More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?
Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.
To steal good fortune from misfortune.
Not “be positive” but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic.
“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.”
obstacles are not only to be expected but embraced.
obstacles are actually opportunities to test ourselves, to try new things, and, ultimately, to triumph. The Obstacle Is the Way.
To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives.
“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. “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.”
Even in prison, deprived of nearly everything, some freedoms remain. Your mind remains your own (if you’re lucky, you have books) and you have time—lots of time. Carter did not have much power, but he understood that that was not the same thing as being powerless.
“Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.
That isn’t to say she saw the world through delusional rose-colored glasses. Instead, she simply chose to see each situation for what it could be—accompanied by hard work and a little upbeat spirit.
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.
Or, with a shift in perception, it can be exactly what you were looking for—the chance to pierce through defenses and teach a lesson that can be learned only by experience. A mistake becomes training.
We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.”
Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate, fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity.
apatheia. It’s the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions.
This is the skill that must be cultivated—freedom from disturbance and perturbation—so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.
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?”
If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one.
Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.
Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?
The sixteenth-century Samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi won countless fights against feared opponents, even multiple opponents, in which he was swordless. In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, sometimes being superficial—taking things only at first glance—is the most profound approach.
So what does it matter, Pericles replied, when the cause of the darkness differs?
as billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson likes to say, is that “business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.”
Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.
Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.
But it’s easier when the choice to limit your scope feels like editing rather than acting. Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s 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.” There is plenty else going on right here to care about any of that.
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?
As Laura Ingalls Wilder put it: “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”
Sports psychologists recently did a study of elite athletes who were struck with some adversity or serious injury. Initially, each reported feeling isolation, emotional disruption, and doubts about their athletic ability. Yet afterward, each reported gaining a desire to help others, additional perspective, and realization of their own strengths. In other words, every fear and doubt they felt during the injury turned into greater abilities in those exact areas. It’s a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. “That which doesn’t kill me makes me
...more
So focus on that—on the poorly wrapped and initially repulsive present you’ve been handed in every seemingly disadvantageous situation. Because beneath the packaging is what we need—often something of real value. A gift of great benefit.
It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you’ll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc).
If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a start-up—a start-up of one.
Failure puts you in corners you have to think your way out of. It is a source of breakthroughs.
The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad thing—is to not learn from it.
Lessons come hard only if you’re deaf to them. Don’t be.
Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.
We are A-to-Z thinkers, fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y.
Respect the craft and make something beautiful.
As Deng Xiaoping once said, “I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”
Think progress, not perfection.
He had a powerful sense of which minor skirmishes would feel and look like major victories.
He was actually better at withdrawing than at advancing—skilled at saving troops that otherwise would have been lost in defeat. Washington rarely got trapped—he always had a way out. Hoping simply to tire out his enemy, this evasiveness was a powerful weapon—though not necessarily a glamorous one.
In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy’s main army.
