How One Ryan Holiday Tweet Changed My Life

Written By Craig Rettew

It was around this time last year that we were celebrating my son’s 3rd birthday. We invited all of his friends from school, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. One of his requests was a bounce house, so of course we rented one which barely fit it in our backyard. There was a huge train cake that my wife and mother-in-law made, which included a gummy bear hot tub train car and everyone loved it. It was also around this time last year when COVID-19 started to become a real issue, but I came across a single Tweet from author Ryan Holiday that in-turn helped me navigate the year to come.

Now, I only knew about Ryan Holiday because I’ve been following Tim Ferriss for a long time. Tim had Ryan on his podcast several times and it was always a good conversation. I ended up following him on Twitter. It just so happened that on my 35th birthday, he Tweeted out a list of newsletters he subscribes to. I decided to check them out because I’ve always thought he was an interesting dude who is a book publishing machine at such a young age.


I went through the list of personalities, read a little about each of them and I was intrigued enough to subscribe to all the newsletters. I was already a subscriber of Tim Ferriss’ 5 Bullet Friday which is one newsletter I never skip opening. Given Tim’s newsletter made the list, that bought some street cred for the rest on the list. February 28th was a Friday so I didn’t expect the new newsletters to start rolling into my inbox until Monday.

I received a welcome email from the Daily Stoic the next day with a link that introduced Stoicism. Day 2, I received another email with another link of compiled works from Stoic philosophers titled “The Stoic Art of Journaling.” This article sparked an idea.

I’ve always known that people journaled, but I never knew why. My wife has been writing in a diary since she was in high school but I was never one to do that. My idea of a diary was something that only girls did to talk about how dreamy that one dude from that one boy band was back in the 90s. I never thought about how writing things down was a way for thoughts to traverse time. Hell, writing words down on a page had to be invented! It’s strange to think about but it’s true. Stories were passed on by only spoken word for a very, very long time. Scholars generally agree that the invention of writing happened about 5,500 years ago.

It was time for me to give journaling a try, but I had to do it in the easiest way possible that wasn’t going to allow me an excuse not to. My handwriting is terrible and it gets worse and worse the more words I write. I’m also terrible at spelling and my writing tool of choice is a pencil. Most of the time I murder the eraser from correcting spelling mistakes. I like technology, so naturally I just fired up a Google Doc, put the date at the top and started typing.

I had no idea where this was going to lead and I just word vomited what I had on my mind. I wrote about how I’m writing because of a Tweet, and just wrote about my day and what I needed to do for that day. That was it, four short paragraphs, but entry number one was done.

I kept up with the journaling, missed a couple days here and there and rarely journaled on the weekends, but I started to love it and it was a singular place to dump my thoughts. There is something magical and profound about seeing your thoughts on a page. It’s a form of therapy where you just brain dump everything into the universe to get the thoughts out of your head and onto the page.

The newsletters continued to roll in and I consumed all of them. The Daily Stoic introduced me to stoic philosophy, something I could implement in my everyday life. Daily Dad is a breath of fresh air and pushes me to be the best father I can be, counteracting the social norms of what a father “should” be.

Other than those two newsletter, the one that really grabbed my attention was Ramit’s newsletter, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich.” Ignoring the click-baity title, the newsletters were hilariously insightful and had practical advice that countered a lot of the regurgitated financial advice you hear around the internet. I wanted to know the man behind the newsletter so I started following Ramit Sethi across social media. He started doing some “fireside” chats (he literally sat next to a fireplace) on Instagram which he was going to do everyday until this coronavirus thing blew over (spoiler: it did not blow over). In one of the chats, he was answering questions from his followers and the question had something to do with his book club. My only experience with book clubs was when my mother would gather with her friends at a coffee shop and discuss their mutual read. I thought to myself, why couldn’t I start a book club? At this point, we were about a month into this pandemic where everything was shutting down, we pulled my son out of school, and hunkered down to see what was going to happen. I needed to fill the down time and I wanted to fill it with books.

I’ve NEVER been a good reader. I barely read the assigned reading throughout school. I thought about how many books I’ve read in my life or the last time I sat down to read an entire book and it was abysmal. I needed accountability, so I discussed my book club idea with my good friend and he was onboard. A book club of two!

We started consuming books, it didn’t matter the genre. Books about zombies, historical fiction, self-help and books about tourism and mischief on the moon. We would give each other a week to read and then we would meet on Zoom (not a sponsor) and have a discussion. It got me really excited about reading books and I have not turned back.

James Clear’s 3–2–1 Thursday was another newsletter that stood out. One of the first self-help books we read was his book, Atomic Habits. I ended up reading 25 books in 2020 and Atomic Habits was my favorite. It had the most actionable concepts I’ve ever come across in a self-help book that has changed my life for the better. One of the lessons from the book was “Identity-Based Habits.” It states that if you want a certain outcome, you have to decide what type of person you want to be first. For example, I want to read more books, therefore I am a reader. I continued to identify as a reader and the outcome has followed.

A simple Tweet has set me on a path that I didn’t even know I was craving. It couldn’t have come at a better time either. Daily Stoicism helped me through this pandemic, and Daily Dad helped me become a better father to the son I kept “safe” from friends and family. Ramit’s newsletter allowed me to get out of my own head about building my business, and James Clear’s newsletter helped me align my thoughts and execute them. It’s now been a year of journaling and I believe it’s changed the way I navigate life and has helped me in difficult times. The benefit of writing in a Google Doc is that I can simply do a ctrl+f on the entire journal to bring up events that I’ve completely forgotten. I’m looking forward to reading my journal 20 years from now to see how silly some of my worries were, or be able to explain to my kids, in detail, how Ryan’s Tweet changed everything.

Craig Rettew
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