30 Of The Best Quotes From The Diary Of A CEO

Image of my copy packed with notes

Being a fan of his podcast, I recently read The Diary Of A CEO by Steven Bartlett. It is a book packed with invaluable insights to be successful in business and life. Here are 30 of the best quotes from Steven Bartlett’s book:

1. “In the midst of a negotiation, debate or heated argument try to remember that the key to changing someone’s mind is finding a shared belief or motive that will keep their brain open to your point of view.”
2. “If you want to create positive behaviour, don’t make statements, ask binary yes or no questions. People are more likely to answer ‘yes’ if it will bring them closer to who they want to be, and once they anwer ‘yes’, that yes is more likely to come true.” — So if you want to establish a habit of going to the gym, don’t tell yourself: ‘I am going to the gym today.’ Instead ask yourself: ‘Am I going to the gym today?’
3. “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. And if you do — only then will you actually have what it takes to overcome the challenges of life — a robust, positive, evidence-based self-story.”
4. “Don’t focus on stopping smoking, don’t fight it; focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with.”
5. “Normality is ignored, absurdity sells.”
6. “In order to be heard, tell stories in an unrepetitive, unfiltered and unconventional way.”
7. “Customers will judge their entire experience on just two moments — the best (or worst) part. and the end.” — This is called the peak-end rule
8. “It’s nearly always cheaper, easier and more effective to invest in perception than in reality.” — This is called a psychological moonshot which is a relatively small investment that drastically improves the perception of something.
9. “The majority of people would choose a wait time that was long — if they’re able to do something during the wait — over a short wait time in which they’re not able to keep themselves busy. Keeping your customer busy can improve customer happiness, retention and conversion by more than 25 percent!”
10. “What motivates us most is how close we are to achieving a goal: we work faster the closer we are to success.”
11. “Making things easier isn’t necessarily the path to a psychological moonshot, sometimes you have to do the opposite: increase friction, wait times and inconvenience, to achieve the same increase in perceived value.” — One example of this is that Red Bull delivers on its psychological expectation of enhancing your performance and ‘giving you wings’ by intentionally making it taste bad. Because it tastes more like medicine than a pleasant frizzy drink, they’ve convinced their customers that it’s packed with powerful, effective chemicals. Sometimes your customers will want your product more if you make their experience worse.
12. “A job title with the word ‘sales’ in it, primes the people you contact to believe you’re going to pester them to buy something they don’t want — conversely, the framing of the word ‘partner’ suggests the person is on your team.”
13. “The endowment effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overvalue an item simpy because they own it, regardless of its objective value.”
14. “The first five seconds are do or die for any great story. You must aggressively, passionately and provocatively design those first five seconds to be thumb-stoppingly compelling, annoyingly magnetic or emotionally engaging.”
15. “Most decisions are changeable and reversible. This is called a Type-2 decision. If you make a sub-optimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to deal with the consequences for that long. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.”
16. “You don’t have to get to 100 percent certainty on your big decisions, get to 51 percent, 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. Perfect decisions only exist in hindsight”
17. “People who experienced a lot of stress but did not see it as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, analysis showed that they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, even including people who had reported experiencing relatively little stress.”
18. “Participants who viewed stress as beneficial had a similar cardiovascular profile to people who were experiencing moments of joy and courage. People who mentally reframe anxiety as excitement can improve their performance in tasks such as sales, negotiating and public speaking.”
19. “Pressure we view as voluntary, meaningful and high in autonomy is received as a privilege. Conversely, compulsory, meaningless, low-autonomy pressure feels more like psychological pain.”
20. “Every major stressful life experience increased an adult’s risk of death by 30 percent — unless they then spent a significant amount of time connecting with loved ones and their immediate community. Then, there was no increase to the risk of death.”
21. “People will assess the worth of your skill based on how much value they believe it can generate for them.”
22. “Context is key — you can significantly boost your earning potential by offering the same skills to a different industry.”
23. “To be considered the best in your industry, you don’t need to be the best at any one thing. You need to be good at a variety of complementary and rare skills your industry values and that your competitors lack.”
24. “By acknowledging our finite nature, we can prioritise what truly matters, shed what doesn’t and foster the calm sense of urgency that helps us focus on living more fully, authentically and in line with our most important values.”
25. “People who undergo these ‘death reflection’ execises report greater life satisfaction, a stronger desire to spend time with loved ones, an increase in motivation to achieve meaningful goals, increased kindness, increased generosity and a greater willingness to cooperate with others, They also reported lower levels of anxiety and stress compared to a control group.”
26. “Discipline = the value of the goal + the reward of the pursuit - the cost of the pursuit”
27. “If your long-term discipline is to be sustainable, you must do everything you can to limit the psychological friction and material hurdles that are associated with the pursuit of your goal”
28. “You are a recruitment company — that’s your priority, and founders that realise this, build world-changing companies.”
29. “The key to overcoming that discomfort and preventing procrastination is to ‘smallify’ the task into easy, achievable micro-goals.”
30. “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.”

Want to read the full book? Purchase The Diary Of A CEO on Amazon (I can earn a commission when you purchase the book via this link)

Thank you for reading my article! Let me know if you learned something and I would love to hear your thoughts on The Diary Of A CEO. Follow me for more self-improvement/business-related content. If you would like to support my work you can buy me a coffee here: https://buymeacoffee.com/jortvanmeenen