Ego Is the Enemy

by Ryan Holiday

qualified to preach, but because it’s the book I wish existed at critical turning points in my own life. When I, like everyone else, was called to answer the most critical questions a person can ask themselves in life: Who do I want to be? And: What path will I take? (Quod vitae sectabor iter.)

The orator Demosthenes once said that virtue begins with understanding and is fulfilled by courage.

We must begin by seeing ourselves and the world in a new way for the first time. Then we must fight to be different and fight to stay different—that’s the hard part.

In Aristotle’s famous Ethics, he uses the analogy of a warped piece of wood to describe human nature. In order to eliminate warping or curvature, a skilled woodworker slowly applies pressure in the opposite direction—essentially, bending it straight. Of course, a couple of thousand years later Kant snorted, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can be made straight.” We might not ever be straight, but we can strive for straighter.

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

But for people with ambitions, talents, drives, and potential to fulfill, ego comes with the territory.

The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition. That’s the definition this book will use.

that’s ego. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.

Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as

With every ambition and goal we have—big or small—ego is there undermining us on the very journey we’ve put everything into pursuing. The pioneering

The performance artist Marina Abramović puts it directly: “If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.” Just one

Humble in our aspirations Gracious in our success Resilient in our failures

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. —ADAM SMITH

Constantly train your intellect, he told him, “for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.”

Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.

It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.

Although we share with many others a vision for greatness, we understand that our path toward it is very different from theirs.

In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey.

Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.

They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into product—and eventually to stillness. They ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act.

There’s a quip from the historian Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. That’s the sad truth Boyd was illustrating, how positive virtues turn sour. How many times have we seen this played out in our own short lives—in sports, in relationships, or projects or people that we care deeply about? This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.

The choice that Boyd puts in front of us comes down to purpose. What is your purpose?

If your purpose is something larger than you—to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself—then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult.

“What is it that I want to accomplish in life?”

Let No Man’s Ghost Come Back to Say My Training Let Me Down. —SIGN IN THE NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT TRAINING ACADEMY

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.

The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.

A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge. A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.

or against something? Do you think you are the only one who hopes to achieve your goal? You can’t possibly believe you’re the only one reaching for that brass ring.

“It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. You can’t learn if you think you already know.

Ego doesn’t allow for proper incubation either. To become what we ultimately hope to become often takes long periods of obscurity, of sitting and wrestling with some topic or paradox.

As we sit down to proof our work, as we make our first elevator pitch, prepare to open our first shop, as we stare out into the dress rehearsal audience, ego is the enemy—giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality.

But ego makes us so hardheaded and hostile to feedback that it drives them away or puts them beyond our reach. It’s why the old proverb says, “When student is ready, the teacher appears.”

Roosevelt was above passion. She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.

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.

“dispassionate.” As in not passionate. Wooden wasn’t about rah-rah speeches or inspiration. He saw those extra emotions as a burden. Instead, his philosophy was about being in control and doing your job and never being “passion’s slave.”

First Lady, was known primarily for her grace, her poise, and her sense of direction. Wooden won ten titles in twelve years, including seven in a row, because he developed a system for winning and worked with his players to follow it. Neither of them were driven by excitement, nor were they bodies in constant motion. Instead, it took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation. In our endeavors, we will face complex

If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation—deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt.

What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.

Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

Purpose is function, function, function.

The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion. Not naïveté.

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.

men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to command. —LORD MAHON

It’s about providing the support so that others can be good.

Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

That’s the other effect of this attitude: it reduces your ego at a critical time in your career, letting you absorb everything you can without the obstructions that block others’ vision and progress.

You can see how easily entitlement and a sense of superiority (the trappings of ego) would have made the accomplishments of either of these men impossible.

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.

That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others.