Chad Silverstein argues obstacles force growth, citing his experience pivoting a call center to remote work after signing a lease weeks before Covid. He recommends The Obstacle is the Way and uses the lobster metaphor: you need pressure to shed your shell and expand.
Chapters
Check him into practice one day and he told me to go get the book the Obstacle is the Way. And it's such a good book, highly recommended. And this kind of piggybacks on to yesterday, which is that you have to have a mindset if you want to be a high performer and you want to be a strong leader, that all the challenges that you have, all the obstacles that you, you know, kind of stop you in your tracks, the hurdles that you need to jump over, and all the different orange barrels that you need to maneuver around, they're all designed to help you grow. And understanding that mindset and then looking back and then finding proof of it in your life will help you react and respond to obstacles that you're going to be up against. And so you have to respond properly by preloading in how you're going to respond when you have bad news given to you, when a big client leaves, when something happens like, you know, a new employee doesn't show up so that you don't react and get angry and throw a temper, you know, and you also have to know how to react when you're not prepared because you haven't thought about something and it was an unknown that came out of left field and you weren't expecting it. And we have examples of like this all the time. I mean, I remember when Covid hit and I had just moved into a 20,000 square foot office. I signed a 10 year lease and within three weeks Covid hit and we, a month in, we sent everybody home. And as a call center, that was a big deal. I wasn't prepared for that. I wasn't prepared to like pour my, my heart and soul into building an office that I was going to be in for the next decade. It took a year and then send everybody home and set up everybody up from working at their home desk. So you have to be prepared and you have to, you have to know and have to have a mindset that those obstacles are going to make you better. Because the fact is, when we adjusted our workflow, when we figured out how to work remote, when we upgraded our technology so that people can work from home, we got better. And we saw how strong we became because we were able to adapt when other companies closed their doors, went out of business. So those obstacles, the challenges, the ones you're facing right now, they serve a purpose for you. And again, all you have to do is look back and figure out which ones in your life that at the time seemed like they were crushing you and now they were a blessing in disguise. You know, they say a lobster, the way that they break out of their shell is when they're growing, they go behind a rock and then they bust out and they have such constriction, and they bust it. And that allows them to grow and then grow a new shell. But that being suffocated is what helped them grow out of it. So there's something to be said about pain and suffering and embrac and having some hope that what you're going through, whether you can understand it or not, is going to be actually the obstacle that helps you get to where you're going. And, you know, again, for me, when I look back, almost every hard thing I've ever gone through led to whatever was coming next. And it was all perfect. I didn't like it didn't feel so good at the time, but I can see the clarity now. So I need to use that, and you need to use that as the means that the next time or right now, as you're going through hard stuff, understanding that that's going to help you get to that next level. And hopefully you'll see it one day. And sometimes you won't. But that doesn't mean that it's not going to be a good thing. At some point, you might realize it and, you know, you just have to embrace it.
