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Title: Ego Is the Enemy Authors: Ryan Holiday Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 20 Date: 2025-04-20 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.
Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.
Tags:cognition,ego,learning,relationships
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
Tags:knowledge,self-awareness,stoic
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means youâre the least important person in the roomâuntil you change that with results.
Tags:stoic
Ego needs honors in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
Tags:confidence,ego
The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
Tags:communication,focus,work
So what is scarce and rare? 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.
Tags:communication,silence,stoic
The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Self-centered ambition.
Itâs far better when doing good work is sufficient. In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effortânot the results, good or badâis enough.
According to Greene, 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.
Find out why youâre after what youâre after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because thatâs independence.
When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) Youâre not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
As Goethe once observed, the great failing is âto see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.â
Tags:failing,perception,stoic
One might say that the ability to evaluate oneâs own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and âvision.â
Tags:ego,growth,reflection
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesnât degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
Tags:ego,perspective
Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much, because youâve got to get back to the task at hand: practicing, working, improving.
In the end, the only way you can appreciate your progress is to stand on the edge of the hole you dug for yourself, look down inside it, and smile fondly at the bloody claw prints that marked your journey up the walls.
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.
Note: This is in context of people who are always voicing their opinions even when they werenât asked for.
Tags:leadership,speaking