The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
Ryan Holiday
Description
It’s wrecked the careers of promising young geniuses. It’s evaporated great fortunes and run companies into the ground. It’s made adversity unbearable and turned struggle into shame.
Its name? Ego, and it is the enemy – of ambition, or success, of resilience.
Ryan Holiday offers a practical meditation on the nature and dangers of the ego.
Key words: Leadership, Success, Actions, Resilience
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My Notes
Introduction
What happens in business during tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
Not: This is not so bad.
But: I can make this good.
The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.
Part 1: Perception
For the rest of his life, the greater the chaos, the calmer Rockefeller would become, particularly when others around him were either panicked or mad with greed. He would make much of his fortune during these market fluctuations – because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on in Warren Buffet’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful”. Rockefeller, like all great investors, could resist impulse in favour of cold, hard common sense.
I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome all along the way.
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 happens (it’s all made up).
When you worry ask yourself “What am I choosing to not see right now?” What important things are you missing because you chose to worry over introspections, alertness or wisdom? Does getting upset provide you with more options?
The difference between observing and perceiving: The perceiving eye is weak; the observing eye is strong. The observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there.
Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn’t matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options? You could write it off, greet it calmly.
Perception is everything.
If effort would affect the outcome, he would die on the field before he let that chance go to waste. They wouldn’t give up until there was absolutely nothing left that they could do. He would die on the field before he quit.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
When it comes to perception, this is the crucial distinction to make: the difference between the things that are in our power and the things that aren’t.
Those who survive depressions, survive it because they took things day by day – that’s the real secret.
Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be ahead.
One thing is certain. It’s not simply a matter of saying ‘oh I’ll live in the present. You have to work at it’.
This moment is not your life, it is just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you right now. Ignore what it ‘represents’ or it ‘means’ or ‘why it happened to you’.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There is no other distinction of it.
Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his ‘reality distortion field’. Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, that made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as ‘it can’t be done’ or ‘we need more time’.
Be open. Question.
His insistence pushed them, once again, past what they ever thought was possible.
Jobs learned to reject the first judgements and the objections that came out of them because those objections are always rooted in fear. When he ordered a special kind of glass for the first iPhone, the manufacturer was aghast at the aggressive deadline. “We don’t have the capacity” they said. “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied, “you can do it.” Get your mind around it. Nearly overnight, manufacturers transformed their facilities, and produce the glass within six months for the first iPhone.
An entrepreneur is someone with the faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before.
They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative.
It is one thing to be overwhelmed by obstacles or discouraged or upset by them. This is something that few are able to do. But after you have controlled your emotions, and you can see objectively and stand steadily, the next step becomes possible: a mental flip, so you’re looking not at the obstacle but at the opportunity within it.
You can study the bad boss and learn from him.
After sports players get injured, each reported gaining a desire to help others, additional perspective and realisation of their own strengths. Psychologists call it adversarial growth or post traumatic growth.
Part 2: Action
Everything must be done in the service of the whole.
Actions is the solution and the cure of our predicaments.
Some academic once asked Demosthenes what the three most important traits for speechmaking were. His reply says it all: “action, action, action.”
But you when you are dealt a bad hand. What’s your response? Do you fold? Or do you play if for all you’ve got?
It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.
One thing that mattered: applying themselves with gusto and creativity.
No, no excuses. No exceptions. No way around it: It’s on you.
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.
Because that’s what people who defy the odds do. That’s how people who become great at things-whether it’s flying or blowing through gender stereotypes-do. They start!!
You’ve got to start, to go anywhere.
Because he never, ever stopped moving. He never stopped moving forward.
If you haven’t even tried yet, then of course you will still be in the exact same place. You haven’t actually perused anything.
We talk a lot about courage as a society, but we forget that at its most basic level, it’s really just, taking action.
First, persistence and pertinacity (resolute in purpose or belief) were incredible assets and probably his main assets as a leader.
In persistence he’d not only broken through: in trying all the wrong ways. Grant discovered a totally new way – the way that would eventually win the war. Grants story is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule. This is how innovation works.
Genius is really just persistence in disguise.
Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search”. Well sometimes that’s exactly the right method.
When you play all the way to the whistle, there’s no reason to worry about the clock.
What is defeat? Nothing but education: nothing but the first steps to something better.
In tech they make an MVP (minimum viable product). The point is to get it to market to see how customers respond. If the response is poor, they have not invested in a product customers do not want.
The MVP model embraces failure and feedback. It gets stronger by failure, dropping the features that don’t work, that customers don’t find interesting, and then focusing the developers’ limited resources on improving the features that do.
In North Africa, the British learned how to fight the Germans – and early on they learned mostly by failure. But this was acceptable as they anticipated a learning curve and planned for it. They welcomed it because they knew, like Grant and Edison did, what it meant; victory further down the road.
Failure shows us the way by showing us what isn’t the way.
Don’t think about what the future may hold. Think about what we can do today, the task in hand.
Do your job and do it well.
To whatever we face in life our job is to respond with:
Hard work
Honesty
Helping others the best we can
Respect the craft and make something beautiful.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Forget the rule book, settle the issue…. this is how we get things done.
Think progress, not perfection.
If not from the pitched battles, where do you find victory? From everywhere else. From the flanks. From the unexpected. From the psychological. From drawing opponents out from their defences.
A castle can be an intimidating, impenetrable fortress, or it can be turned into a prison when surrounded. The difference is simply a shift in action and approach.
What you must do is learn how to press forward when everyone around you sees disaster.
A crisis provides us with the opportunity to do things that you could not do before. If you look back at history, some of the greatest leaders used shocking or negative events to push through much needed reforms.
In many battles, as in life, the two opposing forces will often reach a point of mutual exhaustion. It’s the one who rises the next morning after a long day of fighting and rallies, instead of retreating – the one who says – I will attack – who will send victory home.
We have it in us to be the type of people who try to get things done, try with everything we’ve got and, whatever verdict comes in, are ready to accept it instantly and move on to whatever is next. Is that you?
Part 3: Will
This is strikingly similar to what the stoics called the inner Citadel, that fortress inside of us that know external adversity can break down.
With anticipation, we can endure. We are prepared for failure and ready for success.
After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t, and the break comes down to something you don’t control…you’ve only got one option…acceptance.
Rarely do we consider how much worse things could have been.
To do great things we need to be able to endure tragedy and set-back.
The next step after we discard our expectations and accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things – particularly bad things – are outside our control, is this: loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness.
In your worst moments. Stay calm, always in control, genuinely loving the opportunity to prove himself, to perform for people, whether they wanted him to succeed or not.
Smile.
If persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs, then plenty of people can be said to be persistent. But perseverance is something larger. It’s the long game. It’s about what happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after – and then the fight after that and the fight after that.
Persistence is action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy, the other endurance.
Be able to endue hunger better than other men.
Have a moral and civic true north.
Help ourselves by helping others. Draw purpose from helping others.
By thinking of people other than yourself. You won’t have time to think of your own suffering because there are other people suffering and you’re too focused on them.
Lend a hand to others. Be strong for them, and it will make you stronger.
Each time you’ll learn something, each time you’ll develop strength, wisdom and perspective. Each time, a little more of the competition falls away. Until all that is left is you, the best version of you.
Final Thoughts
Something stands in someone’s way. They stare it down, they aren’t intimidated. Leaning into their problem or weakness or issue, they give everything they have, mentally and physically. Even though they did not always overcome it in the way they intended or expected, each individual emerged better, stronger.
First, see clearly. Next, see correctly.
“Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.”
