Weekly Reading #5: The Obstacle Is The Way (Part 2/3: Action)

The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

What is action? Action is the commonplace, the right action is not. Right actions are directed actions. Everything must be done in the service of the whole. Step by step, with persistence and flexibility, courage and not brashness, we will dismantle the obstacles in front of us.

Read Part 1

Weekly Reading #5: The Obstacle Is The Way (Part 1/3: Perception)

The discipline of actions

If life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given

• It feels better to ignore or pretend. But you know deep down that that isn’t going to truly make it any better. You’ve got to act. And you’ve got to start now.
• If life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. And the only way you’ll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.
• We can always (and only) greet our obstacles with energy, persistence, a coherent and deliberate process, iteration and resilience, pragmatism, strategic vision, craftiness and savvy, and an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments.

Get moving

If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.

• What people who defy the odds and become great at things do is say Yes. They start. Anywhere. Anyhow. They don’t care if the conditions are perfect of 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.
• Sometimes, we wait, even when we know what to do, because we hope that a better alternative will come along. As a result, we do nothing.
• We often assume that the world moves at our leisure. We delay when we should initiate. We jog when we should be running, or better yet, sprinting. And then we’re shocked when nothing big ever happens, when opportunities never show up, when new obstacles begin to pile up, or the enemies finally get their act together.
• Now you’ve started. Could you be doing more? You probably could — there is always more.
• Those who attach problems and life with the most initiative and energy usually win.
• When you’re frustrated in pursuit of your own goals, don’t sit there and complain that you don’t have what you want or that this obstacle won’t budge. If you haven’t even tried yet, then of course you will still be in the exact same place. You haven’t actually pursued anything.
• If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.

Practice persistence

A phrase favored by Epictetus: “persist and resist”. Persist your efforts. Resist giving into distraction, discouragement, or disorder.

• Too many people think that victories like Ulysses Grant’s and Thomas Edison’s came from a flash of insight. That they cracked the problem with pure genius. In fact, it was the slow pressure, repeated from many different angles, the elimination of so many other promising option that slowly and surely churned the solution to the top of the pile. Their genius was unity of purpose deafness to doubt, and the desire to stay at it.
• When you start attacking an obstacle, quitting is not an option. It cannot enter your head. Once you can envision yourself quitting altogether, you might as well ring the bell. It’s done.
• A phrase favored by Epictetus: “persist and resist”. Persist your efforts. Resist giving into distraction, discouragement, or disorder.
• Thomas Edison: “The first step is an intuition — and comes with a burst — then difficulties arise.”
• It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s going to take a lot out of you, but energy is always renewable. Stop looking for epiphany, 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.
• We are working on it. We are getting closer. When setbacks come, we respond by working twice as hard.

Iterate

It hurts to fail. Be graceful to pay the cost. There will be no better teacher for your career.

• In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a startup — a startup of one. And that means changing the relationship with failures. It’s now iterating, failing and improving. Our capacity to try, try, try is inextricably linked with our ability and tolerance to fail, fail, fail.
• Great entrepreneurs may slip many times, but they don’t fall.
• It hurts to fail. Be graceful to pay the cost. There will be no better teacher for your career.
• The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure — to ensure it is a bad thing — is to not learn from it. People fall in small way all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.
• Lessons come hard only if you’re deaf to them. Don’t be. Listen up.

Follow the process

The process is about finishing. Finishing the smallest task you have right now in front of you and finishing it well.

• You’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize.
• The process is about finishing. Finishing the smallest task you have right now in front of you and finishing it well.
• When it comes to our actions, disorder and distraction are death. The unordered my loses track of what’s in front of it — what matters — and gets distracted by thought of the future. The process is order, it keeps our perceptions in check and our actions in sync.
• Being trapped is just a position, not a fate. You get out of it by eliminating each part of that position through small, deliberate action — not trying to push it away with superhuman strength.
• The process is about doing the right things, right now. Not worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture.

Do your job, do it right

Always meet our job with hard work, honesty and helping others as best as we can.

• Everything we do matter. Everything is a chance to do and be your best.
• Always meet our job with hard work, honesty and helping others as best as we can.
• How you do anything is how you can do everything. We can always act right.

What’s right is what works

Sometimes you do it this way. Sometimes that way. Anyway that works — that’s the motto.

• Pragmatism is not about worrying about the “right” way, but worrying about the right way. This is how we get things done.
• 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. Anyway that works — that’s the motto.
• Pragmatism is not so much realism but flexibility. There are a lot of ways to get from point A to point B. It doesn’t have to be a straight line. It’s just got to get you where you need to go. But so many of us spend so much time looking for the perfect solution that we pass up what’s right in front of us.
• Start thinking like a radical pragmatist: still ambitious, aggressive, and rooted in ideals, but also imminently practical and guided by possible. Not everything you like to have, not on changing the world right at this moment, but ambitious enough to get everything you need. Don’t think small, but make distinction between critical and the extra.
• Think progress, not perfection.

In praise of the flank attack

While you’re trying to attack the front door, the side door and windows may be wide open.

• In study some 30 conflicts compromising more than 280 campaigns from ancient to modern history, the brilliant strategies and historian B. H. Liddell Hart came to a stunning conclusion: In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy’s main army.
• Take a step back, see if you could go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the “line of least expectation.” While you’re trying to attack the front door, the side door and windows may be wide open.
• You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held position. You find common ground and work from there. O you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create the alternative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp.
• Sometimes, the longest way around is the shortest way home.

Use obstacles against themselves

Sometimes you overcome obstacles not by attacking them but by withdrawing and letting they attack you.

• Sometimes you overcome obstacles not by attacking them but by withdrawing and letting they attack you. You can use the actions of others against themselves instead of yourself.
• The Russians defect Napoleon and the Nazis not by rigidly protect their border but by retreating into the interior and leaving the winter to do their work on the enemy, bogged down in battles far from home.
• We get so consumed with moving forward that we forget that there are other ways to get where we are heading. Sometimes, the best way to get what we want might be to reexamine those desires in the first place.

Channel your energy

Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosing you up and make you better — if you let it.

• Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosing you up and make you better — if you let it.
• We all have our own constraints to deal with. Think about it too much and it can start to feel oppressive, even suffocating. If we’re not careful, this is likely to throw us off our game.
• To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent. To be physically and mentally tight is anxiety. By physical looseness combine with mental restraint? It’s powerful.

Seize the offensive

You’re wasting a crisis feeling sorry for yourself, feeling tired or disappointed. You forget: Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave.

• Learn how to press forward precisely when everyone around you sees disasters.
• Obama’s advisor Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis going 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.”
• You always planned to do something. Well, now something has happened — some disruptive event like a failure or accident or a tragedy. Use it.
• You’re wasting a crisis feeling sorry for yourself, feeling tired or disappointed. You forget: Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave.
• Can you see that this “problem” presents an opportunity for a solution that you have long been waiting for?
• 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.

Prepare for none of it to work

In every situation, that which blocks our path actually presents a new path with a new part for us.

• All creativity and dedication aside, after we’ve tried, some obstacles may turn out to be impossible to overcome. 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 of skill — even if it’s just learning to accept bad things happen, or practicing humility.
• In every situation, that which blocks our path actually presents a new path with a new part for us.
• Problems are a chance for us to do our best.
• We have within us to be the type of people who try to get things done, try with everything we’ve got and, whatever verdict comes in, are ready to accept it instantly and move on to whatever is next.

About Weekly Reading

Weekly Reading is a personal project to expand my knowledge by exposing myself to new ideas. Every Saturday, I lock myself in the neighborhood Barnes & Nobles and consume a book.

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