Motivation Daily by Motiversity - PROGRESS AND NOT PERFECTION - Powerful Motivational Speech

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Speakers: Ryan Holiday, Mark Manson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The most successful thing I had ever done was write a book. I assumed, oh, I must be an author. Yes. Narrative and identity are very tricky and deceiving. Yes. So it was what the world was rewarding me for. It was what everybody knew me for doing. It was the thing I was most validated for is the thing I was making the most money doing.

So I'm like, I guess I'm an author now. So I wrote a bunch of books. And they went well. They did very well. But I burned myself out and I struggled a lot mentally during that period. And so then I came back to kind of doing the online stuff a few years ago, and I loved it. I'm a dog just chasing a car. I'm like, yeah, show me the numbers.

Let me go viral. I want to see the numbers go up. That's funny. And so I'm having a blast doing it. I actually canceled a book deal to, it was funny. I actually went to my publisher and I said, you know, I want to launch a podcast and I want to do a lot more video content. So I want to push the book back a year or two. But I'll have a much bigger audience and I'll be able to test ideas and stuff.

And they were like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. And then they threatened to cancel the contract. And so I said, yeah, here's your money. And no regrets. You have to find out why you got into the thing you got into. And what's the thing you like doing? So if you're like, if you really love to cook and then you start a restaurant, and then you spend all the time in the back office of the restaurant looking at vendors

or dealing with critics. then like the rewards for you succeeding were that you don't get the thing to do the thing I love. I'd forgotten that I started my career being an internet guy, right? Just posting a bunch of blogs and shit on Facebook and seeing what stuck.

And I loved it. I lived it and breathed it. And eventually as part of that process of growing that online audience and that online following, I did a book deal and then that book deal turned into just like an absurdly mega bestseller.

And I think, What happened then is because the most successful thing I had ever done was write a book, I assumed, oh, I must be an author. I've been thinking a lot about this thing you said. You were saying that you want to be careful when you get advice from successful people about balance because usually they became successful by their fundamental lack of balance. Correct. And then they became successful. And then they're thinking retroactively how they wish they used to be or they're making, changes now and then acting as if that is the approach that got them where they are.

Yes. I think a lot of positive lifestyle changes are a result of privilege. And I don't mean that in like a pejorative way, but it's like, you know, once you do have the money to do a sauna every day or, you know, have your like chia papaya creatine smoothie in the morning, like that does feel like the most important thing to you. And so I just, I remember how. how I was coming up, which was I ate Red Bulls and Reese's cups every morning. I fell asleep with my laptop open on my chest and it would wake up in the middle of the night and continue working.

But yeah, there's a luxury of once you have made it or once you're good to be able to be like, yeah, just take it easy, do it slow. It's very rare that you find someone that's done something that's really impressive or big, and they did it not as a maniac. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think fundamentally to achieve extreme success, you cannot be a balanced person.

I just recognize the gap between who I am today and who I was when I was starting. And I try to be realistic about that gap and understand that my perceptual biases might try to convince me that the way I am today is the way I should have always been. But that probably wasn't realistic back then. What I didn't realize at the time is that as your life kind of levels up, the sexiness of the things you should say no to also level up. Yes. Right? So there are things today that you and I should say no to that our 25-year-old selves dreamt of.

It seems irresponsible to say no to them. Exactly. Exactly. I think humans are really bad at calculating opportunity costs. Yeah. Like I know if I don't do a speaking game, I know exactly how much money that costs, even though it doesn't actually cost any money, but I know what I'm not getting.

There's no way to know what the individual toll of one thing is on a marriage, is on a relationship with a friend, is with your health, is with your overall productivity, is with the burnout that you are slowly, steadily progressing towards, and that's the trap of it. I've learned in the case of accepting speaking gigs

and in the case of eating desserts or drinking alcohol, I can't trust myself. If you're relying on willpower, you've lost. Yes. It's over. Like, you shouldn't even put yourself in the spot where you're having to make a decision between the dessert and the salad or, you know, flying to Dublin or staying home with your kids, right? Like, if you're in that, if you're in that spot and struggling to make that decision, you've failed yourself to a certain extent. I heard the definition of an addiction is when you have lost the freedom to abstain.

Like when you no longer can be like, I don't want to. Yeah. That's a problem. and I think we all have those things. And then that's where the discipline is not, well, just try harder not to do the things. It's how do you outsmart the part of yourself that is failing to not do the things?

Absolutely. And then I realized that like I still couldn't trust my brain. And so now my process is I've told my head of operations to literally not show me any speaking opportunities unless she believes that they could fundamentally change my career. Oh. So that is the current rule. And then the irony is you don't miss the things that you don't know about.

Exactly. But just getting rid of a press request thing on my website just meant I don't get the requests anymore. And I don't know what I'm not doing. And I'm fine. Yeah. And if it wasn't happening, you would be fine. Yeah. I literally got to the point where I'm like, I just went to my wife.

I said, I'm not eating at a restaurant for the next 30 days. like period. Yeah. Because I know if I'm in the environment, my brain is going to start lying to me and I'm going to make up all these stupid reasons to like start eating a bunch of crap that I shouldn't be eating. But I had to go through that period of hard rules

and basically treating myself like an untrained dog. It's like once the inner dog is trained, then you can let it loose and off the leash. But as you get older, you realize, oh, you can't just, brute force this anymore. It's not that your ability declines, but your raw willpower declines. And so to continue to perform at the same level, you have to find other areas to elevate

what you're doing, or you won't, you'll fall off. The advice that, quote unquote, successful people give to aspiring people, it's not so much about how to be successful. It's about how to prepare yourself to stay successful over a long period of time. Yes. Yeah, you see this too, like another example. example of it, and this might be too inside baseball, but like people are like, you're listening to a successful person give you the math on self-publishing or self-funding or bootstrapping or whatever.

And it's like, this is only their experience in light of having succeeded. And you don't know how it's going to pan out for you now. And so actually what the best path is is very different. Do you know what I mean? Like it's very clear once it's worked. Yes. What you should have done. Yeah.

But you don't know if it's going to work. And so it really is like, what are this sort of just more foundational, general best practices, not like the person just wishing they could have done it slightly differently. Yeah. I also just think that, like, that's the advice people want to hear. Yes. Right? Like, if you're a startup founder and you're completely lost and you're,

you've tried like multiple iterations of a product, you have no customers, nothing's working, you're running out of money. Like, there's a piece of you that wants the answer to be. wake up at 5.30, get some sunlight. Yeah. Drink a papaya smoothie. Like, that's what's going to work. Yeah.

You know? So I think there's a demand. There's just a massive demand for that message. And in this day and age, any message that has a demand is going to be met by somebody.