How?
Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is his 16th. It published earlier this week—a book-launch week is one in which, among other features, a frequent question gets asked even more frequently: How? How does he manage and maintain his output? As his research assistant for six years, I can tell you the truth, which is that I don’t exactly know. But I’m fascinated by it too. A newsletter entirely about Ryan would likely make him stop reading and me get bored (a function of the same cognitive variables that didn’t think to call this newsletter, ONE at 6), and so, below, I sometimes hide things I’ve learned from him in stories about others. In any case: consistency, productivity, and the physical and mental stamina needed for any long-term project or pursuit—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
A Gigantic Aspect of Survival
Whenever you say “Yes” to something, you’re saying “No” to something else, Ryan likes to say. More than the amount of stuff he does is the amount of stuff he doesn’t do. It’s similar, I just realized, to the nature of research. The bulk of the researcher’s labor is exclusionary. It’s one thing to read, but another to choose what to take back to your own work and what to say “No” to. As a researcher and in life, Ryan has mastered what Jerry Seinfeld identifies as the ultimate skill of the artist: taste and discernment. “This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival,” Seinfeld says. “It’s kind of unseen, what’s picked and what is discarded, but mastering that is how you stay alive.”
A Guy Gets Trapped In A Hotel (But Don’t Tell Anyone)
When he was in the investment business, Amor Towles would travel to the same city and stay in the same hotel during the same week, year after year. During one of these annual visits, he walked into the hotel, and there in the lobby, Towles recognized a guy, a stranger, sitting exactly where he had been sitting when Towles was leaving the hotel the year before. “And I was like, ‘God, that guy must live here. What the hell?’” Towles said. “Then in the elevator, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s actually kind of an interesting idea for a novel: A guy gets trapped in a hotel.” When he got to his room, on hotel stationary, Towles sketched out “almost all of the key events of what became A Gentleman in Moscow.” And then, “I spent the next couple of years building a detailed outline. Then in 2013, I retired from my day job and began writing the book.” For two reasons, he didn’t tell anyone about what he was doing or working on. One, to protect his enthusiasm and belief in the project by not giving anyone the chance to tell him that he was insane or that it’s hard to write a book or that they actually tried to write a book once too. And, to avoid premature praise and validation. “This is a very interesting thing,” Towles explains. “There’s a certain amount of energy that you need to sustain to write a book. You live with the material for a long period of time, during which you’re writing passages, revising passages, reading passages and rereading them and rereading them again. This takes a certain kind of stamina. And the worst thing you can do is start to talk about the thing before it’s finished. Because what you’re really doing is you’re trying to get people to tell you about how good the idea is or about how great you are. And what that does is it depletes the urgency to finish. You want the opposite: you want to be accumulating the feeling that you cannot wait to share the thing. Because when you’re going back into the draft for the 500th time, you need that feeling.”
The Same Discipline Throughout
At a New York City party full of poets and novelists in the 1960s, there was probably a lot of depleting talk about what everyone was working on. Anyhow, the young poet Diane di Prima was there that night. She had told her daughter’s babysitter she would be home by specific time, and when she got up to go home, she was the first to leave the party. “The other writers in the room found this laughable,” Ryan writes in a chapter about keeping your word, “believing that the literary life must take precedence over such pedestrian matters. ‘Unless you forget about your babysitter,’ Jack Kerouac said to her in front of everyone, ‘you’re never going to be a writer.’ Yet di Prima left anyway. Being a good parent and a good writer, at their cores, required the same thing, ‘the same discipline throughout.’ She had to keep her word. To her work, to her family, every time she made a commitment.” When you tell yourself you’re going to get up early, eat better, walk more, scroll less, pick up a hobby, drop a habit, or hit a self-imposed deadline—“These small tests are more consequential than we like to think,” Ryan writes. “They confirm more and more what kind of person you are.” The kind of person who is disciplined, trustworthy, reliable, productive or prolific, at their cores, are the same thing: “the kind of person who keeps their word.”
The One Thing Most People Don’t Have
Rodney Mullen started skateboarding in 1974, invented most of the sport’s tricks, and started the first-ever skateboarder-owned company, which eventually sold for $46 million. In his 50s now, he’s known as the “Godfather,” so revered that, to avoid a fan frenzy, he skates every night, usually from 1 to 3:30 AM. Being the first or among the first in an industry only becomes cool or impressive or lucrative after years and years, if ever. When Rodney started skating, thinking of it as a good way to get money, respect, admiration, or fans would have been insane. “Those can’t be things that drive you,” anyway, Rodney says. “At least not for long. If you decide those things are why you’re doing what you’re doing, your days are numbered. Because all that stuff eventually fades to just static, and you’re left with you and what you do. When I see people who have had success, I see boredom in them for the most part. Because, often, getting the things you thought you wanted quenches the fire that got you them. There’s a lot of people with talent, with all those things, but the one thing most people don’t have is just that love for doing it for the sake of it. I have that. I’ve nurtured it in my life. And I think that’s been a key for me of why I’ve been able to sustain this fire that’s so seemingly easily quenched. You know? So if there’s anything, just find joy in what you do for the sake of it.”
Ultimately, This Is How
There’s a word for what Rodney’s describing: Autotelic. From the Greek “auto” (self) & “telos” (end)—an Autotelic is “someone or something that has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself.” As opposed to someone who views their work as a means to some end (money, fame, etc.)—for an Autotelic, “the work is the win,” as Ryan once told me. You only control the work, not how it’s received. “So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” You have to find joy in what you do for the sake of it. Ryan has that. He’s nurtured it. When I see him, despite all his success, I don’t see boredom. The fire is still red-hot. And ultimately, I think that’s how. That’s how he’s able to manage the output that’s so seemingly hard to maintain.