Ryan Holiday

Like many people, I knew I had email overload. I knew that I was increasingly a slave to my inbox. I just didn’t have the clarity to really understand how bad it had become.

I am bringing a computer, but only so that we might watch House of Cards (or, more honestly, Law and Order). My phone is accompanying us but only because I don’t know how to read a map. If email intrudes on either of these devices, I will not hesitate to throw them into the ocean.

Everyone should start with just three positive habits that they can easily practice each and every day (for instance, I squeezed them in on my wedding day).

“What they want to hear,” Steve Martin said well, “is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script’…but I always say ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

Documentaries can tell us about history and life just as well as any writer–in fact, as we see with Ken Burns, sometimes it takes an amazing writer teaming up with an amazing filmmaker to truly tell a story.

What’s your main thing? Ok, so why are you doing all these other things?

I own a goat. Two actually: Biscuit and Bucket. One is a nigerian dwarf and the other is a pygmy.

Writing a book is hard. Like, really hard.

7:30am: Get up. House is quiet. Take a shower.

There’s a Mitch Hedberg joke about how Hollywood tries to turn every comedian into an actor. He said that’s like going up to a chef and saying: Yeah, but can you farm?

After an embarrassingly long time of putting up with this, one day, I finally asked myself, “Why?”

If you are looking to start 2015 off right or just read over the holiday break, here are some books you not only can’t go wrong with, they might just change your life.