Stillness Is the Key
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller & Wall Street Journal Bestseller In The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy to show why slowing down is the secret weapon for those charging ahead. All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you. In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus. Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity. More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever.
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Community Reviews
A very useful handbook for surviving the sticks and stones that life throws at you, including viewing the pandemic in a more optimistic way.
big thank you to Heavin for gathering up her blankets and delicious food from Christ Kitchen to host us last week around the fire outside. We explored her chickens and ducks (Sarah M. wrangled a grown hen and may have gotten pooped on by a chick! Never a dull moment!) kittens and dog and a chucker as well! Life is fun in the “country”.
We had a great time discussing the present state of our lives in the lingering pandemic and the ways in which it informed our reading and internalization of Stillness is the Key. We talked a lot about how the pandemic forced the “busyness” out of our lives, and how many of us have found relief in that relief from time constrained obligations packing our calendars. We have found time to play video games with family and grow gardens and just have more time NOT in the car running from activity to activity managing the stress and anxiety of too much to do.
We also talked about how the book explored some tensions “seemingly” at the heart of many of the tenets … like how does letting go intense drive to succeed in favor of emptying the mind or finding work-life balance LEAD to true success. Or how does letting go of an attachment to things lead to more enjoyment of them. Or how we need to feel our difficult feelings, but not dwell on them, in order to move beyond them.
The book called attention to the habits and patterns, often destructive, that are formed in our earliest years, and how reflection on those responses can help heal the pain and free us from allowing that scared vulnerable child to run our adult lives.
“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 the 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.”
I enjoyed the read. Lots of the information in there was stuff we had encountered in other realms. And I often wished that it would go deeper (each chapter could practically be a book of its own). But it was a good introduction to a lot of ideas, and a very accessible read for all levels (in other words … maybe your teens could read it too!)
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