Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.

We are always reachable, which means that arguments and updates are never far away.

“All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed. It is the key that unlocks the insights of genius, and allows us regular folks to understand them.

To achieve stillness, we’ll need to focus on three domains, the timeless trinity of mind, body, soul—the head, the heart, the flesh.

This is, in fact, the first obligation of a leader and a decision maker. Our job is not to “go with our gut” or fixate on the first impression we form about an issue. No, we need to be strong enough to resist thinking that is too neat, too plausible, and therefore almost always wrong. Because if the leader can’t take the time to develop a clear sense of the bigger picture, who will? If the leader isn’t thinking through all the way to the end, who is?

The Daoists would say that he had stilled the muddied water in his mind until he could see through it.

We sign up for endless activities and obligations, chase money and accomplishments, all with the naïve belief that at the end of it will be happiness.

The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.

And if you’ve had trouble with this in the past? That’s okay. That’s the nice thing about the present. It keeps showing up to give you a second chance.

“If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”

The important stuff will still be important by the time you get to it. The unimportant will have made its insignificance obvious (or simply disappeared).

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, “Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”

It is in this stillness that we can be present and finally see truth. It is in this stillness that we can hear the voice inside us.

We are afraid of the silence. We are afraid of looking stupid. We are afraid of missing out. We are afraid of being the bad guy who says, “Nope, not interested.” We’d rather make ourselves miserable than make ourselves a priority, than be our best selves.

“If we’re anxious or nervous when we make the catch or throw, what will become of the game, and how can one maintain one’s composure; how can one see what is coming next?”

Whatever you face, whatever you’re doing will require, first and foremost, that you don’t defeat yourself.

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

What’s essential is invisible to the eye.

The world is like muddy water. To see through it, we have to let things settle.

Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis.

The choreographer Twyla Tharp provides an exercise for us to follow:

This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.

Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists as well, because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs—emotional, external, psychological—that would otherwise overwhelm them.

Randall Stutman, who for decades has been the behind-the-scenes advisor for many of the biggest CEOs and leaders on Wall Street, once studied how several hundred senior executives of major corporations recharged in their downtime. The answers were things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly-fishing. All these activities, he noticed, had one thing in common: an absence of voices.

Each school has its own take on wisdom, but the same themes appear in all of them: The need to ask questions.

If Zeno and Buddha needed teachers to advance, then we will definitely need help. And the ability to admit that is evidence of not a small bit of wisdom!

Wrestle with big questions. Wrestle with big ideas. Treat your brain like the muscle that it is. Get stronger through resistance and exposure and training.

David’s confidence arose from experience, not ego. He had been through worse and done it with his bare hands.

deliver). Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself.

Confidence is what determines whether this will be a source of anguish or an enjoyable challenge.

Both egotistical and insecure people make their flaws central to their identity—either by covering them up or by brooding over them or externalizing them. For them stillness is impossible, because stillness can only be rooted in strength.

In a way, the lotus also embodies the principle of letting go.

Cheating and lying never helped anyone in the long run, whether it was done at work or at home.

We are incapable of seeing what is essential in the world if we are blind to what’s going on within us.

In fact, it almost feels like he wanted to get caught. So he could get help.

Meanwhile, the person who knows what they value? Who has a strong sense of decency and principle and behaves accordingly? Who possesses easy moral self-command, who leans comfortably upon this goodness, day in and day out? This person has found stillness.

There’s no question it’s possible to get ahead in life by lying and cheating and generally being awful to other people. This may even be a quick way to the top. But it comes at the expense of not only your self-respect, but your security too.

Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. Each of us must sit down and ask: What’s important to me? What would I rather die for than betray? How am I going to live and why?

Lust is a destroyer of peace in our lives:

To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.

Earl Woods called that the e-word, like it was an expletive. In truth, enough is a beautiful thing.

There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things as they are, particularly when that person has objectively done so much.

What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough.

That’s why the philosopher Nassim Taleb’s line is so spot on: It’s not that we need to believe that God is great, only that God is greater than us.

The rapper J. Cole has said that the best thing he ever did as a musician was become a husband and a father. “There was no better decision I could have made,” he said, “than the discipline I put on myself of having responsibility, having another human being—my wife—that I have to answer to.”

It is also true that the single best decision you can make in life, professionally and personally, is to find a partner who complements and supports you and makes you better and for whom you do the same.

“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

the realization that we are all one, that we are all in this together, and that this fact is the only thing that truly matters.

Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all. To love all is to be at peace with all, including yourself.