The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

by Ryan Holiday

Does getting upset provide you with more options? Sometimes it does. But in this instance?

The phrase “This happened and it is bad” is actually two impressions. The first—“This happened”—is objective. The second—“it is bad”—is subjective.

It’s so much better to see things as they truly, actually are, not as we’ve made them in our minds.

Fear is debilitating, distracting, tiring, and often irrational.

we often choose the ominous explanation over the simple one, to our detriment.

It’s your choice whether you want to put I in front of something (I hate public speaking. I screwed up. I am harmed by this).

Behind the Serenity Prayer is a two-thousand-year-old Stoic phrase: “ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin.” What is up to us, what is not up to us.

Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.

Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible.

When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?

Problems are rarely as bad as we think—or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.

As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action.

Therefore, we can always (and only) greet our obstacles with energy with persistence with a coherent and deliberate process with iteration and resilience with pragmatism with strategic vision with craftiness and savvy and an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments Are you ready to get to work?

While you’re sleeping, traveling, attending meetings, or messing around online, the same thing is happening to you. You’re going soft. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re not pressing ahead. You’ve got a million reasons why you can’t move at a faster pace. This all makes the obstacles in your life loom very large.

Be deliberate, of course, but you always need to be moving forward. And that’s the final part: Stay moving, always.

We talk a lot about courage as a society, but we forget that at its most basic level it’s really just taking action—whether

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.

We will not be stopped by failure, we will not be rushed or distracted by external noise. We will chisel and peg away at the obstacle until it is gone. Resistance is futile.

Working at it works. It’s that simple. (But again, not easy.)

It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s going to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource.

The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad thing—is to not learn from it.

It’s time you understand that the world is telling you something with each and every failure and action. It’s feedback—giving you precise instructions on how to improve, it’s trying to wake you up from your cluelessness. It’s trying to teach you something. Listen.

It says: Okay, you’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. 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.

The process is about finishing.

We will be and do many things in our lives. Some are prestigious, some are onerous, none are beneath us. To whatever we face, our job is to respond with: hard work honesty helping others as best we can You should never have to ask yourself, But what am I supposed to do now? Because you know the answer: your job.

The first iPhone was revolutionary, but it still shipped without a copy-and-paste feature or a handful of other features Apple would have liked to have included. Steve Jobs, the supposed perfectionist, knew that at some point, you have to compromise. What mattered was that you got it done and it worked.

Think progress, not perfection.

(We want right action, not action

We must be willing to roll the dice and lose. Prepare, at the end of the day, for none of it to work.

True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.

If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul.

Acknowledge the pain but trod onward in your task.

With all our modern technology has come the conceited delusion that we control the world around us. We’re convinced that we can now, finally, control the uncontrollable.

It’s easier to think and act than it is to practice wisdom.

Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality.

Could you actually handle yourself if things suddenly got worse?

We assume that the way we’re born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent.

We craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise, and our physical hardiness through mental practice (mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a strong body).

This is strikingly similar to what the Stoics called the Inner Citadel, that fortress inside of us that no external adversity can ever break down.

We can’t afford to shy away from the things that intimidate us.

Your plan and the way things turn out rarely resemble each other.

You have to make concessions for the world around you.

The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong.

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.

It is far easier to talk of the way things should be. It takes toughness, humility, and will to accept them for what they actually are.

The hubris at the core of this notion that we can change everything is somewhat new. In a world where we can beam documents around the world in nanoseconds, chat in high-definition video with anyone anywhere, predict the weather down to the minute, it’s very easy to internalize the assumption that nature has been domesticated and submits to our whim. Of course it hasn’t.

It’s time to be humble and flexible enough to acknowledge the same in our own lives. That there is always someone or something that could change the plan. And that person is not us. As the saying goes, “Man proposes but God disposes. ”

To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.

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.”

It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do.