Ego is the Enemy
Ryan Holiday
Description
It’s wrecked the careers of promising young geniuses. It’s evaporated great fortunes and run companies into the ground. It’s made adversity unbearable and turned struggle into shame.
Its name? Ego, and it is the enemy – of ambition, or success, of resilience.
Ryan Holiday offers a practical meditation on the nature and dangers of the ego.
Key words: Ego, Leadership, Success
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My Notes
At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages.
We are aspiring to something – trying to make a dent in the universe
We have achieved success – perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Or;
We have failed – recently or continually.
Most of us are in these stages in a fluid sense – were aspiring until we succeed, we succeed until we fail or until we aspire to more, and after we fail, we can begin to aspire or succeed again.
The structure is simple: to help you suppress ego early before bad habits take hold, to replace the temptations of ego with humility and discipline when we experience success, and to cultivate strength and fortitude so that when fate turns against you, you’re not wrecked by failure. In short it will;
Humble in our aspirations - Aspire
Gracious in our success - Success
Resilient in our failures - Failure
When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes - but rock-hard humility and confidence. Confidence is earned. Ego is artificial.
It’s a temptation that exists for everyone – for talk and hype to replace action.
Part 1: Aspire
Setting out do to something
Almost universally the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more ‘let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am’. It’s rarely the truth: ‘I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know’.
She did what a lot of us do when we’re scared and overwhelmed by a project: she did everything but focus on it. It was easier to talk about writing, to do the exiting things related to art and creativity and literature, than to commit the act itself.
Most people are decent at hype and sales. So, what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
Let the others slap each other on the back while you’re back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement. Plug that hole – that one, right in the middle of your face – that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens. Watch how much better you get.
His primary means of effecting change was through the collection of pupils he mentored, protected, taught, and inspired.
It’s about doing, not the recognition.
Each fighter to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser that they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against. The purpose of ‘Shamrock’s’ formulae is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle.
Be driven by reason, not passion.
Be in control and do your job. It took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation.
What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness and methodological determination.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose you could say is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective. Purpose deemphasises the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be.
Find canvases for other people to paint on. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
Franklin saw the constant benefit in making other people look good and letting them take credit for their ideas.
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room – until you change that with results.
Say little, do much.
Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable.
Help yourself by helping others. Trade short term gratification for long-term payoff.
Discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus. It is a rewarding and infinitely scalable power strategy. Consider each one an investment in relationships and in your own development.
The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.
It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how much money you have. When you want to do something – something big and important and meaningful – you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.
Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if – especially if – it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. There is no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
Having an idea is not enough. You must work until you are able to recreate your experience effectively in words on a page.
Be both the craftsman and the artist.
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. So, the next stage of course is the hard work.
You know that all things require work. Sure, you get it right? But do you really understand? Do you have any idea just how much work there is going to be? Not work until you get your big break, not work until you make a name for yourself, but work, work, work, forever and ever.
We’re not talking about brilliance, but continual effort.
When you’re practicing, remember someone, somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win.
The task at hand is practicing, working, and improving. Reps, Reps, Reps.
Say “I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be” To do, not be.
Part 2: Success
At the top of the mountain we worked hard to climb
We have to build an organisation and a system around what we do – one that is about work and not about us.
Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there is one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen.
Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. The uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness you feel when you’re deeply help assumptions are challenged. Change your mind. Change your surroundings.
An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to the enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled and enrage in education as an ongoing and endless process.
Take the theory of disruption, which posits that at some point in time, every industry will be disrupted by some trend or innovation that, despite all the resources in the world, the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to. Why is this? Why can’t businesses change and adapt? A large part of it is because they lost the ability to learn. They stopped being students. The second this happens to you; your knowledge becomes fragile.
Peter Drucker: “As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set-up processes to facilitate this continual education.”
The standard of performance was about instilling excellence – the decisively small things – that was responsible for the team’s performance and victory. In the coach’s eyes if the players take care of the details ‘the score takes care of itself’. The winning would happen.
Once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during the moment at the top that you can afford ego the least – because the stakes are so much higher, the margins for error are so much smaller. If anything, your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever.
When we are aspiring, we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer the success from other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative.
The way to do really big things seems to start with deceptively small things. You start with a small bed and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go. ‘Keep your identity small’. Make it about the work and the principles behind it.
All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want. Why do we do this? Because of the Ego. Say no to more things. Saying no sets you free.
Only you know the race you’re running. We’re the only ones that can set the terms of our lives. Far too often, we look at other people and make their approval the standard we feel compelled to meet, and as a result, squander our very potential and purpose.
It’s about being what you are, and being as good as possible at it, without succumbing to all the things that draw you away from it.
With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control and paranoia.
Managing yourself: Your job is to set the priorities, to think big picture, and then trust the people beneath you to do the jobs they were hired for.
Responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose. First setting the top-level goals and priorities of the organisation and your life. Then enforcing and observing them. To produce results and only results.
Play for the name on the front of the jersey, and they’ll remember the name on the back.
On taking time out: Why do you think the great leaders and thinkers throughout history have ‘gone out into the wilderness’ and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around you, you can finally hear the quiet voice you need to listen too.
If you want to live happy, live hidden. Successful people wear normal clothes. Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.
You must manage yourself in order to maintain your success.
Instead of letting power make us delusional and instead of taking what we have for granted, we’d be better to spend our time preparing for the shifts of fate that inevitable occur in life. That is adversity, difficulty, failure.
Part 3: Failure
Here we are experiencing the trial endemic to any journey.
There are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilising every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.
Whether it’s a book or a business or otherwise – at a certain point, that thing leaves the hands and enters the world. It is judged, received, and acted on by other people. It stops being something you control. You cannot always control whether your work is appreciated or not.
It is far better when doing good work is sufficient. The less attached we are to outcomes the better.
Success is peace of mind, which is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.
Seneca “He who fears death will never doing anything worthy of a living man”.
A characteristic of how great people think: They hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don’t care much for what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than anyone else’s.
“Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience.”
