BONUS | Ryan Holiday’s Office Tour: Books, Stoic Artifacts, and Daily Rituals
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What insights does Ryan Holiday share about his office setup?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm an author. I have a bookstore here outside Austin, Texas, and I'm going to take you through my office today. and show you a couple of things that I think explain how I work, how I think about what I do, and how I think about life.
The most important reminder I have on my wall sits between two pictures of my kids. Here and here, I don't show their faces, but that's Dr. Oliver Sacks and behind him is a sign in his office that just said, no. This was given to me by the sports psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Fader. You develop a career by saying yes to everything, but you can only keep a career by getting good at saying no to things. And he told me that there's something similar in baseball. He's a team psychologist for a bunch of baseball teams. They have a saying in the Dominican Republic, for instance, with baseball players that you don't walk off the island. You only get there by hitting, by swinging at pitches. But once you get to the majors, you have to learn pitch discipline.
You have to learn when not to swing. And so this is a reminder to me that it's really important as I sit here, I check my email, I'm working on stuff, that I not only have to say no to be really good at my job, but that when I'm saying yes to stuff, I'm saying no to these two people. who I've already promised my best time to, who I've already promised my best self to. And actually, I have another reminder of this that I keep here from the great Hugh McLeod. He sent me this in 2020. It's just a little drawing. It says, like an asshole, I took him, her, it for granted. You gotta remember that when you are saying yes to things, you are saying no to things. And most importantly, when you are saying no to things, Mark Schwartz talks about this in meditations, you are saying double yes to the things that actually matter.
And I have two other kind of reminders to say no. These are kind of cool. This is a memo from the Truman administration. This is the inter-office communication the secretary is writing. Since the president will be out of office when this celebration will be held, how do you think that we should answer it? Should we say that because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused? And then here it is underlined by Truman himself. It says the proper answer is underlined, that they should say the president must ask to be excused. And then here's another one. I regret that I cannot comply with your request. It has long been my policy not to respond to questions. I received so many similar requests to yours that I could not keep up with all of them.
I hope you will understand. And it's signed Harry Truman. I actually have a third one that someone gave me from Truman.
How does Ryan Holiday balance saying yes and no in his career?
It says here, your question will be answered in the book I am getting ready to publish as soon as possible. So you let the books do the answering for you. I think that's a pretty good policy as well. I don't keep all my books in my office, but I keep some of them. These are all books for the book I am working on right now. Those are international editions of my books. Those are some signed books. These are all my philosophy books. In here is biographies. Books are made out of books, so I try to keep the books that I rely on or use the most here in the office. I keep most of my novels at home because I like to reread them, but part of the attraction of setting up this bookstore and office space because I told my wife I'd take some of my books out of our house so we'd have a little more room.
But I have books here, a balcony, We've got Civil War and war books here. These are books you can see from downstairs in the bookstore, but you can't touch because they're just mine. E-books are nice, audio books are great, but I like books that I can keep on my shelf as trophies. I like to be able to go back to them, pick them up, to be able to refer to them. I like the ongoing relationship with the physical form.
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Chapters
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