The Obstacle is the Way
Missing the World Cup, might have been his best gift.
It was March 2022, on an ordinary training morning for Mikel Oyarzabal, a young Spanish Soccer player. Without warning, his knee gave out in an unforeseen collision. A ruptured ACL. The injury took months of his career and something worse: his spot at the World Cup in Qatar, the tournament he had spent his whole life working toward.
Every athlete knows the brutal arithmetic of an ACL. Nine months to a year of rehab. Alone, on a table, doing tiny leg raises while your teammates play on television. No crowds. No highlights. Just the slow work of rebuilding a knee one boring rep at a time.
That November, while Spain played the World Cup in Qatar, the captain of Real Sociedad was still learning to trust his leg again. The tournament he had pictured his whole career happened without him. He watched it the way the rest of us did, from the wrong side of a screen.
Fast forward to Berlin, July 2024. The final of the European Championship, Spain against England, 86th minute. The ball crosses the box and the man sliding in to meet it is Oyarzabal, scoring the winner that gave Spain the title.
And this week, four years after the injury, he scored again in Dallas to knock out France and put Spain in the World Cup final against Argentina.
The man who missed his World Cup is now the reason his country is playing for one.
When it gets real
In eight weeks of early 2020, Airbnb lost 80 percent of its business. The company was burning $250 million a month.
What followed was rehab. Brian Chesky borrowed two billion dollars at painful terms and wrote the letter that laid off 1,900 of his own people. He killed the shiny projects too. Transportation, studios, luxury, gone. Then months of triage nobody tweeted about, rebuilding around the one thing customers still wanted: long stays close to home. Seven months later Airbnb went public and touched near one hundred billion dollars on day one.
“I don’t think I’m going to worry much more than in April and May, when we saw our business drop 80 percent in eight weeks in the middle of a pandemic.” Brian Chesky, on IPO day
The injury did not interrupt the story. The injury wrote the training plan. You have had your own eight weeks. Maybe you are in them now. Good.
Worth your time
Read The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It takes one idea from Marcus Aurelius and runs it through Rockefeller, Earhart, and Jobs: the thing blocking your path is the path. It is the clearest short manual for turning a setback into a setup, and it reads in a weekend.
Final thoughts
Oyarzabal got to Berlin through the torn knee, not in spite of it. One boring rep at a time.
“Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two forward.” Tiger Woods
Thanks for reading.
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