The Obstacle Is The Way
You do not control what happened; you control what it draws out of you.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 96%
Holiday's best-known model, taken from Marcus Aurelius: the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way. It is not the claim that bad events are secretly good. It is the claim that once the bad thing has happened, denying it or panicking about it spends energy on the one part you cannot change, while the situation itself presents a set of choices about who you are going to be. The method is to accept the fact, refuse both paralysis and hysteria, and route all remaining energy into the controllable part of the response. Each time you do it, you bank a rep that makes the next crisis less novel.
Origin
From Marcus Aurelius's line in Meditations, which Holiday says he has considered tattooing on his arm, and which became the title of his book after he noticed the same pattern in how effective people behave in crises.
Core principles
- 01We do not control what happens; we control how we respond to what happens.
- 02The event being unfair, painful and not your fault does not change what is now required.
- 03Denial and panic both spend energy on the uncontrollable part.
- 04Crises are reps; people who handle them well have usually been in burning rooms before.
- 05Learn the lesson earlier and cheaper rather than later and calamitously.
How to run it
- 1
Concede the fact without relitigating it
State plainly that the thing happened, that it is painful and that it was not your fault. Do not deny the reality of the burning room, and do not spend the next hour on whether it should have happened.
Watch out Skipping this step produces denial dressed up as positivity, which Holiday explicitly says is not what the model means.
- 2
Refuse both paralysis and hysteria
Identify which failure mode you default to. One person freezes and says nothing; another screams that everyone is going to die. Neither moves anyone toward the exit.
Pro tip Naming your default mode in advance makes it easier to catch in the moment.
- 3
Redirect energy to the controllable part
You are aware the room is on fire. Spend your attention on getting yourself, and then other people, out of it. Ask what is actually in your power in the next hour.
Pro tip The practical version is often mundane: the call you have to make, the money you have to raise, the person you have to let go.
- 4
Ask what opportunity it presents and who it makes you
With the fact accepted, ask what this situation draws out of you: where you can step up, grow, be there for other people, or demonstrate the virtues in a crisis.
Pro tip Extend the analogy: beyond the person who escapes, there is the person who helps the others escape.
Watch out This is not the claim that the tragedy was good for you. Holiday is explicit that it is not.
- 5
Bank it as a rep
Tell yourself during the difficulty that this is practice, and afterwards take from it an updated sense of your capacities, which are almost always greater than you assumed.
Pro tip Seneca's version: the person who has not been tested does not know what they can do.
Watch out The failure mode is emerging more fragile and avoiding every environment where it could recur.
In the wild
Holiday sorts responses to a burning room into types. Person A is paralysed with fear and says nothing. Person B screams that everyone is going to die. Person C already knows the room is on fire, does not need to announce it, and is totally focused on getting out. Bartlett adds a fourth who helps the others out.
→ Only C and D change the outcome, and the difference is not the facts available to them but where they spend their energy.
Holiday points out that a person asked in March 2020 whether they could survive three years of pandemic, millions of deaths, shutdowns, political unrest, supply chain crises and universal remote work would have said it would destroy them. They survived it anyway, because it did not arrive at once; it came one thing after another and they adjusted and adapted as they went.
→ The survivors emerged with direct evidence that their capacities were greater than their own forecast.
Jobs's time in the wilderness begins with being fired from Apple, forcing him to start other companies and to look in the mirror and ask how he got fired from his own company. Holiday notes there were many earlier moments, a tough meeting or an investor laying out the issues to his face, where the same lesson was available far more cheaply.
→ He returned with greater purpose, clarity and skill, but paid the expensive price for a lesson that was on offer earlier.
Common mistakes
Hearing it as toxic positivity
The model does not say a bereavement is great for your business or that the fire is wonderful. Misreading it that way makes it both offensive and useless, and Holiday rejects the reading directly.
Emerging more fragile than you went in
If one horrific experience leads you to avoid every circumstance where something like it could happen again, you have taken the pain without the adaptation and made yourself weaker for it.
Announcing the problem instead of solving it
Screaming that the room is on fire feels like action and communicates nothing the others do not already know. It converts urgency into noise.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, leaders and anyone facing a crisis they did not cause, who need a way to act while the situation is still unresolved.
Not ideal for
Fresh acute grief, where the demand to find the opportunity lands as pressure rather than help; and people who use it to skip the acceptance step entirely.
From the transcript
“the impediment to action advances action it stands in the way becomes the way”
“it's not that it's great that the room is on fire it's that the room being on fire presents you a set of choices”
“to me the essence of stoicism is the idea that we don't control what has happened but we control how we respond to what happens”
“this is practice this is reps right like I am going to emerge out of the other side of this a person who has been…”
From the episode
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