#565： Stillness Is the Key
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Summary
According to my guest today, many of the world s most eminent leaders, thinkers, athletes, and artists have one thing in common: cultivate stillness in their lives. His name is Ryan Holiday, and in his latest book, Stillness is the Key, he highlights how great individuals have used stillness to do great things.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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According to my guest today, many of the world's most eminent leaders, thinkers, athletes,
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and artists have one thing in common, cultivate stillness in their lives.
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His name is Ryan Holiday, and in his latest book, Stillness is the Key, he highlights
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how great individuals have used stillness to do great things.
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We begin our discussion with how Ryan describes stillness, what it means to find stillness
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in mind, body, and soul, and how an individual can have stillness in one of these areas,
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Ryan shares what we can learn about stillness of mind from JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile
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Crisis, and how journaling and limiting media inputs can help us foster our own mental stillness.
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We then discuss the myth that relationships hold you back, and how they can in fact help
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you find both greater achievement and stillness of soul.
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We also discuss what we can learn from Winston Churchill on how to find physical stillness,
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and why having hobbies is so important to finding balance in life.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash stillness.
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All right, Ryan Holiday, welcome back to the show.
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So you got a new book out, Stillness is the Key, and it's part of this trilogy you've been
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How is this book a continuation or sort of a capstone of that thinking you've been doing
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What I've been trying to do with the books is take sort of an idea from ancient philosophy
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So the obstacle is the way was this quote from Marcus Aurelius about how we can turn what
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Ego is the enemy is about this idea of sort of intellectual humility, batting away,
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pride, you know, you can't learn that which you already know, which is a line from Epictetus.
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This one started out a little bit more Eastern, you know, the idea of sort of stillness, of
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And then as I was researching it, it sort of came flooding back to me how much the stoics
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And it's interesting, you know, I've obviously read all these texts all these different times,
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but I just totally missed that's what they were talking about, which is this interesting
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And it's sort of a kick I'm on recently, this idea of rereading books.
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Depending on where you are in your life and what you're going through, it's like you interpret
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And I, you know, it's, I just didn't even notice that over and over again, Marcus is
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like even using the word stillness and talking about, you know, things in a very almost Zen
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And so the book was sort of just zooming in on that idea of how do we get to a place
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of sort of inner peace, external peace, not so we can withdraw from the world, but so
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that we can be better when we are active in the world.
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Well, I'm going to go back to this idea of you missed it the first time around.
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Like, what do you think was going on in your life that caused you to miss it?
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Like, what were you focused on, say, eight years ago when you're reading these texts where
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you're like, yeah, that just totally was under the radar?
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Well, I think being much younger, stillness was not the problem that I had.
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It was like, it's sort of like, I think what I was reacting to was like, oh, this is how
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you overcome obstacles, oh, this is how you, you know, you sort of get your ego under control.
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I was, I was responding to what I needed at that point in my life.
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And then as I got a little older, and I'm sure you relate to this, it's like, oh, you
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realize like this pace that you're on, this intensity is, although it's been an advantage,
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And, and so you have to think about it a different way.
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And there's actually been some interesting studies.
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And they, they did this one where they sort of scraped all this data about like what young
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people versus old people were like writing in blog posts and on social media.
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And what they found is that younger people tended to associate happiness with achievement
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and older people tended to associate happiness with contentment.
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And I think that's just a natural evolution that we're on.
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And so, you know, early on, I was looking to the Stoics for what they could help me achieve,
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what they could help me do, what sort of stresses they could help me manage.
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And then as I've gotten older, and I've been, you know, sort of fortunate and privileged in
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my career, then all of a sudden, you have a different set of problems, which is what you
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can't solve with this, the skill set that the first set of problems were solved with.
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And ironically, this all ties into a theme that that shows up in meditations a lot, which
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Marcus Aurelius gets from Heraclitus, he says, no man steps in the same river twice.
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And what he means is that everything is constantly changing, including you and the river.
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And so as I've gone back and reread a bunch of books, not just the Stoics, but a bunch
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of my favorite novels, I've found that I'm interacting with the material in a different
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way, even though like literally it's unchanged, the environment and myself have evolved.
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And so all of a sudden, you're getting something different from the same words printed in the
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It's a good case for revisiting, rereading books multiple times.
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So he has this concept of like a five foot bookshelf.
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He says like, and this almost sounds like an art of manliness post, but he says, you know,
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every family should have like a five by five bookshelf that is filled with like your family's
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texts, like the books that you need to read and study to like be a good person.
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And I think this ties into something Seneca talks about, which is like, it's not about
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how many books you read in your life, but it's about, you know, reading the same books
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over and over again and studying them very deeply.
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And so again, I think early in my life, it was like, oh, I've got to read this.
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And so it's about doing, doing, doing, acquiring, acquiring, acquiring.
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And that at a certain point you go, I don't know if I, if more is the answer, maybe it's
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And so you, you go back and you look at these things and you, you discover them in a new
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Talking about studies of shifting priorities between younger people and older people,
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So like when you're young, the priority is like getting lots of friends.
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And as you get older, the priority shifts to just like winnowing down to like the friends
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who are like the ones who like give you the most fulfillment.
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It's a, and that's, it's so funny philosophically and all these cliches end up being proven,
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I think when people, like you said, when you first started writing the book, it was sort of
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You're going and looking at Buddhism, Eastern philosophies.
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And I think people have this idea of stillness being, you know, just means sitting on a pillow,
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But you highlight in the book, that's not necessarily the case.
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I think we've, we've done ourselves a disservice by making the word stillness synonymous with
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And, you know, there are many people who are, who are sitting and meditating are probably
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the least still people you could possibly imagine.
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And so what I wanted to do in the book was, was sort of expand the definition and look
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at it from an Eastern and Western sense, a Christian sense.
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You know, when, when they talk about when, when Jesus says, peace, be still, and know that
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I'm God, he is not saying sit and meditate, you know, like, so these are, these are different
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understandings of the same idea from all these different schools.
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But at the core of it, I think they are talking about slowing down.
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They're talking about not being jerked around by interior, exterior forces.
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So it's interesting, like there's, there's kind of not two more different schools than
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We, we almost take it that they are diametrically opposed, but the Stoic word for stillness is
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And they both have like the same definition, which is like some form of tranquility, not
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being jerked around by interior or exterior passions.
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So that's the kind of stillness I'm talking about.
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Although I very deliberately do not talk about it at all in the book, you know, you can get
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You could also get it, you know, sitting on a, on a porch watching the snowfall, right?
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Like there's lots of different ways to get to the stillness.
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And it's when you hear reports from like professional athletes or, or, or people have been in really
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high pressure situations where they managed to do something incredible.
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When you, when you sort of parse their descriptions of how they were feeling, what you hear over
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and over again is some version of that idea of, you know, I wasn't thinking about anything.
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I, I, I was perfectly still, you know, even as they were, you know, throwing a, you know,
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a touchdown pass or, or, you know, playing a chess match or whatever it is.
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So I think there's an inherent benefit of stillness, like stillness for its own sake
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But I think let's look at like the people who are still like in that mindset.
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You know, so like, what would you say to those people?
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Like, what are the benefits that come from fostering stillness in your life?
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Well, what we're doing, whatever, whatever it is, but anything at the sort of professional
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So like, like one of the examples I talk about in the book is, is, is professional baseball.
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And, and you, you, you see these pitchers and these batters facing off and the, the hitting
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of baseball is like the single hardest act in professional sports.
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You have something like 400 milliseconds to identify and begin the swinging process for
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So if, if you are not still, if your mind is going a million miles a minute, if you're
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thinking about, you know, an argument you had with the coach, you know, 20 minutes ago,
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if you're thinking about your contract negotiations that are going to happen at the end of the
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season, you know, if you are thinking in advance of the home run, you're going to hit, you're
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Cause that 400 milliseconds requires a hundred percent of your energy.
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Yogi Berra said, you know, it's impossible to hit and think at the same time.
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And so I think one of the arguments for stillness is that like, it's a resource allocation issue.
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Like when I look at the best things that I've done professionally, I wasn't doing eight things
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And so I think one argument aside from just the, you know, you'll feel better as a human
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being is like, this is how you get to access a hundred percent of your resources.
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So you highlight that there are three areas of life, three domains of life we can find
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And we'll talk about different ways we can access stillness in those three domains, but
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I'm curious, is it possible to be still in one of these areas, but not the other?
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And if so, like, what are some examples of that?
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Well, that's, that's actually sort of my argument in the book, which is that like, we, we are often
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So I, you know, one of the characters I was fascinated with that I wrote a lot about is, is
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So here you have a guy who physically, you know, is complete master of himself, uh, mentally,
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you know, golf is such a mental game, complete master of himself.
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And yet, you know, it's hard to argue that sort of spiritually, emotionally at the soul
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level that for a long time, you know, he wasn't, you know, sort of tearing himself to pieces.
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And, and eventually that part of himself that he kept compartmentalized, but was dealing with
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all sorts of wounds and urges and passions and, you know, temptations, it eventually
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overwhelmed and, and destroyed, you know, his, his, his considerable mastery of the other
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And it took, you know, 10, basically 10 years for him to claw his way back with a lot of
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And so, you know, I talk about someone like Tiger Woods, not from a position of judgment,
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but to, to talk about how out of balance we can get.
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A lot of these sort of gurus of the Eastern world turn out to sort of be like depraved
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It's like they have this sort of mental stillness and physical stillness that can sit for hours
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And then it's like, when they get up, they are, you know, doing some, some me too stuff.
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And my point is like, this, this has to be integrated.
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You, you can't, you can't be, uh, you know, a saint in one part of your life and, and a
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monster in the other and expect that to be sustainable.
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So you have to focus on all three at the same time.
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Well, it's like, you're tackling it from all these different elements because it's like,
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okay, let's say you do get to a place where mentally you can kind of tune things out.
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You've, you've built a really great environment that encourages stillness.
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But then in your heart, you know, all you feel are jealousy and rage and, and, uh, you
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know, insecurity, that's not gonna, that's not gonna be sustainable.
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Or, you know, you could be someone who is, who is, you know, pure hearted, but, you know,
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you've developed this hoarding habit and you walk into your house and it's just chaos and
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And, you know, you're about to be swallowed by piles of your own garbage.
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Like that's going to cause a lot of anxiety and worry.
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And so it's, it's, how do we, how do we tackle this from, from all parts of it, whether it's
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the sort of habits that we practice in the course of a day, you know, the, the, the discipline
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And then also just like the, the sort of standards and principles that we operate by, I think
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you're kind of triangulating your way towards, towards some semblance of stillness.
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That, that's, that's at least the way I think about it.
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So the first section that you talk about is the mind, stillness of mind, and you start
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off talking about JFK, John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of
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So walk us through that and how you think JFK purposely looked for stillness to solve this
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We were talking earlier about sort of active stillness or what does stillness look like
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I think it's hard to, to, to find a better example of stillness in the real world that
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had more of an impact than, you know, John F. Kennedy waking up in, in 1962 and finding
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out, Hey, the entire balance of nuclear power in the world has shifted overnight.
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And I am sitting on a powder keg of a situation that if I'm not careful, literally hundreds of
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And he manages over the, you know, subsequent 13 days to deescalate, to avoid rushing to
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judgment, to avoid, you know, taking the wrong steps or, or making, making irrevocable
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He gets Khrushchev to back down, you know, he, he, he saves humanity from a nuclear Holocaust.
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And he, and he does this by, you know, not just from the sort of Zen perspective of thinking
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of nothing, but in fact, by really slowing down and thinking quite deeply about the situation,
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about what was at stake about, you know, he says at one point, like, I'm not interested
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He's like, what about the third step and the fifth step and the seventh step and the ninth
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And he's like, you generals who are, you know, telling me that we've got to, you know, bomb
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And then we may have to invade the USSR for, for setting this all in motion.
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And he's like, I'm worried that you're so wrong that no one will be around to tell you
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And one, one of Kennedy's expressions, he says, you know, you want to use time as a tool,
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And I think even that the missile crisis, you know, transpires over 13 days is impressive,
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Like, I'm not sure, I'm not sure every president who's held office before or since would have,
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would have taken, had the fortitude and the clarity to allow for that kind of time.
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And really what Kennedy was doing was allowing Khrushchev to come to his senses, right?
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It was like five or six days in and Khrushchev's like, oh man, this was a huge mistake, right?
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But Kennedy realizing that this is going to happen has given him room to back down and
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then ultimately were able to come to a peaceful conclusion.
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And I mean, he learned from a prior mistake with the Bay of Pig invasion, which failed.
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And he had that idea, there's like, you got to act, act, act, act, and it just ended up
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I think it's almost inconceivable that the same president oversaw Bay of Pigs and the
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Cuban Missile Crisis because they were so transformatively different and such transformatively
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different examples of what leadership is supposed to look like.
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He was kind of bullied into one, and then he had the strength and the confidence and the
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clarity to, you know, do the right thing in the second one.
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And it's just filled with all sorts of, you know, sort of genius little insights, right?
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Like he, you know, everyone was like, you got to bomb Cuba.
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And he's like, well, what's Russia going to do if we bomb Cuba?
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And they were like, well, we haven't thought that far, you know?
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He's like, well, if I was president of Russia and someone bombed a place we had missiles,
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He's like, what do you think Khrushchev's advisors are telling him to do right now, right?
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Like this sort of practice of empathy was, I think, really important.
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But one of my favorites is when he decides to put a blockade around Cuba, he's like, look,
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we're not going to bomb them, but we're not going to let this continue.
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He's like, we're going to put, you know, our Navy around Cuba and prevent anything from
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You know, he realizes that even blockade sounds a little aggressive.
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But even the language, down to the language he's using to describe what he's doing, he is
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thinking about how this is going to be received.
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So to me, this is just like the peak performance of leadership and presidential power.
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And hopefully we never have to see anything like it again.
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But he was just sort of firing on all cylinders there.
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And he did some like meditative practices unknowingly.
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Yeah, he sends a note to the gardener at the White House, you know, thanking her for her
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What I think is really interesting, and you can Google and see these, like Kennedy's notes
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Like he was doodling on these legal pads and he was writing kind of mantras to himself.
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You know, but like you can see a picture of a sailboat that he drew on the White House
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stationary, you know, as he's having to think about this terrible, you know, weight on his
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And yet he's finding the ability to sort of zoom out and get some perspective.
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But both the Stoics and the Buddhists use the metaphor of the mind as muddy water, and
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that you have to let the dirt and the silt settle down before the water becomes transparent
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And I think that's, you know, that's what Kennedy was doing.
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But Kennedy's one of those examples too, where he had, you know, incredible stillness of
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mind, but not so still in other areas of his life, particularly like the sole part of his
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Yeah, that's what I mean about this compartmentalization.
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It's like, okay, so in those 13 days, if you only look at it from a policy perspective
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But then you zoom in at the personal and it's like, there's a scene where Kennedy has one
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of his aides, you know, drive in a beautiful co-ed from a college near DC, and they have an
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And so it's like, he didn't know how the missile crisis was going to end up, right?
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But somehow he decided that a good use of those, you know, last few days on earth would be better
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spent, you know, hooking up with a stranger than spending it with his wife and children.
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And so to me, that doesn't strike me as a particularly enlightened decision.
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And it doesn't sound like someone who's in control of themselves, right?
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And when you look at Kennedy's sort of twisted relationship with his father, some of it starts
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So one of the tactics you suggest for getting stillness of mind is limiting inputs.
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What did that look like in some of the lives of the famous folks that you came across and
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I've always loved this story that Emerson tells about Napoleon, which is that Napoleon would
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And he would instruct his secretary to wait sometimes as much as three weeks before he
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checked his mail, knowing that by the time most of these letters were open, they would
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have been rendered irrelevant by subsequent events.
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And he said, look, if there's something important, you know, do not delay.
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But if it's not important, if it's not urgent, if it's good news, like he's like, don't bother
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And the amount of people that I see today who it's like, they wake up in the morning
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and instead of doing whatever they know they need to be working on, and I know you've written
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about this a lot with this sort of Eisenhower matrix, they wake up and the direction of their
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day is determined by, you know, what people have tweeted, you know, in the few hours that
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they were asleep, or, you know, what unsolicited emails came in, or, you know, whatever is running
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And so I think we have to limit our inputs because naturally we're reactive, right?
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And we live in a time where there's way more information to react to than is remotely necessary
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And so we have to really zoom in on what we're going to care about, what we're going to monitor,
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so that we can, we can not just be still, but so we can, we can excel at the few things
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that we're, you know, put on this planet to excel in.
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So for me, that's like, I don't watch a lot of news.
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You know, I don't schedule things, you know, usually before, before noon, because I want
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to be, I want to do the important things before I've been interrupted by, by the various
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But what do you say to folks who think, who would say like, well, you know, things are
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In order to stay ahead of the competition, you have to be on top of all this stuff that's
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The most successful living investor is Warren Buffett, who invests from a value standpoint
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These are not popular because they are cashing in on a trend of the moment.
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They're working because they connect to something timeless, right?
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Most of the things that are going on politically right now, if you have any sense of history,
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you probably have a better grasp on than the person who is refreshing their Twitter feed
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So, I'm not saying that you want to be uninformed.
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I'm saying that, you know, following breaking news or up-to-the-minute information is oftentimes
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Not only is it incredibly inefficient, but it's often very misleading and gives you a false
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It's like, if you pick up, I don't know, Thucydides' History of the Palpatian War, and you're reading
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about this sort of jockeying between, you know, two powers, right?
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I think this will give you more timeless insight about China and America than, you know, following
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this sort of petty squabble about, you know, the NBA and the Rockets' GM who tweeted about
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the, you know, the sort of uprising in Hong Kong, right?
00:24:40.860
So, the question is, is the information that you're going with, is it likely to be rendered
00:24:45.940
irrelevant or is it likely to be, you know, sort of proven incorrect or insufficient by
00:24:54.840
And so, when we're limiting our inputs, we're not going to live in a bubble or we're not
00:25:01.620
What we're trying to choose is more sort of sustainable, reliable, universal information
00:25:08.760
Books are like a great source of, you know, universal, long-term information.
00:25:14.040
Yeah, look, and obviously, as an author, I'm a little biased.
00:25:16.380
But like, you think about like this book, it's like, I spent three years writing it.
00:25:20.720
So, that's like, for the time that it would take you to read, you know, 10 articles that
00:25:27.220
took probably 10 hours to write, you're getting, you know, three years of research and thinking
00:25:35.460
that is a compression of all sorts of, you know, human experience over the centuries.
00:25:44.520
And because you're paying for it, the author is much more obligated to deliver you high-quality
00:25:52.060
And then, I would say on top of this, just the meditative experience of sitting down
00:25:58.100
quietly in a corner with a book where you can't be interrupted, where, you know, there's
00:26:03.480
not a million graphics zinging around or, you know, noises or updates or whatever.
00:26:10.180
Like, I think reading is just a better medium for stillness than the phone or the television
00:26:18.460
So, another tactic for stilling the mind, stilling the mind is journaling.
00:26:22.320
Where are some individuals that have journaled to find stillness in themselves?
00:26:25.840
Almost every, you know, person you could possibly imagine.
00:26:29.540
You know, like, half of history exists because, you know, people kept diaries and journals.
00:26:35.660
And I think they did it not because they were performing for history, but because they were
00:26:40.300
trying to process and wrap their heads around what they're thinking.
00:26:43.020
Like, Marcus Aurelius' meditations is his diary.
00:26:48.680
But he's not saying, you know, I had fruit for breakfast.
00:26:52.260
He's saying, you know, why do I keep losing my temper?
00:26:56.240
You know, he's saying, like, why am I so easily riled up or upset or concerned?
00:27:00.380
You know, why am I so worried about this or that?
00:27:02.800
I think Anne Frank's diary is, you know, one of the most incredible documents.
00:27:06.500
I got to imagine being a 13-year-old girl is already pretty difficult.
00:27:10.160
But then to be trapped in an attic with your parents, afraid that the Nazis are going to
00:27:14.640
come in at any moment, would have been obscene, right?
00:27:18.180
And she sits and works on these thoughts in this journal that, you know, give us such
00:27:26.600
She says, you know, paper is more patient than people.
00:27:30.620
And I just, every time I find myself getting upset or angry or bitter about something, I
00:27:34.940
try to spend some time, you know, just writing that down and hammering it out in my journal.
00:27:40.000
And I almost always feel better and almost always need to do less, right?
00:27:45.120
I need to say less or, you know, argue less or accost someone less because I've taken some
00:27:55.760
You know, I think what it does for me, and I'm going to, this is my theory.
00:27:59.560
There's probably some psychologists that have confirmed this.
00:28:01.840
I'm definitely sure there's a psychologist that's confirmed this, but I think one of
00:28:05.100
the benefits of journaling is that it allows you to take your emotions and put it through
00:28:10.860
Because the act of writing is very linear and logical.
00:28:13.680
So it allows you to think about your emotions more, even, you know, more clear with a clear
00:28:20.840
So you're able to do something with your emotions and it just goes through that prefrontal
00:28:26.500
Or just think about how often our emotions are in conflict with each other, right?
00:28:30.360
Like, it's like, we love someone and then we hate them for what they just did, right?
00:28:34.800
These are love and hate simultaneous for the same person.
00:28:38.460
And when that's kind of in your head, they're like in real close proximity to each other,
00:28:45.500
But when you write it down, now you have some distance, right?
00:28:52.340
You know, how can I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:54.440
But now you have like a foot and a half of distance from that thought and you can stare
00:29:00.700
And I think this is just a healthier place for that thought to be.
00:29:04.800
How have you kept the journaling habit steady and consistent in your own life?
00:29:11.020
And it's one of those things that I think the more you do it, the more you get out of it.
00:29:17.320
One of the things I recommend, I use a journal called the One Line a Day Journal.
00:29:21.160
And you just write one sentence a day for five years.
00:29:24.260
But you can see exactly where you were five years ago, right?
00:29:33.040
And then a couple of years ago, I made a journal called the Daily Stoic Journal,
00:29:37.040
which gives you a question to answer every day.
00:29:40.200
So I find that to be really effective and interesting.
00:29:43.840
I guess it's like if you're having trouble journaling, don't just go buy a blank book.
00:29:50.420
There's all sorts of cool guided journals that help you build a familiarity with a habit
00:29:56.500
that could be prompts or there's a specific way to do it.
00:29:59.880
And that can be a great way to start building the habit.
00:30:05.220
Because I think if you go out and buy a blank journal and you just have one line,
00:30:08.240
you look at the blank page like, well, I didn't really journal.
00:30:17.280
But so another way you can find stillness of mind is finding silence.
00:30:23.200
So any examples from people and from history where they purposely found silence to find stillness?
00:30:28.380
I don't know about you, but I don't know how these writers write in coffee shops.
00:30:33.680
But I think the environment that you choose to do your work, whether it's creative or otherwise, is so important.
00:30:40.480
The open office concept is just literally my nightmare.
00:30:45.940
I would rather not have a job than have a job where I have to work in an open office where people can interrupt you at any time.
00:30:52.980
So I was really fascinated by Bill Gates taking these sort of think weeks.
00:30:59.900
You know, he goes off a week or two a year where he just has complete silence and solitude.
00:31:05.920
He just sort of sits alone and he reads and he catches up and he has ideas and he goes for walks.
00:31:11.740
You know, it's just sort of building up time, both I think daily, but also, you know, sort of regularly in your calendar and your life where you have time to just be disconnected.
00:31:23.440
Because if you don't have that, what you're preventing is those sort of thoughts that just pop in your head.
00:31:31.600
My next book idea came to me when I was, you know, playing on the beach with my son on a family vacation.
00:31:39.120
And it was early in the morning and it was quiet and there's no one there and we were just hanging out, right?
00:31:43.960
And like, I wouldn't have had that had I been, you know, had I been in back-to-back meetings, let's say.
00:31:56.540
One thing that I really enjoyed is I went to a monastery for a weekend.
00:32:08.760
It's like there's no Wi-Fi, there's no cellular coverage, and it's just completely silent there.
00:32:15.260
And I think what happens oftentimes when you experience that silence is now all of a sudden you can really hear what's going on inside your own head.
00:32:22.760
And you realize that's where the noise is coming from.
00:32:25.320
And then you got to do work on yourself to quiet that down.
00:32:29.120
So let's move to the soul aspect of finding stillness.
00:32:32.480
What do you think are the biggest obstacles of finding stillness in the soul?
00:32:36.020
Well, I think a lot of people are ruled by their emotions.
00:32:40.300
And I'm not saying the alternative is to suppress your emotions.
00:32:43.160
But, you know, the Stoics were big at sort of asking, you know, is this emotion, is this urge, is this desire that I'm feeling, is it helpful or not, right?
00:32:56.340
So I just see so many people just sort of led around through life by a bunch of different feelings, right?
00:33:07.740
Sometimes that feeling is a need to be loved, right?
00:33:10.820
Sometimes that feeling is, you know, it can be any number of feelings.
00:33:15.860
But they're sort of led through life by this sort of emotional reactiveness or this sort of compulsion.
00:33:24.980
And then, you know, sort of unsurprisingly, it doesn't end well.
00:33:30.140
And so I think what we're talking about is not avoiding, or sorry, not eliminating all emotions, but just getting to that place of ataraxia, as the Epicureans are talking about, where you're not jerked around by your passions, where you have a sort of a freedom from those compulsions and desires.
00:33:50.920
So in the book, I talk a lot about anger, which I think is a very sort of prominent driver in a lot of people's lives.
00:33:56.900
I talk about sort of envy as one of them, you know, as Theodore Roosevelt said, sort of comparison being the thief of joy.
00:34:04.280
It's the thief of joy, but it's also the driver of a lot of accomplishments.
00:34:09.260
I talk about lust and sort of desire as one to kind of be wary of.
00:34:13.580
And then I think the final was, like, I think a lot of people don't have stillness because of, you know, just traumas or experiences that they've had in their life that they've kind of left untreated, right?
00:34:28.840
And so Tiger Woods, John F. Kennedy, both examples of people who sort of experienced profoundly screwed up childhoods from their overbearing fathers.
00:34:42.500
And then instead of processing that, it sort of ultimately led them both right off a cliff.
00:34:48.940
Well, let's talk about this idea of managing or bridling desires.
00:34:52.280
Because both the Eastern philosophies and the Stoics, they talk about desire, like desire for more, desire for either more money, status, sex.
00:35:03.720
So what did these guys say about what we can do to bridle those desires so we feel like we have enough, that we're content in life?
00:35:11.000
Well, I really became fascinated with Epicurus because Epicurus has this reputation of being this kind of, like, depraved hedonist, right?
00:35:19.300
But there's almost no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:35:23.100
In fact, like, one of the few letters that we have that survived from him of, like, asking for something, like, he had all these rich patrons.
00:35:30.760
He could have had access to, you know, women or alcohol or pleasures of any kind, right?
00:35:38.140
And in this letter, he's like, he's asking if this sort of rich, this patron's like, can I do anything for you?
00:35:43.620
And he's like, yes, you know, I'd really like a small pot of cheese.
00:35:47.540
You know, I think that would be wonderful, right?
00:35:49.240
Like, here you have a depraved hedonist and he's finding great pleasure in cheese, right?
00:35:55.240
And so Epicurus talks about, he goes like, look, really think about if you get the object of your desire, what are you actually going to feel?
00:36:05.780
Like, what is it actually going to change, right?
00:36:08.200
Because what we tend to think about, let's say it's talking to a married person and they see someone and it's like, oh, I would love to sleep with that person.
00:36:16.460
What they're thinking about is like that moment, right?
00:36:19.040
They're thinking about the sexual encounter, right?
00:36:23.440
But Epicurus is asking them to sort of flash forward to what you think about and how you feel right after, right?
00:36:33.540
And what happens if you can't stop yourself after, right?
00:36:38.220
Like, he's sort of going like, don't just think about the pleasure of the acquiring.
00:36:45.140
You know, think about what this is actually going to do and feel like sort of more comprehensively.
00:36:52.420
And it was a way of kind of checking those desires.
00:36:56.020
It's like we all have lusted over something, right?
00:37:16.760
We wanted to get into Harvard and we got into Harvard.
00:37:19.820
And I would urge you to try to remember what that actually felt like, which is, at least in my experience,
00:37:26.620
and I think this is borne out by the literature, is kind of a little disappointing, right?
00:37:30.800
It's like it wasn't the magical cure-all that you thought it would be.
00:37:40.920
You just were directing it to the next thing, right?
00:37:43.180
And so they really want us to stop and kind of think about this because it's what's going to hopefully help us have a little bit of power over that impulse to do it over and over and over and over again.
00:37:56.320
Another aspect of stilling the soul are relationships.
00:38:00.080
How do you think relationships can help still the soul?
00:38:03.100
I was trying to sort of punch back at this weird thing that's taken hold, I think, generationally, but it's pretty universal, I guess, with ambitious people,
00:38:14.960
which is somehow that relationships and success or relationships and achievements are mutually exclusive or that one kind of takes away from the other.
00:38:29.600
Churchill says that his greatest accomplishment was convincing Clementine Churchill to marry him.
00:38:36.860
And there's a fascinating biography of her that I read a few months ago.
00:38:41.960
But you just see that in really great, great people, it was almost always a team effort of some kind, right?
00:38:53.700
Like when I look at people that I thought I admired, and then I find out that they were terrible mothers or fathers,
00:39:01.120
or that they were sort of horrible spouses or horrible children, it just changes.
00:39:07.480
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you find out that he gave all these kids up for adoption.
00:39:12.700
And to me, it just throws the philosophy right out the window.
00:39:18.380
The idea that in Seeking Enlightenment, Buddha walked out on his wife and his young child.
00:39:24.080
It's like suddenly it doesn't feel so impressive anymore.
00:39:29.540
So, I mean, in your own experience, well, I mean, not in your experience.
00:39:32.360
Like some of the people you've come across, you mentioned Churchill finding relationships, bringing stillness to his soul.
00:39:39.300
Well, yeah, I think what you find is that often to be great, you're kind of out of balance, right?
00:39:45.880
Like you have an excess in one trait or another.
00:39:49.120
So in Churchill, it was ambition and energy, and it was a desire to win and all of that.
00:39:56.520
And someone like Clementine balanced that out, right?
00:40:01.800
I got to imagine, you know, it's the exact situation just flipped gender-wise with Angela Merkel and her husband.
00:40:09.520
So at least in my relationship, just having someone at home who understands you, who gets you in a way that maybe you being inside you doesn't get, is hugely beneficial.
00:40:26.120
But then also it's like, what are you doing all this for, right?
00:40:29.160
Like if you're doing it all and then you're just sitting home alone in your enormous mansion with no one to share it with or with a revolving door of people that, you know, work for you or want something from you.
00:40:46.360
I just pictured there will be blood when you mentioned the empty mansion, right?
00:40:56.020
And yeah, it's like, again, what are you doing this for, right?
00:41:07.260
So what role does the body play in a still life?
00:41:11.380
Well, you know, I was sort of making a play off sort of mind, body, soul.
00:41:15.260
But in the body, I'm referring to sort of anything, anything sort of physical, right?
00:41:20.760
The environment, actions, you know, movement, all of that sort of thing.
00:41:26.040
It's how do you get to stillness through what you're doing, right?
00:41:30.760
And so one of the ones I, again, I'm sort of a Churchill nerd, but I was just fascinated that Churchill wrote a book about painting, right?
00:41:39.500
Churchill painted 500 paintings in his lifetime.
00:41:42.240
And he said, you know, in the painting book, he talks about how the most important thing that a powerful public person can have is a handful of hobbies, right?
00:41:53.020
And so where, and I think the power of a hobby is that it gives you something else to pour your energy into.
00:42:00.140
It forces you to take time off from what you're doing and in so doing create some balance, but it also creates room for reflection.
00:42:07.500
So I'm talking to you today from my farm outside Austin, and it's like, people go, oh, isn't having that farm a lot of work?
00:42:15.300
And it's like, it is, but it gives me something to worry about that's not, how's my book selling right now, right?
00:42:21.260
Or, you know, where's that contract they said they were going to give me, right?
00:42:25.600
It gives me an opportunity to go outside and go fishing.
00:42:28.400
It gives me, you know, my son and I, we went for a bike ride this morning.
00:42:31.120
Like, it encourages better behaviors and sources of stillness for me, even though in some ways, and then I'm able to apply that to the work in a constructive way.
00:42:46.320
And so even though it takes me away from the work, it actually makes me better at it.
00:42:50.400
And generally, I think it makes me a happier person.
00:42:53.280
Yeah, I like how you started off talking about Churchill to start off your chapter or your section about body, because a lot of people don't know about this Churchill.
00:42:59.440
Yeah, he painted. He also, he like laid bricks. He enjoyed laying bricks.
00:43:03.680
This is like, you know, during the war, he'd go out to his country estate to build a wall. He enjoyed it.
00:43:08.920
He had his daily routine. You talk about his daily routine, very physically active.
00:43:12.660
He was standing, walking, taking baths, feeding ducks, but it allowed him at the same time to just be a prolific writer.
00:43:20.120
And then also save democracy, save the Western world during World War II.
00:43:24.500
Yeah, I say in the book, like, his paintings are not in museums because they're good paintings.
00:43:31.260
They're in museums because what the person who painted them was able to do through and because of his painting habit.
00:43:39.400
Like, after one of the Allied War conferences, you know, Churchill takes a five-hour car trip to go paint a sunset in Marrakesh.
00:43:47.160
And you can imagine him just desperately needing a few minutes or a few hours to not think about the horrible suffering and struggle and stress.
00:43:59.940
And then we imagine he returned, I think he returns and, you know, begins planning the D-Day invasion.
00:44:09.360
And I think this is sort of counterintuitive. People think in order to recharge and find stillness, you have to, like, not do anything.
00:44:18.180
For Churchill, that wasn't true. He even said that a change is, he said a change is as good as a rest.
00:44:24.400
I found that in my own life. I found that there's always, you have those moments where, like, I just don't want to do anything.
00:44:28.620
And then you do nothing and, like, you feel exhausted from doing nothing.
00:44:32.020
Yeah. No, I get more energy out of going for a run than I do watching two hours of Netflix, right?
00:44:38.820
Like, and I think it's because you feel like you've accomplished something versus, like, you know you just wasted two hours of your life you're not getting back.
00:44:49.780
Right. So you talk about different things you can do to find stillness of body.
00:44:56.440
So who are some famous walkers you've encountered in your research?
00:44:59.200
Again, the walkers are almost as universal as the journalers.
00:45:08.680
Kierkegaard is the main character that I talk about.
00:45:12.380
He would write until he kind of hit a point of diminishing returns, and then he'd just walk.
00:45:18.360
You know, I think we think people used to walk a lot more.
00:45:21.320
But it's like when Kierkegaard was walking around, sidewalks were a new invention.
00:45:26.640
Like, we didn't used to do that that much, right?
00:45:29.000
And in some senses we used to walk more, but in other senses we used to walk less.
00:45:36.640
You know, the Buddhists do talk about a walking meditation.
00:45:39.880
And as someone who has trouble sitting still myself, I tend to find that walks are where I get that from.
00:45:49.840
I tend to walk or I take my son for a bike ride in the morning just to get outside, you know, start the day.
00:45:55.880
But also, like, when I do phone calls, I almost always take them outside walking as well.
00:46:02.520
It's like I have this, you know, 30 minutes of dead time that I don't want to, you know, I'd probably rather not be doing if I had my, you know, a choice about it.
00:46:10.440
But I'm going to walk because it's a chance to be outside to get some sunlight, to put the body in motion, to sort of lull yourself into a place where your best thinking can happen.
00:46:20.700
And I find that I perform better on the phone calls because I'm walking.
00:46:24.200
I've noticed in my own life, like, moving my body, I get a lot of good thoughts doing that.
00:46:29.520
Well, I find when I take my son for a walk, he's only three.
00:46:35.640
Like, we're out in the country, so it's sort of an off-roady stroller.
00:46:38.880
But the point is, on the mornings, like, let's say it's raining or it's too cold that I don't take him on the walk.
00:46:44.320
Like, he's somehow crazier and more amped up throughout the day than he is when we have that walk.
00:46:51.760
And so it's not the physical part of it, right?
00:46:55.880
He's probably burning more calories running around inside than he is, you know, me pushing him around in the stroller.
00:47:04.720
You know, walking is just at the right pace that you're able to think, you know, your heart rate isn't really elevated too much.
00:47:13.900
I think it's just the rhythm of it that's really so valuable.
00:47:18.220
So another way we can find stillness of body through activity are hobbies.
00:47:22.380
A lot, like, Churchill said everyone should have, like, every statesman should have a hobby.
00:47:25.740
Besides Churchill, any other people you encountered that, you know, did great things but also made time for hobbies that people would think, well, that's just a waste of time?
00:47:33.860
I was fascinated by Churchill's predecessor, William Gladstone, who loved to just chop down trees.
00:47:41.340
He had this big estate and he would go out and anytime he saw a dead tree, he was like, I'm chopping that thing down.
00:47:47.260
And he chopped something like 3,000 trees down in his lifetime.
00:47:51.640
And so it's worth saying, it's not like he was clear-cutting forests.
00:47:56.840
But the point was, by hand, one of the most powerful people in the world was sharpening an axe and then chopping down a tree.
00:48:06.060
And he was sort of saying that, you know, as he would get into the rhythm of it, he would have some of his best thoughts.
00:48:15.120
And it was just a deeply meditative experience for him.
00:48:18.860
And when you look at the hobbies of successful people, it's almost always something surprising.
00:48:24.340
Like, you wouldn't think Mr. Rogers would have been a lifelong swimmer.
00:48:28.860
But he swam at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club every day, right?
00:48:32.960
And you just tend to find that successful people have hobbies, right?
00:48:43.800
Maybe if you're a professional athlete, you know, Chris Bosh famously taught himself how to program.
00:48:49.500
Like, he taught himself some programming languages one off-season.
00:48:53.060
You can imagine that's a deeply interesting thing for someone whose profession has them, you know, be really active all the time.
00:49:01.400
So, he's balancing out the physical with a mental activity.
00:49:05.240
Most of us today don't have physical professions.
00:49:08.580
And so, you know, exploring some sort of physical hobby is maybe the best way to do it.
00:49:13.840
And I think what's interesting about these guys is that their hobbies, they did it for just the love of the hobby itself.
00:49:18.500
I think there's this tendency in our culture today.
00:49:21.160
It's like, if you're going to have a hobby, you got to find a way to make it a side hustle and make money from it.
00:49:30.360
And then also, I think the other part is it's...
00:49:35.980
And so, I was watching your PR and I'm very impressed by it.
00:49:42.000
I like to tell people I'm training to not run a marathon.
00:49:45.820
I know I can run one because I've done the distance before.
00:49:48.260
But the point is, I'm not trying to win at my hobby.
00:49:51.720
Like, I feel like it's not healthy for me to have more competition in my life.
00:49:56.940
And so, it's more like the marathon is like, can I do it, right?
00:50:06.200
And so, I think it can be important depending on your personality.
00:50:12.360
But don't suck the fun out of your hobby by making it results-based.
00:50:18.400
I think that's what's so great about Churchill's paintings is that he wasn't very good at it, right?
00:50:23.300
Like, he loved it, but he certainly wasn't world-class.
00:50:29.360
With my hobby with weightlifting, it's like my main hobby I got.
00:50:32.200
When I first started, it was very, like, oriented on the results.
00:50:37.440
But I found, like, really, like, this year, 2019, I just don't really care.
00:50:48.940
But, like, before, if I didn't hit a PR, it would just, like, ruin my day.
00:50:55.460
And I think that's sort of a – that's what happens if you – as you mature in a hobby or an interest.
00:51:01.920
And that's where I'm trying to get in my writing career.
00:51:04.460
But it's also what I'm trying to say in the book generally, which is, like, it's not that you get to a place of stillness and suddenly you don't care about your job anymore, you know, that you don't do – it's, no, you want to be great at what you're doing.
00:51:18.580
And you want to improve, but you want to be coming to it from a place of fullness rather than a place of craving.
00:51:26.960
So, it's, like, the weightlifting, if it's, like, hey, I have to get this PR because if I'm not improving, I suck, you know, or I'm bad or someone else is better than me.
00:51:40.980
It's, like, I genuinely love doing this and I'm going to keep doing it.
00:51:44.080
And from the love and from the commitment, as it happens, the byproduct is often better results.
00:51:54.980
That's, like, the main message of the Bhagavad Gita, right?
00:51:57.260
It's, like, you just love the work for the work itself.
00:52:04.340
It's, like, the effort has to be enough because you don't control the results.
00:52:07.680
At least in weightlifting, you kind of do, or running, you kind of do, right?
00:52:11.620
But it's, like, I had to get to a place with writing where it's, like, you know, when this book came out, it debuted at number one.
00:52:20.380
It just as easily could have been, like, all my other books, which is that it sold well but was somehow snubbed by the times list, right?
00:52:28.360
And it's, like, if I had decided that success was this thing I didn't control, not only would I be upset, but I would have rendered this meaningful experience that I just went through as somehow less significant because somebody else decided that that's what it was.
00:52:49.040
Did you enjoy writing this book the most compared to the other two?
00:52:52.100
I really did, but I don't think it was an accident.
00:52:55.760
I mean, I've really had to remind myself – this was the first time on a book that I really forced myself to slow down.
00:53:04.460
And I also sort of actively thought throughout the process, it was, like, okay, like, consider the book done today, right?
00:53:15.260
I don't know whether I'm going to get to come back to it tomorrow because you don't know, right?
00:53:20.900
I wanted to – so am I actually enjoying and feeling gratitude and feeling sort of purpose in the day-to-dayness of it?
00:53:30.280
Not in the, I'm working hard every day for the next two years so that when this comes out, I will be rewarded, right?
00:53:39.700
To me, that's a very fragile, vulnerable strategy.
00:53:43.200
It's a much more resilient strategy to be like, I am getting benefits out of this every day for two years.
00:53:49.860
And then it comes out, and if you get the results, that's extra.
00:53:54.720
But if you don't, you already got your money back, you know?
00:54:01.240
Well, Ryan, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:54:03.660
So you can go to ryanholiday.net everywhere, at ryanholiday on pretty much every social.
00:54:09.840
And then we should probably tell people about Daily Dad as well if you want a sort of father-inspired meditation on philosophy and self-improvement.
00:54:20.000
Yeah, that's the new newsletter you've got coming out.
00:54:31.240
He's the author of the book, Stillness is the Key.
00:54:34.740
Check out his website, ryanholiday.net, where you can find out more information about his work.
00:54:38.620
Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash stillness, where you can find links to resources.
00:54:51.820
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:54:54.580
Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years about physical fitness, personal finances, how to be a better husband, better father.
00:55:03.100
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00:55:06.820
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00:55:12.000
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00:55:17.780
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00:55:24.000
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00:55:27.860
As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:55:29.600
Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.