The Daily Stoic - You Must Find The Stillness | Kindness Is Always The Right Response

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Ryan talks about why it’s so important to find stillness, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day.Get a copy of Ryan Holiday’s bestselling book “Stillness Is The Key” at The Painted Porch Bookshop.GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. Go to Givewell.Org and enter Daily Stoic at checkout so they know we sent you.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, the daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus Mark Srelius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. You must find the stillness.

From the time the alarm goes off, it can feel like we get hit suddenly with a crossfire hurricane. Our house is chaos, our schedule is grueling, our boss is screaming our ears off. Our coworker needs us to show them how to do something for the umpteenth time. We're running late for a meeting, we're coming down to the wire on a deadline, we're not fully prepared to present to this client. We're supposed to meet that friend for lunch, we're sitting in traffic one car away from the guy who won't lay off the horn. And finally, when you do make it to the end of the day,

even the cool, quiet, darkest pierced by the shriek of someone who's jammed their it to the end of the day, even the cool, quiet, darkest pierced by the shriek of someone who has jammed their toe on the foot of the bed, and that shriek is coming from your mouth after stabbing your toe on the way back from brushing their teeth. There is barely a thread holding it all together. There's never enough sleep. There's never enough time. And yet, to be good at our jobs, to be good at this living thing, we must find time so

that we can find stillness, time to reflect, to focus. We need the calm that comes from stillness to restore and reboot us. And where will we find it? It won't be as Santa and Marcus areelius remind us, in fleeing to the country or to the sea. It won't be those measly two weeks of vacation or by cutting and running. No, we must find the stillness within the chaos. It might not feel like these moments of quiet can exist within a world of honking in yelling, with a Google calendar packed so tight with meetings and deadlines that everything looks like its own package of starbursts. But it can't, if we go within. We must find

it early in the morning before the house and the world are awake. We must drink in those minutes after the kids are in bed. Really drink it in. Don't defer it in favor of Netflix. Sitting in an Uber we can take some time with a journal finding the furthest parking spot in the garage we can enjoy or walk into the office. No matter what is happening in the world we must be like the rock with waves crashing around it.

As Marcus really has said, it stands fast and still and eventually the sea falls still as well, only for a moment. You must find stillness every day in the best place, the only place to reliably look for it, is within yourself. I know all the good things in my life come from stillness. That's why I wrote a book about it, to understand it, to focus on it, to make it more of a priority in my my life come from stillness. That's why I wrote a book about it to understand it to focus on it to make it more of a priority in my own life and stillness is a key came out in the fall of 2019 debuted at number one on the New York Times for Satellists and I got back to work on my other books But if you haven't read it, I'd love for you to check it out stillness is the key. I think one of my best books I've heard from all sorts of cool people in different walks of life who've used it It's the idea that the Sterex and the Buddhist were aligned on this key idea and it's

filled with strategies and exercises. I think that will help you seek out and maintain some stillness in your own life. Check it out. You can get it anywhere at Books or Sold and you can get signed copies in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com or you can come pick up a copy here in my bookstore, the Painted Port, I just signed a whole bunch of them that went out on the shelf this morning. Kindness is always the right response.

And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoke 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoke store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoke in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it.

It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best sellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Kindness is invincible, only when it's sincere with no hypocrisy or faking. For what even can the most malicious person do

if you keep showing kindness? And if given the chance, you gently point out where they went wrong, right? Stay with trying to harm you. This is Marcus Aurel Realysis Meditations 1118. What if the next time you were treated poorly? You didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back. What if you responded with unmitigated sincere kindness? What if you could, as the Bible says, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you? What kind of effect do you think that would have?

The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and you better. Rudeness, meanness, cruelty, these are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength. You have that strength. Use it. I read a book recently, not recently, maybe six, seven months ago, about a book by James Peck, who is one of the freedom writers. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides. And I think we we accidentally ordered a bunch of copies for the painting portion. I think we still have some.

So check it out if you want to. But it's his memoir. James Peck was one of the few white freedom writers, one of the early white participants in passive resistance to the horrendous injustice that was segregation in Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being beaten. He's attacked all these different occasions.

And how in the middle of being beaten or bullied or attacked or whatever, he would often say something to the person attacking him. Like he'd ask them a question or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And then how often, like, this moment, and how often this was like a record scratch moment,

I don't know, like, in some cases, it was like shake the person out of their sort of spiral of rage and hatred because like, they just expected to get nastiness back. And when they didn't, it almost, it didn't always work, of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it?

It's kind of like reminded them, oh, this is a human being. I'm about to do this. Do not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for. FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole.

Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric

rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Non-violence, of course, is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom, the Christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek. It's extraordinarily difficult to do.

You know, the people in the civil rights movement, they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints. There was real training, one of the amazing stories, and I tell this actually in the new book, which I haven't announced yet, but there's a scene where Martin Luther King is attacked on stage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the Civil Rights Movement, and he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi party, and and the crowd watches like, is he gonna fight back? Is he gonna lift his hands to protect themselves? And they know the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King

drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. And again, that took, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets him. They're not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have, you know, under fire. And then when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt, he takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to neutralize this threat, which, you know, Malcolm X would say he ought to have done, but he has like a pleasant conversation with him. And again, that's a record scratch, like the amount of discipline that that takes. I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself, but

Senka's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness, but to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered that the forces of segregation in many cases had control of the police and the military, and then it was insane to try to fight that violence with violence.

So we decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference. I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do. It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind. So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially particularly unkindness. Let's meet that kindness with unkindness. See what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short

and whose attention it catches. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Is this thing all check one, two, one, two.

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