Happy Sexy Millionaire: Unexpected Truths about Fulfillment, Love, and Success
by Steven Bartlett
18 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Happy Sexy Millionaire: Unexpected Truths about Fulfillment, Love, and Success:
Maybe you’ve always been happy, but the world, social media and external comparisons have convinced you that you can’t possibly be.
Time is both free and priceless. The person you are now is a consequence of how you used your time in the past. The person you’ll become in the future is a consequence of how you use your time in the present. Spend your time wisely, gamble it intrinsically and save it diligently.
They trap you in the toxic narrative that quitting is a weakness, an easy way out or, worse yet, that quitting is failure. I assure you – quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill.
Some people just can’t seem to deal with any uncertainty in their lives, and time and time again they find themselves imprisoned in situations that kill their happiness, push them towards despair and gradually disintegrate their self-esteem. They don’t realise that in their attempt to avoid uncertainty and the short-term discomfort it might bring, they’re actually inadvertently opting for long-term misery. I believe that the happiness you’ll find across all areas of your life – your work, your relationships and everything in between – will positively correlate to your ability to deal with uncertainty.
if you go through life believing that happiness is somewhere in your future, it always will be – it will never be where you are now.
Fundamentally we’re all the by-product of not what has happened to us, but how we chose to handle it.
If you truly care about being happy in your life and successful in your work, you have little choice. You have to become the author of your own ‘script’, one written by your heart, not one directed by your society.
Be grateful, for gratitude can bring life to life, it can turn a meal to a feast, resentment to love, a grudge to forgiveness, an enemy to a friend, a disease to hope and you to enough.
Live in accordance with your outside world and you’ll soon find misery. Live in accordance with your inside world and you’ll soon find happiness.
This is one of the great paradoxes of happiness: you have to call off the search in order to find everything you’ve been searching for.
truest definition of wealth – someone who has the freedom of time and can spend more of it doing the things that they value.
your sand timer is there, right in front of you, right now, pouring away as you read these words.
Most people need consistency more than they need intensity. Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.
If you spent 10 days dumping billions of gallons of water on a mountain, the water would ultimately have no lasting impact. But if you spend millions of years pouring a little bit of water on a mountain, consistency and time will change the shape of the mountain indefinitely.
Strong decision-makers ask: ‘Not, “Will X or Y occur?” but, “What is the chance of X or Y occurring — 10, 50, 80 per cent?
Maybe you've always been happy, but the world, social media and external comparisons have convinced you that you can't possibly be.
The fairy tales of how life is‘supposed to be going’ will fuck upyour life. You don’t have to go touniversity at 18, get a job at 21, buya house at 30, get married at 35 andhave kids at 36. Everyone iscompletely different and your pathto happiness will be completelydifferent too.
You’ll never be intrinsically defined, valued or measured by your car, bank balance, job title, followers or accomplishments. That’s a socially propagated lie inspired by societal status games, and it’s a lie that feels so fucking tempting to believe – especially in the social media age. It’s a lie that makes us desire to escape ourselves, fix ourselves or go under the knife to correct ourselves. This toxic lie speaks directly to our self-esteem, our ego and our self-efficacy. After all, if it’s true that we can become ‘more’ than we are right now, we must surely be less.It’s all a fucking lie. You are enough.And you always were.REAL ambition is not based on or inspired by the desire to be ‘more’ than you are. That isn’t real ambition. That’s the same insecure pursuit for external validation that I embarked on at 18 years old. Real ambition isn’t about ‘less’ or ‘more’, status or fame, approval or disapproval. Real ambition is about you; it doesn’t care about likes, followers or comments, it cares about what honestly matters to you.
