PDF Summary:Ego Is the Enemy, by Ryan Holiday

In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday defines ego as an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance. He notes that many successful people are famously egotistical, and he contends that as a result, society tends to think that ego is an important ingredient in success, as if ego leads to accomplishment. However, Holiday argues that ego leads far more often to failure, and that people find success only when they’re able to control their egotistical impulses.

To make his arguments, Holiday draws on the philosophies of Stoic thinkers, advising us to resist the urges of our emotions in order to maintain clarity of thinking. In our guide to his book, we’ll examine his theories through the lens of Stoicism, and we’ll compare them to other management theories that similarly aim to help you find success.

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• Seek out feedback and listen to it.
• Constantly be on the lookout for the next challenge.
• Approach people in your industry who have become successful and ask them for help.
• Take advantage of the wealth of training courses, books, and online instruction available.
• Become a mentor to someone more junior than you—the experience of teaching what you know helps you come to a firmer understanding of it and encourages you to grow.

Schedule Your Learning

Unfortunately, even if you know the importance of learning, it can be hard to put the advice into practice when your day is already full of tasks, activities, and responsibilities. For this reason, many experts advise that you purposefully schedule time during your day to devote to learning. Robin Sharma advocates for this technique in his book The 5 AM Club, in which he notes that so few people actively become lifelong learners that you can easily set yourself above your competition by continually expanding your knowledge.

Control Your Passion

Holiday points out that popular belief holds that passion drives you toward your goals, and that passion is an essential element in achieving success. This belief is misguided. The truth is that passion is often the thing preventing you from achieving your goals.

He emphasizes that you do need to care about your project, but he maintains that passion goes beyond mere caring: Passion is unchecked enthusiasm in the service of some lofty, vague goal that blunts your critical thinking. When you are passionate about a project, you are blinded to the issues that might sabotage it. You ignore the objections that other people raise. You jump ahead too fast, before mastering the skills you need and before fully understanding all the elements of your project. Consequently, passion often ends up masking a weakness in a project—one that may very well sink it later when reality intrudes.

Good Passion Versus Bad Passion

Among those readers who criticized Holiday’s book, one of the most common objections regarded his advice to ignore your passion. Many readers voiced skepticism at the notion that a person can pursue a long-term goal through difficult times and over many years without some degree of passion driving them.

However, Holiday’s ideas on passion are consistent with Stoic thinking that differentiates between good passions (emotional responses based on accurate judgments about things that are important to your life) and bad passions (emotional responses based on mistaken judgments). In recognizing this difference, Stoics don’t advise rejecting all emotions (defined as mental responses that are not based in rationality), but only those that lead us to faulty thinking and unpleasant consequences.

Keep Your Head Down

Holiday points to three other things you should do in order to move past the urges of your ego:

• Be a helper: Especially in the beginnings of your career, accept humble positions that will allow you to learn about your business from a unique angle, even if those positions require grunt work and are not well compensated. (Shortform note: Another way to think about being a helper is that you should be a giver instead of a taker, a concept that Adam Grant fleshed out in his book Give and Take. Grant argues that people who give freely of their time, effort, knowledge, experience, and skills end up more successful than those who mainly try to reap the benefits of other peoples’ time, effort, and so on.)
• Keep your temper: Don't let your anger boil over even if you are mistreated. Always act professionally and stay in control of your emotions. (Shortform note: While Holiday seems to advocate for accepting aggression from others passively, most psychologists advise finding the middle ground between passivity and aggression, which is assertiveness—standing up for yourself while being respectful of both your own needs and the other person’s.)
• Do the work: Be prepared to work hard to put your ideas into practice. History is littered with great ideas that never went anywhere because their creator didn’t do the work to make them happen. (Shortform note: Holiday’s advice to focus on your work rather than your grand ideas recalls his earlier caution not to get caught up in self-promoting talk, as getting caught up in thinking about grand ideas can sap you of mental energy in the same way that self-promotion can.)

Maintaining Success

In these next sections, we’ll take a look at how Holiday advises you to act after you’ve attained success. When you have success, you’ll have different challenges than you had when you were seeking success, and you’ll need a different set of skills and knowledge. If your ego doesn’t properly navigate these new requirements, you’ll have a difficult time holding onto the success you’ve earned.

Holiday notes that although a person might suppress her ego effectively while rising to success, once she’s attained success, her ego might take over. When she’s at the top, she becomes aware of her importance, her ego swells, and she starts behaving poorly. A person who loses control of her ego will most likely lose the success she’s achieved. To prevent this:

• Stay a lifelong student: When you become successful, you’ll need different knowledge and skills than you did when you were achieving success. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you know everything. Stay open to new lessons.
• Don’t lose sight of your priorities: Once you’ve attained success, you may be offered opportunities for different ventures. Don’t be tempted by additional greatness if it means spreading your resources thinly. Ask yourself if these new opportunities will advance your ultimate goal or distract you from it.
• Don’t let your success destroy itself: Sometimes, the very traits that brought you success can rob you of it. For example, to succeed, you ignored people who doubted you, but if you continue to ignore people who offer advice, you’ll miss warnings of legitimate threats. Beware of feelings of entitlement and a heightened need to control others, both of which will steer you to poor decisions.

The “Hubris” Syndrome

Psychologists have identified a “hubris syndrome,” which describes a mindset that people can develop after being in power for some time, in which they:

• View the world as a means of self-glorification

• Conflate themselves with their organization

• Have contempt for others

• Lose contact with reality

• Become impulsive

• Feel morally justified in their actions, no matter how unethical, practical, or costly

• Lose interest in the finer points of policy-making

• Become vulnerable to manipulation by people who recognize their need for flattery and use it to influence their decisions

Hubris causes each of the above points that Holiday mentions: It makes you feel you know everything, it makes you greedy for more success in many different areas, and it convinces you that the skills that brought you to where you are are sufficient to keep you there.

Recovering From Failure

Now that we’ve looked at how ego can get in the way of attaining and maintaining success, let’s look at how it can misguide you when you experience some form of defeat, as everyone must.

Failure will happen to each and every one of us in some form or another. You may be able to get through it and find success again, or it may defeat you for good. Whether or not your ego drives your reactions to setbacks will determine which outcome you realize.

Ego is especially dangerous in the defeat stage of success for two reasons:

1. Ego is especially difficult to ignore when it reacts to failure, making it difficult for you to react rationally.
2. While ego makes all steps of life (aspiration, maintenance, and defeat) more difficult, it will make defeat permanent.

However, a person who can meet failure with the proper attitude can turn it into eventual success. To do so, Holiday advises you to follow several strategies:

• Turn “dead time” into “alive time”: When you’re stuck in a non-productive period, either because you’ve failed at a project or you’ve been forced out of action for some reason (including unemployment or health reasons), you can either endure that time or you can use it productively to prepare for your next step by reading, learning, or increasing your network.
• Let your “low moment” transform you: If you’re faced with a great failure, you must honestly assess what went wrong and face your mistakes. If you let your ego deny the full truth of what happened, allowing you to sugarcoat what you may have done wrong, you won’t learn from your mistakes.
• Redefine success: When evaluating success, focus on your efforts (which you can fully control), not the outcome (which you can’t fully control, as success depends in part on other people and on luck). Consider things like whether you improved your performance, learned from the process, or mastered some work habits, rather than if your project was ultimately successful.
• Cut your losses: Know when to let go of a losing project and chalk it up to a learning experience. Avoid the “sunk cost fallacy” that entraps many people, by which they spend endless money, time, and effort trying to recoup a loss.

Develop a Growth Mindset

Although Holiday doesn’t use the terms “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset,” his theories correspond to these well-known concepts. These two mindsets describe a person’s attitude in response to failure, and psychologists have long noted that consistently, people who easily bounce back from failure do so because they’ve developed a growth mindset.

Carol S. Dweck discusses these in depth in her book Mindset. As she outlines it, a person with a growth mindset believes they can improve their natural abilities through hard work and practice. In contrast, a person with a fixed mindset believes their abilities are unchangeable, and that whatever skills and intelligence they were born with establish limits for the rest of their lives.

A fixed mindset corresponds with an egotistical reaction to defeat—it can prevent future success for the same reasons Holiday outlines above. Someone who egotistically sees failure as a direct reflection of their identity has a fixed mindset and will be more likely to give up and allow that failure to become permanent.

Fortunately, Dweck argues that even if you have a tendency toward a fixed mindset, you can develop a growth mindset that will equip you with a better attitude toward failure. Many of the techniques and strategies that Holiday advises for overcoming failure are different ways that you can learn to see failures as opportunities for future growth (through a growth mindset) rather than as dead ends (through a fixed mindset).

Resist Feeling Hatred

Holiday discusses one additional way that your ego can make it difficult to recover from failure—succumbing to blame and anger. He acknowledges that when failure trips you up, your ego wants to hate someone for it because that puts the blame for your suffering on someone else. Unfortunately, hatred does nothing to release you from your failures. On the contrary, hatred holds you to your failures longer.

The paradox of hatred is that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what you hope it will accomplish. It exposes your bad side, which makes people lose sympathy for whatever difficulties you’ve endured. It also fills you with stress and unpleasant thoughts, which can be debilitating.

Love, though, is transformational. Even when you feel it’s undeserved, finding a way to love someone who’s wronged you will allow you to get perspective on a situation and understand the forces at play that brought your failure about. You’ll resist placing blame on someone else and will be better able to see how you can emerge from your failure as a stronger person.

Tips for Moving On

In his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie discusses techniques for moving on after someone has wronged you. Like Holiday, he notes that holding a grudge will harm you more than it harms the other person because it places a limit on your happiness—you won’t feel happy if they are also feeling happy. It’s far better to let go of your anger so that you can move on.

Carnegie suggests three ways you can help yourself move on:

• Forgive and forget: The fastest way to get over a hurt is to forgive the person and simply stop thinking about them. You’ll move on even faster if you can take it a step further and see some good that they did for you, and thank them for it.

• Immerse yourself in a larger cause: When you’re involved in working toward a higher purpose, you're less sensitive to insults or wrongs because you’re thinking about something greater than yourself.

• Imagine yourself in their shoes: We often blame other peoples’ shortcomings on negative personality characteristics, while blaming our own shortcomings on bad luck or circumstance. This is called attribution error. If you can get beyond this instinctive reaction, you can more clearly see what circumstances may have led the other person to act the way they did.