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Contact
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  • Reading List
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RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

Update on the Reading List Email

A bunch of people have asked for an archive of my Reading Email (where I do monthly book recommendations) and with the help of a reader, I was able to put one together. I don’t know how many books are on it but it goes back almost two years now and I stand behind all the choices. You may have also noticed the big button on the side of the site advertising for it. The email has gotten a lot bigger than I expected so if you’re not signed up yet, you should. The thing is getting better and more and more popular and I hope you’ll become a part of it.

To see the Reading List Email Archive, go here.
To sign up for the Reading List Email, go here.

As always, feel free to email me your thoughts and suggestions.

April 29, 2011by Ryan Holiday
Blog

A Different Take on Empathy

There was a moment in the Civil War where Ulysses S Grant found his legs. Although he’d had experienced leading men into battle during the Mexican-American war, part of his early stumbles can be explained by fear. Or, at least, the anxiety that comes along with being uncertain of yourself. In July of 1861 he was sent to break up a notorious group of guerillas led by Gen. Tom Harris. Grant hemmed and hawed in his mind—it wasn’t the fighting, it was the fighting as a colonel. If there was some way he could be the lieutenant-colonel, he later wrote, and someone else could be the colonel he’d  have been fine.

And so, racked with misapprehension, he marched his men on their mission. But when he arrived at the Harris’ camp it was empty. They enemy had left, knowing Grant was coming. Grant changed in this instant. His fears disappeared and did not return. Grant wrote later in his memoirs “it occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him…from that event to the close of the war…I never forgot that the enemy has as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”

It’s probably a strange take on this, but such a realization—the power you have over your opponent—is deeply connected with empathy. It’s understanding and acknowledging that there is a world outside your predominant emotions. And that this is a logical world, one that is ripe with people who feel what you feel not because you are special and came to it first but because we are all the same.  In a perverted way, it’s very hubristic to think only you would feel fear in this situation. It is to deny, essentially, the enemy a sense of personhood or self. It is to assume that your emotions matter and nothing else does—or rather, that they do not even exist.

So I think you apply Grant’s realization to many parts of your life. The awkwardness of introducing yourself to strangers. Fighting with your girlfriend. Business negotiations. Selling a product. Taking a test. Pitching an idea. It’s not simply that you have something to do or say, there is another person who will be responding to you and that response is equally daunting. And you have to remember that well before the stage of being very attuned to others is the realization that those others exist. And the power that comes from taking that first step. Because most people don’t.

April 20, 2011by Ryan Holiday
Blog

Contemptuous Expressions Pt 2

And here, I feel like this better says what I’ve been trying to get at for a long time:

“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Perceptions like that—latching on onto thing and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VI.13″

I tried here, here, here, here, here, here, here and so many times when I needed to convince myself that it wasn’t all that it appeared. That was some reason, no matter how deep the draw was, to not be like that, to not give in. What I like about finding this again is that its kind of the opposite of that feeling that Emerson talked about when he said that in the genius of others we’ll see our own rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty. This wasn’t discovering that someone else had said what I have struggled to say or never was able to say. This was finding the source that put me down the path the begin with. This is the origin of that nascent thought. And it’s replenishing to return to it.

April 14, 2011by Ryan Holiday
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“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Murakami

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