3 Lessons from Ryan Holiday’s book ‘Ego Is the Enemy’
Nuggets of wisdom that can help you curb your ego and transform your life
I recently read Ryan Holiday’s ‘Ego is the Enemy’ and was blown away.
The book made me stop, re-read, highlight, take notes, think, question…basically all the ingredients of a stimulating read.
As I compiled my notes, I thought why not share this wisdom with others? These are big ideas scouted from 25+ chapters in the book, ideas that stuck with me the most.
However, I have added my personal touch by lending more structure to them and simplifying them for ease of understanding.
I do believe they can help you as much as they have helped me. So, get your notebooks and pens out and let’s get going!
1. All of us have an ego
We often look at others and think they have an inflated ego. However, when we assess ourselves, we absolve ourselves of any guilt.
Egotist and me? Not possible.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether we like it or not, all of us have an ego.
And when I say ‘ego’, I’m not talking about the Freudian interpretation of it. I mean the more colloquial interpretation.
“An unhealthy belief in one’s own importance.” — Ryan Holiday
Simply put, ‘ego’ is the inner voice that tells us that we are better than what we are. That we are special. That we must get our way. That we must be loved and recognized.
2. Ego short changes us in every stage of life
Ryan says that we constantly move between three stages of life: aspiration, success, and failure.
We aspire until we succeed. We stay successful until we fail. And we remain a failure, until we pick ourselves up and start aspiring again.
Achieving success requires hard work and postponement of short term gratification.
But the ego would rather talk about ambitious plans than work on them and wants personal glory at the earliest.
Staying successful requires humility, purpose and continuous learning.
However, our ego makes us think that the universe revolves around us and that we know it all.
Combating failure requires resilience, self-belief and patience.
Notwithstanding, the ego inflicts frustration and self-destruction.
In other words, what is required of us in each stage of life is completely at opposite poles with what the ego wants. Our ego will bring us down in every stage of life.
“Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.” — Ryan Holiday
3. There are ways to curb your ego
Knowing the symptoms and the corresponding treatments of a disease help us treat it. We will adopt the same approach to deal with the festering disease inside of us- our ego.
The symptoms and treatments differ by the stage of life we are in, much like treating a disease in its various stages.
Stage 1: Aspiration
Symptom: Too much talk, very little work
Treatment: Work, Work, Work
Research proves that the more we talk about our plans, the more our brain tires and confuses it with actual progress, making us less likely to make any actual progress.
Yet, this is exactly what the ego loves. The instant high of discussing our fancy ideas and enamoring people with how we seem to have it all figured out.
So here’s what we will do. We will prioritize working over discussing plans and goals.
Symptom: Hunger for recognition
Treatment: Clear the path for others
On our ascend, we might have to work under people, apprentice under experts, report to bosses and so on.
There will be situations where we will do the work and they will get the credit. Where we will do the menial work, while they do the glamorous bits. We will feel frustrated as our ego will insist that this is below our genius, that we deserve more personal glory.
Here’s what we will do. Instead of focusing on personal glory, we will focus on ‘clearing the path’ for the people above us. I.e. we will free up their time so that they can focus on the most challenging problems.
We could do this in a lot of ways:
- Taking care of tasks no one else wants to do
- Reducing waste and redundancies
- Coming up with ideas instead of waiting for them to suggest
This is a remarkably scalable power strategy as Ryan puts it. Over time, the people who you consistently cleared the path for will always want to keep you close, let you lead projects, etc. Therefore, by delaying our need for personal recognition, we will be recognized.
Symptom: Inability to delay short term gratification
Treatment: Restrain yourself
As an aspirant, there will be times when we will not get the importance we think we deserve. Our presence might be ignored in rooms, our talent might go unnoticed and underappreciated. The impulse of the ego will be to lash back thinking ‘How dare they treat me this way! How rude of them!’
Here’s what we will do instead. Suck it up and restrain ourselves. Remember that you can only change the system once you have made it. Until then, just take the abuses of the entrenched in your stride.
Symptom: Letting praise get to your head
Treatment: Beware the danger of early pride
On our path to success, a little bit of beginner’s luck or early upward momentum can swell our heads with pride. Pride can then blunt the very instruments we need to succeed: our hunger to learn, to get feedback, to collaborate with others, to build relationships, etc.
Therefore, we will identify pride early and kill it. We will protect ourselves from any praise or gratification that comes our way if we show promise early.
Stage 2: Success
Symptom: Being a ‘know it all’
Treatment: Always stay a student
With accomplishment appears the growing pressure to pretend to know more than we do, of not appearing stupid.
The result?
We stunt our learning and thereby our growth. We increasingly become less adept at handling new situations and challenges, a trend that can ultimately lead to our downfall.
There is a beautiful line in the book which says-
“As our island of knowledge grows, so does our shore of ignorance”.
Therefore, no matter what we have accomplished so far, we need to remain life long students.
Symptom: Feeling of ‘universe revolves around me’
Treatment: Meditate on the immensity
With success, comes the tendency to gloat in our awesomeness, to be under the misconception that the universe revolves around us, that we must get star treatment.
Here’s what famous personalities, CEOs, and other successful people often do to combat such tendencies. Spend time in the wilderness, or at places of historical significance. Why? They meditate on how small and insignificant they are compared to the vastness of the universe, and how many just like them have come and gone and will come and go.
Meditating on one’s insignificance edges out the ego.
Symptom: Craving for control
Treatment: Manage yourself
Haven’t we all had managers who still want to be involved in every small thing? Those who want to be called to put out every fire, while their time should be spent on more complex things? Who would have thought that that’s ego too!
The ego loves the importance it gets by being the man of the show, of running everything, of being the Atlas with the weight of the world on it.
But let me let you in on a little secret. If you want to stay successful, you have to let others do their job. Equally, you have to do your job, which should be to solve the most complex problems while those below you are empowered to deal with the mundane.
Symptom: Wanting more and more
Treatment: Know what’s important to you
There will always be someone seemingly more successful than you. Does that mean you will continue running until you become the best at possibly everything?
The lure to want more and more is never higher than when you are successful. The need to be better than everyone at everything is never higher than when you are successful.
However, there is a way out if you know exactly what race you are running. Then, it’s easy to let go of participating in every other race.
Stage 3: Failure
Symptom: Being in denial
Treatment: Convert dead time to alive time
When we fail, have you heard that voice which says “It isn’t fair!”, “Why does this always happen to me?” “I shouldn’t have tried this in the first place, I knew this wasn’t for me.”
By now you can guess who that voice is. The ego inflicts self-injury on every failure we experience. It prefers to brush off failure as a one-off, or as something which was just not our cup of tea. As a result, we hit a phase called ‘dead time’ as we don’t seem to move any forward from there.
We can only move forward if we analyze what got us there, what we can learn from it, and what we can do to get out of it. In short, we must convert moments of ruin into alive time. That’s what JK Rowling did and the rest is history.
Symptom: Defining failure based on external factors
Treatment: Remember that the effort is enough
The ego pegs success and failure to external validation and recognition, both of which are beyond our control.
As a result, we set ourselves up for disappointment again and again. We only have control over doing our best work and not on whether it will be well received. Therefore, we will live by ‘Doing the effort is enough’. As a result, any adversity can be endured and any rewards are extra.
Closing thoughts
I’m glad you reached the end. You have kicked off the journey to become aware of the beast inside of you.
Ultimately, curbing your ego is the transformation you need to succeed in every stage of life.
“Suppressing ego will make us humble in our aspirations, gracious in our success and resilient in our failures.”-Ryan Holiday
However, like most other things which are good for us, I hope this doesn’t remain just a good intention with no progress. I’m trying myself and I wish you all the best in this journey!
