Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

Annaeus Seneca, Rome’s most influential power broker, its greatest living playwright, and its wisest philosopher, was struggling to work.

To Seneca and to his fellow adherents of Stoic philosophy, if a person could develop peace within themselves—if they could achieve apatheia, as they called it—then the whole world could be at war, and they could still think well, work well, and be well.

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.

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.

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.

Tolstoy observed that love can’t exist off in the future. Love is only real if it’s happening right now. If you think about it, that’s true for basically everything we think, feel, or do. The best athletes, in the biggest games, are completely there. They are within themselves, within the now.

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. Be present.

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

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

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.

This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer.

The product of the product

Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?*

That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.

Better still, he was aware of what he did not know and was always willing to be proven wrong.

The importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences—most of all failure and mistakes—to open our eyes to truth and understanding.

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

Hitler, spent his short prison sentence after World War I reading the classics of history. Except instead of learning anything, he found in those thousands of pages only that, as he said, “I recognized the correctness of my views.” That’s not wisdom. Or even stupidity. That’s insanity.

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

This toxic form of ego has a less-assuming evil twin—often called “imposter syndrome.”

Of course, this insecurity exists almost entirely in our heads. People aren’t thinking about you. They have their own problems to worry about!

What is better than these two extremes—ego and imposter syndrome—but simple confidence? Earned. Rational. Objective. Still.

Confident people know what matters. They know when to ignore other people’s opinions. They don’t boast or lie to get ahead (and then struggle to deliver). Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself.

This is key. 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.

Don’t feed insecurity. Don’t feed delusions of grandeur.

And as any seasoned captain of the seas of life can tell you, what’s happening on the surface of the water doesn’t matter—it’s what’s going on below that will kill you.

Beneath the surface of this accomplishment there were also currents—of narcissism, egotism, dishonesty, and greed. A simple example: Earl Woods returned from his second tour in Vietnam with a new wife . . . a fact he neglected to mention to the wife and three children he already had.

There were, for those who were looking, signs of sickness: the thrown clubs after a bad hole—and the lack of concern for the fans this occasionally imperiled. The way he’d broken up with his longtime high school girlfriend by packing her suitcase and sending it to her parents’ hotel room with a letter. The way he responded when Steve Scott saved him from accidentally scratching in their epic head-to-head match, not even thanking him, not even acknowledging the incredible sportsmanship of it—treating it like the weakness of inferior prey.* The way he’d left his college golf team to go pro without even saying goodbye to his teammates, the way after he finished eating with family or friends he’d simply get up and leave without saying a word. The way he could just cut people out of his life.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart—that’s true. But how we choose to feed that heart matters. It’s what determines the kind of person we end up being, what kind of trouble we’ll get into, and whether we’ll ever be full, whether we’ll ever really be still.

“For what is a man profited,” Jesus asked his disciples, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

“When you live a life where you’re lying all the time, life is no fun,” Tiger would say later. When your life is out of balance, it’s not fun. When your life is solely and exclusively about yourself, it’s worse than not fun—it’s empty and awful.

What good is it to be rational at work if our personal lives are a hot-blooded series of disasters?

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 is not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of daily life.

What is virtue? Seneca would ask. His answer: “True and steadfast judgment.” And from virtue comes good decisions and happiness and peace. It emanates from the soul and directs the mind and the body.

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?

Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story. Try it, if you can.

How many great men and women end up losing everything—end up, in some cases, literally behind bars—because they freely chose to indulge their endless appetites, whatever they happened to be?

The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.

Accomplishment. Money. Fame. Respect. Piles and piles of them will never make a person feel content.

exstasis—a heavenly experience that lets us step outside ourselves.

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. —SENECA

It’s been said that the word “love” is spelled T-I-M-E. It is also spelled W-O-R-K and S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E and D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y, C-O-M-M-I-T-M-E-N-T, and occasionally M-A-D-N-E-S-S. But it is always punctuated by R-E-W-A-R-D. Even ones that end.

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. —PROVERBS 16:32

It’s a remarkable window into Michael’s mind, for several reasons. First off, it shows how he had twisted a predictable decision into a major slight about his self-worth. Jordan hadn’t been cut from any team. He and Leroy had both tried out for a single spot on the varsity team. One had made it. That’s not getting “cut”—it’s expected that an underclassman won’t make the senior class team! Nor had it even been a referendum on his abilities. Leroy was six foot seven. Michael was five foot eleven at the time. It’s also so childishly self-absorbed. As if Leroy and his coach weren’t their own people, a teammate he could have been happy for, a mentor he could have learned from.

Seneca’s argument was that anger ultimately blocks us from whatever goal we are trying to achieve.

It was, he said later, “an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

mitfreude, the active wishing of goodwill to other people,

To understand all is to forgive all. To love all is to be at peace with all, including yourself.

A better, more open, more vulnerable, more connected question is to ask what it means to be alive, or to exist, period. As she wrote: We share a planet with billions of other sentient beings, and they all have their own complex ways of being whatever they are. All of our fellow animal creatures, as Aristotle observed long ago, try to stay alive and reproduce more of their kind. All of them perceive. All of them desire. And most move from place to place to get what they want and need.

Rise above our physical limitations. Find hobbies that rest and replenish us. Develop a reliable, disciplined routine. Spend time getting active outdoors.