9 Lessons I Learned From Ryan Holiday About Stillness, Strategy, the Enemy Ego, and Playing the Long Game

In the summer of 2019, I watched a man in a black T-shirt stand perfectly still in the middle of a crowded Austin bookstore. He wasn't meditating or frozen by stage fright. He was thinking. Quietly. Deliberately. The event was his. The audience waited. But he didn't rush. That man was Ryan Holiday.

There is something unusually anachronistic about Holiday. He writes on a manual typewriter. He owns a bookstore in a small town. He studies ancient Stoic philosophers and applies their ideas to Ti...