Ryan Holiday
speaker
36,593 appearances
199 recordings
12 series
first heard Jun 2016
last heard today
Ryan Holiday’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 197 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 41.
Appearances
But I think people who are Bruce Springsteen fans, there's just something about little lines, little things that he says that just sort of worm their way into your brain.
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I talked, I think, in the Daily Dad book about this line that wormed its way into Johnny Cash's mind, that line about how there's nothing better than blood on blood.
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Well, my guest today, the sports writer Seth Wickersham, who's been on the podcast before, one of my favorite writers, also has a line from Springsteen that wormed its way into his brain, something he's carried around with him for years.
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And it's this line about being on that hill.
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Let me actually play the Springsteen lyric for you real quick.
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In Seth's interpretation, that line is about showing up.
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It's about being willing to pay the price.
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It's about wanting something so badly, even when it's hard, even when no one's watching, even when you're not sure how it's going to turn out, that you do the work.
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I do think there's something stoic in there too, right?
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You don't control whether you win.
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You don't control whether people appreciate it.
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You just control whether you're out there doing the work.
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You don't control whether you get to the top of the hill like Sisyphus, but you control whether you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
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Seth and I are going to talk about that in today's episode.
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It's a shorter episode, but Seth, who is a great writer at ESPN, is the author of It's Better to be Feared and American Kings, which is a great book about the position of quarterback.
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And his new book, Be On That Hill, is two decades of reporting and writing about athletes and coaches and that pursuit of greatness, the people who are fighting to be on that hill.
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And in today's episode, we're talking about that phrase, where the idea of being on the hill comes from.
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how he thinks it captures something essential about the people he's written about, about who he aspires to be as a writer, and all the things it evokes, right?
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Ambition and obsession and perseverance, what it costs to keep climbing that hill, what it costs to try to stay on that hill.
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Whether you conquer the hill or not is not up to you, I think the Stoics would say, but
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Showing 301–320 of 36,593 · page 16 of 1830
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