Ryan Holiday wrote 37. Here are the ones that hold up on the plant floor — and one where I'd push back.

A few years back I came across a piece by Ryan Holiday called "37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I'd Known Earlier." Holiday's career ran through Hollywood talent agencies, marketing for a publicly traded apparel company, and eventually building a media and publishing business. About as far from industrial operations as you can get.

I made a note because I wanted to come back and test it — not in a talent agency or a marketing department, but against 25 years of capital projects, plant floors, and operational turnarounds.

I'm going to cover his 37 in groups of roughly nine. This is the first one.

What I found: more of it translates than I expected. Some needed reframing. One piece I'd argue with directly.

Here are nine that I'd put in front of any plant manager, ops director, or owner-operator in the room.

You're probably thinking: what does someone who dropped out of college to run marketing for a clothing company know about a capital project in Fort Saskatchewan?

Fair. The specifics are different. But the operating principles — how you build a career, how you earn trust, how you make decisions under pressure — those don't change much between industries. Operators who dismiss advice because the example came from the wrong sector miss the lesson.

1. Be quiet, work hard, stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.

The quiet part came naturally to me. Staying healthy — that I've had to relearn a few times. Every time I've worked too long, taken on too much, and let the exercise slide, I've made a mistake that cost more time to fix than the extra hours were worth.

This matters more in industrial operations than anywhere else. The cost of a bad call during week four of a turnaround — when everyone's running on coffee and no one's slept properly — is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a bad call in a normal week. Rest isn't a personal preference. It's an operational input.

2. If you're going to bother someone above you, make it new and relevant — not proof that you did your job.

This one makes me laugh, because I think leaders don't challenge their people enough. If you're going to take something up the chain, it had better be new, and it had better matter — not the thing you were hired to do in the first place.

I learned it young. I was at a friend's house and went to his dad to complain about something my friend was doing. His dad said: "That's your job — go back and tell him yourself." So I did.

Holiday tells a version of the same lesson. He once called Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, about a small win on a project. Charney was busy and a little frustrated at the interruption, but polite about it: "Ryan, you're calling me to tell me that you did your job." Holiday ties it to the scene in Mad Men where Peggy complains that Don never thanks her. "That's what the money is for," Don says.

The plant-floor version is the supervisor who runs every routine call up to the site manager — and the site manager who keeps taking them. Both are dodging the job. Own your patch. Then bring me what's actually new.

3. No one is thinking about you as much as you think they are.

Holiday's reframe on imposter syndrome: "for the most part no one is thinking about you at all. They're too busy with their own doubts and their own work."

Many times early in my career I'd confide in a trusted advisor about feeling out of my depth. Every one of them said some version of: "Phil, I can guarantee you're the only one thinking that." The people you're worried about impressing are too preoccupied with their own position to be scrutinizing yours. That's not reassuring — it's liberating. Get to work.

4. Find canvases for other people to paint on.

Holiday's framing here goes deeper than the usual "make your boss look good." He puts it this way: come up with ideas and hand them over. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Clear the path. Find the inefficiencies and fix them before anyone asks. The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.

I've watched this play out on plant floors and in project offices for 25 years. The person who quietly improves the turnaround schedule so the site manager gets the win. The engineer who hands off a cost-saving idea rather than sitting on it. That person never has a shortage of opportunity.

My pushback: if your boss is the kind of leader who won't acknowledge what you do, the question isn't how to play the game better. It's why you're still there.

5. Very rarely do people get let go because they lack skills. It's almost always unwillingness to learn or inability to take feedback.

I've only fired someone once for a straight skills gap. It was a double whammy — the person was the husband of a friend, which cost me both a direct report and a friendship. I'd do it again.

But the harder lesson is the one Holiday names: most terminations are about attitude, not aptitude. Before I part ways with anyone, I ask myself: how am I failing to improve this person's performance? If I've tried and they've refused — if I have no honest answer left — it's time to move on. Hire deliberately. Set clear expectations. But don't let it drag when it's not working. The cost of a bad fit on a small team is higher than the cost of a hard conversation.

6. Always say less than necessary.

Holiday learned this at 20, in a meeting where he interjected something that didn't need to be said. His mentor pulled him aside: "Did you think it actually needed to be said, or did you just feel like you wanted to have something to say?"

I see the industrial version of this every week. The ops director who walks into a site review with the answer already loaded — before the foreman has finished describing the problem. The consultant who fills every silence with a framework. The plant manager who talks so much in a meeting that his team stops surfacing problems.

Saying less isn't a social nicety. It's the precondition for actually hearing what's in the room.

7. No one can want your success more than you do.

You have to be the driver of your own career. Nobody is going to drag you to the next level — not a mentor, not a company, not a program. The best leaders I've seen in industrial operations got there because they wanted it badly enough to put in the work before anyone told them to. The ones who waited for the system to recognize them are still waiting.

8. There are two types of time: dead time and alive time.

Robert Greene told Holiday this over lunch in 2013 when Holiday was planning his next move. Dead time: passive, biding, waiting for something to happen. Alive time: learning, acting, making use of every hour.

Think about the last market downturn you lived through. The last slowdown. The last stretch between projects. Some operators used that time to train their teams, clean up their systems, build the next round of client relationships. Others waited it out. Those are two different businesses today.

9. Discipline now, freedom later.

"The labour will pass, and the rewards will last." Simple, but worth keeping visible.

What I'd add from experience: the discipline becomes the habit. The early mornings, the structured week, the standard you hold yourself and your team to — after a while it stops feeling like discipline. It becomes how you operate. That's when you've actually built something that doesn't depend on your willpower to run.

Nine down. Twenty-eight to go.

One next step: Pick one of these nine and test it this week. Not all nine — one. Which one have you been avoiding?

Further reading:

• The Obstacle Is the Way — Ryan Holiday (Portfolio/Penguin, 2014). Stoic philosophy applied to adversity. The operating framework beneath most of what Holiday writes — worth reading first if you haven't.
• Mastery — Robert Greene (Viking, 2012). Greene's framework for moving from the outside to the inside of a craft. The alive time concept in point 8 comes out of this thinking.
• The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene (Viking, 1998). Law 4 — Always say less than necessary — is the one worth committing to memory first. Point 6 above is the applied version.

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