Ryan Holiday

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’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.

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.

Here’s what those same people haven’t told you: your passion may be the very thing holding you back from success.

The world would be a better place if artists, entrepreneurs, executives and creative types got better at explaining and selling what they do. More great stuff would break through in this attention economy we live in.

Especially if you work on anything remotely internet related. Because the amount of people making obscene, life-changing amounts of money doing what appears to be very little work is essentially infinite. Let me tell you, it doesn’t matter how well you’re doing, these people can make you feel like a chump.

“The worst thing in life that you can have is a job that you hate, that you have no energy in, that you’re not creative with and you’re not thinking of the future. To me, might as well be dead.” — Robert Greene

What should you do?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

There is a moment in the book early in Grant’s career as a soldier where he was sent to hunt down a band of guerrillas, shaking with fear as he arrived at their camp only to find they had run away. It was then that he realized the enemy was often as scared of you as you were of them. It changed his approach to battle forever.