A review by jhrcook
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

3.0

This is the first book in Holiday’s trilogy on practicing Stoic philosophy. While it aims to be quick and practical — distilling key Stoic tenets into actionable advice — the writing is too simplistic. It reads like a high-school essay on ethics and hard work: repetitive, lacking nuance, and overly straightforward. The book offers some useful insights, but most come from quotes or anecdotes about historical figures. Holiday adds little original value, instead padding key ideas with analogies, famous stories (sometimes tenuously linked), and restatements with added overly-intense emphasis. It’s a short read — I finished it in a few days while splitting time with another book — but it could have been distilled further, perhaps into a handful of quotes or a one-hour podcast.