RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
  • Home
  • About
  • Newsletter
  • Reading List
  • Blog
  • Best Articles
    • Archive
  • Speaking
  • Books and Courses
  • Contact
Home
About
Newsletter
Reading List
Blog
Best Articles
    Archive
Speaking
Books and Courses
Contact
  • Home
  • About
  • Newsletter
  • Reading List
  • Blog
  • Best Articles
    • Archive
  • Speaking
  • Books and Courses
  • Contact
RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

What Are Your Rules for Life? These 11 Expressions (from Ancient History) Might Help

In one of my favorite novels, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Aunt Emily is famous for asking a question. It’s a simple one, but I think an eye-opening one. Aunt Emily, the wisest character in the book, likes to ask,

What do you live by? 

As in, what are your principles? What are the Ten Commandments that rule your life? Who’s the animating force behind what you do and why you do it? 

You’d think most people would know the answer to this question, but of course they don’t. Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll likes to tell a story about how long he managed to coach football without actually knowing what he believed in as a coach. It was only after another disappointing season with the New England Patriots—some 15 years into his career—that it struck Carroll that he had no real coaching philosophy, no real belief system. Inspired by John Wood, Carroll got to work, “writing notes and filling binders”—on nailing down his core values, his philosophy, what exactly he believes in. It was a transformative decision: He would go on to win two National Championships and win a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks.

Now when he gives talks, he likes to open with that question: What’s your philosophy? What do you live by? He told me once, when I asked him about it, how shocked he is, on a regular basis, how many CEOs and generals and investors and coaches at the highest levels reveal, accidentally, that they have just been winging it. 

That’s crazy! 

In light of that fact, I thought I would look backwards to history, when the idea of a code—the Romans called it mas morium—was more common. The “old ways” come down to us in the form of some wonderful Latin expressions that remain, thousands of years later, very much worth living by. 

Festina Lente (Make Haste Slowly)

From the Roman historian Suetonius, we learn that festina lente was the motto of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. “He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness,” Suetonius writes, “And, accordingly, favourite sayings of his were: ‘More haste, less speed’; ‘Better a safe commander than a bold’; and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.’”

Faster is not always better. In fact, it’s often the slowest way to accomplish anything. Great leaders throughout history have known this. There is a quote ascribed to Lincoln about how the way to chop down a tree is to first spend several hours sharpening your axe. Kennedy used to talk about using time as a tool, not as a couch. 

It’s easy to rush in. It feels good to start doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to do it? Well, it’s not going to go well. If you’re going quickly for the sake of speed, you’re going to make costly mistakes. You’re going to miss opportunities. You’re going to miss critical warnings. 

Each of us needs more clear thinking, wisdom, patience, and a keen eye for the root of problems. “Slowly,” Juan Ramon Jimenezas put it, “you will do everything quickly.” 

Festina Lente.

Carpe Diem (Seize The Day)

Locked in prison by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard II gives a haunting speech about his hopeless fate. One line stands out, as it captures perfectly the reality of nearly every human being—indeed, it sounds like it was cribbed from Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. 

“I wasted time,” Richard II says, “and now doth time waste me.”

Isn’t that beautiful? And terribly sad? It was some 1500 years before Shakespeare that the poet Horace wrote in book 1 of Odes, “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” (seize the day, trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may).

We think that time is ours to waste. We even say, “We have two hours to kill” or speak of dead time between projects. The irony! Because time is the one that’s killing us. Each minute that passes is not just dead to us, it brings us closer to being dead.

That’s what Richard II realizes in that prison cell. He had wasted time and now, by a stroke of bad luck and evil, he is now wasting away. Only now is he realizing that each second that ticks by is a beat of his heart that he won’t get back, each ringing bell that marks the hour falls upon him like a blow. 

Seneca writes that we think life is short, when in reality we just waste it. Marcus admonishes himself to not put off until tomorrow what he can do today, because today was the only thing he controlled (and to get out of bed and get moving for the same reason). The Stoics knew that fate was unpredictable and that death could come at any moment. Therefore, it was a sin (and stupidity) to take time for granted. 

Today is the most valuable thing you own. It is the only thing you have. Don’t waste it. Seize it.

Carpe Diem. 

Fac, si facis (Do It If You’re Going To Do It)

The painter Edgar Degas, though best known for his beautiful Impressionist paintings of dancers, toyed briefly with poetry. As a brilliant and creative mind, the potential for great poems was all there—he could see beauty, he could find inspiration. Yet there are no great Degas poems. There is one famous conversation that might explain why. One day, Degas complained to his friend, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, about his trouble writing. “I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.” Mallarmé’s response cuts to the bone. “It’s not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It’s with words.” 

So yes, deliberation and patience are key. You don’t want to rush into things. That’s what festina lente is about. But at some point the rubber has to meet the road. 

“I should start a company.” “I have a great idea for a movie.” “I would love to write that book one day.” “If I tried hard enough, I could be ______.” How many of those people actually go through with building the company, releasing the movie, publishing the book, or becoming whatever it is they claim they could become? Sadly, almost none.

“Lots of people,” as Austin Kleon puts it, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.” It doesn’t matter where we are; to get to wherever we want to go, to implement all 11 of these expressions to live by, it is works, not words, that are required. “You must build up your life action by action,” Marcus Aurelius said. You must get started. 

Fac, si facis.

Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum (Whatever Is Rightly Done, However Humble, Is Noble)

The youngest of five children, Sir Henry Royce’s father died when he was just 9 years old. He went to work to alleviate his family’s financial burdens, so if his dreams of being an engineer were to be realized, it’d be without any formal education. Royce took jobs selling newspapers, delivering telegrams, making tools, and fixing street lights. At the age of twenty-one he started his own company making electric fittings. At twenty-six his interests shifted to the emerging automobile industry, and soon thereafter, he created Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

It might seem like there is an enormous difference between those professions but in fact, they are related. It was his experiences doing that manual labor, doing those seemingly insignificant tasks that cultivated Royce’s commitment to and understanding of excellence. In fact, he later had a version of it inscribed on the mantle over his fireplace: Quidvis recte factum quamvis humble praeclarum. 

Whatever you do well, however lowly, is noble. 

There is no such thing as a job or a task that is beneath us. How we do anything is how we do everything. And if we can truly internalize and believe that, it will help us do the important things better. That’s why we love luxury items and pay so much for them, isn’t it? Because of their insane attention to detail, because how they refused to settle, how they did everything right? 

Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.

Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful)

Otto Frank was late coming home from the First World War. No, it wasn’t because he was injured. Nor was he detained by a girl he’d fallen in love with or waylaid by traveling he decided to do. He was delayed for weeks because during the war his unit had commandeered some horses from a small farm in Pomerania and, after the hostilities had ended, he felt duty bound to return them. 

When the war ended, nearly every soldier wanted nothing more than to rush home and see their families. Otto Frank did too. But he had borrowed something that wasn’t his and he was determined to honor his obligation, even if that meant delaying the homecoming he craved so much. The farmer, for his part, was shocked to see the horses again. Otto Frank’s mother, who assumed the worst of his absence, was so angry when she heard why he was late that she hurled a coffee pot across the room. She couldn’t understand the selflessness of his actions because in her case, since it had deprived her of her son a little longer, almost felt like selfishness.

“Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” It isn’t easy. It can mean adding on top of already considerable burdens. Other people won’t always understand or take notice. They may be exasperated with you. They might be driven into a rage which you can neither control nor assuage. But none of that matters, and that’s why Semper Fi is the motto of the US Marine Corps. “It is not negotiable,” one Marine puts it. “It is not relative, but absolute…Marines pride themselves on their mission and steadfast dedication to accomplish it.” Not just to the mission, but to each other, and to their country. 

You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. It is the ultimate tautology, but that’s the point. Doing the right thing is all that matters. It is its own reward. 

Semper Fidelis.

Per Angusta Ad Augusta (Through Difficulties To Honors)

Look, nobody wants to go through hard times. We’d prefer that things go according to plan, that what could go wrong doesn’t, so that we might enjoy our lives without being challenged or tested beyond our limits. 

Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen. Which leaves us with the question of what good there is in such difficulty and how we might—either in the moment or after the fact—come to understand what it is that we’re going through…today, tomorrow, and always. 

This passage from Sonia Purnell’s wonderful biography of Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston Churchill, is worth thinking about:

“Clementine was not cut out from birth for the part history handed her. Adversity, combined with sheer willpower, burnished a timorous, self-doubting bundle of nerves and emotion into a wartime consort of unparalleled composure, wisdom, and courage. The flames of many hardships in early life forged the inner core of steel she needed for her biggest test of all. By the Second World War the young child terrified of her father…had transmogrified into a woman cowed by no one.” 

The Stoics believed that adversity was inevitable. They knew that Fortune was capricious and that it often subjected us to things we were not remotely prepared to handle. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because it teaches us. It strengthens us. It gives us a chance to prove ourselves. “Disaster,” Seneca wrote, “is Virtue’s opportunity.” The obstacle is the way, was Marcus Aurelius’s expression. 

And so the same can be true for you and whatever it is that you’re going through right now. 

Per Angusta Ad Augusta.

Amor fati (Love Of Fate)

The writer Jorge Luis Borges said:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Everything is material. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. We have to understand that certain things—particularly bad things—are outside our control. But we can use it all—if we learn to love whatever happens to us and face it with unfailing cheerfulness. And again, not just artists. Issues we had with our parents become lessons that we teach our children. An injury that lays us up in bed becomes a reason to reflect on where our life is going. A problem at work inspires us to invent a new product and strike out on our own. These obstacles become opportunities. 

The line from Marcus Aurelius about this was that a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That’s how we want to be. We want to be the artist that turns pain and frustration and even humiliation into beauty. We want to be the entrepreneur that turns a sticking point into a money maker. We want to be the person who takes their own experiences and turns them into wisdom that can be learned from and passed on to others. 

Nietzsche said, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.” Use it all. Find purpose in all of it. Find opportunity in everything. Love it. 

You love everything that happens. Because you make use of it. 

Amor Fati

Fatum Ingenium Est (Character Is Fate)

When he was in college and struggling to live up to the expectations of his illustrious family, Walker Percy wrote a letter to his uncle and adopted father, Will Percy. He probably expected to receive a lecture about his grades in reply. Or be admonished for letting the family down. Or perhaps to be sent money for a tutor. 

But the reply surprised him. Because there wasn’t any of that. Instead, Will waved those concerns off. “My whole theory about life,” Will told his beloved nephew and son, “is that glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life.” 

It was Heraclitus who said that character is fate. Or character is destiny, depending on the translation. What he meant was: Character decides everything. It determines who we are/what we do. Develop good character and all will be well. Fail to, and nothing will.

It can be easy to lose sight of this. Because we know how competitive the world is. Because things aren’t exactly going our way. Because we want to reach our full potential. But ultimately, we only need to care about our character. The rest is fated from it.  “Life is short,” Marcus Aurelius said, and “the fruit of this life is a good character.”

It’s true in reverse too: A good life is the fruit of good character. 

Fatum Ingenium Est.

Semper Anticus (Always Forward)

The wisdom of the ancient world comes down pretty hard and pretty universally against looking back. No one, Jesus said, who looks backwards as they plot is fit for the kingdom of God. Even before Jesus, Cato the Elder—the great-grandfather of the Stoic Cato the Younger—wrote in his only work, On Agriculture, “The forehead is better than the hindhead.” Meaning: Don’t look back. Look forward. 

It’s easy to want to look back at the past. To reflect on what’s happened. To blame. To indulge in nostalgia. To wistfully think of what might have been. To inspect and admire what you’ve done. But this is pointless. Because the past is dead. It’s lost. We had our shot with it. Now, all that remains before us is the present—and if we are lucky, the future. 

The name of Lance Armstrong’s podcast is called what? The Forward. Because he can’t go back and change what happened, just like in a race, you can’t go backwards and you can’t stop either. All you can do is keep going. All you can do is keep trying to get better. 

We must seize this opportunity while we still can. We must give it everything we have. No matter what has happened before—whose fault it was, how much pain it caused us, what regrets we have, or even how triumphant it was—all we can do is move forward. All we can do is act now, with the virtues we hold dear: courage, temperance, wisdom, justice.

Semper Anticus. 

Vivere Militare Est (To Live Is To Fight)

Odysseus leaves Troy after ten long years of war destined for Ithaca, for home. If only he knew what was ahead of him: ten more years of travel. That he’d come so close to the shores of his homeland, his queen and young son, only to be blown back again. That he’d face storms, temptation, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, and a six-headed monster. Or that he’d be held captive for seven years and suffer the wrath of Poseidon. And, of course, that back in Ithaca his rivals were circling, trying to take his kingdom and his wife. 

He fought his way home. Marcus Aurelius once described life as warfare and a journey far from home. That was Odysseus’s experience certainly. To the Stoics, one had to go through life as a boxer or a wrestler, dug in and ready for sudden assaults. 

That’s life. It kicks us around. The stuff we expected to be simple turns out to be tough. The people we thought were friends let us down. A couple storms or unexpected weather patterns just add a whole bunch of difficulty on top of whatever we’ve been doing. Seneca wrote that only the fighter who has been bloodied and bruised—in training and in previous matches—can go into the ring confident of his chances of winning. The one who has never been touched before, never had a hard fight? That’s a fighter who is scared. And if they aren’t, they should be. Because they have no actual idea how they’re going to hold up.

We have to have a true and accurate sense of the rhythms of the fight and what winning is going to require us to do. We have to be ready for the fighting life. We have to be able to get knocked around without letting it knock us out. We have to be in touch with ourselves and the fight we’re in.

Vivere Militare Est.

Memento Mori (Remember Death)

A person who wraps up each day as if it were the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up. 

“When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.” 

Think back: to that one time you were playing with house money, if not literally then metaphorically. Or when your vacation got extended. Or that appointment you were dreading canceled at the last moment. 

Do you remember how you felt? Probably, in a word—better. You feel lighter. Nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short term anxieties go away—because for a second, you realize how little they matter. 

Well, that’s how one ought to live. Go to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next twenty-four hours as a bonus. As a vacation extended. An appointment with death put off one more day. As playing with house money. 

”You could leave life right now,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Is there better advice than this? If so, it has yet to be written. Keep it close.

Memento Mori.

— 

The power of an epigram or one of these expressions is that they say a lot with a little. They help guide us through the complexity of life with their unswerving directness. Each person must, as the retired USMC general and former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, has said, “Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for.” “State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”

Least of all to you. 

So borrow these eleven, or dig into history or religion or philosophy to find some more. 

And then turn those words…into works.

Tweet
January 23, 2020by Ryan Holiday
Blog

Your Work Is the Only Thing That Matters

There is a story about an exchange between Jerry Seinfeld and a young comedian. The comedian approaches Seinfeld in a club one night and asks him for advice about marketing and getting exposure.

Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Just work on your act.

Seinfeld, a pure stand-up, a comedian’s comedian, is appalled by the question. It’s offensive to his legendary heads-down work ethic. But to the kid, this was a surprise. Isn’t that the kind of question you’re supposed to ask? Isn’t that how you get ahead?

He’s not alone. Certainly, I myself wasted many chances to learn about how to improve my craft by instead asking people I admire for superficial hacks and career opportunities. I see the same mistake repeated in subreddits and forums and blogs and Facebook groups that (aspiring) creative professionals — writers, designers, startup founders — use as networking vehicles and support systems. If Seinfeld ever saw them, he’d cringe at every word.

Because these often closed groups are self-selected communities of ambitious, motivated go-getters, there is a tendency to skip the slow and immeasurable creative process and go right to the tactics for getting attention or catching a break. They want tricks and tips for getting ahead, hacks for advancing their careers. Even amongst the more advanced or already successful, the questions posed to the group are mostly technical: How do you guys like to negotiate contracts? How can I sell more copies or increase my fees? Who is the best agent?

Not that these things aren’t important. Certainly I’d like to know the answers myself but judging by the amount of time people spend asking them, or talking about their complicated Evernote systems or their preferred deal terms, or the readiness with which they are willing to share their elaborate rituals and routines, the less cynical person would assume that everyone must have already mastered their craft and the only thing left for them to worry about is mopping up a few minor details at the margins.

If only…

Because if that were even remotely true, we wouldn’t be drowning in so much mediocrity — if not outright garbage. The reason it’s not true is that nobody in these forums, really no one pursuing an artistic career, wants to hear what sits at the core of Seinfeld’s advice: Your work isn’t good enough. Keep your head down. You still have a long way to go.

To me, one of the root causes of this situation is the economic transformation that creative industries have gone through over the last twenty years. There used to be publishers, art dealers, investors, managers, and record labels that handled the majority of the business side of the equation. But increasingly, the relevance of those partners has fallen away, and the number of hats a creator wears has increased. The artist can’t just be an artist — they also have to know how to upload YouTube videos, use GIFs, promote gigs, and figure out how to get followers on various platforms. The artist has far more visibility into their earnings and their distribution, than ever before. With that comes more leverage, all of which is a good thing.

But the unintended consequence of, what one might call, total brand and business control, is that it diverts attention away from the most essential part of any creative profession. You know, making great stuff.

It’s hard to do that under ideal circumstances; harder still when you’re tweeting or visualizing your next Instagram story or flying to some industry conference. And podcasts…every one of them takes an hour. If you’re lucky. And more are created every single day and again, if you’re lucky, people will want to have you on theirs.

Earlier this month, NovelRank.com, a site which let authors track their sales rank on Amazon across all regions, was shut down by Amazon. The “official” reason had something to do with the terms of service of their affiliate program. I’d never cheer someone losing their business, but secretly, I’m quite grateful to whoever made that call at Amazon. I have spent way too much of my time refreshing that site, checking how my books were selling in Germany or trying to figure out why the rank of one of my older books suddenly shot up.

A line from Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote, is “people who are thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.” I’m willing to overlook the fact that Evernote is too often a shiny distraction for creatives — a black hole into which time is thrown under the auspices of “research” and “organization” — because he’s totally right.

It echoes an even more poignant sentiment from Cyril Connolly which I quoted in Perennial Seller: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”

An artist’s job is to create masterpieces. Period.

Everything else is secondary.

About a year ago, my mind began to construct this recurring moving image that would play on a loop whenever I was working on a book or a particularly difficult article. I’d close my eyes, think about the project, and there it would be. The image is of an unidentifiable baseball player at the plate. It’s zoomed in like one of those SportsCenter closeups, and the batter is already mid-swing and connecting with the ball. It’s one of those beautiful, old-timey swings like Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams used to do. The front leg extended, the back leg all the way back, the bat coming up and hitting the ball perfectly.

That’s it. That’s the whole image.

I don’t see where the ball goes, whether it was a base hit or a grand slam. I suspect earlier in my career, I would have cared about the outcome. I would have cared about who the player was and what team he played for. I would have needed to know whether the ball went foul or found a fielder’s mitt or cleared the upper deck. But as I have gotten better as a writer, paradoxically, it doesn’t even occur to me that such a thing would matter.

The image is just the connecting. The bat and the ball. The thing that is supposed to be all but physically impossible — hitting a rock coming at 90 miles per hour, that traveled from an elevated mound down to the batter in less than 400 milliseconds. Over and over again. The connecting.

Very few of us can do that impossible thing. Can connect like that. Can cut it in the big leagues, where the ball looks like a marble as it comes over the plate and pitchers put it in a spot the size of a croquet ball… at 90+ mph. Very few can time their swing just right to meet the ball and hear that satisfying crack as the ball heads back the other direction. And to do it more than once? To do it game in and game out, day in and day out? It’s a miracle. It requires complete and total dedication.

If you cease practicing for a second, if you let your mind get wound too tight or simply allowed to drift elsewhere, you will lose that ability. Your bat will stop connecting with the ball, your batting average will drop and soon enough you yourself will be dropped, first from the majors and then the sport altogether.

That’s what I think the image is supposed to be a reminder to me of. Writing of course is all about a kind of consistent connection: with the audience, with yourself, with something that goes to the essence of the human experience. Really, that’s all art and commerce are, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are about swinging at the right pitches too.

When a business is perfectly lined up with the needs of the market. When a song taps into some wave of emotion you didn’t know was there. When a painting or a poem shoves you in your solar plexus. When an article touches on some truth about the world that needed to be said.

That’s the job.

Selecting and Connecting.

We need to forget about tertiary concerns and stop fiddling with shit that doesn’t matter.

We need to keep our eye on the ball.

We need to work on our act.

Nothing else is of any consequence.

***

Like to Read?

I’ve created a list of 15 books you’ve never heard of that will alter your worldview and help you excel at your career.

Get the secret book list here!

Tweet
January 21, 2020by Ryan Holiday
Blog

How To Digest Books Above Your “Level” And Increase Your Intelligence

The best advice I’ve ever got about reading came from a secretive movie producer and talent manager who’d sold more than 100 million albums and done more than $1B in box office returns. He said to me one day, “Ryan, it’s not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.”

What he meant was that in an age where almost nobody reads, you can be forgiven for thinking that the simple act of picking up a book is revolutionary. It may be, but it’s not enough. Reading to lead means pushing yourself—reading books “above your level.”

In short, you know the books where the words blur together and you can’t understand what’s happening? Those are the books a leader needs to read. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is—lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight.

For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wrestling with them until you can—shying away from the “easy read.” It means reading Feynman over Friedman, biographies over business books, and the classics over the contemporary.

It worked wonders for me: at 19, I was a Hollywood executive. At 21, I was the director of marketing for a publicly traded company. And at 24, I’d worked on 5 bestselling books and sold my own to the biggest publisher in the world. I may have been a college dropout, but I have had the best teachers in the world: tough books.

My apartment is filled with such books that on paper, I never should have been able to understand. It wasn’t easy to crack them, but with the secrets below, I was able to. And the process starts before you even crack the spine of a new book.

Before the first page…

Break out of the School Mindset

The way you learn to read in the classroom is corrupted by the necessity of testing. Tests often have very little to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time reading it. The easiest way to do this is picking obscure things from the text and quizzing you on them: “Name this passage,” or “What were the main characters in Chapter 4?” We carry these habits with us. Remember: now you’re reading for you.

Let’s say you’re reading the History of the Peloponnesian War. That there was once a conflict between Corinth and Corcyra is not really worth remembering, even though the proxy fight kicked off the war between Athens and Sparta.

(To write this, I had to look the names up myself, I only recalled that they started with a C)

What you should latch onto is that as the two fought for allied support from Athens, one took the haughty—“you owe us a favor”—route, and the other alluded to all the benefits that would come from aiding them. Guess who won? Place. Names. Dates. These are unimportant. The lessons matter.

From Seneca:

We haven’t time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know—when every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

Forget everything but the message and how to apply it to your life.

Ruin the Ending

When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

You ought to ruin the ending—or find out the basic assertions of the book—because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks:

  1. What does it mean?
  2. Do you agree with it?

The first 50 pages of the book shouldn’t be a discovery process for you. You shouldn’t be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say with the book.

Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it. Plus, if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through.

Read the Reviews

Find out what the people who have already read it felt was important. From Amazon to the New York Times, read the reviews so you can deduce the cultural significance of the work—and from what it meant to others. Also, by being warned of the major themes, you can anticipate them coming and then actually appreciate them as they unfold.

Tip: if you agree with someone’s assessment of the work, go ahead and steal it once you’ve finished. You can’t copyright an opinion—this isn’t school, this is life.

The book itself…

Read the Intro/Prologue/Notes/Forward

I know, I know. It infuriates me too when what looks like a 200-page book turns out to have 80 pages of translator’s introduction, but that stuff is important.

Every time I’ve skipped through it, I’ve had to go back and start over. Read the intro, read all the stuff that comes before the book—even read the editors notes at the bottom of the pages. This sets the stage and helps boost your knowledge going into the book.

Remember: you need every advantage you can get to read a book above your level. Don’t skip stuff intended to add context and color.

Look It Up

If you’re reading to lead, you’re going to come across concepts or words you’re not familiar with. Don’t pretend you understand. Look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my phone to look stuff up on Wikipedia. With Military History, for instance, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wikipedia is a great place to grab maps and to help understand the terrain.

I was once trying to read some books on the Civil War and got stuck. 10 hours of Ken Burn’s documentaries later, the books were easy to breeze through (see, looking stuff up can be as easy as watching TV). That being said, don’t get bogged down with the names of the cities or the spelling of names, you’re looking to grasp the meta-lesson: the conclusions.

Mark Passages

I love Post-It Flags. I mark every passage that interests me, that makes me think, or that is important to the book. When I don’t have them, I just fold the bottom corner of the page. (I actually folded the corner of every page of Heraclitus’ Fragments). If there is something I need to look up, I fold the top corner of the page and return to it later.

I carry a pen with me and write down whatever thoughts, feelings, or connections I may have with a passage.

It’s much better to do it in the moment than to risk losing the contemporaneous inspiration. Don’t be afraid to tear the book up with tags and notations—books are a cheap. Plus, you’ll get more for your money this way.

After you finish…

Go Back Through

I have the same schedule with every book I read. After a mandatory 1–2 week waiting period after finishing, I go back through the book with a stack of 4×6 index cards. On these cards, I write out—by hand—all the passages I have noted as being important.

It might seem strange, but it’s an old tactic used by everyone from Tobias Wolff to Montaigne to Raymond Chandler, who once said, “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.” Each one of these cards is then assigned a theme and filed in my index card box.

The result of 4–5 years of doing this? Thousands of cards in dozens of themes—from Love to Education to Jokes to Musings on Death. I return to these pieces of wisdom when I am writing, when I need help or when I am trying to solve a business problem. It has been an immense resource.

Read One Book from Every Bibliography

This is a little rule I try to stick with. In every book I read, I try to find my next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core.

Keep a running list through Amazon’s Wish List service (here is mine). Last month, I read a book on Evolutionary Psychology and discovered that I’d read almost 80% of its sources because I’d been pulled down the rabbit hole of a predecessor.

Apply and Use

You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren’t going to memorize and use them?

Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters, and in your daily life.

How else do you expect to absorb them?

The more fulfilling an outlet you find for the fruit of your database, the more motivated you will be to fill it. Try adding a line to a report you’re doing. Find solace in them during difficult times. Add them to Wikipedia pages. Do something.

I give you Seneca again:

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.

Remember: we read to lead for moral and practical lessons. The point is to take what we’ve read and turn the words, as Seneca says, into works.

Conclusion: It’s on You…

Of course, none of this is easy. People always ask me if the books I carry around are for school because they’re full of notes, flags, and folded pages—why would anyone work so hard on something they were doing on their own? Because I enjoy it, and because it’s the only thing that separates me from ignorance.

These are the techniques that have allowed me to leap years ahead of my peers. It’s how you strike out on your own and build strength instead of letting some personal trainer dictate what you can and can’t be lifting.

It’s also expensive, I’ve purchased thousands of books and invested hours upon hours of time learning them. But how expensive is going back for an MBA? Or attending TED? I think there is more wisdom in the timeless books of the last 5,000 years than a conference or two—if you do it right and push yourself.

So try it: Do your research, read diligently without getting bogged down in details, and then work to connect, apply, and use. It’s your job as a leader. And I think you’ll find that you’re able to read above your supposed “level” and that people will follow your example. If you put in the work, books, as the great writer and voracious reader Petrarch once said, will pay you back:

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

Enjoy the journey.

***

Read To Lead

If you’re looking to use reading to advance your life and career, check out a course I helped create called Lead To Read: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge.

It’s a 13-day challenge that shows you exactly how to find great books to mine for wisdom and to use to build the beginnings of a great library with. You’ll learn to dissect a book like a pro, to remember more of what you read, to apply it to your life, and much more. Learn more here.

Tweet
January 14, 2020by Ryan Holiday
Page 20 of 257« First...10«19202122»304050...Last »

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Murakami

© 2018 copyright Ryan Holiday // All rights reserved // Privacy Policy
This site directs people to Amazon and is an Amazon Associate member.