Ryan Holiday on the art of perception and self-reflection

Who would you be if you dropped all your identities

I've always hated the question, what do you do? I try not to go around seeing myself really as anything

I'm this, I'm that. When you pick these labels, what you're essentially doing is limiting

I'm much less interested in being seen as a writer, and I'm much more interested in writing

Now, when people ask me what I do, I just, I say that I have a bookstore

and they're just like, oh, that's cool, and then they don't ask me any more questions. Have you ever felt you were living according to someone else's standards or values

In what way? You know, when I look back, especially more in my 20s

I would go to this sort of conference every year, this advertising conference, and most of the people were in suits and ties

This wasn't really what I wanted to do. I remember at some point thinking, how many years can I keep going to this and not eventually put on a suit and tie Like it hard to swim upstream for super long I made the leap and left I wrote my first book and then you know I moved to New York

and suddenly I'm around a different scene of people with their own uniform and their own priorities

I think as I've gotten older, I just try to be busy doing the verb

instead of thinking about talking about the nouns. Because the more you're in it

you're solving for X, Y, and Z. And the more you're out of it, you're copying, imitating

comparing. And I find that that's both conducive to like mental health, but also quality of work

Where has your ego taken a hit in a way that ultimately served you? I'm not sure ego ever

serves us. So anything that humbles us is usually for the best. I have it tattooed on my arm here

Ego is the enemy. So like we all tell ourselves a story about who we are and how we got there

And that story usually gives ourselves a lot of credit, you know, pats ourselves on the back

points out how awesome we are And you know as my books have sold well and you know you sort develop a fan base or following our platform You have lots of things that confirm the ego or puff up the ego And this feels good but it also has the process of the effect of obscuring or inflating or detaching us from reality

So I always kind of welcome those humbling things, the things that sort of puncture the ego

I always find that super, super helpful. Have you ever gone through something upsetting or painful that you later viewed as a blessing

I remember in the middle of the pandemic, as we were in the process of opening this bookstore

which we dumped basically our life savings in and so much time. It's just sitting there empty

And, you know, you have no idea where it's going to go, what's going to happen. And I just, I wrote this little note to myself

I said, 2020 will make you a better person or a worse person

And when these things happen to us, your mind wants to go to who's to blame, how unfair it is, what this is going to cost you, what it's going to take from you, how easily it could have been avoided

To all these things that do not change what happened and definitely don move you forward in any way And so the perspective shift is like okay the wheels are spinning How do I send power to where they going to get traction

so then I can move forward? It's not awesome that this happened

but a lot of times it's just not being destroyed by it

And the blessing is what you take out of going through some shit and not being destroyed by it

Like you go, oh, I can go through stuff. That's how I think about it

What is your most consistent and greatest hope? I mean, I think like all parents

you just hope your kids turn out okay. You hope not so much that they're successful

or make a lot of money. I guess you just hope that they're happy

that they make it, that you were what they needed. It doesn't really matter how these other things turn out

If you get all the other things you want or world events go this way or that way

if it doesn't work out for these people, if it doesn't work out here, none of it really matters