Ryan Holiday

Your salary does not say something about you as a person. Especially whatever your first offer is. It will get bigger over time, that’s how it works. And even then it doesn’t mean anything (though money is nice).

There is a solution. The next time you are frustrated, the next time you feel acute pain or resentment or unfairness, all you have to do is remember one thing.

Think about the people whose mouths those words are coming out of. Think about what they do in private, think about the mess that is their own lives, think about their demons.

Sometimes there is nothing like a 900-page biography. Most of the time though, nobody has time for such a thing. Especially with many modern biographers who refuse to take a stand that resembles judgement towards their subjects.

People who study the Civil War tend to fall in two camps.

When action is our priority, vanity falls away.

It’s the question you’re asking yourself…and now, pretty regularly, you’re asking me because my article on leaving school somehow became #1 Google result for “dropping out of college.”

It must be weird to be from Germany today, knowing what your country did in the recent past. Well, this is not that different.

Look, if you’re about to ship a product or launch a new company, open a restaurant, or make your debut on stage, you’re already ahead of 99% of the population. People would kill to be where you are.

So much about LA is broken and not what it could be—how can a city that very intentionally embraced the car and had forsaken all other forms of transportation have such horrible roads?

If you want a satisfying feeling, here it is—opening up the laptop when I get to the hotel or back to my house and seeing the outbox launch a hundred emails one right after another, like paratroopers out of the back of a transport plane.

What are you going to do with this time you “save” speed reading? Work more? Watch more TV? Respond to email? Ugh. By doing this you miss out on all the ancillary benefits of reading: peace, quiet and concentration. Don’t toss that out.