Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

The Buddhist word for it was upekkha. The Muslims spoke of aslama. The Hebrews, hishtavut. The second book of the Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an “evenness of mind—a peace that is ever the same.” The Greeks, euthymia and hesychia. The Epicureans, ataraxia. The Christians, aequanimitas. In English: stillness. 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.

“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.

In our own lives, we face a seemingly equal number of problems and are pulled in countless directions by competing priorities and beliefs. In the way of everything we hope to accomplish, personally and professionally, sit obstacles and enemies. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that there was a violent civil war raging within each and every person—between our good and bad impulses, between our ambitions and our principles, between what we can be and how hard it is to actually get there.

In those battles, in that war, stillness is the river and the railroad junction through which so much depends. It is the key . . . To thinking clearly. To seeing the whole chessboard. To making tough decisions. To managing our emotions. To identifying the right goals. To handling high-pressure situations. To maintaining relationships. To building good habits. To being productive. To physical excellence. To feeling fulfilled. To capturing moments of laughter and joy.

Staring at the blank page in front of us and watching as the words pour out in perfect prose, at a loss for where they came from; standing on fine white sand, looking out at the ocean, or really any part of nature, and feeling like part of something bigger than oneself; a quiet evening with a loved one; the satisfaction of having done a good turn for another person; sitting, alone with our thoughts, and seizing for the first time the ability to think about them as we were thinking them. Stillness.

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

The mind is restless, Krishna, impetuous, self-willed, hard to train: to master the mind seems as difficult as to master the mighty winds. —THE BHAGAVAD GITA

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?

Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.

We might say that Kennedy, if only for this brief period of a little less than two weeks, managed to achieve that stage of clarity spoken about in the ancient Chinese text The Daodejing. As he stared down nuclear annihilation, he was: Careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.

In these situations we must: Be fully present. Empty our mind of preconceptions. Take our time. Sit quietly and reflect. Reject distraction. Weigh advice against the counsel of our convictions. Deliberate without being paralyzed.

The crisis was resolved thanks to a mastery of his own thinking, and the thinking of those underneath him—and it was these traits that America would need to call on repeatedly in the years to come. The lesson was one not of force but of the power of patience, alternating confidence and humility, foresight and presence, empathy and unbending conviction, restraint and toughness, and quiet solitude combined with wise counsel.

Being present demands all of us. It’s not nothing. It may be the hardest thing in the world.

we stand on the podium, about to give a speech, our mind is focused not on our task but on what everyone will think of us. How does that not affect our performance? As we struggle with a crisis, our mind repeats on a loop just how unfair this is, how insane it is that it keeps happening and how it can’t go on. Why are we draining ourselves of essential emotional and mental energies right when we need them most?

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.

In meditation, teachers instruct students to focus on their breath. In and out. In and out. In sports, coaches speak about “the process”—this play, this drill, this rep. Not just because this moment is special, but because you can’t do your best if your mind is elsewhere. We would do well to follow this in our own lives. Jesus told his disciples not to worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will take care of itself. Another way of saying that is: You have plenty on your plate right now. Focus on that, no matter how small or insignificant it is. Do the very best you can right now. Don’t think about what detractors may say. Don’t dwell or needlessly complicate. Be here. Be all of you.

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

In the modern world, this is not easy. In the 1990s, political scientists began to study what they called the “CNN Effect.” Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything but reactive. There’s too much information, every trivial detail is magnified under the microscope, speculation is rampant—and the mind is overwhelmed.

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

Thich Nhat Hanh: Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration.

All this noise. All this information. All these inputs. 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. Than be still . . . and in charge of our own information diet.

It seems crazy, but it isn’t. “Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.”

Chop wood, carry water. Chop wood, carry water. Chop wood, carry water. Don’t overanalyze. Do the work. Don’t think. Hit.

Indeed, it is in Stoicism and Buddhism and countless other schools that we find the same analogy: The world is like muddy water. To see through it, we have to let things settle. We can’t be disturbed by initial appearances, and if we are patient and still, the truth will be revealed to us.

Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis. . . . Think about what’s important to you. . . . Think about what’s actually going on. . . . Think about what might be hidden from view. . . . Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like. . . . Think about what the meaning of life really is.

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. —JACK LONDON

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.

Xunzi was more explicit: “Learning must never cease. . . . The noble person who studies widely and examines himself each day will become clear in his knowing and faultless in his conduct.”

Each school has its own take on wisdom, but the same themes appear in all of them: The need to ask questions. The need to study and reflect. The importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences—most of all failure and mistakes—to open our eyes to truth and understanding. In this way, wisdom is a sense of the big picture, the accumulation of experience and the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.

Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. “I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.” There’s another line, now cliché, that is even more cutting: People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

Find people you admire and ask how they got where they are. Seek book recommendations. Isn’t that what Socrates would do? Add experience and experimentation on top of this. Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding. The wise are still because they have seen it all. They know what to expect because they’ve been through so much. They’ve made mistakes and learned from them. And so must you.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. —COLIN POWELL

Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom. Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for the reward; but never cease to do thy work. —THE BHAGAVAD GITA

As marksmen say these days, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

Stillness, then, is actually a way to superior performance. Looseness will give you more control than gripping tightly—to a method or a specific outcome.

Most students, whether it’s in archery or yoga or chemistry, go into a subject with a strong intention. They are outcome-focused. They want to get the best grade or the highest score. They bring their previous “expertise” with them. They want to skip the unnecessary steps and get right to the sexy stuff. As a result, they are difficult to teach and easily discouraged when the journey proves harder than expected. They are not present. They are not open to experience and cannot learn.

This is the balance we want to strike. If we aim for the trophy in life—be it recognition or wealth or power—we’ll miss the target. If we aim too intensely for the target—as Kenzo warned his students—we will neglect the process and the art required to hit it. What we should be doing is practicing. What we should be doing is pushing away that willful will.

The closer we get to mastery, the less we care about specific results. The more collaborative and creative we are able to be, the less we will tolerate ego or insecurity. The more at peace we are, the more productive we can be.

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

Like so many of us, Tiger had unconsciously replicated the most painful and worst habits of his parents.

As he worked to crowd out distractions—anything that would get in the way of his concentration addressing each shot—he was also crowding out so many other essential elements of life: An open heart. Meaningful relationships. Selflessness. Moderation. A sense of right and wrong. These are not just important elements of a balanced life; they are sources of stillness that allow us to endure defeat and enjoy victory. Mental stillness will be short-lived if our hearts are on fire, or our souls ache with emptiness. We are incapable of seeing what is essential in the world if we are blind to what’s going on within us. We cannot be in harmony with anyone or anything if the need for more, more, more is gnawing at our insides like a maggot.

with my soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul? An adolescent’s? . . . A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?”

That is why those who seek stillness must come to . . . Develop a strong moral compass. Steer clear of envy and jealousy and harmful desires. Come to terms with the painful wounds of their childhood. Practice gratitude and appreciation for the world around them. Cultivate relationships and love in their lives. Place belief and control in the hands of something larger than themselves. Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in bankruptcy.

Virtue, the Stoics believed, was the highest good—the summum bonum—and should be the principle behind all our actions. Virtue is not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls and is made real through the actions we take.

No one has less serenity than the person who does not know what is right or wrong. No one is more exhausted than the person who, because they lack a moral code, must belabor every decision and consider every temptation. No one feels worse about themselves than the cheater or the liar, even if—often especially if—they are showered with rewards for their cheating and lying. Life is meaningless to the person who decides their choices have no meaning.

Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. What do we stand for? What do we believe to be essential and important? What are we really living for? Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our heart, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, come between us and that self-knowledge.

Epicurus, who has been unfairly branded by history as a hedonist, knew that virtue was the way to tranquility and happiness. In fact, he believed that virtue and pleasure were two sides of the same coin. As he said: It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. A person who does not have a pleasant life is not living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely the person who does not have these virtues cannot live pleasantly.

No one can stop you from knowing what’s right. Nothing stands between you and it . . . but yourself.

These raw spots shape decisions we make and actions we take—even if we’re not always conscious of that fact. This should be a relief: 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. The one who was hurt by Mom and Dad, the sweet, innocent kid who wasn’t seen.