The Obstacle Is The Way | The Discipline of Perception

0:00It's time for Cyber Monday, Dell Technologies biggest sale of the year. That's right, you'll find the lowest prices of the year on select Dell PCs like the Dell 16 Plus with Intel Core Ultra processors. And with built-in advanced AI features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster. From smarter multitasking to extended battery life, these PCs get the busy work done so you can focus on what matters most to you. Plus, you can earn Dell rewards and join many other benefits like free shipping, expert support, price match guarantee, and flexible financing options. They also have the biggest deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC, improving the way you work, play, and connect.

0:38Whether you just got started holiday shopping or you're finishing up, these PCs and accessories make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals and don't miss out on the best prices of the year. That's dell.com slash deals. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product.

1:18I've used 8 Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately. It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning, as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, head over to 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic and use code Daily Stoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra.

2:09The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it. But I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash dailystoic.

2:29Welcome 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.

3:19Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think I mentioned this. I'm in the middle now of redoing The Obstacles Away. It's the 10-year anniversary. 2024 is the 10-year anniversary of The Obstacles Away. I don't feel like I'm old enough to have a book that's 10 years old. Certainly, it's even crazier that it's not even my first book that's 10 years old. It feels like not that long ago I was writing this chapter for the first time. I remember I was writing it in a Starbucks on Blaine Avenue. I think it's Blaine, right? Blaine in Iowa, there in Riverside, California.

3:58I don't know why I was back there. I think I was using the UCR library, but this is, I remember having this sort of breakthrough where I wrote this chapter. I had just read a fascinating biography on John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow, one of the great biographers of our time. This is a chunk of the intro of part one of The Obstacles Away. I feel like I was just writing it and then it feels even more recent because I was just rewriting it and adding some stuff that won't be in this excerpt. You'll have to wait until that comes out in the fall. But I think it's always good to look at people who are calm and cool under pressure.

4:33I'm certainly not saying that John D. Rockefeller was a stoic. I'm not saying he was a good person. Ultimately, a lot of his fortune went to do good. but I think he was very un-stoic in his relentless, endless, ceaseless lust for wealth and money. But that's not what this chapter is about. That wasn't what I was trying to do in The Obstacle's Way. But here I am bringing you a chunk of the audiobook of The Obstacle is the Way, just a deep dive, a refresher if you've read the book. If you haven't read the book, here's a sample of it. But I think one of the most important disciplines in all of stoicism, and I'm excited to bring that to you today.

5:13You can, of course, get The Obstacles Away anywhere books are sold. You can get a leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store as well. That's pretty cool. I'll sign it for you if you want, but here we go. I am a person who has a book that is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year. It's been a long way. Thanks to everyone who's been a part of it. Enjoy.

5:51I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. this holiday season whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner whole foods market has what you need to delight everyone at your table they even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department you can make whole foods your one-stop shop everything follows whole foods markets strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you you can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters.

6:40The discipline of perception. Before he was an oil man, John D. Rockefeller was a bookkeeper and inspiring investor, a small-time financier in Cleveland, Ohio. The son of an alcoholic criminal who'd abandoned his family, the young Rockefeller took his first job in 1855 at the age of 16. A day he celebrated as job day for the rest of his life. All was well at 50 cents a day. Then the panic struck, specifically the Panic of 1857, a massive financial crisis that originated in Ohio and hit Cleveland particularly hard. As businesses failed and the price of grain plummeted across the country, westward expansion quickly came to a halt.

7:24The result was a crippling national depression that lasted for several years. Rockefeller could have gotten scared. Here was the greatest market depression in history, and it hit him just as he was finally getting the hang of it. He could have pulled out and run like his father. He could have quit finance altogether for a different career with less risk. But even as a young man, Rockefeller had sang for it, unflappable coolness under pressure. He could keep his head while he was losing his shirt. Better yet, he could keep his head while everyone else lost theirs. And so instead of bemoaning this economic upheaval, Rockefeller eagerly observed the momentous events.

8:04Almost perversely, he chose to look at it all as an opportunity to learn, a baptism in the market. He quietly saved his money and watched what others did wrong. He saw the weaknesses in the economy that many took for granted, and how this left them all unprepared for change or shocks. He internalized an important lesson that would stay with him forever. The market was inherently unpredictable and often vicious. Only the rational and disciplined mind could hope to profit from it. Speculation led to disaster, he realized, and he needed to always ignore the mad crowd and its inclinations. Rockefeller immediately put this insight to use.

8:41At 25, a group of investors offered to invest approximately$500 ,000 at his direction if he could find the right oil wells to deploy the money in. Grateful for the opportunity, Rockefeller set out to tour the nearby oil fields. A few days later, he shocked his backers by returning to Cleveland empty-handed, not having spent or invested a dollar of the funds. The opportunity didn't feel right to him at the time, no matter how excited the rest of the market was, so he refunded the money and stayed away from drilling. It was this intense self-discipline and objectivity that allowed Rockefeller to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life.

9:18during the Civil War, the panics of 1873, 1907, and 1929. As he once put it, he was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster. To that, we could add, he had the strength to resist temptation or excitement, no matter how seductive, no matter the situation. Within 20 years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 % of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out. For the rest of his life, the greater the chaos the calmer Rockefeller would become, particularly when others around him were either panicked or mad with greed.

10:00He would make much of his fortune during these market fluctuations, because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on today in Warren Buffett's famous adage to, be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Rockefeller, like all great investors, could resist impulse in favor of cold, hard common sense. One critic, in awe of Rockefeller's empire, described the Standard Oil Trust as a mythical protein creature, capable of morphing with every attempt by the competitors of the government to dismantle it. They meant it as a criticism, but it was actually a function of Rockefeller's personality, resilient, adaptable, calm, and brilliant.

10:42He could not be rattled, not by economic crisis, not by a glittering mirage of false opportunities, not by aggressive bullying enemies, not even by federal prosecutors, for whom he was a notoriously difficult witness to cross-examine, never rising to take the bait or defend himself or get upset. Was he born this way? No, this was learned behavior, and Rockefeller got this lesson in discipline somewhere. It began in that crisis of 1857 in what he called the school of adversity and stress. He said, Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome all along the way.

11:28Of course, many people experienced the same perilous times as Rockefeller. They all attended the same school of bad times, but few reacted as he did. Not many had trained themselves to see the opportunity inside this obstacle, that what befell them was not unsalvageable misfortune but the gift of education, a chance to learn from a rare moment in economic history. You will come across obstacles in life, fair and unfair, and you will discover time and time again that what matters is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming or possibly thriving because of them.

12:09Where one person sees a crisis, another can see an opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of their emotion, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness, these reactions are functions of our perceptions. you must realize nothing makes us feel this way. We choose to give in to such feelings, or, like Rockefeller, choose not to. And it is precisely at this divergence between how Rockefeller perceived his environment and how the rest of the world typically does that his nearly incomprehensible success was born.

12:49His careful, cautious self-confidence was an incredible form of power. To perceive what others see as negative, as something to be approached rationally, clearly, and most importantly as an opportunity, not as something to fear or bemoan. Rockefeller is more than just an analogy. We live in our own gilded age. In less than a decade, we've experienced two major economic bubbles. Entire industries are crumbling. Lives have been disrupted. What feels like unfairness abounds. Financial downturns, civil unrest, adversity. People are afraid and discouraged, angry and upset, and gathered in Zuccotti Park or in communities online.

13:28As they should be, right? Not necessarily. Outward appearances are deceptive. What's within them, beneath them, is what matters. We can learn to perceive things differently, to cut through the illusions that others believe or fear. We can stop seeing the problems in front of us as problems. We can learn to focus on what things really are. Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds, that sacred place of reason, action, and will, and throw off our compass. Our brains evolve for an environment very different from the one we currently inhabit.

14:11As a result, we carry all kinds of biological baggage. Humans are still primed to detect threats and dangers that no longer exist. Think of the cold sweat when you're stressed about money or the fight-or-flight response that kicks in when your boss yells at you. Our safety is not truly at risk here. There's little danger that we will starve or that violence will break out, though it certainly feels that way sometimes. We have a choice about how we will respond to this situation, or any situation for that matter. We can be blindly led by these primal feelings, or we can understand them and learn to filter them.

14:47Discipline and perception lets you clearly see the advantage in the proper course of action in every situation, without the pestilence of panic or fear. Rockefeller understood this well and threw off the fetters of bad, destructive perceptions. He honed ability to control and channel and understand these signals. It was like a superpower. Because most people can't access this part of themselves, they are slaves to impulse and instincts they have never questioned. We can see disaster irrationally, or like Rockefeller, we can see opportunity in every disaster and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.

15:25Seeing properly everything that happens, be it an economic crash or a personal tragedy, is a chance to move forward, even if it is on a bearing that you did not anticipate. There are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We must try to be objective, to control your emotions and keep an even keel, to choose to see the good in a situation, to steady your nerves, to ignore what disturbs or limits others, to place things in perspective, to revert to the present moment, to focus on what you can control. This is how you see the opportunity within the obstacle.

16:03It does not happen on its own. It is a process, one that results from self-discipline and logic, and that logic is available to you. You just need to deploy it.

16:29We'll be right back.

16:44Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

17:16Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

18:11And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.