“Overcome to become.”

The central point to Ryan Holliday’s marquee book “The Obstacle Is The Way” is that the only path forward is through. He shares that in life, we’re going to face obstacles, roadblocks, challenges, resistance, and setbacks. We’re going to experience hardship on the way to our goals. He argues that those who are most willing to take action through the resistance achieve at the highest level, and that those willing to face off with hard things get stronger in the process.

This is a core theme in Nassim Taleb’s work on antifragility which gives something the property of getting stronger the more it’s tested. It’s like a glass cup that becomes more resistant to shattering the more you drop it.

Let’s take this concept that rings true in the outside world and bring it into our minds. Similarly we face obstacles and challenges that keep us from taking action toward our goals, but the difference here is they’re of our own making. They’re figments of the mind creating unnecessary resistance and keeping us in self-sabotaging patterns of discouragement, doubt, delay, distraction, and delusion. 

But why would the mind redirect us away from things we know we want to do? It’s because unconsciously there’s something we want even more that we're not aware of, and our mind is adamant that we get it. And that thing is safety.

The mind is resistant to doing anything new because new is uncertain... What’s uncertain is less predictable... And unpredictable is a potential threat. So our minds work very hard to keep things how they are to minimize uncertainty and keep us safe.

But as you know, if you keep doing the same things you keep getting the same results. Innovation and improvement require that you do new things, so constantly we’re fighting our mind’s bias to keep us safe as we do our best to create better results in our life. 

The silver lining is - As strong as our minds' self-sabotage might be, we are always stronger than it. We are always capable of taking action despite feelings of discouragement, doubt, delay, delusion, and distraction. We can persevere through the conditions our minds impose on us and do what’s required to take next level action.

For that very reason, that’s why I say: “We must overcome self-sabotage in order to become the best version of ourselves.” 

The obstacle is the way. The only path forward is through. And the more disciplined we can be about taking action toward our goals, the more we step into the next version of ourselves and the more unstoppable we become!

👉 If you want to learn more about self-sabotage, I’ve got a video about it here!