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Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain--from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I "leak" a document. Someti..
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Ryan Holiday |
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serenity and stability are results of your choices and judgment, not your environment.
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Ryan Holiday |
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There must be a reason to share it and the means to do so.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds--that sacred place of reason, action and will--and throw off our compass. Our
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Ryan Holiday |
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There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means. That
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Ryan Holiday |
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This too shall pass" was Lincoln's favorite saying, one he once said was applicable in any and every situation one could encounter. To"
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Ryan Holiday |
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If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul.
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Ryan Holiday |
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the strength to endure, contextualize, and derive meaning from the obstacles we cannot simply overcome (which, as it happens, is the way of flipping the unflippable). Even
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Ryan Holiday |
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Certain things in life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens--at that exposing moment--the world gets a glimpse of what's truly inside you. So what will be revealed when you're sliced open by tension and pressure? Iron? Or air? Or bullshit? As
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Ryan Holiday |
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It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within their minds. The temple became a metaphysical one, located independently in the mind of every believer. Each one--wherever they'd been dispersed around the world, whatever persecution or hardship they faced--could draw upon it for strength and security. ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us. To
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Ryan Holiday |
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The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher. We can't afford to shy away from the things that intimidate us. We don't need to take our weaknesses for granted. Are
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Ryan Holiday |
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A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins: "I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. Tell me what went wrong?" What?! But we haven't even launched yet... That's the point. The CEO is forcing an exercise in hind-sight--in advance. She is using a technique designed by psycholo..
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Ryan Holiday |
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No one has ever said this better than Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, "If you're not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you." If"
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Ryan Holiday |
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But the person who has rehearsed in their mind what could go wrong will not be caught by surprise.
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Ryan Holiday |
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What is bad luck? Opinion. What are conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity? They are all opinions,
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Ryan Holiday |
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After you've distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren't (ta eph'hemin, ta ouk eph'hemin), and the break comes down to something you don't control... you've got only one option: acceptance. The shot didn't go in. The stock went to zero. The weather disrupted the shipment. Say it with me: C'est la vie. It's all fine.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Miyamoto Musashi won countless fights against feared opponents, even multiple opponents, in which he was swordless. In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. The
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Ryan Holiday |
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Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he'd describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms--roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation. We
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Ryan Holiday |
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Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn't matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options? You could write it off, greet it calmly. Think
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Ryan Holiday |
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The more skilled you become seeing things for what they are, the more perception will work for you rather than against
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Ryan Holiday |
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Think of George Washington, putting everything he had into the American Revolution, and then saying, "The event is in the hand of God." Or Eisenhower, writing to his wife on the eve of the Allied invasion at Sicily: "Everything we could think of have been done, the troops are fit everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods." These were not guys prone to settling or leaving the details up to other people--but they under..
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Ryan Holiday |
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those who attack problems and life with the most initiative and energy usually win. He
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Ryan Holiday |
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So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Where is Good? In our reasoned choices. Where is Evil? In our reasoned choices. Where is that which is neither Good nor Evil? In the things outside of our own reasoned choice." --EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.16.1 T"
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Ryan Holiday |
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has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they're made of--to give it all they've got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative. Our
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Ryan Holiday |
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Retention trumps acquisition.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Many creatives want to be just the creator, or only "the idea guy." They like that because it's sexy and because that's what comes easy to us. But I suspect we like it also because we're afraid. We're afraid of taking full responsibility for everything that comes next. A lot of decisions are going to be made--many of which can sink or make a project--that it'd be nice to have someone else to put it on. If we hand it off to someone else, the..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Adults create perennial sellers--and adults take responsibility for themselves. Children expect opportunities to be handed to them; maturity is understanding you have to go out and make them.
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Ryan Holiday |
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That's how it seems to go: we're never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we've achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Instead, the timeless, recurring problems that make us human--those are ambitious problems to tackle. Some
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Ryan Holiday |
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Only is better than best.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Here, we are setting out to do something. We have a goal, a calling, a new beginning. Every great journey begins here--yet far too many of us never reach our intended destination. Ego more often than not is the culprit. We build ourselves up with fantastical stories, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why. These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and realit..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Once we stop thinking of the products we market as static--that our job as marketers is to simply work with what we've got instead of working on and improving what we've got--the whole game changes.
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Ryan Holiday |
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And from what we know, he truly saw each and every one of these obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.
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Ryan Holiday |
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I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. --JOSEPH CONRAD
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Ryan Holiday |
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The tools of the Internet and social media have made it possible to track, test, iterate, and improve marketing to the point where these enormous gambles are not only unnecessary, but insanely counterproductive.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Networking is not going to networking events and handing out business cards--that's flyering. It is instead about forming, developing, and maintaining real relationships. It's about being valuable and being available so that one day the favor might be returned.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Each would collapse beneath the process. We've just wrongly assumed that it has to happen all at once, and we give up at the thought of it. We are A-to-Z thinkers, fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y. We
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Ryan Holiday |
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There's a saying about how the Irish ship captain located all the rocks in the harbor--using the bottom of his boat. Whatever works, right? Remember
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Ryan Holiday |
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To see an obstacle as a challenge, to make the best of it anyway, that is also a choice--a choice that is up to us. Will I have a chance, Coach? Ta eph'hemin? Is this up to me?
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Ryan Holiday |
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He says the best way out is always through And I agree to that, or in so far As I can see no way out but through. --ROBERT FROST F
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Ryan Holiday |
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Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles.
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Ryan Holiday |