Optimize Interview: Stillness is the Key with Ryan Holiday

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Ryan Holiday. Ryan is one of my absolute favorite writers and thinkers and strategists and people. We have covered his. We started with the Obstacle Is the Way, then we moved to Ego is the Enemy, and then we have the Daily Stoic, each of which particularly the Obstacle Is the Way I love to Ego Is the Enemy as well. And the Daily Stoic, I mean, we have that in our kitchen. It is like prime real estate. Open it up all the time. And now Ryan's newest book is called Stillness is the Key. And there's a testimonial in there by one of your friends, a director, who said, I have very few rules in my life, but one of them is when Ryan Holiday writes a new book. I read it as fast as I can. That was my experience when I got this. And just thrilled to be connected and to chat about your newest book, Ryan. Well, thanks.

No, it's always good to talk to you, and you've been so good to me and the books and. Yeah, no, I just love talking to people who love reading.

Right on, man. And then. Nice bookshelf back there.

Thank you. I actually. So this was the first house that I bought, and I got it all set up, and then we bought a different house, and I just decided I was never gonna move them, so that's great.

So it's like your office.

Yeah, yeah. They're just like, I can't bear to put them in boxes again and have them in disorder. I have them exactly how I want to have them.

That is so good. Before we jump into the Stillness Is the Key, I want to chat about the Daily Stoic we shared in our plus ones. We talk about you a lot, and my son and I shared a plus one recently with your coins and how awesome they are. So if you're watching or listening and you haven't checked out dailystoic.com check it out. When I came back into email after basically years of being out with an asterisk on a couple of quick trips in, the only email I kept was Ryan's Daily Stoic. And it's the only thing I read on a daily basis. In addition to now, I learned that Ryan has a project called Daily dad, which is basically the Daily Stoic for dads who want to integrate ancient wisdom and modern science and common sense into being a great dad. I'm really moved by Both. And I just want to give a quick shout out to that before we jump in. So thank you.

Thank you. No, it's my. It's my favorite thing to write. I think there's something very powerful about this sort of page a day format. I think it's underrated and under exploited by authors. And so I sort of fell into doing this book, the Daily Stoic, but then I started doing this email and I just love it. And now I have a number of books that I read every day by other authors that are that, including one that if you haven't read, you would love. Tolstoy wrote a book called A Calendar of Wisdom that is a page a day. So you have basically the greatest novelist of all time wrote a book that's a page a day, and he pulls from Buddhism and Stoicism and Christianity and all sorts of other forms of spirituality and literature. And so it's my favorite thing. I read a page of that every day.

Right on. And I was actually going to bookend this at the end, but we're going to start with this. Tell me about your day. Because when I think of you, and I joked with you about this before, you know that I tell my wife often, like, she thinks I'm reasonably prolific, you know, and I'm like Ryan Holiday. You talk in the book about statues, you know, for people we really admire. I really admire not only your craftsmanship as a writer, but how you've crafted your life and how you show up, how you must show up in terms of how you read and you write and you work with your other authors. Tell us about your day, you know, what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the first thing is more of a mindset thing. But I approach writing like a job. Right. It's not something that I just do when inspiration strikes. It's something that I show up and work at every day. And it's something that I, you know, to extend the metaphor, I see it as something I'm trying to get promoted in. I'm trying to earn my access to the next level. And so I'm putting in time, I'm committed to it. I. I don't take long breaks between projects. I always want to be working in the way that a freelance designer doesn't design something and then go like, well, I'll wait for the next somebody to call me up. You would go, pound the payment and find your book. So stillness comes out on the first. I not only have the next book that I'm writing, I have the proposal for the series that I want to do after that because I don't want there to be lulls and the momentum is really important to me. I always want to, to be moving forward. But as far as my day goes, I'll just, I'll tell you. This morning I Woke up at 6:18am I don't have an alarm clock these days because I have a three year old. So he sort of handles that for me. But. And I also have a four month old. So I took the three month old so my wife could put the baby back to sleep and catch up on sleep. My son and I, we went on a bike ride. He sits in a trailer and I just drive around in circles basically. So I did that for an hour. I had breakfast with my wife. We took eggs from our chicken coop and made eggs for breakfast. And then on today, because I wasn't working from home, I drove my son to daycare and then I sat down and I started writing. I was probably, I was at work writing by, let's call it 9 o' clock and I wrote until I had my first interview for the day. So it's a little different when I'm promoting a book because there's large amounts of time that have to be blocked out for not the creative process. But the first thing I try to do when I start my day is write. And I try to write until I hit diminishing returns, I stop and then I turn to the business side of things. And so I don't think it's a. I don't necessarily think it's the most efficient schedule in the world. It's not the greatest schedule in the world. But if I stick to it enough days in a row, what I know is that books come out of the other side.

So inspiring for so many reasons. How much do you want to get into the details there? But how much do you read? Because the volume of your reading and I joked we're going to talk about a chapter in this book is best. Sixteen pages I've read. It's just so compelling in whatever. So how much do you read on a given day?

So the first time I probably read during the day. I usually, if I'm by myself, I read at lunch. So I'll take like 30 or 40 minutes and I'll sit and I'll read and I'll eat. Sometimes I'll read in the afternoon after I've sort of finished working. I try to, you know, read in the evenings a little bit here. There usually sort of like in the sort of bedtime, getting settled, the kids down, the sort of dead, dead time there where I'm waiting for someone, they're waiting for me, whatever. I try to do some reading then, but I, you know, I used to be the kind of reader who would just read all the time, every day. And I've become more of what I call a binge reader. So, like, I'm going to spend the next six weeks on the road for the book, you know, give or take. And I'm going to be exhausted and busy, but I'll probably read more in those six weeks than I had in the previous, let's say three months. And so that averages out to a really, you know, steady pace. But I tend to do it in spurts. Like, I never buy wifi on planes. I never watch movies on planes. When I'm home, I try to be home. So I don't. I feel somewhat guilty, like being, you know, in my office reading when my family is home. So I. Lately, I do less reading, you know, in the course of daily life. But when I'm gone, I'm going to be catching up on that time because it's just me, you know, making my own schedule.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I just want to go back to. You've sold what, 2 million copies of your own books now?

Something like that, yeah.

So, again, very modest. And what I so love about your approach is just in your whole work. I mean, ego is the enemy, this book. It's humility and the willingness to, as Cal would say, be so good they can't ignore you. But you're already there. But you're approaching it like you're. You're just earning your chops, you know, can I get promoted to the next level? And that is one of the things that inspires me the most in your work is the humility, the virtues, driven character, which is so counter to our culture and something that I find such deep personal inspiration in, so.

Well, thank you. No, I mean, I do, but I do think. I don't think that's necessarily humility to say like that. I want to get to the next level. I think whoever you are, whatever you're doing, you can do better. Right. Like, Bill Belichick wakes up and he says, how can we be better? Tom Brady says the same thing. Organizations that sort of steadily and perennially produce great outputs do it because they are focused on getting better. And so what I'm not interested in doing is patting myself on the back or coasting. What I, as someone who loves books I read books and I go, I don't think I could do that. I want to figure out how they did that, or I want to. I think if I stay at this long enough, I can get there. And so, you know, what's so great about a profession like writing is you can basically do it until the day you die. And so when I think about what I've done in my relatively short career so far, what I'm more thinking about is, like, where can this extrapolate out if I'm lucky enough to still be doing this at Robert Caro's age? Like, I want to, you know, If I have 40 years experience, what am I going to be able to do when I sit down to the keyboard? And that's what keeps me going day in and day out. So I'm very proud of all of my books. But I guess sometimes I try not to think about it too much, but this thought crosses my mind that, like, actually, what if these are. These are warm ups for whatever I was actually put on the planet to write. And, you know, I look at an amazing author like Michael Lewis, I feel like, you know, Moneyball was a great book. Liar's Poker was a great book. The Blind side was a great book. But he was put on this planet to write the big Short. You know, he's a financial writer. He wrote about complex, you know, mathematical economic systems and then that intersected with the world crisis, the world financial crisis, and some of the most absurd characters you can imagine. And he produced this sort of brilliant work of art. And so I like to think maybe, you know, that that would happen for me someday.

Yeah. Then we go back to. I think it was in the obstacles, the way where you talk about the process and just your process of, let me just show up, let me just hit the rock again and just try to get a little bit better at my craft. And as we say with our optimized work, aggregate and compound those tiny little gains. And where can you get to over, not a month or two, but over years and decades, God willing. And again, memento mori. This may in fact be your last word that you write, so make it your best. But if we do that consistently and find that new edge, what can we do? And it's unknowable, but let's show up. And again, that's where for me, it is with the combined audacity to say, what can I be? With the humility to say, I'm not there yet. So let me do my best right now and let the outcomes take Care of themselves, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think comedians are another good analogy. Like right now, I think Nate Bargazzi is one of the funniest people on the planet. I followed his career maybe four or five years, and you watch where he was three or four years ago, and then you watch where he is now, how sort of consistently good he is and how do you get there? Again, unlike sports, you're not fighting your body. Right. Like as a writer or a comedian, it. You're. Maybe there's some sort of bias towards youth, but your body's not quitting on you. You don't necessarily have the same limited time window, so you have the ability to compound. And those first couple years when you put money in the stock market or investment, you don't see the big gains, but it's, you know, it's year 11 or 12 that the math starts to really pick up and that. That's sort of what.

Yeah.

What keeps me going.

And then to play with that metaphor for a bit longer, you know, if you're a great investor, when it goes down is when you invest more, you buy. It's on sale. Right. I'm playing the long game. So when you feel worse and you don't feel like showing up, that's when the master craftsman, the professional, works harder. It's not coming together. That's not when we fail and come back two years later. It's when we dig deeper and we work. What we're going to talk about today, so we've actually got equanimity and stillness to show up more consistently with emotional stamina, etc.

Yeah.

Awesome, man. Thank you for shining some light on your own process.

Yeah, of course.

All right, cool. We can talk about that for a while and I look forward to discussing more. For now, we'll go to Stillness is the key, as always. I've got. I read it over the weekend and crank this out. We've got our philosopher's note, a handful of my favorite big ideas. Let's start at the top. I always like to start with the title. So stillness is the key. Tell us about that.

Yeah. So stillness is this concept that appears in almost every philosophical school and religion you can imagine. They all have different words for stillness, but that idea of poise and self control, of freedom from disturbance inside and outside, a sense of tranquility, of peace, almost every school in religion holds up as being sort of the height of power and wisdom. And so I was fascinated by this idea of stillness. I wanted to write about it And I kept thinking, well, what is stillness for? What is it key to do it? And the truth is, it's sort of key to everything. It's key to personal happiness. It's key to elite performance. It's key to feel, thinking better. It's key to thinking less. It's the key to who you want to be. And whatever you're doing, there's almost no pursuit or person that does not benefit from more stillness. Right? And by stillness, we don't mean doing nothing. What we mean is, again, having reduced the things that are causing the ripples or causing the disturbances or the turbulence. We're talking about Kennedy in the missile crisis. We're talking about a baseball player staring down a fastball. We're talking about great people doing great things. Sometimes that thing is just being there for another person. Other times it's leading troops in battle. But how do you bring everything that you have to whatever it is in front of you in this moment?

Hmm, You. I think it was in Daily Stoic. Is that where you introduced euthymia?

It's in sitting goes the enemy, too. When you stop comparing yourself to other people and you have the sense that you're on the right path, you no longer, Seneca says, get sort of distracted by the people who are crisscrossing yours. And this idea of euthymia, which basically translates to tranquility, would be a kind of stillness that we're talking about here. You know, it's what happens when you're just good. You know what I mean? You're just good when you're inside yourself rather than looking around or checking your phone or your watch or when you're just trying to do too much at once.

I mean, when I read that euthymia and tranquility and that idea of. And, you know, you. One of the things I love most about Ryan is that you can pull in this ancient wisdom and a lot of historical great storytelling and then just knock us down with it, you know, okay, you know, you're not looking side to side and changing your plans every five minutes. You know that this is your path. You stay on it. And that idea of both euthymia then tranquility, for me, I combine that, which we'll talk a little bit about today, into energized tranquility, where it's not a passive state, it's a very active, engaged, hitting the 98 mile an hour fastball, but you do it with absolute equanimity and balance and tranquility and the combination of that, which, again, you articulate in the book has been a really significant part of the work that we now do with our optimized community. So again, I thank you for that distinction because it's.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. When we think stillness, because it tends to have an Eastern sort of leaning, we think like a monk in a monastery or we think someone sitting silently in meditation doing nothing. And I think that's a component in stillness. But, you know, there were Zen Buddhists who were samurai warriors, there were Zen Buddhists who were master archers, there were Zen Buddhists who were kings and princes and diplomats. And so stillness is not simply inactivity, it's how do you slow your heart and your mind and your body down and fuse them into one cohesive whole so you are again, bringing everything you have in that moment. There's no margin for error for a samurai warrior. So he can't be thinking about, you know, his last fight, he can't be thinking about the next fight. The archer, the tiny little things can have such an outsized impact on that process. You know, in Zen and the archery is talking about, it's like, don't even be thinking about hitting the target. Just be thinking about your form. Don't even think about letting go of the arrow. Let it drop naturally from you. So it's just adding a slightly softer touch to what you're doing. And, you know, if we were applying this in the west, we talk about, you know, the stillness of a football team in a two minute drill, how the whole game might have been frantic or disappointing, or they might have struggled to move the ball up and down the field and then suddenly the game is on the line. They have 32 seconds and they can move the ball 90 yards in two plays or three plays, because they've wiped the slate clean. And they're like, this is what we have to do. We've practiced this. No more bullshit. Let's go. Everybody get on board. Let's do this. If you could access that force on demand in your life, I think we'd all be capable of incredible things.

And this book, of course, is a guidebook on how to do that. Before we get into the three domains, you talk about the mind, you talk about the soul, and you talk about the body. Can you share briefly with us that intro story with Lincoln finding the key? And you make this amazing connection again. One of the things I most admire in your writing is historical amazing. This happened and then boom. Here's how we're going to apply it to our work together. Can you Give us that quick take.

When Lincoln becomes President of the United States, he has almost no executive leadership whatsoever. He'd been a lawyer and then he'd been a one term congressman. And so he comes over and now the country is tearing itself apart and all these generals are telling him how the war is gonna be one, or they're telling them how the war is hopeless. And they're saying, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. My favorite thing about Lincoln, Lincoln goes to the Library of Congress and checks out books on military history and just sits down to learn this thing. And what he brings to the table that a lot of these generals lacked is that Lincoln had traveled a large portion of the United States, at least sort of north to south in the Midwest. And he had. He traveled the Mississippi River. Most of all, he'd actually traveled it in a raft, I think two different times. But what Lincoln. There's this scene where all these generals are in Lincoln's office. The Oval Office doesn't exist yet, but Lincoln goes, okay, look, let's do this. And he rolls out a map of the United States and he points to this single city. He points to Vicksburg, Mississippi. And I talk about Vicksburg a little bit, an obstacle. But Vicksburg is this city that doesn't seem important to us now, and it didn't seem particularly important then, but it happened to be a city that was perched on the bluffs of the river and it had a number of important railroad junctions going through. And what Lincoln was able to do is he was able to slow down and he was able to. He didn't think about Richmond, he didn't think about New Orleans, he didn't think about Chicago, he didn't think about all the big important cities. He was able to slow down and think big picture. And he realized that Vicksburg was the city through which all these important things flowed through the river that was shipping north and south. It cut the south in half, essentially. And then because of the railroad juncture, it didn't matter where the south won or lost. Vicksburg was a way for them to constantly resupply troops and resupply food and material. And so Lincoln hones in on this city and he goes, this city is the key. He says, we will never win without this key in our pocket. And he ends up being completely right. He sends Grant to take the city. That's the story I tell in obstacle. But the point being, Lincoln was calm enough, he had a long enough view, he was able to filter out all the things that were being thrown at him to. To see what really, really mattered. And I would argue that obviously talent matters, wealth matters, marketing matters, platform matters, all these things matter. But what really matters is do you have that stillness? Do you have the poise to be able to see clearly, to have patience, to go your own way, to think about downstream effects? And that's what Lincoln was doing there. And I just love this. He says, we cannot win the war until that key is in our pocket. And I would just argue that whatever you're trying to do, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to do it and sustain it if stillness is not a tool in your toolkit.

Yeah. So good man. We use a metaphor of flipping the switch. So optimize is from the Latin optimus, which means the. So our whole thing is. Look, optimize is about helping you become the optimist, best version of you, such that you can be a Yudaimon. We use Aristotle's language a lot to have a good soul, which we're going to talk about today. And of course, how do you do that? Virtue, which we'll talk about, but then that's not enough. We want you to be a hero, to give your gifts and service to the world, etc. But this ability to flip the switch, step in between stimulus and response, requires the stillness. So it's the key we have to have in our pocket and not get carried away via an overactive mind, et cetera.

Yes.

That leads us to our Holy Trinity. So I love to your books nearly always, except for the Daily Stoic broken into three parts. So this one has its own three parts. Can you walk us through the basic idea there?

So my argument is that obviously there are different forms of stillness. There's mental stillness. That might be sort of what you get from meditation that gets you. You get that from journaling. You get that from sort of controlling the mind. How do you mentally slow things down? There's a lot of people who have mental stillness that are sort of spiritually very unstill. They're torn apart by lust or envy or hatred or anger or fear. And so how do you do the emotional work required on yourself so that you don't sit quietly in meditation and then go right back to your miserable life. Right. You know when they say comparison is the thief of joy, it doesn't matter how mentally clear you are, if what you are doing, if your natural instinct is to sort of be insatiable, to constantly compare yourself to other people, that stillness is going to be Very fleeting. And then that leads into the final discipline, which would be sort of the physical domain. And. And ironically, one of the best ways to get mental and spiritual stillness is through movement. But I guess what I'm just saying is, like, what do you do with your body? What do you do with. What environments are you in? So, you know, sometimes the best way to get stillness is to. Is to go seek out solitude. Sometimes the best way, maybe you got to look and go, is my messy stuff to the gill's house responsible for a lot of the anxiety that I feel? Maybe it's. Maybe your house is spotless, but you just bought a house you cannot afford, and that's what caused. You know, you're in that sort of keeping up with the Joneses trap. Or it could be that you're so 100% focused on work that you have stretched your mind and your soul to the breaking point. And what you need is this sort of restorative effects of leisure and hobby and relaxation. And so the point is, you gotta tap. You can't tackle stillness from just one direction. It needs to be all three of these working towards each other. And certainly working on spiritual stillness will help with mental stillness, and working on mental stillness will help with physical stillness. But you gotta be working on all of them.

Yep. Love it. So, to recap briefly, we got mind, we have soul, and we have body. Would start with mine. Yeah, let's start with mine. So what's your. I have my favorite idea here. What's your favorite idea in terms of a practice we can engage in to cultivate stillness in our minds?

Well, I mean, journaling is one I talk a lot about in the book, but I've written about that a lot before. So if I was trying to choose something different, I mean, the exercise of simply emptying the mind. I talk about Shawn Green, the baseball player. He's in this sort of vicious slump in the early 2000s, and he talks about how do you. What the mind does when we start to fail or we start to fall behind? The mind races. You want to work extra hard to undo it. And he talks about the sort of vicious cycle that you get in. And he's talking about, like, I think it takes about 400 milliseconds for a ball to travel from the pitcher to the batter. And so if your mind is not entirely focused on that task, if you are thinking about what. What a hard time you're having for thinking about how mean people are being to you on Twitter, if you're thinking about how you're going to spend the millions of dollars that you're making. You know, all of these are taking precious, precious resources away from the extremely difficult tasks you have in front of him. Yogi Berra said, you know, it's impossible to hit and think at the same time. And it's just the same. It's, you know, it goes right back to Zen Buddhism. You got to empty the mind. You got to wipe the slate clean. And you got to, you gotta look at this thing with the entirety of your mental resources.

Yeah, I love it. Let's talk about journaling, though, too. So John Green story is phenomenal. And then what did he do? He went six for six or something and had one of the greatest game.

In the history of baseball.

Yeah, just. And again, you weave that myth beautifully. So then journaling, tell us about that. Because the way you get, you described that. I, of course I've heard you describe, but I'm not sure you can't exhaust that in my mind. So tell us about.

I mean, it is interesting. Like on the one hand, Zen Buddhism is like, empty the mind. And then on the other hand, it's, you know, stoicism is like pour your thoughts out into a journal, you know, and so I think there are different ways to get to the same place. But the act of sitting down with a blank page. Anne Frank had a great line. She said, paper is more patient than people. And you sit down and you can process your thoughts. You can take some distance from your thoughts. Journaling is just a really essential part of my routine. I mean, I do it every single morning. But before I start the workday, before I check my phone, I sit down with the journal and it's just about, again, wiping the slate clean. What am I worried about? What am I trying to do? How do I think I'm doing? I just want to get in a little bit of a dialogue with myself. And then I want to use that clarity throughout the rest of the day.

That's amazing. So every day, how long would you say?

On average, 10, 15 minutes at most.

Wow, that's cool. So before you even start, you write your first word, you're emptying your mind in a journal. That's amazing.

Before I. Before, you know, before I hit the space bar on my computer to wake it up, I crack the journals.

It's so inspiring. And then you had a great Julia Cameron line of spiritual windshield wipers.

Yeah, yeah, that's how she described it. And I think that's totally right. I very rarely feel worse after journaling. I almost Always feel better.

That's so great. Again, a lot we can talk about there, but moving on. My favorite in that idea among many with the inputs, so limiting inputs, I mean, this is just such an important thing. There's no possible way. I like to quote Stephen King who said that his hardest time writing was when he was a high school teacher. He loved the kids. At the end of the day, it was like his brain had been on like jumper cables, your brain just blown up. So it's very difficult obviously to reach a state of stillness in our minds and if we're constantly exposed to it.

Well, look, I'm very impressed with your ability to walk away from email and I imagine that that contributes in a large way to the concentration and stillness that you're able to bring bring to your work. You know, people just spend way too much time consuming or being bombarded with information that they will not use for any purpose, whether that's watching SportsCenter or listening to talk radio or watching CNN. People are just making themselves miserable and they tell themselves they're being informed, but I'm not sure that they are. And in fact, I think they're usually being radicalized. They're usually being whipped up into a frenzy, liberal or conservative. And I think they actually leave less informed. They certainly have more information in their brains. But I would argue that they're probably less informed than even a sort of a common sense person would be.

Yeah. And again, you referenced Thich Nhat Hanh in the book a few times. A great Zen teacher and he, in one of his books, I think it was Saiwan said that every single input you take in via all sensors, sensory experience, you have to digest. So there's digestion process that's going on. And then you also, you kind of. I was there and I felt pretty confident being out of email. I didn't use my smartphone for almost ever. You and Cal got me off of digital news. Now it's the Economist once a week, non hysterical print. These are some important issues and if anything else is going on, my friends will let me know. But you had the line in the Daily Stoic of quoting Epictetus in your own style of I just, I don't know and I don't care. Those things don't matter. And having the courage and the audacity to. To say I don't know and I don't care. And to be ignorant to extraneous things, as Epictetus I think put it right.

Yeah. He says if you wish to improve, be content to be thought foolish or stupid on certain matters. And so you had to be able to go, sorry, I missed that. What happened? It takes three seconds for someone to describe you and catch you up to speed, or you just nod your head and pretend like you know what they're talking about, and then you go back to whatever you're doing, really not missing anything. But that does require a certain. There's a strength or a courage. I mean, it's not as courageous as running out into a burning building, but people don't want to feel like they're different than everyone else. And to not do what everyone else is doing is scary. It feels like you're doing something sacrilegious or you're doing something offensive. And again, I would much rather learn that news consumption had plummeted, but book sales had radically increased. That would be a much more informed populace, even if they were less knowledgeable about breaking news. If something really is important, it will find you. But the problem is we have a system now that's designed for the really insignificant news to find you and make.

You feel like it's important and incessantly be in your mind. So you can't sit down in the beginning of the day and actually do any meaningful work. To riff on that briefly, I'm in our studio in Ojai, which happens to be David Allen's old headquarters for getting things done. Right.

Wow.

And right down the street, Krishnamurti, the great teacher, taught, and he said, and I quote this more than any other line in our coaches training program we're doing now, that it is no measure of well being to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And so this idea of being willing to be iconoclastic, which actually does require, you know, a fair amount of courage in the most mundane sense, to turn off the smartphone, the email consistently. And then I want to, I want to shine a light on the fact that you start your day what I would call pre inputs. You're creative before you're reactive. And it's your ability to, as Cal would put it, accrete value on a daily basis with a free, fresh mind, laser focused on something you decided is important before you allow any inputs in. That is the source, if I had to say, of your genius. Stillness is the key. And you get there by limiting your inputs radically.

Yeah. And look like I just know too many people. And I don't think there's a political statement who wake up and their day is either this or this, based on what Donald Trump tweeted at 2 in the morning. And if you wanna talk about tyranny, that's tyranny, and it's voluntary. Donald Trump hasn't forced you to read these tweets. Donald Trump hasn't thrown you in jail. He hasn't stolen anything from you. You've willingly given over your equanimity, your sense of purpose in your life, your control of your day. You. You've given that up because you decided to check something, and then you decided that it was going to offend you. And look, a lot of times the purpose of the remark was to offend you. And so by letting it do that, you're not helping anyone, least of all yourself. And so again, wherever you sit politically, to allow what liberals are doing or conservatives are doing or athletes to do or celebrities to do or your boss to do, if you. You cannot give up that real estate so willingly. It's the most valuable thing that you own.

Amen to all that. And then you're not creating the change you want to see in the world. So you don't have any stillness. You didn't use the most precious time in your day, which is pre inputs after you got a good night of sleep, because you shut down the inputs at a reasonable time, right? So then you're just in this victim loop rather than stepping up and saying, well, what am I going to do about that? You know, a whole longer conversation there, but, okay, established, we've got issues in our world now. What are you going to do about it? And are you architecting your day and getting to that point of stillness in whatever ways resonate with you? So this is awesome. So you hit the journaling, and then we talked about the inputs. Let's move to the second domain, which is the soul. Tell us about your favorite aspect of optimizing our soul.

Yeah, so I think my favorite section in this book is probably the section on. Enough. Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut are sitting at a party in the house of a billionaire. And if you've ever been to a really fancy party at someone's house, you know the exact awkward conversation they're having. They're like, why are we here? We don't even know this person. You know, yours or the status symbol that the famous person brought in. It's a monument to their greatness. And Vonnegut starts to tease Joseph Heller. Joseph heller wrote Catch 22. And he says to him, you know, this billionaire probably made more this week than your book will make in its lifetime. How does that feel? And he says, it feels fine, because I have something he'll never have. And he says, what's that? He's like, enough. And as an ambitious person, as a person who is driven, who wants to accomplish things, we can tend to feel like enough is this scary thing. Tiger woods, dad, you know, called enough the E word. There was never enough. You should never say enough. That was like saying uncle or I quit. No, enough is, is being good with yourself. But just because you're good with yourself doesn't mean you stop working or you stop trying. And so, you know, Joseph Heller wrote a lot of other books other than catch 22. You know, a reporter tried to, you know, insult him. He said, you know, you've never written a book as good as catch 22. And he says, who has? You know, he keeps going. But I think he, he keeps going from a better place. It's not a place of need. You know, Seneca, he talks about, he's like a wise man can make use of many things. A fool needs everything and can use none of it. Right? I think that's the look. It'd be nicer to have 20 best selling books than 10 best selling books. It would be nice to wake up on Tuesday, October 1, when stillness comes out and find out that it sold a million copies overnight. It's nicer to be paid a lot of money for the books than it is to be paid no money. But ultimately, I'm not driven by that. I'm driven by, am I writing? When this book comes out On Tuesday the 1st, I will have. I'm not perfect and I'm not a sage. So there's still things that are going to happen that I want, that'll be good for, right? Like I want to hit the bestseller list. I want it to sell well. I want to hear from people like you that said it's good like people. I want to hear from people whose opinions matter to me that I, that I was. That I accomplished what I set out to do. It would be insane to say that doesn't mean anything to me. But I would say 90% of what I'm going to take from that book I've already gotten. Do you know what I mean? I got it in the writing. I got it in holding the finished edition. I got it in knowing that I got to where I wanted to get with the idea. And so that means that I'm mostly playing with house money from here. And I think that's where you want to get spiritually.

Everything about that is so good. Well, I know exactly what you're talking about, which is Why I pulled out the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. I think you started one of these sections with which is the essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. So you already won. You won because you were in Eudaimonia. You were flourishing each moment you showed up and worked your process. Right now, let's see, you're going to do your best. You know, you don't have control, as you emphasize again and again and again. And then I loved your chapter on enough as well. I do have a different favorite from that session, which we'll talk about. But what came to me when I read that section and then thinking about your body of work as I currently know it. And I forgot to mention Perennial Cellar, by the way, if anyone wants to create a great piece of art, whether that's writing or music or whatever. Perennial Cellar. I haven't done a note on it yet, but I don't know if I told you how much I love that. I have shared that with so many of my friends who are writers or musicians, etc. So that was another awesome one. But when I kind of look at the gestalt of all of it and think about how I think about things, what came to my mind was Maslow and his ideas of deficiency needs vis a vis beingness needs. So if you have deficiency needs, you're constantly comparing yourself to someone else. You're never enough and you're suffering from that not enoughness. Then I think we reach a state where we're euthymically full. We've realized, look, we've suffered, we've gone through all that, which we all have. We still have x percent that gets wasted on that whatever. But we've reached a level of completeness and wholeness. And then we shift from what Maslow would say is deficiency needs to beingness needs, where now we realize, well, we're blessed to be alive. Memento mori and Noli Timura. You know, this idea of be not afraid, go out and give your gifts to the world independent of the outcomes, but really committed to making a difference in the world that needs us to go out and live, as I would say, both eudaimonically and heroically. And then there's a weird apparent dichotomy of we know that we have way more than enough yet to your humility as an artist. We're never going to get there, so let's just get back to work. And anyway, that's some of the fun I have.

And look, as I'm writing the books, I try to think about it's. Not just, oh, this is great, I took my winnings off right before it came out as a defense mechanism. What I wanted to do is go like, okay, I'm done for the day. I could die before I get another crack at this. Do I feel like if it gets published after my death, I got enough of what I wanted out? Or if nobody sees it, did I just live the ideas in such a way that I didn't leave anything on the table? So you don't control whether you even get. Not only do you not control how the release goes of anything, company idea, song, movie, whatever, you don't even control whether you get a release. Right. Like you. Many people are cut down before their time. You know, many. How many authors had their works destroyed in manuscript form by Hitler? You know, how many people had their life's work go up in flames? You know, got in an accident, anything can happen. So you've got to. Seneca says you got to put the finishing touches on the books. You got to close the books every day. And then this allows you to be more indifferent to what seems like to other people, these big milestones, you know, today's your release date, you know, this is the first week, this is the second week, this is the one year anniversary, this is the paperback, whatever. None of that, that doesn't matter too much as much to me because I'm closing that loop on a daily basis.

Oh man. It's so inspiring you share the story of Fred Rogers, who I've fallen in love with over the last six months, you know, and his 143 jumping in the pool and the rigor with which he navigated his life. And then there's the ups and downs that when you're so outcome driven, then like you said, it's up or down. And same thing with. It's like, no, no, no. If you actually have a sense of what life is about. Which leads me to my favorite section in the Soul, which was the first. You have these great preludes to it. And then we have the first chapter, which I think was choose Virtue. And so this idea of the summum bonum at the end of the day, are you living with arete? Are you living with virtue and expressing the best version of yourself? Because if you are moment to moment to moment, or at least more moments than not, you won. And then of course the byproduct of that is often more material success. But all you focus on is did you do your best, Right?

Yes, yes. Are you flourishing as a human being, which you know, when we hear virtue. We think like sort of Christian virtue or we think moral virtue, and that's certainly a part of it. But virtue means excellence. It's excellence in. It's not excellence on the football field, but being an abomination in your personal life. It's virtue. It's excellence as a human being, as a person on this planet. So it's doing everything well, including being kind and being fair and being moderate and all the other important things. And so, yeah, I think, look, a person who is not virtuous lives a miserable life. They might be successful in some ways, but ultimately they are unhappy because they're afraid of being found out because they believe everyone is as awful and as rotten as they are. You know, it's just not. It's not a good way to live.

Yeah, that's so good. And one of the things I do in our work a lot is I say, hey, look, this is what you're capable of being. And if this is what you're actually being in that gap, that's where regret and anxiety and disillusionment. If you close the gap, which for me is excellence expressed in this moment, that is the ultimate sense of. In virtue. In that sense, if you do that, there's no room for regret, anxiety, disillusionment. There's just that. Not the. And you do a nice job of reframing Epicurus, but not the hedonic, extrinsically motivated sense of, quote, happiness, but a deep sense of flourishing in the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering, in the midst of slumps, et cetera.

Yeah. I would argue very few people who are going around being a good person, like, doing the right thing on a regular basis are simultaneously miserable.

Give it a shot. Give that one a shot. But you do a great job of. There are a few times where I'm like, oh, wow. I just appreciate the gravity with which you communicate the lack of integrity in individuals we may admire from one facet of their expression in life. And you do it with the same thoughtfulness of clarity that you said Lincoln had, which is you thought about it deeply. And it's not a hysterical pointing fingers that say, look, let's be honest with ourselves. If you go out and excel in that domain, but in the rest, you're an abomination, as you said. What's the point? Come on, work it here. Be a good human being. Which is another.

Totally. Totally. And ultimately it comes back and undoes whatever success you've had. You know what I mean? Whether you're Harvey Weinstein or, or Tiger woods or anywhere in between. Right? One is just a guy who was sort of unfaithful to his wife. One was outright sort of criminal and rapist. But you can't argue that they weren't also extraordinarily talented professionally. But ultimately that is now overshadowed by the lack of virtue that they express in their personal lives and ultimately made that continued professional success impossible. Right. So you could make a really selfish argument for virtue. Do you know what I mean? If Tom Brady was a monster, it would have torn the New England Patriots apart. Right? And so being a good person, being a good teammate, being, you know, honest and straightforward and all this, it. There's this. It's in your self interest, not just professionally, but also personally, because you'll be miserable if you don't.

Yeah. And then the point you make again and again and again that I want to highlight here is you don't need to wait for a quote. Ultimately, because it happened this moment. There's no scenario where those individuals are actually feeling a grounded, still calm sense of true happiness and joy in their lives because they're so far out of integrity. But the good news is in this moment, then you get back into that.

Yes, you can start over. I think this is an ego. But one of my favorite novels is the book what Makes Sammy Run. And it's sort of about this sort of relentlessly amoral character who will screw anyone over and tell any lie and do anything he can to make it to the top of Hollywood. And he gets there and the final scene is basically his wife has just cheated on him. And turns out it turns out someone's trying to steal his job and he's just. He has this moment of vulnerability and the narrator comes in and the narrator says, look, like I waited for this guy to get his comeuppance that, you know, I waited. He was like, I waited for karma to strike this guy down, for cancer, to give him all the pain that he'd inflicted on everyone else. And then he's like, I realized in this moment that that was never gonna happen. That the day to day reality of living in this person's head and skin and life, it was the punishment. And so I'm not religious, but my reading of the Bible, and I think this is supported by some of the scholarship, certainly not the consensus view, but that maybe Jesus was never saying you go to hell if you sin. He was saying. And there's an argument that the hell they refer to in the Bible was like a literal place, like the trash dump outside of Jerusalem. But he was saying that if you sin, if you go astray, if you act without virtue, you live in hell. Your life is hell. Even if you're rich, even if you have fame, even if you have a harem of beautiful women, your life is hell. Moral bankruptcy is not a pleasant place to live.

I love it. And then sin. My understanding of the etymology of the word sin is literally to miss the mark. So you go back to the archer, and you go back to these lines of, here's what you're capable of being hit that there's the best version of you. And the arrow is virtue, right? And Apollo, our patron God of philosophy, as an archer, all he's worried about is pulling the bowstring back and aiming with as much integrity as he can let go, and you're out of control. But then aim again. That's where the joy exists again. So good. We've covered mind, we've covered soul. Let's talk about the domain of the body. And this leads us to the 16 pages that kick off. And I counted them because I'm like, what's the number here? Because those are good. The 16 pages that kick off your. The domain of the body, which is edge of the seat. Like, wow. You know, just. Just so. I don't even know how to put it into words. Ineffably good.

Well, I'll take it. I'll take the compliment. I really struggled. I really struggled with who was gonna be the main character for the third part. I used an athlete, Tiger woods, as the main character for the second part, as a cautionary tale. So I was reluctant to use another athlete. Ideally, I'd wanted to find a female example. I wanted one of the lead stories to be a woman. I just couldn't make it work. And Churchill felt. Originally, I dismissed him because, I mean, nobody looks at Churchill and thinks, like, oh, that guy's, like, mastered the body. You know what I mean? He's portly, and he was. He was a bit of an epicurean, you know? And so I struggled with it, but ultimately, I just felt like he checked all the boxes. He was a lover of routine. He worshiped the power of a good hobby. He went through incredible adversity and difficulty and stress. Nobody worked harder in the 20th century than Churchill. And yet he had a great marriage. He was happy, he was funny. His life was full, filled with joy. And when it really fucking counted, The British Empire was not perfect. It was responsible for all sorts of horrific, horrible rights violations. But when the chips were down, he basically Saved all of humanity from Nazism. And that took immense political, physical, personal courage. And. And you know, the western and the Eastern world, you know, rests in Churchill's debt because of how he stood and what he called the finest hour.

Yeah, and you're. I jokingly said exactly that in the note. Another story, the picture of fitness, but the way that he managed his physical presence and as you said, you know, what he did in the X dozens of books, the 10 million or whatever words written, the 500 paintings, the six and a half decades of public service and oh yeah, he also stopped the Nazi menace. You know, thank you, Churchill. And he did what would have burned out 10 normal men with true eudaimonic joy. And so I love the way you captured that. So let's go back to the same kind of game of what was your favorite idea beyond the story of Churchill, from that section on stillness via the body?

Well, I tell a story about Churchill's predecessor a few generations back, William Gladstone, who was the Prime Minister of England, who basically on every weekend he could, or any free afternoon, he would head out onto the woods of his estate and chop down trees by hand with an ax. And he chopped down something like 3,000 trees in his lifetime. Not just for the hell of it. These were unhealthy trees or trees that needed to be harvested. But he just knew that you had to. Sometimes the way to clear the mind, to rest the body, to restore the spirit, was to go out there and just exhaust yourself. To do something physical and immersive that requires presence and to do it over and over again. And for me, you know, that's running and swimming, but for other people it's, you know, it's riding bikes. For other people it's, you know, collecting stamps. You know, it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be going to crossfit, but you got to do something that consumes you in a way that your work doesn't consume you.

Yeah. And the active leisure that actually replenishes your mind gets you to that point of stillness. My favorites, I think I personally hike, so my thing is I hit the trail every once. So it's a forest, it's there with no technology and it's just. It's my template. Literally. I don't know how many, you know, thousand plus times hitting the trail here. Thousands, actually. My favorite section was probably after the prelude there. I'm a guy of routine, so I love your get a routine. Stick to it. You know, and Churchill's routine as well was Actually, pretty astonishing, too, right? And he laid bricks. To put it in perspective, he painted and he laid bricks. These are two of his primary hobbies, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, you know, when we think routine, we tend to think athletes. But I tell the story of Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers is a creature of routine. He swam every morning, and he spent an hour in prayer. He wore the same clothes every day. He napped at the same time. He opened the show the same way. You know, he weighed the same amount every day. He ate the same meals. That might seem monotonous, but it's actually the stillness of the. Doing the same thing over and over again is what clears up the mental and spiritual energy to focus on really important or ambitious work.

Yeah, it's so good, man. Anything we didn't cover with the book? I want to ask you something about heroes. Anything we didn't cover the book you want to make sure we talk about.

I mean, I would just, you know, the last chapter of the book, the sort of. The afterwards is about something we hinted on, which is the idea of memento mori. And I think people go, oh, I'll have stillness later. You know, stillness is for when I retire. But you don't know, you know. And, you know, I have the coin which you showed, but I also. I wear this ring. I have a version of it made as a memento mori ring. And I just, you know, I fiddle with it, and I want, you know, death to always be there as something that I think about, not to take the joy out of things, but to remind me to feel the joy now, not to defer it to later, not to expect it to happen on its own. I want to see carpe diem is like, this is all you got, you know, seize today while you can. And, you know, I thought. I sort of. I look at how some of the great philosophers have died. Very few of them die unhappily, you know, they die present and grateful and empathetic. You know, Epicurus writes, you know, dear friend, this is the last letter on the most wonderful day of my death. You know, he's, like, happy that it's the last day of his life, because.

What else are you gonna do so good. And again, I. The momento mori coin is one of my favorites as well. I kind of toggle between your coins, but this one is permanent, kind of corner my desk placement. It. The whole carpe diem thing, too. Dan Millman, way of the Peaceful Warrior and all of his great stuff. The first guy whose books I read, all of his Books, you know, just 20 years ago, he framed it as. Actually, it's carpe punctom. You have this moment. It's this moment. In this moment, can you bring that stillness, that vitalized stillness, the energized tranquility, as I like to riff on it, to this precise moment, because that's all you're guaranteed. You said that too in the beginning, actually. I'll quote you on that and then we'll talk about what it means to be a hero. You say, remember, there's no greatness in the future, or clarity or insight, or happiness or peace. There's only this moment, so easy to forget. And I appreciate your guidance and your craftsmanship.

Thank you.

To that point, man. Okay, so then, modern hero, let's talk about Prelude a bit. So a big part of my work is again, optimized equals optimist equals best equals yudaimon high fiving your inner soul such that you can experience that flourishing, such that you can transcends man's most hierarchy. So you self actualize, but then you transcend yourself and you give yourself to the world as a hero, a modern hero. Again, etymologically, that word means protector. It's not tough guy or killer of bad guys. It's protector, strength for two and doing the work to have the strength for two. Love is your secret weapon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All that is a prelude to. When you think of the concept of being a modern hero, what comes to mind? What does that mean for you?

Yeah, I mean, obviously there are the people who literally protect us, whether they're firemen or soldiers. I think those people matter to me. A hero these days is someone who has. I think the most important of the virtues is courage. And they have courage in. In any sense. The courage to live the way that they want to live. The courage to say what they think needs to be said. You know, the courage to do the work that's important to them to do. So to me, it's impossible to separate being a hero and courage. And I think it's just something profoundly lacking in our world. People are. There's lots of noise and lots of chatter, but I'm not so sure that anyone means any of the shit that they're saying. I think they're saying it because they're trying to score points or they know that this is what the party line is. I don't see a lot of people speaking legitimate truth.

Yeah. And doing the work to actually find the stillness. Because that truth comes from bring it full Circle.

Yes.

Meant to sell your book one more time, but to bring it full circle. The only place from which you can actually discover that truth is in stillness.

Yes.

And then the only place from which you can actually consistently have the courage to show up in integrity with that truth is being able to flip the switch and having the stillness in the moment in which you need it the most, which is every moment on the most mundane in order to have the power to do what you need to do.

Sure.

Totally cool, man. Okay, well, one more time. Stillness is the key. The book comes out, right? We're gonna launch this interview the day that comes out. So get it. Yeah. And then go get all of other Ryan's other books. Go to daily stoic.com dailydad.com Ryan, is that. Are those the two best places to find your holiday.net is actually Ryan holiday.net.

And then I'm Ryan Holiday pretty much everywhere as well.

Okay. And then that's that bookshelf. If you're watching this in the background, Ryan, how many books do you read a year?

I don't know. I don't have a number, but you know, it's in the hundreds.

Okay. My goodness, you are my. We didn't talk about it, but Ryan talks about how our culture is lacking statues. Statues of people to whom we can aspire to be. Not in a comparative I'm not good enough, but in a wow, aspirational. That potential exists within me. I want to be that. So I'm inspired. But in your weekly or monthly, whatever it is, email, you're sending out your book recommendations. The first thing I do when I get your books, by the way, is open to the back your bibliography. I have gotten so many amazing recommendations from your books. So any ryanholliday.net Ryan Holiday. Stillness is the key. Thanks, man. Appreciate you.

Thanks for having me. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Bryan Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Brian with a quick little P.S. i'm really excited to let you know about an event we're working on. Plan is to make it the premier self optimizing event of 2020. We're calling it Optimize 2020. You the modern hero. Basic idea, five days, 101 world class luminaries, 1 million people. You can learn more and get your tickets to the online and offline event at Optimize Me 2020. Again, that's Optimize Me2020. Hope to see you.