We all have goals: We want to matter. We want to be important. We want to have freedom and power to pursue our creative work. We want respect from our peers and recognition for our accomplishments. Not out of vanity or selfishness, but of an earnest desire to fulfill our personal potential.
Ryan Holiday
Life is hard, but we make it much harder.
I don't play videogames and generally think that online activism is a giant waste of time.
What I've found in my research is that realism and self-honesty are the antidote to ego, hubris, and delusion.
Growth hacking is a mindset, and those who have it will reap incredible gains.
Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory.
Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction - only disappointment.
Take pride in your work. But it is not all there is.
We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day.
Leveraging community intelligence and making connections is a key component to being a growth hacker.
Our facts aren't fact; they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren't opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn't information; it's just hastily assembled symbols.
Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. And that's why growth hackers beat traditional marketers.
Even people who despise ego and aspire to humility, who plan to be humble once they are successful, are worried that actually enacting those beliefs would sentence them to a life of obscurity or weakness or failure.
If you ask most smart or successful people where they learned their craft, they will not talk to you about their time in school. It's always a mentor, a particularly transformative job, or a period of experimentation or trial and error.
Growth hackers don't tolerate waste.
Let's be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth.
Ego is certainly there in many of the greatest and most dizzying tales of success - but it's there in some of the greatest stories of failure and self-implosion as well.
Every job carries occupational hazards.
Stoicism is a philosophy designed for the masses, and if it has to be simplified a bit to reach the masses, so be it.
The problem with a lot of marketing advice is that the examples they use are not exactly typical. It's hard for businesses, particularly smaller businesses, to relate to the bold innovations of companies like Apple or Tesla.
The media, when it's functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.
If you're shameless enough, you can sell anything.
Everyone needs to start doing interviews over email. Whether you're a journalist or a spokesperson speaking to the media, you're better off communicating questions, statements, or inquiries via email.
The best kind of marketing messages are the ones that don't seem like marketing messages. Because it means that the viewers' defenses are down.
I love books. Probably too much for my own good.
Growth hacking is the future of marketing. It has to be.
Like most reasonable people, it saddens me when I see Americans celebrating a heritage they don't understand.
When I dropped out of school at 19 to start my first job in Hollywood, I didn't know anything, and I had no idea where I'd end up. Thankfully, I was attached to some smart and forgiving people who let me learn under them.
Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing or even reading long, dense books. In fact, it is something men and women of action use - and have used throughout history - to solve their problems and achieve their greatest triumphs. Not in the classroom but on the battlefield, in the forum, and at court.
I made a lot of money and had a great time playing with the words that make up the news. I exploited the laziness behind the news and people's reading habits.
My parents disagreed sharply with me over the decision to leave school.
My advice to young people would be this: Don't move to New York. It is not where you will find yourself.
I know how hard authors work on their books and how far out of their element many are when it comes to doing the sales and marketing. So when I see someone doing it wrong and giving bad advice, I do my best to help - even when they're not my clients.
Being criticized in the media is a good problem to have - most of the time. It means you're doing something that is at least interesting or cool or crazy enough to be noticed. It might not always feel good, but it's usually better than the alternative of obscurity.
Reddit is like any democratic form of government - unless carefully guarded by its leaders and members, its trusts and privileges can be and often are abused.
Don't move to New York. Find your own city and your way.
If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.
Growth hacking isn't some proprietary technical process shrouded in secrecy. In fact, it has grown and developed in the course of very public conversations. There are no trade secrets to guard.
In June 2007, I finished up school for the year. I didn't know it at the time, but I was done with college forever. By the end of the summer, I had dropped out and would not return.
As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online - what spreads - is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite: through slickness, titillation, and polarity.
It angers me to see armed defenders at the bottom of Lost Cause statues, adding a renewed threat of violence to icons that are themselves part of an ideology of violence and intimidation.
As someone responsible for my own fair share of marketing stunts, I am suspicious and cynical - I'll disclose that right up front.
Like pretty much every other ambitious person, I always figured I'd eventually move to New York. It is, at this point, half-dream and half-obligation for people trying to do big things. It's the American Dream inside the American Dream.
The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging.
Every media appearance is a learning experience about the media outlet and their journalists and their feelings about you, so treat it as such.
The greats - they protect their sleep because it's where the best work comes from. They say no to things. They turn in when they hit their limits. They don't let the creep of sleep deprivation undermine their judgment.
In my experience, marketing is best when it proves the product it is supporting.
The risks of speaking extemporaneously are apparent the first time you wing it and promptly put your foot in your mouth.
Online journalism has always had a sourcing problem. From using unverified 'anonymous tips' to repeating whatever rumor or speculation people are chattering about, the general ethic is, 'We'll publish just about anything.'
The essential idea of Stoicism in my interpretation is, you don't control the world around you, you control how you respond. At 19, that's very empowering.
