RYAN HOLIDAY

Watching well-meaning authors follow in the footsteps of someone going in the wrong direction breaks my heart.

The idea that only the swaggering, all-knowing, and ruthlessly ambitious succeed is a lie. One that has discouraged so many people with so much potential - and worse, encouraged many more to crash and burn.

My advice to young people would be this: Don't move to New York. It is not where you will find yourself.

No matter how commonplace or dull your first job's duties seem, chances are you can find something to do that others don't want to and make it your own.

What people often forget is that for the parties involved, the media game is a vicious contest.

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.

Brands are essentially forbidden from saying or associating themselves with the Olympics - something that has been commonly owned by Western Civilization since the Greeks - unless they hand over piles of cash to the Games.

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.

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.

There has to be something about your business that gets you excited. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have spent your precious - irreplaceable - time on it.

You can't believe your own marketing.

I wholeheartedly agree that many media 'standards' can feel disingenuous or, in fact, be a cover for less-than-honest behavior.

Do I regret how my life turned out? Of course not - not for a single second.

Life is hard, but we make it much harder.

Work hard, take it seriously, embrace your ambition. And when you're not doing that, do something - whatever it happens to be - that taps into the part of you that makes you forget about all the rest of it.

You know what's better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.

Don't move to New York. Find your own city and your way.

The news as entertainment is the real danger, because the truth or accuracy of what it is reporting becomes irrelevant.

If you're shameless enough, you can sell anything.

Times change. Context changes. Just because something is old and a 'part of our history' shouldn't mean we are forced to honor it forever.

Virality, at its core, is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.

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.

In 2007, I went to work in Beverly Hills as an intern at The Collective, a talent management agency. I'd been scouted for the job because of a blog I'd started in college and because the blogger-turned-author I worked for, Tucker Max, was producing a project with the company.

We often learn the hard way that our world is ruled by external factors. We don't always get what is rightfully ours, even if we've earned it.