The answer, I say, is with philosophy–practical philosophy. So…how can we cultivate this fortitude and ingenuity? Despite a loss of almost $1 million dollars (more than $23 million in today’s dollars), Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly $10 million dollars in revenue that year ($200-plus million today). Within a month, its men were working two shifts a day churning out new products the world had never seen. Within about three weeks, the factory was partially back up and running. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.” “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. As he told a reporter the next day, he wasn’t too old to make a fresh start. It’s what the stoics might refer to as amor fati–loving the things that happen to us.Įdison wasn’t heartbroken, not as he could have and probably should have been. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.” Don’t worry, Edison calmed him. “Go get your mother and all her friends,” he told his son with childlike excitement. After dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away.Įdison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire looking for his son. That’s exactly what he did.Īt age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home one evening from another day at the laboratory. What is he supposed to do? Rockefeller later said that he was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster.

It’s terrible right? Real investors who supposedly knew what they were doing lost everything.

Here was the greatest market depression in history and it hit Rockefeller just as he was finally getting the hang of things. The result was a crippling national depression that lasted for several years. Less than two years later the Panic of 1857 struck. At 16 he took his first job as bookkeeper and aspiring investor. Which makes sense because stoicism is ultimately an art that is designed to be practiced, not spoken about. People who’d faced an obstacle but saw it as the way. Over the years since I first read the book (and in the course of researching my own), I studied people in history who had made this each decision–willingly or by force of circumstance.

Ryan holiday obstacle is the way