Ryan Holiday defines Ego as:
“An unhealthy belief in your importance.”
This is a very deep and meaningful sentence by Ryan Holiday. The ego is the greatest hindrance in our way to doing something big. Great things are done by those, for whom ‘us’ is more important than ‘me’. Ryan Holiday explains in detail how ego attacks us in three phases of our life; Aspire, Success and Failure i.e. how does it hold us back in the aspiration stage, how does it limit our success and how does it worsen our failure? He also suggests a cure for the ego which is ‘humility’.
Aspire
According to Ryan Holiday, “To whatever we aspire, ego is the enemy.”
Talk less, do more: Don’t waste your energy and time in talk. Silence is rare and more rewarding. When you talk about your ambitions to others, your inner drive to make efforts to achieve your purpose gets weak. Your desire to get recognition without any valuable achievement through talk satisfies your ego. But it takes you away from any valuable achievement. So you should stop talking and start working.
Let your success speak for you, not your tongue.
Your purpose should be bigger than you: Don’t think big about yourself, definitely not bigger than your purpose. Your purpose should be big enough for you than yourself that it should catch all your attention. It makes hard work easier for you. When you give importance to yourself, you think more about success and create an ‘imaginary audience” appreciating you. It is an egoistic behaviour that sucks the energy required to do important things.
Be a perpetual learner: Ryan gives the example of Kirk Hammett. He rejected the offer to join Metallica just to learn more and he joined Metallica after four years and not only became the lead guitarist of the band but also one of the greatest guitarists.
Ryan also mentions the teaching of Martial Arts Pioneer Frank Shamrock who believed that one should always have someone better to learn from, someone lesser to teach and someone equal to compete with. Someone better will control your ego that you are not the best in this field. When you teach someone lesser than you, you remember the time when you started your journey and it develops humility. And finally, your competitor helps you keep growing.
Be considerate, not passionate: Every intense emotion overpowers your brain and affects your ability to focus, and so does passion. “Leave passions for amateurs” and be considerate of your purpose. Observe minute details that are important for your purpose and this is only possible when you are more considerate than passionate.
Ryan Holiday quotes Booker T. Washington:
I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who “keep under the body”; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.
Success
Ego has a direct relation with success. It comes with success and makes us proud. If we let our ego conquer us we even forget what efforts we have done to get this success. In this way, it limits our success.
Don’t Get Addicted: Don’t get too lost in enjoying your success. Don’t get addicted to this praise. Remember that if people are praising you now, they will forget about you if you stop there.
Humility is Cure: You must keep learning, must keep hard-working, and most importantly you must keep fighting with your ego which is the enemy of your success. Be humble all the time. Humility is a cure for the disease that is called ‘ego’. Always remember that there is much more to do. There is much more to learn. Never stop learning when you achieve something.
Ego is an Illusion, Humility is Reality: If you think that the world revolves around you, this is just an illusion. When you leave this illusion behind and embrace the reality that every being living in this world is equally important, you become more humble.
Failure
Ego is not just thinking highly of yourself, it is thinking too much of yourself. I think that ego is more dangerous when you face failure. Ryan says, “It adds self-injury to every injury you experience.”
Ego Blocks the Way to Success: The ego says that you failed because you’re not made for a particular thing. You should not have tried. You should have stayed away. By doing so you might have escaped negative criticism. We cannot achieve success in a true sense without facing challenges and failures. But after the first failure, your ego can block the way to success altogether for you. Don’t let your ego do this.
Alive Time, Dead Time: Detroit Red was sent to jail, he was a murderer and a drug smuggler. He gave himself to self-study in jail. He studied voraciously during that time and became a successful politician when he came out and know he is known as Malcolm X. It means, it depends on you whether you utilize your bad times to achieve something in future and make it alive time, or you keep on cursing your adversity doing nothing significant and make it dead time.
What did I learn from this book?
Ego is not something like “I’m good or I’m bad”. It is all about “I’m”. When you spend too much time thinking about yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths and your aspirations, you fail to observe the ground realities that are very clearly visible. You find simple things complicated. This book not only highlights this problem very clearly but also gives a practical solution to it.