Ego Is the Enemy teaches readers about the dangers and pitfalls of our ego. If we don’t get control of our ego, says author Ryan Holiday, it will stop us from achieving our full potential.
TPM Take: Ego Is Your Life’s Fuel If You Use It Well
Ryan Holiday makes a valuable case for keeping your ego under control—but the title gets the deeper psychology wrong. Ego fuels many of the most ambitious and successful men in the world, and is part of the dark triad edge, especially narcissism. It’s a fragile, needy, or poorly regulated ego that is ineffective.
At TPM, we therefore don’t advocate killing your ego. We advocate developing an antifragile ego. Read our deeper analyses: Antifragile Ego ↗ and Antifragile Grandiosity ↗
Overview
- Ego blinds us and inflates our sense of worth, distorting reality
- When ego and pride get to us, we lose track of what really matters and what we need to focus on
- There are many techniques to avoid ego-take over, including being eternal learners and paying homage to everyone who’s helped us along the way
Notes
About the Author:
Ryan Holiday is a popular author of several self-development books. He learned from Robert Greene and helped Greene write The 48 Laws of Power.
What’s Ego?
This could be a definition of the harmful type of ego that Ryan Holiday wants to warn us against:
Ego is the unhealthy belief in your own importance
Ambition VS Egoism
Ryan Holiday distinguishes between ambition and egoism.
Ambitious people strive to excel in their field and be the best they can be, regardless of whether they become famous and receive accolades and congratulations.
Egoists instead chase after fame, popularity, and accolades, whether they are actually skilled at what they do or not.
TPM Note: We agree, yet there are some undeniable benefits to status, fame and popularity
How to Control Your Ego
Here are some tips and mindsets to control our egos:
- Eternal learner: remind yourself that there is always something new to learn
- Know that mastery is an eternal pursuit (sweeping the gym floor every day)
- Find someone more skilled than you are to learn from
- Trust others and learn to delegate (our ego stops us from delegating by telling us we’re the only ones who can perform well)
- Share recognition with others (often they’ll do the same back)
Pride Prevents Us From Bigger Achievements
Pride and ego are connected but different.
Pride helps us justify our ego, and tells us how good we are after a major success that we’ve had.
However, pride blinds us to new opportunities and room for improvement.
Pride makes us defensive when someone criticizes us or shows us that we could do better. And instead of looking at reality and ways we could move forward, we get busy defending ourselves and bragging about what we’ve done.
Rein Your Ego When You Encounter Sabotage
Ryan says that it’s almost a given that as you strive valiantly towards your goals, you’ll meet not just total indifference, but possibly even covert or open sabotage.
Some people will indeed go out of their way to make you fail.
It’s easy then to be sidetracked by incredulity, hurt ego, or even reactive impulses of revenge.
But that’s exactly when you need to stay calm, put your head down and get on with the most efficient and effective work you can produce.
You can’t afford to be jerked left and right by your ego.
TPM Note: This is more about self-control than ego and it’s context-dependent.
I’m not sure this is tightly connected to ego. Being able master anger as fuel or, sometimes, to even things out, is also a crucially important self-development aspect for too nice guys. We call this principle ‘provocability’ at TPM, borrowing it from game theory.
The Danger of Success
Success is especially dangerous when it comes to ego.
When you become successful, the tendency is to tell your story in an embellished form. The struggles you’ve overcome, the demons you’ve conquered, and the accomplishments seem all but obvious given your immense talent.
You keep telling that story to people and to yourself and your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become what you’re worth.
And that’s when you get trapped.
You become scared of trying something new and of being found lacking because now your story is that of an almost infallible being.
Ego Makes You Approval-Seeking
Ego makes you a slave to others by making you seek the approval of others.
People with an outsized ego are not really focused on results, self-control, and achieving self-mastery. They are after accolades and hand-clapping.
And they are eternal approval seekers.
Ego Destroys Great Teams
As teams become more successful, the people in it grow and become stars.
But as their sense of self-importance grows bigger and bigger, they start claiming and fighting for the spotlight all for themselves.
That breaks the team and rarely leads to more success.
Instead, realize that your strength comes from your team, and the more you push your team up, the more they will push you further up.
All the Dangers of Ego
Ryan says that ego is responsible for a lot of our failures, undoing, and overall ineffectiveness.
Because of ego:
- We delay doing what we should do
- It poisons our relationships as we seek to hog the spotlight
- It blocks us from thinking long term
- Encourages us to be greedy, which rarely makes us happy and fulfilled
- Shifting blame: when things don’t go well, we rather blame someone else
Ego is The Enemy Quotes
On ego is the enemy:
Your ego is the enemy—it blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.
On overcoming entitlement mentality:
Who can afford to be jerked around by impulses, or believe that you’re God’s gift to humanity, or too important to put up with anything you don’t like?
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
On teamwork:
Soccer coach Tony Adams expresses it well. Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll remember the name on the back.
On doing your best:
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.
Amen to that.
TPM Note: Don’t be naive. Many historical figures got their bust sculpted because they were driven by a big ego
CRITICISM
My main criticism is around the concept of “ego is the enemy”.
It’s not.
It’s a poorly developed ego that is the enemy.
But a good ego supports you:
Ego Is Needed, And A Healthy Ego Is Good
Ego is important to a happy, fulfilled, and successful life.
Even focusing on achievement alone, ego allows us to compete, strive to reach our goals, and do our best to surpass our past achievements.
Some psychiatrists even say that narcissism in moderate doses is positively correlated with healthy self-esteem and positive personality.
However, Ego is The Enemy focuses on those instances when the ego doesn’t help us anymore and stands in the way of our success.
It doesn’t mention how ego is important or helpful, and how “attacking” the ego can lead to more harm than good.
Not that AI is the highest authority source, but it can be a valuable aggregator of disparate views. And says ChatGPT:
Some Jumping to Conclusions
The author leverages a lot of historical examples to make his points, and I like that.
However, I didn’t like the determinism with which some examples were presented. For example, did Napoleon overreach because he believed in destiny?
Maybe, but we don’t know that. And there could be a million other reasons why he over-stretched, including hubris, lack of knowledge of Russian winters, etc., etc.
The more scientifically-minded among the readers will find a few of those examples to be a bit of a stretch.
Review
Ego Is the Enemy is a good book if you disregard the generalized attack on ego and redirect it to the worst expressions of ego only.
In that sense, it lists several ways in which the ego can indeed hinder a happy and successful life.
On the other hand, a grandiose ego is also exactly what drives many men to ambitious pursuits and, ultimately, to success and accolades.
The book is not wrong. But some men got the wrong message from the title and sought to “destroy their ego”. That’s wrong: you should use and recruit your ego, and it can become your best ally.
If you’re interested in a strong and empowered mind, check our Confidence University.
