Lessons From The Obstacle is the Way: Part I (Perception)

A great friend of mine gifted me ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ by Ryan Holiday, which I recently finished reading and now consider it one of my favorite books of all time.

In an attempt to ‘pay it forward’, I’m sharing a 3-part writeup (based on the 3 sections the book is divided into — Perception, Action, and Will) to provide the main takeaways I got from the book that you might find useful. In this post, we’ll start with the key points under Perception:

The Discipline of Perception

• We can choose to see the experiences and situations we receive as part of our ‘school of adversity’ sent to teach us how to navigate through life’s stress inducers effectively. We can also choose not to and instead see unpleasant experiences and situations as undeserving, victimising, and eclipsing of all other moments in our life — it’s up to us.

Recognize Your Power

• Events and situations are neither good nor bad — it is our perception of them and the story we tell about them that determines what they become in our lives (opportunities for growth and teaching or obstacles to our joy and peace).

Steady Your Nerves

• When things appear to go wrong, take a pause; there is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up.

Control Your Emotions

• For most situations, we can afford to think and say “I am not going to die from this” because we won’t. So, when situations occur (challenges, failure, betrayal, rejection, etc), why are we all worked up over something that is at least occasionally supposed to happen?

Practice Objectivity

• The Observing eye simply sees what is there; the Perceiving eye sees more than what is there (e.g. The Observing eye sees old, fermented grapes while the Perceiving eye sees ‘vintage wine’).
• The more skilled we become at seeing things for what they are, the more perception will work for us rather than against us.

Alter Your Perspective

• Perspective is everything. When we can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over us.
• Example: George Clooney went from begging producers and casting directors to hire/like him in his early acting days (perspective of ‘I need them’) to projecting himself as a solution to their obstacle of getting the person who understood their needs and would deliver during preproduction, on camera, and film promotion events (perspective of ‘they need me’).

Is It Up To You?

• It will serve us well to know the difference between the things we cannot control (e.g. not getting hired by a company you applied for) versus things we can control (applying to other companies, taking volunteer opportunities and gaining new skills, changing your interview style, etc).
• Focusing on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. Focusing on what is not in our power magnifies and enhances our frustrations, fears, and doubts.

Live In The Moment

• Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
• Those who survive disadvantage (e.g. Microsoft during the 1973–1975 recession) do so because they take things day-by-day.
• Remember that the present is a ‘moment’ in our life and not our entire life — we can simply live in it and ignore what it ‘represents’ or ‘means’ or ‘why it happened to me’.

Think Differently

• We shouldn’t listen too closely to what other people say (or the voices in our head) or we’ll find ourselves erring on the side of accomplishing nothing.
• To an entrepreneur, the idea that no one has ever done this or that before is a good thing because then we can tap into our most creative side and do something extraordinary.
• We can do away with being realistic, it does not serve us much.

Finding The Opportunity

• There is always opportunity within the obstacle — we can choose to look for it and find it.
• Our preconceptions tell us that things ‘should’ be a certain way — the truth is that blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive (e.g. a person who questions our abilities allows us to exceed his/her lower expectations much easier).
• Truth — what doesn’t kill us does actually make us stronger (cliche yet true).

Prepare To Act

• The worst thing that happens is not a challenging or undesirable event; the worst thing is losing your head as a result of the event.
• We can choose to tackle what stands in our way — not because we’re gamblers defying the odds but because we’ve calculated them and boldly embrace the risk.

And that ends Part I on Perception folks. Next week, I’ll be sharing lessons from Part II on Action. Until then.