Wisdom Takes Work |
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10 January 2026 - Erlenbach
I've created a habit of buying every book the Ryan Holiday publishes for a number of years now. They have tended in the past to distill wisdom from Holiday's extensive reading, however the last one left a bad taste in my mouth. And while he has gotten increasingly political over the years, in Wisdom Takes Work the gloves finally come off. Section after section of the book is just spent lambasting Elon Musk's foolishness and denigrating his intelligence. While I can agree that wisdom takes work, it certainly doesn't seem that Holiday has put in the work for this book. Indeed, it seems that he's fallen into the same sort of echo chamber he claims others have fallen into. The section on America's tyrant, Lincoln, is even worse, calling him Christ and "the greatest statesman of the millennium" while lauding his bumbling warmongering, the introduction of income taxation, forcing men into the slavery of military service, and manipulating people around him in a Machiavellian way to achieve his own goals. A high school student could write a more balanced portrait of Lincoln. I need to break the unwise habit of listening to Holiday's regurgitation of foolish ideas...
