Heroic Interview: Ego is the Enemy with Ryan Holiday

You're listening to Ego is the Enemy, an Optimal living interview with Ryan Holiday and Brian Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm truly thrilled to be connecting with Ryan Holiday. Ryan's newest book, Ego is the Enemy, is what we're going to talk about. And last year one of my favorite books was the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan. And if you haven't checked that out yet, check it out. I consider it pretty much a must read, particularly if you want to deal with challenges and just eat challenges as fuel for your actualization. This book I was really excited about after our last interview. He told me about it briefly. I said, awesome, can't wait to see it. Got an advanced copy. And it's just so spot on with how I'm striving to show up and what I think the world needs more of which is more character, less ego, more long term mastery, and just awesome. So I'm really looking forward to talking about some of my favorite big ideas. Ryan's got a fascinating story. Dropped out of College at 19 to apprentice with Robert Greene. He wrote the 48 Laws of Power, which I haven't covered yet, but he wrote another book called Mastery that I absolutely love. And we did an interview with Robert as well. Ryan, really appreciate you and your energy and wisdom and excited to chat.

No, thank you. It's always good to talk to you.

All right, let's start at the top. Easy. Ego is the Enemy book title and tattoo, is that correct?

Yeah, I've got the Obstacle Is the Way on one arm, which was my last book, and then I have Ego Is the Enemy on the other. And it's not so much to commemorate the fact that they're books, but they're reminders to myself of these two things that I think are sort of central day to day maxims that I want to be thinking about, you know, whatever I happen to be doing. It's hard for me not to look at my arm. And so that's why I put them there.

That's great. Well, I want to hear more about that. I'll do a quick aside. I want to put arete, the classic Greek virtue, on my arm. My wife is not allowing me to until we conceive, God willing, our second child. So you further inspired me to make that a permanent tribute. But tell us what that means. Ego is the enemy. What does that mean?

I mean, I don't think it needs to be overthought. It's pretty straightforward. It's this idea of ego being the worst possible element that you could introduce into essentially any situation. It prevents you from being rational, prevents you from being patient. It prevents you from being fair. It prevents you from being clear headed and objective and calm about a given situation. And it makes whatever you happen to be facing, whether it's a really good thing or, or a really bad thing, more difficult to manage.

So let's define ego because one of the things I talk about in my work is I use more of a Freudian sense of ego. And I often make the case that, look, we don't want to annihilate the thing that's keeping us in the game and that we need to have a strong sense of self. And in my parlance, I tend to call that the strong, healthy ego. And you make a really clear distinction between Freudian psychology and just define ego for us as we're going to use it in this conversation and you do anything.

Yeah, you're right. I'm not using it in the Freudian sense at all. I'm using it in the colloquial sense. Like when you go, man, that dude has an enormous ego, right? You're not saying, oh, he has a very strong sense of self. You're saying he's an arrogant, insufferable, delusional, unpleasant person who is his own worst enemy. Essentially. Bill Walsh says ego is when confidence becomes arrogance. I think it's important to make the distinction between confidence, which I believe is earned based on accomplishment and effort, and ego, which is delusional projection and wishful thinking.

That's awesome. And then unhealthy belief in your own importance. As I look at my notes on the book just so succinctly and I love the. You know it when you see it. Not tough to see. And of course all of us who. And obviously this is an important theme for you because my hunch is we're dealing with it. You know, ambitious human beings who want to make a difference in the world can get a little bit too into our own image, right? And how do we tame that, et cetera. So let's talk about how to do that. Ryan walks us through three kind of phases in our life which are cyclical, repeating, et cetera, aspire, success and failure. These three phases are the three sections of the book in which really cool, short, impactful chapters bring the points home. I want to start with a flash in the pan. Let's be more than a flash in the pan. Tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, look, as someone who is successful early in life, one of My sort of perpetual fears was that, you know, I'm just peaking early and we sort of all regress towards the mean. And I think one of the things, you know, you mentioned Robert Greene, one of the things he's talking about in Mastery is, look, this isn't about getting pretty good really quickly. This is about getting absolutely amazing and peerless at something, but over a long period of time. I think one of the things that ego was so seductive about ego is ego is looking for hacks and shortcuts and trying to get the most, the soonest and trying to have this stuff right now. You want the sexy fun part. Whereas someone who has maybe a larger sense of purpose or a sense of dedication to a given path is going to be able to be a bit more patient and sort of in it for the long haul. I think, for instance, for me as a writer, this is something I'm trying to do until literally the morning of the day that I die. Hopefully I want to do it forever. And so you've got to think about that. Are there things I could do to make money from writing right now? Absolutely. Would those things maybe raise my profile or give me a bit more attention? Probably. Are they going to help me continue to do this thing for the next 50 years? Probably not. Taking ego out of the equation allows you to see that trade off a bit more objectively. Instead of saying, what can I do that will get me the most attention right now? Which is what ego wants. It wants validation and the spotlight above anything else.

This is awesome. And Ryan does a lot of marketing consulting as well. And I didn't mention head of marketing for American Apparel at some ridiculously young age, which was that early part of the early success. Just talking about successful books, etc. And you provided some great wisdom for me in our business and how we're approaching things. I'm wondering if you'd be open to sharing. What does that mean for you? So what are the decisions you're making? Like what could you be doing? You're saying, no, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to do this instead. Can you make it more concrete?

Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a lot of things, you know, could I put my face on the COVID and make myself, you know, like a guru esque figure? Probably. Could I put run a bunch of ads for myself all over the place? Could I write really seductive? I'm a great copywriter, it's what I do professionally. But you don't see me writing those misleading but effective sales Letters. I'm not out there endorsing products. I'm trying to say, look, what matters to me is that I write books that matter to people that sell over a long period of time. I'll give you a very specific example. My first book was a controversial marketing title. When I went to my publisher with my second book and said, hey, I want to write a book about an obscure school of an ancient philosophy, that's not the playbook, that's not the next move, typically. But I knew I sensed something in this material and I was willing to invest. I took less than half for that second book than I took for the first book. Then when I sold this book, I sold it before that one came out. I wasn't concerned with how it was going to do. I sort of had a plan for myself of writing a series of books about practical philosophy. And what mattered to me was getting them into existence, not, say, maximizing the amount of revenue I can make from them in the short term or marketing them and bleeding them of every possible reader. In 2014 and 2015, it's. I want that book to be selling through 2020 and 2030 and ideally for as long as I live. So it's about. In some ways, it's about looking at what all the people around you are doing and how they're making money and ask yourself, is this sustainable? Is this a fad? Or is this still going to be here in a while and maybe only dedicating yourself to the things that are really going to last and really only making the work that's going to last. Whereas you might be able to get a lot of short term attention for the 10 marketing tips that every company needs to know right now, versus maybe a more thoughtful piece that's going to change someone's life or develop a real authentic connection with someone.

Yeah, that's awesome. I really appreciate the personal examples and I also want to. The next idea I want to explore is the. So you're taking all that time that you could be spending doing these things and you're putting it into mastering your craft, is my guess.

Sure, yeah. There's a story I told in the book that I really liked from George Marshall where he's forced. Being who he was at this time, he's forced to sit for a portrait. And so he goes and he sits for this portrait and day after day the painter's painting them and they talk. And it takes a couple weeks, whatever it takes. And then the painter goes, all right, you're done. You're good to Go. And. And Marshall gets up to leave, and he starts to walk out the door, and the painter says, don't you want to see the painting? And he's like, no, I'm good. And it's like, look. What does he need to look at a picture of himself for? When you're just starting out in your career, you sort of take every single marketing opportunity that you could possibly get because you're so sort of desperate for attention, and you think that all this marketing is what's really going to grow your brand and get you out into the world. To a certain extent, you're right. The enemy early on is obscurity, not anything else. You're doing all this marketing stuff. But as you get more successful and as you begin to build an audience who is loyal to your work, you start to realize, hey, every minute or hour that I spend on some podcast or going back and forth with the reporter or meeting someone for some radio interview or whatever it is, this is all precious time being taken away from your work. You start to realize, oh, wait, there's a trade off here. And if I want to be as good at this thing as I am committed to being, I've got to be very selective with the shots that I take and the, you know, the marketing and promotional commitments that I take on. And I think. I think, you know, that's what I sort of read into that George Marshall story. It's like he knew he had to sit for the portrait. He knew it mattered, and he knew, you know, maybe he promised someone that he would do it, but he's not going to waste one additional minute looking at the thing. He's got a job that he wants to get back to.

It's so good. And it's not about him. It's not about his ego, and it's about service and giving his best to the world. And to. To bring the point home, the COVID of the book is not a picture of Ryan Holiday as dashing as he is. It is a picture of a Roman statue without a head. And that idea of. For me, when I look at that, it's kind of that stoic ideal that is such a big part of your work. And again, that egolessness of, let's just be good human beings. Right? Virtuous human beings.

Yeah, I think that's right. We tend to focus on. Purely on improving ourselves professionally rather than personally. And I don't. I think the link is. I think the link goes one direction, but not the other direction. I think when we make ourselves better, we get better at what we do. When we make ourselves better at what we do, it doesn't necessarily have the same transferable effect. And so I'd rather focus on how can I strip myself of vanity, of ego, of selfishness, knowing that that's ultimately going to have a massive impact on my work and my ability to relate with an audience that's so powerful.

I often joke that there's often an inverse relationship between one's depth of wisdom and their current reach. Because they were spending so much of the time in the marketing and self promotion, there's just no time left over for the true deep work and mastery. Whole other conversation that.

No, I think that's right. I think particularly as someone who is also a professional in a field which is sort of marketing and strategic advising, I see a lot of people who are traveling constantly giving speeches and all this stuff, and I wonder, how could they really be on top of what they're talking about, considering they're on the road 250 days a year? They don't actually have time to do the work. It's like, do you want to get medical advice from Dr. Phil, who's not even a real licensed doctor anymore, or do you want to get advice from maybe a Dr. Drew, who still has a practice that he maintains and does this other stuff on the side? And so it's a balance, certainly.

Yeah. That's great. I was just looking at my notes on Stephen Covey's primary greatness, and he shares the Latin phrase, esse quam videre. To be rather than to seem. Right. And just that essence of who are we? Which we're gonna get to in a moment. You described it as make it so you don't have to fake it. Which I.

Well, no, And I tell the story of John Boyd in the book, who would give this famous speech to every sort of young acolyte of his. He would say, to be or to do like, you come to a fork in the road and you have to choose. Are you gonna be an impressive person or are you gonna do impressive things? Things. And. And, you know, I think that. And his emphasis is on the doing. You know, do you want to. Do you want to accomplish things or do you want to look like you're someone who accomplishes things?

Yeah. And then in his case, and you tell the story so well, he basically, you know, was so committed to his ideals and so not into the. The fame that he got none of the recognition, but completely changed our conception of so much of the world. Right?

Yep, exactly.

Awesome. So let's talk about mastery. You asked the playful question, is it 10,000 hours or is it 20,000 hours to mastery?

Yeah. I mean, look, obviously I worked with Robert on mastery, and I deeply believe in what he's writing in that book. But I tend to find that what I talk, especially with young people, is this is an obsession with a number. And it's not a number. You don't get a prize. When you. When you get to 10,000 hours, no one gives you a special award. And when you get to 20,000, they're not, hey, you're officially a master. For those of us who don't play chess professionally, the sort of designation of master, it does not actually exist. It's a fluid process. And so for whatever a chosen craft of a person, it might be 30,000 hours, it might be 100,000 hours. You don't. You don't know what it is. I think what you have to take from these studies is that, hey, it's a hell of a lot. It's a lot. And it never really ends either. Not only does it take a long time to get to 10,000, at 10,000, if you don't stay at it every day, it also begins to atrophy. I guess I'm just. I'm pushing back against this notion that it's like a point that you arrive at so much as it's a process that you undergo that you commit to for a lifetime.

Yeah. I love it. And you say, you know, there is no end zone.

Right, Right.

While that's not a terribly sexy idea, I'm quoting Ryan. Now, it should be an encouraging one because it means it's all within reach for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and. And the fortitude to put in the work, rather than, I'm gonna get there, and then I'm gonna be exonerated from all future work. Cause I'm just gonna have made it. I've got the badge that says so. Right.

Sure. And I think the other thing that people miss is, like, look, I'm not a master. And I would not even pretend that I'm at the halfway point of achieving mastery at my profession of being a writer and a thinker. But that doesn't mean that I'm not making a great living at it right now. Right. And so it's. It's not like, oh, at 10,000 hours, you become a professional golfer. You can be really good and really promising after 1000 hours. I think that whole number is a bit confusing and complicated. And maybe encourages people to miss the point, which is it doesn't matter whether you're getting paid or you're not getting paid or you've done it for 10 years or you've done it for one year. What matters is mastery is this sort of elusive goal that you pursue day in and day out. Or maybe it's like Zeno's paradox, right? You get halfway there and then you get halfway there and you get halfway there. But are you ever actually arriving? Possibly not.

Yeah, it's awesome. I was just thinking of Dan Pink, I think it was, who said that mastery is an asymptote. You never get there. You might approach it, but your standards are going to rise as your capabilities rise. And that's how it should be. And then you keep on showing up and doing the work. I'm curious, what are some of the practices? Like, how would you describe what you do in your commitment and pursuit of mastery?

Sure. I mean, look, it's not easy. I write two articles a week. I'm on my fourth book in four years, not including books I've either ghostwritten or edited or conceptualized for clients. So I'm living and breathing this craft. And I understand, like, I think the ideas that I've had up until this point have been pretty good. But I mean, what keeps me going is the idea that at some point I'm going to come up with the idea that I was born to write. And the skills and the practices and the time that I've put in on all these other things which I also believe in and I also think are important, are going to coalesce around this. What's that idea, Napoleon? There's nothing more powerful than. Than an idea whose time has come or a man whose time has come. I think what gets me excited, what keeps me going, is, hey, what if I come up with some world changing, life changing idea when I'm 47 years old and I've been doing this now for almost 30 years? What will I be able to bring to the table then? What will I be capable of doing in the way that we see brilliant screenwriters or directors or producers or authors make these amazing works on top of the fact that they'd already had an amazing portfolio of work, I'm trying to build towards something that every day I can get a little bit better at?

Super inspiring again, that long game. It's not, can I land on the New York Times bestselling list day one and do everything I can to game that look over the long run, can I Get a little bit better day in and day out. And what would that look like? Yeah, that's super inspiring. And let's go to the next idea of the chapter is don't be passionate. I love it. Tell us.

I feel like that's going to be a controversial one, especially for people who have been told for a long time that passion is so important. And I'm not saying that passion isn't powerful. I'm saying in some ways it's dangerously powerful because it's not directed. Christopher McCandless was passionate about going off into the wild. But the problem was he didn't do any of the research or any of the work or have any of the knowledge required to survive in the wild. He ate a poisonous berry and he died a very painful death. I think purpose is better than passion. Purpose is directed and calculated and deliberate and. And prepared for and serviced. When you have purpose, you know what you need to do and what you need to put up with and what you must endure and what you must be patient about. And you know that you have to be committed and you have to give everything that you have to it. I think passion for so many people is sort of undirected. It's a synonym for. For zealously. That can be very dangerous. Look, you have people who work for you. You don't want a passionate kid who's all over the place, who can't stop and think and learn when he's doing something. You don't want a bundle of endless energy. You want someone who is deliberative and calm and intelligent and gets better every single day.

Yeah, that's awesome. And that ties in nicely to one of my next favorite ideas, which was make it so you don't have to fake it. Same basic idea. Walk us through that.

Yeah. Look, I just don't like this idea of faking it till you make it. And I feel like a lot of people say that and they don't really think about what it means, but it's like, look, would you want your doctor to fake it till you make it until he was a good doctor, or would you like him to do the work and become a good doctor? Or could you get away with faking it till you make it as a bull rider or any other important dangerous job? I don't think so. Just because something like being a coach or a writer or a leader or something like that is easier to fake it till you make it because there's less physical risk, that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. In fact, I think the correct word for that is fraud.

Yeah, it's amazing. Which is really just ego turned up to the highest degree. And again, in a culture that's, as David Brooks calls it, right, the big me, it's all about that selfie. You know, am I looking great? And again, long thread we can pull. We'll leave it at that. Talk to us about the Greek word euthymia.

Yeah. So euthymia is Seneca's word for tranquility, but he describes it as the sense of staying on the path rather than being kept on it. So it's that sort of intuitive knowledge or attraction towards what it is that you need to be doing rather than sort of boxing yourself in with, I don't know, artificial constraints or limitations or boundaries. One of the things he's saying, it's a pretty vivid passage in his book on the shortness of life. He's saying, staying on your path even as other paths crisscross yours, which I think is very relatable. In 2016, when we log into social media and we're seeing our friend is doing this. And so. And so just posted an Instagram photo and of their trip to Africa. And so. And so just posted how they were written about in Time magazine. And, you know, it's this sort of exhausting, endless, globalized competition with all these other people doing these awesome things. But if you can intuitively understand your path and stay on it and not stray from it, that's. Look, I think that's essential to the mastery that we're talking about. You can't do 1,000 hours of this thing and then 1,000 hours of this other thing and a thousand hours of some other thing and hope that that adds up to the number that you needed to hit at some point in the future.

That's so cool. And I need to read that one. And Ryan has just as an aside, Ryan reads tenaciously. We're going to do this at the end as well. But where do they go to sign up for your book recommendations?

It's just ryanholiday.net, and I think it's reading newsletter.

Okay. So go to Ryan's site if you're feeling it, and look at his blog post on why he reads, how he reads and what he reads. It's super inspiring. And then he sends out regular updates. One of the first things I did when I got this book was go to the end and look at your recommended bibliography, because I bought so many books from the obstacles, the way that have just changed my Perspective and just. It's just.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah, yeah. Super good. So back to euthymia. You talk about the Greek word of basically knowing and staying on your path, which requires both the clarity and the courage to do so and ignore all the distractions. And that leads to tranquility, which is kind of really the heart of purpose. You were talking about trumping passion. And you said that we need to understand why we do what we do and to stare at that question until we get it right.

Yeah, yeah. Because, look, if you don't know what's important to you and you don't know what you're working towards, it's very easy to get distracted by the fact that so and so just made a million dollars doing some unrelated thing or that, you know, did you hear that so and so is making a killing in the stock market? Or that so and so just quit her job to go be a yoga teacher? And you can sort of get distracted again with all these paths that crisscross yours because they sound seductive and attractive, but they really have nothing to do with what's important to you other than the fact that the person seems to have been maybe financially or spiritually rewarded for doing so. But you got to remember, you're your own person and you've got your own, you know, your own scorecard that you're measuring yourself against.

Yeah. Powerful. You said what? The other people covet you, you know, don't pay attention to their race. You know, there is no race in the first place. And if anything, let them have envy of what you've done, being insulated from all of that. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we forget often we're so busy being jealous of other people that we don't bother to think about, like, hey, maybe they might be jealous of what we have, and are we not ridiculously trying to trade places with each other?

Powerful stuff. Failure. The idea there that I want to pull out and hear you reflect on is false hope versus true hope. You talked about James Stockdale and his extraordinary story. Can you give us a snapshot on that?

Yeah, yeah. And look, there's a great story about this in Good to Great, where Jim Collins talks to Stockdale, who spent seven and a half years in a Vietnam prison camp and is just one of the most inspiring, admiring, amazing individuals of the 20th century. But he's talking about the difference between mindless optimism and entitlement and a profound belief in your ability to decide the ending to your own story. The Stockdale Paradox is this idea of, look, I don't know when this is going to end, but I know eventually it will end and I will be able to make something of it. That is a recipe for resiliency. The idea of it's going to get better tomorrow is a recipe for disappointment. Because you don't control tomorrow. You don't control whether it's going to rain an extra day or whether they're going to keep you, they're going to torture you tomorrow. What Stockdale is talking about is, is this sort of deep faith in yourself because of your ability to adapt and overcome things. He's not saying you should have rose colored glasses that tell you everything's going to be amazing all the time. Because that's not true.

And he found that those are the guys that died, right? They thought they were out by Thanksgiving. Oh, no, maybe by Christmas.

They were crushed when that turned out not to be the case.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think when he came down and just. The living embodiment of Epictetus. Right. I mentioned Epictetus's world. Five years at least. Just even as I say that to imagine, it's impossible to even wrap my consciousness around that experience and his heroic embodiment of all these ideals. What did we not talk about? We obviously only scratched the surface. Any favorite ideas that jump out that we didn't touch on?

You know, one of the things I think that's very seductive in this social media age. It's so easy to talk about what you're doing, but it's harder to spend quiet time alone doing what Cal Newport calls deep work on the thing you're supposed to be doing. So it's, hey, everyone, I'm writing a book. Tell me how great I am. Tell me how excited you are. Give me my congratulations in advance. I think that's a sort of a modern manifestation of ego that's quite dangerous. On the flip side of that.

When.

You'Re struggling with what you're struggling with, you're going through something. You look at what everyone else is posting on social media, and you can be forgiven for feeling that sort of resentment and bitterness and even hatred. One of the last chapters in the book is this idea of really looking at when you go through something tough. What does bitterness or anger or rage, what does that ever accomplish for anyone? There's a line from Seneca, he's like, you wouldn't return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. He's saying, anger always outlasts hurt. And I think that's especially true for resentment and bitterness. They always last Longer than whatever the pain of the thing that caused those feelings were. And so can you put that hatred or anger aside? And when you feel that boiling inside, you ask yourself, you know, is this. Is this going to be good fuel for me or is this going to be bad fuel?

That's awesome. And then antifragile style, and as you talked about so much in the obstacle is the way it is the way. Just allow it to be fuel for the fire. Right?

Yeah. Or at the very least, like, when someone does something awful, I try to remind myself. So let's say someone says something really rude that's totally uncalled for to me, you can remind yourself, hey, now I have to, in a calm, reasonable, collected way, communicate to this person why I didn't like that and why I don't want to do that to them. So at the very least, it's sort of practice in handling something like an adult. That's one upside of a situation. And the other upside might be, okay, this is a chance. This is a reminder to me of why it's not good to be an asshole. Right. And sorry for cursing, but, you know, it's like every time someone's a jerk to me, what I try to take from that is I look at that person that's being a jerk, and I go, like, how is that working out for them? And it's usually not. Well, they don't seem like they're happy people, even if they're successful. And I look at the way in which they could probably be more successful if they weren't like that. So I go, look, this is a reminder in the flesh of why being awful is a poor, unrewarding strategy. And thank you for reminding me of why I try not to be that way.

That's awesome. Then I like to follow it up with, how am I that made? How do I still do that?

That.

Because now I'm getting that beautiful representation of what I aspire to not be.

Yet when have I done that myself?

Wow. Go clean that up. Take a vacuum cleaner into that part of the consciousness, Right?

Totally, totally, totally. No, that's a great point. And that's the harder part to do is to look at someone who you're angry at or you even hate and go, how are we the same? Have I ever summoned these feelings in someone that I've interacted with? And, and, and why was I so unaware of it when it happened?

Yeah, that's awesome. To get that 4% better. One of the big parts of my work is the fundamentals. The Habits, the things that keep us plugged in.

Yeah.

What are yours? What are the things that you do that help you optimize and actualize the daily, very practical, mundane habits?

I'll give you a couple easy ones. I think getting up early is essential to being a productive, contributing member to society. Especially when you have the choice to get up whenever you want. Right. So it's not that Getting up at 4am is not in and of itself of much value, but it's the discipline to say, hey, I could wake up whenever the heck I feel like it. But I'm going to decide that at 7am that's when I'm up out of bed and that's when I go to do my job. I think getting up early is essential for me. It's part of the routine. It keeps me regular and consistent and undistracted. I think some form of strenuous physical exercise every single day is essential. And then a distinction that I make is I think walking every single day is essential, but I don't include that in the bucket of exercise. Walking for me is a therapeutic form of relaxation. Running or swimming or lifting weights is a form of training and exercise. But I think you need both.

Right on. Yeah, completely agree. What time are you getting up these days?

I get up around 7. I've been sick this week so I've been a little slow to get out of bed but I try to get up around seven and then I try to be at work by. I drive to an office but I try to be working by around 8 o' clock and having that means being up on central time. If I'm working by 8, it's really not until like 10, 10:30 that anyone's going to be calling me. I'm going to be getting emails. So I've got two hours of uninterrupted work time there where even if I wanted to be distracted, I didn't have as much distract in me.

Is that the time that you write or read or a little bit of both?

I don't read in the morning. I tend to read at lunch and in the afternoon and at night and definitely when I'm traveling as well. But I write in the mornings.

And how much are you reading these days? If we had to quantify it and we're not doing it from an ego perspective, just more curious.

Not as much as maybe I did when I was just so hungry for knowledge as an up and comer and when I'm researching for a book it's a different, you know, it's a different phase, but like, you know, two. Two books a week on average is probably good for me. I'm also trying to focus on bigger, more challenging books as well. Obviously, I could churn through a dozen business books every month, but, you know, if I'm not learning something, if it's not making me a better person, I don't see. I don't. It's not just, hey, look how big my library is. That's that, you know, that's not what we're doing here.

Yeah. What's the best recent book?

I read this book called An Ethical Bio. Lincoln's Virtues, An Ethical Biography. And it was one of maybe the favorite books I've ever read in my life.

Wow. All right, well, you know which book I'm going to be getting next.

Yeah, I think you would like it. It's just amazing. I was very saddened to hear that the author had died shortly after I'd come to the book or whatever. But it was an amazing book. Wow.

Okay. Number one thing, if you're going to share one piece of wisdom with an individual passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that piece of wisdom be?

Oh, man, that's a good question. I mean, look, the fundamental thing that I've taken from stoic philosophy, which I try to pass to every single person that asks me about it, is if you can leave my books or their books or anything with just this understanding that, look, you don't control what happens to you, you control how you respond. I find that to be an infinitely elastic and resilient and ego killing philosophy if there ever was one.

Right on. I appreciate you. Let's remind people where they can go. Ryanholliday.net Is that right?

Yep, yep. Ryan Holiday on Twitter. The reading list is ryanholiday.netreading-newsletter and yeah, right on here.

We're releasing this and the note early with Ryan's blessing. The book comes out early. What is it, early June, right?

Yes, June 14th.

So go pre order it. You're gonna love it. If you enjoyed this conversation and the obstacles away, I absolutely certain you're gonna love the book. As I said, just more wisdom and less time too. You know, I've grounded practical, doesn't intend to be inspiring by the traditional sense, but deeply inspiring with its depth and commitment to virtue and character. So Ryan, really appreciate your commitment to mastery and really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for having me.

Hi, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos. I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to. Get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best optimal living books out there. Old school classics, Positive psychology, Modern stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, purpose, neuroscience, wealth, etc. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again. We have 250 of these on all these different great books. And then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to optimal living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from Habits 101, Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Meditation 101, instant access to all those classes. And then Future classes include Relationships 101, Energy 101 Purpose 101 business goals, etc. Those are our full length classes. And then I create micro classes. Two to three to five minute little bursts of wisdom on my favorite great ideas from these great books across the domain that you want to optimize in your life. So we have dozens of these so far. I create 50 new micro classes every month and 10 new philosopher's notes every month for 10 bucks a month. So we're blessed to have thousands of members who are enjoying the program and sharing some incredibly kind words with us. And super simple $10 a month. Cancel anytime. Would be honored to be a bigger part of your life and I appreciate your support. And here's to optimizing and actualizing.