Ryan Holiday Quotes

#1. There is always a countermove, always an escape or way through. No one said it would be easy and of course the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.

Ryan Holiday

#2. We're all just humans, doing the best we can. We're all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit.

Ryan Holiday

#3. If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you'll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair-weather friends, and any number of ills that afflict people who haven't thought through their deepest concerns.

Ryan Holiday

#4. Wherever we are, whatever we're doing and herever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well.

Ryan Holiday

#5. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice. - THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Ryan Holiday

#6. What I've learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason - because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside.

Ryan Holiday

#7. Freedom? That's easy. It's in your choices. Happiness? That's easy. It's in your choices. Respect of your peers? That too is in the choices you make.

Ryan Holiday

#8. The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.

Ryan Holiday

#9. Right thing is usually clear and intuitive enough to feel in our gut.

Ryan Holiday

#10. Problems are rarely as bad as we think-or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.

Ryan Holiday

#11. When attempting to turn things around for a particularly disliked or controversial client, Sitrick was fond of saying, "We need to find a lead steer!" The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede.

Ryan Holiday

#12. Bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We're like runners who train on hills, or at an altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat.

Ryan Holiday

#13. The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.

Ryan Holiday

#14. Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

Ryan Holiday

#15. Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.

Ryan Holiday

#16. Publicity does not come easily, profits do not come easily, and knowledge does not come easily.

Ryan Holiday

#17. Coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder ...

Ryan Holiday

#18. we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations." How

Ryan Holiday

#19. The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.

Ryan Holiday

#20. Let's be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above - there's too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.13

Ryan Holiday

#21. Each would collapse beneath the process. We've just wrongly assumed that it has to happen all at once, and we give up at the thought of it. We are A-to-Z thinkers, fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y. We

Ryan Holiday

#22. director of growth at StumbleUpon, put it best: growth hacking is more of a mindset than a tool kit.

Ryan Holiday

#23. What is bad luck? Opinion. What are conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity? They are all opinions,

Ryan Holiday

#24. We can't take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can't recognize opportunities - or create them - if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy.

Ryan Holiday

#25. You've got your mission, whatever it is. To accomplish it, like the rest of us you're in the pinch between the way you wish things were and the way they actually are (which always seem to be a disaster). How far are you willing to go? What are you willing to do about it?

Ryan Holiday

#26. Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,

Ryan Holiday

#27. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home.

Ryan Holiday

#28. you must reclaim the ability to abstain because within it is your clarity and self-control.

Ryan Holiday

#29. Your potential, the absolute best you're capable of - that's the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

Ryan Holiday

#30. Never in a hurry never worried never desperate never stopping short

Ryan Holiday

#31. In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.

Ryan Holiday

#32. It comes in many forms. Idly dreaming about the future. Plotting our revenge. Finding refuge in distraction. Refusing to consider that our choices are a reflection of our character. We'd rather do basically anything else.

Ryan Holiday

#33. The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.

Ryan Holiday

#34. How do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

Ryan Holiday

#35. Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn't matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options? You could write it off, greet it calmly.

Ryan Holiday

#36. Seize this moment to deploy the plan that has long sat dormant in your head.

Ryan Holiday

#37. Persist and resist". Persist in your efforts. Resist giving into distraction, discouragement, and disorder. - Epictetus

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#38. Before he became the most brilliant and famous man in the ad business, David Ogilvy sold ovens door-to-door. Because of that, he never forgot that advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door-to-door sales.

Ryan Holiday

#39. Richard Branson likes to say, is that "business opportunities are like buses; there's always another coming around.

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#40. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity." Just

Ryan Holiday

#41. Conning the conmen is one of life's most satisfying pleasures.

Ryan Holiday

#42. It's three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: Perception, Action, and the Will.

Ryan Holiday

#43. The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher. We can't afford to shy away from the things that intimidate us. We don't need to take our weaknesses for granted. Are

Ryan Holiday

#44. All of us waste precious life doing things we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, and to get things we don't want.

Ryan Holiday

#45. When you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you.

Ryan Holiday

#46. Exert only calculated force where it will be effective, rather than straining and struggling with pointless attrition tactics.

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#47. People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success." It's

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#48. Placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others.

Ryan Holiday

#49. Okay, you've got to do something very difficult. Don't focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize. The

Ryan Holiday

#50. Philosophy's true use - "An operating system for life's difficulties and hardships".

Ryan Holiday

#51. The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power. Winning by sticking your ass to the seat and not leaving until after it's over.

Ryan Holiday

#52. From Rusticus . . . I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something." - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 1.7.3

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#53. Not me," you think.

Ryan Holiday

#54. And what is up to us? Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination

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#55. We blame our bosses, the economy, our politicians, other people, or we write ourselves off as failures or our goals as impossible. When really only one thing is at fault: our attitude and approach.

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#56. An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before.

Ryan Holiday

#57. Every negative has a positive. Push a negative hard enough and deep enough that it will break through into its counterside.

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#58. You're not as good as you think. You don't have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.

Ryan Holiday

#59. When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

Ryan Holiday

#60. When success begins to slip from your fingers - for whatever reason - the response isn't to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It's to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.

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#61. What is known can't jerk us around unwittingly. Before anything can be resolved, the implicit must be made into the explicit.

Ryan Holiday

#62. All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way." - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.6

Ryan Holiday

#63. Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.

Ryan Holiday

#64. It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. - MARCUS AURELIUS

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#65. Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want - from data that is unrepresentative to say the least - and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse.

Ryan Holiday

#66. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We've got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.

Ryan Holiday

#67. Dollar for dollar there is no better investment in the world than a book

Ryan Holiday

#68. A growth hacker doesn't see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself.

Ryan Holiday

#69. Each time, you'll learn something. Each time, you'll develop strength, wisdom, and perspective. Each time, a little more of the competition falls away. Until all that is left is you: the best version of you.

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#70. No slavery is more disgraceful," he quipped, "than one which is self-imposed.

Ryan Holiday

#71. understand the range of potential outcomes and know that they are not all good

Ryan Holiday

#72. Don't let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don't fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it's so unbearable and can't be survived." - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.36

Ryan Holiday

#73. The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.

Ryan Holiday

#74. Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It's more "Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am." It's rarely the truth: "I'm scared. I'm struggling. I don't know.

Ryan Holiday

#75. listen to Marcus Aurelius's empowering call to "get active in your own rescue - if you care for yourself at all - and do it while you can.

Ryan Holiday

#76. which is to say, stand with the philosopher, or else with the mob!" - EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.15.13 W

Ryan Holiday

#77. We forget: In life, it doesn't matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you've been given.

Ryan Holiday

#78. Failure shows us the way - by showing us what isn't the way.

Ryan Holiday

#79. A poet's function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.

Ryan Holiday

#80. In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases. - SENECA

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#81. If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. Yet

Ryan Holiday

#82. sometimes being superficial - taking things only at first glance - is the most profound approach.

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#83. Doing great work is a struggle. It's draining, it's demoralizing, it's frightening - not always, but it can feel that way when we're deep in the middle of it.

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#84. Let others slap each others on the back while you're back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement.

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#85. The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can't bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place.

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#86. Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn't mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn't mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves.

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#87. It's okay to be discouraged. It's not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you've decided to lay siege to in your own life - that's persistence.

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#88. Great commanders look for decision points. For it is bursts of energy directed at decisive points that break things wide open. They

Ryan Holiday

#89. Great times are great softeners

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#90. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go - carving you a path. "The Things which hurt," Benjamin Franklin wrote, "instruct.

Ryan Holiday

#91. Their lifestyle is the result of prioritizing.

Ryan Holiday

#92. attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.

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#93. The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what "other people are saying" and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is.

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#94. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness - these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings.

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#95. I run 5 miles every night. It's where I go to digest my day, hash out the multitude of information that's been poured into me in the last wild six months or so, and to try and condense it down to some sort of cohesive strategy to live my life by.

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#96. In its own way, the most harmful dragon we chase is the one that makes us think we can change things that are simply not ours to change.

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#97. There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

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#98. He chose the latter, channeling the energy

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#99. Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project.

Ryan Holiday

#100. Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF);

Ryan Holiday