Hi there and welcome!

I am Ryan Holiday and I am a writer and media strategist. When I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power. I had a successful marketing career at American Apparel and went on to found a creative agency called Brass Check, which has advised clients like Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as many prominent bestselling authors, including Neil Strauss, Tony Robbins and Tim Ferriss. I am the author of ten books, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Conspiracy and Stillness is the Key which have sold more than 2 million copies in thirty languages and have a following among NFL coaches, world-class athletes, TV personalities, political leaders, and others around the world. I spend much of my time on a ranch outside Austin, Texas where I do my writing and work in between raising cattle, donkeys and goats..

I originally started this blog nearly ten years ago to help me along in my journey of self-education. I wanted to write what I wished other blogs would talk about more often: life, dealing with assholes, how to be self-critical and self-aware, humility, philosophy, reading, learning, research and strategy. Aside from this site, I have written for the New York Times, USA Today, New York Observer, Thought Catalog, Entrepreneur,  Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Medium, Boing Boing, Forbes, Columbia Journalism Review and many other outlets.

Today, most people subscribe to my work via email—about 200,000 people get it emailed directly to their inbox wherever I happen to publish them. I’d like to invite you to sign up and get them too (you can also reply and chat with me about anything I’ve written). As a welcome, I will instantly send you a free PDF collection of my most viral and popular articles designed to help you be more productive, strategic and successful. I can’t take credit for everything in them—because one of my strategies is to borrow from the smartest people I know. My tips and tricks include helpful hints from a wide range of people like filmmaker Casey Neistat, my editor Niki Papadopoulos, my wife Samantha and authors like Tim Ferriss, Nassim Taleb and Robert Greene. Just sign up below and I look forward to chatting!

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For my favorite articles throughout the years, you can consult this page.

What Others Say

“Ryan Holiday is one of his generation’s finest thinkers…” — Steven Pressfield, author of the New York Times bestseller The War of Art

“Holiday is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results…this whiz kid is the secret weapon you’ve never heard of.” — Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titan

“Ryan Holiday is one of the most promising young writers of his generation.” — George Raveling, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Nike’s Director of International Basketball

“I don’t have many rules in life, but one I never break is: If Ryan Holiday writes a book, I read it as soon as I can get my hands on it.” — Brian Koppelman, screenwriter and director, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen and Billions

“[The Obstacle Is the Way is] a book for the bedside of every future—and current—leader in the world.” — Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery

“It’s rare that I finish a book then immediately reread it, this time with a yellow marker in hand…I can’t recommend [Ego is the Enemy] highly enough.” — Kevin Rose, entrepreneur and technology investor

“[The Daily Stoic is] a generous gift of guidance on modern living culled from a canon of wisdom hatched long ago.” —Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings  

“Ryan’s insights are priceless.”  — Marc Ecko, founder of Ecko Unltd and Complex

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You can of course also follow me on Twitter and Facebook where I post most of my writing as well. You’re welcome to follow me on Instagram as well where I regularly post stories involving my donkeys and other animals from our ranch in Texas.

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One of the interesting results of the crash of the economy and the real estate market is what they brought into reach. In cities like Downtown Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, or Detroit, living accommodations that would been considered only by the wealthy just a few years earlier are not only available but desperate for tenants.

So suddenly you find yourself living in a 1,000 sq foot loft with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and a view. It doesn’t take long for you to start thinking these floor-to-ceiling windows are a normal, natural part of my existence because that’s what our narrative tendency does – it stretches to arc around the points available.

This mirrors a larger trend in media. As publishing costs have plummeted, what were previously unattainable perks of an industry seem to peak out at just above eye level. Take a precocious amateur musician and put him in a room with the biggest band in the world and conceivably they’d have a lot to commiserate about: Myspace plays, YouTube views, iTunes downloads. They can throw around identical phrases with huge disparities in meaning – “spending time in the studio,’ an “album release party,” even going “on tour.” What was once a world that had to be broken into, a privileged position that needed to be earned, the amateur inhabits the second he decides to call himself a musician.

This creates interesting incentives, ones that have deeper personal consequences than their industry economics. As people, we have access to social spheres that have shed long-held barriers of entry. Yet the status and narrative associations still retain the prestige that goes along with the struggle and sacrifice they required.

There was a short period in my life where I was receiving regular amounts of fan emails for my writing. It ranged from devoted to unhinged. Yet, at 20, I’d never really written anything at all. I certainly wasn’t a “writer” but there, I’d experienced something that eludes people who dedicate years of their lives to the profession.

It’s tempting notion to buy into, that it’s actually real. Because if you do, you don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to get any better. The position becomes one where it’s irrational to set out and pay dues – to try and earn the illusion. Don’t buy the cow, the saying goes, if you can get the milk for free.

The precipitous drop in prices of plasma tvs, for instance, from lavish to commonplace has far outpaced their fall in status. Objects in this period become empty symbols – an available vessel for you to suspend your disbelief. Having doorman in your building. Being a writer or a musician or a comedian or a social media expert. Same deal.

As a people already predisposed towards narcissism, we’re certainly not compelled to quibble over differences that work out massively in the favor of our ego. But purchasing power isn’t really power at all. Or at least, it isn’t power that we have. The authority oscillates entirely outside of our control. This should make us humble, not enabled.

I’ve tried as much as I can to opt out. Recently, it’s become more clear and easier. I sold my car and bought a shitty old one I didn’t need to transfer money into my checking account to clear. I moved out of my apartment into a shotgun unit in the back of someone else’s house. I feel happier – less weighed down and more honest.

In my thinking, you can use a bad economy in two ways. Arbitrage: picking up the underpriced empty objects and coast on the surplus. Or, like a tide: take note of what was left exposed when the water went out and cut all that shit from your portfolio.

Last week I wrote about learned helplessness and how the world tends to be a breeding ground for it. In between the time it was written and published I had a stream of relatively random and inexplicable bad luck. I got a parking ticket because LA–the city that doesn’t mind having the dirtiest air in the world–insists on weekly street sweepings at 8am. My car was towed because apparently parking too long in an enormous lot is harmful to business whereas a shantytown of homeless people is fine to go unnoticed. Then there were some problems at work. And then I got so sick that I woke up in the middle of the night sweating out my fever so fiercely that I was convinced I’d pissed the bed. None of it made any sense and I just wanted to quit.

Then I remembered what I’d written. The only real thing separating the winners from the losers is if they get back up. Am I going to appreciate these events for their extreme improbability or am I going to delude myself into thinking I am cursed forever? If you stretch the graph out long enough, statistically paranoia and fearfulness and timidity start to pay off. Were boldness to become commonplace, it would no longer exist as a viable strategy. Risk can lead to total failure but cautiousness just the absence of success. Zap, Zap, Zap, Zap–our bodies resign to its infinite continuation and prepares to minimize anguish. It would seem to me that the odds of playing dead were better for survival than pushing through and hoping for a chance win. That might be a way to survive, but not a way to live.

So I didn’t quit. And with the perspective that it’s very easy–but ultimately self-defeating–to look at things with a pessimistic explanatory style, you can resist that impulse. All I know is that my cycles are getting shorter and shorter because I stop before it spins out of control. My cycle is probably different from yours. I start feeling the symptoms of the flu. You might get angry, or restless, or the desire to radically change course. Or that’s when you might get high and tell yourself “that it’s what you need to be inspired.” Whatever. The fact is we all have coping mechanisms that do little but ignore the problem. For me, they actually make it worse.

But what I’ve learned is that in monitoring your SIGs and responding not instinctually but appropriately, you can focus your energy on the stuff that matters. And it’s not that the things weren’t my fault, it’s that there is a difference between accepting responsibility and burdening yourself with blame.