Ryan Holiday

The perfect opportunity you keep picturing in your head? That’s your ego protecting you from change — the feeling of pain and failure that is deliberate practice and experimentation.

Being productive is really a battle. It’s the worst kind of battle: a battle against yourself.

Strategy isn’t something that’s taught well in school. Hell, most people probably couldn’t tell you the difference between “strategy” and “tactics” (or even know there is a difference.)

I won’t say that I present the picture of mental health or anything, but most people would be surprised to find out I harbor a habit that hints at deep insanity.

This isn’t the perfect system. It might not work for you. All I can say is that since learning it about 7 years ago, it has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output.

Obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

Very few people wake up and think “I need philosophy.” This is perfectly understandable. But of course, everyone has their own problems and are dealing with the difficulties of life in some way or another.

“A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us.” – Kafka

People say that visiting and living in New York City are very different things. I’ve found that they are exactly the same and that’s why it is a bad place to live.

Books are an investment. I understand they cost money upfront…but that’s how an investment works.

Well, the idea of keeping a commonplace book has clearly struck a nerve. Not only did the article make the front page of Reddit and blow up on Facebook and Twitter, but many people emailed in their own methods for keeping a commonplace book.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important.

It’s not enough to want a mentor or even to be lucky enough to find one. It’s a relationship that requires investment, energy and clear goals and intentions. But if you do it right, it can change your life.

Checking off the various books from your high school curriculum, and then, perhaps the “100 Greatest Books Ever Written” is the educational equivalent of skating to where the puck is and not where it’s going.

You need to learn how to use the bad people too — to get the light and heat without getting burned.

There is to me, a lot more to admire in someone who stayed put and challenged their perspectives and habits and lifestyle choices at home than there is to some first world Instagram addict who conflates meaning with checking off boxes on a bucket list.

I am a bestselling author at 26. I have a column with a major newspaper […] Everything that is good in my writing came from risks I took outside of school, outside of the “craft.”

Reading must become as natural as eating and breathing to you. It’s not something you do because you feel like it, but because it’s a reflex, a default.