Notes and Takeaways from Ego Is the Enemy
When I read it: March 2020
Why I read it: This book was recommended to me by a friend as a good read on self-awareness. I enjoyed it. The book is packed with wisdom that is relevant to leaders and teams of all kinds. It’s also a book about emotions.
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My notes
About Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is an American author of 10+ books. He’s the founder of the creative advisory firm Brass Check. He is a media strategist, the former director of marketing for American Apparel, and a media columnist and editor-at-large for the New York Observer.
Ryan wrote this book (Ego is the Enemy) because it’s the book he wished existed at critical turning points in his own life.
What is ego?
In Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday defines ego as the group of traits including selfishness, delusion, arrogance, greed, and endless competitiveness. He’s referring to the “ego” we mean when we say someone has a big ego.
Ego is not the same as self-confidence. Confidence is earned while ego is stolen. Ego is self-importance.
If you were to plot a linear scale with self-loathing on one end and self-importance on the other end, self-confidence would be in the middle. (I.e. self-loathing <——— self-confidence ———> self-importance).
Manage your ego
Ego drives us to success, but it also makes us vulnerable. Ego causes us to blame others for our problems.
You don’t want to entirely suppress ego, but you do want to strive for less of it. This requires thinking less of yourself.
You have to manage your ego. Your goal should be to replace it with earned confidence and humility.
The three phases of life
According to Ryan Holiday, we are always moving in and out of three phases: aspiration, success, and failure. Aspiration leads to success and failure. Success creates its own failures. And failure leads to aspiration. Ego is the enemy of all three phases. Ego undermines our aspirations, shortens our successes, and lengthens our failures. To avoid ego, we want to be humble in our aspirations, gracious in our success, and resilient in our failures.
Your goal should be to spend most of your time in the aspiration phase. You are in the aspiration phase when you set out to do something. This often takes the form of a goal. If your belief in your ability to hit the goal is not dependent on actual achievement, it is likely based on ego.
Ways to manage your ego
Develop the skill to evaluate your own ability. Self-assessment leads to self-learning and self-improvement.
Avoid the need for validation and status. Don’t be grandiose, be iterative. Today’s cultural values tend to make us dependent on validation, entitled, and ruled by our emotions. Our leaders, including our parents, public figures, and teachers, focus on building our self-esteem and telling us we can accomplish anything. This makes us weak.
Think big in the long term, but also aim small in the near term. For example, investor Paul Graham warns startup founders against having bold, sweeping visions early on. The trick is to start with deceptively small things and work organically toward bigger things. Success doesn't require a bold vision or some sweeping plan.
Choose action over talk. Both take energy, but acting leads to progress. It’s easier to talk about what you are doing than to actually do it. This applies to writing, creative work, and business building.
Don’t fall in love with the image of what success looks like. Keep a student mindset. Be a sponge and seek harsh, critical feedback. Goal visualization is important, but don’t let visualization be confused with real progress. The more time you spend thinking and talking about a task, the closer you feel to completing the task despite making no real progress.
Embrace the uncertainty of silence. When we are uncertain, we are confronted with silence. This silence is where the great breakthroughs come from. Don’t seek the safety of talk. Most people view silence as a weakness. But silence is a strength.
Create plus, minus, and equal systems. Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. You need someone better than you to learn from (plus). You need someone lesser to teach (minus). You need someone similar to challenge yourself against (equal). This creates a continuous feedback cycle from all angles.
Be an eternal student. Study leads to humility. A true student is self-critical and self-motivated. They are their own teacher and critic. Ego blocks learning. Humility accelerates learning. You can’t learn if you think you already know. And you will not find answers if you’re too proud to ask questions.
Avoid passion and embrace reason. Passion is a strong and hard-to-control emotion that can enslave you. “Passionate” is not far from “crazy”. Lewis Alcindor describes John Wooden’s coaching style as “dispassionate”. Wooden was all about being in control of emotions. Passion can get in the way of progress. Instead, seek purpose and realism. Purpose is like passion with boundaries. Passion is “about”, but purpose is “for”. You are passionate about things. You have purpose for things. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself. Passion is about pleasuring yourself. Realism is about detachment and perspective. Realism is about asking: Where do we start? What do we do first? What do we do right now? How are we sure that what we’re doing is moving us forward? What are we benchmarking ourselves against? Purposeful, realistic people hire professionals and use them. They ask what could go wrong. They seek examples and plan for contingencies. They start small, iterate, and get better as they go
Avoid impatience. Losing your patience rarely speeds up the journey. When it feels wrong to take it slow, you’re probably suffering from impatience. When you want to do something meaningful, you will encounter nonsense. We are defined by how we deal with nonsense. Do we keep our self-control? Or do we lose our patience? The impulse is to lose control. Don’t. Endure the nonsense. Restrain impatience.
Avoid performing for an imaginary audience. According to psychologist David Elkind, adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known as the “imaginary audience”. You’re convinced your every move is being watched by the rest of the world. Adults suffer from this tool. We are susceptible to these obsessions of the mind. Our imagination is dangerous when it runs wild. Live in the present. This takes courage. It’s uncomfortable because there’s no one to perform for, just work to be done and lessons to be learned.
Limit pride. Pride is dangerous because it leads to arrogance and away from humility. Pride is a distraction that blunts our ability to learn and build relationships. Prepare for pride and defend against it. Kill it early. Don’t boast. There’s nothing in it for you. Rockefeller asked himself at night, “Are you going to be a fool? Are you going to let this money puff you up?”
Seek other aspirers as peers, not the proud and the accomplished. You want to be around the workers. Work leads to meaning. Work is forever. There is no end. There’s no big break. There’s no you just made it.
Embrace humility as a leader
We want it all, but we’re not sure humility will get us there. We’re scared that if we are humble, we will be preyed upon and beaten. We think, “everyone else is being egotistical, so we should too.” Fight this and proceed with quiet confidence.
Humility exposes our talents and our blind spots.
Ideal personality traits for a leader
The ideal personality traits for true leadership are 1) ambitious without being impatient, 2) innovative without being cocky, and 3) brave without being dangerous.
Success leads to ego.
Success has many trappings: influence, press, money, etc.
Success leads to forgetting how hard the journey was toward accomplishing your goal (and how much luck was involved). This causes you to idealize your story. Success stories omit the stresses and the mistakes.
Success is often brief because ego sabotages it. We stop learning, we stop listening, and we lose our grasp on what matters. Success causes winners to collapse from within. Achievement and recognition strengthen ego and pride. This leads to blind spots and growing pressure to pretend you know more than you do. Also, once you win, people start gunning for you. The stakes are bigger, and the margins of error are smaller.
Ways to maintain success
Build a system around what you do that is about the work (not you). Don’t let work be your identity. If your work is part of your identity, you’ll worry that any failure associated with your work also says something about who you are as a person. Make your identity about the work and the principles behind it. Remain focused on the execution and on executing with excellence. For example, Bill Walsh used his “Standards of Performance” to focus his teams on execution, not the result.
Remain a student. Build a system around continuous learning. Remind yourself that the more you know, the less you actually do.
Be humble. Allow your deeply held assumptions and beliefs to be challenged (BE HUMBLE)
Don’t tell yourself a story. You’re telling yourself a story when you look back at the path to your success and say “I knew it all long” instead of “I hoped, I worked, and I got lucky”... or “I thought this might happen.” Rewriting our own story leads to arrogance. Narratives don’t change the past, but they do have the power to negatively impact our future.
Say no more often. We don’t say no because we might miss out on something if we did. But, saying yes gets in the way of our work. It leads to wasted time, and it takes us off our path. Yes is a commitment; no is a statement. Urgent and important are not synonyms.
Control your competitiveness. Competitiveness is an important force in life, but you must focus it and direct it. The more you succeed, the more you meet other successful people who make you feel insignificant. The natural instinct is to compete.
Avoid entitlement, control, and paranoia. Success leads to entitlement, control, and paranoia, all of which push people away. Entitlement creates ridiculous expectations. Control says it must be down my way. Paranoia thinks I can’t trust anyone. This exhausts the people who work with you.
Respond to hate with love. Instead of hating your enemies, feel pity and empathy for them. Or just let it go. Don’t let other miserable people make you miserable.
Manage yourself. With success, you must adapt. Increased responsibility requires increased clarity and purpose. There is no right system. Every goal deserves its own approach based on what needs to get done. Seek perspective by silencing the noise around you. Seek nature. For me, this is the lake. It’s hard not to be humble sitting next to an enormous body of water. Avoid the “disease of me.” This happens when we start thinking we are special and no one else could possibly understand. Be firm, clear, and patient. Avoid running on sheer energy and enthusiasm. Be in command of yourself. Find the balance between complacency and endless ambition.
Failure leads to learning.
Our biggest life changes come from failure. If we don’t reflect and learn from failure, we will repeat the same mistakes again.
We all fail in some way, whether it’s setbacks, adversity, or a big fall from success.
Failure is relative. It is unique to each of us. Failure calls for purpose, poise, and patience.
Ego can stall our recovery from failure because it sabotages our ability to learn from it. Moving on from failure requires us to understand what went wrong and why. Ego makes failure worse than what it is. The only real failure is abandoning your principles.
Alive time versus dead time
According to Robert Greene, there are two types of time in our lives. Dead time is when you are passive and waiting. Alive time is when you are learning, acting, and using every second. Every second is either spent as dead time or alive time.
Change the definition of success
Use John Wooden’s definition of success. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”
Set your own standards and principles. Then create internal metrics to allow yourself to evaluate your own progress against them. Anyone can win, but not everyone can be the best possible version of themselves.
Thought-provoking questions:
Do you want to be somebody or do something?
What is your purpose?
What are you here to do?
Who do you want to be?
What path will you take?
What goals do you have that are so important that you’d put up with anything to achieve them?
What are you missing right now that a more humble person might see?
What are you avoiding right now with my franticness and embellishments?
What do you want to do?
Why do you want to do what you want to do?
Is this the person you want to be?
Random anecdotes
Humility, diligence, and self-awareness are rare.
Insincere self-depreciation is not the same as modesty.
For some people, personal success is an expectation. For others, it is a surprise.
The most meaningful things we do are often the most difficult.
The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction.
A reputation worth anything can take a few blows.
Random quotes
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feyman
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” —Lao Tzu
“False ideas about yourself destroy you.” —Frank Shamrock
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” —Unknown
“I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who “keep under the body”; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.” —Booker T. Washington
“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.” —Alan Watts
“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you” —C.S. Lewis
“If you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead. Even the highest mountains have animals that, when they stand on it, are higher than the mountain.” —Genghis Khan
“The best plan is only good intentions until it degenerates into work.” —Peter Drucker
“The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal… the hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.” —Ben Horowitz
“The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.” —Harold Geneen
“Man is pushed by drives but pulled by values.” —Viktor Frankl.
“Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” —John Wheeler
“Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.” —David Maraniss
“The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.” —Paul Graham
“Almost always your road to victory goes through a place called 'failure.'” —Bill Walsh
“What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should bother him.” —Goethe
“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” —John Wooden
“A team, like men, must be brought to its knees before it can rise again.” —Vince Lombardi
“It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.” —Marcus Aurelius