Discover the Best Book Shop Bill Format for Marketing

Book shop bill format for Marketing

the big lesson that you learn from doing hard things is why the stokes talk about challenging yourself is that you learn what you're capable of [Music] a little over a year ago my wife and i had the craziest idea we've ever had in our lives i'm ryan holiday with my wife samantha we opened this little bookstore on main street here in bastrop texas it's called the painted porch which is actually named after the place where stoicism was founded the stowapoquile the painted porch the agora and athens now this was crazy in a bunch of ways and then it got even crazier when a pandemic happened and through all those plans especially running a small retail business into complete disarray there were moments of course when we thought the painted porch would never open when we thought uh life would never go back to normal there were so many days that we doubted it but you don't quit just because something's hard and in fact when something's hard that's really where the opportunities are where the the opportunity for growth is and here we are celebrating our first year in business we've learned a lot we've made a ton of mistakes we've had to actually apply stoicism day to day and in this video i'm going to show you some things that i've learned in the process [Music] it always takes longer than you think it's going to take that's hofstetter's lot we had this idea to open the bookstore in the fall of 2019 we got really serious about it in the late winter early spring of 2020 and we thought maybe we'd be ready by the summer of 2020 and then there was a pandemic and that pushed us a full year then it took many many months to get up and running and then every time we thought the pandemic was was over and things were about to go back to normal you know it never went back to normal and the idea is if you think starting a business doing anything is going to be easy that it's going to be straightforward that it's going to be clean like you're fooling yourself it always takes longer than you think it's going to take one of the things you learn doing a business like this doing anything is that you have to be really patient it's going to take so much longer than you think it's going to take and if you're rushed if you if you expect it now if you can't pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and and deferring things into the future you're just going to get crushed there's this great hemingway line we actually have a shirt of it i love and i have a print of it on my wall it's one of my favorite all-time quotes hemingway said the first draft of everything is i've never done something like this i love how it is now but this wasn't how it was a weekend two weeks in six months in a year and it wasn't how it was when we opened it's been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes so you have to be able you have to be comfortable starting small and the problem is when you have really high standards when you expect a lot of yourself it's hard to get comfortable with something that's kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there so when you say the first draft of everything to and i love the print and i love the shirt you can check it out we sell them here at the store of course don't demand perfection of yourself early on give yourself the permission to experiment to try it's not perfect the first go-around no business is everything it could or should be on opening day you have to be comfortable getting better as you go [Music] so i don't agree when people say money is the root of all evil but money can be a distraction it's not usually the best way to measure success so like when we did this bookstore the painted porch right it was obviously not to make lots of money because there are so many better easier cheaper ways to make money in this life so you have to understand how you're going to measure the success of what you do and almost always money is not that thing if this makes no money if it loses money if it loses obscene amounts of money it goes out of business we can't continue to exist profit is fuel it's what makes the car go but it's really important that you think about how you're going to measure what you're doing we wanted to think about impact we wanted to think about whether it improves our lives whether we have fun doing it whether we help bring books into the world where we make this community better you have to be careful that money doesn't creep in and corrupt or distract you from what you're trying to do or or how you should be trying to measure success there's never going to be a shortage of reasons why you can't do something why it's too expensive why it's too hard so one of the things i did while i was kicking this around is i i looked up like how expensive is it to start a bookstore it was like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars like way more expensive than i could possibly afford but then i i wanted to question whether that number was real so what i did was i went and i looked at how expensive it was to start like an e-commerce business like what daily stoic is and they said it was hundreds of thousands of dollars more than i'd spent to start that business and that that was really helpful it's like oh these people don't really know what they're talking about or that there's a cheaper a different way to do it you don't have to do it the way that everyone else does it so when you get criticism when you get information when you get facts and of course you have to look for those things but you also have to take them with a grain of salt you have to really look at them you have to put them up to the test as the stoics say to find out which ones are real which ones are counterfeit which ones you can trust and which ones you realize are not are not fully accurate so that was really really important was questioning some of those assumptions the facts on the ground and getting to the real core of how it was and it turned out it was still very expensive to start but it wasn't as expensive as those people said it was and it actually was doable for us to do it when i was thinking about opening my bookstore i asked tim ferriss i said you know is this something i should do am i crazy am i going to lose all my money am i it's going to blow up my life i really want to do it but i'm not sure and he said think about it as an experiment he said how are you going to know if it's something you want to do if you haven't tried doing it and so the decision to see it as an experiment not as a permanent forever life choice was so freeing because it allowed me to go into it knowing okay for the next two years this is something i'm committed to but i can change my mind after that and so this idea of seeing everything as an experiment is totally life-changing and it's what made doing this bookstore possible people talk about like trusting their gut or whatever but that's something you have to earn i talk about this in ego is the enemy like there's a difference between confidence and ego ego things like whatever i want to do of course i'm going to be successful i'm great confidence is something you earn something you earn over time it's something you earn by having an idea bringing it into reality learning what you're capable of learning what what's possible learning why you you do deserve to trust yourself on the other side of this having done this scary thing having done a thing that a lot of people said it wasn't a good idea you're like oh i can do this i'm capable of this seneca says like i pity the person who's never gone through adversity who's never done anything difficult because they don't know what they're capable of the greatest wealth that comes out of this experience is that trust and that confidence and that sense of what i'm capable of when i first started my reading list newsletter sort of in 2008-2009 the idea was that i wanted to celebrate other people's works because i didn't have any of my own books i thought maybe that by celebrating other people's works by saying this is a book that will change your life this is an amazing book i could build a relationship with people that later years in the future if i ever did any of my own books they would know that i have good taste or judgment that i could buy myself from them by putting out value into the world eventually earned the trust or the respect that when i came out with one of my own books they would at least know that i know what a good book is to me the bookstore is an extension of the idea of celebrating other people's work and when you do that when you create value for people when you celebrate other people's work when you're generally a positive force in your industry in your space you develop a reputation you deve people want to support you people want to help you and so now when i say hey buy this book from the painted porch people have been buying books that i've been recommending for 10 years they trust me the world is not zero-sum the more you help others the more you help yourself this is a note i wrote to myself when we were opening the bookstore in the middle of the pandemic i said 2020 is a test will it make you a better person or a worse person if it makes you worse if it stresses you out if it tears your relationship apart if it makes you bitter or frustrated with people then it doesn't matter how successful it is it's not successful i just wanted to think about as i was going through it like what does success look like and we just decided that success was going to be becoming more community minded becoming more responsible becoming better organized having more fun like making a positive contribution we didn't want to contribute to the problem we wanted to contribute to the solution that's community that's public health it's all that stuff if you succeed but it comes at the cost of happiness or other important things in life it's not success so that was just something i thought about that was the test that i wanted to remind myself of over and over again will this make you a better person or a worse person if it makes you a worse person what's the point it would be wonderful of course if marketing didn't have to exist if if things could be bare-boned if presentation didn't matter that's just not how life works never has and it never will be and like that was something we thought a lot about the painted porch and i think one of the best decisions we made and it's a lesson for me we put up this book tower this is like 2 000 books it's 20 feet tall it weighs 2 000 pounds it's 4 000 nails and 40 gallons of glue like it was this whole creation it's like an art piece but it's the number one thing that people come into the store and take pictures of people want experiences right like if they just wanted price if they just wanted ease they'd buy online it was not cheap to do i'll tell you it was hard it took forever um we had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work but it's also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store do interesting stuff do stuff that commands attention how you make it stand out how you draw attention like a magnet it cannot be underestimated there's a great line from peter thiel he says competition is for losers the point being when you're doing something you know you can kind of see how everyone else is doing it you can see how it's supposed to be done and there's a safety and a security in that because it's a well-trod path but that's not really where success comes from when when you want to succeed at something you have to find a way to differentiate yourself you have to find a way to do it in a way that that no one else is doing it the way that only you can do it the big decision on the bookstore it's a lesson that i've learned over and over again but it was really codified here was like i didn't want to be like every other bookstore most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books like between 10 and 15 000 books but what we decided here was we'd have like a couple hundred books only my absolute favorite books the books that i put in my reading list email which i've sent out for like a decade now it would only be those books i think the lesson over and over again is don't compete with other people do your own thing right you don't need to be first you want to be the only you want to be the only one doing it you want to have a unique proposition you want to have something that only you could do and that's what makes you stand out that's what makes you special a lot of people don't know that that stoicism was actually founded in a bookstore xeno he's a successful merchant he suffers a shipwreck he loses everything and he washes up in athens completely penniless and he ends up in a bookstore and there in that bookstore he hears the bookseller reading the works of socrates and it's it's there he falls in love with philosophy he falls in love with the idea of this sort of philosophical mentor that was socrates and it goes up to the bookseller and he says hey where can i find a man like that and the bookseller says well look right there and there was a guy a philosopher walking by named cretins and this becomes zeno's mentor and shortly thereafter zeno founds his own philosophical school which becomes stoicism stowapoqile in athens is where he founds stoicism that's the name of my bookstore the painted porch he realized in that bookstore hearing the works of socrates that a bookstore was a place to talk to the dead so many of the authors in this bookstore are dead like look here's uh here's the idiot right this is a 2 000 year old book here's epictetus a 2000 year old book here's the odyssey we don't even know how old this is right but you can talk to those authors as if they're still alive and i think the real lesson from opening a bookstore the power of books to me remains that idea that zeno got 2500 years ago the idea that through conversations with the dead talking to the wisest people who ever lived who are no longer with us but survive to us in the form of books that is the secret to wisdom that's the wonderful thing and over and over again even when things are really hard i just turned to books which i loved i continue to have those conversations with the dead to me that's what makes bookstores so powerful you might notice i'm i'm not at the bookstore for this one and that's because the bookstore is closed all our employees are out sick we're not able to be open is it going to be five days of being closed is it 10 days of being closed how much money is it gonna cost i don't know i know that there wasn't anything we could have done to avoid this we were immensely safe we took every precaution we even we were controversial at how many precautions and protections we put in place my conscience is clear but that doesn't change the fact that it affects the business but but this is life right uh in in the obstacles way i quote this this haitian proverb that i like that behind mountains there are more mountains that's just how life is you don't overcome one obstacle you don't get through the first year of your business and then you're magically done with obstacles that's not how life works life is one obstacle after another you have to keep going and and that's what we're gonna do we're not judging the success of this business purely in dollars and cents what matters to me is are the employees okay what matters is are we doing the right thing are we acting in ance with our values are we doing what's right for the community so we'll have to endure this we'll have to eat this and and that's just life that's just business we'll take it day by day we'll get through this we won't be deterred by it we continue to do the right thing which is all a person and a business and a stoic can do i read a ton basically reading is my job and every month i send out one email of the best books i read that month books i know you'll love that i stand behind you can sign up fully for free at ryanholiday.net reading lists [Music]