The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the basic version of tech start-ups’ new products, which they release to the public in order to gauge interest. Many MVPs fail, which gives their inventors an opportunity to consider what did and didn’t work about their product. Holiday uses this to show how successful creatives embrace failure as a learning opportunity, suggesting that the reader do the same.

A “Pre-mortem” is a business practice in which people anticipate and plan for failure or setbacks, even if their project has barely begun. Holiday compares this method to a Stoic practice called the “premeditation of evils,” which encourages people to be aware of how their lives could be disrupted so they are not distressed when things do not go to plan (140).

Amor fati is Latin for “a love of fate” (140). Holiday suggests that learning to love one’s fate, whether it includes positive or negative events, is key to accepting and acting on reality, rather than focusing on why life is not perfect.