Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

by Ryan Holiday

now you’re addicted to control. Driven to prove the doubters wrong? Welcome to the seeds of paranoia.

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.

we never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else. To think otherwise is not only egotistical, it’s counterproductive.

“You’re becoming who you are going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.”

Just because you did something once, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it successfully forever. Reversals and regressions are as much a part of the cycle of life as anything else.

He will face a battle he knows not, he will ride a road he knows not.

In order to taste success again, we’ve got to understand what led to this moment (or these years) of difficulty, what went wrong and why. We must deal with the situation in order to move past it. We’ll need to accept it and to push through it.

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.

You could say that failure always arrives uninvited, but through our ego, far too many of us allow it to stick around.

As Goethe once observed, the great failing is “to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.”

This is what we’re aspiring to—much more than mere success. What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us. And how we make it through.

I don’t want this. I want ______. I want it my way. This is shortsighted.

Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we’ve long needed to do.

In life, we all get stuck with dead time. Its occurrence isn’t in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is. As Booker T. Washington most famously put it, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Make use of what’s around you. Don’t let stubbornness make a bad situation worse.

What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. — GOETHE

We are all faced with this same challenge in the pursuit of our own goals: Will we work hard for something that can be taken away from us? Will we invest time and energy even if an outcome is not guaranteed? With the right motives we’re willing to proceed. With ego, we’re not.

We have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort—other people’s validation, recognition, rewards. So what are we going to do? Not be kind, not work hard, not produce, because there is a chance it wouldn’t be reciprocated? C’mon.

Well, get ready for it. It will happen. Maybe your parents will never be impressed. Maybe your girlfriend won’t care. Maybe the investor won’t see the numbers. Maybe the audience won’t clap. But we have to be able to push through. We can’t let that be what motivates us.

You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail. How do you carry on then? How do you take pride in yourself and your work? John Wooden’s advice to his players says it: 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.”

Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.” That’s all there needs to be.

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

They almost always came at the hands of some outside force or person. They often involved things we already knew about ourselves, but were too scared to admit. From the ruin came the opportunity for great progress and improvement. Does everyone take advantage of that opportunity? Of course not. Ego often causes the crash and then blocks us from improving.

But change begins by hearing the criticism and the words of the people around you. Even if those words are mean spirited, angry, or hurtful. It means weighing them, discarding the ones that don’t matter, and reflecting on the ones you do.

Most trouble is temporary… unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease.

When we lose, we have a choice: Are we going to make this a lose-lose situation for ourselves and everyone involved? Or will it be a lose… and then win?

Because you will lose in life. It’s a fact.

At any given time in the circle of life, we may be aspiring, succeeding, or failing—though right now we’re failing. With wisdom, we understand that these positions are transitory, not statements about your value as a human being. When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices. “He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man,” Seneca once said. Alter that: He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.

The only real failure is abandoning your principles.

You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.

This is characteristic of how great people think. It’s not that they find failure in every success. They just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don’t much care what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else’s.

Ego can’t see both sides of the issue. It can’t get better because it only sees the validation. Remember, “Vain men never hear anything but praise.” It can only see what’s going well, not what isn’t. It’s why you might see egomaniacs with temporary leads, but rarely lasting runs of it.

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.

Think of the times that you’ve excused your own with “no one will know.” This is the moral gray area that our ego loves to exploit. Holding your ego against a standard (inner or indifferent or whatever you want to call it) makes it less and less likely that excess or wrongdoing is going to be tolerated by you. Because it’s not about what you can get away with, it’s about what you should or shouldn’t do. It’s a harder road at first, but one that ultimately makes us less selfish and self-absorbed. A person who judges himself based on his own standards doesn’t crave the spotlight the same way as someone who lets applause dictate success. A person who can think long term doesn’t pity herself during short-term setbacks. A person who values the team can share credit and subsume his own interests in a way that most others can’t. Reflecting on what went well or how amazing we are doesn’t get us anywhere, except maybe to where we are right now. But we want to go further, we want more, we want to continue to improve. Ego blocks that, so we subsume it and smash it with continually higher standards. Not that we are endlessly pursuing more, as if we’re racked with greed, but instead, we’re inching our way toward real improvement, with discipline rather than disposition.

And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!

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

Yet we find that what defines great leaders like Douglass is that instead of hating their enemies, they feel a sort of pity and empathy for them.

“Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.”

Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?

In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us. Does this get us any closer to where we want to be? No. It just keeps us where we are—or worse, arrests our development entirely. If we are already successful, as Hearst was, it tarnishes our legacy and turns sour what should be our golden years. Meanwhile, love is right there. Egoless, open, positive, vulnerable, peaceful, and productive.

“See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.”

Not to aspire or seek out of ego. To have success without ego. To push through failure with strength, not ego.

There’s a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience.