The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #11 Ryan Holiday: The Stoic Whisperer

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

In this episode, I talk with multiple best selling author Ryan Holiday about how he reads, what it means to be a stoic, and how to gracefully deal with freeloaders. *** Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, curator behind Farnham Street, an online intellectual hub of interestingness that covers topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, and philosophy. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do. It's more conversation than prescription. this episode, I have Ryan Holiday. Since dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under strategist

Robert Green, the author of the 48 Laws of Power, Ryan has advised many New York Times bestselling authors and musicians. He's a master, and some would say, manipulator of the media, as his first book, Trust Me I'm Lying Outlines. His latest book, The Obstacle is the Way, reached bestseller status. We explore how he reads, what it means to be a stoic, and his infamous no-card system. The conversation is actually cut short. We originally had 90 minutes booked for this interview, but I forget to turn on the recorder, so we had to re-record the entire interview. Ryan got to practice some of that famous stoicism. With that said, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. We'll go quicker. We were just talking for about 20 minutes and just realized

that the microphone wasn't on. Wouldn't it be funny if I, like, freaked out and knocked over all the Mike, so I was just very un-stoic about it. No, no, so stoicism is a practical philosophy, right? Most people think, when they think philosophy, they think college professor lecturing them. Stoicism is, you know, it's favored by statesmen, politicians, soldiers, artists, et cetera, because it's really, at its core, I think, a series of maxims and exercises for how to live what they would call a good life or to live virtuously or with excellence. and, you know, if I was to sort of sum up the central maxim there, it would be you don't control

the world around you, 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 that's not just a competitive edge, but it's a recipe for, I think, contentment and fulfillment and stuff like that. And so what really pulled you into that was, I think, the book recommendation by Dr. Drew. Yeah. So I was at a conference. I said, hey, what books would you? I sort of found him afterwards. I said, hey, like, I really love to read. I know you read. What would you recommend that I read? And he told me about Epictetus. I looked up Epictetus on Amazon. Mark Sirrelius was there, who I'd always like the movie Gladiator. So I was like, oh, I'll get that

too. I read Marcus Aurelius. And Marks Surrealus is just, it's just this totally unique historical document in the sense that it is the most powerful, successful man on earth at the that time, literally worshipped as a god, he's deified, writing notes to himself about how to be a better person that were never intended for publication. And that survives to us. And so when I picked that up at 19, it was like so radically different than what I learned in school, radically different than any self-help book I'd ever read. It's radically different than any of the crap. My parents had ever told me. And so I was just like, wow, this is what I want. This is what I want to be. This is how I want to live my life. And was that the Hayes translation?

Yeah, the Gregory Hayes translation. So one of the mistakes I see people do when they read philosophy is they cheap out. Like, oh, this is free on Project Gutenberg. First off, it's free because according to the copyright system, it's not worth anything, right? Like, that's why it's free. Every generation needs its own translation because a book like Mark Cyrillus, he's writing to himself in colloquial personal language. So when you see, like, Thou Shall not. That's not, he didn't say that.

That's what someone in the 17th century would have said. And so I think you want to read the best translation you can. And right now, that's Gregory Hayes. I remember reading, I first came across that, I think in university, and it wasn't the Hayes translation. I read this and I was like, what the fuck is this? And then I found the Hayes translation just randomly in an airport one day. And I started reading it going, why didn't I read this before?

Like, what was I thinking? Like, who was hiding this for me? This is crazy. Yeah. So who are your favorites then in terms of the Stoics, I guess? So Mark Serialis is my favorite. Probably Seneca is my second favorite. Seneca was a high sort of profile political advisor.

He was also a very famous playwright at the time, famous enough that one of his, as I was saying earlier, I'm trying to remember what I said and didn't say. One of Seneca's lines from his plays is actually a graffiti line on a wall. at Pompeii that's just been preserved for us. So, like, he's one of the most famous writers of his time, and his plays are actually great. But I like Seneca a lot.

I like Epictetus. Epictetus is a bit preachy for me, but those are the big three. I've read the others. The others are much harder to understand. Like Chris Phyllis or... Yeah, if you want to read the others, the best thing to do is Diogenes Laertes, wrote this book that's sort of a biography of all the other... all philosophers. It's like a multi-volume series. But one of the volumes is about the Stoics.

And so it's like he's giving a biography, but then also quoting all their best lines. The reason Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus are also the most famous is because their works survive the most completely. So all you really get from the other people are fragments anyway. So Seneca's fascinating to me. And he led this life that's been portrayed in multiple ways right to maybe we already had this conversation but maybe you can give me uh sure yeah so um so seneca's most famous letter or one of his most famous letters is to his mother after he'd been exiled and we don't know whether he deserved to be exiled or not he supposedly he had an affair with uh claudius maybe claudius is uh no caligula's like sister-in-law okay he had an affair with a famous woman

and was exiled from rome and his mother was of course devastated he He, as a political insider and a powerful person, was, of course, devastated. This is the end of his professional life. And so he's sent away. And so... He lost all power, all influence, everything. Yeah. And so he's not just writing about philosophy in theory.

He's writing about it as someone who underwent, you know, who lost everything. It would be like going bankrupt tomorrow or being impeached from office or something. And so then he's recalled to Rome on the condition that he become Nero's tutor. And he accepts Nero at the time was just a child, right? So no one knew whether he was really good or bad or anything. But it became increasingly clear that this was a deranged pathological individual, like a true psychopath. And he's – and so not only is Seneca his mentor trying to curb these things, but he's also becoming immensely rich. He was one of the richest men in Rome because the emperor is his – he's almost –

more powerful than the emperor. Right. So there's that, and then, you know, he's an artist, which I imagine was stressful and interesting. So it's just some, even in his own time, a lot of people thought he was hypocritical. But at the same time, they loved his writing, and they loved his essays,

and he was one of the most prominent, considered to be one of the wisest men at the same time. So he's complicated like everyone else. And as someone who's worked for complicated people, and I have a bit of a complicated reputation myself, Like I very much related to this idea that there's just a lot more than people see when they hear like rich guy, Nero's Tudor, famous writer, stoic. So it's almost impossible to comprehend what this individual must have been like. I think we're like that with almost everybody, right?

We paint them with some sort of brush or label based on a sound butt, a tweet, you know, a headline in a newspaper. And we don't think that we're, you know, we don't think about that person or what's going on in their life or why they make these choices. Yeah, in the Eric Rombok, which I know you've recommended, he says that the Seneca's critics, and I won't try to pronounce a Greek word, what they called him was tyrant teacher. There's actually a Greek word for that. And that was considered an epithet, right? And as someone who has represented individuals, many of which are very hated, I've got this, I myself have been accused of enabling these people or encouraging these people or being worse. than these people, you know, so like I, and then, you know, I've, my opinion of some of the people that I've worked for has changed over time. And, and I read that book about Seneca around the time

that American Apparel was collapsing and Dev Charny, who is the CEO, sort of went through, you know, did some things I very much disagree with. And so, you know, it was like, uh, there's this great line in one of Seneca's plays where he says, crimes often return upon their teacher. And, You know, that's what happened to Seneca, right? Seneca is ultimately forced to commit suicide by Nero. It's a very prescient remark that he would write in one of his plays something that basically describes the fate that would befall him. And as that was sort of happening to me, and I read that book, I thought, like, I relate

on a very small scale to what that person must have been like and what they must have gone through. You stopped going to school when you were 19. Yeah. Can you walk me through that decision and what you did right after that? Well, I mean, one of the first things I like to do, if only for my own sake, is I, even though I, like, look, I wrote my biography, so I'm responsible for the people who say like, hey, you know, you dropped out of college at 19, but it's interesting how things can become in retrospect more significant than they are. And Nassim Talib calls this the narrative fallacy um you you tell yourself a story about your life so it's like call the my sophomore year of college ended you know two weeks before my 20th birthday and that's why i stopped

going to school so did i drop out when i was 19 or did i drop out when i was 20 um is that semantic or is that a that's a very significant five percent of your life right it's big um so but anyways i left when i was 19 or 20 to i was at the time i was a sort of a marketing um manager for Tucker Max, who had, you know, written these best-selling books and had a sort of a media empire. I was working at a talent agency in Hollywood. I signed some of the first YouTube clients to ever become sort of professional actors and content creators. And then I got to try out to be a research assistant for the author of Robert Green,

who wrote the 40 Laws of Power. And so it was just, it was three things that if you told me when I was graduating that I could choose one of them, I would have said college was worth it. So to me it was, should I stay in school? Should I turn down these things, stay in school because that's what you're supposed to do and then hope to get this lucky again? And so I tried it. And so we were talking earlier about being busy and saying no to things and doing three things at once.

It sounds like it's a lot. And how have you, you're always doing multiple things at once. You're always trying to do a lot. How do you juggle that? Well, it was a lot, but it was also very formative, right? So I was working in, you could argue that what I do now is a combination of all those three things, right? I have my own marketing company. I write books and I, and I advise sort of clients and people on strategies, right?

So it's a combination of those three things. And so instead of developing them concurrently, which would have taken a long time, or no, consecutively, which would have taken a long time, I did them concurrently. And so it compressed, you know, you want to say your 10,000 hours, if I'm close to that, it compressed it in three years instead of 10 or four, you know, probably closer to four. But I did, I was very overwhelmed and very busy, but by not doing it at a leisurely pace, I got to skip ahead in line, so to speak. But it's also been a tendency in my life that I just commit to a lot of stuff. So like, not only was I working for all those people, but I never like stopped working for

those people. I would just start doing more things. And so, you know, I probably worked for Robert for like five or six years. And if you call me today, I'm, oh, what do you need me to do? And so it's very, it's very, it can be very exhausting, but it's also a bit of a compulsion for me. It's hard for me to say no to things. And you kind of reached a tipping point recently on that, didn't you? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, around the time that collapsed in American Barrel, I was just very overworked. And I, like, I built this life for myself here in Austin where I live. And yet I was in L.A. I was had to show up in an office every day. I was dealing with all sorts of stuff. I tried to cut out of my life because, like, someone called me and said, hey, like, we need you. Can you come? And I said, I'll be on the next plane.

And the idea of stopping and going, what's the opportunity cost of this? Or should I say yes? Is this what I want? What, you know, what is going to, what's going to be the problem here? And I didn't ask that until sometimes you got to touch the stove to get burned. And so I really got burned and overwhelmed. And I've tried to get better at saying no. But I would say, you know, this is a very first world thing.

And I get that. But one of the hardest things in the world for people to do is to say no to money. It's just extraordinarily difficult. It almost doesn't matter how much, right? Like if somebody offers you $20 to do something in the next 10 minutes or something. I remember, like, my wife makes fun of me because like a couple years ago, we were like walking into like a Home Depot or something. And I was like, oh, they're hiring. And she was like, are you looking for a job?

But it was like, like, somehow, like, I can't even, I just couldn't turn off that part of my brain. The idea of like, there's an opportunity. Should I consider that? Like, and this is crazy. I have 20 minutes right now. Right, right. Like, and so for me, it's, it's, my wife's the same way. It's like, when we see stuff, we think about, like, why shouldn't we do it?

We don't think, like, what is the opportunity cost? We don't think, you know, do we need this? We think, well, they're paying us for it. you know and that that is not great that's not a great attitude if you're trying to produce lasting work or to be the ultimate best at what you do how is your framing change now in terms of these costs and i mean you must be bombarded all the time with i mean not as much as you think like i don't want to make it sound like i'm just drowning in opportunities like i'm certainly not there but um one of the things that was formative for me is like i'd said yes

to a bunch of i said yes so i said yes to working on this one book and And then for some personal reasons, I backed out of it. And then, like, a week later, Tony Robbins called me and wanted me to work on his book for, like, double the amount. And that book has sold, like, a million copies since it was, like, a huge, big life-changing opportunity for me. But I just committed to this other thing not thinking about it. Like, it was, you need to have the confidence to be able to go, like, things are going to be okay in the future. Right. So you're not, you know that, what's that?

You're not driven by that immediate kind of. Yeah, there's that fable about, you know, the ant and the cricket, about the, you know, the ants always preparing for winter while the cricket's like playing and then the, the ants. Well, if you actually read about that story, some of the interpretations, the interpretation of the allegory is changed in different eras. You know, the ant, if the ant is overpreparing at a certain point, it's missing out on life that the cricket is experiencing, right? And so I think for me, it's this idea of like, okay,

this is what enough is or this is what my baseline is and I have to be able to say no sorry that's not enough and it's also understanding what makes you happy right and we're totally yeah yeah like and that it was like okay I'm making great money doing this thing but I have to show up in an office and my whole life is around was about not having to show up for an office right um there's that throw line like be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes it's like if you don't if you like like if you don't like having to dress up for work don't it doesn't matter how good the opportunity is if they make you dress up for it you know like i i i you got to think about what's important to you and if you don't know you can end up very far if you don't know and you don't make those decisions

um one by one you will end up very far from where you need to be to be happy right i want to come back to working with robert green yeah what did you learn from that uh i mean i learned everything, right? Like he, I would not be a writer if it wasn't for Robert Green. I would not be able to think the way that I think if it wasn't for Robert Green. I'd be a much worse person if I never met Robert Green, which I know is probably funny to people who hear that, you know, he's the author of The 40thous Power. Robert is one of the most generous, patient, um, wisest people that I've ever met. Um, I, you know, I started for him. I was transcribing interviews for a book that he was writing with 50 Cent. And then he would start to let me read books that he

he didn't want to read that he thought there might you know he remote possibility he's like look there's a 1% chance this book has some material in it that I might be able to use please read it and most of the time I answer was like yeah you're right there's nothing here but he would say like you know I want I remember he was saying like he's like in the 50 cent book he was like I like I like to include some stories of like the great black boxers he's like but I've already written about Muhammad Ali and my other books so let's see what you can find and so I read biographies of Joe Lewis and Jack Johnson and all these other people. And so I was like, that was like one of my first contributions to one of his books. Like I was like, there's something

there about Joe Lewis. Like, here's what I would suggest you. That's how that worked. Like, hey, I read this biography of Joe Lewis. This is something I think you should check out. There might be something there. And then he goes and finds that I'm not like contributing in any way there. I'm just, hey, I've eliminated this for you. Check this. But those, like, I'm never. I'm never would have read those books if he hadn't assigned me to read them. So in a weird way, it was sort of like a college-esque experience and that I have an instructor who's assigning me to explore certain things. It was like a work study program. I think you referred to it as almost an apprenticeship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not an official apprenticeship and like we didn't

sign like a contract. But yeah, the idea is at a certain point, after I'd gotten a little bit better, he was like, what do you want to do? Because that's how I can make, if you could tell me how I can help you with what you want to do with your life. And this is a conversation I have with people that I work with now. If you, he's like, I'm not going to pay you like a ton of money. But if you can tell me what you want to do with your life, I can make sure this is very rewarding for you. And it was. Like he showed my note card system, how I research books now is a direct result of the system that he taught me.

And how I think about books is a result of. You know, I would go, you know, he'd be like, I want you to do this. I want you to do this. Can you do this? Can you do this? And I'd, and then I'd be like, okay, but I have one question. Like, I remember one time I was like, Robert, like, who makes the indexes for books? Like, how does that happen?

He was like, oh, like, because I thought, like, one of the things that was intimidating to me about writing a book was like, do I have to do that? And he was like, oh, no, that just like happens. A publisher just does that. I was like, oh, okay. Like, so it was just little things. And then when I decided to write my first book, he, walked he was like he walked you through the process that's awesome um let's geek out for a second

because the number one question i got when i told people i was interviewing you is yeah they want to know about this infamous note card system can you walk me through uh robert's system and then how you've adapted that to your system now sure so robert does uh he's not quite robert caro who writes everything longhand but robert um i would say probably 80% of his work is in the research and 20 is in the writing and all the writing is done on these note cards so you would read a book he would read a book go through it and take notes uh mark things that he liked and then he would transfer that knowledge onto note cards and then if you note like so the 48 laws of power might be 48 sections and then each law is supported by note cards and so the way that works with a research assistant is

like my job is to find materials to go in the note cards right so then when he's writing law six in the 50th law or whatever there's stuff for him to rely on. And so I started using note cards myself. And really, I just started, I would write stuff I would, I would see a quote that I would like, or a word I would like, or a story I would like, I would just write it down on this note card. And I just had a collection of note cards until I had enough note cards that I started organizing them by theme. And then when I wrote my first book, it was, trust me, I'm lying, it was, I spent a year before I left American Apparel writing note cards around media and hey this is good i read this book and then i would you know all this stuff

and uh it became you know hundreds and hundreds of note cards and then what that allows you to do is when you like my book uh the obstacle is away is three parts 10 chapters in each part so um that would be 30 parts plus an intro and a conclusion right so that's 32 sections um you're just filling that up But let's say I'm writing part two, chapter six, that's all I have to carry with me. If I'm going to a library or I'm on the road, and you're not carrying the whole book around your head. You're not sitting down and just writing where it leads you. You're focused on that individual section, which makes it all much more manageable. And how did you pick the themes that you came up with originally?

For what? For your no card system. It's really just a function of the material, right? Like, you're not like, oh. It's a personal categorization of. Yeah, it's like, look, I read a lot of books about stoicism, so I have a huge section of note cards that are on stoicism. But the obstacle is the way, like, you know, I was writing, I read this section in Pierre Hadoes, the Inner Citadel, where he talks about this stoic idea of turning the obstacle upside down, which is how you take a negative thing and turn it into a positive thing. And I wrote that down.

Right. And then I would read other examples of people doing that, and I would write that down, and I'd write in the corner, turning the obstacle upside down. So I got to, you know, 20 note cards about that topic. And then I said, hey, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my next book, I was like, I think there's something there. And so I wrote a proposal. I sold it. And then I said, okay, I've got 20 note cards.

I need a thousand to write a book. Now I have to go read and explore and find things to build up this database of knowledge, essentially. And then... And so how do you store these? There must be thousands of them. There are thousands of note cards. I use this thing that's called a cropper hopper, which is just a weird thing they used to make to store,

um, store like photos, photos. Because a four by six photo is the same size as a note card. So, um, I just bought, I used to buy one at a time. Then I started running, they started stop making them. So I got my garage full of them. But each one of my books is one of those boxes.

Then I have a, I used to have just one box of general note cards in different categories that have not become books or anything. yet, and now that's split into two. And so do you store these electronically? So I store them on my office. I got really scared, like, my house got broken into a couple years ago, and I was really scared that, like, someone stole them, not knowing what they were.

They didn't, thankfully. And then... But it all would have been gone. Like, all of that research. And then, ironically, I came home and knocked the box over and disorganized everything. But Robert a couple years ago found a scanner that can scan note cards. So every couple weeks I have an assistant go through, scan all of them, and then I back them up to Dropbox.

So you don't use Evernote or anything like that? I don't even know how to use Evernote. And a lot of people go like, oh, your system, it sounds just like Evernote. It's not Evernote. It's physical note cards for a reason. Like Raymond Chandler is a line. If you take the pain to write it down, you're more likely to remember it. and use it. 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, a huge paragraph, I'm going to type it out, but it's still no copying and pasting. That's sort of the law. The rule. The rule, because it's about taking the knowledge from the book, running it through your body, and then putting it in a in a thing that you can manipulate but still have tangibly in front of you, right? Like my note, I could lay out the box for obstacles away

and it would be right there and you could see it and while it was there I could move stuff around. I could say actually this chapter is going to be moved into part three or this note card. I thought this note card would work for somewhere in section two but it didn't so I'm going to rework it into section one. I can move stuff around.

So I have a physically. visually yes and i think that's very very important i don't want it to be a black hole on my computer but it's not searchable right like how hard is it it's not searchable if i look if i ever couldn't find something i could have someone go through them for me or i could go through them which i do all the time um but i've never i want my memory works as such like i could tell you what different passages look like in books on my shelf where that shelf is i'm i'm a bit like, I don't know, Aspergerry like that, I guess, but I, I've not found, I think people overestimate, like, they're like, oh, I need it to be searchable.

It's like, well, what have you ever done with it, right? Like, I think a lot of people get very nerded out about the system and about having, like, the perfect optimized thing when, you know, if you told me they'd written 30 books, I'd be like, okay, your system's better than mine, but it's certainly not helped. I mean, I've written four books in four years. like, it's, it's, uh, it's not having, not having it's searchable has not held me back in any way that I can currently tell. Reading, playing, learning.

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No, I don't think so. So what's your workflow like for writing a book? Maybe you walk me through kind of, okay, I have an idea not from a publishing perspective, but from a writing perspective. So you go from an idea, what is the structure and the tools that you're using to put that together? So you have an idea, you do the research, you get the note cards, you arrange them, are you writing in, like, how are you?

I mean, that's a more difficult question to, I think when you write your book, you will not ask that question because, like, it's just different. Like, people go, like, how long did it take you to write it? And it's like, I don't know, because when did it start, right? Did it start when I was born? Did it start when I first had the idea? Did it start when you sold it? You know, my book that's coming on in June,

I started writing it January 1st of 2015. Like I know that, and my first book, I started June 17th, 2011. I know the exact day that I started, but I've been researching them for years, right? Like, so, and I know when I sold it. So it's a little weird, right? But when you, when you have, you have the idea, you're researching, it's sort of like, you have this general sense of what you're trying to say and what you believe. And then you, you know, you sort of let the confirmation bias do its work, right?

Because you're only thinking about this thing. You weirdly just attract all sorts of things that could support that idea or would be interesting to discuss in that idea. And so one of the, one of the downsides of that is you're paranoid, someone's going to steal your idea all the time. But they're not. You're just thinking about your idea all the time. So you feel almost a pressure to get it out there really quickly. Totally. So what I do is when I sit down to write, let's say, I'm.

I've broken it up into pieces. That's part of what the note card system does. So it's like, today I'm writing the intro. Like when I say, on January 1st, I started, I was writing the intro. And now that intro is radically different now than it was, but I was writing that. And then I got to a point where I could say, like, the rough draft of the intro is done. Then now I'm writing, you know, part one, chapter one. And I'm writing these discrete pieces because writing a book is very demoralizing.

Like, think about it. Let's say a book is 60,000 words. and you're writing 500 words, 500 usable words a day, let's say, which is, you know, people write two or three thousand, but you don't get rid of them, right? So you could work for eight hours on something or three hours. You could work a day's work of writing and make no visible, perceivable progress towards your goal. So there's no, you only get to the light at the end of the tunnel like three or four months

in. Or, you know, think about someone like Robert Caro has been, he wrote. wrote, you know, he's been writing about Lyndon Johnson for like 40 years. He's, Lyndon Johnson's like 60 in the book, right? And so he's like, and that's only to get him to volume four. So you have to break it up into discrete tasks. At least I think, when you break it into discrete tasks, then like even Robert Carrow, he knows the last sentence and the first sentence of the book. And then everything else is filling it in. But what you don't do, what I think is the most dangerous thing for writers to do is to just,

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. Oh, but that's like the whole notion that people sell is meant about being an author. Oh, you just go to the coffee shop, you sit down, the words magically spew out of your mouth. I mean, there's this Hemingway quote where he says, writing is easy. It's just sitting down and writing, sitting down at a typewriter and opening a vein or something, right? And that would be great, except for he didn't write.

right that way like if you look at um a farewell to arms there are eight no 27 handwritten different endings to that book so he was not sitting down and bleeding unless he was bleeding to death right like he was meticulously writing and rewriting and getting closer to something like so writing i think when you break it up into task you're like okay all i have to do is get these 2,000 words right. That's much easier to wrap my head around. And then later you're linking all these pieces together. But I write, I write in, this is another weird thing with that. So I write those chunks in Google Docs, like in separate Google documents. So I'm not doing like a day-to-day word count. It's like, hey, today I'm writing part two, chapter four. And then only when I've

gotten to the end, do I then combine all the things and then begin to look at the book as a whole. So it's a big, then I switch to, and this is all personal, but then I switch to Microsoft Word. So I'm taking it off the internet and now it's a distinct manuscript. And now I'm thinking about the project as a whole. I think editing while you write, the whole thing is hard, but if you're just doing these pieces, then I'm able to sort of be a bit recursive about these smaller sections. And do you map it out in that like today I'm going to do this section. Tomorrow I'm going to do this section. Are you doing anything else while you're doing this? It's not scheduled like on Tuesday I'm doing this and Wednesday I'm doing this. It's more like you have to go from A to Z and so you're

starting an A and then when you're done with A, then you move on to B. But like I don't write full time. Like I could, but I have a company and I try to write one or two articles a week. I have my own site. I do a lot of consulting for the first three books. I was also working in American Apparel. So I don't know how someone writes for an entire day. So I write, I usually get up early. I love your stuff about, you know, if you want to be more productive, wake up early. I wake up around seven. I try to start writing by like eight. And I write usually like at like 11, 1130, like I'm done. There's, it's, it's hard. It's draining. It's very draining. And you just hit diminishing returns, right? So then I stop. And then I don't give myself a break for the rest of the day. I'm not going to work for

three hours um i i work on my other stuff so i just schedule everything after i start but you're matching your energy and intensity to the work in some way right yeah yeah like you're writing to you're writing to you stop and then you're moving on to these other things and then usually throughout the course of the day other things occur to you that would be valuable to the writing and you're either taking notes and doing them tomorrow or you're i'm sending an email to myself or whatever like for instance i like to exercise in the middle of the day not in the middle of the day in the mid-afternoon okay so it's like i write till let's say hypothetical schedules i write into 11 from 11 to 3 i'm doing calls or working on client stuff or i'm editing stuff for other people

whatever i'm doing and at 3 i'm going to go for like an hour run and on that run wherever i was stuck in the writing some of that's going to come loose in my head and i'm going to be like oh that's a great phrase and i'll email it to myself for a gotta remember this when I come home and then I'm like bursting in like some the amount of times I burst into my house and said to my wife like don't say anything to me like until I get this down on paper and then I'm just writing you know in shorthand like little notes and and then it's like and then I can go back to being a normal person so I either run or swim but that breaks it up for me and what's your night like um I usually am done by like five or six and then I just sort of

dick around we eat dinner we'll watch TV we play with our animals sometimes I'll check email I'm checking email throughout this time I'm not not working at all but um so you are one of the quickest responders that I know for a busy person on email can you how do you do that I mean my job is to communicate the like so I don't do much phone so I'm sitting there working on stuff and part of what I'm working on is email I mean I'm amazed I get responses from you sometimes i've like barely hit send and gone to like a new message and it's like a response so i'm like inbox zero so like i'm i pride myself on having gotten to a point that i can deal with new stuff as they come in but one of my tricks is like if you send me something and

it's worth responding to i'm responding if someone is sending me something like you know i'll get a letter from someone who read one of my books it's really nice but i you may have written about this the Eisenhower stuff, urgent, not important or whatever, I save a lot of stuff until late, like, to you, I'm, this is, so maybe this doesn't work, but to you, I'm responding in two minutes, but then I have people I owe emails to from three weeks ago that I probably won't do until the next time I'm on a flight or I'm stuck without Wi-Fi and I'm just getting caught up on old stuff. I'm notoriously bad for email and I struggle with something that maybe you struggle with as well, which is I get a lot of unsolicited email that I feel in some ways that people are

burdening my time and they're not necessarily thinking about it. Like the request. Can you read this 20 page document? I got one last week. Can you do it? Is, you know, well worded, but it was basically like, can you do my homework assignment for me? Yeah. So one, I meet Sethi talks about this a lot where it's like, you can just not respond. Like, just pretend you didn't get it. I have personally, I struggle. Like, I've adapted over the last year, I would say I've come leaps and bounds. But at first, I had to respond to everything. Sure. So I find on stuff like that, responding is what they want, right?

You don't actually have to do the request. You can say like, hey, I can't read this, but here's a thought. Or like, I'll go like, hey, one of the things I think about for the articles I write is, what do I get the most email about? Can I write an article about that? Because now the first I know that at least one person is interested in this idea. Oh, that's a really good idea. And then now in the future, all emails I get about this thing, like, how do I find a book agent?

Boom. I don't even link them to the post. I just go like, I wrote an article about this, Google my name and book agent, and then it'll come up. And so I'm sort of treating it like a frequently asked questions thing. That's a good idea. That's a sign that somebody, you know, like what does a politician go like one calls a thousand constituents or whatever? It's probably similar on email. Most people don't email.

I've started adding a little bit of friction to it. I like your idea of you always have some sort of caveat. Like if you email me, think about it beforehand. Yeah. And my reading newsletter, where I recommend books, I was just tired of people going, like, they would just email me their thoughts, which is great. But like, it's like, what do you want me to do with this? So, but the reality is, like, I don't think it actually deters anyone.

So one thing I've done that I find interesting, and I don't know where I got this, I didn't come up with it myself, which was when people are sending me 20-page, 30-page documents, proposals, I'll just reply saying, hey, my, you know, can you print this out and mail it to me? And so what I've done is now I've added some sort of, and if they do, and they mail it to me, I will read it, but if it's not worth their time to print it out and mail it, because it's so easy to send email. And a lot of them are, I don't want to say form emails, but, you know, it's very easy to insert, you know, switch Ryan and Shane and send the exact same email. So one of the things that I realized with my company, which is like a consulting and sort of strategy, we call it a creative advisory. But I realized that I was spending a lot of time talking to people who may or may not have become my clients. Right. Right. And that was very inefficient for me.

So it was like, wait, did I just like, first I'd go meet with someone, which meant I couldn't be writing. then we would talk and I'd have to give them a ton of ideas on the spot then they'd be like well send me a proposal then I'd have to make a proposal and then we'd have to negotiate a rate and blah blah blah totally suboptimal yeah so especially because I'm trying to run a lifestyle business not trying to create a scaled major company so like because otherwise the whole that that's why you hire people but I was trying not to do that so one of the things that I realize and this has been a huge not only source of growth for my company but it's been a huge relief, I go, like, look, unless it's like a kid asking me for advice about life, my job

is to give companies advice on how to grow, how authors, how to write books, people how to think about stuff, you know, how to market things. So if you'd ask me that, I'm not going to respond to that email. So what I, and I'm not going to get together to pitch you on why you should pay me to tell you how to do that. So what I've come up with is by giving you the answers that you're looking for it to begin with. I'm not going to give you, you know, some of my answers and then try to hold some stuff back and then, you know, it's just ridiculous. So what I came up with is all my clients, even ones I know I want to work with, I start with a paid strategy session. Right. So I charge like $1,500 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 phone and then I will, I will not shoot the shit with you. I will give you my best work for an hour about that idea, what you need to know, what I would think, what I would do if you hired me. Like, I'll give all my ideas away. And then, because the 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 to hire someone else to execute, that's fine. So then I do these sessions, which is on the one hand, qualifies all leads because the people who are never going to hire me or just milking me for free

advice they go away right away um the people who can afford whatever i am going to charge are like you know they don't bulk at the fee so we work we do we then we map out exactly what they should do and then if they hire me or they hire my company which is called brass check that fee just counts against so it's like you know let's say we end up working for 20 or 30 000 it's like they paid a deposit essentially that's a brilliant idea because i'm struggling Like, I'm overwhelmed with these people asking for advice, which I love, right? Because it's a sign that you're doing something and people are valuing what you're doing. But on the same token, you're trying to make a living and you can't just give away, you know, 90% of your day.

Well, a couple things. So one, I hate the phrase, pick your brain. Like, my brain is how I make my living. And I say that to people. I go, like, I would, look, if I could, I would do all of this for free because I love it. But my wife would kill me. I wouldn't be able to eat and more importantly

I have other clients who have paid me and it's not fair for me to do for free for you what they pay me for so I can't do it for free I'm sorry if that I totally understand

if that pisses you off and like let's not work together and so there's that and then the other thing is you have to value your time like Neil Strauss he has a thing and he's like look I can buy my own coffee

you taking me out to coffee or like there's if if a consulting session for me for an hour is worth $1,500 and like you might think that that's too high but plenty of people pay for it and almost all of them say it was worth it or worth many times that there's not a dinner in the world that you could pay that you could pick up the tab for that would cost $1,500 right so and that means I have to drive somewhere I have to block like for this it's like What I do, not only the other hack is, I go for a walk when I do these calls. So I get an hour walk in and I talk to people and I'm stimulated and it challenges me and it works out my chops and then they leave with either in most cases a plan they can totally

execute themselves at a fraction of what it would have cost to have me do it for them or we it's the start of a really good relationship. And so that obviously worked out only by trial and error, but it's been a huge relief for me because I have a way, I can just pass these things to a coordinator, he negotiates it, and then I either get to talk to someone and we do awesome work together or, you know, nobody, no, I don't feel like I'm giving a piece of my life away. There's a quote from Seneca. He's like, let no man take a day of my life without, you know, giving me something worthwhile

in return. And like, we sell our time. for money. That's what we do. Don't give it away. And, you know, that's just how I think about it. I think that's the perfect way to end this. Listen, this has been a fascinating conversation, even the second take. But I really appreciate you taking the time. And we'll have to do this again sometime. For sure. Hey, guys. This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at Farnhamstreetblog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G dot com slash podcast.

You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to Farnham Streetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening. You know,