The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life

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 that your industry values and that your competitors lack.

This thought experiment and the corresponding survey reveal a fundamental truth about the nature of all of our beliefs: the things you believe are fundamentally based on some form of primary evidence. However, scientific studies have repeatedly proved that whether that evidence is objectively true or false doesn’t actually matter – we subjectively

If the culture is strong, new people will become like the culture. If the culture is weak, the culture will become like the new people.

‘It helps this channel more than you know, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests get.’ (This is a promise of a future reward – if you subscribe, you’ll be rewarded with bigger guests.)

The key, as I’ve witnessed in all of my own companies, clients and case studies, is to make project teams as small as they can possibly be, to give them more authority, trust and access to resources when making decisions, and to cut back all sign-off processes, especially when a team is seeking to make a Type 2 – low-consequence, reversible – decis

‘I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they’ve never had a chance to do that before and they don’t want to work with B and C players. And so it becomes self-policing, and they only want to hire more A players. And

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 answer ‘yes’, that yes is more likely to come true.

Psychological moonshots prove that it’s nearly always cheaper, easier and more effective to invest in perception than reality.

Critically, the person who implements the idea has to be the one who had it in the first place. You can imagine how this principle alone alters the types of suggestions people make. A criticism is no longer an idea; ‘I hate the office music’ can’t be a suggestion, as under this principle every idea must be practical, productive and focused on a sol