Ryan Holiday
We all have goals: We want to matter. We want to be important. We want to have freedom and power to pursue our creative work. We want respect from our peers and recognition for our accomplishments. Not out of vanity or selfishness, but of an earnest desire to fulfill our personal potential.Collection: Work
I have a pet goat.Collection: Pet
If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you're not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you're going to have a much harder time accepting it and moving on to attempts two, three, and four.Collection: Moving
It angers me to see armed defenders at the bottom of Lost Cause statues, adding a renewed threat of violence to icons that are themselves part of an ideology of violence and intimidation.Collection: Anger
Growth hacking is the future of marketing. It has to be.Collection: Future
Life is hard, but we make it much harder.
Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory.
Growth hacking is a mindset, and those who have it will reap incredible gains.
If you're shameless enough, you can sell anything.
Growth hackers don't tolerate waste.
I don't play videogames and generally think that online activism is a giant waste of time.
What I've found in my research is that realism and self-honesty are the antidote to ego, hubris, and delusion.
Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction - only disappointment.
Online journalism has always had a sourcing problem. From using unverified 'anonymous tips' to repeating whatever rumor or speculation people are chattering about, the general ethic is, 'We'll publish just about anything.'
Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. And that's why growth hackers beat traditional marketers.
Stoicism - and philosophy - are not the domains of idle professors. They are the succor of the successful and the men and women of action.
The reality is that the economic situation for millennials is not a good one.
If you ask most smart or successful people where they learned their craft, they will not talk to you about their time in school. It's always a mentor, a particularly transformative job, or a period of experimentation or trial and error.
Growth hacking isn't some proprietary technical process shrouded in secrecy. In fact, it has grown and developed in the course of very public conversations. There are no trade secrets to guard.
Everyone faces adversity.
In 2007, I went to work in Beverly Hills as an intern at The Collective, a talent management agency. I'd been scouted for the job because of a blog I'd started in college and because the blogger-turned-author I worked for, Tucker Max, was producing a project with the company.
Growth hackers are typically computer engineers that build great marketing ideas into the product during the development process.
Even people who despise ego and aspire to humility, who plan to be humble once they are successful, are worried that actually enacting those beliefs would sentence them to a life of obscurity or weakness or failure.
If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.
I made a lot of money and had a great time playing with the words that make up the news. I exploited the laziness behind the news and people's reading habits.
When I dropped out of school at 19 to start my first job in Hollywood, I didn't know anything, and I had no idea where I'd end up. Thankfully, I was attached to some smart and forgiving people who let me learn under them.
Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing or even reading long, dense books. In fact, it is something men and women of action use - and have used throughout history - to solve their problems and achieve their greatest triumphs. Not in the classroom but on the battlefield, in the forum, and at court.
Self-imposed discipline with a bent towards results rather than 'creative' and sustainability spending is unfortunately not the norm in the marketing industry.
The idea that only the swaggering, all-knowing, and ruthlessly ambitious succeed is a lie. One that has discouraged so many people with so much potential - and worse, encouraged many more to crash and burn.
Stoicism is a philosophy designed for the masses, and if it has to be simplified a bit to reach the masses, so be it.
The essential idea of Stoicism in my interpretation is, you don't control the world around you, you control how you respond. At 19, that's very empowering.
My neighbors don't care that I'm an author. It's inherently ego-inhibiting.
Because we make ourselves deaf to feedback, because we overestimate our abilities, because we become consumed with ourselves, we end up subjecting ourselves not just to the inevitable stumbles or difficulties of life but catastrophic, painful failures.
You can't believe your own marketing.
Growth-hacking is about scalability - ideally, you want your marketing efforts to bring in users, which then bring in more users.
Virality, at its core, is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.
The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging.
As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online - what spreads - is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite: through slickness, titillation, and polarity.
Our facts aren't fact; they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren't opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn't information; it's just hastily assembled symbols.
Public relations and marketing are something companies do to move product. It is not meaningful. It is not cool. Yet because it is cheap, easy, and lucrative to cover, blogs want to convince you that it is.
The media, when it's functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.
We need to separate marketing messages from content. We need to enforce a clear line between 'editorial' and 'advertising.'
Brands are essentially forbidden from saying or associating themselves with the Olympics - something that has been commonly owned by Western Civilization since the Greeks - unless they hand over piles of cash to the Games.
I love books. Probably too much for my own good.
I know how hard authors work on their books and how far out of their element many are when it comes to doing the sales and marketing. So when I see someone doing it wrong and giving bad advice, I do my best to help - even when they're not my clients.
As authors, we're all trying to fight against obscurity and outside distractions, but it's a tough battle.
Watching well-meaning authors follow in the footsteps of someone going in the wrong direction breaks my heart.
The problem with a lot of marketing advice is that the examples they use are not exactly typical. It's hard for businesses, particularly smaller businesses, to relate to the bold innovations of companies like Apple or Tesla.
There has to be something about your business that gets you excited. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have spent your precious - irreplaceable - time on it.
People love stories; they use stories to make sense of the world.