Find Bumps
One of the central themes of stoicism is the idea of the obstacle being the way.
This is not an easy thing to do.
It’s easy to say when talking about philosophy.
It’s easy to say a lot of cool things when talking about philosophy.
All without really knowing what you’re talking about.
Say you watch a pretty interesting lecture or video.
The guy is pretty charismatic.
The video is well put together.
A lot of cool images and sounds.
Made like high quality entertainment.
Images changing every couple of seconds.
Cool sounds.
A very pleasant experience.
So you extract a few really cool, really inspiring sounding phrases.
And then you go on with your day.
Instant Expert
And find yourself watching another similar video, or having a conversation.
And you say those phrases that you heard in the video.
Between the initial viewing, and the second you dropped those phrases, either in the comments of another video or within a conversation, you lived your live EXACTLY as you normally do.
Yet you say those phrases as if you’ve discovered them.
Which you have.
You discovered them in a video that was specifically designed to be “entertaining.”
Or “info-taining.”
This is how most people process non-work-related ideas.
We hear cool things.
Then we later say those cool things.
Objective View
But very, very few people actually EXPERIENCE those cool things.
Most of the time, we pretty much copy and paste cool sounding phrases.
So, what does that actually MEAN?
That the “obstacle is the way?”
Say you are eyeing a cutie across the room.
You think of something to say.
You walk over, spit out your best attempt, and she smiles.
But she only smiles politely.
You ask for the number and she blows you off.
It sucks.
But after a few minutes, after you walk back to your side of the room, you start to feel pretty good.
Good because of the adrenalin.
And later, once the adrenalin wears off, you still feel kind of good for trying.
Then maybe a day or two later, you start to think about the event with much more clarity.
You are no longer emotionally attached to the event.
Improvement Style
You think of maybe how you messed up.
Maybe you started off too strong.
Maybe you approached too late, after the flirty eye contact.
Maybe she said something that you COULD have turned into something.
So you start to think about NEXT TIME.
This happens with every single “obstacle.”
Every time you try something and it DOESN’T work out.
A couple of days later, you’ll remember the event but WITHOUT the emotions.
Only the data.
Every single time you fail, you get more data.
This is a NATURAL FUNCTION of your brain.
You don’t need to remember to do this.
This is how humans have been learning since the dawn of time.
The statement “the obstacle is the way” is absolutely useless UNLESS you go out and FIND OBSTACLES.
Try, fail, get data, try again.
Getting better every single time.
This is difficult.
Which is why most people are content to copy and paste cool sounding ideas without having a clue what they really mean.
What about you?
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