Have you ever seen a set of Russian tea dolls?

They’re beautifully and elaborately painted, made of wood, and unscrew in the middle because they’re hollow. Also known as nesting or stacking dolls, a set decreases in size, so that all four or five individual dolls fit inside one another.

Often, the largest portrays an older Russian peasant woman. If that’s the case, the other reproductions of the peasant women get younger and younger as they get smaller and smaller, and the set ends with a peasant baby.

Keep those dolls in the back of your mind as I tell you what was on mine one night. I had ridden especially well for 90 minutes indoors that morning and on a time trial bike after a more-painful-than-promising, 35-minute warmup.

I wanted to know how. I wanted to know why.

The final 90 minutes featured 10 “on-off” intervals, riding all-out for four minutes followed by one minute of easy pedaling. It’s something I hadn’t done on a time trial bike in years.

Typically, the titanium rods screwed to my femurs cause a toothache type of pain in my ball-and-socket joints in that riding position. Yet I hadn’t been deterred that morning when that feeling recurred.

Moreover, a dead feeling in my legs during the warmup suggested that no part of the ride would be special.

But it was special, really special, and when I looked at the end table beside my recliner that night, I realized why. While my legs may have been off in the warmup, my mind had been on.

And it was on because I had been doing what I suggested you do in an article five weeks ago. Reread “quake” books - those that have rocked your world and remind you of what’s really important in life - in the never-ending battle to keep your mind calm and clear and your efforts fueled and focused.

The Obstacle Is the Way (Portfolio, 2014) by Ryan Holiday is the quake book currently on my end table. The point to the book is also its title, which Holiday explains in the introduction by posing two questions.

What if those “frustrating, unfortunate, problematic, unexpected” obstacles preventing you from doing what you want to do weren’t really so bad? What if you could actually find certain benefits “embedded inside or inherent” in them?

That would certainly produce a proper mindset. The sort that caused Holiday’s long-gone mentor Marcus Aurelius to realize “what stands in the way becomes the way.”

The first thing in my way that morning came via Canada: the poor air quality brought on by wildfires. It would keep my ride inside, something I don’t like doing in the summer.

The second came from a workout plan that called for a hard 60 minutes of riding as part of a longer outdoor ride.

Since you’re probably not a hardcore cyclist, it does you no good to hear additional workout details. But since your mind, just like mine, can sometimes go awry, it could be good to hear a bit of what’s in Holiday’s book.

Like his view on perception. “Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is.

“We decide what story to tell.”

Beside those words in my book, I have written, “Who is always in charge? You!” It’s the question I kept asking myself during the during the aforementioned workout warm-up.

The next morning, I said the same question-answer combo a time or two just before I deleted from my computer a halfway-done article. It was 400 hundred words or so about a self-help book sent to me for free by a publicist in the hope I’d review it.

It was also the right decision, but one that probably wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t been rereading Holiday’s book.

A sense of guilt would’ve kept me from it.

This would also be the first time I accepted a book gratis and didn’t write about it. Despite that, junking the article was the best course of action for me - and you.

Those Russian nesting dolls help explain why. Your body, soul, spirit, and mind are separate entities, but you are only truly whole - and therefore only truly healthy - when you unify them, when you find a way to fit one inside another inside another.

The blurb on the back the self-help book that won’t ever get reviewed here claims it’s a “powerful model for handling stress, distress, and life’s turbulent plot twists.” Yet unlike Russian nesting dolls, the chapters never come together to create a unified whole.

But I see this book’s failure, not as failure, but as a good reminder - and you should, too.