Stillness Is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

  On the contrary, after a bull’s-eye, Kenzo would urge them to “go on practicing as if nothing happened.” He’d say the same after a bad shot. When the students asked for extra instruction, he’d reply, “Don’t ask, practice!”

  He wanted them to get lost in the process. He wanted them to give up their notions of what archery was supposed to look like. He was demanding that they be present and empty and open—so they could learn.

  In Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, the lotus flower is a powerful symbol. Although it rises out of the mud of a pond or a river, it doesn’t reach up towering into the sky—it floats freely, serenely on top of the water. It was said that wherever Buddha walked, lotus flowers appeared to mark his footprints. In a way, the lotus also embodies the principle of letting go. It’s beautiful and pure, but also attainable and lowly. It is simultaneously attached and detached.

  This is the balance we want to strike. If we aim for the trophy in life—be it recognition or wealth or power—we’ll miss the target. If we aim too intensely for the target—as Kenzo warned his students—we will neglect the process and the art required to hit it. What we should be doing is practicing. What we should be doing is pushing away that willful will.

  The closer we get to mastery, the less we care about specific results. The more collaborative and creative we are able to be, the less we will tolerate ego or insecurity. The more at peace we are, the more productive we can be.

  Only through stillness are the vexing problems solved. Only through reducing our aims are the most difficult targets within our reach.

  ON TO WHAT’S NEXT . . .

  If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love.

  —JOHN CAGE

  The stakes of what each of us is trying to do are too high to allow ourselves to be riven by the chatter of the news or the noise of the crowd. The insights we seek are often buried and rarely obvious—to find them, we need to be able to look deeply, to perceive what others are unable to.

  So we ignore the noise. We zero in on what’s essential. We sit with presence. We sit with our journals. We empty our minds.

  We try, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, to “shrug it all off and wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter stillness.” To build a kind of mental vault or stronghold that no distraction or false impression can breach. For brief moments, we are able to get there. And when we’re there, we find ourselves capable of things we didn’t even know were possible: Superior performance. Awesome clarity. Profound happiness.

  Yet that stillness is often fleeting. Why?

  Because it is undermined by disturbances elsewhere—not just the expected turbulence of the surrounding world, but also inside us. In our spirit and our physical bodies.

  “The mind tends toward stillness,” Lao Tzu said, “but is opposed by craving.” We are like the audience at Marina Abramović’s performance. Present for a moment. Moved to stillness for a moment. Then back out into the city, back to the old routines and pulled by endless desires and bad habits, as if that experience never happened.

  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. Getting there will require more work. It’s going to require some holistic self-examination, treating the disease and not just the symptoms.

  The premise of this book is that our three domains—the mind, the heart, and the body—must be in harmony. The truth is that for most people not only are these domains out of sync, but they are at war with each other. We will never have peace until that civil war Dr. King described is settled.

  History teaches us that peace is what provides the opportunity to build. It is the postwar boom that turns nations into superpowers, and ordinary people into powerhouses.

  And so we must go onward to fight the next battle, to pacify the domain of the spirit and purify our hearts, our emotions, our drives, our passions.

  PART II

  MIND ♦ SPIRIT ♦ BODY

  Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls.

  —EPICTETUS

  THE DOMAIN OF THE SOUL

  In retrospect, it was one of the finest moments in golf, perhaps in all of sports. In June 2008, Tiger Woods birdied the final hole of the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, just north of San Diego, to force an eighteen-hole playoff. He took an early three-stroke lead but surrendered it, only to come charging back, to birdie again and force forty-six-year old Rocco Mediate into a head-to-head, sudden-death round. On that 488-yard par-four, Tiger Woods would birdie a final time to win his third U.S. Open and his fourteenth major. The second most major victories in the history of the game.

  And Woods was certainly the first person and likely the last golfer in history to win such a roller-coaster match on a torn ACL and a leg broken in two places. To call it a triumph of grit and determination almost undersells Woods’s performance, because he did it with such poise that no one watching even knew the extent of his injuries.

  Woods himself knew only of the fractures, not the fact that his knee joint was basically gone. Yet somehow, with nearly inhuman mental and physical discipline, he transcended every limit the complex and crushing game of golf had tried to place on him, and he did it with little more than an occasional grimace.

  We could call this moment the high-water mark of Tiger Woods’s career. He took a six-month leave to recover from emergency knee surgery. Not long after, his mistress, Rachel Uchitel, was caught at his hotel in Australia, and suddenly the secrets of his personal life were no longer secret.

  When he was confronted by his wife, Tiger tried to lie his way out of it, but the lies stopped working. Within minutes, Tiger was sprawled out in a neighbor’s driveway, his SUV crashed into a nearby fire hydrant and the back windows smashed by a golf club. Unconscious, his wife weeping over him, he was, for a moment, still, in a way he had not been perhaps since he was a baby.

  It did not last long.

  The tabloid nightmare of all tabloid nightmares would ensue—twenty-one consecutive covers of the New York Post. The text messages. The affairs with porn stars and Perkins waitresses, frantic sex in church parking lots, sex even with the twenty-one-year-old daughters of family friends, all made public. The stint in sex rehab, the loss of his sponsors, and the $100 million divorce—it all nearly broke him, as it would break anyone.

  He wouldn’t win another major for a decade.

  “On the surface of the ocean there is stillness,” the monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said of the human condition, “but underneath there are currents.” So it was for Tiger Woods. This man who had become an icon for his ability to be calm and focused in moments of intense stress, a man with the physical discipline to pump the emergency brake on his 129-mile-per-hour swing if he wanted to start over, the champion of the “stillest” of sports, was at the mercy of insatiable riptides that lurked beneath his placid demeanor. And as any seasoned captain of the seas of life can tell you, what’s happening on the surface of the water doesn’t matter—it’s what’s going on below that will kill you.

  Tiger Woods could stare down opponents and unimaginable pressure, persevere through the countless obstacles in his career. He just couldn’t do the same for his own spiritual demons.

  The seeds of Tiger’s undoing were sown early. His father, Earl, was a complicated man. Born into poverty, Earl Woods lived through the worst of American racism and segregation. He managed to put himself through college and join the army, where he became a Green Beret in Vietnam. Beneath the surface of this accomplishment there were also currents—of narcissism, egotism, dishonesty, and greed. A simple example: Earl Woods returned from his second tour in Vietnam with a new wife . . . a fact he neglected to mention to the wife and three children he already had.

  When Tiger was b
orn of that second marriage, Earl Woods was forty-three years old and not particularly excited to become a father again. For the first year of Tiger’s life, fatherhood mostly involved strapping the baby in a high chair while hitting golf balls in the garage. It was in fact in watching his father play golf—instead of being able to play like a regular kid—that Tiger developed his almost unnatural obsession with the game. According to family legend, at nine months old Tiger slid down from his chair, picked up a club, and hit a golf ball.

  It’s a story that is both cute and utterly abnormal. At age two, Tiger Woods appeared on The Mike Douglas Show to show off his golf skills. The audience loved it, but Jimmy Stewart, the other guest that day, was not amused. “I’ve seen too many precious kids like this sweet little boy,” he told Douglas backstage, “and too many starry-eyed parents.”

  Still, his parents’ dedication is undoubtedly what allowed Tiger Woods to become a great golfer. Thousands of hours in the garage watching his father hit seared the beautiful mechanics of a swing into his mind. The thousands more hours they spent at the driving range and playing golf—thanks in part to the discounted rates Earl Woods got at the military course near their home—were instrumental. His parents sacrificed for him, drove him to tournaments, and hired the best coaches.

  They didn’t stop there. Earl Woods knew that golf was a mental game, so he worked to prepare his son for the unforgiving world of sports. Starting when Tiger was about seven, Earl took active measures to develop his son’s concentration. Whenever Tiger teed off, Earl would cough. Or jingle change in his pocket. Or drop his clubs. Or throw a ball at him. Or block his line of sight. “I wanted to teach him mental toughness,” Earl recounted. “If he got distracted by the little things I did, he’d never be able to handle the pressure of a tournament.”

  But as Tiger got older, the training became, even by Earl’s admission, an increasingly brutal finishing school. It was a boot camp of “prisoner-of-war interrogation techniques” and “psychological intimidation” that no civilized person ought to inflict on another. “He constantly put me down,” Tiger said later. “He would push me to the breaking point, then back off. It was wild.”

  Yeah. Wild.

  That’s what it is for a child to hear his father taunt him as he tries to play a sport, to call him a “motherfucker” while he’s trying to concentrate. Imagine how painful it would be to have your dad tell you to “fuck off,” or to ask, “How do you feel being a little nigger?” to try to get a rise out of you. Earl Woods even cheated when they played together, supposedly to keep his son humble and on his game. As Tiger reflected, this was all deliberate training to become what his father wanted him to be: a “‘cold-blooded assassin’ on the course.”

  Now, Tiger, who clearly loved his father, said that they had a code word he could use if his father ever pushed too far—in either their mental or physical training—and that all Tiger had to do was say it and Earl would stop. Tiger says he never did, because he needed and enjoyed the training, but even the word itself is illustrative. It wasn’t a cute inside joke or some silly word that meant nothing. The word that Tiger could utter to get his father to stop bullying him, to get him to treat him like a normal child, was, if you can believe it: enough.

  And not only was it never uttered, but the two of them came to refer to it almost as an expletive: the “e-word.”

  The e-word was something quitters said, that only losers believed in.

  Are we surprised, then, that this talented boy would go on to win so much? But that those wins didn’t make him happy? He was imperturbable on the golf course and utterly miserable inside.

  Tiger’s mother taught him lessons too. She told him, “You will never, ever ruin my reputation as a parent because I will beat you.” Notice the threat of physical violence and what it was over—not doing wrong but embarrassing her. Earl Woods, as a husband, showed Tiger early on how to balance this razor’s edge too. He cheated on his wife when he traveled with his son. He drank to excess. He even, likely in violation of amateur sporting rules, accepted a secret $50,000-a-year stipend from IMG, the sports agency that would eventually represent Tiger Woods.

  The lesson there? Appearances are the only thing that matters. Do whatever it takes to win—just don’t get caught.

  A less talented and dedicated athlete would have been crippled by this abuse. But Tiger Woods was not just naturally gifted, he truly loved golf and he loved the work of it. So he got better and better.

  By the time he was three, he was beating ten-year-olds. By eleven years old, he could beat his father regularly on eighteen-hole courses. By seventh grade, he was being recruited by Stanford. At Stanford, where he spent two years, Tiger was an All-American and the number one player in the country. By the time he went pro at twenty, it was already obvious that he might become the greatest golfer who ever lived. The richest too. His first contracts with Nike and Titleist were worth a combined $60 million.

  Tiger Woods’s first decade and a half as a pro stand as possibly the most dominant reign ever, in any sport. He won everything that could be won. Fourteen majors, 140 tournaments. He was ranked the number one golfer in the world for 281 consecutive weeks. He won more than $115 million in PGA Tour winnings. He won on every continent except Antarctica.

  There were, for those who were looking, signs of sickness: the thrown clubs after a bad hole—and the lack of concern for the fans this occasionally imperiled. The way he’d broken up with his longtime high school girlfriend by packing her suitcase and sending it to her parents’ hotel room with a letter. The way he responded when Steve Scott saved him from accidentally scratching in their epic head-to-head match, not even thanking him, not even acknowledging the incredible sportsmanship of it—treating it like the weakness of inferior prey.* The way he’d left his college golf team to go pro without even saying goodbye to his teammates, the way after he finished eating with family or friends he’d simply get up and leave without saying a word. The way he could just cut people out of his life.

  Woods’s golf coach Hank Haney would say that over time Tiger began to understand that “anyone who was brought into his world was lucky and would be playing by his rules.” This was what he had been taught by his parents, who raised him both as a kind of prince and a prisoner in a psychological experiment. Fame and wealth only added to this. “I felt I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me,” Tiger would say later. “I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them.”

  We can imagine Tiger Woods, like so many successful people, getting less happy the more he achieved. Less freedom. Less and less sleep, until it came only with medication. Even with a beautiful, brilliant wife whom he loved, even with two children, whom he also loved, even as the undisputed champion of his craft, he was miserable, tortured by a spiritual malady and a crushing anxiety from which there was no relief.

  His mind was strong but his soul ached. It ached over his tragic relationship with his father. It ached over the childhood he had lost. It ached because it ached—Why am I not happy, he must have thought, don’t I have everything I ever wanted?

  It’s not simply that Tiger loved to win. It’s that for so long winning was not nearly enough and never could be enough (the e-word). He would tell Charlie Rose, “Winning was fun. Beating someone’s even better.” Tiger said this after his public humiliation, after his multiyear slump, after his stint in sex rehab. He still had not learned. He still could not see what this attitude had cost him.

  Everybody’s got a hungry heart—that’s true. But how we choose to feed that heart matters. It’s what determines the kind of person we end up being, what kind of trouble we’ll get into, and whether we’ll ever be full, whether we’ll ever really be still.

  When Tiger Woods’s father died in 2006, Tiger’s extramarital affairs went into overdrive. He spent time in clubs, partying, instead of at home with his fa
mily. His behavior on the course grew worse, more standoffish, angrier. He also began to spend unusual amounts of time with Navy SEALS, indulging in an impossible fantasy that he might quit golf and join the Special Forces, despite being in his early thirties (and one of the most famous people in the world). In one weekend in 2007, Tiger Woods reportedly jumped out of a plane ten times. In fact, the injuries that plague him to this day are likely a result of that training, not golf—including an accident where his knee was kicked out from under him in a military exercise “clearing” a building.

  There he was—rather than enjoying his wealth, success, and family—cheating on his wife, playing a soldier in some sort of early midlife crisis. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy after all,” a friend of Earl and Tiger’s would say of the situation. Like so many of us, Tiger had unconsciously replicated the most painful and worst habits of his parents.

  Some have looked at those fruitless years after Tiger’s return to golf as evidence that the selfishness of his previous life helped his game. Or that somehow the work he did in rehab opened up wounds better left bound up.

  As if Tiger Woods, a human being, did not deserve happiness and existed solely to win trophies and entertain us on television. “For what is a man profited,” Jesus asked his disciples, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

  It’s a question we must ask ourselves. Cheating and lying never helped anyone in the long run, whether it was done at work or at home. In Tiger’s case, it was that he was so talented, he could get away with it . . . until he couldn’t.