These 8 Laws From This Book Changed My Life

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 of 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 and 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 eat your skills bucket number three is who you know I.E your network bucket number four is what you have i.eu 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 Etc 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 on 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 on 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 a hundred million dollars 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 the questions that I like to ask to myself but there are also questions I like to ask 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 on 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 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 they'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 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 non-fiction 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 to 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 of 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 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 going to 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 into 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 organize your life or your work or your studies you might like to check out my complete beginner's guide to using notion if you've been following the stuff with AI recently you might like to check out a brand new skillshare original by smittish mystery called make AI work for you which is all about beating creative block and skillshare can also help you level up in your career with lots of classes on marketing and UI and ux design and they've even got classes on how to be a freelancer along with some side hustle ideas as well so if you happen to be one of the first 1000 people to hit the link in the video description that will let you sign up for completely free one month trial of skillshare and during that time you can watch all of my classes you can check them all out you can do all the class projects but you can also browse the incredible library of other online classes available on skillshare 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 going to 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 DAR over 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 Mr who's the boss 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 a lot 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 he's got in mind in this 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 he might have 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 to 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 and 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 oh 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 want to check that out then check out the link in the video description or go to alibthal.com 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 want to 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 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 up 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 well where I'll see someone else's success that seems a bit bizarre to me I'd be like whoa that that YouTube channel is 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 it's just because the audience is weird or because of 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 stand 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 want to 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 favorite 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 service I've ever seen that summarizes books is called short form there'll be linked down in the video description if you want to check it out next we come to law number 21 you must out fail 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 out failing 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 going to 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 I think of it as experiments for example should I go for this University or that University this career or that career this subject to 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 going to 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 going to happen you have no idea how it's going to grow you have no idea whether it's even going to 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 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 going to come out better are you going to come out worse and generally most decisions that involve getting away from a comfort zone and going into a new territory unless it involves territory that's going to get us eaten by 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 for the power of negative manifestation call it the Crystal Ball Method 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 pre-mortem on big decisions that you're making now a pre-mortem 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 say you're imagining you want to 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 have 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 want to do this thing and that's the thing that Stephen talks about in the story he talks about how he was going to 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 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 going to 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've 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 a 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 this 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 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 how can I apply the discipline equation if you enjoyed this video 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 bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 720,005

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, motivational video, inspirational video, personal development, motivational speech, change your life, habits of success, laws of success, how to be successful, the diary of a ceo, steven bartlett, the diary of a ceo steven bartlett, the diary of a ceo book, the diary of a ceo podcast, how to become successful, business advice, life advice, laws of success for entrepreneurs, steven bartlett podcast, steven bartlett book, dragons den steven bartlett

Id: Y-d90cILIDk

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023