## The Obstacle Is the Way ### The Obstacle Is the Way  #### Metadata * Author: [[Ryan Holiday]] * Full Title: The Obstacle Is the Way * Category: #books #### Highlights * The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. (Location 89) * This philosophic approach is the driving force of self-made men and the succor to those in positions with great responsibility or great trouble. (Location 105) * We are the rightful heirs to this tradition. It's our birthright. Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? (Location 110) * What do these figures have that we lack? What are we missing? It's simple: a method and a framework for understanding, appreciating, and acting upon the obstacles life throws at us. (Location 137) * Subjected to those pressures, these individuals were transformed. They were transformed along the lines that Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them." (Location 146) * Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good. (Location 175) * There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions. How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home? With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it. After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road. Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said: "The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition." (Location 178) * We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles. (Location 234) * Rockefeller could have gotten scared. Here was the greatest market depression in history and it hit him just as he was finally getting the hang of things. He could have pulled out and run like his father. He could have quit finance altogether for a different career with less risk. But even as a young man, Rockefeller had sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure. He could keep his head while he was losing his shirt. Better (Location 241) * Within twenty years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out. (Location 257) * Was he born this way? No. This was learned behavior. And Rockefeller got this lesson in discipline somewhere. It began in that crisis of 1857 in what he called "the school of adversity and stress." (Location 267) * You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming—or possibly thriving because of—them. (Location 273) * Our brains evolved for an environment very different from the one we currently inhabit. As a result, we carry all kinds of biological baggage. Humans are still primed to detect threats and dangers that no longer exist—think of the cold sweat when you're stressed about money, or the fight-or-flight response that kicks in when your boss yells at you. Our safety is not truly at risk here—there is little danger that we will starve or that violence will break out—though it certainly feels that way sometimes. (Location 290) * Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been. —MARCUS AURELIUS (Location 309) * It took nineteen years and two trials to overturn that verdict, but when Carter walked out of prison, he simply resumed his life. No civil suit to recover damages, Carter did not even request an apology from the court. Because to him, that would imply that they'd taken something of his that Carter felt he was owed. That had never been his view, even in the dark depths of solitary confinement. He had made his choice: This can't harm me—I might not have wanted it to happen, but I decide how it will affect me. No one else has the right. (Location 328) ^12ccd6 * Even in prison, deprived of nearly everything, some freedoms remain. Your mind remains your own (if you're lucky, you have books) and you have time—lots of time. Carter did not have much power, but he understood that that was not the same thing as being powerless. Many great figures, from Nelson Mandela to Malcolm X, have come to understand this fundamental distinction. It's how they turned prison into the workshop where they transformed themselves and the schoolhouse where they began to transform others. If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then for our purposes, nothing we'll experience is likely without potential benefit. (Location 337) * "Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," as Shakespeare put it. (Location 344) * An employee in your company makes a careless mistake that costs you business. This can be exactly what you spend so much time and effort trying to avoid. Or, with a shift in perception, it can be exactly what you were looking for—the chance to pierce through defenses and teach a lesson that can be learned only by experience. A mistake becomes training. (Location 354) * 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. Or whether we will tell one at all. (Location 358) * Ulysses S. Grant once sat for a photo shoot with the famous Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady. The studio was too dark, so Brady sent an assistant up to the roof to uncover a skylight. The assistant slipped and shattered the window. With horror, the spectators watched as shards of glass two inches long fell from the ceiling like daggers, crashing around Grant—each one of them plenty lethal. As the last pieces hit the ground, Brady looked over and saw that Grant hadn't moved. He was unhurt. Grant glanced up at the hole in the ceiling, then back at the camera as though nothing had happened at all. (Location 366) * In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that "tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head." (Location 385) * Welcome to the source of most of our problems down here on Earth. Everything is planned down to the letter, then something goes wrong and the first thing we do is trade in our plan for a good ol' emotional freak-out. Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm, because it's easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. (Location 407) * John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, spent nearly a day in space still keeping his heart rate under a hundred beats per minute. That's a man not simply sitting at the controls but in control of his emotions. A man who had properly cultivated, what Tom Wolfe later called, "the Right Stuff." (Location 418) * 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. (Location 440) * It might help to say it over and over again whenever you feel the anxiety begin to come on: I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. Or try Marcus's question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness? Nope. (Location 453) * The sixteenth-century Samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi won countless fights against feared opponents, even multiple opponents, in which he was swordless. In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. (Location 466) * Everything about our animalistic brains tries to compress the space between impression and perception. Think, perceive, act—with milliseconds between them. A deer's brain tells it to run because things are bad. It runs. Sometimes, right into traffic. (Location 477) * In the writings of the Stoics we see an exercise that might well be described as Contemptuous Expressions. The Stoics use contempt as an agent to lay things bare and "to strip away the legend that encrusts them." Epictetus told his students, when they'd quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It's funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us. Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he'd describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms—roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation. (Location 483) * Once as the Athenian general Pericles cast off on a naval mission in the Peloponnesian War, the sun was eclipsed and his fleet of 150 ships was cast into darkness. (Location 505) * 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). These add an extra element: you in relation to that obstacle, rather than just the obstacle itself. And with the wrong perspective, we become consumed and overwhelmed with something actually quite small. So why subject ourselves to that? (Location 519) * Small tweaks can change what once felt like impossible tasks. Suddenly, where we felt weak, we realize we are strong. With perspective, we discover leverage we didn't know we had. (Location 531) * George Clooney spent his first years in Hollywood getting rejected at auditions. He wanted the producers and directors to like him, but they didn't and it hurt and he blamed the system for not seeing how good he was. This perspective should sound familiar. It's the dominant viewpoint for the rest of us on job interviews, when we pitch clients, or try to connect with an attractive stranger in a coffee shop. We subconsciously submit to what Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, refers to as the "tyranny of being picked." Everything changed for Clooney when he tried a new perspective. He realized that casting is an obstacle for producers, too—they need to find somebody, and they're all hoping that the next person to walk in the room is the right somebody. Auditions were a chance to solve their problem, not his. (Location 536) * The difference between the right and the wrong perspective is everything. How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we'll just lie there and take it. Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective. (Location 546) * The first time came during the middle of the 1974 season when Tommy John blew out his arm, permanently damaging the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow. Up until this point in baseball and sports medicine, when a pitcher blew out his arm that was it. They called it a "dead arm" injury. Game over. (Location 560) * He could have retired. But there was a one in one hundred chance. With rehab and training, the opportunity was partially in his control. He took it. And won 164 more games over the next thirteen seasons. That procedure is now famously known as Tommy John surgery. (Location 565) * Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. (Location 580) * 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. And what is up to us? Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination (Location 587) * A business must take the operating constraints of the world around it as a given and work for whatever gains are possible. 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. For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. 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. Emerson put it best: "We cannot spend the day in explanation." Don't waste time on false constructs. (Location 632) * It doesn't matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you're in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. (Location 637) * This was Jobs's view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: "There shall be no Alps!" For most (Location 662) * To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. 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. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative. (Location 694) * One of the most intimidating and shocking developments in modern warfare was the German Blitzkrieg (lightning war). In World War II the Germans wanted to avoid the drawn-out trench fighting of previous wars. So they concentrated mobile divisions into rapid, narrow offensive forces that caught their enemies completely unprepared. (Location 701) * Only then were the Allies able to see the opportunity inside the obstacle rather than simply the obstacle that threatened them. Properly seen, as long as the Allies could bend and not break, this attack would send more than fifty thousand Germans rushing headfirst into a net—or a "meat grinder," as Patton eloquently put it. (Location 715) * The Battle of the Bulge and before that the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, both of which were feared to be major reversals and the end of the Allies' momentum, in fact were their greatest triumphs. 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. The invincible, penetrating thrust of the German Panzers wasn't just impotent but suicidal—a textbook example of why you never leave your flanks exposed. (Location 718) * It's one thing to not be overwhelmed by obstacles, or discouraged or upset by them. This is something that few are able to do. But after you have controlled your emotions, and you can see objectively and stand steadily, the next step becomes possible: a mental flip, so you're looking not at the obstacle but at the opportunity within it. (Location 722) * 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 study this bad boss and learn from him—while you fill out your résumé and hit up contacts for a better job elsewhere. 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. (Location 732) * Or that computer glitch that erased all your work? You will now be twice as good at it since you will do it again. (Location 743) * How about that business decision that turned out to be a mistake? Well, you had a hypothesis and it turned out to be wrong. Why should that upset you? It wouldn't piss off a scientist, it would help him. Maybe don't bet so much on it next time. And now you've learned two things: that your instinct was wrong, and the kind of appetite for risk you really have. Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive. It's a lot more complicated. Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy. (Location 744) * Sports psychologists recently did a study of elite athletes who were struck with some adversity or serious injury. 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. It's a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is not a cliché but fact. (Location 750) * When people are: —rude or disrespectful: They underestimate us. A huge advantage. —conniving: We won't have to apologize when we make an example out of them. —critical or question our abilities: Lower expectations are easier to exceed. —lazy: Makes whatever we accomplish seem all the more admirable. (Location 760) * 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. Because then you'll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc). (Location 776) * There was little evidence that Demosthenes was destined to become the greatest orator of Athens, let alone all of history. He was born sickly and frail with a nearly debilitating speech impediment. At seven years old, he lost his father. And then things got worse. (Location 793) * To conquer his speech impediment, he devised his own strange exercises. He would fill his mouth with pebbles and practice speaking. He rehearsed full speeches into the wind or while running up steep inclines. He learned to give entire speeches with a single breath. And soon, his quiet, weak voice erupted with booming, powerful clarity. (Location 805) * Demosthenes locked himself away underground—literally—in a dugout he'd 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. And from that point forward, he dutifully descended each day into his study to work with his voice, his facial expressions, and his arguments. (Location 807) * 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. In struggling with his unfortunate fate, Demosthenes found his true calling: He would be the voice of Athens, its great speaker and conscience. He would be successful precisely because of what he'd been through and how he'd reacted to it. 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. (Location 817) * Some academic once asked Demosthenes what the three most important traits of speechmaking were. His reply says it all: "Action, Action, Action!" (Location 821) * People turn shit into sugar all the time—shit that's a lot worse than whatever we're dealing with. I'm talking physical disabilities, racial discrimination, battles against overwhelmingly superior armies. 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. (Location 838) * No one is coming to save you. And if we'd like to go where we claim we want to go—to accomplish what we claim are our goals—there is only one way. And that's to meet our problems with the right action. (Location 851) * Amelia Earhart wanted to be a great aviator. But it was the 1920s, and people still thought that women were frail and weak and didn't have the stuff. Woman suffrage was not even a decade old. She couldn't make her living as a pilot, so she took a job as a social worker. Then one day the phone rang. The man on the line had a pretty offensive proposition, along the lines of: We have someone willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. Our first choice has already backed out. You won't get to actually fly the plane, and we're going to send two men along as chaperones and guess what, we'll pay them a lot of money and you won't get anything. Oh, and you very well might die while doing it. You know what she said to that offer? She said yes. Because that's what people who defy the odds do. That's how people who become great at things—whether it's flying or blowing through gender stereotypes—do. They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don't care if the conditions are perfect or if they're being slighted. Because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. As it went for Amelia Earhart. Less than five years later she was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and became, rightly, one of the most famous and respected people in the world. (Location 861) * In the first years of World War II, there was no worse assignment for British troops than being sent to the North African front. Methodical and orderly, the British hated the grueling weather and terrain that wreaked havoc on their machines and their plans. They acted how they felt: slow, timid, cautious. German Field Marshal General Erwin Rommel, on the other hand, loved it. He saw war as a game. A dangerous, reckless, untidy, fast-paced game. And, most important, he took to this game with incredible energy and was perennially pushing his troops forward. (Location 885) * That's definitely not what they say about most leaders today. While overpaid CEOs take long vacations and hide behind e-mail autoresponders, some programmer is working eighteen-hour days coding the start-up that will destroy that CEO's business. And if we were honest, we're probably closer to the former than the latter when it comes to the problems we face (or don't face). (Location 891) * Like Earhart, Rommel knew from history that those who attack problems and life with the most initiative and energy usually win. (Location 901) * 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 that's approaching someone you're intimidated by or deciding to finally crack a book on a subject you need to learn. Just as Earhart did, all the greats you admire started by saying, Yes, let's go. And they usually did it in less desirable circumstances than we'll ever suffer. (Location 911) * In 1878, Thomas Edison wasn't the only person experimenting with incandescent lights. But he was the only man willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men—inching closer each time to the one that would finally work. (Location 941) * Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison's lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would "proceed at once" to simply "examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search." Well, sometimes that's exactly the right method. (Location 946) * So what if this method isn't as "scientific" or "proper" as others? The important part is that it works. Working at it works. It's that simple. (But again, not easy.) (Location 958) * In other words: It's supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren't going to work. It's goings to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It's a renewable resource. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you'll get there. (Location 978) * The old way of business—where companies guess what customers want from research and then produce those products in a lab, isolated and insulated from feedback—reflects a fear of failure and is deeply fragile in relation to it. If the highly produced product flops on launch day, all that effort was wasted. If it succeeds, no one really knows why or what was responsible for that success. The MVP model, on the other hand, embraces failure and feedback. It gets stronger by failure, dropping the features that don't work, that customers don't find interesting, and then focusing the developers' limited resources on improving the features that do. (Location 993) * In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a start-up—a start-up of one. (Location 998) * I would never claim it doesn't. But can we acknowledge that anticipated, temporary failure certainly hurts less than catastrophic, permanent failure? Like any good school, learning from failure isn't free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over. (Location 1016) * This was what the great nineteenth-century pioneer of meteorology, James Pollard Espy, was shown in a chance encounter as a young man. Unable to read and write until he was eighteen, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous orator Henry Clay. After the talk, a spellbound Espy tried to make his way toward Clay, but he couldn't form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him: "He wants to be like you, even though he can't read." (Location 1059) * There is a much easier way. First, you don't panic, you conserve your energy. You don't do anything stupid like get yourself choked out by acting without thinking. You focus on not letting it get worse. Then you get your arms up, to brace and create some breathing room, some space. Now work to get on your side. From there you can start to break down my hold on you: Grab an arm, trap a leg, buck with your hips, slide in a knee and push away. (Location 1077) * "That does not disconcert me in the least; for when I used to be a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making close fits, always punctual with my customers, and always did good work." (Location 1109) * Another president, James Garfield, paid his way through college in 1851 by persuading his school, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, to let him be the janitor in exchange for tuition. He did the job every day smiling and without a hint of shame. Each morning, he'd ring the university's bell tower to start the classes—his day already having long begun—and stomp to class with cheer and eagerness. Within just one year of starting at the school he was a professor—teaching a full course load in addition to his studies. By his twenty-sixth birthday he was the dean. (Location 1111) * 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. Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires. (Location 1123) * Steve Jobs cared even about the inside of his products, making sure they were beautifully designed even though the users would never see them. Taught by his father—who finished even the back of his cabinets though they would be hidden against the wall—to think like a craftsman. In every design predicament, Jobs knew his marching orders: Respect the craft and make something beautiful. (Location 1139) * The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: "What is the meaning of life?" As though it is someone else's responsibility to tell you. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it's your job to answer with your actions. (Location 1144) * In 1915, deep in the jungles of South America, the rising conflict between two rival American fruit companies came to a head. Each desperately wanted to acquire the same five thousand acres of valuable land. The issue? Two different locals claimed to own the deed to the plantation. In the no-man's-land between Honduras and Guatemala, neither company was able to tell who was the rightful owner so they could buy it from them. How they each responded to this problem was defined by their company's organization and ethos. One company was big and powerful, the other crafty and cunning. The first, one of the most powerful corporations in the United States: United Fruit. The second, a small upstart owned by Samuel Zemurray. To solve the problem, United Fruit dispatched a team of high-powered lawyers. They set out in search of every file and scrap of paper in the country, ready to pay whatever it cost to win. Money, time, and resources were no object. Zemurray, the tiny, uneducated competitor, was outmatched, right? He couldn't play their game. So he didn't. Flexible, fluid, and defiant, he just met separately with both of the supposed owners and bought the land from each of them. He paid twice, sure, but it was over. The land was his. Forget the rule book, settle the issue. (Location 1160) * Sometimes you do it this way. Sometimes that way. Not deploying the tactics you learned in school but adapting them to fit each and every situation. Any way that works—that's the motto. (Location 1175) * What Zemurray never lost sight of was the mission: getting bananas across the river. Whether it was a bridge or two piers with a dock in the middle, it didn't matter so long as it got the cargo where it needed to go. When he wanted to plant bananas on a particular plantation, it wasn't important to find the rightful owner of the land—it was to become the rightful owner. (Location 1181) * Take a step back, then go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the "line of least expectation." (Location 1239) * What's your first instinct when faced with a challenge? Is it to outspend the competition? Argue with people in an attempt to change long-held opinions? Are you trying to barge through the front door? Because the back door, side doors, and windows may have been left wide open. (Location 1240) * Part of the reason why a certain skill often seems so effortless for great masters is not just because they've mastered the process—they really are doing less than the rest of us who don't know any better. They choose to exert only calculated force where it will be effective, rather than straining and struggling with pointless attrition tactics. (Location 1247) * Being outnumbered, coming from behind, being low on funds, these don't have to be disadvantages. They can be gifts. Assets that make us less likely to commit suicide with a head-to-head attack. These things force us to be creative, to find workarounds, to sublimate the ego and do anything to win besides challenging our enemies where they are strongest. (Location 1251) * The art of the side-door strategy is a vast, creative space. And it is by no means limited to war, business, or sales. (Location 1261) * The great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard rarely sought to convince people directly from a position of authority. Instead of lecturing, he practiced a method he called "indirect communication." Kierkegaard would write under pseudonyms, where each fake personality would embody a different platform or perspective—writing multiple times on the same subject from multiple angles to convey his point emotionally and dramatically. He would rarely tell the reader "do this" or "think that." Instead he would show new ways of looking at or understanding the world. You don't convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alternative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp. The way that works isn't always the most impressive. Sometimes it even feels like you're taking a shortcut or fighting unfairly. There's a lot of pressure to try to match people move for move, as if sticking with what works for you is somehow cheating. Let me save you the guilt and self-flagellation: It's not. You're acting like a real strategist. You aren't just throwing your weight around and hoping it works. You're not wasting your energy in battles driven by ego and pride rather than tactical advantage. Believe it or not, this is the hard way. That's why it works. Remember, (Location 1262) * Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enmities. —PLUTARCH (Location 1275) * That was deliberate, of course. Gandhi's extensive satyagraha campaign and civil disobedience show that action has many definitions. It's not always moving forward or even obliquely. It can also be a matter of positions. It can be a matter of taking a stand. (Location 1278) * Weak compared to the forces he hoped to change, Gandhi leaned into that weakness, exaggerated it, exposed himself. He said to the most powerful occupying military in the world, I'm marching to the ocean to collect salt in direct violation of your laws. He was provoking them—What are you going to do about it? There is nothing wrong with what we're doing—knowing that it placed authorities in an impossible dilemma: Enforce a bankrupt policy or abdicate. Within that framework, the military's enormous strength is neutralized. Its very usage is counterproductive. (Location 1282) * Martin Luther King Jr., taking Gandhi's lead, told his followers that they would meet "physical force with soul force." In other words, they would use the power of opposites. In the face of violence they would be peaceful, to hate they would answer with love—and in the process, they would expose those attributes as indefensible and evil. (Location 1286) * So instead of fighting obstacles, find a means of making them defeat themselves. (Location 1299) * There is a famous story of Alexander the Great doing just that—and it was Alexander's masterful use of an obstacle against itself that gave observers their first hint that the ambitious teenager might one day conquer the world. As a young man, he trained his famous horse Bucephalus—the horse that even his father, King Philip II of Macedon, could not break—by tiring him out. While others had tried sheer force and whips and ropes, only to be bucked off, Alexander succeeded by lightly mounting and simply hanging on until the horse was calm. Having exhausted himself, Bucephalus had no choice but to submit to his rider's influence. Alexander would ride into battle on this faithful horse for the next twenty years. (Location 1300) * The harder Bucephalus ran, the sooner he got tired out. The more vicious the police response to civil disobedience, the more sympathetic the cause becomes. The more they fight, the easier it becomes. The harder you fight, the less you'll achieve (other than exhaustion). (Location 1330) * But his actual form and playing style was something quite different. All the energy and emotion he had to suppress was channeled into a bold and graceful playing form. While his face was controlled, his body was alive—fluid, brilliant, and all over the court. His style is best described in the epithet he created for himself: "physically loose and mentally tight." (Location 1339) * Other players, free to celebrate, free to throw tantrums or glower at refs and opponents, never seemed to be able to handle the pressure of high-stakes matches the way Ashe could. They often mistook Ashe as inhuman, as bottled up. Feelings need an outlet, of course, but Ashe deployed them to fuel his explosive speed, in his slams and chips and dives. (Location 1345) * Rename it and claim it, that's what Ashe did—as have many other black athletes. The boxer Joe Louis, for example, knew that racist white boxing fans would not tolerate an emotional black fighter, so he sublimated all displays behind a steely, blank face. Known as the Ring Robot, he greatly intimidated opponents by seeming almost inhuman. He took a disadvantage and turned it into an unexpected asset in the ring. (Location 1349) * Toussaint Louverture, the former Haitian slave turned general, so exasperated his French enemies that they once remarked: "Cet homme fait donc l'ouverture partout" ("This man makes an opening everywhere"). He was so fluid, so uncontainable, he was actually given the surname Louverture, meaning "the opening." It makes sense. Everything in his life had been an obstacle, and he turned as many of his experiences as he could into openings. Why should troops or politics or mountains or Napoléon himself have been any different? (Location 1358) * To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent. That's just recklessness. (We want right action, not action period.) To be physically and mentally tight? That's called anxiety. It doesn't work, either. Eventually we snap. But physical looseness combined with mental restraint? That is powerful. (Location 1368) * This speech, known today as the "A More Perfect Union" speech, was a transformative moment. Instead of distancing himself, Obama addressed everything directly. In doing so, he not only neutralized a potentially fatal controversy but created an opportunity to seize the electoral high ground. (Location 1385) * Ignore the politics and focus on the brilliant strategic advice that Obama's adviser Rahm Emanuel, once gave him. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." (Location 1392) * Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune—really anything, everything—to their advantage. (Location 1401) * Napoleon described war in simple terms: Two armies are two bodies that clash and attempt to frighten each other. At impact, there is a moment of panic and it is that moment that the superior commander turns to his advantage. (Location 1410) * This is what Obama did. Not shirking, not giving in to exhaustion despite the long neck-and-neck primary. But rallying at the last moment. Transcending the challenge and reframing it, triumphing as a result of it. He turned an ugly incident into that "teachable moment," and one of the most profound speeches on race in our history. (Location 1421) * This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because we can turn that obstacle upside down, too, simply by using it as an opportunity to practice some other virtue or skill—even if it is just learning to accept that bad things happen, or practicing humility. (Location 1434) * The nation called for a leader of magnanimity and force of purpose—it found one in Lincoln, a political novice who was nevertheless a seasoned expert on matters of will and patience. These attributes were born of his own "severe experience," as he often called it, and the characteristics were representative of a singular ability to lead the nation through one of its most difficult and painful trials: the Civil War. (Location 1472) * This is the avenue for the final discipline: the Will. If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul. The (Location 1494) * Schooled in suffering, to quote Virgil, Lincoln learned "to comfort those who suffer too." (Location 1503) * Lincoln's words went to the people's hearts because they came from his, because he had access to a part of the human experience that many had walled themselves off from. His personal pain was an advantage. (Location 1505) * At the gym that his father built on the second-floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years, slowly building muscle and strengthening his upper body against his weak lungs and for the future. By his early twenties the battle against asthma was essentially over, he'd worked—almost literally—that weakness out of his body. (Location 1540) * That gym work prepared a physically weak but smart young boy for the uniquely challenging course on which the nation and the world were about to embark. It was the beginning of his preparation for and fulfillment of what he would call "the Strenuous Life." (Location 1543) * We take weakness for granted. We assume that the way we're born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent. And then we atrophy from there. (Location 1549) * 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). (Location 1554) * It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within their minds. The temple became a metaphysical one, located independently in the mind of every believer. Each one—wherever they'd been dispersed around the world, whatever persecution or hardship they faced—could draw upon it for strength and security. (Location 1558) * Consider the line from the Haggadah: "In every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt." (Location 1561) * During Passover Seder, the menu is bitter herbs and unleavened bread—the "bread of affliction." Why? In some ways, this taps into the fortitude that sustained the community for generations. The ritual not only celebrates and honors Jewish traditions, but it prompts those partaking in the feast to visualize and possess the strength that has kept them going. (Location 1563) * 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. (Location 1565) * No one is born a gladiator. No one is born with an Inner Citadel. If we're going to succeed in achieving our goals despite the obstacles that may come, this strength in will must be built. (Location 1573) * A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins: "I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. Tell me what went wrong?" What?! But we haven't even launched yet . . . That's the point. The CEO is forcing an exercise in hindsight—in advance. She is using a technique designed by psychologist Gary Klein known as a premortem. (Location 1588) * Today, the premortem is increasingly popular in business circles, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies and the Harvard Business Review. But like all great ideas, it is actually nothing new. The credit goes to the Stoics. They even had a better name: premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils). (Location 1603) * The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The (Location 1621) * Beware the calm before the storm. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. The worst is yet to come. It gets worse before it gets better. (Location 1623) * We're like runners who train on hills or at altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat. (Location 1630) * Thomas Jefferson: born quiet, contemplative, and reserved—purportedly with a speech impediment. Compared to the great orators of his time—Patrick Henry, John Wesley, Edmund Burke—he was a terrible public speaker. His heart set on politics, he had two options: Fight against this sentence, or accept it. He chose the latter, channeling the energy into his writing, which others put into oratory instead. There he found his medium. He found he could express himself clearly. Writing was his strength. Jefferson was the one the founding fathers turned to when they needed the Declaration of Independence. He wrote one of the most important documents in history, in a single draft. (Location 1647) * Same goes for Edison, who, as most people have no idea, was almost completely deaf. Or Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind. For both, it was the deprivation of these senses—and acceptance rather than resentment of that fact—that allowed them to develop different, but acutely powerful, senses to adjust to their reality. (Location 1653) * If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can't argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it. (Location 1662) * After you've distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren't (ta eph'hemin, ta ouk eph'hemin), and the break comes down to something you don't control . . . you've got only one option: acceptance. The shot didn't go in. The stock went to zero. The weather disrupted the shipment. Say it with me: C'est la vie. It's all fine. You don't have to like something to master it—or to use it to some advantage. When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence. Let's be clear, that is not the same thing as giving up. This has nothing to do with action—this is for the things that are immune to action. 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. It takes a real man or woman to face necessity. All external events can be equally beneficial to us because we can turn them all upside down and make use of them. They can teach us a lesson we were reluctant to otherwise learn. For instance, in 2006 a long-term hip injury finally caught up with Lakers' coach Phil Jackson, and the surgery he had to fix it severely limited his courtside movement. Relegated to a special captain's-style chair near the players, he couldn't pace the sideline or interact with the team the same way. Initially, Jackson was worried this would affect his coaching. (Location 1668) * Say it with me: C'est la vie. It's all fine. (Location 1671) * 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. (Location 1689) * People didn't always think this way. The ancients (and the not so ancients) used the word fate far more frequently than us because they were better acquainted with and exposed to how capricious and random the world could be. Events were considered to be the "will of the Gods." The Fates were forces that shaped our lives and destinies, often not with much consent. Letters used to be signed "Deo volente"—God willing. (Location 1692) * No one understands him, this man who smiles. Well, the story of the fight is the story of a smile. If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today. (Location 1751) * Odysseus leaves Troy after ten long years of war destined for Ithaca, for home. If only he knew what was ahead of him: ten more years of travel. That he'd come so close to the shores of his homeland, his queen and young son, only to be blown back again. That he'd face storms, temptation, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, and a six-headed monster. Or that he'd be held captive for seven years and suffer the wrath of Poseidon. And, of course, that back in Ithaca his rivals were circling, trying to take his kingdom and his wife. How did he get through it? How did the hero make it home despite it all? (Location 1780) * But perseverance is something larger. It's the long game. It's about 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. The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power. Winning by sticking your ass to the seat and not leaving until after it's over. (Location 1793) * Tags: [[favorite]] * When Antonio Pigafetta, the assistant to Magellan on his trip around the world, reflected on his boss's greatest and most admirable skill, what do you think he said? It had nothing to do with sailing. The secret to his success, Pigafetta said, was Magellan's ability to endure hunger better than the other men. (Location 1807) * Determination, if you think about it, is invincible. Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill's old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On. (Location 1829) * threatened him with. But he was human. And he understood that his men were, too. The first thing he did was throw out any idealistic notions about what happens to a soldier when asked to give up information under hours of torture. So he set up a network of support inside the camp, specifically to help soldiers who felt ashamed for having broken under the pressure. We're in this together, he told them. He gave them a watchword to remind them: U.S.—Unity over Self. (Location 1853) * This kind of myopia is what convinces us, to our own detriment, that we're the center of the universe. When really, there is a world beyond our own personal experience filled with people who have dealt with worse. We're not special or unique simply by virtue of being. We're all, at varying points in our lives, the subject of random and often incomprehensible events. Reminding ourselves of this is another way of being a bit more selfless. You can always remember that a decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennium earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt very similar things, struggling with the very same thoughts. They had no idea that you would exist, but you know that they did. And a century from now, someone will be in your exact same position, once more. Embrace this power, this sense of being part of a larger whole. It is an exhilarating thought. Let it envelop you. We're all just humans, doing the best we can. We're all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit. Help your fellow humans thrive and survive, contribute your little bit to the universe before it swallows you up, and be happy with that. Lend a hand to others. Be strong for them, and it will make you stronger. MEDITATE ON YOUR MORTALITY When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —DR. JOHNSON (Location 1894) * This sublime and unusual experience marked the moment Montaigne changed his life. Within a few years, he would be one of the most famous writers in Europe. After his accident, Montaigne went on to write volumes of popular essays, serve two terms as mayor, travel internationally as a dignitary, and serve as a confidante of the king. (Location 1910) * Death doesn't make life pointless, but rather purposeful. And, fortunately, we don't have to nearly die to tap into this energy. (Location 1915) * The paths of glory, Thomas Gray wrote, lead but to the grave. (Location 1932) * Remember the serenity prayer: If something is in our control, it's worth every ounce of our efforts and energy. Death is not one of those things—it is not in our control how long we will live or what will come and take us from life. But thinking about and being aware of our mortality creates real perspective and urgency. It doesn't need to be depressing. Because it's invigorating. (Location 1939) * Tags: [[favorite]] * As the Haitian proverb puts it: Behind mountains are more mountains. (Location 1963) * Elysium is a myth. One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. (Location 1964) * The Stoics liked to use the metaphor of fire. Writing in his journal, Marcus once reminded himself that "when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material." The unexpected death of his rival, the man whom Marcus had been deprived of granting clemency to, was this metaphor embodied. Marcus would now forgive essentially everyone involved. He wouldn't take any of it personally. He'd be a better person, a better leader for it. (Location 1991) * Tested in the crucible of adversity and forged in the furnace of trial, they realized these latent powers—the powers of perception, action, and the will. With this triad, they: First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it (Location 2017) * The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who "transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking." It's a loop that becomes easier over time. (Location 2022) * What they did was simple (simple, not easy). But let's say it once again just to remind ourselves: See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must. (Location 2039) * I need to thank my master teacher and mentor Robert Greene, who not only subsidized my reading of many of the books I used as sources, but taught me the art of crafting a message and a book. His notes on my drafts were invaluable. (Location 2103) * Letters of a Stoic by Seneca (see also: On the Shortness of Life). Both these translations by Penguin are fantastic. Seneca or Marcus are the best places to start if you're looking to explore Stoicism. Seneca seems like he would have been a fun guy to know—which is unusual for a Stoic. I suggest starting with On the Shortness of Life (a collection of short essays) and then move to his book of letters (which are really more like essays than true correspondence). (Location 2224) * His book Philosophy as a Way of Life explains how philosophy has been wrongly interpreted as a thing people talk about rather than something that people do. (Location 2235) # The Obstacle Is the Way  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ryan Holiday]] - Full Title: The Obstacle Is the Way - Category: #books ## Highlights - The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. (Location 89) - This philosophic approach is the driving force of self-made men and the succor to those in positions with great responsibility or great trouble. (Location 105) - We are the rightful heirs to this tradition. It’s our birthright. Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? (Location 110) - What do these figures have that we lack? What are we missing? It’s simple: a method and a framework for understanding, appreciating, and acting upon the obstacles life throws at us. (Location 137) - Subjected to those pressures, these individuals were transformed. They were transformed along the lines that Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.” (Location 146) - Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good. (Location 175) - There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions. How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home? With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it. After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road. Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” (Location 178) - We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles. (Location 234) - Rockefeller could have gotten scared. Here was the greatest market depression in history and it hit him just as he was finally getting the hang of things. He could have pulled out and run like his father. He could have quit finance altogether for a different career with less risk. But even as a young man, Rockefeller had sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure. He could keep his head while he was losing his shirt. Better (Location 241) - Within twenty years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out. (Location 257) - Was he born this way? No. This was learned behavior. And Rockefeller got this lesson in discipline somewhere. It began in that crisis of 1857 in what he called “the school of adversity and stress.” (Location 267) - You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming—or possibly thriving because of—them. (Location 273) - Our brains evolved for an environment very different from the one we currently inhabit. As a result, we carry all kinds of biological baggage. Humans are still primed to detect threats and dangers that no longer exist—think of the cold sweat when you’re stressed about money, or the fight-or-flight response that kicks in when your boss yells at you. Our safety is not truly at risk here—there is little danger that we will starve or that violence will break out—though it certainly feels that way sometimes. (Location 290) - Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. —MARCUS AURELIUS (Location 309) - It took nineteen years and two trials to overturn that verdict, but when Carter walked out of prison, he simply resumed his life. No civil suit to recover damages, Carter did not even request an apology from the court. Because to him, that would imply that they’d taken something of his that Carter felt he was owed. That had never been his view, even in the dark depths of solitary confinement. He had made his choice: This can’t harm me—I might not have wanted it to happen, but I decide how it will affect me. No one else has the right. (Location 328) - Even in prison, deprived of nearly everything, some freedoms remain. Your mind remains your own (if you’re lucky, you have books) and you have time—lots of time. Carter did not have much power, but he understood that that was not the same thing as being powerless. Many great figures, from Nelson Mandela to Malcolm X, have come to understand this fundamental distinction. It’s how they turned prison into the workshop where they transformed themselves and the schoolhouse where they began to transform others. If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then for our purposes, nothing we’ll experience is likely without potential benefit. (Location 337) - “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it. (Location 344) - An employee in your company makes a careless mistake that costs you business. This can be exactly what you spend so much time and effort trying to avoid. Or, with a shift in perception, it can be exactly what you were looking for—the chance to pierce through defenses and teach a lesson that can be learned only by experience. A mistake becomes training. (Location 354) - 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. Or whether we will tell one at all. (Location 358) - Ulysses S. Grant once sat for a photo shoot with the famous Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady. The studio was too dark, so Brady sent an assistant up to the roof to uncover a skylight. The assistant slipped and shattered the window. With horror, the spectators watched as shards of glass two inches long fell from the ceiling like daggers, crashing around Grant—each one of them plenty lethal. As the last pieces hit the ground, Brady looked over and saw that Grant hadn’t moved. He was unhurt. Grant glanced up at the hole in the ceiling, then back at the camera as though nothing had happened at all. (Location 366) - In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.” (Location 385) - Welcome to the source of most of our problems down here on Earth. Everything is planned down to the letter, then something goes wrong and the first thing we do is trade in our plan for a good ol’ emotional freak-out. Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm, because it’s easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. (Location 407) - John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, spent nearly a day in space still keeping his heart rate under a hundred beats per minute. That’s a man not simply sitting at the controls but in control of his emotions. A man who had properly cultivated, what Tom Wolfe later called, “the Right Stuff.” (Location 418) - 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. (Location 440) - It might help to say it over and over again whenever you feel the anxiety begin to come on: I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. Or try Marcus’s question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness? Nope. (Location 453) - The sixteenth-century Samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi won countless fights against feared opponents, even multiple opponents, in which he was swordless. In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. (Location 466) - Everything about our animalistic brains tries to compress the space between impression and perception. Think, perceive, act—with milliseconds between them. A deer’s brain tells it to run because things are bad. It runs. Sometimes, right into traffic. (Location 477) - In the writings of the Stoics we see an exercise that might well be described as Contemptuous Expressions. The Stoics use contempt as an agent to lay things bare and “to strip away the legend that encrusts them.” Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us. Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he’d describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms—roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation. (Location 483) - Once as the Athenian general Pericles cast off on a naval mission in the Peloponnesian War, the sun was eclipsed and his fleet of 150 ships was cast into darkness. (Location 505) - 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). These add an extra element: you in relation to that obstacle, rather than just the obstacle itself. And with the wrong perspective, we become consumed and overwhelmed with something actually quite small. So why subject ourselves to that? (Location 519) - Small tweaks can change what once felt like impossible tasks. Suddenly, where we felt weak, we realize we are strong. With perspective, we discover leverage we didn’t know we had. (Location 531) - George Clooney spent his first years in Hollywood getting rejected at auditions. He wanted the producers and directors to like him, but they didn’t and it hurt and he blamed the system for not seeing how good he was. This perspective should sound familiar. It’s the dominant viewpoint for the rest of us on job interviews, when we pitch clients, or try to connect with an attractive stranger in a coffee shop. We subconsciously submit to what Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, refers to as the “tyranny of being picked.” Everything changed for Clooney when he tried a new perspective. He realized that casting is an obstacle for producers, too—they need to find somebody, and they’re all hoping that the next person to walk in the room is the right somebody. Auditions were a chance to solve their problem, not his. (Location 536) - The difference between the right and the wrong perspective is everything. How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we’ll just lie there and take it. Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective. (Location 546) - The first time came during the middle of the 1974 season when Tommy John blew out his arm, permanently damaging the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow. Up until this point in baseball and sports medicine, when a pitcher blew out his arm that was it. They called it a “dead arm” injury. Game over. (Location 560) - He could have retired. But there was a one in one hundred chance. With rehab and training, the opportunity was partially in his control. He took it. And won 164 more games over the next thirteen seasons. That procedure is now famously known as Tommy John surgery. (Location 565) - Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. (Location 580) - 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. And what is up to us? Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination (Location 587) - A business must take the operating constraints of the world around it as a given and work for whatever gains are possible. 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. For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. 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. Emerson put it best: “We cannot spend the day in explanation.” Don’t waste time on false constructs. (Location 632) - It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. (Location 637) - This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most (Location 662) - To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. 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. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative. (Location 694) - One of the most intimidating and shocking developments in modern warfare was the German Blitzkrieg (lightning war). In World War II the Germans wanted to avoid the drawn-out trench fighting of previous wars. So they concentrated mobile divisions into rapid, narrow offensive forces that caught their enemies completely unprepared. (Location 701) - Only then were the Allies able to see the opportunity inside the obstacle rather than simply the obstacle that threatened them. Properly seen, as long as the Allies could bend and not break, this attack would send more than fifty thousand Germans rushing headfirst into a net—or a “meat grinder,” as Patton eloquently put it. (Location 715) - The Battle of the Bulge and before that the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, both of which were feared to be major reversals and the end of the Allies’ momentum, in fact were their greatest triumphs. 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. The invincible, penetrating thrust of the German Panzers wasn’t just impotent but suicidal—a textbook example of why you never leave your flanks exposed. (Location 718) - It’s one thing to not be overwhelmed by obstacles, or discouraged or upset by them. This is something that few are able to do. But after you have controlled your emotions, and you can see objectively and stand steadily, the next step becomes possible: a mental flip, so you’re looking not at the obstacle but at the opportunity within it. (Location 722) - 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 study this bad boss and learn from him—while you fill out your résumé and hit up contacts for a better job elsewhere. 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. (Location 732) - Or that computer glitch that erased all your work? You will now be twice as good at it since you will do it again. (Location 743) - How about that business decision that turned out to be a mistake? Well, you had a hypothesis and it turned out to be wrong. Why should that upset you? It wouldn’t piss off a scientist, it would help him. Maybe don’t bet so much on it next time. And now you’ve learned two things: that your instinct was wrong, and the kind of appetite for risk you really have. Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive. It’s a lot more complicated. Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy. (Location 744) - Sports psychologists recently did a study of elite athletes who were struck with some adversity or serious injury. 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. It’s a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is not a cliché but fact. (Location 750) - When people are: —rude or disrespectful: They underestimate us. A huge advantage. —conniving: We won’t have to apologize when we make an example out of them. —critical or question our abilities: Lower expectations are easier to exceed. —lazy: Makes whatever we accomplish seem all the more admirable. (Location 760) - 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. Because then you’ll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc). (Location 776) - There was little evidence that Demosthenes was destined to become the greatest orator of Athens, let alone all of history. He was born sickly and frail with a nearly debilitating speech impediment. At seven years old, he lost his father. And then things got worse. (Location 793) - To conquer his speech impediment, he devised his own strange exercises. He would fill his mouth with pebbles and practice speaking. He rehearsed full speeches into the wind or while running up steep inclines. He learned to give entire speeches with a single breath. And soon, his quiet, weak voice erupted with booming, powerful clarity. (Location 805) - Demosthenes locked himself away underground—literally—in a dugout he’d 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. And from that point forward, he dutifully descended each day into his study to work with his voice, his facial expressions, and his arguments. (Location 807) - 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. In struggling with his unfortunate fate, Demosthenes found his true calling: He would be the voice of Athens, its great speaker and conscience. He would be successful precisely because of what he’d been through and how he’d reacted to it. 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. (Location 817) - Some academic once asked Demosthenes what the three most important traits of speechmaking were. His reply says it all: “Action, Action, Action!” (Location 821) - People turn shit into sugar all the time—shit that’s a lot worse than whatever we’re dealing with. I’m talking physical disabilities, racial discrimination, battles against overwhelmingly superior armies. 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. (Location 838) - No one is coming to save you. And if we’d like to go where we claim we want to go—to accomplish what we claim are our goals—there is only one way. And that’s to meet our problems with the right action. (Location 851) - Amelia Earhart wanted to be a great aviator. But it was the 1920s, and people still thought that women were frail and weak and didn’t have the stuff. Woman suffrage was not even a decade old. She couldn’t make her living as a pilot, so she took a job as a social worker. Then one day the phone rang. The man on the line had a pretty offensive proposition, along the lines of: We have someone willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. Our first choice has already backed out. You won’t get to actually fly the plane, and we’re going to send two men along as chaperones and guess what, we’ll pay them a lot of money and you won’t get anything. Oh, and you very well might die while doing it. You know what she said to that offer? She said yes. Because that’s what people who defy the odds do. That’s how people who become great at things—whether it’s flying or blowing through gender stereotypes—do. They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don’t care if the conditions are perfect or if they’re being slighted. Because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. As it went for Amelia Earhart. Less than five years later she was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and became, rightly, one of the most famous and respected people in the world. (Location 861) - In the first years of World War II, there was no worse assignment for British troops than being sent to the North African front. Methodical and orderly, the British hated the grueling weather and terrain that wreaked havoc on their machines and their plans. They acted how they felt: slow, timid, cautious. German Field Marshal General Erwin Rommel, on the other hand, loved it. He saw war as a game. A dangerous, reckless, untidy, fast-paced game. And, most important, he took to this game with incredible energy and was perennially pushing his troops forward. (Location 885) - That’s definitely not what they say about most leaders today. While overpaid CEOs take long vacations and hide behind e-mail autoresponders, some programmer is working eighteen-hour days coding the start-up that will destroy that CEO’s business. And if we were honest, we’re probably closer to the former than the latter when it comes to the problems we face (or don’t face). (Location 891) - Like Earhart, Rommel knew from history that those who attack problems and life with the most initiative and energy usually win. (Location 901) - 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 that’s approaching someone you’re intimidated by or deciding to finally crack a book on a subject you need to learn. Just as Earhart did, all the greats you admire started by saying, Yes, let’s go. And they usually did it in less desirable circumstances than we’ll ever suffer. (Location 911) - In 1878, Thomas Edison wasn’t the only person experimenting with incandescent lights. But he was the only man willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men—inching closer each time to the one that would finally work. (Location 941) - Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method. (Location 946) - So what if this method isn’t as “scientific” or “proper” as others? The important part is that it works. Working at it works. It’s that simple. (But again, not easy.) (Location 958) - In other words: It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s goings to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there. (Location 978) - The old way of business—where companies guess what customers want from research and then produce those products in a lab, isolated and insulated from feedback—reflects a fear of failure and is deeply fragile in relation to it. If the highly produced product flops on launch day, all that effort was wasted. If it succeeds, no one really knows why or what was responsible for that success. The MVP model, on the other hand, embraces failure and feedback. It gets stronger by failure, dropping the features that don’t work, that customers don’t find interesting, and then focusing the developers’ limited resources on improving the features that do. (Location 993) - In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a start-up—a start-up of one. (Location 998) - I would never claim it doesn’t. But can we acknowledge that anticipated, temporary failure certainly hurts less than catastrophic, permanent failure? Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over. (Location 1016) - This was what the great nineteenth-century pioneer of meteorology, James Pollard Espy, was shown in a chance encounter as a young man. Unable to read and write until he was eighteen, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous orator Henry Clay. After the talk, a spellbound Espy tried to make his way toward Clay, but he couldn’t form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him: “He wants to be like you, even though he can’t read.” (Location 1059) - There is a much easier way. First, you don’t panic, you conserve your energy. You don’t do anything stupid like get yourself choked out by acting without thinking. You focus on not letting it get worse. Then you get your arms up, to brace and create some breathing room, some space. Now work to get on your side. From there you can start to break down my hold on you: Grab an arm, trap a leg, buck with your hips, slide in a knee and push away. (Location 1077) - “That does not disconcert me in the least; for when I used to be a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making close fits, always punctual with my customers, and always did good work.” (Location 1109) - Another president, James Garfield, paid his way through college in 1851 by persuading his school, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, to let him be the janitor in exchange for tuition. He did the job every day smiling and without a hint of shame. Each morning, he’d ring the university’s bell tower to start the classes—his day already having long begun—and stomp to class with cheer and eagerness. Within just one year of starting at the school he was a professor—teaching a full course load in addition to his studies. By his twenty-sixth birthday he was the dean. (Location 1111) - 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. Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires. (Location 1123) - Steve Jobs cared even about the inside of his products, making sure they were beautifully designed even though the users would never see them. Taught by his father—who finished even the back of his cabinets though they would be hidden against the wall—to think like a craftsman. In every design predicament, Jobs knew his marching orders: Respect the craft and make something beautiful. (Location 1139) - The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell you. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s your job to answer with your actions. (Location 1144) - In 1915, deep in the jungles of South America, the rising conflict between two rival American fruit companies came to a head. Each desperately wanted to acquire the same five thousand acres of valuable land. The issue? Two different locals claimed to own the deed to the plantation. In the no-man’s-land between Honduras and Guatemala, neither company was able to tell who was the rightful owner so they could buy it from them. How they each responded to this problem was defined by their company’s organization and ethos. One company was big and powerful, the other crafty and cunning. The first, one of the most powerful corporations in the United States: United Fruit. The second, a small upstart owned by Samuel Zemurray. To solve the problem, United Fruit dispatched a team of high-powered lawyers. They set out in search of every file and scrap of paper in the country, ready to pay whatever it cost to win. Money, time, and resources were no object. Zemurray, the tiny, uneducated competitor, was outmatched, right? He couldn’t play their game. So he didn’t. Flexible, fluid, and defiant, he just met separately with both of the supposed owners and bought the land from each of them. He paid twice, sure, but it was over. The land was his. Forget the rule book, settle the issue. (Location 1160) - Sometimes you do it this way. Sometimes that way. Not deploying the tactics you learned in school but adapting them to fit each and every situation. Any way that works—that’s the motto. (Location 1175) - What Zemurray never lost sight of was the mission: getting bananas across the river. Whether it was a bridge or two piers with a dock in the middle, it didn’t matter so long as it got the cargo where it needed to go. When he wanted to plant bananas on a particular plantation, it wasn’t important to find the rightful owner of the land—it was to become the rightful owner. (Location 1181) - Take a step back, then go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the “line of least expectation.” (Location 1239) - What’s your first instinct when faced with a challenge? Is it to outspend the competition? Argue with people in an attempt to change long-held opinions? Are you trying to barge through the front door? Because the back door, side doors, and windows may have been left wide open. (Location 1240) - Part of the reason why a certain skill often seems so effortless for great masters is not just because they’ve mastered the process—they really are doing less than the rest of us who don’t know any better. They choose to exert only calculated force where it will be effective, rather than straining and struggling with pointless attrition tactics. (Location 1247) - Being outnumbered, coming from behind, being low on funds, these don’t have to be disadvantages. They can be gifts. Assets that make us less likely to commit suicide with a head-to-head attack. These things force us to be creative, to find workarounds, to sublimate the ego and do anything to win besides challenging our enemies where they are strongest. (Location 1251) - The art of the side-door strategy is a vast, creative space. And it is by no means limited to war, business, or sales. (Location 1261) - The great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard rarely sought to convince people directly from a position of authority. Instead of lecturing, he practiced a method he called “indirect communication.” Kierkegaard would write under pseudonyms, where each fake personality would embody a different platform or perspective—writing multiple times on the same subject from multiple angles to convey his point emotionally and dramatically. He would rarely tell the reader “do this” or “think that.” Instead he would show new ways of looking at or understanding the world. You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alterative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp. The way that works isn’t always the most impressive. Sometimes it even feels like you’re taking a shortcut or fighting unfairly. There’s a lot of pressure to try to match people move for move, as if sticking with what works for you is somehow cheating. Let me save you the guilt and self-flagellation: It’s not. You’re acting like a real strategist. You aren’t just throwing your weight around and hoping it works. You’re not wasting your energy in battles driven by ego and pride rather than tactical advantage. Believe it or not, this is the hard way. That’s why it works. Remember, (Location 1262) - Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enmities. —PLUTARCH (Location 1275) - That was deliberate, of course. Gandhi’s extensive satyagraha campaign and civil disobedience show that action has many definitions. It’s not always moving forward or even obliquely. It can also be a matter of positions. It can be a matter of taking a stand. (Location 1278) - Weak compared to the forces he hoped to change, Gandhi leaned into that weakness, exaggerated it, exposed himself. He said to the most powerful occupying military in the world, I’m marching to the ocean to collect salt in direct violation of your laws. He was provoking them—What are you going to do about it? There is nothing wrong with what we’re doing—knowing that it placed authorities in an impossible dilemma: Enforce a bankrupt policy or abdicate. Within that framework, the military’s enormous strength is neutralized. Its very usage is counterproductive. (Location 1282) - Martin Luther King Jr., taking Gandhi’s lead, told his followers that they would meet “physical force with soul force.” In other words, they would use the power of opposites. In the face of violence they would be peaceful, to hate they would answer with love—and in the process, they would expose those attributes as indefensible and evil. (Location 1286) - So instead of fighting obstacles, find a means of making them defeat themselves. (Location 1299) - There is a famous story of Alexander the Great doing just that—and it was Alexander’s masterful use of an obstacle against itself that gave observers their first hint that the ambitious teenager might one day conquer the world. As a young man, he trained his famous horse Bucephalus—the horse that even his father, King Philip II of Macedon, could not break—by tiring him out. While others had tried sheer force and whips and ropes, only to be bucked off, Alexander succeeded by lightly mounting and simply hanging on until the horse was calm. Having exhausted himself, Bucephalus had no choice but to submit to his rider’s influence. Alexander would ride into battle on this faithful horse for the next twenty years. (Location 1300) - The harder Bucephalus ran, the sooner he got tired out. The more vicious the police response to civil disobedience, the more sympathetic the cause becomes. The more they fight, the easier it becomes. The harder you fight, the less you’ll achieve (other than exhaustion). (Location 1330) - But his actual form and playing style was something quite different. All the energy and emotion he had to suppress was channeled into a bold and graceful playing form. While his face was controlled, his body was alive—fluid, brilliant, and all over the court. His style is best described in the epithet he created for himself: “physically loose and mentally tight.” (Location 1339) - Other players, free to celebrate, free to throw tantrums or glower at refs and opponents, never seemed to be able to handle the pressure of high-stakes matches the way Ashe could. They often mistook Ashe as inhuman, as bottled up. Feelings need an outlet, of course, but Ashe deployed them to fuel his explosive speed, in his slams and chips and dives. (Location 1345) - Rename it and claim it, that’s what Ashe did—as have many other black athletes. The boxer Joe Louis, for example, knew that racist white boxing fans would not tolerate an emotional black fighter, so he sublimated all displays behind a steely, blank face. Known as the Ring Robot, he greatly intimidated opponents by seeming almost inhuman. He took a disadvantage and turned it into an unexpected asset in the ring. (Location 1349) - Toussaint Louverture, the former Haitian slave turned general, so exasperated his French enemies that they once remarked: “Cet homme fait donc l’ouverture partout” (“This man makes an opening everywhere”). He was so fluid, so uncontainable, he was actually given the surname Louverture, meaning “the opening.” It makes sense. Everything in his life had been an obstacle, and he turned as many of his experiences as he could into openings. Why should troops or politics or mountains or Napoléon himself have been any different? (Location 1358) - To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent. That’s just recklessness. (We want right action, not action period.) To be physically and mentally tight? That’s called anxiety. It doesn’t work, either. Eventually we snap. But physical looseness combined with mental restraint? That is powerful. (Location 1368) - This speech, known today as the “A More Perfect Union” speech, was a transformative moment. Instead of distancing himself, Obama addressed everything directly. In doing so, he not only neutralized a potentially fatal controversy but created an opportunity to seize the electoral high ground. (Location 1385) - Ignore the politics and focus on the brilliant strategic advice that Obama’s adviser Rahm Emanuel, once gave him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” (Location 1392) - Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune—really anything, everything—to their advantage. (Location 1401) - Napoleon described war in simple terms: Two armies are two bodies that clash and attempt to frighten each other. At impact, there is a moment of panic and it is that moment that the superior commander turns to his advantage. (Location 1410) - This is what Obama did. Not shirking, not giving in to exhaustion despite the long neck-and-neck primary. But rallying at the last moment. Transcending the challenge and reframing it, triumphing as a result of it. He turned an ugly incident into that “teachable moment,” and one of the most profound speeches on race in our history. (Location 1421) - This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because we can turn that obstacle upside down, too, simply by using it as an opportunity to practice some other virtue or skill—even if it is just learning to accept that bad things happen, or practicing humility. (Location 1434) - The nation called for a leader of magnanimity and force of purpose—it found one in Lincoln, a political novice who was nevertheless a seasoned expert on matters of will and patience. These attributes were born of his own “severe experience,” as he often called it, and the characteristics were representative of a singular ability to lead the nation through one of its most difficult and painful trials: the Civil War. (Location 1472) - This is the avenue for the final discipline: the Will. If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul. The (Location 1494) - Schooled in suffering, to quote Virgil, Lincoln learned “to comfort those who suffer too.” (Location 1503) - Lincoln’s words went to the people’s hearts because they came from his, because he had access to a part of the human experience that many had walled themselves off from. His personal pain was an advantage. (Location 1505) - At the gym that his father built on the second-floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years, slowly building muscle and strengthening his upper body against his weak lungs and for the future. By his early twenties the battle against asthma was essentially over, he’d worked—almost literally—that weakness out of his body. (Location 1540) - That gym work prepared a physically weak but smart young boy for the uniquely challenging course on which the nation and the world were about to embark. It was the beginning of his preparation for and fulfillment of what he would call “the Strenuous Life.” (Location 1543) - We take weakness for granted. We assume that the way we’re born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent. And then we atrophy from there. (Location 1549) - 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). (Location 1554) - It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within their minds. The temple became a metaphysical one, located independently in the mind of every believer. Each one—wherever they’d been dispersed around the world, whatever persecution or hardship they faced—could draw upon it for strength and security. (Location 1558) - Consider the line from the Haggadah: “In every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt.” (Location 1561) - During Passover Seder, the menu is bitter herbs and unleavened bread—the “bread of affliction.” Why? In some ways, this taps into the fortitude that sustained the community for generations. The ritual not only celebrates and honors Jewish traditions, but it prompts those partaking in the feast to visualize and possess the strength that has kept them going. (Location 1563) - 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. (Location 1565) - No one is born a gladiator. No one is born with an Inner Citadel. If we’re going to succeed in achieving our goals despite the obstacles that may come, this strength in will must be built. (Location 1573) - A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins: “I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. Tell me what went wrong?” What?! But we haven’t even launched yet . . . That’s the point. The CEO is forcing an exercise in hindsight—in advance. She is using a technique designed by psychologist Gary Klein known as a premortem. (Location 1588) - Today, the premortem is increasingly popular in business circles, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies and the Harvard Business Review. But like all great ideas, it is actually nothing new. The credit goes to the Stoics. They even had a better name: premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils). (Location 1603) - The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The (Location 1621) - Beware the calm before the storm. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. The worst is yet to come. It gets worse before it gets better. (Location 1623) - We’re like runners who train on hills or at altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat. (Location 1630) - Thomas Jefferson: born quiet, contemplative, and reserved—purportedly with a speech impediment. Compared to the great orators of his time—Patrick Henry, John Wesley, Edmund Burke—he was a terrible public speaker. His heart set on politics, he had two options: Fight against this sentence, or accept it. He chose the latter, channeling the energy into his writing, which others put into oratory instead. There he found his medium. He found he could express himself clearly. Writing was his strength. Jefferson was the one the founding fathers turned to when they needed the Declaration of Independence. He wrote one of the most important documents in history, in a single draft. (Location 1647) - Same goes for Edison, who, as most people have no idea, was almost completely deaf. Or Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind. For both, it was the deprivation of these senses—and acceptance rather than resentment of that fact—that allowed them to develop different, but acutely powerful, senses to adjust to their reality. (Location 1653) - If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it. (Location 1662) - After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin), and the break comes down to something you don’t control . . . you’ve got only one option: acceptance. The shot didn’t go in. The stock went to zero. The weather disrupted the shipment. Say it with me: C’est la vie. It’s all fine. You don’t have to like something to master it—or to use it to some advantage. When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence. Let’s be clear, that is not the same thing as giving up. This has nothing to do with action—this is for the things that are immune to action. 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. It takes a real man or woman to face necessity. All external events can be equally beneficial to us because we can turn them all upside down and make use of them. They can teach us a lesson we were reluctant to otherwise learn. For instance, in 2006 a long-term hip injury finally caught up with Lakers’ coach Phil Jackson, and the surgery he had to fix it severely limited his courtside movement. Relegated to a special captain’s-style chair near the players, he couldn’t pace the sideline or interact with the team the same way. Initially, Jackson was worried this would affect his coaching. (Location 1668) - Say it with me: C’est la vie. It’s all fine. (Location 1671) - 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. (Location 1689) - People didn’t always think this way. The ancients (and the not so ancients) used the word fate far more frequently than us because they were better acquainted with and exposed to how capricious and random the world could be. Events were considered to be the “will of the Gods.” The Fates were forces that shaped our lives and destinies, often not with much consent. Letters used to be signed “Deo volente”—God willing. (Location 1692) - No one understands him, this man who smiles. Well, the story of the fight is the story of a smile. If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today. (Location 1751) - Odysseus leaves Troy after ten long years of war destined for Ithaca, for home. If only he knew what was ahead of him: ten more years of travel. That he’d come so close to the shores of his homeland, his queen and young son, only to be blown back again. That he’d face storms, temptation, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, and a six-headed monster. Or that he’d be held captive for seven years and suffer the wrath of Poseidon. And, of course, that back in Ithaca his rivals were circling, trying to take his kingdom and his wife. How did he get through it? How did the hero make it home despite it all? (Location 1780) - But perseverance is something larger. It’s the long game. It’s about 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. The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power. Winning by sticking your ass to the seat and not leaving until after it’s over. (Location 1793) - Tags: [[favorite]] - When Antonio Pigafetta, the assistant to Magellan on his trip around the world, reflected on his boss’s greatest and most admirable skill, what do you think he said? It had nothing to do with sailing. The secret to his success, Pigafetta said, was Magellan’s ability to endure hunger better than the other men. (Location 1807) - Determination, if you think about it, is invincible. Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill’s old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On. (Location 1829) - threatened him with. But he was human. And he understood that his men were, too. The first thing he did was throw out any idealistic notions about what happens to a soldier when asked to give up information under hours of torture. So he set up a network of support inside the camp, specifically to help soldiers who felt ashamed for having broken under the pressure. We’re in this together, he told them. He gave them a watchword to remind them: U.S.—Unity over Self. (Location 1853) - This kind of myopia is what convinces us, to our own detriment, that we’re the center of the universe. When really, there is a world beyond our own personal experience filled with people who have dealt with worse. We’re not special or unique simply by virtue of being. We’re all, at varying points in our lives, the subject of random and often incomprehensible events. Reminding ourselves of this is another way of being a bit more selfless. You can always remember that a decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennium earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt very similar things, struggling with the very same thoughts. They had no idea that you would exist, but you know that they did. And a century from now, someone will be in your exact same position, once more. Embrace this power, this sense of being part of a larger whole. It is an exhilarating thought. Let it envelop you. We’re all just humans, doing the best we can. We’re all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit. Help your fellow humans thrive and survive, contribute your little bit to the universe before it swallows you up, and be happy with that. Lend a hand to others. Be strong for them, and it will make you stronger. MEDITATE ON YOUR MORTALITY When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —DR. JOHNSON (Location 1894) - This sublime and unusual experience marked the moment Montaigne changed his life. Within a few years, he would be one of the most famous writers in Europe. After his accident, Montaigne went on to write volumes of popular essays, serve two terms as mayor, travel internationally as a dignitary, and serve as a confidante of the king. (Location 1910) - Death doesn’t make life pointless, but rather purposeful. And, fortunately, we don’t have to nearly die to tap into this energy. (Location 1915) - The paths of glory, Thomas Gray wrote, lead but to the grave. (Location 1932) - Remember the serenity prayer: If something is in our control, it’s worth every ounce of our efforts and energy. Death is not one of those things—it is not in our control how long we will live or what will come and take us from life. But thinking about and being aware of our mortality creates real perspective and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because it’s invigorating. (Location 1939) - Tags: [[favorite]] - As the Haitian proverb puts it: Behind mountains are more mountains. (Location 1963) - Elysium is a myth. One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. (Location 1964) - The Stoics liked to use the metaphor of fire. Writing in his journal, Marcus once reminded himself that “when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material.” The unexpected death of his rival, the man whom Marcus had been deprived of granting clemency to, was this metaphor embodied. Marcus would now forgive essentially everyone involved. He wouldn’t take any of it personally. He’d be a better person, a better leader for it. (Location 1991) - Tested in the crucible of adversity and forged in the furnace of trial, they realized these latent powers—the powers of perception, action, and the will. With this triad, they: First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it (Location 2017) - The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who “transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking.” It’s a loop that becomes easier over time. (Location 2022) - What they did was simple (simple, not easy). But let’s say it once again just to remind ourselves: See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must. (Location 2039) - I need to thank my master teacher and mentor Robert Greene, who not only subsidized my reading of many of the books I used as sources, but taught me the art of crafting a message and a book. His notes on my drafts were invaluable. (Location 2103) - Letters of a Stoic by Seneca (see also: On the Shortness of Life). Both these translations by Penguin are fantastic. Seneca or Marcus are the best places to start if you’re looking to explore Stoicism. Seneca seems like he would have been a fun guy to know—which is unusual for a Stoic. I suggest starting with On the Shortness of Life (a collection of short essays) and then move to his book of letters (which are really more like essays than true correspondence). (Location 2224) - His book Philosophy as a Way of Life explains how philosophy has been wrongly interpreted as a thing people talk about rather than something that people do. (Location 2235)