Published 2016, ISBN 9780698192157, 227 pages
Born Jun 16, 1987, Ryan Holiday is a media strategist who dropped out of college at age of 19, he advised best-selling authors and multi-platinum musicians. He worked as a Director of Marketing at American Apparel, and is currently a media columnist and editor-at-large at New York Observer. He also worked with Tucker Max and Robert Greene (author of "48 Laws of Power").
- Introduction
- Summary
- Part I - Aspire
- Part II - Success
- Part III - Failure
- Epilogue
- Conclusion
- Bibliography and Resources
Just around the time I was researching what constitutes a person's ego and how to work with it, I saw several thoughtful quotes taken from this book. So I went to purchase the book after reading several reviews and finding them positive. The author seemed as a person who could speak from personal experience, getting through a wild success early in life. This fast success overly inflated their ego, and then crushed it after he has seen the very same people he came to admire, succumb to the poisons of egotism1.
With success comes the temptation to tell oneself a story, to round off the edges, to cut out your lucky breaks and add a certain mythology to it all.
You know, that arcing narrative of Herculean struggle for greatness against all odds: sleeping on the floor, being disowned by my parents, suffering for my ambition. It’s a type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth.
But a story like this is never honest or helpful.
The success often gets to people's heads and they get trapped by their own thoughts. Starting to believe they themselves and their work is more important than anything or anyone else is the first sign that something's wrong. I didn't want that happening to me, As I've recognized that first red flag.
And I had already noticed for quite some time, how successful people tend to release lower quality material (music, movies, books) once they start believing they are as great, talented and amazing as everyone is telling them, if not more than that! They seem to get disconnected from that very source of inspiration which drove them to their original success. It was when they believed in their work, not when they believed in The Artist that media created for them, the false self that flattery made them believe they became.
The book is divided into three parts main - Aspire, Success and Failure each of which has essay-like chapters (not numbered). The three-part structure of the book comes from the observation that we are always in one of three stages - aspiring to something, succeeding in it or failing. The goal is to help us to be
- Humble in our aspirations
- Gracious in our success
- Resilient in our failures
The definition of the ego in the book is not in the usual, Freudian sense - it's the over-inflated sense of our own importance, arrogance and self-centered ambition.
It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else. The need to be better than, more than, recognized 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.
This ego at the same time drives us towards accomplishments and drives us to the ground when we believe the fictional narrative it's telling as. As football coach Bill Walsh said
self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.
In that sense the ego is the enemy of everything you want to accomplish - mastering the craft, getting a real insight, getting along with others, building lasting relationships, acquiring loyalty and gathering support. As the voice of ego tells us we're better than we really are, it prevents us from real connection to the world around us. And if we don't see the reality for what it really is, we'll warp it, we'll be delusional, and likely blame others for our own failures and problems.
The performance artist Marina Abramović puts it
If you start believing in your own greatness, it is the death of your creativity
The part starts with a letter from Isocrates to Demonicus, around 374 BC. The letter was written after Demonicus lost his father at a young age, and knowing how ambitious he was Isocrates warned him of dangers of unbounded ambition. He told him to be modest, just and self-controlled, that nobody can stand arrogance and to abhor flatterers as they are deceivers. And when you trust flatterers and sweet-talkers, you get hurt. He told him to be slow in deliberation but prompt in execution and to constantly train his intelect "for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body".
Those words made way to Shakespeare, who later wrote
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
With these precepts in mind, we are told a story of William Tecumseh Sherman, possibly the greatest American general and strategic thinker, and most likely the only person to turn down the presidency of the USA. His life story shows a person who was slow to accept positions and always realistic in strategic thinking. Being humble kept him aware of the realities of the Civil War and enabled him to achieve significant victories.
He advised his friend Grant to be wary of the glittering praise and not to take it seriously. Unfortunately, Grant didn't listen and proceeded to have a terrible political career, dying a bitter man.
Where Isocrates and Shakespeare wished us to be self-contained, self-motivated, and ruled by principle, most of us have been trained to do the opposite. Our cultural values almost try to make us dependent on validation, entitled, and ruled by our emotions.
Our culture puts heavy emphasis on building self-esteem, making us feel special, that we're going places. That makes us weak. It makes us believe it, and stop doing our best.
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.”
At this phase it's helpful to view yourself from a little distance, detachment is an antidote to ego. It's easy to be emotionally infatuated with your own work. What is rare is humility, diligence and self-awareness.
Upton Sinclair campaigned for a governor of California in 1934 - by writing a book about his accomplishments once he's elected. The problem was that he told the story about his success before he got elected. That vision he imagined drained him of the energy to actually pursue the position. The book was a best seller, but the campaign a failure.
It’s a temptation that exists for everyone — for talk and hype to replace action.2
Now, more than ever, we're tempted by the blank spaces in social media ("what's on your mind?") to talk. And almost universally this talk on social media is positive. It's more about saying how great things are going than how scared we are, how much we struggle.
Starting something new is scary so we comfort ourselves externally, we look for support and validation from others. Putting in the work is hard. Talking is easy.
We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. That being ignored is tantamount to death (and for the ego, this is true). So we talk, talk, talk as though our life depends on it. In actuality, silence is strength— particularly early on in any journey.
As the philosopher (and as it happens, a hater of newspapers and their chatter) Kierkegaard warned, "Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it."
The research has showed that even though the goal visualisation is important, after a certain point our mind starts to confuse it with actual progress.
Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening— not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. “Void,” Marlon Brando, a quiet actor if there ever was one, once said, “is terrifying to most people.”
We should stop seeking validation and let others slap each other on the back for deciding to go to the gym. The real success comes from wrestling with the void and overpowering the fears and insecurities. Then, and only then, the talk is earned.
Here we get introduced to John Boyd, one of the most influential strategists in modern warfare, and the person most people had never have heard of. Even though he has never talked publicly or published anything, his work had advanced the aerial combat significantly. The F-15 and F-16 fighter jets were his pet projects.
His biggest influence was on numerous pupils he had mentored, taught and protected. Is it possible that staying humble had made him more influental? He had lived the speech which he would give to many a young soldier - a insecure and impressionable person every time, when they were starting out:
“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” Boyd said to him. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.”
Using his hands to illustrate, Boyd marked off these two directions. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd paused, to make the alternative clear.
“Or,” he said, “you can go that way and you can do something— something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision.”
And then Boyd concluded with words that would guide that young man and many of his peers for the rest of their lives. “To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
As we go thourgh life we get distracted by many incentives, positions, recognition and politics. It makes us fall in love with the image of how success looks like. It makes us focus on being something instead of doing something.
Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing good work and it doesn’t mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
The choice which Boyd has laid in front of us is the question of purpose. What is your purpose? What are you here to do? This question helps to decide whether to be or to do - are you more important, or the work you're trying to do?
If your purpose is something bigger than yourself, if you're trying to accomplish something, everything becomes more easier and more difficult at the same time - easier because it's easier to recognize what you need to do. Easier because it's not about recognition. And harder because each opportunity needs to be evaluated by strict guidelines - does it help what you set out to do? Does it allow you to achieve what you started? Are you being selfish or selfless?
Through the story of how Dave Mustaine got kicked out of Metallica early on, to be replaced with Kirk Hammett, we find out that even though Hammett was now a part of up-and-coming huge band, he didn't let that go to his head. Instead of coasting of the success of being a great guitarist to be picked, he continued to learn and study. He got a best teacher he could find - Joe Satriani. Hammett felt he needed to learn what he didn't know, from a person playing a style completely different from his band. Apparently Satriani was a strict and unforgiving teacher too. There were weekly lessons and they had to be learnt, if not, Hammett was wasting everyone's time.
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. There is a sort of ego ceiling imposed— one knows that he is not better than the “master” he apprentices under. Not even close. You defer to them, you subsume yourself. You cannot fake or bullshit them. An education can’t be “hacked”; there are no shortcuts besides hacking it every single day. If you don’t, they drop you.
We don't like thinking someone is better than us, or that we have a lot left to learn.
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
To really become a master we must be ready to accept there are people who are better than us, seek them out and learn from them, knocking down illusions we have about ourselves.
The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
The purpose of Shamrock’s formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast.
Epictetus said "It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows". So empty your cup. Become the student. Humble, absorbing like a sponge, listening to feedback and improving himself. There's no room for ego here. The art of taking feedback, especially harsh and unforgiving feedback is a crucial skill in life. We'd rather avoid being criticized, but that's just the ego trying to protect itself. We need to actively seek feedback and criticizm. Especially when everyone is telling us we're doing great.
Ego also doesn't allow for incubation, for long periods of hard work in obscurity, it demands recognition and praise. Ego thinks patience is for losers, assumes we're good enough to put our talents out in the world. It blocks us from improving by telling us we don't need to improve.
Today it's easier than ever to get access to information, to teachers, masters and exemplars. There is no excuse not to advance your own education. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Passion— it’s all about passion. Find your passion. Live passionately. Inspire the world with your passion.
People go to Burning Man to find passion, to be around passion, to rekindle their passion. Same goes for TED and the now enormous SXSW and a thousand other events, retreats, and summits, all fueled by what they claim to be life’s most important force.
The passion might be the very thing preventing you from achieving what you set out to do. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were passionate about Iraq. Christopher McCandless passionately headed into the wild. So many others pursued their passion, fervently believing in their cause. They were also unprepared, and incapable of grasping the reality of their goals.
To be clear, I’m not talking about caring. I’m talking about passion of a different sort— unbridled enthusiasm, our willingness to pounce on what’s in front of us with the full measure of our zeal, the “bundle of energy” that our teachers and gurus have assured us is our most important asset. It is that burning, unquenchable desire to start or to achieve some vague, ambitious, and distant goal. This seemingly innocuous motivation is so far from the right track it hurts.
We get inspired by the passion of the greats, but we don't see the failures produced by the same force. We never hear of the countless inventors and entrepreneurs who had sunk their ships before ever leaving a mark. They had passion but lacked deliberation and methological determination.
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous.
Passion can be seen in those who can explain in great detail what they'll become, and even describe the burden and worries their achievements will some day bring! But they can't show you any progress to speak of.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
Passion is about. (I am so passionate about ....) Purpose is to and for. (I must do .... I was put here to accomplish .... I am willing to endure ... for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
Purposeful people operate on a different level. They hire professionals and use them, they ask questions, they plan for contingencies. It's less exciting to have a step-by-step approach instead of manifestos and bold proclamations, it's less glamorous and bold. But it will bring us closer to our goal because it works. Passion is form over function, purpose is function, function, function.
The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion. Not naïveté.
It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead— humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless.
Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be.
Being in an entry level position, a junior, an intern often produces impotent rage. We feel our genius is not seen and appreciated. We feel we're forced to do things we don't like, for people less talented than us. We see it as a waste of time. But what if we'd see it as a unique opportunity to learn from our position, to prepare ourselves for the time we'll be in charge?
We see it in recent lawsuits in which interns sue their employers for pay. We see kids more willing to live at home with their parents than to submit to something they’re “overqualified” to work for. We see it in an inability to meet anyone else on their terms, an unwillingness to take a step back in order to potentially take several steps forward. I will not let them get one over on me. I’d rather we both have nothing instead.
In reality, the apprentice model had been working fantastic for centuries. Most of the great people navigated this system successfully. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, to mention just a couple. Today, when someone gets a new job or joins a new organization, they are advised to make others look good. To keep their head down and serve the boss. It's hard to hear for young, ambitious person with a college degree. Isn't getting the degree precisely what was supposed to spare them from this indignation?
Let’s flip it around so it doesn’t seem so demeaning: 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. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. ... Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
When you are just starting out, few fundamental realities are certain
- 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 in books or in school is out of date or wrong
The canvas strategy is helping yourself by helping others. It's easier to be bitter than to let others take credit for your work.
There is an old saying, “Say little, do much.” What we really ought to do is update and apply a version of that to our early approach. 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 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.
Some of possible ways of embracing the canvas strategy
- Maybe it’s coming up with ideas to hand over to your boss.
- Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce them to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks.
- Find what nobody else wants to do and do it.
- Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas.
- Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away
What most people's egos prevent them to see is that the person who clears the path shapes it's direction, like the canvas shapes the painting in the works.
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
In the story about Jackie Robinson (the first black player in Major League Baseball) we see how his learning to restrain himself allowed him to reach great heights in his career. As a young person he was rash and hot-headed. In 1944 he ended his career as a military officer at Camp Hood when a bus driver attempted to force him to sit in the back in spite of laws that forbade segregation on base buses. Arguing, cursing and then challenging his commanding officer led him to court-martial. He was acquitted but nevertheless soon discharged.
When Branch Hickey, the manager and owner of Brooklyn Dodgers scouted him out he asked Jackie does he have the guts not to fight back. He told him what he'll face - hotel clerks refusing him a room, rude waiters, opponents shouting slurs. And Robinson assured him that he's ready to handle all of it. He was ready to see the bigger picture. Much more waited for him, there was an agressive, coordinated campaign to libel, provoke, attack and even kill. He nearly had his Achilles tendon taken out by players who aimed their spikes at him. Yet Robinson held to a pact he had with Hickey and never gave in to anger - however deserved. He never hit another player in nine years of his professional career.
Jackie’s path called for him to put aside both his ego and in some respects his basic sense of fairness and rights as a human being. Early in his career, the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, was particularly brutal in his taunting during a game. “They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!” he yelled over and over. “We don’t want you here, nigger.” Not only did Jackie not respond— despite, as he later wrote, wanting to “grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist”— a month later he agreed to take a friendly photo with Chapman to help save the man’s job.
The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even sixty years removed, almost turns the stomach. Robinson called it one of the most difficult things he ever did, but he was willing to because it was part of a larger plan. He understood that certain forces were trying to bait him, to ruin him. Knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order do it. He shouldn’t have had to, but he did.
Our difficulties will pale in comparison to Robinson's but it will still be tough to keep our self-control. When we set out to do something, something big and important and meaningful, we will certainly face treatment ranging from indifference to sabotage.
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
Up ahead there will be: Slights. Dismissals. Little fuck yous. One-sided compromises. You’ll get yelled at. You’ll have to work behind the scenes to salvage what should have been easy. All this will make you angry. This will make you want to fight back. This will make you want to say: I am better than this. I deserve more.
What are we to do? Endure it. Take it. Brush it aside and work harder. Ignore the noise. It's difficult to restrain yourself, but critical.
No matter how confident and famous Robinson became, he never spit on fans. He never did anything that undermined his legacy. A class act from opening day until the end, Jackie Robinson was not without passion. He had a temper and frustrations like all of us do. But he learned early that the tightrope he walked would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego.
Honestly, not many paths do.
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
With literary examples of JD Salinger, John Fante and Walker Percy we can see how self-obsessivenes and immaturity can ruin great talents. They felt the world is too much to bear, thinking mostly about themselves to the point of paralzying their genius and stifling their output of creative work.
The Civil War general George McClellan is a great example - he was proven in battle, graduated from West Point and loved by his men, but he couldn't lead the forces into battle over too much thinking
McClellan was constantly thinking about himself and how wonderful he was doing— congratulating himself for victories not yet won, and more often, horrible defeats he had saved the cause from. When anyone— including his superiors— questioned this comforting fiction, he reacted like a petulant, delusional, vainglorious, and selfish ass. By itself that’s insufferable, but it meant another thing: his personality made it impossible to do what he needed to do most— win battles.
Novelist Anne Lamott tells us a warning story about KFKD (K-Fucked) station that will play in our heads if we aren't careful
Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one had no talent or insight, and on and on and on.
We are all like that, sometimes anxious, doubting ourselves and feeling impotent. Somewhat like teenagers. The psychologist David Elkind said the adolescence is marked by a phenomenon called "invisible audience". Imagine a fourteen year old missing a week of school - he'll imagine everyone is talking about it, murmuring about his absence. In truth it was barely noticed.
Even as adults, we’re susceptible to this fantasy during a harmless walk down the street. We plug in some headphones and all of a sudden there’s a soundtrack. We flip up our jacket collar and consider briefly how cool we must look. We replay the successful meeting we’re heading toward in our head. The crowds part as we pass. We’re fearless warriors, on our way to the top.
It’s the opening credits montage. It’s a scene in a novel. It feels good— so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness— and so we stay stuck inside our heads instead of participating in the world around us.
That’s ego, baby.
We are all suceptible to imagine ourselves being watched more closely than we are. That we're more important than we are. We start doing things to match our reputation, our image. To be successful, we need to curb these flights of fancy.
Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if— especially if— it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.
There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
At the tender age of 18, young Benjamin Franklin had returned to Boston, full of pride and self-satisfaction and a pocketfull of coins that he would show to everyone who was willing to indulge him. When meeting was Cotton Mather, one of the town's most respected figures, they walked down the hallway chatting. Franklin, completely self-absorbed had missed Cotton's warning to stoop, hitting his head into a low ceiling beam. Mather response was "Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high"... "Stoop, young man, stoop— as you go through this world— and you’ll miss many hard thumps."
Christians consider pride a sin, because it convinces people they are better than they are, deludes and distracts them.
“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly famously said, “they first call promising.” Twenty-five hundred years before that, the elegiac poet Theognis wrote to his friend, “The first thing, Kurnos, which gods bestow on one they would annihilate, is pride.”
Pride blunts our mind, makes us less perceptive of reality, of how much better we can become. It makes minor accomplishments feel like major ones. It makes us pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness and genius.
Pride and ego say:
- I am an entrepreneur because I struck out on my own.
- I am going to win because I am currently in the lead.
- I am a writer because I published something.
- I am rich because I made some money.
- I am special because I was chosen.
- I am important because I think I should be
We all indulge in this self-congratulating behavior, and every culture has words of caution against it. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Don’t cook the sauce before catching the fish. The way to cook a rabbit is first to catch a rabbit. Game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned. Punching above your weight is how you get injured. Pride goeth before the fall.
The childlike little prince in Saint-Exupéry’s famous story makes the same observation, lamenting that “vain men never hear anything but praise.” That’s exactly why we can’t afford to have it as a translator.
...As the famous conqueror and warrior Genghis Khan groomed his sons and generals to succeed him later in life, he repeatedly warned them, “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He told them that pride would be harder to subdue than a wild lion. He liked the analogy of a mountain. He would say, “Even the tallest mountains have animals that, when they stand on it, are higher than the mountain.”
We learn how to protect ourselves from negativity, people doubting us. But we rarely learn how to protect ourselves from things that makes us feel too good. We must prepare for pride and kill it. Stop it before it kills what we aspire to.
The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: 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? It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later.
The difference between a professional and a dilettante is in recognizing that having the idea is not enough - execution is everything.
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do,” was how Henry Ford put it. The sculptor Nina Holton hit the same note in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s landmark study on creativity. “That germ of an idea,” she told him, “does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work.”
There's no specific point where you're done. There's no "work... but only until your big break". There's only work forever and ever-ever ever-ever...
Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We’re simply talking about a lot of hours— that to get where we want to go isn’t about brilliance, but continual effort. While that’s not a terribly sexy idea, it should be an encouraging one. Because it means it’s all within reach— for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work.
Our ego wants the talk, the planning, the chatter to matter. Work is hard, we complain. And we've put in so much time in planning, surely it counts for something?
We want the fruit of our labour now, without sacrifice, without effort. But if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it. Life doesn't give you what you want. It gives you what you deserve.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
We know we want to succeed, but we're afraid that staying humble will end up with us being stepped on, embarrased and subjugated.
The internal debate about confidence calls to mind a well-known concept from the radio pioneer Ira Glass, which could be called the Taste/Talent Gap.
All of us who do creative work . . . we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good . . . It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste— the thing that got you into the game— your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.
Who wants to look at their work and admit that it doesn't quite measure up? Who can admit to themselves they're not as good as they want to be? We can cover our shortcomings with passion or try to clearly see where we're talented and where we can improve.
Of course, what is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with quiet confidence in spite of the distractions. Let others grasp at crutches. It will be a lonely fight to be real, to say “I’m not going to take the edge off.” To say, “I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be.”
To do, not be.
To whatever success you have achieved, ego is the enemy
Sobriety, open-mindedness, organization, and purpose— these are the great stabilizers. They balance out the ego and pride that comes with achievement and recognition.
Even though Howard Hughes is seen as a great visionary and business wizard, because of his ego, he created one of most embarassing, wasteful and dishonest business track records in history.
After purchasing control in his father's company he left Houston for good, moved to Los Angeles where he decided to become a film producer and a celebrity. He lost $8 million trading stocks from his bed, before the Depression. His most well known movie, "Hell's Angels" took three years, and lost $1.5 million on a budget of $4.2 million. And then he lost another $4 million on Chrysler stock. Afterwards he created Hughes Aircraft Company, which also was a failure, despite his amazing achievements as an inventor. The plane he designed and called Hercules, one of the biggest planes ever made took over five years to develop, cost $20 million and flew only once, less than a mile far. Doubling down on movie business, Hughes purchased the RKO studio and created losses of over $22 million.
There's way way more, but one important thing to note is that the only single thing which made him restrain himself was the fear of public exposure.
“That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes,” a young Joan Didion wrote, “tells us something interesting about ourselves.” She’s absolutely right. For Howard Hughes, despite his reputation, was quite possibly one of the worst businessmen of the twentieth century.
Ego drove Howard Hughes into a deep and devastating darkness. It was his spiritual demise, debilitating as much as the injuries he had sustained. Because of the wealth he inherited, he had never had to stop and check himself.
Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world.
Today, Genghis Khan is remembered as a ruthless leader of bloodthirsty Mongolian invaders, pillaging and destroying everything in their path and leaving nothing behind. The truth is starkly different. Genghis Khan was the greatest conqueror because he had never stopped learning.
Under Genghis Khan’s direction, the Mongols were as ruthless about stealing and absorbing the best of each culture they encountered as they were about conquest itself.
First he learned to organized his troops in squads of ten - from Turkic people, later, with the help of Chinese engineers, he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines which could knock down city walls.
By working with the scholars and royal family of the lands he conquered, Khan was able to hold on to and manage these territories in ways that most empires could not. Afterward, in every country or city he held, Khan would call for the smartest astrologers, scribes, doctors, thinkers, and advisers— anyone who could aid his troops and their efforts. His troops traveled with interrogators and translators for precisely this purpose.
The Mongol Empire was remarkable for it's religious freedoms, for the convergence of ideas it facilitated. It brought lemons to China and Chinese noodles to the west. It spread Persian carpets, German mining technology, French metalworking and Islam.
With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything. Scientia infla (knowledge puffs up). That’s the worry and the risk— thinking that we’re set and secure, when in reality understanding and mastery is a fluid, continual process.
It's not enough to be a student early in life, we need to learn from everyone and everything. Even from our supposed enemies. There is always opportunities to learn.
Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.
The solution is to push ourselves out of our comfort zone - pick up a book on topic you know almost nothing about. Put yourself in the room where you're the least knowleagable person. Subject yourself deliberately to that uncomfortable feeling when your assumptions are challenged. Only an amateur is defensive, the professional enjoys being humbled and the constant and endless process of education.
The great manager and business thinker Peter Drucker says that it’s not enough simply to want to learn. As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education. Otherwise, we are dooming ourselves to a sort of self-imposed ignorance.
Starting in 1979, Bill Walsh took the 49ers from being the worst team in football to a Super Bowl victory, in just three years. It was a tempting idea to present that path as a scheduled and premeditated story. Walsh refused to give in to the temptation, and when people asked him did he have a timetable to win the Super Bowl his answer was always no.
When he took over, he wasn't focused on winning as such, he worked to implement what he called Standard of Performance - what should be done, when and how. He focused on seemingly trivial details - no sitting down on the practice field, coaches had to wear tucked in shirts and ties, everyone had to give maximum effort and commitment, locker rooms needed to be neat and clean. No smoking, no fighting, no profanity. Practices were scheduled down to a minute.
This wasn't about control - it was about instilling excellence. In his eyes, if the players can take care of the details, the score would take care of itself. He was humble enough to know he couldn't predict when the victory would happen.
We want so desperately to believe that those who have great empires set out to build one. Why? So we can indulge in the pleasurable planning of ours. So we can take full credit for the good that happens and the riches and respect that come our way. Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks.
Bill Walsh understood that the deceptively small things, the Standard of Performance, was what mattered, but it's boring to the media. It doesn't make for a good story.
Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It’s also dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. It turns our life into a story— and turns us into caricatures— while we still have to live it. As the author Tobias Wolff writes in his novel Old School, these explanations and stories get “cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration.”
Unlike Walsh, his players let the success go to their heads. The believed they won because they were special. And in the next two seasons they failed miserably, losing 12 out of 22 games. That's what happens when you credit yourself for powers you don't yet have. When you think that your achievements say something about you and slacken the effort and discipline that got you there in the first place.
Once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during your moment at the top that you can afford ego the least— because the stakes are so much higher, the margins for error are so much smaller. If anything, your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever before.
We must resist to craft stories from other people's success just the same as we need to resist the need to create a story about our own path, editing out the boring and the tedious. It didn't unfold exactly like we planned. It never does. There was no great narrative.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has talked about this temptation. He reminds himself that there was “no aha moment” for his billion-dollar behemoth, no matter what he might read in his own press clippings. The founding of a company, making money in the market, or the formation of an idea is messy. Reducing it to a narrative retroactively creates a clarity that never was and never will be there.
Investor Paul Graham explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on.[...] Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world[...], but explains, “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.” He’s saying you don’t make a frontal attack out of ego; instead, you start with a small bet and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go. His other famous piece of advice, “Keep your identity small,” fits well here. Make it about the work and the principles behind it— not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.
Seneca warned us that the great destiny is great slavery. And it was proven to Napoleon who had words "To Destiny" engraved in the ring he gave his wife. His destiny ended in divorce, exile, defeat and infamy.
There is a real danger in believing it when people use the word “genius”— and it’s even more dangerous when we let hubris tell ourselves we are one. The same goes for any label that comes along with a career: are we suddenly a “filmmaker,” “writer,” “investor,” “entrepreneur,” or “executive” because we’ve accomplished one thing? These labels put you at odds not just with reality, but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place. From that place, we might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story— when really it’s rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.
We must not pretend we're living some great story, but remained focused on the execution. Let us shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here.
Too often, artists who think it was “inspiration” or “pain” that fueled their art and create an image around that— instead of hard work and sincere hustle— will eventually find themselves at the bottom of a bottle or on the wrong end of a needle.
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
After the Civil War victory, Sherman and Grant took different paths. Grant pursued the presidency and won by a landslide, however, his mandate was a catastrophe.
As Sherman wrote with sympathy and understanding of his friend, Grant had “aimed to rival the millionaires, who would have given their all to have won any of his battles.”
Grant had accomplished so much, but to him, it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t decide what was important— what actually mattered— to him. That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us.
We start with a clear picture of what we want in life, but as we move along and get more successful, we run into people who are even more successful. And we feel envy and jealous, we want to do more, have more, be more. We feel the tinge of competitiveness. Being competitive isn't bad in itself, as long as it's clear to us who we're competing with and why. Too often we pick up the race unconsciounsly, listening to our ego to be better than someone, more than others. Too often we try to meet someone else's standards, to win someone else's approval.
According to Seneca, the Greek word euthymia is one we should think of often: it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it. In other words, it’s not about beating the other guy. It’s not about having more than the others. 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. It’s about going where you set out to go. About accomplishing the most that you’re capable of in what you choose. That’s it. No more and no less.
(By the way, euthymia means “tranquillity” in English.)
Life requires trade-offs, but ego wants it all. Ego doesn't let us acknowledge our limitations, ego makes us say yes to everything. We need to answer to ourselves why do we do what we do. Then we can say no to races that don't align with our purpose. Everyone buys into if they only had that - they would be happy.
Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because that’s independence.
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
Entitlement, control and paranoia arrive easily with success and especially with power. Great historical example is how Persian emperor Xerxes had the sea whipped and threatened a mountain. We might not go to that delusional depths but it's common to begin overestimating our own power and lose perspective.
The problem lies in the path that got us to success in the first place. What we’ve accomplished often required feats of raw power and force of will. Both entrepreneurship and art required the creation of something where nothing existed before.
Achieving success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us. It meant rejecting rejection. It required taking certain risks.
Naturally, we end up believing we shape our reality, that we're somehow better, stronger and more capable. Even if deserved, the feeling of certainty can easily lead astray. The feelings of accomplishment can easily degrade to arrogance and hubris, wishing to prove others wrong plants the seeds of paranoia.
If you’ve ever listened to the Oval Office tapes of Richard Nixon, you can hear the same sickness, and you wish someone could have sent him such a letter. It’s a harrowing insight into a man who has lost his grip not just on what he is legally allowed to do, on what his job was (to serve the people), but on reality itself. He vacillates wildly from supreme confidence to dread and fear. He talks over his subordinates and rejects information and feedback that challenges what he wants to believe. He lives in a bubble in which no one can say no — not even his conscience.
Even the talented, smart, and brave people hurt themselves and the ones they love, when they lose the perspective of limits to their own power and reach.
“He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears,” wrote Seneca, who as a political adviser witnessed destructive paranoia at the highest levels.
The sad feedback loop is that the relentless “looking out for number one” can encourage other people to undermine and fight us. They see that behavior for what it really is: a mask for weakness, insecurity, and instability. 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.
After Dwight D. Eisenhower got inaugurated, upon entering the White House, his chief usher handed him two envelopes with the labels "Confidential and Secret". The President told him "Never bring me a sealed envelope. That's what I have a staff for."
It's not snobbish, coming from a military background, Eisenhower recognized a disfunctional organisation.
The public image of Eisenhower is of the man playing golf. In reality, he was not someone who ever slacked off, but the leisure time he did have was available because he ran a tight ship. He knew that urgent and important were not synonyms. His job was to set the priorities, to think big picture, and then trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for.
While we're aspiring or small time, we can sometimes make up by hard work and some luck. Going up, however, that's not going to cut it. It's important to grow up to organize yourself.
Contrasted to the efficiency which Eisenhower understood, is the story about DeLorean who quit GM where he felt like a misunderstood genius, and proceeded to create a "completely different" company, ditching conventional wisdom and business practices. The end result, instead of free-thinking high-tech sanctuary, was overbearingly political, dysfunctional and corrupt organization, ending up with the embarrasing fraud and losses of some $250 million.
He worked probably more than Eisenhower but with very different results.
Though probably not on purpose, DeLorean created a culture in which ego ran free. Convinced that continued success was simply his by right, he seemed to bristle at concepts like discipline, organization, or strategic planning. Employees were not given enough direction, and then at other times, overwhelmed with trivial instructions. DeLorean couldn’t delegate— except to lackeys whose blind loyalty was prized over competence or skill. On top of all this, he was often late or preoccupied.
Since DeLorean couldn't manage himself, he couldn't manage others so he managed to fail, himself and his dream. In the end, we become the adult supervision we used to rebel against, but we often petulently think that, with us now in charge, things are going to be different.
The DeLorean had the vision and the knowledge to make his dream car a reality, and it could've worked if it wasn't for his disorganisation. He knew how to work, but he didn't know how to lead. As responsibilities change, it often happens that most time is spent making decisions instead of working.
It means putting away some satisfying parts of our previous job and accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized for the work that needs to be done.
Responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose. First, setting the top-level goals and priorities of the organization and your life. Then enforcing and observing them. To produce results and only results. A fish stinks from the head, is the saying. Well, you're the head now.
Pat Riley (L.A. Lakers & Miami Heat coach and manager) says there's a trajectory which the great teams follow. Before they win, they're innocent. If they work well together towards the common goal, they enter the "Innocent Climb".
After winning and attracting attention of the media, egos pop up. Players calculate their own importance, frustrations emerge, and often the "Disease of Me" follows. Like Shaq and Kobe not able to play together, Jordan punching several team members of his own team, Enron people plunging California into darkness for profit and so on.
For us, it’s beginning to think that we’re better, that we’re special, that our problems and experiences are so incredibly different from everyone else’s that no one could possibly understand. It’s an attitude that has sunk far better people, teams, and causes than ours.
The author then tells about the life of WWII General George Catlett Marshall Jr. One thing everybody said about him was how he never thought about himself. He passed awards and honors to others. The difference between ego and confidence is that ego needs honors to be validate, confidence is being patient and focused at the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
Early in the career we can sometimes gloss over the lack of recognition but as we get more successful, we get more entitled, and can get greedy in demanding what we consider we have earned.
A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.
~ Evagrius Ponticus
Chapter starts with John Muir's description of a moment from his trip to Alaska in 1879, where he witnessed an immensely powerful feeling of the entire world being in sync. Stoics would call it sympatheia - connectedness to the cosmos. A sense of belonging to something larger, realising that "human beings are an infinitesimal point in the immensity".
In these moments we are drawn to important questions like "Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in the world?". What drives us furthest from these questions is often material success - when we're busy, distracted, reported to, wealthy or told we're important and powerful. Ego tells us that being the center 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. (...) Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way.
No wonder we find success empty.
Visit a ancient battlefield or a place of historical significance and imagine the people witnessing the events. In those moments it's possible to sense the immensity of the world. Ego is impossible to survive such immensity, however fleetingly we get to merge with it. And we might realise what Emerson meant, when he said how "Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.". We should embrace this and learn from our history and tradition.
It's a duality of being very small and irrelevant to the cosmos, but also being big as a part and a process of the same cosmos.
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.
By removing the ego - even temporarily - we can access what's left standing in relief. By widening our perspective, more comes into view.
When you start feeling better than or bigger than, reconcile yourself more intimately with the realities of life, go and put yourself into the touch with the infinite.
The author tells how much success of Angela Merkel comes from her being sober, while many leaders get intoxicated with power, with position, with ego. "Fear is a bad advisor", she said during a major crisis once.
We often think people succeed through enthusiasm and sheer energy, we assume ego is important in "making it big". The problem is that running based on ego isn't sustainable. Ego tells us we're invincible and unstoppable.
Merkel, as a powerful leader, is an embodiment of the tortoise from the fable. The night Berlin Wall fell she was thirty five, she had one beer, went to bed and showed up early for work the next day. After working to become a respected, albeit obscure physicist for several years, she only then entered politics. She became a chancellor in her fifties, after a diligent, plodding path.
Most of us don't have the patience for waiting. We want to get there as fast as possible.
When Russian president Vladimir Putin once attempted to intimidate Merkel by letting his large hunting dog barge into a meeting (she is reportedly not a dog lover), she didn’t flinch and later joked about it. As a result, he was the one who looked foolish and insecure. During her rise and especially during her time in power, she has consistently maintained her equilibrium and clearheadedness, regardless of the immediate stressors or stimuli.
She could get angry, demanding, insulted, but she didn't. That's ego, escalating tension instead of dealing with it. Merkel is firm, calm and willing to compromise on everything but the issue at stake. She actually said "You can't solve ... tasks with charisma". That's sobriety, that's command of oneself.
...there actually are some successful people with modest apartments. Like Merkel, they have normal private lives with their spouses (her husband skipped her first inauguration). They lack artifice, they wear normal clothes. 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.
Once we arrive at the success we see how it's a different beast to manage than we expected. We find we must manage ourselves to maintain our success.
Endless ambition is easy; anyone can put their foot down hard on the gas. Complacency is easy too; it’s just a matter of taking that foot off the gas. We must avoid what the business strategist Jim Collins terms the "undisciplined pursuit of more," as well as the complacency that comes with plaudits. (...) what’s difficult is to apply the right amount of pressure, at the right time, in the right way, for the right period of time, in the right car, going in the right direction.
Napoleon, who not only died miserably, but as Europe ended up pretty much the same after his death as it was before him, caused much greed, deaths, honors and effort in vain, said - "Men of great ambition have sought happiness... and have found fame."
To not follow in footsteps of great but sadly deluded men we need to protect our sobriety, avoid greed and paranoia, stay humble while retaining our sense of purpose and connect to the larger world around us.
Failures, reversals and regressions are a part of life just as everything else, so instead of being in denial about the facts of life, it's better we spend our time preparing for inevitable shifts in life. Adversity, difficulty and failure.
It happens to everyone at some times, trials, setbacks and failures are a part of life. But where ego can be a nasty side effect of success, in failure it can be fatal.
The reality is that while yes, often people set themselves up to crash, good people fail (or other people fail them) all the time too. People who have already been through a lot find themselves stuck with more. Life isn’t fair. Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is “fair” or not. 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. Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now.
Humble and strong people have less trouble going through difficult times than egotists - their identity isn't threatened and they get by without constant validation. As Plutarch said - "The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown". The only way is through.
When in February of 1946 Malcolm-X got 10 years in jail, he faced what Robert Greene called "Alive Time or Dead Time" life scenario. Dead time is when people are passive and waiting, and alive time when they are learning, acting and using every second of their time.
Malcolm chose Alive Time and spent his time learning. He taught himself how to be a reader by lending out a dictionary and had not just read it, but copied it longhand from cover to cover. He had read politics, sociology, philosophy. Many people know what he did after the prison, but they don't understand how the combination of acceptance, humility and strength had contributed to the transformation.
In life, we all get stuck with dead time. It's occurrence isn't in out control. It's use, on the other hand, is.
Don't let stubborness make a bad situation worse.
Belisarius, one of the most capable military leaders, barely known today, who served under emperor Justinian, practically saved Western Civilisation on at least three occassions. Unfortunately, mistrusted by emperor, his victories were wasted by bad politics and he ended up relieved of command and in the end blinded, forced to beg in the streets.
In his eyes, he was just doing his job— one he believed was his sacred duty. He knew that he did it well. He knew he had done what was right. That was enough.
In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative: failure, disrespect, jealousy, or even a resounding yawn from the world.
The result can be crushing to the ego. It strikes it as unfair. But we only have minimal control over rewards and recognition we get for our efforts. Are we going to stop working hard because we're not being recognized enough?
It's far better when we're not attached to the outcomes. When putting in honest effort is enough, not the results, good or bad.
There was an unusual encounter between Alexander the Great and the famous Cynic philosopher Diogenes. Allegedly, Alexander approached Diogenes, who was lying down, enjoying the summer air, and stood over him and asked what he, the most powerful man in the world, might be able to do for this notoriously poor man. Diogenes could have asked for anything. What he requested was epic: “Stop blocking my sun.” Even two thousand years later we can feel exactly where in the solar plexus that must have hit Alexander, a man who always wanted to prove how important he was. As the author Robert Louis Stevenson later observed about this meeting, “It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.”
It's how you carry yourself when you're unapreciated, when your expectations aren't met, when you lose, when you fail. Marcus Aurelius would remind himself, "Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do... Sanity means tying it to your own actions."
Worry about doing your work and doing it well, that's what's in your power, rewards and recognition are not.
Here, the author mentions katabasis, a term from the Greek mythology. It's the experience of "going down" which happens to the hero. Modern parallel is what happens to the protagonist of Fight Club once his apartment blows up - a journey into a completely different and rather dark part of his life. In Greek myths, the hero often literally descends into the underworld, to emerge with enhanced knowledge and deeper understanding.
We all surround ourselves with comfortable lies we like telling ourselves. We surround ourselves with bullshit. When the self-destructive, awful behaviors driven by ego reach their peak, katabasis tears it all down and forces us to face reality.
Duris dura franguntur.
Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego, the harder the fall.
Facing the truth is not easy, and the further away we are, the more painful it is to bear it. We become humble by enduring humiliations.
In fact, many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false. We might call these “Fight Club moments.” Sometimes they are self-inflicted, sometimes inflicted on us, but whatever the cause they can be catalysts for changes we were petrified to make.
This is when we ask ourselves questions like: How to make sense of this?, Is this the bottom or is there more to come? How did I let this happen?
These moments usually:
- almost always come from the hands of an outside force or person
- often involve things about us we already knew but were too scared to admit
- from the ruin came opportunity for great progress and improvement
Not everyone takes advantage of this, for some (a rejected narcissist, gang member defending honor, exposed impostor), ego knows only how to escalate, pushing already bad situation into toxic.
Face the consequences, cure the disease. Listen to the criticism of those around you and be honest with yourself. It's going to be hard, but it's more than worth it.
In the end, the only way you can appreciate your progress is to stand on the edge of the hole you dug for yourself, look down inside it, and smile fondly at the bloody claw prints that marked your journey up the walls.
People make mistakes all the time, they overestimate themselves, they get over their heads sometimes. We take risks. We mess up.
The problem is that 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 a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. It’s the sunk cost fallacy.
In those moments, ego feels trapped, like a scared animal, making people thinking about how it will reflect on them. Fighting desperately for something is only likely to make it worse.
When ego is in control, it's difficult to see the big picture. And it's important to see it clearly, before we get hurt. Only ego thinks that failure or embarassement are worse than they are. With wisdom, we understand that aspiring, winning or failing are trasitory and aren't saying anything about our value as a human being.
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.
You are NOT as good as you think - you haven't got it all figured out, you need to keep focused and do better. By having their own set of standards, which exceed the society's standards - that's how great people live. That's why they don't care much for the recognition of the society. For the fanfare and spotlights. They only care about meeting their own standards.
Ego can't see both sides - it can only see the things going well.
Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of— that’s the metric to measure yourself against. 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.
Harsh, yes. The flip side is that it means being honestly able to be proud and strong during the occasional defeat as well. When you take ego out of the equation, other people’s opinions and external markers won’t matter as much. That’s more difficult, but ultimately a formula for resilience.
Adam Smith advised we keep the outlook of the "indifferent spectator", especially early in our endeavour, when we'd rather enjoy the thunderous applause the society would give us.
When we start thinking how "no one will know", like many CEOs, politicians and bankers with their not technically illegal behavior like to think, we wander into the dangerous gray territory. Holding your ego against a standard makes it less likely you'd do any wrongdoing.
Because it’s not about what you can get away with, it’s about what you should or shouldn’t do.
When you keep your eyes on long-term perspective, when you understand the bigger picture, you do not get easily lured away by the spotlights and vanity. You don't get disheartened during the short-term setbacks.
To keep improving, we need to keep smashing our ego with continually higher standards of our own.
And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!
—EURIPIDES
Hate and anger come from ego, and ironically, what we fear and hate - we strenghthen by resisting it. Trying to destroy something out of ego, often ensures it becomes more permanent.
Thus, the paradox of hate and bitterness. It accomplishes almost exactly the opposite of what we hope it does. In the Internet age, we call this the Streisand effect (named after a similar attempt by the singer and actress Barbra Streisand, who tried to legally remove a photo of her home from the Web. Her actions backfired and far more people saw it than would have had she left the issue alone.) Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.
And to continue the paradox - the right response is always love. Even to things that annoy us. And as we become more successful, there will be more things we care about. More ways others could disrespect us. And if we're not careful we can get lost defending what's precious to our ego. How many countless lives and beauty was lost out of reasons who hardly anyone remembers now, by angry men and aggrieved women? Out of slight. Out of embarassement. Out of ego.
You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don't like? Love. That's right, love. For the neighbor who won't turn down the music. For the parent who let you down. For the bureaucrat who lost your paperwork. For the group that rejects you. For the critic who attacks you. The former partner who stole your business idea. The bitch or bastard who cheated on you. Love.
Now, loving might be too difficult, but at least try to laugh, shake it off and move on. You don't want to become just another self-absorbed narcissist, too sensitive to stand any criticism or rumor. Don't turn minor inconveniances into massive sores. You will only end up hurting yourself.
Just like the path which Richard Nixon took first forward and then downward - he did more damage to himself than anyone else could've done. Not even the "leader of free world" is immune to hate, bitterness and paranoia.
It's easier to lash out, to get angry, frustrated and hateful. But loving liberates, and hate suffocates. What has helped many great leaders is the way they looked at their enemies, not with hate and frustration, but with pity and empathy3.
Once, when Frederick Douglass was asked to move to baggage car because of his race, and a white supporter was apologizing to him, the responce Douglass had was:
They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.
What we need to ask ourselves is
Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?
Why would we be?
The very traits that pissed us off in other people, dishonesty, selfishness, laziness -- they aren't going to work out well for those people in the end anyway. When Orson Welles died, his long-term girlfriend said in his eulogy, referring to the lifetime of obstructions and insults he received in a particularly ruthless industry - "I promise it didn't make him bitter". The obsession with the past, how they did you wrong is ego embodied. Everyone else moved on but you haven't.
Hate also puts blame on someone else, so it's easy to do in the times of adversity. Fear and hate rob us of our strength, tarnishes our reputation and takes the best away from us. And love is right here, all the time - egoless, free, positive, open, peaceful, vulnerable, understanding, joyful and productive.
Remember Kirk Hammet, who suddenly became the guitarist in Metallica? The man they kicked out to make room for him, Dave Mustaine, went on to form another band, Megadeth. Even amidst his own unbelievable success, he was eaten up with his rage and hartred over the way he'd been treated those many years before. It drove him to addiction and could have killed him. It was eighteen years until he was able to even begin to process it, and said it still felt like yesterday that he'd been hurt and rejected. When you hear him tell it, as he did once on camera to his former bandmates, it sounds like he ended up living under a bridge. In reality, the man sold millions of records, produced great music, and lived the life of the rock star.
I don't like work--no man does-- but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself.
~JOSEPH CONRAD
Too often, while working, we will find ourselves alone and struggling. It's just the nature of things. The difficult, challenging work is often lonesome and hard. Many who came before as had faced the same obstacles and many had made it through - so can you.
See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom
~ celtic saying
The aspirations lead to success and adversity. Which lead to new aspirations, more success and other adversities, branching and looping back endlessly. It's great when we're up, and it sucks when we're down. It's only natural.
The only certain thing in this constant change is that ego will be the enemy of anything coming up along the way. Ego is the most important thing to avoid. It makes all the steps hard, and it can make failure permanent.
The mantra which can save is might be simple, but doing what it invocates, isn't easy.
Not to aspire or seek out of ego.
To have success without ego.
To push through failure with strength, not ego.
It's not easy to go head-to-head with one's ego. It might be even harder for some people to acknowledge that it's there and running the show. Most of us can't handle the uncomfortable self-examination.
The work, the training, the self-improvement needs to be constant. It's like sweeping the floor. We sweep daily, and dust daily settles back. We keep dusting, and it keeps settling. Every day we must sweep.
While working on the book, Holiday admits to have been struggling with several drafts and much discouragement. However, he came up with a pretty amusing solution:
At some point during the process, I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft, I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a work compost I keep in my garage. A few months later, those painful pages were irt that nourished my yard, which I could walk with bare feet. It was a real and tangible connection to that larger immensity. I liked to remind myself that the same process is going to happen to me when I'm done, when I die and nature tears me up.
He realized how every ambitious person shares the feeling we need to do great things and if we don't, we are worthless failures and the world is against us. So much pressure will eventually break something.
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; they will help us navigate the treacherous waters that ambition will require us to travel. And they are also their own reward.
The potential and motivation we feel are healthy and worthy aims. It is the ego which corrupts them. It is the ego which lies to us and distorts the truth. Any fool can learn from experience, but why learn from our own? There are plenty of sad examples out there to learn from.
Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them. You will make mistakes in each of them.
You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.
It took me too long to finish writing this book summary. In the months during which I'd come back to writing it, I went through several of the more serious life adversities (divorce being the first one) but also found success in other aspirations, and pushed through the periods of failure. Which all made me appreciate the material in this book even more - there was great value in re-reading it.
The ego from this book, in a way, has many similarities with the Resistance, which is covered in "War of Art". Both of them will rob us of our best work, prevent us from achieving most of our potential and the world would be poorer for it.
The bad things aren't many, just that most of the book is comprised of the quotes and anecdotes (which this summary mirrors as a consequence), but considering how the author humbly admits that many of his ideas came from giants on whose shoulders stood, it can be forgiven :)
"All that's worth doing, is worth doing well" is a saying I like repeating to myself and others. If we're to produce quality work, we need to sweep our ego away every day. If we're to improve ourselves, we need best tools available. And Ryan Holiday gave us a vacuum-cleaner to sweep. If you care about public recognition more than the quality of your work - do yourself a favor and read "Ego is the Enemy".
The author initially wrote an enormous bibliography section, which was trimmed for the published book, and the extended bibliography is available at the official website.
1. Egotism - the practice of talking and thinking about oneself excessively because of an undue sense of self-importance.
2. Someone I know used to say *"Who talks a lot, does little"*
3.David Foster Wallace talks more subtle aspects of this perspective in his "[This Is Water](https://vimeo.com/188418265)"