Stillness Is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

  After a few sweet remarks about his family, Jordan pointed out a man in the audience named Leroy Smith, the player who had gotten Michael’s playing time some thirty-one years earlier. Jordan knew that many people thought that his getting cut in high school was a myth. “Leroy Smith was a guy when I got cut he made the team—on the varsity team—and he’s here tonight,” Michael explained. “He’s still the same six-foot-seven guy—he’s not any bigger—probably his game is about the same. But he started the whole process with me, because when he made the team and I didn’t, I wanted to prove not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach that picked Leroy over me, I wanted to make sure you understood—you made a mistake, dude.”

  It’s a remarkable window into Michael’s mind, for several reasons. First off, it shows how he had twisted a predictable decision into a major slight about his self-worth. Jordan hadn’t been cut from any team. He and Leroy had both tried out for a single spot on the varsity team. One had made it. That’s not getting “cut”—it’s expected that an underclassman won’t make the senior class team! Nor had it even been a referendum on his abilities. Leroy was six foot seven. Michael was five foot eleven at the time. It’s also so childishly self-absorbed. As if Leroy and his coach weren’t their own people, a teammate he could have been happy for, a mentor he could have learned from.

  Yet for decades Jordan had chosen to be mad about it.

  It’s almost palpable how uncomfortable the audience grew as the complaints grew increasingly personal and petty. At one point, Michael mentioned a remark that Jerry Krause made in 1997, supposedly saying that “organizations win championships,” not just individual players. Sneering at this minor—but true—observation of the Bulls’ general manager, Michael explained that he had specifically not invited Krause to the ceremony in retaliation. He mentioned with pride the time he kicked Pat Riley, the coach of the Lakers, the Knicks, and later the Heat, out of a hotel suite in Hawaii because he wanted to stay in it.

  Friends understood that Michael had intended for the speech to be helpful. Instead of uttering a few platitudes, he wanted to show just what it was that created a winning mentality. How tough it was. What it took. He wanted to illustrate how productive anger could be—how as a player each time he was slighted, each time he was underestimated, each time someone didn’t do things his way, it made him a better player.

  The problem is that he delivered almost the exact opposite message.* Yes, he had shown that anger was powerful fuel. He had also shown just how likely it is to blow up all over yourself and the people around you.

  There were undoubtedly moments in Jordan’s career when resentment had worked to his advantage and made him play better. It was also a form of madness that hurt him and his teammates (like Steve Kerr and Bill Cartwright and Kwame Brown, whom he physically fought or berated). It had cruelly wrecked the self-confidence of competitors like Muggsy Bogues (“Shoot it, you fucking midget,” he’d told his five-foot-three opponent while giving him a free shot in the ’95 playoffs). In training camp in 1989, Jordan threw a vicious elbow that knocked a rookie named Matt Brust unconscious, and ended the man’s hopes of an NBA career.

  Jordan’s game was beautiful, but his conduct was often savage and ugly.

  Was anger really the secret of Michael Jordan’s championships? (Did his anger get him that varsity spot he wanted the next year . . . or did growing four inches help?) Could it have actually been a parasitic by-product that prevented him from enjoying what he accomplished? (Tom Brady wins a lot without being mean or angry.)

  If history is any indication, leaders, artists, generals, and athletes 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. It was without a hint of self-awareness that Nixon—who hated Ivy Leaguers, hated reporters, hated Jews and so many other people—said these high-minded words to his loyal staffers in his last hours in the White House: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

  He was right. His own downfall proved it.

  The leaders we truly respect, who stand head and shoulders above the rest, have been motivated by more than anger or hate. From Pericles to Martin Luther King Jr., we find that great leaders are fueled by love. Country. Compassion. Destiny. Reconciliation. Mastery. Idealism. Family.

  Even in Jordan’s case, he was most inspiring not when he was trying to dominate someone but when he was playing for the love of the game. And his rings all came under the tutelage and coaching of Phil Jackson, known in basketball as the “Zen Master.”

  It would be unfair to say that Michael Jordan was as tortured or pained as Richard Nixon, or that he was utterly without joy or happiness. Still, the speech is striking. He had locked so much anger and pain up in a closet in his soul that, at some point, the doors burst open and the mess poured out.

  Seneca’s argument was that anger ultimately blocks us from whatever goal we are trying to achieve. While it might temporarily help us achieve success in our chosen field, in the long run it is destructive. How excellent is excellence if it doesn’t make us feel content, happy, fulfilled? It’s a strange bargain that winning, as Jordan illustrated, should require us to constantly think of the times we were made to feel like a loser. The reward for becoming world-class should not be that you are a walking open wound, a trigger that’s pulled a thousand times a day.

  And what of the people whose anger is more of a hot flash than a slow burn? Seneca once more:

  There is no more stupefying thing than anger, nothing more bent on its own strength. If successful, none more arrogant, if foiled, none more insane—since it’s not driven back by weariness even in defeat, when fortune removes its adversary it turns its teeth on itself.

  Anger is counterproductive. The flash of rage here, an outburst at the incompetence around us there—this may generate a moment of raw motivation or even a feeling of relief, but we rarely tally up the frustration they cause down the road. Even if we apologize or the good we do outweighs the harm, damage remains—and consequences follow. The person we yelled at is now an enemy. The drawer we broke in a fit is now a constant annoyance. The high blood pressure, the overworked heart, inching us closer to the attack that will put us in the hospital or the grave.

  We can pretend we didn’t hear or see things that were meant to offend. We can move slowly, giving extreme emotions time to dissipate. We can avoid situations and people (and even entire cities) where we know we tend to get upset or pissed off. When we feel our temper rising up, we need to look for insertion points (the space between stimulus and response). Points where we can get up and walk away. When we can say, “I am getting upset by this and I would like not to lose my cool about it,” or “This doesn’t matter and I’m not going to hold on to it.” We can think even of the Mr. Rogers verse about anger:

  It’s great to be able to stop

  When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,

  And be able to do something else instead

  And think this song

  As silly as those lyrics might seem to us in the moment, as our temper is boiling over, are they any worse than a grown adult losing their cool over some minor slight? Are they worse than saying or doing something that will haunt us, possibly forever?

  Not that regret minimization is the point of managing our temper, although it is an important factor. The point is that people who are driven by anger are not happy. They are not still. They get in their own way. They shorten legacies and short-circuit their goals.

  The Buddhists believed that anger was a kind of tiger within us, one whose claws tear at the body that houses it. To have a chance at stillness—and the clear thinking and big-picture view that defines it—we need to tame that tiger before it kills us. We have to beware of desire, but conquer anger, because anger hurts not just ourselves but many other people as
well. Although the Stoics are often criticized for their rigid rules and discipline, that is really what they are after: an inner dignity and propriety that protects them and their loved ones from dangerous passions.

  Clearly, basketball was a refuge for Michael Jordan, a game he loved and that provided him much satisfaction. But in the pursuit of winning and domination, he also turned it into a kind of raw, open wound, one that seemed to never stop bleeding or cause pain. One that likely cost him additional years of winning, as well as the simple enjoyment of a special evening at the Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  That can’t be what you want. That can’t be who you want to be.

  Which is why we must choose to drive out anger and replace it with love and gratitude—and purpose. Our stillness depends on our ability to slow down and choose not to be angry, to run on different fuel. Fuel that helps us win and build, and doesn’t hurt other people, our cause, or our chance at peace.

  ALL IS ONE

  All that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one—we are the parts of one great body.

  —SENECA

  In 1971, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell was launched into space. From 239,000 miles up, he stared down at the tiny blue marble that is our planet and felt something wash over him. It was, he said later, “an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

  So far away, the squabbles of the earth suddenly seemed petty. The differences between nations and races fell away, the false urgency of trivial problems disappeared. What was left was a sense of connectedness and compassion for everyone and everything.

  All Mitchell could think of, when he looked at the planet from the quiet, weightless cabin of his spaceship, was grabbing every selfish politician by the neck and pulling them up there to point and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

  Not that he was angry. On the contrary, he was the calmest and most serene he’d ever been. He wanted them—the leaders, the people who are supposed to work on behalf of their fellow citizens—to have the same realization he was having: the realization that we are all one, that we are all in this together, and that this fact is the only thing that truly matters.

  The Christian word for this term is agape. It is the ecstasy of love from a higher power, the sheer luck and good fortune of being made in that image. If you’ve ever seen the Bernini statue of Saint Teresa, you can get a sense of this feeling in the physical form. The caring smile of an angel thrusting an arrow into Teresa’s heart. The rays of golden sun shooting down from heaven. Teresa’s closed eyes and partly opened mouth, realizing, knowing the depth of love and connection that exists for her.

  Whether it comes from the perspective of space, a religious epiphany, or the silence of meditation, the understanding that we are all connected—that we are all one—is a transformative experience.

  Such quiet peace follows this . . . such stillness.

  With it, we lose the selfishness and self-absorption at the root of much of the disturbance in our lives.

  The Greeks spoke of sympatheia, the kind of mutual interdependence and relatedness of all things, past, present, and future. They believed that each person on this planet had an important role to play, and should be respected for it. John Cage came to understand something similar as he embraced his own quirky, unique style of music—like that four-minute-and-thirty-three-second song of silence—rather than trying to be like everyone else. “That one sees that the human race as one person,” he wrote, with each of us as an individual part of one single body, “enables him to see that originality is necessary, for there is no need for eye to do what hand does so well.”

  The truly philosophical view is that not only is originality necessary, but everyone is necessary. Even the people you don’t like. Even the ones who really piss you off. Even the people wasting their lives, cheating, or breaking the rules are part of the larger equation. We can appreciate—or at least sympathize with—them, rather than try to fight or change them.

  Robert Greene, known for his amoral study of power and seduction, actually writes in his book The Laws of Human Nature about the need to practice mitfreude, the active wishing of goodwill to other people, instead of schadenfreude, the active wishing of ill will. We can make an active effort to practice forgiveness, especially to those who might have caused those inner-child wounds we have worked to heal. We can seek understanding with those we disagree with. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all. To love all is to be at peace with all, including yourself.

  Take something you care about deeply, a possession you cherish, a person you love, or an experience that means a lot to you. Now take that feeling, that radiating warmth that comes up when you think about it, and consider how every single person, even murderers on death row, even the jerk who just shoved you in the supermarket, has that same feeling about something in their lives. Together, you share that. Not only do you share it, but you share it with everyone who has ever lived. It connects you to Cleopatra and Napoleon and Frederick Douglass.

  You can do the same with your pain. As bad as you might feel in a given moment, this too is a shared feeling, a connection with others. The man stepping outside to take a walk after an argument with his spouse. The mother worrying about her child, the one who seems to always be in trouble. The merchant stressing over where the money will come from—How will I keep going? Two siblings grieving the loss of a parent. The average citizen following the news, hoping their country will avoid an unnecessary war.

  No one is alone, in suffering or in joy. Down the street, across the ocean, in another language, someone else is experiencing nearly the exact same thing. It has always been and always will be thus.

  You can even use this to connect more deeply with yourself and your own life. The moon you’re looking at tonight is the same moon you looked at as a scared young boy or girl, it’s the same you’ll look at when you’re older—in moments of joy and in pain—and it’s the same that your children will look at in their own moments and their own lives.

  When you step back from the enormity of your own immediate experience—whatever it is—you are able to see the experience of others and either connect with them or lessen the intensity of your own pain. We are all strands in a long rope that stretches back countless generations and ties together every person in every country on every continent. We are all thinking and feeling the same things, we are all made of and motivated by the same things. We are all stardust. And no one needs this understanding more than the ambitious or the creative, since they live so much in their own heads and in their own bubble.

  Finding the universal in the personal, and the personal in the universal, is not only the secret to art and leadership and even entrepreneurship, it is the secret to centering oneself. It both turns down the volume of noise in the world and tunes one in to the quiet wavelength of wisdom that sages and philosophers have long been on.

  This connectedness and universality does not need to stop at our fellow man. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum recently pointed out the narcissism of the human obsession with what it means to be human. A better, more open, more vulnerable, more connected question is to ask what it means to be alive, or to exist, period. As she wrote:

  We share a planet with billions of other sentient beings, and they all have their own complex ways of being whatever they are. All of our fellow animal creatures, as Aristotle observed long ago, try to stay alive and reproduce more of their kind. All of them perceive. All of them desire. And most move from place to place to get what they want and need.

  We share much of our DNA with these creatures, we breathe the same air, we walk on the same land and swim in the same oceans. We are inextricably intertwined with each other—as are our fates.

  The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater ability we have
to understand and contribute to our environment, the less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate the larger ecosystem of which we are a part.

  Peace is when we realize that victory and defeat are almost identical spots on one long spectrum. Peace is what allows us to take joy in the success of others and to let them take joy in our own. Peace is what motivates a person to be good, to treat every other living thing well, because they understand that it is a way to treat themselves well.

  We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one.

  We are the same.

  Still, too often we forget it, and we forget ourselves in the process.

  ON TO WHAT’S NEXT . . .

  Very few go astray who comport themselves with restraint.

  —CONFUCIUS

  L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

  What’s essential is invisible to the eye.

  The quote that hung on Fred Rogers’s wall was actually only a partial quote. The rest appears in The Little Prince, the beautiful and surreal children’s book by the French aviator and World War II hero Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In it, the fox tells the little boy, “Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  First, we sought mental clarity. But quickly we realized that the soul must be in equally good order if we wish to achieve stillness. In concert with each other—clarity in the mind and in the soul—we find both excellence and unbreakable tranquility. It is with the heart and soul that we are able to surface important things that the eyes need to see.