Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) The Obstacle Is The Way | The Discipline of Perception About this episode The Obstacle Is the Way has become a cult classic, beloved by men and women around the world who apply its wisdom to become more successful at whatever they do. In this episode of the podcast, Ryan reminds us to revert to the present moment by focusing on what we can control. This is how we see the opportunity within the obstacle and that results from self discipline and logic. Get The Obstacle Is The Way from The Painted Porch BookstoreGet a signed copy of the special leatherbound edition of The Obstacle Is The Way from the Daily Stoic Store✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Ryan Holiday? Welcome 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,
0:50 Ryan Holiday? and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.
0:57 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think I've mentioned this, I'm in the middle now of redoing The Obstacle is the Way. It's the 10-year anniversary. 2024 is the 10-year anniversary of The Obstacle is the Way. 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. I 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.
1:42 Ryan Holiday? 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 Obstacle is the Way. 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. I'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
2:27 Ryan Holiday? 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. You can get, of course, get The Obstacle's Way 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.
3:34 Speaker 01 The Discipline of Perception.
3:38 Speaker 01 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. The result was a crippling national depression that lasted for several years.
4:22 Speaker 01 Rockefeller could have gotten scared. Fear 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. Almost 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.
5:07 Speaker 01 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. At 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.
5:48 Speaker 01 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. During 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."
6:31 Speaker 01 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. He 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, quote, "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.
7:16 Speaker 01 One critic, in awe of Rockefeller's empire, described the Standard Oil Trust as "a mythical protean creature, capable of morphing with every attempt by the competitors or 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. He 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.
8:01 Speaker 01 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." Of 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.
8:43 Speaker 01 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. Where 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.
9:26 Speaker 01 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. His 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, and less than a decade, we've experienced two major economic bubbles. Entire industries are crumbling, lives have been disrupted.
10:10 Speaker 01 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, as 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.
10:52 Speaker 01 Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds, that sacred place of reason, action, and will, and throw off our compass. Our brains evolved for an environment very different from the one we currently inhabit. As 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.
11:34 Speaker 01 We can be blindly led by these primal feelings, or we can understand them and learn to filter them. Discipline 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 rationally, or like Rockefeller, we can see opportunity in every disaster and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.
12:19 Speaker 01 Seen 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. It does not happen on its own. It is a process, one that results from self-discipline and logic.
13:02 Speaker 01 And that logic is available to you. You just need to deploy it.
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