What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Sam Powell, Zach Elliott, Tom Schweizer, Dennis LaRue, and Michelle King.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
118-The Obstacle Is The Way: Part 2, Episode 4; Whats Right, What Works
We explore two key chapters from Ryan Holiday's "The Obstacle is the Way" about taking action when faced with obstacles through creative problem-solving and finding alternative paths forward.
• Discussing how "what's right is what works" encourages flexible, goal-oriented thinking over rigid adherence to conventional methods
• Exploring Marcus Aurelius's simple wisdom: "The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out" as a guide to avoiding unnecessary complications
• Sharing real-life examples of finding creative solutions to roadblocks, including Denise's Disney trip detour story
• Examining the concept of the "flank attack" - approaching problems from unexpected angles rather than head-on confrontation
• Highlighting how George Washington's unconventional military tactics demonstrate the power of strategic thinking over brute force
• Looking at how successful businesses often use "side door strategies" to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles
• Reflecting on how sometimes the longest way around can be the shortest way home when obstacles are approached creatively
Join us next week as we continue exploring Holiday's book, focusing on using obstacles against themselves and effectively channeling our energy.
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Welcome to what's on your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves, with your host, denise Russo, and Sam Powell. Hi everyone, Welcome back to another episode of what's on your Bookshelf. This is our life and leadership podcast, where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. My name is Denise Russo, I'm here with my friend, sam Powell, and together we are going through a book called the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. This is a great little book about how do you turn your trials into triumphs in life. It's broken up into three parts. The first part was about our perceptions about things, and now we're in part two, which is about how we take action on the way we think about certain things, and the first part of our episode today is about how. What's right is what works. I'm looking forward to diving into that with you today. Sam, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Yeah, I'm definitely interested in this. This, to me, these, these two chapters in this section, are really about, to me, being creative in your approach. Right, I think last time was more about like you know this system and doing the right thing and kind of like. That felt more like steady movement forward. This is more of the like let's be, let's figure it out, let's make it work. Let's you know, let's, uh, you know, let's just kind of take a more direct but in a creative way approach I think so too too.
Speaker 1:So I really like how, in my book, he starts with another Marcus Aurelius quote. That really simplified for me what this chapter is, and I had to read it a couple times to see how it applied to my life today, because this is an author from you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, right? So it says the cucumber is bitter ago. Right, so it says the cucumber is bitter, then throw it out. There's brambles in the path. Then go around. That's all you need to know. And I was like, is it really that simple? Like something bad is happening. Well then move around it or ignore it or throw the thing away.
Speaker 1:And I struggle with this myself at home because I'll have something like, let's say, a leftover in the refrigerator. I just won't want to get rid of it because I paid a lot of money for it the first time around. But he makes it pretty clear, like, if you don't like it, if you haven't already eaten it, if it's something on your desk that you're not going to use, if there's something in your way that you bought a long time ago that you thought would help you do something at work and it just isn't, then why are you keeping it? Get rid of it, throw it out, go around the obstacle. If it's that simple, is it that simple?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that that's the thing we always miss, right. Sometimes the right path is just the very simple thing in front of you, and I love the story this chapter started out with, with the two companies trying to buy land to like farm bananas, essentially and the problem was is that two different people claimed to have owned the property. Like two people had deeds, they both claimed to have rights to it, and the one company fighting for it was this huge, like one of the biggest, like food producer companies, and the other one was like a smaller, a smaller company. And so the big guns went in the way you would think they would. They hired all the lawyers, the lawyers went and did all the research and they're trying to figure out. You know what's going on.
Speaker 2:The other guy he just went and sat and talked to the two people and said, hey, can I buy both of your? Can I buy the property from both of you? Like sure, he paid more, but he won, he owned the property, like at the end of the day, it was just this, like the choice was obvious. Go talk to the two guys. Like don't try to like sort it out and take the super complicated path. And you, you know it's like quote, unquote, right, right, let's figure out who the correct owner is and do whatever it's like no one of them is the correct owner, so let's just buy them both out, like I. Just there was something about this story that was like duh, I and I like. It got me thinking like how many places in my life am I doing this? I'm sitting here trying to design this perfect thing, trying to like do all the right things, when it's like, yeah, how about I just cut through this path and that actually is the way.
Speaker 1:Have you ever seen this TV show that's out right now called Tulsa King, with Sylvester Stallone? No, oh, you got to go watch it. So if you have, paramount Plus, I think is where the show is on streaming. And he is the epitome of this entire chapter. And now he's cunning. Okay, he just spent like two decades in prison. He's a gangster, he was in the mafia. He gets displaced and sent to Tulsa, oklahoma, because they're trying to just kind of get rid of him, but he ends up building like an empire there, and the story of the banana farmers is almost identical to what happens in season two of this television show, and so I don't want to give spoilers if there's people watching the show, except to say that this chapter, which is about looking at things like any way that works, is the right way Now, within reason, not breaking the law and not doing some of the things that the show does, because it's still about a gangster and it's about drugs and it's about the mafia.
Speaker 1:But but the principles of this chapter, which is there was this mega rich guy who owned lots of property and had lots of farmers, was competing against him and he had no staff, he had no knowledge or awareness of the industry. All he had was his wits and sort of street smarts, and that's what ended up making him be successful. And so the book says that once you get started on something, and as long as the conditions are right, you don't have to wait for everything to be perfect. You don't have to wait for everything to be exactly how you expect or want to be. You just have to get started.
Speaker 1:And the author says it's better to focus on making do with what you've got. It doesn't have to be pretty, and so the idea has to be. I think in this section, which is about action, is what is your actual goal? So in this case, the goal was to create these farms with the bananas, but they got stuck and they thought their goal no longer was that. Their goal was to create these farms with the bananas, but they got stuck and they thought their goal no longer was that. Their goal was like competing against each other, and that wasn't the goal. And the goal of competing against each other was preventing the ultimate real goal, which was being able to own the property, to have the bananas to sell to the people, to make a profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is why, like as a coach, I always focus on what is the goal right. Like what's the goal of the session, what is the ultimate goal of this whole coaching engagement? Like, what are we trying to accomplish? Because we inevitably get off track, right, Every single one of my clients is going to go on some random story that you know feels strong, it feels like it's part of it and it's like, yeah, but what about? How does that fit into what you're trying to accomplish? And then it's like, oh, okay, nevermind, Right, Like we'll just, we'll just move on into, you know, into into this and it's and it's that focus on what's the goal right.
Speaker 2:The goal is to sell bananas, not figure out who the rightful owner of this property is. It's one of them, so like it doesn't really matter. And like the same, the same company, same story there was. He kind of goes on to talk about how it was illegal to build a bridge across the river, and so the guy didn't build a bridge, he bought two large barges that stick out and then a little thing that could be like put in between them and taken down. So like it was never a bridge right, it was like just kind of playing with those rules and, like one of my favorite sayings, one of my mottos for life is actually from the show Whose Line Is it? Anyways, it's an improv show and it's the rules are made up and the points don't matter. And this is exactly that is exactly what I mean. What? Every time I say that when somebody is like, oh, I have to do this or I'm supposed to do this, and it's like, yeah, those rules, like someone just made those rules up.
Speaker 1:We're just going along with them.
Speaker 2:You don't really have to follow them. Right, we're not violating anything by taking a different path. Right, we're still staying. We're not harming anyone, we're not doing anything that's, you know, detrimental to you know, the greater good. Here we're just being creative with how we get from point A to point B.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the point B part, which is the finish line, may not be the goal. The goal is how to get to B right, because there's a lot of ways that you could get from A to B. The other day I was I was coming home from. Well, let me back up to why I was going to where I was going. So the plan was to go to Disney world and just spend the day and walk around, and that's just something that I like to do because I can get exercise and I live close by so many people would like love that life PSI track.
Speaker 2:I know so many people would like love that life psi track. I know so many people that it's like they love disney and it's like disney's an event because we live far away from it, you're like I think this afternoon I may go stroll the park like something like funny about it.
Speaker 1:I've crafted my life to be able to do that. I live right between a beach and right between disney world and so, and so that's part of the intention I crafted to live where I live. So I went to Disney. Well, the plan was to go to Disney World. Well then we realized, as soon as we were getting close by, like oh my gosh, the traffic here is insane today and it's in the middle of spring break, so traffic, of course, is insane. So we ended up deciding okay, is the goal that we really want to go to magic kingdom, or was the goal we really wanted to just go have fun in the environment of disney world? So we took a detour, so we ended up going first over to um, where there's an outlet mall for disney, and so it's not one mall with a lot of shops, and we went in and the goal was just to walk. That's the whole purpose of why we were going to go to Disney World. So we went in, we went into like a couple stores. There was nothing we liked, and we ended up leaving. And it was funny because Quinn and I started laughing, thinking we went to a mall where people's goal is to go there and buy something and we ended up going and not buying anything. And then we ended up going over to Disney Springs, which is sort of like the free version of Disney, where there's shop Well, it's not free, it's free to get into but then you go to shops and restaurants and stuff like that and we ended up with like last minute decision going to Disney has a Cirque du Soleil show on their property at Disney Springs and it just so happened that they had this sale. So we went to the show and, sam, it was magnificent. It was not part of the plan to go spend the day at Disney Springs to go to the Cirque du Soleil show, but we ended up having an amazing meal. We went to this awesome show that was so moving, the story was so beautiful.
Speaker 1:We got our exercise in and then on the way home, bam, we hit traffic like bad, and so the goal was just to get home, and normally point A to point B was not going to be the way that we had to get home. So we started looking at the GPS to figure out if the computer could tell us better ways to get home. And his phone was saying one way and my phone was saying another way and the car's GPS was saying a third way. So we had to pivot and we had to make do with doing it a completely alternative way, but, as it so turned out, we ended up having to take a longer mileage way home. That ended up getting us home faster than the shorter mileage way because of traffic and stuff.
Speaker 1:And then it turned out that once we got home we realized the reason traffic was so bad was there was this horrible accident on a bridge, speaking of bridges and so it was almost as if you, if we had tried to take the normal route one, we could have been in the accident. Two, we could have not been in the accident but stuck for hours not able to even move at all. So you have to be flexible and realize there's a lot of ways around point A to point B that you have to be willing to do. And in this chapter, which is called, what's right is what works, and sometimes we get so stuck in our ways and say, nope, the right way is we're supposed to drive home on this highway in this direction, but in that case it wasn't the right way and it wasn't the right thing, and so it's about progress, not perfection. I love how he adds this part of the chapter with that. So curious what else you have for this part of the chapter before we move into the next one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that story of like it's just about moving forward. Right, it's not about the path necessarily that you take and it doesn't matter. Like that you've tried to design like you're following the right path, but then the right path becomes the wrong path as you go down it, and so then it's just about pivoting and you know doing something else, because you don't lose sight of, like I'm just trying to go walk, I'm just trying to get into the environment, like that's it, that was the whole goal, and you end up somewhere kind of beautiful along the way. And I love that. And, like you said, I love that he ends this with think progress, not perfection.
Speaker 2:And he said he goes on to say under this kind of force, obstacles break apart, they have no choice. Since you're going around them or making them irrelevant, there's nothing for them to resist that right, like I'm not gonna fight this obstacle, I'm just gonna walk right around, and it it has. It has no choice but to kind of dissolve into the background. Right, it's in the rearview mirror and nobody, nobody cares about it. And I think that that, like that, really sums up this chapter for me and I just I love that that thought process of the right action is kind of the next, it's the next action. It's not the perfect action, it's of the next, it's the next action.
Speaker 1:It's not the perfect action, it's just the next right thing that you have to take next right thing and sometimes the net right next right thing is not the obvious right thing, so the next chapter is super interesting.
Speaker 1:so if you're someone who's been watching or are listening to our podcast or maybe now you're watching because this is now also in video format then perhaps you're also watching our exclusive series, which is our series. That's hosted by Zach Elliott, and Zach's series is a series where we are using military authors and books that are books that were written for people in business, that are that are leaders. So I was so interested when we got into this next chapter because it's in perfect alignment with a book that we are going through with his series. So if you are not familiar with that series yet, I definitely encourage you to subscribe to our general podcast because you'll get those episodes as well. But this next chapter of our book Obstacle is the Way is called In Praise of the Flank Attack, and it's really an interesting take on how, if you have an opponent or you have an obstacle or you have this thing that is preventing your progress, that maybe the solution around it is to do exactly what you just said. You go around it in a way that's unexpected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love the story he starts out with here too, because this is about George Washington and I didn't know this, which feels really dumb that I didn't know this. But he said, like it's not surprising that, like you don't know this, which feels really dumb that I didn't know this. But he said, like it's not surprising that, like you don't know this, because we tend to like make everything seem like some grand win or whatever, right, like I think, when a lot of people think of George Washington, it's like he led the army that defeated the British and, and you know, created the beginning of what is the united states and blah, blah, like, right, it's this like grand adventure, but the reality was very messy, like very, very messy, and we were, um, like outgunned, outmanned, right, like there's a great like part of the um, like if you ever watch the hamilton, like I love all of the parts of George Washington, but like that's really what it was. Like it was the little scrappy, you know, like backwoods guys going against a very coordinated, very well-trained army that had really conquered a lot of the world at that point, and the reason that Washington was so successful was because he would go around.
Speaker 2:It was never a direct attack. It was always this like what do we do to get around the side, right, the flank attack, right? What do we do to, you know, take out this way or that way? He had a sense of which minor skirmishes would feel and look like major victories, right, like it was the psychological game. It was the little wins that really like turned the tides type of stuff.
Speaker 2:And that's like, if you really look into the stories and I think about what I do know about history and now I need to go back and reread, is what I've kind of learned from this is that it's not. It's it's not what you think of now of like I think you know, sitting here 200 and some years later, like you think of like the U S military and this huge force and all this kind of stuff and like that is definitely not what it started Right and and it's such a good reminder when it started right and it's such a good reminder and I love that he talks about BH. Lindenhart came to the stunning conclusion he studied like 30 conflicts comprising more than 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy's main army? Only six, that is 2%, and so we win.
Speaker 2:Not in this like I'm going to throw all my effort at the big guy, I'm going to take this head on it's. I worked smart, not hard, and I think that that's like if I had to summarize this chapter, it's. It's that idea of how can you work smart, not hard, because working hard is not going to get you anywhere in this kind of a situation.
Speaker 1:I love that part of the chapter Also. I highlighted that whole section about from going from the unexpected and from the psychological perspective to build your strategy. He talks about how, when you're really at your wits end and you're straining and straining with all your might, when people tell you you look like you might pop a vein. So think about that. Maybe you're at a job that feels really hard right now, or you don't understand why leaders are making the decisions they're making. Or perhaps you're trying to build a company and you just feel a little bit stuck. Or maybe you have a situation in your personal relationships where you just really are at your wits end.
Speaker 1:The author says take a step back and then go around the problem. It doesn't say stay stuck. It doesn't say don't address the problem. It doesn't say avoid the problem. It says go around the problem, find leverage approach from what is called the line of least expectation. And so you might have an initial instinct that you want to just attack attack a person, attack a problem, attack a situation. But if you take a step back, look at the bigger picture. It's kind of like the peasant from the first chapter, right, like he was facing this giant obstacle, this big boulder. He knew he couldn't walk around it. He knew he couldn't climb over it, but he took a step back and when he could see more clearly he realized all I really need is this little stick that can give me some leverage to move it out of the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Right, it's that you know him. Just like taking a hammer at that giant boulder wasn't going to do anything, right, it's an, it's an immovable object in that approach. But if you work smart, if you think about what tools you've got or you think about, hey, if I from the side push it this way, like it, you know, it's absolutely, absolutely, absolutely that. And when you said like, oh, if you're, you know, if you're thinking about how to deal with like work and things like that, like all I could think about was you're trying to go out, like we always, we ended up feeling so powerless, feeling like I can't go against the organization, the company, the like. It's like this has all been handed down to me and so therefore, we can't do it. And it's like, nah, there's always like a way to work inside of, inside of that, right, like I remember like a million little micro moments as a leader. You know somebody would hand me something and be like we have to do this, and I'd be like no, I just like what happens if I don't do it? Right, like it's that question of like how do I make this work? By like looking as if we're doing this thing that makes no sense and is going to waste all of our time with I mean, I've spent no effort on that but hit the sentiment of what it is right, like make, make a result happen, do that. And I think that, like that was the stuff that mattered the most. Right, those creative solutions, those well, this is the crazy situation and the big force coming at me. And so how can I be creative in that? I'm not going to just accept that, I'm not going to try to butt against it and go talk to whoever be like, oh, I'm going to escalate this up the chain and make it happen. It's like it doesn't function that way.
Speaker 2:Maybe I think of that too, like from all my experience in working with cloud software, you know like I was on the earlier waves of that in the first part of my career and you can't. We'd have customers who are so used to like owning all the code of their product right on their you know installed system and so like if they wanted to work a different way, you just hire somebody who's really good at coding and they would go in and we would make it work however way you wanted it. But like in a cloud software where you're all sharing the code. That's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:You can tell me all day long you don't like how this works, but like if I change it for you, I'm impacting everyone. And so I would have customers come to us like I have been yelled at by C-suite executives saying, like you need to change this, you need to do whatever, and I'm like that's just not how it. Like, that's not how this works. And so then we had to get really good at. Well then, what's the what are you really trying to get at? Right, like, what's the win? And we've got to attack it from a different way. Right, we've got to change a process, we've got to make an adjustment, we've got to do something and attack the flank, not the head on. You know full blown army of the cloud code there's a thing.
Speaker 1:You got to take time to think. So design thinking, diversity and thought brainstorming, bringing people together that don't always agree, but opening space for there to be some sort of emerging ideas and thoughts is so important. I used to work for AirTrain Airways before you and I came together to work together and there was at the time call centers at airlines and there was also nobody using the internet to book airline tickets. So this is dating it a little bit, because we weren't using the computer to pay for airline tickets and the idea was, and the reason I got my job was because my master's degree thesis was whether or not I believed people would use and trust the Internet to book their air travel. So it ended up working. I had the right hypothesis, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Good job, at least you didn't, at least you didn't write about the opposite.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like my 11th grade teacher who said you could say typing or computers, but computers are going to be a fad. Everybody needs to know how to type. Yeah, I can type pretty fast, let's say that. But anyways, we were in a situation where we were a small airline in the hometown hub of Delta and we were competing against this monster airline who was very successful, very well known, the hometown darling of brands in Atlanta, georgia, and we had to come up with a concept to build a call center and compete against the customer service that was like pristine at Delta, and we just weren't winning the game by following the way everybody else did it. So we ended up coming together and thinking about this idea of hitting from the flank.
Speaker 1:So what happened? We ended up opening a call center on a college campus, right outside of a college campus, about an hour away from the airport. So there would be a low likelihood that the kids were going to use the benefit of free air travel and we paid them more than Chick-fil-A, which was at the time the highest paid retail type place that kids were getting paid to go to college in this little town that all there was was a hospital and a college and farms. So we paid them more, we gave them like the Disney version of customer service training and we've created an environment where there was a natural revolving door that, once the kids are ready to graduate, we'd bring in the airline business.
Speaker 1:Airtran was winning all sorts of awards and they were becoming well-known that most people thought AirTran was an Atlanta airline and yet the hub for AirTran was in Orlando and the headquarters was in Orlando. So this was an example that there's sometimes new ways of looking at things or doing things in a creative way that still get you the goal that you want and maybe even get you better than what you wanted. But you can't always follow the prescription of what somebody else does to dictate your success, and this is a key in business. If you look at somebody else's success, that is their success. It doesn't have to be your story. Maybe that's not your story and the path that they followed may very well be a path that was tread by other people as well, but it's not necessarily the path that your feet should be on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I love he says the art of the side door strategy is vast, is a vast creative space and it is by no means limited to war, business or sales, like you're saying right, like it's, and I love it, it's the art of the side door strategy. Like I think I might print that out and put it on my wall of my office. I was like what's the side door strategy I need to be using? And it's funny, no-transcript the other day and it's her giving like a talk, um, to an audience and it's it's lovely, it's all about like the her daring greatly. It's really funny, it's great.
Speaker 2:But she tells the story of that ted talk that launched her into like the stratosphere. And you know she was talking about her, you know like her path of doing that. Like she ended up doing the talk because she, you know, because of her, her day job was, you know she's a professor. And so they were like hey, would you like to give the keynote at this? You know houston event that we're doing, and and she was like sure, and then she decided like she, she tells a story about talking with her and her husband about. She was like yeah, I'm not going to give my regular talk and he goes what do you mean? You're not going to give your regular talk? And she goes. I'm going to talk about, you know, vulnerability and she's like why she goes.
Speaker 2:And she gives this talk and she goes oh gosh, at least nobody's going to see that. And then she didn't realize it was on YouTube. And then she, like it was one of these things where I get snowballed on her Like she had no idea it was going to be put onto YouTube, onto the regular Ted thing, and then I have like millions and billions and millions of views. But it's the thing that launched her, right, like it's the thing that really pushed her out there into the world.
Speaker 2:And it just was this, as you said, that, right, it's like she wasn't using a backdoor strategy, but it ended up being her like backdoor strategy to like the success that she's got now is this alternate little path of just making this one change of like. Yeah, I'm not going to give my regular talk, I'm going to give this other one, right, and that's the. You know, that was the path. It was like your, your story, you told us about your, your trek to Disney and you know, and all that it's, it wasn't the path you had set out on. It was, you know, just part of the journey that I thought was just really interesting. But that's, that's what clicked in my head when you said that it was. Yeah, it's. I'm going to totally check that show out.
Speaker 1:This is a perfect segue for what we're going to talk about next week, since we're out of time for today, and it's about how to use obstacles against themselves. So I wonder, because I haven't seen the show, I wonder if she had any fear in thinking about wanting to have a completely different topic, because you said that she kind of made a mention that, well, nobody's going to watch it anyway. So maybe she felt like this is a testing ground where I can talk about the thing I really want to talk about. And now that's her business, and that's a business that's impacting millions of people's lives around the world with her, her sort of pivot into this different atmosphere of what she teaches.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you're, I think you're spot on that. And she does talk about the fear that she had and, you know, wanting to pull back the um, the youtube talk. She was like, can we delete it? It's like, but yeah, using the obstacles against themselves, I think is it. It's like if you embrace, if you embrace that the obstacle there, which is the whole thing we're doing here, then find that side door strategy right, like we talked about today. Find that thing to move you forward, but you can also use it against itself.
Speaker 1:Interesting. This is a great way to end the episode for today that don't fight your purpose. Your purpose was predestined in your life. Like what your purpose is. If you fight against it, it's still going to come about to be, because it's what's meant for you.
Speaker 1:And the book ends by saying you may have a battle of your ego and pride rather than your tactical advantage of how to attack whatever that purpose is. And the the author ends by saying believe it or not, that's the hard way in life, and I do believe it. I believe that you fight against the things that are meant for you. It will make your life feel hard. And then he he concludes the chapter by saying remember, sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home, and it truly was my story coming home from Disney the other day. So on that note, next week, again, we're going to be talking about using obstacles against themselves and also where you can best channel your energy. So I'm really looking forward to that part of next week, but for this week, my name's Denise Russo, on behalf of my friend, sam Powell. This has been another episode of what's On your Book Show.