Like with Tim Ferriss and Robert Greene, I'll read anything Ryan Holiday makes. The Obstacle is the Way is no exception. It blends historical accounts with Stoic Philosophy and contemporary examples. It's a quick read – I finished it on a flight from Boston to LA. Ryan filled it with little actionable tidbits and left me feeling crazy positive.
Key Takeaways
Memorable Quotes
Rating: 10/10
This is the most important book I've read this year. Anyone will find a valuable takeaway here. If you're struggling with any kind of challenge, this will help you reframe and solve it. The book is timeless, and one of the texts I'll keep revisiting.
Key Takeaways
- You get to choose how you feel about everything. It's hard to overestimate how powerful this fact is.
- It is often the anticipation of pain, rather than pain itself, that causes so much anxiety.
- Every challenge or obstacle contains the means to solve it and improve ourselves.
Memorable Quotes
- 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.
- We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.
- Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
- Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing and herever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well.
- Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
- The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.
- 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. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one said you can't ever cry. Forget "manliness." If you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. 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.
- Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.
- Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves.
- In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices. —EPICTETUS
- Andrew Carnegie famously put it. There’s nothing shameful about sweeping. It’s just another opportunity to excel—and to learn. But you, you’re so busy thinking about the future, you don’t take any pride in the tasks you’re given right now. You just phone it all in, cash your paycheck, and dream of some higher station in life. Or you think, This is just a job, it isn’t who I am, it doesn’t matter. Foolishness. Everything we do matters—whether it’s making smoothies while you save up money or studying for the bar—even after you already achieved the success you sought.
- We’ve all done it. Said: “I am so [overwhelmed, tired, stressed, busy, blocked, outmatched].” And then what do we do about it? Go out and party. Or treat ourselves. Or sleep in. Or wait. It feels better to ignore or pretend. But you know deep down that that isn’t going to truly make it any better. You’ve got to act. And you’ve got to start now.
- To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.
- All great victories, be they in politics, business, art, or seduction, involved resolving vexing problems with a potent cocktail of creativity, focus, and daring. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
Rating: 10/10
This is the most important book I've read this year. Anyone will find a valuable takeaway here. If you're struggling with any kind of challenge, this will help you reframe and solve it. The book is timeless, and one of the texts I'll keep revisiting.
