Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress

by John Fitch

Those who actually made the biggest contributions deliberately aspired to not have to work – in their eyes, if you had to work, you were not successful. And it was exactly this leisure-focused life, and the time it provided for philosophy, games, literature, family, and sports, that allowed culture to blossom. Leisure, as Bertrand Russell would later write, was “essential to civilization.” And according to one of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle, leisure was not only essential, it was the highest ideal anyone could aspire to. Work was a necessity. But leisure was noble.

Aristotle also did not consider rest as a form of leisure. Rest, in the way he defined it, always asks the question, “Rest from what?” (with the answer, “To do more work!”). In Aristotle’s hierarchy, we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure.

True leisure, noble leisure, is not passivity or relaxation. It is an activity in which we can find our greatest fulfillment as humans.

“The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know.” Don’t get caught up in reactivity and the resulting stress and busyness. Stay calm, use reflection to assess the situation and your own response to it, and take only the action that is essential. Then move on and enjoy your resulting time off in tranquility. The Stoics had a concept they referred to as the “Inner Citadel.” It is the fortress within us that nothing from the outside can perturb. It is a trait that sets many great leaders apart from the rest. Crucially, it is not there from the beginning. No one is born with an Inner Citadel.

As Ryan Holiday, a modern promoter of Stoic thought, writes, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” It’s a trade worth making. Saying

As Zorba says, “It’s all because of doing things by halves, saying things by halves, that the world is in the mess it is in today. Do things properly by God! One good knock for each nail and you’ll win through! God hates a halfdevil ten times more than an archdevil!” Take