The Obstacle is the Way: Book Summary

The Obstacle is the Way: Book Summary

One trait that separates the “successful” (however you define it) from those who lack consistency with their results, is the way they view obstacles. Those who accomplish a lot see obstacles not as setbacks but as opportunities.

I just recently read Ryan Holiday’s book The Obstacle is the Way and I really enjoyed it. Holiday is a self-proclaimed Stoic and he takes this ancient philosophy and applies it to modern times.

In this book, Holiday gives a blueprint on how we can respond better to adversity through reshaping our perception, acting on the opportunity presented to us, and persevering regardless of the results.

I don’t agree with every premise in this book, but I do think Holiday does a really good job of sharing time-tested philosophy and showing the practical application.

If you are interested in this topic, I think you’ll enjoy this summary of the book through some of my highlights. 

 

Preface/Introduction

    • “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” 

 

Perception

    • What is Perception? It’s how we see and understand what occurs around us — and what we decide those events will mean.
    • Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, “the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.”
    • Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.
    • Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.

 

Action

    • Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action.
    • In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a start-up — a start-up of one. And that means changing the relationship with failure. It means iterating, failing, and improving.
    • To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent. That’s just recklessness…to be physically and mentally tight? That’s called anxiety…physical looseness combined with mental restraint? That is powerful.
    • As Duke Ellington once said, “Problems are a chance for us to do our best.”

 

Will

    • What is Will? Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world.
    • This is the avenue for the final discipline: the Will. If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul. The Will is the one thing we control completely, always.
    • It doesn’t always feel that way but constraints in life are a good thing. Especially if we can accept them and let them direct us. They push us to places and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued. 
    • To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens.

 

Final Thoughts: The Obstacles Become the Way

    • See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must. What blocked the path now is a path. What once impeded action advances action. The Obstacle is the Way.

 

Game Plan

First, I highly recommend reading this book. Second, what is one obstacle that is currently standing in the way of you accomplishing a goal? Ask yourself these questions:

    1. Am I seeing this situation in the right perspective or am I creating a story? Maybe you need to reframe your perception.
    2. What’s the next step I can take? See the opportunity in this obstacle.
    3. What can I learn about myself through this situation? Use this as a learning moment.

 

Tweetable Lesson

 

The Starbucks Experience: Book Summary

The Starbucks Experience: Book Summary

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and I receive a commission if you visit a link and buy something on my recommendation. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust. All opinions are my own. For more details see my disclosure policy and privacy policy.

I recently read The Starbucks Experience by Joseph A. Michelli and I have to say I was extremely impressed with the culture that Starbucks is cultivating internally with their employees which leads to exceptional customer service. 

If you are looking for ways to improve your team’s culture and/or increase your customer experience, then I highly recommend this book. You can purchase it here.

Below are some of my highlights from reading this book…

 

Introduction

    • The employee turnover rate at Starbucks, according to some reports, is 120% less than the industry average. Maryann Hammers states in Workforce Management, “Starbucks employees have an 82% job-satisfaction rate, according to a Hewitt Associates Starbucks Partner View Survey. This compares to a 50% satisfaction rate for all employers and 74% for Hewitt’s ’Best Place to Work’ employers.” 
    • The Starbucks Experience reflects tenets that are simple, yet not simplistic. They are results-oriented and can be deceptively powerful when applied:
        1. Make it your own
        2. Everything matters
        3. Surprise and delight
        4. Embrace resistance
        5. Leave your mark

PRINCIPLE 1: Make It Your Own

    • The “Five Ways of Being”
        • Be welcoming
        • Be genuine
        • Be considerate
        • Be knowledgeable
        • Be involved
    • At Starbucks, that discretion comes in the form of giving priority to being welcoming, demonstrating generally what being welcoming looks like, refreshing that image, and then letting people make that concept their own as they bring it into the lives of those they serve. 
    • The concept of what it takes to be genuine is fairly straightforward, but profound. At Starbucks, being genuine means to “connect, discover, and respond.” 
    • When Starbucks leaders ask partners to “be knowledgeable,” they are encouraging employees to “love what they do and share it with others.” 
    • Leaders encourage employees to go beyond just doing their day-to-day job, and instead invest with attentive, creative, and passionate energy. 

 

PRINCIPLE 2: Everything Matters

    • Howard Schultz is fond of saying that “retail is detail.” 
    • Managers have to constantly put themselves in the shoes of their customers, seeing everything from the other side of the counter.
    • Every company’s brand is nothing more than the sum total of the individual actions its people take. 
    • Not only does everything matter; everyone matters as well.

 

PRINCIPLE 3: Surprise and Delight

    • Consumers want predictable and consistent, with an occasional positive twist or added value thrown in. 
    • Rather than encouraging trite customer service sayings like “Have a nice day” or other scripted communications, successful leaders help staff look for genuine opportunities to do the positively unexpected. 
    • When businesses partner with customers in these personal ways, they create a loyalty that is far greater than what a company could obtain by simply serving a high-quality product. Business leaders give their people the opportunity and permission to make a real connection with their customers. 
    • Predictability produces customer delight…And even when something goes wrong, an employee or manager can still delight the customer by going the extra mile to make things right. Delight is the result of an unwavering commitment to creating a comfortable and trusted customer relationship.

 

PRINCIPLE 4: Embrace Resistance

    • Embrace Resistance…This principle requires leaders to distinguish between customers who want their concerns to be resolved and those individuals who will never stop complaining or be satisfied. 
    • Successful leaders do not hide from difficult challenges. They approach complex and controversial issues with a willingness to benefit from the concerns raised by commentators and adversaries.
    • District manager Renny Freet: “Embracing resistance is a lot about respecting other people’s perspectives.” 

 

PRINCIPLE 5: Leave Your Mark

    • Employee morale is three times higher in firms that are actively involved in the community than in their less-involved counterparts. When employees’ work environments match their personal values, they are more productive. 
    • Starbucks challenges its staff members to make their individual mark right where they live. In support of this, Starbucks makes a $10 per hour contribution, up to $1,000 per project, to the qualifying organization where the partner volunteers. 
    • To the benefit of Starbucks, volunteerism strengthens team identity and enhances leadership abilities. 

 

A Final Word

    • Your guiding tenets need to offer a flexible structure so that you can implement those values while fostering the special gifts and passions of young people.
    • Starbucks is an excellent model of how a company can become a learning institution. Starbucks leaders understand the importance of taking feedback, both positive and negative, and disseminating it throughout the company for collective education and adaptation.

 

Game Plan

Consider doing a personal inventory of how you stack up against the Starbucks Experience principles. Consider the following questions:

    • How consistently welcoming am I?
    • What details do I tend to overlook?
    • Where can I offer more surprise or delight in my workplace?
    • In what situations do I embrace resistance, and when do I run from it?
    • What mark am I leaving at work, at home, and in my community? 

 

Tweetable Lesson

 

My Top 10 Leadership Books of All Time (1-2)

My Top 10 Leadership Books of All Time (1-2)

I frequently get asked by aspiring leaders what leadership books I recommend; or what my five most favorite leadership books are.

So I’ve decided to compile a list of my top leadership books of all time. Today, I share my top 2. 

 

2. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

This book is one of those leadership classics. I recently re-read it and was again amazed at the depth and relevancy of its content. Covey adopts an inside-out approach to leadership, meaning leadership begins within the leader first with what he calls “private victories”. We must have private victories before we move to leading others to “public victories”.

This is a book that you can read every year and get something new out of it each time. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: 

  • “Private victories precede public victory.”
  • “The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basic habits of effectiveness.”
  • “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
  • “Time management is really a misnomer—the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.”
  • “Trust is the highest form of human motivation.”
  • “You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself.”

 

1. Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders

If I had to recommend only one book, it would be this one. In my opinion, it is one of the most comprehensive books I have found on leadership. It is specifically directed at faith-based leaders, but can be applied to all contexts of leadership.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

  • “We can lead others only as far along the road as we ourselves have travelled. Merely pointing the way is not enough.”
  • “Leaders who want to show sensitivity should listen often and long, and talk short and seldom.”
  • “The true leader is concerned primarily with the welfare of others, not his own comfort or prestige.”
  • “True greatness, true leadership, is found in giving yourself in service to others, not in coaxing or inducing others to serve you. True service is never without cost. Often it comes with a bitter cup of challenges and a painful baptism of suffering.”
  • “The final estimate of men shows that history cares not an iota for the rank or title a man has borne, or the office he has held, but only the quality of his deeds and the character of his mind and heart.”

 

Game Plan

  1. Choose one book that will help you along your leadership journey (it doesn’t have to be on this list). Any book on leadership will do.
  2. Make a goal to finish it this next month. It might sound hard now, but it’s very doable. For example, if you select a 200-page book and read only 7 pages per day, you will complete it in less than a month. If you kept that up, you could read 12 books in a year.

 

Below are more posts from my top leadership books of all time series:

 

Tweetable Lesson

My Top 10 Leadership Books of All Time (3-5)

My Top 10 Leadership Books of All Time (3-5)

 

I frequently get asked by aspiring leaders what leadership books I recommend; or what my five most favorite leadership books are.

So I’ve decided to compile a list of my top leadership books of all time. Today, I share numbers 3-5.

 

5. The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

At some point, all leaders have to manage.  This book is one of the best at teaching the basic skills and systems a manager needs. In typical Ken Blanchard fashion, the lessons of the book are presented in parable form, which makes it an easy read.

If you are just starting out as a manager or your managerial skills need some refinement, then this book is perfect for you. As an added bonus, this book is only about 100 pages, so you can likely finish it in two hours or less.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

  • “The best managers manage themselves and the people they work with so both the organization and their employees win.”
  • “Catch people doing something right.”
  • “A praise that is earned builds confidence.”
  • “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

 

4. What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam

This book is part of a series called, “What the Most Successful People Do”. Laura Vanderkam also wrote books entitled, “What the Most Successful People Do at Work” and “What the Most Successful People Don the Weekend”.

Vanderkam’s premise is that the most important or highest priority tasks should be done in the morning. I’m not a morning person by nature, but I decided to try out her premise and was amazed at the results. Four years later, I still wake up early and workout. I haven’t been this consistent with working out since my college days playing basketball! My whole morning routine (and by extension, the rest of my daily routine) have been changed due to the principles in this book.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

  • “These are your highest-value activities: nurturing your career, nurturing your family beyond basic personal care, and nurturing yourself. By that last category, I mean activities such as exercise, a hobby, meditation, prayer, and the like.”
  • “Learning to use mornings well is, in our distracted world, what separates achievement from madness.”
  • “New research into that old-fashioned concept of willpower is showing that tasks that require self-discipline are simply easier to do while the day is young.”

 

3. Getting Things Done by David Allen

In order for any leader to be effective, they have to be productive. And reading this book is like viewing the answer key for an exam on efficiency and productivity. It’s not flashy, but David Allen gets into the nitty-gritty principles of effective work and, as the title says, “getting things done”. I use his principles every single day, from my task management system to the way I check email.

If you need to bring some order and organization to the busy chaos surrounding you, then this book will help.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

  • “Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does.”
  • “It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxieties about what you should be doing and aren’t.”
  • “Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.”
  • “Your best thoughts about work won’t happen while you’re at work.”

 

Game Plan 

  1. What leadership books are in your top five? Take some time to think through your bookshelf and narrow it down.
  2. I’d encourage you to begin re-reading those five books over the next two years. I’ve started to do this and it’s been so valuable to my personal leadership development. Re-reading reminds of key lessons and principles, but I can always find something new to take away from the book since I’m in a different season of life than when I first read it.

 

Below are more posts from my top leadership books series:

 

Tweetable Lesson 

The 8 Habits of Highly Significant Leaders: Habit #5

The 8 Habits of Highly Significant Leaders: Habit #5

Today, in our series on The 8 Habits of Highly Significant Leaders, I’m discussing Habit #5. In this video, I share how an axe and tree can increase your motivation to accomplish any goal or projects.

 

Game Plan

Today, our Game Plan is this: create and celebrate milestones. Remember, what gets rewarded, gets repeated. So what are you rewarding? What milestones should you celebrate, so you can continue to make progress toward your most important goals?

 

Tweetable Lesson

 

Top 10 Posts From 2020

Top 10 Posts From 2020

I know all of us are ready to leave 2020 behind and focus on 2021. But like many of you, I spent some time reflecting on the last year, and there were certainly lessons I learned. Here are my top 10 posts from 2020, a sample of lessons I learned and shared over the last year.

 

  1. The First Ingredient of All Great Leaders (Part 2)

There is no “one size fits all” leader or leadership style. But there are characteristics or qualities that all great leaders have in common. In the first session of an ongoing series entitled “The Ingredients That All Great Leaders Have,” I share the characteristic that is foundational to effective leadership.

  1. The Art of Goal-Making: How I Read 25 Books in a Year (Part 2)

In this series, I share some tips that have helped me become more consistent in accomplishing my goals. In fact, these techniques helped me go from reading 13 books in 2018 to nearly doubling it to 25 books in 2019. Part 2 is focused on what most people forget when it comes to creating their goals.

  1. A Type of Learning That Transforms

We are inundated with information. And when it comes to learning, the opportunities are endless. However, for all this intake of information, is it producing growth and development? Here’s why this is an important question. Information, in and of itself, doesn’t produce transformation. Transformation is in the application. Simply knowing a fact or point of view cognitively doesn’t help us develop. So, how do we create a type of learning that actually transforms instead of one that simply informs?

  1. The Top 5 Temptations That Will Derail All Leaders

We have all heard stories of highly talented leaders (and celebrities) who never reached their potential because poor choices ended up derailing their career. Our leadership journey is a marathon, not a sprint. And if you are going to be a leader that finishes well you must stay away from these common temptations.

  1. Leading in Uncertainty 

Leadership, (or the lack thereof), is revealed through adversity and uncertainty. The measure of leadership is not found in how one leads in security and success; it’s how one leads in uncertainty and chaos. Here are five tools to help you lead both yourself and your team effectively through uncertainty.

  1. How to Lead With Significance: Vision

Significance is more important (and impactful) than success. If leaders want to lead with significance, there are 10 qualities or skills they must develop. In this video session, I share the first skill of leading with significance (vision), why it’s vital to leadership, and how to develop vision.

  1. How Not to Stand Out

In this Sixty(ish) Seconds with Shawn video, I share two traits that will guarantee that you don’t stand out and will eventually cripple your leadership. 

  1. A Leadership Lesson From a Janitor

The President and a janitor walk into NASA…that sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s actually a powerful story about the importance of vision, how to increase employee engagement, and how to be self-motivated at work. In this Sixty(ish) Seconds with Shawn video, I share a great leadership lesson that I learned from a janitor.

  1. How to Stand Out

Most of us want to stand out, whether at a job interview, at our current place of work, or even among our family and friends. But let’s be honest: few of us do. In this Sixty(ish) Seconds with Shawn video, I share the eight traits that will guarantee you stand out and make you a more effective leader.

  1. My Top 10 Leadership Books of All Time (1-2)

Many of us understand the importance of reading, but due to busy schedules or an overabundance of options, we struggle with consistency (or perhaps we even struggle to get started). In this video session, I share my top two leadership books of all time.