EGO IS THE ENEMY by Ryan Holiday

• We must begin by seeing ourselves and the world in a new way for the first time. Then we must fight to be different and fight to stay different—that’s the hard part.
• Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
• The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility—that’s ego. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.
• Most of us aren’t “egomaniacs,” but ego is there at the root of almost every conceivable problem and obstacle, from why we can’t win to why we need to win all the time and at the expense of others.
• With every ambition and goal we have—big or small—ego is there undermining us on the very journey we’ve put everything into pursuing.
• Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion.
• Just one thing keeps ego around—comfort. Pursuing great work—whether it is in sports or art or business—is often terrifying. Ego soothes that fear. It’s a salve to that insecurity. Replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption, ego tells us what we want to hear, when we want to hear it.
• At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. We’re 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—we’re 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.
• We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers. But no one is truly successful because they are delusional, self-absorbed, or disconnected.
• Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement.
• One must ask: if your belief in yourself is not dependent on actual achievement, then what is it dependent on? The answer, too often when we are just setting out, is nothing. Ego. And this is why we so often see precipitous rises followed by calamitous falls.
• One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible.
• own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.
• It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.
• Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard.
• In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey.
• Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. 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.
• 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. The same goes for verbalization.
• After spending so much time thinking, explaining, and talking about a task, we start to feel that we’ve gotten closer to achieving it.
• Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.
• Doing great work is a struggle.
• The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
• Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority.
• Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
• What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you.
• The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.
• The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.
• The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
• “False ideas about yourself destroy you.
• You can’t learn if you think you already know.
• The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback. We not only need to take this harsh feedback, but actively solicit it, labor to seek out the negative precisely when our friends and family and brain are telling us that we’re doing great.
• To become what we ultimately hope to become often takes long periods of obscurity, of sitting and wrestling with some topic or paradox.
• In our endeavors, we will face complex problems, often in situations we’ve never faced before. Opportunities are not usually deep, virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into, but instead are obscured, dusted over, blocked by various forms of resistance. What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination.
• Passion typically masks a weakness.
• 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 is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
• Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.
• It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead—humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless.
• Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
• When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
• attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously. It’s certainly more glamorous to pursue your own glory—though hardly as effective.
• 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.
• There is an old saying, “Say little, do much.” What we really ought to do is update and apply a version of that to our early approach. Be lesser, do more.
• Find what nobody else wants to do and do it.
• Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away
• 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.
• Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
• Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one. You will often be tempted, you will probably even be overcome. No one is perfect with it, but try we must.
• It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched.
• you’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it.
• We tend to think that ego equals confidence, which is what we need to be in charge. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.
• It is natural for any young, ambitious person (or simply someone whose ambition is young) to get excited and swept up by their thoughts and feelings.
• The more creative we are, the easier it is to lose the thread that guides us.
• Our imagination—in many senses an asset—is dangerous when it runs wild. We have to rein our perceptions in. Otherwise, lost in the excitement, how can we accurately predict the future or interpret events?
• 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. Feast on it, adjust for it.
• There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
• Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.
• Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.
• Punching above your weight is how you get injured. Pride goeth before the fall.
• If you’re doing the work and putting in the time, you won’t need to cheat, you won’t need to overcompensate.
• Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life.
• We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to.
• We must be on guard against that wild self-confidence and self-obsession.
• Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous.
• “Don’t boast about what hasn’t happened yet.”
• The best plan is only good intentions unless it degenerates into work.
• “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do,”
• Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.
• You can lie to yourself, saying that you put in the time, or pretend that you’re working, but eventually someone will show up. You’ll be tested. And quite possibly, found out.
• Make it so you don’t have to fake it—that’s the key.
• Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego.
• Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes.
• Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
• Of course, what is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with quiet confidence in spite of the distractions.
• Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world. We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do—one that is about the work and not about us.
• It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more.
• With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.
• No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re 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.
• Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.
• The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged—what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your surroundings.
• Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It’s also dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance.
• once you win, everyone is gunning for you.
• Facts are better than stories and image.
• “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”
• Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution—and on executing with excellence.
• That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us.
• 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.
• Ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small.
• The farther you travel down that path of accomplishment, whatever it may be, the more often you meet other successful people who make you feel insignificant.
• Let’s be clear: competitiveness is an important force in life. It’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in.
• It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest. Without this, success will not be pleasurable, or nearly as complete as it could be. Or worse, it won’t last.
• The more you have and do, the harder maintaining fidelity to your purpose will be, but the more critically you will need to.
• Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because that’s independence.
• 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.
• A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach.
• When we’re aspiring or small time, we can be idiosyncratic, we can compensate for disorganization with hard work and a little luck. That’s not going to cut it in the majors. In fact, it’ll sink you if you can’t grow up and organize.
• It turns out that becoming a great leader is difficult. Who knew?!
• Management? That’s the reward for all your creativity and new ideas? Becoming the Man? Yes—in the end, we all face becoming the adult supervision we originally rebelled against. Yet often we react petulantly and prefer to think: Now that I’m in charge, things are going to be different!
• 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. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity. It requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job. It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.
• Sometimes systems are better decentralized. Sometimes they are better in a strict hierarchy. Every project and goal deserves an approach fitted perfectly to what needs to be done.
• What matters is that you learn how to manage yourself and others, before your industry eats you alive.
• 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.
• This is one of the most dangerous ironies of success—it can make us someone we never wanted to be in the first place.
• Early in your career, you’ll notice that you jump on every opportunity to do so. As you become more accomplished, you’ll realize that so much of it is a distraction from your work—time spent with reporters, with awards, and with marketing are time away from what you really care about.
• It doesn’t make you a bad person to want to be remembered. To want to make it to the top. To provide for yourself and your family. After all, that’s all part of the allure.
• Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll 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.
• When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone.
• Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.
• Once we’ve made it, we tend to think that ego and energy is the only way to stay there. It’s not.
• We have to fight to stay sober, despite the many different forces swirling around our ego.
• But as Merkel supposedly said, “You can’t solve . . . tasks with charisma.”
• Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.
• Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way.
• Endless ambition is easy; anyone can put their foot down hard on the gas. Complacency is easy too; it’s just a matter of taking that foot off the gas.
• The world conspires against us in many ways, and the laws of nature say that everything regresses toward the mean.
• Just because you did something once, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it successfully forever.
• Reversals and regressions are as much a part of the cycle of life as anything else.
• No one is permanently successful, and not everyone finds success on the first attempt.
• Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.
• If ego is often just a nasty side effect of great success, it can be fatal during failure.
• According to Greene, 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 utilizing every second.
• Lacking the ability to examine ourselves, we reinvest our energy into exactly the patterns of behavior that caused our problems to begin with.
• 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.
• “Success is peace of mind, which is a 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.”
• There are many ways to hit bottom. Almost everyone does in their own way, at some point.
• The bigger the ego the harder the fall.
• The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.
• People make mistakes all the time.
• Ego kills what we love. Sometimes, it comes close to killing us too.
• Most trouble is temporary . . . unless you make that not so.
• Only ego thinks embarrassment or failure are more than what they are. History is full of people who suffered abject humiliations yet recovered to have long and impressive careers.
• “He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man,” Seneca once said. Alter that: He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.
• The only real failure is abandoning your principles.
• If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.
• This is characteristic of how great people think. It’s not that they find failure in every success. They just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don’t much care what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else’s.
• Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against.
• The more successful or powerful we are, the more there will be that we think we need to protect in terms of our legacy, image, and influence. If we’re not careful, however, we can end up wasting an incredible amount of time trying to keep the world from displeasing or disrespecting us.
• Yet we find that what defines great leaders like Douglass is that instead of hating their enemies, they feel a sort of pity and empathy for them.
• At various points in our lives, we seem to have different capacities for forgiveness and understanding.
• There is no way around it: We will experience difficulty. We will feel the touch of failure.
• “People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”
• Most of us can’t handle uncomfortable self-examination.
• We all experience success and failure in our own way.