Book Byte #231 "Ego is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday

The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

📣 Curious Quotes from the Author

“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. 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.”

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

“Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.”

“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.”

“When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes—but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.”

“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”

“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”

“When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

“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.”

“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”

📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea

The main takeaway from this Blink is straightforward: stay away from ego at all times. Avoid it now, in the future, and forever. Aspiration is the road to achievement, but it can also lead to difficulties. Success will inevitably lead to new challenges, but it should also inspire new goals. And the way to new goals and achievements is through difficulties. There is no end to the loop. If you don't succeed, see it as a chance to grow, learn, and get better so you may try again stronger and better equipped. The only thing preventing you is your ego.

All of history's titans had to overcome challenges and hardships. They were all fallible. However, they overcame those challenges or learned from them, even if the only thing they took away was that mistakes are inevitable and that people's wishes aren't always fulfilled.

They never would have improved or accomplished great things if they hadn't absorbed the lesson and possessed the humility and self-awareness to take it to heart. Ego is the one thing standing in the way of your success and ability to thrive in any era of life, including aspiration, success, and failure.

You don't need ego to aim. Without ego, success is possible. With strength, you might fail, but with ego, never. Ego is the Enemy

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