"Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet me take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls." — Epictetus, quoted in Stillness is the Key
Seven years ago, I found myself in a job I hated and a mediocre relationship I was acclimating into. I was anxious and in serious questioning mode. I was twenty-three-years young, but felt old and tired. There I was in SoCal, three thousand miles away from my hometown and best friends and family, less than a year out of college and suffering from a full-scale quarter-life crisis. I even had the red Mustang convertible to prove it. But I shouldn't have been feeling that way.
I was working in video production. I was only making $31,000 a year, but I loved the work—work I was eager to learn and take on larger, higher-paying projects. I lived just eight miles from Laguna Beach. I was renting a room from a family so I could bike to work. That way I could save for said Mustang and tutor their son for even more. What was causing much of my pain was the insane, House of Cards-style office politics—the nasty, vindictive, almost daily warfare waged between competing teams at the company I worked at. The war was started by certain executives, but I and the rest of the junior team found ourselves caught up in. Despite my best efforts to just focus on the work, I couldn't escape it. Even after switching teams to the other side of the office. After many of those personalities eventually spiraled downhill or were tossed out in the coming months. And, sadly, even after I left the office.
Despite trying new diets and exercise routines I was in a funk in my personal life. I couldn't leave the bad at work and be a strong partner for my then-girlfriend. I'm grateful that we're still friends to this day though.
During this quarter-life crisis, I sought guidance from friends, family, and coworkers. Some helped. I scoured my bookshelf. A couple dozen Barnes & Noble too. That led to a few more insights. But the real breakthrough came unexpectedly one day in my roomy corner office. It was a corner office I had wrangled from the executives after threatening to quit and a day I will never forget. I was researching how to organize the company's tens of terabytes of video files when I stumbled upon Chase Jarvis' YouTube channel. One video led to another. Eventually author Robert Greene (a favorite to this day) sat on CJ's couch for a thought-provoking interview. He was writing about power, war, and seduction from history, but I found it profoundly relevant to my daily experience. Then Ryan Holiday's episode queued up. He was Robert's long-time apprentice and research partner. Here was Ryan, a guy not much older than me, the former Director of American Apparel who was part-remorsefully, and part-tongue-in-cheekily(?) confessing a series of outrageous media stunts performed for his clients to the tune of millions of dollars. And yet, he was getting out of the rat race. In large part, because he'd been burned by the politics and also found solace in an ancient philosophy called stoicism.
For all my book travels thus far in life, I hadn't heard of stoicism, as a formal school of thought, nor of its major figures: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cato, Zeno, Epictetus. But at Ryan's own encouragement via Twitter I soon devoured them. They helped me kick my social media addiction in no time. And when Ryan published The Obstacle is the Way a few months later, the first in what would become his stoicism trilogy, he helped give me the courage to quit my job, step out of the relationship, and go off to what was next:
Where Obstacle focuses on our interpretation of events and regulating our emotions, and Ego explores the trappings of arrogance people who have lost their heads and grip on reality, Stillness councils us on how and why to develop healthy mental and physical habits. Organized into three parts, Soul, Mind, and Body, the book is uniquely solution-oriented and perhaps the most tactile of the three. For instance, Ryan deep-dives into the importance of getting hobbies, going for walks, enjoying nature, building daily routines, addressing old wounds from childhood, maintaining longterm relationships, and much more. This may sound common sense, but it seems too often not to be uncommon practice—at least, for a lot of us during certain trials in our lives.
I greatly appreciated three chapters especially: the cautionary tale of Tiger Woods and that of Michael Jordan, as well as the instructive one on Winston Churchill towards the book's conclusion. Those three great men are case studies in and of themselves, but Ryan extracts the essence of certain traits they embodied, at least during certain periods of their lives, with the goal of showing us what we can learn from them and about ourselves. He does this for Anne Frank, Fred Rogers, Seneca, Socrates, the astronaut Edgar Mitchel, baseball legend Shawn Green, Queen Victoria, the journalist and nun Dorothy Day, and a dozen other fascinating humans.
I'm typing all this nearly seven years to the day after moving to California and first being introduced to Ryan's work and stoicism. Earlier today, I completed a six mile sunset hike to the Top of the World in Laguna Beach, ate a favorite-recipe: lamb chops with broccoli, finished reading Stillness to the sound of Christmas harp music, and will be sleeping for twelve hours on my memory foam mattress before some Sunday work projects. I am much more content, grateful, safe, loved, harder-working, humbler, wiser, and still than I used to be. [JG]
I was working in video production. I was only making $31,000 a year, but I loved the work—work I was eager to learn and take on larger, higher-paying projects. I lived just eight miles from Laguna Beach. I was renting a room from a family so I could bike to work. That way I could save for said Mustang and tutor their son for even more. What was causing much of my pain was the insane, House of Cards-style office politics—the nasty, vindictive, almost daily warfare waged between competing teams at the company I worked at. The war was started by certain executives, but I and the rest of the junior team found ourselves caught up in. Despite my best efforts to just focus on the work, I couldn't escape it. Even after switching teams to the other side of the office. After many of those personalities eventually spiraled downhill or were tossed out in the coming months. And, sadly, even after I left the office.
Despite trying new diets and exercise routines I was in a funk in my personal life. I couldn't leave the bad at work and be a strong partner for my then-girlfriend. I'm grateful that we're still friends to this day though.
During this quarter-life crisis, I sought guidance from friends, family, and coworkers. Some helped. I scoured my bookshelf. A couple dozen Barnes & Noble too. That led to a few more insights. But the real breakthrough came unexpectedly one day in my roomy corner office. It was a corner office I had wrangled from the executives after threatening to quit and a day I will never forget. I was researching how to organize the company's tens of terabytes of video files when I stumbled upon Chase Jarvis' YouTube channel. One video led to another. Eventually author Robert Greene (a favorite to this day) sat on CJ's couch for a thought-provoking interview. He was writing about power, war, and seduction from history, but I found it profoundly relevant to my daily experience. Then Ryan Holiday's episode queued up. He was Robert's long-time apprentice and research partner. Here was Ryan, a guy not much older than me, the former Director of American Apparel who was part-remorsefully, and part-tongue-in-cheekily(?) confessing a series of outrageous media stunts performed for his clients to the tune of millions of dollars. And yet, he was getting out of the rat race. In large part, because he'd been burned by the politics and also found solace in an ancient philosophy called stoicism.
For all my book travels thus far in life, I hadn't heard of stoicism, as a formal school of thought, nor of its major figures: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cato, Zeno, Epictetus. But at Ryan's own encouragement via Twitter I soon devoured them. They helped me kick my social media addiction in no time. And when Ryan published The Obstacle is the Way a few months later, the first in what would become his stoicism trilogy, he helped give me the courage to quit my job, step out of the relationship, and go off to what was next:
- To fight for the work that was my calling.
- A few years later, to check myself.
- And now, but really again, to find stillness.
Where Obstacle focuses on our interpretation of events and regulating our emotions, and Ego explores the trappings of arrogance people who have lost their heads and grip on reality, Stillness councils us on how and why to develop healthy mental and physical habits. Organized into three parts, Soul, Mind, and Body, the book is uniquely solution-oriented and perhaps the most tactile of the three. For instance, Ryan deep-dives into the importance of getting hobbies, going for walks, enjoying nature, building daily routines, addressing old wounds from childhood, maintaining longterm relationships, and much more. This may sound common sense, but it seems too often not to be uncommon practice—at least, for a lot of us during certain trials in our lives.
I greatly appreciated three chapters especially: the cautionary tale of Tiger Woods and that of Michael Jordan, as well as the instructive one on Winston Churchill towards the book's conclusion. Those three great men are case studies in and of themselves, but Ryan extracts the essence of certain traits they embodied, at least during certain periods of their lives, with the goal of showing us what we can learn from them and about ourselves. He does this for Anne Frank, Fred Rogers, Seneca, Socrates, the astronaut Edgar Mitchel, baseball legend Shawn Green, Queen Victoria, the journalist and nun Dorothy Day, and a dozen other fascinating humans.
I'm typing all this nearly seven years to the day after moving to California and first being introduced to Ryan's work and stoicism. Earlier today, I completed a six mile sunset hike to the Top of the World in Laguna Beach, ate a favorite-recipe: lamb chops with broccoli, finished reading Stillness to the sound of Christmas harp music, and will be sleeping for twelve hours on my memory foam mattress before some Sunday work projects. I am much more content, grateful, safe, loved, harder-working, humbler, wiser, and still than I used to be. [JG]
WHO IS RYAN HOLIDAY?
Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author of nine books on marketing, entrepreneurship, stoic philosophy, American culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into twenty languages and appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Fast Company, The New York Observer, and others. I'm also a huge fan of three other books by him: Trust Me, I'm Lying, The Obstacle is the Way, about which I had the privilege of interviewing him in 2016, and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, & Advertising. I first encountered Ryan by way of the Chase Jarvis Live show in 2012, and since have discovered an incredible amount of books from other authors and creatives, including bestselling author Robert Greene, CEO of Breather Julian Smith, human guinea pig Tim Ferriss, and others.
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