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Stillness Model

Be still. Find a guide. Become a citizen, not a user. Stillness is the first of the three, and the other two stand on it.

Hold a free seat Find a guide

One drop. The rings spread and fade, and the water goes still enough to hold the light.

The model

Three teachers

The Stillness Model learns from three people who built large things and stopped long enough to see them.

Restraint

Yvon Chouinard

On Black Friday, 25 November 2011, Patagonia ran an ad in The New York Times that said Don't Buy This Jacket. “Everything we make takes something from the planet we can't give back.”

In September 2022 he gave the company away: the voting stock to a trust, the rest to a nonprofit that fights climate change. “We're making Earth our only shareholder.”

Reflection

Ray Dalio

In 1982 a bet wiped him out, and he borrowed $4,000 from his father to help pay the family's bills. He had taken up Transcendental Meditation after the Beatles studied it in India in 1968.

He later put what he learned in one line: pain plus reflection equals progress.

Attention

Steve Jobs

In Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography, Jobs describes sitting still: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is.”

Given time, he said, the mind does calm, and then there is room to hear subtler things.

WA\ through this model

Where stillness lives in WA\

Why, way, wave: Why comes first: be still, find a guide, become a citizen, not a user. Way is a compass that points, a cube that works for you, and a circle of your people. Wave is the experience of life, no devices. Literally go surf.
Sapphire · $99 a month: Stillness applied to a business, a team, an enterprise.
It runs with every model off: Switch them off and the compass still points. Your circles still meet.
Eight questions a day: Each day, WA\ asks eight questions: four about your inner life, four about your outer one. Answer both kinds and your LIFT rises. A day of only one kind scores zero.
The inner faces: The six inner faces of your cube: Meaning, Stability, Relationships, Health, Character and Happiness. What a life is for. Each outer face serves the one inside it.
Rest on a schedule: Rest is part of the campaign, not a retreat from it. No one gets used to it →
Phone and portal: WA\ on the phone asks the day's eight questions. WA\WA\, the portal on any computer, keeps the whole record, so you can sit with it. The two stay in sync.
GOOD AS GOLD: A person checks the work. A human stakes their name before anything counts.

One thing to do

Two minutes, no screen

Before you open a screen tomorrow, sit for two minutes. Then write one line: what is today for? Keep it. Your own words come before any platform's, and this can be the first line of your Book.

Start your Book

The first 108

Become a founding citizen

Free to start. Pay as you grow. Earn as you learn. The first 108 cross with Self waived, one circle at a time, from Maui.

Hold a free seat See the rungs

Sources, read 31 October 2026

Patagonia, Don't Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and the New York Times: the ad ran on Black Friday, 25 November 2011.
NHPR and NPR, The founder of Patagonia is giving his company away to help fight climate change, 15 September 2022: 2 percent voting stock to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, 98 percent nonvoting stock to the Holdfast Collective.
CNBC, Transcendental Meditation helped Ray Dalio recover from financial ruin, 1 July 2019.
Quartz, Ray Dalio's philosophy for achievement: his line at Summit LA18, 2018. The book behind it is Principles (2017).
Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (2011), as quoted on Goodreads.
Rest and the infantry: as sourced on WA\ Day.