It’s less messy to think that way, sure. And comforting. It may even briefly be lucrative. But that is not how it really works. As much as a part of me wishes I could live in that universe, I don’t and can’t. It’s not how you get things done.

“See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it.”

That is Richard Feynman. What he’s talking about is the flipness of pseudo-science and the false confidence of delusion. Everything about the internet enables those impulses. From the segmentation to the lack of accountability, we forget what it really takes to know something. How hard it is to be truly sure.

That comes from rigor and discipline. From humility and understatement.  It comes practices, checklists, from methods, and the scientific method. It comes from staying up late reading, not blogging. It comes from having deep connections with a handful of smart people who push you to be better, not networking. It comes from separating ideas from your identity—so you can pick up, discard, pick up, rearrange, discard and pick them up at whim.

To really study something almost inevitably eliminates the desire to talk about it. You don’t need to intimidate other people because you’re too busy checking your own assumptions to bother worrying about theirs. You’re not out trying to sell your theory to random people on the internet (and calling it Ryan’s Law or some indulgent shit) because you’re selling it to people who matter—people who actually pay you for your ideas.

All this takes time. That is, it can’t be done in real-time. So be patient and quiet and do the work. Check the experiments and put in the care. Then you start to know what it really means to know something.

I couldn’t actually narrow it down to 3 exactly, but I tried my best. Below are the my favorite books for the year and the ones that made the biggest impact on me. There is no question they are worth reading and your time.

The Works of John Fante by John Fante
I found John Fante through Neil Strauss, who considers Ask the Dust one of his favorite books. I read it in one day, LOVED it and subsequently read everything by Fante I could get my hands on. In 2011, I read seven Fante novels, one biography by his son and a book of letters between John and H.L Mencken. I utterly immersed myself in his world, from spending hours in Downtown LA where the books are based to reading everything I could find by his contemporaries. I even found out one of his novels is set in the random Northern California town I grew up in and that Fante lived just down the road from where I lived. NO fiction writer made a bigger impact on me this year and there were no book I enjoyed reading more (or read faster) than Fante’s books. My favorites, in order, are: Ask the Dust, Dreams from Bunker Hill, The Brotherhood of the Grape, Full of Life, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, The Road to Los Angeles, 1933 Was a Bad Year. Once you read those, you will almost certainly enjoy Fante/Mencken, and Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving.

Sherman: Solider, Realist, American by B.H Liddel Hart
This was someone I knew little about before the year began, and by the end of it found myself referencing and thinking of him constantly. It is equal parts due to the greatest of the man himself and to Hart’s vivid and engrossing portrait. I almost feel like I have lost something not having known this of him my whole life. There is a stunningly profound quote from Hart in the book that I’ll paraphrase here that defines his genius: Sherman’s success was rooted in his grasp that the way to success is strategically along the line of least expectation and tactically along the line of least resistance. It is that kind of thinking that immediately displaces any preceding notions about Sherman’s reputation as a general or a legend. All these myths belies his strategic acumen, his mastery of terrain and his deep understanding of statesmanship and politics. There is much to learn from the man and this biographer—who himself was a great strategist and mind—so if you are going to read one biography this year, read Sherman: Solider, Realist, American.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Surival by John Vaillant
Holy shit, this book is good. Just holy shit. Even if it was just the main narrative–the chase to kill a man-eating Tiger in Siberia in post-communist Russia–it would be worth reading, but it is so much more than that. The author explains the Russian psyche, the psyche of man vs predator, the psyches of primitive peoples and animals, in such a masterful way that you’re shocked to find 1) that he knows this, and 2) that he fit it all into this readable and relatively short book. You may have heard about the story on the internet a while back: a tiger starts killing people in Russia and a team is sent to kill it (Russia is so fucked up, they already have a team for this). At one point, the tiger is cornered and leaps to attack the team leader…and in mid-air the soldier’s rifle goes into the tigers open jaws and down his throat all the way to the stock, killing the tiger at the last possible second. The autopsy later revealed that the tiger had been shot something like a dozen times during its life and lived. The story is very similar to that of the Tsavo maneaters, which was turned into the underrated Val Kilmer movie The Ghost and the Darkness. There are all sorts of well-selected threads from evolutionary psychology and biology in this book and it makes the book a self-educator’s dream. You can pick and choose which ones you want to follow next–trusting safely that the author has pointed you in an interesting and valuable direction. But that’s just the meta-stuff that is a bonus with this book, and it’s worth pointing out only because the rest of the book is just so fucking interesting and exciting.

Welcome to narcissistic injury. To paraphrase Epicurus, we—the narcissistically inclined—live in an unwalled city. Everything is a threat to the fragile self. Illusions, accomplishments, these are not defenses. Not when you’ve got the special, sensitive antennae trained to receive (and create) the signals that challenge your precarious balancing act.

They hang out with somebody else, it means they don’t want to hang out with you. They don’t ask how you were feeling, it’s because you don’t matter. They do something you don’t like, it’s because they know you don’t like it and did it anyway. And these are the straightforward, almost-logical kinds of slights. From there it descends into hopelessly opaque list of unrelated and seemingly banal events with one commonality: a twisted, selfish interpretation that it somehow said something about me (and how woefully awry things went from that faulty premise)

It is a miserable way to live, whatever the degree of your affliction. Deep down this is all a fear about  existence. And to have trivial events make you feel as though you do not exist, is a constant and unavoidable source of aggravation (torture). That’s the consequence of trying to determine your identity through external things—making it possible for it to be challenged by the things that other people say or do, no matter how unrelated to you they actually are. So go the risks of allowing your identity to be anything but secure and intrinsic (to say nothing of delusions of grandiosity).

The solution, well, I don’t know if there is one. But it seems to get better with therapy—rigorous, introspective and committed therapy. It is possible to rewire the brain, but it takes a lot of work. For me, practicing a different take on empathy has been helpful (or at least, humbling). To realize that other people have as much to wrongly interpret from your actions as you do from theirs. And that there is a feedback loop between these worldviews. So too, with contemptuous expressions. The less you puff, the less there is to pop.

Aware of all this, you must do your best to just stop, and take things as they are. Remind yourself: this doesn’t say anything about me—because external things cannot—and, even if it literally did, I don’t have to let it bother me. I don’t need to hear it, let alone agree with it. It has nothing to do with my identity, my existence or anything foolish like that. Because narcissistic injury is by definition a self-injury. Figure out why you feel the need to inflict it.

“Could it be that we fill out our lives, experience all that we experience, and then simply leave this world and are forgotten? I can’t bear thinking that existence is so insubstantial, a stone thrown in a pond that leaves no ripple.” Susan Orlean, Rin Tin Tin

Just because you can’t bear it, doesn’t mean that it’s not the case. To think otherwise, is to argue with reality.

To these impulses, we should think like one of Lincoln’s biographers,who responding to the President’s claim that European allies seemed to care more about tiny Northern defeats than his major victories, said simply: “Unreasonable it may have been, but it it was a reality.”

Soldiers can be refreshingly full of this pragmatism. After the Vietnam War, Col. Harry G. Summers argued with a North Vietnamese colonel, and tried to point out that the US was never beaten on the battlefield. The man replied: “That is true. It is also irrelevant.”

That some thought seems unbearable—be it insignificance or unfairness—is exactly why we must struggle with it and try to. Because our opinion on it has nothing to do with whether we have to put up with it.  It’s a good metaphor for what life in this universe is: a situation we’re stuck with. We were born far along in its existence and we will die long before it changes or ends. Its conditions were created in a distant past beyond our comprehension through organic, emergent forces powerful beyond our measure. The sooner we can get over this, come to terms with it, and accept our infinitesimalness, the sooner we may be able to live properly and with perspective.

It doesn’t extend that everything is meaningless or without purpose, rather that those human notions count only in the immediate present. Your opinion. Your technicalities. Your endless objections. They have no effect. There is no grand record that you may enter them into. What you have is in front of you. What you have is what happens. Focus on that. For it is all that you control.

They make their choices as if time is infinite and as if it will all be handed to them. As a young man, Bill Bradley used to tell himself that when he was not practicing, someone else was and that when he finally met that person, they—not he—would win. These people do not practice and yet expect to win. And they are disappointed and disillusioned when that doesn’t happen.

You’re given a deadline. What does this mean to you? To me it means nothing. I have my own deadlines. They are tighter and shorter. You are told that the system works a certain way. What does this mean to you? It means little to me. I have my own knowledge, my own education. I’ll learn the best way, not the way to do things. You see that most people life their life a certain way. This too means absolutely nothing. Most people are miserable, self-loathing and passive. No thanks.

When I was a 19 year old college dropout with no experience in the field I was operating in, out-working and out-producing people twice my age, I realized something. I realized that there was very little out there that was so hard or difficult that I couldn’t figure out and excel at so long as I followed my own rules and held myself to my own standards. And so I was able to do this repeatedly, from Hollywood to publishing to fashion and now to writing.

It is a special kind of freedom. It is the freedom from the tyranny of acting ordinarily and expecting extraordinary results (the definition of futility). Total commitment. This is what it takes. It’s more than just wanting—it’s making it happen.

There you can experience what Hadot calls the “oceaniac feeling.” A sense of belonging to something larger, to realize that “human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity.” It is in this instance, that you can ask yourself the important questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in this world?

The battlefield at Vicksburg. The canals and palazzos of Venice. The forum in Rome. The streets of Tombstone. Old South Meeting House in Boston, the grounds of Harvard. The Hangman’s Elm in Washington Square Park. I’ve spent a lot of time in the American South. Part of the reason I like it is for its hallowed ground potential. Huey Long trained at the gym where I work out. As far as I know, the heavy bag I hit is still in the same place he learned to box. The building I write this in is 200 years old. How many people have passed through it? Wasted time? Enjoyed themselves?

I don’t always even need to physically step in these places or, if I do, spend more than just a few moments. I’ve driven slowly through the streets of old Birmingham, I didn’t really see why I needed to get out of the car. The thoughts are the same.

Violence. Money. Death. Politics. Sex. These are the themes of humanity. Nothing makes this clearer than hallowed ground of every era. To see your face in a statue and understand how little has changed since then—since before and as it will be forever after. Here a great man once stood. Here another one died. Here a cruel rich man lived in this palatial home…

Yet where are they now? Nowhere. Their works? Mostly gone. As William Alexander Percy wrote, even most extraordinary individuals like his father, “who warmed and led and lighted our people,” are barely remembered. Their name and deeds will be soon forgotten. And ours, which pale in comparison to theirs, will too. What does it matter if “soon” means tomorrow or 1,000 years from now? This is what hallowed ground can teach us.

We are left only with first principals: be a good person; do what you love. Contribute your little bit to the universe before it swallows you up and be happy with that. On hallowed ground,  we can channel the energy of the accomplishments of the people who came before it, the passage of time having long stripped them of their vanity, and direct it properly in our own lives.

Of course, it is possible to take the wrong lesson from hallowed ground. Like Caesar, weeping at the sight of a statue of Alexander, that’d he’d conquered fewer nations in the same amount of time. It should not spur our ambition, but chasten it. It is a flash lesson in humility. We are put in our place, and yet at the same time, left with a sense of the magnitude of possibilities.

We read the biographies of great men and see similarities in ourselves. We see a plaque for a division that fought and was slaughtered, and it might pain us to know that we’ll likely never warrant even a generalized marker like that. We fail to realize all of these events are just blips on the larger radar of life. The difference in posthumous recognition between Ulysses S. Grant and an infantryman means nothing to either of them. And in turn between Grant and a greater general—Ghenghis Khan, let’s say—matters less still, even though one’s achievements echo louder and have for longer than the other. All dead. All trod upon by you and I today.

Take comfort in that fact. That decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennia earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt the same things you feel, struggled with the same thoughts. They have no idea that you exist, but you know that they did. Embrace the power of this position and learn from it. It is an exhilarating moment, let it propel you.

Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, because it helps you reconcile yourself a bit better with the mundane. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain today, and that anyone can go and—to quote Murakami—breath death into their lungs like a fine dust. Breath it in so it becomes a part of you. Do it as often as you can, whenever you can: go and stand on hallowed ground.

For this plug in any sort of exercise, spiritual or physical. And for marathon, you can plug any of the pointless competitions, recitals, readings, exhibitions and other bullshit forms of external validation that we try to graft on to intrinsically valuable pursuits.

Getting up and going for a run everyday doesn’t need to be “justified” a few months later by competing to finish an arbitrary number of miles in a certain amount of time against a bunch of other unhappy losers. No, you run because keeping a healthy body and clear mind is part of your job as a human being. Because its a commitment you made to yourself that you’re obligated to keep no matter how tired, how busy or how burn out you feel. In other words, it’s practice—proof of your ability—in always having a little bit extra in you.

We slap these things on because we want to ruin them. We are afraid. We are afraid of making ourselves the project. So we trivialize it with some meaningless goal. This way it’s not our responsibility or our burden, only some activity we engage in. It’s an obligation with an expiration date. We’ll never have to question why we do it, why it’s the right thing to do, because there is a nice big easy answer: the race, the Bible, whatever.

And then we wonder why it never fills the void. Then we die and realize there is no heaven and that we missed the entire fucking point.

In practice:

First, to be fair and honorable. To make mistakes and know it—and forgive them. Don’t slow down traffic or recline your seat on airplanes or any such other make-the-world-worse, externalizing nonsense. Know others and think of them often. Pick up the check whenever you can. And try to do these things with one word in mind: unconditional.

Being good at something is not sufficient reason to do it for the rest of your life. But loving it is. Work on the things that make you stare out car windows or not even hear someone say your name repeatedly. The things that make you forget what time it is. Be certain that what you do for hobbies and vacations are not the gasps of a suffocating man but your common breath. Learn how to love many things, simple things, and it’s even easier to do them all the time.

Frankl reframed the now cliche question of “What’s the meaning of life?” to one that we answer instead of ask. We’ve been asked this by life, he said, and we must answer with our actions. The way to do this, in my view, is simple: be a good person; do what you love.

Pierre Hadot deduced from the Stoic writers the concept of the “inner citadel.” It was a protected core that could be depended on, counted on for protection and strength. For a philosophy, that meant a series of robust principles that provided guidance in every situation. I try to expand this metaphor in my daily life. Our routine, our choices about what we do and what we own, can be pared down and turned into a source of strength. It’s not about compulsive regulation. On the contrary it’s about reducing the needless varieties so you can introduce novel ones without hesitation. (Like quitting a job the second you’re unhappy with it.) Experiment with important things, not how you look.

When you stock your life with things you can depend on and things you can trust, it frees up precious resources. You can say, this is who I am and what I do, I don’t need to put any stock in all that other nonsense. You don’t need to read Hypebeast or those other sites. You don’t need a car to say anything about you because you’ve got one that works that you’re planning to drive into the ground. You can look yourself in the mirror and have no problem with the choices you make or products you endorse. I don’t recall the last time I went shopping. Not because I don’t need things, I do, it’s that I don’t need to look for things. I know what I want. I may go to stores, but I don’t shop.

This is a critical difference and one that is often lost in discussions about sustainability. The real waste is not in materials but in the pointless consumer cycle—that each season or year, companies turn over their entire product offering. They design, produce, market and sell anew constantly. This is redundant and incredibly costly. The slate is wiped clear. Most of the equity earned with last year’s products is discarded and reacquired.

It’s costly for customers too. The real waste is externalized to us, and we are the least equipped to deal with these loses. Hidden in the array of our things were the seconds you spent thinking about them; hidden in the few dollars you saved in price was the unreliability and the unfamiliarity; hidden in it all was the opportunity costs. To be jerked around this way and that way is to be worse than a sheep (who at least is led rationally by a shepherd). It is to be an inanimate object, complete subject to outside forces beyond its control, never allowed to focus on what is important.

The question inevitably becomes well, what is important? The answer: basically everything else. When you limit your choices and variety down, you not only fore a more resilient core—an inner citadel—but you can prioritize further still. (It’s why Seneca and Montaigne practiced poverty on a monthly basis, it allowed them to see clearly what was necessary and what was optional.) You also have more time for others. For your duties. For doing nothing if not to reflect on the fact that you can take none of this when you die—and that that death is not so far away.



Inspired partially by Ben Casnocha’s list, here are some of ‘my things,’ all of which I’ve owned dozens of by now*:



Morning Ritual: I take 8-10 1,000mg fish oil pills (which help with a million things, including depression), gummy vitamins (seriously) and eat 3 eggs, Niman Ranch sliced ham and black beans. With my drink, I usually do two spoonfuls of Mila Chia Seeds.
Food: I do a modified paleo diet, with one cheat day (more on why here)
Pants: American Apparel Schoolboy Pant (for dressier, Bonobos makes a good men’s pant)
Shorts: Lulu Lemon Run Response Short
T-Shirt: Tri-blend or Power Washed
Outerwear: Dov’s Hoody and Winter Jacket from American Apparel
Shoes: Sperry Top Sider
Running/Working Out: Nike Free’s 5.0 (I hate how they keep changing it.) Lulu Lemon Run Response Short. Lulu Lemon Metal Vent Shirt (kills bacteria that smells)

Books: Amazon, always, with Amazon Prime (if its an old book or translation, I stick with Penguin or Modern Library)

*
I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how I can wear or only afford these things because of my job. Only someone trying to rationalize their own situation would claim it was so black and white. We’ve talked plenty about making your own rules. I make mine.


At 24, Ryan [pictured right] is a year older than me. I’ve viewed his blog as a kind of counsel since I first became aware of his work. His thinking and writing has, in turn, shaped my thinking and writing. It is fair to say that I wouldn’t be on the path I am now if I hadn’t been closely studying another young male on the other side of the world, fearlessly kicking down doors in search and pursuit of his goals. For a couple of years, Ryan’s ambition, persistence and confidence all directly influenced my day-to-day thoughts and actions. Which is another statement that will make Ryan blush, because it’s a pretty fucking weird thing to type, let alone think.

I am having to put a press kit together and prep for some media stuff anyway, so if anyone wants we can do an open Q&A in the comments. It’d be helpful to me and I know a lot of you have questions since you email them to me. We can talk about anything that is on your mind or anything you feel like I haven’t addressed before.