There are times when you wake up and think that you are just utterly mediocre. And that–for many of us–is worse than feeling like a failure. Because failing, or fucking up, those are just the risks that come along with pushing forward. But to doubt for a second that perhaps you don’t have what it takes, that for all the hard work you just don’t have the talent to make it happen; that is terrifying.

It takes on many forms. It might be a stasis, a period of inactivity or slowing of progress. It might be an inkling that you just aren’t as good as the models you are emulating. Or it could be clues that the goal simply isn’t physically conceivable. Worse yet, maybe it’s beneath you. The competition might have shown itself and after comparison, your assets no longer seem so rare.

It’s weird to think that this is a good thing. It’s the resistance. It’s the point at which most people give in. They get depressed, they get doubtful, and then they quit. Often, these feelings are evidence that you’re onto something. When you start to think that you can’t handle it–then you’ve discovered something challenging. These are the extra reps that you just didn’t think you could handle But ultimately, it’s where you build the muscle. Conversely, it can be a hint that you’re traveling down the wrong path–that you need to stop. Here, it’s the warning before the injury.

I like to remind myself of two (conveniently delusional) things. One, most people don’t consider these things at all. They lack the self-awareness to be attuned to their emotions and then fall prey to them. The benefits of being self-conscious never reveal themselves, leaving them ignorant and oblivious to the finer details. Or in never pulling back, they get overextended. Two, many people overreact. They get down and quit. Someone says something derogatory and they just never recover. Perhaps they only reason they’ve entered the game at all is for validation and then they become beholden to it.

For me, the solutions to these feelings requires addresses both poles. I remind myself that I am on the right path and that I developed myself precisely for the pursuit. Yet I proceed with caution. I understand that this is where many others have go awry. And when you examine the bones of these fallen comrades, you can learn from their mistakes. Lastly, I use the doubts to reestablish my foundation. You could call it a preparatory splurge, where you make the fears irrelevant by addressing the root problems. Upon which you simply wait for the next wave and go through the entire process again.

-There will be more details on this later, and I can’t really get into it but I just signed my first client. It is a major, major online star who hopefully will be one of the rare few who are able to translate pageviews to sales and views into box office dollars. Obviously I had no idea how to close, or how the process went but the people who showed me the ropes know who they are and I really appreciate it. In this case the real hurdle was access, not negotiation. And I got it in the same way I get access to all the people I’ve dealt with: HONESTY. I was upfront with who I was–age and all–and it ended up being an area that fostered a personal connection. Too, when I messed up I admitted it and managed to turn a potentially catastrophic error into only a minor embarrassment. A whole bunch of strategies are currently in the works and you’ll hear about them soon–here and all over the web.

-You might have noticed that the page switched over from rch.rudiusmedia.com to ryanholiday.net. We are slowly in the process of migrating this over from an employee blog to one of the Rudius sites. I’m not really sure how to express my excitement over this. I first found Tucker’s site in 2004. I was a junior in high school. All my friends were into Maddox and I was happy to finally read someone who wasn’t a nerd. I couldn’t really verbalize it, but I knew that it was significant to me at the time–that it was possible to be smart and say whatever you wanted and be rewarded for it. When FesteringAss came, I decided I wanted to be a part of it and now, a solid 3 years later I am–in both senses. The design looks really fucking good. I’m not sure how long it will take to go up but I’ll post when it does. The RSS stuff will stay the same, but if you haven’t subscribed, I’d appreciate it if you did.

“You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle–that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson

I read the book 3 or 4 years ago and haven’t really thought about it since. I remember it being influential in my Tucker Max column, but apart from that it had slipped into being a vague memory. Then about a week ago, the quote above slipped into consciousness and has been echoing in my head since. If you want to break the book down–find the root of the escape or the demon Thompson was chasing–this is the place. Vegas in the late 60’s was the hollow, empty hole in America. It was the Gatsby parties for a new era, the place where people pursued pleasure instead of acknowledging pain. The idealism and the vision of the time crested and crashed in the Nevada desert.

I think this is relevant now because we are in a very similar cycle. The rhetoric and the revolutionaries have never been louder. All sorts of wild promises are being thrown around–the end of newspapers, the citizen journalist, the fall of Hollywood tyranny, a brand new world. Well what if it’s all just talk? What if it doesn’t happen? TheExecutive is fond of saying that the “Studio is like the house, and the house always wins.” A lot of these predictions just have no chance of coming true. Can technology really change people? Can a new delivery system ever deincentivize laziness or the tendency to rush art? Won’t we always be susceptible to sensationalism? And aren’t many of our consumer habits based on social motivations instead of personal tastes?

One of the questions I keep coming back to is “What happens if we don’t win?” What will become of all this progress if it doesn’t crush its enemy totally? I read a cool script a while back called Terra Firma and the short plot of it was that revolutionaries began to speak in this new telepathic language to connect with each other directly–instead of through the clogged lens of corporate advertising, bias and capitalism. Well, the catch is that you find out that advertisers were the ones who created it, and now they had access directly to our thoughts.

As the Web 2.0 wave rushes through us and we buy into it, we are in essence creating a whole new game. It’s a world where the typical barriers between consumer and creator have come down, where our tastes are right out in the open, and where the costs of production fall to almost zero. The same men who ruled the last one can come back to power here–or at the very least, their tendencies can come to roost in the next generation of leaders. And what worries me is that all the idealism has left us unprepared to deal with the possibility. Not only that, but we’ve created an infrastructure designed to be taken advantage of. A massive high is almost always followed by a massive low. Have we considered this? The exuberance won’t die easy, but anything less than what we’ve demanded is going to be crushing. That’s the thing too, for the first time we’ve really asked for something–and we asked for a hell of a lot. We sat at our computers and poured our hearts out and wrote down exactly what we wanted. But what if they don’t listen? What then? There is that Xenophon saying “it’s not for the conquerors to surrender their arms.” I’ve spent a bit of time in Hollywood now and both sides think they’ve got the power. Which might just leave the world with a compromise or a long war of attrition; neither are great options. We’ve ventured way out into Persia and if we have to battle our way home, most of us won’t make it back.

I’m not saying that I’ve lost faith, but I think I am getting the Fear. But like Thompson said, that’s what happens when you get real close to the savage heart of the American Dream. It’s not as simple as playing the Reveille and watching as the world changes. We must got to the mattresses if change is to really occur. And even then, it’s still a long shot. So temper the rhetoric with a taste of history every now and then or you’ll see it happen again right before you.