by Ryan Holiday
Churchill demanded equal courage from those in his own house. When asked by his daughter-in-law what they could possibly do if the Germans invaded Britain, he growled and replied, “You can always get a carving knife from the kitchen and take one with you, can’t you?”
The British Empire had been responsible for despicable human rights violations, but Churchill knew irredeemable evil when he saw it, and its name was Nazism. Concentration camps and genocidal extermination still lay off in the future, but Churchill saw that no self-respecting leader, no country of virtue could make a deal with Hitler. Even if that was easier. Even if it might have protected Britain from invasion. At the same time, he was careful to manage the passions that war stirs up. “I hate nobody except Hitler,” he said “and that is professional.”
Churchill was an indefatigable workhorse from the day Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 until the end of the war in mid-1945. During the war, Clementine designed a special suit her husband could wear and sleep in. They were called his “siren suits”—though the British public endearingly referred to them as his “rompers”—and they saved him precious minutes getting dressed, allowing him to grab much-needed naps.
So, yes, he was out of balance in those years, working 110-hour weeks, and hardly ever still. It has been estimated that he traveled 110,000 miles by air and sea and car between 1940 and 1943 alone. During the war, it was said that Churchill kept “less schedule than a forest fire and had less peace than a hurricane.” But then again, he’d rested up for precisely this moment—and when it was an option, he did maintain his routine, even when he was living like a gopher in the underground bunker that was the Cabinet War Rooms. He didn’t have much time for painting during the war—nor many chances to be out in nature—but when he could he did. (One is a beautiful painting of a North African sunset, which he drove an extra five hours to capture after the major war powers met at Casablanca.)
It is unlikely that any single individual has ever done more to save or advance the notions sacred to Eastern or Western civilization. And how was Churchill rewarded for these labors, for all that he had done?
In 1945, he was pushed out of office. Upon hearing the news, Clementine attempted to console him by saying, “Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.” “It must be very well-disguised,” Churchill replied. He was wrong. She was right. As usual.
Not only because it allowed Churchill to write his final set of memoirs, The Second World War, which firmly established and taught the lessons that have prevented the world from veering toward suicide since, but because it allowed him once again to rest up and balance himself. We can see photos of him painting in Marrakech in 1948, in the south of France in the 1950s. In all he would paint some 550 paintings in his lifetime, 145 of them after the war.
It was, in the end, a life of much struggle and sacrifice, a lot of it thankless and misunderstood. It was productive, but at a high personal cost. The same tasks and responsibilities would have burned out and burned through a dozen normal people.
“Was it worth it?” a wearied hero had asked in Churchill’s only novel. “The struggle, the labor, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what?” He wrote that when he was young, when he had been busy and ambitious, and but not yet truly engaged in public service. In the future lay fifty-five years in Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nine years as prime minister. The years ahead would show him the true meaning of life and what it meant to really fight for causes that mattered. He experienced both triumph and disaster. And by the end of his life, he came to know that it was all worth it—and certainly all of us alive today are grateful for those labors.
Indeed, Churchill’s last words were confirmation of this fact:
The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making—once!
Epicurus once said that the wise will accomplish three things in their life: leave written works behind them, be financially prudent and provide for the future, and cherish country living. That is to say, we will be reflective, we will be responsible and moderate, and we will find time to relax in nature. It cannot be said that Churchill did not do these things well (even granting that he did live it up when he could afford to).
We compare this description to the three words Aristotle used to describe the lives of slaves in his time: “Work, punishment, and food.”
Which of these are we closer to in the modern world? Which of these is the path to happiness and stillness?
No one can afford to neglect the final domain in our journey to stillness. What we do with our bodies. What we put in our bodies. Where we dwell. What kind of routine and schedule we keep. How we find leisure and relief from the pressures of life.
If we are to be half as productive as Churchill, and manage to capture the same joy and zest and stillness that defined his life, there are traits we will need to cultivate. Each of us will 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—to do nothing when called for.
Get enough sleep and rein in our workaholism.
Commit to causes bigger than ourselves.
As they say, the body keeps score. If we don’t take care of ourselves physically, if we don’t align ourselves properly, it doesn’t matter how strong we are mentally or spiritually.
This will take effort. Because we will not simply think our way to peace. We can’t pray our soul into better condition. We’ve got to move and live our way there. It will take our body—our habits, our actions, our rituals, our self-care—to get our mind and our spirit in the right place, just as it takes our mind and spirit to get our body to the right place.
It’s a trinity. A holy one. Each part dependent on the others.
SAY NO
The advantages of nonaction.
Few in the world attain these.
—THE DAODEJING
When Fabius was dispatched to lead the Roman legions against Hannibal, he did nothing. He did not attack. He did not race out to drive the terrifying invader out of Italy and back to Africa.
You might think this was a sign of weakness—certainly most of Rome did—but in fact, it was all part of Fabius’s strategy. Hannibal was far from home, he was losing men to the elements and could not easily replace them. Fabius believed that if Rome just held out and did not engage in any costly battles, they would win.
But the mob couldn’t handle that kind of deliberate restraint. We’re the strongest army in the world, his critics said. We don’t sit around doing nothing when someone tries to attack us! So while Fabius was away attending a religious ceremony, they pressured his commander Minucius to attack.
It did not go well. He ran straight into a trap. Fabius had to rush to his rescue. And even then, Minucius was hailed as a hero for doing something, while Fabius was labeled a coward for holding himself back. When his term ended, the Roman assemblies voted to abandon what is now known as a “Fabian strategy” of mostly avoiding battle and wearing Hannibal down, in favor of greater aggression and more action.
It didn’t work. Only after the bloodbath at the Battle of Cannae, in which the Romans attacked Hannibal and lost nearly their entire army in a horrific rout, did people finally begin to understand Fabius’s wisdom. Now they could see that what had looked like an excess of caution was in fact a brilliant method of warfare. He had been buying time and giving his opponent a chance to destroy himself. Only now—and not a moment too soon—were they ready to listen to him.
While most great Romans were given honorific titles that highlighted their great victories or accomplishments in foreign lands, Fabius was later given one that stands
out: Fabius Cunctator.
The Delayer.
He was special for what he didn’t do—for what he waited to do—and has stood as an important example to all leaders since. Especially the ones feeling pressure from themselves or their followers to be bold or take immediate action.
In baseball, you make a name for yourself by swinging for the fences. Particularly for players from small, poor countries, showing your power as a home run hitter is how you get noticed by scouts and coaches. As they say in the Dominican Republic, “You don’t walk off the island.” Meaning, you hit your way off.
It’s like life. You can’t benefit from opportunities you don’t try to take advantage of.
But Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who has spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, has talked about just how problematic this lesson is for rookie players in the majors. They built their reputations, and therefore their identities, on swinging at every pitch they thought they could hit . . . and now they’re facing the best pitchers in the world. Suddenly, aggression is a weakness, not a strength. Now they have to get up there in front of millions of people, getting paid millions of dollars, and mostly not swing the bat. They have to wait for the perfect pitch.
What they have to learn, what the great hitter Sadaharu Oh himself learned in a series of complicated batting exercises designed by his Zen master and hitting coach, Hiroshi Arakawa, was the power of waiting, the power of precision, the power of the void. Because that’s what makes for a real pro. A truly great hitter—not just a swinger—needs quick hands and powerful hips, to be sure, but they must also possess the power of wu wei, or nonaction.
Wu wei is the ability to hold the bat back—waiting until the batter sees the perfect pitch. It is the yogi in meditation. They’re physically still, so that they can be active on a mental and spiritual level. That was also Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might have seemed like he wasn’t doing enough—that he wasn’t rushing to destroy his opponent—but he was rightly carving out the space and time to think, and time and space for the Russians to do the same thing. Practicing wu wei was precisely what Tiger Woods lost the ability to do as his work and sex addictions took control.
A disciplined action, that’s what John Cage called doing nothing in the performance instructions on 4′33″.
You don’t solve a maze by rushing through. You have to stop and think. You have to walk slowly and carefully, reining in your energy—otherwise you’ll get hopelessly lost. The same is true for the problems we face in life.
The green light is a powerful symbol in our culture. We forget what Mr. Rogers was trying to make us see—that the yellow light and the red light are just as important. Slow down. Stop. One recent study found that subjects would rather give themselves an electric shock than experience boredom for even a few minutes. Then we wonder why people do so many stupid things.
There is a haunting clip of Joan Rivers, well into her seventies, already one of the most accomplished and respected and talented comedians of all time, in which she is asked why she keeps working, why she is always on the road, always looking for more gigs. Telling the interviewer about the fear that drives her, she holds up an empty calendar. “If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work. Nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.”
It’s not just that there was never enough for Joan. It’s that our best and most lasting work comes from when we take things slow. When we pick our shots and wait for the right pitches.
Somebody who thinks they’re nothing and don’t matter because they’re not doing something for even a few days is depriving themselves of stillness, yes—but they are also closing themselves off from a higher plane of performance that comes out of it.
Spiritually, that’s hard. Physically, it’s harder still. You have to make yourself say no. You have to make yourself not take the stage.
A weaker Fabius would not have been able to resist attacking Hannibal, and all of history might have turned out differently. A long-distance runner who can’t pace himself. A money manager who can’t wait out a bear market. If they can’t learn the art of wu wei in their professions, they won’t succeed. If you can’t do it in your life, forget about success, you’ll burn out your body. And you don’t get another one of those!
We should look fearfully, even sympathetically, at the people who have become slaves to their calendars, who require a staff of ten to handle all their ongoing projects, whose lives seem to resemble a fugitive fleeing one scene for the next. There is no stillness there. It’s servitude.
Each of us needs to get better at saying no. As in, “No, sorry, I’m not available.” “No, sorry, that sounds great but I’d rather not.” “No, I’m going to wait and see.” “No, I don’t like that idea.” “No, I don’t need that—I’m going to make the most of what I have.” “No, because if I said yes to you, I’d have to say yes to everyone.”
Maybe it’s not the most virtuous thing to say “No, sorry, I can’t” when you really can but just don’t want to. But can you really? Can you really afford to do it? And does it not harm other people if you’re constantly stretched too thin?
A pilot gets to say, “Sorry, I’m on standby,” as an excuse to get out of things. Doctors and firemen and police officers get to use being “on call” as a shield. But are we not on call in our own lives? Isn’t there something (or someone) that we’re preserving our full capacities for? Are our own bodies not on call for our families, for our self-improvement, for our own work?
Always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.
In every situation ask:
What is it?
Why does it matter?
Do I need it?
Do I want it?
What are the hidden costs?
Will I look back from the distant future and be glad I did it?
If I never knew about it at all—if the request was lost in the mail, if they hadn’t been able to pin me down to ask me—would I even notice that I missed out?
When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to the things that matter.
TAKE A WALK
It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Nearly every afternoon the citizens of Copenhagen were treated to the strange sight of Søren Kierkegaard walking the streets. The cantankerous philosopher would write in the morning at a standing desk, and then around noon would head out onto the busy streets of the city.
He walked on the newfangled “sidewalks” that had been built for fashionable citizens to stroll along. He walked through the city’s parks and along the pathways of Assistens Cemetery, where he would later be buried. On occasion, he walked out past the city’s walls and into the countryside. Kierkegaard never seemed to walk straight—he zigged and zagged, crossing the street without notice, trying to always remain in the shade. When he had either worn himself out, worked through what he was struggling with, or been struck with a good idea, he would turn around and make for home, where he would write for the rest of the day.
Seeing Kierkegaard out walking surprised the residents of Copenhagen, because he seemed, at least from his writings, to be such a high-strung individual. They weren’t wrong. Walking was how he released the stress and frustration that his philosophical explorations inevitably created.
In a beautiful letter to his sister-in-law, who was often bedridden, and depressed as a result, Kierkegaard wrote of the importance of walking. “Above all,” he told her in 1847, “do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked my
self into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Kierkegaard believed that sitting still was a kind of breeding ground for illness. But walking, movement, to him was almost sacred. It cleansed the soul and cleared the mind in a way that primed his explorations as a philosopher. Life is a path, he liked to say, we have to walk it.
And while Kierkegaard was particularly eloquent in his writing about walking, he was by no means alone in his dedication to the practice—nor alone in reaping the benefits. Nietzsche said that the ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra came to him on a long walk. Nikola Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, on a walk through a city park in Budapest in 1882. When he lived in Paris, Ernest Hemingway would take long walks along the quais whenever he was stuck in his writing and needed to clarify his thinking. Charles Darwin’s daily schedule included several walks, as did those of Steve Jobs and the groundbreaking psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the latter of whom wrote that “I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos.” It was the physical activity in the body, Kahneman said, that got his brain going.
