Always Try To Do It The Hard Way

Ryan Holiday
5 min readAug 15, 2024
On stage in Sydney, Australia. Get tickets to see me live in Europe and Canada here.

I was coasting on fumes when he asked me the question, so I don’t think I got the answer right.

To be fair, I was 90 or so minutes into being on stage for my talk in Sydney when I was asked: “If obstacles make us better, should we seek them out (or create them for our kids)?”

Like I said, I was a little fried, so I said something like: “Life is full of obstacles already, I’m not sure we need to go around creating additional ones.”

It’s strange that I said this because I was in the middle of doing the exact opposite… and it’s Chris Williamson’s fault.

He and I were talking in Austin back in May and he told me he had just gotten back from a speaking tour. “What kind of presentation did you do? Did you have slides?” I asked, curious because I was getting ready to head out of the country for my own set of theater dates (which, by the way, ​you can get tickets for my next stops in Europe and Canada here​) and Chris had spoken at some of the same venues I was going to be at.

“It was just me and a microphone,” he said.

This struck me because most of the talks I do — usually at conferences or to companies or to sports teams or soldiers — are not that way. You’re expected to have a slide deck that walks the audience through what you’re talking about. This extra work can…

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Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday

Written by Ryan Holiday

Bestselling author of ‘Conspiracy,’ ‘Ego is the Enemy’ & ‘The Obstacle Is The Way’ http://amzn.to/24qKRWR

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