Books%2FThe Obstacle Is The Way

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- meta
- totally missed - “And that’s the final part: Stay moving, always.”
- Overcoming obstacles is a discipline of three critical steps. It’s three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: Perception, Action, and the Will.
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- Perception
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  - “When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?”
  - ==Does getting upset provide you with more options?==
  - Or try Marcus’s question: **Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?**
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  - Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test. —EPICTETUS
  - Give yourself clarity, not sympathy #Discipline
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  - Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn’t matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options? You could write it off, greet it calmly. **Think of all the ways that someone could solve a specific problem.**
  - Take what you’re afraid of—when fear strikes you—and break it apart. #gtd
  - Perspective is everything. That is, when you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you. Self Inquiry
- Action
  - work hard and make it look easy - @sid
  - energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource.
- Iteration
  - The old way of business—where companies guess what customers want from research and then produce those products in a lab, isolated and insulated from feedback—reflects a fear of failure and is deeply fragile in relation to it. If the highly produced product flops on launch day, all that effort was wasted.
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		  Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.
  - The key idea is to Fail Fast and Evolve. To have fast iteration speed. Learn from feedback. Pretty much what machine learning is. Neither agile in the sense of shipping shity products, counter Apple, not waterfall, being too scared to fail to never innovate
  - This is also be naturally do hypotheses testing, remeber harvard business course number example? we nullify and disconfirm to get the right answer
- The process is about finishing. Finishing games. Finishing workouts. #kaizen
- *Under the comb the tangle and the straight path are the same. —HERACLITUS*
- How often do we compromise or settle because we feel that the real solution is too ambitious or outside our grasp? #amygdala
- The process is the voice that demands we take responsibility and ownership. That prompts us to act even if only in a small way.
- Replace fear with the process. Depend on it. Lean on it. Trust in it. #systemvsgoals
- Take your time, don’t rush. Some problems are harder than others. Deal with the ones right in front of you first. Come back to the others later. You’ll get there.
- ### Highlights
- When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path.
- “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
- Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. —MARCUS AURELIUS
- If your nerve holds, then nothing really did “happen”—our perception made sure it was nothing of consequence. #storm in a tea cup
- Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. —PUBLILIUS SYRUS
- Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve.
- Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us.
- Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know. Behind the Serenity Prayer is a two-thousand-year-old Stoic phrase: “ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin.” What is up to us, what is not up to us. And what is up to us? Attention to Awareness
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  - Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.
  - But every ounce of energy directed at things we can’t actually influence is wasted—self-indulgent and self-destructive. So much power—ours, and other people’s—is frittered away in this manner. #burnout Circle of Concern
- The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. —CHUCK PALAHNIUK
- It’s a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth.
- It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head.
- Remember and remind yourself of a phrase favored by Epictetus: “persist and resist.”
  - - The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know. —MARCUS AURELIUS
- With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules.
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- the natural instinct is always to push back. But martial arts teach us that we have to ignore this impulse. We can’t push back, we have to pull until opponents lose their balance. Then we make our move.
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