Stillness is The Key by Ryan Holiday

I finished this book in May 2025. I recommend this book 10/10.

Why you should read this book:

This book is a combination of Stoic philosophy, stories of John Kennedy, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates, and wraps up with how to be more still inside in a modern world. This book is a recipe on how to slow down within and realize that a master doesn't ever rush to check email or Slack. This is my favorite book from Ryan Holiday.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. There is only now; nothing lives in the past or in the future besides reminiscing or anxiety. Love is only now.

2. Slow down within. Beauty and stillness is in the small things. You already live the life you want, why rush through it.

3. A Master don't rush—they follow a system. Let's wait answering the email until tomorrow. You can't think while checking Slack or LinkedIn at the same time.

   
   

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P14. Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.

• P27. Tolstoy observed that love can't exist off in the future. Love is only real if it's happening right now. If you think about it, that's true for basically everything we think, feel, or do. The best athletes in the biggest game are completely there. They are within themselves, within the now. Remember, there's no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment.

• P43. Whatever you face, whatever you're doing will require, first and foremost, that you don't defeat yourself. That you don't make it harder by overthinking, by needless doubts, or by second-guessing. The space between your ears—that's yours. You don't just have to control what gets in. You also have to control what goes on in there. You have to protect it from yourself, from your own thoughts. Not with sheer force but rather with a kind of gentle, persistent sweeping. Be the librarian who says "Shhh!" to the rowdy kids or tells the jerk on his phone to please take it outside. Because the mind is an important and sacred place. Keep it clean and clear. (Chop wood—Carry water.)

• P67. Ask questions like Socrates. Hear everyone's voice. Seek wisdom by listening to everyone.

• P79. The closer we get to mastery, the less we care about specific results. The more collaborative and creative we are able to be, the less we will tolerate ego or insecurity. The more at peace we are, the more productive we can be. Only through stillness are the vexing problems solved. Only through reducing our aims are the most difficult targets within our reach. (It's the pro-golfer who is only aware of how he strokes the ball. It focuses on this moment, how you behave and act to the people around you, and let the future unfold as it may.)

• P100. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. What do we stand for? What do we believe to be essential and important? What are we really living for? Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our hearts, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, come between us and that self-knowledge. Confucius said that virtue is a kind of polestar. It not only provides guidance to the navigator but attracts fellow travelers, too. Epicurus, who has been unfairly branded by history as a hedonist, knew that virtue was the way to tranquility and happiness. In fact, he believed that virtue and pleasure were two sides of the same coin. As he said:

  • It is impossible to live a pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely, it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. A person who does not have a pleasant life is not living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely, the person who does not have these virtues cannot live pleasantly.

• P119. The writers Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, were once at a party in a fancy neighborhood outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of some boring billionaire, Vonnegut began to needle his friend. "Joe," he said, "how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?" "I got something he can never have," Heller replied. "And what on earth could that be?" Vonnegut asked. "The knowledge that I've got enough."

• P121. In a way, this is a curse of one of our virtues. No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire—or the need—for more is often at odds with happiness. Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process. There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things as they are, particularly when that person has objectively done so much. The creep of more, more, more is like a hydra. Satisfy one—lop off the bucket list—and two more grow in its place.

• P124. You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you've always had. If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign.

• P126. What do we want more of in life? That's the question. It's not accomplishments. It's not popularity. It's moments when we feel like we are enough. More presence. More clarity. More insights. More truth. More stillness.

• P128. The trackless woods. A quiet child, lying on her belly, reading a book. The clouds cutting over the wing of an airplane, it's exhausted passengers all asleep. A man reading in his seat. A woman sleeping. A stewardess resting her feet. The rosy fingertips of dawn coming up over the mountain. A song on repeat. That song's beat, lining up exactly with the rhythm of events. The pleasure of getting an assignment in before the deadline, the temporary quiet of an empty inbox. This is stillness.

• P131. It is better to find beauty in all places and things. because it does surround us., And will nourish us if we let it. The soft paw prints of a cat on the dusty trunk of a car. The hot steam wafting from the vents on a New York City morning. The smell of asphalt just as the rain begins to fall. The thud of a fist fitting perfectly into an open hand. The sound of a pen signing a contract, binding two parties together. The courage of a mosquito sucking blood from a human who can so easily crush it. A basket full of vegetables from the garden. The hard right angels that passing trucks cut out of the dropping branches of trees next to a busy road. A floor filled with a child's toys arranged in the chaos of exhausted enjoyment. A city arranged the same way, the accumulation of hundreds of years of spasmodic, independent development. Are you starting to see how this works? It's ironic that stillness is rare and fleeting in our busy lives because the world creates an inexhaustible supply of it. It's just that nobody's looking.

• P133. There is peace in this. It is always available to you. Don't let the beauty of life escape you. See the world as the temple that it is. Let every experience be church-like. Marvel at the fact that any of this exists—that you exist. Even when we are killing each other in pointless wars, even when we are killing ourselves with pointless work, we can stop and bathe in the beauty that surrounds us always. Let it calm you. Let it cleanse you.

• P137. If we told a Zen Buddhist from Japan in the twelfth century that in the future everyone could count on greater wealth and longer lives but that in most cases those gifts would be followed by a feeling of utter purposeless and dissatisfaction, do you think they would want to trade places with us? Because that doesn't sound like progress.

• P188. 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, 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.

• P197. In our own search for beauty and what is good in life, we would do well to head outside and wander around. In an attempt to unlock a deeper part of our consciousness and access a high level of our mind, we would do well to get our body moving and our blood flowing. Stress and difficulty can knock us down. Sitting at our computers, we are overwhelmed with information, with emails, with one thing after another. Should we just sit there and absorb it? Should we sit there with the sickness and let it fester? No. Should we get up and throw ourselves into some other project—constructive, like cleaning, or cathartic, like picking a fight? No. We shouldn't do any of that. We should get walking.

• P204. Most people wake up to face the day as an endless barrage of bewildering and overwhelming choices, one right after another. What do I wear? What should I eat? What should I do first? What should I do after that? What sort of work should I do? Should I scramble to address this problem or rush to put out this fire? Needless to say, this is exhausting. It is a whirlwind of conflicting impulses, incentives, inclinations, and external interruptions. It is no path to stillness and hardly a way to get the best out of yourself.

• P205. A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred.

• P217. In a more emulatable form of Merton's retreat, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has, twice a year for many years now, taken what he calls a "think week." He spends seven days alone in a cabin in the forest. There, physically removing himself from the daily interruptions of his work, he can really sit down and think. He might be alone there, but he is hardly lonely. Gates read—sometimes hundreds of papers—quietly for hours at a time, sometimes in print, sometimes off computer monitors that look out over the water. He reads books, too, in the library adorned with a portrait of the Author Victor Hugo. He writes long memos to people across his organization. The only breaks he takes are a few minutes to play bridge or to go for a walk. In those solitary days in that cabin, Gates is the picture of Thomas a Kempis's line In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi angulo cum libro—"Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book." Do not mistake this for some kind of vacation. It is hard work—long days, some without sleep. It is wrestling with complex topics, contradictory ideas, and identity-challenging concepts. But despite this struggle, Gates emerges recharged and refocused. He can see further into the distance. He knows what he wants to prioritize and what to assign his people to work on. He carries the quiet stillness of the woods back to the complicated world he has to navigate as a businessman and philanthropic leader.

• P225. The email you think you need so desperately to respond to can wait. Your screenplay does not need to be hurried, and you can even take a break between it and the next one. The only person truly requiring you to spend the night at the office is yourself. It's okay to say no. It's okay to opt out of that phone call or that last-minute trip. Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you're utterly and completely overworked? It's a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we're wound so tight and have so little patience.

• P239. While we don't want our leisure to become work, we do have to work to make time for them. "For me," Nixon wrote in his memoir, "it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it." On the job, we are busy. We are needed. We have power. We are validated. We have conflict and urgency and an endless stream of distractions. Nixon said that the constant grind was "absolutely necessary for superior performance." But was his performance really that superior? Or was that the whole problem? At leisure, we are with ourselves. We are present. It's us and the fishing pole and the sound of the line going into the water. It's us and the waiting, giving up control. It's us and the flashcards for the language we are learning. It's the humility of being bad at something because we are beginners but having the confidence to trust in the process.