Ryan Holiday
49 statements across 5 episodes · 10 bullish · 11 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement May 16, 2016 by Ryan Holiday · said 17 times in 5 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ryan Holiday's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Les Snead (8), Robert Greene (3), Charlie Hoehn (3), Shane Parrish (2), Jeff Annello (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2024 4 mentions in 1 episode
2022 8 mentions in 1 episode
2018 3 mentions in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Ryan Holiday, oldest first
May 16, 2016 neutral
May 16, 2016 negative
Manual transcription creates a vital physical ritual for processing research notes
“The idea of just quickly being able to copy and paste stuff is antithetical to what I'm doing and why, like, it's the ritual that's important, and the act of taking it longhand is very important. Obviously, if it's like a, you know, huge paragraph, I'm gonna t…”
May 16, 2016 negative
Writing non-fiction without a discrete target and outline is highly dangerous
“What you don't do, what I think is the most dangerous thing for writers to do, is to just, and maybe it works when you're writing fiction, I don't know, but sitting down and just writing. Like, you can't hit a target that you didn't aim for.”
May 16, 2016 positive
Stoicism offers a competitive advantage by focusing purely on internal reactions
“If I was to sort of sum up the central maxim there, it would be, you don't control the world around you control how you control your thoughts, you control how you respond to the world around you, and so the Stoics are Focused exclusively on that stuff, and tha…”
May 16, 2016 positive
May 16, 2016 negative
May 16, 2016
Consultants should charge for strategic thinking instead of pitching for free
“People think, like, the execution is the hard part, but to me, the thinking is the hard part, so I'm not going to think for free and then get paid to execute. I would rather get paid to think and then maybe get paid a little bit more to execute, or if you want…”
May 16, 2016
May 16, 2016
Holiday mandates a $1,500 hourly upfront strategy session for new clients
“All my clients, even ones I know I want to work with, I start with a paid strategy session. Right. So, I charge, like, 1500 bucks an hour and we get on the phone, and, like, you can send me a little bit of stuff, but almost no prep, and then we get on the phon…”
May 16, 2016 positive
Jun 27, 2018 neutral
Jan 11, 2022
Holiday: Creative work is his unscheduled default when calendar is empty
“For me, if the calendar is empty, then I'm spending that time writing, reading, thinking about, like, my creative work. That doesn't get scheduled. That's the default. So if there's something in the calendar, then suddenly everything else I'm doing pivots arou…”
Jan 11, 2022 positive
Holiday: Prioritizing easier tasks sustains creative momentum during bottlenecks
“In this case, I'm going to do the easier one first because stalling out is the main thing that I want to avoid. It's not that I'm going towards the path of least resistance, but I'm going towards where I'm going to make forward progress,”
Jan 11, 2022
Holiday: Establishing the next project before finishing prevents existential angst
“There's a couple parts of my process that are integral to the output that I have, which is one, I always have the next idea set before I finish writing. The one that I'm on. So there's not this sort of, like, existential angst about, like, what I do next.”
Jan 11, 2022
Jan 11, 2022
Jan 11, 2022
Jan 11, 2022
Jan 11, 2022
Holiday: Critical reception and creative quality are decoupled from book sales
“You can write your best book, and it could sell the fewest amount of copies. You could get the most critical reception, and it could, ah, it could sell the fewest amount of copies. All you should really focus on is like, are you proud of it? Did you do what yo…”
Jan 11, 2022
Holiday: Wisdom governs how and when to apply all other virtues
“Wisdom is not just the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. But particularly the almost intuitive sense of, like, how much courage is required, how much temperance is required, right? What is the right thing? So wisdom, the final virtue is the virtue that k…”
Jan 11, 2022 negative
Holiday: Creative professions overly tolerate spotty output unlike sports or trading
“Maybe it's because writing is a creative profession that people don't treat, like professional sports or, you know, trading or anything where it's just sort of excuse, like, because people think it's hard and they don't understand how it works. They're just a …”
Jul 4, 2023 neutral
Holiday: Most personal and historical mistakes stem from primal emotional passions
“I would say at the root of most mistakes, both personally and sort of historically it's one of the passions, right? Envy, lust, anger, fear you know, pain you know, the, those sort of emotional states that take us out of the rational part of ourselves and into…”
Jul 4, 2023 neutral
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness relies on disorienting opponents rather than strategic genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that it's almost lik…”
Jul 4, 2023 neutral
Holiday: Emotional control in high-stakes situations requires prior practice in minor moments
“If you haven't practiced it in the little areas, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to do it. Like when the game is on the line or your career is on the line or like the Eyes of the world are upon you.”
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024
Holiday: Retiring at one's peak takes more discipline than chasing more titles
“It clearly takes more discipline to walk away early or on top than it does to go for the sixth ring or the three-peat or whatever. Those things are extraordinarily hard, but clearly if Less people do this other feat. It must be because it's even harder.”
Nov 26, 2024 bearish
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Holiday: Stoic joy is resilient flourishing amidst adversity, not superficial cheerfulness
“And I think when the Stokes thought about joy and happiness, they were thinking about a more resilient form of that emotion, not Fun smiling, cheerfulness, happiness, but like a happiness of a person who is surviving the blows of fate and flourishing as a huma…”
Nov 26, 2024 neutral
Holiday: Singular domain excellence creates inherent psychological imbalance
“There is something inherently unbalanced about Excellence in a singular domain, because you are focusing all of your energy on one thing. There's something dysmorphic about like the athlete's physique. And that's probably just the physical manifestation of als…”
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024 neutral
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Holiday: Cancel culture pushes disgraced public figures into radicalized caricatures
“And what would happen today is that this person would be basically shoved by one half of society, and then perversely, like, embraced by another darker side of society that Doesn't like those people, right? And you would see him get radicalized and fight again…”
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Ryan Holiday: Virtue signaling is preferable to cruelty and vice signaling
“But if I had to choose, you know, like people are today are like, oh, it's all this virtue signaling, you know, it's like certainly better than the alternative, you know, totally. I'm not sure this sort of like this, the cruelty is the point vice signaling is …”
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Holiday: Marcus Aurelius resisting power's corruption surpasses any military victory
“What I think makes Marx real is such a fascinating example. Here you have one of the few humans to hold absolute power as we Would really define it and doesn't seem to have become deranged or grotesque is into an overwhelmingly cautionary tale. That to me is a…”
Nov 26, 2024
Nov 26, 2024
Ryan Holiday: Dissecting past blame distracts from choosing immediate action
“How I got here is separate and independent from the fact that I currently am here. I might need to, at some point, examine those causes so I can learn from it, but my impulse to dissect And blame and question what has happened is actually just a really conveni…”
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Holiday: Compulsive overwork produces temporary relief, not genuine accomplishment
“I think that's the thing about most compulsive tendencies is they're not based on anything. You have this belief that if you don't do it, things will fall apart. It's not based on anything real. And most of the time what you get is not even the reward for doin…”
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Holiday: Refused to hire agency employees to avoid uninteresting projects
“When I had my marketing company one of the reasons I never wanted to hire employees was that I was skeptical that there were enough projects that I would be interested in working on to pay for the people, which meant if I hired someone, they would represent a …”
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Holiday: Framing interpretations as personal stories invites clarification instead of conflict
“By you saying what I make up about that is, or the story I tell myself about that is, Or the way that sounds to me is you are not expressing your interpretation of reality as reality. And therefore you are offering the person the opportunity to correct or upda…”
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Nov 26, 2024
Holiday: Cognitive Distance Makes Advising Others Easier Than Self-Regulation
“We're really good at giving advice to other people and then not so good at applying it ourselves because we have that cognitive distance distance, you know, we're able to It's, our identity is less at stake or our emotions are less tied up in it.”
Nov 26, 2024 negative
Holiday: Rejects private equity because it eliminates founder autonomy
“I've expressed no interest in doing that because like, to me, part of the whole joy of doing it is not having a boss and not needing to get at a, to a certain level or do a certain amount of things, which you are foregoing when you bring on somebody else.”
Nov 26, 2024 neutral
Nov 26, 2024 positive
Holiday: Virtue is a practice built through repeated actions, not a fixed trait
“Wouldn't it be far better to think of virtue as a verb? Aristotle says, like, how do you get better at playing the flute? It's by playing the flute. How do you become a more generous person? It's by doing more generous actions.”