Ryan Holiday

Andrew Carnegie had a great piece of advice for young people (that pre-dates John F. Kennedy’s line by 60 years or so): “Instead of the question, ‘What must I do for my employer?’ substitute ‘What can I do?’”

“A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.”

LA has a handful of things that no other city in the world has. I won’t even call those things hidden gems–because they aren’t. They’re right there. You’re just missing them.

Sometimes you have to be dumb enough to be wrong. Really wrong. Because that’s ultimately how you turn out to be right.

If you’ve done your job, they’ll do theirs.

These are books I loved so much that I read them in marathon sittings, wanting to get to the end but hoping they never finished.

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.

I’ll read book after book in a series in an author’s bibliography. In that moment, I’ll even read The Hunger Games if it’s the only thing in reach (or worse, as a kid, I once made it several books deep into the Babysitter’s Club series when I ran out of stuff to read). And then, just like that, the urge is relieved and normal life resumes until the cycle starts again.

So if you’re staring some life changing decision in the face right now, you need to understand this. It is always going to be inscrutable. There will not be clarity. Not before, not during, not until well, well after.

I started writing online in early 2006. It wasn’t until December of 2011, nearly six years later, that I got my first check for the act of writing. And that book wasn’t ultimately published in mid-July 2012.

“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.”

Sometimes you have to be a dick. Don’t waver when the time comes for it. Just push through it and move on.