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I'm alarmed at how many creators gloss over creating. They fritter away their time on Twitter and Facebook--not killing time, but believing that they are building up followers to be the recipients of their unremarkable work.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are at their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune to their advantage.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Humans are still primed to detect threats and dangers that no longer exist -- think of the cold sweat when you're stressed about money, or the fight-or-flight response that kicks in when your boss yells at you. Our safety is not truly at risk here -- there is little danger that we will starve or that violence will break out -- though it certainly feels that way sometimes. We have a choice about how we respond to this situation (or any situa..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The idea that you won't have to work to sell your product is more than entitled.
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Ryan Holiday |
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I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego--and that's important because humility always works harder than ego.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Ben Horowitz: "There is no silver bullet. . . . No, we're going to have to use a lot of lead bullets."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Focusing on smaller, progressive parts of the work also eliminates the tendency to sit on your ass and dream indefinitely. There
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Ryan Holiday |
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Successfully finding and "scratching" a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for? Instead, many creators want to be for everyone . . . and as a result end up being for no one."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Not "be positive" but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good."
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Ryan Holiday |
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To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Paul Graham explains, "The best way to increase a startup's growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends."
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Ryan Holiday |
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To borrow from Budd Schulberg's description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was "indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch." I no longer have those illusions. Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that "each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last." I was even more delusional. I thought I could ski..
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Ryan Holiday |
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To create something is a daring, beautiful act. The
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Ryan Holiday |
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Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF);
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Ryan Holiday |
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The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what "other people are saying" and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Choose not to be harmed--and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed--and you haven't been. --MARCUS AURELIUS R
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Ryan Holiday |
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Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness--these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to. And it is precisely a..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Let's be honest. Most of the time we don't find ourselves in horrible situations we must simply endure. Rather, we face some minor disadvantage or get stuck with some less-than-favorable conditions. Or we're trying to do something really hard and find ourselves outmatched, overstretched, or out of ideas. Well, the same logic applies. Turn it around. Find some benefit. Use it as fuel.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can't actually influence is wasted, self-indulgent, and self-destructive.
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Ryan Holiday |
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You will come across obstacles in life -- fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming -- or possibly thriving because of -- them. Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blind..
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Ryan Holiday |
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through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation--as well as the destruction--of every one of our obstacles.
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Ryan Holiday |
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There are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We must try: To be objective To control emotions and keep an even keel To choose to see the good in a situation To steady our nerves To ignore what disturbs or limits others To place things in perspective To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled
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Ryan Holiday |
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Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn't possible.
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Ryan Holiday |
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We choose how we'll look at things. We retain the ability to inject perspective into a situation. We can't change the obstacles themselves--that part of the equation is set--but the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear.
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Ryan Holiday |
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When action is our priority, vanity falls away.
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Ryan Holiday |
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When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie.
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Ryan Holiday |
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We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we'll break or whether we'll resist. We decide whether we'll assent or reject. No one can force us to give up or to believe something that is untrue (such as, that a situation is absolutely hopeless or impossible to improve). Our perceptions are the thing that we're in complete control of.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The researchers found that while sadness is an extreme emotion, it is a wholly unviral one. Sadness, like what one might feel to see a stray dog shivering for warmth or a homeless man begging for money, is typically a low-arousal emotion. Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing. It's why nobody wanted to share the Magnum photos but gladly shared the ones on the Huffington Post. The HuffPo photos were awe-some; they made us angry, o..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them."
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Ryan Holiday |
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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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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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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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Outward appearances are deceptive. What's within them, beneath them, is what matters.
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Ryan Holiday |
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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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Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against.
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Ryan Holiday |
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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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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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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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It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows," Epictetus says."
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Ryan Holiday |
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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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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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You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible--and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom. But what if some other area of my action is thwarted? Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately ..
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Ryan Holiday |