The Daily Stoic - The Obstacle Is The Way | Summarized by Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: December 5, 2021

The Obstacle Is the Way has become a cult classic, beloved by men and women around the world who apply its wisdom to become more successful at whatever they do. In this episode of the podcast, Ryan Holiday gives you a summary of the book. Its many fans include NBA legend Chris Bosh, PGA Champion Rory McIlroy, NBC sportscaster Michele Tafoya, pop star Camila Cabello, former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and the coaches and players of winning teams like the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, and Chicago Cubs. Get The Obstacle Is The Way from The Painted Porch BookstoreGet a signed copy of the special leatherbound edition of The Obstacle Is The Way from the Daily Stoic StoreWe've joined Team Feed Corporate to help end hunger in America. No one should go without a meal, yet more than 38 million people in America still face hunger. We created this fundraiser to help provide these much needed meals to our neighbors through the Feeding America network of food banks and we're asking you to join us in our cause. Go to https://dailystoic.com/feeding to donate and let's end hunger together!The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Trade Coffee will match you to coffees you’ll love from 400+ craft coffees, and will send you a freshly roasted bag as often as you’d like. Trade is offering your first bag free and $5 off your bundle at checkout. To get yours, go to drinktrade.com/DAILYSTOIC and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. Take the quiz to start your journey to the perfect cup.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics. Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Daily Stoke is raising money for feeding America. Last year the Daily Stoke is raising money for feeding America. Last year, the Daily Stoke community came together and raised over $100,000 together, providing more than a million meals. And this year, we're trying to go twice as big. We've donated the first $20,000 and we'd like your help getting to our goal, $200,000, which would provide more than two million meals

for families across the country. You just have to head over to dailysteroic.com slash feeding. And together we can make a small dent and a big problem. We can't alleviate everyone's struggle or suffering, of course, but for the people we can help, the difference is huge. So let's do it. Let's be good at stoics today. Let's fulfill our obligation. Just go to dailystalk.com slash feeding even one dollar

Can provide as many as 10 meals. So head over to dailystalk.com slash feeding to help us reach our goal of providing two million meals for families across the country the country. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode that Daily Stove podcast has been cool now to put out Courage is calling, which is the start of a new series, my four virtue series, but it also brings sort of fully to a close like the last series I did, the obstacle ego and stillness. And obstacle came out in 2014, I really started thinking about it in 2011, 2012. So it's been a book that's been part of my life now

for almost 10 years. I thought it would maybe help a few people in business. I thought it would help people who were trying to apply stoicism to life, you know, again, to business. I could not have imagined that it would sell, you know, close to a million and a half copies, spend weeks and weeks on the bestseller lists and be used by superbow-winning teams and special forces operators and sitting senators, even world leaders. It's been an incredible insane, totally unbelievable journey. And people often ask me,

you know, what's the book about? What are the lessons? What are the core key takeaways from the book? There's a million book summary platforms out there. Some of them have even advertised on the Daily Stove podcast before. But in today's episode, I wanted to go back and look at that book, summarize what the obstacle is the way is really about, look at some of the practical lessons from this idea, an idea that I think about often enough that I had it tattooed on my arm. So I now think about it on a daily basis. It's always a reminder, what's the good that can come from this, what's the change I can make because of this? Where's the opportunity for growth? That to me is what stoicism is about. As Mark really says, the impediment to action, advances action, what stands in the way is the way. And that is the subject of today's episode.

An in-depth summary and discussion of the ideas in the obstacle is the way, which I hope you've read. If you haven't, please do check out the book. If you have read it, I think this is a good reminder, good update, good behind the scenes look at what I think is important in the book, what really stands out to me and what I think you should be applying on a daily basis. So here is the obstacle is the way summarized by me, Ryan Holiday, the author, quick note. Obviously you can check it out in any format,

but we have this really cool leather bound edition of the book, which you can check it out in any format, but we have this really cool leather bound edition of the book, which you can check out in the Daily Stoke store. It even comes with an obstacle, is the way Medallion, when I was on my epic drive across the United States. I was at a gas station outside an air force base in Nevada, and this guy walks up to me is in uniform, and he goes, are you Ryan Holiday? And I said, yeah, and he's like, look what I have. And he had a leather bound edition of the book.

It was so cool. I signed that and I gave him my first copy off the presses of Courage is Calling. So if you want to check that out, go to store.dailystoke.com. Thanks for supporting this book in all the books and enjoy this in-depth episode. You know, I opened the book with this Zen story about the king who believed his people had grown soft.

And so he puts a large boulder on the road into town to see what happens and he hides and he watches. And he watches this person after person is discouraged by this obstacle. They curse him, they quit, they wait for someone else to solve it. Nobody does anything. Until finally one man comes along, and he decides he's gonna tackle this problem.

He grabs a big stick, uses it as a lever, and he pries the boulder out of the path, rolls it off the trail. But what he finds underneath is a pouch of gold coins with the coins was a note that said, never forget, inside every obstacle is a chance to prove our condition. And this is where the zen expression,

the obstacle is the path comes from. It happens that the east and west were totally aligned here because there's also a quote from the great Marx really, the emperor of Rome, he says, the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way it becomes the way. The first discipline of this would be the discipline of perception. It makes sense how we look at a problem is the first step and how we're going to be able to do something about it. The opening story I tell to illustrate this in the book is John D. Rockefeller who has a young man, interest finance in the midst of what we now call the panic of 1857. He sees this as he says later as an apprenticeship in difficulty, a chance to grow and learn and see the market

at both its best and its worst. Really Rockefeller is shaped by this experience. He studies it. He sees how people got irrationally exuberant, but then also lost confidence in the market and missed out on opportunities. So if you don't have to like Rockefeller, you can dig use the most evil man in the world. But his discipline emits the chaos, the panics, the trends, the fads of his time is what makes him great as an investor. And in fact, he makes good chunks of his fortune in successive economic panics from the

Pancake 1857, the Civil War, the Pancake 1873, 1907. Even the Market Crash in 1929, the Rockefellers make money, because they're cool under pressure, they don't get rattled by external events. But where does that come from? Comes from training. Rockefeller is good later in his life because he went through it early in his life.

I talk about the first Apollo astronauts in the book, John Glenn, for instance, Orbitz the Earth, the first American to do this, and his heart rate never goes above 100. And I remember I once had dinner with Jim LaValle, the famous astronaut who was also a new jungler, and they were talking about, it's like, how does this happen?

It says, it wasn't unfamiliar to us. We practiced it over and over and over again. We got to a place where it wasn't scary even when things went wrong. So this nerve control, this comes from training. That's why police officers can be co-under pressure or special forces or an athlete can hit a shot when everyone's screaming at them because they've practiced this thousands of times. They expose themselves to it

thousands of times. I think also this knowledge allows us to not be intimidated even by things that are new to us. I tell a story of parakelies in the Peloponnesian war. He is casting off with the Athenian navy and an eclipse blacks out the sun. And this might not seem scary to us now because we know what an eclipse is, but in ancient Greece they did not. And so the minute are terrified, but thinking fast parakely says, well, look, if I put a cloak over your face, would you be scared? And the men says, no. And he says, well, what does it matter? What causes the darkness?

Darkness itself is not scary. So this ability to break things down logically is an essential part of the discipline of perception. So you have to be wise. It's to be smart. It's to be intelligent. You have to talk to yourself out of what fear wants you to feel. This is all trying to get you to a place where you can pull off the most essential part of the discipline of perception, which is where everyone else sees difficulty

and hopelessness, you see something positive. So I tell this story shortly after the invasion of Normandy where Eisenhower sees all his generals are battled by this massive Nazi counteroffensive. He calls them all into a meeting and he strides in and says, the present situation is to be regarded as opportunity and not disaster. He says, I only want to see cheerful faces at this conference table. Meaning it. Being scared, being intimidated, not believing in ourselves, that's not going to help us

move forward. First, let's stop that bleeding. He's saying. But then, let's see what good is in this. And what they realize is that this massive counteroffensive is also an opportunity, because perhaps, the Nazis have overreached. And so by absorbing this blow, sort of encircling them from behind, they pull off one of the biggest upsets of World War II that sets off the race to Berlin. If you've heard of the Battle of the Bulge, it's Eisenhower turning this around, flipping the obstacle, turning it into the opportunity. So that's what we do. The discipline of perception is about seeing clearly, seeing objectively, seeing calmly, and then seeing the good inside the bad, and then moving forward and

taking action based on that. It's not just about how you see things. Yes, Mark really says, life is died by the color of our thoughts. Those thoughts are meaningless without action. What action do you take on the thoughts? That's the essential part. The stokes are action, action, action. And that's actually a mantra of the great Demosthenes who I open part two of the discipline of action of the book with. Demosthenes is still terrible hands. He's got a speech impediment. He's weak. His parents die early and then evil relatives steal the family fortune. This might have been the end of it for Demosthenes. But instead it becomes the event that spurs off his life of greatness. Which is that he decides he's not going to let this stand.

He is going to fight for every penny back and he's going to bring these people to justice. So he becomes a great orator because of the injustices he experiences. And he doesn't just magically decide to do this, it's incredibly difficult. He at one point actually moves into an underground burrow, shaves half of his head. So he's embarrassed to go outside and practices for years and years and years to become a great speaker and a great lawyer. He even practices puts rocks in his mouth, shouts into the wind. He builds up this booming voice, overcomes the speech impediment,

and he does bring them to justice. Sadly, most of the fortune has gone, but it doesn't matter because he won something greater, which is that he himself was now strong, brilliant, respected, and wise, and he could be a great lawyer and speaker and politician, which is what he becomes. So we can turn the worst thing that ever happened to us into a springboard for who we want to be or who we can be. It can actually unlock a whole new destiny for us. And I talk about Emilia Earhart.

She is a great pilot, but you know, this is 1920s America. No one wants to give a female pilot a shot. So when she does get this offer to be one of the first women to ever fly across the Atlantic, it seems like a horrible offer. Like she's not actually gonna get a fly the plane. She can't even be the co-pilot.

Just to be the navigator. They're going to get paid. She's not, it's like a really insulting condescending BS offer. But what does she say? She says yes. Because she knows if she can get started, if she can get momentum, she can beat this. And so she accepts it. She flies the mission. She bites her tongue. But then using the power and the fame that comes from the coverage of this event, she becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. So it's about momentum, and she actually has painted on the side of her plane, always think with your stick forward. It's about momentum, it's about taking actions, about getting up and getting moving, because

if you don't, you crash, or worse worse you never take off in the first place. Things are never going to be perfect. They're never going to be ideal. They're never going to be truly fair. You have to work with what you can do what you can with what you've got and then turn it into what you want to have. This persistence is so key though. I talk about Ulysses S Grant and taking the city of Vicksburg. He tries everything. None of it works. the city of Vicksburg. He tries everything, none of it works. It's only in trying everything, and being so desperate that he tries this crazy plan where he runs the gun batteries at Vicksburg. Once it's done, it can never be undone. He has to forget about Vicksburg, head to Jackson, Mississippi first. But then coming at Vicksburg the other side, he turns all the advantages of this

fortified city into obstacles for the people trapped inside. But more importantly, he discovered how to win the Civil War, which is that it would take endless amounts of men, and energy, persistence, perseverance, dedication, and taking the war to the enemy. In fact, Sherman's March, which we know wins the Civil War, comes out of the March from Louisiana to Jackson, Mississippi, and taking the war to the enemy and living off the land. So in trying everything he accidentally discovers the way to win the war. In my house, my wife is the coffee lover. I am the Philistine, and she is a big fan of today's sponsor.

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Take the quiz to start your journey to the perfect cup. That's drinktraded.com slash daily stoke. promo code daily stoke for a first bag free, five bucks off your bundle. Enjoy. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where

each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lin spears. When Brittany's fans formed the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lin's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot

of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dysentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. I also tell the story of Edison and the discovery of the light bulb, you know, 1% inspiration,

99% perspiration, whether he says this or not, we don't know. But he does try 6,000 different filaments as he's trying to get the light bulb to work. And one of them finally does. It takes years, again, 6,000 filaments. So it's one out of 6,000 that work. So overcoming obstacles is really about persistence and dedication. It's also about following a methodical process.

I talk about Nick Sabin and the idea of the process, which builds Alabama to perhaps the greatest college football dynasty in the history of the game. How does Sabin do this? It's not about focusing on winning. It's not about focusing on the playoffs. It's not about the championship.

It's not even about the fourth quarter. It's not even about the first game of the season He wants players to focus on the immediate thing in front of you the average down in football like seven seconds He says focus doing your job these seven seconds you accumulate it piece by piece Zeno says well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing the process is small and humble But it's ultimately unbeatable and process is small and humble, but it's ultimately unbeatable. And even writing the obstacles the way was, okay, first I got to do a proposal. Then I got to sell. Then I got to start the book. Then I got to write not the whole thing, but just the first sentence. And then the next sentence. And then chapter one and chapter

two and chapter three. And even getting it to sell, you know, it doesn't sell when it first comes out. It's only six years later that it hits the best seller list for the first time. It takes six years to sell a million copies, but that's because I never quit on it. I never got distracted by external results. I just focused every day on doing a little thing to make me and the book a little bit better. The other thing about obstacles is it's not always about attacking them head-on. Sometimes, yeah, you test 6,000 different filaments, but sometimes you get creative. Talked about the great military strategist, BH Labelhart. He finds

it of all the great battles of history, only like a minuscule percentage of them are head-to-head battles, where two evenly matched armies beat each other. Says, no, it's all about attacking from the side. It's about trickery and fates and the element of surprise. You beat your obstacles by outthinking them, by outflanking them, by outmaneuvering them. Think of Gandhi, right? Gandhi doesn't beat the British army by building a bigger army. No, he uses their strength against them by accentuating his weakness. Martin Luther King does this in the American Civil Rights movement. He says, physical power must be met with soul power.

And so the greatest achievers, the people who overcome incredible odds and obstacles, don't do it by just throwing themselves against a wall. They find out if they can go under the wall or around the wall or if they can run the other direction. And then the person on the other side of the wall, they're the one that's trapped. There's an opportunity inside the obstacle that's not regard ourselves as being screwed over. Let's see what we can do because of this.

Persistence is key, but perseverance is when you have to hang on for years. I talk about Odysseus, right? Ten years. He's lost, but he never quits, he never gives up. I open part three, the book with the story of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, as you know, did not have an easy life. Gros up in poverty, his father is abusive, he loses his mother, and on top of this, he deals with this devastating depression. They call it melancholy back then.

By the time he actually does become president and the horrors of the Civil War break out, it turns out this is exactly who you want leading the country at this time because he knows what pain is. He knows how to be patient. He knows how to think about other people. He knows how to hang on. And so everything, every difficulty, every failure, every piece of pain that he went through up until this point was in fact leading up to who he needed to be in this critical moment. And that can be true for you. That's what a more faulty, that's what stoicism is ultimately about, but using everything that happened as fuel

to become who you can become. The stoics say, look, things can be hard, but only you can quit. You have to decide to quit. And if you don't quit, if you decide to grow or learn or be made better for what's happened, then ultimately you do with. And one of my favorite stories in the book, I tell another Edison's story, which is that towards the end of his life, he's America's most famous inventor,

sitting down for dinner with his family, and a man rushes in. The factory is on fire. His life's work up in flames. He rushes to the scene. There's nothing he can do about it. You know, he could have broken down. He could have cried. He could have killed himself. Instead, he grabs his son and he says, go get your mother and all her friends.

They'll never see a fire like this again. This is an illustration of a key stoke idea, the idea of a morphology. So yes, the stokes accept things that are outside of our control so we can focus on what's in our control. But beyond acceptance is an embracing, a love of what's happened. And that's what the idea of a morpher, you meet, a love of fate. Mark Serio says, what you throw on top of a fire,

fire turns the heat, and brightness, and flame. That's what Edison was doing. And he rebuilds. He comes back better for what he's gone through. And that's the question for you with what you're dealing with. Are you gonna be better for this injury, for this loss, for this mess up, this mistake, this failure? You decide that.

No event is so bad that you can't decide to learn something from it, that you can't decide to use it as an opportunity to grow. I tell the story of Admiral James Stockdale, who read Epic Titus, who shot down over Vietnam, he's taken prisoner of war, and he says to himself that I'm not gonna lose faith. And he says, I never lost faith in my ability to decide the end of the story. That if I survived, he said I was gonna have turned this into the best thing

that ever happened to me. And he does that, not just when he gets home, it's not like dead timers just trap there for seven years. But while he's there, he's the commanding officer, he's strong for the men. He teaches them a code so they can communicate. One of the things they communicate that tapping these cups is US, not United States, but Unity over self. He is the inspiration, the backbone, the leader that these men need while they're trapped in this horrible place. And that's what stoicism is. It's about even when life devastates you and breaks you. It's about stepping up. It's about making something out of what's happened. Obviously, I want you to read the book. You know, I have a leather edition on the regular book. But if you don't have time to read the book. You know, I have a leather edition, I have the regular book.

But if you don't have time to read it, if you're not sure, just apply this one thing. This is a quote from Mark's Reel. It's, I think, summing up the three disciplines that we just talked about. Remember, the discipline of perception, the discipline of action, the discipline of will. He says, objective judgment now at this very moment. He says, unselfish action now at this very moment. Then he says, willing acceptance now at this very moment. He says, unselfish action now at this very moment. Then he says, willing acceptance now

at this very moment, that's all you need. Right, you need to see things clearly, see them for what they are. That's what Rockefeller did so well. Unselfish action, what do you do for others? How can you put yourself out there, really try and not give up? That's Grant at Vicksburg, that's Edison in the Discovery the Lightbook.

That's Marcus Realis selling off the palace furnishings at the depths of the Antimine play, doing what you can to be better for what's happened. And then finally, willing acceptance. Some stuff happens. Some stuff is hard. Some stuff is gonna take way longer than we thought. But we can't give up, we can't give in.

We have to choose to be transformed by what happened. We have to use this as an opportunity to be strong, to be resilient, to be caring, to be committed. And that's what makes us who we are. So that's what I was trying to write in the book, the idea that, as that King said, inside every obstacle is always a chance to improve our condition. That what's in the way is the way the obstacle is the path. The timeless art of turning trials into triumph, it's simple, it's not easy as I say in

the book, but you can do it and I tried to present examples and stories in this video and in the book that you can follow, they're not, they're simple, they're straightforward, they're inspiring. I hope you check it out, but most importantly I hope you remember Mark Serelyse' advice, objective judgment now at this very moment. Unselfish action now at this very moment, willing acceptance now at this very moment of all external events. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Mandukayoga mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some

of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts.

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