For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices, habits, and routines that get them through their day.
Last month, the author Ryan Holiday released his sixteenth book in the last twelve years: Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds. It is, like most of Holiday’s books, about Stoicism, the ancient philosophy whose bible is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and whose central idea is “what matters is not what happens to you, but how you react to what happens to you,” which has proven enticing for a modern world that feels increasingly chaotic and unpredictable.
Holiday is largely responsible for this resurgence. His books are often bestsellers (Right Thing, Right Now debuted at #1 on The New York Times’ best-seller list), and he has developed a devout following. He also owns a bookstore, The Painted Porch, in Bastrop, Texas, where he lives. It’s an impressive slate of work, all of which he manages knock out in a typical 9-to-5 work day. Here, he shares how: how he starts his day, why he doesn’t believe in goals, and the number of times he estimates he’s read Meditations.
Ryan Holiday: I can't think back to when I didn't have one, as a professional. But when you have kids, your routines blow apart and then you have to rework it. Not just once, but every day. Routine implies the order that you do things, and practices are the things that make up a routine. I'm a big believer in practices. Routines I have to be more flexible on. Some days you're on the road, sometimes somebody wakes up sick. There are core things that I try to go back to. And there are still some things I can only do at certain parts in the rhythm. Toni Morrison's thing was she had to do all her writing before she heard the word “mom.” I tend to do the mornings, because the mornings are more in my control. I’ve got to do the writing before I have anything scheduled: meetings, phone calls, tasks. You gotta do the concentrated, focused thing first. Then you have so much more freedom to do the other things, because they're not in the way of anything else.
Something hard physically. Concentrated creative work. Some time in the morning with no phone, no device, no news. A walk, which I separate from the physical activity. (The exercise is for health benefits, the walk is for mental health.) Some concentrated reading time.
Then I know I'm in my rhythm and space if I'm getting time to do my notecards. A ritual I have is taking a book from a big stack of books that I've read and excising all the stuff that I liked [to notecards]. Then those notecards get filtered into the thing I'm working on, or something else.
And then, I don’t work late. I’m done by the time I pick my kids up from school. I try to be disciplined in that sense. Work shouldn't be spilling out. You can be a very successful, creative, artistic person and keep banker’s hours—or better.
I don't think I would have believed it, because there’s this idea of staying up late, working through every weekend. I've come to understand that's actually a sign of ill-discipline. I mean, there are other inputs: reading, thinking, experiencing, these are all part of the creative life. It’s not like you're only working two hours a day. I’ve just never seen someone sit there and write for eight hours. I'm not sure that's possible. If you can put in two hours a day consistently, published works come out of the back side of that. The problem is most people are spending large amounts of time not doing any of it.
So, I was working on my new book yesterday as the new one's coming out. I almost like feeling that the one that's coming out is an imposition on the one that I'm working on. Because it keeps you from riding too high or too low on how it's doing. Everything I'm doing is time away from writing the next thing.
It also feels like a safe place to be from an identity perspective. When you're in the middle of a project, you just care less if everyone hates you, if everyone loves you, or if everyone is wildly indifferent to you. If you're riding high or low on the releases of it, you're in an outcome-oriented mindset. But if you are in the middle of a project, you're process- and production-oriented. That's much more in your control.
I have zero goals. I don't have any goals. I like doing the stuff.
You obviously have this sense of, like, what you've done before. So I guess you have a sense of if you’re failing. But no, I don’t. I feel like if you're always trying to top what you did before, it feels like it sucks all the fun out of it. I don’t have any goals. I don’t run marathons. I don’t try to set times. I like running. To me, doing it every day is the marathon. And that’s true of the writing, too. I like writing more than publishing. So as long as I keep doing that, stuff will come out the other side.
Not good. I don't know anyone who has a great relationship with it. I don't have any social apps on here. I have Spotify, Kindle, and Instapaper. And then I have another phone, like a brick phone that doesn’t have cell service, just WiFi, and I have Instagram on there. It’s the only social network that I like.
It’s weird: you have to have a relationship with the audience in the world, and yet, it’s at such a scale that it's totally unhealthy. The data and info of what people like and don't like skews your perspective on what you should be doing. The Daily Stoic email goes out to a million people every day. So even if 99 percent of the people like it, the amount of people that didn't like it is incomprehensible—and they'll respond.
Well over a hundred. And if you're just asking how many times I’ve picked it up and read parts of it, it would be thousands. I'm not sure it’s even supposed to be read beginning to end. It’s worth a couple of those, but I think it's more something you dip in and out because that’s how Marcus Aurelius was writing it. He was thinking about something today, and then, eight weeks later, he was thinking about the same thing—or it could have been eight years apart, we have very little understanding of how he wrote it.
Marcus Aurelius talks about how you have to always ask yourself, is this essential? Because a lot of what we do and say is not essential. When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better.
I stopped going to dinners and I stopped going to conferences that I wasn't being paid to go to. Austin Kleon, who wrote the book Steal Like an Artist, gave me one of the best pieces of advice. He said, “Work, family, scene—pick two.” So trips and parties and events and games and award shows and whatever, I just pass on it. Part of the reason I like living in Texas is I just get invited to fewer things. In New York and L.A., there’s always something going on and it’s always something that it would be “really good for you to go to.” I live outside of Austin, so it’s either a flight or a drive, so I can get out of a lot.
I wish I'd started riding bikes earlier. I've always been a runner, and I like swimming. You never think you're going to get old and wear out, and of course you get old and start wearing out. So I like the low intensity of the bike: it takes longer, your heart rate is a smidge lower.
There’s something about Memento Mori that’s morbid and seems depressing but there’s also something that gives an urgency and a clarity that’s valuable. It’s interesting to me when you look at a lot of ancient art, at a time when people died all the time, very easily, the Memento Mori theme is everywhere. They need a reminder. And yet here we are, life expectancy’s doubled, infant mortality has wonderfully plummeted, but because people die in hospitals, because it’s not something we talk about, it’s actually easier to lose sight of it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.