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

by Ryan Holiday

For the most part, these businesses had little awareness they were in some historically significant depression. Why? Because the founders were too busy existing in the present—actually dealing with the situation at hand.

Or we get ourselves so worked up and intimidated because of the overthinking that if we’d just gotten to work we’d probably be done already.

In fact, half the companies in the Fortune 500 were started during a bear market or recession. Half.

Those who survive it survive because they took things day by day—that’s the real secret.

Those people with an entrepreneurial spirit are like animals, blessed to have no time and no ability to think about the ways things should be, or how they’d prefer them to be.

Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters.

You’ll find the method that works best for you, but there are many things that can pull you into the present moment: Strenuous exercise. Unplugging. A walk in the park.

You have to work at it. Catch your mind when it wanders—don’t let it get away from you. Discard distracting thoughts.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.”

To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. Assumptions were not law, they needed to be questioned.

Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.”

This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Confident, adamant, convinced of a person’s agency to change it.

Jobs responded calmly, explaining to the engineers that if they could make it in two weeks, they could surely make it one—there was no real difference in such a short period of time.

Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own abilities to succeed.

Jobs learned to reject the first judgments and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are so often rooted in fear.

“We don’t have capacity,” they said. “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. “You can do it. Get your mind around it. You can do it.”

An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before.

When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they’re made of—to give it all they’ve got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win.

Our best ideas come from there, where obstacles illuminate new options.

The Blitzkrieg strategy was designed to exploit the flinch of the enemy—that they would collapse at the sight of what appears to be overwhelming force. Its success depends completely on this response.

He’d have no more of this quivering timidity from his deflated generals. “The present situation is to be regarded as opportunity for us

He didn’t get rattled. He redoubled.

By allowing a forward wedge of the German army through and then attacking from the sides, the Allies encircled the enemy completely from the rear.

That’s step one. Not being overwhelmed and rattled and discouraged, as the Blitzkrieg and so many problems in life want you to be.

But after you have controlled your emotions, the next step is for our adaptability to come in,

Laura Ingalls Wilder said that “there is good in everything, if only we look for it.”

It’s our preconceptions that are so often at the root of the problem.

If you mean it when you say you’re at the end of your rope and would rather quit, you actually have a unique chance to grow and improve yourself. A unique opportunity to experiment with different solutions, to try different tactics, or to take on new projects to add to your skill set.

You can prepare yourself for that job by trying new styles of communication or standing up for yourself, all with a perfect safety net for yourself: quitting and getting out of there.

With this new attitude and fearlessness, who knows, you might be able to extract concessions and find that you like the job again. One day, the boss will make a mistake, and then you’ll make your move and outmaneuver them.

Or take that longtime rival at work (or that rival company), the one who causes endless headaches? Note the fact that they also: keep you alert raise the stakes

Or that computer glitch that erased all your work? It’s a chance to start fresh. By doing it a second time, even if it comes out exactly the same, you will now be twice as good.

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.

The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity.

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.

Once you see the world as it is, for what it is, you must act.

A clearer head makes for steadier hands. And then those hands must be put to work.

Decide to tackle what stands in your way—not because you’re a gambler defying the odds but because you’ve calculated them and boldly embraced the risk.

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

Step by step, action by action, we’ll dismantle the obstacles in front of us.

Our movements and decisions define us: We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence.

Action is the solution and the cure to our predicaments.

Demosthenes locked himself away underground—literally—in a dugout he had built in which to study and educate himself. To ensure he wouldn’t indulge in outside distractions, he shaved half his head so he’d be too embarrassed to go outside.

Every speech he delivered made him stronger, every day that he stuck with it made him more determined. He could see through bullies and stare down fear.

He had channeled his rage and pain into his training, and then later into his speeches, fueling it all with a kind of fierceness and power that could be neither matched nor resisted.

But you, when you’re dealt a bad hand: What’s your response? Do you fold? Or do you play it for all you’ve got?

But those people didn’t quit. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves. They didn’t delude themselves with fantasies about easy solutions. They focused on the one thing that mattered: applying themselves with gusto and creativity.

Because each obstacle we overcome makes us stronger for the next one.

We have an obstacle we have to lean into and transform.