What does it take to build a thriving business in today’s competitive landscape? How can entrepreneurs maximize their impact while maintaining a fulfilling life?
The Diary of a CEO, a book by Steven Bartlett, draws from countless conversations with successful leaders and Bartlett’s own entrepreneurial journey to share game-changing wisdom. His insights cover everything from personal development and team management to brand building and business innovation.
Continue reading to discover practical strategies that will transform your approach to business and life, straight from one of today’s most influential young entrepreneurs.
The Diary of a CEO Book Overview
What if you could sit down with hundreds of the world’s most successful people and ask them to teach you their greatest wisdom? One entrepreneur has done just that. The Diary of a CEO, a book by Steven Bartlett, distills the business and life advice Bartlett has gained from several years of podcast interviews, as well as his own extensive business experience. His tips are for anyone looking to make a difference in the world and live the most fulfilling, productive life possible.
Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, and host of the popular podcast The Diary of a CEO, in which he interviews experts and top performers like Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, actor Maisie Williams, and entrepreneur Richard Branson. He’s co-founded several companies, including Social Chain, a social media marketing agency he started at age 21, and Flight Group, a marketing and investment company. In 2020, Bartlett was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and he’s been an on-camera investor on the reality show Dragon’s Den since 2022.
In addition to writing The Diary of a CEO, Bartlett has authored the self-help book Happy Sexy Millionaire. In it, he warns that materialistic goals like wealth and fame don’t lead to lasting happiness, and he explains how to find true contentment.
In this overview, we’ve reorganized Bartlett’s advice into four categories:
- Living a meaningful life
- Running a successful business
- Managing productive teams
- Building an irresistible brand image
How to Live a Meaningful Life
Before we get into specific advice for business success, let’s explain how to develop the mindset you need to reach your full potential and change the world. We’ll also cover the general strategy you’ll use to do so. Here are four of Bartlett’s tips.
Tip #1: Keep Death at the Front of Your Mind
First, Bartlett asserts that you can motivate yourself to live life to the fullest by frequently reflecting on your mortality. Many people avoid thinking about death because they see it as an unpleasant, depressing reality. However, Bartlett asserts that reflecting on death will help you feel more alive. Remind yourself that every hour you spend is one you’ll never get back. You’ll naturally find a new appreciation for the good things in your life. Additionally, you’ll feel more inspired to spend your time and energy on the most meaningful activities that make you the happiest.
Bartlett also argues that because your time on Earth is limited, your health should be your top priority. Investing time and effort in healthy habits like a nutritious diet, exercise, and sufficient sleep increases your odds of living longer. This gives you more time to spend on meaningful and enjoyable pursuits. Furthermore, maintaining a healthy body and mind will drastically improve your mood, empowering you to accomplish more in practically every other aspect of your life.
Tip #2: Focus on Increasing Your Potential Impact on the World
Once you recognize that your time on Earth is limited, how do you get the most out of the time you have?
According to Bartlett, you can maximize your impact on the world by building up certain assets in a particular order. First, focus on acquiring knowledge and developing your skills. This will make you increasingly valuable to others, giving you the leverage you need to (over time) forge connections with people willing to help you, accumulate capital, and establish a reputation as someone capable of great things. This reputation will make it easier for you to gain even more connections and capital, empowering you to make a sizable difference in the world.
For example, you might start out as a world-class programmer, then use those skills to connect with other talented technical workers and attract the attention of investors to fund your product ideas. Eventually, you’ll work on enough high-profile projects that all kinds of people will clamor to work with you on any project you think will change the world.
Bartlett warns that attempting to shortcut this process by prioritizing connections, capital, or reputation right away is a recipe for failure. If you lack the necessary knowledge and skills, any lucky breaks in connections, capital, or reputation will be short-lived and unsustainable.
For instance, imagine a musician suddenly gains industry connections, a record deal, and worldwide fame after starring in a viral video. If they lack musical skills and an understanding of what makes a song compelling, they won’t be able to create music that continues resonating with listeners, and they’ll quickly fade back into obscurity.
Discover Where Your Skills Are in Demand
Although Bartlett recommends building up valuable knowledge and skills, he also argues that no knowledge or skills are inherently valuable; rather, their worth is determined by the market in which you use them. Thus, you can greatly increase the demand for your expertise (and accelerate your potential impact on the world) by deploying your knowledge and skills in an industry where they’re less common or can generate more value. For example, a talented graphic designer could accelerate their career by specializing in an emerging field like virtual reality user interfaces.
Tip #3: Seek Positive Stress
There’s a lot you have to do if you want to maximize your potential impact. Bartlett notes that high-stakes pursuits are inherently stressful. However, he asserts that stress doesn’t have to be bad—on the contrary, it can be motivating, empowering, and even pleasant.
Bartlett argues that as long as the source of your stress is a meaningful challenge you’ve chosen to pursue, it’s possible to experience it as a positive, energizing force that sharpens your mind and improves your chance of success. To do this, all you need to do is notice that you’re stressed, then remind yourself that it’s part of the meaningful purpose you’ve chosen.
Tip #4: Strengthen Your Self-Concept
According to Bartlett, one major influence on the way you interpret stress—as well as almost everything else in your life—is your self-concept. This includes your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings about who you are and what you’re capable of. An empowering self-concept is essential to build the resilience you need to overcome major challenges.
Unfortunately, negative cultural influences can have a significant negative impact on your self-concept, particularly if you’re a member of a marginalized group. In particular, widely held stereotypical beliefs can infect your self-concept, shaking your confidence and making it easier for setbacks to leave you demoralized.
To combat these negative influences and develop a strong, positive self-concept, Bartlett recommends focusing on taking actions that align with the type of person you want to become. Every choice you make serves as evidence to yourself about who you are and what you’re capable of. The more you act like a strong, resilient person, the more you believe you are one, and the stronger your self-concept becomes. This makes you more confident, which makes it easier to push through obstacles, creating a virtuous cycle in which the small steps you take toward your goals give you the strength you need to take bigger steps.
How to Run a Successful Business
Now that you’ve set some major life goals and internalized the right mindset, Bartlett explains how to put them into practice by building a thriving business. Here are four of his tips for developing an organization that’s optimized for rapid innovation and prolonged success.
Tip #1: Encourage Employees to Experiment and Learn From Their Mistakes
Bartlett argues that experimentation should be a core component of any successful business strategy. Even if many of these experiments fail, every mistake provides crucial information that can inform future experiments and decisions. Ultimately, it only takes one wildly successful experiment to pay off the sunk cost of all the other failed experiments a thousandfold. For example, imagine a restaurant chain gives each location the freedom to add local specials to the menu. Most flop, but a few become hit dishes that are rolled out nationwide, driving massive sales growth.
Encouraging your employees to fail isn’t enough—design your company from the ground up to support frequent experimentation and mistakes. To do this:
- Make project teams as small as possible so they can organize themselves and make decisions quickly.
- Give these teams greater autonomy and access to resources.
- Streamline approval processes for experimental projects—especially for those that are low-risk and easily reversible.
- Measure how much employees are experimenting, and reward those who experiment the most with public recognition or promotions to management roles. (Promoting your most innovative workers will also encourage their teams to be more experimental.)
Tip #2: Focus on Tiny Upgrades
Businesses that conduct frequent experiments often reap the reward of huge groundbreaking innovations, but Bartlett also contends that innovations don’t have to be big and groundbreaking to radically improve your business. Rather, a multitude of tiny upgrades can achieve big results over time. For example, an online marketplace may run thousands of small A/B tests to determine the effect of subtle design changes on user behavior. Over time, these tiny changes result in an irresistible website that gives the company a huge competitive advantage.
Bartlett insists that, if you build your company’s culture around continuous tiny upgrades, eventually you’ll have a world-class business.
Likewise, Bartlett asserts that ignoring small details has the opposite effect: If you ignore little problems, their consequences will add up over time and cause major damage to your business. For example, a software company that dismisses every minor bug and user complaint as trivial will alienate its user base over time as the product becomes increasingly unusable.
Tiny Upgrades Are Motivating
Furthermore, Bartlett emphasizes that tiny upgrades serve as a powerful source of motivation for your team. As long as your employees feel like they’re successfully moving toward a goal, they’ll be motivated to keep going, even if progress is slow.
Tip #3: Constantly Predict What Could Go Wrong
We’ve established that many companies fail because they overlook countless tiny flaws—but surprisingly, a good number of companies also fail because they overlook enormous flaws. According to Bartlett, people subconsciously push away thoughts and feelings about bad things that could happen because thinking about them is so unpleasant. This means that when you’re running a business, your first instinct would be to avoid thinking about potential ways your company could fail and ignore any evidence that it has major flaws.
Bartlett recommends regularly conducting premortems to compensate for this bias toward denial. A premortem is a proactive analysis of a business strategy’s potential flaws—as opposed to a postmortem, which is an analysis you conduct after a strategy has already failed.
First, imagine in detail a future in which your strategy has failed. Then, come up with as many explanations as you can for why it failed. Finally, adjust your strategy to make this negative future less likely, and come up with backup plans to reduce the potential downsides of negative outcomes. The premortem is most effective when you walk many relevant team members through this process together, allowing them to contribute insights.
Tip #4: Be Humble Enough to Hire People Better Than You
According to Bartlett, to build a successful business, you don’t need to master a vast range of skills. More than anything else, you need to be good at identifying, hiring, and retaining people with the skills you need. No matter how smart or capable you are, your business will be constrained by the limits of your knowledge, skills, and time. The only way to break through those constraints is by surrounding yourself with team members who shore up your weaknesses and expand your capabilities.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of overestimating the impact their skills and expertise have on whether their businesses succeed or fail. Consequently, they fail to invest enough effort in hiring the right people. Accept that you’re not as essential to your business’s success as you’d like to be, and focus your efforts on assembling the highest quality team you can. Additionally, make sure you create a working environment that allows them to do their best work.
How to Manage Productive Teams
We’ve established that the success of your business rests in large part on your talented workers—but how do you nurture these talents and unlock your team’s full potential? Here are two of Bartlett’s tips on how to build a productive team culture and coach individual workers to do their best work.
Tip #1: Establish a Fanatical Culture, and Then Transition to a Supportive Culture
Bartlett contends that organizational culture—the collective working habits and underlying philosophy of your team—determines the quality of your team’s work and, ultimately, your business’s success or failure. However, the ideal culture differs depending on what stage in its lifespan your business is in.
When launching a new business, encourage your core team to fanatically prioritize the company’s success above all else. Intense devotion and single-minded focus are required to get a new business up and running. In this stage, treat your company like a cult: Make your employees feel like they’re all a part of the same special group that’s going to change the world. Position yourself as a visionary leader for whom failure is impossible so they can get excited to follow you.
Bartlett warns that, although this kind of fanatical culture is effective at building momentum quickly, it’s impossible to maintain forever. People can only wholly devote their lives to a mission for so long before they get burnt out. For this reason, once your company is well-established, allow your culture to mature into one that’s more supportive of employees’ long-term well-being and loyalty. Keep your team motivated and engaged over the course of years by giving them autonomy over their work and protecting them from excessive emotional stress—while ensuring that they’re still doing work they can be proud of.
How to Shape Your Team’s Culture
Bartlett explains how to nurture your desired culture in your organization: Articulate the fundamental values that define your organization (at this stage), and ensure that they’re woven into every one of its operational protocols and routines. For instance, the CEO of a tech startup might adopt the mantra of “victory requires speed” and center the organization on rapid innovation. The company requires all meetings to be held standing up to ensure they’re as short and efficient as possible, and it crowns one employee every day as the “Momentum Maker” to recognize those who make the most rapid progress in a single day.
According to Bartlett, another way to shape your team’s culture is to identify employees who epitomize the culture you want to see and promote them to managerial positions so they can exert a stronger positive influence on other team members.
Bartlett also recommends firing employees who are consistently unwilling to adapt to your desired culture. Although firing people is unpleasant, it’s necessary: Negative attitudes and habits spread easily, and if you don’t remove them, it’ll prevent many of your other employees from reaching their full potential.
Tip #2: Coach Every Individual Differently
Although the right culture can empower all your employees, it takes a more hands-on approach to maximize their individual potential. Bartlett states that every member of your team has unique personality quirks, motivations, and weaknesses. Thus, there’s no single coaching method that will inspire and motivate everyone in the same way. To be a great manager, you must know your team members at a deep, personal level and customize your management style to bring out their unique potential.
This kind of individualized management demands emotional intelligence more than anything else. Study what causes your team members to feel the way they do and discover ways to evoke positive, productive emotions.
For example, you may notice that one of your workers is remarkably efficient when given specific instructions, but they tend to get anxious when asked to engage in open-ended problem-solving. For this reason, you take extra time to break down complex projects into step-by-step tasks for them. This way, they feel confident that they’ll be able to do their work correctly and effectively.
How to Build an Irresistible Brand Image
Finally, Bartlett asserts that even the most well-run business will fail if consumers aren’t excited about its offerings. Here are his tips for crafting a brand image that attracts attention and makes your product or service irresistible.
Tip #1: Create Value Through Presentation
Bartlett argues that the way you package and present your product or service can make a world of difference in how valuable consumers believe it is. People typically don’t evaluate anything in a purely logical way—they use irrational mental shortcuts to determine how much they want something. This means that, often, small tweaks in presentation or design are enough to transform your brand image. For instance, a high-end vodka brand might exclusively sell their liquor in small bottles to make each drop seem more precious.
Present your product or service in a way that perfectly matches the idea of what a high-quality version should look like, and avoid adding anything that would detract from this narrative, even if it would technically make the product or service more valuable. For example, a high-end earbud brand might have discovered a way to make music sound crystal clear using extremely small, convenient earbuds. However, they choose to build their earbuds much larger because consumers assume that larger earbuds have better sound quality.
Tip #2: Stand Out From the Crowd
According to Bartlett, truly successful marketing does more than present a product or service as valuable—it’s so unusual and striking that it demands attention. People naturally get used to—and subconsciously ignore—the types of brands and marketing messages that they’ve repeatedly encountered in the past. This means that you need to find unique, attention-grabbing ways to advertise and present your brand.
Furthermore, Bartlett insists that the most engaging and shareable marketing messages are unusual in a way that’s impractical and ridiculous. Most companies rarely waste their marketing budgets on goofy messages, publicity stunts, or silly product features—so if you do, you’ll stand out. Ridiculous investments like this will make media outlets and consumers excited to talk about your brand online, giving you free word-of-mouth advertising.
For example, a car wash might enact a policy in which they’ll wash your car for free if you bring in a photo of you with a celebrity. They create a huge wall to display all these photos with a large banner that reads, “Friends of celebrities wash their cars here.” This memorable rule gets people talking about the car wash and reinforces the brand message that it’s a high-end, celebrity-worthy service.
Although unusual brands attract attention, your marketing shouldn’t be so unusual that it’s inconceivable. Generally, people prefer to engage with concepts that are somewhat recognizable, so your goal is to find the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty. Trends in marketing are always coming and going, so you need to be constantly ahead of the curve: Create marketing campaigns that are fresh yet understandable, and drop them before they become so commonplace that consumers ignore them.
