5 Things Ryan Holiday Taught Me
#2: Become the master of the mundane.
His name makes me want to take a vacation and I ain’t mad at it. I don’t just read Ryan’s work because of his last name.
The work of Ryan Holiday is game-changing. Ryan introduced me to stoicism, which for simple folk just means ancient wisdom. Roman emperors from hundreds of years ago were dropping self-improvement bombs and had no idea, or no social media to share their thoughts. So, they wrote their thoughts down in books and diaries, and wham bam thank you mam, Mr Holiday stumbled across them centuries later.
Ye holy one (Ryan) then turned this ancient wisdom into books. Books everywhere, there was. The most popular book he wrote was Obstacle Is The Way, shortly followed by my favorite, Stillness Is The Key.
There was just one problem on his hero’s journey to teach people ancient wisdom: attention spans. The average human disguised as a goldfish looking at a cell phone couldn’t always be bothered to read Ryan’s books. Unless you’d had Ryan’s work recommended to you a dozen times by a woman as wise as Oprah, you were unlikely to take your holiday leave (see what I did there — genius I tell ya!) and spend it reading his books. Books can be a bad investment for a modern-day person with a bright screen.
