Book: Ego Is The Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent
Author: Ryan Holiday
Date: Feb 18, 2023

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition."

HIGHLIGHTS

- There is no one moment that changes a person. There are many. And it seemed those moments were all happening in succession.

- To go from wanting to be like someone your whole life to realizing you never want to be like him is kind of whiplash that you can’t prepare for.

- We assume the symptoms of success are the same as success itself

- Talent is only the starting point. The question is: Will you be able to make the most of it?

- Facts are better than dreams

- Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort.

- Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.

- Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

- This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.

- What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you.

- “Say little, do much”.

- When you want to do something - something big and important and meaningful- you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.

- That’s the reality. Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.

- Make it so you don’t have to fake it - that’s the key.

- I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be.

- You have a chance to do this yourself. To play a different game, to be utterly audacious in your aims. Because what comes next is going to test you in ways that you cannot begin to understand. For ego is a wicked sister of success.

- Without the right values, success is brief.

- Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?

- 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.

- Learn from everyone and everything.

- The same goes for us, whatever we do. Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution - and on executing with excellence. We must shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here. Because that’s the only thing that will keep us here.

- We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities.

- 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. 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.

- Euthymia: it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it.

- It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest.

- You need to know what you don’t want and what your choices preclude.

- Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. That’s independence.

- Fear is a bad advisor.

- Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.

- “Men of great ambition have sought happiness… and have found fame.” Behind every goal is the drive to be happy and fulfilled - but when egotism takes hold, we lose track of our goal and end up somewhere we never intended.

- Just because you did something once, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it successfully forever.

- 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.

- Life isn’t fair.

- Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now.

- What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us. And how we make it through.

- 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.

- Change the definition of success: success is peace of mind.

- We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent.

- Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things.

- The bigger the ego the harder the fall.

- It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

- Most of us can’t handle uncomfortable self-examination. It’s easier to do just about anything else.

- Helpful metaphor: training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep.

- Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience.

- What is left? Your choices. What will you do with this information? Not just now, but going forward?

- Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.  MY NOTES

- It’s a type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth.

- There is no one moment that changes a person. There are many. And it seemed those moments were all happening in succession.

- To go from wanting to be like someone your whole life to realizing you never want to be like him is kind of whiplash that you can’t prepare for.

- I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts.

- “EGO IS THE ENEMY” and “THE OBSTACLE IS THE WAY” - I use these two phrases to guide the decisions in my life.

- Who do I want to be? What path will I take?

- We must fight to be different and fight to stay different

- Fans and followers - things only rock stars and cult leaders used to have

- We assume the symptoms of success are the same as success itself

- We’re aspiring to something. We have achieved success. Or we have failed.

- ASPIRE. Every great journey begins here.

- Talent is only the starting point. The question is: Will you be able to make the most of it?

- The ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all.

- Facts are better than dreams

- Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.

- It’s a temptation that exists for everyone - for talk and hype to replace action.

- She did what a lot of us do when we’re scared or overwhelmed by a project: she did everything but focus on it.

- Silence is strength

- After a certain point, our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress.

- Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort.

- Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.

- Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

- This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.

- What is your purpose? What are you here to do?

- If what matters to you - your reputation, your inclusion, your personal ease of life - your path is clear: tell people what they want to hear.

- What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you.

- It’s about the doing, not the recognition.

- What is it that I want to accomplish in life? Do I need this? To be or to do - life is a constant roll call.

- A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge.

- When student is ready, the teacher appears.

- She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.

- Passion typically masks a weakness.

- Purpose is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.

- 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.

- “Say little, do much”.

- Helping yourself by helping others.

- Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with.

- When you want to do something - something big and important and meaningful- you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.

- It doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.

- You’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it. In the meantime, you’ll have to find some way to make it suit your purposes.

- His personality made it impossible to do what he needed to do most.

- There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.

- Pride is a sin because it is a lie.

- Pride leads to arrogance and then away from humility and connection with their fellow man.

- If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.

- The first product of self-knowledge is humility.

- You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.

- “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal… The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare” - Ben Horowitz

- Sure, you get it. You know that all things require work and that work might be quite difficult. But do you really understand? Do you have any idea just how much work there is going to be?

- That’s the reality. Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.

- Fac, si fais. (Do it if you’re going to do it).

- Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes.

- Make it so you don’t have to fake it - that’s the key.

- I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be.

- You have a chance to do this yourself. To play a different game, to be utterly audacious in your aims. Because what comes next is going to test you in ways that you cannot begin to understand. For ego is a wicked sister of success.

- That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves.

- You can only see this if you want to see it. It’s more attractive and exciting to see the rebel billionaire.

- Without the right values, success is brief.

- We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe.

- It’s about the work and not about us.

- Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?

- Each victory and advancement that made Khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he’d never encountered before.

- 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.

- Learn from everyone and everything.

- Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.

- Standard of Performance: what should be done. when. how.

- It would be a mistake to think this was about control. The Standard of Performance was about instilling excellence.

- If the players take care of the details, “the score takes care of itself”. The winning would happen.

- The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.

- His other famous piece of advice, “Keep your identity small” make it about the work and the principles behind it - not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.

- Hard work and sincere hustle

- The same goes for us, whatever we do. Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution - and on executing with excellence. We must shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here. Because that’s the only thing that will keep us here.

- We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities.

- 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.

- What if there is more than one race going on?

- Competitiveness is an important force in life. 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.

- Euthymia: it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it.

- It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest.

- You need to know what you don’t want and what your choices preclude.

- Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. That’s independence.

- With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.

- Achieving success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us. It meant rejecting rejection.

- He rejects information and feedback that challenges what he wants to believe. He lives in a bubble in which no one can say no - not even his conscience.

- The president does the most important things. I [as his chief of staff] do the next most important things.

- Urgent and important were not synonymous. His job was to set the priorities, to think big picture, and then trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for.

- The system and work habits that got us where we are won’t necessarily keep us there.

- DeLorean had the ability to recognize a good opportunity but he didn’t know how to make it happen. He was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another.

- DeLorean couldn’t manage himself, so he had trouble managing others. And so he managed to fail, both himself and the dream.

- Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll remember the name on the back.

- Each and every one of them lives in a world he was largely responsible for shaping.

- Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.

- Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition.

- Fear is a bad advisor.

- The ego tells us we’re invincible, that we have unlimited force that will never dissipate. But that can’t be what greatness requires - energy without end?

- There certainly is an element of restraint to egoless sobriety - an elimination of the unnecessary and the destructive.

- Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.

- “Men of great ambition have sought happiness… and have found fame.” Behind every goal is the drive to be happy and fulfilled - but when egotism takes hold, we lose track of our goal and end up somewhere we never intended.

- Just because you did something once, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it successfully forever.

- 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.

- Life isn’t fair.

- Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now.

- What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us. And how we make it through.

- 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.

- This moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life.

- The system and work habits that got us where we are won’t necessarily keep us there.

- DeLorean had the ability to recognize a good opportunity but he didn’t know how to make it happen. He was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another.

- DeLorean couldn’t manage himself, so he had trouble managing others. And so he managed to fail, both himself and the dream.

- Don’t let stubbornness make a bad situation worse.

- Change the definition of success: success is peace of mind.

- This is why we can’t let externals determine whether something was worth it or not. It’s on us.

- There are many ways to hit bottom. Almost everyone does in their own way, at some point.

- We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent.

- Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things.

- The bigger the ego the harder the fall.

- Many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false.

- It was in those moments - when the break exposes something unseen before - that you were forced to make eye contact with a thing called Truth. No longer could you hide or pretend.

- A look at history finds these events seem to be defined by three traits: 1. They almost always came at the hands of some outside force or person. 2. They often involved things we already knew about ourselves, but were too scared to admit. 3. From the ruin came the opportunity for great progress and improvement.

- The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.

- It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

- You’ve seen this. You’ve done this. Fighting desperately for something we’re only making worse.

- Ego kills what we love. Sometimes, it comes close to killing us too.

- He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living men. He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.

- The only real failure is abandoning your principles.

- I never look back, except to find out about mistakes… I only see danger in thinking back about things you are proud of.

- 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. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else’s.

- Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

- A person who judges himself based on his own standards doesn’t crave the spotlight the same way as someone who lets applause dictate success.

- You know what is a better response to an attack or a sight or something you don’t like? Love.

- Hate will get you every time.

- Okay, maybe love is too much to ask for whatever it is that you’ve had done to you. You could at the very least try to let it go. You could try to shake your head and laugh about it.

- Otherwise the world will witness another example of a timeless and sad pattern: Rich, powerful person becomes so isolated and delusional that when something happens contrary to his wishes, he becomes consumed by it. The same drive that made him great is suddenly a great weakness. He turns a minor inconvenience into a massive sore. The wound festers, becomes infected, and can even kill him.

- He ended up doing more damage to himself than anyone else could.

- Hate was a burden and love was freedom.

- Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything?

- The traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment.

- Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?

- Ego. It makes all the steps hard, but failure is the one it will make permanent. Unless we learn, right here and right now, from our mistakes. Unless we use this moment as an opportunity to understand ourselves and our own mind better, ego will seek out failure like true north.  Most of us can’t handle uncomfortable self-examination. It’s easier to do just about anything else.

- Helpful metaphor: training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep.

- He realizes that the vengeance - the bad karma - he’d hoped for wasn’t coming. Because it was already there. I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process.

- Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience.

- What is left? Your choices. What will you do with this information? Not just now, but going forward?

- Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.

MY NOTES