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, 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, then 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.e. your skills.

Bucket number three is who you know, i.e. your network.

Bucket number four is what you have, i.e. your 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, et cetera, 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, and 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 our 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 $100 million 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.

They're questions that I like to ask to myself, but they're also questions I like to ask to 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 out 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 and 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, there'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 nonfiction 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 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, 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 gonna 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 to 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 wanna organise your life or your work or your studies, you might like to check out my complete beginner's guide to using Notion.

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And Skillshare can also help you level up in your career with lots of classes on marketing and UI and UX design.

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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 a 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 gonna 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 Diary of a 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 lots 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 that he's got in mind 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 you might've 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 so 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?

It 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.