RyanHoliday.net

The new design is up. It took a little while, but it was clearly worth the wait. Bunny is the genius behind the designs and Luke is tech mastermind. For the record, the picture is not of me. But if you can tell me who it is, I will be impressed with your knowledge of obscure music.

Couple of notes:

-Why a site? I don’t write in the same way or even on the same level as most of the other writers. But my goals are a little bit different. I don’t want to get in the business of 5 part series, and I will be more of a typical blogger than you’re used to seeing.

-The old links still send you to the old design. So you might need to readd them on delicious or StumbleUpon if you did it before.

-All the contact info from before is now under the Contact page. If you want to add me on Facebook, or Myspace or Digg or StumbleUpon, go ahead. I don’t bother people with notes and bulletins every two days.

–The Reading List is still there and I should be updating it shortly.

-Since I haven’t been living in my own place for the last four months, all my books have been in storage so I haven’t been able to update the Book Quotes and Passages section. Updates coming there as well.

It is very easy, after the fact to go back and create a chain of events that led to an accomplishment. You can sprinkle the path with delusions of foresight and determination that never really existed. For me, getting a Rudius site is not that. I remember vividly sitting in a high school classroom and thinking “I can do that.” I felt there was a connection between the way Tucker and Sadler and some of the early messageboard posters looked at the world. I bet there are at least a thousand other people that felt the same way. I have seen their applications. But I went out and did it. Almost everything I have done in the last 4 years was in someway connected to making that a reality. It wasn’t “I can do that now” or “I deserve that today” but that it was withing my range. And so I made it happen.

No question, there are a whole bunch of people who deserve more credit than I. And that in the big scheme of things, there are way more important milestones than being absorbed into a blog network. But this way something that was important to me and I fucking wore myself down doing it. Everything I read, all the people I talked to, all the times I made a fool of myself or set myself up for disappointment–all of it was for this goal.

And in the process I learned two crucial lessons:

1) Don’t talk, Just Do. This post is probably the first time Tucker ever heard me express how far back my desire for a site goes. The only person that needed to know was me. There is that cool line in Hustle and Flow, about how people who talk are too busy to walk. There were all sorts of steps I had to take beforehand and anything else would have been a distraction. And quite frankly, it’s a lot easier to Get Stuff Done when you keep your goals to yourself. Look at Law #3.

2) Don’t swing at the first pitch (unless it’s the best) I had a lot of opportunities where I could have asked and almost all of them would been rejected. Maybe, I could have gotten lucky, but the point is that I am best prepared now. What I did instead was finagle chances to prove myself, then worked my ass off doing it. Like I said, I’ve wanted this for years. Waiting was the harder option, striking was the easy way. When it is reversed–when holding back is easy and going for it is daunting, that is the time to make your move.