Happy Sexy Millionaire
Happy Sexy Millionaire: Unexpected Truths about Fulfilment, Love and Success by Steven Bartlett
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Today’s media narratives, social media fallacies and societal conventions are risking leading us down a miserable and unfulfilling path.
Our generation, the social media-obsessed, attentionless, pleasure-chasing, lost, instant-gratification led, mental health struggling generation - are obsessed with money, changing the world, being considered sexy and being happy.
We are enough and if we realise this, it creates real genuine ambition to pursue your greatest internal goals, for the sake of nothing more than fulfilment, satisfaction and enjoyment.
🎨 Impressions
This is an honest, unapologetic take on society's current narratives. Steven draws from his own experiences as a global leading CEO, shares stories from his personal life, and gives practical insights to help the reader not fall into societal traps and misguided dreams.
This book dismantles the most popular, unaddressed lies about happiness that we've been led to believe. Steven exposes the source of these lies, examine the incentives that fuel them and replaces them with a practical set of scientifically proven and unconventional ideas that will help you to live a truly fulfilled life, a life full of the love you seek and the success you deserve.
How I Discovered It
I have been waiting a long time to read this, from first listening to Steven's No. 1 podcast Diary of a CEO and also following his thought-provoking, insightful Insta page. It definitely didn’t disappoint.
Who Should Read It?
All millennials who are struggling to find their way and who are confused and conflicted by what they should be doing. This book provides an unapologetic, unconventional approach on how to live your fullest life. ✍️ My Top 5 Quotes
Maybe you’ve always been happy, but the world, social media and external comparisons have convinced you that you can’t possibly be.
The only worthwhile comparison is YOU yesterday vs YOU today. If you want to be happy, you have to focus on that.
Social media has made ‘perfect’ look normal so now ‘good’ has become disposable.
You'll never be defined, valued or measured by your car, bank balance, job title, followers or accomplishments.
You are not what happened to you. You are how you choose to handle it.
📒 Summary + Notes
This book is actually about fulfilment (happy), love (sexy) and success (millionaire).
Happiness is Now
Happiness and fulfilment are infinite games – where it is designed to continue to play and with the purpose of bringing more players into the game. You cannot win. Life is a perpetual, ongoing, infinite experience that only ceases when you die. Because it is constant, you have to play it without expectation of a finish line, without believing in a mountain top and without a ‘destination mindset.’
The great paradox of happiness: you have to call off the search to find everything you’ve been searching for.
No baby was born believing they weren’t enough – therefore it is societal brain washing, everywhere you look, for as long as you have lived that has worked tirelessly to convince you of the exact opposite – that you are not enough.
And now this toxic societal narrative is urging us to trade meaningfulness for material abundance, followers, likes, isolation and shallowness. There is a crisis of meaning in the Western world and it’s destroying our lives.
Contrasting
The perceived value of anything can change, compare an old Nokia phone to the new iPhones. The truth is that nothing in life has any intrinsic value without context.
Our judgement of the inherent value of things change as we determine the value of things relative to the circumstances than logical, rational terms. We have become accustomed to speeding up decisions but our assessments of the value of things have become irrational.
These short cut, comparison-orientated decisions that would have saved you from lions thousands of years ago in the context of the social media orientated world we live in, will inescapably present everyone being apparently prettier, stronger, sexier and happier than you, and will almost certainly make you unsatisfied.
Our Context
We think that looking at our idols is fun, entertaining and inspiring without realising the destructive mental cost of that ‘entertainment.’ A decision to follow fake influencers is an act of mental self-harm – maybe that is the greatest modern act of self-harm millennials unknowingly perpetrate on themselves.
As now we all have a fake self-construct and a false superficial context that we have built up around us to compete with. An unrealistic standard that has been created by us.
Our brains weren’t designed to deal with all this social noise or algorithms that feed us the prettiest, richest and smarted people every day.
Digital technology has the capacity to overwhelm our prehistoric brains by exploiting their biases, vulnerabilities and limitations in subconscious, invisible ways. We don’t see it happening, but the astronomical growth of anxiety and other mental health issues in the modern era suggests we’re feeling the consequences.
Make your context smaller, healthier and more real.
A Complete Life
There are so many social propagated fairy tales about how our lives are ‘supposed’ to be going.
The fairy tale of a complete life has been broadcast into the core of our self-perception for so long with unrelenting consistency and with such casual presumption. It has nonchalantly bypassed any reasonable conscious scrutiny and has become the accepted standard for all of our lives – regardless of circumstance.
Not having everything you want, though, is what makes the stuff you do have special. There is a limit to how many balls you can juggle which means you have to choose which balls are most meaningful.
The ones you do choose will feel more valuable because they were chosen at the expense of all the others that you simply couldn’t hold.
Chaos and Stability
Any accomplished goal brings with it a loss of orientation and the risk of being swayed towards the chaos of purposelessness and psychological destabilisation. There is often discomfort in the act of striving for something – such as hard work, failure, rejection and fatigue – and we confuse this with chaos – but it’s ironically the act of striving that keeps us stable.
Therefore, chaos is our order.
Forced Boxes
Seemingly innocent questions have caused more people to feel lost despite being intended to provide direction. Loaded questions like ‘follow your passions’ has the remarkable ability to make a perfectly happy person question if they actually are. Society makes everything look perfect and binary and imperfect and complex feel wrong even though life is imperfect and complex - and life is not wrong.
You have to resist conforming to the script, to resist squeezing into binary boxes or answering invalid questions and instead write fresh rules. We need some unconventional thinking to do this.
You have to become the author of your own script – one written by your heart and not one directed by society.
Changing the World
People who change the world are globally admired so as status-seeking beings we think if we ‘change the world’ too, we’ll receive the same level of admiration from the world and also from ourselves. That if we emulate those we admire, we’ll admire ourselves.
So wanting to change the world for changing the worlds sake is just bullshit social virtue signalling driven by social media and group think and rewarded with some kind of philanthropic social currency.
Working Hard
Society and social media peddles the ‘you’re not working hard enough’ narrative alongside the ‘you’re working too hard you’re going to burn out’ narrative.
Working hard matters, anyone who says otherwise is equally narrow-minded, but so does the rest of life.
If you stubbornly value career success above all else, then ‘all else’ feels entirely pointless. We can be held captive by our own socially inspired miscalculation of our needs.
The issue isn’t hard work itself, it’s what you work hard at the expense of.
Otherwise, we will end up winning at everything that didn’t matter and losing at everything that did.
The Art of Quitting
It is easy to follow into the trap that quitting is a weakness. Or even worse, that quitting is failure. Quitting is a skill. You have to quit something in order to start something new and better.
The greatest force stopping all of us going in search of the right thing is usually the gravitational pull from the wrong thing. The last thing. The safe thing.
Composure
Composure really matters. If you want to avoid making the same mistake twice, make decisions based on your past memories and less decisions based on your current emotions.
Summon the self-awareness, perspective and rationality to regain control before we do something we regret.
Your brain tends to life to you because a bruised ego will value short term ‘victory’ over long term outcomes. The best reaction in high-emotion, ego-wounding situations is nearly always no reaction.
Driving Forces
If there is a single force in this world holding you back, it probably isn’t other people, your boss, the political party in charge or your circumstances: it is you and the stories you believe about you.
So much happiness comes from trying to make other people believe we’re happy or significant. It turns out that validation is an inside job – only you can validate you.
We shouldn’t sign up to narratives that seek to externalise our sense of accountability, vilify success or encourage victimhood.
If you try and be someone else, you’ll just increase your chances of becoming nobody at all.
Knowing what you truly care about, and knowing who you truly are is becoming more and more difficult given the increasing number of authoritative external forces that are gradually, and deliberately sculpting you into something and somebody you just aren’t.
It is your job to fight back.
We are Enough
We will always be worth the same. We are intrinsically always the same. You are you and you will always be that. Your life doesn’t have varying and fluctuating levels of inherent value. The world has just convinced us that we are not enough.
“I became a happy sexy millionaire when I realised that striving to be a happy sexy millionaire was the one thing that stood the greatest chance of stopping me from becoming one.”
It is the feeling that you aren’t enough that will persuade you to spend your life chasing false external foals down dead ends. And its realise that you are enough that creates real genuine ambition to pursue your greatest internal goals, for the sake of nothing more than fulfilment, satisfaction and enjoyment.
