Ego Is The Enemy - By Ryan Holiday
Date read: 2016-09-01How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Focuses on how ego can impede you from your goals and ambitions and to stay humble and continue to be a student.
Contents:
My Notes
Your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
Ego is defined as an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.
With every ambition and goal we have ego is there undermining us on the very journey we've put everything into pursuing.
Focus on being:
- Humble in our aspirations.
- Gracious in our success.
- Resilient in our failures.
Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people's experience.
The ability to evaluate one's own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible.
You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote.
Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
Never give reasons for what you think or do until you must. Maybe, after a while, a better reason will pop into your head.
Having authority is not the same as being an authority.
Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
It's about doing, not the recognition.
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.
To become great and to stay great, they must all know what came before, what is going on now, and what comes next.
They must be always learning. We must all become our own teachers, tutors, and critics.
The art of taking feedback is such a critical 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.
Your passion may be the very thing holding you back from power or influence or accomplishment. Passion typically masks a weakness.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
More than purpose, we also need realism. 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?
Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
Just starting out in your career you're:
- Not nearly as good or as important as you think you are.
- You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted.
- Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned from books or in school is out of date or wrong.
Be lesser, do more.
The canvas strategy is helping yourself by helping others.
Discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus.
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn't degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
Successful people ignore the temptations that might make them feel important or skew their perspective.
Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.
We must prepare for pride and kill it early - or it will kill what we aspire to.
The question to ask, when you feel pride: "What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?"
"When you're not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win." -Bill Bradley
Make it so you don't have to fake it.
Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego.
Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety.
If you're not learning, you're already dying.
As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education.
Writing your own narrative leads to arrogance.
Once you win, everyone is gunning for you. Your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever before.
When we are aspiring we must resist the impluse to reverse engineer 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.
We think "yes" will let us accomplish more, when in reality it prevents exactly what we seek.
Sit down and think about what's truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest.
Why do you do what you do? That's the question you need to answer. Only then will you understand what matters and what doesn't.
The complete utter sense of certainty that got you here can become a liability if you're not careful.
A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach.
In its frenzy to protect itself, paranoia creates the persecution it seeks to avoid, making the owner a prisoner of its own delusions and chaos.
As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing 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 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.
Micromanagers are egotists who can't manage others and they quickly get overloaded.
The Innocent Climb is almost always followed by the "Disease of Me" - Pat Riley.
Ego needs honors in order to be validated. But confidence is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
"Play for the name on the front of the jersey and they'll remember the name on the back." -Soccer coach Tony Adams.
Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you.
Don't be deceived by recognition you have gotten or the amount of money in your bank account.
Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.
You must manage yourself in order to maintain your success.
You must adhere to a set of internal metrics that allow you to evaluate and gauge your progress while everyone on the outside is too distracted by supposed signs of failure or weakness.
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. Every moment of failure, every moment that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: alive time or dead time.
Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we've long needed to do.
In life, we get stuck with dead time. Its occurence isn't in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is.
The less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effort - not the results, good or bad - is enough.
We can't let externals determine whether something was worth it or not, it's on us.
Many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished. They can be catalysts for changes we were petrified to make.
Change begins by hearing the critcism and the words of the people around you. It means weighting them, discarding the ones that don't matter, and reflecting on the ones that do.
The only way you can appreciate your progress is to stand on the edge of the whole you dug for yourself, look down inside it, and smile fondly at the bloody claw prints that marked your journey up the walls.
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. So we throw good money and good life after bad and end up making everything so much worse.
Only ego thinks embarrassment or failure are more than what they are.
He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.
Great people hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. 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 is the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are and winning isn't enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.
What defines great leaders is that instead of hating their enemies, they feel a sort of pity and empathy for them.
Aspiration leads to success. Success creates its own adversity. Adversity leads to aspiration and more success.