RyanHoliday.net:

This is what I was trying to say:

"Never work against Mother Nature. You only succeed when you work with her." Cesar Millan Cesar's Way: The Everyday Guide to Understanding Common Dog Problems

When I said this:

All around us there is a natural energy and a flow to things and you can tap into that. You know, the groove, the pocket, the current--all those terms we throw around to describe other people's freedom of movement but never really bother thinking about for ourselves. Ferriss talks about this--about just letting go and realizing that a little momentum can carry you further than all your frantic scrambling. I am starting to feel that when you stop trying so hard and let your subconscious do what it needs to, you find better results than you do in the Pyrrhic battle for control.

You can't change a human nature any more than you can change a dog's nature any more than your can change the nature of nature itself. It's a lot easier, a lot more efficient, and a lot more effective to find out how to channel that power instead of throwing bodies at it. His is more concise, I like it better.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The facts are beyond dispute: George Bush was as much of a flip-flopper as John Kerry. But Bush told the story first. He and his team did a masterly job of telling a story about Kerry and his inability to stick to one story. The Kerry team responded with a doomed effort to point out that Bush flip-flopped as much as Kerry did. Of course, this story couldn't take hold because the other story was already in place.

Then the Kerry campaign tired to make the case that flip-flopping was a good thing, that it was another word for flexibility. In order to adopt Kerry's story, people would have had to admit that they were wrong--and that almost never happens.

The best strategy would have been to go first. Failing that, the appropriate response would have been to tell a completely different story, one that used a frame that matched the worldview of the undecided voter.
Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars"

Tactical victories are brutal. It's spending more hours at the office than someone, spending another few million on commercials than the competition, or compromising on your last remaining principles. It's playing a game that you really have no power over. It's the +1 strategy--they'll bid 100, I'll bid 101.

Do you really think there is a niche out there for you to be slightly more efficient than Tim Ferriss, or a little more of an asshole than Tucker or to read .5 more books than I do? There is a guy on YouTube and all he does is make response songs about other popular people's videos. Not only is it cringingly lame, it's just picking up garbage views--it's their video plus a small twist.

Attacking strategy (Robert's most valuable lesson) is not only the most productive channel for your resources, but it's the most authentic path you can take. In a world of Global Microbrands, your positioning in crucial. The best possible position to be in is you. When you're you, you don't have to do any work. All you have to do is wake up each morning and refuse to be defined by other people.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Despite what I said about the servers yesterday, Rudius does a lot of stuff really well, especially community. And what Tucker did here is the perfect example.

Chasing Kaz is slowly evolving from a blog about two guys weighlifting to a community about strength, improvement and fitness. The Alexa rank doesn't reflect it, but the forum has threads with 20,000 and 30,000 views and discussions that run for pages. Now users can post running diaries of their workout regimen and other people can give advice or criticize.

Hosting dozens of workout logs for strangers probably wasn't what Tucker had in mind when he launched his site 4 years ago. I still have some of the initial emails from when Chasing Kaz got started and no one brought up anything remotely close to that idea. But this is where it went--it's what the people wanted and I think it is a natural progression for the site.

Rudius won't make much money from the work out log forum. When someone logs on to post their stats, they aren't looking for ads--they're just trying to complete a task. But in the long run, every time someone does it, they are just a little more tied to the brand. They've transitioned from a consumer to a prosumer and that connection is harder to break. It's harder because it's meaningful, because the users have invested something other than just time.

In contrast to the Hollywood side, where The Agency owns a site with about the same traffic as Tucker and one of the managers keeps insisting on finding sites to merge or acquire. First, in the corporate world, mergers have an awful track record but online? I can't wrap my head around how that would even work. We shouldn't be thinking about acquiring a larger audience but rather how to become better connected with the one you already have. Which again highlights the two different, deeply innate approaches to value. One wants superficial relationships and the other wants concentrated, intense connections. It's not stupid to think like that--"Let's get more, more, more"--but it is a massive strategic error. Just because something is intuitive doesn't mean it will work online. Because one morning you're going to wake up and everyone will have run off to the next site, where they're treated better, where they feel pulled to, where their life becomes intertwined into the creative process.

In my view, Facebook made the same mistake. They had a chance to grow up with the Y Generation. They could have evolved with that 9 million person userbase (and rising) and had a lock on it forever. I don't think you could have asked for a more profitable and long-term niche than the social lives of American college students (and eventually, their business and personal lives), but that wasn't enough. Instead they decided to spread to an numerically larger but significant less loyal demographic and now, the future isn't looking so rosy. If Myspace was Krispy Kreme--a hot niche commodity that leveraged their buzz to flood the market and then was forced to retreat--Facebook could have been In and Out--an autonomous and principled to their core and have lines out the door at 1 in the morning. Now the core audience is alienated, the new audience has a sense of entitlement and the infrastructure is straining under the weight of thousands of applications, requests and spam-profiles.

So that is the dilemma that companies ultimately face online. The smart people are building community and a deeper relationship whenever they can. The people stuck to the old model think that what they really need is as many eyeballs as possible. If your strategy online is to "write something I care about and then get as many people to read it as possible" then you're doomed to fail. You're just dressing up the old model in digital form. The internet has succeeded precisely because that model is flawed and like Hugh said, it continues to exist so long as there are "young, hungry people willing to take the pyramid/privilege model seriously." The future, online, is there for those who think differently--strategically--who create value that propagates itself instead of stealing it before it runs out. What that really means is this: Stop trying to get on the front page of Digg or "roll up" other verticals and be absolutely indispensable to the people you already have.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Every time I go to see a movie, I leave hating theaters just a little bit more. Yesterday, the movie showtime was 7:30 but the opening credits didn't roll until 8:00 on the dot--and the movie started as scheduled. That's because, in addition to the 10-12 minutes of previews, Disney decided to run a 17 minutes animated short with Goofy and an inexplicably stupid storyline about setting up a home theater system. It wasn't even an advertisement and I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the fuck it was for. And naturally, this was preceded by the "20" minutes of commercials that the theater runs before the show that they half-heartedly attempt to disguise as content.

All of it is a weak attempt to milk a little more money out of a dying system. Using the contrast of the internet we can see how utterly laughable and self-defeating such measures are. Like slowly mining the movie experience of anything positive isn't eventually going to have some repercussions. What if Rudius did this? Imagine if Tucker, to break my site, forced all the users who went to TuckerMax.com to check out out my blog for 30 seconds. It would build me an user block almost instantly, but at what cost? It's just moving food around the plate--it's not creating any new value. When you rob one hand to fill the other enough times, eventually one comes up empty. And that's the experience of going to a movie--there is nothing left to take. I can't think of one thing they could do to make it worse without going out of their way to hurt people.

The Rudius pages of have had an abysmal record of staying online recently. Sometimes they're down for as much as half of the day. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think that this is absolutely the worst possible thing the company can allow to happen. Fixing it should be priority number 1. To raise the barrier of entry in the edgeconomy in any way is to slowly slit your own throat. People will just go elsewhere. The next site isn't 15 miles away like another theater, it's a click away. I know Rudius isn't just an internet company but how can it claim to be different and then ignore the fundamental new paradigm of our age: Unfettered access, all the time.

I have a post coming on why it is that Hollywood, to date, has only one significant victory on the web: TMZ. The leader in almost every other category is someone who came up outside the system. But basically, I think it comes down how they look value. Hollywood is a genius at extracting it--they scorch the earth getting it out. "We've got these people sitting in the theaters waiting, how can we use that time to OUR benefit?" instead of "How can we make those people happy?" And the web isn't about that at all. That's why Knol will fail, because Google designed it to answer this question: "How can we get people to make pages FOR US?" You won't find that in the philosophy of Wikipedia. The web is about creating value together, not taking it from someone else. The Entrenched Player Dilemma tells us that you really can't transition from extracting value to collaborating to make it because extracting was where you made all your money.

Theaters are allowed (by the market) to be shitty because there are costs involved in alternatives. I'd have to wait for it to come out on DVD, or risk pirating it, or drive an hour to one of Cuban's Landmark Theatres. There is also some cultural inertia involved--I remember that it used to be pleasant. That's a relic though and it won't save anyone's ass online. Whatever early mover's advantage Rudius has can be lost pretty easily if the servers keep making it a shitty experience.

Hollywood's blissful ignorance of what anyone thinks or feels or has to say has been shattered. The idea that you can rape value without ever having to create it, thankfully, is going away. It's only a matter of time before it's totally gone.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

For the last year to the day, I've run in the same pair of shoes. I think they cost something like 50 dollars. They've done close to a thousand miles. Holes showed up in the toes almost 4 months ago. The bottoms have long been worn smooth. They've been chewed on by four different dogs and pissed on by at least one them. Every week since June, they took the train from Los Angeles to Riverside. God knows how many times I threw them in a rage because they were the closest thing to pick up. All I know is that my walls have plenty of skidmarks. I soaked them in the rain and 100 degree heat. I have been known to purposely run through puddles. They've never been washed and they've definitely never been "put away nicely." And my feet feel just fucking fine.

Running is a multi-billion dollar industry. This is despite it being the most basic sport in existence. People have fancy heart monitors, energy goo, gym memberships and fucking special running socks. They use two hundred dollar shoes. All of this because it's a buffer between getting down and dirty and hitting the road. That's the masturbation that Tyler Durden was talking about. Self-destruction...

I'm not the best at a lot of things. Most of the time, the stuff people talk about makes my head spin and I get confused pretty easily. But I make due with what I've got. Arguably, I'm doing a better job than most. I meant to get new shoes a long time ago but mainly I was too busy running to get around to it. I probably would have kept going for a lot longer, getting everything out of what I had available, if someone else hadn't gotten me a new pair. And really, that's reason I've got three separate jobs that Ivy League grads have gone out for and been passed over or why I've got a better Alexa rank than thousands of bloggers with more of a right to an audience than I.

For the next year, stop thinking about all the stuff you need before you can start and just act. It doesn't matter that you smoke or you don't have the right shoes or that you're tired or you've got too much school work. If you wanted it to happen, it would happen. Being smart or talented or having the right equipment--none of that is all that rare. But to get up do a thousand miles or punched in the face or write a hundred pages or strike a deal or read a book or make a phone call without anyone telling you to? That's almost unheard of. So stop preparing and start working, stop talking and start walking.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

About 2 years ago, I had this really ambitious idea for how a band could use the internet to completely change how music works. And how they could make a ton of passive income by ceding a little bit of control and abandoning old ideas. I told it one of my friends, someone I'd always thought was really smart, and is response was (quote) "If that could actually work, someone would have done it already."

And so I went ahead and did it anyway. At 18, I ended up signing a major label musician onto an early incarnation of the idea and launched a site around it. It did ok for a while but I ended up shutting it down about a year later because I hadn't thought it all through and was an abysmal failure as an organizer and a motivator. Mostly, I learned how all the components worked and where the future was going to a level that frankly, the heads of most labels do not comprehend. And he and I are still friends.

Since then, I've been kicking the idea around in my head constantly. I took what Tucker taught me about publishing and leadership and the internet and I wove that in. I took what I learned from Godin about monopolies and marketing and giving up direct ownership and added that in. I took some of the ideas that Mark Cuban threw out a year ago for HDNet and adapted them. I took what Robert said about attacking strategy and the dynamic as confirmation that I was heading in the right direction. Umair's post about love and math recently codified the core of it. And for the last week, TheExecutive had me break it down and reconstruct so it from its flowery and hypothetical roots into a pragmatic, real product that could be stand-up to the skepticism of an inert industry. It would have been nothing without that.

Then it got pitched to the biggest band in the world on Friday. And the reports are looking good so far. This was just some idea I had when I was running when I was a freshman in college. It could have just been that if I'd listened to my friend who is apparently incapable of thinking of the bigger picture.

Vision is one of the few skills that can't be outsourced. Do you have any? Or are all your ideas derivative of things that already exist?"It's like Facebook but for people who love cats." Are you able to understand where things are going well enough that you can combine converging trends into a cohesive and comprehensive conclusion? "This industry is leading this one, and what we see there will matter for this reason. Here is how we can draft of that energy." And probably most importantly, are you in an environment that incubates those ideas instead of stifling them? "If you have any ideas, Ryan, now is the time...You're on the right track, but it's tell me how and why--not what."

I'm sure vision has always been important, but today, when we're no longer just dealing with getting trucks from one state to another or putting asses in seats, it's just about the only competitive advantage left. You really can't be more efficient on the internet--websites load at about the same speed and Google is hard to game--so you have to be better at scope, scale and vision. Because really, that's all you have.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Always quality over quantity. It doesn't matter how much you end up reading--your collection will never be bigger than a County Branch Library. But the selection can be better--it could be a lot better.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you race, it matters only how you behave on the hills. Downhill--did you resist brashness, exhibit more control and discipline here than on the straight-aways. Ignore your impulse and shorten your strides. Uphill--did you clench your jaw, look down once and then lift your gaze to stare directly in to its eyes. Races are won here and not there--where it's hardest to speed up, not where it's easiest.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You've already made it this far, might as well take one more step.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I owned a restaurant that had those business card drawings for free lunch or whatever, I would just call everyone up that entered each month and tell them that they won. If some marketer had come by and told you that for $10 a head they could make your target consumer feel like they were #1 out of a few hundred people, wouldn't you jump on it in a second? This is that, but real. Of course, the status-quo may better--where you pretend like you do a drawing each month and really just throw all the cards away. That's the way to treat your consumer.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"We often go from love to ambition, but we never return from ambition to love." de la Rochefoucauld

One of my problems is that I start to turn everything into a routine. I go from love to ambition and then I can't come back. I take the passion that I had for something and I ossify it into a rigid, set activity that ultimately ends of defeating the logic that led me to undertake it in the first place. It's been a while since I ran well--since I really, really liked it. It's so much more about "did I hit my quota? did I get all the days in I said I would?" I sort of become enslaved to it instead of employing it to my benefit. To me, this is a perversion of sticking to your word and the demands you set for yourself. It really easy to get locked in--sort of the banal evil of mediocrity, of doing what you're supposed to do instead of what you want to do. It's looking at life as a series of check marks instead of continued expression of whatever principles you've decided on.

It might be confusing since I posted about writing down what you want and then sticking to it and ratcheting it up. And then making sure other people hold you accountable. But It can't be about micromanaging yourself, it's need is to think of results. Because without an understanding of the vision, you get too caught up in the present. The Exec turned me on to Mission Creep, which is very much the opposite of Commander's Intent. It's where you start with a clear goal and then as you approach it, slowly load details onto it until it collapses as an utter failure (like a bill through Congress). Because what if you wake up one day and you're a little closer to becoming that thing you didn't ever want to become? What if you can feel the system start to break and twist your logic, and the sand start to suck you in? The day someone calls you out on your own bullshit...

It kills me inside. In Hollywood you see a lot of dead people. They can't feel anything; if they had any self-awareness they'd be doing this all day--screaming and grinding their teeth in loathing, rattling the "chains that bind us." But they're not stupid or bad people or really any different than you or I, they just made a choice. Cognitive Dissonance tells us that when we face two clashing facts--my job makes me miserable and it's my hope and dreams that compounds it--it's a lot easier to go numb than change jobs. It's the temptation to add just a little more here and there until the creep ties your identity in so deep that you can never change. And all that makes you is a tool.

What is the difference between a tool and a douchebag? A douchebag is that person with a delusional sense of self-worth, a lack of self-awareness, tact--an idiot. They are clueless but assertive; an asshole without justification or value. A tool is all that, but at someone else's bidding. Which makes it so, so much worse. The world is filled with douchebags, but Hollywood, I think, is mainly tools.

The unifying theme is this

Play the game but don't believe in it--that part you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a straight jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way-part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy." Invisible Man

It's very hard to stop believing in the game. Especially after you lost a bunch of money playing in it. That is the horrible trap of Cognitive Dissonance: Why would I have wasted all this time for no reason? Might as well try to make the best of it. Me, I'm trying hard not to believe in it all, even though that's what the whole system is designed to do. Because no one wants to wake up one day creeped into being a tool.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I shouldn't be able to read most of the books on my shelf. I never took a single classical history class and I cheated through most of Economics 001. Still, the loci of my library are Greek History and Applied Economics. And though they often are beyond me educationally, I'm able to comprehend them because of some equalizing tricks. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is--lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you're not familiar with and wresting with them until you can--shying away from the "easy read."

This is how I break down a new book:

Break out of the School Mindset
Almost everything you learn in the classroom is tainted by the fact that ultimately teachers have to test you on it. Tests often have very little to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time reading it. The easiest way to do this is picking obscure things from the text and quizzing you on them: "Name this passage" "What were the main characters in Chapter 4?" So forget that--you're reading for you. Even when you're in school, you should be reading for yourself and not for the teacher. The worst thing that can happen is they knock you down a little bit on a grade that means very little.

When you read History of the Peloponnesian War, the countries involved in the conflict between Corinth and Corcyra is not really worth remembering. (Proof: I had to go look up the names on Wikipedia, all I remember was that they both started with a C. )What you should latch onto is that as the two fought for allied support from Athens, one took the haughty "you owe us a favor" route and the other alluded to all the benefits that would come from aiding them. Guess who got the support?

From Seneca:

"We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know--when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew."

He rightly points out that Homer was wise before he recited or sat down to write his own works--so what do you really gain by analyzing the minutia of it? The work is an expression of the message, not the message itself. So forget everything but that message and how to apply it to your life. Dates, names, pronunciations--they only matter in how they provide context for the lesson at hand. They carry little value otherwise.

Ruin the Ending
I almost always go straight to Wikipedia and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary. In the case of HOTPW, without reading the entry you might have passed over the glorious anecdote that Thucydides missed a large part of the war because he caught the Plague and that he was largely delegated to writing about the battles because his military incompetence led to an early defeat.

You ought to ruin the ending--or find out the basic assertions of the book--because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks: 1) What does it mean? 2) Do you agree with it? The first 50 pages of the book shouldn't be a discovery process for you; you shouldn't be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say. Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he's right and how you can benefit from it. Plus if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through.

Read the Reviews (Amazon)
Find out from the people who have already read it what they felt was important. From the reviews you can deduce the culture significance of the work--and from what it meant to others, at least grasp a bearing of what it could mean to you. Also by being warned of the major themes you can anticipate them coming and then actually appreciate them as they unfold. Which again frees you up much in the same way that ruining the ending does. And frankly, if you agree with their assessment of the work, go ahead and steal it once you've finished. They didn't copyright it--this isn't school, this is life.

Read the Intro
I know, I know. It infuriates me too that a 200 page book has a 80 page translator's introduction, but they are helpful. Every time I have skipped through it, I've had to go back and start over. Read the intro. It often has a ton of interesting stuff about who the work ended up influencing, and other tidbits that often stick with you longer than the work itself.

Look It Up
If you're reading to lead, you're going to come across concepts or words you're not familiar with. Don't pretend like you understand, look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my Blackberry to look stuff up on Wikipedia. If you're away from a computer and need the definition of a word, type "Define: ______" and text it to 46645 (Googl) and you'll get one back from Google. With Military History, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wikipedia is a great place to grab maps and to help understand the terrain. That being said, don't get bogged down with the names of the cities or the spelling of names, you're looking to grasp the meta-lesson--the conclusion.

Post It Highlighters
These will change how you read. On the right side of the page, I tag the pages I have highlighted important passages on. On the top of the page, I mark if there is a concept I need to research or if there is a book the author suggests I read as a supplement. Don't be afraid to tear the book up with tags--tape is cheap but the time it will take you to otherwise flip back through the book to track something down is not.

Flip Through It Again
Before you close the book, go back through and reread all the passages you've marked. This puts them back into your memory and let's you walk away knowing the crucial hits of the author's message. With these flagpoles you will be able to go back through and remember the details if necessary, like knowing the chord structure of a song and working through the rest as it comes.

Type Out the Important Quotes and Passages
In Old School, Tobias Wolff talks about how he used to retype the works of classic authors when he felt uninspired just to feel what it was like to have that profoundness flow out of his finger tips. That is why I have the Book Quotes and Passages section. I've been compiling for almost 4 years now and have nearly 15,000 words typed. And I still have boxes left to go through. Not only will it inspire you, but it will help you remember them.

Read One Book from Every Bibliography
This is a little rule I try to stick with. In every book I read, I try to find my next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject--it's how you trace a subject back to its core. Just keep a running list through Amazon's Wish List service (here is mine). Last month I read a book on Evolutionary Psychology and discovered that I'd read almost 80% of its sources because I'd been pulled down the rabbit hole of a predecessor.

Connect, Apply, Use
When you make connections--that the cultural reactions after WWI (largely extroverted and flamboyant) and WWII (introverted, uptight and overly moral) appear to be opposite takes on the same disillusionment--you can see things for what they are. And then better understand the cyclical nature of history and human nature. Make the connection--that every major military pretext for war was claimed by (some) historians to be governmentally orchestrated (sinking of the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, 9/11)--and appreciate how our responses to events rarely ever contain perspective or a sense of rational continuity. Ex: Is Cicero's advice on speaking similar to the mechanics of good writing?

Begin to apply the mindset of the author to your daily life--even if you don't agree with it. How would an evolutionary psychologist consider this situation? If people are economically self-interested, how can I explain this action? If Von Clausewitz said that we love Greek history because it's the easiest to manipulate, should I trust this anecdote? Ex: I know Cicero wanted to make you a better speaker, but if he wanted you to write better, what would he say?

Use. You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren't going to memorize them? Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters and in your daily life. How else do you expect to absorb them? Don't be a douche and drop them where they aren't relevant, but use the wisdom to make yourself a better person.Ex: Write, even if it's just for yourself, even if you're thinking aloud, what Cicero can teach you about writing.

I give you Seneca again:

"My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application--not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech--and learn them so well that words become works."

Conclusion
Of course, none of this is easy. People always ask me if the books I carry around are for school because they're full of notes, flags and folded pages--why would anyone work so hard on something they were doing on their own? Because I enjoy it, because it's the only thing that separates me from ignorance. These are the techniques have allowed me to leap years ahead of my peers. It's how you strike out on your own and build strength instead of letting some personal trainer dictate what you can and can't be lifting.

So try it: Do your research, read diligently without getting bogged down in details, and then work to connect, apply and use. And I think you'll find that you're able to read above your supposed "level" even outside the classroom setting.

You can check out my Reading List for a place to start.

**Note: My list isn't conclusive, it's just my system. If there are any steps I am missing, feel free to post what you use.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Some background... The line was uttered in a description of David Sarnoff, who was the president of RCA/NBC. At first, Sarnoff wanted the airwaves to be free of advertising and profit primarily from the sale of radios. After the company suffered because of the Great Depression, Sarnoff was forced to put ads on the airwaves and his company grew tremendously as a result.

Anyway, the line is this: "Once you're good at connecting consumers with advertisers, it's hard to be good at anything else."--Get Excited

Ricky, it's called the Entrenched Player's Dilemma.

Wikinomics had a fairly good description:

"The problem with mature companies is that the very commercial success of their products increases their dependency on them. Making radical changes in the product's capabilities, underlying architecture or associated business models could cannibalize sales or lead to costly realignments of strategy and business infrastructure. It's as though popular and widely adopted products become ossified, hardened by the inherent incentives to build on their own success. The result is that entrenched industry players are generally not motivated to develop or deploy disruptive technologies."

I know you know Tucker but we haven't met. The stunt you guys pulled during your SXSW panel was the only time I laughed the entire conference besides from sadness and despair.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I never came to like "Starbucked." But I grew very fond of its writer. Most books about social and business phenomena give the reader something to think about. This book gave the author something to think about. Reading "Starbucked" produced an odd reversal of roles and left me, at least, feeling less like a student of the subject than a teacher. Not that I mean to instruct Clark. But I experienced the pleasure a teacher must feel when he watches a kid with promise outgrowing the vagaries and muddles of immaturity (and the jitters of too many coffee-fueled all-nighters) and coming into his own as a young man of learning, reason and sense. -- P. J. O'Rourke in this weekend's New York Times.

It might seem weird, but that is exactly what I am trying to do with this blog.

I think it's better that way. It is much more honest. The perspective of looking back after the fact gives us all these opportunities to make excuses or embellish or omit. Instead, I'm wrestling with them out loud and trying to weave them into a narrative. This is me, as it happens.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just got another genius book pushed on me called "A Nervous Splendor." For about 4 months in 1888, on the same block in Vienna, unpublished Freud, the prodigal Crown Prince Rudolf, Theodor Herzl, Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahmes all lived together without knowing their inevitable collective contribution to history. The book interweaves their journey's and hints at what the future holds. It ends the day Hilter is born.

"By such a paradox Vienna attained greatness after all. It bred geniuses who foretold a modern wound. And Rudolf too became in a time a sad but significant precursor. He was the herald of an alienation common to the youth of our day. Over him loomed Franz Joesph, a storybook incarnation of The Establishment....

Nervousness is the modern sickness. It is the sickness of the century. Outside, everything is gleam and gorgeousness. One lives only on the outside, one is led astray by the dancing phosphorescence...one no longer expects anything from the inner life, from thinking or believing."

Which echoed what Alinsky said less than 100 years later about an entirely different world--you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

The rest of the middle class, with few exceptions, reside in suburbia, living in illusions of partial escape. Being more literate, they are even more lost. Nothing seems to make sense. They thought that a split-level house in the suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank account children in good prep schools and then in college, and they had it made. They got it--only to discover they didn't have it. Many have lost their children--they dropped out of sight into something called the generation gap. They have seen values they held sacred sneered at and found themselves ridiculed as squares or relics of a dead world.

But basically, Austria had peaked and inertia was the only thing keep it going. There was optimism, but mostly just fear. It blanketed the town. And in response, people stuck to what they knew best. They further embraced the Monarchy. They reveled in customs, tradition and archaic expression. But none of that shook off the fear. And the one man with some optimism, the Crown Prince and heir to the throne, so hamstrung by the system, put a bullet in his head. And was succeeded by Franz Ferdinand and the First World War.

And so the book asks this question over and over again: "Why doest thou suffer? Why doest thou live?" It doesn't answer it of course, but it's still a good question.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Agreeing to disagree is the middle way--and thus not your way. Either admit that you are wrong or fight it until the end.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It is everything.

And you can go ahead and say that I am projecting my personal belief system or that there is no objective standard to hold people to or whatever. If that's what it takes for you to rationalize being a douchebag, awesome. We have two tasks, to do what you enjoy (happiness through excellence) and to be a good person (integrity via empathy and honesty).

I'm sure you've dealt with someone who flabbergasted you with their narcissism. How could they treat me like that? They're stunning in their lacking ability to think of anything outside themselves. How can you walk around screaming on yourself when people are clearly trying to concentrate? They never stopped to think that maybe you're sensitive about something. Why are you such a black hole? They would never accept you treating them that way. Why are you such a hypocrite? It all comes down to being devoid of empathy--purposefully or unintentionally blocking their humanness.

I don't know why, but I have trouble with this myself. How do you step away from being wrapped up in your own selfish desires, your own cognitively biased mind, or desire to "win" and actually consider what is right? It's really easy to be cold or uncaring or snap because you're tired. The path to progress and improvement is in the resistance to that. When you stop and think why we're pushed to act that way (selfishly) you see that it's sort of a perverted modern adaption to the desire to accumulate as much as we can, fuck as many women to have as many kids who we then give those things away to as a head start. You don't get to take any of that with you when you die.

Think about industrial society. It satiates literally every human need. I have obese homeless people on my street. Our abundance gets us all twisted up. And of course I'm not saying that you can do without these evolutionarily ingrained benchmarks for happiness--the feeling of a woman's biological clock running out isn't a societal creation--but really, what do they fucking matter? If I put an entire cake in front of you, you might be tempted to eat it--but should you? Does it truly make you feel good, or does it just address an instinctual urge?

Which brings me back to my actual point: Empathy. It's what makes us worthy of the rest of the stuff. That's what Frankl said, that the one thing that industry and technology will never be able to do is satisfy "the need to find and fulfill a meaning in our lives." That onus is on us.

The Golden Rule is cliche, but nevertheless the ethos of being good. Treat other people, as you wish to be treated. And understand that it is a human struggle--you fail all the time at it--so don't hold it against people when they do. I don't want to give the wrong idea, I am so fucking far from the ideal I put forth here. I sit back sometimes and am appalled and shamed by my own behavior. Saying that you think empathy is important really isn't all that impressive either. At the end of the day, do you or don't you make it a priority?

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I got this email about online classes at Yale, which raised an interesting question:

I imagine in the future all courses will eventually be taught this way. This got me thinking about the effects it might have on the universities. If people could choose any University from where they could learn from, everyone will choose the best colleges Harvard, Cambridge etc. this will have a massive effect on the low ranked Uni's. Nobody will want to learn from the poor teaching on the low ranked sites when world class teaching is for free elsewhere. It makes me speculate that perhaps lower ranked universities will have become good at teaching a niche.

The discussion was pretty fruitful last time, so we might as well continue it. But first, as Tucker pointed out, I have a huge bias here, so my thoughts should be taken in that light. And I'm certainly not arguing that people are only going to be learning on computers or that classrooms will go away.

But as for the writer's point, this is going to be a predicament we face continuously in the future. When some of the previous constraints of our physical reality disappear, what then? The system will have to change or it will die. It can longer use location, inertia or distribution to subsidize mediocrity. He is right, full-service education has existed primarily because it was the most efficient use of resources and the best way to get the most money from students for the least amount of value. Like the album though, this logic doesn't withstand digitization. I could take a class from Harvard or Yale and from that standout professor a community college in Texas just like I could download 8 songs from 8 bands without buying 8 CDs. Or, even more likely, someone will come along and develop a reputation for education aggregation that unites individuals across the country.

You can disagree with me that university system isn't in dire need of a radical overhauling today, but it will have to respond to the same pressure as all our traditional industries will: When the underlying economics are altered, the concepts founded upon them have to find new support or face collapse. 5 years ago it was music, today it is Hollywood, tomorrow...

I'm not sure, but I'm curious to hear thoughts.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

The Pope's Elephant--Silvio Bedini
This was my favorite book all year. It's a historical account of a baby white elephant that the imperialistic king of Portugal sent to Pope Leo X--he also included a trained hunting leopard that could ride on the back of a horse. Leo fell in love with the elephant, who was trained to bow in his presence and trumpet as he walked into the pen which Leo had specially built behind the Vatican. Raphael sketched it and Da Vinci's villa in Vatican City looked down on the papal menagerie. The book is hilarious and entertaining and at the same time a illustrative history of the Church. For instance, Leo sold indulgences partly to cover the expenses of Hanno, the cause which Luther later used to start the reformation. I also named my puppy after it.

Wikinomics--Don Tapscott
Great book. Probably should have read it earlier (when TheExec first recommended it). I haven't decided if the premise of the book is undermined by the fact that the author's came to it based on proprietary research that they refused to make public--the exact kind of thing they say companies should get away from doing--but whatever. It takes "Wisdom of Crowds" to a new level without being gushing or absurd or nerdy.

Gonzo Marketing--Christopher Locke
Old but awesome. It's by one of the Cluetrain authors. The premise is strong--that marketing and creation online need to follow Hunter S Thompson's style of actively being engaged with the story as it happens--but the book is overwritten. And I mean really overwritten--like 100x worse than I am. He makes a cool analogy with Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and the way corporations look at internet communities.

The Greco-Persian War--Peter Green
Robert recommended this one to me. It is an incredibly clear and analytical history of the war that preceded the Peloponnesian war in Greece. It gives Themistocles his due and frames Thermopylae as the relatively minor part of the conflict that it was. If you read this you can probably fool people into thinking that you read Herodotus. For me, it was the best contemporary telling of Greek history that I have read.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is a really, really good idea. And Tim is the kind of guy that will meet all of them.

Like Tim asks, If you could choose only five people in the world to get to know in the 2008, who would they be? It can be anyone you want that is alive; people to help with business, people who interest you, etc. [His list: The Crystal Method band members, Rick Rubin, Jeff Corwin, Jamiroquai, Francis Ford-Coppola, Hayao Miyazaki]. Please provide a link to the person or an explanation who they are if its not very obvious.

My list of the five people I want to get to know this year:

1. Eminem
2. Mark Cuban
3. Marc Andreessen
4. Steven Pressfield
5. Umair Haque

--Tucker

I don't want to publish my list because I think it would be a little creepy to let the people know that I'm coming for them but I did make one for myself. It's a great idea for everyone to do the same. And Tim is 100% right, you wouldn't believe the people I have talked to (or was contacted by) because I put myself out there.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One thing I learned from Robert was that you always attack the strategy of your enemy. This sounds simple, but it's not. Most of the time, you're attacking the tactics--or just trying to beat them in the game they chose. (We have to outrun them to that hill as opposed to, what if we made that hill a worthless target) In general, a of his stuff is difficult to apply as a real, regular human. I don't dispute that absence increases fondness, but just getting up and leaving in the middle of relationship is complicated when you actually care about the person. But one thing you can always do in life is attack strategy. Figure out what it is, and then find a way to to interrupt it.

I found a perfect example when I was reading Wikinomics over the weekend. The writers talk about how in the 90's there was a huge push to patent gene sequences and research in the race to develop blockbuster drugs. From what I gathered, the idea was to isolate the gene that caused the disease and then develop and monopolize the drug that treats it by keeping the data locked away.

Merck was just one player in this scramble. Inevitably, it would have been a war of attrition to see who could grab the most patents and keep them the most secret. The strategy of their competitors was to be better at this than Merck was--to cut costs, be more efficient at it, invest more and to slowly gather patents as possible.

Instead of playing this game, Merck shocked the world by releasing 15,000 of their proprietary human gene sequences to the public and announcing that they would release the rest of them as they came about. And then the dynamics utterly changed. Merck's strength was never in researching genes, it was in developing and marketing drugs. So they attacked their competitor's strategy by making it obsolete--making it no longer a commodity. They turned their weakness in research--a battle that if they won, would be Pyhrric--and took it off the table. And then competed where they were strong--marketing, distribution and other infrastructure. Most important, they got access to everyone else's research when they were forced to follow their lead and make their patents public. And from what I gathered (although it's still ongoing) that's where they won.

Attacking strategy is a long-term plan. It's getting inside and disrupting. It's how you understand that even if you win otherwise, your victory is defined by the fact that you're reacting against someone else. That means you're focusing your energy in a lot of directions that you don't necessary wish to; it's full of waste and costs and friction. I am trying to to look at situations and go "what is their strategy?" and "can you I go around it?" instead of just accepting it as a given.

*More coming from Wikinomics, but you should read it if you haven't yet.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

There is a ton of stuff (inspired a bit by this post) I am trying to wrap my head around that I can't really teach myself or just need explained. I am having trouble understanding the second law of thermodynamics and specifically the concept of entropy. My eyes tend to blur over when I read about it but I want to know more.

So if someone knows the subject a little, I'd genuinely appreciate being taught or discussing it. [ryan holiday (at) gmail.com] I'll pay in books and dvds and cds that I get sent. I think I have some first edition printings of Tucker's book too.

And also, as some people have figured out, if you have questions, send them my way.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Others are learning from your mistakes. They watch you, and correct themselves where you fail. Should you, then, not be doing this as well? Standing back and objectively looking at where you work and where you don't. Then, most of all, making the necessary adjustments.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of my favorite feelings in the whole world is the day after an intense workout. I tried out this new ab workout a few weeks ago and I spent the following four days feeling like I'd been in a fight. Every month or so I do this sprint workout I learned a long time ago where you do a 40 then a 45 then a 50 then 55, 60, 65...all the way up to a 100 yards at a dead sprint (jogging back and 10-15 seconds of rest per). I did it twice, back to back. The next day I could barely get out of bed. Literally every part of my body ached, including for some reason, my arm pits.

I have a big shipment of books coming from Amazon and I am almost giddy to get to them. To see them in a week strewn about the floor--flagged and torn apart, stained with food and a dirty cover. To crack the spine like it was a person you hated, to conquer it, to absorb it and simultaneously refuel with it.

I like that better than I do the feeling of a lazy Sunday or sleeping in (although both are fantastic). Which only leads me to further believe, as Aristotle did, that happiness is the expression of excellence. And that more than anything, good spirits depend on creating a space in which you can do something that you like as best as you possibly can.

I have so much I want to write. So much to say. So much further to run. So much more to do. So much more to learn. But I suppose that if it didn't happen, if something happened and made all that impossible, I could shrug it off. Because yesterday, I did everything I fucking could. I was at full capacity.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I just wanted to say thanks for posting "On the Spartans and the Perfect Paper" on May 17. Your suggestion of Chuck Palahniuk's "Chorus Line" and the outline you put on really helped me structure a paper for a class I needed a good grade in. I pulled a C on my first paper because everything was too poorly held together. The A I got this time and the "This is a strong paper..." comment I attribute to utilizing your suggestions.

I just helped someone with a paper on the rise and fall of Themistocles. I sketched out an outline just to get them started and then later in the day as I was thinking about it, I wrote almost the entire paper in my head. It's actually a lot easier than it sounds. The outline required a Thesis, a sub-thesis for each paragraph and then a concluding realization--literally almost the entire paper. And the focus on the format, I guess, is misleading, because it doesn't really feel that way once you get good at it. With the thesis in mind I wrote the third paragraph first, a few sentences on the second and then conclusion.

That's how I write and how I try to work my overall strategy in life. It's called The Commander's Intent. What do you need to get done? [What are you trying to say] Identify the most basic and fundamental goals of the endeavor. [Thesis] And it all flows from there. The direction always dictates the details--not the other way around.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Trust your impulses, they have served you well. Remember, though, how many times they told you to shut-up, and the successes that have come from that. You are young, close your mouth. Pent up that energy and that passion and pour it all into a single indulgence of the tongue. The payoff will come from a combination of scarcity and selectiveness. Tone it down, too much noise.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The more I look at this Facebook situation, the more I am convinced that the fatal error came in attempting to change user bases, not in the poor advertising decision. I wrote this in June about coffee shops:

Some customers are better than others, and it's those customers who are always right. They can't all be because they don't all want the same thing. With an alarming regularity the needs of one group collides with another--the choice then is whose side to take? I say you take the ones who will make you the most money. You don't keep it quiet because it's the "right thing to do," you do it because that's what the customer is demanding.

They traded their core audience, college students, for the press and hype of the tech crowd and then were surprised that there was no loyalty. The TechCrunch 50,000 has been on Facebook for 6-8 months--they don't have anything vested in the network. They're not even the ideal usergroup for the service. So of course they turned against it and of course they're trying to kill it now. One of comments on the last post was right, the backlash against Facebook within the college community is far less. It doesn't matter, ultimately, because they've made the switch and left those people behind.

Tucker for instance is working with a company that can turn the Rudius collective into a social network. But that creates a deeply troubling problem: How do you maintain the community that you got you there in the first place? Undoubtedly, he could significantly increase the messageboard traffic if he lifted the draconian moderating process and let people post whatever and however they wanted. In the process though, he'd lose the loyal and talented people who built the community with him. In this case, the original audience is also the customer that is "always right" and they should be listened to. Those are the ones that make you the most money--because they actually care. And in a future where the physical costs of switching are a mouseclick, caring is all you have.

Note: I'm not sure you can fault someone for swapping a long-term, sustainable strategy [which I would also tag as "meaningful" and "real"] for a $15 billion dollar valuation. That's his price and it's probably a lot higher than most of ours.

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tore this book to pieces. My copy is overflowing with tabs. Seneca was a really interesting figure too. Like Hay's said in my interview with him, "not being a tyrant was something he had to work at one day at a time" and often, Seneca lost that battle. He was the Cardinal Richelieu behind Nero. He sat back and enjoyed the spoils of his student who had clearly lost his way--at least Aristotle didn't profit from Alexander's lust for power. Nevertheless, the book is profoundly insightful, it calls you to action, and it has that 'quit your fucking whining--this is life' attitude that so defines the Roman stoics. I put the quotes into the Quotes section, but here is Seneca on some important topics:

On doing more than consuming:

He should be delivering himself of such sayings, not memorizing them. It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. 'Zeno said this.' And what have you said? 'Cleanthes said that.' What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others? Assume authority over yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.

On endurance:

Life's no soft affair. It's a long road you've started on: you can't but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired and openly wish--a lie--for death.

On freedom from perturbation:

Show me a man who isn't a slave; one who is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his 'little old woman', a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. And there is no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.

On book quotes:

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. I shall send you, accordingly, the actual books themselves, and to save you a lot of trouble hunting all over the place for passages likely to be of use to you, I shall mark the passages so that you can turn straight away to the words I approve and admire."

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was trying to think yesterday about what I would do if I was just starting today. Like if I'd had just now come to the mindset I was in 2-3 years ago and wanted to crack into the industry(ies). Or, let's say I got fired and had to start completely over.

Henry Copeland said we're in a post-media world. Umair is calling it a post-consumer world. Maybe it's a post-college one as well. At least in the sense that the educational system simply cannot keep up with what is happening. By the time the US military got around to adopting maneuver warfare in the late 90's, the world had moved on to 4th Generation combat. Before you have time to understand something, it's already obsolete. The implications of that are profound. A good example, I'm reading this book right now called Gonzo Marketing by the author of Cluetrain Manifesto which is brilliant and totally right but it was written in 2001. It doesn't even mention Google, Youtube or blogs.

I'm just looking at it like--and I don't mean to rationalize my decision onto other people--that we might be past the point where college means anything. In my opinion, your average teenager is significantly smarter than any generation previous, regardless of what any standardized testing might show. Where I am now, mainly self-taught, well-read, connected, and with access--how would that have been possible 20 years ago? Tucker's reading list was an enormous contributing factor to that. In order for me to find that or something similar without the internet I would have had to a) know him personally b) be the child of a college professor. And even then how could I have possibly made sense of the material? I couldn't even have bought most of the books.

So I think that leaves the dilemma as such: How can you prepare now for a world in which traditional education is obsolete? How can you capitalize or leverage a world in which people are instantaneously connected and you have access to literally all the world's knowledge?

[*]If I wanted to break into finances or money management, I would become the best financial adviser to bloggers/web guys. Mike Davidson just told his company to MSNBC for $10 million dollars, and he's clearly looking for something to do with that money. I'd be tracking down personalized tips for each of these guys and giving them to them for free. And then I'd make this offer: "I know I'm young, but what if you let me manage $5,000 of your money? I double in the next 12 months. And I'm playing with my money too--so this isn't a joke." What resources does a major brokerage have that you don't at this point? Insider information, maybe. People want to make money but they also want to work with people they like, who understand their goals and show they have potential. And I would write about the entire process as it happened.

Or of course, you could be an intern for 2 years and pray someone throws you a few nuggets of wisdom along with the abuse as this whole thing passes you buy. All you need is one guy to create enough trust to let you break your back for one person and if you deliver, that whole world is open to you. When Kevin Rose sells digg, don't you think he'll ask Mike where he put his money?

[*]I'd become a personal RSS reader for one or two of the big bloggers. "You'll like this article." "Do you read this blog? He hits a lot of the same themes that you do." "I'm hearing rumors that ____ is going to acquire ______, just wanted to give you a heads up." And I would tailor the results for that person based on what I know they like. I would kill myself doing it. Every day, 5-10 articles. And then I would start to integrate commentary or questions. Become the guy that they get their information from, the person that keeps them connected to the pulse. Maybe one week I'd take a break and send nothing, just to highlight the difference. The ultimate end game being that they would start to send you out to find things for them: "What can you tell me about ________" Yes, you're a research bitch but in the end, you come away with something that even the person you're serving doesn't--not just a vast reserve of knowledge but the ability to find out where it is coming from

[*]I'd copy Muhammad Saleem and become one of the top contributors on one of the social media sites like Digg or Del.icio.us. But I'd twist it a little. I'd identify sites that were tracking well and poised to really pick up and then I'd email them and say "Hey, I know it's awkward to submit your own stuff on Digg but I have a pretty good reputation on the site, if you'd like to start submitting your stuff to me I will post the links I like." Become the easy connection between social networking and the content creators with your own editorial voice. And then you might find that they start writing for you--which is real power.

There are a ton more ways to do it but my point is this: All the things you're supposedly going to school for (unless you're going to be a doctor) you could be doing right now. No one knows who you are on the internet. All the BLINK biases and constraints are gone. So why aren't you?

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage." That is how bad your life can get.--Fight Club

Whatever. Hanno the new puppy:

Posted by Ryan Clark Holiday at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)