are changing the way
that I approach my life,
in the hope that you'll find some of them helpful.
Now Stephen Bartlett, if you haven't come across him,
is an insanely successful entrepreneur,
and he's the host of the podcast, The Diary of a CEO.
And he's interviewed hundreds of the world's
most famously successful people.
And so if you're interested in personal development
or entrepreneurship, or just generally advice for life,
then I hope you'll enjoy this episode of Book Club,
the ongoing series where we distill and discuss
highlights and summaries from some of my favorite books.
And let's just get into it.
Law number one, fill your five buckets in the right order.
So the idea here is that when it comes
to our professional success, we all have five buckets.
Bucket number one is what you know,
otherwise known as your knowledge.
Bucket number two is what you can do, i.e. your skills.
Bucket number three is who you know, i.e. your network.
Bucket number four is what you have, i.e. your resources.
And bucket number five is what the world thinks of you,
i.e. your reputation.
And the idea here is that professional success
involves filling these five buckets,
but crucially, it involves filling them up in order.
He writes that we usually start our professional life
acquiring knowledge, school, university, et cetera,
and when this knowledge is applied, we call it a skill.
When you have knowledge and skills,
you become professionally valuable to others
and your network grows.
Consequently, when you have knowledge, skills,
and a network, your access to resources expands.
And once you have knowledge, skills,
a valuable network, and resources,
you will undoubtedly earn a reputation.
Now this law, when applied properly,
can actually help in decision-making
when it comes to what to do with your career and your life.
So let's say you're young and you're early in your career.
This model suggests that you should generally prioritize
a career or a job that teaches you knowledge and skills,
and you should prioritize those things over something
that will give you resources or reputation or network.
This means that if, for example, you're in a job
where you're not learning anything,
it's maybe time to consider a bit of a change,
even if that job is giving you more and more money.
The other cool thing here is that these first two buckets,
knowledge and skills, are also the two buckets
that don't really have a tax associated with them,
but also these are the two buckets
that can withstand any kind of professional earthquake,
as he calls it.
So for example, even if you lose your job
and suddenly you've lost resources and network
and a reputation overnight,
you still have your knowledge and you still have your skills.
He writes that those who hoard gold
have riches for a moment.
Those who hoard knowledge and skills
have riches for a lifetime.
True prosperity is what you know and what you can do.
And the lesson that I'm taking away from this personally
is just the absolute profound importance
of spending time every week, or maybe even every day,
investing in my own knowledge and skills.
It's so easy, especially when running a business,
especially when managing a team
and like lots of stuff is going on in life,
as I'm sure is the case with your life.
You probably feel that you're very busy,
but especially for really busy people,
carving out the time to level up our knowledge
and our skills, to learn something new,
to read something new, to explore a new area
that might help us in our business or in our health
or in our relationships or in our life,
that's continuing to fill the bucket
of knowledge and skills.
And those are the things that compound insanely over time.
Law number six, ask, don't tell.
The question behavior effect.
Now this vibes with something that I've been thinking
for quite a while,
which is about the power of powerful questions.
And I've really found in my own life
that asking the right powerful questions
can have an enormous impact on the actions that I take
and therefore on the results that I get.
Now, I normally do this in the context of journaling,
but reading this has made me apply it
in one other interesting way in my life as well.
So for example, when journaling,
I'll often try and ask myself powerful questions
that I know will force me to think.
So here are some of my favorite powerful questions
that I like to ask.
Number one, what do I really want?
Number two, what would I do if I knew I wouldn't fail?
Number three, what would I do if I knew I would fail,
but I would want to do it anyway?
Number four, if I won the lottery
and had $100 million in the bank,
how would I change how I spend my time?
Number five, if I broadly repeated the things
that I did today for the rest of my life,
would it give me the life that I want
or a life that I don't want?
And I like to collect these lists of powerful questions.
They're questions that I like to ask to myself,
but they're also questions I like to ask to other people
if I'm doing a mini sort of business
or life coaching session with a friend or something.
I'll just pop a few of these questions out there
and they generally make people think really hard
and come to interesting conclusions
about their business or their life.
But the cool thing that I learned in this chapter,
which I'm now applying to my life,
is the power of changing a statement into a question
to prompt a particular behavior.
So for example, instead of thinking,
I will go to the gym today,
what I'm trying to do is in the morning
when I plan out my day,
I ask myself, will I go to the gym today?
If you ask yourself that question
and then you respond yes to it,
you are more likely to carry out the behavior
rather than if you just told yourself the statement
in the morning, I will go to the gym today.
He writes that the great thing about a yes or no question
is that it doesn't give you any wiggle room
to deceive yourself.
It forces you to commit one way or the other.
And that brings us to law number nine,
always prioritize your first foundation.
Now there's a story that he tells in the book
of a talk that Warren Buffett gave to some students
in Omaha, Nebraska.
When I was 16, I had just two things on my mind,
girls and cars.
I wasn't very good with girls, so I thought about cars.
I thought about girls too, but I had more luck with cars.
Let's say that when I turned 16, a genie had appeared to me
and that genie said,
I'm going to give you the car of your choice.
It'll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it,
brand new, and it's all yours.
Having heard all the genie stories,
I would say, what's the catch?
And the genie would answer, there's only one catch.
This is the last car you're ever going to get in your life.
So it's got to last a lifetime.
If that had happened, I would have picked out a car,
but can you imagine knowing it had to last a lifetime,
what I would do with it?
I would read the manual about five times.
I would always keep it garaged.
If there was the least little dent or scratch,
I'd have it fixed right away
because I knew I wouldn't want it rusting.
I would baby that car
because it would have to last a lifetime.
This is exactly the position you're in
concerning your mind and body.
You only get one mind and you only get one body
and it's got to last a lifetime.
Now, it's very easy to let them ride for many years,
but if you don't take care of that mind and that body,
there'll be a wreck 40 years later,
just like the car would be.
It's what you do right now, today,
that determines how your mind and body will operate
to 10, 20, and 30 years from now.
You must take care of it.
And so this is the idea that Stephen in the book
calls your first foundation.
Your health is your first foundation.
And one of the things that I really take away
from these sort of nonfiction self-help books
is like, if I'm just reading the book
and all I'm doing is reading and highlighting it,
I'm just reading for entertainment.
And so what I try and do is make sure
that I've taken some action points.
If I ever have that moment of inspiration
while I'm reading a book or watching a video
or listening to a podcast,
I will try my best to act on it there and then.
And so the action point here, I was like,
oh crap, I'm not prioritizing my health.
And so what I did was I took action there and then,
I opened up my calendar and I tried to figure out,
okay, I need to get in three sessions at the gym
every single week.
And I also need to take flexibility and mobility
and stretching a little bit more seriously.
And so I've now downloaded this app called Pliability
where most nights I do this sort of
20 minute stretching routine,
which is a nice way to wind down.
But I've also restarted sessions with a personal trainer
three times a week.
And by booking the personal trainer
and paying for them in advance,
it adds that extra nudge and accountability
and it forces me to actually get to the gym,
which is the thing that I want to do.
Basically, every person I've ever spoken to
who has a personal trainer says it's a very, very,
very ROI positive expense.
And actually, if you struggle with getting to the gym,
if you struggle with taking care of your health,
any money that you spend investing in your health
is gonna pay way more dividends
than the money you could spend investing
in literally anything else.
And really, the way that I think about
a lot of these behaviors is that it's all about
getting to a point where that behavior is on autopilot,
i.e. it becomes a habit.
Right now for me, going to the gym regularly
three times a week and actually working hard at the gym
is not enough of a habit.
I don't enjoy it.
My whole book, Feel Good Productivity
is all about how to make things feel good.
And so as I was reading this, I was thinking,
okay, how do I make going to the gym feel good?
Cool, if I get a personal trainer
who I know is there to motivate me
and I say to the personal trainer, to him or her,
be like, hey, look, I just need motivation.
I need you to make this fun for me,
then chances are I'll be way more likely to go to the gym
and therefore treat my health
as genuinely my first foundation.
And another law that has changed my life
happens to be the law of learning,
which is why I'm very excited to say
that this video is sponsored by Skillshare.
If you haven't heard by now,
Skillshare is a fantastic online platform
that has classes on all sorts of topics,
ranging from illustration and graphic design
to coding, to interior design, to cooking.
There's loads of stuff on there.
I've personally been teaching classes on Skillshare
since 2019, and I've got around a dozen classes
on Skillshare, which you can access completely for free
if you sign up for the Skillshare free trial.
If you're interested in being more productive,
I've got three classes that are all about
different facets of productivity.
If you're interested in being a YouTuber,
I've got an incredible class on how to edit videos
in Final Cut Pro, and if you want to organise your life
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you might like to check out my complete beginner's guide
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If you've been following the stuff with AI recently,
you might like to check out a brand new Skillshare original
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And they've even got classes on how to be a freelancer
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So if you happen to be one of the first 1000 people
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that will let you sign up for a completely free
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And during that time, you can watch all of my classes,
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So thank you so much Skillshare for sponsoring this video
and let's get back to it.
Law number 19, you must sweat the small stuff.
Now when it comes to productivity,
one of the common things that you'll hear is the 80-20 rule.
Focus on the 20% of inputs that are gonna get you 80%
of the outputs.
This is the Pareto principle,
and I think there's a lot of value in it.
But then there's also value in the complete other side
of the coin, which is that you must sweat the small stuff.
Now, Stephen Bartlett's podcast, The Diary of a CEO,
has grown an absolutely insane amount.
It's like growing faster than Joe Rogan
even certain months this year.
And in the book, he talks about how he thinks
his podcast has grown so fast.
And he writes that, the secret, in my opinion,
is that we sweat the small stuff
more than any team I've ever encountered.
We obsess over thousands of small details
that I believe most people would dismiss as trivial,
crazy, or a waste of time.
Similarly, when I interviewed MrWhosetheboss,
who is one of the biggest tech YouTubers in the world,
making stupid amounts of money every year,
he obsesses over every tiny detail of his videos.
He spends lots of time painstakingly analyzing
the YouTube analytics.
He scripts everything word for word,
then he goes over the script multiple times
to make sure the script would be accessible
to three different people that he's got in mind
as his target audience.
And when I asked him how long he spends
scripting each of his videos, he said,
oh, probably, I don't know, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours.
I think that was probably three and a half days of scripting.
Three and a half days?
Yeah.
Are we talking eight hour days?
No, we're talking like 14 hour days.
And I was just like absolutely mind blown
because that is the pure definition
of sweating the small stuff.
It's such a level of attention to detail.
And it's the complete opposite of the 80-20 principle.
And in the book, he talks about the Japanese philosophy
of Kaizen, which you might've come across,
which is basically continuous small improvements over time.
He writes that in the Kaizen philosophy,
innovation is seen as an incremental process.
It's not about making big leaps forward,
but rather making small things better in small ways
everywhere you can on a daily basis.
And so the action point, or the question for you
to consider here is, what is one area of your life
in which you would benefit from trying
to get minor improvements every single day?
It could be your health, it could be in work,
it could be in relationships, it could even be in all three.
And I think there's a lot of value in thinking this way
and trying to make things always a little bit better
over time.
Now, quite a lot of what I do in my daily life
is try and find these little small improvements,
these minor changes where over time,
they'll compound to create a big result.
And generally when I do find something
that I've applied to my life and I've seen,
ooh, this thing is really working,
then I'll share that in an email that I send
to some members of my audience every Sunday.
And this is for people who are subscribed
to my completely free Sunday Snippets newsletter.
So if you haven't checked it out,
that's a very short email I send every Sunday.
I've been sending it every Sunday
for the last five years now.
And I also share some interesting book and article
and video and podcast recommendations.
And so if you wanna check that out,
then check out the link in the video description
or go to alibdoll.com slash Sunday
and you can sign up completely free.
Law number five, you must lean into bizarre behavior.
And the idea here is that when you're faced with ideas
or situations or information that you don't understand
that you might think is bizarre,
then instead of leaning out, we wanna aim to lean in.
Now, leaning out is what people do
when they're like confronted by change.
Oh my God, all this AI stuff.
Oh, I can't think about it.
I'm just gonna kind of do my thing.
That's when people are leaning out.
They're choosing not to find out more about the AI stuff.
They're scared of it.
They're worried about it.
And because of that,
they don't take advantage of the new technology.
Instead, the idea is that when you come across something
that you find interesting or bizarre or strange
or that you don't understand,
take the opposite approach.
Choose to lean into the thing.
Ask yourself, why am I believing what I believe?
Is it possible that I'm wrong?
Do I know what I'm talking about?
Am I leaning out because I don't understand?
Am I following the party line?
Are these my own beliefs
or the beliefs of the people like me?
Now, the way that I'm applying this in my life personally
is that I've noticed that there are a handful of times
where I'll see someone else's success.
It seems a bit bizarre to me.
I'd be like, whoa, that YouTube channel's blowing up
for no reason that I can't see.
Like, what?
Now, in that context,
one approach would be to lean out,
to be like, oh, it's probably just because
that girl is really good looking
or it's just because the audience is weird
or because people's attention spans these days.
That would be the lean out approach.
But what I try my best to do
is when I see a situation that I don't understand instead,
I lean in and I think, huh,
what is it about this that's making it so popular?
Let me try and understand with humility
what I can learn from the situation.
A, it helps us understand the world.
And B, if we're thinking about success
in business and in life,
we're way more likely to have an edge over the competition
if you wanna think in competitive terms
if you try your best to understand
what is going on in the world without overly judging it.
Oh, and by the way, in case you're interested,
my favourite way of leaning in
when I don't understand something
is to read a book about the thing
or to read a book summary about the thing.
And the best surveys I've ever seen
that summarises books is called Short Form.
There'll be a link down in the video description
if you wanna check it out.
Next, we come to law number 21.
You must outfail the competition.
And basically what he's talking about here
is that when it comes to business,
the way you get ahead of your competition
is by outfailing them,
by running more experiments than they do.
And the more you strive for these failures,
the more likely you are to have successes
because you're gonna learn from those experiments.
Now, I personally don't really vibe
with the competitive aspect here.
I generally like to think of competition
when it comes to business as being like collaborators
or friends or colleagues rather than competitors.
But I love the idea of failing.
And in fact, I don't even think of it as failing.
For example, should I go for this university
or that university?
This career or that career?
This subject or that subject?
Should I learn this skill to start this business
or that skill to start that business?
And if we're trying to get certainty in our decisions,
we're gonna end up not making any decisions at all
and just staying where we are and staying fairly static.
Now, there's a great quote
from former President Barack Obama.
He said, you don't have to get to 100% certainty
on your big decisions, get to 51%.
And when you get there, make the decision quickly
and be at peace with the fact that you made the decision
based on the information you had.
And this is an idea that poker players refer to as plus EV.
So plus expected value.
The idea is that you've got imperfect information,
but if you were to make that decision a hundred times,
would you on average come out positive
or would you on average come out negative?
And if you think that a decision is plus EV,
you should just take the decision
because you can't be 100% certain.
And some of the biggest and most important decisions
of my life have been made under conditions of uncertainty,
like they are for all of us,
where I've made a sort of plus EV judgment on the situation.
For example, starting a YouTube channel.
There is no certain path to success
when starting a YouTube channel.
You have no idea what's gonna happen.
You have no idea how it's gonna grow.
You have no idea whether it's even gonna be successful
depending on your definitions of success.
But if you think about, let's say 100 parallel universes
where you watching this right now,
you start a YouTube channel or that business,
or you learn that skill, or you quit your job
and do that interesting thing
that you've been wanting to do.
Try and model out what it looks like
if you do this thing 100 times.
And then on average, are you gonna come out better
or are you gonna come out worse?
And generally, most decisions that involve
getting away from our comfort zone
and going into a new territory,
unless it involves territory
that's gonna get us eaten by a lion.
Most of these decisions are generally plus EV.
You generally open yourself more to randomness
and optionality and serendipity.
And I like this quote that he writes
at the end of the chapter,
failure equals feedback, feedback equals knowledge,
knowledge equals power, therefore failure gives you power.
Right, next we come to law number 25
Stephen Bartlett calls it negative manifestation.
It's the same kind of thing.
Basically what we're both referring to
is the idea of doing a premortem
on big decisions that you're making.
Now a premortem is when you skip forward in the future
and you imagine what would happen
if the situation didn't work out the way you planned it.
And the pivotal question that he describes
is why will this idea fail?
And so the way to do this is let's say you're imagining
you wanna quit your job and start your business.
Cool, fair enough.
Once you've made a plan,
project yourself three months in the future.
Imagine the thing that you're trying to do has not worked
and you're having to go back to your job.
What are the top three reasons
why the thing might've failed?
Reason number one might be
that you didn't even have an idea.
Reason number two might be
that you didn't get enough leads.
Reason number three might be
that you got so much negative feedback
from your friends and family that you decided,
screw it, I'm just gonna go back to my day job.
And now that you know what those top three reasons are,
you can then figure out, cool,
what can I do right now to mitigate against the risk
of these top three reasons from actually happening?
Now at this point, one of two things will happen.
Number one, either you'll be just better prepared
for the situation that arises
because you've tried to figure out in advance
what could possibly go wrong.
Or number two, when you do your negative manifestation
or your crystal ball method,
you realize that actually we don't wanna do this thing.
And that's the thing that Stephen talks about in the story.
He talks about how he was gonna start some podcast network
and he had all these guests and all these shows
and all these celebrities booked in for it.
And then after investing several hundred thousand dollars
into this thing, I think up to a million dollars,
he asked his team, why might this idea fail?
And they came up with a long list of reasons
why the thing would fail.
And they realized, ah, hang on,
given that we've now seen why this thing is gonna fail,
we actually don't want to do it
because we think this thing might actually fail.
And finally, we come to law number 27,
the discipline equation.
This law apparently teaches you how to be disciplined
in anything that you set your mind to
through a simple discipline equation
and why discipline is the ultimate secret
to being successful in any ambition we have.
Now, I slightly disagree with him here
in that I don't think discipline is the absolute key.
This is something I talk about in my book.
I think that feeling good and trying to find a way
to make the things that we're trying to do
feel more enjoyable, more meaningful, and more fulfilling.
That is a more certain path towards, you know,
getting to our destination,
but also enjoying the journey along the way
rather than being like laser focused on discipline.
But, you know, let's put that aside
and take his point for now.
I do like the discipline equation.
I think this actually vibes with kind of
what I talk about in my book as well.
And so the equation here is that discipline
is the value of the goal plus the reward of the pursuit
minus the cost of the pursuit.
And so based on this equation,
if you want to be more disciplined
towards doing the things you actually want to do,
although I would argue that this is not actually
the definition of discipline, but hey, it's a model.
All models are wrong.
The question is just, you know, are they useful?
I think this is a useful model,
even if I disagree with the definition slightly.
But if you want more discipline
to do the things that matter to you,
you need to increase the value of the goal,
i.e. your reason why you want to do the thing.
Secondly, you need to increase the reward of the pursuit.
So make it more fun, make it feel good.
And thirdly, reduce the cost of the pursuit.
So make it feel less bad.
So again, using my gym example,
if I can make going to the gym more fun,
the reward of the pursuit increases,
and therefore I'm more likely to go to the gym.
And thirdly, if I can reduce the cost of the pursuit.
So for example, initially I was signed up to a gym
that was 20 minutes away and I would never go.
But then I thought, you know what,
let me sign up for the gym that's five minutes away.
It's a bit less nice, but it's five minutes away.
And that five minutes makes an enormous difference.
It means that for me going to the gym and back
is like a one hour thing rather than a two hour thing.
And it's very hard for me to shove a two hour thing
into my day, very easy for me to shove
a one hour thing into my day.
I have reduced the cost of the pursuit.
And so for whatever thing that you're struggling with,
try and ask yourself,
this is actually only one of the amazing books
that I've read most recently.
So if you're interested in more book recommendations,
I have made a list of incredible books
that I would recommend that you read in 2023,
which you can check out right over here.
Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.