Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Ryan Holiday

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Self-Improvement

226 pages, published June 14, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In his book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday demonstrates how the primary obstruction to a full, successful life is not the outside world, but rather our ego.   In addition to being an author, Holiday 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.  In Ego is the Enemy, he provides a selection of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history to highlight the role that ego plays in our success.  His profiles include historical figures such as Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt and shows how they reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos.

Quotes

“ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”

 

“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”

 

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

 

“Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”

 

“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. 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.”

 

“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.”

 

“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”

 

“When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

 

“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

 

“It’s not that he was wrong to have great ambitions. Alexander just never grasped Aristotle’s “golden mean”—that is, the middle ground. Repeatedly, Aristotle speaks of virtue and excellence as points along a spectrum. Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line—this golden mean—is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes. This is why it is so hard to be excellent, Aristotle wrote. “In each case, it is hard work to find the intermediate; for instance, not everyone, but only one who knows, finds the midpoint in a circle.”

 

“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”

 

“One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

 

“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”

 

“Take inventory for a second. What do you dislike? Whose name fills you with revulsion and rage? Now ask: Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything? Take an even wider inventory. Where has hatred and rage ever really gotten anyone? Especially because almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people—their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness—are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?”

 

“In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to 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.”

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. —RICHARD FEYNMAN”

 

“And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice! —EURIPIDES”

 

“The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.”

 

“Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have “gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity”

 

“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 effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road. That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others.”

My Take

There are many pearls of wisdom in the slim volume Ego is the Enemy, which is what I like to call a “thinker book.”  Holiday made me think about the role that complacency and pride play in my life and also consider the pointlessness of anger.  It’s worth checking out.