I just read a bunch of Ryan Holiday articles. For those who don’t know, this guy was the marketing director for American Apparel and the reason Tucker Max’s book sold. Holiday is not a good person — he employs the shock tactics that he claims to abhor — but he is very talented and industrious. Any writer who gets me to open a bunch of browser tabs is talented, because I hate keeping more than three tabs open. I endured the visual mess in order to keep track of all the different things this guy has written that I want to read, notably a lot of posts for the Observer.
Here’s my conclusion from Holiday’s various you-suck-here’s-why advice pieces: the only way to get ahead in life is to work. Okay, that’s obvious. And yet it’s not. As Holiday writes, almost with incredulity, “The energy [that people] waste on fad diets and gear and figuring out how various unnecessary technologies work. The resources and creativity that seeps out telling people (or themselves) stories about themselves or projecting an image to the world.” The only successful strategy is to work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working. You can still fail if you work hard, but you can’t succeed without doing it.
Last night, devouring all this stuff, I had kind of an internal crisis about the publishing industry and my place in it. I asked myself, is it actually a good idea to start writing for Bustle? Is that how I should spend my energy? The answer is probably a combination of “no” and “yes”. The answer is that it can be the right decision if I work hard enough and smart enough. I can use Bustle’s higher traffic to increase my personal audience. That is the only worthwhile way to approach this gig.
Work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working.