Stillness Is the Key
All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you. In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus. Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity. More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2019–2024years
50% recommend25% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Since the last few years, I have made it a habit to write about the books[1] I read without trying to add my smart-a* comment but more as a way to come back later in life and read the articles. For this year, here are some of the books I liked (quite a few of them are re-reads);
- The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi (English Version)
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
- Ego is the Enemy, Stillness Is the Key, and The Obstacle Is the Way; all 3 books by Ryan Holiday
- Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher[2]
- Ohh Boy, I feel relate to your explanation a lot. After heavy gaming and diagnosed with ADHD. I started to think a lot about how we focus how our attention span various to the content. And it became obvious that we're losing long focus ability which is really hard to improve.
For that there's really nice book called Stillness is the Key from Ryan Holiday and Chop wood and Carry Water they're perfect examples to teach how precious focus and stillness is.
- I’ve been working through the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, reading Stillness is the Key and Siddhartha.
The SICP might take me a year.
- Seeing titles like "Courage is Calling", "Stillness is the Key", and "Trust Me, I'm Lying" only make me more confident in my point, not less. But, I'm not going to buy these books just to see if my hunch developed over 15 seconds is correct.
