PDF Summary:Stillness Is the Key, by Ryan Holiday

Stillness is not just the absence of motion—it’s a perceptible state of mind that’s been sought and recognized as valuable throughout all of history and across many belief systems. Ryan Holiday says stillness already exists in all of us, and with some intentional practice, we can reap its rewards. In Stillness Is the Key, Holiday takes us through the dimensions of the mind, soul, and body, explaining how to cultivate stillness in each area to enrich our lives, guide us to make better decisions, and encourage a sense of connectedness to everything around us.

In this guide, we’ll explain what Holiday means by stillness, and discuss how stilling your mind requires also stilling your body and soul. We’ll examine each of those domains in turn, and explore Holiday’s techniques for cultivating stillness in each. Along the way, we’ll draw connections to principles from Stoicism, Buddhism, and Taoism and expand on Holiday’s ideas by comparing them with other spiritual and self-help books.

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He also points out that engaging in creative endeavors helps keep us in the present. Presence is one thing that characterizes artists, because being creative means being in the “flow” of the moment. So, a regular practice of journaling, focusing on the present moment, and being creative can help keep your mind clear and still.

(Shortform note: Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, in his book Flow, that the culture you live in can affect your experience of flow. A culture that places a high value on creativity and personal enrichment is more amenable to achieving a flow state than one that emphasizes productivity and conformity to rigid norms. Additionally, people with attention disorders may have a harder time achieving this state. If your culture or mind are not naturally conducive to the flow state, you may find it easier to achieve via a movement-oriented activity, such as yoga, martial arts, dancing, or even sex.)

Strengthen Your Mind

To keep your mind still, you’ll need to maintain mental strength. Holiday says cultivating wisdom and humble confidence can help keep your mind strong and still. Wisdom and confidence go hand in hand, because as you become wise you grow more confident in a genuine way, rather than having insecurities manifested as egotism.

Although egotism may look like confidence from the outside, it's really the opposite. Egotistical and insecure people have very unsettled minds. They’re constantly consumed with their insecurities and perceived flaws and are driven by the need to disguise or compensate for them. These are mental weaknesses, where stillness requires mental strength, which gives you confidence. So, Holiday says it’s essential to cultivate a humble kind of confidence through acquiring wisdom.

Your Ego Gets in Your Way

Holiday’s 2016 book, Ego Is the Enemy, addresses the distinction between egotism and humble confidence more deeply. He argues that ego drives people to focus too much on themselves, which hinders progress toward your life goals in a few ways:

• It shifts your focus from the tasks you need to achieve to your own self-image.

• You become so concerned with looking good to others that you fear taking risks because you don’t want to be seen as a failure.

• You can be so self-centered and prideful that you can’t take feedback or criticism that might help you.

• Your ego can blind you to your own faults, keeping yourself from improving in those areas.

One key to overcoming your ego is to commit to being a lifelong learner. Always humbly admit that you still have more to learn.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Socrates questioned everything, because he recognized how much he didn’t know. Like Socrates, you must be open-minded and humble, and acknowledge your own ignorance, in order to acquire wisdom. Some of the recommendations Holiday gives for increasing your wisdom are:

• Seek out wise teachers and their advice.
• Read books on a variety of topics with an open mind.
• Seek out new experiences that are outside of your comfort zone.
• Learn new skills.
• Contemplate the big philosophical questions in life.

He says you should be patient with yourself because seeking wisdom can be challenging, cause confusion, and even be unpleasant. Learning new things may dissolve your whole worldview, but you have to push through it. Think of it as exercise for your brain. It can feel painful before it feels better, but eventually your mind will become stronger and this will make you more confident.

Practice Reconsideration

Social scientist Adam Grant, in Think Again, agrees with Holiday about the value of being open to new knowledge and beliefs. He says reconsideration—the ability to analyze and question your own beliefs—is an essential life skill that can benefit you in many ways. Some of the benefits of reconsideration include:

• Higher quality interaction with others: You can have more productive and engaging conversations with a wider range of people on a wider range of topics and learn more from them.

• Greater self-awareness and humility: When you become aware of your own biases and assumptions, it makes you a more self-aware and humble person.

• An expanded mind: Being open to new ideas instills a deeper love of learning, which cultivates a sense of openness and adventure.

Learning to practice reconsideration requires changing your mindset to think of your current beliefs as “hypotheses” instead of truths. Then, using that framework, you can begin to investigate all the evidence for and against that belief in a neutral way, as if you were doing scientific experimentation. As in all scientific studies, sometimes the hypothesis is proven correct, and sometimes it’s proven false. You must be open to either possibility.

Stilling the Soul

A clear, calm, and strong state of mind works in unison with a healthy and virtuous spiritual state. Cultivating stillness in the domain of the soul involves working on the deepest parts of yourself. You must confront and heal your spiritual wounds, cultivate virtue, and connect to something beyond yourself. Holiday says doing this soul work is the key to happiness and contentment, which are at the core of stillness.

Heal Your Soul From Toxicity

Cultivating stillness in the mind first requires addressing the negative inputs there. Similarly, to grow spiritually, you should first address the negativity you hold in your soul, such as childhood trauma, anger, desire, and dissatisfaction.

Holiday says that everyone has residual pain from childhood experiences and that you should learn to recognize and heal that pain through self-reflection, self-love, and therapy. We often react to life’s situations from this wounded place, so understanding the roots of our childhood pain will help us avoid that. One way to think about breaking generational patterns of trauma, Holiday suggests, is to think about what you didn’t get as a child, and commit to giving more of that.

Another problem we have in the realm of the soul is toxic emotions. Holiday says the following emotions particularly trip us up:

• Desire: Lust and desire enslave us. We’re never really free if we can’t control our urges. Envy is the most common type of desire that entraps people. When you face temptation, take time to think about the consequences of giving in. Noticing your temptations and resisting them develops spiritual strength and will help you avoid regret.
• Dissatisfaction: Know when you have enough and be content with it so you’re not always chasing “more.” You can’t have peace and stillness while craving more wealth, material possessions, power, and other worldly pursuits.
• Anger: Anger is a destructive force. People who are angry can’t be happy and at peace. We don’t need to just avoid anger—we need to totally defeat it within ourselves. Calming anger requires responding differently to situations. Slow down, take time to process, and react with stillness and clarity instead.

Tame the Tiger Within You

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh discusses dealing with these kinds of toxic emotions in his book Taming the Tiger Within. He offers some techniques for “transforming” negative emotions, which he likens to taming a tiger that might otherwise kill you. He says you should not deal with anger and frustration by aggressive methods such as hitting things or yelling. This would only be feeding the tiger, as it’s essentially training yourself to deal with anger through aggression. Rather, Hanh says you should transform those negative emotions into positive ones.

One way to transform your emotions is to observe and alter your physical state and allow the inside to follow. When you’re feeling toxic emotions, look at yourself in a mirror. Note how unpleasant your face looks. Use this to motivate yourself to transform your face into looking more calm, peaceful, and beautiful. Take slow, calm, deep breaths and smile at yourself. Keep mindfully breathing and smiling until you have calmed your energy and transformed your feelings and your face into a pleasant state. Doing this regularly will begin to tame that tiger within you.

Become Virtuous

Without a strong moral code to live by, Holiday says you’ll be confused and never have peace. For this reason, stillness requires cultivating virtue in your life, as a means of enriching your soul and guiding your behavior.

A virtuous life is worth living for its own sake, Holidays says, and you can cultivate virtue in yourself by intentionally defining your moral code. This means you should take time to really contemplate what’s important to you. Ask yourself the following:

• How do I want to live?
• What do I stand for?
• What makes life worth living?
• What values would I rather die than not embody?

When you’ve answered these questions and know clearly what your moral principles are, you can call on them in decision-making and use them to guide you through confusion or difficulty. And when you abide by them virtuously, you’ll feel good about yourself and your life.

Holiday says that relationships are one of the most soul-enriching things available to us. He says everything is meaningless and empty if we don’t have love and others to share it with. In fact, stillness is actually more for other people than for ourselves. In addition to providing nourishment for your soul, good relationships will require you to practice your virtuous behaviors, and therefore continue to grow.

How to Identify Your Values

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that most self-help books give advice for reaching your life goals but fail to discuss how to actually define what your goals should be. He says identifying the right goals for your life rests on clearly defining your values, and he gives advice on thinking through this process.

• Pay attention to your emotions. Notice what makes you feel happy, sad, angry, and so on.

• When you have an emotional response to something, ask yourself why this thing is making you feel this way.

• Identify the values underlying that feeling.

For example, let’s say you notice a particular news story makes you feel unusually angry. When you stop and ask yourself why this anger is welling up, you recognize it’s because the story involved an incident of racism. This probably indicates that a sense of equality and justice in society is a deep value you hold. Make note of each of these values as you discover them, and use them as a basis for deciding what kinds of life goals to pursue.

Manson does note that many people are not in touch with their emotions due to social conditioning. If you think that’s the case for you, this work would be better undertaken with the help of a therapist.

Connect With Something Greater

Another important piece of soul development, according to Holiday, is connecting with something greater than yourself. You can think of this as God, a universal energy, or any kind of higher power. He says without a belief that there is something greater beyond us, life is meaningless.

Holiday says that connecting to a higher power contributes to stillness in three ways:

1. It allows you to relax, knowing that things are being taken care of on a grander scale. Holiday says putting ourselves at the center of the universe is egotistical, and believing only in the material world leads to nihilism, fragility, and depression. When you remember that there is a higher power and a higher purpose or guiding force in life, you can relax and feel at peace. Putting yourself in perspective of the vastness of the universe can quiet your mind and allow for stillness.
2. It gives you a sense of oneness with everything. When you recognize the interconnectedness of all of humanity and all of life—past, present and future—you feel that you’re one with your ancestors and with all of the living world. This kind of connectedness encourages humility and empathy, which lead to forgiveness and understanding.
3. It empowers you to accept death without fear. Don’t try to escape death, Holiday says. Knowing how to live well also teaches you how to die well. We spend so much of our life in fear or denial of death instead of living life to the fullest. Remember, your life will end in permanent stillness, so practice it in preparation.

Connecting to Something Greater for Atheists

If you’re someone who believes in God, Holiday’s advice in this section is likely straightforward and easily applied. But how does someone who doesn’t believe in any “higher power” connect to something greater than themselves? If that’s the case for you, you might think about the scientific concept of “energy” as equivalent to the concept of “spirit” and contemplate the fact that everything in the universe is actually made of energy. Quantum physics has revealed that even the solid matter that makes up you and everything around you is really energy at its core. And on that smallest level, there is quite literally no separation between anything.

This might not give you the sense that something greater is “in control” but it certainly points out that you are interconnected with everything in the vast universe. And the law of conservation of energy tells us that energy can never be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. This means that all of the energy that comprises you will exist in some form even after death.

Stilling the Body

Finally, Holiday says if you don’t take care of your body, what you do with your mind and spirit won’t matter. Your body carries you through this world, so you can’t get your mind and soul into shape without using your body to do it. For example, appreciating nature requires physically taking yourself out there. Practicing stillness in your body involves optimizing your physical space, practicing healthy habits, and using your body to pursue the right kinds of activities.

Create Order to Optimize Your Space

According to Holiday, the first step in preparing your body for stillness is creating order in the space you inhabit. He says you should start with building a daily routine and following it. Ritualistic behavior enriches your life experience, he says. Ritual isn’t about “superstition,” it’s about the psychological effects it has on us. When you have a general routine, you free your mind from having to make choices every day about what to do, eat, wear, and so on, at any given time. Limit the amount of decisions you have to make every day by making your life orderly and predictable.

Next, Holiday says you should declutter your physical space. Hoarding material possessions enslaves us, he says, because those possessions come with more responsibility and the fear of losing them. And when your identity is tied up with your stuff, losing that stuff can be disastrous for your mental state and interrupt your stillness. The more you own, Holiday says, the more cluttered your space and your mind will be.

Decluttering Your Home

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo outlines a straightforward process for clearing clutter from your home.

Kondo says to sort all of your items into these five specific categories: clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and sentimental items. Go through the piles in that order, beginning with clothing.

For each pile, pick up every item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If it does, set it aside to keep. If it doesn’t, thank the item for being a part of your life and put it into a pile to discard or donate. By acknowledging that each discarded item has performed a service in your life (and showing gratitude for it) you release the guilt of letting it go, which brings a sense of stillness to your mind while also creating order in your home.

After you’ve gone through every item in every pile, organize everything in your “keep” pile neatly in your home, and get rid of everything in your “discard” pile.

Slow Down and Take Care of Yourself

In addition to treating your space with respect, it’s crucial that you treat your body with reverence, and that means giving it the rest and nourishment it needs. Slowing your body down, Holiday says, will allow your mind to slow down too. Too many people are wrapped up in being “busy” all the time, and many place too much importance on their jobs. Holiday says to remember that you are not your job—learn to separate from it and prioritize other things. Don’t fall prey to the “glorification of busy.” That’s a life of servitude.

Holiday reminds us that time is the most important thing we have in life. In fact, time is literally your life. For every task you do, remember that you’re trading a piece of your life for it. Ask yourself if each to-do is worth trading some of your life away, and if it’s not, then say no.

(Shortform note: If you need help getting out of that “glorification of busy” mindset, Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism explains how to “do less but better.” His process involves identifying what’s actually essential on your to-do list. He says when you try to do too many things, you end up doing none of them well, and your priorities become displaced. This means you trade the more important and meaningful activities in life—like spending time with family and getting rest—for someone else’s priorities.)

Holiday also encourages you to:

Take walks: Holiday says the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that sitting still would lead to illness and that moving the body was necessary for keeping the mind agile as well. You should regularly go out and walk with attention and intention, slowly and deliberately. Notice the sights, smells, sounds, and so on, and let your stresses fade away as you do.

(Shortform note: Although the idea of moving your body to cultivate stillness may seem counterintuitive, Buddhists have long practiced various forms of “moving meditation.” Holiday’s example of walking slowly and mindfully is essentially walking meditation. Other forms of moving meditation include yoga, as well as tai chi and Qigong, which are both slow, graceful martial art forms. The reason moving the body can encourage stillness of mind is because your mind is kept from wandering by focusing it fully on your movements.)

Seek Solitude: Solitude and silence help cultivate stillness. You must find alone time. Find time and space to physically be alone on some regular basis. Holiday acknowledges that it can be hard to find the time or afford to go away somewhere, but you should prioritize it as much as you can. Even if it’s just getting up earlier, before others in your household wake up, find the time. (Shortform note: If finding alone time is hard, think about how you schedule other tasks in your day and pencil your alone time in among them. Use your calendar or another scheduling tool to block off small amounts of time as you plan your day or week, and commit that time to a restful and solitary activity.)

Stay well-rested: Prioritize getting enough sleep. It’s how we recharge ourselves and keep our bodies healthy and minds clear. (Shortform note: Americans in particular have earned a global reputation for overworking and not getting enough rest and sleep. In most parts of Europe, rest is highly valued. In France, for instance, most workers take off the entire month of August. And in Spain, a midday siesta (nap) is practiced by almost half of the population.)

Spend Your Time Wisely

Finally, Holiday says you should consider carefully what you do with your spare time. How you carry yourself through this world and what you devote yourself to will affect your whole life experience. To encourage stillness throughout your body, mind, and soul, you must fully engage with the world in some meaningful way.

Holiday says you can become more engaged with the world by taking up hobbies. He says to devote some regular amount of time to artistic or intellectual pursuits. Doing this puts your body and mind in harmony, and puts you in a state of “flow,” which is essentially a state of stillness. Don’t spend your downtime binging on TV and video games. Instead, spend your free time improving yourself.

Lastly, Holiday says you should avoid escapism. Too many people try to constantly run from one thing to the next, filling their minds with junk, to hide from their deeper thoughts. Some people even try to physically flee their problems by going somewhere else, through constant travel for instance. Holiday cautions that you can’t escape despair when it’s in your own mind. An exciting vacation may temporarily suppress it, but it’ll be there when you get back, and worse. He says you need to be still and let it surface so you can examine it. Don’t try to escape your life—create a life you don’t need to escape from.

Avoid Escapism

Psychologists say mental escape from our lives can be healthy or unhealthy, and the difference is sometimes a matter of moderation. For example, drinking one glass of wine or watching a TV show to wind down at the end of a stressful work day can be a harmless strategy to calm your mind. But if you feel like you need alcohol every day to cope with life, or you spend every weekend binging Netflix or scrolling social media, you may be engaging in unhealthy escapism. In these cases, you may be substituting that coping mechanism for something that could improve your life—such as stronger relationships, exercise, or spending time in nature.

To evaluate whether your escapist activities are healthy or unhealthy, observe how they truly make you feel. Do you feel energized, joyful, and inspired after an hour on social media? Or does it bring up insecurity or anger, or make you feel energetically depleted? If it’s the latter, try substituting that time with another activity, like doing a craft project or going for a walk. Then notice how that makes you feel. Soon, you’ll become more acutely aware of which activities enrich your life and which ones diminish it.