Stillness Is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

  Eventually one has to say the e-word, enough. Or the world says it for you.

  In one sense, his father’s training had succeeded. Tiger Woods was mentally tough. He was cold-blooded and talented. But in every other part of his life, he was weak and fragile—bankrupt and unbalanced. That stillness existed only on the golf course; everywhere else he was at the mercy of his passions and urges. As he worked to crowd out distractions—anything that would get in the way of his concentration addressing each shot—he was also crowding out so many other essential elements of life: An open heart. Meaningful relationships. Selflessness. Moderation. A sense of right and wrong.

  These are not just important elements of a balanced life; they are sources of stillness that allow us to endure defeat and enjoy victory. Mental stillness will be short-lived if our hearts are on fire, or our souls ache with emptiness. We are incapable of seeing what is essential in the world if we are blind to what’s going on within us. We cannot be in harmony with anyone or anything if the need for more, more, more is gnawing at our insides like a maggot.

  “When you live a life where you’re lying all the time, life is no fun,” Tiger would say later. When your life is out of balance, it’s not fun. When your life is solely and exclusively about yourself, it’s worse than not fun—it’s empty and awful. Tiger Woods wasn’t just a solitary man; he was, like so many of us in the modern world, an island. He might have been famous, but he was a stranger to himself. No one who reads about his endless affairs gets the sense that he was enjoying it or that they brought him much pleasure. In fact, it almost feels like he wanted to get caught. So he could get help.

  We don’t need to judge Tiger Woods. We need to learn from him, from both his fall and his long and valiant journey back to winning the Masters in 2019 at forty-three years old with a fused back, with his own young son cheering him on. Because we share the same flaws, the same weaknesses—and have the same potential for greatness, if we are willing to put in the work.

  Marcus Aurelius would ask himself, “What am I doing with my soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul? An adolescent’s? . . . A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?”

  We need to ask ourselves these questions, too, especially as we become successful.

  One of the best stories in Zen literature is a series of ten poems about a farmer and his trouble with a bull. The poems are an allegory about conquering the self, and the titles of each one map out the journey that each of us must go on: We search for the bull, we track the footprints, we find it, we catch it, we tame it, we ride it home.

  At first the beast is untamable, it’s wild and impossible to contain. But the message is that with struggle and perseverance, with self-awareness and patience—with enlightenment, really—eventually we can tame the emotions and the drives inside us. As one of the poems reads:

  Being well-trained, he becomes

  naturally gentle.

  Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.

  The narrator is in a state of serenity and peace. He has tamed his wild spirit.

  That’s what we’re trying to do. Since ancient times, people have strived to train and control the forces that reside deep inside them so that they can find serenity, so that they can preserve and protect their accomplishments. What good is it to be rational at work if our personal lives are a hot-blooded series of disasters? How long can we keep the two domains separate anyway? You might rule cities or a great empire, but if you’re not in control of yourself, it is all for naught.

  The work we must do next is less cerebral and more spiritual. It’s work located in the heart and in the soul, and not in the mind. Because it is our soul that is the key to our happiness (or our unhappiness), contentment (or discontent), moderation (or gluttony), and stillness (or perturbation).

  That is why those who seek stillness must come to . . .

  Develop a strong moral compass.

  Steer clear of envy and jealousy and harmful desires.

  Come to terms with the painful wounds of their childhood.

  Practice gratitude and appreciation for the world around them.

  Cultivate relationships and love in their lives.

  Place belief and control in the hands of something larger than themselves.

  Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in bankruptcy.

  Our soul is where we secure our happiness and unhappiness, contentment or emptiness—and ultimately, determine the extent of our greatness.

  We must maintain a good one.

  CHOOSE VIRTUE

  The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Marcus Aurelius famously described a number of what he called “epithets for the self.” Among his were: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. These were, then, the traits that served him well as emperor.

  There are many other traits that could be added to this list: Honest. Patient. Caring. Kind. Brave. Calm. Firm. Generous. Forgiving. Righteous.

  There is one word, however, under which all these epithets sit: virtue.

  Virtue, the Stoics believed, was the highest good—the summum bonum—and should be the principle behind all our actions. Virtue is not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls and is made real through the actions we take.

  The East prized virtue as much as the West. The Daodejing, for instance, actually translates as The Way of Virtue. Confucius, who advised many of the rulers and princes of his day, would have agreed with Marcus that a leader was well served by the pursuit of virtue. His highest compliment would have been to call a ruler a junzi—a word that translators still have trouble finding equivalents for in English but is roughly understood as a person who emanates integrity, honor, and self-control.

  If the concept of “virtue” seems a bit stuffy to you, consider the evidence that a virtuous life is worthwhile for its own sake. No one has less serenity than the person who does not know what is right or wrong. No one is more exhausted than the person who, because they lack a moral code, must belabor every decision and consider every temptation. No one feels worse about themselves than the cheater or the liar, even if—often especially if—they are showered with rewards for their cheating and lying. Life is meaningless to the person who decides their choices have no meaning.

  Meanwhile, the person who knows what they value? Who has a strong sense of decency and principle and behaves accordingly? Who possesses easy moral self-command, who leans comfortably upon this goodness, day in and day out? This person has found stillness.

  A sort of soul power they can draw on when they face challenges, stress, even scary situations.

  Look at the response of Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh to an angry protester during a campaign stop. When the agitated woman came up and started shouting at him about Islam (despite the fact that he is Sikh), he replied with two of his own epithets for the self: “Love and courage.” Soon, the crowd began to chant along with him: “Love and courage. Love and courage. Love and courage.”

  He could’ve stood there and yelled back. He could have run away. It could have made him cruel and mean, in the moment or forever after. He may well have been prodded in those directions. But instead he remained cool, and those two words helped him recenter in the midst of what not only was a career-on-the-line situation, but probably felt like a life-threatening one.

  Different situations naturally call for different virtues and different epithets for the self. When we’re going into a tough assignment, we can say to ourselves over and over again, “Strength and courage.” Before a tough conversation with a significant other: “Patience and kindness.
” In times of corruption and evil: “Goodness and honesty.”

  The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not.

  Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. What do we stand for? What do we believe to be essential and important? What are we really living for? Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our heart, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, come between us and that self-knowledge.

  Confucius said that virtue is a kind of polestar. It not only provides guidance to the navigator, but it attracts fellow travelers too. Epicurus, who has been unfairly branded by history as a hedonist, knew that virtue was the way to tranquility and happiness. In fact, he believed that virtue and pleasure were two sides of the same coin. As he said:

  It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. A person who does not have a pleasant life is not living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely the person who does not have these virtues cannot live pleasantly.

  Where virtue is, so too are happiness and beauty.

  Confucius wrote that the “gentleman is self-possessed and relaxed, while the petty man is perpetually full of worry.” It’s worth a look at Seneca, another Stoic philosopher, who, like Marcus, made his living in politics. Like us, Seneca was full of contradictions. On the one hand, his writings contain some of the most beautiful meditations on morality and self-discipline ever written, and they are obviously the result of incredible concentration and mental clarity. On the other, Seneca was a striver—an ambitious writer-politician who aspired to be remembered as much for his prose as for his policies.

  At the height of his career, he could be found working as a fixer for the emperor, Nero. Nero, although he had begun as a promising student of Seneca, did not make his teacher’s job easy. He was deranged, selfish, distractible, paranoid, and coldhearted. Imagine that you spend your evenings writing about the importance of doing the right thing, of temperance and wisdom, and then by day you have to help your all-powerful boss justify trying to assassinate his mother. Seneca knew he should walk away; he probably wanted to, but he never did.

  What is virtue? Seneca would ask. His answer: “True and steadfast judgment.” And from virtue comes good decisions and happiness and peace. It emanates from the soul and directs the mind and the body.

  Yet when we look at Seneca’s life, we get the sense that he was the type of man whose ambition did not provide much peace, but instead skewed his decision making. Seneca wrote eloquently of the meaninglessness of wealth, yet came to possess an enormous fortune through questionable means. He believed in mercy, kindness, and compassion, but he willingly served two different emperors who were probably psychopaths. It was as if he didn’t believe in his own philosophy enough to put it wholly into practice—he couldn’t quite accept that virtue would provide enough to live on.

  Money, power, fame just seemed a little more urgent.

  Seneca knew of the virtuous path, but chased the prizes that drew him away from it. This choice cost him many sleepless nights and forced him into ethically taxing dilemmas. In the end, it cost him his life. In AD 65, Nero turned on his former teacher and forced him to commit suicide—the evil Seneca had rationalized for so long, it eventually cost him everything.

  There’s no question it’s possible to get ahead in life by lying and cheating and generally being awful to other people. This may even be a quick way to the top. But it comes at the expense of not only your self-respect, but your security too.

  Virtue, on the other hand, as crazy as it might seem, is a far more attainable and sustainable way to succeed.

  How’s that? Recognition is dependent on other people. Getting rich requires business opportunities. You can be blocked from your goals by the weather just as easily as you can by a dictator. But virtue? No one can stop you from knowing what’s right. Nothing stands between you and it . . . but yourself.

  Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. Each of us must sit down and ask: What’s important to me? What would I rather die for than betray? How am I going to live and why?

  These are not idle questions or the banal queries of a personality quiz. We must have the answers if we want the stillness (and the strength) that emerges from the citadel of our own virtue.

  It is for the difficult moments in life—the crossroads that Seneca found himself on when asked to serve Nero—that virtue can be called upon. Heraclitus said that character was fate. He’s right. We develop good character, strong epithets for ourselves, so when it counts, we will not flinch.

  So that when everyone else is scared and tempted, we will be virtuous.

  We will be still.

  HEAL THE INNER CHILD

  The child is in me still . . . and sometimes not so still.

  —FRED ROGERS

  There was always something childlike about Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, this is what made him such a brilliant artist—his mischievousness, his curiosity, his fascination with inventing and creating. But behind this playfulness was a deep sadness, pain rooted in the events of his early life.

  Leonardo was born in 1452, an illegitimate son from a prosperous family of notaries. Though in time his father would invite his bastard son to come live with him, and would help secure Leonardo’s first artistic apprenticeship, a distance between them never closed.

  At the time, it was customary that the oldest son of a prominent tradesman like Leonardo’s father would be chosen to take up his father’s profession and eventually take over his business. While the notary guild technically did not recognize non legittimo heirs, it’s surprising that Leonardo’s father never even attempted to appear before a local magistrate and present a petition to legitimate his son.

  Leonardo’s father would go on to have twelve more children, nine of whom were sons. When he died, he left no specific will, an act that for a notary, familiar with the law, meant one thing: He was legally disinheriting Leonardo in favor of his “real” children. As Leonardo’s biographer Walter Isaacson would later write, by excluding Leonardo and never fully accepting him, Piero da Vinci’s “primary bequest to his son was to give him an insatiable drive for an unconditional patron.”

  Indeed, all of Leonardo’s artistic life exhibits an almost childlike search for love and acceptance from the powerful men he worked for. He devotedly served his first mentor, Andrea del Verrocchio, for more than eleven years—until Leonardo was twenty-five—an incredibly long time for such a prodigal talent (Michelangelo broke out on his own at sixteen). What could have attracted a sweet soul like Leonardo to Cesare Borgia, a murderous psychopath? Borgia was the only patron who was willing to look at and consider Leonardo’s military inventions—a longtime passion project. From Milan to France and to the Vatican itself, Leonardo traveled far and wide in his career, looking for the financial support and artistic freedom he thought would make him whole.

  Nearly half a dozen times, he uprooted himself and his workshop in a huff, leaving unfinished commissions behind him. Sometimes it was over a slight. Usually it was because the patron couldn’t quite be everything Leonardo wanted. The subtext of his angry letters and half-completed work speaks as loudly to us today as any angry teenager: You’re not my dad. You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t really love me. I’ll show you.

  Many of us carry wounds from our childhood. Maybe someone didn’t treat us right. Or we experienced something terrible. Or our parents were just a little too busy or a little too critical or a little too stuck dealing with their own i
ssues to be what we needed.

  These raw spots shape decisions we make and actions we take—even if we’re not always conscious of that fact.

  This should be a relief: The source of our anxiety and worry, the frustrations that seem to suddenly pop out in inappropriate situations, the reason we have trouble staying in relationships or ignoring criticism—it isn’t us. Well, it is us, just not adult us. It’s the seven-year-old living inside us. The one who was hurt by Mom and Dad, the sweet, innocent kid who wasn’t seen.

  Think of Rick Ankiel, one of the greatest natural pitchers to ever play baseball. He had a brutal childhood in the home of an abusive father and a brother who was a drug dealer. His whole life, he stuffed this pain and helplessness down, focusing on his skill on the mound, eventually becoming the minor leagues’ top pitching prospect. Then suddenly, just as his career was starting to go well, in the first game of the playoffs in 2000, in front of millions of people, he lost the ability to control his pitches.

  What happened? Just days before, his father and brother had gone to jail on drug charges and Rick had been in the courthouse to see them. He’d been running from that pain and that anger for years, until it finally exploded and shattered the delicate balance that pitching required. It took years of work with Harvey Dorfman, a brilliant, patient sports psychologist, to coax his gifts back. And even then only so far. Ankiel would pitch only five more times in his career, none as a starter. The rest of his career he spent in the outfield—mostly in center field, the position farthest away from the mound.

  Sigmund Freud himself wrote about how common it is for deficiencies, big and small, at a young age to birth toxic, turbulent attitudes in adulthood. Because we weren’t born rich enough, pretty enough, naturally gifted enough, because we weren’t appreciated like other children in the classroom, or because we had to wear glasses or got sick a lot or couldn’t afford nice clothes, we carry a chip on our shoulder. Some of us are like Richard III, believing that a deformity entitles us to be selfish or mean or insatiably ambitious. As Freud explained, “We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism,” thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived. (This was Tiger Woods to the detail.)