Captain (0:01)

Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Race the sails.

Omar Zenhom (0:05)

Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.

Captain (0:08)

Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?

Stephen Bartlett (0:12)

Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions apply. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Omar Zenhom (0:53)

Of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show, helping you become a better entrepreneur with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is a must read episode. On our must read episodes, I share with you a book that that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights, and why you should read it too. Today's must read is the Diary of a CEO by Stephen Bartlett. This is a book I've heard about for about 18 months now. And usually when I hear about a book that's quite successful, that's quite popular, I pick it up quickly. But for some reason it didn't hit my reading list. But I started to get to know Stephen and his work through his podcast and his YouTube channel. So I decided to pick up the book and move it up the queue. And boy, am I glad I did. This is one of my favorite books of 2023 and I'll tell you why in today's lesson. This is the book that you will read and reread because of all the amazing gems he drops in the book. What kinds of gems? Well, gems like what to focus on, how to get people to see your perspective and get on your side, how to stand out from the crowd, how to make sure your business stands for something, and much, much more that I'll get into in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. At the start of this book The Diary of a CEO Stephen Bartlett shares that the best way to learn is to teach. And you could see this book as a collection of things that Stephen Bartlett learned along the way as a CEO from other experts, from other industry leaders and his experience, and shares it in a single volume. It's one of the best compilation of life and business advice I've seen in a long time. And as you know, I read a lot of books. I read about 50 books a year. Many of those books don't make it as a must read on this podcast. This book does because it's fantastic. It's actually a really, really great read. I want to share with you some of my top takeaways and why you should read it too. Let's get into it. One of the strongest points that he makes in the book is that you need to prioritize certain things in your life. You should see your life as a bunch of stuff sitting on a table. Some of the stuff on the table might be your relationships, especially your relationship with your significant other. Other things on the table might be your, your career, it might be your hobbies. We all have different priorities in our life that sit on this table. But then he says that table that all these things sit on is actually your health, your mental and physical health. Meaning if you remove the table, then everything drops to the ground. If you don't have your health, you don't have anything. It's impossible for you to actually do anything if you don't have your health. Think about it. If you got hospitalized tomorrow, it's going to be very hard for you to run your business. It's going to be very hard for you to keep your relationships or do the things you love you. You might prioritize travel, forget that you're better at it. And I love this illustration because it really shows you, hey, you got to prioritize your health, your mental health, your physical health. I would include your spiritual health. Doesn't matter what you believe in. You got to be at peace with yourself so that you can have a content life. We say this, we know this, but do we actually do something about it? Do we actually work out every day? Do we actually eat right? Do we actually prioritize getting some sun? Do we actually reduce our stress levels? Do we do things that make us laugh? Do we keep things away from us that give us anxiety and stress? This is such an important point he makes, and I'm glad he makes it early on in the book because all the advice he gives won't really matter if you don't prioritize your health because if your health fails you, you're not gonna be able to do much in your life. You're not gonna be able to accomplish much. You're not gonna be able to implement the advice. Now, I didn't mention this from the top, but this book is a compilation of what he calls laws. The book has 33 laws. And one of my favorite laws in the book is law number three, you must never disagree. And this is all about how do you get people to see your perspective? How do you get people on your side? How do you convince somebody of your arguments or what you believe in so that you can move a project forward, or get them to sign on the dotted line or agree with what you're saying in an argument? Well, one of the things he recommends is you should never disagree. Often when we start a discussion with saying I disagree, or you point out the differences between you and the other person, it puts a ball, and there's an unlikely chance that they'll turn around and agree with you later on. It's better for you to start with what you have in common. Like, I agree with what you said here, there, and I think that's a strong point. I would add xyz, and this is where you would probably be the point of difference that you want to convey. I've learned this before, and this comes from the days of theater, the idea of yes and where when people are doing improv, you never say no, you just say yes, and you build upon what people have suggested or said. And this is such a strong point because we need to convince people to do things constantly as CEOs, as company leaders, as innovators. Law number seven is never compromise your self story. Your self story is the story you tell yourself. It's probably the strongest story, the strongest belief we have. And you can make your story whatever you wanted to make it. If you want to tell yourself, I'm a winner, I don't quit, then you should never compromise that story. Meaning if you're at the gym and you're doing reps, say for example, you got to do 10 reps of the set and you're on rep 8, and you can't do much more. You feel like just putting the weight down, don't put down that weight because your self story says you don't quit. So you got to prove to yourself constantly that you don't quit. Put up those last two reps. The little things matter because it contributes or it goes against your self story and you can change your self story based on your actions and what you hold. It could be something as simple as I'm always on time. If you're always on time, then you got to make sure anytime you're going to an appointment that you leave early. Because if you're late, you're not always on time. In this chapter in the audiobook, he shares clips from his own podcast where he interviews successful athletes like this one boxer who shares this crazy, crazy story about how he didn't want to change his self story and kept on going. I'll let you check that out in the audiobook, which is a great version of this book. I highly recommend it. In chapter 12, he advises, you must piss people off. This one's a tough one for a lot of people. If you don't like confrontation, you will not make a great business, you will not make a great brand, you will not make a great CEO because it requires you to do the tough stuff, to say the tough stuff, do the things that might upset people. Especially if you're trying to build a brand, he says. It's better for you to offend 80% of the people, but really resonate with 20% of the people. Those people are going to be your loyal fans. They're going to absolutely love you. They're going to buy everything you offer. The worst thing is to be vanilla is to have no reaction. It's better for people to love you, hate you, but nothing in between because that's not a strong emotion. That's an easy way for you to be ignored. And that's the worst thing that can happen in business or marketing. So be willing to ruffle some feathers. It's okay, not everybody has to love you. Level number 14 talks about friction can be value. This chapter is mind boggling and yet so provocative. I love it. Talks about sometimes your product can be improved by making it more difficult or less intuitive than it should be. I know this sounds like it makes no logical sense, but here are some examples. Booking sites like booking.com and kayak used to give you results in less than a second, but people didn't believe they're actually getting you accurate results or that it would search all these different sites in just a fraction of a second. So Kayak and these other search sites said we could actually make this experience worse than we want it to to prove it's working. So it actually delays the results on purpose and says, hey, we're searching these sites and these sites and it'll have prices kind of come down from a high price point as it's loading the results, it could load the results a whole lot faster, but it's doing it slowly so that the viewer believes it's working. The point that this chapter is making is that human beings don't make any sense. They often are not logical creatures. And you have to understand that sometimes that minty fresh taste in toothpaste has nothing to do with the cleanliness of your teeth. They put that ingredient in the toothpaste to make you feel like something's happening, like it feels cleaner. Same thing with fabric fresheners like Febreze. When it first came out, it was odorless, but people felt like this is not really doing anything. So they added this fresh scent to make people feel like, hey, Febreze is doing something. Law number 16 is called use Goldilocks to your advantage. And this is the idea of the Goldilocks effect, where we only see value in comparison to something else. This is why pricing experts say that you should anchor prices to other prices, meaning you should have tiers. You should never just have one price, because that one price as a standalone doesn't really mean much if it doesn't have other prices to compare it to. For example, a Basic, Pro, and Ultra package, all three with different prices, all three with incrementally higher prices. The basic might be $100, the Pro might be $150, and the Ultra might be $300. And now, all of a sudden, the Pro doesn't seem that much. Actually seems like great value. A lot of people believe, hey, the middle one is not the worst one, but it's not the extravagant one either. So it actually allows you to charge more and give more value to your products and service just by having those price anchorings. Chapter 16 goes deep on this topic.