Book notes: Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

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Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Synopsis:

“All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness – to be steady while the world spins around you. In this audiobook, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history’s greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus.

Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity. More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever. ” -Audible

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Opening thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve read a Ryan Holiday book, though I know he’s pretty well-known in the self-improvement genre and his work is referenced by a lot of different authors and thought-leaders I follow. I was expecting to get a lot of good takeaways from this book that I could immediately apply. And this book in particular was highly rated and seemed relevant for what I feel like I need right now.

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Key notes:

• The ability to cultivate quiet and quell the turmoil inside us, to slow the mind down, understand our emotions, and conquer our bodies has always been extremely difficult 
• The aim of this book is to show how to uncover and draw upon the stillness we already possess

Part One: Mind

• Anecdote: how Kennedy’s stillness allowed him to handle the Cuban missile crisis

Domain of the Mind

Become Present

• The hardest thing is actually doing something that’s close to nothing. It demands all of you
  • Being present demands all of us, it’s not nothing

Limit Your Inputs

• A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
  • There is ego in trying to keep up with everything

Empty the Mind

• Don’t defeat yourself by overthinking or second-guessing

Slow Down, Think Deeply

Start Journaling

• Seneca would journal at night and reflect on the day, hiding nothing from himself
  • His sleep afterward was good as these reflections helped him reach stillness at night
• Take note of the insights you’ve heard and allow the wisdom to flow
  • The best journals aren’t for the reader but for the writer. To slow the mind down
  • This is a chance to ask yourself the hard questions, find solutions and get out of your own way
• Scientific evidence shows that journaling can help one get through and process traumatic events
• Putting it down on paper also gives you objectivity that is missing when emotions are flooding your mind
• There is no wrong way to start journaling
  • The most important thing is just to do it, and also why you’re doing it, which is to have quiet time with your thoughts, clarify them, and separate the harmful from the insightful

Cultivate Silence

Seek Wisdom

• The Socratic method came from an open-minded search for truth, asking questions in the pursuit of wisdom
• We must read, learn, and seek mentors in the pursuit of wisdom
• Find people you admire and ask how they got to where they are
  • Seek book recommendations
  • Add experience and experimentation
  • Put yourself in tough situations
• Wrestle with big ideas and big questions
  • Treat your brain like the muscle it is. Get stronger through resistance and training

Find Confidence, Avoid Ego

• The parable of David and Goliath is a reminder of the perils of ego, the importance of humility, and the necessity of confidence
• Confidence is the ability to set your own standards and freeing yourself from needing to prove yourself
  • They don’t fear disagreement nor see changing to correct opinions as an admission of inferiority
• Ego is unsettled by doubts, and afflicted by hubris and posturing
  • It would not allow itself to be probed
• Confident people are open, reflective, and able to see themselves without blinders, which makes room for stillness by removing unnecessary conflict and uncertainty and resentment

Let Go

• We should aim to strike the balance of attached and detached
  • If you aim for the trophy and rewards, you’ll miss the target
  • If you aim too intensely for the target, neglect the art in the process required to hit it

On to What’s Next…

• The mind tends towards stillness, but it is opposed by craving
• A flash of stillness is not what we’re after. We want consistent focus and wisdom that can be called upon in even the most trying situations

Part Two: Spirit

The Domain of the Soul

• Anecdote: Tiger Woods, his fall and return

Choose Virtue

• Life is meaningless for the person who decides their choices have no meaning
• The person who knows what they value, has a strong sense of decency and principles, who possesses easy moral self-command
  • This person has found stillness
  • A power they can draw on when they face challenges, stress, or scary situations

Heal the Inner Child

• A lot of our negative tendencies come from childhood deficiencies

Beware Desire

Enough

When you realize that nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you

The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment

• More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their experiences and relationships

Bathe in Beauty

Accept a Higher Power

• Addiction is a biological disease, it is also a process of becoming obsessed with one’s own self and the primacy of one’s urges and thoughts
  • Therefore, admitting that there is something bigger than you out there is an important breakthrough
• The benefit of accepting a higher power is quieting our mind and putting it in perspective 

Enter Relationships

• Relationships require a lot of time and effort, but we are also nothing without them
  • Bad relationships are common and good relationships are hard
  • Being close to and connected with other people challenges every facet of our soul
• A good relationship challenges us and requires us to be virtuous, faithful, present, empathetic, generous, open, and willing to be a part of a larger whole
  • It requires, in order to create growth, real surrender
• Stillness is best not sought alone and like success, it is best when shared
  • We all need someone who understands us better than we understand ourselves if only to keep us honest
• Life without relationships and focused solely on accomplishment is empty and meaningless, in addition to being precarious and fragile

Conquer Your Anger

• People who are driven primarily by anger not only tend to fail over a long enough timeline, but they tend to be miserable even if they don’t
• Great leaders are fueled by love, country, compassion, destiny, reconciliation, mastery, idealism, family

All is One

• We can actively practice forgiveness, as well as practice active wishing of good will to others
• Peace is what allows us to take joy in the success of others and allow them to do the same for us
  • Peace is what novitiates someone to be good and treat every other thing well because it understands that it is a way to treat oneself well

One to What’s Next…

Part Three: Body

The Domain of the Body

• We need to rise above our physical limitations
• Find hobbies that rest and replenish us
• Develop a reliable, disciplined routine
• Spend time getting active outdoors
• Seek out solitude and perspective
• Learn to sit and do nothing when called for
• Get enough sleep and reign in workaholism
• Commit to causes bigger than ourselves

Say No

• When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to things that matter

Take a Walk

• Walking is an exercise in peace
  • It is a practice of being present, detachment, emptying your mind and noticing and appreciating the beauty in the world around you

Build a Routine

• A good routine is not only a source of comfort and stability, it’s the platform from which stimulating and fulfilling work is possible
• The greats know that complete freedom is a nightmare
  • Order is a prerequisite of excellence, and in an unpredictable world, good habits are a safe haven of certainty

Get Rid Of Your Stuff

• Give away and get rid of the stuff you don’t need 

Seek Solitude

• It’s difficult to understand yourself if you’re not by yourself
  • Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to better connect with yourself and with the people you serve and love 

Be a Human Being

• Balance and pacing is necessary for longevity and to avoid burnout

Go To Sleep

• Anecdote about American apparel fonder running his company into the ground due to overwork and lack of sleep
• Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself 
• Everyone functions better when well-rested

Find a Hobby

• Leisure is activity without any external justification
  • You cant do leisure for pay or to impress people, you have to do it for you 

Beware Escapism

• The one thing you can’t escape is yourself
  • Build a life that you don’t need to escape from

Act Bravely

• Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world
  • Quite the opposite, it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people 
• If you see fraud but not say fraud, you are a fraud
  • Worse, you’ll feel like a fraud and you’ll never be proud or happy

On To the Final Act

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Closing thoughts:

This was a really good book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the insights presented about stillness is fairly different from other self-improvement books and overall in this genre. Although the ideas of being centered and grounded aren’t new, I like how it is presented in this idea of stillness. I think it’s particularly profound in this age of busyness and technology-fueled distractions.

What I really enjoyed is that in reinforces this idea what we don’t need more and more. In fact, we need less so that we can pursue peace and contentment. That’s the true path to happiness, not achievement.

I also really liked the emphasis on relationships, which I completely agree with. The quality of our lives is definitely determined by the quality of our relationships.

Overall, a fantastic book and relevant to pretty much everyone. And like any good self-development book, it has practical applications.

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One Takeaway / Putting into practice:

There are a lot of great takeaways in this book and insights on how to achieve this coveted “stillness”. However, one of the biggest insights I want to emphasize from this book is:

• The one thing you can’t escape is yourself

I think fundamentally understanding this would motivate us to truly connect with ourselves and improve our self-awareness. When we understand ourselves, we can be in a better position to develop inner peace through disconnecting from technology and distractions, spending time alone, developing good routines, building relationships, choosing virtue, practicing contentment, building confidence, avoiding ego, choosing wisdom, and thinking deeply.

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Nutshell:

Seeking stillness and peace is a path to meaning, contentment, and excellence.

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Similar books:

• Awareness by Anthony de Mello
• Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
• The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown
• Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty

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Rating:

4/5

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