What You Should Read Next: “The Diary of a CEO” by Steven Bartlett. Happy Father’s Day. Get Him the Book.

This is our “What You Should Read Next” series. And today is Father’s Day. So this one is for the dads.

Not the dads who want socks. Not the dads who want aftershave they will never open. The dads who read. The dads who think. The dads who are quietly building something, a company, a career, a family, a life, and who carry the weight of that building every single day without drawing attention to it.

Steven Bartlett The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life has sold over 1 million copies. It is the №1 Sunday Times bestseller. And the first thing Bartlett tells you on the opening page is what the book is not: it is not about business strategy. Strategy changes like the seasons. This is a book about something much more permanent. At the very heart of it all.

Bartlett built Social Chain from his bedroom at 22 years old. He grew it into a company valued at over $200 million. He became the youngest ever Dragon on Dragons’ Den at 28. The Diary of a CEO podcast became the biggest in Europe. He has conducted over a thousand long-form interviews with some of the most accomplished people on the planet: scientists, athletes, entrepreneurs, psychologists, military leaders, and artists.

The 33 laws in this book are the distillation of everything those conversations and experiences taught him. Not the tactics. Not the growth hacks. The principles. The things that remain true when the market shifts, the strategy fails, and the plan you spent six months building turns out to be wrong.

The laws are organised into four pillars. The first covers self-mastery: knowing yourself, understanding your own patterns, and building the psychological infrastructure that sustains long-term performance. The second covers environment design: how the spaces, people, and systems around you shape your behaviour far more than willpower ever will. The third covers storytelling: the stories you tell yourself, the stories you tell others, and the gap between the two. The fourth covers philosophy: the deeper principles about failure, success, discipline, and what it actually means to live a life you can look back on without regret.

Each law is drawn from real experience. Real mistakes. Real moments of doubt. Bartlett is unusually honest about his own failures, his insecurities, and the lessons he learned by getting things catastrophically wrong before getting them right.

For Father’s Day, this book is the gift that says something most cards cannot: I see the work you do. I see the decisions you carry. I see the late nights and the early mornings and the weight of responsibility that comes with being the person other people depend on. Here is a book that will sharpen how you think about all of it.

The 33 laws are not just CEO skills. They are dad skills. The law about showing up consistently? That is Tuesday’s school run. The law about managing your environment? That is deciding what kind of home you are building. The law about storytelling? That is the version of yourself you model for your children. The law about discipline over motivation? That is every morning you got up and did the thing even though you did not feel like it.

Bartlett did not write this book for CEOs. He wrote it for anyone who is building something that matters. And there is no construction project more ambitious, more demanding, or more important than raising a family while trying to become the best version of yourself.

Happy Father’s Day. Over 1 million copies sold. What you should read next. Better than socks. The owl guarantees it.

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