Ryan Holiday's Blog, page 27

December 7, 2015

10 Strategies for Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities

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There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions.

How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home?

With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the in- convenience, but none managed to do anything about it.

After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find some- thing he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road.

Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said:

The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.

What if you had the ability to flip your obstacles and turn them into opportunities?

Here are 10 historical strategies for doing just that—practiced by great men and women throughout the centuries.

Strategy 1: Alter Your Perspective

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. — Viktor Frankl

We chose how we look at things. How we approach an obstacle determines how daunting it will be to overcome.

By controlling our irrational emotions, we are able to see thing as they are, not as we perceive them to be.

Think of it as selective editing—not to deceive others, but to properly orient ourselves.

Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.

Strategy 2: Flip The Obstacle On Its Head

There is good in everything, if only we look for it.— Laura Ingalls Wilder

The events that we initially perceive as negative all contain a positive, exposed benefit that we can recognize and act on.

A computer glitch that destroys your work is now a means to make it twice as good because you’re better prepared.

Having a terrible boss is now an opportunity to learn from his faults while you fill up your resume and look for better jobs elsewhere.

Notice this is a complete mental flip: Seeing through the negative, past its underside and through to the positive.

Strategy 3: Stay Moving, Always.

We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out. — Theodore Roosevelt

Those who attack problems and life with most initiative and energy usually win.

Courage is really just taking action. Start by saying yes to create momentum and you’ll be on your way.

Obstacles seem more intimidating when we stop to look up at them.

Strategy 4: Fail Cheaply and Quickly

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —Wendell Phillips

Engineers now like to quip: Failure is a Feature.

There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. Each time it happens, new options open up to us and problems can be flipped into opportunities.

When failure does come ask: Why did this happen? This helps birth alternative ways of doing what needs to be done. Failure puts you in corners you have to think your way out of and is a source of breakthroughs.

Strategy 5: Follow The Process

Under the comb the tangle and the straight path are the same. — Heraclitus

In the chaos of life, process provides us a way.

For whatever obstacles you come across, take a breath, do the immediate, composite part in front of you—and follow its thread into the next action.

The process is about doing the little things, right now. Not worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture.

Strategy 6: What’s Right Is What Works

I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. — Deng Xiaoping

We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be.

As they say in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it doesn’t matter how you get our opponent to the ground, only that you take them down.

Start thinking like a radical pragmatist: not on changing the world right at this moment,but ambitious enough to get everything you need.

Think progress, not perfection.

Strategy 7: Use The Flank Attack

Where little danger is apprehended, the more the enemy will be unprepared and consequently there is the fairest prospect of success. — George Washington

Think about this: In a study of more than 280 military campaigns, only two percent were decided on a direct attack on the enemy’s main army.

Being overmatched don’t have to be a disadvantage. It forces us to find workarounds, instead of challenging our enemy head on.

Remember, sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home.

Strategy 8: Use The Obstacle Against Itself

Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enemies. — Plutarch

Action has many definitions. Sometimes you overcome obstacles not by attacking them but by withdrawing and letting them attack you.

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.

So instead of fighting obstacles, find a means of making them defeat themselves.

Strategy 9: Seize The Offensive

The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged chance, conquered the change, and made chance the servitor. — E.H. Chapin

Ordinary people shy away from negative situations and avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite.

They never waste an opportunity to flip a personal tragedy or crisis to their advantage.

At certain moments in our brief existences we are faced with great trials. We must see that this “problem” presents an opportunity for a solution that we have long been waiting for.

It is in these moments that we must seize the offensive, because it is when people least expect it that we can pull off our biggest victories.

Strategy 10: Focus On Something Bigger Than Yourself

A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul. — Leroy Percy

Sometimes when we are personally stuck with some impossible problem, one of the best ways to create opportunities or new avenues for movement is to think:

If I can’t solve this for myself, how can I at least make this better for other people?

You’ll be shocked by how much of the hopelessness lifts when we reach that conclusion—the strength that comes by thinking of people other than yourself.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. — Marcus Aurelius

So when you’re frustrated in pursuit of your own goals, don’t sit there and complain that you don’t have what you want or that this obstacle won’t budge. If you haven’t even tried yet, then of course you will still be in the exact same place. You haven’t actually pursued anything.

All the greats we admire started by saying, Yes, let’s go. And they usually did it in less desirable circumstances than we’ll ever suffer.

Just because the conditions aren’t exactly to your liking, or you don’t feel ready yet, doesn’t mean you get a pass. If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.

The post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

The post 10 Strategies for Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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Published on December 07, 2015 08:00

November 30, 2015

The Performance Bias: Life Is Not a Movie, Life Is Not a Novel

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The economist Tyler Cowen observed that few people when asked to describe their lives would answer ‘a mess.’ Instead they say their life was ‘a journey.’ They tended to use the metaphor of a novel. They see their life as a story.

Life feels like a story because when we look back on our pasts, we have a beginning and an end and we can put it all in order. We can filter out the events that don’t fit, we can forget the stuff that’s not worth remembering.

In a world of social media, this is a hard idea to shake. Not only does every platform and medium urge you to tell your story but it weaves it all into a narrative for you (Snapchat stories, Facebook’s Year in Review, etc). And because you have an audience—your followers, friends, fans and subscribers—there is always someone to perform it for.

Think about what you put on Instagram, on Twitter, on a blog, on Facebook. These are great media but it’s clear they select for a very specific type of content. It’s got to be bite sized. It’s got to look good. It has to be spreadable. It has to compete with all the other content out there from professionals, from pretty girls, from snarky assholes. Oh, and it has to generate a certain number of public responses or you look like a loser.

In a sense, these tools that were intended to help us share our realities ironically has turned into a sort of unpaid performance art.

I know that you sense this too. That moment of hesitation before you post something. Is this good enough? That flash of guilty giddiness when you see something that you know other people would be impressed by when they see it. Yes! when you capture it perfectly.

It might seem like we’re all connected with each other today but in fact, we’re as isolated as we’ve ever been. We don’t even experience our own experiences except through some artificial lens, let alone the experiences of others.

It’s related to an important concept in science known as the “Publication Bias.” Discovered bafflingly recently (1960s), the Publication Bias refers to an interesting fact: people rarely publish papers about experiments that didn’t work. Who is going to put the time into writing it, and what journal is going to give space to something that doesn’t prove anything?

This doesn’t seem like a big deal but it is. It means that almost every piece of scientific literature you’ll ever read is “positive.” When in reality, most experiments fail. Most of them don’t mean anything.

So it paints a false picture, an unrepresentative one. It makes us think we know more than we do.

You’ve seen this—friends who are going through a rough patch in a relationship but post loving photos of themselves with their partner, almost as if they’re willing it to be better. People going through financial difficulties apparently living it up on Instagram. Even in your own life, do you ever post when things aren’t going well?

It’s the Publication Bias. It’s the Performance Bias.

I think about this a lot because as a writer the job makes you start to view your life as material. It’s a real easy and tempting way to escape what another writer, Walker Percy, called the “everydayness” of your life.” Or what Nassim Taleb calls the “narrative fallacy.”

Nobody sees the article ideas that I couldn’t quite figure out. Nobody sees me when I am uncertain or unsure. I don’t write about the parts of my life I don’t feel qualified to talk about or I’m too embarrassed to reveal. And as a result, I leave a lot out.

This is true for every public facing creative in the world.

Casey Neistat’s daily vlog gives a pretty undeniable sense that his life is awesome. I’m sure it is—but you’re watching six to seven edited minutes out of 1440. My friend Tucker, who has sold a couple million books about his life, will tell you that his stories—as crazy and funny as they are—are only from one side of his life, and really just a fraction of that one side. The other moments are much more boring. Considering the three books span little more than a decade and contain about 150+ stories, it should give you a sense of how unrepresentative they really are. I read a lot. You know how many books I’ve ever found written by someone who failed? Two. (email me if you want recommendations)

That’s just the filtering that comes from the selection process. It’s even deeper than that of course. I like to show people the source photo that eventually became the cover of my first book. It makes me look a lot cooler than I actually am or ever will be (in real life it was a pen in my mouth and I was wearing a hoodie from Wal-Mart). The TV show they’re producing on the book will warp things further still.

Increasingly, the real world is left on the cutting room floor. What is left is artifice and even deceit.

Your Instagram filters can make an overcast day seem bright. A tweet can strip out nuance and claims certainty it doesn’t deserve. A Facebook post shares an article that no one actually bothered to read.

These forces are acting on us. Separating us from our own actual experiences and separating us from the other people who consume them creates envy, inferiority and conflict. For one young, deeply depressed athlete, it meant misled parents and the loss of a great promising talent. It creates that eternal fear of missing out. It’s not lying. It’s that tools and media exploit our fantasies and what we wish to be true.

Where does it end? Not in happiness, that’s for sure.

One of the things I really like about Beme (where I’ve done some advising) is that the app makes so much of this impossible. It’s fun and real precisely because it subtly eliminates all the features that encourage us to fool others and ourselves.

If you decide you want to film something, it’s posted automatically—you can’t stop the process once the recording has begun. You can’t edit your clips. You can’t even see what you’re filming as you’re filming it. In other words, it demotes you from your role as the cinematographer of your own life. It’s just a facilitator. It helps you share what you experience—cutting clips together based on time and place, not your perceived narrative of events or the script you’d like to follow. It keeps the performance to a minimum.

The name Beme—is a portmanteau of Be Me. Even the metrics in the app emphasize this (seen here). There is no follower count, just the number of people and the amount of time they have spent seeing things from your perspective. You actually get to be yourself and be other people and other people get to be you. Isn’t that what art is fundamentally about?

Some critics have said that this doesn’t work. Because no one likes authenticity.

Of course that’s ridiculous. The videos are riveting and the app is addicting. Like actual life.

So in this sense, life is not like a novel. It’s not a movie. It’s a mess.

Unfiltered by social media, life is real. It is what it is.

It is also awesome.

We’ve just forgotten.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

The post The Performance Bias: Life Is Not a Movie, Life Is Not a Novel appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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Published on November 30, 2015 08:00

November 23, 2015

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between The World and Me’ Is Not the Masterpiece We Hoped For

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. This is what it says on the cover of his new book, Between the World and Me. It’s actually a quote from The New York Observer (where I am an editor at large).

It’s also true.

I would take it a step further and say that he’s one of America’s best writers and journalists, period. I’m a big fan.

I’m also disappointed in his new book.

But before we get there, I suppose I should declare my various biases. First off, it was a book I have eagerly anticipated for some time–if only selfishly because this book has taken him away from the prodigious amounts of daily output that his fans have come to cherish over the years. The other bias is that my father was a police officer. First as a hate crimes detective and later the robbery division, and also as the head of Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Also I am white (though puzzlingly tan) and a writer myself.

In other words, I bring some baggage to the table. But I also desperately wanted to love this book.

Someone needs to articulate and detangle the pernicious myths and bad history that has long held our country back from dealing with, understanding and moving forward when it comes to the issue of race. It’s in literature that unique human experiences can be shared and communicated—and what it feels like to be black in America is a powerful and important reflection on this nation as a whole. In a world of television pundits and pageview hungry bloggers, it is rare to see someone as big picture and historical and thoughtful as Coates. It’s even rarer still to see them reach such a massive online audience without pandering, and without exploiting politics to get traffic.

I am humbled at the way that Coates makes you think, makes you question your assumptions, and makes you see the inhumanity and disgrace of many of this country’s laws and politics. There are moments in this book that accomplish that.

The problem with the rest of it is that it often feels like it was written by a writer who has fallen in love with their own voice (something that can increasingly be said about his blog as well). This is apparent from the very beginning of the galley copy which contains a letter from Chris Jackson, the book’s editor. It says that the book was originally supposed to be a book of essays about the Civil War (which I do hope Coates also writes) but instead changed after Coates re-read James Baldwin. He writes “[Coates] called after his reading and asked me why people don’t write books like that anymore—books that combine beautiful story-telling, intellectual rigor, powerful polemic, and prophetic urgency.”

This is dangerous territory for a writer—when they’re motivated to emulate someone else, particularly a style from a different generation (a unique and peerless one I would add to that). It’s dangerous for an editor to encourage it too and to set such expectations for advanced readers is in poor judgement. As a fellow author put it to me recently, “emulating Baldwin is death.”

The result is that this book seems to rarely come out and say anything. Or at least, say directly what it means. The opening scene is Coates writing about an appearance on cable television where he discussed race, fear and safety with the host. But instead of coming out and saying that, he writes “Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far side of Manhattan. There was a one word snaking into my ear and another dangling down my shirt. The satellite…” I’ll cut it there but it goes on like this for some time.

My point is, what Coates is talking about is urgent and important. But it’s almost as if he doesn’t want to get to it. He can’t be direct. He has to refer to Howard University as “The Mecca” throughout the book, he has to use a million other euphemisms and overwrought phrases, but why? It doesn’t make his point clearer. On the contrary, if you’re not searching for it, you might miss it. In fact, it often feels like he missed it—or at least lost track of it.

Some of the other reviewers have focused on his controversial reaction to 9/11 and the deaths of many police officers on that day. Despite my bias, I appreciated this. Because it was real. It was authentic. It was a powerful revelation and powerful personal point (which is all it was intended to be). It makes you think–what if my close friend had been brutally executed by the police, how would that change my perspective?—EVEN if you ultimately push back on it

Elsewhere, I tried to imagine someone currently not convinced of Coates’ genius or the significance of his message. Sadly, I could not see them making it more than a few chapters before closing it and moving on to someone else. Someone less talented, less insightful, but at least more straightforward. No one would make that argument about his past writing, which is almost always cogent and clear and definitive.

The response here will be that this book wasn’t written for me, or someone like me. The book was written as a letter to Coates’ son, so of course, some of this is to be expected. But certainly, no father would ever actually speak this way. Not without their kid rolling their eyes anyway.

The irony is that there is a section in the book where Coates discusses what he learned from poetry. He writes “I was learning the craft of poetry, which is to say I was learning the craft of thinking. Poetry aims for economy of truth–loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.” The reality is that this is a very short book that somehow manages to violate that dictum. It certainly waxes poetic at times, far too indulgently.

A writer’s job, as Fitzgerald once said about ‘genius’, is “to put into effect what is in your mind.” An editor’s job is to help a writer sort through their own experience and lens of seeing so that the vision best reaches the audience. The audience’s job is take the step forward to the material and be prepared to receive and interact with it. Somewhere in the rush to publication (which was moved up in light of recent news events) these parties have not fully met.

The book exists in some kind of thick bubble.

Which is really unfortunate because as events have shown recently, America is its own impenetrable bubble.

There’s that line from Kafka about how a book should be an axe that breaks the frozen sea within us.

This could have been this book. Coates has been that writer for me, personally. His guided journey through the Civil War, through segregation and race relations and so many other topics, have been that for thousands of other people.

Between the World and Me is a book with many gems in it but it forces the reader to search for him. And thus it fails to fully break through as one would hope.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

The post Why Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between The World and Me’ Is Not the Masterpiece We Hoped For appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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Published on November 23, 2015 08:00

November 16, 2015

Sangfroid: The Art of Being Cool Under Pressure (and Success)

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Lately it seems that whenever a technology startup is bought for billions , be it Instagram , Yammer , Viber , Waze , Tumblr , or Whatsapp , financial analysts predict another bubble in the making. We’ve had the 2008 recession, the tech bubble bursting in 2000, and now Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance , is worried about the next bubble.

With the threat of investment bubbles bursting more frequently, how can you keep cool under fire and bridge the gap between perception and reality in order to invest rationally? How do you stay out of the cycle that everyone else seems to be stuck in?

One answer is found in the great financial figures of the past who lived through similar bust and boom cycles, and see how they prospered through it all.

Someone like John D. Rockefeller.

The making of a titan

Rockefeller had barely begun his career as a bookkeeper and investor in Cleveland, Ohio when the Panic of 1857 struck, a massive national financial crisis that originated in Ohio and hit Cleveland particularly hard. Just as he was finally getting the hang of things, here came the greatest market depression in history.

But even as a young man, Rockefeller had sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure. He kept his head while everyone else lost theirs. Instead of bemoaning this economic upheaval, he quietly saved his money and watched what others did wrong. He saw the weaknesses in the economy that many took for granted.

This intense self-discipline and objectivity allowed Rockefeller to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life, during the Civil War, and the financial panics of 1873, 1907, and 1929. As he once put it: He was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster.

Within 20 years of the 1857 crisis, Rockefeller alone would control 90% of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out.

School of adversity

Rockefeller would make much of his fortune during market fluctuations — because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on today in Warren Buffett’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Rockefeller put those insights to use. When he was 25 years old, a group of investors offered to invest around $500,000 at his discretion if he could find the right oil wells in which to deploy the money. Grateful for the opportunity, Rockefeller set out to tour the nearby oil fields. A few days later, he shocked his backers by returning to Cleveland empty-handed, not having spent or invested a dollar of the funds. The opportunity didn’t feel right to him at the time, no matter how excited the rest of the market was — so he refunded the money and stayed away from drilling.

Like Rockefeller, we must practice this type of self-discipline with our own investments, whether its for a supposed “blue chip” IPO or our retirement fund. With assistance from our round-the-clock, say anything financial media, seemingly endless attractive opportunities abound — it is up to us to see through the madness of the markets.

Later in life, Rockefeller said, “Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.”

But Rockefeller wasn’t born this way. This was learned behavior. These strategies were developed in the market — in bad markets specifically. And Rockefeller got this lesson in discipline in that crisis of 1857. In what he called “the school of adversity and stress.” Understanding that the obstacle is an opportunity is a formula Rockefeller and other icons used to graduate from this school of hard knocks, using timeless philosophical principles forged over centuries.

The obstacle is the way

Rockefeller’s life is more than just an analogy. We live in another Gilded Age. In less than a decade, we’ve experienced two major economic bubbles, entire industries are crumbling, and lives have been disrupted. What feels like unfairness abounds. Financial downturns, civil unrest, adversity. But outward appearances are deceptive. What’s on the inside is what matters.

We can learn to perceive things differently, to cut through the illusions that others believe or fear. We can stop seeing the “problems” in front of us as problems. We can learn to see things simply as they are. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds — that sacred place of reason, action and will — and throw off our compass.

Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation — without panic or fear. Rockefeller understood this and threw off the fetters of bad, destructive perceptions. He honed the ability to control and channel and understand these signals. Most people can’t access this part of themselves; they are given to impulses and instincts they have never questioned.

We can see disaster rationally. Or rather, like Rockefeller, we can see opportunity in every disaster and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune. Seen properly, everything that happens — be it an economic crash or a personal tragedy—is a chance to move forward.

This is how you see the opportunity within the obstacle. It does not happen on its own. It is a process that requires self-discipline and logic. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.

This post appeared originally on Medium.

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Published on November 16, 2015 08:00

November 11, 2015

I’m a Millennial and I Don’t Understand My Peers—Not Even a Little Bit

I’ve always had trouble relating to kids in my generation.

Other than my wife and a few exceptions, most of my friends are much older and always seem to have been. As I’ve achieved some semblance of success, my peers have tended to be older too.

The result is that I feel old all the time. When I watch a show like Girls it’s usually with a mix of horror and confusion—probably like an ill-humored liberal watching the Colbert Report. What is going on here? Do monstrous people like this really exist? I honestly am not sure if the show is satire or criticism or portraiture.

The first time I met the writer Liana Maeby these feelings were very much in play. It was at a barbeque on the front yard of a house in Culver City. Drew Grant from the Observer was there. So was Daniel O’Brien, a senior editor at Cracked. I remember walking through the house—whoever’s it was—and thinking: I have nothing in common with most of these people.

As we all stood outside and talk, Liana told me she was a writer and working on a novel. I’m sure my reaction was feigned interest. I can’t imagine I ever expected to hear about it again. Because millennials are always talking about stuff they never actually end up doing, especially when it comes to art.

At first, I felt some relation to Liana’s character—someone I assume is at least partially autobiographical since she basically has the same name (Leila Massey) and from what I know of her, the same backstory. Leila is a young screenwriter who everyone sees as the next big thing. She has heat, she has momentum, big jobs come her way. I’ve been there. I’ve felt that.

This relation was short-lived. Because the writer throws it away. Drugs. Alcohol. Work aversion. Pointless travel. The momentum is frittered away. The career torpedoed.

Why? Angst. That perpetual ruiner of promising young talent.

Perhaps that’s what I have trouble relating to and what makes me feel apart. The only angst I’ve ever felt is over not working enough. I don’t fear missing out, I worry constantly that I’m being irresponsible. Like, am I investing enough for retirement? Am I turning things down out of youthful ego or entitlement? When I dropped out of college, it wasn’t because the traditional path scared me—it’s that I wasn’t moving along it as quickly as I desired. I wanted it all now: job, relationship, house. I wanted freedom, but only to skip the dicking around that seemed baked into the process.

At most parties, I’m the only one not drinking. I never really have and don’t quite see the point. Liana joined me in abstaining at that party, for reasons that were much clearer after reading the book. This desire to obliterate oneself—endemic to the binge culture of my young friends and peers—is another one I’ve always had trouble understanding. It’s part and parcel with the angst. It’s a cycle—unhappy and unfulfilled, we make poor choices, which lead us to the escapes that make reality more tolerable. God forbid you were born with the wrong biochemistry and the cycle can be nearly impossible to break.

It fascinates me to see others struggle and rebel against themselves, as the character in her book seems to. Why the self-destruction? Why the idleness? Where does the inability to make decisions come from? Why can’t they commit? What if early on they had lost themselves in something different—work, purpose, relationships?

It’s said that millennials—graduating into the Great Recession—are the Lost Generation. This has always felt like an excuse to me. The directions are the same as they’ve always been. Nobody wants to look them up and follow them. Because it’s somehow inauthentic.

There is a theme in Liana’s book that may hint at what lies at the root of it all. It’s a trait particularly potent to writers, but in a world where everyone publishes, everyone suffers from it. It’s as if the young writer sees her life as a work to be produced instead of to live. Leila, like Arturo Bandini in John Fante’s famous novels about LA, sees life happening “across a page in a typewriter.” Where Bandini saw every moment as a potential poem, a play, a story, a news article with him as its main character, Leila’s book actually lapses into script—literally, in a clever use of meta-fiction.

It turns out she was more than complicit in her own downfall. In fact, she was writing the film of her life. Justifying her addiction as part of a plan to hit “rock fucking bottom.” She brags to her agent that one day, they can “can make a movie about it” and the “town will lose its fucking mind.” The last words of the novel appear in script typeface: “WE FADE TO BLACK.”

It’s this obsession with performance—this performing for an imaginary audience—that makes the ordinary so difficult for most people. It’s something I’ve come to ascribe to a concept from Nassim Taleb—the narrative fallacy. This idea that your life is some unfolding story and it must be constantly exciting and compelling. It’s why young people have always been drawn to Los Angeles and New York, the places certified in the movies and television and books of their formative youth.

Work is hard to capture in an Instagram photo. A boring life centered around your craft doesn’t make for good blog posts. Living up to commitments and obligations and a sense of right and wrong—this violates the image we have of what a glamorous artist gets to do.

Maybe that’s Liana’s point. Maybe that’s the truth she’s trying to get at, having been to the other side and back.

Or maybe I’m just wired like a premature old man and I don’t get it at all.

But I’m glad she wrote it. I’m glad she shipped the book.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

The post I’m a Millennial and I Don’t Understand My Peers—Not Even a Little Bit appeared first on RyanHoliday.net.

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Published on November 11, 2015 08:00

November 5, 2015

Practice The Stoic Art of Negative Visualization

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A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins, “I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. What went wrong?”

The team is perplexed: What?! But we haven’t even launched yet…!

I know it seems strange and maybe even counterproductive to demand that employees think negatively instead of optimistically, but in business circles today, everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies and the Harvard Business Review are doing this exact exercise. In a direct response to optimistic, feel-good thinking, these leaders are encouraging their employees to think negatively.

The technique that the CEO above was using was designed by psychologist Gary Klein. It’s called a premortem. In a premortem, a project manager must envision what could go wrong—what will go wrong—in advance, before starting. Why? Far too many ambitious undertakings fail for preventable reasons. Far too many people don’t have a backup plan because they refuse to consider that something might not go exactly as they wish.

In fact, I think more companies need a Chief Dissent Officer, someone to shoot down the bad ideas that our blind spots and naive optimism too often obscure. They can catch us when we are puffed up with visions of our own greatness and preordained success. Remember Netflix’s aborted attempt to split into two separate companies? Or when Google Wave was marketed as “the next Gmail,” only to be shut down in a little over a year? If only these great companies had stopped to envision the possible travails that awaited them, they might have been able to prevent them.

No one has ever understood this better than former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, “If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.”

The practice goes back much further than just psychology though. It dates back many thousands of years, in fact—to the great Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca. And they had an even better name for it: premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils).

A writer like Seneca would begin by reviewing or rehearsing his plans, say, to take a trip. And then, in his head (or in writing), he would go over the things that could go wrong or prevent it from happening—a storm could arise, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates.

“Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation,” he wrote to a friend. “. . . nor do all things turn out for him as he wished but as he reckoned—and above all he reckoned that something could block his plans.”

By doing this exercise, Seneca was always prepared for disruption and always working that disruption into his plans. He was fitted for defeat or victory. And let’s be honest, a pleasant surprise is a lot better than an unpleasant one.

In a case where nothing could be done, the Stoics would use it as an important practice to do something the rest of us too often fail to do—manage expectations. Because sometimes the only answer to “What if?” is, “It will suck but we’ll be okay.”

We often learn the hard way that our world is ruled by external factors. We don’t always get what is rightfully ours, even if we’ve earned it. Not everything is as clean and straightforward as the games they play in business school. Psychologically, we must prepare ourselves for this to happen.

If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you’re not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you’re going to have a much harder time accepting it and moving on to attempts two, three, and four. The only guarantee, ever, is that things could go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation, because the only variable we control completely is ourselves.

The world might call you a pessimist. Who cares? It’s far better to seem like a downer than to be blindsided or caught off guard.

If we have prepared ourselves for the obstacles that are inevitably on their way, we can rest assured that it’s other people who have not. In other words, this bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We become like runners who train on hills or at altitude so they can beat racers who expected the course would be flat.

Anticipation doesn’t magically make things easier, of course. But we are more prepared for them to be as hard as they need to be, as hard as they actually are.

You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life. Of course, it’s a lot more fun to build things up in your imagination than it is to tear them down. But what purpose does that serve? It only sets you up for disappointment. Chimeras are like bandages—they hurt when torn away.

With anticipation, we have time to raise defenses, or even avoid them entirely. We’re ready to be driven off course because we’ve plotted a way back. We can resist going to pieces if things didn’t go as planned. With anticipation, we can endure.

We are prepared for failure and ready for success.

#stoicweek

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Published on November 05, 2015 06:26

November 2, 2015

Stoicism isn’t Pessimistic. It’s Boldly Optimistic.

[image error]When I was nineteen years old I was told to read a book: Meditations, by the stoic philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Of course, I didn’t fully understand it at the time, again I was a teenager, but I immediately tore the book apart and made a million notes on it. It was for me, what the economist Tyler Cowen calls a “Quake Book.” It shook my entire (albeit limited) world view.

Though this book changed my life, it was really a single passage inside that book that made the difference. It’s a passage that has struck and changed the lives of many people in the two thousand years since it’s been written. One I’ve turned to again and again–when I dropped out of school, when I had problems at work, problems in my relationships, problem with employees, and just normal life.

The passage goes like this:

“Our actions may be impeded…but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

And then he concluded with powerful words destined for a maxim.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

These words were scrawled by Marcus Aurelius himself, to himself, likely on the battlefront as he lead the Roman Army against barbarian tribes or possibly at the palace amongst the intrigue and pressure. Not exactly a happy or encouraging place to be.

Yet in the years since I first read it, I’ve started to understand is that this little paragraph is the perspective for a special kind of optimism. Stoic optimism.

I’m sure that sounds like an oxymoron, but stoicism gets a bad–and unfair–rap.

What Marcus was writing—reminding himself—is one of the core tenets of Stoicism. What it is prescribing is essentially this: in any and every situation—no matter how bad or seemingly undesirable it is—we have the opportunity to practice a virtue.

An example: I’m writing this article and I hope that it is received well. But it could very easily bomb or get a terrible response. Now this would be a minor but rather undesirable impediment or an obstacle.

That’s probably what I would think at first too. But seen another way it’s…a chance for me to remind myself of humility, or learn from the feedback and improve my writing or even just accept that I can’t please everyone all the time.

A Timeless Idea

Over the years since I first read the book (and in the course of researching my own), I studied people in history who had made this each decision–willingly or by force of circumstance. People who’d faced an obstacle but saw it as the way. Which makes sense because stoicism is ultimately an art that is designed to be practiced, not spoken about.

Take John D. Rockefeller before he was…well John D. Rockefeller as we knew him. He was just a kid with a deadbeat dad. At 16 he took his first job as bookkeeper and aspiring investor. He was making fifty cents a day. Less than two years later the Panic of 1857 struck. The result was a crippling national depression that lasted for several years.

Here was the greatest market depression in history and it hit Rockefeller just as he was finally getting the hang of things. It’s terrible right? Real investors who supposedly knew what they were doing lost everything. What is he supposed to do? Rockefeller later said that he was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster. That’s exactly what he did.

Instead of complaining about this economic upheaval or quitting like his peers, Rockefeller chose to eagerly observe the events that unfolded. He looked at the panic as an opportunity to learn, a baptism in the market.

It was this intense self-discipline and objectivity that allowed Rockefeller to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life, during the Civil War, and the panics of 1873, 1907, and 1929. Within twenty years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished and his doubters had missed out.

It’s a two part mental shift. First, to see disaster rationally. To not panic, to not make rash decisions. And second, like Rockefeller, we can see opportunity in every disaster, and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.

Another example: General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

General Eisenhower—who men sniped behind his back was more of an organizer than a leader—had just pulled off the largest amphibious invasion in military history.

Slow going in the hedgerows of France had allowed the Germans to wage a series of counteroffensives—a final blitzkrieg of some 200,000 men. And now the Nazis threatened to throw them all back to the sea.

The Allies had a pretty understandable reaction: they just about freaked out.

But not Eisenhower. Striding into the conference room at headquarters in Malta, he made an announcement: He’d have no more of this quivering timidity from his deflated generals. “The present situation is to be regarded as opportunity for us and not disaster,” he commanded. “There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.”

In the surging counteroffensive, Eisenhower was able to see the tactical solution that had been in front of them the entire time: the Nazi strategy carried its own destruction within itself.

Only then were the Allies able to see the opportunity inside the obstacle rather than simply the obstacle that threatened them. Properly seen, as long as the Allies could bend and not break, this attack would send more than fifty thousand Germans rushing headfirst into a net—or a “meat grinder,” as Patton eloquently put it.

Eisenhower’s ability to not be overwhelmed or discouraged by the German Blitzkrieg allowed him to see the weaknesses within it. By defusing his fear of the German counteroffensive he uses his optimistic attitude to find its weakness.

And then there is Thomas Edison. I don’t think that inventing the lightbulb was the craziest thing the guy ever did.

At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home one evening from another day at the laboratory. After dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away.

Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire looking for his son. “Go get your mother and all her friends,” he told his son with childlike excitement. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.” Don’t worry, Edison calmed him. “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”

That’s a pretty amazing reaction. It’s what the stoics might refer to as amor fati–loving the things that happen to us.

Edison wasn’t heartbroken, not as he could have and probably should have been.

Instead, the fire invigorated him. As he told a reporter the next day, he wasn’t too old to make a fresh start. “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.”

Within about three weeks, the factory was partially back up and running. Within a month, its men were working two shifts a day churning out new products the world had never seen. Despite a loss of almost $1 million dollars (more than $23 million in today’s dollars), Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly $10 million dollars in revenue that year ($200-plus million today).

So…how can we cultivate this fortitude and ingenuity?

The answer, I say, is with philosophy–practical philosophy. With Stoic optimism, we can be Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate but enjoying the spectacular scene. And then starting the recovery effort the very next day—roaring back soon enough.

How about a business decision that turned out to be a mistake? It was a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong, like a scientist you can learn from it and use it for your next experiment. Or that computer glitch that erased all your work? You will now be twice as good at it since you will do it again, this time more prepared.

Perhaps you were injured recently and are stuck in bed recovering. Now you have the time to start your blog or the screenplay you’ve been meaning to write. Maybe you’ve recently lost your job. Now you can teach yourself the skills to get the job you’ve always wanted. You can take a careless employee’s mistake that cost you business and turn it into a chance to teach a lesson that can only be learned from experience. When people question our abilities that means we can exceed their lowered expectations of us that much quicker.

Easier said than done, of course.

In each of the three situations above, the individuals faced real and potentially life-threatening adversity. But instead of despairing at the horrific situation—economic panic, being overrun by the enemy, a catastrophic fire—these men were actually optimistic. You could almost say they were happy about it.

Why? Because it was an opportunity for a different kind of excellence. As Laura Ingalls Wilder put it: “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”

I’m not Eisenhower. You’re not Rockefeller. Our factory has never burned down, so we don’t know how we would react.

But I don’t think it’s as super-human as it seems at first glance. Because there is a method and a framework for understanding, appreciating, and acting upon the obstacles life throws at us. Like Rockefeller too we can perceive events rationally and find the fortune in downturns. Like Eisenhower, we can disengage from our fears and see the opportunity inside our obstacles. Like Edison we can choose to be energized by the unexpected circumstances we find ourselves in. We know it won’t be easy but we are prepared to give it everything we have regardless.

In our daily lives we forget that the things that seem to be blocking us are small and that the obstacles blocking us are actually providing us answers for where to go next. It’s a timeless formula that can be revisited again and again.

All I can say is that this attitude is something I try to think of always. I try to envision these people facing much more significant problems than me, and seeing it not only as not bad but as an opportunity.

We all face tough situations on a regular basis. But behind the circumstances and events that provoke an immediate negative reaction is something good—some exposed benefit that we can seize mentally and then act upon.We blame outside forces or other people and we write ourselves off as failures or our goals as impossible. But there is only one thing we really control: our attitude and approach

Which is why the stoics say that what blocks the path is the path. That what seems to impede action can actually advance it. And that everything is a chance to practice some virtue or something different than originally intended. And you never know what good will come of that.

The obstacle is the way.

#stoicweek

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Published on November 02, 2015 08:00

October 27, 2015

Texas Forever: How I Found the American Dream in the Lone Star State

When we shopped for our first house, I told my girlfriend (now wife) that most of the decision was up to her. I had worked out what we could afford, but in terms of what house, where and what style, I wanted whatever she wanted.

We were coming from New York and so everything seemed bigger in Texas. A real estate agent showed us a “small” place that was “only” 1,500 square feet. We didn’t have enough stuff to fill half of that. We ended up with a two story, two bedroom with a small fenced in yard, at just under 900 square feet. It was perfect.

Except the day we moved in, she said to me, “You know, I’ve always wanted to live on a farm.”

When I moved to the South for the first time in 2011 I thought it would be a good place to write. What I could not have anticipated is how good a place it was for just about everything. I certainly could not have anticipated that just a few years later I would live on a twenty acre ranch with more animals I can confidently account for (it’s somewhere around 20 but if you include the cattle that live on the land, closer to 50).

A few years ago, Tyler Cowen wrote a Time Magazine cover story about why everyone was moving to Texas. There is a bunch of data behind it, but I can lay it out pretty simply:

-It’s cheap.

-It’s beautiful.

-It’s awesome.

It’s a chance at the life.

It’s easy to say about a lot of places, I suppose. But let me tell you what they actually mean in Texas.

First, there is no state income tax in Texas. Some people know this and some don’t—few really grasp what it means practically. It means that if you make decent money and decide to move here and rent something affordable, it’s essentially free to live in Texas. If you make $150,000 a year, your state income taxes in California are roughly $12,000 per year (in NYC it’s closer to $15,000). Or, you can put a thousand bucks a month toward your rent here. If you decide to buy, property taxes are high—but what you get for the money more than makes up for it. My editor at the Observer recently tried to cajole me into coming back to New York. Our house now—which has its own lake and is 29 minutes from the airport which never has lines—costs less than the rent we were paying for our lofted studio apartment in Midtown. Are you kidding?

Second, I’ve driven across the United States many times. I am continually shocked at how beautiful Texas is. The vastness of Texas means it has essentially every kind of climate you can think of from plains to swampland to pine forests to the coast to deserts and even some mountains (topping out at 8,750’). I could go on about the many beautiful features of Texas but I thought I would just pick one thing and it’s so unexpected: water. Barton Springs in Austin is probably one of the most amazing natural swimming pools in the world (rivaling Australia’s rock pools). There is a college campus near San Antonio that has a swimmable river in the middle of it(with its own rare species of grass at the bottom). In a place called Wimberley, there is a 120 foot deep blue hole that you can rock dive into. There’s another stream nearby called Wimberley Blue Hole and a thing called Hamilton Pools, which is one of the largest natural rock grottos on the planet. Out in the middle of nowhere, there is a park in Toyahvale that happens to have the largest spring fed pool in the world. In some random town called Luling, there’s an Old Mill turned into a swimming hole that looks like something out of Mayberry. Honestly, the only water that isn’t nice in Texas seems to be the ocean.

Third, it’s awesome. Like really awesome. In East Austin, where we used to live, we had two small pet goats. We were not the only ones. Another neighbor had them too. Oh, and apparently other people did too because one day someone found one wandering the streets—wandering the streets of the fastest growing city in the US—and gave it to us. His name is Watermelon.

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In Dallas, a guy named Jason Roberts created a program called Better Block Projectthat has become the model for urban revitalization. A friend of mine started the best hostel in Austin out of an old Victorian mansion and a month after opening, it’s fully booked almost every night. They’re building the first Wavegarden surf park in Texas and a brand new F1 racetrack sits right outside Austin. They say the state bird of Texas should be the construction crane—that’s how much it’s being built out.

There is a certain freedom and ridiculousness to Texas that I love. Sure, let’s have a 20 oz. chicken fried steak for breakfast. Sure, let’s put queso on everything and have tacos for every meal. I remember shortly after moving there, asking an employee at Cabella’s if he had any recommendations for a gun safe. “Well, son,” he said to me in complete seriousness, “m’boy moved away to college a few years ago so I reinforced the door frame and just turned the whole guest room into a gun vault. Have ya thought ‘bout doing sumthin like that?” Good God, I thought. And then, when we moved into a new house this year, it had a walk in closet turned into gun vault.Welcome to Texas.

Some other awesome things: It’s a state with two football teams, three NBA teams, and two professional baseball teams (oh and pretty decent college and high school—including a 100,000 seat college stadium). It’s the setting for one of the greatest television shows and books of all time, Friday Night Lights. It’s one of only three states to ever be independent countries. There’s a fort in southeast Texas called La Bahia (arguably more important than the Alamo) that flew the flags of six different nations in its 294 year history. In East Austin, there is a French embassy. (Did you know the two countries almost came to blows over a pig that broke into the ambassador’s home?) Oh and my favorite, Texas is so big that the distance between its two furthermost cities Beaumont and El Paso is 26 miles more than the distance from Los Angeles to El Paso. Texas is roughly the size of France and Switzerland combined

And yet…it’s a four-hour flight to basically anywhere worth going in the United States. You can leave Texas on a 7am flight and still have a full day of work or meetings on either coast.

To me, the American Dream has always been relatively simple: The ability to live one’s life on one’s terms. That is: financially, recreationally, personally, and creatively. Texas offers that. Increasingly, America’s great cities and states make having all of that essentially impossible for the vast majority of people. They are culturally, financially or physically oppressive.

Of course, Texas is not without its flaws. Two cultural flaws are particularly odious and bear pointing out. One, the radical, delusional politics. Not because it’s a Red State—every state has the right to lean the way the population cares to (for the most part, as a liberal person I’ve never found conservatism in the South to be a bother). Instead, I’m speaking of the Jade Helm 15 variety of nutbags and the Overton Window that these views set. I’m talking about anyone who can’t see that Americans in Texas complaining about Mexican immigrants clearly doesn’t understand enough history to deserve the right to an opinion. The second cultural problem is a certain breed of NIMBY-esque hipsters—particularly in Austin—who constantly complain about the other Americans who dare to like their city enough to move here. In fact, I can already hear them complaining that I wrote this piece. Last week I shot a jack rabbit off my front porch, skinned and ate it. I’ve earned my stripes. I’m not the enemy.

But these are minority viewpoints and they’ll work themselves out. I’ve always found the South to be almost disconcertingly welcoming. It’s that they people seem to generally want you to live there, they’d like you to be a part of their community. Diversity—an essential ingredient to a happy life—has always been more tangible to me here than East or West, and not only by race but by occupation, lifestyle and beliefs.

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This too is part of the dream. This too is part of the rich life. Along with millions of other people, I found it and fallen in love with it here.

So I’m not saying everyone should move to Texas, but you should move to Texas.

This post appeared originally on the New York Observer.

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Published on October 27, 2015 11:22

September 28, 2015

Seeing Opportunities Where Others See Obstacles

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(from my poster with Joey Roth)

The story of Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg is the story of a central truth of history: that strength often becomes a weakness and weakness can be transformed into strength. The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” Every negative has its positive. And conversely, every positive–every advantage you think you have–has its negative.

Grant spent months trying to take Vicksburg, which looked down from its protected perch high on the cliffs of the Mississippi, strangling the most important river in the country. He tried attacking head-on and was repeatedly repulsed. He spent months digging a new canal that would change the course of the river. He blew the levees upstream and literally tried to float boats down into the city over flooded land.

None of it worked. But Grant refused to be rattled, refused to rush or cease. His next move ran contrary to nearly all conventional military theory. He decided to run his boats and men past the gun batteries guarding the river—a considerable risk, because once down, they couldn’t come back up. Despite an unprecedented nighttime firefight, nearly all the boats made the run unharmed. A few days later, Grant crossed the river about thirty miles downstream.

The enemy thought he’d given up. You have to ‘catch the rabbit’ before you eat it, Vicksburg’s newspaper taunted him. Lincoln had a replacement ready and primed to take over.

In fact, Grant had a bold plan: Leaving most of their supplies behind, his troops would live off the land and make their way up the river, heading east to take the state’s capitol in Jackson (which had been supplying the city), and only then circle back west towards Vicksburg, hitting it from the other side.

Finally, he laid in for a siege. On July 4th, 1863, Grant ate his dinner inside the city. He had caught the rabbit.

It seems obvious and clear in retrospect. By looping around the fortress and attacking from the rear, he pinned them inside their own walls. With a simple change–and an enormous gamble–he turned their impenetrable advantage into a prison of their own making.

That’s how it works–in war and in life.

It’s something I’ve talked a lot about with my friend, the designer Joey Roth. Why is it that entrenched players, with all their resources, can’t seem to innovate? Why do outsiders seem to respond better to disruption and changes? How does one learn to spot transformative opportunities?

At its core, Stoicism discerns from the things we can control from the things we cannot. Ego on the other hand, is incapable of making this distinction. It deludes us, it lies, it makes us soft and vulnerable. It takes for granted the protections of a fortress and refuses to see how the tables might be turned. On the other hand, the strategist–the stoic–allows us to see obstacles not as impediments, but as opportunities that guide our efforts.

As Joey put it when we were collaborating on a poster about this very idea:

When the competition is established, dug in and secure, it looks like an insurmountable obstacle, but in fact gives you freedom maneuver. This mirrors the agility of a startup vs. an entrenched player, or the beginner’s unencumbered approach beating the expert’s finely tuned but rigid technique. It’s also a reminder to stay flexible as you advance in your work and develop processes and expectations.

Being outnumbered, coming from behind, being low on funds, these don’t have to be disadvantages. They can be gifts. Assets that make us less likely to waste our time, our energy, or potentially even our lives in a failed frontal assault on whatever it is that we happen to face. “Obstacles” force us to be creative, to find workarounds, to sublimate the ego and do anything to win besides challenging our enemy where they are strongest.

In fact, having the advantage of size or strength or power is often the birthing ground for true and fatal weakness. The inertia of success makes it much harder to truly develop good technique. People or companies who have that size advantage never really have to learn the process when they’ve been able to coast on brute force. And that works for them . . . until it doesn’t.

At Vicksburg, Grant learned two things. First, persistence and pertinacity were incredible assets and probably his main assets as a leader. Second, as often is the result from such dedication, in exhausting all the other traditional options, he’d been forced to try something new. That option—cutting loose from his supply trains and living off the spoils of hostile territory—was a previously untested strategy that the North could now use to slowly deplete the South of its resources and will to fight.

In persistence, he’d not only broken through. In trying it all the wrong ways, Grant discovered a totally new way—the way that would eventually win the war.

In our lives, we can apply the same lesson–and ideally, not at such a high and violent cost. We can learn from our obstacles, and they can show us the way. We can remind ourselves to see the counterside to every negative (as well as every positive.). And understand that it’s our obligation to push through.

All it takes is mobility, creativity and a little bit of risk.

This post originally appeared on Thought Catalog.

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Published on September 28, 2015 11:54

July 27, 2015

All My Writing for 2015 So Far

It’s been a busy first half 2015. In case you don’t follow me everywhere (twitter is best for articles), I wanted to put together a quick roundup of all the writing I’ve done so far.

THOUGHT CATALOG

Amor Fati: Learning To Love And Accept Everything That Happens

If You Do This, You’re A Monster

Here’s Your Productivity Hack: Go The F*ck To Sleep

Shut Up When They’re Talking To You: Always Say Less Than Necessary

I Just Turned 28: Here’s What I’ve Learned In Another Year

Tell Me Who You Spend Time With, And I Will Tell You Who You Are

Anything Can Have Meaning If It Changes You For The Better

Things This Dropout Actually Learned In College

How To Learn The Art Of Speed Reading

Why I Run

24 Fiction Books That Can Change Your Life