The 51% Rule (and 3 More Strategies to Think Like a Millionaire) with Steven Bartlett

In Happy Sexy Millionaire, Steven Bartlett calls out the myth that you can find happiness, love, and wealth if you just follow three simple steps and a hack or two. Bartlett says the internet, social media, and algorithms have dazzled us into believing that we can have the perfect life if we just chase the “right” dreams—a lie that pulls us off the path of genuine contentment, meaning, and fulfillment.

Bartlett, a social media mogul and public speaker, was born in Botswana to a Nigerian mother and British father and raised in a predominantly white area in England. A university dropout, once so poor that he scavenged for food, Bartlett founded the successful internet company Social Chain at age 21 and was by all objective accounts “living the dream.” But when wealth and fame didn’t bring him happiness, Bartlett reevaluated his priorities. He wrote Happy Sexy Millionaire to warn against chasing false idols and encourage others to find contentment and success by being themselves and doing what has meaning to them.

In How Will You Measure Your Life? business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen shows how economic theories that help businesses succeed can also help individuals make better life decisions. He presents theories and business case studies that show you pitfalls to avoid (such as marginal thinking and outsourcing your parenting), and also how to build a career that makes you happy, how to deepen your relationships with your spouse and children, and how to live with integrity. Together, they offer a philosophy for living a fulfilling life.

If you want to accomplish anything on a large scale, you have to learn to lead a team. What makes leadership difficult, however, is the fact that every quality of a good leader becomes a hindrance when taken to the extreme: At a certain point, courage, discipline, and empathy all become deficiencies like recklessness, rigidness, and emotional paralysis. Thus, leadership requires a delicate balance of various dichotomies: You must be compassionate yet pragmatic, humble yet confident, bold yet cautious. The Dichotomy of Leadership teaches you to master such dichotomies.

As former Navy SEAL commanders and corporate leadership consultants, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin have extensive hands-on leadership experience. In this guide, we’ll explain where Willink and Babin’s expertise overlaps with the ideas of other popular writers on leadership, such as Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules) and Ray Dalio (Principles). We’ll also offer actionable ways to put the authors’ ideas into action, whether you’re leading a team of professionals or just looking to discipline yourself.

Decision-making skills play a key role in every part of life, from professional advancement to personal relationships. Therefore, the ability to pick the best options available can measurably improve your career, family life, and even happiness. But when you’re in the moment, it can be hard to know how to approach a major decision.

In our master guide to making better decisions, we’ll cover advice on decision-making from popular science and psychology authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive). We’ll arrange their views into concrete principles you can use to analyze a decision, approach it from an informed perspective, and make your decision objectively. We’ll also explain how each of these strategies helps to improve your decision-making process.

Every decision carries risk. We don’t always think in terms of risk, and maybe that’s why we’re prone to making irrational decisions. But what if we worked on keeping risk at the forefront of our minds?

Annie Duke discusses how her decades-long poker career helped her develop decision-making strategies based on the idea that all decisions are bets. Being immersed in the game enabled her to observe how people make decisions in a setting where every choice leads to a clear outcome—winning or losing money. That’s what a bet is: a decision with quantifiable risk. In our guide to Thinking in Bets, you’ll find out how to work around your biases, objectively evaluate your beliefs, learn from your past, and ultimately get better at making good decisions.