Ryan Holiday on How to Live a Good Life
Metadata
- Author: James Altucher
- Full Title: Ryan Holiday on How to Live a Good Life
- Category:articles
- Published Date: 2017-05-26
- Document Note: In an interview, Ryan Holiday, an author and expert in Stoicism, discusses various aspects of life and how to find meaning. He emphasizes that self-worth should not be equated with net worth, and that people can find fulfillment pursuing what they love, like writing. Ryan also stresses the importance of Stoic philosophy in taking control of one’s life and not being at the mercy of external circumstances. He advocates for making one’s job irrelevant by automating it and moving onto new things, and for seeking approval only from the right people.
- Summary: In an interview, Ryan Holiday, an author and expert in Stoicism, discusses various aspects of life and how to find meaning. He emphasizes that self-worth should not be equated with net worth, and that people can find fulfillment pursuing what they love, like writing. Ryan also stresses the importance of Stoic philosophy in taking control of one’s life and not being at the mercy of external circumstances. He advocates for making one’s job irrelevant by automating it and moving onto new things, and for seeking approval only from the right people.
- URL: https://thoughtcatalog.com/james-altucher/2017/05/ryan-holiday-on-how-to-live-a-good-life/
Highlights
- I’m jealous of the people who don’t write actually. Making business deals and going to work is so much more profitable than trying to tear your soul apart and put words on a piece of paper most people won’t read. (View Highlight)
- There’s only one writer in history to become a billionaire. (J.K. Rowling, if you’re reading… come on my podcast!) (View Highlight)
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- Victim or Hero (View Highlight)
- Note: Ryan said that Stoicism is a practical philosophy that teaches you to be in control of how you feel about the things that happen to you. He told me about two important people who practiced Stoicism: one was a very powerful emperor and the other was a slave who was not powerful at all. Ryan said that Stoicism works for both of them because it helped them both even though one had a lot of power and the other had none. Ryan said that this showed how Stoicism is a philosophy that helps everyone no matter their situation.
- Everyone wants to be the hero of their own story. I do. But I chose victim for years. I lost everything and I wanted the world to pick me back up. I’m not mad at the world for leaving me on the floor. I’m grateful. Because it let me pick myself up. It let me choose myself. “Stoicism is a practical philosophy and it works,” Ryan said. “Define ‘works’.” “At its core, it says you don’t control the world around you. You control how you respond to the world around you.” He told me about the two most prominent practitioners of Stoicism. One was Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor. He had all the power in the world. His favorite Stoic was a slave, Epictetus, who was banished from Rome by a past emperor. “You have extreme wealth and power using the philosophy, and it’s helping them,” Ryan said. “And then you have extreme adversity, difficulty and powerlessness using the philosophy and it’s helping them. To me, that’s working.” (View Highlight)
- He said, “The Stoics call that amor fati, which in Latin means ‘a love of fate…’ You look forward to the bad things because they were made just for you.” (View Highlight)
- This is the key to all advancement in life. Make your job irrelevant. Burn the bridges behind you. (View Highlight)
- “You should be trying to make your job or your role irrelevant because what you’re actually proving is that you know how to do things, you know when something is working, and you’re able to come up with the next thing,” Ryan said.
“When an employee comes to you and says, ‘I know my job was to run this marketing department, but over the last 6 months I’ve automated X and Y. I’ve hired someone who’s incredibly talented, sales are up X percent and I don’t have that much to do.’ Your boss doesn’t go to their boss and say, ‘Well how do we get rid of James?” They go, “James is f**king killing it.’”
“That’s how you work through or up an organization,” he said. “No one says, ‘Your book was so amazing Ryan, we don’t need anymore books from you.’ They go, ‘What are you writing next?’” (View Highlight)
- Note: “You should try to do your job so well that it becomes unnecessary. This shows that you know how to do things, you know when something is working, and you can think of the next step. For example, if an employee tells their boss that they have done a great job in the marketing department and made sales go up, the boss won’t say ‘Let’s get rid of them’. Instead, they will say ‘This person is doing an amazing job!’ This is how you can progress in a job and become more successful.”
- Integrity, (universal integrity, for example: never lie to get what you want) (View Highlight)
- Fairness (Help the people around you. Even if it hurts you. If it helps someone more than it hurts you, it’s just.) (View Highlight)
- “Temperance,” he said, which means don’t be an addict to some other force. Don’t be an addict to anything. (View Highlight)
- “John Kennedy Toole killed himself because his book was rejected. That’s so sad to me because then the book won the pulitzer prize,” Ryan said. (View Highlight)
- So I asked Ryan, given that we still want people to like us, how can you be creative or if you don’t like your job, how can you persevere if you’re seeking other people’s approval? He told me how he judges his own success. “I’m trying to shrink the amount of people whose approval matters to me.” He gave an example. A U.S. Senator wrote him. He said he reads “The Daily Stoic” everyday. “I really liked today’s entry,” the Senator said. “It’s exactly what I try to think about for my office.” That’s the approval Ryan chose. He’s not after 10 million views on Facebook. “I try to think less about if what I’m doing is popular and more about if what I’m doing is being proven right.” (View Highlight)