Butler - How To Bullshit Your Way to Number 1: an unorthodox guide to 21st century success from... the worlds #1 fake restaurateur and paris fashion

How To Bullsh*t Your Way To Number 1:

An Unorthodox Guide To 21st Century Success From The Worlds #1 Fake Restaurateur and Paris Fashion Weeks #1 Fake Designer

Oobah Butler

Published in 2019 by Oobah Butler

26 Worth Grove, Walworth, London, SE172HN

Copyright 2019 by Oobah Butler. All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Issue Print: #1 out of 20,000

Cover design by Tristan Cross

ISBN: 9781513643656

Dedication

To Dean Noroozi (the man who rented me the Shed), Victoria and Paul Butler, Chris Tarrant and Vanessa Swanson

Contents

Hi, Im Oobah Butler, and heres how bullshit changed my life.

In 2017, I embarked on the stupidest and most successful prank of my career: turn the backyard shed I lived in at the time into the Number 1-rated restaurant in London, then invite strangers to come and dine in my garden. The challenge was: would anyone know it wasnt real? Or would they assume this was the workings of a mad idiot and shop me to the police?

Well, long story short: I wasnt arrested. In fact, Ive become the opposite of arrested: after the video explaining what I did went viral (41.4 million views to date), Ive become more successful than Ive ever been, after appearing on the UKs most-watched morning TV show Good Morning Britain, being written about in the Washington Post and profiled in Forbes, being debated in Singaporean parliament, being the subject of an hour-long documentary on Japanese TV. In the year since the video came out, Ive gone viral again, (twice), and my life is now spent jetting around the globe, either talking at conferences to tell other people the secrets of my success (Ive spoken in Bangladesh, Sweden, Germany, San Francisco) or filming my first original TV series (which I cant tell you about, but youre going to love). Im richer than ever, people ask me to teach them the ways of my success more than ever, and crucially I no longer live in a shed. And how did I do it?

Well, hard work, a fair about of luck, lots of caffeine and a fair amount of persistence.

But also, very crucially:

A whole load of bullshit.

The backyard shed I was living in was never meant to be the number one-rated restaurant in London.

Backyard sheds, in general, are not supposed to be restaurants. Maybe you keep a shovel in yours, or one of those really long garden hoses. Maybe you keep the remains of cans of paint in the exact same colour as your hallway, in case you ever need to touch up the paintwork (you are never going to touch up the paintwork). Maybe your shed is home to a mass of spiders and a bike you told yourself you were going to ride to work this week but didnt. It doesnt matter what is in your shed, because nobody looks in there, least of all you. Last time you tried to open the door you heard that dreadful sound of three things collapsing at once like when you stack plates in a cupboard and hear them all shuffle behind the closed door and thought: Not my problem. You went inside and put the TV on. You forgot your shed even existed at all.

My shed wasnt my shed in the traditional sense, it was my home. Or, rather, it wasnt even my shed: it was someone elses shed that I rented from them for 800 a month and lived in with my girlfriend. In the back of the garden of a house in south-east London, for two years, I lived in a shed-shaped box with a faulty shower, a washing machine that occasionally got confused about the ideal direction of the sewage pump (I maintain that the ideal direction is out. The washing machine had other ideas.) and, yes, a normal sheds worth of spiders.

But then, in 2017, I had an idea. And that turned into another idea. And with a lot of hard work and a whole lot of bullshit I managed to turn that idea, and my rented shed, into something else entirely.

I managed to turn it into success.

I managed to turn it into a business.

I managed to turn it into a job.

I managed to turn it into fame.

I managed to turn my shed into the best-rated restaurant in London.

And what I learned along the way can help you do it too. You dont have to go and live in a shed I would honestly say it is preferable if you didnt but you have to have a shed mindset. You have to have a metaphorical shed a box full of spiders you want to turn into gold and the drive to do it. In 11 months, I went from living in a shed to appearing on primetime TV, and less than two years later I am flying around the world giving speeches to CEOs, company presidents, award-winning thinkers and millionaires, telling them all about that time my washing machine made a horrible clunking noise and started filling with human shit.

It does not matter if your washing machine is full of shit if your heart is still pure.

Over those 11 months, I developed a way of thinking that I have used again and again and taught to many others that can make even the strangest idea a huge success.

I overcame obstacles, both physical and mental, and persevered to make something that has changed my life wholly for the better.

I battled naysayers and negativity and proved my many doubters wrong.

I got that washing machine fixed, at great personal cost to myself.

And I developed a mental toolkit that can be taught, used, and repeated, over and over, to take that tiny spark of an idea you have that little glimmer of gold in your boxful of spiders and turn it into something big, and loud, and real.

It doesnt matter what you want to achieve, or how badly you want it: if you attempt to do a job with the wrong tools in your hands, youre never going to finish it.

You wouldnt try to hammer a nail into a wall with a three-day old baguette, would you? You wouldnt try to cross a lake on a raft made of straw. You wouldnt try to make your clothes clean in a large metal box filled with liquefied shit.

In this book, I will give you the tools to make any idea of yours real, solid, and successful.

I turned my shed into the number one-rated restaurant in London. Think what I can teach you to do.

Were going to go on a journey together that starts at rock bottom, somehow manages to go a little deeper to a place far beneath rock bottom, and then ascends high above both your and my expectations. We have to do this because thats how I did this. Maybe you can skip a few steps maybe you can start from a place thats medium-bottom, or even just somewhere quite normal but Im going to tell you how I started low and went lower, because its crucial to my (and your) eventual success.

Im going to need you to identify your shed.

In 2015, I moved into a shed. I admit this isnt normal. It had heating, and electricity, and a bed in it all the things you most likely have in your house or flat! but, from the outside, it was definitely a shed. The first day we moved in, I put my foot through the damp wooden deck just outside the shed, and from then on we constantly had a foot-shaped hole directly outside our front door. A month after that a pregnant fox got in through the foot-shaped-hole and nestled deep under the foundations of the shed, where she gave birth to four beautiful, loud, red little cubs. Have you ever heard the sound a fox makes when its a frolicking cub? Its high, and deranged, and awful. They would start up at 3 a.m. and not stop until the sun started to creep through our curtains. Me, to my girlfriend, during The Spring When The Foxes Came, as we came to know it: Hey, can you hear those foxes? Her, to me, with that quiet anger you only get when you are really in trouble: ... yes, Oobah.