- I don't even know how to describe Ryan Holiday anymore.
Back when I was first getting into business,
he was a blogger that I liked that used to
write these insanely insightful posts about making it.
He's the former director of marketing at American Apparel,
he's written a ton of New York Time's best sellers,
he helped Tim Ferriss launch his book,
he helped Tucker Max with his book,
and he's a great author himself.
In today's video, I wanna run through what I think
is his best book so far.
It is called, Perennial Seller.
And it's all about how to create a book or a
movie or a piece of music that stands the test of time.
His definition of a perennial seller is something
that keeps selling for 10,20,30,40,50 years
after it's conception.
Let's jump into it, here's my review
of the book, Perennial Seller.
The first quote here is,
"A willingness to trade off something;
time, comfort, easy money, recognition,
lies at the heart of every great work."
This is huge, especially the part about
easy money or recognition.
Holiday's saying that in order to create
a great piece of art,
the artist has to avoid going for things
that are just going to be good for the current audience.
So for instance, if I was gonna write a business book,
which I do have something in the works right now,
rather than go for easy money, I'm gonna focus more on
how do I create a piece of art that works,
even if email goes away?
What points can I hit where it tells a story good enough
that maybe the book doesn't sell immediately on
release date, but as my career progresses,
it becomes more and more valuable?
There's another quote that I like,
"Art is the kind of marathon where you cross the
finish line, and instead of getting a medal placed
around your neck, the volunteers roughly grab you
by the shoulders and walk you over to the
starting line of another marathon."
What Holiday's talking about here is that art,
in itself, isn't the end goal.
If you create a book that's good enough
to be in the echelons of great works,
people are gonna want more and more from you.
It's actually the beginning of an art career.
And the next quote,
"The idea of watering things down for a
mainstream audience, I don't think it applies.
People want things that are really passionate.
Often, the best things are not for everybody."
This is gold. Because a lot of what people do when they
sit down to write a business book or make a movie,
is thinking about what's gonna sell.
What's gonna hit in the marketplace?
When instead, the goal should be, what story
am I very passionate about telling
and what is the most passionate way I can tell that story?
And if I make that as real as possible,
then it has a chance of becoming a perennial seller.
That's the same thing in business.
If you're going after all the customers in the world,
you're gonna get a lot fewer customers than if you had
chosen one specific type of person and went after them.
Next quote, "Not every convention is worth questioning,
and usually questioning too many at the
same time is confusing and overwhelming to the consumer."
If you're gonna go all out and try to create a
perennial seller and make something that's new to you,
then it's best to follow some conventions
so that the audience has a way in as well.
If you're ebook is three pages long, for instance,
that's gonna be too short for most people.
Next one, "Anything that requires advertising
to survive will, on a long enough timeline,
cease to be economically feasible."
We've paused most of our Instagram ads and in part,
it's because of this quote.
"Things that grow without advertising
last for a very long time."
If you can't pitch your book in a way that gets people
to talk about it on podcasts, or you can't make a
movie that resonates with people in a way
that gets them to tell their friends organically,
it doesn't deserve to exist.
And so, paying for advertising and forcing it into
the public consciousness, should actually be an
embarrassment to you as an artist.
Your work wasn't good enough to resonate, so pushing it
down people's throats with advertising doesn't help anybody.
Another quote is, "Don't tell me what to do.
Make my mind adaptable to any circumstance."
What Holiday is saying is, the best books,
instead of teaching you what to do,
they make your mind adaptable to any circumstance
so you can approach any problem, not just this one problem.
This book does a great job of doing this.
Because yes, he's talking about writing,
but this book is also useful for music and
it's useful for movies, or art.
Anything can be improved using this framework.
In the end of this book, he makes a really good point.
He says that he didn't mention Instagram or Snapchat
or any specific channels because those
will kill your perennial seller.
He said since he started writing this book,
Snapchat changed their name to Snap,
Instagram added Instagram stories, which completely
changed how people interact with Instagram.
And the technology market generally moves on.
If one of those tools goes away or changes the name,
you're instantly dated and the art will slowly cease to be.
The counter example he gave which I love, is email.
He says that since email has been around for over 25 years,
that it is in perennial seller territory.
So you can reference old technology like that,
email, phones, and you'll have a higher
chance of staying relevant.
If you want the exact contract we use on call number one
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If you run any sort of B2B service company,
you're selling to other businesses and you
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check out experiment27.com.
And if you have a business book and wanna turn it
into a documentary, check out loreliapictures.com.
I'm Alex Berman, thanks.