The key ideas

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

Ryan Holiday, 2014

A crisis, a rejection, a plan that fell apart: it feels like there is a wall ahead. Ryan Holiday gathered the stories of people, from a Roman emperor to Edison, who at that very moment found a road beyond the wall, and drew three skills from Stoic philosophy: seeing clearly, acting and enduring. This book shows you how to apply them to your own difficulty this very week.

Who it is for

For anyone who has run into a problem and can't see where to start. And for anyone curious how the Stoics, two thousand years ago, learned to turn failures into something to stand on.

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

What this book is about

Almost two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor wrote down for himself a thought that sounds like a paradox: the impediment to action advances action, and what stands in the way becomes the way. The emperor was Marcus Aurelius, and his notes were later published as the Meditations.

Ryan Holiday built a whole book on that line. He shows that the people we think of as strong did not live without problems. They knew how to do three things: look at a difficulty soberly, act, and endure what cannot be changed. Holiday calls these perception, action and will. He takes all three from Stoicism, the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome about how to live when so much is out of your hands.

Ahead of you: a young bookkeeper who did not panic in a market crash, an orator held back by a speech impediment, a general who spent months unable to take a single fortress, and an inventor who watched his life's work burn. If this book is in your hands right now, some difficulty may already be waiting for an answer. That is a good sign: strong people start precisely by not looking away.

Idea 1. It's not the problem that scares us, it's what we think about it

In the autumn of 1857, a financial panic hit America. Banks failed and people lost their savings. In Cleveland, it caught an eighteen-year-old bookkeeper named John Rockefeller. Everyone around him was in a frenzy, while he watched and learned: how a market collapses and where other people go wrong. Later, in new crises, he kept a cool head while his competitors panicked, and that was exactly when he found opportunities.

Holiday calls this the discipline of perception. An event in itself is neither good nor bad. We add the fear and the resentment ourselves when we judge it. Marcus Aurelius practised this on purpose: he described expensive wine to himself as fermented grape juice, and a purple robe as sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish.

The mistake is to confuse the fact with our interpretation of it and then react to the interpretation.

How to use it: describe your problem as if it had happened to someone else. Holiday recommends exactly this, because another person's trouble seems clearer and easier to solve.

On Friday evening your boss writes: “Come and see me on Monday.” All weekend your mind writes the story of your firing. Yet there was only one fact: on Monday there will be a conversation. Fear wrote the rest.

There is a gap between an event and your reaction, and whoever separates fact from interpretation in that gap sees opportunities where others see disaster.

Read in Livria

About the author

Ryan Holiday is an American writer who brings Stoicism to a wide audience, and a former director of marketing at American Apparel. His books on Stoic philosophy have been translated into dozens of languages.

All books by this author: Ryan Holiday

Terms from the book

  • Grant
  • Edison
  • Cleveland
  • Rockefeller
  • Stoicism
  • Epictetus
  • Marcus Aurelius
  • Seneca
  • amor fati
  • Meditations: The private notes Marcus Aurelius wrote for himself, not for publication. One of the central books of Stoicism.
  • Carter: Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, American boxer. He was convicted of murder and spent almost twenty years in prison, and in 1985 a federal court overturned the verdict.
  • Earhart: Amelia Earhart, American aviator. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane, and in 1932 she did it again alone, at the controls.
  • Demosthenes: Ancient Greek orator and statesman of the fourth century BC, one of the most famous speakers of Athens.
  • Vicksburg: A fortress city on the Mississippi River. When it surrendered in July 1863, the North gained control of the whole river.
  • Premeditatio malorum: Latin for “the premeditation of evils”. A Stoic exercise: imagine what could go wrong so that you can prepare for it in advance.

All terms

Similar books