Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

Buddhism. Stoicism. Epicureanism. Christianity. Hinduism. It’s all but impossible to find a philosophical school or religion that does not venerate this inner peace—this stillness—as the highest good and as the key to elite performance and a happy life.

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

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?

Kennedy didn’t let his own ego dominate the discussions, nor did he allow anyone else’s to. When he sensed that his presence was stifling his advisors’ ability to speak honestly, he left the room so they could debate and brainstorm freely.

Take our time. Sit quietly and reflect.

We do not live in this moment. We, in fact, try desperately to get out of it—by thinking, doing, talking, worrying, remembering, hoping, whatever. We pay thousands of dollars to have a device in our pocket to ensure that we are never bored. 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.

Be present. 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.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON

Each of us has access to more information than we could ever reasonably use. We tell ourselves that it’s part of our job, that we have to be “on top of things,” and so we give up precious time to news, reports, meetings, and other forms of feedback.

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

There is ego in trying to appear the most informed person in the room, the one with all the gossip, who knows every single thing that’s happening in everyone’s life.

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 have to do the kind of thinking that 99 percent of the population is just not doing, and we have to stop doing the destructive thinking that they spend 99 percent of their time doing.

The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.”

It’s a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness.

people trying to avoid silence. They’d rather watch the same bad movies again and again, or listen to some inane interview with an annoying celebrity, than stop and absorb what’s happening around them. They’d rather close their mind than sit there and have to use it.

what made Socrates so wise was that “he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.”

People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

There’s little advantage to reading with arrogance or to confirm preexisting opinions either.

Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding.

Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself. A confident person doesn’t fear disagreement and doesn’t see change—swapping an incorrect opinion for a correct one—as an admission of inferiority.

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.

Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for the reward; but never cease to do thy work.

Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls. —EPICTETUS

a virtuous life is worthwhile for its own sake.

What would I rather die for than betray?

The source of our anxiety and worry, the frustrations that seem to suddenly pop out in inappropriate situations, the reason we have trouble staying in relationships or ignoring criticism—it isn’t us. Well, it is us, just not adult us. It’s the seven-year-old living inside us.

It’s dangerous business, though, creating a monster to protect your wounded inner child.

Give what you didn’t get.

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.

Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start.

Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will.

Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”

Thomas Traherne: “To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”

More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences.

You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had.

“Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” she wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”

the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye—the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.

The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing—which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues.

Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore.

Acknowledging a higher power is difficult because submitting to anything other than their own desires is anathema to what one addict describes as the “pathological self-centeredness” of addiction.

The progress of science and technology is essential. But for many of us moderns, it has come at the cost of losing the capacity for awe and for acknowledging forces beyond our comprehension.

they knew how powerful faith and belief were, how essential they were to the achievement of stillness and inner peace.

A good relationship requires us to be virtuous, faithful, present, empathetic, generous, open, and willing to be a part of a larger whole.

Our stillness depends on our ability to slow down and choose not to be angry, to run on different fuel. Fuel that helps us win and build, and doesn’t hurt other people, our cause, or our chance at peace.

A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES

It is difficult to think clearly in rooms filled with other people. It’s difficult to understand yourself if you are never by yourself. It’s difficult to have much in the way of clarity and insight if your life is a constant party and your home is a construction site.

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty.

A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking.