GA 151 | The Obstacle Is the Way with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 151 with Ron Pereira.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today I'm going to fly solo and talk about a book that I've recently read. Actually, I read several books recently that I want to talk about eventually, but one in particular I want to kind of focus in on today is called the Obstacle Is the Way, the timeless art of turning trials into triumph. Now, it's written by a gentleman named ryan holiday, and Mr. Holiday has also written a couple other books. And the second book that I've read from Mr. Holiday is called the Ego Is the Enemy, and perhaps we'll do a follow up podcast on that one. But today I want to focus on Obstacle Is the Way. Now, this book is based on something called Stoicism or like a Stoic philosophy. Some of the most popular Stoic philosophers of our time have been Marcus Aurelius, right? This is the old man from, from Gladiator. Another famous Stoic is Epictetus and Seneca and a few of these other philosophers who, you know, walked the earth 2000 some years ago and were really teaching some pretty radical things back then. And honestly, it's pretty radical even today when you really stop to listen to what they were saying and what they were believing. So the Obstacle is a Way is really kind of focused on Marcus Aurelius. Now he talks about many other people and he got, he has tons of stories and examples to make his point throughout the book. But Marcus Aurelius definitely, I would say, is the root, if you will, of the book. And there's a famous quote that Marcus Aurelius wrote. You know, he was writing these things to himself and they've been compiled into his book called Meditations that you can, you can also purchase that as well. But this quote is the impediment to action advances action. What stands in a way becomes the way. Let me say that again. The impediment to action or the thing that's kind of stopping action. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And so what the whole gist of the book is that we can control certain aspects of our lives, namely how we react to situations. And we can control our actions and we can control how we think and how we perceive the world. Really other than that, there's not much that we do control. We can't control, you know, someone cutting us off on the highway. Right. But we can control how we react to that person cutting us off on a highway. So the book is really well written. Mr. Holliday is a fantastic author and he's broken the book up into three parts. And so what I want to do is just kind of give a high level overview of the three parts. The three parts are perception, part one, part two is action, and part three is the will. So the first one, perception. And I'm just going to, I'm going to read just a few things from the book to give you a sense for how it flows. But in part one, on page 11, it says, what is perception? It's how we see and understand what occurs around us and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or great weakness. Now, the easiest way for me to describe what perception means to me is to tell a true story. A few weeks ago, I was asked by my lovely wife to go to Kroger to pick up Perception a few items for, for dinner. Now I also had an appointment to be at, to meet some, some friends shortly after dinner. And so I was kind of under a time crunch, so I was feeling a little pressure. But Kroger's about, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes from my house. I made 10, 10 minutes from my house. And so I get to, to Kroger and I've got my list and I'm inside, I got the car and I'm walking around the store and I'm getting everything that I need. I'm struggling to find a few things. So I'm asking, I don't know where everything's at in the store like a typical guy. And finally I get everything and I'm walking my way to the, to the checkout area. And for some reason I just kind of naturally took my right hand and kind of brushed my backside a little bit and guess what? No wallet. So I was like, fantastic, here I am, I got all the grocery cart full of stuff. I'm running late. I'm going to Be late for my meeting if I don't hurry up. My wife's waiting, my kids are hungry, everything's going wrong. And no wallet. At that moment, I had really two choices. Number one, I could get mad, cuss, slam the cart, or I could just say, forgot my wallet. Got to go home and get it. Now, what I chose to do, you know, I did feel a little emotion. I did feel a little disappointment. I won't lie. I'm not this perfect, stoic man. But I did think about this book, and I thought, golly, getting upset isn't going to help the situation. It's not going to make me get my wallet any faster. If anything, it's probably going to cause me to drive like an idiot, maybe get into a car accident, and then I'm really up a creek, right? So what I decided to do was just kind of shrug my shoulders. I took the cart, I kind of put it over to the side. I actually told one of the young ladies at the checkout area, hey, I forgot my wallet. Is it okay if I leave my cart right here? I'll be right back. She's like, yeah, no problem, no problem. So got into the car, put on some music and just drove home, got my wallet. My wife laughed at me. She said, don't worry, it's okay. We're fine. Drove back, checked out, everything was fine. Dinner was fine. I made it to my meeting on time. Everything was good. So that's just one simple life example of how you can control your perception or how you react to situations. Now, what does this have to do with continuous improvement or us lean thinkers? Well, I contend it has a lot to do. So the next time that you're feeling like someone is, oh, I don't know, maybe your leadership doesn't support you the way that you think they should support you. Well, how are you going to react to that? Are you going to get all mad? Are you going to go talk about them behind their back? Or are you just going to get all negative Nancy kind of thing and just kind of woe is me? Or are you going to kind of pull yourself up and say, you know what? I know I don't have the perfect support, but at least I have a job, and at least they're allowing me to kind of perhaps, you know, try to make some things better? So forget my leader. I choose to control my reaction, and I'm going to go out and do the very best that I can. So what my challenge is to you is to think about the next time that you Come into a situation and could be anything. Maybe it's at work, maybe it's at home, maybe it's at the grocery and you forgot your wallet or your purse. Okay? I want you to practice controlling your emotions, controlling the way that you behave to that situation. When someone cuts you off on the highway, I want you to think about why wouldn't I wonder why they cut me off? Perhaps they're child sick and they're rushing to get home to be with them. Or perhaps, you know, they're having some emergency and they just gotta get to where they gotta get. We don't know. Right? But by getting upset, honking a horn, you know, flipping them off, or whatever you want to do, it's not going to help the situation. It's only going to make you upset. Okay, so that's the first thing that Holiday talks about. Now obviously he goes through a bunch of different examples and he gives some really good case studies. He talks about Rockefeller and gosh, he just talks about Hurricane Carter who was a, you know, a famous boxer who was wrongly accused of a crime. I don't know exactly when that was, but anyhow, he was locked up for a long time. And, and basically the story goes that Hurricane Carter chose to not feel like a prisoner. He chose to basically better himself and to not get defeated. And eventually, you know, they figured it out and he was released and, and everything worked out. But that was an example of where he could have despaired and he could have, you know, gone into the tank, so to speak, but he didn't. So that's the first section, our first part, which was perception. Now part two is all about action. Now for us continuous improvement folks, this is really kind of preaching to the choir. We are people of action, right? This is what we do. We problem solve. We know about pdca, we know about, you know, kind of. It's not people who are to blame, it's the process, that sort of thing. So I found this section really nice and it was a good reminder of many of the principles that we, that we talk about. And he gave some really good reminders about perseverance and about. He uses the analogy of when a, when a boat is out on the, the ocean and there's a big storm or just on water in general, the boat needs to really attack the wave head on. It can't ride along the side of the wave. So it was some really nice subtle reminders of, you know, how we continuous improvement folks needed to, you know, stay after it and, and not give up and be persistent. He does talk about Nick Saban. You know, Nick Saban is the, the, the coach for the Alabama Crimson Tide college football team. Now I'm a, as you know, a Buckeye, so I'm no big Nick Saban apologist or anything like that, but you got to give the guy credit. He knows how to win. He wins everywhere he's at, and he does a great job. Well, he actually preaches something called the process. And, and that his Alabama football team, they're going to follow the process. And a famous kind of explanation. I don't know, I think it's. Saban actually said this. He says, don't think about winning the SEC championship, which is the championship for their, their league, for folks that don't follow college football, 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. So obviously, you know, we Lean thinkers talk about everybody every day making improvements. Paul Akers 2 second lean, you know, getting after it and not being, not, not making it harder than it needs to be. Right? So those are some really nice reminders in this second part. And finally the third part of the book was really interesting to me. He talks about the will. And so let read from, from page 125 here, says, what is will? Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world. It is our final trump card. If action is what we do when we still have some agency over our situation. The will is what we depend on. When agency has all but disappeared, placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others. That's willpower. Now he goes on to, to. To give lots of great examples, but I think my favorite example in the whole book was the one he gave on Thomas Edison. So the, the story goes, and he goes through it in great detail in the book, so I'll just kind of give you the highlights here. But the story goes that Edison was returning home for dinner one evening about 5:30pm and he got home and someone charges into his house and says, thomas, Thomas, your campus is on fire. And Thomas looks at the guy, says what? He says, yeah, the buildings are burning to the ground. So alarmed, Edison obviously makes his way to the campus and he definitely acknowledges the guy was right. Everything is up in flames, all of his buildings. So all of his research all of his work, everything that, that he has as it relates to his professional career is literally burning to the ground. Well, Thomas assesses the scene and then he seeks out his son. His son, I believe, was 24 years old at the time. And when he finally found his son, he said, son, where's your mother? And his son looks at him and says, I don't know, dad. What are you talking about? He says, where's your mother? I don't know. Go find her. Edison says, she's never going to see a fire like this again. So his son is kind of in disbelief and he's looking at his dad like he's crazy. He says, what are you talking about, dad? Everything's burning to the ground. This is the worst thing that could ever happen to us. And Thomas looks at his son like a true stoic that he was, and he says, don't worry, son. We just got rid of a lot of rubbish. So the story then goes that the very next day, Edison begins to kind of rebuild his campus. And within six months, he had things kind of up and running. And really, they went on that year to basically never really miss a beat. And to make matters even worse, all the buildings were thought to have been built with this fireproof brick. So the insurance that they had didn't even come close to covering all of the, the losses that they, that they realized. So, so here was a situation to where he could have pulled up and he could have just started freaking out. He could have, you know, fallen to the ground. Why, why, why me? He could have totally despaired, but he didn't. Instead, he was truly stoic. And he just said, first of all, you said, go get your mom. She's never going to see a fire like this again. I mean, how incredible is that? But then the second step is he took action the very next day and he never looked back. He didn't. I mean, the situation was what it was. It's burning. Nothing we can do. So they rebuilt things, they got things going. But all this was made possible because of his will, because of the way that he lived his life, the way that he controlled all aspects of his life and, or did the best to control the aspects of his life that he could control, namely how he reacted to situations and his actions. So that's a high level overview of the book. I'm going to link to a really nice YouTube video that offers a really, a good explanation of the, of the, of the book. Heck, you know what, I think what I'll do is it's free. Hopefully Mr. Holiday's okay with this, but I think I'm just going to cut that little piece in right here so you can listen to it. It's a fantastic. But I definitely recommend you go out and buy the Obstacle is the way. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. So just go to gemba podcast.com and look for episode 151. You can go on Amazon or anywhere. There's an audiobook version as well, if you're into audiobooks. I use Audible for that, so we'll link to that. Ryan Holiday actually narrates it as well, so that's a cool way to to go through the book. So I'll go ahead and end my part here and we'll finish up with with Mr. Holiday kind of narrating an overview book.

Sometime in the year, about 170 AD, at night, in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of the Roman Empire, sat down to write. It may have been at dawn, the palace in Rome, or perhaps he stole a few seconds to himself during the games. When and where it was doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that this man, at the time the most powerful man in the world, he sat down to write something both to himself and for himself. And that idea, it survives to us, what he wrote. It's a pretty simple quote, but basically he said, our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. And then Marcus, he concluded with these words that are, I think, a maxim for anyone. He said, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And so this concept is critical to a philosophy known as Stoicism. It's part of an exercise in that philosophy known as turning obstacles Upside down. It's basically the premise that we don't control what happens to us, but we do control how we respond to what happens to us. And in this way, there is no such thing as a setback or a problem or an obstacle. There's simply an opportunity to do something different. Maybe not what we thought, but what we needed or not, maybe what we would have preferred, but still good enough to work with. And so this is a philosophical idea, of course, but it's also a recipe for entrepreneurship, for personal happiness, for navigating a world that is inherently unpredictable. It's a philosophy for self Made individuals for resilient and robust individuals, people who understand that they don't control these outside forces, but they do control their internal forces. And so the book for me, is the idea of taking this ancient philosophy that is both timeless and modern at the same time and illustrating it with historical stories, whether we're talking Thomas Edison or Ulysses S. Grant or Amelia Earhart or Gandhi. Erwin Rommel, the German general to Demosthenes, the Athenian orator. John D. Rockefeller is another story I tell in the book, Even Steve Jobs. I'm looking at great men and women who throughout history have responded to problems and obstacle and adversity, some great and some small. But they've all responded to it in the same way, which is that they used it as an opportunity. In fact, it was these difficulties that made those people great. And so, look, all of us, we have something in front of us. We have an obstacle, an issue, a frustration, an unexpected problem. Or if we're not encountering it right now, we will in the future. Well, what if that thing wasn't so bad? What if embedded inside of it were certain benefits, Benefits for just you? What would you do if that was your attitude? How much better would you be? And the reality is, most of us, when we're faced with problems, we are paralyzed, we're stuck. We say, this is unfair. I don't want it to be this way. We look to blame someone. We look to investigate what caused it, instead of dealing with the actual thing that's right in front of us. And so, of course, we have fear and frustration and confusion and helplessness and depression and anger, because those are the only emotions. Those are the emotions that we've enabled and allowed ourselves to have. And what the Stoics do, and what I've broken this book down, is they sort of break the philosophy down into these three very important disciplines. The first discipline is perception. That's how you see the problem. If you decide to see it as horrible or unfair or insurmountable, it in many ways will be those things. That's not to say that stoicism is the secret, and how you see things magically makes them that way. We're still going to have to get into action, which is the next discipline. But the story you tell yourself about a thing has a great impact on what that thing actually will be for you. And so next, if you've told yourself that this thing, although problematic and unfortunate and upsetting, or maybe not even upsetting, that it is what it is, but that you can in fact do something about it, what's next is to do something about it. So that leads to the discipline of action. That's the desire to actually take action, to do something about your problem, to respond to it with creativity and with persistence and with some. Some ingenuity with using what you have to the best of your ability. These are the sort of the Stoicism in action, right? And then the final part, that's. That's what we control about a given problem, right? Is the action we take about it. And then the sort of final third of the book is probably my favorite. This is the discipline of the will. Now, the will is looking at the parts of the things that we don't control, right? We don't control that we're all going to die. We don't control that people might try to hurt us in life or they might try to screw us over. We don't control the fact that not only will that happen, but we're not always going to be prepared for it. So what do we do about that, right? So the discipline of the will is sort of building that inner fortitude, that strength. That's understanding our own mortality. That's understanding that there are things that are bigger than us, and there has to be causes bigger than us that we dedicate ourselves to. There's this great Stoic concept, amor fati, which in Latin means a love of fate. And the Stoics were about accepting and embracing and loving. What happened to them, even if it was bad. I tell the story of Thomas Edison. His factory burned down, and his words to his son were, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. What he was saying is like, look, crying about it isn't going to do anything, but I can at least enjoy it. And then the next day I can get back to work and I can do something about it. And that's, in fact, sort of exactly what he did. And so Stoicism is this idea that in everything that happens to us, there's a chance to practice excellence, to practice virtue, to encourage, improve our position in life. And this is an idea that is both very Western and very Eastern, right? There's also the Eastern saying, the Zen proverb, the obstacle is the path. And so the book is me combining these ideas. It's embracing, as Benjamin Franklin said, the things which hurt instruct, and focusing on, instead of, how do we reduce adversity and obstacles in our life? How do we figure out how to take advantage of it? How do we learn how to seize the events that paralyze everyone else. And so I thought maybe I'd end. There's a. There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius again that I think embodies the ideas in the book quite well. He said, objective judgment. Now, at this very moment, unselfish action, now, at this very moment, willing acceptance now, at this very moment, of all external events. That's all you need. And so that is stoicism in a nutshell, right? That's the three ideas, the discipline of perception, action and will. And that's a recipe for greatness in whatever it is that someone's doing. It's this sort of stoic optimism. It's how you turn what's in the way into the way. And that's the attitude I've tried to live my life by. Because the people that I admire and the people that I respect and the people who have done great things throughout history, that's how they live their lives.

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