Stillness Is the Key
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4.5 • 57 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller & Wall Street Journal Bestseller
In The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy to show why slowing down is the secret weapon for those charging ahead.
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. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ryan Holiday knows it’s tough to maintain stillness in this whirling dervish of a world. But he’s also crystal clear about the fact that learning how to ground your mind and body can make you better at pretty much anything, which is why we eagerly dug into Stillness Is the Key. Instead of getting all New Agey, Holiday uses a combination of history, psychology, and some straightforward spiritual savvy to explore the topic, making his ideas compelling and easy to absorb. We love how he homes in on key moments in the careers of artists, politicians, athletes, and thinkers—everybody from Socrates to JFK—to show how stillness contributed to their brilliance and success. That seems like a lot to live up to, but Holiday brings it all home by clearly explaining how you can center yourself in the same way.
Customer Reviews
Good read!
Give it a chance, you won’t regret it.
Stillness is the key
A great read for anyone trying to find that quiet place inside themselves to become a better person and more at peace in this crazy world. Ryan Holiday as a particular way of bridging generations of stoic (and other) philosophers together to help provide people today with an excellent blueprint for finding stillness in themselves for what ever type of life they’re living. Highly recommend any and all of his writing!
Misleading title
The book, in and of itself, is good, but the title is misleading. It starts with stillness in focus and then slowly meanders away from the topic in the title until the word stillness vanishes. This book is an inspirational, uplifting book, but is not about stillness.