The Obstacle Is the Way

The biggest obstacle in the way of your success is the person staring at you in the mirror.

That’s not a motivational poster line. That’s the thing I’ve learned after 25+ years in this industry, after building two firms, after training over 600 search operations across six continents, and after spending years coaching recruiters one-on-one through every version of stuck there is.

The external obstacles are real. The market, the economy, the clients who won’t commit, the candidates who ghost, the slow months that stretch into slow quarters. All real.

But the internal ones are the ones that actually stop people.

I am a believer in Stoicism. Have been for a long time. And I believe it in the way that you believe something that was forged in you rather than chosen, because for me, it wasn’t a philosophy I discovered in a book. It was the operating system I had to build to survive my own obstacle.

My Obstacle

I have a speech impediment called Verbal Apraxia.

It’s not so severe now. Most people who talk to me never catch it. But when I was young, it was bad enough that getting through a sentence under pressure was its own act of will. Until high school, it was almost impossible for me to speak at all. They thought it was a stutter.

So naturally, I picked the one career that would force me to talk for a living.

Not by accident. On purpose. Because I was damned if I was going to let the thing I was supposedly worst at be the thing that decided my life.

That stubbornness became the operating system for everything that followed. My obstacle literally became my way. The speech impediment that could have been the reason I stayed small became the reason I’m here, writing this, having built what I’ve built, training the people I train.

That’s the whole concept. Turned outward, it applies to every recruiter I’ve ever worked with who was using their obstacle as an excuse to stay stuck.

What Marcus Aurelius Said About It

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius figured this out roughly 2,000 years before Ryan Holiday wrote the book on it:

“Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.”

~ Marcus Aurelius

Read that twice if you need to. Maybe read it every morning for a month.

What he’s saying is not that obstacles don’t exist or that hardship isn’t real. He’s saying that the obstacle itself, when you stop fighting it and start moving through it, becomes the path forward. It stops being the thing in your way and starts being the thing that shows you the way.

That’s not comfortable. It’s one of the most demanding philosophical positions you can hold, because it removes every excuse.

Everyone Has a Story

We all go through hard things. Some harder than others. Divorce, disability, depression, addiction, betrayal, loss. Everyone has something. Everyone has their own particular version of the mountain.

And in a world that increasingly rewards victimhood, there’s always a ready audience for your story. Always someone who will validate your reasons for staying put. Always a comment thread full of people nodding along.

But here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: no one gives a damn about your excuses. Not because people are cruel. Because the world moves forward regardless, and your reasons for not moving with it are only visible to you.

The only thing any of us can actually control is our reaction to what happens to us.

That’s it. That’s the whole game.

The Thing You Keep Not Doing

There’s a line I come back to constantly:

“If you think you can’t, you must.”

If you think you can’t do the thing, that is precisely the thing you must do. Not someday. Not when the conditions are right. Now.

And then there’s the harder version of the same question:

If you had a gun to your head right now, would you do the thing you’ve been putting off for years?

Quitting the thing that’s killing you. Starting the thing you keep deferring. Making the call you’ve been avoiding for six months. Building the system you know you need but keep finding reasons not to build.

Whatever that thing is, the gun-to-the-head version of you already knows the answer. The question is whether the everyday version of you will do it without needing that kind of pressure to act.

What This Has to Do With Your Recruiting Business

Most of the recruiters I talk to are not lacking information. They know what they should be doing. They’ve read the articles, attended the webinars, bought the courses. They know cold outbound works. They know their positioning is vague. They know their follow-up is inconsistent. They know the referral pipeline they’re depending on is fragile.

They know.

The obstacle isn’t knowledge. The obstacle is the version of themselves that keeps choosing comfort over the thing that would actually change their situation.

Facing the mountain head on can push you to find a way over it. Forget can. You have to find a way over it. Because the alternative is staying exactly where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing, and getting exactly what you’ve been getting.

It’s not easy. Conflict never is. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes every ounce of motivation gets sucked dry, and it’s in that moment after you have nothing left that your character gets built. Brick by brick. Rep by rep.

The struggle and your reaction to it define you. You have to let the person you were die a little, and choose who you’re going to be instead.

I’m thankful for my Apraxia. That sounds like something people say to seem evolved, but I mean it plainly. The thing that was supposed to disqualify me from the career I chose became the engine underneath everything I’ve built. It taught me, at a young age and in an unavoidable way, that the obstacle is never the final word.

It’s just the beginning of the actual work.

So. You know what the one thing is.

Go do it.