Book Summary — Ego is the Enemy
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1 paragraph summary:
The title is the summary — Ego is the Enemy. Purpose. Realism. Student for a Life. Find canvases for others to paint on. Life up to your own standards.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes — but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. 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.
Aspire
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. In actuality, silence is strength — particularly early on in any journey.
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. Chas your fame, your salary, your title, and enjoy them as they come.
If your purpose is something larger than you — to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself — then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult. Easier in the sense that you know now what it is you need to do and what is important to you. The “other” choices wash away, as they aren’t really choices at all. They’re distractions. It’s about the doing, not the recognition. Easier in the sense that you don’t need to compromise.
In this course — it’s not “Who do I want to be in life?” but “What is it that I want to accomplish in life?”. Setting aside selfish interest, it asks: What calling does it serve? What principles govern my choices? Do I want to be like everyone else or do I want to do something different?
Become a Student
The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands. There is a sort of ego ceiling imposed — one knows that he is not better than the “master” he apprentices under. Not even close.
Each fighter, to become great, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
The purpose of the formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast.
The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback. 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.
Don’t be Passionate
She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.
Passion is unbridled enthusiasm, our willingness to pounce on what’s in front of us with the full measure of our zeal, the “bundle of energy”.
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.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
Passion is about. Purpose is to and for.
- I am passionate about XXX.
- I am here to accomplish XXX for YYY.
Purpose is about pursuing something outside of yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
Follow the Canvas Strategy
It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this:
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’re starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realitities:
- You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are
- You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted
- Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
There’s one fabulous way to work all that out of your system: attach yourself to people and organisations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.
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 a canvas strategy is about — helping yourself by helping others. Making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer-term payoff.
Remember: the person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.
Restrain Yourself
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly, it degrades them.
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.
The Danger of Early Pride
A proud man is always looking down on things and people, and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
Pride leads arrogance and then away from humility and connection with tier fellow man.
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.
Work, Work, Work
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring, whatever plaudits you may be getting.
Success
Learn from everyone and everything.
From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies. At every step and every juncture of life, there is an opportunity to learn — and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let the ego block us from hearing it again.
Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in our comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid.
What’s important to you?
We’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities.
We think “yes” will let us accomplish more, when in reality it prevents exactly what we seek. 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.
Competitiveness is an important force in life. IT’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in.
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.
When you combine insecurity and ambition, you get an inability to say no to things.
Ego rejects trade-offs. Ego wants it all.
Manage Yourself
Responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose. First, setting the top-level goals and priorities of the organisation and your life. Then enforcing and observing them. To produce results and only results.
A fish stinks from the head, is the saying. We’ll, you’re the head now.
Meditate on the Immensity
When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we’ve detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from, whatever that happens to be (a craft, a sport, a brotherhood or sisterhood, a family). Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way.
Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world.
Failure
Almost always your road to victory goes through a place called “failure”. 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.
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.
Alive Time or Dead Time?
There are two types of time in our lives:
- Dead Time — when people are passive and waiting, and
- Alive Time — when people are learning and acting and utilising every second.
Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.
Doing the Work
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.
The world is after all, indifferent to what humans “want”. If we persist in wanting, in needing, we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse. Doing the work is enough.
Draw The Line
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.
Maintain Your Own Scorecard
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.
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