By Ryan Holiday
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius. The secret to an art known as turning obstacles upside down. Setbacks and problems are always expected and never permanent. Making certain that what impedes us can empower us. xiv
Perception – a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective, and shortsighted, we only add to our troubles. 11
Where one person sees crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Nothing MAKES us feel this way, we choose to give in to such feelings. 16
Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation – without the pestilence of panic or fear. 18
Apatheia – the Greek word. Obstacles make us emotional, but the only way we’ll survive or overcome them is by keeping those emotions in check – if we can keep steady no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate. 29
Perception vs. Objectivity: The perceiving eye is weak, the observing eye is strong. – Miyamoto Musashi, Samurai swordsman The Book of Five Rings . The observing eye sees just what is there. It lays no additional biases down. This will help us steady our emotions. Perceptions give us information we don’t need. Everything in our animalistic brains tries to compress the space between impression and perception. 34
Marcus Aurelius described glamorous and expensive things without their euphemisms – roasted meat is a dead animal. Vintage wine is old, fermented grapes.
A bad boss is an opportunity instead of disaster. Instead of quitting, you have a unique chance to grow and improve yourself. To experiment with different solutions, tactics, and add to your skill set. Prepare yourself for your next job. Keep yourself alert, raise the stakes, motivate you to prove them wrong, harden you, help you appreciate true friends, provide instructive antilog (someone you don’t want to become) this is called adversarial growth to psychologists. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. 56
“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.” – Victor Frankl 36
“A good person dyes events with his own color…and turns whatever happens to his own benefit” – Seneca
Great success is often preceded by epic failure – because people went back to the drawing board. They weren’t ashamed to fail, but spurred on, piqued by it. 83
Follow the process: “Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.” – Coach Nick Saban 87
We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be, or what the rules say we should do. Trying to get it all perfect. Just focus on making due with what you have. Good enough approach. 99
Will: Will is the discipline of the heart and soul. The one thing we control completely, always. You can try to change your perception and give 100% to your actions but WILL is different because it is internal. It gives us ultimate strength that no external force can affect. 130
Certain things in life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens – at that exposing moment – the world gets a glimpse of what’s truly inside you. So what will be revealed? 132
Theodore Roosevelt beat his horrible asthma through his will power to train in the gym. “The Strenuous Life”. 135
The Art of Acquiescence – when bad things happen you have but one option. Acceptance. You don’t have to like something to master it. When the cause of the problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. 146
Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy. The other, endurance. 157
Life is a marathon and not a sprint. Conserve your energy/ Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. 173
“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformations mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking. It’s a loop that becomes easier over time.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school…it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” – Henry David Thoreau