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

by Ryan Holiday

The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.

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

Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. 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.

“A poet’s function… is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” That is, his job is to produce work.

Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because that’s independence.

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.

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. 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.

maybe love is too much to ask for whatever it is that you’ve had done to you. You could at the very least try to let it go. You could try to shake your head and laugh about it.

Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them. You will make mistakes in each of them.