You Must Find The Stillness | Kindness Is Always The Right Response

Ryan talks about why it’s so important to find stillness, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. Get a copy of Ryan Holiday’s bestselling book “Stillness Is The Key” at The Painted Porch Bookshop. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. Go to Givewell. Org and enter Daily Stoic at checkout so they know we sent you. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y la Art of Living", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, luego un análisis de mí, y luego os enviaremos al mundo a hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  "Debes encontrar la quietud. Desde el momento en que la alarma se apaga, puede sentirse como si nos golpeara de repente una tormenta de fuego cruzado. Nuestra casa es caos, nuestro programa de trabajo es desagradable, nuestro jefe está gritando nuestras orejas. Nuestro coahora necesita que les demos a ver cómo hacer algo para el 17º momento. Estamos corriendo tarde para una reunión, estamos llegando a la red a un plazo. No estamos preparados para presentar a este cliente. Estamos supuestamente para reunirnos con ese amigo para la cena. Estamos sentados en el tráfico, uno por el que el tipo que no dejará el ojo. Y finalmente, cuando lo haces llegar al final del día, incluso el frío, tranquilo y oscuro es cortado por el llamido de alguien que ha agarrado su pierna en la pierna del sillón. Y ese llamido viene de tu boca después de estirar tu pierna en el camino de regreso de limpiar sus dientes.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hay apenas una cuerda que lo sostiene todo. Nunca hay suficiente sueño, nunca hay suficiente tiempo. Y aún así, para ser buen en nuestros trabajos, para ser bueno en este ser vivo, debemos encontrar tiempo para que podamos encontrar quietud, tiempo para reflejar, para enfocarnos. Necesitamos la calma que viene de la quietud para restaurar y reempezarnos. ¿Y dónde lo encontraremos? No será como Seneca y Marcus Aurelius nos recuerdan en huir al país o al mar. No será esos dos meses de vacaciones desagradables o cortando y corriendo. No, debemos encontrar la quietud dentro del caos. Puede que no se sienta como estos momentos de quietud pueden existir dentro de un mundo de gritos y gritos, con el calendario de Google estallado tan estrecho con reuniones y plazos que todo se ve como su propio paquete de estrellas."

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  But it can if we go within. We must find it early in the morning before the house and the world are awake. We must drink in those minutes after the kids are in bed. Really drink it in. Don't defer it in favor of Netflix. Sitting in an Uber, we can take some time with a journal. Finding the furthest parking spot in the garage, we can enjoy our walk into the office. No matter what is happening in the world, we must be like the rock with waves crashing around it. As Marcus Aurelius said, "It stands fast and still, and eventually the sea falls still as well, if only for a moment." You must find stillness every day. And the best place, the only place to reliably look for it is within yourself.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  I know all the good things in my life come from stillness. That's why I wrote a book about it, to understand it, to focus on it, to make it more of a priority in my own life. And Stillness is the Key came out in the fall of 2019, debuted at number one on the New York Times Bestseller list, and I got back to work on my other books. But if you haven't read it, I'd love for you to check it out. Stillness is the Key is, I think, one of my best books. I've heard from all sorts of cool people in different walks of life who've used it. It's the idea that the Stoics and the Buddhists were aligned on this key idea. And it's filled with strategies and exercises, I think, that will help you seek out and maintain some stillness in your own life. Check it out and get it anywhere books are sold. And you can get signed copies in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  Or you can come pick up a copy here in my bookstore, The Painted Portrait, just signed a whole bunch of them that went out on the shelf this morning.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  Kindness is always the right response.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Kindness is invincible, but only when it's sincere, with no hypocrisy or faking. For what even can the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness?

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  And if given the chance, you gently point out where they went wrong, right as they were trying to harm you? This is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 1118.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  What if the next time you were treated poorly, you didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back? What if you responded with unmitigated sincere kindness? What if you could, as the Bible says, "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you"? What kind of effect do you think that would have? The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and you better.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  Rudeness, meanness, cruelty, these are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength. You have that strength. Use it. I read a book recently, not recently, maybe six, seven months ago, about a book by James Peck, who was one of the Freedom Writers. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides. And I think we accidentally ordered a bunch of copies for the painted portion. I think we still have some, so check it out if you want to. But it's his memoir. James Peck was one of the few white Freedom Writers, one of the early white participants in passive resistance

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  to the horrendous injustice that was segregation and Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being beaten. He's attacked, all these different occasions. And how in the middle of being beaten, or bullied, or attacked, or whatever, he would often like say something to the person attacking him. Like he'd ask them a question, or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And that how often like this moment, and how often this was like a record scratch moment. Like in some cases, it would like shake the person out of their Sort of spiral of rage and hatred because like they just expected to get nastiness back.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  And when they didn't, it almost, it didn't always work, of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it? It's kind of like reminded them, oh, this is a human being I'm about to do this to, not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Nonviolence, of course, is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom, the Christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek. It's extraordinarily difficult to do. You know, the people in the civil rights movement, they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints. There was real training. One of the amazing stories, and I tell this actually in the new book, which I haven't announced yet, but there's a scene where Martin Luther King is attacked onstage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the civil rights movement. And he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi Party. And, and the crowd watches like, is he gonna fight back? Is he gonna lift his hands to protect themselves?

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  And they note the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. And again, that took, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets him there, not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have, you know, under fire. And then when, when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt. He takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to, not to neutralize this threat, which, you know, Malcolm X would say he ought to have done. But he has like a pleasant conversation with him. And again, that's a record scratch, like the amount of discipline that that takes.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself. But Seneca's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness. But to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered, that the forces of segregation, in many cases, had control of the police and the military.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  And then it was insane to try to fight that violence with violence. So he decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference. I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do. It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind.

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially, particularly unkindness. Let's meet that kindness with unkindness, see what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short and whose attention it catches. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.