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

by Ryan Holiday

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

In life, we all get stuck with dead time. Its occurrence isn’t in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is.

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. Rejection, that’s on them, not on us.

A look at history finds that these events seem to be defined by three traits: 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.

Sometimes because we can’t face what’s been said or what’s been done, we do the unthinkable in response to the unbearable: we escalate. This is ego in its purest and most toxic form.

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.

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.

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

Especially because almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people—their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness—are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment.

This obsession with the past, with something that someone did or how things should have been, as much as it hurts, is ego embodied. Everyone else has moved on, but you can’t, because you can’t see anything but your own way. You can’t conceive of accepting that someone could hurt you, deliberately or otherwise. So you hate.

Meanwhile, love is right there. Egoless, open, positive, vulnerable, peaceful, and productive.