EntreLeadership - #348: Stillness is the Key with Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

In a world that seems to be moving faster than ever, bestselling author Ryan Holiday favors a steadier, more measured approach to things. Rather than being fueled by emotion and rushing into big decisions, he insists that there is real insight to be gained in what he calls stillness, a strategic pause to stop and evaluate every option. Tune in to hear Ryan explain why stillness is the ultimate expression of strength and how this powerful mindset can bring clarity to even the most high-stakes situation.   entreleadership.com/podcast Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday Ryan Holiday's website The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Painting As a Pastime by Winston Churchill Free tool from EntreLeadership: Decision Making Checklist Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever been in this position where you start to really dive into the work that you're supposed to be doing and then you get distracted? Distracted by a ping, distracted by an alert, distracted by a notification. Well, that's why they call it the age of distraction. And that kind of presents a problem for you and I. Because our accessibility has dramatically increased, but our attention span is taking a free fall. And we find ourselves with this problem, this predicament, where the one thing that you and I both need, focus, is the one thing that we just can't seem to find. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today's guest, Ryan Holliday is one of the great thinkers, writers, storytellers of our time.

In this conversation, he's going to draw from ancient history, athletics, pop culture, and even the ancient art of stoicism to make a compelling case that the key to focused leadership is stillness. That's right. Ryan says that stillness is the key. It's the title of his new book. And the moment that typifies this principle is two weeks in 1962 in which one man's intentional stillness change the course of human history. As I was sort of looking through history and trying to find an example that I felt like exemplified the very high stakes that stillness matters on, I mean, obviously one impulse is sports. You could look at some team with the Super Bowl on the line or two strikes in the World Series and the game on the line. But I ended up looking instead at the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is probably

the single most dangerous moment in human history. The Soviets set up a number of active missile sites on Cuba, you know, like 90 miles from American shores. The rumor, the belief was that, you know, something like 50 to 100 million people would die if nuclear war broke out between America and the USSR. And, you know, John F. Kennedy was not up until this time a particularly well-respected president. He'd bungled the Bay of Pigs. He'd been sort of diplomatically manhandled by Khrushchev at a UN meeting. And, you know, he'd live this sort of privileged life as kind of a spoiled rich kid. And I mean, I think one of the things you lay out in the book, too, is that he kind of lacked experience, like real world experience up to that point.

Totally. He'd sort of skated through life. I mean, look, he'd gone a war hero in the Second World War. And he had shown in flashes, you know, his sort of strength and courage. But as an executive leader, he did not have. much in the way of a resume. And so when he goes to bed and wakes up and finds out that overnight, the CIA has found out about these missile sites, I mean, it must have felt like the world was going to end. And literally, it was on the cusp of ending. And so, you know, he convenes his advisors and his generals. And this sort of the sentiment is unanimous. We have to go to war over this. We have to bomb the hell out of Cuba, probably have to invade. We may have to lob missiles at Russia itself. And lots of people are going to die. And that's just

the way that it is. And what was so remarkable about Kennedy is particularly for a guy who'd been sort of bullied into the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs, he had this sort of stillness and the courage and the insight to go like, whoa, let's slow this thing down. Let's think about what our options are. One of Kennedy's favorite expressions, he said, I want to use time as a tool and not as a couch. So he wasn't saying like, hey, let's sit back and just see how this goes. He was saying, If we rush into this, we eliminate options. If we wait and we look at this and we try to get to the bottom of it, we have more options. And that's really what he did. And because a lot of this was recorded, a lot of it was memorialized. You can see Kennedy just over and over again pushing these people who

wanted to instinctually go with the sort of the emotional response. He said, okay, so we bomb Cuba. What does Russia do? And it was like the generals had not thought that far. They just knew what their training told them to do. And so ultimately, what Kennedy settles on is this idea of putting a quarantine around Cuba. And even that is a little brilliant, right? Technically, it's a blockade. You're encircling a country and militarily preventing shipments from coming and going. But what Kennedy calls it a quarantine.

He's trying to de-escalate as much as possible to give his opponent a chance to come to their senses. And that's really what he does. There's something so powerful there in that from a least, leadership perspective, it wasn't indecision necessarily. It was strategic waiting almost and that he was he was being patient for the correct time and the correct order of things, it seems like. Yes. And what I think is key, though, there were also advisors who were like, look, we have lots of missiles in Europe. This is just the state of things. Like, don't worry about it, you know? And so it's not that Kennedy was like, we'll just let this play out as it's going to play out. He was incredibly principled. It was unquestionable to him.

that these missiles had to go. And that rival power was not permitted to deceitfully install missiles the way that Russia had did. And Russia had continually lied to Kennedy about it. So we have some of the notepads that Kennedy wrote on, which is incredible. And, you know, he would just write like missile, missile, missile, missile, consensus, consensus. He drew pictures of sailboats. He walked through the White House Rose Garden. And emotionally, he wanted to do what everyone thought you should do.

But intellectually, mentally, spiritually, he knew that there was a better way. And he ends up settling on this quarantine path. He de-escalates at every step. And then finally, the Soviets realized, oh, man, we massively underestimated our opponent here. You know, Kennedy had written on this pad. Like, we are demanding the withdrawal of these missiles. And he underlined it multiple times.

Like, he was not going to back down. At the same time, he wasn't riled up, he wasn't angry, he wasn't paranoid. He was exactly what you want presidential leadership to be when a crisis hits. He was calm. He was open. He saw the big picture. He had empathy, but he also had the strength of his convictions. And so ultimately, the Soviets sort of wake up. They signal they're willing to negotiate. Kennedy has given them a way out. And I think even more impressively, and people didn't know this for many years later, but then also privately, Kennedy calls and goes, look, if you take away, I'm not going to do a quid pro quo thing here, but know that if you get out of this, if you get yourself out of this mess you put yourself into, I will also remove some of

the missiles that we have in Turkey as sort of a sign of good faith. And so again, the world has probably never come so close to a nuclear holocaust as it did in that moment. And, you know, as the historians sort of say now the Soviets and the Americans were eyeball to eyeball off the coast of Cuba. There were submarines. There were missiles that were ready to go. Plains were even shot down. But somehow Kennedy's sort of strength and stillness prevents this situation from spiraling out of control as it so easily could have. And the reason I tell the story, look, most of us are never going to be in a position like that. But we are in arguments with their spouse. We are in legal disputes with a business partner. We're stuck in traffic. We're facing a book deadline. We all have

high-stakes situations in our own lives, and there's almost no situation that does not benefit from the sort of mindset and the clarity that Kennedy brought to the 13 days in October that changed the course of history. I had chills when I read the story, and now I've got chills again with you telling it. I think it so perfectly illustrated. kind of in a high pressure situation over the course of 13 days. Like it just kind of pressure cooks the idea that everything that you're talking about, stillness, it's a decision. And it was one that maybe at earlier stages in his life, he had not shown a propensity for.

But I'll tell you, as I was reading your book, I was thinking about, I mean, I've heard that it's a trilogy. So you wrote, the obstacle is the way, ego is the enemy, and then stillness is the key. And I just, I always think like, obstacle is the way. Yes, ego is the enemy. Yes, go kill the enemy. And then I thought, really, stillness? That's where he's going to go now? It seemed like a little bit of a departure from kind of the militant approach that you've had to your writing, at least in those past two books. So why was this your next focus? Why was this the next thing you wanted to spend your time on? That's a great question. I mean, look, I think as a creative or an artist as an entrepreneur, you always want to be pushing yourself. You always want to be doing. something new. You don't want to do what's predictable. You don't want to do what everyone thinks you're going to do next. I think that's just not a recipe for growth. Like you grow when you

challenge yourself and you grow when you challenge expectations. So there's a little bit of that, but I think primarily what I realized is that as much as stillness can feel like a soft skill, it's the skill that makes the things that I'm talking about in the other book possible. There's nobody who has less stillness than this sort of narcissistic egomaniac. There is no way you can overcome those really complex, difficult obstacles if you're frantic. You know, I tell the story in Obstacles Away about Ulysses S. Grant, he's sitting in this chair in a photography studio and a skylight breaks above him and like these glass shards come sort of shattering down. He very easily could have been killed. And Grant just sort of looks up and then he looks.

looks back at the camera. He just has such discipline and self-control that it doesn't even rattle him. And so we can think about that stillness and go, oh, I can see why that level of sort of self-discipline, that self-mastery, would serve someone very well as president, would serve someone very well in battle, would have served him really well when, you know, when he was down and out before the Civil War. So stillness isn't this sort of absence of strength. It's not this kind of flexibility or this nothingness, it's actually like the ultimate sort of strength and it's the ultimate part of mastery. Like there's lots of really strong people. There's lots of really driven people. But like the people we really admire, the people who have accomplished sort of incredible things,

I think uniquely have this sort of stillness running through them. That's powerful. It's not the absence of strength. It's the expression of strength. That's so good. So there's a couple topics that I think you hit on in the book that are hyper relevant to the business owners and business leaders that we get to work with and speak to every day. And the first one that I read it and I just started pumping my fist as I was reading it was the chapter titled Let Go and it was where you focus on this topic of control. And so I'd love for you to just kind of lay the framework for us of how how does control and maybe being a control freak to a degree affects stillness, and then what is the proper approach?

So in that story, I'm talking about Zen and the art of archery and how the really great archery masters don't teach, you know, here's how you aim the arrow, here's the secret to shooting a bullseye, what they talk about is form, and then they talk about detachment. Awa Kenzo, the sort of great archer, Zen Buddhist, he talks about the idea of willful will and how self-defeating that is. And so, you know, the archer who's really trying really hard is the one who's not very good. And a more modern analogy, anyone who's ever played golf knows that the harder you try to play golf, the worse you are at golf, right?

When you try to hit it really hard, that's when you shank it. When you try to follow your shot, that's where you shank it. when you really want to hit a put a certain way, that's when you met. So, so it's, what you need there is a bit of detachment and you need to be able to relax. You need to be able to let go. Writing is kind of the same way, writing and putting out books in general. I actually have to work actively in my life not to have goals. Now that might seem like a crazy thing to say to an entrepreneur or a creative person, but this is, if you have goals now, you're outcome focused rather than processed focus. So when I sit down to write, my goal is not to write a bestseller. My goal is to write

purely and presently and give everything that I have to the process. When I put out a book, my goal is to reach the people that the book deserves to reach. It's not to hit a bestseller or sell a certain number of copies. In a way, a goal is artificially delimiting, right? If I go, my goal for my first week is to sell 15,000 copies. Well, maybe actually the book was capable of selling 20,000 copies. And now I've gotten sort of myopically obsessed with a specific number that, you know, quite frankly, I just pulled out of nowhere. And again, instead of focusing that energy on doing what I need to succeed. And so what I'm talking about in this chapter, what the archery master is talking about, is just the idea of focusing on the process, on drawing back the

string, on letting the arrow sort of lightly leave your fingers, on holding the form, on your breath. It's not on the externals. The student who is convinced that they know how they should be taught is the hardest student to teach. The one that hands themselves over to the process, to the master, and then truly apprentices in the craft is the one who is easiest to mold and the one who learns quickly and the best. That's a pretty powerful analogy. And we see it all the time with leaders that it can be so easy to care so much about an outcome that you become the micromanager that you swore to never be. Of course. And you're holding on to it so tight that you become insufferable to work with.

And I think honestly, most leaders have a little bit of a control freak stint to them. And it's just a product of the fact that they actually care. So what are the practices, what are the actions people should take to just to start loosen the grip and have what you, describe as a healthy detachment? Look, it's like the Bonnie Raid song. You can't make somebody love you, you know? You can't make someone do anything. All you can do is set in motion or set up the pieces necessary for the thing to ideally ensue.

And so you focus on hiring the right people. You focus on the clarity of your instructions. You know, you focus on providing the best information, the best problem. the best processes. You focus on putting yourself in a position to succeed. What you don't focus on is sort of trying to white-knuckle it in the direction you go. And, you know, Nick Saban, and I talk about this in obstacle, he talks about the process. He says, like, the average down in football is like seven seconds. He's like, let's just focus on that, the seven seconds in front of us. So in a way, what this letting go also produces and why it's so integral to stillness, it produces real presence, right?

Like, when I'm writing, I'm thinking about nothing more or less than the thing I am writing. I'm not thinking about what the cover is going to look like on the shelf. I'm not thinking about the book party. I'm not thinking about the check that I'm going to get. You know, I'm not thinking about the things that I'm afraid of either. I'm not thinking about people saying that it's not any good. I'm not thinking of it not being accepted by the publisher. I'm not thinking of the haters you're going to leave negative Amazon reviews.

I'm just thinking about the task in front of me. And I'm giving everything to that. So I think this kind of becomes this paradox. And I'd love to get your take on this because it almost seems like on one hand, we're telling leaders, don't be overly controlling, have a loose grip. Don't come at this too aggressively. And then on the other hand, and constantly talking about you need to take ownership.

You need to have an ownership mentality, and you need to drive this thing forward. Everything rises and falls on leadership. I mean, that sounds, it just seems like a very stressful tightrope to walk. So what is your take on how those two pair together? How do you work those two into leadership? So I think we would look at something the Stoics called the dichotomy of control. And what they talk about is they go, look, you can separate things in life into

two categories, the things that are up to you and the things that are not up to you. The things that are not up to you, you have to not even think about. You have to be totally indifferent to. The things that are up to you, this is where you focus. This is where you are relentless. This is where you exert your force and your character and your desire. So again, I focus on what I can do, what I don't spend a lot of time thinking about or being upset by is what happens. after it leaves my hand. So again, to go to the archery example, drawing back the arrow, you know, knocking it properly, aiming your breath, your training, what you ate for breakfast that morning, how much sleep you got, all of that's up to you. But as soon as the arrow leaves

the bow, now the wind has it. The target can be moved, you know? A bird could fly down and snatch the arrow out of the air. You know, like any number of things that can happen. And so what you focus on is what you control. That's where you exert your... So just as an example, with my ego book, all these people have probably gotten a thousand of these emails since the book came out. People go, I really like your book. I'd like some advice on dealing with my boss's ego.

And I totally get where they're coming from. But you don't control your boss's ego. And I promise you, you have your own ego that might not be nearly as bad as your bosses, and it might not have nearly the consequences that your bosses have, but it's the part that you have the most control and ownership over and the one you are most likely to have real impact on. So why don't we start there? If you could somehow prove to me that you had utterly banished ego from your life, maybe we could have this conversation with your boss, but that's very, very unlikely. That's, man, that's good, because I think about it from the other

perspective, too, from the business owner perspective. It's like, We hear people all the time. We teach Pat Lencioni's humble, hungry, smart. And people all the time say, I just, my people, this person on my team, they are not being humble. How do I get them to be more humble? And it's like, you can't control that. What you can control is your hiring process that let that person in the door. And that's what you can own is refining that hiring process.

I love that focus on what you can control. Yeah, look, people spend a lot of time watching CNBC to find out what the markets do. doing what the larger economic forces are. Is the president going to do X, Y, or Z? You know, and it's like all of this has substantially less impact on your business than like the attitude that you brought into work that morning or like the strategic initiatives that you are laying out for yourself and for your employees. And so yeah, we just tend to get focused on these bigger picture things. It's easy to spend a lot of time thinking about, what's going on in the general industry, what our competitors are doing, you know, what our predecessors

did, what the board of directors thinks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, that comes at a cost, and it almost always comes at the cost of you handling your business. So do you think it's, I mean, is it almost, are we using it as a cop out whenever we blame circumstance? Like, are we putting ourselves in the role of a victim whenever we start to blame the economy or the person that's in the White House or what the market is doing today or there just aren't any good people out there anymore. I mean, is that what that is? Yeah, I think it's a form of entertainment. It's a catharsis.

You know, it's a distraction. In a way, it's like gossip, right? It's just like, like, what I love about sports is that it reminds me of some of these lessons, right? Like, when I watch Sports Center, I sometimes have to go like, you know, I'm not participating in this at all. Like what I'm watching today on SportsCenter is they're speculating about, you know, what New England's going to do or, you know, is this coach going to be let go? Is this player hurt? Whatever. It doesn't, the game on Sunday is going to be the game on Sunday, right? And what's crazy is I get emotionally affected by the game on Sunday. How crazy is that? But if that's a contained entertainment experience, I get it. What I think is interesting is that people not only want to watch the game on Sunday, but then they want to watch speculation about how the game on Sunday is going to be. from Monday to Saturday. And my point in making this is like, the news is basically the exact same thing, right? Like,

you're going to vote for who you're going to vote for. Your representatives are going to do X, Y, and Z. But speculation about will Donald Trump do X or will Donald Trump do Y, is Nancy Pelosi going to do X? Is Nancy Pelosi going to do Y? This is just idle speculation and chatter. And you watching this and being involved in it, is not influencing those events any more than watching the injury reports on SportsCenter, but it feels like your civic duty. And then the same is true on the business level. You turn on CNBC. And like I would urge someone who watches CNBC to go like, okay, list out 10 decisions that you made based on the information that you consumed today.

Like 10 actual decisions that you. you made based on this information. And the same applies for CNBC, Fox News, CNN, regardless of what you're watching is what you're saying. Yes, totally. Yeah. And I'm just saying, whatever your industry is, if you're reading, you know, like booksellers monthly or, you know, you're reading Zookeepers Magazine or whatever it is in your business, ask yourself, am I making any decisions on this information? Or is this just causing me anxiety, stress? Is this just a distraction? is this getting me excited? Like, is this actually information that I am using in any tangible way? And the truth is most of it is not. So you'd be better off watching Netflix or going for a walk or, you know,

playing video games. Like, you think that you're working, but actually you're just sacrificing your equanimity for somebody else's entertainment business. I'm never going to turn on the news again. I'm done. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. I'm not going to give up the Texas Longhorns on Saturday afternoon, but I would... No, no, that's totally fine. That's good. Okay, the next topic I want to jump into is this topic of enough. And I felt like it would be doing a disservice to our audience, not to read some of your writing

because it's so well written. So this is what you wrote on page 151. In a way, this is a curse of one of our virtues. No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire or the need for more is often at odds with happiness. Billy Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets someone to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The expectation of progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process. First of all, brilliantly written, Brian,

Thank you. How do we wrestle with that tension? Because you're talking to a bunch of people right now that probably the one thing that they all have in common is they are extremely driven and extremely ambitious people. So how do we wrestle with this idea that there are so many examples out there of people that are ambitious that end up not where they wanted to be and end up completely dissatisfied in the chase of something that they thought was going to bring them meaning? It's complicated, right? because the desire to get better and improve and grow is what drives us. It's what makes progress. It's what got us from where we began to where we are now.

It's also what got the human species from wherever it began to where we are now, right? There's a great quote. It's like, progress depends on the irrational man, right? The person who believes that if they get this, they will be happy. Of course, that's not how it works. but like we do benefit from these things. It's how we have electricity and, you know, iPhones and whatever. So it's a balance, certainly.

But what I'm talking about in this chapter is like, how can you make sure that you're not buying the delusion that if you just get this one thing on the other side of that hill, then finally you'll feel good. Finally, you'll be happy. Finally, you'll be okay. That lie has just wrecked so many people. Tiger Woods, his father, would refer to the word enough as the e-word. There was never enough.

And you can see where that leads you. It leads you to sort of spiritual bankruptcy, if not in many cases, financial and professional bankruptcy. Because you end up overreaching, you gamble everything instead of being happy with what you have. And look, I would say there's another version of this that I experience my own life. I've certainly seen with my parents that I bet, you know, the people in that sort of Dave Vrands, the universe or can relate to, which is like your desire to save, your desire for efficiency, you know, your desire to build wealth is great, especially early on in your career, right? It's better that you, you want to save, that you're willing to go without. But I sometimes I see with my parents, it's like, you know, you just traded like six hours with your grandchildren to save $30 on a flight, you know?

and you don't need the $30. Like you can't take, not only is your time now worth a lot, but you can't take any of this with you when you die. And so I'm not talking about, you know, buying yourself a Lamborghini because you think it'd be fun. What I'm talking about is understanding the value of your time and that this is your only non-renewable resource. You can earn more money.

What you cannot do is get back. back the time that you wasted, but also I think this is where it really meant. The amount of people that I see, and again, I experience as my own life, the arguments that we have with people we love because they want to buy this and we don't want them to buy this or they have a slightly different attitude towards money than we do, you can't get back the stress or the anxiety or the argument that you had either. And so I just want people to think about like, what are you doing this for? You are earning one. you are saving, you are investing wisely, you are trying to be successful in your career,

ultimately for one reason. And that is to be a happy, contented, still human being who is enjoying their life. And so you want to make sure that you don't end up doing the opposite of what you want to supposedly get you what you want, especially when you can get hit by a bus tomorrow. Are you at the stage of business where for you as an owner and certainly for your team, are just overloaded with tasks and activities and you're recognizing that you're at the stage where you need to start bringing system and process into your organization. Well, from a coaching perspective, the first step that we recommend you take is start automating any tasks that are repeated. And specifically, whenever it comes to automating customer communication, the service we recommend is

called Keep. We've worked with them for years to grow our business and serve our customers well. and we've seen small business owners win by leveraging the power of this service. And so if you're at this stage where you need to start working smarter and not just harder, Keep is offering a free trial to our podcast listeners. So if you want to take advantage of that free trial with Keep, text the word work smart to 33444. Again, that's the word work smart, no spaces to 33444, and work with Keep to start. start automating your customer communication. We use that phrase all the time around here.

If you're not growing, you're dying. Right. And it's kind of just business lexicon now. If you're not growing, you're dying. If you're not growing you're dying, which that phrase is a little bit at odds with this idea to a degree. But I think from a certain perspective, so much of the examples and the anecdotes that you lay out in your book

is just highlighting the fact that the people that are the best in the world have a remarkable presence about them to be all in where they are. Yes, you do want to always be getting better. The problem is, is this process making you miserable? Or is the desire to always get better become a sort of a compulsion and a need? So when you bump into obstacles or difficulties or you experience setbacks, now all of a sudden you're just whipping yourself. You know what I mean?

Okay, so let me ask you this. And this is a personal question for me, but I think many will relate to this. I've run 19 marathons now. Okay. And I'm feeling this need to sign up for another one, not necessarily because I really, really deeply want to run another marathon, but because I feel where I'm afraid or I'm scared

that I'll slip into laziness, if I don't. And I think a lot of driven people feel that way that if I don't pursue that next thing, then I'll get lost in this pool of mediocrity. So what does healthy look like? How do you go about defining what is enough, whether it's moving your leadership forward, whether it's a personal goal, moving your business forward? How do you define what healthy looks like? Does that make sense? Yeah, look, I think it's tricky. But what I would say to someone in your position is the fact that you're worried about slipping into laziness is the check on laziness. You know what I mean? It's like a person who's worried that they might be a sociopath is not a sociopath, right? Because the fact that you've even

thought about this is it reveals that you have a certain capacity that an actual sociopath wouldn't have. So I think you do want to be getting better and you do want to always be growing. But you want to make sure that, again, it doesn't become, that positive things can become an addiction. Look, I run as well. I think I've written about this, but I have an Apple Watch. And so, you know, the Apple Watch sort of tells you like, did you meet your goal today? Did you not meet your goal? Last year, I got in a streak, I did like 36 days in my exercise goal. So that's 36 consecutive days of working out without a rest day. Obviously, that's not great. It was actually harder for me to stop on the 37th day than it would have been to do another day of exercise. The reason I tell this story is it's sort of a cautionary tale,

because on like the 38th or the 39th day, I just felt awful and I went to the urgent care. Oh, and it turned out I had mono. Like I just worn myself down so much because I lacked the discipline to say no. I lacked the discipline to be disciplined about my discipline that I ended up causing myself a far bigger setback than just taking one or two days off in that time. And so look, the number one cause of injuries for athletes is not some freak hit on the field. It's usually from over-training. It's from, look at Kevin Durant. He forced himself to come back before his body was ready. And instead of missing a couple games in the championship, he now misses an entire year of playing. And I relate to that very much because it almost takes more discipline for you to rest

and to restore yourself than it does to put yourself out there and give your 100% effort. So we see examples of that all the time where people hit a rock bottom essentially because they had this relentless capacity for pleasing people and for consistently, saying yes and for consistently doing the next thing. And they lacked the discipline to say no, and they lacked the discipline to slow down. What are the systems or the habits that you would recommend people put in place so that they don't just slow down when they have to because they hit a rock bottom, but so that they slow down systemically as a part of something they should be doing regularly? I'll give you one way I think about it. I gave a talk to the Rams this year.

at their training camp in Orange County. And, you know, most of these teams have sort of like a list of sort of virtues or missions. Inside the organization, one of the ones for the Rams, this is their number one thing. It's keep the main thing, the main thing. And what they mean by that is, like, everyone has, like, a lot of skills. But, like, what's the main thing? What's your main job in this organization? What's the main priority we're trying to do here?

And let's make sure we're not getting distracted or deviating from that. So for me, I have to think about what's my main thing. I have lots of different opportunities. I have investments I can do. I have, and this is just professionally. Obviously, I have lots of personal demands on my time and interests as well. But I have speaking opportunities. I have consulting opportunities.

I have ghostwriting opportunities. I have all sorts of things that are interesting or cool. But the main thing for me is writing my books. I have to remember this always. And that when I say yes to things that I don't really want to do, that are not that important or maybe that are lucrative but are totally uninteresting to me, that comes at a cost. And so like I tell this to my assistant, my calendar, everything you book in this calendar is time I'm not writing, right? Like I don't schedule writing. Writing is the main thing. It's the

default. So, and I try to think about this and I obviously have the people at work with me, think about this too. When I agree to be on a 20-minute phone call, when I agree to meet for coffee with someone I don't actually want to meet, you know, when I agree to a speaking gig that's less than my normal fee, that time is going in the calendar and I'm not writing in that time. And I can never get that time back. And I actually almost certainly am not monetizing my time properly because writing is the most, not only the most important thing I do, it's the most lucrative. So you got to know what your main thing is. Is your main thing being a mom or a dad? Is your main thing, you know, being a leader as your main thing, being the ideas person for the organization, like,

are you the organized? What is the thing that only you can do? And know that when you're doing other things, it's coming at the expense of that main thing. So many of the examples of high performers in your book are people that were irrationally unbalanced. Yeah, sure. And so, I mean, we could think like, okay, Ryan's a writer. So Ryan wakes up at first. And so Ryan wakes up at 5 a.m. starts writing and doesn't talk to anyone, see anyone, eat sleep or drink until 9 p.m. at night. But that would run its course and it wouldn't be healthy anymore. So how do you define what is the proper balance for the season that you're in, Ryan? Yeah, it's actually, when I talk to people that are like that, I sort of go like, man, it does not seem fun to be you. And I don't know how you can

produce good work from such an unbalanced state. So, yeah, look, writing is my main thing. And but like when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is spend time with my kids. I have breakfast with my family. I sit down with a journal. I make time to exercise later in the day. I know that what I do is very important, but it's also very fragile. And it can be burned out very easily. And so part of keeping the main thing, the main thing is not just only doing that.

It's protecting it and treating it. as the sort of delicate gift that it is. You know, you're not going to do good work pulling all-nighters. It's just not going to happen. And so you have to go, oh, I'm going to bed at 10 o'clock tonight, not because I'm lazy, not even though I hear Elon Musk is working until 2 in the morning, I'm going to bed early tonight and I'm keeping a normal, healthy schedule because it makes me better at what I do. Hmm. Final question on this topic of enough. I know you've done some work with the University of Alabama and Nick Sabin. I'd be interested to hear your take on this because he is someone that, I mean, so much to admire about what he has accomplished there, arguably one of the, if not the greatest college football coaches in American history. And I mean, the comment that everyone makes about him is the guy never smiles. The guy never smiles. The guy never smiles. you know. So it's like there's this constant questioning, and he obviously doesn't say much publicly, but I think there's this constant questioning of does he ever actually enjoy where he currently is enough,

or is he always focused on the next thing? So you can speak to the Nick Sabin part if you would like, but what I'd like to know is how do you make sure that you do take time to just be present and be grateful for what you have accomplished, but also not let that keep you from doing the next thing? So I've actually talked to Sabin about this a little bit. I mean, obviously I'm a huge fan. He is probably the best to ever do what he's done. He says, like, look, I have such high standards for myself that what you guys see as objective success, I'm comparing to how I know it could be. So it's not that he's dissatisfied. It's that he's not letting the fact that they're up 35 points determine whether this is good or not. And so on the one hand, that prevent. I think ego from creeping in, but from what I've heard, Saban is actually like the coach you want to have in your locker room when you lose a national championship. Obviously, he's great when you win. But when you win, he's like, here's what we didn't do good enough in this game, right? When you lose, he's like, I didn't coach you well enough. This is on me. We're going to come back better next year.

Right. So in the one hand, yes, what you're doing is you're taking a little bit of the air out of the balloon on the success. And the success is already wonderful, so I don't think this is that big of a deal. But what you're also doing by the same attitude is taking a lot of the sting out of the setbacks and the difficulty as well. So, yeah, sure, he's stepping out of a celebration dinner to call a potential recruit. But also, when there's a difficulty or an injury, he's also right back at it and he's not feeling that too hard either. So I think, just as an analogy, you my own career. Whenever I have a book coming out, I also have the next book that I'm writing about halfway done, and I have a proposal out for the book that I want to write after that. So it's

not that I don't care how this book does. Obviously, a lot is writing on it, and I really believe in it, I'm pushing on it really hard, but it means that there's no outcome that it could have good or bad that's going to substantially change what I'm doing day to day. because I got work to do. I love that. I got work to do. I'd love to shift gears a little bit. One of the things that I love about your writing is you draw from a wide variety of examples and sources,

but the name that consistently comes up over and over and over again is Marcus Aurelius. And this was a character from history that I did not know much about or I don't even know that I knew who he was until you introduced me to him. I'd love you to share with our audience who he was and then really why you look at him as such an example and such a kind of a light as to the proper way to live a life. So Marcus Aurelius, for people who don't know, is the old guy and the movie Gladiator that Washington Phoenix's character kills. He's this incredible historical anomaly, right? We have this rule, absolute power corrupts absolutely. but Marcus Aurelius is chosen. He's not like born to the son as the son of an emperor. He's chosen. He's adopted to become the emperor of Rome. So he becomes the most powerful man in the world. And yet he

does not seem to be changed or corrupted by the power that he holds. The first thing Marcus Aurelius does when he becomes emperor is he names his stepbrother co-emperor. The first thing he does with this power that's supposed to corrupt absolutely is he gives half of it away. I mean, it's insane. And so what we have from Marcus and why he's such a core source in all of my writing is that Marcus spent many quiet nights and mornings while he was the most powerful man in the world writing in a diary or a journal that survives to us and is now known as the Meditations. And his Meditations is just this beautiful book of a really busy, stressed out person with the weight of the world on their shoulders, giving themselves advice on how to be better, how to be more fair, how to be more honorable,

how to work harder, how to be happier, how to be less worried or anxious about things. And so it's just this remarkable, beautiful historical document that I think every single person should read and should have their kids read and should, you know, it's just incredible to think that Stoicism, that's the philosophy that Marcus is writing about, is walking the earth not as this sort of academic discipline, but as a strategy or a way of living by real people in the real world. Like it's just, just as interesting on his side. The other famous Stoak philosopher is this guy, Seneca, who's a couple of generations before Marcus Reel. this, Seneca and Jesus are born the same year. And so obviously Jesus is an incredible figure,

depending on what you believe, he's an incredible figure because he's the son of God, right? Seneca's just a guy, right? Like Seneca is just a normal human being dealing with the same problems that you and I are dealing with. And these writings survive to us and they provide, I think, a sort of a way of living and all sorts of interesting advice and dilemmas and ethical quandaries. Seneca's brother is in the Bible. He adjudicates a case involving St. Paul. So this ancient world is not this sort of distant foreign thing. It's like intricately tied in to all the traditions and beliefs that we have now.

What is the message that you hope people get from what we talked about today and then also your writing? And what do you hope people do with it? What are the actions that you hope they will take? Well, look, if they don't read the book or they do read the book and they forget everything, I mean, to me, the main thing is like just this, even this word stillness. Like, there's a reason that this word stillness appears in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Islam, in Judaism, in Stoicism, in Epicureanism, in every school and religion you can possibly imagine all talk about this idea of stillness, of slowing down, of getting clarity, of mastering oneself,

of not being jerked around by emotions or external forces of bearing adversity with equanimity. And so there's a reason that they talk about it's because it's really important and that it's what makes life worth living. And so if people can just leave with this idea of just, okay, I'm going to prioritize stillness or I'm just going to at least think about this idea of stillness and maybe try to notice it when it pops up naturally in my life. To me, that would be a form of success. but I would say other than that, like what I try to do as a writer is take ancient wisdom from a diverse number of sources and present it to people in a sort of a modern, applicable way. And so I hope there are lessons or tips or tools in the book that people can apply to whatever it is they're doing. I was thinking this morning as I was finishing up your book, I am not one to typically get lost in what I'm reading,

but you have this ability, Ryan, to make me get lost in what I'm reading. And I was thinking about, like, why is that the case? What does he do that gives him the ability to do that? And I think two things came to mind. I think, number one, every single thing that I've ever read that you've written just seems like it's going to have increasing relevancy in the years to come. I think the obstacle is the way, is more relevant today than when you wrote it. I think ego is the enemy is more relevant today than when you wrote it.

I think stillness is the key is going to be more relevant, a decade from now than when you wrote it. But then the other thing that I keyed in on was that honestly, more than just about anyone I've ever read, you have this ability to pull from such a wide variety of sources to make a point. And over the course of 10 pages, you can reference John F. Kennedy, Billy Jean King, a monk that I've never heard of, Epictetus, Johnny Cash, Tiger Woods, Jesus, and you pull all these things to make a point. So I really value your perspective in that way. I'd love you to close us out similar to the way that you began with the story about Kennedy. I'd love you to tell us a story about someone that you deeply look up to,

either from pop culture or from history, that will really hit this point home. I close the book with the story of Winston Churchill, who I would argue is probably the busiest man of the 20th century. He wrote something like 10 million words. He held office for 60 plus years. he led Britain through the Second World War as well as the First World War. He was an incredible human being. You would not think someone with the resume and skill that he had. And if you've ever seen a picture of Winston Churchill, is not necessarily, doesn't look like a guy that takes care of himself.

You would not think stillness when you think of Winston Churchill. You think sort of a bundle of energy and, you know, a bit of an Epicurean. And he was those things, but he writes this amazing book called Painting as a Pastime. and it's all about his love of painting, which he discovered after, you know, some failures in the First World War, he turns to painting as a hobby, but not as a thing that's unrelated to his work, but as a way to restore himself and give him peace despite the craziness of his work. He also picks up a second hobby. He loves bricklaying. He builds cottages, like actual buildings out of bricks on his own property. He was a guy that understood that

almost the harder you work and the more weight that's on your shoulders professionally, the more important leisure time and relaxation and the ability to say no and the ability to find humor and joy and creative expression in ordinary things, the more important that becomes. And so I just find Churchill to be a fascinating. Churchill, with all the weight and things on his schedule often spent about not only to take a nap every day he spent about an hour sitting on his porch just sort of rocking repeating poetry to himself thinking you know this was in the depths of world war two he was doing those things yeah yeah and he did this because if he wasn't taking care of himself and if he wasn't taking time to think and to think big picture and to see what was

coming up on the horizon who was doing it You know, if he wasn't doing it, who was doing it. So it's really, really important that we take the time to find hobbies, to find leisure, to enjoy ourselves, to find an outlet for these emotions. Because if we don't, we're going to burn out. And then we're going to leave a lot of potential breakthroughs or collaborations or even just impact on the world on the table. Well, Ryan, we're so grateful for every conversation we've gotten to have with you. And I'm super thankful for the message that you presented in this one today. I know it's going to help a whole lot of people. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Okay, here we go.

We're going to take that whole conversation and make it hyper-actionable right now. And I want 100% participation on this. Seriously, I want you to do it. I'm going to do it. Our producer, Tim's going to do it. He's sitting right across from me right now and he can't speak up. You just opted in. We all need to do this.

It's going to be the stillness challenge. So five minutes, 10 minutes, for you overachievers out there, 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. I want you to take intentional time today, whatever you can muster, to just sit still and think. I want you to turn off the phone. I want you to eliminate distractions. I want you to take the earbuds out of your ears. And I want you to just sit still and think. If you're like me, you get to points in your life where your thoughts.

haven't caught up to you. And as a leader, that is really dangerous. So it's important that we all just take this time. So I'm going to encourage all of you, take the challenge, do it today. I also meant what I said. I read Stillness is the key and the book is phenomenal. So if you do want to get that book, the link is in the show notes of this episode. Also, I want to let you know about a free resource that our team created for you, the listeners, that ties in directly to everything Ryan just taught on. It's the decision-making checklist. One of the things that he talked about was the fact that so often the crucial decisions that you have to make as a leader require forethought, require wisdom, and require your ability to walk systematically through a process. And that's why we created this

checklist is because we want to make sure that you have on paper the questions you should be asking yourself before you ever make a big decision. So if you want to take advantage of that free resource, You can text Decision to 33444. Again, that's Decision to 33444, or you can click the link that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership.

This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Dave Ramsey Show. If you're looking for boring financial talk, you're in the wrong place. This is not your mother's 401k meeting. This is life on the radio. And it's just downright entertaining.

Thanks for hanging out with us, America. We're glad you're there. To hear full episodes, just search Dave and, Dave Ramsey wherever you listen to podcast or go to Dave Ramsey.com.