Category King of Stoicism, Ryan Holiday #business #entrepreneur #writingsecrets

You know the story how Ryan Holiday found his niche, right? Ryan Holiday didn't start out writing about stoicism. He started out writing about marketing. He was working as a marketer. His first book was called Trust Me, I'm Lying. It's all about how to ladder up blog posts in the media world. Book did pretty well. So he doubles down on that topic, writes a second book called Growth Hacker Marketing. Doesn't perform very well. All of a sudden. Then he asked the question, is this what I want to do? Do I want to be a marketer? Do I want to want to write about marketing? So then one day he writes a guest blog for Tim Ferriss website. The blog post is titled Stoicism101 blog post goes viral. He starts getting all these email from people really interested in stoicism. And what was his credibility at the time? His credibility wasn't that he was the stoicism expert. It was that he read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and goes, I'm just going to write about it. I'm going to make it more accessible to the average reader. So he sees that blog post go viral. He then goes to the publisher and goes, I want to double down on this. They go, you're crazy. You're a marketer. Everything you've written about is marketing. He goes, no, trust me. They go, fine. They give him a small advance. He takes that advance, writes, the Obstacle Is the Way. The Obstacle Is the Way is now his best selling book of all time.