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These 8 Laws From This Book Changed My Life

2023-09-05 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali, Arun Maini · recording, 18:33 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Work and career, Goals, purpose and life design, Health, sleep and habits, Productivity and time, Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode Ali goes through his eight favourite laws from Steven Bartlett's book The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life, from filling the five buckets in order and prioritising health to out-failing the competition, the pre-mortem and the discipline equation, and says how he applies each.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: eight favourite laws from The Diary of a CEO

  • ★★ In this Book Club episode Ali shares his eight favourite lessons from Steven Bartlett's book The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life, which he loved. — 00:00:00 · Book Club
  • ★ Ali calls Steven Bartlett an insanely successful entrepreneur and the host of the podcast The Diary of a CEO. — 00:00:00

00:00:35 — Fill your five buckets in the right order

  • ★★★ Ali relays Steven Bartlett's law of the five buckets: professional success means filling knowledge, skills, network, resources and reputation, and crucially filling them in that order. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Following the five buckets, Ali says that early in your career you should generally prioritise a job that teaches you knowledge and skills over one that gives resources, reputation or network. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett 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 can do. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali's personal lesson from the five buckets is the profound importance of spending time every week, or maybe even every day, investing in his own knowledge and skills. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ When journaling, Ali asks himself powerful questions that force him to think, such as what he really wants, what he would do if he knew he wouldn't fail, and how $100 million would change how he spends his time. — 00:02:40

00:02:48 — Ask, don't tell: the question/behaviour effect

  • ★ Ali also asks his powerful questions of friends in mini business or life coaching sessions. — 00:03:17
  • ★★★ Applying the question-behaviour effect, Ali plans his day with questions instead of statements: he asks "Will I go to the gym today?", since answering yes makes you more likely to do it than telling yourself you will. — 00:03:46
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett writes that a yes-or-no question leaves no wiggle room to deceive yourself and forces you to commit one way or the other. — 00:04:15

00:04:23 — Always prioritise your first foundation

  • ★★ Warren Buffett (quoted): In a talk to students retold in Bartlett's book, Warren Buffett compares mind and body to a car that must last a lifetime: you get only one of each, so you must take care of them now. — 00:05:13
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett's law of the first foundation, as Ali relays it, says your health is your first foundation. — 00:05:13
  • ★★★ Ali says just reading and highlighting a self-help book is reading for entertainment, so when a book, video or podcast inspires him he tries his best to act on it there and then. — 00:05:44
  • ★★★ Realising from the first-foundation law that he was not prioritising his health, Ali opened his calendar at once to fit in three gym sessions every week. — 00:05:44
  • ★★ To take flexibility and mobility more seriously, Ali has downloaded the app Pliability and most nights does its 20-minute stretching routine, a nice way to wind down. — 00:06:13
  • ★★ Ali has restarted sessions with a personal trainer three times a week; booking and paying in advance adds a nudge and accountability that forces him to get to the gym. — 00:06:13
  • ★★ Ali says everyone he has spoken to who has a personal trainer calls it a very ROI-positive expense, and if you struggle to look after your health, money invested in it pays more dividends than anything else. — 00:06:13
  • ★★★ Going to the gym three times a week is not yet a habit Ali enjoys, so, in the spirit of his book Feel-Good Productivity, he asks his personal trainer to motivate him and make it fun, which makes him far more likely to go. — 00:06:42 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:07:21 — Skillshare sponsor read

  • ★★ Ali sees a lot of value in the 80/20 rule, focusing on the 20% of inputs that give 80% of the outputs, but also in its opposite, Bartlett's law that you must sweat the small stuff. — 00:08:19

00:08:33 — You must sweat the small stuff

  • ★★ Ali says Steven Bartlett's podcast The Diary of a CEO has grown an insane amount, in certain months of 2023 even faster than Joe Rogan. — 00:08:48
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett writes that the secret of his podcast's growth is that his team sweats the small stuff more than any team he has met, obsessing over thousands of details most people would dismiss. — 00:08:48
  • ★★ Arun Maini (Mrwhosetheboss), whom Ali interviewed, obsesses over every detail of his videos: he analyses YouTube analytics and scripts word for word, checking each script against three target viewers. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Arun Maini says he spends probably 50 to 80 hours scripting each video, about three and a half days of 14-hour days. (hedged) — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Ali was mind-blown by Arun Maini's scripting time, which he calls the pure definition of sweating the small stuff and the complete opposite of the 80/20 principle. — 00:09:43
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett writes that in the Japanese philosophy of kaizen innovation is incremental: making small things better in small ways everywhere you can, every day. — 00:09:43
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers to consider one area of life, such as health, work or relationships, that would benefit from minor improvements every single day. — 00:10:12
  • ★★ Ali relays Bartlett's law that you must lean into bizarre behaviour: when faced with ideas, situations or information you don't understand, lean in rather than out. — 00:10:41

00:11:00 — You must lean into bizarre behaviour

  • ★★ Ali says people who lean out of change such as AI, out of fear and worry, choose not to find out more and so don't take advantage of the new technology. — 00:11:10
  • ★★★ When someone else's success seems bizarre to Ali, such as a YouTube channel blowing up for no reason he can see, he tries to lean in and ask with humility what makes it popular and what he can learn. — 00:12:13
  • ★★ Ali says trying to understand what is going on in the world without overly judging it makes you far more likely to have an edge over the competition. — 00:12:13
  • ★★ Ali says his favourite way of leaning in when he does not understand something is to read a book, or a book summary, about it. — 00:12:13
  • ★★ Ali relays Bartlett's law that you must out-fail the competition: in business you get ahead by running more experiments than your competitors. — 00:12:42
  • ★★ Ali does not vibe with the competitive side of out-failing: he likes to think of competitors in business as collaborators, friends or colleagues. — 00:12:42
  • ★★★ Ali loves the idea of failing, which he does not even think of as failing but as experimenting. — 00:12:42

00:12:47 — You must out-fail the competition

  • ★★ Ali says that if we seek certainty in decisions such as which university, career or skill, we end up making no decisions at all and staying static. — 00:13:15
  • ★★ Barack Obama (quoted): Barack Obama said you don't need 100% certainty on big decisions: get to 51%, decide quickly and be at peace with deciding on the information you had. — 00:13:15
  • ★★★ Ali advises deciding on expected value, as poker players do: with imperfect information, ask whether making the decision a hundred times would on average come out positive, and if it is plus EV, take it. — 00:13:44
  • ★★ Some of the biggest decisions of Ali's life, such as starting a YouTube channel, were made under uncertainty on a plus-EV judgement. — 00:13:44
  • ★★★ Ali says most decisions that take us out of our comfort zone into new territory are generally plus EV, opening us to randomness, optionality and serendipity. — 00:14:14

  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): Steven Bartlett ends the chapter: failure equals feedback, feedback equals knowledge, knowledge equals power, so failure gives you power. — 00:14:14

    “Failure equals feedback. Feedback equals knowledge. Knowledge equals power. Therefore, failure gives you power.”

  • ★★★ Ali relays Bartlett's law of negative manifestation, the same idea as his own crystal ball method: a pre-mortem on big decisions, imagining the plan has failed and asking why it will fail. — 00:15:03

  • ★★★ For quitting your job to start a business, Ali suggests projecting yourself three months ahead, imagining it has not worked and you are back in your job, and naming the top three reasons it failed. — 00:15:03

00:15:05 — The power of negative manifestation

  • ★★ Ali retells that Steven Bartlett, after investing several hundred thousand dollars, perhaps up to a million, in a planned podcast network, asked his team why it might fail and decided not to do it. (hedged) — 00:16:02
  • ★★★ Ali slightly disagrees with Bartlett that discipline is the absolute key: as in his book, he thinks making things feel more enjoyable, meaningful and fulfilling is a more certain path. — 00:16:02 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:16:42 — The discipline equation

  • ★★★ Ali likes Bartlett's discipline equation, discipline equals the value of the goal plus the reward of the pursuit minus the cost of the pursuit, as a useful model though he disputes it as a definition. — 00:16:52

    “discipline is the value of the goal plus the reward of the pursuit minus the cost of the pursuit”

  • ★★★ To be more disciplined about what matters, Ali advises raising the value of the goal (your reason why), raising the reward of the pursuit by making it fun, and reducing its cost by making it feel less bad. — 00:17:21

  • ★★ Ali never went to a gym 20 minutes away; a less nice one five minutes away makes the gym a one-hour trip instead of two, far easier to fit into his day. — 00:17:50

00:18:19 — Sign-off and a list of books to read in 2023

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Asked by a viewer whether there will be an audio version, Ali says he is recording the audiobook of Feel-Good Productivity next week (week of 11 September 2023). — creator comment · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

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Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: discipline equation · expected value · five buckets · Steven Bartlett · The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life

Also: People: Arun Maini · Barack Obama · Joe Rogan · Warren Buffett

Projects: Book Club

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · The Diary of a CEO

Concepts: 80/20 rule · artificial intelligence · crystal ball method · discipline · first foundation · kaizen · optionality · question-behaviour effect

Products: Pliability

Also centred on expected value: How I Stopped Overthinking

Also centred on Steven Bartlett: I was an imposter for a day...here's what I learned.

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