# The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday: 3 Ideas I Use Now

> Source: [https://icharles.com/articles/the-obstacle-is-the-way-by-ryan-holiday-3-ideas-i-use-now](https://icharles.com/articles/the-obstacle-is-the-way-by-ryan-holiday-3-ideas-i-use-now) (canonical)
> Author: Chuck — iCharles, https://icharles.com
> Published: 2015-12-02 · Updated: 2026-07-07

I found Ryan Holiday on YouTube, not in a bookstore. The guy is 27, already has two bestsellers, and reads a book a day. That last part alone made me want to see what he'd written. The Obstacle Is The Way is his third book, and it's built around one line from Marcus Aurelius: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Whatever's blocking you isn't separate from the work. It is the work. Holiday breaks that idea into three parts — perception, action, will — and all three changed something about how I operate.

## Perception decides what your obstacle actually is

The same event happens to two people and becomes two different stories, depending on the lens. Holiday's example is the recession: people with capital saw it as the moment to buy businesses cheap and expand while everyone else panicked. Same recession. One person calls it an opportunity, the other calls it a crisis. The obstacle didn't change. The perception did.

There's a section maybe 20 pages in that hit me harder than anything else in the book. For most of human history — up until around the year 1000 — you died from something external: disease, war, starvation, a murderer. Now most of us die from something internal, something we did to ourselves over decades. Holiday ties this to a Les Brown idea: we live until 20, then spend the next 50 years getting buried. We take risks, push limits, and grow like crazy until 20 — and then a lot of people just stop. Stop learning, stop challenging themselves, stop expanding. I don't want to be one of the people who peaked at 20 and coasted.

The practical version of this section is simple: control your emotions, and practice objectivity. Something goes wrong — a deal falls apart, a stock drops 50%, someone you're counting on quits — and the instinct is to get angry. Anger does nothing. The move is to remove yourself emotionally and psychologically from the situation and ask one question: what can I actually do right now.

## Action is just consistency, repeated

Part two is about doing the thing. Not planning it, not perfecting it — doing it. This is my mantra for this year: consistency. Consistency going to the gym. Consistency making the sales calls. Consistency waking up at the same time and eating right. None of that is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Holiday brings in Seth Godin's "just ship it" idea here, and I'm reading a book right now called Bold that has the LinkedIn founder saying something close to it: if you're not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late. I think about that every time I want to hold something back one more week to polish it. It will never be perfect. Send it.

## Will is what survives when the first two run out

Part three is willpower — your discipline of will. Holiday points to Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct here, which I'd now recommend on its own. But the idea that stuck with me most is this: do it for something bigger than yourself.

I heard almost this exact line at a business conference once, and it stopped me. I own a business in New York City, and for a long time I thought about it as mine — which, as Holiday frames it, is a selfish way to hold it. If you're only doing this for yourself, you live and die by the sword. Fail, and it's your identity that failed. But if you're doing it for your kids, your parents, your team, some group beyond you — you'll wake up earlier, make the extra call, push harder, because it's not just about you anymore. That's the same territory Steven Pressfield covers in The War of Art, and I think the two books make a good pair.

## Who should read this

Anyone running a business, training for something hard, or just stuck feeling like life is happening to them instead of through them. It's short, it's built on real historical figures who actually faced this stuff, and it gives you a three-part filter — perception, action, will — you can run any setback through. I've already started running mine through it.