5 Things Ryan Holiday Taught Me
#2: Become the master of the mundane.
His name makes me want to take a vacation and I ain’t mad at it. I don’t just read Ryan’s work because of his last name.
The work of Ryan Holiday is game-changing. Ryan introduced me to stoicism, which for simple folk just means ancient wisdom. Roman emperors from hundreds of years ago were dropping self-improvement bombs and had no idea, or no social media to share their thoughts. So, they wrote their thoughts down in books and diaries, and wham bam thank you mam, Mr Holiday stumbled across them centuries later.
Ye holy one (Ryan) then turned this ancient wisdom into books. Books everywhere, there was. The most popular book he wrote was Obstacle Is The Way, shortly followed by my favorite, Stillness Is The Key.
There was just one problem on his hero’s journey to teach people ancient wisdom: attention spans. The average human disguised as a goldfish looking at a cell phone couldn’t always be bothered to read Ryan’s books. Unless you’d had Ryan’s work recommended to you a dozen times by a woman as wise as Oprah, you were unlikely to take your holiday leave (see what I did there — genius I tell ya!) and spend it reading his books. Books can be a bad investment for a modern-day person with a bright screen.
Thankfully, Ryan had a flash of his own wisdom. Stardust fell from the sky, lightning struck, and Tim Ferriss left the logwood fire with his dog Molly and got out his phone full of dust (from not being used [self-help pro, seriously]), and said: “Hey Ryan, you need to start sharing your writing in short blog posts.” The blog of Ryan Holiday was born not too far away from my own.
He didn’t teach me in person, but he did teach me every day through his short blog posts. Some of the lessons came from his life and others came from the lives of people he studied vigorously. Ryan has played with a few of the lessons and others have been left untouched. (Let’s credit everything Ryan says to him because Marcus Aurelius is dead and can’t collect the royalty check or publish picture quotes on Insta anymore. Your call. #POW)
To save you time and share the wisdom of Ryan Holiday, here is a heavily curated list of five things he taught me and they will help you too.
Saying Yes Is Giving Away a Piece of Your Life
What you say yes to determines how much time you have leftover to do what you love (in my case, write).
There are millions of ways to say no, including Derek Sivers’s famous question of “Does the ‘ask’ make you say Hell Yes?” But Ryan taught me an even better way to think about what to say yes to.
Every ask of your time is really a request of a piece of your life. And then comes the gold from Ryan: “usually in exchange for something you don’t even want.”
This lesson from Ryan has helped me a lot. Do you really want the thing you are saying yes to? Is that thing you want really worth trading a piece of your life to obtain? The framing of this question is overly dramatic and that’s why it makes saying no so much easier.
Become the Master of the Mundane
Ryan loves the moments between moments. The desire to chase the holy grail of “quality time” seems useless to him.
“Some of my best writing and thinking have come when I was stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be, or doing something I didn’t want to do.”
He teaches us that the moment right in front of us is the best no matter where we are. You could be doing some sh*tty mundane task you dislike, like taking out the trash or driving your parents to the airport, and still find a way to enjoy it.
The mundane moments produce unpredictability and that can be when you do your best thinking or have the greatest life experiences.
If all you do is try and have quality time and produce highlight-reel-worthy moments, you waste all the in-between time and no person who doesn’t want to experience extreme regret can afford to waste their life away like this.
The present moment is the good moment.
Ego Is the Enemy
This is one of the titles of another book Ryan wrote. After reading it, I went on the warpath to reduce my ego. It’s why I write so much about rejecting the influencer movement, doing away with selfies, parking the Lambo in the garage, and writing to be helpful instead of famous.
All of these ideas started with Ryan’s insistence that ego is the enemy.
The moment you think life is about you, you’ve missed the entire point. You run the risk of living a life of selfishness that can push everybody worth being around away from you. Your ego jabs you in the eye and says things like:
“You’re way better than that person.”
“You’ve worked too hard and you deserve to be rewarded.”
“You’re so much smarter than that person so ignore the haters.”
Thoughts of being the smartest person in the room who is overdue for a reward and is better in every way than everybody else is a huge master plan for failure with a capital “F.”
Your own sense of importance is lying to you. You are just a tiny bit of human matter made up of star dust from thousands of years ago. You will spend a millisecond of Earth’s history walking on this planet and then be gone. This is not an outcome you should be unhappy with though.
Knowing you’re not so important sets you free. Opinions, critics and all the small stuff you worry about will, for the most part, go away when you understand your ego is the enemy and there’s an easy way to defeat it.
The Upside of Internet That Can Barely Stream Netflix
When Ryan moved from Austin Texas, out of town to live on a farm, he found he had bad cell phone coverage and internet that could barely stream Netflix.
His life accidentally became about building something: in his case, a farm. The joy of seeing his farm grow, fixing fences and trimming grass was far more satisfying to him after a few years than watching what other people had built by consuming endless Netflix shows.
This idea of building your own thing vs. watching someone else build theirs really stayed with me. It is a useful lesson that helps you choose how you’ll divide up your time between creating and consuming.
Nothing beats the joy of looking at something you’ve built yourself.
The Life-Changing Magic of Having ‘Enough’
Where does the path to wanting more ever end? Does the billionaire have enough money or has the writer written enough viral blog posts or has the runner won enough gold medals?
Ask people who have achieved these extreme feats and they will tell you no. It’s almost never enough and that is the problem in disguise. Ryan changed my perspective when he said “Having enough comes from the inside.” He urges us to see our life’s work differently and understand at the deepest level that having more is not the answer.
The answer is, you already have enough. Start from that place and then see how what you create takes on an entirely different form that makes you proud when you look back.
Ryan will help you beat yesterday using conventional wisdom. He is a reminder that simple is life-changing, and having less is having more. The lessons of the past have just as much value today and Ryan’s lifelong pursuit to bring back ancient wisdom, give it a spit shine, and break it down into short blog posts anybody can read has the potential to help you through uncertain times.
The current state of the world gets a little easier to accept when you’ve got hundreds of years of evidence to back up the notion “everything works out for the better.” All you need is what you have.
