Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 25

Here’s Why Smart People Believe The Nonsense That Trump Might Win

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Even after two disastrous debate appearances, overwhelming poll numbers and one of the worst campaign scandals in modern history, if you talk to many reasonable people you’ll still hear this whisper: I really think he might win.

It’s the fear of an electoral surprise—that the pollsters are wrong, that faith in logical, rational voters is faith without evidence. Post-Brexit this sort of skepticism seems even more reasonable. In light of recent events—after all the predictions that were wrong before—how do we even know what everyday people even think these days?

I’ll tell you this attitude is absurd and wrong.

It reminds me of a story that Ulysses S. Grant tells in his memoirs about a night he spent on the wild prairies of East Texas. He and a fellow officer were near Goliad when they heard “the most unearthly howling of wolves” directly in front of them. They couldn’t see the wolves through the tall prairie grass, but the men knew they were near. The other officer asked Grant how many wolves he thought were in the pack. Grant, not wanting to seem afraid, tried to lowball the number at twenty—knowing well enough, he said later, that it was still enough “to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal.” Grant thought that maybe they should turn around, but the other officer, having come from a part of Indiana where the wolves hadn’t been completely driven out, smiled and pushed on.

The men arrived to find just two lone wolves sitting on their haunches. These were the sole animals who had made all the noise that had scared Grant so badly, that had convinced him he was overwhelmingly outnumbered. Four decades later, after a full life in public service and politics, Grant would relate that he often thought of this incident when he heard of a group changing course due to criticism or someone giving up because they were deterred by an unseen enemy. The lesson in such situations, he concluded, was this: “There are always more of them before they are counted.”

Which brings us to a lesson we would do well to remember in modern media when it comes to politics: There is always less behind the noise than you think.

Certainly this is true in our current election, where the media had tried to convince us that behind Donald Trump is an overwhelming mass of white male blue collar workers who will be rising up as one (or in more extreme characterizations, a raging army of white supremacist lunatics who will riot in the streets if he’s not elected.) Conversely, we’re expected to believe that the unexciting Hillary Clinton is supported by no one, that she’s a candidate created by vested interests, defended by “the media”, and propped up by illusory political correctness—but insufficient votes. The results on election day, the narrative goes, may just shock us.

However alarming these scenarios may be, it belies the objective electoral and demographic facts of this race: That Hillary has a much clearer path to 270 electoral votes than Trump. That, as many smarter people than I have pointed out, there isn’t even enough uneducated white men in America to earn Trump the popular vote either. When a candidate has alienated literally every significant minority voting bloc in this country—African Americans, Latinos, as well as alienating Asian-Americans at an unprecedented rate as the New York Times has shown—they cannot win an election. When they have pissed off huge chunks of their own party—especially the elites, the power brokers, their own running mate and now the dozens who have withdrawn endorsements—they cannot win. And that doesn’t even get into what happens when you run a mismanaged, shoestring campaign.

As David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and current informal advisor to Hillary’s campaign, has observed:

“This race is being covered in a way that suggests it’s a dead heat. And it’s not…Some polls closely capture where the race stands. But they’re very incomplete. The Clinton campaign is doing large samples for modeling surveys of everybody on the voter file. So you have a very good understanding of how you believe 100 percent of the electorate will be allocated on election day. When you look at how 100 percent of the vote is likely to be allocated in Florida, I get very optimistic….I can get Donald Trump to within two or three in Pennsylvania, but I can’t get him to a win number. The same is true in Virginia and Colorado. I know everybody goes crazy about the latest Cheetos poll, but I feel very confident about both New Hampshire and Florida. So that puts her over 300 [in the electoral college]. Trump has to pull off a miracle in the electoral college.”

To think that since Plouffe wrote that, Trump not only hasn’t pulled off any miracles, he was caught in one of the most embarrassing hot mic scandals since the invention of recorded sound.  

But I actually want to put that aside for a second so we can look at the boom-and-bust cycle of political movement in this country, particularly as it pertains to the media. Because it, as opposed to the surprising results of Brexit, is a far more predictable historical record to study.

We seem to have forgotten the burst of enthusiasm and interest in the largely internet and college-driven campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 (then he finished third in Iowa). We forget Ron Paul at the beginning of the 2008 election as another internet-driven sensation which caused many to ask whether we’d finally found a viable outsider candidate. If you spent any time online in 2007, it was really made to look like we might have (when the reality, of course, was we hadn’t). Very few seem to remember that the 2012 election was presented as a horse race (and in fact, Romney so believed it, he thought he might win!) Of course, the results were anything but close, with Obama securing 332 electoral votes and nearly 5 million more popular votes. How quickly we forget just months ago that Sanders was on the rise, that he was activating loyal young voters who would drive him past Hillary (and then, if they didn’t, at the very least wouldn’t back the ultimate nominee)? And let’s not even get into the Gary Johnson and other third party candidate nonsense of earlier this summer.

All these failed movements were defined by their claims to an ascendent voter bloc—one that the elites didn’t understand, that hadn’t been tracked before, that was going to surprise everyone. The only real surprise was how much none of this materialized.

Yet here we are again.

I think it’s about time we start to recognize that in an insatiable media system, fringe candidates—from Dean to Ron Paul to Sanders to Trump—operate a lot like those wolves that Grant met out on the plains. It’s a fact that in a system which favors extreme views and has an insatiable need for conflict, extreme and conflicting stories will be overrepresented. When candidates without a coalition see the bandwagon effect as their only hope, they will attempt to exaggerate their reach and the size of their base. They will over-rely on the rabidity of their fans to compensate for the big gaps in the lines. It will seem like there are many millions of them…until they are ultimately counted. Because noise carries further than signal right up until the point that the signal gets dialed in.

I’m not saying there were no Sander supporters and certainly no one denies that millions of people will be voting for Donald Trump. It’s just that enough non-stop coverage can skew the estimates and expectations of even the most rational observers. When you’re on Reddit or Facebook and every reasonable comment is followed up by dozens of intensely argumentative responses from Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson supporters it can start to feel like there are a lot of them out there—that there is a real movement afoot.

Certainly, the Republican party fell for this in the primary, mistaking the fact that Trump seemed louder and bigger than his early opponents for a realistic chance of putting enough electoral points on the board to win. In fact, Trump has often touted—and exaggerated—the sizes of his rallies, as if that stat mattered. Today, Republicans and Democrats are falling for it again.

When you go on Facebook and see endless amounts of anti-Hillary memes, you might start to think: Man, people really hate her. Sure some do—and many polls show that Americans have trouble finding her trustworthy—but even her “unpopularity” is not as unclear as it looks. The Daily Beast recently outed the almost-billionaire and founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, for secretly “putting money behind an unofficial Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and circulating internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton.” There are also the reports that have shown how potentially a significant number of Trump’s Twitter followers are fake accounts. And of course, there were the internet trolls of suspected Russian origin which broadcast pro-Donald support and propaganda. In Business Insider’s piece on astroturfing, they quote Adrian Chen, who researched Russian trolls for a New York Magazine story in 2015, talking on the Longform podcast,

“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in awhile, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.”

I don’t know if those were the people who started tweeting at me when I wrote two Trump pieces over the summer, but I can tell you, I don’t normally receive many responses to my writing from people with 7 followers (in one case, the “person” had literally zero followers—which I didn’t know was even possible). I do know that the people who disliked the article were far more vocal and loud and obnoxious that the ones who agreed. I happened to have a pack of coyotes living near my house—which can often sound like they’re right next to my window—and the upside is that I’ve gotten good at ignoring empty noise.

Another version of this throwing of sound is in internet polls, which candidates like Ron Paul, Donald Trump and even Bernie Sanders have often dominated. People don’t understand that this is often deliberate manipulation. For instance, Trump’s fans on 4chan and reddit made an explicit effort to have Trump win in every online poll around the outcome of the first debate—which Trump excitedly tweeted the results of—with users explaining how to cheat the system and vote again and again in each poll. Philip Bump in The Washington Post has compared this online behavior to a Trump rally: “These online polls are, again, garbage, no more representative of the population as a whole than is the crowd at a Trump rally. That comparison is very apt, in fact. The crowd at a Trump rally 1) is open to all comers, 2) is geographically isolated, meaning that while anyone can attend, it doesn’t include a huge swath of people who vote, and 3) it rewards enthusiasm in a way that tends to obscure actual interest.” (I’d also add that many attendees admit to showing up to Trump rallies “for the spectacle.”)

It’s those last few points that are most interesting to me—in fact, they point to a fundamental reality of the internet. Not only does research show that anger is the most viral and provocative emotion—meaning that angry Trump supporters are going to be far more active than a resigned Clinton voter—but silence is often misinterpreted. Going back to what one programmer defined as Warnock’s Dilemma, it’s very hard to know what to make of a lack of response. The media’s typical reaction is to cater to active audiences. If something is being shared, they cover it more. There is no positive sign of people simply nodding their head and moving on—a common reaction to common sense, middle of the road content—so there is no way to skate to that puck. By definition, normal, reasonable people are not an audience you can pander to.

In the same way that no amount of media fawning makes HBO’s Girls more popular than The Big Bang Theory, no amount of Trump media coverage changes his fundamental demographic issues. It has been the inability of his now alt-right driven campaign to realize this that doomed him from truly capitalizing on voter’s real desire for change. It’s what makes his most recent debate performance irrelevant. He landed plenty of punches on Hillary…but it pleased the crowd and not the referee-like undecided voters he needed so desperately to add to his base.

Yes, it seems like there are huge amounts of Trump supporters out there. They are by definition louder and more motivated. They are naturally more compelling to cover. They are also engaged—or complicit—in forms of manipulation designed to create the sense of a movement which can’t be stopped. Clinton hides from media coverage and doesn’t make herself available even to be interviewed. Both approaches create feedback loops in which support for the former appears greater than support for the latter, because one is vocal and loud while the other is implicit and begins and ends at the ballot box.

All of which brings us to where we are now. A good portion of Trump’s supporters are not dumb—just as Sanders and Dean and Romney’s weren’t. Like Grant, they’ve just fallen for the noise. Some are excited by it, some are scared, some just don’t know what to believe anymore. But it’s all the same fundamental mistake.

The underlying numbers haven’t changed. We’ve just been gaslighted. The path to a Trump victory remains as unlikely—if not impossible—as it always was. Not only electorally, but personally—because every time Trump does get momentum, like clockwork, he rips off his Hannibal Lecter mask and says what he really thinks, ruining the very momentum his discretion had created. The only rotating variable is the media’s interest in keeping things interesting and the natural phenomena of how noise carries.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly win. It is not a surprise. The only part likely to change is by how much or by how little.

I’m not just telling myself that so I’ll feel better. I’m not hoping that’s the outcome. I know the dangers of that. I’m also not running around getting worried and anxious as a form of virtue signaling.

Both are pointless exercises rooted in the same bad assumption. The Stoic philosopher Hecato has said that hope and fear were the same. They are both based on irrational projections—of following the noise and ignoring the tricks that noise can play on you.

What’s better is truth. What’s better is counting the voices, not measuring their volume.

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Podcasts & Interviews for Ego is the Enemy

Ego is the Enemy came out exactly three months ago and I want to thank you for your support. The book was an immediate Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller (it also hit a few lists abroad) as well as receiving 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon with nearly 300 reviews so far. I want to thank you again for your support and especially the many of you who took part of the preorder campaign. I’m blown away by the support you all gave the book and I am having a wonderful time finishing the strategy calls with many of you who preordered more than 50 copies of the book.

Aside from the preorder campaign and the usual press around a book launch, I was interviewed at a number of podcasts and I thought I’d put a list together of some my favorite ones:

[*] I did a podcast with Dr. Michael Gervais of the Seahawks. As I said when the episode came out, it was like a 2 hour therapy session.

[*] My friend Lewis Howes interviewed me for his show and you can watch the entire episode below:

[*] I was in the UK promoting the book and had my second appearance on London Real:

[*] Tim Ferriss not only interviewed me but also posted two chapters from the audiobook on his podcast as he holds the audio rights to the book.

[*] I was also interviewed by Jordan Harbinger from the Art of Charm.

[*] Back in May I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Brian Koppelman (the screenwriter behind Ocean’s Thirteen, Rounders, Billions, etc.) for his podcast The Moment.

[*] It was my second appearance on Rich Roll’s podcast (the first one was during the launch of The Obstacle Is the Way).  

[*] I also got to sit down and chat with my friend Aubrey Marcus (the man behind Onnit):

[*] Scott Barry Kaufman from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania interviewed me for The Psychology Podcast.  

[*] The hilarious and amazing guys behind the ETC Show invited me for an interview. Watch below:

[*] I also had the opportunity to chat with Russ Robert from EconTalk who also happens to be the author of one of my favorite books, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

[*] I had an amazing chat with James Altucher on his podcast and our conversation after the episode inspired my piece on envy and jealousy.

[*] I want to thank Todd Henry from The Accidental Creative for inviting me for a second round for his podcast.

[*] Few weeks before the book came out, Gerard Adams came over and we filmed a little segment for Leaders Create Leaders. You can watch below:

[*] The Art of Manliness is one of my favorite sites out there (I have written a number of pieces for them) and you can listen to our interview together.

[*] I also had great conversations with both Brian Johnson and Shane Parrish for their respective shows.

[*] I was lucky to go back and speak at Google again and you can watch my entire presentation below:

[*] I collaborated with FightMediocrity for this animated prologue of the book:

[*] I also had a great chat with Nathan Chan from Foundr magazine.

[*] I had the honor to make an appearance and join Maddox on his podcast.

[*] Julien Blanc interviewed me for his YouTube channel and you can watch below:

[*] I was also on NPR’s On Point with guest host Sacha Pfeiffer.

[*] I was at the NASDAQ offices where we recorded a short interview about the book.

Thanks to everyone for having me and if I missed anyone let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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The fascinating and ego-killing existence of human wormholes

A few months ago, Chief Medicine Crow, one of the last remaining links to the Native American tribes of the Wild West died at age 102. He had grown up hearing stories about George Armstrong Custer from his grandfather, who’d been a scout for the doomed general at Little Bighorn in 1876. A soldier himself in the Second World War, Medicine Crow was one of the last Crow people to ever accomplish the four deeds required to be considering a war chief (command a war party, steal an enemy horse, touch an enemy without killing him and taking an enemy’s weapon).

He was a fascinating man, not just for what he did but also for what he represents to us now. He was, to use a phrase coined by Jason Kottke, a “human wormhole.” His unusual and long live is a reminder to how connected the past and present really are.

A curator at the Smithsonian described meeting Medicine Crow as “you’re shaking hands with the 19th century.” Which an amazing concept. A few intrepid historians on reddit recently discovered an even more amazing one, calculating that it would take a chain of just six individuals who shook hands with one another to connect Barack Obama to George Washington across the centuries (Obama ->Queen Elizabeth II -> Herbert Hoover -> William H. Taft -> Benjamin Harrison -> William Henry Harrison -> Benjamin Harrison V -> George Washington).

I’ve become fascinated with discovering and tracking some of these reminders. For some time now, I’ve kept a file of them on 4×6 notecards in my house. My friends and I email these moments to each other as we find them — some absurd (Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman may have hooked up), coincidental (Orson Welles claimed to have been in the Biograph Theater in Chicago where John Dillinger was killed by the FBI) and some that are so unbelievable that they might just blow your mind (there’s a video from a 1956 CBS game show, “I’ve Got a Secret,” with a very old guest whose secret was that he was in Ford’s Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated. Appearing with him on the show? Lucille Ball.)

Here in modern life, it’s easy to think the past is dead and distant, until we bump up against the reality of Faulkner’s admonition that it’s not really even past. England’s government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic wars, the empire’s abolition of slavery, and the Irish potato famine — meaning that for more than a decade and a half of the twenty first century there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (The US is still paying pensions related to both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.)

I’ll share a few more wormholes before I get to my point — because I promise there is more to this than just strange trivia.

Did you know that Tom Pratt, a football coach whose team the Arizona Cardinals narrowly missed going to the Super Bowl in 2015, was also on the coaching staff for the Kansas City Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl fifty years ago? Or that there are whales alive today who were born before Melville published Moby Dick? Or the world’s oldest tortoise, Jonathan, lives on an island in the Atlantic and is 183 years old? Or that President John Tyler, born in 1790, who took office just ten years after little Jonathan was born, still has living grandchildren?

War is perhaps the strangest source of these anomalies. Did you know that Winston Churchill and James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s father fought in the same unit in WWI? When Fleming’s father was killed, Churchill wrote his obituary. General Simon Bolivar Buckner was a Confederate general in the Civil War (he surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson). His son Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr also became a General, and he died at Okinawa some 83 years later. General MacArthur — his father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr. — was a Civil War hero for the Union. Stonewall Jackson had a granddaughter who lived to be 104. She died in 1991.

In high school, a promising young student at the Virginia Military Institute named George Marshall petitioned the president for a military commission. Which President did the creator of the Marshall plan petition? William McKinley (just months before man’s life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet.) And most unbelievably, what of the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln was present as his father died of assassination, was at the train station with President James Garfield was assassinated, and was in attendance at the event in which McKinley was assassinated? Three assassinations, spread out over 40 years. Robert Todd Lincoln himself lived to be 82, dying in 1926. He could have read stories published by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He drove in a car. He talked on the telephone. He would have heard jazz music.

And these are just the events of the so called modern history.

We forget that woolly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built. We don’t realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom. We forget that Ovid and Jesus were alive at the same time. When British workers excavated the land in Trafalgar Square to build Nelson’s Column and its famous bronze lions, in the ground they found the bones of actual lions, who’d roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before.

The effect of these stories — after the novelty wears off — is an intense humbling. We like to think that we are special — that we live in blessed, unprecedented times. It’s this self-absorption that disconnects us from the universe we belong to. It’s unthinking ego that makes us assume that because the photos of the past were in black and white, that the past itself was too.

Obviously, it wasn’t — their sky was the same color as ours (in some places brighter than ours), they bled the same way we did, and their cheeks got flushed just like ours do. “Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian,” wrote the wise Marcus Aurelius some 1900 years ago, “and you’ll see all these things: marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one’s lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone… the times of Trajan, again the same… ”

Again the same for us now. However much we celebrate our own exceptionalism.

In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (which was a favorite of Napoleon’s) there is a scene in which Werther writes to a friend about his daily trip to a small, beautiful spring. He sees the young girls coming to gather water and thinks about how many generations have been doing that — have come and had same thoughts he is having. “When I sit there the patriarchal ways come vividly to life about me,” he says, “and I see them all, the ancestral fathers, making friends and courting by the spring, I sense the benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells. Oh, anyone who cannot share this feeling must never have refreshed himself at a cool spring after a hard day’s summer walking.”

That’s the feeling most of us miss. Even if we don’t see it, it’s there. The whispers and the smoke and remnants never disappear. Goethe was born in 1749, wrote his first bestseller which contained those words in 1774 before America was a country, and would live well into the 19th century (overlapping briefly with Jonathan the Tortoise). A hundred years after that, another famous German writer, Stefan Zweig, would be stunned to find that his elderly upstairs neighbor was the daughter of Goethe’s doctor, who had vivid memories of meeting Goethe as a young girl. In fact, Goethe had attended her christening.

Sorry, I’m getting distracted. I have too many of these wormholes and I don’t know where to put them all.

Back to the point, Ernest Hemingway opens The Sun Also Rises with a bible verse: “One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.” It was this passage, his editor would say that “contained all the wisdom of the ancient world.”

And what wisdom is that? That we all flow into each other as part of an endless stream (slavery, Louis C.K. observed is just two old ladies back to back). It seems slow and long to us because we’re in it. It seems distant to us because it wasn’t our problem, it wasn’t us that did that terrible deed we’d like to forget. In fact, time whips by in a blur. Wounds barely have time to heal. They don’t recognize the passing of generations. Because generations don’t really exist. It is instead an endless parade.

When I lived in New Orleans, my apartment was partitioned out of 19th century convent. When I would head uptown to write what became my first book, I’d hop on the longest continually running streetcar in the world — some 181 years it had been traveling the same tracks. How many millions of people had ridden those same rails? Sat, even, in the same seat. Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, George Washington Cable, Edgar Degas — could have looked out these very windows. They, along with so many others not as easily remembered — but who lived and hustled and struggled just as I was trying to.

In moments like that, one cannot help but know what Pierre Hadot has referred to as the “oceanic feeling.” A sense of belonging to something larger, realizing that “human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity.” And when one gets this feeling, we ask ourselves important questions about who we are and what we are doing.

On the other hand, nothing draws us away from those questions like material success — when we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from; when we’re wealthy or told that we’re important or powerful. Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter. When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we’ve detached ourselves from the tradition we hail from — forgetting that we’re just like the people who came before us, and we’re but a brief stopover until the people just like you who will come after. The earth abideth forever, but we will come and go.

History on the other hand, gives us perspective. As I said, it has the power to humble us. Specifically, these wormholes — illustrating the “great span” as they do — are instant humility in bite-sized pieces. It’s proof that others have been here before you, generations of them, and that they can almost reach out and touch you. In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world and also its smallness. Ego is impossible, because we realize, if only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that “every man is a quotation from all his ancestors” or what John Muir tried to convey to us about his epic experiences in nature. Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.

Baldwin wrote that “if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too.” I actually think it’s the reverse. If you can examine and face the connection between other lives, and other eras, only then can you begin to understand and appreciate your own.

This post appeared originally on Boing Boing. 

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The Maxim For Every Successful Person; ‘Always Stay A Student’

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Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed throughout history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have him and his Mongol horde traveling across Asia and Europe, insatiable, stopping at nothing to plunder, rape, and kill not just the people who stood in their way, but the cultures they had built. Then, not unlike his nomadic band of warriors, this terrible cloud simply disappeared from history, because the Mongols built nothing that could last.

Like all reactionary, emotional assessments, this could not be more wrong. For not only was Genghis Khan one of the greatest military minds who ever lived, he was a perpetual student, whose stunning victories were often the result of his ability to absorb the best technologies, practices, and innovations of each new culture his empire touched.

In fact, if there is one theme in his reign and in the several centuries of dynastic rule that followed, it’s this: appropriation.

Under Genghis Khan’s direction, the Mongols were as ruthless about stealing and absorbing the best of each culture they encountered as they were about conquest itself. Though there were essentially no technological inventions, no beautiful buildings or even great Mongol art, with each battle and enemy, their culture learned and absorbed something new.

Genghis Khan was not born a genius. Instead, as one biogra­pher put it, his was “a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined and focused will.” He was the greatest conqueror the world ever knew because he was more open to learning than any other conqueror has ever been.

Khan’s first powerful victories came from the reorganization of his military units, splitting his soldiers into groups of ten. This he stole from neighboring Turkic tribes, and unknowingly converted the Mongols to the decimal system.

Soon enough, their expanding empire brought them into contact with another “technology” they’d never experienced before: walled cities. In the Tangut raids, Khan first learned the ins and outs of war against fortified cities and the strategies critical to laying siege, and quickly became an expert. Later, with help from Chinese engineers, he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines that could knock down city walls. In his campaigns against the Jurched, Khan learned the importance of winning hearts and minds. By working with the scholars and royal family of the lands he conquered, Khan was able to hold on to and man­age these territories in ways that most empires could not.

Afterward, in every country or city he held, Khan would call for the smartest astrologers, scribes, doctors, thinkers, and advisers — anyone who could aid his troops and their efforts. His troops traveled with interrogators and translators for precisely this purpose.

It was a habit that would survive his death. While the Mongols themselves seemed dedicated almost solely to the art of war, they put to good use every craftsman, merchant, scholar, entertainer, cook, and skilled worker they came in contact with. The Mongol Empire was remarkable for its reli­gious freedoms, and most of all, for its love of ideas and con­vergence of cultures. It brought lemons to China for the first time, and Chinese noodles to the West. It spread Persian carpets, German mining technology, French metalworking, and Islam. The cannon, which revolutionized warfare, was said to be the resulting fusion of Chinese gunpowder, Mus­lim flamethrowers, and European metalwork. It was Mongol openness to learning and new ideas that brought them together.

As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. The freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics. The salesman, how to manage. The founder, how to delegate. The writer, how to edit others. The comedian, how to act. The chef turned restaurateur, how to run the other side of the house.

This is not a harmless conceit. The physicist John Wheeler, the physicist who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, once observed that “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” In other words, each victory and advancement that made Khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he’d never encountered before. It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.

With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pre­tend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything. Scientia infla (knowledge puffs up). That’s the worry and the risk — thinking that we’re set and secure, when in reality understanding and mastery is a fluid, con­tinual process.

The nine­-time Grammy– and Pulitzer Prize–winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis once advised a promising young musician on the mind­set required in the lifelong study of music: “Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. . . . Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’” No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.

It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies. At every step and every juncture in life, there is the opportunity to learn — and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let ego block us from hearing it again.

It’s something I’ve had to learn as an author, personally. Just because one book does well, doesn’t mean that the next one will. It certainly doesn’t mean that everything that I’ll write is good or that I know everything there is to know about this profession either. Thinking that way is a recipe for falling off and disappointing both publishers and audiences. A better attitude is to start from scratch with each project — to focus on all there is left to learn and all the room we have left improve. That’s what I’ve tried to do with each subsequent project, including this most recent one (appropriately about ego).

Too often, convinced of our own intelligence or success, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our under­ standing, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.

Each of us faces a threat as we pursue our craft. Like sirens on the rocks, ego sings a soothing, validating song — which can lead to a wreck. The second we let the ego tell us we have graduated, learning grinds to a halt. That’s why UFC champion and MMA pioneer Frank Shamrock said, “Always stay a student.” As in, it never ends.

The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncom­fortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to noth­ing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged — what about subjecting your­self to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your sur­roundings.

An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.

Most military cultures — and people in general — seek to impose values and control over what they encounter. What made the Mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively, and if need be, swap out previous prac­tices for new ones. All great businesses start this way, but then something happens. Take the theory of disruption, which posits that at some point in time, every industry will be dis­rupted by some trend or innovation that, despite all the resources in the world, the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to. Why is this? Why can’t businesses change and adapt? A large part of it is because they lost the ability to learn. They stopped being students. The second this happens to you, your knowledge becomes fragile.

The great manager and business thinker Peter Drucker says that it’s not enough simply to want to learn. As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education.

Oth­erwise, we are selling ourselves — and our careers — dreadfully short.

This piece is adapted from Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy , published by Penguin Portfolio

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The 3 Ways Ego Will Derail Your Career Before It Really Begins

“Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.” – B.H. Liddell Hart

When we’re young and just setting out in our careers we tend to assume that the greatest impediments to our progress and success are external to us. We blame our bosses and “the system” but we rarely think that we might be our own worst enemies, sabotaging ourselves right when we are beginning on our path.

Too often the obstacle that impedes our progress the most is internal—our own ego.

Yes, all of us, with all our talent and promise and potential, if we don’t control our ego, risk blowing up before we start. Talent, as Irving Berlin put it, is only the starting point. What we also need is self-management, self-control and humility.

Here are three ways that ego is the enemy of those important traits.

1. Talk, talk, talk.

At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly. There’s a weak side to each of us, that—like a trade union—isn’t exactly malicious but at the end of the day still wants to get as much public credit and attention as it can for doing the least. That side we call ego.

The writer and former Gawker blogger Emily Gould—essentially a real-­life Hannah Horvath—realized this during her two-­year struggle to get a novel published. Though she had a six-­figure book deal, she was stuck. Why? She was too busy “spending a lot of time on the Internet,” that’s why.

“In fact, I can’t really remember anything else I did in 2010. I tumbld, I tweeted and I scrolled. This didn’t earn me any money but it felt like work… It was also the only creative thing I was doing.”

She did what a lot of us do when we’re scared or overwhelmed by a project—she did everything but focus on it. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult, whether it’s coding a new startup or mastering a craft. But talking, talking is always easy. So we do that instead.

It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.

Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening—not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.

The question is, when faced with your particular challenge—­whether it is researching in a new field, starting a business, producing a film, securing a mentor, advancing an important cause—do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head­-on?

2. Early pride.

At 18, a rather triumphant Benjamin Franklin returned to visit Boston, the city he’d run away from. Full of pride, he had a new suit, a watch and a pocketful of coins that he showed to everyone he ran into. All posturing by a boy who was not much more than an employee in a print shop in Philadelphia.

In a meeting with Cotton Mather, one of the town’s most respected figures, Franklin quickly illustrated just how ridiculously inflated his young ego had become. As they walked down a hallway, Mather suddenly admonished him, “Stoop! Stoop!” Too caught up in his performance, Franklin walked right into a low ceiling beam.

Mather’s response was perfect: “Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high,” he said wryly. “Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”

The problem with pride is that it blunts the instrument we need to succeed—our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride. Most dangerously, this tends to happen either early in life or in the process—­when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit. Only later do you realize that that bump on the head was the least of what was risked.

The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?

It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later.

3. Don’t be passionate.

Early on in her ascendant political career, a visitor once spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “passionate interest” in a piece of social legislation. The person had meant it as a compliment. But Eleanor’s response is illustrative. “Yes,” she did support the cause, she said. “But I hardly think the word ‘passionate’ applies to me.” As a genteel, accomplished, and patient woman born while the embers of the quiet Victorian virtues were still warm, Roosevelt was above passion. She had purpose and direction.

Today it’s all about passion. Find your passion. Live passionately. Inspire the world with your passion.

People go to Burning Man to find passion, to be around passion, to rekindle their passion. Same goes for TED and the now enormous SXSW and a thousand other events, retreats and summits, all fueled by what they claim to be life’s most important force.

Here’s what those same people haven’t told you: your passion may be the very thing holding you back from power or influence or accomplishment. Because just as often, we fail with—no, because of—passion. To be clear, this is not about caring. This is passion of a different sort—unbridled enthusiasm, our willingness to pounce on what’s in front of us with the full measure of our zeal, the “bundle of energy” that our teachers and gurus have assured us is our most important asset.

Instead, what we require in our ascent is purpose. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundar­ies. Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function. The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion.

Passion is about. (I am so passionate about ______.) Purpose is to and for. (I must do ______. I was put here to accomplish ______. I am willing to endure ______ for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I.

Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself. “Great passions are maladies without hope,” as Goethe said. Which is why a deliberate, purposeful person operates on a different level, beyond the sway or the sickness.

It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead—humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about your purpose: what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be. Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-­intentioned, but ineffective self.

Early on in our careers we are setting out to do something. We have a goal, a calling, a new beginning. Every great journey begins here—yet far too many of us never reach our intended destination. Ego more often than not is the culprit.

We build ourselves up with fantastical stories and talk, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why. These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and reality are the cure.

Do not let ego derail your career—before it even begins.

This piece is adapted from Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy, published by Penguin Portfolio.

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13 Moral Biographies That Make You A Better Person And Teach You About Life

Sometimes there is nothing like a 900-page biography. Most of the time though, nobody has time for such a thing. Especially with many modern biographers who refuse to take a stand that resembles judgement towards their subjects.

After all, we read biographies to learn and improve ourselves, not to simply accumulate facts about someone we’ll never meet.

This leads to one of my favorite categories of books I like to recommend: moral biographies. That is, short biographical sketches about great men and women in history, written with an eye towards practical application and advice. As in, have a moral rather than about morality. They are often more anecdotal than historical, apocryphal than accurate but they get the job done. (Incidentally, this was the model I tried to base my book The Obstacle Is The Way on, though I hardly consider myself in the same league.)

Below are some of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.

How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told By Themselves by Orison Swett Marden Written in 1901 these are uplifting business oriented biographies of men like Marshall Field, John D Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and women like Helen Gould and Julia Ward Howe (creator of Battle Hymn of the Republic). I was referred this book by Maria Popova over at Brainpickings and loved it—I’ve referred to it many times since reading it.

Lives of Eminent Philosophers Volumes I & II by Diogenes Laertius Ironically, Diogenes’ most famous biography in this collection is of the other Diogenes—Diogenes the Cynic. Other excellent and illustrative sketches include Zeno, Ariston, Cleanthes and Chrysippus the Stoic. Heraclitus is another great biography. All of these vary in length. Zeno is over 150 pages, Herillus (not to be confused with Heraclitus) is 2 pages. But regardless of length, they are all quite good. My favorite little quirk of the book is Diogenes’ weird poem that he writes about each philosopher and of course the credulity with which he reports on their unusual deaths (on that note, you may also like the book The Book of Dead Philosophers, a book on how many of the world’s most famous philosophers supposedly died.)

Lives of the Later Caesars by Anonymous Written by an anonymous author (possibly multiple) in the 4th century, these biographies are a mix of myth, legend and fact about some of the most powerful men who ever lived: the Roman emperors. We have Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Avidius Cassius, Severus and countless others. I’m sure you can guess my favorite subject. Also try The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, translated by the peerless Robert Graves, these are more biographies of the Roman emperors—from Julius Ceasar to Domitian.

Plutarch’s Lives Clearly the master of this genre, Plutarch wrote biographies of famous Greeks and Romans around the year 100 AD. As always, I tend to default to the Penguin collections. I strongly recommend Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I & II, Essays, and The Makers of Rome: Nine Lives. His book On Sparta is also a collection of biographies (and aphorisms) from the famous Spartans. There is a reason that Shakespeare based many of his plays on Plutarch—not only are they well-written and exciting but they exhibit everything that is good and bad about the human condition. Greed, love, pain, hate, success, selflessness, leadership, stupidity—it’s all there.

The Works of Robert Greene You can argue that the master heir to this tradition is Robert Greene. What is the 48 Laws of Power but a series of biographies—moral lessons—from interesting figures in history? Naturally when I say moral I don’t mean morality, I mean the stories have a moral. From Robert Greene you can learn about Napoleon, Machiavelli, Cortez, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, FDR, Temple Grandin, PT Barnum, and 50 Cent in an accessible way that is really quite difficult to replicate anywhere else.

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy Written by President Kennedy when he was bedridden after back surgery, Profiles in Courage recounts the inspiring acts of eight different American Senators, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, and Robert A. Taft. Kennedy had recently been elected as the junior Senator from Massachusetts and was inspired to write a book after reading a passage from The Price of Union about an act of courage by John Quincy Adams while serving in the Senate. It was heartening to read about Senators willing to cross party lines and stand up for their principles given the current state of our Congress.

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari A friend and peer of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael Titian and all the other great minds of the Renaissance sat down in 1550 and wrote biographical sketches of the people he knew or had influenced him. What I like about this book is that the profiles are not about statesmen or generals but artists. There are so many great lessons about craft and psychology within this book. The best part? It was written by someone who actually knew what he was talking about, not some art snob or critic, but an actual artist and architect of equal stature to the people he was documenting.

Founders At Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston Now this one is certainly a little less historical than the others, if only because most of the profiles are about companies founded in the last ten years. Written by Jessica Livingston, a founder of YCombinator, the book profiles some of the hottest and most successful startups in Silicon Valley history. It shows how the founders managed to create massive growth, usually with very few resources. Now I’m not saying that companies like Hot or Not compare with the accomplishments of Pericles or Da Vinci, but you can certainly see how this book captures a moment in time—and its leading men and women—and what that means. This is the most current book on the list (besides mine) but I think many of you will like it. Plus you can learn a lot about the tech scene in one swoop.

If you never took a history course, hell if your parents never taught you anything, these little books could help. They show us how to live and how not to live. And best of all, you can read about a bunch of different people in one book.

What we choose to do with that information is up to us, of course. I hope you all use it wisely and get as much out of it as I did.

And if you have room for another book of such stories, try my book The Obstacle Is The Way for stories about Amelia Earhart, Arthur Ashe, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Abraham Lincoln.

This post was published originally on Thought Catalog. 

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Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump

I originally submitted this piece to the New York Observer where I am an editor-at-large and a columnist on media and culture. Editorial decided it would no longer accept columns of this nature on this topic. I have the utmost respect for the leadership at the Observer, but I respectfully disagree with that decision.

Dad, let me start this letter by saying that it isn’t my intention to embarrass you. I find that I can express myself in writing better than I can when we talk on the phone (in fact, if anyone likes this piece, that will be, in its own way, a compliment to you — I developed as a writer sitting alone in my room as a kid, trying to find ways to respond to your overwhelming parental logic) and so when I heard that you were leaning towards voting for Donald Trump, I felt inclined to put my thoughts down so they would be clear.

It’s fitting that I would write to you here anyway, because the Observer has its own father issues when it comes to Donald Trump (Mr. Trump is the publisher’s father-in-law.) This is a newspaper that, despite its sincere and passionate reporting on anti-Semitism and its frontline investigations on the rise of Russia as a national security threat, has found itself endorsing and defending Trump…even as he veers dangerously towards courting anti-Semitism and justifying Russia’s authoritarian methods (when he isn’t complimenting the tactics of Saddam Hussein.) Having been associated with my own fair share of controversial people, I empathize with the position, Jared Kushner, the paper’s owner, must be in.

I get that elections are complicated. Yet I cannot help but feel that the right choice has become increasingly simple. Not easy, but simple.

The choice is simple because it’s hard for me to think of a single person who violates more of what you taught me as a child. The case against Donald Trump as a candidate — even as a person worthy of two seconds of anyone’s serious attention in our busy lives — is clear to me precisely because of what I learned from you, Dad.

I remember the trips we took to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. This is where people like Grandma and Grandpa first arrived in America, you told us. It was here that they stopped on their way to the American Dream, fleeing the terror of their homeland and hoping for a better life. You taught us that it was honorable and brave to be an immigrant and that what made America special was that we opened our arms to these people. Do you remember taking us to the Civil War battlefields and explaining how many of the men who fought and died in that war were fresh off the boat, paying for their citizenship to this country in blood — dying to eradicate the scourge of slavery, a plague they had nothing to do with creating in the first place? That was what made America great, you said.

But you didn’t just teach us to admire white European immigrants either. It was from you that I learned to respect just how hard Latino, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants worked to make a life for themselves here. You told me what it was like picking fruit in the California heat, and explained how they took jobs that other people weren’t willing to do — because they wanted to support their families just like everyone else. You also took the time to explain how many immigrants were entrepreneurs — starting restaurants and small businesses from donut shops to car dealerships (we’ve invested together in a few of those small businesses) and how their efforts made the world better for everyone.

When I was in Austria a few years ago, I called Mom and had her do some research to find the location of the refugee camp that Grandpa was sent to when he was just a little younger than I am now. It’s an apartment complex now, which I guess goes to show how quickly we can forget the kind of thinking that creates such horrors. Experiences like these — they color the way I see the world, which is why, I imagine, you encouraged us to travel and study history. Those trips are why I find it so repulsive to hear Donald Trump talk about how Mexicans are “rapists” and how his solution is building a literal wall — “We’re going to have a big, beautiful wall that nobody’s crossing” — to keep these kinds of people out. I find it disgusting to hear him talk about banning Muslims from America. That’s not what you taught me. That’s not how this country is supposed to work. Mom and half our relatives wouldn’t be here if it was.

I told you that a few weeks ago we had someone out at the house to repair some damage from the floods. As I was walking the property with the guy, he asked me if I owned a gun. I said that I did — this is Texas after all. “Good,” he said, “you’ll need to have something when them sand niggers come and try to take this country from us.” Then he told me about how he was glad Donald Trump was speaking the truth and taking things in the right direction.

I know you don’t agree with this man. And I don’t think it’s fair to hold a candidate accountable for every fringe group that attaches themselves to their platform. But doesn’t it alarm you to see a candidate who seems to stoke these kinds of fires — directly or indirectly? Surely you must be shaking your head at Trump’s repeated refusal to distance himself from these people.

As a police officer, you worked for a time in the hate crimes division. You’ve seen the horrible things that prejudice and ignorance can do. I remember you once told me that the way the Ku Klux Klan recruited people in our hometown was by convincing white people that they were being attacked and that their way of life was under siege. C’mon Dad, is that not eerily similar to some of Trump’s campaign tactics? Why else would he have refused to immediately disavow the support of David Duke and other white supremacists? What possible purpose did he have to insinuate that President Obama was a Muslim, that he was not born in America? Or question a Mexican-American judge’s loyalty to the law and to the Constitution?

A few years ago, Donald Trump went on live television and talked about how nice his daughter Ivanka’s body was, saying how if he wasn’t her father, he’d probably be dating her. It was disturbing then, but we all say things that come off utterly differently than intended. Except last year, speaking to a Rolling Stone reporter, Trump said the exact same thing again. “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one,” he told the journalist. “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father…”

You have a daughter (and now a daughter-in-law). Can you imagine saying anything like that about them? What would you say to one of your friends who uttered something half that creepy? You’ve been married for thirty years. You taught me about respecting women, about the importance of marriage and fidelity. This man, he doesn’t stand for any of that. On the contrary, he refers to women he doesn’t like as “fat pigs” and “dogs.” He attacks them and when they press him on the issues, says it’s because they’re probably menstruating.

You’ve protected presidents and other heads of state as part of your job. Can you imagine any of them behaving that way? I remember our family trip to the White House in middle school — even though you disagreed with the man who was President, you spoke of the office with such reverence and dignity that we felt honored just to visit. I left that day with exactly the sense of admiration and respect for the office that I think you hoped we’d feel. I remember another trip to New York where we walked by the Trump Tower. What’s that, I asked? You just shook your head and said, “Tacky.”

Before he died, Grandad gave me his copy of John McCain’s memoir Faith of My Fathers and said that I might like to read it. It wasn’t until years later that I got around to it. Did you know that when John McCain was trapped in that horrible North Vietnamese prison, his captors offered to let him go several times? McCain’s father was the commander of all US forces in the Vietnam theater and the Vietcong thought by giving his son an easy way out, they could show that Americans were cowards. Despite the repeated torture that he’d already undergone, despite the fact that McCain ached to go home, he refused. He stayed because he refused to embarrass his country or abandon his comrades — death was better than dishonor. I think that’s the kind of lesson that Grandad was trying to pass along to me. I know you voted for McCain in 2000 and in 2008 in part for that very reason. I don’t agree with many of McCain’s politics but I hope that when tested, I could exhibit one iota of the courage that that man has.

And yet here we are discussing a Republican candidate who insulted John McCain in front of the entire world — claiming that John McCain isn’t a hero because he was captured and spent time in a POW camp. Donald Trump, who got out of serving with a series of draft deferments, said he only likes the veterans “that weren’t captured.” That this pathetic encounter has been nearly forgotten in the campaign is not because Donald addressed it or apologized, but rather because nearly every day since he either said something worse or piled on with some other obscene gesture or gaffe.

Wouldn’t just a single one of these remarks have run a candidate out of the race in a normal election cycle? Wouldn’t have these repeated and ridiculous lapses in judgement effectively end the campaign for anyone in any election anywhere in the civilized world? I’ve tried to think about why we’ve been so forgiving of Donald Trump. Is it because his opponent is a woman? Does it say something about us? Have we all collectively lost our sense of where the line is and we’re just hoping that someone will finally draw it for us?

I realize that most of these issues I’ve brought up are personal ones, but isn’t all politics personal? That’s a lesson I learned from you, too. I remember asking whether you supported the Republican or the Democrat candidate in some local election when I was a kid, having heard some friends’ parents talking about it. You told me that people got too caught up in party affiliation and that what really mattered was character and whether you could work together with the person (and whether they could do the job). That’s how I’ve tried to think all my life. I’m thinking about it now that it really matters.

The baffling reality is that when it comes to Trump, it’s difficult to critique him on much besides his personality and (lack of) character — because that is all there is. Maybe you can make an exception for some of these comments, I’ve certainly said dumb things before. We all have. Maybe we chalk them up to media mischaracterizations as some of the Trump supporters I know have (given what I write about in this column, I’m the last one to think the media is completely fair or trustworthy). But even making allowances for that, I know for a fact, no matter what the talking heads on TV are trying to tell moderate conservatives, is that you and he stand very far apart on most of the economic principles and civil policies in which you have always believed.

I remember long trips in the car and the conversation we had about civics and governance. The basics you taught me about the free market, about capitalism, about the government staying out of people’s business. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve come to fully understand and truly appreciate why you taught me these lessons. I see how they’ve contributed to my own success. I also see how the few policies or firm beliefs Trump might actually have fly in the face of all of them.

Besides repeatedly donating money to Democratic (and Republican) candidates from whom he tried to get favors, Donald Trump has said publicly that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who get abortions (though he later backtracked under pressure). He’s advocated economic policies that the experts say will start trade wars with China and Mexico. He cheered Brexit because it might drive traffic to his Scottish golf courses (the definition of a conflict of interest), has hinted at using federal resources to go after personal enemies like Jeff Bezos, admits he wouldcontinue to let his children run his numerous international businesses while in office, supports “opening up” our libel laws to reduce freedom of the press, and apparently believes that global warming is a lie created by China.

I suppose it would be one thing if these beliefs came from some unique ideological framework but we both know they don’t. He’s a man who reacts, a man who speaks before he thinks (something you always taught me to avoid). These aren’t the meticulously crafted positions of an educated leader surrounded by qualified and informed policy experts — as Trump famously said, he advises himself. There is a quote I read from Winston Churchill recently. During World War One, someone asked why he was reading the work of a certain anti-war poet. “I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon,” Churchill said, “That man can think. I am only afraid of people who cannot think.”

I think that’s why I am so scared, Dad. That’s why I am writing you this letter. I don’t think this man has done a lick of thinking in years — except about himself and the irrational prejudices and fears which rule his increasingly erratic and bizarre life.

If my understanding of where you sit it is correct, you are inclined to agree with most of the criticisms I’ve just made and yet are swayed by very few of them. As is true for a lot of Americans, I know you’ve been disturbed with a lot what Trump has said and wish sincerely that someone else was running in his place. The problem is — the reason you can’t help but feel pressure to give him the benefit of the doubt or vote for him reluctantly — is that you feel a profound and real distrust towards Hillary Clinton.

I wasn’t old enough to experience the anger and disillusionment that the Clintons brought to the White House. I get the sense that you see them as thoughtless, careless self-aggrandizers who believe themselves to be above the law. Given the evidence, this is a more than fair assessment. You have real, negative experiences with the last administration and the vague memories of the scandals and noise of that era probably makes another four years seem unappealing. I get it.

It was J.K. Galbraith who said that politics was a matter of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. I don’t disagree with you we are dealing with less than ideal options. But surely, unpalatable is better than disastrous.

Then again, no one is saying you have to vote for Hillary. I’m just asking if you could not vote for Donald Trump. Vote for a third party candidate. For a write-in, you could take a page from Trump’s people, who when they initially had trouble finding people to speak on his behalf at the convention, apparently just put “George Washington” in as a placeholder. Or, what about just not voting in this election? Is that not a powerful statement in its own right? One does not need to endorse disaster just because they resent unpalatable.

Mitt Romney has said that he was finally motivated to get involved in this election when his son asked him, “When the grandkids ask ‘What did you do to stop Donald Trump?’ what are you going to say?’”

I was so happy to be able to tell you a few weeks ago that you have your first grandchild on the way and that he’s expected to arrive just three days before the election. I think that’s why I am writing this letter too, as my way of asking myself what am I going to do to make sure the world he enters is just a little bit better than the one I came into thirty years ago. I guess I am writing this letter to ask that you, as his grandfather, do what you can to ensure the same.

So that when he does ask, not that many years in the future, looking back at what was hopefully just a painful aberration in this nation’s history, we both have a good answer to how we faced this challenge in front of us. And that we acted — despite any personal feelings, or complications or doubts — with principle and courage.

Dad, please don’t vote for Donald Trump. Everything you’ve taught me about what is wrong in the world is everything that man represents. And if you won’t do it for me, do it for your grandchild. Give him something to be proud of — and thankful for.

Your Loving Son,

Ryan

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My Extended Bibliography for Ego Is The Enemy and How I Screwed It Up

During the writing of Ego is the Enemy, I happened to read Jon Ronson’s amazing book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. My favorite part wasn’t the book (though the book is great), I loved the book’s annotated bibliography. Ronson took the time to explain what he liked about each source and how he used it. I wrote a note (literally, a notecard) to myself that said “Do this on your next book” and then, when I came to the end of writing Ego, I did.

I took the time to do that instead of just listing my sources because I loved all the books that went into making Ego is the Enemy. In fact, I think a lot of them are better than anything I ever have or ever will write. I also know that my own life would be radically different if it wasn’t for authors taking the time to recommend and acknowledge their sources. For a long time, my rule as a young reader was: Try to read one book mentioned in every book that you read. This philosophy took me down countless rabbit holes and introduced me to fascinating topics and people.

When I look at most bibliographies, I am usually left wanting to know more. What did the author like about the book? What didn’t they like about it? How did they find it? What other interesting things had they wished they’d been able to include but couldn’t? What was their favorite part? I want to know everything.

To me, there’s also not a big difference between a bibliography and an Acknowledgements section either. They are both about citing sources of value—and often doing so is of great use to the reader. Hell, I found my agent through the acknowledgements of a book by Andrew Keen. If an author was being honest, the acknowledgements section would be pages and pages long. So many people and so many things go into making a book. A wife gets one sentence. An agent gets a few words. The publisher gets a mention. And then we’re done. Hardcore fans want to know more. So do aspiring writers. The people who contributed to a book love seeing their name in print. Due to space concerns, most contributions go unthanked.

Anyway, that’s what I set out to rectify at the end of Ego is the Enemy. I went as far as thanking food I ate during certain chapters, admitting the fact that I found Neil deGrasse Tyson paraphrasing a John Wheeler quote in an airplane magazine, and even pointed out extra stuff, like a Ta-Nehisi Coates quote, that I read after I’d already finished my chapter on Jackie Robinson. All sorts of stuff. I’ve always believed that any wisdom or insight in my books can and should be attributed to people smarter than me—that I am just a conduit or a collector. This was the first acknowledgments section in any of my books that felt truly complete.

The only problem is that the bibliography I wrote was something like 5,000 words and added 17 pages to an already longer than intended book. The publisher told me I would have to choose between it and substantial edits to the book. What was I going to do?

I decided I would cut it from the book, replace it with a standard ‘selected’ bibliography and then give away my fuller works cited online to all the readers who wanted it. I certainly wasn’t going to scrap all the time and energy I’d put into making it. The upside was that by making it digital, I could make the links clickable, the sources searchable and I could even update it if I felt like anything had been left out. Plus it’s a good way to interact with readers and capture email addresses. I did something similar with Growth Hacker Marketing and have talked with thousands and thousand of people as a result.

This is the exact language I put at the end of the book announcing my plan.

For most people, bibliographies are boring. For those of us who love to read, they can be the best part of an entire book. As one of those people, I have prepared for you—my book­loving reader—a full guide to every single book and source I used in this study of ego. I wanted to show you not just which books deserved citation but what I got out of them, and which ones I strongly recommend you read next. In doing this, I got so carried away that my publisher informed me what I had prepared was too big to in the book. So I’d like to send it to you directly—in fully clickable and searchable form.

If you’d like these recommendations, all you have to do is e­mail EgoIsTheEnemy@gmail.com or visit EgoIsTheEnemy/books.

And here’s where the story takes a twist. Because I really screwed up (as you can partly see already).

In the bustle of the launch, I somehow lost control of EgoistheEnemy@gmail.com—the address I was asking people to use. I’m positive I registered it, but after dozens of emails to some of my contacts at Google, trying every single password and secret question I could think of and asking everyone who worked for me in the last year whether they knew how to login, I’m not sure of anything anymore. I’m writing this post to admit my biggest screwup as author to date: The first 5-10,000 copies of my book offer a bonus with a non-working email address (I’m not the only one who screwed up: Penguin didn’t fix an error in the domain name listed either, though that hardly makes anything better). I can console myself by saying that if 10% of those 5,000 people email, it’s not a huge number of people effected and the hardcore fans will reach out to me directly, but it’s still not something I wished had happened.

At the same time, I’m also proud of how I handled it. I didn’t freak out. I didn’t yell—at the publisher for their mistake or for Google for their incredibly frustrating customer service. I focused on solutions instead. We managed to fix it in the audiobook and the ebook in time. It’s also been addressed in subsequent printings. I worked the Google angle until it turned out to be a dead end. And then I moved on to focus on things that were in my control (like writing this post for example). Still, it’s a mistake. I don’t feel good about it. I also didn’t make it worse either.

That being said, I still am really excited for people to check this thing out and for all the people and books and ideas that went into making Ego is the Enemy to get their due. If you’re reading this post because you’re trying to figure out why the hell no one at EgoistheEnemy@gmail.com is responding, I’m sorry. Just resend your email to books@egoistheenemy.com or you can just go here and fill out this form.

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Events for Ego is the Enemy

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Just wanted to invite everyone to a few events/appearances planned for Ego is the Enemy (which is out on June 14th!).

Signings:

Book People

Austin, TX

June 17th 7pm

RSVP on Facebook here

Book Soup

Los Angeles, CA

July 6th 7pm

RSVP on Facebook here

Talks/Events:

Reddit AMA

June 14th 12-2pm

Link

Quora Session

June 15th

1-2:30pm

Link

Google NYC

Private (Except for Googlers–will probably be online after)

June 22nd

Austin Trail Running Company

Austin, TX

June 28th 6:30pm

RSVP on Facebook here

Affiliate World Europe

(Keynote Address)

Berlin, Germany

July 18-19

RSVP/TICKETS Here

More to come. Check back to this page!

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Ego is the Enemy: My New Book & A Bunch of Preorder Bonuses

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Well, the day is here. I get to finally tell you all about my next book, Ego is the Enemy (BN)(iBooks)(UK)(Audio is coming soon). It’s a book that took more than two years, three book proposals, a dozen drafts and hundreds of hours in the making. It was a process that left behind (at least for me personally) many painful lessons, toxic relationships and bad habits. The result is what I think I can say is my best writing and my proudest economy.

Ego is the Enemy begins where The Obstacle Is The Way leaves off—asking: What do we do when our greatest obstacle is ourselves? How do we conquer the arrogance that comes with success or the blinding focus that accompanies ambition? In every phase of life—whether we’re aspiring to something, reaping the rewards of success or dealing with the difficulties of adversity or failure—ego is our enemy. It is the worst ingredient to add into any situation.

We know this, intuitively, but how do we actually do something about it? I decided to look at the lives of some of history’s greatest figures. How did someone like George Marshall manage to accomplish so much without ever falling prey to the destructive vanity that impeded the careers of Douglas MacArthur or George Patton? How did Katharine Graham, raised in a life of immense privilege, find the courage and strength amidst terrible tragedy to become one of the 20th century’s best CEOs? How does someone like Bill Belichick keep a franchise together despite huge salaries and the perils of fame? How did Eleanor Roosevelt balance passion and purpose, poise and power? And conversely, how has an inability to navigate these tricky problems ruined brilliant men like Howard Hughes or John DeLorean? How many empires have imploded because of egotistical leaders?

These are the stories I tell in the book and I draw on the philosophy of the Stoics, of Aristotle, of Adam Smith, Alan Watts, Benjamin Franklin and Goethe to try to answer the difficult questions that they provoke. I haven’t been able to share that work or those answers until now. Until today.

Now, I can finally announce that Ego is the Enemy is available for preorder and that it will be released in less than a month. Even better, I have all sorts of awesome stuff to share with everyone who wants to order it right now. As someone who buys a lot of books, I don’t make the decision to pre-order very many. So I want to make it worth your while to pre-order mine—ridiculously worth your while. Below you’ll see a series of offers and bonuses for anyone that pre-orders the book. There’s also bonuses for those of you who think that people in your life might like this book and decide to order it for them now as well.

MY OFFER TO YOU

If you pre-order 1 copy of the book before June 14th, you’ll receive:

*1 exclusive BONUS chapter of Ego is the Enemy titled “Take Care of Yourself” (it wasn’t something I was able to put in the book—but it’s one of my favorite chapters—and one I think you’ll enjoy a lot)

*1 exclusive copy of “Ego is the Enemy Reading List”, which details all the books and sources that led me to writing Ego is the Enemy.

*Instant access to the Introduction & Prologue of Ego is the Enemy, before anyone else.

*1 free Ego is the Enemy temporary tattoo. (Like with Obstacle, I got a matching tattoo for the maxim behind this book and my publisher made a replica for anyone that preorders)

Click here to pre-order 1 copy, then email your receipt to ryholiday@gmail.com with “Preorder #1” in the subject.

If you pre-order 5 copies of the book before June 14th, you’ll receive:

All of the above (bonus chapter from the book, the reading list, temporary tattoo and instant access to Introduction & Prologue) PLUS:

* 1 one-of-a-kind, original signed 4×6 notecard that I actually used while researching and writing this book. I’ll pick one at random, sign it, and mail it to you (I make myself a copy of it to keep for my records). You can use it as a bookmark, paste it inside your copy of the book, or put it on your wall.

*3 personalized book recommendations that I’ll select just for you. You tell me a little about what you like to read and I’ll personally pick out three books that I think you should read and will enjoy.

*Free lifetime access to “Growth Hacker Marketing: The Course”. It is a completely self-paced online course – you decide when you start and when you finish. (a $39 dollar value)

Click here to pre-order 5 copies, then email your receipt to ryholiday@gmail.com with “Preorder #2” in the subject.

If you pre-order 20 copies of the book before June 14th, you’ll receive:

All of the above (bonus chapter from the book, the reading list, instant access to Introduction & Prologue, temporary tattoo, the $39 growth hacker course and signed notecard) PLUS:

*A 30 minute strategy call with me. In this call, we can talk about whatever you’d like, whether it’s strategy, books, or obstacles. It will be your open forum. As you can see, I usually charge $1500 for an hour call like this—even more when I talk to companies and public figures. I’ve done hundreds of these in the past year, and truly feel they deliver a ton of value.

Click here to pre-order 20 copies, then email your receipt to ryholiday@gmail.com with “Preorder #3” in the subject.

If you pre-order 50 copies of the book before June 14th, you’ll receive:

All of the above (bonus chapter from the book, the reading list, instant access to Introduction & Prologue, $39 growth hacker course, temporary tattoo and signed notecard) PLUS:

*A 1 hour strategy call with me. In this call, we can talk about whatever you’d like, whether it’s strategy, books, or obstacles. It will be your open forum. As you can see, I usually charge $1500 for an hour call like this—even more when I talk to companies and public figures. I’ve done hundreds of these in the past year, and truly feel they deliver a ton of value.

*An invitation to a private book launch party hosted at the Hostel Kids mansion in Austin, Texas on June 17th. It will be an intimate gathering of friends, clients, authors artists, and other interesting people I spend time with here in town. There may even be some bonus BBQ available.

*A limited edition autographed Early Proof of Ego is the Enemy, as well as autographed copies of The Obstacle Is The Way, Growth Hacker Marketing, and Trust Me, I’m Lying. You get the whole catalog, personalized however you’d like.

Click here to pre-order 50 copies, then email your receipt to ryholiday@gmail.com with “Preorder #4” in the subject.

Choose Your Own Bonus:

Maybe you have a better idea for a bonus? Well, make me an offer of how many books you’d preorder for it (Hint: Start with more than 50). Last time I made this offer, I ended up giving a talk for a group of executives in Riverside, California. I consulted for a handful of startups. I did a year long consulting arrangement with an author who ultimately published a book and created a podcast. I’ve done lunch and dinner with people who had specific business problems they wanted to solve. All that is on the table, and more. Let me know what you have in mind, I’d love to make something big happen (and places like 800-CEO-READ give great discounts on bulk purchases). So reach out.

You can buy the book anywhere, including through the following links:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iTunes

800-CEO-Read

Indiebound

Books A Million

Kobo

*Fine Print: This offer applies to digital or physical or audiobook (which is not up yet but will be available soon). I’m running this all myself so please give me a minute to reply and get things set (I’m in the middle of a book launch here!). Any prize that involves me mailing something to you has to be for US only. Thanks again for the support everyone.

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