Steven Bartlett Books

Happy Sexy Millionaire

Steven Bartlett · 2021

Bartlett's debut book grew out of a diary entry he wrote at eighteen, broke and university drop-out, promising himself he would become a "happy sexy millionaire" by twenty-five. He hit that goal on schedule, building Social Chain into a company worth hundreds of millions — and then discovered the title itself was the joke: money and status hadn't delivered the fulfilment he'd been chasing. The book dismantles the assumptions behind that original goal and replaces them with what he found actually worked.

Happy Sexy Millionaire earns its place as his most personal book because it's structured around his own mistake rather than his success — a young entrepreneur publicly correcting the story everyone assumed he was living. It became a Sunday Times bestseller and set the tone for everything he's written and podcasted since: unfiltered, allergic to the polished founder narrative.

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

Steven Bartlett · 2023

Drawing on hundreds of conversations recorded for his podcast The Diary of a CEO, Bartlett distills recurring patterns from founders, scientists, and high performers into thirty-three specific, testable "laws" covering ambition, communication, self-belief, and failure. Rather than a memoir, it reads as a working manual: each law paired with the reasoning and evidence behind it.

This book belongs on the list because it converts the podcast's raw material — thousands of hours of interviews — into something structured and reusable, rather than just retelling his own story again. It debuted as a Sunday Times bestseller and is now the book most people mean when they refer to "the Diary of a CEO book," distinct from the podcast itself.