The book "The Obstacle is the Way" by Ryan Holiday serves as a great reminder that there are a lot of external factors that could happen in our lives which are way beyond our control.
Promises aren’t kept.
You don’t always get what is rightfully yours, even if you earned it.
Not everything is as clean and straightforward as the games they play in business school.
A technique to prepare oneself to be able to deal with life's challenges is to anticipate the range of potential outcomes even before something happens. Holiday shares:
... the person who has rehearsed in their mind what could go wrong will not be caught by surprise. The person ready to be disappointed won’t be. They will have the strength to bear it. They are not as likely to get discouraged or to shirk from the task that lies before them, or make a mistake in the face of it...
It doesn’t always feel that way but constraints in life are a good thing. Especially if we can accept them and let them direct us. They push us to places and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued.
Would we rather have everything? Sure, but that isn’t up to us....
You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition...
After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t, and the break comes down to something you don’t control . . . you’ve got only one option: acceptance.
But Holiday emphasizes that acceptance is not the same thing as giving up. Acceptance is making the best of external events that have come our way and allowing these events to teach us lessons we would have been reluctant to learn otherwise and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued.
Holiday's example to illustrate acceptance is an incident in Thomas Edison's life. Here are excerpts from the book:
At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away.
"Go get your mother and all her friends", he told his son with childlike excitement. "They’ll never see a fire like this again."
You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition...
After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t, and the break comes down to something you don’t control . . . you’ve got only one option: acceptance.
But Holiday emphasizes that acceptance is not the same thing as giving up. Acceptance is making the best of external events that have come our way and allowing these events to teach us lessons we would have been reluctant to learn otherwise and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued.
Holiday's example to illustrate acceptance is an incident in Thomas Edison's life. Here are excerpts from the book:
 |
| Thomas Edison Source |
At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away.
"Go get your mother and all her friends", he told his son with childlike excitement. "They’ll never see a fire like this again."
"What?!"
"Don’t worry", Edison calmed him. "It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish."
That’s a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about it, there really was no other response. What should Edison have done? Wept? Gotten angry? Quit and gone home? What, exactly, would that have accomplished? You know the answer now: nothing.
To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad.
Of course, there was more than just a little rubbish in Edison’s buildings. Years and years of priceless records, prototypes, and research were turned to ash.
Within about three weeks, the factory was partially back up and running. Within a month, its men were working two shifts a day churning out new products the world had never seen. Despite a loss of almost $1 million dollars (more than $23 million in today’s dollars), Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly $10 million dollars in revenue that year ($200-plus million today). He not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it spectacularly.
This is the first time I heard about this story on Thomas Edison. Imagine, while his lab was being eaten by flames, his reaction was - "you'll never see a fire like this...", "we've just got rid of a lot of rubbish...". 😮
All of this happened when he was 67 (past the retirement age). And it happened in 1914, an era where digital and cloud-based back-ups didn't exist. There was no way to retrieve several years of research and prototypes other than to start from scratch. Edison could just have decided to give up, close shop and live a quiet life. But nope, he bounced back and did even greater things. 💪
