Stillness is the Key - Ryan Holiday
What exactly do you call Ryan Holiday? Is he a content creator? Kind of but not really. He does a lot more. Is he an author? Certainly but he does a lot more than write books alone. Is he a philosopher? Not really? He’s not really adding a new look at canonical philosophical thought - rather he mediates primarily on existing Stoic though. At the end of the day, I think he is pretty much exactly that - he’s a Stoic. He is a stoic in the same way that Marcus Aurelius was. Aurelius didn’t really add all that much completely unique in his Mediations. Instead, he was writing down the core Stoic philosophies from Epictitus and Seneca that resonated with him and his own life. This is basically what Ryan Holiday does.
Ryan Holiday is really good at taking ancient ideas and historical events and repackaging them in a way that is meaningful in the modern day. That is pretty much what he does for the topic of “stillness” in Stillness is the Key. In his reading, he found constant references to the need to still our minds to be able to think clearly and be at peace. The kind of stillness that comes from really early mornings or from being engrossed in a hobby that engages your mind fully rather than letting it jump from one worry to the next. The funny think, is that this isn’t anything new or revolutionary. Everyone knows that we need to slow down a little bit everyday to remind ourselves what is really important. Yet, for some reason, no-one really does it. It’s like why the effects of habit compound interest in Atomic Habits - James Clear (via Thomas Frank) is hard to stick with. In a given day, the rewards of letting our minds fly from one worry to the next is easier and more pleasurable (because its easy) than having the discipline to slow down, take a couple breaths, and try and find stillness. The ultimate rewards of making a habit of resisting the urge to let our brains jump all around and instead finding some peace is much greater in the long run. Or at least I have faith that it is - I’m certainly not there yet.
I read this book on my Kindle and it is well suited to the format. It is extremely “highlight-able” and did a lot of it.
Highlights
- 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. “You may be sure that you are at peace with yourself,” Seneca wrote, “when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaning sin.”
- The call to stillness comes quietly.
- “All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
- This book is an attempt to answer the pressing question of our time: If the quiet moments are the best moments, and if so many wise, virtuous people have sung their praises, why are they so rare?
- Reaching across party lines and past rivalries, he consulted openly with the three still-living ex-presidents and invited the previous secretary of state, Dean Acheson, into the top-secret meetings as an equal.
- people do not display statesmanlike wisdom,” he said, “they will eventually reach the point where they will clash, like blind moles, and then mutual annihilation will commence.”
- The Daoists would say that he had stilled the muddied water in his mind until he could see through it.
- Deliberate without being paralyzed.
- Trust no future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,—act in the living present! Heart within, and God o’erhead! —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW - Trust no Future!
- “People don’t understand that the hardest thing is actually doing something that is close to nothing,” Abramović said about the performance. “It demands all of you . . . there is no object to hide behind. It’s just you.”
- 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.
- 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. More energy for the future
- We want to learn to see the world like an artist: While other people are oblivious to what surrounds them, the artist really sees. Their mind, fully engaged, notices the way a bird flies or the way a stranger holds their fork or a mother looks at her child. They have no thoughts of the morrow. All they are thinking about is how to capture and communicate this experience. #resources/beauty
- How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as quickly as we answer the dings and rings of technology in our pockets?
- “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.”
- By relying on what’s not there, we actually have something worth using. During the recording of her album Interiors, the musician Rosanne Cash posted a simple sign over the doorway of the studio. “Abandon Thought, All Ye Who Enter Here.” Not because she wanted a bunch of unthinking idiots working with her, but because she wanted everyone involved—included herself—to go deeper than whatever was on the surface of their minds. She wanted them to be present, connected to the music, and not lost in their heads.
- We have to do the kind of thinking that 99 percent of the population is just not doing, and we have to stop doing the destructive thinking that they spend 99 percent of their time doing.
- Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre of hupomnemata (notes to oneself). He called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat,” a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty.
- Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists as well, because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs—emotional, external, psychological—that would otherwise overwhelm them.
- 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. 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.
- stillness can only be rooted in strength.
- What we need in life, in the arts, in sports, is to loosen up, to become flexible, to get to a place where there is nothing in our way—including our own obsession with certain outcomes.
- History teaches us that peace is what provides the opportunity to build. It is the postwar boom that turns nations into superpowers, and ordinary people into powerhouses.
- 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
- 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.
- “Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy after all,” a friend of Earl and Tiger’s would say of the situation.”
- “For what is a man profited,” Jesus asked his disciples, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
- Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in bankruptcy.
- The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. #resources/virtue
- What’s important to me? What would I rather die for than betray? How am I going to live and why?
- Indeed, most desires are at their core irrational emotions, and that’s why stillness requires that we sit down and dissect them. We want to think ahead to the refractory period, to consider the inevitable hangover before we take a drink. When we do that, these desires lose some of their power.
- It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.
- “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.” Thomas Traherne: “To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”
- “I think I understand now that the restlessness we feel as we make our plans and chase our ambitions is not the effect of their importance to our happiness and our eagerness to attain them. We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.” #resources/purpose
- What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough.
- While addiction is undoubtedly a biological disease, it is also, in a more practical sense, a process of becoming obsessed with one’s own self and the primacy of one’s urges and thoughts. Therefore, admitting that there is something bigger than you out there is an important breakthrough. It means an addict finally understands that they are not God, that they are not in control, and really never have been. By the way, none of us are.
- A good relationship requires us to be virtuous, faithful, present, empathetic, generous, open, and willing to be a part of a larger whole. It requires, in order to create growth, real surrender.
- “Sarah,” he wrote, “my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield. The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long.”
- Love, Freud said, is the great educator. We learn when we give it. We learn when we get it. We get closer to stillness through it.
- All that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one—we are the parts of one great body. —SENECA
- Finding the universal in the personal, and the personal in the universal, is not only the secret to art and leadership and even entrepreneurship, it is the secret to centering oneself. It both turns down the volume of noise in the world and tunes one in to the quiet wavelength of wisdom that sages and philosophers have long been on.
- 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.
- High-minded thoughts and inner work are one thing, but all that matters is what you do. The health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.
- If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, the philosopher Nassim Taleb has said, you are a fraud. Worse, you will feel like a fraud. And you will never feel proud or happy or confident.
- It was Cicero who said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die.