Stillness is the Key

🤔 Impressions

It’s alright. It is sometimes sprinkled with judgment and slightly condescending.

There are some assumptions to be taken very lightly (like having a partner or kids is the way to go and will fulfill your life).

There are a lot more men mentioned in the book, which can be annoying.

It’s a pick-and-choose kinda book. You might find something you needed to read, or you might want to throw it over your shoulder and not look behind you. These are the writing that most spoke to me.

⭐️ Rating: 3/5 

📖 Dictionary – New Words

• Belabor: argue in extensive detail, attack or assault someone verbally or physically.
• Ataraxia: Has its origin in Greek, then French (ataraxie) – is a state of serene calmness.

📔 Notes

Part 1 – The Domain of the Mind

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 so self-blinding.

From the book J.F. Kennedy read: the strategist B.H Liddell Hart on nuclear strategy. (P.14)

Become Present

As we struggle with a crisis, our mind repeats on a loop just how unfair this is, how insane it is that it keeps happening and how it can’t go on. Why are we draining ourselves of essential emotional and mental energies right when we need them most? (P.25)

The real present moment is what we choose to exist in, instead of lingering on the past or fretting about the future. It’s however long we can push away the impressions of what’s happened before and what we worry or hope might occur at some other time. Right now can be a few minutes or a morning or a year — if you can stay in it that long.
As Laura Ingalls Wilder said, now is now. It can never be anything else. (P.27)

Empty the Mind

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. (P.42)

You have to protect it from yourself, from your own, thoughts. Not with sheer force, but rather with a kind of gentle, persistent sweeping. Because the mind is an important and sacred place. Keep it clean and clear. (P.44)

Slow Down, Think Deeply

Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis.

… Think about what’s important to you.
… Think about what’s actually going on.
… Think about what might be hidden from view.
… Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like.
… Think about what the meaning of life really is. (P.50)

Start Journaling

Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?* (P.55)
*Check out The Daily Stoic Journal, for journal prompts

Cultivate Silence

Each of us needs to cultivate those moments in our lives. Where we limit our inputs and turn down the volume so that we can access a deeper awareness of what’s going on around us. In shutting up — even if only for a short period — we can finally hear what the world has been trying to tell us. Or what we’ve been trying to tell ourselves.
That quiet is so rare is a sign of its values. Seize it. We can’t be afraid of silence, as it has much to teach us. Seek it. The ticking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it. (P.62)

Seek Wisdom

All philosophical schools preach the need for wisdom. The corresponding term in Islam is hikma, and both cultures believe that God was an endless source of it. (P.64)

Find people you admire and ask how they got where they are. Seek book recommendations. Add experience and experimentation on top of this. Put yourself in a tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding. The wise are still because they have seen it all. They know what to expect because they’ve been through so much. They’ve made mistakes and learned from them. And so must you. Wrestle with big questions. Wrestle with big ideas. Treat your brain like the muscle that it is. Get stronger through resistance and exposure and training. Do not mistake the pursuit of wisdom for an endless parade of sunshine and kittens. Wisdom does not immediately produce stillness or clarity. Quite the contrary. It might even make things less clear — make them darker before the dawn. (P.67)

Find Confidence, Avoid Ego

That’s the answer of a confident person, a person at peace even in difficulty. Grant wouldn’t have chosen this situation, but he wasn’t going to let it affect his sense of self. Besides, he was too busy trying to fix it where he could. Observers often commented on Grant’s unshakable confidence in battle. He knew he just needed to stay the course. He also knew that losing hope — or his cool — was unlikely to. help anything. (P.71)

This is also confidence. It is an honest understanding of our strengths and weakness that reveals the path to a greater glory: inner peace and a clear mind. Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself. A confident person doesn’t fear disagreement and doesn’t see change—swapping an incorrect opinion for a correct one — as an admission of inferiority. (P.72)

There are going to be setbacks in life. Even a master or a genius will experience a period of inadequacy when they attempt to learn new skills or explore new domains. Confidence is what determines whether this will be a source of anguish or an enjoyable challenge. If you’re miserable every time things are not going your way, if you cannot enjoy it when things are going your way because you undermine it with doubts and insecurity, life will be hell.
And sure, there is no such thing as full confidence, or ever-present confidence. We will have doubts. We will find ourselves in new situations of complete uncertainty. But still, we want to look inside that chaos and find that kernel of calm confidence. (P.73)

Let Go

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. (P.79)

Part 2 – The Domain of the Soul

The Domain of the Soul

The work we must do next is less cerebral and more spiritual. It’s work located in the heart in the soul, and not in the mind. Because it is our soul that is the key to our happiness (or our unhappiness), contentment (or discontent), moderation (or gluttony), and stillness (or perturbation). (P.96)

Choose Virtue

Virtue is not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls and is made real through the actions we take. (P.99)

Which is why each of us 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 heart, we know the answer. (P.101)

But virtue? No one can stop you from knowing what’s right. Nothing stands between you and it…but yourself. Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. each of us must sit down and ask: what’s important to me? what would I rather die for than betray? How am I going to live and why? (P.103)

It is for the difficult moments in life —- the crossroads that Seneca found himself on when asked to serve Nero — that virtue be called upon. Heraclitus said that character was fate. He’s right. We develop good character, strong epithets for ourselves, so when it counts, we will not flinch. So that when everyone else is scared and tempted, we will be virtuous. We will be still. (P.104)

Beware Desire

The most common form and lust is envy — the lust for what other people have, for the sole reason that they have it. Joseph Epstein’s brilliant line is: “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” Democritus, twenty-four hundred years before him: “An envious man pains himself as though he were an enemy.”
No one in the sway of envy or jealousy has a chance to think clearly or live peacefully. How can they? It is an endless loop of misery. We’re envious of one person, while they envy somebody else. (P. 115)

There is also a “have your cake and eat it too” immaturity to envy. We don’t simply want what other people have — we want to keep everything we have and add theirs to it, even if those things are mutually exclusive (and on top of that, we also want them to not have it anymore). But if you had to trade places entirely with the person you envy, if you had to give up your brain, your principles, your proudest accomplishments to live in their life, would you do it? Are you willing to pay the price they paid to get what you covet?
No, you aren’t. (P.115)

To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell — this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be is his world. Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start. Only they know that real pleasure lies in having a soul that’s true and stable, happy and secure. (P.118)

Enough

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 of progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process. (P.121)

Now, there is a perfectly understandable worry that contentment will be the end of our careers — that if we somehow satisfy this urge, all progress in our work and in our lives will come to a screeching halt. If everyone felt good, why would they keep trying so hard? First, it must be pointed out that this worry itself is hardly an ideal state of mind. No one does their best work driven by anxiety, and no one should be breeding insecurity in themselves so that they might keep making things. (P.125)

It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful. (P.125)

Accept a Higher Power

Epicurus wasn’t an atheist but rejected the idea of an overbearing or judgmental god. what deity would want the world to live in fear? Living in fear, he said, is incongruent with ataraxia. (P.136)

Realism is important. Pragmatism and scientism and skepticism are too. They all have their place. But still, you have to believe in something. You just have to. Or else everything is empty and cold. (P.138)

It is probably not a coincidence that when one looks back at history and marvels at the incredible adversity and unimaginable difficulty that people made it through, you tend to find that they all had one thing in common: Some kind of belief in a higher deity. An anchor in their lives called faith. They believed an unfailing hand rested on the wheel, and that there was some deeper purpose or meaning behind their suffering even if they couldn’t understand it. It’s not a coincidence that the vast majority of people who did good in the world did too. (P.139)

Epicurus was right — if God exists, why would they possibly want you to be afraid of them? And why would they care what clothes you wear or how many times you pay obeisance to them per day? What interest would they have in monuments or in fearful pleas for forgiveness? At the purest level, the only thing that matters to any father or mother — or any creator — is that their children find peace, find meaning, find purpose. They certainly did not put us on this planet so we could judge, control, or kill each other. (P.140)

Nassim Taleb’s line is so spot on: It’s not that we need to believe that god is great, only that God is greater than us. (P.141)