Book SummaryEgo Is the Enemy, by Ryan Holiday

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Ego Is the Enemy

Author Ryan Holiday defines ego as a sense of superiority that goes beyond mere confidence, distorting our perception so that we see other people as either subservient or oppositional. He argues that ego leads us to failure because it causes us to overestimate our own skills while underestimating threats and challenges. It can also lead to a host of adverse characteristics, such as addiction, depression, mania, and abuse, that can destroy a person’s career (and life).

Holiday emphasizes that you don’t need to be a full-blown “egomaniac” (a person completely obsessed with themselves) to suffer the effects of ego. Even slightly elevated levels of ego can hold you back from success and create difficulties in your life.

Holiday outlines three overall ways that ego can lead to failure: before success (by preventing you from achieving it), during success (by sabotaging the success you’ve earned), and after success (by preventing you from bouncing back from failure). The following sections explore each of these areas.

Stoic Philosophy Channels the Ego

To make his arguments, Holiday draws on the philosophies of Stoic thinkers, who advise that the only true happiness lies in virtue, and that all material goods should exist solely to help you live a virtuous life. While some Stoics urge you to resist all desires for worldly items, modern Stoics (including Holiday) don’t advocate that you give up all trappings of success (wealth, power, and so on), but rather, that you chase these things within a framework of a virtuous life.

While Holiday states that he advises you to give up all egotistical urges because even slight ones can derail you, throughout his book he seems to allow for people to follow their ego in some ways as long as they don’t allow their ego to take over. He thus seems to interpret Stoicism as a means to an end (success) rather than an end in itself (the rejection of worldly desires).

Although some readers have criticized Holiday for this interpretation, arguing that true Stoicism advocates for a more complete rejection of desires, his interpretation does seem to align with much contemporary Stoic thinking that sees Stoicism as a mindset that allows you to be freed from negative emotional urges that can derail your progress toward your goals.

Attaining Success

Holiday argues that ego can prevent you from achieving your dreams by leading you to incorrect ways of thinking that prevent success. He maintains that to control your ego’s influence over your thoughts, you need to stop talking about yourself and stop thinking about yourself.

Stop Talking About Yourself

Holiday notes that ego often drives people to talk about and promote themselves. We see this kind of egotistical “talk” every day, as people post their thoughts, activities, and interactions with other people all over social media.

Holiday warns that this type of self-promoting talk can prevent you from achieving the very things you’re bragging about because talk replaces action, and action is what’s actually going to make you successful. Self-promoting talk keeps us from our goals by:

• Monopolizing our time: When you talk about working toward something instead of actually working toward it, you rob your goals of the time needed to achieve them. (Shortform note: Business experts recognize time management as one of the most crucial practices for success. In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends figuring out which tasks will lead to your goal and eliminating any others from your daily schedule.)
• Sapping our psychological energy: When you promote yourself, you engage in a type of positive visualization, which can make you feel like you’ve accomplished what you’re envisioning even though you haven’t made any concrete progress. (Shortform note: Research backs up Holiday’s claims. When test subjects visualize positive outcomes from a project, they lose enthusiasm for that project, working on it less and abandoning it quicker.)
• Preventing the silence needed for productive reflection: To properly struggle with a task, you must pause and focus your attention on that task completely. When you fill that silence with self-promoting talk, you rob yourself of the chance to focus. (Shortform note: Brain scans show that meditation measurably increases focus. Holiday doesn’t address meditation but the underlying theory is the same: Allowing for silence and freedom from distractions improves your focus.)

Stop Thinking About Yourself

In addition to not talking about yourself, Holiday urges you to not think about yourself either. He cautions that ego can prompt self-aggrandizing thoughts, leading you to spend more time thinking about what you’ll do with success than on how you’ll achieve it. Holiday outlines three ways that egotistical thoughts can paralyze you:

• They shift your focus from your task to your “greatness.” When you’re convinced of your own greatness, you’re more concerned with defending that image than completing your task.
• They stop you from taking action out of a fear that your plan must first be perfect. When you have an inflated sense of self-importance, you might be reluctant to embark on a course of action that doesn’t live up to the standards you envision for yourself.
• They erect a barrier between you and reality. Convinced of your own superiority, you might ignore...

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Shortform Introduction

In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday defines ego as an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance that goes beyond mere confidence—it’s a sense of superiority that makes us see everyone around us as either subservient or oppositional. 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 are able to control their egotistical impulses.

Holiday discusses the ways an unchecked ego can destroy your success at three different periods: first, as you’re striving for success, second, as you’re trying to maintain the success you’ve achieved, and third, when you’ve lost success and need to recover from failure. He offers insights into how to understand and counter your ego so it doesn’t stop you from living up to your potential.

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....

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Introduction to Ego

In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday contends that ego is an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance that distorts our perception of the world so that we see ourselves as central figures and see everyone else as either subservient or oppositional.

Holiday notes that many successful people are famously egotistical—ambitious, self-important, and caught up in their own vision of the world. He says that as a result, society tends to think that ego is an important ingredient in success, as if ego leads to accomplishment. Holiday disagrees. The premise of his book is that ego leads far more often to failure, and that people find success only when they’re able to control their egotistical impulses.

Holiday argues that overall, ego leads us to failure because it causes us to overestimate our own skills while underestimating threats and challenges. It also prevents us from effectively connecting with people, which limits our ability to lead them or to inspire them to help us. Further, it can lead to a host of adverse characteristics, such as addiction, depression, mania, and abuse, which can destroy a person’s career (and life). He emphasizes...

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Part 1A: Attaining Success: How to Think

Holiday argues that ego can prevent you from achieving your dreams by leading you to incorrect ways of thinking that prevent success. He contends that unfortunately, many of us are taught these incorrect ways of thinking starting in childhood: Our parents, teachers, and other adults teach us that having a high self-esteem is the first step to leading a happy and fulfilled life. Further, we’re taught that we’re entitled to have a big ego whether or not we’ve accomplished anything that would merit such confidence.

Unfortunately, these beliefs about confidence and ego are mistaken. Self-esteem must be based on true achievement for it to be a positive (and controlled) part of our lives. Confidence based on nothing but validation is imaginary and leads to an inflated ego that gets in the way of happiness and success.

Is Self-Esteem Harmful?

Psychologists have long noted the danger of raising your kids with constant self-esteem-building messages like “you’re so smart.” Some psychologists even argue that [self-esteem—confidence in your worth or abilities—is inherently harmful to your...

Shortform Exercise: Avoid Self-Promoting Talk

Ego often drives people to talk about themselves in positive, self-promoting ways. But talk and action compete for the same finite resources: time and energy.

Think of a time when you spent an inordinate amount of energy on an ego-driven activity that didn’t advance your goals while convincing yourself that it did. (Perhaps you participated in online forums instead of working on your project, or planned what you would do with your success rather than doing the tasks needed to achieve it.) How did those activities delay your success?

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Part 1B: Attaining Success: How to Act

Now that we’ve discussed some ways that ego prevents you from thinking about yourself and the world properly, we’ll explore some ways ego can prevent you from doing the right things. We’ll also look at how you can correct these impulses so that your ego doesn’t get in the way of your dreams.

Aim to Do Something, Rather Than Be Someone

Holiday warns that ego can stop you from achieving your goals when it leads you to try to be somebody (earn the recognition that comes with doing a job the way others expect you to) rather than to do something (accomplish things that would elevate your profession or the world at large).

When you start your career, you typically envision accomplishing great things—leaving a mark and making a difference in the world. However, it’s easy to get distracted from your mission by things that give the appearance of success, such as a high number of Twitter followers or a lofty job title. People confuse these things with actual accomplishment, even though they don’t necessarily indicate competence (sometimes, for example, promotions go to people who check the right boxes—they’ve gone to the right business school or are members of a...

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Part 1C: Attaining Success: How to Interact

As you strive for success, you’ll cross paths with many different people. Holiday discusses many ways that you can interact with others to help you further your progress toward your goals. He advises that you focus on keeping your ego under control as you navigate the world.

Look for Teachers

In your quest to become a lifelong student, Holiday advises you to look for unusual sources of instruction—you can pay teachers or mentors for their guidance, but don't ignore the wealth of free instruction that’s available on virtually every subject.

• Approach people in your industry who have become successful and ask them for help. People have a natural instinct to want to help others, and those who have found success are often happy to pass along their expertise.
• Study historical figures or people who have gone before you whom you look up to. The challenges they faced may hold lessons you can apply to your life.

Seek Out a Mentor

Many management experts have echoed Holiday’s advice to seek out people from whom you can learn, and in particular, when possible, to seek out mentors. A mentor is an experienced professional who helps a more inexperienced...

Shortform Exercise: Find Three People

To become great, you need to find three types of people with whom you can interact on your journey to success:

• Someone better than you whom you can learn from
• Someone lesser than you whom you can teach
• Someone equal to you whom you can challenge yourself against

Think of someone better than you at your current job or the job you dream of. How can you reach out to that person and ask for assistance? What exactly would you ask?

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Part 2: Maintaining Success

In this section, we’ll take a look at how Holiday advises you to act after you’ve attained success. Holiday notes that although a person might suppress her ego effectively while rising to success, once she’s attained it, 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. The following sections explore different ways this can happen, and how you can resist that fate.

Stay a Lifelong Student

In Part I, Holiday discussed the importance of becoming a lifelong student. Here, he discusses how important it is that you maintain that openness to learning. While striving for success, you might absorb whatever knowledge and lessons you can, but once you’re successful, you might start thinking you know everything. If so, you’ll likely ignore new information and consequently blind yourself to challenges, threats, and points of weakness.

Further,** when you’ve achieved a measure of success, you’ll have different challenges than you had when you were seeking success, and you’ll need a different set of skills and...

Shortform Exercise: Be a Manager

While your ego wants you to be the boss of everything, managing properly means delegating and focusing your efforts on big-picture issues.

Think of a situation where you couldn’t stop yourself from micromanaging details. What responsibilities did you take on that you could have delegated to another person?

Ego Is the Enemy Summary Part 3: 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: Ego sees failure as a direct insult to your personal identity and instinctively takes over your emotions, 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. Simon Cowell, television personality and record producer, is an example of someone who faced multiple setbacks but powered through and remained successful because [he figured out how to keep his ego in...

Shortform Exercise: Redefine Success

Sometimes your ego defines success based entirely on how much or how little others give you recognition, through honors, praise, awards, job titles, raises, and so on. If you let your ego define success for you in this way, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, because you can’t control how the world receives, judges, or acts upon your work.

Think of a time when you had an opportunity but passed it up because it didn’t meet a superficial marker of success. (Maybe you passed on an entry-level job in an industry you loved because it didn’t pay well, or you didn’t bother submitting to an art contest because the prize wasn’t prestigious enough.)

Shortform Exercise: Don’t Hate

The paradox of hatred is that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what we hope it will accomplish. While we may feel hatred will demonstrate how wrongly we’ve been treated, it more often demonstrates how appropriate our failures are—how well-deserved.

Think of a situation that made you angry, in which you felt bitterness or hatred toward someone.