Ego Is the Enemy

Title: Ego is the Enemy
Author: & Ryan Holiday
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Ryan Holiday

THE PAINFUL PROLOGUE

To go from wanting to be like someone your whole life to realizing you never want to be like him is a kind of whiplash that you can’t prepare for.

How does something like this happen? Can you really go from feeling like you’re standing on the shoulders of giants one day, and then the next you’re prying yourself out of the rubble of multiple implosions, trying to pick up the pieces from the ruins?

What path will I take? (Quod vitae sectabor iter.)

The orator Demosthenes once said that virtue begins with understanding and is fulfilled by courage.

Kant snorted, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can be made straight.” We might not ever be straight, but we can strive for straighter

INTRODUCTION

• The aim of that structure is simple: to help you suppress ego early before bad habits take hold, to replace the temptations of ego with humility and discipline when we experience success, and to cultivate strength and fortitude so that when fate turns against you, you’re not wrecked by failure. In short, it will help us be: Humble in our aspirations Gracious in our success Resilient in our failures

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

• Most of us aren’t “egomaniacs,” but ego is there at the root of almost every conceivable problem and obstacle, from why we can’t win to why we need to win all the time and at the expense of others. From why we don’t have what we want to why having what we want doesn’t seem to make us feel any better.

• Wow

• CEO Harold Geneen compared egoism to alcoholism: “The egotist does not stumble about, knocking things off his desk. He does not stammer or drool. No, instead, he becomes more and more arrogant, and some people, not knowing what is underneath such an attitude, mistake his arrogance for a sense of power and self-confidence.”

• The ways this separation manifests itself negatively are immense: We can’t work with other people if we’ve put up walls. We can’t improve the world if we don’t understand it or ourselves. We can’t take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can’t recognize opportunities—or create them—if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy.

• Marina Abramović puts it directly: “If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”

• We can name ourselves CEO of our exists-only-on-paper company.

  • Lol condu

• At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. We’re aspiring to something—trying to make a dent in the universe. We have achieved success—perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Or we have failed—recently or continually.

• Robert Greene once said we must take to like a spider in its web—that was at the core of their great art, great writing, great design, great business, great marketing, and great leadership.

• And therefore, the three parts that this book is organized into: Aspire. Success. Failure.

• Only when free of ego and baggage can anyone perform to their utmost.

• Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.

PART I: ASPIRE

• & Isocrates began by informing the young man that “no adornment so becomes you as modesty, justice, and self-control; for these are the virtues by which, as all men are agreed, the character of the young is held in restraint.” “Practice self-control,” he said, warning & Demonicus not to fall under the sway of “temper, pleasure, and pain.” And “abhor flatterers as you would deceivers; for both, if trusted, injure those who trust them.” He wanted him to “Be affable in your relations with those who approach you, and never haughty; for the pride of the arrogant even slaves can hardly endure” and “Be slow in deliberation, but be prompt to carry out your resolves” and that the “best thing which we have in ourselves is good judgment.” Constantly train your intellect, he told him, “for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.”
• Imagine that—an ambitious person turning down a chance to advance in responsibilities because he actually wanted to be ready for them. Is that really so crazy?

This is your show, Sherman told him in a note accompanying a shipment of supplies; call upon me for any assistance I can provide
- { Leadership, Strategies, and Tactics#^76c956

• Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.
• For a generation, parents and teachers have focused on building up everyone’s self-esteem. From there, the themes of our gurus and public figures have been almost exclusively aimed at inspiring, encouraging, and assuring us that we can do whatever we set our minds to.
• He regularly and consistently deferred to others and was more than happy to contribute to a winning team, even if it meant less credit or fame for himself.
  • How to Succeed as a new leader
• We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative—one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time.

TALK, TALK, TALK

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. — & Lao Tzu

• Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.” At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly. There’s a weak side to each of us, that—like a trade union—isn’t exactly malicious but at the end of the day still wants get as much public credit and attention as it can for doing the least. That side we call ego.
  • Tik tok is authentic
• She was too busy “spending a lot of time on the Internet,” that’s why. In fact, I can’t really remember anything else I did in 2010. I tumbld, I tweeted, and I scrolled. This didn’t earn me any money but it felt like work. I justified my habits to myself in various ways. I was building my brand. Blogging was a creative act—even “curating” by reblogging someone else’s post was a creative act, if you squinted. It was also the only creative thing I was doing.
  • 202108012127 - The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection
• his talk got out ahead of his campaign and the will to bridge the gap collapsed.
• We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. That being ignored is tantamount to death (and for the ego, this is true). So we talk, talk, talk as though our life depends on it.

Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.”

• Steven Pressfield calls the “Resistance”—the hurdle that stands between us and creative expression. Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.
• I just spent four hours talking about this. Doesn’t that count for something? The answer is no.

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

• They ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act. They don’t talk much. Or mind the feeling that others, out there in public and enjoying the limelight, are somehow getting the better end of the deal. (They are not.) They’re too busy working to do anything else. When they do talk—it’s earned

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

Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” Boyd said to him. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” Using his hands to illustrate, Boyd marked off these two directions. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd paused, to make the alternative clear. “Or,” he said, “you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to[…]

• Ego aids in that deception every step of the way. It’s why Boyd wanted young people to see that if we are not careful, we can very easily find ourselves corrupted by the very occupation we wish to serve.
• Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing good work and it doesn’t mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
• If what matters is you—your reputation, your inclusion, your personal ease of life—your path is clear: Tell people what they want to hear. Seek attention over the quiet but important work. Say yes to promotions and generally follow the track that talented people take in the industry or field you’ve chosen. Pay your dues, check the boxes, put in your time, and leave things essentially as they are. Chase your fame, your salary, your title, and enjoy them as they come.
• Harder because each opportunity—no matter how gratifying or rewarding—must be evaluated along strict guidelines: Does this help me do what I have set out to do? Does this allow me to do what I need to do? Am I being selfish or selfless?

TO BE OR TO DO?

The other “choices” wash away, as they aren’t really choices at all. They’re distractions.

BECOME A STUDENT

• An education can’t be “hacked”; there are no shortcuts besides hacking it every single day. If you don’t, they drop you.
• The need for a student mind-set doesn’t stop with fighting or music.
• A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge. A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.

It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says.

• You can’t learn if you think you already know.
• We not only need to take this harsh feedback, but actively solicit it, labor to seek out the negative precisely when our friends and family and brain are telling us that we’re doing great.
• It thinks it already knows how and who we are—that is, it thinks we are spectacular, perfect, genius, truly innovative. It dislikes reality and prefers its own assessment.
• As we sit down to proof our work, as we make our first elevator pitch, prepare to open our first shop, as we stare out into the dress rehearsal audience, ego is the enemy—giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. It’s defensive, precisely when we cannot afford to be defensive. It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.

DON’T BE PASSIONATE

A flash of inspiration: I want to do the best and biggest ______ ever. Be the youngest ______. The only one to ______. The “firstest with the mostest.” The advice: Okay, well, here’s what you’ll need to do step-by-step to accomplish it. The reality: We hear what we want to hear. We do what we feel like doing, and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard, we accomplish very little. Or worse, find ourselves in a mess we never anticipated.

• The inventor and investors of the Segway believed they had a world-changing innovation on their hands and put everything into evangelizing it
• Neither of them were driven by excitement, nor were they bodies in constant motion. Instead, it took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation
• What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination

Passion typically masks a weakness

• You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous.
• How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that’s the passion paradox.

What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism.

• When we are young, or when our cause is young, we feel so intensely—passion like our hormones runs strongest in youth—that it seems wrong to take it slow. This is just our impatience. This is our inability to see that burning ourselves out or blowing ourselves up isn’t going to hurry the journey along.

Passion is about. (I am so passionate about ______.) Purpose is to and for. (I must do ______. I was put here to accomplish ______. I am willing to endure ______ for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
Great passions are maladies without hope,” as Goethe once said.

FOLLOW THE CANVAS STRATEGY

anteambulo—literally meaning “one who clears the path.”

• Obeisance is the way forward. That’s the other effect of this attitude: it reduces your ego at a critical time in your career, letting you absorb everything you can without the obstructions that block others’ vision and progress.

• Once we fight this emotional and egotistical impulse, the canvas strategy is easy. The iterations are endless. Maybe it’s coming up with ideas to hand over to your boss. Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce them to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away

• Instead of being pained by such a system, what if he’d been able to come to terms with it? What if—gasp—he could have appreciated the opportunities it offered?

• Because in reality, not only is the apprentice model responsible for some of the greatest art in the history of the world—everyone from Michelangelo to Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin has been forced to navigate such a system—but if you’re going to be the big deal you think you are going to be, isn’t this a rather trivial temporary imposition?

• Find canvases for other people to paint on. **Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

• When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities:

1. You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are;
2. You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted;
3. Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

• goalodicy

• With the Segway, the inventor and investors wrongly assumed a demand much greater than ever existed.

• the drunkenness of passion.

• If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation—deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt

  • I've definitely said this before!

• The famous epigrammist Martial fulfilled this role for many years, serving for a time under the patron Mela, a wealthy businessman and brother of the Stoic philosopher and political adviser Seneca

• Franklin was playing the long game, though—learning how public opinion worked, generating awareness of what he believed in, crafting his style and tone and wit. It was a strategy he used time and again over his career—once even publishing in his competitor’s paper in order to undermine a third competitor—for Franklin saw the constant benefit in making other people look good and letting them take credit for your ideas.

• He thrived on what was considered grunt work, asked for it and strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for.

• He was like a sponge, taking it all in, listening to everything,” one coach said. “You gave him an assignment and he disappeared into a room and you didn’t see him again until it was done, and then he wanted to do more,” said another

• 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.

• That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others.

• In other words, discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus. It is a rewarding and infinitely scalable power strategy. Consider each one an investment in relationships and in your own development.

• The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.

RESTRAIN YOURSELF

• Yet Jackie Robinson held to his unwritten pact with Rickey, never giving into explosive anger—however deserved. In fact, in nine years in the league, he never hit another player with his fist.
• He was willing to because it was part of a larger plan. He understood that certain forces were trying to bait him, to ruin him.
• Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with
• You cannot, as John Steinbeck once wrote to his editor, “[lose] temper as a refuge from despair.”
• It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how much money you have. When you want to do something—something big and important and meaningful—you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.
• Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
• It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched
• Jackie Robinson was not without passion. He had a temper and frustrations like all of us do. But he learned early that the tightrope he walked would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego.

GET OUT OF YOUR OWN HEAD

• A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. —ALAN WATTS

Love this quote

• It’s the opening credits montage. It’s a scene in a novel. It feels good—so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness—and so we stay stuck inside our heads instead of participating in the world around us. That’s ego, baby
• Plato spoke of the type of people who are guilty of “feasting on their own thoughts.”
• The more creative we are, the easier it is to lose the thread that guides us.
• Adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known now as the “imaginary audience.”

THE DANGER OF EARLY PRIDE

• Pride and ego say: I am an entrepreneur because I struck out on my own. I am going to win because I am currently in the lead. I am a writer because I published something. I am rich because I made some money. I am special because I was chosen. I am important because I think I should be.
• Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly famously said, “they first call promising
• 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. Most dangerously, this tends to happen either early in life or in the process—when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit. Only later do you realize that that bump on the head was the least of what was risked.
• Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.
• If you’re doing the work and putting in the time, you won’t need to cheat, you won’t need to overcompensate
• Saint-Exupéry’s famous story makes the same observation, lamenting that “vain men never hear anything but praise.”
• Even the tallest mountains have animals that, when they stand on it, are higher than the mountain.”
• What we don’t protect ourselves against are people and things that make us feel good—or rather, too good. We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to. We must be on guard against that wild self-confidence and self-obsession.
• The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor once said.
• The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments? It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later.
• That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.

WORK, WORK, WORK

• The best plan is only good intentions unless it degenerates into work. — & Peter Drucker

• Mallarmé’s response cuts to the bone. “It’s not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It’s with words.

• 1938, “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.
  & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - { Deep Work

• That germ of an idea,” she told him, “does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work.

• Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn’t matter

  • { The infinite game

• Our ego wants the ideas and the fact that we aspire to do something about them to be enough. Wants the hours we spend planning and attending conferences or chatting with impressed friends to count toward the tally that success seems to require. It wants to be paid well for its time and it wants to do the fun stuff—the stuff that gets attention, credit, or glory

• That’s the reality. Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish

  • How does this concept apply to the teachings of { Think and Grow Rich?

• 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

  • { Deep Work { Getting Things Done
  • { Give and Take

• Fac, si facis: Do it if you’re going to do it.

• There is another apt Latin expression: Materiam superabat opus. (The workmanship was better than the material.)

• Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego.

PART II: SUCCESS

• Sobriety, open-mindedness, organization, and purpose—these are the great stabilizers. They balance out the ego and pride that comes with achievement and recognition.
• Tiring of these businesses as he had of the tool company, he forsook defense contracting and handed it off to executives to run, where it slowly began to thrive . . . because of his absence.
• & Aristotle observed, “it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably."
• The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism,” & Harold Geneen famously said.
• Whether in middle management or top management, unbridled personal egotism blinds a man to the realities around him; more and more he comes to live in a world of his own imagination; and because he sincerely believes he can do no wrong, he becomes a menace to the men and women who have to work under his direction,” & Harold Geneen wrote in his memoirs.
• Man is pushed by drives,” Viktor Frankl observed. “But he is pulled by values.”
• Without the right values, success is brief.
  • { Principles by & Ray Dalio

ALWAYS STAY A STUDENT

• Genghis Khan was the greatest conqueror the world ever knew because he was more open to learning than any other conqueror has ever been.
• As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. The freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics. The salesman, how to manage. The founder, how to delegate. The writer, how to edit others. The comedian, how to act. The chef turned restaurateur, how to run the other side of the house
• & John Wheeler, who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, once observed that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
• Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. . . . 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. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’”
  • & Wynton Marsalis advising a promising young musician on the mind-set required in the lifelong study of music”
• Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know)
• What made the Mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively, and if need be, swap out previous practices for new ones. All great businesses start this way, but then something happens. Take the theory of disruption, which posits that at some point in time, every industry will be disrupted by some trend or innovation that, despite all the resources in the world, the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to.
  • { The Signals are Talking and contrarian views

DON’T TELL YOURSELF A STORY

The success of & Bill Walsh and the 49ers

• & Bill Walsh (49ers head coach): Standard of Performance.” That is: What should be done. When. How.
  • “Bill Walsh took the 49ers from being the worst team in football, and perhaps professional sports, to a Super Bowl victory, in just three years.”
• Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen. Of course you didn’t really know all along—or if you did, it was more faith than knowledge. But who wants to remember all the times you doubted yourself?
  • Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. It turns our life into a story—and turns us into caricatures—while we still have to live it.
• Bill Walsh understood that it was really the Standard of Performance—the deceptively small things—that was responsible for the team’s transformation and victory
• These narratives don’t change the past, but they do have the power to negatively impact our future.

“Here’s the other part: once you win, everyone is gunning for you”

• The founding of a company, making money in the market, or the formation of an idea is messy

"The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”

• He’s saying you don’t make a frontal attack out of ego; instead, you start with a small bet and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go.
• His other famous piece of advice, “Keep your identity small,” fits well here
• Make it about the work and the principles behind it—not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.
• A great destiny is great slavery. — & Seneca
  • Certainly 20220708 - Google’s alienation from its own roots (confusing vision and potential with scientific and technological prowess) will cause it to stumble soon enough — { Start with Why

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO YOU?

• A genuinely good and loyal individual, he was not cut out for the dirty world of Washington, and it made quick work of him. He left office a maligned and controversial figure after two exhausting terms, almost surprised by how poorly it had gone.
  • #comment Wow
• Ulysses S. Grant had accomplished so much, but to him, it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t decide what was important—what actually mattered—to him.
• All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want.
• Ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small. Ego undermines greatness by deluding its holder.
• The farther you travel down that path of accomplishment, whatever it may be, the more often you meet other successful people who make you feel insignificant. It doesn’t matter how well you’re doing; your ego and their accomplishments make you feel like nothing—just as others make them feel the same way. It’s a cycle that goes on ad infinitum . . . while our brief time on earth—or the small window of opportunity we have here—does not.
• Far too often, we look at other people and make their approval the standard we feel compelled to meet, and as a result, squander our very potential and purpose.
• Euthymia(“tranquillity” in English): The sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it.
  • In other words, it’s not about beating the other guy. It’s not about having more than the others. It’s about being what you are, and being as good as possible at it, without succumbing to all the things that draw you away from it. It’s about going where you set out to go. About accomplishing the most that you’re capable of in what you choose. That’s it. No more and no less.

If you don’t know how much you need, the default easily becomes: more

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

ENTITLEMENT, CONTROL, AND PARANOIA

• With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.
• If you do not cure yourself of this temper,” Franklin advised, “it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner.”
• He talks over his subordinates and rejects information and feedback that challenges what he wants to believe. He lives in a bubble in which no one can say no—not even his conscience
• Paranoia thinks, I can’t trust anyone. I’m in this totally by myself and for myself. It says, I’m surrounded by fools. It says, focusing on my work, my obligations, myself is not enough. I also have to be orchestrating various machinations behind the scenes—to get them before they get me; to get them back for the slights I perceive.
  • #comment Conditioning from parents?

MANAGING YOURSELF

• Not everything needed to run through & Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • Through military, understood the power of 202108012256 - Decentralized Command

The rise and fall of John DeLorean

• John DeLorean, when he walked away from GM to produce his brand of futuristic cars
  • #comment During the time gm was restricting? { The Effective Executive - The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
  • A story of Power-hungry narcissist undermines his own vision, and loses millions of dollars of other people’s money in the process.
• DeLorean “had the ability to recognize a good opportunity but he didn’t know how to make it happen.” Another executive described his management style as “chasing colored balloons”—he was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. He was a genius. Sadly, that’s rarely enough
• What was so sad about DeLorean is that, like a lot of talented people, his ideas were on point. His car was an exciting innovation. His model could have worked. He had all the assets and the talent. It was his ego and the disorganization that resulted from it that prevented the ingredients from coming together—just as it they do for so many of us.
• Such is the nature of leadership. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity. It requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job. It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.
• If you don’t think big picture—because you’re too busy playing “boss man”—who will?
• Worse yet are those who surround themselves with 202108012048 - Yes Men or sycophants who clean up their messes and create a bubble in which they can’t even see how disconnected from reality they are.
  • #comment Yikes. This hits home

BEWARE THE DISEASE OF ME

& Pat Riley and the “Innocent Climb.”

• The Innocent Climb is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.
• Like any normal human being, { George C. Marshall wanted to earn formal honors only the right way
• The word for that is one we don’t use much anymore: magnanimous

Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll remember the name on the back — & Tony Adams

• Restated by Aaron babicz

MEDITATE ON THE IMMENSITY

• sympatheia: A connectedness with the cosmos
• In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world. Ego is impossible, because we realize, if only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that “Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me.” — & Neil deGrasse Tyson

MAINTAIN YOUR SOBRIETY

Fear is a bad advisor.”

• During her rise and especially during her time in power, she has consistently maintained her equilibrium and clearheadedness, regardless of the immediate stressors or stimuli.
  • Normal face & Jocko Willink

“Power doesn’t so much corrupt; that’s too simple. It fragments, closes options, mesmerizes.” — & Shelby Foote, historian

• That’s what ego does. It clouds the mind precisely when it needs to be clear. Sobriety is a counterbalance, a hangover cure—or better, a prevention method
• A German writer observed in a tribute on her fiftieth birthday that unpretentiousness is Merkel’s main weapon.
• Leaders like Belichick and Merkel know that steak is what wins games and moves nations forward. Sizzle, on the other hand, makes it harder to make the right decisions—how to interact with others, who to promote, which plays to run, what feedback to listen to, where to come down on an issue.
• Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success

FOR WHAT OFTEN COMES NEXT, EGO IS THE ENEMY . . .

• Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line—this golden mean—is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes.

& Aristotle: “In each case, it is hard work to find the intermediate; for instance, not everyone, but only one who knows, finds the midpoint in a circle.”

• Endless ambition is easy; anyone can put their foot down hard on the gas. Complacency is easy too; it’s just a matter of taking that foot off the gas. We must avoid what the business strategist Jim Collins terms the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” as well as the complacency that comes with plaudits.”
  • what’s difficult is to apply the right amount of pressure, at the right time, in the right way, for the right period of time, in the right car, going in the right direction — & Aristotle
  • What he means is that behind every goal is the drive to be happy and fulfilled—but when egotism takes hold, we lose track of our goal and end up somewhere we never intended
  • 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.

PART III: FAILURE

• If success is ego intoxication, then failure can be a devastating ego blow—turning slips into falls and little troubles into great unravelings. If ego is often just a nasty side effect of great success, it can be fatal during failure
  • We have many names for these problems: Sabotage. Unfairness. Adversity. Trials. Tragedy. No matter the label, it’s a trial
• There is a “natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude.— & Thomas Paine, remarking about George Washington
• 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
  • Graham’s ego didn’t cause her to fail, but if she’d had one, it certainly would have prevented her from succeeding ever again.

To paraphrase & Epicurus, the narcissistically inclined live in an “unwalled city.” A fragile sense of self is constantly under threat.”

• 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.”

ALIVE TIME OR DEAD TIME?

• When injustice or the capriciousness of fate are inflicted on someone, the normal reaction is to yell, to fight back, to resist. You know the feeling: I don’t want this. I want X . I want it my way. This is shortsighted.
• That’s what so many of us do when we fail or get ourselves into trouble. Lacking the ability to examine ourselves, we reinvest our energy into exactly the patterns of behavior that caused our problems to begin with.

THE EFFORT IS ENOUGH

• What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. — & Goethe
• the less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effort—not the results, good or bad—is enough
• & Robert Louis Stevenson later observed about this meeting, “It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.”

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 means tying it to your own actions.” — & John Wooden

Fight Club MOMENTS

• A look at history finds that these events seem to be defined by three traits:
  1. They almost always came at the hands of some outside force or person.
  2. They often involved things we already knew about ourselves, but were too scared to admit.
  3. From the ruin came the opportunity for great progress and improvement.
• katabasis: “a going down.”
• Duris dura franguntur: Hard things are broken by hard things

The Reverend & William A. Sutton: “we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.”

• In fact, many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false. We might call these “Fight Club moments.” Sometimes they are self-inflicted, sometimes inflicted on us, but whatever the cause they can be catalysts for changes we were petrified to make.

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” — & Earnest Hemingway, { A Farewell to Arms

• 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.

Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed,” reads John 3:20.

• Face the symptoms: Cure the disease. Ego makes it so hard—it’s easier to delay, to double down, to deliberately avoid seeing the changes we need to make in our lives.

“I’ve been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls and I emerged, and I lived, and that’s such a liberating feeling.”— & Barack Obama, as he neared the end of his second term

• 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.

DRAW THE LINE

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. — & Marcus Aurelius

• “We take risks. We mess up. The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person. It’s a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. It’s the sunk cost fallacy.

Act with fortitude and honor. If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make a full stop.” — & Alexander Hamilton, writing to a distraught friend in serious financial and legal trouble of the man’s own making

• 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 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

• 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. 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
  • #comment Leaving my principles after starting my job led me down an emotional path driven by my ego

MAINTAIN YOUR OWN SCORECARD

• 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.

There are two different occasions upon which we examine our own conduct, and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial spectator would view it: first, when we are about to act; and secondly, after we have acted..."" — The economist (and philosopher) & Adam Smith, a theory for how wise and good people evaluate their actions

• 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.

ALWAYS LOVE

• The Streisand effect (named after a similar attempt by the singer and actress Barbra Streisand, who tried to legally remove a photo of her home from the Web. Her actions backfired and far more people saw it than would have had she left the issue alone.)
  • Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever
• They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”
• This obsession with the past, with something that someone did or how things should have been, as much as it hurts, is ego embodied.

“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.”

FOR EVERYTHING THAT COMES NEXT, EGO IS THE ENEMY . . .

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. & JOSEPH CONRAD

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

EPILOGUE

• My friend the philosopher and martial artist Daniele Bolelli once gave me a helpful metaphor. He explained that training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep. The same is true for ego. You would be stunned at what kind of damage dust and dirt can do over time. And how quickly it accumulates and becomes utterly unmanageable.