That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin, you who think yourself to be someone — Menanader, old Greek playwright.

Ego Is The Enemy: Lessons and Summary

Providing a pragmatic philosophy to help us navigate life.

Ego is the enemy. Photo by Alfred Aloushy on Unsplash

Here is a summary of ‘Ego is the Enemy’ by Ryan Holiday, in which Holiday focuses on our biggest internal opponent: our ego. Drawing on characters from Eisenhower to Malcolm X, Holiday teaches us timeless and often, at first glance, counterintuitive or seemingly contradictory lessons in staying humble, countering our ego, and building a lifestyle of resilience and success.

The summary is split into the various chapters and the notes that I found most interesting and eye-opening, alongside my own occasional thoughts. The main themes are:

• Aspire — wanting to accomplish bigger and better goals.
• Success- achieving our goals and receiving public praise.
• Failure — falling from grace and dealing with internal resistance.

Aspire

• Reject promotion so you can be ready for your achievements — William Sherman
• Where does your belief in yourself come from? Is it from achievements? If not, it is from your ego.
• Abhor flatterers as you would deceivers. If one was to be true, both would injure you.
• The ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the greatest skill of all. Detach yourself. Are you actually being useful? Is what you are writing actually beneficial. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with our own work.
• Facts are better than dreams.

Talk, talk, talk

• Talk and hype replace action. What you’re going to do. What you should do. Comment boxes, tweets, journals. Talking is always easy. Writing the book, coding a startup… The creative process is difficult, but it’s a lot easier to talk about it. Talking about it releases endorphins. It’s as if you already achieved it.
• Talking and doing fight for the same resources.
• The greats ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act.

To be, or to do?

• From doing to being, from earning to pretending. Pretending that the money in my bank account is mine, when actually it’s all Student Finance.
• Impressing people is utterly different from being impressive.
• Being right is different from having the right.
• A man is worked upon by what he works on — Frederick Douglas
• Keep in mind Boyd when you start to feel entitled. Do not equate fame with the American dream

Become a student

• You can’t hack an education.
• The power of being a student is not just that it’s an extended period of instruction, but that it places the ego and ambition in other people’s hands.
• There are no short cuts. Think about your goals. How have they changed in the past year? No wonder you’re not achieving your goals if they are changing so much
• “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows”, Epictetus says.

Photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash

Don’t be passionate

• Is passion really life’s most important force? Perhaps not. Perhaps the cause of our unsuccess.
• Passion typically masks a weakness. It’s breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline for mastery with strength and purpose and perseverance.
• We need realism. Where do we start? What do we do first? What we do right now? Are we sure that what we’re doing is moving us forward? What are we benchmarking ourselves against?
• Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

It is not wrong to take it slow. To build on yourself over time, day upon day, week upon week, year upon year, and then on the catalogue of all that experience to achieve something.

Hire professionals and use them. Ask questions. What could go wrong? Ask for examples. How could it be better next time?

This iterative approach is, indeed, far less exciting than the passionate approach: flying 4,000 miles to surprise someone etc but it is more effective.

Follow the canvas strategy

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 organisations 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 but hardly as effective. Obeisance is the way forward

What am I doing right now? Trying to pursue my own glory.

Greatness from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you are the least important person in the room dash until you change that with results.

Be lesser, do more

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 effects this would have overtime would be profound: you learn a great deal by solving diverse problems

Restrain yourself

• You’ll think to yourself: I’m better than this, I deserve more.
• But it doesn’t matter whether you have a million dollars, a wall full of awards. That doesn’t mean anything in the new field you’re trying to tackle. Don’t react. Take it.
• Quietly brush it off and work harder.
• The up and coming must endure the abuse of the entrenched. You’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it.
• Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one. You will often be tempted; you will probably even be overcome. The tightrope you walk will tolerate only restraint and has no forgiveness for ego.

Don’t tell yourself a story

• Stop being attached to the results.
• “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.”
• Stop performing. There’s no one to perform for. Reign your imaginations in.
• Avoid pride through feedback.
• ‘You who think yourself to be someone’
• It is not enough to have ideas. You must work until you are able to recreate the experience effectively in words on the page.
• You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.

Always stay a student

• “When you are not practising. remember someone somewhere is practising, and when you meet him, he will win.” —Ed Macauley
• Fake it til’ you make it? There will be a point where you’re tested, and you will be found out.
• Quit thinking you’re special. If you don’t put in the work, what do you expect?
• It’s an idea repeated in self-deception — stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on what you can do for others? It’s continual, continued effort
• Understand how you learn.
• Keep your identity small. Make it about the work and the principles behind it. Not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline. Start extremely small and scale your ambitions as you go.

We might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story when really it is rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.

• Create the image around hard work and sincere hustle, not inspiration or pain.

What’s important to you?

• “To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and old age.”
• It’s absolutely critical you know who you are competing with and why. For example, money: if you don’t know how much you need, the default easily becomes more. In reality, I don’t need lots of money. Just enough to buy bikes, travel around the world.
• So figure out what is important to you. Find out why you are after what you are after

Entitlement, control, and paranoia

1. Entitlement: It’s mine. I’ve earnt it. Nickels and dimes other people. Overstates our own abilities to us. Creates ridiculous expectations.
2. Control: It must be done all my way, even tiny, inconsequential things.

• Figure out how to manage yourself. Eisenhower and the sealed envelopes: let the best man do the job.

Beware of the disease of me

• If you do everything right that is enough. Do not require appreciation or results.
• Play for the name on the front of the jersey and they will remember the name on the back.
• 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.

The credit? Who cares?

• Stop caring if you’ll be rewarded for your work. Belisarius was blinded and forced to beg on the streets after saving Western Civilisation on at least three occasions.

Be part of something bigger than yourself.

Charisma doesn’t get results.

Maintain your sobriety

• You don’t have to one-up everyone, always be right, always stand up for yourself. Compromise, except for the principle at hand.
• We don’t need pity. We need purpose, poise, and patience.
• Ego turns slips into falls and little troubles into great unravellings.
• Narcissistic injury: when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events.

Alive time or dead time?

• The occurrence of dead time is out of our control. Its use is not.
• Time is money.
• Dead time: I will use this time. I will choose to use this time. It will be an opportunity for me.

The effort is enough

• Ego says, why did you ever try? This isn’t worth it. This isn’t fair. This is not your problem, come up with a good excuse and wash your hands of this.
• Hard things are broken by hard things.
• A team, like men, must be brought to its knees before it can rise again.
• When success begins to slip from your fingers — for whatever reason — the response is not to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It is to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.
• The point is: everyone can win. But not everyone can be the best version of themselves. Winning or achieving is not enough. Measuring up to your standards is.
• Look for failure even in success, like the New England Patriots.

Maintain your own scorecard

• “No one will know”. “What can I get away with?”. That’s ego. What do your inner standards say about right and wrong?
• It is tough to, after labouring so intensely, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.
• What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us.

To sum up:

1. Live with purpose, not passion. What do I want to do? Figure that out through experimentation. Prioritise your goals with clarity and then execute them. Follow through.
2. Always be a student. Learning is a requirement, not just in the beginning but especially then. You aren’t as good as you think you are. Everything in life has something to teach you.
3. Talk and think less, do more. Talking and thinking too much drain the energy you could be using to put into your work. Stay focused on execution.

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.