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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.
For the rest of his short life, Kennedy worried that people would learn the wrong lessons from his actions during the Missile Crisis. It wasn’t that he had stood up to the Soviets and threatened them with superior weapons until they backed down. Instead, calm and rational leadership had prevailed over rasher, reckless voices. 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
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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.
“If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”
analysis paralysis.
Instead of carrying that baggage around in our heads or hearts, we put it down on paper. Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance. It gives you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind.
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.
Diogenes Laërtius would write that what made Socrates so wise was that “he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.” Better still, he was aware of what he did not know and was always willing to be proven wrong.
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.
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.
Whatever happened, he told himself early in the crisis, no one would write The Guns of October about his handling of it. That was something he could control, and so in that he found confidence.
Virtue, on the other hand, as crazy as it might seem, is a far more attainable and sustainable way to succeed.
But virtue? No one can stop you from knowing what’s right. Nothing stands between you and it . . . but yourself.
Because we weren’t born rich enough, pretty enough, naturally gifted enough, because we weren’t appreciated like other children in the classroom, or because we had to wear glasses or got sick a lot or couldn’t afford nice clothes, we carry a chip on our shoulder. Some of us are like Richard III, believing that a deformity entitles us to be selfish or mean or insatiably ambitious. As Freud explained, “We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism,” thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived.
In one shameful moment, as Soviet and American forces teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy brought in a nineteen-year-old student from Wheaton College for a rendezvous in a hotel near the White House. Here was a man who had no idea how much longer he would live, who was working with inhuman dedication in that crisis to curb the dangerous impulses of his nation’s enemies . . . cheating on his wife, choosing to spend what were potentially his last moments on earth in the sheets with a random girl half his age instead of with his scared and vulnerable
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A person enslaved to their urges is not free—whether they are a plumber or the president.
Joseph Epstein’s brilliant line is: “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” Democritus, twenty-four hundred years before him: “An envious man pains himself as though he were an enemy.”
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his Vita Antonii that one of the benefits of journaling—Confessions, as the Christians called the genre—was that it helped stop him from sinning. By observing and then writing about his own behavior, he was able to hold himself accountable and make himself better:
“Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?” “I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied. “And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked. “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.
The term for this is exstasis—a heavenly experience that lets us step outside ourselves. And these beautiful moments are available to us whenever we want them. All we have to do is open our souls to them.
Because Step 2 isn’t really about God. It’s about surrender. It’s about faith.
Nihilism is a fragile strategy. It’s always the nihilists who seem to go crazy or kill themselves when life gets hard. (Or, more recently, are so afraid of dying that they obsess about living forever.) Why is that? Because the nihilist is forced to wrestle with the immense complexity and difficulty and potential emptiness of life (and death) with nothing but their own mind. This is a comically unfair mismatch.
“Who is there who would wish to be surrounded by all the riches in the world and enjoy every abundance in life and yet not love or be loved by anyone?” was Cicero’s question some two thousand years ago. It echoes on down to us, still true forever.
Life without relationships, focused solely on accomplishment, is empty and meaningless (in addition to being precarious and fragile). A life solely about work and doing is terribly out of balance; indeed, it requires constant motion and busyness to keep from falling apart.
The truly philosophical view is that not only is originality necessary, but everyone is necessary. Even the people you don’t like. Even the ones who really piss you off. Even the people wasting their lives, cheating, or breaking the rules are part of the larger equation. We can appreciate—or at least sympathize with—them, rather than try to fight or change them.
It was 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, then, is how we maintain that freedom.
You were given one body when you were born—don’t try to be someone else, somewhere else. Get to know yourself. Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.
