Book Review Summary of The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett

Thinking about reading The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life by Steven Bartlett??

Want to know a bit more about the book before you read a copy for yourself? Well, keep on reading as I’m going to let you know what you’ll find inside as well as sharing my thoughts on the book to help you decide whether you should read The Diary of a CEO for yourself.

Book Review Summary of The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett - Pin

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Introduction

PILLAR I: THE SELF

Law 1: Fill Your Five Buckets in the Right Order

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

Law 3: You Must Never Disagree

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

Law 5: You Must Lean into Bizarre Behavior

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

Law 7: Never Compromise Your Self-Story

Law 8: Never Fight a Bad Habit

Law 9: Always Prioritize Your First Foundation

PILLAR II: THE STORY

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

Law 11: Avoid Wallpaper at All Costs

Law 12: You Must Piss People Off

Law 13: Shoot Your Psychological Moonshots First

Law 14: Friction Can create value

Law 15: The Frame Matters More than the Picture

Law 16: Use Goldilocks to Your Advantage

Law 17: Let Them Try and They Will Buy

Law 18: Fight for the First Five Seconds

PILLAR III: THE PHILOSOPHY

Law 19: You Must Sweat the Small Stuff

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

Law 21: You Must Out-Fail the Competition

Law 22: You Must Become a Plan-A Thinker

Law 23: Don’t Be an Ostrich

Law 24: You Must Make Pressure Your Privilege

Law 25: The Power of Negative Manifestation

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

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

PILLAR IV: THE TEAM

Law 28: Ask Who Not How

Law 29: Create a Cult Mentality

Law 30: The Three Bars for Building Great Teams

Law 31: Leverage the power of progress

Law 32: You Must Be a Consistent Leader

Law 33: Learning Never Ends

References

Acknowledgements

ABOUT THE BOOK ‘THE DIARY OF A CEO’

The Diary of a CEO was originally published in 2023 and is written by Steven Bartlett. Steven Bartlett is an entrepreneur, investor, speaker and podcast host. His podcast, by the same title of the book, started in 2017. The book claims to be not a book about business strategy, since that changes over time. Instead, the book is filled with timeless laws for achieving excellence in business and life.

INSIDE ‘THE DIARY OF A CEO’

In the introduction Steven shares five core beliefs that impacted the way he has created The Diary of a CEO and then briely goes into the four pillars of greatness.

Pillar I: The Self is filled with laws that are focused on you. Some things have to be done in a specific order. You have to focus on yourself before business and as shared in Law 1 there are five buckets that you need to fill (but even with them there is a specific order. The laws in this pillar cover everything from habits to health, to beliefs and self-story

Then in Pillar II: The Story the focus is on storytelling. As you’d expected for an amazing marketer Steven knows a lot about story. This pillar will especially be helpful for anyone in marketing, but is powerful for anyone who has to tell a story (which is virtually everyone at some point).

Pillar III: The Philosophy is about the values, principles and beliefs people have and follow. Everyone has a personal philosophy and your personal philosophy impacts how you behave – both now and in the future In this section of the book Steven shares philosophies that both individual people and businesses have had. He shares the philosophy and also the great results following those philosophies has created.

And then last but not least Pillar IV: The Team is focused on laws to help you build, and lead, great teams. A key part of succeeding in business is being able to build great teams and them lead those teams in a way that they perform in the best way possible. Drawing on his experience of building, and leading, multiple companies Steven shares what he has learnt first-hand. And then that is combined with what he’s learnt from other greats in business.

QUOTES FROM THE DIARY OF A CEO THAT I LOVED

“When deciding which path to take in life, which job to accept or where to invest your spare time, remember that knowledge, when applied (skill), is power”

“Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do.”

“Change is only going to get faster”

“You have to risk the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary”.

“Everything you do with or without an audience – provides evidence to you about who you are and what you are capable of”.

“Prove to yourself – in a thousand tiny ways, at every opportunity you get – that you have what it takes to overcome the challenges of life”.

“You should aim to have fewer goals, which increases the likelihood that you will complete any of them.”

“Strong marketing demands an opinion, a response and an emotion. It doesn’t want to be liked – it calls for either love or hatred”.

“It’s been repeatedly proven that what motivates us most is how close we are to achieving a goal: we work faster the closer we are to success.”

“When you’re thinking about storytelling, cater to your most uninterested customer first”.

“The easiest way to do big things is by focusing on the small things”.

“Things that are easy to do are also very easy not to do”.

“If you want to increase your chances of success, you must increase your failure rate”.

“The more you perceive negative emotion in the event of failure, the more driven you will be to succeed.”

“Pressure is neither good not bad – but our relationship, perspective and evaluation of pressure and the stress it creates can have purposeful or deadly consequences.”

“The market you decide to sell your skills in will determine how much you get paid far more than the skills themselves.”

FINAL THOUGHTS FROM CHARELLE

I really enjoyed this book. At the time of reading, I was fairly new to Steven Bartlett. I had seen him deliver the keynote speech at the UK Black Business Show in October 2023 (You can check out my review of that event and other UK business and marketing events I attended in 2023 here ). And after that I started listening to his podcast and then read The Diary of a CEO a few months later.

As a solo business owner I didn’t connect with Pillar IV: The Team but that didn’t matter. There was so much value in the rest of the book. It is clear that the wisdom in this book has come from a mixture of personal experiences, what Steven has learnt from his guests on the podcast and research. I loved that mixture. I also think the format will help people to apply the laws. Rather than lots of useful information all thrown together by having separate laws a reader can choose a few they really like and then commit to implementing them. Which is exactly what I made members of PropelHer’s Book Club do.

WHO WOULD I RECOMMEND READS

As you can expect I would highly recommend this book to business owners. However, you don’t have to be a business owner to get a lot out of the book. Pilar II of the book is a great read for anyone who works in marketing. And I would argue there is enough value in the ‘life’ sections that you don’t run a business you’ll learn a lot from the book.

I chose this book to be Book of the Month for PropelHer’s Book Club in January 2024 (You can find out more about PropelHer’s Book Club here). This means I first-hand spoke to women (a mixture of entrepreneurs and employees) who read the book – and everyone found it valuable.

So if you are a person looking to improve your life – read it.
If you are a person who works in marketing – read it.
If you run your business and want to grow your business and grow yourself – read it.