Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 35

The Question to Ask

Let’s stop and ask ourselves a question: What are we doing right now?

Does it fall under “doing what you love” or “being a good person?”

To categorize real quick: the first category is our passions, it’s the people we care about and whatever our life’s task happens to be. The second is our duties–moral, personal, civic. It’s our obligations to ourselves and others as talented and unique individuals who have something to offer the world.

Then of course there is the third category. The “I have no idea why I am actually doing this.” You don’t want to, you don’t actually need to (though someone may have told you “have to”) you’re just doing it. Maybe because everyone else is doing it. Or because it’s easier than saying no or doing nothing.

But then you wonder why you sometimes feel that your life is not your own. You wonder why other people have accomplished what you dream of, while it remains elusive to you. You complain about not having enough time or that you struggle with difficult decisions.

These things are not unrelated. They are no difficult to resolve either.

It begins with a question and standard from which to measure things. And then following it. That’s it.

Some New Writing

Here’s some of my stuff from around the web for the last few weeks.

Great Lessons From Bad People — Learning From History’s Most Hated

Exposing the Racket: A Simple Stunt Reveals How Blogs Will Print Anything for Pageviews

The Secret That Defines Marketing Now (Fast Company)

How to Travel: 21 Contrarian Rules (Tim Ferriss’s site)(a shorter, altered version of the piece also ran on ThoughtCatalog)

So, You Want To Be a Writer? That’s Mistake #1



You can comment here or on the articles, happy to take questions.

Seneca on Travel

“Then from this dislike of others’ success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves. For the human mind is naturally mobile and enjoys activity. Every chance of stimulation and distraction is welcome to it–even more welcome to all those inferior characters who actually enjoy being worn out by busy activity…

For some things delight our bodies even when they cause some pain like turning over to change a side that is not yet tired and repeatedly shifting to keep it cool…like an invalid could endure nothing for long but used his restlessness as a cure. Hence men travel far and wide, wandering along foreign shores and making trial by land and sea of their restlessness, which always hates what is around it. ‘Let’s now go to Campania.’ Then when they get bored with luxury–‘Let’s visit uncultivated areas; let’s explore the woodlands of Bruttium and Lucania.’ And yet amid the wilds some delight is missing by which their pampered eyes can find relif from the tedious squalor of these unsightly regions. ‘Let’s go to Tarentum with its celebrated harbor and mild winters, an area prosperous enough for a large population even in antiquity.’ ‘Lets now make our way to the city’–too long have their ears missed the din of applause: now they long to enjoy even the sight of human blood.

They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says ’Thus each man flees himself.’ But to what end if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. — Seneca (“On Tranquility of the Mind“)

Updates and RSS

As you know Google Reader is going away on July 1. The feed for this site will continue to work as it always has, and so will my email book recommendations. Personally, I’m using Feedly as my reader and I like it so far.

But as many of you have noticed, I am increasingly writing for other publications as well like the New York Observer and Thought Catalog. Those articles aren’t included in the feed and I think that it’s some of my best work.

Going forward, I am going to be reposting some of that stuff here, but also if you want to keep track of it, I ask you all to following me on Twitter (which you can do via RSS actually) to get the links to everything I write. This is probably the best way to get all my articles from all over the web.

Here are three recent pieces published elsewhere that were quite controversial. Hope you enjoy them:

25 Rules For Living From A (Semi-)Successful 26-Year-Old

How To Read More — A Lot More

The Jenna Marbles Paradox: Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible?

Here’s Some Marketing Advice: Your Thing Sucks

For whatever reason, in my writing I seem to have assumed the role of the guy who says the things that no one else will say. But in my actual business life as a marketer, I’ve been struggling with that. Namely, I seem to get paid a lot of money to specifically not say this one thing.

Because of my successes in marketing working for bestselling authors like Tucker Max, Tim Ferriss and Robert Greene, in working on the marketing at American Apparel for a number of years, people see that success and they come to me and they ask me to work on their projects. They say, “I love the risks that you take and I love all the ridiculous media stunts that you’ve done/ I’ll do whatever you say, let’s just do something crazy.”

They say everything is on the table but really it isn’t. The one thing they don’t want to hear from me is that their product sucks. Like itreally sucks.

It’s not worth talking about, it’s not interesting, I can’t get excited about. I don’t think deep down they are even excited about it but they see the success other people have and they want it. And even though they’re paying thousands of dollars for my advice, they blow off the most important advice that I have.

See, if I contributed anything to the massive projects I’ve been a part of it was in adding velocity something that already had its own momentum or I concentrated an organic process that would have happened already into a smaller period of time.

It should go without saying that to have marketing success like that you need to have a truly remarkable amazing product. But doesn’t go without saying. Not at all. Like I say it over and over and over again and people still don’t hear me.

What happens is an author will come to me and they clearly phoned in this book or worse they went off into the writers cave for a year not thinking about who this book was for or how they were intending to reach them. They just think there is this mythical audience of smart people out there who buy books that marketers put in front of them.

Or people who have never done anything newsworthy in their life come to me and ask me to put them in the news like reporters are just sitting around trying to do favors or will just print whatever I say which of course is not the case either.

Or companies come to me and I’ll say “Hey what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish with this launch?” And they’ll look me straight in the eye and say “Oh I want featured in Vanity Fair, I want to be profiled in Fast Company or the New York Times,” and of course why or what for has not crossed their mind. What is their angle here? Why is their thing worth talking about. This is a thing that they think they outsource to marketers and thats not how it works.

I’ve dealt with a few old school publicists and marketers myself and look occasionally they’ll surprise me with the ability to call up some old friend and place some story and I’ll think, “Wow I wish I had that power,” but I don’t. I don’t think many people do anymore.

That’s not how my clients have been successful, thats not how I’ve seen marketing evolve in my years of doing it now. Increasingly it is the product that does all the heavy lifting and it is the marketer’s job is simply, the communication or facilitation of the relationship of the idea to the influencers that spread messages. We are the accelerant, but rarely the cause of the fire.

The three variables my clients have in common they all did these three things.

They did something totally new.
They did something provocative and controversial in some way.
Finally they knew exactly who they were doing it for and where those people were located.

And I know you think you are probably doing these things and look, this audience is better than most, but I’ve done enough of these events that what inevitably happens is I get off stage (or check my email) and having a bunch of people come up to me and tell me about their project and I pretend to be interested and immediately forget about it. Because there is nothing there.

I’m not saying their project will have no success, it might even have a decent amount of success but it’s not going to spread and it doesn’t matter how much work or effort I put behind it when people read it they’re disappointed or see it they’re disappointed or try it they are disappointed.

Those of you who understand the online marketing space know this concept as “bounce rate.” Most of the projects people pitch me are destined for a high bounce rate. You can get people to it and they don’t stick and so it doesn’t matter how good a marketer you are. It doesn’t matter what relationships I bring to the table, how hard I go to bat for you or how hard any publicist goes to bat for you.

Part of the problem with marketing, of course, is that publicists don’t care because their job is to bring media to you but not ultimately results. We are not usually partners in the outcome of your product so we don’t really care.

One of the best pieces of marketing advice I’ve ever heard actually came from Paul Graham who is the founder of Y Combinator (the angel investor behind AirBnB, Looped, Reddit, many of the web services that have become integral to our lives). Startups come in and they are like how “Ok how can we get people to talk about our product?” And he just says, “Make stuff that people want.”

And it seems simple and we nod and think, “ Oh yeah people want this,” but we don’t actually want to hear if they want it or not and we are deaf to that feedback. We will not let anyone tell us otherwise.

The process of creation goes something like: I’m going to make this thing, then it’s done and now I’m going to talk to a marketer and start marketing as though these are two distinct phases when they are not.

I’m seeing marketing become this sort of fluid spectrum. In this Silicon Valley they’ve started to describe this concept as “Growth Hacking.” The term is not all that important, but the results are. To see people with no experience or no traditional background in marketing turn an unknown web service into something with a million or 100 million users really rapidly.

And how do they do that? It’s a set of distinct phases, the first of which is Product-Market fit, which I’m sure you’ve all heard of, which is you make something that people actually want or need and the marketing can happen on a much smaller scale. You only need to reach a few 100 or 1000 people because they actually want this, and when you build in features to help spread the product, you watch 1 user become 2 users become 3 users become 4 users the product spreads itself and you don’t need marketing.

And finally there is this process of optimization, improvements and iterative refinements of the product itself. All of that is made possible by the simple understanding that I started with which is, chances are the first version of your idea sucks and it’s not that interesting and it’s not worth marketing. We put the cart before the horse and then we wonder why our efforts don’t build the kind of products, or the kind of successes, or ground swell support that we were hoping for, that we saw in other people.

I think if I could close with one thought it would be, don’t spend your money on marketing, don’t give it to me even though obviously I would be glad to take it, but spend it on going back to the lab and making something that’s really special, that’s provocative and interesting and unlike other things out there and it’s actually meant for a specific person that you can almost reach out and touch rather than for this vague idea of success and massive appeal that far too many people aim at and never end up hitting.

The above material is adapted out of a short talk I gave at Mastermind Toronto with Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, Marc Ecko and Derek Halpern. It was a little more awkward to deliver this message in person to a room full of the people I was in some ways criticizing. But the upside was I got pitched a lot less afterwards. In the last 24 hours, already emailed the post to a handful of people who wrote me to pitch their products. 

Help Me With My Next Book

I’ve talked a little bit about my next two projects in my reading newsletter and in the occasional interview, but for those of you who don’t know, I am working a two new books: one will be a Kindle Single and the other, a full length book. As many of you have inquired and requested, the full length book will be about stoicism. I’m really excited about it and am nearing the light at the end of the tunnel on it.

I’m also working on another project which will come out first that I could use your help on. A few months ago, an article I wrote for Fast Company about growth hacking was optioned into an ebook for Portfolio/Penguin. Since many of my readers are involved in marketing, looking for jobs in marketing, or trying to launch or sell a product, I have a simple question: What are you having trouble with? What are you looking to learn about marketing and promoting? What would you like to hear from me?*

A word of warning before you answer. This is going to be a short ebook (less than 15,000 words) and it is about a specific approach to marketing, so I only have so much room. I am exploring how startup methodology has changed the marketing game forever. Within that framework, however, I want to address the practical needs or problems you are having. My main aim is to prevent people from picking up a lot of the bad habits and bad assumptions of traditional marketing, so this book will be much more about mindset rather than tactics.

Anyway, very curious to hear from all of you.

*This is itself a growth hacking trick. You don’t get to product market fit without asking questions from prospective customers. 

Only One Way to Make Progress

We want things to happen. We know what we need to do solve our problems or overcome our obstacles. We’ve got it all figured out. And then we mostly proceed to sit and do nothing.

And the most insidious and disingenuous part is that when we check in on our “progress,” weeks or months later, we’re shocked—SHOCKED—that we haven’t made any.

Of course our wordcount, usercount, cashflow, or understanding are exactly the same. Of course we’re still stuck. We didn’t do shit.

This isn’t to say it’s all about throwing yourself against a wall. Thinking is an action tooand if done right, waiting can be as well. So long as you’re pressing forward, alternating between ideas and exertion until you finally break through.

The breakthrough isn’t coming because you sat back and thought about it a lot. It’s coming because you got up and then stayed at it. Because you took risks and tried things. Because you persisted (and resisted) the impulse to give up.

Let’s ask an honest question: could you be doing more? You probably could, there’s always more. At minimum, you could be trying harder. You might have gotten started, but your full effort isn’t in it—and that shows.

Is that going to get you the results you want? Obviously not.

So get moving. Give it everything.

Trust Me I’m Lying Excerpt/Slideshow

I’ve wanted to put something like this together for a long time and so when AMP Energy’s PowerDash proposed sponsoring the idea, I jumped on it. What follows is a selected piece from Chapter II in Trust Me I’m Lying, adapted into a slideshare presentation. It’s a how to for one of the more controversial topics of the book “Trading Up the Chain”–essentially, how to create and influence the news with very little effort. If you remember from the book, this tactic can be used for good (a friend’s charity is my first example) or for bad (I talk about Terry Jones and his disgusting media stunts as well). In any case, it’s something you want to understand, whether you’re in marketing or simply a consumer.

For those of you who have read the book already, enjoy and hopefully show it to your friends. For those of you who haven’t, hopefully this gives you a taste of the book.

Why am I doing this now? The big news is that the Revised & Expanded paperback of Trust Me I’m Lying will be coming out in mid-June and the book is now available for preorder. The paperback includes an updated preface/introduction from me, three case studies, a selection of articles I’ve written and some selected editing and improvements to the main text. It’s worth checking out (plus it’s cheaper).

Without further delay, here is the Slideshare:

Trading Up The Chain: How To Make National News in 3 Easy Steps (Excerpt from Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator) from Ryan Holiday

Thanks again for AMP Energy and their app AMP Energy PowerDash for sponsoring this and to Mohnish Soundararajan for designing it.

The Narrative Fallacy Embodied

Is there a better example of The Narrative Fallacy (or, the Soundtrack Delusion or all the posts I’ve tried to write on this subject) than this photo?

Read the article. Compare it to the photo.

That’s the difference between the grandiose story of self-deception we spin for ourselves and the sad, pathetic reality of what we really are.

Buzz Bissinger is an amazing writer. In many ways, his article is brave and honest and commendable. At the same time, it is the perfect embodiment of the delusional image we project in order to cover up our own fears and inadequacies.

Fortunately, there is an antidote for this. Documentary photographs like this work quite well. You’re not awesome, you’re not a rockstar. All eyes are not on you–at least not in a good way. You look like an idiot. 

Just do yourself a favor and learn from examples like this, instead of by your own trial and error.

Finding Hidden Education Subsidies

I never got a PhD or anything but from what I understand, the transaction goes like this: The school covers tuition of promising students and pays their living expenses in exchange for the student doing all the work the professors don’t want to do–research, grading papers, hosting study sessions.

But the real value for the student–which some fully take advantage of and some don’t–is in the fact that the professor gives them their own set of keys to the laboratory. Oh, and they’re allowed to trade on the prestigious name of the university and the professor’s reputation.

This transaction is not all that dissimilar to the one I made with Tucker at 19 years old, or the one I made with Robert Greene a little later. In some ways with American Apparel, too. They not only covered my education costs, but let me into their laboratory. And I got to explore all sorts of amazing opportunities merely by association with them. (Before this even, I met Tucker because I was writing for my college newspaper. The paper was paying me to go out and meet people who’d have never talked to me otherwise)

I’m realizing that identifying opportunities like this has been the secret to whatever success I’ve had so far. That is: identifying hidden subsidies. Finding someone or something that will cover the costs you otherwise would have (or perhaps, could not have) had to cover to yourself.

For instance, I’ve been doing some speaking lately. This is not something I had any experience or expertise in. In fact, I found it quite terrifying. I knew that getting good at it would require a fairly large investment on my part, both in time and in possibly hiring a coach.

Then, Creative Live (through my friend Chase Jarvis) asked if I would try out a marketing class to see if it worked on their platform. Doing 10 hours live on camera was not exactly my idea of a good time–but I noticed that subsidy again. Here, someone was offering to pay me to break myself of stage fright, to craft my message, to develop my materials and best of all, put me in front of a large audience. Of course, I said yes.

I think the same thing when journalism schools or universities ask me to come in for Q&As. These don’t usually pay, but the institution is offering me the opportunity to introduce my book to young audience and lending me their credibility as well. And I also get to test my material in a relatively safe and low key environment.

And now, as a result, an hour keynote (which does pay) is easy and painless for me. I had my education and development not only covered–in fact, at a profit–and now I’m booked with a bunch of cool talks this year.

It’s not always something you’re “asked” though. More often than not you need to seek it. Let’s say you see some client or would be client suffering from a problem. It might be something outside your current specialties or capabilities, but try offering to take a crack at it for way less than what someone else would charge (or for free if you must) Why? They’re paying you to learn how to do something you can then charge other people for.

Your education is covered. You’re learning in someone else’s laboratory–in a safe way. If and when you succeed, you can add that service to offering. I try to think about this when people approach me with products they want to market. Will this open up a new avenue for me?

Another example: No one asked me to put my Reading Newsletter together. But it works on the same logic. I realized I was already reading all these books, I figured there had to be a way to get it subsidized. Now, the email more than covers the books I buy each year (thousands of dollars worth a year). In fact, I actually have the Amazon Affiliate revenue just roll over into Amazon gift cards each month. It worked out quite nicely–oh, and it was also the single biggest driver of sales for Trust Me I’m Lying as well (In fact, two of my foreign rights deals came from editors who subscribe).

The way to think about it is like this: You’re already going to try to do things. That’s who you are. You’re not the type who sits idle. You’re curious, motivated and resourceful. Guess who else is interested in those traits? Basically every successful business, entrepreneur or institution. So find them and ask them to subside the cost. Let them think they are harnessing that energy exclusively for their advantage. Let them think they’re getting a deal. (This is the essence of Charlie Hoehn’s strategy)

Really though, you’re the one leaving on top. You’re getting an education. You’re developing a business on their time and on their dime. And you’re benefiting from their direction, connections and access the entire time.

For young people increasingly turning away from school, this is the path you’ve got to take. No one is going to take you by the hand and lead you. Subsides don’t fall in your lap. Find them, take full advantage of them, move on to the next. And then never ever forget to repay the people who helped you along the way.