Friday, July 31st, 2026
Another week in the books. Mine had a couple of walls in it, the kind you don't see until you've already walked into them. Some I climbed. Some I'm still standing in front of, hands on my knees, catching my breath. Both are useful in their own way, which happens to be the whole theme of this week's reading.
Here's what I was reading, listening to, and watching. No filler. No content for the sake of content. Just the stuff that actually made me stop and think.
Grab your drink. Let's get into it.
Book of the week
Reading
I've read this book more times than any other on my shelf, and I keep coming back to it in the seasons when I need it most. This was one of those seasons. There's something about rebuilding that makes you want a book you can trust, and this one has earned the trust the hard way, one obstacle at a time.
For anyone who hasn't picked it up, the premise comes from a single line by Marcus Aurelius. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Holiday takes that idea and builds a practical system around it, structured on the three Stoic disciplines of perception, action, and will. Perception is how you see the obstacle. Action is what you do about it. Will is how you endure the part you can't change. It sounds simple written out like that. Living it is another matter entirely.
What I love about this book is that it doesn't romanticize hardship. Holiday isn't telling you your problems are secretly gifts. He's telling you that the problem in front of you contains the exact instructions for getting past it, if you're willing to look at it clearly instead of flinching away. He walks through Rockefeller, Amelia Earhart, Ulysses S. Grant, Steve Jobs, and a long list of people who got flattened and then used the flattening as raw material.
The tenth anniversary edition adds new material that hits different a decade on, especially if you first read this book when you were younger and hungrier and thought the obstacles would eventually stop coming. They don't stop coming. You just get better at reading them. That's the promotion.
If you're stuck, frustrated, or standing in front of your own wall right now, read this one slowly, with a pen. It won't make the wall disappear. It'll just remind you the wall is the way.
Three articles worth your time
Article one
If the book is the deep dive, this is the perfect on-ramp, and honestly a good refresher even if you've read it five times like I have. Shane Parrish and the Farnam Street crew break down the core of Holiday's argument in a way you can read on a coffee break and actually apply the same afternoon.
What they nail is the practical translation. It's easy to hear "the obstacle is the way" and treat it as a nice piece of gym-poster philosophy. This piece drags it into the real world. It walks through how perception is a choice you make in the moment, how most of what wrecks us isn't the event but the story we tell ourselves about the event, and how the gap between those two is where all your leverage lives. Read it when you need the idea sharpened back to a point.
Article two
This one hit close to home because I live it. The piece digs into something that's genuinely reshaping the game right now. A single person with the right stack of tools can now run an operation that used to require a whole team. That's not hype. That's just the current reality, and it's accelerating.
But here's why I picked it, and it's not the shiny part. The article is honest about the trap underneath the opportunity. When you can do everything yourself, the temptation is to do everything yourself, and that road ends in burnout dressed up as productivity. The leverage is real, but leverage without boundaries just means you can now overwork yourself more efficiently than ever before. It's a clear-eyed look at both the boom and the loneliness in the name. Worth reading twice if you're a solo operator, once for the opportunity, once for the warning.
Article three
I'm a sucker for anything with the word "quietly" in the title, because the quiet stuff is almost always where the real results hide. This piece makes the case that the habit separating the people who win from the people who spin isn't some dramatic act of genius. It's consistency. The boring, unglamorous discipline of showing up and doing the small right thing over and over until it compounds.
What makes it worth your time is that it doesn't just cheerlead for consistency. It gets into why consistency is so hard, which is that the results lag the effort by so long that most people quit in the gap. The work you do today doesn't pay out today. It pays out in three months, and by then you've forgotten you planted it. This article is a good reminder to keep planting anyway. It pairs perfectly with the book this week, because enduring that gap is exactly what Holiday means by will.
Podcast of the week
Listening
Alex Petkas does something on this show that I wish more people did. He takes ancient stories and makes you feel why they've survived three thousand years instead of just reciting the plot. This episode on the Odyssey is a standout.
Here's the thing that got me. The Odyssey is the original "the obstacle is the way" story. It's a man trying to get home, and every single thing in his path, the storms, the monsters, the temptations, the years lost, is the way he becomes who he needs to be to actually deserve the home when he finally reaches it. If he'd sailed straight there, there'd be no story and no man worth telling it about. The detour was the point.
Petkas connects that to how we actually live now, which is what makes it more than a history lecture. Listen to this one on a walk, no notes, and let it work on you. It's the audio companion to everything else in this week's list.
On repeat
Track
Quick heads-up before you hit play. This one's explicit, so maybe not the one for the kids in the car. It's a diss track, born out of a very public back-and-forth, and on the surface it's just Eminem doing what Eminem does better than anyone alive.
But here's why it ended up on repeat for me this week, and why it fits the theme. Strip away the target and what you've got is a masterclass in answering noise with precision. Everybody was talking. Everybody had an opinion. And instead of getting louder to match the noise, he got sharper. More exact. More undeniable. That's the energy I keep coming back to, not the beef, the discipline underneath it. When the world's shouting at you, you don't win by shouting back. You win by being so precise that the argument's over before it starts. Proof over promise. That's the whole game.
Play it when you need to remember that the answer to noise isn't more volume. It's better aim.
Worth watching
Watching
Michael Fassbender leads this one, and if you like your spy dramas slow-burning and psychological rather than explosion-of-the-week, this is your show. Season two dropped in June, and both seasons are sitting there waiting for you.
What kept me watching isn't the tradecraft, though that's good. It's the central tension, which is a man living a life so divided he can barely keep track of which version of himself is real. He's built an identity for the job, an identity for the cover, and somewhere underneath both there's supposed to be an actual person. The drama is watching those layers grind against each other.
I found it landing on me in a way I didn't expect, because there's a version of that split every entrepreneur knows. The face you show clients. The version you post online. And the person you actually are at 6am before any of the masks go on. The show's a thriller, but the real question underneath it is one worth sitting with. Who are you when nobody's watching, and how far has that person drifted from the one everybody sees? Watch it for the tension. Stay for the mirror.
Resources
Everything linked in one place
Article one: The Obstacle Is the Way (Farnam Street)
Article three: The Business Habit That Quietly Creates Extraordinary Results (Global Banking and Finance)
Podcast: The True Story Of The Odyssey
Track: Killshot by Eminem
Show: The Agency (Paramount+)
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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