For your work to have truth in it, it must come from truth.
What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. When You Aspire, Use Detachment as Ego Antidote In this phase, you must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. The book shall help us not to aspire out of ego, to have success without ego, and to push through failure with strength instead of ego. When we’re setting out to do something (aspire), when we are at the top of the mountain we worked hard to climb (success), or when we experience setbacks along the way (failure). Confidence is earned.Įgo is the enemy at every stage we find ourselves in life. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. What replaces ego is humility, yes – but rock-hard humility and confidence. When we remove the ego, we’re left with what is real. The aim of the 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 a sense, ego is the enemy of building, of maintaining, and of recovering. Or we have failed – recently or continually.Įgo is the enemy at every step along this way. We have achieved success – perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. We’re aspiring to something – trying to make a dent in the universe.
Fight the Ego in 3 Stages of Life At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. Luckily, ego can be managed and directed. The ego replaces our rational side with an artificial sense of confidence, telling us what we want to hear when we need it to override our fears and insecurities. We’re not egomaniacs, and yet ego – an unhealthy belief in our own importance – is there and at the root of most of our problems. But it is a short-term fix with a long-term consequence. Replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption, ego tells us what we want to hear, when we want to hear it. Pursuing great work – whether it is in sports or art or business – is often terrifying. Just one thing keeps ego around – comfort.
From why we don’t have what we want to why having what we want doesn’t seem to make us feel any better. Most of us aren’t “egomaniacs,” but ego is there at the root of almost every conceivable problem or obstacle, from why we can’t win to why we need to win all the time and at the expense of others. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility – that’s ego. It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else. That’s the definition this book will use. What Is the Ego and Why Is It the Enemy? The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance.
Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday is a book about your worst enemy that already lives inside you: your ego.
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