PERENNIAL SELLER by Ryan Holiday

• People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.
• In other words, classics stay classic and become more so over time. Think of it as compound interest for creative work.
• Makers of great work are intimidating.
• Even the best admen will admit that, over the long term, all the marketing in the world won’t matter if the product hasn’t been made right.
• Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they’re heard about.
• accept that hope has nothing to do with it. To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus.
• Crappy products don’t survive.
• “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”
• “The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.”
• Ideas are cheap. Anyone can have one.
• The difference between a great work and an idea for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real. That difference is not trivial.
• If great work were easy to produce, a lot more people would do it.
• If you are trying to make something great, you must do the making: That work cannot be outsourced to someone else.
• You must have a reason—a purpose—for why you want the outcome and why you’re willing to do the work to get it. That purpose can be almost anything, but it has to be there.
• From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force.
• There is inevitably a crisis and a low point in every creative work.
• You can’t make something that lasts if it’s based on things, on individual parts that themselves won’t last, or if it’s driven by an amateur’s impatience.
• businesses. It certainly makes things a bit more intimidating, but necessarily so if lasting greatness is your intention.
• “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing people don’t get.”
• The risk for any creator is over-accounting for what’s happening right in front of them.
• It’s better to play the longer game. Leave behind the hype and ephemeral infatuations for the time capsule and the one-hit wonders.
• Very few great things were ever created at a hackathon.
• A creative work usually starts with an idea that seems to have potential and then evolves with work and interaction into something more.
• The best we can do is sit down and create something, anything, and let the process organically unfold. Tolerating ambiguity, frustration, and changes in the grand plan and being open to new experiences are essential to creative work.
• If there is any magic in creative expression, it’s how small, even silly ideas can become big, important, awe-inspiring works if a person invests enough time in them.
• A book should be an article before it’s a book, and a dinner conversation before it’s an article. See how things go before going all in.
• ego-boosting or soul-crushing if you’re not careful. The proper approach is to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, so you can parse the constructive criticism you need from the notes you need to ignore.
• Creating is often a solitary experience. Yet work made entirely in isolation is usually doomed to remain lonely.
• You don’t have to be a genius to make genius—you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.
• Focusing on smaller, progressive parts of the work also eliminates the tendency to sit on your ass and dream indefinitely.
• An audience isn’t a target that you happen to bump into; instead, it must be explicitly scoped and sighted in. It must be chosen.
• Successfully finding and “scratching” a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for?
• For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE.
• Great, successful work rarely starts as a solution in search of a problem.
• One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten as a creator was from a successful writer who told me that the key to success in nonfiction was that the work should be either “very entertaining” or “extremely practical.”
• The bigger and more painful the problem you solve, the better its cultural hook, and the more important and more lucrative your attempt to address it can be.
• As we know, ideas are cheap. Not only do lots of people have ideas, but you, as a talented, creative person, are going to have lots of ideas.
• Again, it’s not that creativity is magical. It just appears to be magic to people who don’t understand the trick. In this case, the most important part of the trick is filtering out the seemingly lucrative but ultimately derivative dead ends that you might otherwise have pursued.
• An essential part of making perennial, lasting work is making sure that you’re pursuing the best of your ideas and that they are ideas that only you can have (otherwise, you’re dealing with a commodity and not a classic).
• probably going to be boring in twenty years. Stuff that looks, sounds, reads, and performs like everything else in its field today has very little chance of standing out tomorrow. That’s exactly what you don’t want.
• People want things that are really passionate. Often the best version is not for everybody.
• Erring on the side of audaciousness—trying to grab the customer by the throat—is partly why a lot of the projects we are talking about were wildly controversial and, in some cases, deeply upsetting when they launched.
• The point is that you cannot violate every single convention simultaneously, nor should you do it simply for its own sake. In fact, to be properly controversial—as opposed to incomprehensible—you must have obsessively studied your genre or industry to a degree that you know which boundaries to push and which to respect.
• not every convention is worth questioning, and, usually, questioning too many at the same time is confusing and overwhelming to the consumer.
• If you do push boundaries, it’s important to understand that not everyone will love it—not right out of the gate, anyway.
• A famous scientist once warned his students not to worry about people stealing their ideas: “If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
• Work is unlikely to be layered if it is written in a single stream of consciousness. No. Deep, complex work is built through a relentless, repetitive process of revisitation.
• There is always more you can do, more you can add.
• A master is painstakingly obsessed with the details.
• There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.
• “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
• The hunger and drive to create something great, coupled with the sincere belief that you can do it, can very quickly trip into delusion and hubris if you’re not vigilant.
• The first wake-up call for every aspiring perennial seller must be that there is no publisher or angel investor or producer who can magically handle all the stuff you don’t want to handle.
• If the first step in the process is coming to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save you—there’s no one to take this thing off your hands and champion it the rest of the way home—then the second is realizing that the person who is going to need to step up is you.
• Adults create perennial sellers—and adults take responsibility for themselves. Children expect opportunities to be handed to them; maturity is understanding you have to go out and make them.
• Nobody has a reason or the time to give you the star treatment.
• If you want to be successful, you’d better be cut, polished, set, and sized to fit.
• Most of our ideas, upon their initial implementation, turn out to be laughably wrong.
• yet.”* As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work.
• “Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
• The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making.
• Nobody creates flawless first drafts. And nobody creates better second drafts without the intervention of someone else. Nobody.
• There is a fundamental question of knowledge that goes all the way back to Plato and Socrates: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know if you’ve found it?
• Each small audience is contained inside a potentially larger audience.
• The democratization of production was great news—it empowered people like you and me. The bad news is that it empowered millions of other people too.
• Today, in order to even have a chance at people’s attention, your project has to seem as good as or better than all the others. Three critical variables determine whether that will happen: the Positioning, the Packaging and the Pitch. Positioning is what your project is and who it is for. Packaging is what it looks like and what it’s called. The Pitch is the sell—how the project is described and what it offers to the audience.
• Work that is going to sell and sell must appear as good as, or better than, the best stuff out there.
• The differences between doing it well and doing it poorly are enormous.
• It’s not easy to change your name or hire a new design firm midway through a project. But it’s far better to feel the pain now instead of later, when despite all your efforts the marketing just isn’t working.
• There are many different missions. Whatever yours is, it must be defined and articulated. Once that has occurred, there is one last thing you must do. You must deliberately forsake all other missions.
• With a perennial seller as your goal, the track is clear: lasting impact and relevance.
• Knowing what your goal is—having that crystal clear—allows you to know when to follow conventional wisdom and when to say “Screw it.”
• We are fighting not just against our contemporaries for recognition, but against centuries of great art for an audience.
• Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.
• Marketing is both an art and a science, and must be mastered by all creators who hope their work will find traction.
• “If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson” (emphasis mine) for your product.
• You can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion.
• As Peter Drucker put it: “[Each project] needs somebody who says, ‘I am going to make this succeed,’ and then goes to work on it.”
• Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.
• The only way the job will get done—to make people care—is if we do it ourselves.
• The mark of a future perennial seller is a creator who doesn’t believe he is God’s gift to the world, but instead thinks he has created something of value and is excited and dedicated to get it out there.
• According to a study by McKinsey, between 20 percent and 50 percent of all purchasing decisions happen from some version of word of mouth.
• A product that doesn’t have word of mouth will eventually cease to exist as far as the general public is concerned.
• Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That’s how ideas spread as well.
• The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product.
• Our initial audience is just as important. We have to get them hooked somehow, and free is often the best way to do it.
• One of the best ways to build a readership, viewership, listenership, user base, or customer base early on is by making it cheap.
• As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.
• I’ve always found that a critical part of attracting influencers is to look for the people who aren’t besieged by requests.
• Social proof sells.
• A reality of our culture is that if you or your product has never been covered in the press, there is a risk that people will think you’re a nobody.
• The last thing you want is to get a large hit and for viewers to feel like there is less to the story the more they dig in.
• What many creators fail to realize—and it becomes clear only when you’ve spoken to many reporters over a long period of time—is that the media is desperate for material.
• The most newsworthy thing to do is usually the one you’re most afraid of.
• Don’t be afraid of pissing people off either.
• Creative advertising is probably the least competitive sector of advertising, because most brands either aren’t creative or are afraid to be.
• It’s always better to focus on the bigger picture, on the things that don’t change.
• When it comes to creating a perennial seller, the principle to never lose sight of is simple: Create word of mouth.
• The best strategy is to try everything and see what works for your project—because it’s going to be different for every single project.
• With one thousand true fans—people “who will purchase anything and everything you produce”—you’re more or less guaranteed a livable income provided that you continue to produce consistently great work.
• If I could give a prospective creative only one piece of advice, it would be this: Build a list. Specifically, an email list.
• “The only way to guarantee longevity online is to retain control of your own engagement channel.
• Email is almost fifty years old.
• You can build a list about anything.
• Building your list is not someone else’s job.
• The best way to create a list is to provide incredible amounts of value.
• Make no mistake—this list you are building can become, over time, incredibly valuable.
• Never dismiss anyone—You never know who might help you one day with your work.
• Play the long game—It’s not about finding someone who can help you right this second. It’s about establishing a relationship that can one day benefit both of you.
• Focus on “pre-VIPs”—The people who aren’t well known but should be and will be.
• No one is entitled to relationships only because their work is genius. Relationships have to be earned, and maintained.
• People who want long-term success must participate—and do so authentically and honestly.
• The reality is that the race to creative success today is really a marathon.
• Audiences often need to hear about things multiple times and be exposed to them from multiple angles before they’re willing to give something a chance.
• No one can guarantee that your project will be a success, but it can be safely said that if you quit on it before your audience does, it’s guaranteed to fail.
• The best marketing you can do for your book is to start writing the next one.
• More great work is the best way to market yourself.
• In fact, creating more work is one of the most effective marketing techniques of all.
• He or she is just someone who has published a book. The best way to become an author is to write more books, just as a true entrepreneur starts more than one business.
• The best way to become a true comedian, filmmaker, designer, or entrepreneur is to never stop, to keep going.
• The key is to know that there is a difference between something that services your audience and something that expands it.
• repeating yourself is rarely the recipe for winning over new fans.
• Don’t be afraid to try crazy things.
• Keep yourself from getting stale. Choose never to become so settled into a rut or routine or type that you are constrained by it.
• There’s another reality of creative businesses that we need to consider: Most of the real money isn’t in the royalties or the sales. For authors, the real money comes from speaking, teaching, or consulting.
• Every industry has its own opportunities.
• Luck is polarizing. The successful like to pretend it does not exist. The unsuccessful or the jaded pretend that it is everything. Both explanations are wrong.
• The more you do, the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.