How to keep Disruptive Emotions and Impulses in Check
Control yourself or someone else will control you
Ryan Holiday in his book, Stillness is the key shares the historic story of John Kennedy and his handling of a global crisis:
The entire world changed in the few short hours between when John F. Kennedy went to bed on October 15, 1962, and when he woke up the following morning. While he slept, the CIA identified the ongoing construction of medium and long-range Soviet ballistic nuclear missile sites on the island of Cuba, just ninety miles from American Shores.
Kennedy would tell a stunned American public days later, “Each of these missiles is capable of striking Washington DC or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States, Central America or the Caribbean”. This incident is what we now know as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The stakes were high, experts predicted that as many as seventy million people were expected to die if nuclear missiles were launched. But that was just a guess, no one knew how terrible a nuclear war would be.
Self-control is the ultimate act of taking charge of your state of mind.
The advice from Kennedy’s advisors was immediate and emphatic. The missile sites had…