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Ryan Holiday

author · in 16 sources (2018–2021)

Works: The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, Perennial Seller

Speaks in 3 sources; this page lists what is said about them.

Sources by year: 2018: 1 · 2020: 7 · 2021: 8

Also named in the threads: Book Club, Ali's series of book-summary videos (2020) · Ali's first book, which a publisher asked him to write (2020)

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

stoicism (7) · Derren Brown (4) · journey before destination (3) · Book Club (3) · Instapaper (2) · Readwise (2) · The Stormlight Archive (2) · Deep Dive (2) · Brandon Sanderson (2) · Kindle (3)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2021

  • 2021-01-06 · My PRODUCTIVE Bucket List (2021) — Ali: Four of Ali's Deep Dive livestream interviews in 2020 made him want to develop a love of storytelling: with Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday, Alex Banayan and David Perell. — 00:14:25
  • 2021-07-07 · How to Live more Intentionally — Ali explains the third Stoic virtue, courage, which Derren Brown, Ryan Holiday and William Irvine write about: for the Stoics, courage is feeling fear, desire and anxiety and acting in the right way anyway. — 00:03:50
    • Ali has not figured out how to live intentionally, but books on Stoicism have helped; he recommends William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, Derren Brown's Happy and Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way, which he calls probably the most accessible. — 00:07:31
  • 2021-08-04 · The Greatest Enemy of Success - Ego is the Enemy — Ali finds Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy a helpful book to revisit at milestones such as 2 million subscribers, when congratulations make it easy to let success go to your head. — 00:00:00
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday writes in Ego Is the Enemy that the pretence of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it stops us getting better. — 00:02:38
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday advises in Ego Is the Enemy keeping our goals and ambitions to ourselves for the most part and not being overly keen on visualising success. — 00:07:10
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday advises in Ego Is the Enemy keeping your head down and doing the work to combat the ego: self-promotion has value once you have something to promote. — 00:08:33
    • A few months before this video Ali had a phone call with Ryan Holiday to ask how to make the book he is writing a bestseller. — 00:09:02
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday told Ali that asking how to make his book a bestseller was the wrong approach: write a really good book first, then turn to self-promotion and marketing. — 00:09:02
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday concludes in Ego Is the Enemy that externals must not decide whether something was worth it, since the world is indifferent to what we want: doing the work is enough. — 00:12:56
  • 2021-09-12 · My Journey of Self-Acceptance — recommendation: Ali recommends three really good books about Stoicism: Derren Brown's Happy, William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life and Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way. — 00:05:05
  • 2021-09-29 · Why Positive Thinking is Bad for You — Ali retells from Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy how Upton Sinclair, running for governor of California in the 1930s, wrote a whole book in the past tense about what he accomplished as governor, then lost interest in his campaign and lost the election. — 00:01:56
  • …and 3 statements more in 2021 — all statements of 2021

Also named in: The Most PRODUCTIVE Thing I Do Each Year, My Favourite iPad Productivity Apps

2020

  • 2020-09-29 · How to See Problems as Opportunities (The Obstacle is the Way) — announcement: Ali: This Book Club episode, in Ali's series distilling highlights from his favourite books, is on The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. — 00:00:00
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way argues that we meet obstacles at every stage of life and, instead of avoiding them, must learn to tackle them and use them to our advantage. — 00:00:29
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): In Ryan Holiday's account, perception is how we judge and interpret events: by controlling our emotions, putting things in perspective and examining them objectively, we see obstacles more clearly. — 00:00:58
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday writes that anyone can cultivate the skill of controlling emotions, which the Greeks called apatheia: calm equanimity without irrational or extreme emotions, not the loss of feeling altogether. — 00:01:57
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday writes that Thomas Edison did over 6,000 experiments to find the missing element of his filament bulb; of the many people then trying to invent a working light bulb, it was Edison who persisted through many iterations and overcame the obstacles most successfully. — 00:04:20
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday writes that we are "A to Z thinkers", fretting about A and obsessing over Z while forgetting the steps in between; action means consistency and focus on the process. — 00:04:20
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday describes will as the discipline of heart and soul: inner fortitude and wisdom that lets us put events in context, endure hardship and draw meaning from obstacles, the Stoics' inner citadel. — 00:06:17
    • Ryan Holiday (quoted): One Stoic way of strengthening the will that Ryan Holiday describes is premeditating adversity: imagining something bad happening to us so that we are more prepared if it does. — 00:06:46
  • 2020-10-04 · My BIGGEST Rejections in Life — Ali actively set out to turn losing his savings into an opportunity, the idea Ryan Holiday writes about in The Obstacle Is the Way. — 00:20:57
  • 2020-10-14 · Revamping My Living Room - Day In The Life — Ali: On his iPad Ali edits the structure of a Book Club episode on Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way. — 00:00:58
  • 2020-11-11 · A Productive Day on Vacation in the Canary Islands — Ali is rereading Ryan Holiday's Perennial Seller, which he first read in 2018, to mine more timeless wisdom from it. — 00:03:56
  • 2020-11-15 · How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers — Ryan Holiday (quoted): In a blog post, Ryan Holiday writes that when told he had hit number one on the bestseller list while mowing his lawn, he put his phone away, kept mowing and said it feels like nothing. — 00:23:29
  • …and 5 statements more in 2020 — all statements of 2020

Also named in: The 5 Magical Apps That Changed My Life

2018