We recently connected with Ryan Aliapoulios and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ryan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I had a pretty unique childhood—my dad was an executive for Ford when I was growing up and we moved a lot, from Michigan to Kansas and then to Germany for five years before coming back to Michigan. From early on, I was used to picking up and starting over with new friends and dealing with culture shock, so those experiences definitely shaped me. When we came back to the States, my parents had a pretty rough divorce right around the time of the financial downturn, and we basically lost everything and had to build everything back again, so there was a new kind of resilience I learned through those experiences that also had a big effect on my outlook on empathy and fostered a new kind of work ethic in me.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
A lot of the work I do is for Legacy Launch Pad Publishing (legacylaunchpadpublishing.com) in LA—we’re a boutique publishing company that helps entrepreneurs step into their authority, tell their own stories and release books independently with the same quality as New York Times bestsellers (our books have even ended up on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists themselves). Our founder, Anna David, has experienced all the ins and outs of traditional publishing firsthand, so she brings a ton of experience and care to all of our projects.
On my own, I’m growing my own copywriting and online marketing agency called Alias Media (aliasmedia.co) to help tech companies and online businesses with branding, social strategy, and storytelling. On the creative side, I release a regular humor and culture newsletter on Substack called organica that covers poetry and literature, though more recently it’s been transformed into a daily crossword column covering NYT crosswords (raliapo.substack.com). I’m also currently doing a creative collaboration with artist Molly Schulman through the IKEA Residency (https://ikearesidency.net) which will be displayed in a show later this Spring.
Finally, I also write poetry, which has been published online and in print in places like Corporeal, Dirt Children, Swamp Spit, Graphic Violence Lit, Bullsh*t Lit, BRUISER, and SPECTRA, and I have a first short collection coming out later this year. I’m always jumping between creative projects, so the best way to see what I’m up to is to visit my website (ryanaliapoulios.com).
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I think my greatest strengths in order are my emotional intelligence, systems thinking skills, and then my writing chops would come in third. Especially for writers and editors who are early in launching their own projects, I think it’s really important to keep in mind that their actual raw writing talent will often not be the determining factor in how far they go—there is so much more of a premium put on people who are easy to work with, kind, and thoughtful, and people who can solve hard problems at all different levels, whether they are detail-oriented at the micro-level or systemic at the macro-level. I do think I’m a skilled writer, but I attribute most of my success more to the other two qualities.
To work on these skills, one of the best things you can do is read a lot and read widely—not just non-fiction for technical knowledge but also a lot of fiction, to understand other peoples’ points-of-view, get inside their heads, and to be exposed to ideas you wouldn’t be otherwise. Having a passion for learning and a positive attitude are generally two skills that have a positive trickle-down effect in virtually every other area of life.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron has been the book that I’ve returned to the most and that has helped me most in terms of boosting my creative practices. If there’s one takeaway from it I would share it’s that doing three, longhand, stream-of-consciousness pages of writing every morning has a huge positive impact on your mental health and your creativity (while boosting your memory and even helping you stay organized at work as well). I do think the “morning” part of it is important if you can manage it, but also journalling every day (or at least regularly) can provide most of the same benefits.
From the more technical side, other great books about mindset and systems thinking are Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, and I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi (kind of a silly title, but far and away the best book on personal finance for anyone trying to be a freelancer, start their own business, or really anyone trying to improve their thinking about money).
Contact Info:
- Website: ryanaliapoulios.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rollyops/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-aliapoulios-a1915848/
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/raliapo
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/dadbops
Image Credits
“sanguine” poem screenshot from BRUISER, “american airport haikus” screenshot from swamp spit, rest of photos are mine
