You Must Attack The Day | Stillness Is The Key Summarized In 5 Minutes

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  You must attack the day.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  In Meg Mason's hilarious and moving novel, Sorrow and Bliss, and I interviewed her recently on the Daily Stoic Podcast, Patrick tries to convince his wife Martha, who struggles with depression, to get up and have some fun. "We have to attack the day," he tells her, which was a reference to a podcast they had listened to. And in it, the guest had explained the need to attack the day so it doesn't attack you. This becomes a helpful, though somewhat contentious, mantra between the two characters, as it was in its own way for Marcus Aurelius. Isn't that what Marcus Aurelius is doing at the opening of Book Five of Meditations? Trying to convince himself that he has to get up and do what his nature demands, that he has to attack the dawn to get what he can from life. And

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  yet, this was also quite difficult for Marcus due to his very real struggles with insomnia. Of course, in the ancient world, they had no understanding of these things, be they depression or insomnia. They thought it was all simply a matter of willpower, which it certainly is not. In the novel, Patrick thinks he can simply cheer or encourage his wife into getting it together, when in fact, it's so much more complicated than that. As Meg Mason explained in her interview on the Daily Stoic Podcast, "For a person suffering from depression, even the thought of refilling an ice tray in the freezer might be too much." All of which is to say, yes, we must attack the day, but we must also understand that

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  some people are being attacked by the day. It's not their fault. It might not even be visible. It may well be incomprehensible. But they're having a hard time. It's not their fault. And we need to be patient and empathetic with them. We need to support them, and we need to protect them.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  I still remember where I was when I had the idea for Stillness is the Key. I was walking with my family in Bastrop State Park. And you know, you just sort of get a hit. You don't know where ideas come from or why, why the muses visit them upon you. But I have found that almost every book I have ever written is a book I desperately needed. It was something I needed to explore and in exploring it, learned a lot myself. Seneca says, "We learn as we teach." I've learned so much writing my books and stillness being, I think, an important reset, an important philosophy shift in my own life that shifted who I am, how I think about things, how I live my life. It certainly set me up, you know, to think that I was writing Stillness is the Key in,

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  in 2018. It came out in the fall of 2019. And then to go into the pandemic, this sort of moment of forced stillness for so many of us. I don't know if I would have been in a position to survive and thrive. I don't, I think I would describe that, that the last few years I've thrived in that sense. I don't think I would have been in a position to do that had I not gone through the experience of writing Stillness is the Key. But what does that idea mean? What is stillness? What is it the key to? That's what I want to talk about in today's episode. I'm going to summarize Stillness is the Key in five minutes. Cause I think stillness is the most important force in the world.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's certainly the source of not just my best work, but my happiest moments. And I'll give you this quote from Seneca that I think captures it. He says, "You may be sure that you are at peace with yourself when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaninged din." In this episode, I'm going to summarize that book, number one New York Times bestselling book, Stillness is the Key, that took me years to write in just a few minutes for you. So enjoy it. You can check out the book at anywhere books are sold. There's an audiobook version, ebook version. We have signed copies in the Daily Stoic store and of course, at thepaintedporch.com.

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  It hit me a couple of years ago that of all my happiest moments, all my most successful moments, when I did my best work, they all had one thing in common, this idea of stillness. Even though I was active, even though I was often doing things, that everything kind of had slowed down. Everything was clearer. I was operating on a different plane. Now, there's a lot of words for this. Call it flow state. Cal Newport calls it deep work. The Stoic concept is stillness. Marcus Aurelius talks about being like the rock that the waves crash over. And eventually, even the raging sea falls still around. And so that's the idea in my book, Stillness is the Key. It's a book that debuted in number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  I've talked about it everywhere, from Google to NBA teams. I think you'll really like it, but I'm going to give you this book in five minutes. Hopefully, you'll have time to read it. But if not, I just want you to leave with the ideas of why stillness is so important and what it can do for you.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  The first part of the book is the domain of the mind, mental stillness. I open the book with this story of Seneca. Seneca is trying to write in Rome, and there's all this crazy noise around him. He's in this apartment, and you can hear yelling on the street below. By the way, also, his life is falling apart. And Seneca writes, "I have toughened my nerves against this kind of thing." He says, "I force myself to concentrate. All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there's no disturbance within." And he says, "You will know that you have stillness when no noise reaches you, when nothing shakes you." But that's like the hardest thing to do in the world. Blaise Pascal said, "All of the ills of humanity come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone." And so in the first part of the book, I talk about managing your inputs.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  Who do you let in? What information sources are you getting? Talk about journaling. And Frank talks about how paper is more patient than people. This is really important. Talk about emptying the mind. I talk about cultivating silence. You need quiet. You also need wisdom. You need study. You need to read. And then finally, I talk about letting go, right? At a certain point, you have to make your decision. You have to do your best and understand the results are not up to you.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  Then the next discipline, which is the spirit, the emotion. And I tell the story of Tiger Woods, who was brilliant, but spiritually was not just bankrupt, but utterly out of control and eventually ruins himself. His father used to refer to enough as the E-word. Imagine how much that would screw you up. And so, really, the second part of the book is about this stuff. Our emotions, our urges, our desires, right? You could be locked in and focused, but if you crave unlimited amounts of money or fame, you're also not going to be focused and do good work. You want to do great work from a place of fullness, not emptiness, not a place of desire and temptation, but a place of, "I'm good enough, I'm doing my best, that is enough." And then, the last thing I talk about in this section of the book is really just appreciating

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  beauty and the wonder of the world around us. Going out in nature, it stills you, it calms you down, because you realize how small you are in comparison to the immensity of the universe.

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  The final domain in the pursuit of stillness is the physical domain. So in the third part of the book, I talk about Winston Churchill, who was ambitious, who was a striver, who was always pushing, and yet, was a remarkable creature of habit and routine. He fell in love with painting. Painting saves Churchill's life. How do we have a routine? How do we have hobbies? How do we have physical practices that, by keeping us active, actually slow down and still the mind? A key part of the physical domain for me is, what do you say no to so you can say yes to the things that matter? So you can say yes to stillness. And then, we have too much stuff. We wonder why we don't have stillness. We're being encroached by all of our possessions. The stuff we own ends up owning us. But look, all the philosophies of the ancient world, from the Stoics to the Christians,

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  Confucians, the Buddhists, they spoke of stillness as this powerful force, one of the most powerful forces on the earth. You know, it's the ability to slow down, clarify your thinking, to center your soul, to direct your effort, to be steady while the world spins. So stillness, to me, is the secret to elite performance. It's the peace that makes room for happiness. It's the key to everything that matters. The best things in my life have come from stillness. The best work in my life has come from stillness. The question is, the idea in the book, and I do hope you check it out, is, how can you find it? What would you be capable of doing if you had that stillness?

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.