The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
This month we are looking at books on resilience, making this weeks book The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday. Now, usually, I mix up a cocktail with these reviews. However, you may have noticed from my background I am not at home and this time, my day job has me in fabulous Las Vegas, NV. Where it is approximately 142 million degrees outside. And when you are standing on the surface of the sun, alcohol will only dehydrate you faster. So today, I am NOT mixing a cocktail and I am sticking with plain, ice cold, water. So lets do this.
My first introduction to Stoicism was through Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. And once I read that, I googled Stoicism, and this lead to The Daily Stoic website, which I’m pretty sure is Ryan Holiday’s website, since this pointed me towards his books, including this weeks book.
Holiday breaks down the keys to stoicism and resilience into three parts, Perception, Action, and Will. And each of these parts are further broken down to explain these overarching themes.
So Perception is described as a discipline. Perception is “how we see and understand what occurs around us – and what we decide those events will mean.” If you respond to everything like it’s an emotional catastrophe, life quickly becomes a never ending tragedy of sorrow and misfortune.
But if you restrain yourself, limit your reactions and passions, as Holiday calls it, then you limit their control over your life. This allows YOU to take control of your own life. And with that simple step, you become the architect of your own fate, rather than being jerked around. And it truly is that simple....which is not to say it’s easy. The idea of it is simple: Control your emotions. But in an age where we are taught, or even encouraged to have a public meltdown and share it with the world via social media, controlling our emotions is NOT second nature to most people.
So how do you get to a point where you are able to control your emotions and responses? Well as the old song goes, how do you get to Carnegie hall? Practice, practice, practice. Holiday provides loads of anecdotes which illustrate his point. Learn to focus on how things really are. Shift your perception from this is how this made me feel to how can I learn from this to my advantage? The example he gives in the book is oil baron John D. Rockefeller. People like to decry him as a robber baron, without realizing Rockefeller literally came from nothing. His father was a criminal who abandoned the family, so Rockefeller started work at 16....right before the financial panic of 1857.
Rather than panicking, like everyone else, Rockefeller, who had learned to master his emotions by this point, stayed calm, cool, and collected and did the opposite of what everyone who was panicking did. This ultimately led to him controlling 90% of the oil market. By remaining unflappable, by staying in the market when greedy competitors crashed and burned, nervous colleagues sold out, and doubters missed out, he became a legend. And for this, history now decries him as a robber baron. You will not win friends by remaining calm. But you will be master of your own fate.
Steady your nerves, control your emotions, learn to pivot when reality dictates. He points to the NASA space training programs and how they train astronauts NOT to panic. By practicing every possible scenario. When John Glenn orbited the earth on February 20, 1962, and his heat shield started reading as loose, he did not panic. Holiday reports that his heart rate remained under 100 beats per minute. By controlling his emotions, by not panicking, he managed safe reentry.
The section on perception contains discipline, recognize your power, steady your nerves, control your emotions, practice objectivity, alter your perspective, is it up to you, live in the present moment, think differently, find the opportunity, and prepare to act. And each of these subsections include stories from history of these guidelines in action, to give you an idea of how you might incorporate these ideals into your own life. Because in the 21st century, you have almost certainly not been challenged in the same way our forbears have been. Which is not to say you have not been challenged. But your challenges will be different. And here is how you might overcome this.
So how about part two: Action? Man, I called back to Prepared: A Manual for Surviving Worst Case Scenarios by Mike Glover. Move. Get moving. Get off the X. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Usually. The opposite corollary is knowing when NOT to act. Rockefeller had that trick. But this section is action. Know when to take the risk...even if its not flattering. Like Amelia Earhart. Who was told, basically, “We have someone willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. Our first choice has backed out. You won’t get to fly the plane, we’re going to send two men along as chaperones. We’re going to pay them but not you.” And she took this insane offer. Why? Because you have to start somewhere.
Persistence is key to action, and here Holiday talks about General Ulysses S. Grant and his attack on Vicksburg during the Civil War. When no other attacks worked, he was forced to think outside the box, move up river. Leave all supplies behind and live off the land. This did not make him any friends in the South, but he didn’t care. His goal was to win. And ransacking the towns, which flew in the face of conventional warfare at the time, ensured he was able to eventually lay siege to Vicksburg, and turned the war solidly in favor of the North.
Use obstacles against themselves. By knowing when NOT to act. Like...Ghandi. Whose civil disobedience exposed the horrors of British colonialism to the world. And Martin Luther King Jr, who imitated Ghandi, and showed the world the brutality of Jim Crow in the Southern states.
And while you can control your perceptions, and direct your actions, you have to be prepared for the idea that none of it may work. The world around us may not be cooperative with what we want to achieve. Nothing can stop you from trying. Sometimes, obstacles truly can’t be overcome. You can practice all possible scenarios in your head, and then something no one ever thought would happen comes at you out of left field....like a pandemic, for example, which wiped out thousands of small businesses. There was no real way to prepare for that, from a business perspective.
Do you quit all dreams at that point? Or do you use the opportunity to pivot your actions, and learn something new, practice new skills or virtues?
The section on Action includes Discipline of action, get moving, practice persistence, iterate, follow the process, do your job do it right, what’s right is what works, in praise of the flank attack, use obstacles against themselves, channel your energy, seize the offensive, and prepare for none of it to work.
The last section is Will, or as Holiday says “true will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by and ambition. See which lasts longer under the hardest of obstacles.”
Willpower is Theodore Roosevelt exercising every day for three years until he overcame the asthma and physical weakness of the body he was born with. Will is also knowing when an obstacle truly can’t be overcome, and learning to go with the flow...like Helen Keller, acquiescing to the fact of her disabilities, yet still becoming world famous as an author and disability rights activist. Acquiescing is Thomas Jefferson realizing he would never be a great orator, and pouring all his passion into writing. Acquiescence is knowing that “Man proposes, God disposes.” You can’t control all things. Accept when something can’t be controlled, and move on.
Willpower is perseverance. Not quite the same thing as persistence, perseverance is the long game. It’s knowing success is not going to be overnight, or maybe not even in five years. But continuing anyways. Holiday clarifies it as “persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs....perseverance is 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, until the end.” THAT’S Perseverance. That’s will to overcome every obstacle. Persistence is action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy. The other is endurance.
The section on Will includes subsections on discipline of will, build your inner citadel, anticipation, art of acquiesecence, love everything that happens, perseverance, something bigger than yourself, meditate on your mortalitiy, and prepare to start again.
Stoicism always provides food for thought and good things to meditate on. It’s understandable why Stoicism remains an enduring philosophy on which to build your personal kingdom. And easily describes the thoughts of the most resilient among us. Stoicism is accepting that ultimately, you are responsible for your own fate. Accept it...along with the fact of your own mortality.
Holiday has a definite way with words that gets his point across without belaboring it, which made this book a joy to read, and one that I’ll probably keep out and reflect back on frequently. Like, pick it up, flip to a random page, and read it to think on it, kind of reflection, as I continue on my next learning phase of life. I do recommend it, for anyone who's trying to get a handle on the insanity of the modern world, and come out the other side more in control of yourself and your life.
