The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent
Today I'd like to share my notes of Ego is the Enemy. It's a brilliant book written by Ryan Holiday. No matter where you are in life, you'll have to fight your ego in order to succeed.
Ego is the enemy, without a doubt. Reading this book will make you feel uncomfortable, and even angry sometimes. Ryan Holiday shares powerful stories of how ego ruins individuals, lives, organizations, and civilizations.
Biggest lesson: Ego is your biggest enemy in work, relationships, and life. Fight it or you'll fail.
In this provocative book, Ryan Holiday shows us how the ego can get in the way of success, satisfaction, and true happiness. When we let our ego get the best of us, it can lead to self-sabotage, and it often makes it harder for us to listen, learn, and grow.
Ego is the Enemy offers a powerful antidote to the ego trap by demonstrating how great historical figuresâfrom Napoleon to John D. Rockefeller to Serena Williamsâhave let their egos get the best of them and how, in contrast, historyâs greatest achievers were able to use ego to their advantage.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourselfâand you are the easiest person to fool.â RICHARD FEYNMAN
The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.
We think something else is to blame for our problems (most often, other people).
We canât improve the world if we donât understand it or ourselves. We canât take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources.
When we remove ego, weâre left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yesâbut rock-hard humility and confidence.
As Irving Berlin put it, âTalent is only the starting point.â The question is: Will you be able to make the most of it? Or will you be your own worst enemy?
One might say that the ability to evaluate oneâs own ability is the most important skill of all.
Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote.
Facts are better than dreams, as Churchill put it.
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.â LAO TZU
Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard. Sitting there, staring, mad at yourself, mad at the material because it doesnât seem good enough and you donât seem good enough. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult, whether itâs coding a new startup or mastering a craft. But talking, talking is always easy.
Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress.
Talkingâlistening to ourselves talk, performing foran audienceâis almost like therapy. I just spent four hours talking about this. Doesnât that count for something? The answer is no. Doing great work is a struggle. Itâs draining, itâs demoralizing, itâs frighteningânot always, but it can feel that way when weâre deep in the middle of it.
Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.
Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesnât.
Let No Manâs Ghost Come Back to Say My Training Let Me Down.â SIGN IN THE NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT TRAINING ACADEMY
An education canât be âhackedâ; there are no shortcuts besides hacking it every single day.
Do you think you are the only one who hopes to achieve your goal?
You will not find the answers if youâre too conceited and self-assured to ask the questions. You cannot get better if youâre convinced you are the best.
âWhen student is ready, the teacher appears.â
She had direction. She wasnât driven by passion, but by reason.
The reality: We hear what we want to hear. We do what we feel like doing, and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard, we accomplish very little.
Because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people, we forget that failures shared the same trait.
Great men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to com mand.â LORD MAHON
Franklin saw the constant benefit in making other people look good and letting them take credit for your ideas.
He learned how to be a rising star without threatening or alienating anyone.
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means youâre the least important person in the roomâuntil you change that with results.
Find what nobody else wants to do and do it.
Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.
Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with.
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesnât degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
But youâre not able to change the system until after youâve made it.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.â ALAN WATTS
Our imaginationâin many senses an assetâis dangerous when it runs wild. We have to rein our perceptions in.
Thereâs no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
What we donât protect ourselves against are people and things that make us feel goodâor rather, too good. We must prepare for pride and kill it earlyâor it will kill what we aspire to.
The first product of self-knowledge is humility,â Flannery OâConnor once said. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves.
We are still striving, and it is the strivers who should be our peersânot the proud and the accomplished.
You canât build a reputation on what youâre going to do.
Weâre simply talking about a lot of hoursâthat to get where we want to go isnât about brilliance, but continual effort.
The material weâve been given genetically, emotionally, financially, thatâs where we begin. We donât control that. We do control what we make of that material, and whether we squander it.
Because no one ever said, reflecting on the whole of someoneâs life, âMan, that monstrous ego sure was worth it.â
Sobriety, open-mindedness, organization, and purposeâthese are the great stabilizers.
We know that empires always fall, so we must think about whyâand why they seem to always collapse from within.
After we give ourselves proper credit, ego wants us to think, Iâm special. Iâm better. The rules donât apply to me.
Without the right values, success is brief.
Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We canât keep learning if we think we already know everything.
Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.â RALPH WALDO EMERSON
With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.
No matter what youâve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If youâre not still learning, youâre already dying.
Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies.
When we are aspiring we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other peopleâs stories.
Thatâs how it seems to go: weâre never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else.
We think âyesâ will let us accomplish more, when in reality it prevents exactly what we seek. All of us waste precious life doing things we donât like, to prove ourselves to people we donât respect, and to get things we donât want.
Only you know the race youâre running.More urgently, each one of us has a unique potential and purpose; that means that weâre the only ones who can evaluate and set the terms of our lives.
This is especially true with money. If you donât know how much you need, the default easily becomes: more.
Ego rejects trade-offs. Why compromise? Ego wants it all.
So why do you do what you do? Thatâs the question you need to answer. Stare at it until you can.
We all occasionally find ourselves in the middle of some project or obligation and canât understand why weâre there. It will take courage and faith to stop yourself.
With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.
Ego is its own worst enemy. It hurts the ones we love too. Our families and friends suffer for it.
As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership.
Ego needs honors in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
There is a balance. Soccer coach Tony Adams expresses it well. Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and theyâll remember the name on the back.
Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter.
Most successful people are people youâve never heard of. They want it that way.It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.
What you found is that you must manage yourself in order to maintain your success.
Because even if we manage ourselves well, prosperity holds no guarantees. The world conspires against us in many ways, and the laws of nature say that everything regresses toward the mean.
something once, doesnât mean youâll be able to do it successfully forever.Reversals and regressions are as much a part of the cycle of life as anything else. But we can manage that too.
The way through, the way to rise again, requires a reorientation and increased self-awareness.
Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.
The only way out is through.
As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life. How will you use it?
In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative: failure, disrespect, jealousy, or even a resounding yawn from the world.
Especially problematic is the fact that, often, we get that. We are praised, we are paid, and we start to assume that the two things always go together. The âexpectation hangoverâ inevitably ensues.
We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and whatâs important.
Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego the harder the fall.
Sometimes because we canât face whatâs been said or whatâs been done, we do the unthinkable in response to the unbearable: we escalate. This is ego in its purest and most toxic form.
The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person. Itâs a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up.
Ego says weâre the immovable object, the unstoppable force. This delusion causes the problems.
Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.
The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?
Everyone else has moved on, but you canât, because you canât see anything but your own way. You canât conceive of accepting that someone could hurt you, deliberately or otherwise. So you hate.
I donât like workâno man doesâbut I like what is in the workâthe chance to find yourself.â JOSEPH CONRAD
Thereâs a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other peopleâs experience.