Ryan Holiday

That’s why you didn’t update your blog for but twice this year? Why you had to take a sabbatical from work but you still haven’t release that album yet? Is that why your thesis isn’t finished yet?

“Do you have time to meet for coffee?” A “kick-off conference call?” “A sales pitch?” Conferences built around buzzwords and charlatans? No thanks man.

Books are an investment. I understand they cost money upfront…but that’s how an investment works.

These guys are called growth hackers. They built Facebook and Twitter and Airbnb and Dropbox and Instagram and a bunch of other billion dollar companies using techniques that you can’t learn in school.

Well, the idea of keeping a commonplace book has clearly struck a nerve. Not only did the article make the front page of Reddit and blow up on Facebook and Twitter, but many people emailed in their own methods for keeping a commonplace book.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important.

The saying is also incomplete. Because while people can be quite awful, there are plenty of other ordinary, petty tortures. Nor is fair to say “people” when it is much more clearly certain people, doing certain things.

Seeing a kid–like we’re talking 6 and under–who is way cooler and has way more swag than you ever will.

The words threw me back slouched in my chair, speechless and dumbfounded.

It’s not enough to want a mentor or even to be lucky enough to find one. It’s a relationship that requires investment, energy and clear goals and intentions. But if you do it right, it can change your life.

Checking off the various books from your high school curriculum, and then, perhaps the “100 Greatest Books Ever Written” is the educational equivalent of skating to where the puck is and not where it’s going.

I’ve felt with a few old school publicists and marketers myself and look occasionally they’ll surprise me with the ability to call up some old friend and place some story and I’ll think, “Wow I wish I had that power,” but I don’t. I don’t think many people do anymore.