The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

by Ryan Holiday

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Personal Growth & Leadership

What do you do with the thing standing in your way? Ryan Holiday's answer, taken from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, is that it becomes the way forward once you work it through three disciplines: perception, action and will. You get that argument mostly through short stories from history, business, politics and sport.

Core ideas
  • An old idea: The preface opens with Marcus Aurelius in Germania around 170 CE, and the book's premise comes straight from his Meditations.
  • Three disciplines: Perception, action and will are the sequence for turning an obstacle into the means of progress rather than a reason to stop.
  • Setbacks into advantage: John D. Rockefeller, Amelia Earhart, Ulysses S. Grant and Steve Jobs each appear as people who turned what blocked them into an advantage.
Published2014
Pages201
ISBN9781591846352
ReadJul 2022

Connected to 7 other books

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