Overcoming Obstacles and Doing Hard Things

Overcoming Obstacles and Doing Hard Things
by Charlie Smith

I bought a fancy Garmin running watch. It is full of sports-related bells and whistles. It also has a heavy “nanny” component. The watch rates my sleep patterns and monitors other health data. Apparently, driving and other daily habits give me great stress. The second time my watch began buzzing about an “unusually high heart rate,” while I was calmly grocery shopping in the frozen-food section, I finally took matters into my own hands and shut it down. Still, this has led to some questions: What causes stress? What is my figurative Achilles heel? Does it feel as if things are happening out of my control and obstacles are constantly appearing?

I’ve found some answers with a book called The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. He uses examples of historic and contemporary figures who perceived obstacles or even tragedies as opportunities and achieved success by pragmatic action in the face of overwhelming odds. At age 67, Thomas Edison received an urgent message that his research and production campus was burning down. Upon arriving at the scene and finding that his son was safe, his response caught everyone off guard: “Go get your mother and all of her friends,” Edison said. “They’ll never see another fire like this again.” With his son astonished at his father’s reaction, Edison reassured him: “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.” The lesson: Even from the most difficult of situations, hope and new life can emerge.

The title of the book comes from a quote from Marcus Aurelius, In the book, Holiday, a follower of Stoicism, tells this parable: There was once a king who was frustrated that his people had grown complacent. He decided to test the people, placing a large boulder to block the main road leading to the city. The king watched with disappointment as person after person approached the boulder. Some tried to move it and gave up. Others whined and blamed the king for not taking care of the problem for them. Finally, a peasant came along, needing to get his cart full of vegetables into the city. He tried to push the boulder, but it didn’t budget. The man wouldn’t give up, running to the forest to retrieve a large branch he could use as a lever to pry the rock and remove it from the road. And he found a surprise – the king had left a sack of gold coins and note reading: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path.”

             Among other ideas, Holiday explains the seemingly contradictory Power of Negative Thinking through anticipation with the “premortem” concept, in which prior to a campaign or project, groups meet to discuss theories of why the plan might have failed. Those reasons, enumerated beforehand, then may help avoid pitfalls before they occur. According to Holiday, when faced with an obstacle, people might quit, or spend energy complaining about it. Leaders and innovators find a way around, over, or through the obstacle, often achieving greater success than they would have otherwise.

Another book that plumbs the depths of Stoicism is Do Hard Things by Steve Magness. The book answers this question: How do you handle uncertain, stressful and high-pressured situations? Magness suggests that many of our conventional notions are wrong. He says that toughness isn’t created by making people grind, by making them show they can handle long hours, and immense workloads. They aren’t molded via a hard, demanding leadership style that is meant to instill discipline, but research shows do anything but that. Resilient teams don’t come from demandingness or control. They don’t come from throwing people into the deep end of the pool and seeing if they can swim.

Instead, Magness says, tough and resilient teams come from leaders who are decent human beings. From supporting, creating an environment where people feel like they can take risks without fear of punishment. From creating cohesion through genuine connection. From letting go, and making people feel like they have a voice and can positively impact the trajectory of the company. Magness says that people perform best under highly stressful situations when they are challenged, not threatened. The key to creating teams that can navigate a chaotic and uncertain world isn’t through control and power, Magness says. It comes from fulfilling people’s basic psychological needs. Hire good people, coach them up, and put them in a place where they feel secure, so that they can play to win, instead of not to lose.

In my quiet, relaxed time, after I finish my meditations and yoga, practicing deep breathings, I am reading parts of both books to my watch. I hope it is learning its lesson.