Today, with the developing inconveniences of life, the hardships and frustrations, and the multitude of circumstantial consequences many of us face, it can be tough to know how to navigate the challenges we encounter. How do we trek this rocky path?

In his book The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday takes the timeless teachings of stoic philosophy and translates them for the modern reader, pulling stories from history to teach the art of "turning obstacles upside down." The book is based off of a passage written by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

Our actions may be impeded...but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting...The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

As we all face obstacles in our professional and personal lives, the lessons Holiday expounds are crucially important during this time. Many firms of all sizes have tackled the challenge to modify their modes of work, how they think about practice, and how they lead their teams. Here are three lessons from Holiday's writing that have the potential to empower the design professional through this novel time:

Do I need to freak out about this?

In a chapter entitled Control Your Emotions, Holiday quotes a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. In that book Gavin writes: "When you worry, ask yourself, 'What am I choosing not to see right now?' What important things are you missing because you chose to worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?" Holiday sums it up by asking the reader if getting upset provides us with more options. More often than not, the answer is no.

In a time like this, especially as the creatives, architects and designers tend to be, our mental powers of creativity are critical for problem solving. A bad situation doesn't have to take away from our ability to gift the world with good work, meaningful service, or noble character. We shouldn't discount the weight of a situation but rather ask ourselves something Holiday reminds us Aurelius asked himself:

Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?

Press forward when others see disaster

Holiday recounts the spring of 2008, looking at Barack Obama's presidential candidacy at the time. His campaign was threatened by a "scandal involving inflammatory remarks by his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright." Considered a political disaster, this was surely one of the lowest moments of his presidential race. But "against all advice and convention, he decided that he would take action and that this negative situation was actually a 'teachable moment,'" Holiday writes. 

Obama took this negative attention around race, religion, and demographics and delivered a speech, known as the "A More Perfect Union" speech, that transformed the trajectory of his campaign. Instead of wallowing in the unfairness, frustration, and set-back of his predicament, Obama took the offensive and made something out of this obstacle.

We see this already with many firms across architecture, seizing the opportunity to transition to remote practice, still servicing clients, and resiliently evolving and adapting along the way. Holiday's ultimate lesson here is that we must learn how to press forward when everyone around us sees doom and disaster.

Love everything that happens

Holiday tells the story of a sixty-seven year old Thomas Edison. He has come home early after a long day at the laboratory. Later in the evening, a man comes rushing to Edison's home to inform him that a fire has broken out at Edison's research and production campus that threatened to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his entire life building, Holiday writes. 

Edison calmly headed down to the fire, and once he arrived, he found hundreds of spectators and heartbroken employees. "Go get your mother and all her friends," Edison said to his son with excitement. "They'll never see a fire like this again." The son was confused. "It's all right," Edison assured him, "We've just got rid of a lot of rubbish."

The point Holiday is making here is that Edison didn't really have another option in his reaction. He could have cried, gotten angry, quit everything, or any other number of things. But that would have accomplished nothing, Holiday explains. He didn't waste his time, but decided to accept the situation and move forward. 

This attitude comes from the Latin phrase, "Amor fati" which translates to "love of fate" or "love of one's fate." There is a similar ancient biblical proverb to this that goes: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance." In times of hardship, we must build our endurance, learning what we can control and what we can't, enabling ourselves to tackle the circumstances in front of us.

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Let's continue to build our resilience during this time, using our creative powers to see this evolving situation in the best way we can. We aren't advocating to ignore the facts, but rather to see them differently than everyone else. Hopefully, some of Holiday's lessons prove useful and can be introduced into our mental toolkits, ready for use when things get a little tough.