The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life Paperback – August 31, 2023

Simple read but full of good insight

Starts off strong with the self and the story, but veers off into general life hacks after a while.Here are some of the highlights that stuck with me:ーーーーー INTRODUCTION ーーーーーEverything that stands in your way is a human.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. (4)ーーーーー THE SELF ーーーーーThe five buckets:1.) What you know.2.) What you can do.3.) Who you know.4.) What you have.5.) What they think of you.'You cannot pour from empty buckets.'He was telling me to focus on filling my own buckets, because someone with full buckets can positively bend the world in any way he or she desires. (11)These first two buckets are your longevity, your foundation and the clearest predictor of your future. (13)Make sure you fill your buckets in the right order. (14)If you want to master something, teach it. (17)If you want to keep someone's brain lit up and receptive to your point of view, you must not start your response with a statement of disagreement. (27)The art of becoming a great communicator, conversationalist, or partner is first listening so that the other person feels 'heard', and then making sure you reply in a way that makes them feel 'understood'. (28)Disagree less, understand more. (29)The most powerful force of all is first-party evidence from our own five physical senses. As the phrase goes, seeing is believing. (34)Evidence that offers positive outcomes is the easiest evidence for someone to believe. (41)Unchallenged limiting beliefs are the greatest barrier between who we are and who we could be. (42)Resolving a problem often requires enough humility to disregard your initial hypothesis and listen to what the market is telling you. (47)Innovation disrupts because it's different. By definition, it should look weird, it should feel unconventional, it should be misunderstood, and it should sound wrong, stupid, dumb, or even illegal. (50)When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake. (52)In moments of dissonance, when we're faced with ideas, innovations, and information that we don't understand, which challenge our conventions or threaten our identity - Web 3.0, AI, virtual reality, social media, opposing political ideologies and social movements - the key is to reserve the temptation of judgment - which is often just an attempt to ease our cognitive dissonance - to lean in, to study and to ask honest questions. (53)Ask questions of your actions, and your actions will answer. (63)Choose to do the tenth rep when it would be easier to stop at nine. Choose to have the difficult conversation when it would be easier to avoid it. Choose to ask the extra question when it would be easier to stay silent. 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. (74)I don't allow any meeting, call, or appointment to be scheduled before 11am, and I rarely use an alarm clock, because I've always known that sleep is the foundation of success, not an inhibitor of it. (80)"You're more likely to do the thing you don't want to do when you're stressed out." ~Russell Poldrack, psychology professor at Stanford UniversityFighting habits is a bad idea - it will drain your willpower (a limited resource) and increase your chances of yo-yoing back into the habit. (83)The best way to create a new habit isn't by fighting an old one or depriving yourself of rewards - which is counter-productive - it's by finding new rewards, healthier rewards and less addictive rewards, but nonetheless making sure you are still rewarding yourself along the way. (84)ーーーーー THE STORY ーーーーーThe most absurd thing about you says everything about you. (97)People have no incentive to think, talk, or write about things that maintain the status quo, but they have a tremendous incentive to share absurd things that mock it, tear it down, and laugh in the face of it. (98)You'll be known for the most absurd things you do. Those absurd things will do the job of saying everything about you, and you won't have to say anything at all. (100)Normality is ignored. Absurdity sells. (101)Indifference - when people don't love you or hate you - is the least profitable outcome for a marketer. (119)The Peak-End Rule: …Customers will judge their entire experience on just two moments - the best (or worst) part, and the end. (125)The way that something is packaged has a big impact on how it's received. How something is framed affects how consumers perceive and value the brand. (143)Our decisions aren't driven by sense, they're driven by the nonsense created by social cues, irrational fear, and survival instincts. (153)I never, ever 'pitched'. I never bombarded an audience with graphs, stats, or data. Every talk I delivered started, sounded, and ended more like something out of Harry Potter than a sales presentation. (165)Those first five seconds disproportionately dictate the fate of every second that follows. (170)Drop the warm introduction, the pleasantries and the musical B-roll footage, and urgently get to the most compelling promise, point or provocation that you can. No matter the medium, you must earn the right to the attention you're seeking within those first five seconds. (171)ーーーーー THE PHILOSOPHY ーーーーーTo be innovative, you have to experiment. You need to do more experiments per week, per month, per year, per decade. It's that simple. You cannot invent without experimenting. (202)No contracts, no lawyers, no layers of sign-off, no delays - trust, speed, and empowerment. (205)Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time the quo has lost its status. (209)If you want to predict what a group of people will do over the long term, you need to look at their incentives, not their instructions. (212)Influence trickles down: you need the people at the highest point in the company to be the most avid disciples of your cultural values. (212)Education is the easiest way to remove operational psychological friction. (213)Our skills hold no intrinsic value. Our skills are worth nothing. As the phrase goes, value is what someone is willing to pay. (259)However, a more effective and potentially rewarding approach may lie in transplanting one's skill set to an entirely new context - a different industry - where it can deliver greater value for the employer. (262)There are many things the human mind is incapable of truly grasping: one of them is how insignificant we are - life at every touchpoint will seduce us into overestimating the importance of day-to-day things, and another is that we are actually going to die someday. (267)You're going to die… your time - and how you choose to spend it - is the only influence you have on the world. (269)The one rule of the game is that we have to place one chip every hour, and once a chip is placed, we will never get it back. … The game ends when you run out of chips, and once the game is over, you don't get to keep any of the things you've won anyway. (270)You must do everything you can to enjoy the process and deploy psychological tactics to keep your engagement high. (275)ーーーーー THE TEAM ーーーーーI've delegated anything I don't like doing and can't do (usually the same thing) to someone who is much more capable, experienced, and confident. (284)It's not about learning how to do something, it's about knowing who can do it for you. Business is all about people. Every company, whether they realize it or not, is simply a recruitment company. (285)The truth is, your destination will be defined by the sum total of the ingenuity, ideas and execution of the group of people that you assemble. (285)Use myths, stories, company-specific vocabulary and legends, along with symbols and habits, to reinforce the company culture and embed it in the collective consciousness. (296)I never carried a negative person that didn't fit the culture for more than a couple of months. These people are thieves in the night, they take your energy away, and your most valuable asset is your energy. (303)"What you need instead of the big wins is simply the forward momentum that small wings bring… making progress in one's work - even incremental progress - is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event." ~Teresa AmabileThe bigger the task and the less competent we feel about accomplishing it, the greater the procrastination. (315)The key to overcoming that discomfort and preventing procrastination is to 'smallify' the task into easy, achievable micro-goals. (316)Therefore, the key to action, confidence, and movement is scaling your challenge down. Small wins may seem unimportant, but a series of wins begins to reveal a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are compact, tangible, upbeat, and noncontroversial. (316)My job as CEO is to play the role of a supportive enabler, not a critical micromanager. (319)To solve problems, encourage and celebrate small wins. This provides continuous forward momentum, which creates an atmosphere of success and a positive sense that a team is moving towards their bigger goals. (320)The most professionally rewarding feeling in the world is a sense of forward motion. (321)In light of this, a one-size-fits-all, reason-, information-, and facts-centric approach to leadership is deeply inadequate for inspiring passion, motivation, and action among any group of people. (328)[Sir Alex Ferguson] possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from the hobbies of his players' wives to the names of their pets, and as Rio Ferdinand told me, even their grandfathers' preferred brand of whisky. More significantly, he knew that every member of his team was propelled by vastly different motivators. (329)When you're in the business of motivating people, emotional management is everything. (330)ーーーーー DONE ーーーーーOverall, too many laws (33). Could do without the final QR-code-scanned law that leads to an email address request, a well-known (and well-despised) marketing tactic for collecting emails for direct marketing.The first half of the book has some really solid points. But the second half sounds like a lot of pontification without direct insight or transparency into the writer's life. He never names the companies he mentions (see p.203 on the battle between father and son -- nameless, faceless people!), always using generic categories. He cites his own marketing company's success without delving into what that success is, and how specifically it succeeded. He doesn't share the nitty-gritty details about how his marketing company turned the corner or got big clients like Coca Cola, only glossing over the bullet points.The book offers solid advice without fluff, but Steven Bartlett isn't transparent enough about how his own marketing company broke through, and he doesn't cite enough specific evidence - with names of companies and in-scene dramatization - to make me feel he is on my side, in the trenches with me, giving me applicable tricks that will work in an ever-changing market. The last part, about growing a company culture, could have benefited most from these specifics, since it reads like general business advice available in any self-help business book.