Steven Bartlett - Happy Sexy Millionaire: Unexpected Truths about Fulfillment, Love, and Success

Photograph by Rick Jones, May 2019

Steven Bartlett is the 28-year-old founder of the social media marketing agency, Social Chain. From a bedroom in Manchester, this university drop-out built what would become one of the worlds most influential social media companies when he was just 21-years-old, before taking his company public at 27 with a market valuation of almost 200m.

He was born in a village in Botswana, Africa and grew up as a young black man in an all-white area in the southwest of England. He never had money or good grades, but he did have an unshakeable sense of self-belief and a remarkably unconventional perspective on the world.

Steven is widely considered one of Europes most talented and accomplished young entrepreneurs and philosophical thinkers.

His podcast The Diary Of A CEO has become one of the top lifestyle, business and mindset podcasts in Europe and Steven has accumulated over 2 million followers online.

Dedicated to my mum and my dad. Your love is the reason I survived and thrived. To you, I give all of the credit. x

www.yellowkitebooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Yellow Kite

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright 2021 Steven Bartlett

The right of Steven Bartlett to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Claire Fearon and Anthony Logan

Internal illustrations by Jamie Bryan ().

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 529 39650 8

Yellow Kite

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.yellowkitebooks.co.uk

IM A 28-YEAR-OLD black kid from a bankrupt family. A decade ago I was an 18-year-old university drop-out, shoplifting food from the corner shop in an attempt to thwart the throbbing pain in my unfed stomach.

Today, the social media company I founded just listed on the stock exchange, valued at roughly a quarter of a billion pounds . I am sitting on a first-class flight from Sydney to Hong Kong reflecting on how a very normal kid with bad grades at school, who was born in a village in Africa, raised in a bankrupt home, kicked out of school and dropped out of university managed to get here To get here quickly, to get here in love and, most importantly, to get here happy.

I guess the story starts 10 years ago at 18 years old when, three weeks after I dropped out of university after just one lecture, my friend Marc gifted me a diary. On the front page of that diary I wrote the following:

My personal goals:

• Technical millionaire by 25
• Range Rover will be my first car
• Hold a long-term relationship
• Work on my body image

When I look back at this page, I was essentially telling myself that I wanted to be a sexy millionaire by the age of 25, with a girlfriend and a fancy car, and the reason I aspired to be a sexy millionaire is ultimately because I believed that would make me happy.

I couldnt have been more wrong.

Not only was I wrong about how having all of those things would feel, but I was also completely wrong about how you attain those things. This book wasnt written to tell you not to become sexy and rich (Im honestly a fan of both) but I am going to tell you what nobody told me about these goals, the life-changing revelations over the last 10 years that have made me reconsider everything I thought I knew and, most importantly, Im going to tell you everything that will ultimately matter more once you achieve all of the above.

If I dont tell you this now, theres an incredibly high chance youll either never get there, or youll end up somewhere else thinking youre there and with a series of mental health problems at least thats what the science says.

I was a victim. A victim of todays media narratives, social media fallacies and societal conventions. Conventions that, if followed, risk leading us down a dangerously miserable and unfulfilling path.

I know that people arent telling you this stuff because many of them dont have an incentive to do so they certainly didnt tell me when I needed to hear it the most.

This is a book that aims to suck all of the bullshit social brainwashing out of your mind and replace it with a practical, scientifically proven set of unconventional ideas that will help you find the fulfilment, love and success that were all craving and searching for. This is everything I wish someone had told me when I started my journey, in easy-to-understand, bullshit- and jargon-free language.

Let me just say I didnt want to write a fucking book. What a waste of time, I thought. I intentionally swerved the publishers and the book agency (sorry, Adrian) for the best part of two years. The social media-obsessed, attentionless millennial in me that no longer valued depth and had no patience would rather have just tweeted or posted an Instagram story to explain my thoughts and absorb the instant likes, retweets and comments, rather than spend years of my life pouring my heart into something so meaningful.

That is exactly why I had to write this book.

Im writing it as a desperate plea to you our attentionless, pleasure-chasing, lost, instant gratification-led, mental health struggling generation who are obsessed with money, changing the world, being considered sexy and being happy so you can tell your followers what you did, be your own boss and have it all Yesterday.

We are a generation that has more information than any other in history but are seemingly further from the right answers than any that have come before; a generation that I genuinely believe are going to be fucked if someone or something doesnt aggressively intervene.

I apologise in advance for every instance where this book offends you. That wasnt my intention but some of the things I believe, and how I say them, arent always politically correct. There are no ghost writers, no one telling me what I can and cant say here, just my honest uncomfortable truths.

Consider this my intervention.

When I talk about happiness in this book, Im not referring to a mood. Im talking about happiness in the context of what the word means in our society an internal feeling of fulfilment. When people ask: Are you happy in life? they dont want to know if youre in a good mood. They mean: Are you fulfilled?.