Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 26

The Best Book About Addiction You’ve Never Heard of Is Back in Print After 50 Years

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Buried in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Crack Up, a collection of the great writer’s essays and diary entries written during his sad decline, is a quick mention of a fellow alcoholic writer and a book about his struggles.

He doesn’t mention the title. He doesn’t explain anything about the author, William Seabrook, besides his name. Probably because at the time he wrote the essay, both things were self-evident. William Seabrook was, at least then, much more famous than Fitzgerald.

I remember coming across this mention and making a note of it. I looked for the book on Amazon a few days later. The only copy available was a Bantam paperback from 1947. It cost $13.98 with shipping. (Today it starts at $75.00.)

Little did I know, the book that would arrive would become one of my all-time favorites and that I would play some role in not just helping it find a new audience, but bringing it back into print after decades in obscurity.

That book? Asylum (An Alcoholic Takes the Cure)—the very true story of the journalist William Seabrook who, in December 1933, as one of the most successful travel writers in the world, committed himself voluntarily into an insane asylum to treat a crippling addiction to alcohol. In a time before 12-step programs, support groups and rehab centers, there were no other options. What emerged was not just quite possibly one of the first modern addiction/recovery memoirs, but perhaps the most honest and haunting accounts of the struggle for mental health in literature.

A travel book where the journey is inward instead of outward? You can write like that? You can look at your own problems and your own role in them like that?

You cannot turn a page in the book without watching him bump, unknowingly, into the basic principles of 12-step groups and the patterns of behavior we now associate with depression and addiction. Trapped behind the walls of the institution, Seabrook wrote:

I was forced to see sober a panorama that had been nothing but a miserable series of “runnings away from myself” since earliest childhood, and in which I now fully realized for the first time, neither whiskey nor the particular trade I had adopted were anything more than incidental. I took sober stock and saw that dissatisfaction, a sense of my own inability to arrive at a harmonious adjustment in any environment—sporadically dotted with flights and attempted escapes—had been the whole pattern of my life. I had run away ineffectually at 6 to be a pirate as all children do, and instead of getting maturer powers of adjustment as I grew older, I had been running away ever since… Now I knew that all the time I had been running away from something, and that the thing had always been myself.

Like many busy, successful people, Seabrook’s busy-ness and success were as much aresult of his addiction as his addiction inhibited them. Addiction doesn’t immediately drive us to rock bottom, sometimes it takes a detour to top of the mountain first. In fact, it was only when Seabrook had his fame and career and many bestselling works—a writer with enough money in the bank can be a dangerous thing—that the toll of his behavior finally began to make itself known. Only then did the impostor syndrome begin to creep in (and in shame, he began to drink heavily to pretend it wasn’t true).

Always ahead of the curve, he was a modern man right before modern times. Which is what makes this book so powerful, so timeless, so provocative then, as now. And yet, despite the splash this book made at the time, the book was eventually forgotten and lost to history. Seabrook was too, despite his significant contributions to American culture. This was the man, after all, who gave us the world “Zombie” and was notorious for having eaten human flesh and writing about it. How could he have been forgotten while the works of other lesser writers remain? I’m not sure.

All I know is that when I read the book, I was blown away by its vulnerability and honesty. A travel book where the journey is inward instead of outward? You can write like that? You can look at your own problems and your own role in them like that? In retrospect, a lot of the most insightful observations went over my head—but in the way that the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson is so powerful to college freshman, so was the writing of William Seabrook to me.

A few months after reading it, I decided I would start a newsletter specifically to recommend obscure or forgotten books like this. About 100 people signed up. The works of William Seabrook were the first books I recommended. My recommendation read:

From the perspective of a travel writer, [Seabrook] described his own journey through this strange and foreign place. On a regular basis, he says things so clear, so self-aware that you’re stunned an addict could have written it—shocked that this book isn’t a classic American text.

I think I sold about 5 copies.

But over the years that list grew. Where the first group of subscribers nearly seven years ago was small enough to drop into the bcc field in Gmail, last month’s listwent out to more than 50,000 people. A few years ago, I wrote an article for Thought Catalog titled “24 Books You’ve Probably Never Heard Of That Will Change Your Life.” Number 14 was Asylum. The piece was read by about 100,000 people and then more when I reposted it on my own site. It was turned into a SlideShare (200,000 views) and a Business Insider piece (640,000 views) a while later. I once brought the book with me when a client was appearing on Dr. Drew’s show Loveline, but couldn’t bear to part with my only (note-filled) copy.

In any case, over the last few years, Asylum started to get some of the attention it deserved. I’ve heard from hundreds of readers who loved the book. I would see it pop up on Amazon in the recommended books on the pages of some of my favorite authors. Now, when you look at Asylum on Amazon, the “You Might Also Like” section is entirely filled with other books from my list of “24.”

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(Photo: Ryan Holiday)

Still, last month I was surprised to get an email from an acquisitions editor at Dover, a publisher that specializes in out-of-print and public domain books. With the help of Seabrook’s son, they were bringing Asylum back. And not just Asylum either—they were going to put multiple editions of his books “into the hands of a new generation of readers.”

A few days later, the book arrived. It has a new cover designed by the illustrator Joe Ollman and a comic that serves as its introduction. I re-read the book and fell in love all over again. It was exactly as I remembered. Insightful, vulnerable, funny. And in the years since my first reading—with my own struggles with forms of addiction and my own personal issues—I took more out of it than I had before.

As a reader and a lover of books, in many ways this is the dream. That one could stumble upon a book randomly, advocate for it and take pride in having paid it forward enough that the book is given a second life. It’s what Bukowski did for Fante and or Walker Percy did for John Kennedy Toole.

I was even able to spend some time on the phone with Seabrook’s son, Bill. Bill told me about the book’s unique path to re-publication, which began with his mother’s smart decision to maintain the book’s copyrights over the years, and continued with the work of the literary agency Watkins/Loomis, which itself is over 100 years old(and also represents writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates). He and I talked about what his father must have been looking for as he traveled to the far corners of the Earth and to the bottom of a bottle on his way to the darkest depths of his own psyche. We spoke about how that same wanderlust—though perhaps without the darkness—was passed from father to son, as it so often seems to be.

The whole thing was almost too perfect.

It’s that sense…that if some people had just had their act together a little more, it could have all turned out even better, even bigger.

I don’t want to say it is perfect because from a publishing perspective the new edition leaves something to be desired. I do wish that Dover could have taken the time to give the book a full introduction that explains to modern readers just who this great man was and why his writing deserves to be known. Having purchased a handful of Dover Thrift editions of books over the years (which Amazon tends to recommend due to their price), I’m familiar with their—let’s just say “economical”—approach to re-publishing famous works. If Penguin Classics or Library of America are the Whole Foods of book publishing, handcrafted, lovingly produced and expertly marketed, then Dover can sometimes feel like the bargain bin at Walmart.

The new cover is cool—but I can’t help but think the book would have been better served by something more subdued. Somehow they lost the book’s helpful subtitle/logline and on the back, gave even less description than the cheap pulp paperback of the mid-20th century. Just compare The Crack Up (published by New Directions) and Asylum and tell me which one you’d rather read.

As one of the book’s biggest and most public fans, I was sad to hear about it onlyafter it was out. The things I would have done for free to help this book! Nor can I be the only one. It’s that sense—common in interactions with the publishing industry—that if some people had just had their act together a little more, it could have all turned out even better, even bigger.

But as anyone who knows the arc of Seabrook’s story can tell you,“almost too perfect” is probably fitting. Because his time at the insane asylum ended in 1934 with a diagnosis that he’d been “cured” of alcoholism. His doctors’ only post-treatment plan? They asked him to promise not to drink for six months.

Seabrook lasted a little longer than that, published his book, moved on with his life and, of course, had his only son. Though eventually, with the approval of the naive medical opinion at the time, he began to drink again. And then moved on to drugs and increasingly dark sexual behavior.

He died in 1945 of an overdose in Rhinebeck, N.Y.

His perfect work and his perfect story disappeared with him.

Until now.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer. 

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Things Heavy Metal Taught Me About Life

I can no longer remember the first heavy metal song I ever listened to, but I assume it was something by Metallica. I can tell you the first album I fell in love with: Brave New World by Iron Maiden.

For metal purists, this is a strange choice. The album came out in May 2000, not exactly the heyday of the genre. In fact, this was actually the perfect introduction for me. The album was just new enough that it sounded modern and fresh, but being that it was the band’s first reunited collaboration in nearly a decade, it had just enough of their classic sound that I was hooked. It’s a damn good album too—one of the singles even got a Grammy nod.

From there, it was down the rabbit hole. The exposure had been accidental—all because in those days illegal downloads from sites like Audiogalaxy were constantly mislabeled. But it also meant that I had access to the vast back catalogs of artists that I’d have never heard on the radio.

I went through all of it. Priest. Megadeth. Dio. Sabbath. Ozzy. Blind Guardian. Dream Theater.

It’s probably every parent’s worst nightmare, especially parents of the generation mine came from. This was dumb people music to them. It was ridiculous, ugly, and only a few short steps from tattoos, drugs, long hair and dropping out of school (only a few of those things actually happened to me!)

But really, heavy metal put me on the path I am on today—in every positive sense.

A few years ago a study found that kids with the highest IQs are disproportionatelyattracted to heavy metal. The reason is that the themes of alienation, frustration, and even pain, match the experience of a smart young person struggling to fit in and make sense of the world.

So yes, most parents might think that metal songs are about drugs, violence, suicide, the devil and whatever other ridiculous stereotypes scared people project onto it. More directly, the assumption is that they somehow advocate these things to impressionable young people. Of course, the opposite is true. In fact, the music is often about coping with the complicated and dark feelings that come along with a serious intellect at an early age.

The result is often surprising. I remember that one of the first open minded and thoughtful things I heard about gay people was from a Rush song called Nobody’s Hero (the sexuality of Rob Halford, the lead singer of Judas Priest, was an open secret in heavy metal for a long time). Metallica has songs that deal with suicide, drugs and addiction in smart and moving ways and their song One is based on the anti-war novel, Johnny Get Your Gun. Metallica is not the only band to address these issues as Megadeth, Slayer, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest to name a few have tackled the subject. Who else were we going to process it with?

From Iron Maiden, I fell in love with history in a new way. In fact, several studies have examined the multitude of historical themes explored by the band, ranging from Pre-History to current events, from Genghis Khan to the battle of Passchendaele. The first time I heard audio of a Winston Churchill speech wasn’t in school, it was in the intro of Iron Maiden’s 1984 music video for “Aces High”—which I downloaded off another file sharing network. It’s not as if MTV was playing it. They have a song inspired by Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and another based on an epic poem from Coleridge.

I’m not saying it was a straight line from here to studying ancient philosophy and history, but it did start the process.

It’s not just what the music is about. There is an artistry that far too many people fail to see. There’s a line in Metallica’s For Whom The Bell Tolls (based on Hemingway’s book, by the way) that goes:

“Crack of dawn, all is gone

except the will to be”

Even now, every time I hear it, I think: that is so good. It’s poetry in a different context, sure, and damn good writing. When what we had to read and study in school bored me out of my mind, it was music that stimulated me–that inspired me to think about how words could be used, what was worth studying and just what the human experience really was.

I remember reading a lot about Metallica and specifically its guitarist Kirk Hammett. After the band had kicked out its original guitarist (Dave Mustaine who would go on to form Megadeth), they invited Kirk to join the group. You know what the first thing he did was? Even though he was an accomplished player, he started taking lessons from a guy named Joe Satriani (who went on to be one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived). That is, even though he landed his dream job, he continued to learn and stay a student. I remember thinking how different that was than the notion that geniuses are just naturally that way. No, it actually takes practice and work to be good at something—even a thing that many don’t respect as real “art.”

I’m not saying this is what made me a writer, but it helped. Something you notice really quickly about the genre is that it’s more than just music. Heavy metal album covers are some of the best in the history of music. Because the bands understood that they weren’t just recording songs, but creating brands. Metallica’s cover forMaster of Puppets is spectacular. Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,Somewhere in Time, Powerslave and The Number of the Beast are all ridiculously cool(mostly because of Eddie their mascot). Megadeth’s Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? is spectacular. Judas Priest’s British Steel is badass too.

Heavy metal has always been the clearest proof of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” concept. These are acts that rarely got on the radio or on television. How did they survive? How did they keep going? How do they currently sell out stadiums—literally stadiums—when most people assumed they’ve broken up? Because they know who their fans are and exist exclusively for them. They were also smart enough businessmen to figure out earlier than the rest of the industry that the money was never in record sales. One of the common dismissals of bands like Anthrax or Maiden or Megadeth is that they sold more t-shirts than albums. Yeah, that’s brilliant. Because nobody takes a cut of your merchandise sales.

Like I said, the first Iron Maiden songs I heard were pirated, but since then I’ve probably spent close to a thousand dollars on a various related products the band sold from tickets to box sets to DVDs. This is what made Metallica’s attack on Napster so ridiculous. They’d gotten popular as a band because of bootleg tapes. Their own balance sheet should have made it clear where the profit centers of the industry were. In any case, to see these bands continue to thrive when the economics of music have supposedly collapsed is a testament to the power of a loyal fan base and a universe of products.

Of course, I’m not saying that this is what got me into marketing or even that it was responsible for my time in the music industry, but it did give me a lot of good ideas.

The most important lesson I learned from heavy metal came from the band (and the singer) that caught me first. From Bruce Dickinson, I learned that you really can be good at more than one thing. And that stereotypes are total bullshit. In Dickinson, we have a man who wasn’t content to just be the lead singer in a band that sold 85 million records. He also wanted to have an acclaimed career as a solo artist, a professional airline pilot, a bestselling novelist, Olympic-level fencer and then in his spare time, have a show on BBC radio. The guy flies the band and its equipment to Iron Maiden’s sold-out shows in a custom 757. Fuuuck…was all I could think when I was 15. It’s what I think still.

If there’s one model that I’ve used to justify my peripatetic career, it’s been Bruce. Why shouldn’t I try new things? Why wouldn’t it be possible to get really good at this thing? If he can do all he’s done, I can do a fraction of it.

I know to my parents my love of heavy metal probably seemed like the beginning of a bad dream. Where will this go, they must have thought? Is he going to end up like those losers?

Of course, the entire time it was making me smarter, introducing me to new ideas, teaching me about the business of art, and inspiring me to pick a unique career.

Plus it was fun.

I don’t listen to great music as much anymore. Honestly, my taste has atrophied intowhatever will help me tune out distractions while I work. But every once in a while, a Maiden track will come on and it takes me right back. I love it.

Heavy metal changed my life. Up the Irons.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer. 

The post Things Heavy Metal Taught Me About Life appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

How Dr. Drew Pinsky Changed My Life

Dr. Drew Pinsky changed my life. I asked him one simple question, and his answer put me on a path that saved me from a very dark place. But more than that it ultimately helped me achieve success, made me a published author, saved my relationships, and made me happy.

I’m sure this is true for a lot of people. He is after all, a practicing medical specialist of many years and now the host of a major television show, Dr. Drew On Call. But these circumstances were a little different. You see, I am not and have never been an addict. I don’t have an eating disorder or a sexual or medical issue. I have never called into Loveline (though I was a fan). It happened because I walked up to him at 19 years old and asked him if he had any books he could recommend.

I was in college in the mid-aughts and I was invited to a small, private summit of college journalists that Dr. Drew, then the host of Loveline, was hosting. After it ended, he was standing in the corner and I cautiously made my way over to nervously ask a question I thought might be worth taking a shot with: “I heard you read a lot. What should I read?” He said he’d been studying a stoic philosopher named Epictetus and that I should check it out. He also recommended a biography of Theodore Roosevelt that remains one of my favorites (TR it turns out was also a fan of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius).

Dr. Drew—the sex doctor from MTV and KROQ—introduced me to classic philosophy. That night I emailed my friend Tucker Max (who would later go on to be a frequent guest on Loveline) to see if he’d read it. He told me it was amazing and that I should also read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays, arrived first. My life has not been the same since.

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I had just gone through a breakup of a long relationship (from sophomore year in high school to sophomore year in college) and was wrecked. In fact, I’d spent most of the conference despondent in my hotel room. I was depressed. I was miserable. I been prescribed sleeping pills by a college therapist because I wasn’t sleeping.

So the words of Marcus Aurelius — a Roman emperor writing admonishments and reassurances to himself amidst the stresses of imperial life hit me in the face. The words of Epictetus, a lowly slave teaching at the outskirts of Rome had the same effect.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” — Marcus Aurelius

“It’s not about you, but how you react that matters.” — Epictetus

Anyone who remembers me from that time probably laughs at what a ridiculous convert to stoicism I became. “Have you read this?” I would ask people. “It’s SO good.” You know how young people are when they read Ayn Rand for the first time? I was like that. Enthralled! I was just amazed that something like this existed, something that wasn’t pretentious or impractical. Something that was real and solved my problems.

But unlike some silly Ayn Rand phase, this revelation has only grown for me over time. My understanding of stoicism is no longer so naive and simple, but it is equally fervent. It’s made me a better person, not a harder, less empathetic one.

I saw Dr. Drew again at another college conference a few months later (I guess he was speaking to a lot of college journalists at the time). I was a little late but I snuck up to a seat at the front. After it ended, I waited for everyone to ask their questions and I walked up to him and he remembered me: “You look so much better,” he said. There was a reason, I replied: “It’s because I read Epictetus.”

“I’m so glad,” he said, and then politely corrected my pronunciation. It’s “Epic-teat-us” not “Epic-tey-tus”—though to this day the incorrect one is imprinted on my mind. I said it so many times the wrong way during that period that I’ll never get it right. I think it was this moment that I realized not only the true power of books, but also that it didn’t matter whether I was a college student or a teenager but I could talk to and connect with just about anyone. It didn’t matter if they were a celebrity or rich or powerful — we all had the same problems and needs.

A few years later, Tucker was invited on as a guest on Loveline and I came with him to the taping studio. Of course, Dr. Drew no longer remembered me and I was much too shy to bring it up. But as I sat in that green room, all I could think about was how grateful I was, how lucky I’d been to have an opportunity to ask such a question, and how sometimes the fates align and you’re given exactly what you need.

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” — Marcus Aurelius

This man (and the philosopher he introduced me to) changed my life and in a very significant way contributed to the person I ended up becoming.

And now, over seven years later, I have the opportunity to introduce stoicism to even more people. My book The Obstacle is The Way (Portfolio/Penguin) is about a single exercise that both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius lived by: “The impediment to actions advances action What stands in the way becomes the way.” We think that the terrible things that happen to us are obstacles — as I did with my breakup — but they are in fact great opportunities. For me, those dark moments contributed to a great awakening. They exposed me, they motivated me to take a risk (to ask a question of an important, busy man) and I was rewarded for it.

The obstacle became the way. And Dr. Drew showed me that.

This post appeared originally on The Huffington Post.

The post How Dr. Drew Pinsky Changed My Life appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Time When I “Only” Had One Goat

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer in January 2014. Two years later I have three goats and live on a farm. A proposition that appeared “nightmarish” at the time.

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I own a goat. Her name is Bucket.

Less than a year ago, I had an apartment in Manhattan, convinced I was ready to live the dream. I was a published author. I had high profile PR and marketing clients. I wasn’t sure exactly which dream I was living but I was pretty sure New York City was the place you came to celebrate it.

Twice today–once while on a conference call and then again while writing this article–I heard scratching at the door. It’s usually the dog asking to go outside. But this was my goat, and she wanted to come inside.

“No, Bucket,” I told her. “We can’t let livestock in the house.”

She scampered off to eat some leaves.

But soon enough she’d be back, like a good-natured amnesiac, to make the same request.

This is life in Austin, Texas. I have a pet goat.

Bucket is a three month old Nigerian Dwarf goat from a small farm in Seguin, Texas. She has blue eyes, a pink collar, and comes when you call her. She also enjoys being picked up and giving kisses. Currently she weighs about 20 lbs. and won’t get much bigger than a medium-sized dog. The only major change we’re expecting are her horns, which already grow a little every day.

When we first started talking about buying a goat, the veneer of utility still existed. Goats are Mother Nature’s little lawnmowers, after all, and I hate cutting the grass. Then we learned that goats do not eat grass. This fact came as a relatively late surprise in the decision making process, and eliminated the half-hearted justification my girlfriend and I had for our $350 impulse buy. She does eat weeds, clover, leaves and other such undesirables, but that doesn’t really matter anymore.

And that is because I find great peace and pleasure in sitting in my office/library and watching her out the window. She doesn’t know I can see her, but I can. I watch her bother the chickens (which have slightly more practical benefits for our fridge). On occasion I will catch her laying down in their coop for some reason. I watch her prance, and every so often, stop and make goat noises to no one in particular.

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When I am on the phone, I will walk around the ground floor of the house and track her as she makes her migration around the yard. It’s a game that makes boring calls bearable, though it has required me to stifle a laugh a few times.

Only recently did my girlfriend–who I’ve been with for several years–finally come forward with her dream of living on a farm. Of course, she did this after I bought a house that is not anything like a farm, so we’re doing the best we can.

Is this my first step on the path carved by Susan Orlean? I hope not–though secretly I also hope so. The landscape she painted in her short book, Animalish, of a menagerie of unusual-but-not-exotic animals seems like a writer’s haven and just generally an interesting place to live.

Having animals is soothing (especially if your pretty farm girlfriend takes care of the details). I just get to look at them and pretend they are my friends. I get to project personalities onto them and have ridiculous conversations purely for my amusement.

My favorite is to pretend that my miniature dachshund is horribly betrayed by these new additions to the households and is constantly trying to inform on their behavior to get them in trouble. Or after hearing her dart up the stairs, that she’s breathlessly alerting me to the news that someone has let a goat into the yard.

In reality, she just wants to play. Unfortunately, Bucket does not understand fetch and feigns a headbutt if the dog gets too excited. Dachshunds are great at flushing out badgers; they are not great at taking a horned skull to the face.

When I am out of town my girlfriend sends me photos of their antics–including one recently that had both the goat and the dog wrapped up inside the coat she was wearing. There was also the infamous shot of the goat wearing an American Apparel dog hoodie.

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But I also found out somewhat accidentally that my girlfriend and I have slightly different relationships and boundaries with the animal. Back in New York for meetings this week, I got a motion alert from my Dropcam, which monitors my living room and inside doorway. Usually the update is wind related, so I certainly wasn’t expecting to see the goat, the dog and Samantha all playing on the floor together. I guess that explains why Bucket always seems to expect me to open the door and let her in.

Sitting between meetings, watching this interspecies cuddlefest 1500 miles away, I realized the life I had envisioned for myself here in New York allowed for none of this. It was expensive, and it was restrictive. No question it afforded certain business opportunities, but they are purchased at a high cost. Not just in rent and cost of living, but in options–especially ridiculous options.

I’m not saying to run away and live small town life. That sounds equally nightmarish to me–that wasn’t my intention with Austin anyway. Work hard, take it seriously, embrace your ambition. And when you’re not doing that, do something–whatever it happens to be–that taps into the part of you that makes you forget about all the rest of it.

Buy a goat.

The post The Time When I “Only” Had One Goat appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

My 2015 Writing Roundup

I thought I would do a roundup of everything I’ve written and published (other than here) since my last one in July. If you missed any of these, definitely follow me on Twitter, where I post each article when it goes live. Hope you enjoy these articles and feel free to share them.

More to come in 2016!

THOUGHT CATALOG

‘Go Straight To The Seat Of Intelligence–Your Own, The World’s, Your Neighbors’

Human Being, Not Human Doing

A Controversial ‘Spiritual’ Exercise That Guarantees You’ll Have A Good Day

Why Do You Write So Much?

Stop Working For Free! Time Is Running Out

32 Little Rules I Follow To Live A Life That Feels Good Every Day

From Someone Who Travels A Lot: 42 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Stress And Being Rude While Flying

What Are You Working Towards? Because You Better Know.

How To Buy A House Before You’re 30

Share This If You Don’t Drink And Are Sick Of People Asking Why

Holding On To Toxic Friends Isn’t Harmless: Why It’s Time For A Friend Purge

42 Books That Will Make You A Better Person, Described In One Sentence

21 Stoic Life Hacks For #Stoicweek

The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings

Epiphanies Don’t Exist, Here’s How You Can Actually Change Your Life In A Moment

Here Is Everything I Learned From Reading In 2015

This Is All There Is (And It’s More Than Enough)

Why You Should Be Talking About Work All Holiday Season

No, Don’t Do It Later. Do It Now — The Case Against Procrastination.

3 Books (Ok, More Than 3) You Absolutely Must Read This Year

 

NEW YORK OBSERVER

Julien Blanc, ‘Most Hated Man In The World,’ Shares His Surprising Side Of The Story

The Performance Bias: Life Is Not a Movie, Life Is Not a Novel

Meet the Woman Behind ‘the Most Hated Man in the World’

Texas Forever: How I Found the American Dream in the Lone Star State

The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings

EXCLUSIVE: Author of New Zealand’s First Banned Book in 22 Years Speaks Out

Meet the Genius Whose Chrome Extension Bans All Kardashian Content From Your Computer

The Quiet Co-Founder of the Media Juggernaut No One Writes About

These Parents Lost a Son in the Aurora Shooting. They Want the Media to Change. Now.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Stoicism Is Exactly Why You Need It

#StoicWeek: 10 Strategies for Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities

This Restaurant Made Fools of Hipsters Everywhere (Or Did They?)

The Best Book About Addiction You’ve Never Heard of Is Back in Print After 50 Years

People Keep Stealing This Photo of My Dog…And She’s Very Upset About It

Here’s the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level

 

The post My 2015 Writing Roundup appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Best Article of My Career

I wasn’t able to share this article when it first came out, because it promptly sent the book out of stock on Amazon, where it remained so for almost the entire month of December. But now I can and I hope you like it.

Sports Illustrated: How a book on stoicism became wildly popular at every level of the NFL

At the center of perhaps the most unlikely Venn Diagram ever drawn, an even more unlikely group of humans overlap. There’s a former governor/bodybuilder/actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a hip hop star (LL Cool J), an Irish tennis pro (James McGee), an NFL lineman (Garrett Gilkey, Bucs), a renowned sideline reporter (Michele Tafoya, NBC), an Olympian (cross-country skier Chandra Crawford), a performance coach (Andy McKay, Mariners), a baseball manager (Joe Maddon, Cubs) and a college basketball coach (Shaka Smart, Texas). That’s just to start.

They’re connected by a book, The Obstacle Is the Way, by Ryan Holiday. It’s a book they’ve digested, drawn inspiration from and applied to their careers. It’s a book about stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy and its principles, and it has sold more than 100,000 copies, been translated into 17 languages and reverberated in one place not even Holiday expected it to—the wider world of sports. He describes that as a “happy accident.”

The article goes on to talk about how the teams found it, what they got out of it and, what’s most interesting to me, why Stoic philosophy seems to be finding an audience in professional sports. It interests me because it’s so very much not what I expected when I wrote the book. When I pitched Portfolio—a business imprint—a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, athletes and celebrities were not who I had in mind. I was thinking business folks, everyday people, lovers of history.

But this was pretty absent minded of me. Because not only did the stoics love borrowing metaphors from wrestling, the Olympics, gladiatorial combat, chariot racing, stoicism had an immediate impact on me as a runner. The idea of pushing the body, testing its limits, preparing for trying ordeals, the presentness inherent in experiencing flow state, the importance of routine and commitment—these are the things that get me up each morning or away from my desk each afternoon to run. At a certain level, most athletes (and really, this is true in all fields) are more or less equally talented. What separates success from failure is the ability to manage the mental component, the motivation factor and the will to endure. The stoics have wonderful wisdom on morality and principled living, but their writing is particularly amazing on those three things.

In any case, one of the best parts about writing a book is watching it leave your hands and reach those of people you respect or admire. You often think a book will have one effect, but it turns out to have a completely different one. Robert Greene certainly didn’t expect The 48 Laws of Power to become popular in hip hop, yet it did. I certainly didn’t expect to talk to any NFL coaches when I wrote the book, but it’s been an eye-opening and educational experience.

Ironically, it’s also been one that introduced me to a bunch of books that have now become my favorites. I read Education of a Coach by David Halberstam about Bill Belichick after hearing from the Patriots. One coach recommended I read The Winner Within by Pat Riley, another that I read The Way To Love by Anthony de Mello. There have been many others.

I’ll add one other thing that helped make this possible. I put my email in the back of it—and I put my email prominently on my site and encourage people to use it. Yes, that’s meant I get a lot of email and spend a lot of time replying—for free—answering questions, helping people with problems, giving recommendations, dealing with jerks, haters and boatloads of spam. But it’s also opened me up to the serendipity of the coaches who felt OK shooting me a note after they read the book. One conversation led to another, which led to introductions, which led to sending books out, which led to the article. That doesn’t happen if you build walls around yourself, that doesn’t happen if you don’t put the time in.

I should have expected that too. I’ve always been the type of person who ‘reaches out.’ When I read something I like or have my mind blown by someone, I don’t just let that thought flitter away. I try to do something with it. Some of the mentorships I’ve had were a result of this impulse, some of my favorite friendships and memories too. I should have figured that successful coaches, athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs would be the same way. They wouldn’t have gotten where they were without that habit. I just (thankfully) wasn’t presumptuous enough to figure it would happen to my book that would trigger it in them.

Thanks for letting me share and most of all, for supporting the book and my writing before anyone else. I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you and enjoy the article.

Ryan

PS, if there is someone in sports or business that you think might like the book, please send them the link (or a copy). If you need help, let me know.

The post The Best Article of My Career appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

From Zero to 50,000: How I Built A Big Email List Exclusively About Books I Liked

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer in November 2014. 

In May 2009, I sent an email to a friend. I’d been posting book recommendations on my website for the last couple years, but what did he think of the idea of doing it as a monthly email instead? It was a bad idea, he said–because people wouldn’t be able to share the blog posts anymore. People are protective of their emails, so who would want to sign up for that?

I considered his advice and decide to ignore it. In the five years since, that list, known as the Reading List Email, has grown from 50 friends to roughly 35,000 people with a 50% open rate (which is crazy compared to most lists). It has readers from all over the world, ranging from high school students to Fortune 500 CEOs, NFL coaches, bestselling authors, publishers and entrepreneurs. I’ve sent close to 100 emails to a “total” audience of 400,000+ over the years and sold a few hundred thousand dollars worth of books for retailers over the years.

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After having a great deal of fun writing two big posts for the New York Observer on the ins-and-outs of book marketing, I thought I would do a similar breakdown on how to build an email list.

But first, why build one at all? I love recommending books but deep down I have to admit there was another motivation for creating the list. In 2009, I dreamed of one day writing my own book. How would I tell people about it? I thought if I spend every month for the next several years recommending amazing books to other people, maybe those readers would give me a shot when it was my turn. And they did!

Building an email list is the single best way to communicate with your audience, period. Better than Facebook, better than Twitter, better than ads. Because you own it. Because it is a relationship of mutual trust and opt-ins. That is why you need to build one.

So here’s what I learned building mine:

-When I started, I knew so little about email marketing that I just put up a post on my blog and told people to email me if they wanted to sign up. I figured I could just email them all directly.

-So the first year of the Reading List was me copy and pasting the emails into Gmail. I found out the hard way that Gmail only lets you email 250 people a day (or did at the time). Sometimes I had to batch it over a couple days.

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-Eventually, I turned to Mailchimp–that made my life way easier. But more on that later.

-One of the best books I’ve ever read on marketing taught me a lot about emails. Check out Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. It will change how you approach your customers.

-It’s critical that you pick an angle for your mailing list. I see so many authors and brands just put up a form that says: “Sign up for my newsletter.” What newsletter? Why would I want a random newsletter from a random person? I decided on book recommendations because no one else was doing it and it was something I was good at. What are you good at? What can only you offer via email?

-I decided to go no frills with the reading list email too. No images, no formatting, all text–partly because it’s easier but also because it is better for mobile. Before you waste too much time designing some fancy template realize that there are marketers out there making millions of dollars on great copywriting alone. Maybe you don’t need frills.

-Though I don’t use a template, I do have a very standardized format that I follow, including the same conclusion I paste onto each email. Keep it simple and you’ll find the list less of a burden.

-I also decided that I wanted my email to be a conversation. I “send” all the emails from my personal address and encourage subscribers to reply. Every month I have all sorts of great conversations about books. Sometimes I even get recommendations that I end up reading and using myself later.

-I said I decided to go with Mailchimp for my backend. Why? I only send one email a month and most plans are designed for people who send lots of emails. Using Mailchimp was cheap and easy. Also they allow bulk imports of emails, which was important because my list already existed. If you use this link to sign up, MailChimp will give you like $30 in bonus credits.

-There are a lot of other good programs out there such as SendGrid, AWeber and ConstantContact.

-Mailchimp also allowed me to put a little form on my website for entries.

-But I’ve also always encouraged people to just email me directly with the words “Reading List” in the subject line. It’s a little bit of a pain but over the years I have manually entered hundreds of addresses this way. Would those people have signed up the other way? Maybe, but I didn’t want to take the risk that they wouldn’t.

-The list chugged along by word of mouth for about two years. Every month I did an email and sold a couple books via Amazon’s affiliate program. The first real bump in subscribers came from Tim Ferriss–I wrote a post for his blog in 2011 and asked if I could link to the list at the bottom. Almost 1,000 subscribers came to the list just from that post.

-Speaking of which, you have to give yourself time. I knew that I wouldn’t need to deploy my email list for years so I was able to develop it over time and treat it right. If you have a product you’re releasing next week, that’s just not enough runway to build a proper list.

-Also because I am thinking long term and know that I have no plans to abandon this list, I was able to buy Mailchimp credits in bulk (a few thousand dollars at a time) and save a lot of money on the cost-per-send.

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–Charlie Hoehn suggested a couple years ago that I do a yearly round up. His point was that most people follow along but don’t have time to read all the books. Could I recommend 3-5 BEST for the year, as well? So I do that in December or January and I post it online too. It actually drives leads. Here are the ones from 2011, 2012 and 2013.

-I’ve tried multiple different toolbars at the top of my site to drive signups. First I used HelloBar. Then I moved to the ViperBar, which was great because it offered A/B testing. Recently I moved to Noah Kagan’s SmartBar which is absolutely killer.

-Don’t obsess over unsubscribes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs–you can’t email lots of people without pissing off a couple. Provided that you’re adding a lot more than you’re losing, you’re good. A couple months ago, some kook got very upset about something I said about Adam Smith–so I unsubscribed him myself. No reason to bother with it.

-I deliberately have zero monetization plans for this list. It has made a decent amount of money from Amazon affiliate links over the years but in all honesty, it probably barely covers my time and definitely doesn’t cover how much I’ve spent on books myself. The benefit of the list is meaningful, direct access to 35,000 avid readers. The value of that is essentially priceless.

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-In fact, in seven years I have sent a total of two emails to the list that were not exclusively book recommendations. Even my short book, Growth Hacker Marketing, did not get its own dedicated blast–that’s how protective I am of not abusing the privilege of communicating with these readers. This has paid off. For the announcement of my first book, the email list alone was enough to send it sub 100 on Amazon two months before release…and the list was less than 5,000 people then.

-Be ok mailing to very few people for a long time. I was. I knew that I had a long-term strategy. I also knew that recommending some life-changing books even to a small number of people was a beneficial activity in itself. Look at my chart–the size is basically unchanged for over a year. In reality I was excited each time 2-3 people signed up and I also knew that it takes time for word of mouth to spread.

-Obsess about quality. There are some months when I was so-so on the books I read. I debated whether to include them in the list (because that is lost affiliate revenue). I always decide no. The trust and respect of the readers has to trump all. I would rather recommend nothing than recommend a book that ends up letting people down.

-According to Amazon over 30,000 books/products have been ordered via my affiliate link since creating the list.

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-As you can imagine, this was a convincing bit of information to include in my book proposals. I wasn’t just saying that I had some fans who would buy my stuff, I had proof that I had a list of people who bought tons of books on my recommendation (that I didn’t even write!). Having a platform is one of the biggest things that agents and publishers look for.

-Oh yeah, during the launch of Trust Me I’m Lying, I found out that my Brazilian publisher actually found out about my book because they’d been a subscriber for a few years and were willing to take a chance on me.

-One thing I’ve never done well is proofing or editing my emails. I know I should spend more time and I get this criticism a lot. Learn from my bad example here.

-I saw my friend Ben Casnocha speak at UC Riverside a few years ago and was impressed with how he sent around an email signup sheet at the end of the talk. I didn’t want to do that, so I decided I would put a slide in all my presentations that gave away some bonuses if people emailed a certain email address. I’ve probably snagged 1,000 email addresses this way over the last two years.

-The list added 32 people yesterday. I didn’t do anything. Not bad for a day’s work.

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-My publisher Portfolio was nice enough to let me put a page in the back of my first book pushing the newsletter under the title “Further Reading.” As you can see from the graph at the top of the post, this correlates nicely with the growth of the list. It also worked out that they’ve continued to publish my other books–and have benefited from its sizeable growth.

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-That’s something to remember: Lists help promote launches. But launches, if done right, also help grow lists.

-I use MailChimp’s “Email Beamer” to draft almost all the emails. Basically, I type up the email in Gmail, send it to a special unique address and bam, the campaign is ready to go in my account.

-Another unexpected benefit of the list. Authors and publishers send me free copies of their books all the time. It’s also been a great way to connect with authors I admire. Amazon added me to “Amazon Vine” and other cool stuff like that. When the list was small, nobody cared that I recommended a book to 100 friends. But now when I say, “Hey Joe Author, I loved your book and just told 35,000 people to buy it,” they tend to be pretty friendly.

-For the launch of The Obstacle Is The Way I did a Bittorrent bundle. Their email gate (to get the content you have to provide an email) was responsible for over 5,000 emails I got to add to my list. It was the single largest driver for me to date (other than word of mouth).

-I’ve also been a long-time Slideshare Pro user–a program that they inexplicably discontinued recently. Last year, I paid $200 to have this Slideshare made to promote my list. It has done 152,000 views and driven substantial numbers of new emails to the list. Before that, it was a successful blog post. The point is, create content in multiple mediums to inform people about what you do.

-Another thing about protecting your list? Through MailChimp I use AlterEgo to require double authentication for login. I don’t want to mess around with security or privacy with these emails.

-The best way to drive people to your list is to have a list that people enjoy being on. I put a little line at the bottom that encourages readers to forward the email to friends. A lot of them do so because they genuinely do recommend it. Like all things, word of mouth is the best marketing there is.

-Sometimes friends will ask me to recommend their books to my list. I have to be super choosy–honestly, I won’t even recommend books by clients who pay me to consult on promoting their books unless I love love love the book.

-There are a couple of high-profile subscribers like Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing and the author Austin Kleon. Their occasional mentions of the list has been hugely helpful.

-In 2012 I got my act together after talking to my friend Derek Halpern. I redid my sign-up page for the list with a clear explanation of what the list was, why people should sign up and what they’d get out of it. It has done wonders for the number of new subscribers. Who’d have guessed?

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-But what really made a difference was the auto-responder I set up. For more than five years, new subscribers were simply added to this list but received nothing from me until the next monthly email went out. That meant that sometimes readers might go 45 days before they heard from me, meaning that some forgot that they’d even signed up (and then promptly unsubscribed). So I added a short, clear email that you now automatically get when you sign up. It hits you with 5 book recommendations to start you off and provides links to some popular articles I have written about reading and writing.

-Of the 20,000-plus people who have gotten this initial note, more than 80% have opened it. It’s sold many, many copies of the books I’ve written, driven great traffic to my articles and of course, made the list more active and engaged. For more on this, I would check out these resources: Start with The Art of the Welcome Email and 13 ‘Welcome’ Email Ideas. You should also look into Really Good Emails, which has a category dedicated to great welcome emails. Tim Ferriss’ introductory email is a great example to follow–it provides exclusive content and highlights some of his best posts.

-In the future I might create a track for users so that there are more automated emails. For instance, a 1-year anniversary email or a bump after three months with some thoughts about reading. Onboarding is incredibly important and I want to get better at it.

-My list doesn’t currently offer sign-up bonuses but I have worked with plenty of clients to develop some. Look at what we set up for Robert Greene. In less than three months he has nearly doubled the size of his email list simply by offering this cool little document we created to anyone who signed up.

-The regularity of the list is important. Some people let their lists lie fallow for a long time. I don’t get that. On the other hand, look at Groupon, which could have been this hotly anticipated, exclusive email once a day but instead became forgettable by oversending. For a list like mine, once a month has been a great middle ground. Enough to keep people active, not too much to lead to burnout.

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-The list has an open rate of nearly 50%. That’s crazy for a list of this size. And guess what? I do basically no subject line testing, no clickbait, no trickery. In fact, for like a year I forgot whether I called it the “Reading List Email” or “Reading Recommendation Email. One might be better than the other but what really matters is having a solid email that people actually want to open.

-I’ve never done affiliate mailings to my list, but I have worked on them with clients. Essentially, it’s when someone mails to their list on your behalf for a cut of the revenue. This can be a great way to expand your reach for a product launch or particular push. Here are some resources: Look into this post on Indiemark, MarketingSherpa’s 10 rules of thumb and Mailchimp’s post on the pitfalls of email list rental.

-Oh yeah, when you have a list, people will come to you all the time to ask “if you’ll send to your list for them.” They ask like it is some tiny favor. See the affiliate point above, but also be very cautious about this. Protect your list. Don’t give yours away. The whole value is that the readers believe that you carefully curate this and that its content reflects your actual values and sensibilities. Don’t trade trust today that you might need down the road. (One nice lesson I learned with my list is that by having a very defined and clear format, I can easily say no because their request just doesn’t fit with what I do.)

-I also worked to develop a popup. I generally hate popups and don’t think they are effective–but a clear, non-intrusive call-to-action can really work. I had it coded so the popup came only after your second visit to the site and only after you’d been reading for something like 30 seconds. This did well for me at first. Recently, I switched over to Noah Kagan’s popup, which is more automated and looks better. It shows up after a reader has seen 80% of a given page and can be easily x’d out of.

-One question I’ve gotten a lot over the years was access to the Reading List Email archive. I’ve deliberately declined to make that available to most people because I want the list to be forward focused. I want them to sign up and look out for the email each month, not go back through what I recommended in 2010. But the archive did make for a really good PDF bonus when I did a pre-order campaign for The Obstacle Is The Way.

-Last month I tried out a KingSumo contest that encouraged people to sign up for the list. I offered a free copy of every book in the October list to one winner. But the benefit of a KingSumo contest is that it incentivizes entrants to invite their friends to participate (by offering them a better chance of winning). My contest wasn’t as huge as some people’s but I did snag around 700 new names to the list.

-I also have two other smaller lists. I’ve collected more than 3,000 emails for my launch of Growth Hacker Marketing (detailed here) and it made for a great asset for the launch. I also collected about 500 random emails during the launch of The Obstacle Is The Way (though almost all went directly to the Reading List Email).

-Think about it: Facebook just announced they were going to be deliberately throttling marketing messages (what a scam). Most Twitter messages get lost in the stream. Email is the best way to reach your people because no one can get in the way.

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I hope this case study was helpful and of course, I hope you sign up for the Reading List Email. More than that, I hope you start creating your own list. You’ll thank me later.

I’ve built a lot of different assets in my career, from marketing campaigns to books to businesses. Honestly, building this list ranks among my proudest achievements. It’s something that no one else has replicated and has succeeded with an incredibly discerning audience. I take some extra satisfaction that it succeeded despite some doubters.

Where it will go in the future, I have no idea. I know it will continue trucking along–in fact, I’m typing up this month’s blast right now.

The post From Zero to 50,000: How I Built A Big Email List Exclusively About Books I Liked appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The Perfect Spouse Is the Best Life Hack No One Told You About

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(Photo: Erich Chen)

Two moments now stand out at me in my life. Driving home, by myself, after my high school graduation, thinking: I am finally free. And now, driving with my father, on the way to my wedding.

Such different feelings toward two similar life events, almost exactly a decade between them. One, excited to get away—anywhere, anything. Now, excited to be here—to be at peace, like heading home. The experiences feel so different, it is as if they are happening to two different people.

Of course, it’s because so much has happened between these two versions of myself. Not just in my relationship with my parents, which 10 years ago I would have doubted would be this way. But more importantly, I met a girl. Or rather, I met the girl.

It’s funny for me to think that my now wife and I met not long after that first moment. At a party, as sophomores in college, eight years ago. I was much closer to the first me. Young, ambitious, impatient. Driven by an almost manic intensity to do things, to prove certain points, to make a mark. Things are different now, if only by degree.

For all the productivity and success advice I’ve read, shaped and marketed for dozens of authors in the last decade, I’ve never really seen someone come out and say: Find yourself a spouse who complements and supports you and makes you better. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that relationships tie people down, that they are the death knell for creativity and ambition. When Cyril Connolly said that there was “no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” he was voicing, in appalling clarity, the selfishness and self-absorption that draws many people away from love and happiness.

Maybe I worried about it when I was young and ignorant, but today, I don’t feel any shame in saying that I would have spun off the planet a long time ago if it wasn’t for her. We don’t have kids, but relationships take their own time and toll. Yet, I’ve been in one nearly the entirety of my working life and it’s accelerated everything I ever hoped to do.

It’s as if we don’t want to admit that we can’t do this alone, or that success may require dealing with the soft parts of ourselves, the uncomfortable, sticky parts we’d rather pretend weren’t there. We have trouble seeing the ramifications of our personal lives on our professional lives and that the best way to navigate the public world is to master and find contentment in the private one.

The myth is of the lone creative entrepreneur battling the world without an ally in sight. A defiant combination of Atlas and Sisyphus and David, wrestling a Goliath-sized mass of doubters and demons. In reality, I’ve found that nearly every person I admire—every person I’ve met who strikes me as being someone who I would like to one day be like—lives a quiet life at home with a person who they’ve teamed up with…for life. The reason this one person strikes us as special, I find, is because they’re really two people.

Why it took me so long to grasp the freeing truth of this, I do not know. Samantha and I met when we were 19 years old. We’ve lived in five cities together, published three books, traveled the world, started (and dissolved) companies, quit jobs, broke several bones and, of course, on the eve of our engagement, had most of what we owned stolen—including the ring. In that time we’ve faced and experienced things far beyond what most people so young should or could experience (mostly good rather than bad things—I’m not trying to be melodramatic), and yet it was the two of us that helped each other through it.

In my part of the vows, I said that marriage was essentially one of the few regrets I have in my short life—in that I wish I’d done it sooner. Because it feels like we have always been married—partners in it together. It’s been this way almost since we met, but without the legal status, the ceremony and of course, the acknowledgment or understanding of other people. I think we always knew we would get married, but there was some slight resistance or immaturity that held it back from being made real. With time that fell away, until what was left felt natural and necessary, this step and commitment.

Anyway, that’s what I said in my vows. In hers, she promised to continue to allow goats in the house despite my repeated objections. This is, after all, what makes her special and attracts me to her, that she is so inexplicably different. That she defies and baffles the order, logic and seriousness with which I tend to treat the world. At the end of her vows, she stated she would continue to manipulate me as long as she could, into whatever other ridiculous schemes and larks she’s decided upon. That she would be both my biggest supporter and even bigger distraction. Not that I don’t love it anyway, but if this is my fate, cleaning it up and dealing with the insanity of it all, will be a plenty fair penance to pay.

Penance? One of the most difficult things about starting a relationship as kids and getting married as adults is this: “stupid kid mistakes” didn’t happen to someone else, some unfortunate ex. It happened together, or to one of you. You grew up together, instead of coming together as more fully formed people.

Biologically, women mature earlier than men, which means one thing for young but sustained relationships: I’ve usually done the ridiculous things, held on to stuff and made issues where there shouldn’t have been any. And did this to her. A man nearing his thirties can only look back on his twenties—however successful they may have been—and think: Goddamn, I was an idiot. Or more likely, an asshole. I suppose the reverse is true for her too, that I put up with her growing phases, but that’s not really the case. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it.

There’s a line from Kurt Vonnegut where he says that at the root of every couple’s fight is this claim, which neither understands or can admit: You are not enough people. I need more people. In retrospect, I see how true this was over the years and only now, have we started to fully become enough for each other. It took trial and error to begin building the support structures necessary to allow these two different people to live and fully be together.

But in this moment, heading to the wedding, all is far from my mind. Seeing her come down the aisle with a baby bunny in a basket instead of flowers, it was her moment to be the center of attention, which she not only richly deserved but relished. There were ponies and baby animals. There were friends, some wealthy and well known, some old acquaintances from life phases nearly forgotten, and there was a cake shaped like an armadillo. And there was, thankfully, only a little bit of dancing.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

The post The Perfect Spouse Is the Best Life Hack No One Told You About appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2015

Every year, I try to narrow down the hundred plus books I have recommended or read down to just the three or four best. I know that people are busy, and most of you don’t have time to read as much as you’d like. There’s absolutely no shame in that–what matters is that you make the time you can and that you pick the right books when you do. In 2015, I read a lot—though not as much as I have in years past. I was more disciplined this year and I’d like to think I tackled books that were more challenging, personally and intellectually. When I was 19 or 20, Tyler Cowen talked to me about the concept of “quake books”—books that shake you to your core. But he said something at the time that I didn’t quite understand. He said that as you get older, you experience that feeling less and less. I wasn’t sure I believed him then, but he was right.

Below are some books I absolutely loved and loved above the others. Did they turn my world upside down? No—but that’s a good thing. Because the books I read in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and long before that have set up a sturdy foundation.

The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

In 2014, I read The Education of a Coach, a book about Bill Belichick which influenced me immensely (coincidentally, the Patriots have also read my book and were influenced by it). Anyway, I have been chasing that high ever since. Bill Walsh’s book certainly met that high standard. Out of all the books I read this year, I marked this one up the most. Even if you’ve never watched a down of football, you’ll get something out of this book. Walsh took the 49ers from the worst team in football to the Super Bowl in less than 3 years. How? Not with a grand vision or pure ambition, but with what he called the Standard of Performance. That is: How to practice. How to dress. How to hold the ball. Where to be on a play down the very inch. Which skills mattered for each position. How much effort to give. By upholding these standards—whatever they happen to be for your chosen craft—success will take care of itself. A few other excellent coaching and leadership books I read this year: The Winner Within by Pat Riley and The Essential Wooden: A Lifetime of Lessons on Leaders and Leadership by John Wooden (thanks to the friend who recommended all these). Also related to this, another inspiring coach recommended the book The Way To Love to me. It has nothing to do with sports, but was a highlight of my reading year.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

There’s no question this was the year’s best book about media and culture–maybe even the best of the decade. Not only is it provocative and insightful, but the idea—interviewing and focusing on people who have screwed up and found themselves in the midst of massive online controversies—is one I am genuinely jealous of. Ronson proceeds to write about it with such sensitivity, empathy, humor and insight that I was blown away. If you’ve at all appreciated any of my media criticism over the years, please read this book. It looks at all that’s wrong with the rage and glee with which we tear people down–often people who were never public figures to begin with. He is just a helluva writer. If you get a chance, watch Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk which is also surprisingly good and pairs well with the ideas in the book.

Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

For me, this year was filled with what one might called “cautionary biographies”—bios of people you don’t want to end up like—and Hughes is at the top of the list. The authors clearly respect what was great about Howard—his daring, his talent for flying, his sense for people and love of negotiation—but they also see clearly his many, crippling flaws. They are able to tell his story in a way that gives one real insight into the life of a tragic and tortured figure. I very much related to the stories in the book given my more recent experiences at American Apparel and I imagine anyone else who has dealt with powerful personalities and eccentric figures will too. Related and with equal weight, I want to recommend George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon by Stephen W. Sears (a biography of the talented but utterly delusional General George McClellan), Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne (a biography of the brilliant but manic Stonewall Jackson) and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (an equally brilliant, more accomplished but equally tragic founding father). All these books made me angry, sad, and confused. But they also made me look inward and taught me quite a bit.

Misc

This year I want to make my Misc section (which usually exists because I can’t stick to just a few books) and dedicate it exclusively to fiction. I read a lot of it this year and got so much from the books I read. First, James Salter’s The Hunters: A Novel was a magnificent book which focuses on the burning fire of ambition—in this case, that of a young fighter pilot—and what it does to us. I read The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe which looks at a different burning fire—that of young love—and how crazy it makes us. A beautifully written book that every person should read. Dr. Drew recommended Voltaire’s Candide, which I read on my wedding day, and found to be fantastic and educational. Equally allegorical, I read The Little Prince for the first time which for some reason I’d never been exposed to before. If you’re in the same boat, read it. It’s short but great. Finally, I’m not sure what compelled me to pick Fahrenheit 451 back up but I’m so glad I did because I was able to see the book in a very different context. Bradbury’s message (made explicit in his 50th Anniversary Afterword) is much less a warning against government control and much more about a road to hell paved by people attempting to rid the world of offensive speech and conflicting ideas. In a world of microaggressions and outrage porn, this is an important idea to see in such a timeless work of fiction.

Also, great news: my book Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing & Advertising is discounted to $1.99 as an ebook this week. It’s just in time to give as a gift or if you’re looking to read something over the break. What started as a short 10,000 word experiment is now an expanded edition that’s sold more than 40,000 copies and is translation in close to a dozen language. Hope you like it.

Enjoy and looking forward to reading with you in 2016!

The post The (Very) Best Books I Read in 2015 appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

Here’s the Real Solution to Millennial Angst

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(Photo: BK/Flickr)

The media narrative about millennials is well worn right now. You’ll read they’re lazy, narcissistic, soft, and entitled. It’s a great way to get pageviews—it either gratifies the older reader, or it pisses of the younger one. The result is a lot of comments and angry Facebook shares.

Of course, this doesn’t accomplish anything. The reality is that the economic situation for millennials is not a good one. Thirty-six percent of our generation still lives with their parents. Unemployment for millennials is twice the national average. Half of all Millennials have taken a job they didn’t want just to pay the bills and only 30 percent consider their current job a career. According to one 2011 study by the University of Michigan, many graduates aren’t even bothering to learn how to drive. The road is blocked, they are saying, so why get a license I won’t be able to use? Despite student loan debt rising above $1 trillion, surpassing credit card debt, we go back to school.

And a lot of young people are stuck because of it. We are paralyzed by the obstacles which lay before us. Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Anger. Depression. These are understandable emotions in the face of what seems like insurmountable obstacles everywhere we look.

Of course, this has always been the case for young people. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841:

“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.”

If that was printed in The New Yorker tomorrow under a different name, no one would bat an eye. That’s because our situation is not unique. We’re all, at varying points in our lives, subject to random and often incomprehensible events. It just so happens that when we are young we don’t have the framework to deal with these problems. We have no idea how to turn them around.

But we are in great luck, because we can find examples in the icons of history who used this formula to persevere and turn their obstacles into advantage. They took what should have held them back—paralyzed with the same emotions we are feeling—and used it to achieve great success. Just like them we have the ability to see our obstacles for what they are and attack them to achieve what we want in life. Like them, we can use the following framework to stand out amongst those who remain mired in this rut.

Control Your Perceptions

John D. Rockefeller took his first job in 1855 at the age of 16 making 50 cents a day. Less than two years later the Panic of 1857 struck. It was at the time the greatest market depression in US history and it had hit him just as he was starting his career. Instead of getting angry or growing despondent, he looked at the panic as an opportunity to learn, a baptism in the market. Within 20 years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. We can try to see disaster rationally. Or rather, like Rockefeller, we can see opportunity in every disaster, and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the classic series Little House, faced some of the toughest and unwelcoming elements on the planet: harsh and unyielding soil, Indian territory, and the humid backwoods of Florida. But Wilder wasn’t afraid or jaded, she saw all these unforgiving environments as adventures. As she put it: “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”

For us, we face things that are not nearly as intimidating, and then promptly decide we’re screwed. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves. Or whether we will tell one at all. That is the power of perception.

Direct Your Actions

When former President James Garfield couldn’t afford his tuition at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in 1851, he paid his way through by persuading the school to let him be the janitor in exchange for tuition. Within just one year of starting at the school he was a professor—teaching a full course load in addition to his studies. By his 26th birthday he was the dean.

In the 1920s Amelia Earhart couldn’t make a living as a female pilot, so she took a job as a social worker. Then one day the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a pretty offensive offer: She could be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but she wouldn’t actually fly the plane and she wouldn’t get paid anything. Guess what she said to the offer? She said yes. Less than five years later she was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and became, rightly, one of the most famous and respected people in the world.

Sometimes, on the road to where we are going or where we want to be, we have to do things that we’d rather not do. Often when we are just starting out, our first jobs “introduce us to the broom,” as Andrew Carnegie famously put it. There’s nothing shameful about sweeping. It’s just another opportunity to excel—and to learn.

Strengthen Your Will

Theodore Roosevelt spent almost everyday during the first 12 years of his life struggling with horrible asthma. The attacks were an almost nightly near-death experience. But as a fragile child born into great wealth and status, he could have remained weak and would have been taken care of throughout his life.

Instead, he one day looked at his father and said with determination: “I’ll make my body.” He proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years. By his early twenties his battle against asthma was essentially over. Roosevelt had worked it out of his body. Like Roosevelt, we can choose to not accept the hand we’re dealt with, a hand we don’t control. Instead of sitting back and enjoying the modern cushy life, we can prepare for the adversity that is all but guaranteed to come our way and react accordingly.

Abraham Lincoln’s life was defined by enduring and transcending great difficulty. He grew up in poverty, lost his mother while he was still a child, and suffered through intense bouts of depression. Because of the difficulties he endured in both his personal life and as President, he was able to embody the Stoic maxim: sustine et abstine. Bear and forbear. Acknowledge the pain but trod onward in your task. With all our modern technology has come the conceited delusion that we control the world around us, which is of course not true. We can follow Lincoln’s example andadjust to a world that is inherently unpredictable by remaining confident, calm, and ready to work regardless of the conditions.

Our generation needs to always remember that over a hundred years before us, people stood right where we were and felt very similar things, struggling with the same issues. People have always had to dig themselves out of messes they had nothing to do with creating.

This is a recession, not the Great Depression. Those that came before us dealt with much worse problems and had fewer safety nets and tools at their disposal. They dealt with the same obstacles we have today, plus those that they worked so hard and sacrificed their lives to eliminate for us.

We’d be so much better following the lead of Emerson’s counterexample, as someone who “tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet.”

This is perseverance. And with it, Emerson said, “with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.”

The post appeared originally on the New York Observer. 

The post Here’s the Real Solution to Millennial Angst appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.