Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 13

This is The Real Plague To Avoid

Last week I did a piece for the New York Daily News, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy! It’s alarming to see how relevant Trust Me I’m Lying has turned out to be, but here we are…

At the first vaccine clinic I worked at here in a small town outside Austin, Texas, the county vaccinated more than 2,000 people in one day. The last clinic I volunteered at, which closed because they no longer put volunteers to use, I checked less than 15 people in for their shots. 

It was actually a good day. The day before, they had done five. 

This was not because there was a shortage of people who needed these miraculous mRNA vaccines. We, like much of the rural South, have barely cracked a 40% vaccination rate for adults. 

How could this be? Bastrop County is the kind of place where people will pull over and change a tire for you. Where we just banded together to pull each other out of the snow during a freak Texas freeze. We’re part of a state where flooding and hurricanes bring out the so-called Cajun Navy to rescue neighbors from danger, often at grave risk. 

What could have happened to make people so indifferent to their own health–let alone to the health of the most vulnerable in our community? People who I know are good people are not only doing a stupid thing by not getting vaccinated, some are actively trying to convince others to follow their lead. What’s gotten between them and their better angels?

Well, the answer to this trick question is of course that nobody thinks that’s what they’re doing. 

What’s happened is that otherwise good people have been grossly deceived, they have been infected with a different kind of virus, one that takes otherwise smart and caring people and turns them against their own interests and the people they love. 

It should be said that this is not a new phenomenon. Two thousand years ago, in the depths of the Antonine Plague, Marcus Aurelius wrote “an infected mind is far more dangerous pestilence than any plague–because one threatens your life, the other destroys your character.” Yet the mentally infected in the Roman Empire were effectively quarantined from each other by time and distance. When I posted a version of this quote on Instagram last week to my one million followers, the comments section was immediately besieged by anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and COVID-deniers who have been empowered and enabled by technology to infect others with their ignorance and conspiracy theories. 

These angry posters are nothing like my politely vaccine-hesitant neighbors, the problem is that the message they are spreading is what has trickled down to the folks I share a fence line with and contributed to a cultural consciousness where a solid quart of the population is declining to protect themselves from a virus that has killed 610,000 of their fellow citizens. Rural America has proven to be particularly fertile ground for the doubt and denial these messages sow, dramatically lagging behind the rest of the country in vaccination rates. Talk to anyone about why they haven’t been vaccinated and they will inevitably lead you back to something they heard about on social media. 

Due to the abysmal failures of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it has fallen on content creators, Nextdoor neighbors and social media users to block and report misinformation in an endless game of whack-a-mole. (Or worse, getting sucked into pointless, circular arguments) Is this efficient? Or fair? I have to either sit idly by as my own audience is targeted by brigands of COVID-deniers or I have to bail out an ocean of untruth with a thimble.

Couldn’t these platforms just, you know, plug the hole in the boat?

Make no mistake, Facebook and Twitter and even Nextdoor–which collectively employ tens of thousands of people–each has the tools to dramatically decrease the spread of misinformation on their platform. There’s a reason one can spend hours on Instagram without seeing a naked breast. Facebook is able, magically, to know whether you’re using your real name for your account. Content on YouTube is instanted vetted against vast databases of copyrights for infringements. Because it is in the financial (or legal) interests of these companies to filter this way, they do. 

There is almost no feature on social media that was not intentionally designed and no piece of content surfaced to the user that is not selected purposefully by their algorithms. The most brilliant designers, behavioral scientists and engineers have spent decades perfecting a system optimized for engagement and virality. It’s not an accident that Facebook’s Newsfeed is the most popular news platform in the world. Literally, the smartest people in the world worked to make it so…and are paid gobsmacking amounts of money to fine tune it.

They can do something about this problem. They haven’t. Why?

It just happens that misinformation, like political polarization, tends to be very good for business. As I wrote about in Trust Me, I’m Lying, outrage is a feature, not a bug of our online world. Infected minds–be they by conspiracies, misinformation or outright malevolence–are active minds that love to post, comment, share…with an almost inhuman intensity. A recent report has shown, the majority of anti-vaccine sentiment can be traced back to twelve individuals, who source and spread bad science, in bad faith or stupidity or most likely a combination of the two. Just like whales and compulsive gamblers are the most profitable customers for casinos, these super spreaders keep engagement high. 

The way to protect the public is obvious: Ban them. Algorithmically-punish accounts which share their content. Quarantine accounts infected until this temporary fit of insanity passes. Artificially boost the information that vulnerable members of society desperately need to hear until they’ve heard it. Political parties on both sides of the aisle use social media data to target prospective voters and corporations use the same tools to turn those people into customers. It’s time to demand these platforms use their own tools to save lives and serve the common good in what is clearly the crisis of our lifetimes. 

Might that be bad for business? Might it upset some culture-warriors?

Perhaps. But Marcus Aurelius, who led brilliantly and selflessly during the Antonine Plague, has a reminder that Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Silicon Valley needs to hear:

Just do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

There are real consequences to allowing this to continue. Not in the abstract, not statistically, but with your neighbors and loved ones, as we just experienced here in my town where a beloved food truck owner died of COVID.

Where could she have possibly been convinced to reject a life-saving vaccine?

And so another preventable casualty must be laid to rest at the feet of social media…and by no means the last unless we do something. 

If you’re not vaccinated, you’ve never been more vulnerable. If you don’t care about that, think of the millions of children who can’t be vaccinated, the people in nursing homes, cancer wards, etc. 

P.S. If you haven’t read Trust Me I’m Lying, I encourage you to read it. You can pick up a copy at my bookshop, The Painted Porch. You can also get a signed copy here. 

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18 Things I Stole From Some of History’s Greatest Leaders

People think that leadership is something that just happens. One is anointed a leader. One is promoted to leadership. One is born into leadership. And of course, this is not the case.

“Leadership,” Eisenhower said, “is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.” Which means that, like any art, leadership is something that has to be studied. You have to practice and develop skills. Like an apprentice, you have to get yourself in the vicinity of the greats. You have to, as Marcus Aurelius wrote of his own development as a leader, “go straight to the seat of intelligence.”

No one comes out of the womb a leader. And yet we’re all leaders in one way or another—of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. So there’s no one who wouldn’t benefit from learning some of the essential lessons on the art of leadership from some of history’s greatest leaders. Lessons on how to inspire people, lessons on how to survive crises, lessons on how to treat people, lessons on how to learn. These 18 by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll be a better leader for it. But perhaps the first and most important lesson we learn from the leaders I talk about below is that leadership is a skill that one could refine over multiple lifetimes—so the sooner you start the better.

A Leader Is A Reader

Harry Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers—they have to be. And they certainly aren’t reading to impress people or for the mental gymnastics. It’s to get better! It’s to find things they can use. Not at the dinner table or on Twitter, but in their real lives. “One common characteristic of virtually all great leaders I have known is that they have been great readers,” Richard Nixon would write later in life. “Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it engages and exercises the brain. Today’s youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow’s leader.” Great advice… that a reader of history also knows that Nixon did not quite live up to. In all, Nixon watched over 500 movies while in office in less than 6 years. Might he have been better served by engaging and exercising his brain? Might he have been better off if he’d had more of his assumptions challenged? A leader must learn from the experiences of others. A leader must be challenged. A leader must prepare themselves for the things they’ll only be able to experience once, by learning from the experiences of others. Because, to paraphrase the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education solely by experience, one mistake at a time. A leader must be a reader. It’s not just the best way, it’s the only way. 

A Leader Knows What They Stand For

There’s a story of Mattis, as a very senior officer, who took over guard duty on Christmas so a soldier could be home with his family. These types of gestures abound in the lore around Mattis. There’s the story of Mattis exposing himself to the elements and danger in Iraq like a common soldier and countless other incidents. With modesty, he would attribute these examples of leadership to a philosophy he picked up in his early years as a Marine. “Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for,” Mattis wrote. “State your flat-ass rules and stick to them.” Marcus Aurelius called them “epithets for the self.” Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Those were his non-negotiables. “If you maintain your claim to these epithets,” Marcus wrote, “without caring if others apply them to you or not—you’ll become a new person, living a new life.” That’s what Mattis believed too. He said having character is harder than having physical courage. The less disciplined, more self-centered, more power-obsessed types of people are everywhere and try everything to make you those things too. Draw the bottom line, Mattis said, remove any uncertainty, clear out the ambiguity until they don’t “come as a surprise to anyone.”

A Leader Accepts Reality On Reality’s Terms

When James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam and taken prisoner, he knew he would be the highest-ranking POW the North Vietnamese had ever captured. That meant that at the Hỏa Lò Prison, victory for his captors was getting Stockdale to break. He was deprived and tortured and beaten and stripped of his possessions and forced to wear leg irons in solitary confinement for two of the seven years he ultimately spent in solitary confinement. But when later asked if he had it the worst in Hỏa Lò, Stockled said no. Who could have possibly had it worse? “Oh, that’s easy,” Stockdale answered, “the optimists…The ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” When things are hard, when things are scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had a run of bad luck, that’s what happens: magical thinking kicks in. This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. Great leaders resist this kind of thinking. Whether they’re facing a crisis or a downturn or a disruptive competitor or a spectacular losing streak, hope and denial and running away are never part of their strategy. As Jocko Willink told me on the Daily Stoic podcast a few months into the pandemic, the only type of people among his client base of businesses and nonprofits and military leaders who had managed to thrive were the ones who accepted the reality of the situation immediately. Unflinchingly. That’s what Stockdale said too:  “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Hỏa Lò Prison or the midst of the biggest economic crisis of our generation, that’s the only way through. 

A Leader Puts Everything In The Calm and Mild Light

The job of a leader, George Washington said, was to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” The phrase comes from the play Cato, about the Roman Senator and Stoic philosopher by Joseph Addison. In a single two week period in 1797, Washington quoted that same line in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he quoted the same line again, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration. “It shapes and builds up the soul,” Seneca wrote of the calm lights of mild philosophy, “it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done—it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties…Countless things happen every hour that require advice, and such advice is to be sought out in philosophy.” 

A Leader Seeks To Serve Others

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the surest way to happiness was to seek it for others. She was referring to doing good, to being of service. It’s how she found happiness despite the tragic loss of her father, her painful childhood, her troubled marriage. And it’s how she became one of the most powerful and influential female activ­ists in history and America’s most important First Lady. She did good. She made herself useful. She sought relief for others. Marcus Aurelius said that his only job was to do works for the common good. That is: a leader’s only job is to do good. To help others. To be of service. To think less of your problems and try to help others with theirs.

A Leader Is Not Passionate 

A young basketball player named Lewis Alcindor Jr., who won three national championships with John Wooden at UCLA, used one word to describe the style of his famous coach: “dispassionate.” As in not passionate. Wooden wasn’t about rah-rah speeches or screaming from the sidelines. He saw those extra emotions as a burden. Instead, his philosophy was about being in control and doing your job and never being “passion’s slave.” The player who learned that lesson from Wooden would later change his name to one you remember better: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 

A Leader Knows What To Prioritize

Success, money, and power can intoxicate a leader. The great ones stay sober because they know what to prioritize. One look at Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful women on the planet is revealing. She lives in an apartment rather than a palace. She is plain and modest—one writer said that unpretentiousness is Merkel’s main weapon—unlike most world leaders intoxicated with position. Or look at Warren Buffett, whose net worth is approximately $65 billion, lives in the same house he bought in 1958 for $31,500. Or San Antonio Spurs star Kawhi Leonard, who gets around in the 1997 Chevy Tahoe he’s had since he was a teenager, even with a contract worth some $94 million. Why? It’s not because Merkel, Buffett, and Leonard are cheap. It’s because the things that matter to them are. It’s not an accident that they’ve become who they are. It’s the result of prioritizing, which allows them the freedom to pursue the things they most care about.

A Leader Sets High Standards 

Football coach Bill Walsh took the 49ers from the worst team in the league to Super Bowl champions in just three years. How? He created a culture of excellence and instilled what he called his “Standard of Performance.” That is: How to practice. How to dress. How to hold the ball. Where to be on a play down to the very inch. Which skills mattered for each position. He knew that by upholding these standards, “the score would take care of itself.”

A Leader Persists 

“Two words,” Epictetus says, “should be committed to memory and obeyed by alternatively exhorting and restraining ourselves, words that will ensure we lead a mainly blameless and untroubled life.” Those two words were ‘persist and resist.’ A leader knows that an obstacle standing in their way isn’t going anywhere on its own. A leader is in it for the long haul. Others might give up but the leader says, as Margaret Thatcher famously did: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” A leader knows that genius often really is just persistence in disguise.

A Leader Does The Right Thing

When the Antonine Plague hit Rome and plunged its economy, fundraising efforts began with a masterstroke of inspirational leadership. As one biographer wrote, the emperor Marcus Aurelius “conducted a two-month sale of imperial effects and possessions, putting under the hammer not just sumptuous furniture from the imperial apartments, gold goblets, silver flagons, crystals and chandeliers, but also his wife’s silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels.” Funerals for plague victims were paid for by the imperial state. He audited his own officials and allowed no expenditures without approval. In a crisis, people must trust that their leaders are doing the right thing and that they are bearing the same burden as the citizens—if not a greater one.

A Leader Listens To Feedback

The great ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio contrasted Marcus Aurelius’ greatness against his son Commodus’ fatal flaw. Marcus famously surrounded himself with brilliant public servants and talked about how he would gladly change if anyone could show him he were looking at things the wrong way. Commodus, on the other hand, had “many guardians, among whom were numbered the best men of the senate. But their suggestions and counsels Commodus rejected.” Dio adds that “[Commodus] was not naturally wicked, but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived.” This innocent young man became one of history’s most wicked beings because he made the deliberate decision to reject his advisors advice and feedback. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the best commanders of the last century, said of the necessity of listening to feedback: “I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.”

A Leader Stands Up and Stands Out

In a famous exchange, the lesser known philosopher Agrippinus said he was spurning an invitation to attend some banquet being put on by Nero. A fellow philosopher, one who had felt inclined to attend, asked for an explanation. Agrippinus responded with an interesting analogy. He said people are like threads in a garment. Most people see it as their job to match the other threads in color and style. They want to blend in, so the fabric will match. But “I want to be the red,” Agrippinus said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful…’Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?” He wanted to be red even if it meant being beheaded or exiled.  Because he felt it was right. Because he wouldn’t be anything other than his true self. That’s the leader’s job. It is not to go along to get along. It is not to be another replaceable thread in an otherwise unremarkable garment. The leader’s job is to stand up. To stand out. To speak the truth. As Sam Walker writes in his wonderful book The Captain Class about the unsung leaders who have taken their teams on incredible championship runs, one of the traits great leaders share is they have “strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.

A Leader is Always Composed 

“The first qualification of a general is a cool head,” Napoleon once said. Remaining cool-headed in times of crisis and adversity is one of the most critical skills. The worst that can happen is not the event itself but the event and you losing your cool.

A Leader Makes Doesn’t Make Problems Worse

Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, reminds us that there is “no problem so bad that we can’t make it worse” (and panicking is often a way to do that). Yet how many of us have had bosses we didn’t want to keep informed about problems because if we did, they’d only make solving them harder? Leaders have to be a source of good energy and solutions. They can’t make hard things harder—they need to make hard things easier for their employees or followers. That’s the job.

A Leader Prepares  for Chaos 

As the legendary coach Phil Jackson would explain, “Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion I made them scrimmage with the lights out. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.”

A Leader Has a Guiding Philosophy

I mentioned Bill Walsh’s “Standard of Performance” philosophy above. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is known for his “Win Forever” philosophy—the winning mindset he aims to instill in his staff and players. The great coach John Wooden had his “Pyramid of Success” philosophy. These philosophies and frameworks are critical as they codify the principles and rules by which a team will make decisions and operate on a day-to-day basis. If you don’t have a philosophy, how do you expect to know what to do in tough situations? Or when things are confusing or complicated? Being reactive is never a position of strength. It is not a position a leader should find themselves in.

A Leader Gets The Best Out Of People

Aside from Marcus Aurelius’ 3-page recount of everything he learned from his mentor, Antoninus Pius is largely forgotten by history. Ernest Renan wrote that if he hadn’t groomed Marcus so successfully, his name would today be to us what Marcus’ is. All his adult life, Marcus strived to be a disciple of his adopted step-father, to whom he saw, according to the french philosopher Ernest Renan, as the “the most beautiful model of a perfect life.” What was the most important lesson he learned from Antoninus? “This in particular,” Marcus said, “his willingness to yield the floor to experts—in oratory, law, psychology, whatever—and to support them energetically, so that each of them could fulfill his potential.” This in particular because it would have been more natural for him to have often been frustrated and disappointed with people. It’s something that lots of brilliant leaders and talented people have wrestled with through the centuries—they expect of others what they expect of themselves, so they are constantly upset and let down. We know that Marcus found a better way through. “So long as a person did anything good,” Cassius Dio wrote, “he would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but to his other conduct he paid no attention.” That’s key for anyone in any position of leadership. Your standards are for you. You only control your behavior. You have to meet everyone else where they are. Get as much as you can from them and of them. See the good in them. Lean into their strengths rather than disdain their weaknesses. Focus on what is special and unique about them instead of zeroing in on the ways they are not as good as you. That’s not only the kind way to lead, it’s the only effective way.

A Leader Isn’t All About Business

Randall Stutman has been a coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs for decades. His clients have included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. His consulting and advising agency, CRA, has worked with thousands of executives at hundreds of hedge funds and banks. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on them being perpetually ready to respond to the daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute volatility of the world’s financial markets. Stutman surprised me when he told me that he often asks these very busy executives how they recharge, given the all-consuming nature of their work. The best, he found, have at least one hobby that gives them peace — things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. There is a surprising commonality between all the hobbies: An absence of voices. For leaders, people who make countless high-stakes decisions in the course of a day, a couple hours without chatter, without other people in their ear, where they can simply think (or not think), is essential.

P.S. On Monday, we announced what is the longest and most in depth course ever built over at Daily Stoic. It’s one I’ve been working on for 6 months, The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders . It features 63 total emails, packed with the best wisdom from the Stoics on what it takes to become a great leader. I also assembled some of today’s great leaders to be for you what Antoninus was for Marcus, as I mentioned above. Once a week, there will be a Leadership Deep Dive—a live video session where I’ll be interviewing a guest with expertise on that week’s theme before we open it up to questions from course participants. Randall Stutman is actually one of those leadership experts. He’s been a coach and a mentor of mine over the years, so I’m excited to be able to bring him—as well as military generals and pioneering businesswomen and CEOs of professional sports teams, among others—into the Daily Stoic community. I’m really excited about this course. I think it’s going to be one of our best. I would love to have you join us—you can learn more at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge

 

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Everything You Say Yes To Is Saying No To Something Else

It is with some pride that I can think of some “big” things I have passed on doing.

Tickets to the Super Bowl.

A trip to Necker Island.

More than a few different book deals.

I’m not proud because I think I am better than those things, it was just that I had better things to do with that time, at that time. Sometimes it was family, sometimes it was cooler work opportunities, sometimes it was just because I was exhausted and I needed to rest. 

Just because you’re offered something that might be good for your career, that would definitely feel good to your ego, that most people would have said yes to, doesn’t mean you have to listen to your ego and accept the offer. You can say NO.

It’s easy to forget that, especially with peer pressure and FOMO, but it’s true. 

There’s a great quote from Nassim Taleb:

“You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

I didn’t need it. I had competing interests. I could say “No,” so I did. 

That’s a rich feeling, that’s only tangentially related to money.  

Yet if I am being honest, like most people, it’s not one I indulge myself in enough.

In the last year, as the pandemic radically reoriented so many parts of everybody’s lives, I was reminded painfully of what economists call opportunity costs. I’ve always been productive and disciplined, so I was under the impression that even with all my traveling and various projects, I wasn’t suffering much for it. 

I was producing books, after all. I spent lots of time with my kids. I was exercising. I was writing my daily emails for Daily Stoic and Daily Dad, my Reading List Email each month and this email each week. Obviously there was no problem with the things I had been accepting to that point. But in having so much suddenly taken away, I was given the gift of seeing what all the busyness was actually costing me.

The last twelve months have been the most creatively fulfilling and productive months of my life. It turns out (surprise!) that being home for bath and dinner every single night had a massive impact on my relationship with my young children, their behavior and my marriage. 

Obviously the costs of this had been there all along, I just wasn’t aware of them—or I was denying them. Even if you’re aware that you’re, say, 80% as effective while on the road as you are when you’re at home, in your routine, it’s easy to miss the simple math: Four days of traveling is the equivalent of taking a full day off…without the benefits of, you know, a day off. 

So while I do take pride in some of the things I’ve said no to over the years, the reality is that I have been undisciplined more often that I was disciplined. I may have been producing…but it wasn’t as good as it could be. And when it didn’t feel like work was suffering, it was only because other parts of life were.

All those meetings I didn’t really need to go to. Those clients I really didn’t respect or like that I worked with anyway. Interview or press that I did because it was flattering. The time when my kid wanted my attention, but I was glued to my phone, to some email—so glued that my “no” was implicit. I didn’t have to be somewhere else. I was home…and yet I was gone all the same. 

You have to understand: Everything you say “YES” to in this life means saying “NO” to something else. 

The decision to agree to that coffee meeting means saying no to an hour of reading. The decision to hop on this Zoom call means not hopping on the bike and getting some exercise in . The decision to stay up late to watch another episode of some mindless television show or scroll on your phone is saying no to a productive early morning. The decision to go to some conference across the country means missing one of those meaningful developmental moments with your young kids right there at home.  

Which of these will you get more out of? Which will produce the growth you seek? Which will you remember ten years, ten weeks, hell, ten days from now?

Why is it so hard for us to see this? Inertia for one. Ego for another. We identify with being busy, we think it’s taking a step towards our best work, but that’s because we’re blinded to the long-term costs. 

There is a haunting clip of Joan Rivers, well into her seventies, in which she is asked why she keeps working, why she is always on the road, always looking for more gigs. Telling the interviewer about the fear that drives her, she holds up an empty calendar. “If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work. Nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.” 

That’s an attitude that creates a lot of work, but does it create anybody’s best work? No, desperation stinks. It corrupts. It wears you down. 

What kind of rich life is that? 

You have to be able to say no. You have to be able to pick your shots. And if success doesn’t earn you that right, what kind of success is it? If you’re not strong or free enough to pass on things, are you really that strong or free?

In fact, really caring about your work is a great reason to need to be able to say no to stuff. 

A pilot gets to say, “Sorry, I’m on standby,” as an excuse to get out of things. Doctors and firemen and police officers get to use being “on call” as a shield. But are we not on call in our own lives? Isn’t there something (or someone) that we’re preserving our full capacities for? Are our own bodies not on call for our families, for our self-improvement, for our calling? 

I want to remind you (and myself) to always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.

And when we get better at saying “No,” we get to experience the benefits of the flip-side of what I said above. Because everything we say “No” to means you’re saying “Yes” to something else. 

To your important work.

To your health.

To the people you love.

Even to just a moment of stillness in a busy life.

You deserve that. You’ll be proud of yourself if you do it. 

P.S. For a limited time, the ebook edition of my book Stillness is the Key is nearly 90% off! Whether you want to get better at saying NO or at knowing what to say YES to, whether you’re overwhelmed with opportunities or with problems and uncertainties and emails and notifications and alerts and one thing after another—Stillness is the Key is for you. It is a formula for keeping steady, disciplined, focused, and at peace, so you can access your full capabilities. It was an instant #1 bestseller and will not be on sale for long so grab it now! Or if you prefer hardcover, you can order those in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get a personalized signed copy.

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Don’t Go To Business School. Read These 18 Books Instead

Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19 years old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30. Today, Buffett’s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. 

Not a bad ROI!

Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t bought a copy of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI!

One of the questions I get most is about business and marketing books specifically. In school, kids are already assigned literature and history. But about books that teach you about business? About money? About building something? About getting people interested in what you’ve built? 

There are some amazing, life-changing books in these categories, some of which also rank among the best investments I’ve made in my life. I returned to many of them during the crazy twelve months of renovating and opening our new bookstore during the pandemic. And now, we carry many of the books below at The Painted Porch.

If you’re looking for a business education, these 18 books are a lot cheaper than an MBA.

Enjoy!

Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan 

Any fool can learn by experience, I prefer to learn by the experiences of others, is how Bismark put it. Most business books are about what went right. This one isn’t. It’s about painful failures. The ones that get repeated over and over and over. This book will humble future CEOs and keep them conservative—which is an important balance for any ambitious person. Pair Carroll’s book with the story of Jim Paul, who made some successful moves to become the Governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which convinced him that he was special, different, and exempt from the rules. Once the markets turned against his trades, he lost it all — his fortune, job, and reputation. That’s what makes this book a critical part in understanding how letting arrogance and pride get to your head will ruin your business. Learn from stories like this instead of by your own trial and error. Think about that next time you believe you have it all figured out. (Tim Ferriss produced the audiobook version of this, which I recommend.)

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen  

This book tells the incredible story of Sam Zemurray, the penniless Russian immigrant who, through pure hustle and drive, became the CEO of United Fruit, the biggest fruit company in the world. The greatness of Zemurray, as author Rich Cohen puts it, “lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation.” For Zemurray, there was always a countermove, always a way through an obstacle, no matter how dire the situation. That’s why, although he was a morally complicated man, I used his story in The Obstacle is the Way. You can listen to my interview with Rich Cohen here as well.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight  

This is the memoir of the founder of Nike, it’s really the story of a lost kid trying to find meaning in his life and it ends with him creating a multi-billion dollar company that changes sports forever. What I love about this book is that 90% of it is about the early years. It’s not about how to sign Jordan, but about how he sold shoes out of the trunk of his car. The main thing I took from it? You actually have to love the thing you’re going into business to sell. Live and love it and breathe it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown  

This is a book that focuses you, that makes you question many of the projects and commitments and assumptions you’ve said yes to over the years. Though the book is about applying design-style thinking to your life, I really think it is just a solid book of philosophy, stories and anecdotes that make you reconsider your priorities. That’s all you can hope for from a book and it more than delivers, as Greg did when he came on the Daily Stoic podcast.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins 

There is a little pseudo-science to Collins’ research but I don’t care about that. This is a great book. He creates a framework for how to think about building a great company. You get the right people on the bus, you spend time and energy winding up the flywheel and if you’re lucky you break through. It’s not a complicated formula but the examples in this book are helpful. Even if you don’t read it, the title is helpful. You don’t want to be good, you want to be great.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin 

You wouldn’t tell anyone that you saw a cow. You would tell them if you saw a purple cow. Seth wrote this book many years ago but it’s a classic because it says something basic, timeless and important. Make remarkable things, do remarkable marketing. It’s the best way to grow. It’s the best way to sell. Even Jay-Z has recommended this book—to Oprah no less! As a marketer, the clearest takeaway from the book is: Represent people who stand out, it makes it easier to do what you do. 

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout 

It’s a quick read, but I think you’ll come away with one or two key lessons that with stick with you. Personally, I found the valuable lessons were a bit front loaded (the first couple laws are the best). In short: turns out the best “marketing” decisions you’ll make come long before the paint is dried (or even applied) to the product. Forget the notion that marketing is something that is applied after the product is completed and aim to achieve Product-Market Fit. As I write in Growth Hacker Marketing, the single worst marketing decision you can make is to work on a product that nobody wants.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne  

The best law in the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is “invent your own category.” Well, Blue Ocean Strategy is entirely about that. It’s about competing where there is the least amount of competition. It teaches you how successful businesses focus on being different, about carving out a new space for themselves. Instead of battling numerous competitors in a contested “red ocean,” it’s far better to seek fresh, uncontested “blue” water. If Blue Ocean Strategy is the what behind the theory of creating new markets rather than competing in crowded ones, then Blue Ocean Shift is the how and the mindset required to do so. Lots of good examples in this book, including a bunch that are not from business (“blue ocean” thinking also applies to government, NGOs, leadership, etc.).

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

This book is my favorite of Chris’s and a must read. You don’t have to have a lot of money to start a company, and not every idea has to be some massive world changing thing. Start small. Be smart. Be creative. I talked about those themes and more when I interviewed Chris in early April of 2020 while he was feeling the fresh sting of having to cancel a 40-city tour for his then just-released book, The Money Tree.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This is an absolutely incredible book—a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson. It is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! Even stuff I already knew about those figures, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters. Or as the Stoics say: character is fate. Or as I wrote about in this piece about leadership during the plague in ancient Rome: when things break down, good leaders have to stand up.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz 

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book. If it was the only thing he’d ever done, I’d consider him a master. But it’s not. Building billion-dollar companies, slogging through the depths of multiple recessions, mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs—these are the things Ben does for his day job. Writing for him is just a side project distilling that hard won experience into lessons we can use. This book is inspiring, it’s honest, it’s practical and it’s actually real. There’s a reason Horowitz’s essays have taken hold online second only to those of Paul Graham. 

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferriss  

We talked about ROI at the beginning of this piece. The question to ask yourself with this book is, What’s one life-changing tool worth? What’s one solid new habit worth over the course of a life? Because that’s what you will find in here. Emerson talked about how we can learn something from everyone we meet, because everyone is better than us at something. Tim is a master at learning something from everyone he meets, interviews, works with and then sharing that wisdom with us. 

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

I found Rockefeller to be strangely stoic, incredibly resilient, and, despite his reputation as a robber baron, humble and compassionate. Most people get worse as they get successful, many more get worse as they age. In fact, Rockefeller began tithing his money with his first job and gave more of it away as he became successful. He grew more open-minded the older he became, more generous, more pious, more dedicated to making a difference. And what made Rockefeller stand apart as a young man was his ability to remain cool-headed in adversity and grounded in success, always on an even keel, never letting excessive passion and emotion hold sway over him. That’s why I used his story to open the discipline of perception section of The Obstacle is the Way. 

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William N. Thorndike

This book is also one of Warren Buffett’s favorite books. Instead of focusing on celebrity business figures who were good at self-promotion, it studies the heads of companies like the Washington Post, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne who created billions of dollars of wealth through a series of unorthodox business and leadership strategies we can all learn from. I discovered the book after reading Katharine Graham’s epic autobiography—an exceptional leader and CEO.

Empire State of Mind: How Jay Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office by Zack O’Malley Greenburg

This is a biography that also functions as a business book. It shows how as a young man in Brooklyn, Jay applied hustling techniques to the music business and eventually built his empire. A true hustler, he never did only one thing — from music to fashion to sports, Jay dominated each field, always operating on the same principles. As he puts it, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!” And related to that, I also recommend The 50th Law, which tells the stories of many such individuals and will stick with you just as long.

Oh and one more book…by me.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts by Ryan Holiday

Perennial sellers are books like What To Expect When You’re Expecting, Good to Great, The Great Gatsby, movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “A Christmas Story,” or songs like “Happy Birthday” or “Candle In The Wind.” It’s products like Red Wing’s 1907 Work Boot (which confusingly only dates back to the 1950s) or restaurants like The Original Pantry, which has been open every single day since 1924. People think that perennial sellers are created by accident. The truth is that when you study them, there are all sorts of lessons to be learned from the classics, there are timeless principles to be applied in your own pursuit to make something that lasts.

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Of course there are many other books that belong on this list. If you want some more related book recommendations, here is a list of essential strategy books, biographies and you can get books recommended each month by signing up here.

The post Don’t Go To Business School. Read These 18 Books Instead appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

34 Mistakes on the Way to 34 Years Old

The great Hyman Rickover used to say that success teaches nothing, only failure is educational. I don’t know if that’s completely true, but I will say that my own short time on this planet has had its share of teachable moments rooted in mistakes, usually of my own making. 

For going on ten years now, I have done a piece on my birthday around the idea of lessons learned, either from preceding twelve months or over the course of my life up to that point. This year, at 34, I thought I’d focus exclusively on my failures and what they’ve taught me. And I can assure you, ten years into my career as a published author, ten years into entrepreneurship, and going on fifteen years with my now wife, five years into having a family, I have made lots of mistakes. 

If I have been successful at all, it’s been through learning from these mistakes (painfully) and by benefiting from the mistakes of others (a less painful way to learn). With that, I share these things I learned the hard way…or continue to struggle with.

Also check out my pieces from 33, 32, 31, and however else long I have been writing this annual piece.

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[*] If I had to go back and give a younger version of myself one word of advice it would be: “Relax.” It’s almost preposterous how intensely, passionately, anxiously I was worked up about certain things—how seriously I took things that, in retrospect, matter so little that I don’t even remember them. Of course, earnestness, commitment, and ambition are virtues (more so than their opposites, anyway) but taken too far they become liabilities, to happiness and objectivity most of all. 

[*] When I look back on my own writing, the stuff that makes me cringe isn’t necessarily even stuff I was wrong about. What disturbs me is the certainty. I thought I knew, but I didn’t really know. I wasn’t even close to knowing. Ego never ages well, even if it was correct in a narrow instance. As I get older, I’d like to think I am more open to nuance, less prone to black and white statements, and humbler in how I come off. 

[*] My first book was an exposé about media manipulation and fake news. I was convinced that if it didn’t come out right away, I’d get scooped, or miss my window of opportunity. This is what I was anxiously insisting to my publisher…in 2011! I thought I was out of time, in fact I was probably a half decade early (it’s second best sales week was in 2017!). Stuff is better when you don’t rush. If you think you have to rush, you’re either whipping yourself for no reason, or pursuing something too ephemeral to begin with. 

[*] I also should have fought harder on the title of my first book (I wanted to call it Confessions of a Media Manipulator, not Trust Me, I’m Lying), and I should have stuck to my guns about the prologue of Ego is the Enemy (I didn’t want to be in it, they wanted me in it). In creative disputes, the publisher/studio/investors/etc are not always wrong but they often are. And even when they’re not, you have to remember, that whatever the decision, you have to live with it in a way that they do not. I’ve regretted anytime I did not go with what was in my heart as an artist.

[*] The book I am most proud of is my book Conspiracy. The only parts of it I wish I could do differently are the few instances which, in retrospect, I was too conscious of what other people might think (particularly journalists). I should have just played it exactly how I felt like playing it. Again, do what’s in your heart. 

[*] Why did I move to New York? I guess I thought I was supposed to. It wasn’t a mistake exactly, but it’s definitely not the right place for me to live—not permanently anyway. Life is too short to live somewhere that doesn’t make you happy. 

[*] As I explained on reddit a while back, I wish I had gotten married and had kids earlier. I wasn’t really late for my age bracket (29 and 30), but when I look back at the last few years—including even the pandemic—I’m not sure what I waited for. Elizabeth Bruenig’s New York Times piece on having kids at 25 expressed this better than I can, but I think I was worried I wasn’t ready, but the truth is you’re never ready. You learn by doing. You’re only putting off the thing that will provide you the most meaning and joy in your life. 

[*] In 2013, I started a business with a partner that my wife warned me against working with. I remember explaining to her why she was wrong and that I couldn’t possibly not do this because of some vague gut instinct of hers. It would turn out to share a commonality with almost all my mistakes and regrets: Not listening to my wife from the beginning. Anyway, this business turned into a nightmare, and it turned out that this partner was not someone I should have worked with. Who knew?

[*] Why have I so often expected differently of people who have already shown me who they are? Character is fate. Character is fate. 

[*] I bought my first bitcoin somewhere under $500. I’m still here working for a living, so that should tell you all you need to know about what kind of investor/gambler I am. It’s not that I’m afraid of risks, it’s that I have trouble putting the right amount behind risks when I take them. 

[*] Most of my regrets—things I wish I’d done, things I wish I’d said, stands I wish I’d taken—have one thing in common: Fear. We worry about what will happen if… But Marcus Aurelius has the answer: “You’ll meet tomorrow with the same weapons you have now.” I should have quit certain jobs sooner, I should have come out and said what I thought more clearly, I should have believed that I’d figure out how to get through it, even if things went wrong. 

[*] If you’d asked me in January 2020, if I could survive—professionally and personally—with no travel, no events, no dinners out, no get-togethers, I’d have said absolutely not. As it turns out, the last fifteen months have been not only rewarding but immensely productive in every sense. Why? Because clearly, those things I thought I had to do, I didn’t not actually have to do. I’m actually better and happier when I don’t. 

[*] That’s another lesson learned the hard way: Don’t say “Maybe” when you really want to say “no.” Just say no. The only person making a big deal about it is you. Just say no. How many events/meetings/wastes of time are you going to agree to and then regret before you learn this?

[*] It was sweetly painful over the fifteen months of the pandemic to get more than a year of consecutive bedtimes with my kids, to get an uninterrupted streak of morning walks and afternoons in the pool. It was sweet because I loved every minute of it. It was painful because I had chosen not to have this before, I had so often chosen the other things, the less important things we throw into that bucket of “work responsibilities.” It is intimidating to contemplate how easily it will be to slip back into the old way of doing things too. 

[*] It’s clear to me in retrospect that my desire for approval, for being seen, for being a part of something important or newsworthy or exciting, blinded me to the character of certain people I worked for. Of course, this was something those people understood and exploited in me and lots of other more vulnerable victims, but it’s still on me. You have to wake up to the ways that the wounds you experienced as a kid make you a mark, or create patterns in your life. It’s not your fault things happened to you, it is your fault if you don’t learn how to adjust accordingly. 

[*] Of all the people (or types of people) I’ve had strong negative opinions or judgements about from afar, only few turned out to be even close to as obnoxious or stupid or awful as I thought. In fact, more often than not, I ended up liking them quite a bit. The world works better when we get to know each other. 

[*] You know deep down that accomplishing things won’t make you happy, but I think I always fantasized that it would at least feel really good. I was so wrong. Hitting #1 for the first time as an author felt like…nothing. Being a “millionaire”…nothing. It’s a trick of evolution that drives us, and no one is immune from making this mistake. The mistake to really avoid though is the one that comes after the anti-climatic accomplishment, the one where you go: “Ah, it’s that I need to repeat this success, it’s that I didn’t get enough. More will do it.”

[*] There have been a lot of problems I could have solved earlier if I’d been more willing to seek out experts on the topic. It’s funny, that’s clearly what sports teams and military leaders and politicians were doing when they emailed me after having read one of my books. How much growth have I left on the table, how much pain have I needlessly endured by not picking up the phone myself?

[*] Somewhat less related but still related: It’s good to be frugal, but if you don’t spend your money to make your life or your relationships or your work easier, what exactly are you going to spend it on? Actually, what I’ve found is that it is very expensive to be cheap. You just pay for it in the form of a frustrated spouse or a stressful life or with shit that never works and you have to end up replacing a bunch of times anyway. Don’t grit your teeth and bear it. You can only get so far white knuckling things. Remove the friction, improve the system—and money (not a lot usually) should help you do that. I thought of this just the other day as I reached for a Sharpie that was nearly dry, that I had clearly put back in the drawer in my desk for like the fifth time instead of buying a new one (and there was still a part of me that hated throwing it away). Replace your dull tools! Upgrade your workshop! Find quality help! You are expending energy in the wrong places.  

[*] There’s a great Kurt Vonnegut story about marriage. He realized, fighting one day with his wife, that what they were really both saying was, “You’re not enough people.” You can only expect so much from a person. They can only deliver so much. When I think of relationships that have not worked out, or near breaking points of others, at the root of them was that: Expecting them to be too many people. 

[*] With 34 years of data now, I can confidently say that I have never once lost my temper and afterwards said, “I’m so glad I did that.” A corollary to this: I don’t recall the last time I spent time on social media and felt better after either. A corollary to this corollary: I regret almost every time I have expressed an opinion on social media. I don’t necessarily regret the opinion, I regret the lapse in self-control that culminated with me shouting into the void. 

[*] There are many books I regret powering through, far fewer that I regret quitting. Life is too short to put up with bad writing—bad anything really. If the food sucks, don’t finish it. If the speaker is boring, get up and leave. If the party is no fun, go home. 

[*] Needing things to be a certain way has continually prevented me from enjoying them as they are. 

[*] I’ve been lucky enough to sit across the table, literally, from some incredible people. Astronauts, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians. The mistake I’ve made far too many times? Talking more than I listened. You get nervous, you want to impress, so you open your mouth. I tend to forget: Two ears, one mouth for a reason. In thirty years, are you going to want to look back on this chance encounter and think about what you said, or what you got them to say? So shut up!   

[*] I’ve done it so many times it’s now embarrassing but this is a pattern: I have an opinion or a frustration or a need that I don’t speak up about. It builds. By the time it finally does come to a head, the situation is past resolving. I’ve lost agents because of this, employees because of this, friends because of this. You have to speak to be heard. You can’t wait. You can’t let resentments pile up. Communication is not conflict. It preempts and prevents conflict. Everytime I forget this, it has cost me. 

[*] If you keep having to put down your horses, it’s because you’re riding them too hard. Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of otherwise great talent because I put too much on them. Just as athletes have to think about personal load management, coaches and GMs have to think about it for the whole team (and understand that every person has a different threshold).

[*] Good enough is usually good enough…except when it’s not. When I was in high school, I ran a 5:04 mile in one of my last races senior year. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s pretty good!” No part of me (nor did anyone around me) pressed to see if I could shave those few extra seconds off. I was so close! Why did I settle? Only later did I come to regret it…and of course, every day that passed made it more difficult to ever get back there. In my mid-twenties, I did finally break five minutes but mostly as a reminder to myself: Don’t be satisfied with getting close enough. Go all the way. “Almosts” are the most painful regrets. Especially almosts where you didn’t do your best. 

[*] My anxiety has brought about exactly the kind of stress or frustration I was hoping to avoid infinitely more times than it has prevented it from happening. Don’t ride out to meet your ruin...

[*] Epictetus says, “You can’t learn that which you think you already know.” Evaluating my response to the early warning signs of the pandemic, or why I missed taking advantage of certain investing opportunities (see crypto and housing mistakes above, among others), invariably it was my certainty or smugness that blocked me from seeing what a more open, curious person would have seen. 

[*] Just because someone you don’t respect holds a certain position, doesn’t mean the position is incorrect. And vice versa. One of the toughest things to do in this life is to think for yourself, to come up with your own judgements on issues, stripped of bias or preconceived notions. Almost every time I have looked for a shortcut—whenever I have not done the work—I’ve come to regret my views. 

[*] I grew up in a mostly conservative household, one that internalized a lot of that Reagan-esque suspicion of governing. But of course, this suspicion—especially when widely held—contributes to poor governance. Government is not a thing, at least in America. We are the government, just as much as we are traffic, we are culture, we are media. A line I heard that changed my worldview: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” I wasted a lot of time seeing politics as something you consume, when of course politics—going back to Aristotle—is always something we do. 

[*] Related, if success is not making your life easier—or at least, providing you more autonomy—what good is it? This was learned the hard way in our house. You’re not a beast of burden. Don’t treat yourself like one!

[*] This line from Springsteen captures, in retrospect, almost every argument or grudge I’ve held onto.

We fought hard over nothin’

We fought till nothin’ remained

I’ve carried that nothin’ for a long time

[*] This idea of “Fuck Yes…or No” is far too simple and has caused me quite a lot of grief. Dropping out of college, I was maybe 51/49 on it. Leaving my corporate job to become a writer, maybe 60/40. Right now I’m about to do something big that I am both excited and terrified about. The point is: The certainty comes later. The truly life-changing decisions are never simple. If I had only ever done things I was absolutely certain about, I’d have missed out on experiences I love. Conversely, I regret a good chunk of my “Fuck yes’s” because I was caught up in a fit of passion or bias. The whole point of risk is that you don’t know.

**

So here I am at 34 with many more mistakes than these to my name. But the key to progress, I have found, is relatively simple. It’s not to avoid error…but to avoid making the same error more than once. Or, more realistically, fewer times than you might ordinarily be inclined to.

Because the only way to compound an error, to add to the suffering caused by its consequences, is to refuse to see them. To refuse to heed their lessons. 

And so, if I am lucky enough to make it another year, I hope to write to you again in 2022, a tad wiser and as always, grateful for the time and experiences I’ve been lucky enough to have. Even the not so glamorous ones. 

P.S. Seneca said a lot of people don’t have any proof for their age but a number of years. To avoid that mistake, I carry a coin that says “Memento Mori,” which is Latin for ”remember you will die.” On the back, it has one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius: “You could leave life right now.” That is how I try to go through life—not taking time for granted, not leaving anything undone, not wasting time on making the same mistake twice, not ever thinking tomorrow is a given. If you want to create more priority and appreciation in your life, get a Memento Mori coin and carry it in your pocket everywhere you go.

The post 34 Mistakes on the Way to 34 Years Old appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics

What is the job of a philosopher?

“When the standards have been set,” Epictetus said, “the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.”

Pretty straight forward then: Define your rules. Live by them. 

But of course, the Stoics were not quite so direct in practice. One Stoic, Chrysippus—supposedly wrote 500 lines a day…the vast majority of which are lost. The Stoics spoke, wrote, debated, but nowhere did they put their “commandments” down in one place. Not at least in any form that survived. 

Having thought about this, and trying to get them all straight for my own practice, here are 50 rules from the Stoics, gathered from their immense body of work across two thousand years. These rules functioned, then, as now, as guides to what the ancients called “the good life.” Hopefully some of them will illuminate your own path.

Focus on what you can control.You control how you respond to things. Ask yourself, “Is this essential?” Meditate on your mortality every day.Value time more than money/possessions.You are the product of your habits.Remember you have the power to have no opinion.Own the morning.Put yourself up for review (Interrogate yourself).Don’t suffer imagined troubles.
Try to see the good in people.
Never be overheard complaining…even to yourself.
Two ears, one mouth…for a reason (Zeno)There is always something you can do. Don’t compare yourself to others.
Live as if you’ve died and come back (every minute is bonus time).
“The best revenge is not to be like that.” Marcus Aurelius
Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.
Put every impression, emotion, to the test before acting on it.
Learn something from everyone.
Focus on process, not outcomes.
Define what success means to you.
Find a way to love everything that happens ( Amor fati ).Seek out challenges.
Don’t follow the mob.Grab the “smooth handle.”Every person is an opportunity for kindness (Seneca)Say no (a lot).Don’t be afraid to ask for help.Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee (Marcus Aurelius)Don’t judge other people.Study the lives of the greats.Forgive, forgive, forgive.Make a little progress each day.Journal.Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks ( premeditatio malorum )Look for the poetry in ordinary things.To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself. ( sympatheia )Always choose “Alive Time.”Associate only with people that make you better.If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense. Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this. Possessions are yours only in trust.Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).The obstacle is the way.Ego is the enemy.Stillness is the key.

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I’ll leave you with the one rule that captures all the rules. It comes from Epictetus: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” 

Don’t talk about it, be about it. The whole point of Stoicism is what you do. It’s who you are. It’s the act of virtue, not the act of talking about virtue. Or reading about it. Or writing about it. It’s about embodying your rules and principles. Letting your actions speak for you. So, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself and now us, “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like. Be one.” 

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P.S. If you want to learn more about Stoicism, read the originals. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius , Letters From A Stoic by Seneca, and Discourses by Epictetus are some of the most accessible philosophic works ever published. AND we carry all of them in my new bookstore, The Painted Porch . It’s just outside Austin, Texas—all are welcome! Or you can support the store by picking up a book in The Painted Porch online store. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas. Just remember, we’re a small shop and just getting going…be patient and kind. We appreciate your support!

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Opening a Small-Town Bookstore During the Pandemic Was the Craziest Thing We Ever Did

This is a piece I just wrote for Texas Monthly. Yes, I just opened my own bookstore outside Austin, Texas. If you want to support the store, you can follow us on Instagram, sign up for our email list or pick up a book online !

When you tell people you’re thinking about opening a bookstore, they’re quick to respond, I’ve always wanted to do that. 

It’s every book lover’s fantasy. Yet nothing can quite prepare you for the reality of starting any business, even under normal conditions. Certainly, few dreamers think to prepare for the nightmare of a global pandemic that shutters most brick-and-mortar retail, disrupts supply chains, and kills hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens. 

In January of last year, my wife and I put our life savings down on a 140-year-old building on Main Street in Bastrop, a small town outside Austin—East of Weird goes the slogan—where we’ve lived since 2015. We’d spotted the storefront, which is part of the National Register of Historic Places, while having breakfast one morning at Maxine’s Cafe, just across the street and a few doors down. By February we’d hired our first employees and started renovations. We envisioned hosting events, welcoming customers from the community, and drawing people to this beautiful street on the bluffs of the Colorado River.

Yet by the first week of March, what began with such excitement found me, for obvious reasons, standing between the empty brick walls thinking of that Arrested Development line: I’ve made a huge mistake. 

I thought I had some sense of what could go wrong with the venture. Whenever I’m considering an idea I’m excited about, I like to ask friends to talk me out of it. In late 2019, I was cautioned with plenty of pessimistic scenarios and potential difficulties. It’ll take longer than you think. It will cost more than you think. It will be more work than you think.

All of this was correct. 

That it would take longer, cost more, and require more work I understood. But that it would then sit unopened for months?

CONTINUE READING ON TEXAS MONTHLY: Opening a Small-Town Bookstore During the Pandemic Was the Craziest Thing We Ever Did

If you want to support The Painted Porch, these are the three most popular books in the store: The Library Book, The Boy Who Would Be King, and Empire of the Summer Moon. If you buy from those links, your books will be shipped from us here in Bastrop, Texas! Just remember, we’re a small shop and just getting going…be patient and kind.

The post Opening a Small-Town Bookstore During the Pandemic Was the Craziest Thing We Ever Did appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

Life Is About What We Can Do For Each Other

Why are we here? 

It’s an impossible question to answer, I suppose.

Of course, on a fundamental evolutionary level, we’re here to pass along our genes. This is why we strive for success. This is why we lust for sex. This is what keeps the species going. 

But equally encoded in that evolutionary software and in our culture is another purpose, another less selfish drive: The drive for meaning. Merely to subsist, to persist—what kind of existence is that?

Indeed, the greatest achievements in human history are not selfish ones. It’s art that speaks to what it means to be alive, that gives people hope or insight. It’s a scientific breakthrough that makes things better for everyone. It was the invention of the rule of law, it was the notion that government exists with the consent of the people, it’s the collective sacrifices, it’s the tackling of hard problems together.

It’s the idea that we are here for each other, that we are here to make things better for others, for the next generation, that makes life meaningful and worth living. Because in doing so, we find happiness and respect for ourselves. 

“The fruit of this life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “is good character and acts for the common good.”

On Easter, James Altucher sent me a verse from the Gospel of Mark. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” it reads, “and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

There was a time in my life when that would have made about zero sense to me. Look at the language—servant, slave, give your life? No thanks. 

As I have gotten older, it’s logic is clearer. Perhaps this came, as I wrote a while back, from discovering the relative emptiness of accomplishments. Maybe it was having kids. Maybe it just took a while for the wisdom to seep in. Or maybe it was a byproduct of bearing witness to the rampant selfishness, needless cruelty and displaced rage that has consumed large swaths of our society, over the last year especially.

I suspect, in a perverse way, the ugliness of that prolonged moment–from COVID-19 to our racial reckoning-will turn out to be a gift for us all. Because it’s a compelling cautionary tale of how easily one’s life can go very differently. Because these people are not just ignorant and unattractive, but punishing by their own way of living. If you’ve ever talked to a selfish or deranged person who has been radicalized by politics or untethered by conspiracy theories, or found yourself related—by blood or friendship—to folks who have been infected with this virus, it sobers you up real quick. It breaks your heart too.  It didn’t have to go this way, and yet it so quickly and easily did for so many.

There was a great Huffington Post headline a few years ago that captured the impotence one feels trying to discuss basic human rights or compassion or restraint to some people: I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.

I have found myself thinking that same thing time and time again over the last year too, whether it was after watching something on the news or talking to a neighbor or even writing to my own audience here. About the pandemic. The social justice and race conversations that exploded this summer. The 2020 election. And now, vaccines. 

Watching friends say things like “I can’t wait for things to go back to normal,” when social media makes it quite clear literally nothing about their habits or social life was impacted by a devastating pandemic that spreads in enclosed places and disproportionally affects the elderly and the vulnerable. Watching members of my own family seek to rationalize something like George Floyd’s death because he might have been on drugs, might have had a criminal record, or that very few people are killed by the police each year. Stuck in my head is an exchange I had with a woman who took profane exception to me referring to the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery as “hillbillies,” yet seemed to not be bothered at all by a video of the man being chased down and shot like a dog in the street.

Just last week, a very accomplished friend sent me a note explaining his resistance to the COVID-19 vaccines (which by the way, marks an incredible collective human accomplishment on par with landing on the moon). “Why should I, a perfectly healthy adult in a safe age bracket, have to risk myself by taking some new vaccine?” he said to me. 

The polite technical term for this is “vaccine hesitancy.” I think it’s more correct to call it an abdication of duty, a rejection of our collective purpose. I’d love a chance to go back and explain this conversation to my grandfather and great-grandfather who fought in World War I and World War II. 

Oh, you’re worried about the possibility of side effects despite the overwhelming available information to the contrary? (And yes, this is true even after yesterday’s announcement about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine). You’re wondering why you should have to take a tiny risk when you’re otherwise healthy and could otherwise go about your life just fine? I’m sure the generations who not only lived through typhus, the Great Influenza and polio but then had to cross the Atlantic to fight in someone else’s war would totally understand. Do you know what the data said about landing at Normandy, I can imagine my grandfather saying, it said we were probably all going to die. And it wasn’t even certain that the invasion would work!

You’re saying it’s unfair of me to compare the pandemic to WWII? That’s true. It is. It took the full might of an axis of industrial powers and four years of war to kill 400,000 Americans. It took COVID-19 just 10 months. And by the way, it’s a lie to say these were all old people. A full 105,000 under age 65 have perished from COVID in the US alone. 

There were definitely isolationists in America in 1918 and 1941, but by and large people got it. The idea of ransoming oneself for the many, as Jesus said, was common. More than 6 million people volunteered to serve during WWII. That’s nearly 40% of the entire fighting force. And the average service length was nearly three years! That’s what happens when a generation of men and women (and children) get to work for a common cause. And they accomplished something incredible as a consequence, something far more impressive than anything any of them did as individuals, when those fortunate enough to survive came back home and went about their ordinary lives. 

But for the last twelve months, in the same country that melted down its jewelry for the war effort just a generation or two ago, we’ve had serious discussions about whether we have any obligations to people who sat vulnerable in nursing homes.

I get it. 

It sucks to have your life and business disrupted, to lose opportunities you worked your whole life for. I make my living flying around and giving talks to large groups indoors. The last twelve months were quite anxious economically. It was stranger still having to turn down offers to speak to groups that had no business getting together during the second and third surges of the pandemic, but that was obviously right. 

I also happened to have dropped my life savings into opening a bookstore in my small town in Texas…two months before the world shut down. Needless to say, it was a financial bloodbath to sit here and not be able to open, as the expenses carried on nonetheless. But again what was the alternative? Put my interests over somebody’s grandma? Or some cancer patient who was already facing high enough odds as it is? Externalize the consequences of the actions I freely took, and make society carry all the weight? 

I think I’d rather die of COVID than that. 

I love sports. I’ve missed all sorts of cool opportunities in the last year not being able to go and speak in various locker rooms. I remain nonetheless appalled at the behavior of so many people in sports, because as always, sports are a metaphor for life. Whether it’s Dan Mullen demanding that the stadium be packed for Florida home games…days before his own team was devastated by a COVID outbreak, or just this month, the Rangers packing a stadium in the middle of the 4th surge of the virus. Was our governor concerned? No, he was throwing a tantrum about MLB moving its All Star game due to a stupid law passed in another state. 

“I don’t want my son’s athletic career negatively affected,” said the parents of college athletes. “But this is my daughter’s last year of academic eligibility!” Ok, so we have a season of college sports and thousands and thousands of cases in the NCAA. The athletes were all mostly fine and it certainly didn’t turn out as bad as some of the more dire predictions, but it’s indisputable that we (if we had even basic contact tracing in this country) could link these cases to hundreds and hundreds of thousands more people out in the community. Go talk to them about negative consequences. 

Of course nobody comes out and says, “I don’t care about other people.” They say a bunch of other stuff instead—stuff that I’m sure some of you are already getting ready to angrily write me in response to this article. They say, “This pandemic is overblown.” They shrug and say, “Well I guess we all have different risk tolerances.” (We can have different preferences about how we invest our retirement money, not whether we drink and drive). They try to claim that what they’re really worried about is how this affects small businesses or lonely people. They say, “But this wedding is really important to my sister.” They say, “My six year old deserves a party with their friends!”

COVID is not the only place this indifference manifests. Rather than wrestle with the police brutality, or the simmering rage of their black countrymen and women, they say, “But what about black on black crime?” They say, “But what about all the property damage!” They said, “What about Antifa?!” 

All of this is a way of dodging the reality of the choice in front of us: Can you subjugate your own interests—if only temporarily—for the sake of someone else? Countless someone else’s. Most of whom you will never know or even meet. Can you serve them? Can you sacrifice for any of them? Can you hear what they’re saying? Can you care? 

The religious stuff I put up top, maybe that turns you off a bit. I get it. I myself am not a Christian, but I use the verse not only because it’s beautiful but because it seems that Christians have struggled more with the lesson at the core of the verse than almost any other group. The most vaccine hesitant group in America is Republicans and White Evangelical Christians. This video of a woman explaining why her faith made her exempt from COVID-protocols at the beginning of the pandemic sticks with me. So does this photo of an Easter service, attended by a president who quite nearly died of COVID, indoors, without a mask in sight…a year into a pandemic that has killed more Americans than every war the United States has ever fought except for the Civil War—and we’re giving those war dead a run for their money. 

Hillel was once asked to explain the Bible in a short sentence. He stood on one foot and said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself—all the rest is commentary.” 

I would argue that this is a great answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” as well. 

We are what we’re able to do for each other. 

We’re here to serve. We’re here to help, to have good character and do acts for the common good.

That’s not always easy. In fact, it’s often quite hard. 

Did the pandemic or the racial events of the last year reveal the difference in privileges that some of us have? Absolutely—and this knowledge should increase our sense of obligation. 

We are made for each other. We forget that to our peril. We ignore that to our shame.

P.S. My newest book, The Boy Who Would Be King, tells a timeless story about putting others before yourself. It’s an illustrated fable about Marcus Aurelius and how the influential figures in his life guided him along the path to becoming one of history’s greatest figures. You can order it in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get a personalized signed copy. And we have some great news—for some reason, the ebook version of The Boy Who Would Be King is on sale on Amazon right now for 60% off. It won’t last long so grab it now.

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This Is the Test to Apply to Everything

We can imagine he was a busy man, perhaps the busiest man in the world. 

He had 14 children.

There was a pandemic. 

He had a nagging stomach ailment. 

He was taking philosophy classes.

Oh, and he was the emperor of Rome. His domain stretched some 2.2 million square miles and included some 120 million people for whom he was both responsible for and in charge of. 

How did he manage it all? How did he get it all done? Without losing his mind? Without falling behind? 

We know that one question played a huge role. 

“Most of what we say and do is not essential,” Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations. “If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”

How much or how little you work. Where you live. What your marriage or your relationships look like. The political policies you support. What you spend money on. What your goals are. The way your schedule is arranged. The things taking up room in your junk drawer…or the thoughts running through your head. 

Ask yourself about everything you do and say and think, “Is this necessary?” “Is this essential?” “Does it have to be this way?” “Why am I doing this?” “What would happen if I changed?”

We wonder why we’re not doing our best. We wonder why we’re not happy. We wonder why things are hard. 

It’s because we’re doing too much. Or we’re doing the wrong stuff. Or doing it in the wrong way. 

Greg McKeown has a great book called Essentialism. I love that word. You want to get to a place where your life is defined by it—where you’re doing only what needs to be done, in the way it ought to be done. 

That’s going to mean getting comfortable with saying “No.” It’s going to be mean cutting fat from your life, maybe even hurting some feelings. But that’s OK. You’ll soon realize: When you say no to something, you’re saying yes to something else. And conversely, when you think you’re saying yes to one thing, you have to understand all the things you’re saying no to in the same breath. So you might make some people upset by saying no, but you’ll make other people a lot happier too. 

A little while back, I was on Greg’s “What’s Essential” podcast. He called this the “non-essentialist trap.” When you haven’t distinguished between what is and isn’t essential, how do you decide what to yes to and what to say no to? Usually, we default to filtering opportunities by what’s most lucrative or what’s most impressive. Greg quoted Seneca to me, and that passage is worth putting here in full,

“We are told that life is short and the art is long…It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough and a sufficiently generous amount of it has been given to us for the highest achievement if it were all well invested. When it is wasted in the heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short. We are not ill supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.”

One thing the pandemic has helped me with is it has shown me—in most cases without my consent—just what doing less looks like. 

Less flights.

Less dinners out.

Less meetings. 

Less income. 

Less errands.

You could argue that COVID-19 was the largest forced lifestyle experiment in history. It shattered so many of our assumptions about what is and isn’t essential. Oh, this can’t be done remotely? Just watch. Oh, I couldn’t live without childcare. Well, now you have to. Oh, I’ll never have time to do ____. OK, here it is. 

We’ve had to make due with less. We’ve had to reinvent how stuff was done. We had to reorganize everything. 

Some parts of this have been hard to bear. Some have made us sad and lonely. But other parts have been downright liberating. That’s the thing about less—why we ask Marcus Aurelius’ version of the question: Is this necessary?—is that it also reveals what more looks like. Because as tough as the last few months have been, it’s also meant:

More sunsets from the back porch.

More dinners at home.

More focused writing, about weightier topics. 

More appreciation for the people and things that matter.

More understanding of the urgency of memento mori.

“Doing what’s essential,” Marcus said, “brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

So take a minute today and ask yourself Marcus’ question. Is this necessary? Is it essential? Do I really need to do this? What if I said no? What if I opted out?

What would happen?

You will find the answer, in many cases, is that no, it is not essential. It’s not important nor necessary. And by saying no, you’re not “shirking” your responsibilities. On the contrary, you are better fit, better able to actually fulfill your important duties—to your family, to your work, to yourself. 

And that’s the real double benefit.

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This Is the Secret to Business and Artistic Success

One of the strangest things about business to me has always been how damn far everyone is from the products they create and the customers who use them. 

You have a problem with a product you bought and you call customer service, but you’re not actually talking to an employee of the company who made it—you’re talking to a customer service contractor, who is employed by an agency that runs third-party customer logistics, who in turn was hired by the company you purchased from (if in fact you bought direct, instead of through a retailer). 

Whenever companies are investigated by labor activists, the story always follows a similar path of intermediation: Shoe Company X outsourced to Manufacturer Y who outsourced to Factory Z who in turn used slave labor to make shoes not just for Shoe Company X but for all their competitors too. 

“We had no idea that the workers were being treated so poorly,” a spokesperson for the company explains, who is often a crisis PR flak, not an employee. What’s more, they are usually not totally lying. Neither the company, nor their spokesperson.

Even my profession—books—is illustrative of this phenomenon. You walk into an independent bookstore in your town and purchase a book because you like to “support authors’’ or “support local small business.” But what actually happened is this: you bought a book from a shop, who in turn bought their books from a large distributor like Ingram (est. annual revenue of $2.4 billion), who in turn bought their books from a publisher like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (market cap of nearly $1 billion), who in turn had acquired the book from the writer. In the business of books, the creator and the customer (i.e. the author and the reader) are several steps removed from each other. Even a multi-billion dollar behemoth like my publisher, Penguin Random House, sells the vast majority of their books to Amazon, who in turn uses a complicated algorithm to decide what to show to customers, and what to charge them.  

This has always struck me as weird, as well as ethically fraught. On top of that, it’s also felt like bad business to me. We say marketing is important, that knowing your customer is key, but then businesses hand responsibility for those areas off to a bunch of contractors? And then use their insights and choices to decide what to make next? Imagine a sports team who doesn’t do their own scouting, player development or coaching! Who doesn’t interact with their own fans!

How can you do a good job of making stuff for your customers if you don’t have a relationship with them? The short answer is, you can’t. Publishers are quick to tell authors about what audiences like and don’t like, but where are they getting this information? Not from the source, that’s for sure! 

When I was in marketing, I loved talking to people with the same job at other companies and in different industries. Or, not really the same job, because the “Director of Marketing” at most companies is often supplemented by an outside advertising agency, a creative agency and a PR agency. Like The Bobs in Office Space, I’d ask my own version of their question: What would you say you do here? 

As the flywheel of my own books has begun to spin faster and faster—nearing 4 million copies sold—I have become increasingly less satisfied with this intermediated status quo. I remember once talking to an author who had sold a million copies of a book that was published seven or eight years previous. Ok, I asked them, what kind of email list have you got? They started telling me about how many contacts were in their Outlook. Meaning: They didn’t have an email list at all. They’d sold a million books… but that relationship was Amazon’s to own (or in their case, Borders, which had existed when their book came out).

Since my first book was published in 2012, I’ve made sure the last page of the book asked readers to send me an email to sign up for my list. Hundreds of thousands of people have done that. I have entered many of their emails into my list personally. Their names have passed from my eyes through my fingertips into my customer database. I have heard what they liked and don’t like about the books. I have seen what’s worked and what hasn’t. I have gotten to know them.

Of course, I have social media, too (you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube). But in the last several years, I’ve decided that those communication channels were not sufficient. I needed to be in the business of transacting directly to my readers, as well.

I had Tobias Lütke, the founder of Shopify, on my podcast recently and we talked about the power of a platform like his, one that allows people to become their own retailers. In 2017, with DailyStoic.com, we opened our own store. We started with a print, then moved on to challenge coins and then online products and a premium leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic too. Since we launched, we’ve directly sold to north of 100,000 customers. Or rather, to a whole football stadium worth of “true fans” who we now have a relationship with. 

Imagine standing on the 50-yard line of the Big House at the University of Michigan, packed with people to the very rim of the stadium, and knowing you’ve sold something to every single face staring back at you. It’s an immensely powerful feeling. 

Mostly though, it’s a liberating one. I’ve said before that I spell “success as a-u-t-o-n-o-m-y,” and this fits with that philosophy. I don’t want other people telling me what to do. I don’t want to be dependent on other people either. Yes, I work with a traditional publisher on my bigger books, but by choice.

Early in the pandemic, I started working on a fable about Stoicism that came out of stories I was telling my then 3-year old son. After I had finished the outline of the idea, I went to my publisher—who had done 10 books with me at that point—to see if they wanted to work on this one. They came back with terms that just made zero financial or creative sense for me. Part of me was frustrated, but I also believed that they had given me a great gift. Now I could do The Boy Who Would Be King myself. 

I did it faster. I did it cheaper. I did it with complete creative control. I even got to print it in the United States. In its first week, it sold more than 5,000 copies without a peep of external marketing or PR, just an email and a social post to my own fans, sold through my own store. It would have been enough to debut on any of the major bestseller lists—but of course, it didn’t appear on any because those lists had no way of tracking it. 

But what do I care? Well, let me tell you. I care about the fact that something I care about got into the hands of people who care about it. 

Isn’t that the whole point of art? Isn’t that the true basis of sustained (and sustainable) success in business?

Fewer middlemen. Fewer impediments. No delays in getting to market.

I did a talk for a fashion company a few weeks ago. When they started, they did 90% of their sales through retailers and 10% direct-to-consumer. That ratio has flipped as they have grown, based on the CEO’s strategic plan. Imagine if that hadn’t been the plan? They would have been destroyed during the pandemic, when physical retail was largely shut down or severely sidelined. And even without something like a pandemic, by going direct-to-consumer, they improved their margins, as well as the quality of their product… because, you know, they actually knew who their customers were and what those people liked. And by cutting out all those middlemen they could take the savings and apply it to the substance of the product itself.

Nobody knows what the future holds, that’s true. I will continue to traditionally publish many of my projects. My publisher helps me do things I can’t do and I help them do things other authors can’t do—which is why we choose to work together. Even right now, I am working on a distribution deal to get The Boy Who Would Be King sold through other stores. 

Still, I’m not sure how anybody goes broke working directly—as much as possible—with the audience and market they serve. Are there efficiencies that come from outside contractors and manufacturers? Of course. Are there great opportunities selling through other people’s platforms or stores or audiences? Obviously.

But if you’re not also cultivating a direct line to your people, what are you doing? Being arrogant and reckless is the answer, in my opinion. You’re gambling that the middleman will always need you, you’re gambling that your intuition will always land with the audience. You’re also giving up autonomy and creative freedom, too.

I’ll conclude with a great passage from The 50th Law by Robert Greene, as it defines the imperative for all creators perfectly:

Your goal must be to break down the distance between you and your audience, the base of your support in life. Some of this distance is mental—it comes from your ego and the need to feel superior. Some of it is physical—the nature of your business tends to shut you off from the public with lawyers of bureaucracy. In any event, what you are seeking is maximum interaction, allowing you to get a feel for people on this inside. You come to thrive off their feedback and criticism. Operating this way, what you will produce will not fail to resonate because it will come from the inside. This deep level of interaction is the source of the most powerful and popular works in culture and business, and a political style that truly connects.

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