By Ryan Holiday

The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance, Self-centered ambition. That’s the definition this book will use. It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility-that’s ego. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.

(Holiday 2016, 2)

If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.

(Holiday 2016, 3)

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

(Holiday 2016, 66)

As the psychologist David Elkind has famously researched, adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known now as the “imaginary audience.” Consider a thirteen-year-old so embarrassed that he misses a week of class, positive that the entire school is thinking and murmuring about some tiny incident that in truth hardly anyone noticed. Or a teenage girl who spends three hours in front of the mirror each morning, as if she’s about to go on stage. They do this because they’re convinced that their every move is being watched with rapt attention by the rest of the world.

Even as adults, we’re susceptible to this fantasy during a harmless walk down the street. We plug in some headphones and all of a sudden there’s a soundtrack. We flip up our jacket collar and consider briefly how cool we must look.We replay the successful meeting we’re heading toward in our head. The crowds part as we pass. We’re fearless warriors, on our way to the top.

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.

What successful people do is curb such flights of fancy.They ignore the temptations that might make them feel important or skew their perspective. General George C.Marshall-essentially the opposite of McClellan even though they briefly held the same position a few generations apart refused to keep a diary during World War II despite the requests of historians and friends. He worried that it would turn his quiet, reflective time into a sort of performance and self-deception. That he might second-guess difficult decisions out of concern for his reputation and future readers and warp his thinking based on how they would look.

(Holiday 2016, 70-71)

… 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?

Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It’s also dangerous and untrue. 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.

(Holiday 2016, 109)

When we are aspiring we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened.

(Holiday 2016, 111)

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has described this duality well—it’s possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos. As he says, “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.” We just can’t forget which is bigger and which has been here longer.

Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers through-out history have gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the target picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to.

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.

(Holiday 2016, 140-141)

According to Greene, 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 utilizing 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.

Which will it be?

Malcolm chose alive time. He began to learn. He explored religion. He taught himself to be a reader by checking out a pencil and the dictionary from the prison library and not only consumed it from start to finish, but copied it down longhand from cover to cover. All these words he’d never known existed before were transferred to his brain.

As he said later, “From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk.” He read history, he read sociology, he read about religion, he read the classics, he read philosophers like Kant and Spinoza. Later, a reporter asked Malcolm, “What’s your alma mater?” His one word answers “Books.” Prison was his college. He transcended confinement through the pages he absorbed. He reflected that months passed without his even thinking about being detained against his will. He had “never been so truly free in his life.”

Most people know what Malcolm X did after he got out of prison, but they don’t realize or understand how prison made that possible. How a mix of acceptance, humility, and strength powered the transformation. They also aren’t aware of how common this is in history, how many figures took seemingly terrible situations: a prison sentence, an exile, a bear market or depression, military conscription, even being sent to a concentration camp—and through their attitude and approach, turned the circumstances into fuel for their unique greatness.

(Holiday 2016, 171-172)

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References

Holiday, Ryan. 2016. Ego Is the Enemy. N.p.: Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN 978-1-59184-781-6