How to face off obstacle

The Stoicism is your powerful tools

The main message of this book, at least the one it left to me, is “How to turn obstacle in your favor with stoicism”. The author Ryan Holiday (pretty good surname eh?) starts each chapter with a quote or a life example of one of the big people in the past like Marus Aurelius, Seneca, Nitche and so on.

The main example of the book, at least the one I appreciated the most, is referred to Markus Aurelius. At his time this man was the powerful man in the world and he wrote a pretty simple quote

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 owns purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Basically, this is the main concept of Stoicism. With this kind of philosophy you turn the obstacle upside-down. Basically we don’t control what happens to us, but we do control how we respond to what happens to us.

If you read it with attention you can notice that when you think in that way, there is no such thing as setback, problem, obstacle. There is simply an opportunity. Maybe that opportunity may not be the one you want but it will the one you need, for sure.

This kind of mindset is the receipt of entrepreneurship, personal happiness. It is also a philosophy to develop your resilience and for people that want to develop their internal forces.

But wait a minute, why am I talking about it ?

Because I noticed that that mindset could work! These concepts persuade me to see my problems and obstacle like opportunities.

???? Problem: I want to read more.

????Opportunity: I can search a way that it is under my control to read more.

????Problem: All of the audiobook I am searching for are in english and this is a problem because it is a foreign language and I have difficult to understand it if I don’t concentrate on it a lot.

????Opportunity: Is it a real problem? I mean, I can study and concentrate and listen and do whatever it is under my control in order to understand the audiobook.

Ok maybe they are little example but they can help you to understand how with your resilience you can turn the problem in an opportunity that make you a better version of yourself.

All of us have something to face off. We have obstacle, issues, frustration, unexpected problems.

What if that thing wasn’t so bad ? How do we can transform that issue in something else ?

We can use 3 tools of Stoicism mindset.

1. Perception

This is how do you see the problem. If you decide to see the problem as horrible, unfair or insurmountable you automatically tell yourself that you can’t do anything and you shut down your will. Instead you can tell yourself that this thing it is what it is. In that way you can in fact have a chance to do something about it.

2. Action

When you accept the problem as it is you can allow your self to do something about it and take action. That’s desire empower your creativity, persistence and whatever are your abilities, to respond to the problem. That is what we can control. We can make actions to overcome the problem. But most of the times we have also something we can’t control.

3. Will

When we’re talking about the will we’re looking at the part of the things we don’t control. We can’t control when we’re all going to die, we don’t control the people that might try to hurt us in life. We don’t control that we are not prepared for what can happen next. So, what do we do about that ? 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.

For all of these there is this great stoic concept described in the book : AMOR FATI. In latin it means “a love of fate” and the Stoics were about accepting and embracing and loving what happened to them even if it was bad.

So, stoicism is this idea that in everything that happens to us there’s a chance to practice excellence, virtue, patience, to improve our position in life. This is an idea that is both very Western and very Eastern.

So the next time you see and obstacle don’t say

How do we reduce adversity and obstacle ? ????

Say instead:

How do we figure out how to take advantage of it ? ????

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