Ego is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday Flashcards
The comedian Bill Hicks said the world was tainted with fevered egos. Ryan Holiday writes us all a prescription: humility and reality.
The toxic vanity of ego wrecks promising creative endeavours.
The greatest obstacle to mastery and true success in life - our insatiable ego.
The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance.
The need to be better than, more than, recognised 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.
Ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.
“If you start believing in your greatness, it is the DEATH of your creativity”
The aim of the book is to be:
Humble in our aspirations
Gracious in our success
Resilient in our failures
PART 1 ASPIRE
Our cultural values almost try to make us dependent on validation, entitled, and ruled by our emotions. For a generation, parents and teachers have focused on building up everyone’s self-esteem. In reality, this makes us weak.
The ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Arrogance and self-importance inhibit growth.
Detachment is a natural ego antidote. We need humility, diligence and self-awareness.
Some noble maxims:
“Abhor flatterers as you would deceivers; for both, if trusted, injure those who trust them.”
“Be slow in deliberation, but prompt to carry out your resolves.”
We will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative.
1/ Talk Talk Talk: silence is strength. 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. The more difficult the task, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.
‘Never give reasons for what you think or do until you must. Maybe, after a while, a better reason will pop into your head.’
We must ignore the impulse to seek recognition before we act. We must quietly work in the corner.
2/ To be or to do: ego aids in the deception to redirect us from doing to being. From earning to pretending.
Appearances are deceiving: having an authority is not the same as being an authority. Being promoted does not necessarily mean you’re doing good work. Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
It’s all about the doing, not the recognition. It’s not “who do I want to be in this life?”, but “what do I want to accomplish?”.
3/ Become a student: the power of being a student is that it places ego and ambition in someone else’s hand - there is a sort of ego ceiling imposed.
An education cannot be ‘hacked’.
The prettiness of of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
False ideas about yourself destroy you.
Epictetus says, “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows’.
We need to solicit critical feedback. This is what the ego avoids.
Humility is what keeps us studying. There are no excuses for not getting your education.
4/ Don’t be passionate: passion typically masks a weakness. It’s breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for mastery, strength, purpose and perseverance.
How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? That’s the passion paradox.
We need purpose (passion with boundaries) and realism (detachment and perspective).
Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.
The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration.
5/ Follow the canvas strategy: it’s worth taking a look at the supposed indignities of ‘serving’ someone else.
It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. Find canvases for other people to paint on.
No one is endorsing sycophancy. It’s about looking for opportunities for someone other than yourself.
Entitlement and a sense of superiority are the trappings of ego.
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work.
‘Be lesser, do more’. You can develop a reputation for being indispensable.
The canvas strategy is about helping yourself by helping others. It’s too easy to be bitter or hate the thought of subservience.
Once we fight this emotional and egotistical impulse the canvas strategy is easy. The iterations are endless e.g. find what nobody else wants to do and do it
6/ Restrain yourself: restrain is a difficult skill but a critical one.
7/ Get out of your own head:
‘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
Good example is Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
2400 years ago Plato spoke of the type of people who are guilty of ‘feasting on their own thoughts’.
We must suppress the endless stream of self-aggrandizement and the rap songs of self-loathing.
The disability to separate fiction from reality will paralyse us.
The psychologist David Elkins says that adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known as the ‘imaginary audience’. We are convinced that our every move is being watched with rapt attention. All of us are susceptible to obsessions of the mind.
There is no one to perform for. There is just work to be done.
8/ The danger of early pride: 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. It is a masterful encroacher.
‘Vain men never hear anything but praise’.
What we cultivate less is how to protect ourselves against the validation and gratification that will quickly come our way if we show promise. We must prepare for pride and kill it early - or it will kill what we aspire to.
Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous.
Don’t boast. There’s nothing in it for you.
9/ Work Work Work: make an investment in yourself instead of your ego.
What is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with confidence in spite of the distractions.
Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test.
Part 2 SUCCESS
10/ Always Stay a Student
Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts the blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves.
There is one simple to test to spot a humble person: they consistently observe and listen.
11/ Don’t tell yourself a story
Reductionist narrative retroactively creates a clarity that never was and never will be there.
Keep your identity small. Make it about the work and the principles behind it - not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.
A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.
12/ What’s important to you?
All of us waste precious life doing things we con’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and tp get things we don’t want.
In Seneca’s essay on tranquility, he uses the Greek word euthymia (YOU-THIM-IA), which he defines as “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path.”
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.
Euthymia means tranquility in English.
When you combine insecurity and ambition and you get an inability to say no to things.
Everyone buys into the myth that if only they had that, they would be happy. It may take getting burned a few times to realise the emptiness of this illusion.
13/ Entitlement, controla nd paranoia
“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important” Bertrand Russell
14/ Beware the disease of me
Who cares about the credit?
We don’t use the word magnanimous anymore.
15/ Meditate on the Immensity
Nothing draws us away from the bigger questions like material success. Ego tells us wrongly that meaning comes from activity, that being the centre 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.
No wonder we find success empty. No wonder it feels like we’re on a treadmill.
Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.
Famous Blake poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Part 3 Failure
If success is ego intoxication, then failure can be a devastating ego blow.
Thomas Paine, remarking about George Washington, once wrote that there is a “natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles”.
Psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events. We do that when our sense of self is fragile and dependent on life going our way all the time.
We can get by without constant validation. Our identity is not threatened when things go wrong. Pity isn’t necessary. Instead, there’s stoic resilience.
According to Robert Greene, there are 2 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.
“Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons”
Useless patterns of behaviour:
Idly dreaming about the future
Finding refuge in distraction
Plotting revenge
Dead time is usually controlled by ego.
16/ The effort is enough
We cannot let externals determine whether something was worth it or not
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do…sanity means tying it to your actions.
Many of the breaks we receive in life are arbitrary.
17/ Fight Club moments
Psychologists often say that threatened egotism is one of the most dangerous forces on earth.
18/ Draw the line
The problem is 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. It’s the sunk cost fallacy.
Ego asks: why is this happening to me? How do I save this and prove to everyone I’m as great as they think? It’s the animal fear of even the slightest sign of weakness.
Only ego think embarrassment or failure are more than what they are.
At any given time in the circle of life, we may be aspiring, succeeding or failing. With wisdom, we understand that these positions are transitory, not statements about your value as a human being.
Vain men never hear anything but praise.
Working to refine our habitual thoughts, working to clamp down on destructive impulses, these are not simply the moral requirements of any decent person. They will make us more successful.
