You Can Get Away From It All Anytime You Like | 12 Stoic Ways to Quiet Your Mind

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1:09Ryan Holiday: Tonal.com, TDS, 200 bucks off. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:27Ryan Holiday: You can get away from it all anytime you like. It would certainly be nicer, it would be quieter, it would be an escape from all this, the work, the annoying people, the noise, the heat, the responsibilities. This is why we dream of vacations, of the open road, of getting out into the woods or to the ocean. People try to get away from it all, to the country, to the beach, to the mountains, Mark Sreelius writes in Meditations. You always wish that you could do that too. Of course the emperor of Rome wished for all that. We all do. The thing is, he said, we can, and he could, anytime he liked, in fact.

2:07Ryan Holiday: Not by traveling, but by going within, he said. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful, more free of interruptions than your own soul. An instant's recollection, and there it is, complete tranquility. And by tranquility, he said he meant a kind of harmony. So keep getting away from it all like that. Renew yourself, but keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough. And send you back ready to face what awaits you. We all want to get away from time to time. And too often we imagine that peace is somewhere else, somewhere that requires time, money, or distance to reach. But Marcus reminds us that stillness doesn't depend on where we are.

2:51Ryan Holiday: You don't have to escape your life to get away from it for a moment. just have to retreat into yourself and then return renewed to whatever is waiting for you.

3:11Ryan Holiday: This moment is enough. I don't need to be anywhere. I don't need to do anything. I don't need to become anything other than I am at this very moment, at this very place that I am, in this very instant. That's it. It's enough.

3:28Ryan Holiday: Stillness, it seems easy. It seems like the absence of action or discipline, but it really requires an immense amount of discipline and self-control. That's what Seneca was practicing there in that busy, noisy environment, trying to focus. In fact, Seneca said there is no greatness without stillness. Someone who's successful, but they're frenzied and busy and chaotic. Nobody wants to be that person. In fact, that's a horrible person to be. It's what Marcus Aurelius had to practice amidst the stresses and distractions of his job and it's what we all have to practice in the chaos and busyness of modern life.

3:59Ryan Holiday: I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written books about stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to speak about it to the NBA and the NFL and one of those books I wrote is called Stillness is the Key and it's about how stillness unlocks our potential not just for professional success but for personal happiness and contentment and that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Stoic secrets, stoic strategies about achieving this stillness, which unlocks so much of what we need in life. Nietzsche said that only ideas had while walking have any worth. I don't know if that's strictly true, but I do know I've had a lot of really good ideas walking.

4:34Ryan Holiday: And that's just like an extra benefit. I mean, you're outside, you're active. Ideally, you're not on the phone. Maybe you're with people that you care about. You're present. Doing what human beings were evolved to do over thousands and thousands of years. So I try not to let a single day go by without walking. It rests, it relaxes the mind, it centers me. I try to start the day with the walk, I try to end the day with the walk. The mind must be given over to relaxation to take wandering walks. It's part of the philosophical process, it's part of my daily routine, and it should be part of your daily routine too.

5:10Ryan Holiday: Cable television news is like the worst thing you could possibly put in your body. I'd rather drink soda or eat at McDonald's. If you think about what the news is designed to do, it's designed not to inform you, because if it informed you, you wouldn't need to watch any more news, right? The purpose of the news is to make you continue watching the news. People go, oh, but isn't your civic duty to be informed? Yes, your civic duty is to be informed. I would argue that the best way to be informed is to read books. I happen to be partial to books. News is typically worth what you pay for it, which is usually nothing.

5:43Ryan Holiday: The number one predictor of social spread is how angry something makes you. So should it surprise us that whether you're a liberal or a conservative, the news seems to constantly be showing how outrageous the world is, right? Of course, it's not a coincidence. This is their business model. I'm actually not sure how bad things actually are right now and how much of this is a reflection of what the medium needs to provide for us so we continue to consume it. I would urge you to think if you are someone who reads a lot of news who thinks, oh, I'm being informed, this is my civic duty. How many decisions do you actually make on this information?

6:13Ryan Holiday: You already know who you're probably gonna vote for. You already know most of your stands on the issue. What you're really doing is seeing where this is going to go. Here's a funny fact. It's gonna go where it's gonna go. You can just check in at the end. And so I try to consume as little news as possible. People ask how, again, how are you so productive? How do you read so many books? I don't watch the news, right? I don't spend time doing this. And if I'm gonna spend the news watching mindless entertainment, I'm gonna watch something that's enjoyably entertaining, not something that tells me that the world is on fire.

6:42Ryan Holiday: I have found like I've got to get to the office early before I get sucked into other stuff. I've got to have quiet time alone. If I'm trying to write in four in the evening, if I'm trying to write in a busy coffee shop, I'm trying to write in my office is a mess or disaster. I can't be in the headspace that I need to be to do what I need to do. We make these choices that facilitate the stillness that we need to access to perform at a peak or an elite level. I'm sure many of you read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school, you've heard of it. She has this great line in her diary that I think about.

7:16Ryan Holiday: She says, paper is more patient than people. Instead of vomiting your thoughts on your employees, on your friends, on the driver in front of you who's taking forever, put it on the page. These are some of Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was writing notes to himself, thoughts, but you can see his sort of brainstorming, working out of the stressful situation he's in. I was in Milan a few years ago and I got to see some of Da Vinci's journals, just as a creativity exercise, right? The journaling, the working, the sketching out, this is what creates the work, right? You can't have the Last Supper without the journals.

7:48Ryan Holiday: The page is forgiving and patient. It keeps secrets. It doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself. It doesn't care if you're being a baby. It doesn't care if you're whining. Just put it down on the page. The page will help. I love the idea of having distance between you and your thoughts. Part of the reasons we're worked up and anxious and stressed is that we're trapped in our heads with all this stuff and you get it out and you see it from a distance and you go, I don't even agree with my own thoughts here. I don't even like this. I'm not going to choose to carry this around. So putting it down on the page is just really important.

8:20Ryan Holiday: And this is what journaling can help us do. So the idea of exploring, keeping a commonplace book, a place you collect ideas, you work out your thoughts. This is a really important exercise. The Stoics speak of this idea of the inner citadel, this sort of part inside yourself that can't be touched by externals, good news, bad news, good fortune, misfortune. Marcus Aurelius writes that stuff cannot touch the soul. And I think that's what we see despite all the things that we know happen to Marcus in his life, all the good fortune that he did not meet with, all the misfortune that he did not deserve.

8:54Ryan Holiday: Nothing touches the inner goodness inside him. That's what meditation shows. It shows that despite the filth, the dust, the stress of life. What remains is the goodness. He keeps that pure bubbling up always. When you watch the greats, when you see the Jordan, the Tom Brady, the great politicians, great actors, you see a certain level of calmness too. That kind of changed everything for me. To me, being present is being extremely calm. Yes. It's Bill Belichick right there. That's why I think he's the best coach because of his ability to stay calm no matter what. Big win. He'll smile a little bit and get happy, but a big loss.

9:33Hey, got our butts kicked. It's almost the same. A lot of people probably don't like that. Someone like an emotional coach. There was a guy named Rex Ryan, who's a hell of a coach, very up and down emotional. And then you get a team like that and you get your family like that, whether you're the head of the household, like it's important with your kids, with your wife, with your family, with your business, with whatever it is, just stay that level. Yeah, like an even keel. Everything begins with that level of calm.

9:56Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I mean, my word for that is stillness. And the idea is that when I think about all the best moments of my life, whether it's like performance, whether it's happiness, like when I'm like, this was awesome. I wasn't at an 11. I was at like five. Do you know what I mean? Like you'd calm things down. You were present. You were focused. You were still. And I think the tension, though, is like to be great at whatever it is you do, you also have to have an intensity that you have to really want it. And you have to be aggressive and ambitious, invested. The default is you care a ton. And then you have to figure out how to ratchet that down because that intensity will make you not as good as you could be.

10:33Ryan Holiday: You'll make emotional decisions. You'll take things too seriously. Obviously, Bill Belichick loves football and he is intensely driven to win. So he has to work that calmness has to sit on top. Everything you talked about, all the intensity, the putting the hours in the presence, everything. And then at that last stage, before you go out on the stage, the last thing to remember is the calmness. It still is. This is the busy season, right? More calls, more customers, more chances that something can slip through the cracks. Staying ahead means having the right system, not just working harder. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, Q-U-O, the business phone system built so that you never miss a call.

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12:58Ryan Holiday: When you're watching the news, when you're freaking out about what's happening in the world, it's because you're looking at it up close. You think all the things that you're doing are important. You think what you're worried about is important, but it's puny. And when we zoom out a little bit, we finally get some perspective. We get some clarity. we realize how exaggerated, what a preposterous sense of our own proportions we have. Let me show you something. Ants. These are ants on my forum. Marcus Reelus talks about how even armies, nations, are just like little ants fighting over scraps of land.

13:29Ryan Holiday: So whatever you're focused on, whatever you're worried about, whatever you're convinced is of the utmost importance, I promise you if you just zoom out a little bit, you see it from the 10 ,000 foot view. If you see it out of the window of an airplane. It will put it in its proper perspective and it will remind you that you're not nearly as important. Things aren't nearly as dire or significant as you think. Just relax. You can work your way through them. I try to remind myself constantly that this moment is enough. I don't need to be anywhere. I don't need to do anything. I don't need to become anything other than I am at this very moment in time, at this very place that I am in this very instant.

14:05Ryan Holiday: That's it. It's enough. The Stokes talk about poverty being not just a thing about your finances, but about needing, desiring, wishing, hoping, fearing that you are anything but what you are at this very instant to become present, to lock in. That's the key to everything to me. That's what stillness is about. And that's really what happiness is too. There's three things I think people should do every day. These are really simple things. I think they make every day a win. I think they should journal. It takes some time to write in a journal, get your thoughts on paper from your mind. I think you should go for a walk.

14:37Ryan Holiday: Quiet time where you do nothing. You're just walking around. In nature, you're outside. Do a phone call on the walk if you don't have time to just go for a walk. Go outside, experience nature, have this sort of movement through stillness. Even if I live in a city? Even if you live in a city. Take a walk around a parking lot, look at the ground, you know? And the last one seems the same as walking, but it's different. Have some sort of strenuous exercise that you do. If you take care of your body, your mind, and your spirit will be better. You'll have ideas. I love swimming because there's no screens.

15:04Ryan Holiday: You can't hear anything and you're staring down. You can have the shittiest day at the office. You could get the worst sales report, but you lifted a PR on your deadlift. You just had a really good run. You had like 30 minutes of winning. Give yourself that every day. I'm curious how guitar, music, language, reading, all the other things that you did, how did that make you a better basketball player? And how is that sort of informed even now when you think about with your kids? Yeah. I had a friend that told me hobbies lead to greatness. I always thought that fascinating and just that made me look back on things.

15:37And I did these things just to kind of get my mind off of the game. And one of the things that I found was, for instance, during the playoffs, I would cook dinner. You have to concentrate on the meal or it's going to suck. I'm looking at the time. I'm checking the meat. It's a thing that I have to focus on. Because if I don't, my brain is going to start going and then we're going to start thinking about tomorrow and I'm to be back in that rabbit hole. You don't want to be there all the time. Once I start relaxing in my cooking or in me playing the guitar, I see some weird connection to where I think about basketball, but it'd be like, oh, okay, I could put that to the side.

16:11It's like, it was this crazy thing of no judgment. Wow. I never thought of that before. This is the move I'm going to do tomorrow.

16:18Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Sometimes when you're thinking about something else, you create room for your brain subconsciously solve some problem. If you're, I got to solve this. I got to solve this. I got to you're not going to make any progress. Yeah. Because the grind will grind you down if you don't have anything to refresh. All the way down. Sometimes you just stink. Yeah, yeah. I've been there plenty of times. Go eat a delicious meal. Go do something else. Get out of here. One of my favorite passages in all of meditations, Mark Surrealis talks about being the rock that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around.

16:56There's something really special about water.

16:59Ryan Holiday: I just went for this swim in Lake Michigan. I'm just standing here by the water, listening to the waves, trying to sort of slow myself down. I have a talk I have to give later today. I have to travel later today. I have a bunch of stuff I have to do. I want to get in that place of stillness. Euthymia, as Seneca talks about, that tranquility. I want to get to a place of peace. Even though everything is crazy, it's slowing down around me and I'm going to be able to do what I have to do for the day. Every day I send out one stoic inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people all over the world.

17:28Ryan Holiday: If you want to take your stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com slash email. Love to see you there.