The Buckets That Determine Success: Lessons from The Diary of a CEO

🎙️ Hear this issue on The Sunday Blueprint Podcast - Episode: 9

Hey

At the start of the year, I made a quiet promise to myself: to read, reflect, and focus on learning not to post about it or write formal reviews, but just to grow.

Months later, that small promise has left me with a few books read and a Notes app full of unfinished thoughts. Today, I want to share one of those thoughts, from The Diary of a CEO.

I finished the book a while back, and the next day I found myself explaining one of its ideas to my dad the concept of the “buckets.” And the more I spoke about it, the more I realized it didn’t just explain something it exposed something about how we grow, professionally and personally.

The Buckets You Keep Trying to Fill

Steven explains that we all carry buckets in our lives:

• Your knowledge – what you know

• Your skills – what you can do

• Who you know – your network

• What you have – your resources

• What others would think of you – your reputation

Most of us try to fill them all at once. We chase money, connections, approval, and status sometimes forgetting that these buckets naturally fill in a certain order.

Steven’s point is simple: focus on filling the earlier buckets first, and the rest will follow. Build your knowledge first. Develop your skills. Expand your network. Gain resources. And reputation? That takes care of itself.

A Question I Keep Coming Back To

What’s your main bucket right now? The one you spend the most energy on, whether consciously or not:

→ Your knowledge?

→ Your skills?

→ Who you know?

→ What you have?

→ What others think of you?

And when you fill it, are you filling it in a way that actually lasts or are you pouring into a bucket with holes?

My Own Reflection

Looking back, I think my network bucket was leaking for a long time. Reading this book didn’t fix that but it gave me a clear framework to understand it. Once I had that, I could start being honest with myself not just about what I was doing, but why. That alone changed something.

This wasn’t a perfect book. But it was a perfectly timed one. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Until next Sunday,

Yousaf