Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday was born in Sacramento in 1987, dropped out of the University of California, Riverside at nineteen to apprentice under the strategist Robert Greene, and became director of marketing at American Apparel in his early twenties.

His first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, published in 2012, was an account of media manipulation written by somebody who had done it, describing how he had planted stories, exploited the incentives of aggregation-driven blogs, and generated coverage from nothing. It functions as a confession and as a manual, which is an uncomfortable combination and is the source of its reputation.

He then turned to Stoicism, and it is the work he is now known for. The Obstacle Is the Way, published in 2014, takes the line from Marcus Aurelius about the impediment to action advancing action and builds a method around perception, action, and will. Ego Is the Enemy followed in 2016, examining ego at three stages of a career, and Stillness Is the Key in 2019 completed the trilogy.

He has since published The Daily Stoic with Stephen Hanselman, a year of daily readings, along with Lives of the Stoics, Courage Is Calling, Discipline Is Destiny, and Right Thing Right Now, working through the cardinal virtues.

The consistent criticism of his Stoic work is that the philosophy gets flattened into a performance tool. Marcus Aurelius was working out how to be a decent person while holding absolute power, and the modern packaging frequently deploys him as a technique for beating a competitor, so the ethical content thins as the productivity content thickens. Holiday has engaged with that criticism in later work.

He runs the Painted Porch bookshop in Bastrop, Texas, and writes a widely read daily email.