Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

If a person puts even one measure of effort into following ritual and the standards of righteousness, he will get back twice as much.

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual—it becomes sanctified and holy.

Isn’t the whole point of greatness that you’re freed from trivial rules and regulations? That you can do whatever you want?

They know that order is a prerequisite of excellence and that in an unpredictable world, good habits are a safe haven of certainty.

Eisenhower who defined freedom as the opportunity for self-discipline.

In fact, freedom and power and success require self-discipline. Because without it, chaos and complacency move in. Discipline, th...

“The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he says, “it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

keep their lockers, as well as the dugout, spotless and orderly at all times

Done enough times, done with sincerity and feeling, routine becomes ritual.

When the body is busy with the familiar, the mind can relax. The monotony becomes muscle memory. To deviate seems dangerous, wrong. As if it’s inviting failure in.

The purpose of ritual isn’t to win the gods over to our side (though that can’t hurt!). It’s to settle our bodies (and our minds) down when Fortune is our opponent on the other side of the net.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

We buy room for peace and stillness, and thus make good work and good thoughts accessible and inevitable.

A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred. And so must we.

Like any person who feels attached to their stuff, he was disappointed and surprised and violated. Someone had come into his home and stolen something that belonged to him.

mental and spiritual independence matter little if the things we own in the physical world end up owning us.

We don’t need to get rid of all our possessions, but we should constantly question what we own, why we own it, and whether we could do without.

“If a man can reduce his needs to zero,” he said, “he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.”

Living outside your means—as Churchill could attest—is not glamorous. Behind the appearances, it’s exhausting.

The person who is afraid to lose their stuff, who has their identity wrapped up in their things, gives their enemies an opening. They make themselves extra vulnerable to fate.

We get so used to a certain level of convenience and luxury that it becomes almost inconceivable that we used to live without it.

You need this. Be anxious that you might lose it. Protect it. Don’t share.

Think of it as clearing more room for your mind and your body. Give yourself space. Give your mind a rest.

The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home.

Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.

This is not a rich life. There is no peace in this.

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

“not in far-off, quiet places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him wherever he may be, because he loves it.”

Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to better connect with yourself and with the people you serve and love.

If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.

Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”

The dancer Twyla Tharp points out that “solitude without purpose” is a killer of creativity.)

The wise and busy also learn that solitude and stillness are there in pockets, if we look for them.

Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.

Man is a beast of burden,”

“and he is only happy if he has to drag his burden and if he has little free will. My experience teaches me every day to understand the truth of this more and more.”

the main cause of injury for elite athletes is not tripping and falling. It’s not collisions. It’s overuse.

Eliud Kipchoge,

He prefers instead to train at 80 percent of his capacity—on occasion to 90 percent—to maintain and preserve his longevity (and sanity) as an athlete.

Man is not a beast of burden. Yes, we have important duties—to

But we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re not taking care of ourselves, or if we have stretched ourselves to the breaking point.

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

We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes.

Do you want to be the artist who loses their joy for the process, who has strip-mined their soul in such a way that there is nothing left to draw upon? Burn out or fade away—that

It’s human being, not human doing,

Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits.

The overworked person creates a crisis that they try to solve by working harder.

Mistakes are piled upon mistakes by the exhausted, delirious mind.

The more they try, the worse it gets and the angrier they get that no one appr...