“The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph” by Ryan Holiday
Published May 1, 2014 by Portfolio
Pages: 224
ISBN-10 : 1591846358
Date Finished: Nov 26, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org
This one is a classic.
My Notes:
So that setbacks or problems are always expected and never permanent. Making certain that what impedes us can empower us.
And from what we know, he truly saw each and every one of these obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.
Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?
We might not be emperors, but the world is still constantly testing us. It asks: Are you worthy? Can you get past the things that inevitably fall in your way? Will you stand up and show us what you’re made of?
Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.
There have been countless lessons (and books) about achieving success, but no one ever taught us how to overcome failure, how to think about obstacles, how to treat and triumph over them, and so we are stuck.
Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength.
“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
“The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
We’re soft, entitled, and scared of conflict. Great times are great softeners.
The Way Through Them Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.
Yes, because these obstacles are actually opportunities to test ourselves, to try new things, and, ultimately, to triumph. The Obstacle Is the Way.
Warren Buffet’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
“Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life,” he once said.
what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.
Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective.
Seen properly, everything that happens—be it an economic crash or a personal tragedy—is a chance to move forward.
There are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We must try: To be objective To control emotions and keep an even keel To choose to see the good in a situation To steady our nerves To ignore what disturbs or limits others To place things in perspective To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled
“Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve.
Don’t let the negativity in, don’t let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can’t afford to panic.
As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, “When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?”
Does getting upset provide you with more options?
Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.
Marcus’s question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?
Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he’d describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms—roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation.
With other people we can be objective.
the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear.
the difference between the things that are in our power and the things that aren’t. That’s the difference between the people who can accomplish great things, and the people who find it impossible to stay sober—to avoid not just drugs or alcohol but all addictions.
Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?
This is why we shouldn’t listen too closely to what other people say (or to what the voice in our head says, either). We’ll find ourselves erring on the side of accomplishing nothing.
Now, how do you and I usually deal with an impossible deadline handed down from someone above us? We complain. We get angry. We question. How could they? What’s the point? Who do they think I am? We look for a way out and feel sorry for ourselves.
As Laura Ingalls Wilder put it: “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”
It’s our preconceptions that are the problem.
Or take that longtime rival at work (or that rival company), the one who causes endless headaches? Note the fact that they also: keep you alert raise the stakes motivate you to prove them wrong harden you help you to appreciate true friends provide an instructive antilog—an example of whom you don’t want to become
Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive.
Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy.
The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning.
The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.
Demosthenes’s reputation as an orator, ability to command a crowd and his peerless knowledge of the intricacies of the law, was worth more than whatever remained of a once-great fortune.
But in our lives, when our worst instincts are in control, we dally. We don’t act like Demosthenes, we act frail and are powerless to make ourselves better. We may be able to articulate a problem, even potential solutions, but then weeks, months, or sometimes years later, the problem is still there. Or it’s gotten worse. As though we expect someone else to handle it, as though we honestly believe that there is a chance of obstacles unobstacle-ing themselves.
We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. And the only way you’ll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.
People turn shit into sugar all the time—shit that’s a lot worse than whatever we’re dealing with. I’m talking physical disabilities, racial discrimination, battles against overwhelmingly superior armies.
No one is saying you can’t take a minute to think, Dammit, this sucks.
Just don’t take too long. Because you have to get back to work.
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT
They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don’t care if the conditions are perfect or if they’re being slighted. Because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work.
As it went for Amelia Earhart. Less than five years later she was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and became, rightly, one of the most famous and respected people in the world.
But we fear that taking action is too risky, that we don’t have the experience or that it’s not how we pictured it or because it’s too expensive, because it’s too soon, because we think something better might come along, because it might not work.
And you know what happens as a result? Nothing. We do nothing.
And that’s the final part: Stay moving, always.
He says the best way out is always through And I agree to that, or in so far As I can see no way out but through. —ROBERT FROST
In 1878, Thomas Edison wasn’t the only person experimenting with incandescent lights. But he was the only man willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men—inching closer each time to the one that would finally work.
proving that genius often really is just persistence in disguise.
Too many people think that great victories like Grant’s and Edison’s came from a flash of insight.
But do we have the patience to refine our idea?
Epictetus: “persist and resist.” Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.
new path is, by definition, uncleared. Only with persistence and time can we cut away debris and remove impediments. Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory—only by persisting and resisting can we learn what others were too impatient to be taught.
In other words: It’s supposed to be hard.
What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —WENDELL PHILLIPS
As engineers now like to quip: Failure is a Feature.
On the path to successful action, we will fail—possibly many times.
Failure puts you in corners you have to think your way out of.
We do everything we can to avoid it, thinking it’s embarrassing or shameful. We fail, kicking and screaming.
Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.
The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad thing—is to not learn from it.
Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.
Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize.
We shy away from writing a book or making a film even though it’s our dream because it’s so much work—we can’t imagine how we get from here to there.
But you, you’re so busy thinking about the future, you don’t take any pride in the tasks you’re given right now. You just phone it all in, cash your paycheck, and dream of some higher station in life. Or you think, This is just a job, it isn’t who I am, it doesn’t matter. Foolishness.
We will be and do many things in our lives. Some are prestigious, some are onerous, none are beneath us.
Think progress, not perfection.
Under this kind of force, obstacles break apart. They have no choice. Since you’re going around them or making them irrelevant, there is nothing for them to resist.
You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alternative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp.
Perhaps you’re stuck in bed recovering. Well, now you have time to write.
In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. —SENECA
We must be willing to roll the dice and lose. Prepare, at the end of the day, for none of it to work.
Abraham Lincoln battled crippling depression his entire life.
Known at the time as melancholy, his depression was often debilitating and profound—nearly driving him to suicide on two separate occasions.
Even in his own time, Lincoln’s contemporaries marveled at the calmness, the gravity, and compassion of the man.
It’s almost a cliché at this point, but the observation that the way to strengthen an arch is to put weight on it—because it binds the stones together, and only with tension does it hold weight—is a great metaphor.
The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.
a technique designed by psychologist Gary Klein known as a premortem.
Always prepared for disruption, always working that disruption into our plans.
You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition. If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane.
We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it.
It’s a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know, at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lie within adversities.
Stop making it harder on yourself by thinking about I, I, I. Stop putting that dangerous “I” in front of events. I did this. I was so smart. I had that. I deserve better than this. No wonder you take losses personally, no wonder you feel so alone. You’ve inflated your own role and importance.
Stop pretending that what you’re going through is somehow special or unfair.
contribute your little bit to the universe before it swallows you up, and be happy with that.
As the Haitian proverb puts it: Behind mountains are more mountains.
Soviet poet, dissident, and political prisoner Joseph Brodsky wrote in his famous essay on the original version of that same statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome that “if Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.”
Today, Bill Clinton rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year.
Bestselling author and investor Tim Ferriss refers to Stoicism as his “operating system”—and,
as an operating system for the difficulties and hardships of life.
Epictetus’s famous work—means “close at hand,” or as some have said, “in your hands.” That’s what the philosophy was meant for: to be in your hands, to be an extension of you. Not something you read once and put up on a shelf. It was meant, as Marcus once wrote, to make us boxers instead of fencers—to wield our weaponry, we simply need to close our fists.
For more… find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org