The Art of Manliness - #565： Stillness Is the Key

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.940 According to my guest today, many of the world's most eminent leaders, thinkers, athletes,

00:00:14.660 and artists have one thing in common, cultivate stillness in their lives.

00:00:18.240 His name is Ryan Holiday, and in his latest book, Stillness is the Key, he highlights

00:00:21.880 how great individuals have used stillness to do great things.

00:00:24.800 We begin our discussion with how Ryan describes stillness, what it means to find stillness

00:00:28.340 in mind, body, and soul, and how an individual can have stillness in one of these areas,

00:00:32.200 but chaos in another.

00:00:33.540 Ryan shares what we can learn about stillness of mind from JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile

00:00:37.440 Crisis, and how journaling and limiting media inputs can help us foster our own mental stillness.

00:00:42.300 We then discuss the myth that relationships hold you back, and how they can in fact help

00:00:45.780 you find both greater achievement and stillness of soul.

00:00:48.060 We also discuss what we can learn from Winston Churchill on how to find physical stillness,

00:00:51.840 and why having hobbies is so important to finding balance in life.

00:00:54.760 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash stillness.

00:00:58.620 Ryan joins you now via clearcast.io.

00:01:10.800 All right, Ryan Holiday, welcome back to the show.

00:01:14.100 Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:01:15.360 So you got a new book out, Stillness is the Key, and it's part of this trilogy you've been

00:01:19.680 doing about stoicism.

00:01:21.420 Ego is the enemy, the obstacle is the way.

00:01:23.380 How is this book a continuation or sort of a capstone of that thinking you've been doing

00:01:29.000 over the years with this idea of stoicism?

00:01:31.760 What I've been trying to do with the books is take sort of an idea from ancient philosophy

00:01:37.420 and then illustrate it through stories.

00:01:40.560 So the obstacle is the way was this quote from Marcus Aurelius about how we can turn what

00:01:45.980 stands in the way into the way.

00:01:48.120 Ego is the enemy is about this idea of sort of intellectual humility, batting away,

00:01:53.360 pride, you know, you can't learn that which you already know, which is a line from Epictetus.

00:01:58.240 This one started out a little bit more Eastern, you know, the idea of sort of stillness, of

00:02:04.200 clearing the mind, of slowing down.

00:02:06.040 And then as I was researching it, it sort of came flooding back to me how much the stoics

00:02:13.500 had talked about the same thing.

00:02:15.820 And it's interesting, you know, I've obviously read all these texts all these different times,

00:02:20.000 but I just totally missed that's what they were talking about, which is this interesting

00:02:24.880 thing.

00:02:25.640 And it's sort of a kick I'm on recently, this idea of rereading books.

00:02:29.800 Depending on where you are in your life and what you're going through, it's like you interpret

00:02:34.380 texts a certain way.

00:02:36.540 And I, you know, it's, I just didn't even notice that over and over again, Marcus is

00:02:39.920 like even using the word stillness and talking about, you know, things in a very almost Zen

00:02:46.640 sense.

00:02:47.840 And so the book was sort of just zooming in on that idea of how do we get to a place

00:02:52.800 of sort of inner peace, external peace, not so we can withdraw from the world, but so

00:02:57.860 that we can be better when we are active in the world.

00:03:00.780 Well, I'm going to go back to this idea of you missed it the first time around.

00:03:04.920 Like, what do you think was going on in your life that caused you to miss it?

00:03:08.500 Like, what were you focused on, say, eight years ago when you're reading these texts where

00:03:12.960 you're like, yeah, that just totally was under the radar?

00:03:15.760 Well, I think being much younger, stillness was not the problem that I had.

00:03:21.960 It was like, it's sort of like, I think what I was reacting to was like, oh, this is how

00:03:26.900 you overcome obstacles, oh, this is how you, you know, you sort of get your ego under control.

00:03:31.460 I was, I was responding to what I needed at that point in my life.

00:03:35.480 And then as I got a little older, and I'm sure you relate to this, it's like, oh, you

00:03:39.580 realize like this pace that you're on, this intensity is, although it's been an advantage,

00:03:44.660 is not really sustainable.

00:03:46.860 And, and so you have to think about it a different way.

00:03:49.880 And there's actually been some interesting studies.

00:03:51.540 And they, they did this one where they sort of scraped all this data about like what young

00:03:56.180 people versus old people were like writing in blog posts and on social media.

00:04:01.580 And what they found is that younger people tended to associate happiness with achievement

00:04:06.240 and older people tended to associate happiness with contentment.

00:04:10.960 And I think that's just a natural evolution that we're on.

00:04:15.120 And so, you know, early on, I was looking to the Stoics for what they could help me achieve,

00:04:19.040 what they could help me do, what sort of stresses they could help me manage.

00:04:23.300 And then as I've gotten older, and I've been, you know, sort of fortunate and privileged in

00:04:26.540 my career, then all of a sudden, you have a different set of problems, which is what you

00:04:31.840 can't solve with this, the skill set that the first set of problems were solved with.

00:04:37.720 And ironically, this all ties into a theme that that shows up in meditations a lot, which

00:04:43.120 Marcus Aurelius gets from Heraclitus, he says, no man steps in the same river twice.

00:04:48.440 And what he means is that everything is constantly changing, including you and the river.

00:04:54.080 And so as I've gone back and reread a bunch of books, not just the Stoics, but a bunch

00:04:58.720 of my favorite novels, I've found that I'm interacting with the material in a different

00:05:04.140 way, even though like literally it's unchanged, the environment and myself have evolved.

00:05:11.280 And so all of a sudden, you're getting something different from the same words printed in the

00:05:16.920 same order.

00:05:17.420 Right.

00:05:17.960 It's a good case for revisiting, rereading books multiple times.

00:05:21.900 Have you, did you, did you have Ben Sass on?

00:05:24.840 Ben Sass.

00:05:25.980 No, I have not.

00:05:26.900 No, Sass, the senator.

00:05:27.380 Sass, no, yeah, no, Ben Sass, have not.

00:05:29.520 So he has this concept of like a five foot bookshelf.

00:05:32.900 He says like, and this almost sounds like an art of manliness post, but he says, you know,

00:05:36.280 every family should have like a five by five bookshelf that is filled with like your family's

00:05:42.360 texts, like the books that you need to read and study to like be a good person.

00:05:47.420 And I think this ties into something Seneca talks about, which is like, it's not about

00:05:51.480 how many books you read in your life, but it's about, you know, reading the same books

00:05:57.480 over and over again and studying them very deeply.

00:05:59.780 And so again, I think early in my life, it was like, oh, I've got to read this.

00:06:03.920 I've never heard of this.

00:06:04.820 I don't know anything about that.

00:06:06.440 And so it's about doing, doing, doing, acquiring, acquiring, acquiring.

00:06:10.460 And that at a certain point you go, I don't know if I, if more is the answer, maybe it's

00:06:15.380 better is the answer.

00:06:16.920 And so you, you go back and you look at these things and you, you discover them in a new

00:06:20.740 way.

00:06:21.500 Well, yeah.

00:06:21.760 Talking about studies of shifting priorities between younger people and older people,

00:06:25.820 they say the same thing goes with friends.

00:06:28.280 So like when you're young, the priority is like getting lots of friends.

00:06:32.180 And as you get older, the priority shifts to just like winnowing down to like the friends

00:06:36.240 who are like the ones who like give you the most fulfillment.

00:06:39.100 Oh, sure.

00:06:39.640 Yeah.

00:06:39.920 No, that's, that's beautiful.

00:06:41.040 It's a, and that's, it's so funny philosophically and all these cliches end up being proven,

00:06:46.680 you know, which is like less is more.

00:06:48.540 Right.

00:06:48.980 So let's talk about what stillness means.

00:06:51.180 I think when people, like you said, when you first started writing the book, it was sort of

00:06:54.340 taking on this Eastern flair.

00:06:55.740 You're going and looking at Buddhism, Eastern philosophies.

00:06:59.220 And I think people have this idea of stillness being, you know, just means sitting on a pillow,

00:07:05.080 meditating under a tree like the Buddha.

00:07:08.500 But you highlight in the book, that's not necessarily the case.

00:07:11.220 Stillness can be active in a weird way.

00:07:13.900 Yeah.

00:07:14.180 I think we've, we've done ourselves a disservice by making the word stillness synonymous with

00:07:19.360 meditation.

00:07:19.920 And, you know, there are many people who are, who are sitting and meditating are probably

00:07:24.480 the least still people you could possibly imagine.

00:07:26.980 Right.

00:07:27.440 And so what I wanted to do in the book was, was sort of expand the definition and look

00:07:32.040 at it from an Eastern and Western sense, a Christian sense.

00:07:35.540 You know, when, when they talk about when, when Jesus says, peace, be still, and know that

00:07:39.560 I'm God, he is not saying sit and meditate, you know, like, so these are, these are different

00:07:46.040 understandings of the same idea from all these different schools.

00:07:50.040 But at the core of it, I think they are talking about slowing down.

00:07:55.880 They're talking about equanimity.

00:07:57.880 They're talking about having an even keel.

00:08:00.080 They're talking about not being jerked around by interior, exterior forces.

00:08:05.200 So it's interesting, like there's, there's kind of not two more different schools than

00:08:08.780 the Stoics and the Epicureans, right?

00:08:10.540 We, we almost take it that they are diametrically opposed, but the Stoic word for stillness is

00:08:15.780 apatheia and the Epicurean word is ataraxia.

00:08:19.420 And they both have like the same definition, which is like some form of tranquility, not

00:08:24.760 being jerked around by interior or exterior passions.

00:08:28.980 So that's the kind of stillness I'm talking about.

00:08:31.700 And, and meditation is one way to get there.

00:08:33.940 Although I very deliberately do not talk about it at all in the book, you know, you can get

00:08:38.840 to stillness paradoxically on a long walk.

00:08:41.580 You can get it sitting with a journal.

00:08:44.300 You can get it reading a book of poetry.

00:08:46.700 You could also get it, you know, sitting on a, on a porch watching the snowfall, right?

00:08:51.200 Like there's lots of different ways to get to the stillness.

00:08:54.520 And it's when you hear reports from like professional athletes or, or, or people have been in really

00:09:00.340 high pressure situations where they managed to do something incredible.

00:09:04.380 When you, when you sort of parse their descriptions of how they were feeling, what you hear over

00:09:12.160 and over again is some version of that idea of, you know, I wasn't thinking about anything.

00:09:17.580 My mind was empty.

00:09:18.960 I slowed it down.

00:09:20.320 I, I, I was perfectly still, you know, even as they were, you know, throwing a, you know,

00:09:26.360 a touchdown pass or, or, you know, playing a chess match or whatever it is.

00:09:31.000 So I think there's an inherent benefit of stillness, like stillness for its own sake

00:09:34.680 that you can strive for there.

00:09:36.180 But I think let's look at like the people who are still like in that mindset.

00:09:39.100 We're like, I have to do this for a reason.

00:09:41.040 Yeah.

00:09:41.260 Right.

00:09:41.520 You know, so like, what would you say to those people?

00:09:43.540 Like, what are the benefits that come from fostering stillness in your life?

00:09:48.100 Well, what we're doing, whatever, whatever it is, but anything at the sort of professional

00:09:52.740 or elite level is really hard.

00:09:55.040 Right.

00:09:55.400 So like, like one of the examples I talk about in the book is, is, is professional baseball.

00:09:59.400 And, and you, you, you see these pitchers and these batters facing off and the, the hitting

00:10:06.240 of baseball is like the single hardest act in professional sports.

00:10:10.920 You have something like 400 milliseconds to identify and begin the swinging process for

00:10:17.520 a pitch.

00:10:17.980 Right.

00:10:18.640 So if, if you are not still, if your mind is going a million miles a minute, if you're

00:10:24.160 thinking about, you know, an argument you had with the coach, you know, 20 minutes ago,

00:10:28.820 if you're thinking about your contract negotiations that are going to happen at the end of the

00:10:33.320 season, you know, if you are thinking in advance of the home run, you're going to hit, you're

00:10:38.660 going to be in trouble, right?

00:10:39.660 Cause that 400 milliseconds requires a hundred percent of your energy.

00:10:45.220 Yogi Berra said, you know, it's impossible to hit and think at the same time.

00:10:49.100 And so I think one of the arguments for stillness is that like, it's a resource allocation issue.

00:10:54.780 Like when I look at the best things that I've done professionally, I wasn't doing eight things

00:11:00.060 at the same time.

00:11:01.080 My mind wasn't wandering as I did it.

00:11:03.300 I was like locked in.

00:11:05.580 And so I think one argument aside from just the, you know, you'll feel better as a human

00:11:09.700 being is like, this is how you get to access a hundred percent of your resources.

00:11:16.780 I like it.

00:11:17.640 So you highlight that there are three areas of life, three domains of life we can find

00:11:22.820 stillness in mind, spirit, body.

00:11:24.840 And we'll talk about different ways we can access stillness in those three domains, but

00:11:28.300 I'm curious, is it possible to be still in one of these areas, but not the other?

00:11:33.340 And if so, like, what are some examples of that?

00:11:35.440 Well, that's, that's actually sort of my argument in the book, which is that like, we, we are often

00:11:40.360 out of balance.

00:11:41.380 So I, you know, one of the characters I was fascinated with that I wrote a lot about is, is

00:11:46.060 someone like Tiger Woods.

00:11:47.180 So here you have a guy who physically, you know, is complete master of himself, uh, mentally,

00:11:52.560 you know, golf is such a mental game, complete master of himself.

00:11:56.960 And yet, you know, it's hard to argue that sort of spiritually, emotionally at the soul

00:12:02.500 level that for a long time, you know, he wasn't, you know, sort of tearing himself to pieces.

00:12:08.600 Right.

00:12:09.040 And, and eventually that part of himself that he kept compartmentalized, but was dealing with

00:12:15.420 all sorts of wounds and urges and passions and, you know, temptations, it eventually

00:12:21.920 overwhelmed and, and destroyed, you know, his, his, his considerable mastery of the other

00:12:28.460 two.

00:12:28.860 And it took, you know, 10, basically 10 years for him to claw his way back with a lot of

00:12:35.140 sort of fits and starts along the way.

00:12:37.460 And so, you know, I talk about someone like Tiger Woods, not from a position of judgment,

00:12:41.080 but to, to talk about how out of balance we can get.

00:12:44.240 I mean, it's, it's not a coincidence.

00:12:46.620 A lot of these sort of gurus of the Eastern world turn out to sort of be like depraved 0.99

00:12:53.580 monsters, right?

00:12:54.720 It's like they have this sort of mental stillness and physical stillness that can sit for hours

00:12:59.800 on end.

00:13:00.420 And then it's like, when they get up, they are, you know, doing some, some me too stuff.

00:13:04.540 Right.

00:13:05.280 And my point is like, this, this has to be integrated.

00:13:10.100 You, you can't, you can't be, uh, you know, a saint in one part of your life and, and a

00:13:16.460 monster in the other and expect that to be sustainable.

00:13:19.920 All right.

00:13:20.360 So you have to focus on all three at the same time.

00:13:22.760 Yeah.

00:13:23.000 Well, it's like, you're tackling it from all these different elements because it's like,

00:13:26.280 okay, let's say you do get to a place where mentally you can kind of tune things out.

00:13:30.400 You've, you've built a really great environment that encourages stillness.

00:13:33.180 But then in your heart, you know, all you feel are jealousy and rage and, and, uh, you

00:13:39.060 know, insecurity, that's not gonna, that's not gonna be sustainable.

00:13:43.140 Or, you know, you could be someone who is, who is, you know, pure hearted, but, you know,

00:13:50.080 you've developed this hoarding habit and you walk into your house and it's just chaos and

00:13:54.060 dysfunction. 0.99

00:13:54.740 And, you know, you're about to be swallowed by piles of your own garbage. 0.98

00:13:58.120 Like that's going to cause a lot of anxiety and worry. 0.99

00:14:00.980 Right.

00:14:01.280 And so it's, it's, how do we, how do we tackle this from, from all parts of it, whether it's

00:14:06.140 the sort of habits that we practice in the course of a day, you know, the, the, the discipline

00:14:10.980 we have over our mind.

00:14:12.400 And then also just like the, the sort of standards and principles that we operate by, I think

00:14:17.000 you're kind of triangulating your way towards, towards some semblance of stillness.

00:14:22.840 That, that's, that's at least the way I think about it.

00:14:25.560 Well, so let's dig into these three domains.

00:14:27.220 So the first section that you talk about is the mind, stillness of mind, and you start

00:14:31.100 off talking about JFK, John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of

00:14:36.840 finding stillness in mind.

00:14:38.380 So walk us through that and how you think JFK purposely looked for stillness to solve this

00:14:43.500 problem.

00:14:44.560 Yeah.

00:14:44.860 We were talking earlier about sort of active stillness or what does stillness look like

00:14:48.320 in the real world?

00:14:49.000 How do you make a self-interested case?

00:14:50.420 I think it's hard to, to, to find a better example of stillness in the real world that

00:14:57.160 had more of an impact than, you know, John F. Kennedy waking up in, in 1962 and finding

00:15:02.780 out, Hey, the entire balance of nuclear power in the world has shifted overnight.

00:15:08.120 And I am sitting on a powder keg of a situation that if I'm not careful, literally hundreds of

00:15:14.680 millions of people will die.

00:15:15.920 And he manages over the, you know, subsequent 13 days to deescalate, to avoid rushing to

00:15:23.720 judgment, to avoid, you know, taking the wrong steps or, or making, making irrevocable

00:15:29.640 mistakes.

00:15:30.480 He gets Khrushchev to back down, you know, he, he, he saves humanity from a nuclear Holocaust. 0.94

00:15:37.040 And he, and he does this by, you know, not just from the sort of Zen perspective of thinking

00:15:43.560 of nothing, but in fact, by really slowing down and thinking quite deeply about the situation,

00:15:48.780 about what was at stake about, you know, he says at one point, like, I'm not interested

00:15:53.760 in the second step of this sort of exchange.

00:15:56.320 He's like, what about the third step and the fifth step and the seventh step and the ninth

00:15:59.580 step?

00:15:59.880 And he's like, you generals who are, you know, telling me that we've got to, you know, bomb 0.99

00:16:04.800 Cuba to hell and back. 0.90

00:16:06.440 And then we may have to invade the USSR for, for setting this all in motion. 0.94

00:16:10.860 And he's like, I'm worried that you're so wrong that no one will be around to tell you

00:16:16.820 I told you so when we find out.

00:16:18.780 Right.

00:16:19.080 And one, one of Kennedy's expressions, he says, you know, you want to use time as a tool,

00:16:24.200 not as a couch.

00:16:25.500 And I think even that the missile crisis, you know, transpires over 13 days is impressive,

00:16:32.400 right?

00:16:32.580 Like, I'm not sure, I'm not sure every president who's held office before or since would have,

00:16:39.740 would have taken, had the fortitude and the clarity to allow for that kind of time.

00:16:47.400 And really what Kennedy was doing was allowing Khrushchev to come to his senses, right?

00:16:51.580 It was like five or six days in and Khrushchev's like, oh man, this was a huge mistake, right?

00:16:56.460 But Kennedy realizing that this is going to happen has given him room to back down and

00:17:01.540 then ultimately were able to come to a peaceful conclusion.

00:17:05.160 And I mean, he learned from a prior mistake with the Bay of Pig invasion, which failed.

00:17:09.760 Exactly.

00:17:09.880 And he had that idea, there's like, you got to act, act, act, act, and it just ended up

00:17:12.780 a disaster.

00:17:13.580 And he used that as a learning experience.

00:17:15.280 And I'm going to slow things down this time.

00:17:17.700 Yeah.

00:17:17.920 I think it's almost inconceivable that the same president oversaw Bay of Pigs and the

00:17:23.900 Cuban Missile Crisis because they were so transformatively different and such transformatively

00:17:28.680 different examples of what leadership is supposed to look like.

00:17:31.620 He was kind of bullied into one, and then he had the strength and the confidence and the

00:17:36.040 clarity to, you know, do the right thing in the second one.

00:17:41.140 And it's just filled with all sorts of, you know, sort of genius little insights, right?

00:17:44.960 Like he, you know, everyone was like, you got to bomb Cuba. 0.99

00:17:47.580 And he's like, well, what's Russia going to do if we bomb Cuba?

00:17:50.740 And they were like, well, we haven't thought that far, you know?

00:17:53.120 He's like, well, if I was president of Russia and someone bombed a place we had missiles,

00:17:58.240 I would be forced to attack.

00:17:59.860 He's like, what do you think Khrushchev's advisors are telling him to do right now, right?

00:18:03.840 Like this sort of practice of empathy was, I think, really important.

00:18:07.500 But one of my favorites is when he decides to put a blockade around Cuba, he's like, look,

00:18:12.680 we're not going to bomb them, but we're not going to let this continue.

00:18:14.700 He's like, we're going to put, you know, our Navy around Cuba and prevent anything from

00:18:19.260 coming or going.

00:18:20.760 You know, he realizes that even blockade sounds a little aggressive.

00:18:25.360 And so he calls it a quarantine.

00:18:27.280 It's the same exact thing.

00:18:29.240 But even the language, down to the language he's using to describe what he's doing, he is

00:18:35.840 thinking about how this is going to be received.

00:18:38.780 So to me, this is just like the peak performance of leadership and presidential power.

00:18:45.300 And hopefully we never have to see anything like it again.

00:18:47.640 But he was just sort of firing on all cylinders there.

00:18:50.880 And he did some like meditative practices unknowingly.

00:18:53.740 Like he would just walk to the Rose Garden.

00:18:55.840 Yeah, he would swim.

00:18:56.720 Yeah, he sends a note to the gardener at the White House, you know, thanking her for her

00:19:01.280 important contributions to saving humanity.

00:19:03.660 What I think is really interesting, and you can Google and see these, like Kennedy's notes

00:19:08.360 from the missile crisis survived.

00:19:10.560 Like he was doodling on these legal pads and he was writing kind of mantras to himself.

00:19:15.620 You know, but like you can see a picture of a sailboat that he drew on the White House

00:19:19.940 stationary, you know, as he's having to think about this terrible, you know, weight on his

00:19:25.960 shoulders.

00:19:26.360 And yet he's finding the ability to sort of zoom out and get some perspective.

00:19:31.000 And I think mostly just calm himself down.

00:19:34.020 But both the Stoics and the Buddhists use the metaphor of the mind as muddy water, and

00:19:40.840 that you have to let the dirt and the silt settle down before the water becomes transparent

00:19:46.540 and before you can see through it.

00:19:48.240 And I think that's, you know, that's what Kennedy was doing.

00:19:51.700 But Kennedy's one of those examples too, where he had, you know, incredible stillness of

00:19:54.740 mind, but not so still in other areas of his life, particularly like the sole part of his

00:19:58.520 life.

00:19:58.760 Yeah, that's what I mean about this compartmentalization.

00:20:01.460 It's like, okay, so in those 13 days, if you only look at it from a policy perspective

00:20:06.060 or a geopolitical standpoint, he's flawless.

00:20:09.560 But then you zoom in at the personal and it's like, there's a scene where Kennedy has one

00:20:14.900 of his aides, you know, drive in a beautiful co-ed from a college near DC, and they have an

00:20:22.640 affair in a hotel room.

00:20:23.820 And so it's like, he didn't know how the missile crisis was going to end up, right?

00:20:28.180 He couldn't have.

00:20:29.320 But somehow he decided that a good use of those, you know, last few days on earth would be better

00:20:36.860 spent, you know, hooking up with a stranger than spending it with his wife and children.

00:20:43.560 And so to me, that doesn't strike me as a particularly enlightened decision.

00:20:48.420 And it doesn't sound like someone who's in control of themselves, right?

00:20:51.520 And when you look at Kennedy's sort of twisted relationship with his father, some of it starts

00:20:56.100 to make a little bit of sense.

00:20:58.200 So one of the tactics you suggest for getting stillness of mind is limiting inputs.

00:21:02.840 What did that look like in some of the lives of the famous folks that you came across and

00:21:06.700 talked about in the book?

00:21:07.760 I've always loved this story that Emerson tells about Napoleon, which is that Napoleon would

00:21:14.100 delay the opening of his mail.

00:21:17.000 And he would instruct his secretary to wait sometimes as much as three weeks before he

00:21:22.000 checked his mail, knowing that by the time most of these letters were open, they would

00:21:27.080 have been rendered irrelevant by subsequent events.

00:21:29.780 And he said, look, if there's something important, you know, do not delay.

00:21:33.480 But if it's not important, if it's not urgent, if it's good news, like he's like, don't bother

00:21:37.340 me with it.

00:21:37.800 I got, you know, important things to do.

00:21:40.020 And the amount of people that I see today who it's like, they wake up in the morning

00:21:46.180 and instead of doing whatever they know they need to be working on, and I know you've written

00:21:51.640 about this a lot with this sort of Eisenhower matrix, they wake up and the direction of their

00:21:59.100 day is determined by, you know, what people have tweeted, you know, in the few hours that

00:22:05.220 they were asleep, or, you know, what unsolicited emails came in, or, you know, whatever is running

00:22:12.600 on CNN that morning.

00:22:14.860 And so I think we have to limit our inputs because naturally we're reactive, right?

00:22:21.940 And we live in a time where there's way more information to react to than is remotely necessary

00:22:29.040 or important.

00:22:30.260 And so we have to really zoom in on what we're going to care about, what we're going to monitor,

00:22:35.220 so that we can, we can not just be still, but so we can, we can excel at the few things

00:22:42.400 that we're, you know, put on this planet to excel in.

00:22:45.240 So for me, that's like, I don't watch a lot of news.

00:22:48.040 I don't check my phone in the morning.

00:22:49.740 I have no alerts on my phone.

00:22:51.920 You know, I don't schedule things, you know, usually before, before noon, because I want

00:22:57.220 to be, I want to do the important things before I've been interrupted by, by the various

00:23:02.940 inputs that are coming my way.

00:23:04.400 But what do you say to folks who think, who would say like, well, you know, things are

00:23:08.100 going fast, changing fast.

00:23:09.700 In order to stay ahead of the competition, you have to be on top of all this stuff that's

00:23:13.500 coming in at you.

00:23:14.460 Sure.

00:23:15.080 What would you say to those guys?

00:23:16.220 I mean, I look at the facts, right?

00:23:17.840 The most successful living investor is Warren Buffett, who invests from a value standpoint

00:23:24.360 and thinks in terms of decades, right?

00:23:26.780 The best books, you know, the best music.

00:23:30.400 These are not popular because they are cashing in on a trend of the moment.

00:23:35.440 They're working because they connect to something timeless, right?

00:23:39.160 Most of the things that are going on politically right now, if you have any sense of history,

00:23:45.780 you probably have a better grasp on than the person who is refreshing their Twitter feed

00:23:50.880 in real time.

00:23:51.580 So, I'm not saying that you want to be uninformed.

00:23:56.500 I'm saying that, you know, following breaking news or up-to-the-minute information is oftentimes

00:24:04.600 the worst way to be informed.

00:24:06.620 Not only is it incredibly inefficient, but it's often very misleading and gives you a false

00:24:11.260 picture of the world.

00:24:12.100 It's like, if you pick up, I don't know, Thucydides' History of the Palpatian War, and you're reading

00:24:18.280 about this sort of jockeying between, you know, two powers, right?

00:24:22.360 I think this will give you more timeless insight about China and America than, you know, following

00:24:30.840 this sort of petty squabble about, you know, the NBA and the Rockets' GM who tweeted about

00:24:37.820 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

00:24:53.280 the next breaking report?

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

00:25:00.020 choosing ignorance.

00:25:01.620 What we're trying to choose is more sort of sustainable, reliable, universal information

00:25:07.020 instead.

00:25:07.460 Right, and books.

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.

00:25:42.060 You're getting all of that.

00:25:44.520 And because you're paying for it, the author is much more obligated to deliver you high-quality

00:25:51.560 information.

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

00:26:16.920 or the desktop.

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.

00:26:47.160 It's his journal.

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?

00:26:54.940 How can I get better at this?

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

00:27:23.280 an insight now into the human experience.

00:27:25.320 But she has a great line.

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

00:27:52.760 of the edge off of that on the paper.

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

00:28:09.140 your prefrontal cortex, right?

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

00:28:18.880 mind.

00:28:19.420 And so you feel better, right?

00:28:20.840 So you're able to do something with your emotions and it just goes through that prefrontal

00:28:24.420 cortex and you feel better afterwards.

00:28:26.360 Yeah.

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,

00:28:43.340 right?

00:28:43.560 And they're bumping up into each other.

00:28:45.500 But when you write it down, now you have some distance, right?

00:28:48.420 You're like, I'm so angry that they did X.

00:28:50.360 Why do they keep doing X to me?

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

00:28:59.540 at it and look at it.

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?

00:29:08.700 Well, I do it every morning.

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.

00:29:15.000 But I would just, I would start small.

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?

00:29:28.240 It's really cool.

00:29:29.020 I've done it for about three and a half years.

00:29:30.600 So I have three years of looking at it.

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.

00:29:48.180 I think that's a hard place to start.

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.

00:30:03.140 Yeah, I like that idea of starting small.

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.

00:30:11.100 And you're just like, you stop.

00:30:12.740 So I start small.

00:30:13.540 Yeah, you're like, what should I say today?

00:30:14.740 And it's like, well, they're telling you.

00:30:17.040 Right.

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.

00:30:31.500 It just seems insane to me.

00:30:33.100 Yeah, I don't get it.

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.

00:31:04.680 And he just thinks.

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.

00:31:52.620 All right.

00:31:52.740 So we got to get out in nature, disconnect.

00:31:54.880 That's an easy way to do that.

00:31:56.420 Yeah.

00:31:56.540 One thing that I really enjoyed is I went to a monastery for a weekend.

00:32:01.160 Oh, really?

00:32:01.720 Really nice.

00:32:02.340 Yeah.

00:32:02.460 There's a monastery, Clear Creek Abbey.

00:32:04.780 It is a Benedictine monastery.

00:32:06.520 It's like an hour out of Tulsa.

00:32:08.340 It was awesome.

00:32:08.760 It's like there's no Wi-Fi, there's no cellular coverage, and it's just completely silent there.

00:32:13.580 And it was wonderful.

00:32:15.100 Yeah.

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?

00:32:54.340 Is it constructive or deconstructive?

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?

00:33:06.140 Sometimes that feeling is anger.

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.

00:33:28.960 It often gets them in trouble.

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.

00:35:01.080 That was sort of the big driver of suffering.

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?

00:36:21.060 And the sort of pleasure of that.

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?

00:36:30.420 Or what happens if you get caught, 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?

00:36:59.720 Let's say it's a career accomplishment.

00:37:01.400 We're like, I want to be X, right? 0.97

00:37:04.160 I want to win a Super Bowl.

00:37:05.340 I want to be a best-selling author.

00:37:06.680 I want to be a millionaire.

00:37:07.940 I want to have a big, fancy house, right?

00:37:10.300 Or I want to be the CEO of this company.

00:37:13.120 And then we've gotten it, right?

00:37:14.580 Or we've gotten some...

00:37:15.680 We had something.

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.

00:37:35.160 It didn't transform really anything.

00:37:37.860 You still felt the same desires and urges.

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.

00:38:26.180 I tend not to find that's true.

00:38:27.780 You and I have talked about Churchill before.

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?

00:38:51.340 And then I found the opposite, 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.

00:39:16.580 Or even Buddha, right?

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.

00:39:27.940 You know what I mean?

00:39:29.020 Right.

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.

00:39:37.780 Any other people you highlight in the book?

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?

00:40:00.200 So they became a really great team.

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.

00:40:23.240 It calms you down.

00:40:24.600 It gives you perspective.

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.

00:40:44.280 I don't know.

00:40:44.660 That seems very empty to me.

00:40:46.360 I just pictured there will be blood when you mentioned the empty mansion, right?

00:40:51.820 That's him.

00:40:52.540 Totally.

00:40:53.200 Yes, yes, yes.

00:40:54.200 Daniel Plainview.

00:40:55.520 Yeah.

00:40:56.020 And yeah, it's like, again, what are you doing this for, right?

00:41:01.400 Who are you sharing it with ultimately?

00:41:04.120 So let's move on to the body.

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.

00:43:19.780 Yes.

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.

00:44:05.780 So it's not escapism, it's the opposite.

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.

00:44:23.580 I love that.

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.

00:44:53.540 One is taking walks regularly.

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.

00:45:05.760 But, you know, Hemingway was a big walker.

00:45:08.680 Kierkegaard is the main character that I talk about.

00:45:10.880 Every day he would go for a walk.

00:45:12.380 He would write until he kind of hit a point of diminishing returns, and then he'd just walk.

00:45:17.200 And it's weird.

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.

00:45:33.220 And so it's just about going outside.

00:45:35.140 It's putting the body in movement.

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.

00:45:47.900 I actually do kind of two kinds of walks.

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.

00:45:55.340 And it's wonderful.

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.

00:46:32.960 So he doesn't walk.

00:46:33.820 He sits in a stroller, right?

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?

00:46:54.000 Because he's burning the same...

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.

00:47:02.040 But I think it's just the being outside.

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.

00:47:21.560 You mentioned that earlier.

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.

00:47:40.500 That was his hobby.

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.

00:47:55.180 Like, he was helping.

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.

00:48:12.580 You know, his emotions would calm down.

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?

00:48:36.720 And the hobbies are not...

00:48:38.660 Ideally, they're not stamp collecting, right?

00:48:41.240 If you're already working a desk job, 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.

00:49:26.180 But these guys didn't.

00:49:27.120 They didn't care about that.

00:49:28.980 Yeah, it's a side hustle.

00:49:30.360 And then also, I think the other part is it's...

00:49:34.320 And I know you're into weightlifting.

00:49:35.980 And so, I was watching your PR and I'm very impressed by it.

00:49:39.200 But as a runner, what I'm actually like...

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?

00:50:01.840 Can I do it on a regular basis?

00:50:03.540 Not, can I win at exercise?

00:50:06.200 And so, I think it can be important depending on your personality.

00:50:10.220 So, this is a one-size-fits-all thing.

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.

00:50:28.180 No, I think it's interesting.

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.

00:50:34.960 And it was a big driver of my motivation.

00:50:37.440 But I found, like, really, like, this year, 2019, I just don't really care.

00:50:42.840 Like, I just train because I enjoy it.

00:50:44.240 And if, like, the PR comes, great, fantastic.

00:50:47.040 If it doesn't, no big deal.

00:50:48.160 I still enjoy it.

00:50:48.940 But, like, before, if I didn't hit a PR, it would just, like, ruin my day.

00:50:52.160 And, like, I don't care anymore.

00:50:53.700 I just enjoy the moving.

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.

00:51:01.580 Yeah.

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.

00:51:38.440 It's that – it's exactly as you were saying.

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.

00:51:52.900 Right.

00:51:52.960 This goes back to the Gita. 0.72

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.

00:52:00.020 Like, don't worry about the rewards of it.

00:52:02.280 Yeah.

00:52:02.700 And I talk about that in Ego is the Enemy.

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.

00:52:18.300 It was wonderful.

00:52:18.900 But I didn't control that.

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.

00:52:44.800 And that's not a place of fullness.

00:52:47.220 That's what craving gets you.

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?

00:53:12.480 Like, it's, like, I'm finishing for the day.

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?

00:53:19.740 We could go at any moment.

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?

00:53:59.040 You already got your investment back.

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.

00:54:22.240 Is that delivering now?

00:54:23.660 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:24.080 Just go to dailydad.com.

00:54:25.760 Dailydad.com.

00:54:26.700 Well, Ryan Holiday, thanks for your time.

00:54:28.020 It's been a pleasure.

00:54:28.860 Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:54:30.060 My guest here is Ryan Holiday.

00:54:31.240 He's the author of the book, Stillness is the Key.

00:54:33.340 It's available on amazon.com.

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.

00:54:43.400 We can delve deeper into this topic.

00:54:51.820 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

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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.

00:55:34.600 We'll see you next time.

The Art of Manliness - December 02, 2019

#565： Stillness Is the Key

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