Welcome to The Knowledge Project.
I'm your host, Shane Parrish, curator behind Fernum Street, an online intellectual hub of interestingness that covers topics like human misjudgment, decision making, strategy, and philosophy.
The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do.
It's more conversation than prescription.
On this episode I have Ryan Holiday.
Since dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under strategist Robert Green, the author of The 48 Laws of Power, Ryan has advised many New York Times bestselling authors and musicians.
He's a master and some would say manipulator of the media.
As his first book Trust Me I'm Lying Outlines, his latest book The Obstacle is the Way reached bestseller status.
We explore how he reads, what it means to be stoic, and his infamous no -card system.
The conversation is actually cut short.
We originally had 90 minutes booked for this interview but I forgot to turn on the recorder so we had to rerecord the entire interview.
Ryan got to practice some of that famous stoicism.
With that said I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
We'll go quicker, this just we were just talking for 20 minutes and just realized that the microphone wasn't on.
Wouldn't it be funny if I like freaked out and knocked over all the mics?
I was just very unstoke about it.
No, no, so stoicism is a practical philosophy, right?
Most people think when they think philosophy they think college professor lecturing them.
Stoicism is you know it's favored by statesmen, politicians, soldiers, artists, etc because it's really at its core I think a series of maxims and exercises for how to live what they would call a good life or to live virtuously or with excellence and you know if I was to sort of sum up the central maximum
there would be you don't control the world around you, you control how you control your thoughts, you control how you respond to the world around you.
And so the stoics are focused exclusively on that stuff and that's a not just a competitive edge but it's a recipe for I think contentment and fulfillment and stuff like that.
And so what really pulled you into that was I think the book recommendation by Dr.
Drew. Yeah so I was at a conference I said hey what books would you write, I sort of found him afterwards I said hey like I really love to read I know you read what would you recommend that I read and he told me about Epictetus.
I looked up Epictetus on Amazon, Marcus Aurelius was there who I'd always liked the movie Gladiator so I was like oh I'll get that too.
I read Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Aurelius is just it's just this totally unique historical document in the sense that it is the most powerful successful man on earth at that time literally worshipped as a god he's deified writing notes to himself about how to be a better person that would never intended
for publication and that survives to us and so when I picked that up at 19 it was like so radically different than what I learned in school radically different than any self -help book I'd ever read radically different than any of the crap my parents had ever told me and so I was just like wow this is this is what I
want this is what I want to be this is how I want to live my life and was that the Hayes translation yeah the Gregory Hayes translation so that one of the mistakes I see people do when they read philosophy is they cheap out like oh this is free on project Gutenberg first off it's free because according
to the copyright system it's not worth anything right like that's what it's free.
Every generation needs its own translation because a book like Mark Serealius he's writing to himself in colloquial personal language so when you see like thou shall not that's not he didn't say that that's what someone in the 17th century would have said and so you I think you want to read the best
translation you can and right now that's Gregory Hayes.
I remember reading I first came across that I think in University and it wasn't the Hayes translation I read this and I was like very dense is this and then I found the Hayes translation just randomly in an airport one day and I started reading it going why didn't I read this before like what was I
think it was hiding this for me this is crazy yeah so who are your favorites then in terms of the the the stoics I guess so Mark Serealius is my favorite probably Seneca is my second favorite Seneca was a high sort of profile political advisor he was also a famous playwright at the time famous enough
that one of his as I was saying earlier I'm trying to remember what I said and didn't say one of one of Seneca's lines from his plays is actually a graffitied line on a wall at Pompeii it's just been preserved for us so like he's one of the most famous writers of his time and his plays are actually
great but I like Seneca a lot I like I like Epictetus Epictetus is a bit preachy for me but those are the big three I've read the others the others are much harder to understand like Chris Phyllis or yeah if you want to read the others the best thing to do is Diagonese Laertes wrote this book that's
sort of a biography of all the other folk all philosophers it's like a multi -volume series but the one of the volumes is about the stoics and so it's like he's giving a biography but then also quoting all their best lines the reason Seneca, Mark Serealius and Epictetus are also the most famous is because their
works survive the most completely so all you really get from the other people are fragments anyway so Seneca is fascinating to me and he led this this life that's been portrayed in multiple ways right so maybe we already had this conversation but maybe you can give me a shirt yeah so so Seneca's most
famous letter or one of his most famous letters is to his mother after he'd been exiled and we don't know whether he deserved to be exiled or not he supposedly he had an affair with Claudius maybe Claudius is no Caligula's like sister -in -law okay he had an affair with a famous woman and was exiled from Rome
and his mother was of course devastated he as a political insider and a powerful person was of course devastated this is the end of his professional life right and so he's sent away and so he lost all power all influence everything yeah and so he's not just writing about philosophy in theory he's writing
about it as someone who underwent you know who lost everything be like going bankrupt tomorrow or being impeached from office or something and so and then he's recalled to Rome on the condition that he become Nero's tutor and he accepts Nero at the time was just a child right so no one knew whether
he was really good or bad or anything but it became increasingly clear that this was a deranged pathological individual like a true psychopath yeah and he's and so not only is Seneca his mentor trying to curb these things but he's also becoming immensely rich he was one of the richest men in Rome because the Emperor is his you
know he he's almost more powerful than the Emperor right so there's that and then you know he's an artist which I imagine was stressful and interesting so it's just some even in his own time a lot of people thought he was hypocritical but at the same time they loved his writing and they loved his essays
and he was one of the most prominent considered to be one of the wisest men at the same time so he's complicated like everyone else and as someone who's worked for complicated people and I have a bit of a complicated reputation myself like I very much related to this idea that there's just a lot more
than people see when they hear like rich guy and your own tutor famous writer stoic so it's almost impossible to comprehend what this individual must have been like I think we're like that with almost everybody right we paint them with some sort of brush or label based on a sound but a tweet you know
a headline in a newspaper and we don't think that we're you know we don't think about that person or what's going on in their life or why they make these choices yeah in the Eric Rambok which I know you've recommended he says he says that the Seneca's critics and I won't try to pronounce a Greek word
they what they called him was tyrant teacher there's actually a Greek word for that and that was a considered an epithet right and as someone who is represented individuals many of which are very hated I've got this I myself have been accused of enabling these people or encouraging these people or being
worse than these people you know so like I and then you know I've my opinion of some of the people that I've worked for has changed over time and and I read that book about Seneca around the time that American Apparel was collapsing and Jeff Charney who is the CEO sort of went through you know did some
things I very much disagree with and so you know it was like there's this great line and one of Seneca's plays where he says crimes often return upon their teacher and you know that that's what happened to Seneca right Seneca is ultimately forced to commit suicide by Nero it's it's very a prescient
remark that he would write in one of his plays some thing that basically describes the fate that would befall him and as that was sort of happening to me and I read that book I thought like I I relate on a very small scale to what that person must have been like and what they must have gone through
you stop going to school when you were 19 yeah can you walk me through that decision and what you did right after that well I mean one of the first things I like to do if only for my own sake is I even though I like look I wrote my biography so I'm responsible for the people who say like hey you know
you dropped out of college in 19 but it's interesting how things can become in retrospect more significant than they are and Nassim Taleb calls this the the narrative fallacy you tell yourself a story about your life so it's like call the my sophomore year of college and did you know two weeks before
my 20th birthday and that's why I stopped going to school so did I drop out when I was 19 or did I drop out when I was 20 is that semantic or is that a bit that's a very significant percent of your life yeah it's big so but anyways I left when I was 19 or 20 to I was I was at the time I was a sort of a marketing
manager for Tucker Max who you know written these best -selling books and had a sort of a media empire I was I was working at a talent agency in Hollywood I signed some of the first YouTube clients to ever become sort of professional actors and content creators and then I got a tryout to be a research
assistant for the author Robert Greene who wrote the 40 laws of power and so it was just it was three things that if you told me when I was graduating that I could choose one of them I would have said college was worth it so to me it was should I stay in school should I turn down these things stay in school
because that's what you're supposed to do and then hope to get this lucky again and so I tried it and so we were talking earlier about being busy and some note of things and doing three things at once sounds like it's a lot and how have you you're always doing multiple things at once you're always trying
to do a lot how do you juggle that what it was a lot but it was also very formative right so I was working in you could argue that what I do now is a combination of all those three things right I have my own marketing company I write books and I and I and I advise sort of clients and people on strategies
right so it's a combination of those three things and so instead of developing them concurrently which would have taken a long time or not consecutively which would have taken a long time I did them concurrently and so it compressed you know you want to say your 10 ,000 hours if I'm close to that it
compressed it in three years instead of ten or four you know probably closer to four but I did I was very overwhelmed and very busy but by not doing it at a leisurely pace I got to skip ahead in line so to speak but it's also been a tendency in my life that I just commit to a lot of stuff so like not only
was I working for all those people but I never like stopped working for those people I would just start doing more things and so you know I probably worked for Robert for like five or six years and if you call me today I'd oh what do you need me to do and so it's very it's very it can be very exhausting
but it's also a bit of a compulsion for me it's hard for me to say no to things and you kind of reached a tipping point recently on that didn't you yeah yeah I mean around the time the collapse of American barrel is just very overworked and I like I built this life for myself here in Austin where I
live and yet I was in LA I was had to show up at an office every day I was dealing with all sorts of stuff I tried to cut out of my life because like someone called me and said hey like we need you can you come and I said I'll be on the next plane and the idea of stopping and going what's the opportunity
cost of this or should I say yes is this what I want what you know what am what is gonna what's gonna be the problem here and I didn't ask that until sometimes you've got a touch of the stove to get burned and so I really got burned and overwhelmed and I've tried to get better at saying no but I would say
you know this is a very first world thing I get that but one of the hardest things in the world for people to do is to say no to money it's extraordinarily difficult it almost doesn't matter how much right like if I offered you 20 bucks to do something in the next 10 minutes or something I remember
like my wife makes fun of me because like a couple years ago we were like walking into like a Home Depot or something and I was like oh they're hiring and she was like are you looking for a job but it was like like somehow like I can't even I just couldn't turn off that part of my brain the idea of like
there's an opportunity should I consider that like like and this is pretty many minutes right right right like and so for me it's it's my wife's the same way it's like when we see stuff we think about like why shouldn't we do it we don't think like what is the opportunity cost we don't think you know
do we need this we think well that are paying us for it you know but and that that is not great that's not a great attitude if you're trying to produce lasting work or to be the ultimate best at what you do how is your framing changed now in terms of these costs and the I mean you must be bombarded
all the time way I mean not as much as you think like I don't want to make it sound like I'm just drowning in opportunities like I'm certainly not there but one of the things that was formative for me is like I'd said yes to a bunch of I said yes so I said yes to working on this one book and then for for some
personal reasons I backed out of it and then like a week later Tony Robbins called me and wanted me to work on his book for like double the amount and that book is sold like a million copies since it was like a huge big life -changing opportunity for me but I just committed to this other thing not thinking
about like the idea it was hard you need to have the confidence to be able to go like things are gonna be okay in the future right so you're not you know that what's that I'm not driven by that immediate kind of yeah there's that fable about you know the ant in the cricket about the you know the ants
always preparing for winter while the crickets like playing and then the the ants well if you actually read about that story some of the interpretations the interpretation of the allegory has changed in different eras you know the ant if the ant is over preparing at a certain point it's missing out
on life that the cricket is experiencing right and so I think for me it's this idea of like okay this is what enough is or this is what this is what my baseline is and I have to be able to say no sorry that's not enough and it's also understanding what makes you happy right and we're totally yeah yeah
like and that it was like okay I'm making great money doing this thing but I have to show up in an office and my whole life is around was about not having to show up for an office right there's that through line like be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes it's like if you don't if you like
like if you don't like having to dress up for work don't it doesn't matter how good the opportunity is if they make you dress up for it you know like I you've got to think about what's important to you and if you don't know you can end up very if you don't know and you don't make those decisions one
by one you will end up very far from where you need to be to be happy right I want to come back to you working with Robert Greene yeah what did you learn from that I mean I learned everything right like he I would not be a writer if it wasn't for Robert Greene I would not be able to think the way that I
think if it wasn't for Robert Greene I'd be a much worse person if I never met Robert Greene which I know is probably funny to people who hear that you know he's the author of the 48 lines of power Robert is one of the most generous patient wisest people that I've ever met I you know I started for him
I was transcribing interviews for a book that he was writing with 50 cent and then he would start to let me read books that he didn't want to read that he thought there might you know he remote possibility he's like look there's a 1 % chance this book has some material in it that I might be able to use
please read it and most of the time my answer was like yeah you're right there's nothing here but he would say like you know I want I remember he was saying like he's like in the 50 cent book he was like I'd like to include some stories of like the great black boxers he's like but I've already written
about Muhammad Ali in my other books so let's see what you can find and so I read biographies of Joe Lewis and Jack Johnson and all these other people and and so I was like that was like one of my first contributions to one of his books like I was like there's something there about Joe Lewis like here's
what I would suggest you that's how that worked like hey I read this biography of Joe Lewis this is something I think you should check out there might be something there and then he goes and finds that I'm not like contributing in any way there I'm just hey I've eliminated this for you check this but those
like I never would have read those books if he hadn't assigned me to read them so in a weird way it was like it was sort of like a college -esque experience and that I have an instructor who's assigning me to explore certain things it was like a work -study program I think you referred to it as almost
an apprenticeship yeah yeah yeah I mean it's not an official apprenticeship and like we did like a contract but yeah the the idea is at a certain point after I've gotten a little bit better he was like what do you want to do because that's how I can make if you could tell me how I can help you with what you
want to do with your life and this is a conversation I have with people that I work with now if you he's like I'm not gonna pay you like a ton of money but if you can tell me what you want to do with your life I can make sure this is very rewarding for you and it was like he he showed my note card system
how I research books now is a direct result of the system that he taught me and how I think about books is a result of you know I would go you know he'd be like I want you to do this I want you to do this can you do this can you do this and I and then I'd be like okay but I have one question like I
remember one time I was like Robert like who makes the indexes for books like how does that happen he was like oh like because I thought like one of the things that was intimidating to me about writing a book was like do I have to like do I have to do that and he was like oh no that just like happens
a publisher just does that I was like oh okay like so it was just little things and then when I decided to write my first book he walked he was like he walked you through the process that's awesome um let's geek out for a second because the number one question I got when I told people I was interviewing
you yeah they want to know about this infamous note card system can you walk me through Robert system and then how you've adopted that to your system now sure so Robert does he's not quite Robert Caro who writes everything longhand but Robert I would say probably 80 % of his work is in the research and 20
% is in the writing and all the writing is done on these note cards so you would read a book he would read a book go through it and take notes mark things that he liked then he would transfer that knowledge onto note cards and then if you note it like so the 48 laws of power might be 48 sections and then
each law is supported by note cards and so the way that works the research assistant is like my job is to find materials to go in the note cards right so then when he's writing law 6 in the 50th law or whatever there's stuff for him to rely on and so I started using note cards myself and really I just
started I would write stuff I would I would see a quote that I would like or a word I would like or a story I would like I would just write it down on this note card and I just had a collection of note cards until I had enough note cards that I started organizing them by theme and then when I wrote
my first book it was trust me I'm lying it was I spent a year before I left American Apparel writing note cards around media and hey this is good I read this book and then I would you know all this stuff and it became you know hundreds and hundreds of note cards and then what that allows you to do is when you
like my book the obstacle is the way is three parts ten chapters in each part so that would be 30 parts plus an intro and a conclusion right so that's 32 sections just filling that up but let's say I'm writing part two chapter six that's all I have to carry with me if I'm going to a library or I'm on the road
and you're not carrying the whole book around your head you're not sitting down and just writing where it leads you you're focused on that individual section which makes it all much more manageable and how did you pick the themes that you came up with originally for what for your note card system just
it's really just a function of the material right like you're not like oh personal categorization yeah it's like look I read a lot of books about stoicism so I have a huge section of note cards that are on stoicism but the obstacles away like you know I was writing I read this section in Pierre Hadeau's
the inner citadel where he talks about this stoic idea of turning the obstacle upside down which is how you take a negative thing and turn it into a positive thing and I wrote that down right and then I would read other examples of people doing that and I write that down and I write in the corner turning
the obstacle upside down so I got to you know 20 no cards about that topic and then I said hey when I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my next book I was like I think there's something there and so I wrote a proposal I sold it and then I said okay I've got 20 no cards I need a thousand to
write a book now I have to go read and explore and find things to to Britain to to build up this database of knowledge essentially and then and so how do you store these there must be thousands of them there's thousands of no cards there I I use this thing it's called a cropper hopper which is just
a weird thing they used to make to store store like photos photos because a four by six photo is the same size as a no card so I just have bought and I used to buy one at a time then I started running they started stop making so I've got my garage full of them but each one of my books is one of those
boxes then I have I used to have just one box of general no cards in different categories that have not become books or anything yet and now that's split into two and so do you store these electronically what I store them on my office I got really scared like my house got broken into a couple years
ago and I was really scared that like someone stole them not knowing what they were they didn't thankfully and then but it all would have been gone like years and then ironically I came home and knocked the box over and I just organized everything but Robert a couple years ago found a scanner that can scan no cards
so every couple weeks I have an assistant go through scan all of them and then I back them up to drop box so you don't use Evernote or anything like that I don't even know how to use Evernote and a lot of people go like oh your system it sounds just like Evernote it's not Evernote it's physical no cards
for a reason like Raymond Chandler as a line if you take the pain to write it down you're more likely to remember it and use it the idea of just quickly being able to copy and paste stuff is antithetical to what I'm doing and why like it's the ritual that's important and the act of taking it long hand is very
important obviously if it's like a you know huge paragraph I'm gonna type it out but it's still no copying and pasting that's sort of the law the rule the rule because it's about taking the knowledge from the book running it through your body and then putting it in a in a thing that you can manipulate
but still have tangibly in front of you right like like my note I could I could lay out the box for obstacles away and it would be right there and you could see it and while it was there I could move stuff around I could say actually yeah this chapter is gonna be moved into part three or this note card
I thought this note card would work for somewhere in section two but it didn't so I'm gonna rework it into section one I could move stuff around so I have a physically visually yes and I think that's very very important I don't want it to be a black hole on my computer but it's not searchable right
like how hard is it it's not searchable if I look if I ever couldn't find something I could have someone go through them for me or I could go through them which I do all the time but I've never won it my memory works at such like I could tell you what different passages look like in books on my shelf
where that shelf is I'm I'm a bit like I don't know Asperger like that I guess but I I've not found I think people overestimate like they're like oh I need it to be searchable it's like well what have you ever done with it right like I think a lot of people get very nerded out about the system and about having
like the perfect optimized thing when you know if you told me they'd written 30 books I'd be like okay your systems better than mine but it's certainly not how I mean I'm optimizing for what yeah I've written four books in four years like it's it's uh it's not having not having it searchable has not held
me back in any way that I can currently tell and you wouldn't you don't envision doing things differently in the future um no I don't think so so what's your workflow like for writing a book maybe walk me through kind of okay I have an idea not from a publishing perspective from a writing perspective
so you go from an idea what is the structure and the tools that you're using to put that together so you you you have an idea you do the research you put them you get the note cards you arrange them are you writing and like how are you I think that's it that's a more difficult question to I think when you
write your your book you will not ask that question because like it's just different like people go like how long did it take you to write it and it's like I don't know because when did it start right did it start when I was born did it start when I first had the idea did it start when you sold it you
know my book that's coming out in June I started writing it January 1st of 2015 like I know that and my first book I started June 17th 2011 I know the exact day that I started but I've been researching them for years right like so and I know when I sold it so it's it's a little weird right but when you
when you have you have the idea you're researching it's sort of like you have this general sense of what you're trying to say and what you believe and then you you know you sort of let the confirmation bias do its work right because you're only thinking about this thing you weirdly just attract all
sorts of things that could support that idea or would be interesting to discuss in that idea and so one of the one of the downsides of that is your paranoid someone's gonna steal your idea all the time but they're not you're just thinking about your idea all the time so you feel almost a pressure to
to get it out there really quickly so nobody so what I do is when I sit down to write let's say I'm I've broken it up into pieces that's part of what the note card system does so it's like today I'm writing the intro like on my son did on January 1st I started I was writing the intro and now that intro
is radically different now that it was but I was writing that and then I got to a point where I could say like the in the rough draft of the intro is done then now I'm writing you know part one chapter one and I'm writing these discrete pieces because writing a book is very demoralizing like think about it
let's say a book is 60 ,000 words and you're writing 500 words 500 usable words a day let's say which is you know people write two or three thousand but you don't get rid of them right so you you could work for eight hours on something or three hours what you could work a day's work of writing and make
no visible perceivable progress towards your goal so there's no you only get to the light at the end of the tunnel like three or four months in or you know think about someone like Robert Caro has been right he wrote you know he's been writing about Lyndon Johnson for like 40 years he's Lyndon Johnson's
like 60 in the book right and so he's like and that's only to get him into volume four so um you you have to break it up into discrete tasks at least I think when you break it into discrete tasks then like even Robert Caro he knows the last sentence and the first sentence of the book and then everything
else is filling it in but you don't do what I think is the most dangerous thing for writers to do is to just maybe it works when you're writing fiction I don't know but sitting down and just writing like you can't hit a target that you didn't know but that's like the whole notion that people sell isn't
it about being an author oh you just go to the coffee shop you sit down the words magic spew out of your mouth and I mean there's that there's this Hemingway quote where he says writing is easy it's just sitting down and writing it's sitting down at a typewriter and opening a vein or something right
and that would be great except for he didn't write that way like if you look at a farewell to arms there are eight now 27 handwritten different endings to that book so he was not sitting down and bleeding unless he was bleeding to death right like he was meticulously editing and rewriting and getting
closer to something like so writing I think when you break it up into tasks you're like okay all I have to do is get these 2 ,000 words right that's much easier to wrap my head around and then later you're linking all these pieces together but I write I write in this is another weird thing with that so I
write those those chunks in Google Docs like in separate Google documents so I'm not doing like a day -to -day word count it's like hey today I'm writing part 2 chapter 4 and then only when I've gotten to the end do I then combine all the things and then begin to look at the book as a whole so it's a big
then I switched to and this is all personal but then I switched to Microsoft Word so I'm taking it off the internet and now it's a now it's a distinct manuscript right and now I'm thinking about the project as a whole I think editing while you write the whole thing is hard but if you're just doing these
pieces then I'm able to sort of be a bit recursive about these smaller sections and do you map it out in that like today I'm going to do this section tomorrow I'm gonna do this section are you doing anything else what you're doing this it's not scheduled like on Tuesday I'm doing this and Wednesday
I'm doing this it's more like you have to go from A to Z and so you're starting an A and then when you're done with A then you move on to B but like I don't write full -time like I could but I have a company and I try to write one or two articles a week I have my own site I do a lot of consulting for the first
three books I was also working in American Apparel so I tend to I don't know how someone writes for an entire day so I write I usually get up early I love your stuff about you know if you want to be more productive wake up early I wake up around seven I try to start writing by like eight and I write
usually like like 11 1130 like I'm done there's it's it's hard it's draining it's very draining and you just hit diminishing returns right so then I stop and then I I don't give myself a break for the rest of the day I'm not gonna work for three hours I I work on my other stuff so I just schedule everything
after I start but you're matching your energy and intensity to the work in some way right yeah yeah like you're writing to you're writing till you stop and then you're moving on to these other things and then usually throughout the course of the day other things occur to you that would be valuable to
the writing and you're either taking notes and doing them tomorrow or you're I'm sending an email to myself or whatever like for instance I like to exercise in the middle of the day not in the middle day in the mid afternoon okay so it's like I write till let's say hypothetical schedules I write into
11 from 11 to 3 I'm doing calls or working on client stuff or I'm editing stuff for other people whatever I'm doing and then at 3 I'm gonna go for like an hour run and on that run wherever I was stuck in the writing some of that's gonna come loose in my head and I'm gonna be like oh that's a great phrase
and I'll email it to myself or oh god I remember this when I come home and then I'm like bursting and like some I the amount of times I burst into my house and said to my wife like don't say anything to me like until I get this down on paper and then I'm just writing you know in shorthand like little
notes and then it's like and then I can go back to being a normal person so I either run or swim but that breaks it up for me and what's your night like I usually am done by like five or six and then I just sort of dick around watch me dinner we'll watch TV play with our animals sometimes I'll check
in like I'm checking email throughout this time I'm not not working at all but so you are one of the quickest responders that I know for a busy person on email can you how do you do that I mean my job is to communicate the like so I don't do much phone so I'm sitting there working on stuff and part
of what I'm working on is even I mean I'm not amazed I get responses from you sometimes I've like barely hit send and gone to like a new message and it's like so I'm like inbox zero so like I'm I pride myself on having gotten to a point that I can deal with new stuff as they come in but one of my tricks
is like if you send me something and it's worth responding to I'm responding if someone is sending me something like you know I'm getting a letter from someone who read one of my books it's really nice but I you may have written about this the Eisenhower stuff urgent not important or whatever I save
a lot of stuff until late like like to you I'm this is so maybe this doesn't work but to you I'm responding in two minutes but then I have people I owe emails to from three weeks ago that I probably won't do until the next time I'm on a flight or I'm stuck with that Wi -Fi and I'm just getting caught
up on old stuff I'm notoriously bad for email and I struggle with something that maybe you struggle with as well which is I get a lot of unsolicited email that I feel in some ways that people are burdening my time and they're not necessarily thinking about it like the requests can you read this 20 -page
document I got one last week can you do is you know well worded but it was basically like can you do my homework assignment for me yeah so one I meet Seth he talks about this a lot where it's like you can just not respond like just pretend you didn't get it I have personally I struggle like I've adopted
over the last year I would say I've come leaps and bounds but at first I had to respond to everything sure so I find like on stuff like that responding is what they want right you don't actually have to do the request you can say like hey I can't read this but here's a thought or like I'll go like hey
what one of the things I think about for the articles I write is what do I get the most email about can I write an article about that because now I now the first I know that at least one person is interested in this idea oh that's a really good idea and then now in the future all emails I get about this thing
like how do I find a book agent boom here's all I don't even link them to the post that I just go like I wrote an article about this Google my name and book agent and then it'll come up and so I'm at sort of treating it like a frequently asked questions thing that's a sign that somebody us you know
like what is a politician go like one calls a thousand constituents or whatever it's probably similar on email most people don't email I've started adding a little bit of friction to it I like your idea of you always have some sort of caveat like if you email me think about it beforehand and yeah am
I reading newsletter would I recommend books I was just tired of people going like they would just email me their thoughts which is great but like it's like what do you want me to do with this so but the reality is like I don't think it actually deters anyone so one thing I've done that I find interesting
I don't know where I got this I didn't come up with it myself which was when people are sending me 20 page 30 page documents proposals yeah I'll just reply saying hey my you know can you print this out and mail it to me and so what I've done is now I've added some sort of and if they do and they mail
it to me I will read it but if it's not worth their time to print it out and mail it cuz it's so easy to send email and a lot of them are I don't want to say form emails but you know it's very easy to insert you know switch Ryan and Shane and send the exact same email so one of the things that I realized
with my company which is like a consulting and and sort of strategy we call it creative advisory but I realized I was spending a lot of time talking to people who may or may not have become my clients right right and that was very inefficient for me so it's like wait did I just like I first I'd go meet
with someone which meant I couldn't be writing then we would talk and I'd have to give them a ton of ideas on the spot then they'd be like well send me a proposal then I'd have to make a proposal and then we'd have to negotiate a rate and blah blah blah totally suboptimal yeah so especially because I'm
trying to run a lifestyle business not trying to create a scaled major company right so like because otherwise the whole point that that's why you hire people but I was trying not to do that so one of the things that I realized and this has been a huge not only source of growth from my company but it's
been a huge relief I got like look when unless it's like a kid asking me for advice about life my job is to give companies advice on how to grow how authors how to write books people how to you know think about stuff you know how to market things so if you'd asked me that I'm not gonna respond to that email
so what I and and I'm not gonna get together to pitch you on why you should pay me to tell you how to do that so what I've come up with is like giving you the answers that you're looking for to be I'm not gonna give you you know some of my answers and then try to hold some stuff back you know it's it's
just ridiculous so what I came up with is all my clients even ones I know I want to work with I start with a paid strategy session right so I charged like 1500 bucks an hour and we get on the phone and like you can send me a little bit of stuff but almost no prep and we get on the phone and then I will I
will not shoot the shit with you I will give you my best work for an hour right about that idea what you need to know what I would think what I would do if you hired me like I'll give all my ideas away and then because the people think like the execution is the hard part right but to me the thinking
is the hard part I'm gonna think for free and then get paid to execute right I would rather get paid to think and then maybe get paid a little bit more to execute or if you want to hire someone else to execute that's fine so so then I do these sessions which is on the one hand it qualifies all leads
because the people who are never gonna hire me or just milking me for free advice they go away right away the people who can afford whatever I am gonna charge are like you know they don't balk at the fee so we work we do we then we map out exactly what they should do and then if they hire me or they
hire my company which called brass check that fee just counts against so it's like you know let's say we don't work for 20 or 30 thousand dollars it's like they paid a deposit essentially that's a brilliant idea because I'm struggling like I'm overwhelmed with this these people asking for advice here
I love right because it's a sign that you're doing something and people are valuing what you're doing but on the same token you're trying to make a living and you can't just give away you know 90 % of your day well a couple things so one I hate the phrase pick your brain like my brain is how I make my
living and I say that to people I go like I would look if I could I would do all of this for free because I love it but my wife would kill me I wouldn't be able to eat and more importantly I have other clients who have paid me and it's not fair for me to do for do for free for you what they pay me for right
so I can't do it for free I'm sorry if that like I totally understand if that pisses you off and like let's not work together and so there's that and then the other thing is you have to value your time like Neil Strauss he has a thing he's like look I can buy my own coffee you taking me out to coffee
or like there's if if a consulting session for me for an hour is worth fifteen hundred dollars and like you might think that that's too high but plenty of people pay for it and almost all of them say it was worth it or worth many times that there's not a dinner in the world that you could pay for that you
could pick up the tab for that would cost fifteen hundred right so and that means I have to drive somewhere I have to block like for this it's like what I do it not only the other hack is I go for a walk when I do these calls so I get an hour walk -in and I talked to people and I'm stimulated and it
challenges me and it works out my chops and then they leave with either up in most cases a plan they can totally execute themselves at a fraction of what it would have cost to pay to have me do it for them or we it's the start of a really good relationship and so that obviously worked out only by trial
and error but it's it's been a huge relief for me because I have a way I can just pass these things to a coordinator he negotiates it and then I either gonna talk to someone and we do awesome work together or you know nobody know I don't feel like I'm giving a piece of my life away there's a quote from Santa Cruz
like let no man take a day of my life without you know giving me something worthwhile in return and like we sell our time for money that's what we do don't give it away and you know that's just how I think about it I think that's the perfect way to end this listen this has been a fascinating conversation even
the second take but I really appreciate and I will have to do this again sometime for sure hey guys this is Shane again just a few more things before we wrap up you can find show notes at fernamstreetblog .com slash podcast that's f -a -r -n -a -m -s -t -r -e -e -t -b -l -o -g comm slash podcast you can also find information there
on how to get a transcript and if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food go to fernamstreetblog .com slash newsletter this is all the good stuff I found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends books I'm reading and so much more thank
you for listening you
