Ego Is the Enemy

for people with ambitions, talents, drives, and potential to fulfill, ego comes with the territory. Precisely what makes us so promising as thinkers, doers, creatives, and entrepreneurs, what drives us to the top of those fields, makes us vulnerable to this darker side of the psyche.

Freud was fond of explaining the ego by way of analogyour ego was the rider on a horse, with our unconscious drives presenting the animal while the ego tried to direct them.

Modern psychologists, on the other hand, use the word "egotist" to refer to someone dangerously focused on themselves and with disregard for anyone else.

The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility-that's ego. It's the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.

The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.

The performance artist Marina Abramović puts it directly: "If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity."

Just one thing keeps ego around-comfort.

At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. We're aspiring to something-trying to make a dent in the universe. We have achieved successperhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Or we have failed-recently or continually. Most of us are in these stages in a fluid sensewe're aspiring until we succeed, we succeed until we fail or until we aspire to more, and after we fail we can begin to aspire or succeed again.

Only when free of ego and baggage can anyone perform to their utmost.

When we remove ego, we're left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes-but rock-hard humility and confidence.

Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.

As Irving Berlin put it, "Talent is only the starting point." The question is:

Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote.

There's a weak side to each of us, that-like a trade union-isn't exactly malicious but at the end of the day still wants get as much public credit and attention as it can for doing the least. That side we call ego.

she did what a lot of us do when we're scared or overwhelmed by a project: she did everything but focus on it. The actual novel she was supposed to be working on stalled completely. For a year.

It was easier to talk about writing, to do the exciting things related to art and creativity and literature, than to commit the act itself.

Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization.

Steven Pressfield calls the "Resistance"-the hurdle that stands between us and creative expression. Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.

In our building phase, resistance will be a constant source of discomfort.

Doing great work is a struggle. It's draining, it's demoralizing, it's frightening-not always, but it can feel that way when we're deep in the middle of it.

"Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road," Boyd said to him. "And you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go." Using his hands to illustrate, Boyd marked off these two directions. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends.

Whatever we seek to do in life, reality soon intrudes on our youthful idealism.

There's a quip from the historian Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. That's the sad truth Boyd was illustrating, how positive virtues turn sour.

"A man is worked upon by what he works on," Frederick Douglass once said.

Think about this the next time you face that choice: Do I need this? Or is it really about ego? Are you ready to make the right decision? Or do the prizes still glitter off in the distance?

The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the and ego ambition in someone else's hands.

The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.

The purpose of Shamrock's formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don't know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast.

As Shamrock observed, "False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student.

A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge. A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.

"It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows," Epictetus says.

Many don't even know they are teaching-they are simply exemplars, or even historical figures whose lessons survive in books and essays.

Passion is about. (I am so passionate about pose is to and for. (I must do .) I was put here to for the accomplish I am willing to endure sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

Let the others take their credit on credit, while you defer and earn interest on the principal.

Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don't live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even ifespecially if it's uncomfortable. Be part of what's going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.

There is another old expression: You know a workman by the chips they leave. It's true. To judge your progress properly, just take a look at the floor.

Without virtue and training, Aristotle observed, "it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably."

"The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism," Geneen famously said.

Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know).

The same goes for us, whatever we do. Instead of tending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution-and on executing with excellence. We must shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here.

As his wife later observed, the people who saw George Marshall as simply modest or quiet missed what was special about the man. He had the same traits that everyone hasego, self-interest, pride, dignity, ambitionbut they were "tempered by a sense of humility and selflessness."

There is a balance. Soccer coach Tony Adams expresses it well. Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he and they'll remember the name on the back.

Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has described this duality well-it's possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos. As he says, "When I look up in the universe, I know I'm small, but I'm also big. I'm big because I'm connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me." We just can't forget which is bigger and which has been here longer.

What about you? Will your ego betray you when things get difficult? Or can you proceed without it?

As Goethe once observed, the great failing is "to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth."

What both Graham and Walsh were doing was adhering to a set of internal metrics that allowed them to evaluate and gauge their progress while everyone on the outside was too distracted by supposed signs of failure or weakness.

Belisarius could win his battles. He could lead his men. He could determine his personal ethics. He could not control whether his work was appreciated or whether it aroused suspicion. He had no ability to control whether a powerful dictator would treat him well.

If ego holds sway, we'll accept nothing less than full appreciation.

How do you carry on then? How do you take pride in yourself and your work? John Wooden's advice to his players says it: Change the definition of success. "Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming." "Ambition," Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, "means tying your well-being to what other people say or do... Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasisor "a going down." They're forced to retreat, they experience a depression, or in some cases literally descend into the underworld. When they emerge, it's with heightened knowledge and understanding.

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

When we lose, we have a choice: Are we going to make this a lose-lose situation for ourselves and everyone involved? Or will it be a lose... and then win?

"He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man," Seneca

For us, the scoreboard can't be the only scoreboard. Warren Buffett has said the same thing, making a distinction between the inner scorecard and the external one. Your potential, the absolute best you're capable of-that's the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are.

This is characteristic of how great people think. It's not that they find failure in every success. They just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don't much care what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else's.

When you take ego out of the equation, other people's opinions and external markers won't matter as much. That's more difficult, but ultimately a formula for resilience.

The economist (and philosopher) Adam Smith had a theory for how wise and good people evaluate their actions:

A person who judges himself based on his own standards doesn't crave the spotlight the same way as someone who lets applause dictate success.

And why should we feel anger at the world?

Thus, the paradox of hate and bitterness. It accomplishes almost exactly the opposite of what we hope it does. In the Internet age, we call this the Streisand effect (named after a similar attempt by the singer and actress Barbra Streisand, who tried to legally remove a photo of her home from the Web. Her actions backfired and far more people saw it than would have had she left the issue alone.) Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.

In failure or adversity, it's so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It's a distraction too; we don't do much else when we're busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.

I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work-the chance to find yourself. - Joseph Conrad

As Benjamin Franklin observed, those who "drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet with some of the dregs."

But what if those dregs weren't so bad? As Harold Geneen put it, "People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success." It's why the old Celtic saying tells us, "See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom."

Aspiration leads to success (and adversity). Success creates its own adversity (and, hopefully, new ambitions). And adversity leads to aspiration and more success. It's an endless loop.

There is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives. There is a recalcitrant South of our soul revolting against the North of our soul. And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life. - Martin Luther Kung Jr.

There's a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people's experience.

it is like Plutarch's reflection that we don't "so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience [we have] of things."