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279a718
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Many of our problems come from having too much: rapid technological disruption, junk food, traditions that tell us the way we're supposed to live our lives. We're soft, entitled, and scared of conflict. Great times are great softeners. Abundance can be its own obstacle, as many people can attest.
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Ryan Holiday |
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26734a8
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And Johnson, genuinely hated by his opponent and the crowd, still enjoying every minute of it. Smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There's no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden and Johnson refused to pick it up.
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Ryan Holiday |
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49989c1
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Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of "How do I get customers for my product?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . ."
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Ryan Holiday |
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33c68b4
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Outward appearances are deceptive. What's within them, beneath them, is what matters.
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Ryan Holiday |
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98f62f3
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In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.
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Ryan Holiday |
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27959a6
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Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against.
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Ryan Holiday |
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ad7174f
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Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair--these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy--those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter--these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation...
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Ryan Holiday |
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b689969
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Marketing is the art of allocating resources--sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!
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Ryan Holiday |
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b129ca4
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It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he's told: "There's nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world." Peter Thiel's friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a "high-agency person." How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What's the reaction to being told you ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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e51aab7
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It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows," Epictetus says."
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Ryan Holiday |
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57fb686
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As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, "In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion."
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Ryan Holiday |
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d37cdac
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Just because you've begun down one path doesn't mean you're committed to it forever , especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded. At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.
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Ryan Holiday |
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f6c920e
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But in our lives, when our worst instincts are in control, we dally. We don't act like Demosthenes, we act frail and are powerless to make ourselves better. We may be able to articulate a problem, even potential solutions, but then weeks, months, or sometimes years later, the problem is still there. Or it's gotten worse. As though we expect someone else to handle it, as though we honestly believe that there is a chance of obstacles unobstac..
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Ryan Holiday |
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eca3a60
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Being trapped is just a position, not a fate. You get out of it by addressing and eliminating each part of that position through small, deliberate actions--not by trying (and failing) to push it away with superhuman strength. With
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Ryan Holiday |
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41dd4b1
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The reality is that while the Internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time--a snapshot of the process--and makes his or her conclusions from that.
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Ryan Holiday |
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9adcb77
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He was patient because he knew that difficult things took time.
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Ryan Holiday |
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d4e1a1d
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We're all just humans, doing the best we can. We're all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit.
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Ryan Holiday |
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a27e3c9
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Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you're at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.
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reporting
journalism
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Ryan Holiday |
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aef8717
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See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.
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Ryan Holiday |
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0da2f36
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The ways this separation manifests itself negatively are immense: We can't work with other people if we've put up walls. We can't improve the world if we don't understand it or ourselves. We can't take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can't recognize opportunities--or create them--if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy.
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Ryan Holiday |
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eed1464
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Doing great work is a struggle. It's draining, it's demoralizing, it's frightening. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away. The question is, when faced with your particular challenge, do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head-on?
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work-ethic
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Ryan Holiday |
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e998cde
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Appearances are deceiving. *Having* authority is not the same as *being* an authority. *Having* the right and *being* the right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good work and it doesn't mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). *Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.* To be or to do - life is a constant roll call.
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the-power-of-choice
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Ryan Holiday |
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95fc6a0
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You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.
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Ryan Holiday |
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8ca3143
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Knowledge--self-knowledge in particular--is freedom.
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Ryan Holiday |
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42243e5
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Ego needs honors in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
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Ryan Holiday |
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da9ca07
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Let's make one thing clear: we never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else. To think otherwise is not only egotistical, it's counterproductive.
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Ryan Holiday |
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9840dba
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It's the logic of two campers and the bear--you don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.
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Ryan Holiday |
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850f2d2
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More than purpose, we also need realism. Where do we start? What do we do first? What do we do right now? How are we sure that what we're doing is moving us forward? What are we benchmarking ourselves against?
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Ryan Holiday |
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a9204f9
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No matter what you've done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you're not still learning, you're already dying. It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies. At every step and every juncture in life, there is the op..
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Ryan Holiday |
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62ccd6f
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Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift. Someone on a deadline doesn't indulge himself with attempts at the impossible, he doesn't waste time complaining about how he'd like things to be.
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Ryan Holiday |
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ef29827
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Up ahead there will be: Slights. Dismissals. Little fuck yous. One-sided compromises. You'll get yelled at. You'll have to work behind the scenes to salvage what should have been easy. All this will make you angry. This will make you want to fight back. This will make you want to say: I am better than this. I deserve more.
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Ryan Holiday |
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2a57346
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When someone doesn't reckon you with the seriousness that you'd like, the impulse is to correct them. (As we all wish to say: Do you know who I am?!) You want to remind them of what they've forgotten; your ego screams for you to indulge it. Instead, you must do nothing. Take it. Eat it until you're sick. Endure it. Quietly brush it off and work harder. Play the game. Ignore the noise; for the love of God, do not let it distract you.
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Ryan Holiday |
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b6edf28
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Because sadly, this trait, the inability to get out of one's head, is not restricted to fiction.
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Ryan Holiday |
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7bfc130
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Are you okay being alone? Are you strong enough to go a few more rounds if it comes to that? Are you comfortable with challenges? Does uncertainty bother you? How does pressure feel? Because these things will happen to you. No one knows when or how, but their appearance is certain. And life will demand an answer. You chose this for yourself, a life of doing things. Now you better be prepared for what it entails.
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Ryan Holiday |
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518b90c
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No matter what you've done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you're not still learning, you're already dying.
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Ryan Holiday |
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ebe40f3
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Remember: even what we get for free has a cost, if only in what we pay to store it--in our garages and in our minds.
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Ryan Holiday |
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6c5ef59
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Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth." --MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.48.2"
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Ryan Holiday |
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fa0c262
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It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he's told: "There's nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world." Peter Thiel's friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a "high-agency person." How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What's the reaction to being told you ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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4eca415
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When you first rise in the morning tell yourself: I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that these wrong-doers are still akin to me ... and that none can do me harm, or implicate me in ugliness--nor can I be angry a..
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Ryan Holiday |
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95ee9c7
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She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn't driven by passion, but by reason.
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Ryan Holiday |
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dccf828
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Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that ever..
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Ryan Holiday |
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be8df8a
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You can only see this if you want to see it.
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Ryan Holiday |
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b08a21f
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God laid down this law, saying: if you want some good, get it from yourself" (1.29.4). "Protect your own good in all that you do" (4.3.11)."
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Ryan Holiday |
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315c5f7
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This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus--how to love my country, wife and father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends." --SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 88.7b M"
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Ryan Holiday |