Ego Is the Enemy

by Ryan Holiday

Pat Riley, the famous coach and manager who led the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat

When they start—before they have won—a team is innocent. If the conditions are right, they come together, they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal. This stage, he calls the “Innocent Climb.” After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear. The Innocent Climb, Pat Riley says, is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.” It can “strike any winning team in any year and at any moment,” and does with alarming regularity.

Ego needs honors in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.

magnanimous.

“never did General Marshall think about himself.”

He had the same traits that everyone has—ego, self-interest, pride, dignity, ambition—but they were “tempered by a sense of humility and selflessness.”

preservationist

Stoics would call sympatheia—a connectedness with the cosmos.

belonging to something larger, of realizing that “human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity.”

material success—when we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from. When we’re wealthy and told that we’re important or powerful. Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, 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. Like we’ve detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from, whatever that happens to be (a craft, a sport, a brotherhood or sisterhood, a family). Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way.

found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life.

finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to.

in the twenty-first century there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain.

politicians are bold and charismatic. But as Merkel supposedly said, “You can’t solve . . . tasks with charisma.” She is rational. She analyzes. She makes it about the situation, not about herself, as people in power often do. Her background in science is helpful here, surely. Politicians are often vain, obsessing about their image. Merkel is too objective for that.

There’s an old line about how if you want to live happy, live hidden. It’s true.

.

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.

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Instead of letting power make us delusional and instead of taking what we have for granted, we’d be better to spend our time preparing for the shifts of fate that inevitably occur in life. That is, adversity, difficulty, failure.

Failure and adversity are relative and unique to each of us. Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.

“to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.”

Their identity isn’t threatened. They can get by without constant validation.

arsenal

According to Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.

Kant and Spinoza.

turned those circumstances into fuel for their unique greatness.

As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life. How will you use it?

“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Make use of what’s around you. Don’t let stubbornness make a bad situation worse.

obscured

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.

Belisarius could win his battles. He could lead his men. He could determine his personal ethics. He could not control whether his work was appreciated or whether it aroused suspicion. He had no ability to control whether a powerful dictator would treat him well.

This reality rings essentially true for everyone in every kind of

adversity

Indignation

We have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort—other people’s validation, recognition, rewards.

It’s far better when doing good work is sufficient. In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better.

“Stop blocking my sun.”

John Wooden’s

Change the definition of success. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

“Ambition,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “means tying your well-being to what other people say or do . . . Sanity me...

Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.“ That’s all there needs to be. Recognition and rewards—those are just extra. ...

we can’t let externals determine whether something was worth it or not. It’s on us.

The world is, after all, indifferent to what we humans “want.” If we persist in wanting, in needing, we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse. Doing the work is enough.

J. K. Rowling finds herself seven years after college with a failed marriage, no job, single parent, kids she can barely feed, and approaching homelessness.

There are many ways to hit bottom. Almost everyone does in their own way, at some point.

Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego the harder the fall.

“we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.”

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

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

Psychologists often say that threatened egotism is one of the most dangerous forces on earth. The gang member whose “honor” is impugned. The narcissist who is rejected. The bully who is made to feel shame. The impostor who is exposed. The plagiarist or the embellisher whose story stops adding up.