Every company that survives long enough faces a moment where the path forward disappears. The market shifts beneath you. A key customer leaves. The fundraising environment freezes. The technology you built your thesis on gets commoditized. What separates the companies that find a new path from the ones that don’t isn’t talent or capital — it’s the relationship the leadership team has with adversity itself.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that “the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” I’ve returned to this idea more times than I can count over the last fifteen years of building companies. Not as a motivational platitude, but as an operational principle.
The First Lesson: Obstacles Reveal Strategy
When I co-founded BitTorrent, we faced a fundamental problem: the entire entertainment industry viewed our technology as an existential threat. Rather than retreating, that opposition forced us to understand our own value proposition with a clarity we never would have achieved in a friendly market. The obstacle — industry hostility — became the catalyst for a deeper understanding of what distributed content delivery actually meant for the future of media.
The companies that endure are not the ones that avoid obstacles, but the ones that develop a metabolic capacity for converting obstacles into fuel.
The Practice of Steady Dedication
There’s a difference between resilience as a concept and resilience as a daily practice. The concept is easy to admire. The practice is unglamorous. It looks like showing up on Monday morning after a difficult board meeting and focusing on the next most important thing. It looks like gratitude for the team that’s still building, even when the macro environment is working against you.
I don’t mean toxic positivity. I mean the disciplined refusal to let circumstances dictate your internal state. This is, I think, the most underrated skill in leadership: the ability to hold two truths simultaneously — things are hard right now, and we are still moving forward.