Stillness Is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

  The Buddhists refer to wisdom as prajñā, and took wisdom to mean the understanding of the true nature of reality. Confucius and his followers spoke constantly of the cultivation of wisdom, saying that it is achieved in the same way that a craftsman develops skill: by putting in the time. Xunzi was more explicit: “Learning must never cease. . . . The noble person who studies widely and examines himself each day will become clear in his knowing and faultless in his conduct.”

  Each school has its own take on wisdom, but the same themes appear in all of them: The need to ask questions. The need to study and reflect. The importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences—most of all failure and mistakes—to open our eyes to truth and understanding. In this way, wisdom is a sense of the big picture, the accumulation of experience and the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.

  The fact that you are sitting here reading a book is a wonderful step on the journey to wisdom. But don’t stop here—this book is only an introduction to classical thinking and history. Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. “I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.” There’s another line, now cliché, that is even more cutting: People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

  There’s little advantage to reading with arrogance or to confirm preexisting opinions either. Hitler, spent his short prison sentence after World War I reading the classics of history. Except instead of learning anything, he found in those thousands of pages only that, as he said, “I recognized the correctness of my views.”

  That’s not wisdom. Or even stupidity. That’s insanity.

  We must also seek mentors and teachers who can guide us in our journey. Stoicism, for instance, was founded when Zeno, then a successful merchant, first heard someone reading the teachings of Socrates out loud in a bookstore. But that wasn’t enough. What he did next was what put him on the path to wisdom, for he walked up to the person reading and said, “Where can I find a man like that?” In Buddhism, there is the idea of pabbajja, which means “to go forth” and marks the serious beginning of one’s studies. That’s what Zeno was doing. Answering the call and going forth.

  Zeno’s teacher was a philosopher named Crates, and Crates not only gave him many things to read, but like all great mentors helped him address personal issues. It was with Crates’s help that Zeno overcame his crippling focus on what other people thought of him, in one case by dumping soup on Zeno and pointing out how little anyone cared or even noticed.

  Buddha’s first teacher was an ascetic named Alara Kalama, who taught him the basics of meditation. When he learned everything he could from Kalama, he moved on to Uddaka Ramaputta, who was also a good teacher. It was during Ramaputta’s time that Buddha started to realize the limitations of the existing schools and consider striking out on his own.

  If Zeno and Buddha needed teachers to advance, then we will definitely need help. And the ability to admit that is evidence of not a small bit of wisdom!

  Find people you admire and ask how they got where they are. Seek book recommendations. Isn’t that what Socrates would do? Add experience and experimentation on top of this. Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding. The wise are still because they have seen it all. They know what to expect because they’ve been through so much. They’ve made mistakes and learned from them. And so must you.

  Wrestle with big questions. Wrestle with big ideas. Treat your brain like the muscle that it is. Get stronger through resistance and exposure and training.

  Do not mistake the pursuit of wisdom for an endless parade of sunshine and kittens. Wisdom does not immediately produce stillness or clarity. Quite the contrary. It might even make things less clear—make them darker before the dawn.

  Remember, Socrates looked honestly at what he didn’t know. That’s hard. It’s painful to have our illusions punctured. It’s humbling to learn that we are not as smart as we thought we were.

  It’s also inevitable that the diligent student will uncover disconcerting or challenging ideas—about the world and about themselves. This will be unsettling. How could it not be?

  But that’s okay.

  It’s better than crashing through life (and into each other) like blind moles, to borrow Khrushchev’s analogy.

  We want to sit with doubt. We want to savor it. We want to follow it where it leads.

  Because on the other side is truth.

  FIND CONFIDENCE, AVOID EGO

  Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

  —COLIN POWELL

  In 1000 BC in the Valley of Elah, the people of Israel and Philistia were locked in terrible war. No end was in sight until the towering Goliath offered a bold challenge to end the stalemate between the armies. “This day I defy the armies of Israel! Give me a man and let us fight each other,” he shouted.

  For forty days, not a single soldier stepped forward, not even the king of Israel, Saul. If Goliath was driven by ego and hubris, the Israelites were paralyzed by fear and doubt.

  Then came young David, a visiting shepherd with three brothers in the army. David heard Goliath’s challenge, and unlike the entire army, cowering in fear, he was confident that he could fight Goliath and win. Was he crazy? How could he possibly think he could beat someone so big?

  “When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock,” David said to his brothers, “I went after it, struck it, and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it, and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this Philistine will be like one of them.”

  David’s confidence arose from experience, not ego. He had been through worse and done it with his bare hands.

  David knew his strengths, but he also knew his weaknesses. “I cannot go in these,” he said after trying on a soldier’s armor, “because I am not used to them.” He was ready to proceed with what we could call true self-awareness (and of course, his faith).

  How did Goliath respond to his tiny challenger? Like your typical bully: He laughed. “Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?” Goliath shouted. “Come here,” he said, “and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and the wild animals!”

  This arrogance would be short-lived.

  David came at Goliath at a full sprint, a sling in one hand and a few stones from the river in the other. In those few quick seconds, Goliath must have seen the confidence in David’s eyes and been afraid for the first time—and before he could do anything, he was dead. Felled by the stone flung expertly from David’s sling. His head cut off by his own sword.

  The story of these two combatants may be true. It may be a fable. But it remains one of the best stories we have about the perils of ego, the importance of humility, and the necessity of confidence.

  There is perhaps no one less at peace than the egomaniac, their mind a swirling miasma of their own grandiosity and insecurity. They constantly bite off more than they can chew. They pick fights everywhere they go. They create enemies. They are incapable of learning from their mistakes (because they don’t believe they make any). Everything with them is complicated, everything is about them.

  Life is lonely and painful for the man or woman driven by ego. Donald Trump in the White House at night, his wife and son far away, in his bathrobe, ranting about the news. Alexander the Great, drunk again, fighting and killing his best friend over a stupid argument, thinking of nothing but the next conquest. Howard Hughes, trapped in his mansion, manically excited about some crazy project (which he will inevitably sabotage).

  Successful, yes, but would you want to trade places with them?

 
This toxic form of ego has a less-assuming evil twin—often called “imposter syndrome.”

  It’s a nagging, endless anxiety that you’re not qualified for what you’re doing—and you’re about to be found out for it. Shakespeare’s image for this feeling was of a thief wearing a stolen robe he knows is too big. The writer Franz Kafka, the son of an overbearing and disapproving father, likened imposter syndrome to the feeling of a bank clerk who is cooking the books. Frantically trying to keep it all going. Terrified of being discovered.

  Of course, this insecurity exists almost entirely in our heads. People aren’t thinking about you. They have their own problems to worry about!

  What is better than these two extremes—ego and imposter syndrome—but simple confidence? Earned. Rational. Objective. Still.

  Ulysses S. Grant had an egotistical, self-promoting father, who was always caught up in some scheme or scandal. Grant knew that wasn’t who he wanted to be. In response, he developed a cool and calm self-confidence that was much closer to his mother’s quiet but strong personality. It was the source of his greatness.

  Before the Civil War, Grant experienced a long chain of setbacks and financial difficulties. He washed up in St. Louis, selling firewood for a living—a hard fall for a graduate of West Point. An army buddy found him and was aghast. “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” he asked. Grant’s answer was simple: “I am solving the problem of poverty.”

  That’s the answer of a confident person, a person at peace even in difficulty. Grant wouldn’t have chosen this situation, but he wasn’t going to let it affect his sense of self. Besides, he was too busy trying to fix it where he could. Why hate himself for working for a living? What was shameful about that?

  Observers often commented on Grant’s unshakable confidence in battle. When other generals were convinced that defeat was imminent, Grant never was. He knew he just needed to stay the course. He also knew that losing hope—or his cool—was unlikely to help anything.

  With similar equanimity, he was equally unchanged by his success and power in later years, not just leading a powerful army but spending eight years as a world leader. (Charles Dana observed of Grant that he was an “unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt.”) After his presidency, Grant visited the old cabin where he and his wife had lived in those hard days. One of his aides pointed out what an incredible rags-to-riches story his life was—almost like the plot of an epic poem—to go from that cabin to the presidency. Grant shrugged. “Well I never thought about it in that light.”

  This is also confidence. Which needs neither congratulations nor glory in which to revel, because it is an honest understanding of our strengths and weakness that reveals the path to a greater glory: inner peace and a clear mind.

  Confident people know what matters. They know when to ignore other people’s opinions. They don’t boast or lie to get ahead (and then struggle to deliver). Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself. A confident person doesn’t fear disagreement and doesn’t see change—swapping an incorrect opinion for a correct one—as an admission of inferiority.

  Ego, on the other hand, is unsettled by doubts, afflicted by hubris, exposed by its own boasting and posturing. And yet it will not probe itself—or allow itself to be probed—because it knows what might be found.

  But confident people are open, reflective, and able to see themselves without blinders. All this makes room for stillness, by removing unnecessary conflict and uncertainty and resentment.

  And you? Where are you on this spectrum?

  There are going to be setbacks in life. Even a master or a genius will experience a period of inadequacy when they attempt to learn new skills or explore new domains. Confidence is what determines whether this will be a source of anguish or an enjoyable challenge. If you’re miserable every time things are not going your way, if you cannot enjoy it when things are going your way because you undermine it with doubts and insecurity, life will be hell.

  And sure, there is no such thing as full confidence, or ever-present confidence. We will waver. We will have doubts. We will find ourselves in new situations of complete uncertainty. But still, we want to look inside that chaos and find that kernel of calm confidence. That was what Kennedy did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had been in tough situations before, like when his PT boat sank in the Pacific and all appeared to be lost. He learned then that panic solved nothing, and that salvation rarely came from rash action. He also learned that he could count on himself and that he could get through it—if he kept his head. Whatever happened, he told himself early in the crisis, no one would write The Guns of October about his handling of it. That was something he could control, and so in that he found confidence.

  This is key. Both egotistical and insecure people make their flaws central to their identity—either by covering them up or by brooding over them or externalizing them. For them stillness is impossible, because stillness can only be rooted in strength.

  That’s what we have to focus on.

  Don’t feed insecurity. Don’t feed delusions of grandeur.

  Both are obstacles to stillness.

  Be confident. You’ve earned it.

  LET GO

  Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom. Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for the reward; but never cease to do thy work.

  —THE BHAGAVAD GITA

  The great archery master Awa Kenzo did not focus on teaching technical mastery of the bow. He spent almost no time instructing his students on how to deliberately aim and shoot, telling them to simply draw a shot back until it “fell from you like ripe fruit.”

  He preferred instead to teach his students an important mental skill: detachment. “What stands in your way,” Kenzo once told his student Eugen Herrigel, “is that you have too much willful will.” It was this willful will—the desire to be in control and to dictate the schedule and the process of everything we’re a part of—that held Herrigel back from learning, from really mastering the art he pursued.

  What Kenzo wanted students to do was to put the thought of hitting the target out of their minds. He wanted them to detach even from the idea of an outcome. “The hits on the target,” he would say, “are only the outward proof and confirmation of your purposelessness at its highest, of your egolessness, your self-abandonment, or whatever you like to call this state.”

  That state is stillness.

  But detachment and purposelessness don’t exactly sound like productive attitudes, do they? That was exactly the kind of vexing predicament Kenzo wanted to put his students in. Most of his pupils, like us, wanted to be told what to do and shown how to do it. We’re supposed to care, a lot. Willful will should be a strength. That’s what’s worked for us since we were kids who wanted to excel in school. How can you improve without it? How can this be the way to hitting a bull’s-eye?

  Well, let’s back up.

  Have you ever noticed that the more we want something, the more insistent we are on a certain outcome, the more difficult it can be to achieve it? Sports like golf and archery are the perfect examples of this. When you try to hit the ball really hard, you end up snap-hooking it. If you look up to follow the ball, you jerk the club and slice it into the woods. The energy you’re spending aiming the arrow—particularly early on—is energy not spent developing your form. If you’re too conscious of the technical components of shooting, you won’t be relaxed or smooth enough. As marksmen say these days, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

  Stillness, then, is actually a way to superior performance. Looseness will give you more control than gripping tightly—to a method or a specific outcome.

  Obviously an archery master like Kenzo realized that by the early twentieth century the skills he was teaching were no longer matters of life and death. Nobody ne
eded to know how to shoot an arrow for survival. But other skills required to master archery remained essential: focus, patience, breathing, persistence, clarity. And most of all, the ability to let go.

  What we need in life, in the arts, in sports, is to loosen up, to become flexible, to get to a place where there is nothing in our way—including our own obsession with certain outcomes. An actor doesn’t become his character by thinking about it; he has to let go, dispense with technique and sink into the role. Entrepreneurs don’t walk the streets deliberately looking for opportunities—they have to open themselves up to noticing the little things around them. The same goes for comedians or even parents trying to raise a good kid.

  “Everyone tries to shoot naturally,” Kenzo wrote, “but nearly all practitioners have some kind of strategy, some kind of shallow, artificial, calculating technical trick that they rely on when they shoot. Technical tricks ultimately lead nowhere.”

  Mastering our mental domain—as paradoxical as it might seem—requires us to step back from the rigidity of the word “mastery.” We’ll get the stillness we need if we focus on the individual steps, if we embrace the process, and give up chasing. We’ll think better if we aren’t thinking so hard.

  Most students, whether it’s in archery or yoga or chemistry, go into a subject with a strong intention. They are outcome-focused. They want to get the best grade or the highest score. They bring their previous “expertise” with them. They want to skip the unnecessary steps and get right to the sexy stuff. As a result, they are difficult to teach and easily discouraged when the journey proves harder than expected. They are not present. They are not open to experience and cannot learn.

  In Kenzo’s school, it was only when a student had fully surrendered, when they had detached themselves from even the idea of aiming, having spent months firing arrows into a hay bale just a few feet in front of them, that he would finally announce, “Our new exercise is shooting at a target.” And even then, when they would hit the target, Kenzo wouldn’t shower the archer with praise.