Ego Is the Enemy

by Ryan Holiday

Then we must fight to be different and fight to stay different—that’s the hard part.

“Be natural and yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.”

What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.

At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly.

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.

Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization.

the greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away.

The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.

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.”

Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority.

There’s a quip from the historian Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Joe Satriani, the man Hammett chose as his instructor, would himself go on to become known as one of the best guitar players of all time and sell more than 10 million records of his unique, virtuosic music.

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.

A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold.

A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.

It’s why the old proverb says, “When student is ready, the teacher appears.”

Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance.

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 form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.

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.

other words, discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus.

But he learned early that the tightrope he walked would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego.

Real people preferring to live in passionate fiction than in actual reality.

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.

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.

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.

Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life. Pride dulls these senses.

the end, this isn’t about deferring pride because you don’t deserve it yet. It isn’t “Don’t boast about what hasn’t happened yet.” It is more directly “Don’t boast.” There’s nothing in it for you.

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do,” was how Henry Ford put it.

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.

As a young man, Bill Clinton began a collection of note cards upon which he would write names and phone numbers of friends and acquaintances who might be of service when he eventually entered politics.

I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for.

You know a workman by the chips they leave. It’s true. To judge your progress properly, just take a look at the floor.

Sobriety, open-mindedness, organization, and purpose—these are the great stabilizers.

As success arrives, like it does for a team that has just won a championship, ego begins to toy with our minds and weaken the will that made us win in the first place.

Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Later, with help from Chinese engineers, he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines that could knock down city walls.

The physicist John Wheeler, who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, once observed that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

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.

. Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve.

If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.

What made the Mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively, and if need be, swap out previous practices for new ones.

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.

Here’s the other part: once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during your moment at the top that you can afford ego the least—because

When we are aspiring we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other people’s stories.

Make it about the work and the principles behind it—not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.

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.

The sad feedback loop is that the relentless “looking out for number one” can encourage other people to undermine and fight

It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them.

That’s not going to cut it in the majors. In fact, it’ll sink you if you can’t grow up and organize.