Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

own term for this: being “house poor”). Montaigne was perceptive enough to ask whether it was in fact he who was the pet of his ...

tied down by what we own. Every piece of expensive jewelry comes with an insurance bill, every mansion with a staff of groundske ...

Which is why philosophers have always advocated reducing our needs and limiting our possessions. Monks and priests take vows of ...

This is not a rich life. There is no peace in this. Take action. Get out from under all your stuff. Get rid of it. Give away wha ...

I SEEK SOLITUDE A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES t was ...

busy studio and attended many spectacles and parties. Even his last years were spent not in secluded retirement but in the bustl ...

just how much they love someone while they’re booking back-to back-to-back meetings. If solitude is the school of genius, as the ...

In a more emulatable form of Merton’s retreat, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has, twice a year for many years ...

came to occasionally regret his complete solitude. Was there more he could do as a man of the world? Could he have a bigger impa ...

C BE A HUMAN BEING Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN ompared with most royal coupl ...

together they seized every formal and informal bit of influence the monarchy had in the British Empire at that time. They were a ...

obligation, done at a breakneck pace that the two of them inflicted on themselves. It is a testament to their affection for each ...

it was possible because he was willing to reimagine his approach to training and to approach it with more balance. Pacing is som ...

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking ca ...

A GO TO SLEEP There is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep. —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY merican Apparel was a billion-do ...

Early on, this policy had advantages. Charney was constantly in tune with what was happening in the company, and it prevented bu ...

Within a few months of the warehouse episode, Dov Charney was on the verge of losing control of the company. Terms of desperate ...

them. This was no way to live. There was no glamour in working oneself to the bone, trading sleep for an extra conference call o ...

soundly that one of his students said that “his snores reverberated through the house like rumblings of thunder.” It went on for ...

W FIND A HOBBY This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled. —ARISTOTLE illiam Gladstone, the four-time ...