Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday: Summary and Lessons
“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”
Rating: 6/10
Related: The Obstacle Is the Way, Stillness Is the Key, Meditations, Man’s Search for Meaning
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Table of Contents
Ego Is the Enemy Short Summary
In Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday argues that often our problems are caused not by external factors but from our own ego. The book is divided into 3 parts: aspire, success, and failure. A good book on stoicism but lacks practical ways to fight the ego.
Summary
“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.
Ego is an unhealthy belief in our own importance.
Now more than ever, our culture fans the flames of ego. It’s never been easier to talk, to puff ourselves up.
We intuit a causal relationship that isn’t there. We assume the symptoms of success are the same as success itself—and in our naiveté, confuse the by-product with the cause.
Ego is the enemy of building, of maintaining, and of recovering.
Your ego is not some power you’re forced to satiate at every turn. It can be managed. It can be directed.
Part I: Aspire
Talent is only the starting point. The question is: Will you be able to make the most of it? Or will you be your own worst enemy?
Practice seeing yourself with a little distance. Cultivate the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote.
Though we think big, we must act and live small to achieve what we seek.
We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. But silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey.
The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away.
It is not “Who do I want to be in life?” but “What is it that I want to accomplish in life?”
You can’t learn if you think you already know.
Ego gives us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve.
How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that’s the passion paradox.
What we need is purpose—passion with boundaries.
Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful. 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. Be lesser, do more.
Help yourself by helping others. Make a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer-term payoff.
We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to.
What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from?
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”—Henry Ford.
There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We’re simply talking about a lot of hours—that to get where we want to go isn’t about brilliance, but continual effort.
Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.
Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
Part II: Success
As success arrives, ego begins to toy with our minds and weaken the will that made us win in the first place.
Without the right values, success is brief.
No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying. It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life.
An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning to be enjoyable. They like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.
Crafting stories out of past events is dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. These narratives don’t change the past, but they do have the power to negatively impact our future.
Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution—and on executing with excellence.
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.
With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.
As you become successful in your own field, your days will be less about doing and more about making decisions. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity.
Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you. By removing the ego—even temporarily—we can access what’s left standing in relief. By widening our perspective, more comes into view.
Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.
Part III: Failure
Failure always arrives uninvited, but through our ego, far too many of us allow it to stick around.
What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us. And how we make it through.
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.
Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.” Recognition and rewards—those are extra.
The world is to what we “want.” If we persist in wanting, we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse. Doing the work is enough.
Hitting bottom is as brutal as it sounds. But the feeling after—it is one of the most powerful perspectives in the world.
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, understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.
If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.
Great people 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. And these standards are much higher than everyone else’s.
The absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.
Aspiration leads to success (and adversity). Success creates its own adversity (and, hopefully, new ambitions). And adversity leads to aspiration and more success. It’s an endless loop.
