Notable Notes from “Ego is the enemy”

I recently read this book from one of the most popular new age writers — Ryan Holiday. His name kept on popping up in my podcasts (EconTalk, Tim Ferris etc.), in my Feedly (Farnam Street type blogs) etc. that I decided to check out some books he has written.

I did the ‘sampling’ (which has become a habit since I bought a Kindle) of his ‘Obstacle is the way’ and ‘Trust me I‘m’ lying’. Both were good but not the ones that make you feel ‘Every page has a great insight’ of the type of ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’, ‘Anti Fragile’ etc. (aka, I did not understand most of what is written so I did not even complete the book yet haha)

When I visited JustBooks recently, I found ‘Ego is the enemy’ in the ‘New Arrivals’ section — Since this was supposed to be the follow-up book to ‘Obstacle is the way’ (that talks about Stoicism, which I fancy myself to be a follower of, haha), I decided to rent it immediately.

It is so rare that JustBooks has a book that I want so I thought it to be some kind of divine intervention to have put it there when I went in. Otherwise, JustBooks only has more of the ‘popular’ varieties of books than what I want.

Yes, I read the one with RED cover. Not the one with BLUE cover. Does it matter?

So, without further ado, here are some notes that I managed to pick up from it. Note that some of these are simply retyped from the book (not in quotes), some are my notes from it, all mixed up.

• Ryan divides life (or may be any aspect of life) as going through one of the three phases at any point in time — Aspire, Success, Failure.
• In a nutshell, this is the advice:

When you are ‘Aspiring’, be humble; suppress ego early before bad habits take hold.

When you have ‘Succeeded’, be gracious; Replace temptations of ego with humility and discipline.

When you have ‘Failed’, be resilient; Cultivate strength and fortitude so that when fate turns against you, you are not wrecked by failure

Aspire

• Do not talk of success before achieving it — Your subconscious may already feel it has succeeded and stop you from putting efforts
• You better have your goals around ‘Do Something’ (No Ego!) than ‘Be Someone’ (Ego!). This has been something I have been intending to read more about — I first read it in Ribbonfarm (or in Be Slightly Evil) and have been wanting to explore more of Boyd. Now, I definitely will.
• Don’t be ‘passionate’ and keep looking for ‘purpose’. Be rooted in realism. I remembered Scott Adam’s thoughts on ‘Survivor Bias’ and passionate people mistaking it themselves that they were actually passionate when only success made them passionate.
• Use ‘Follow the Canvas’ strategy. Do be behind titles, positions of power. Be the canvas that others can paint on. Be lesser, do more.
• Get out of your own head. Stop planning and start doing. There is a good example of a American civil war generals, which runs through the book
• Plan is only an “intention”, if it does not degenerate into work!
• Be aware of the danger of early pride — There is a Benjamin Franklin example there which made me more eager to read his biography
• There is also an example of Darwin, who did not publish anything before he was sure it was all correct. Goes well with the ‘danger in early pride’ theme but not so much with ‘stop planning & start doing’ theme. Well, it is on a case to case basis so no point nit picking

Success

• As success arrives, ego begins to toy with our minds; weakens the will that made us win in the first place
• With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do
• Crafting stories out of past events is a human impulse. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. When we are aspiring, we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that it all unfolded exactly as planned
• “Our lives are Grand monuments” is a delusion. Do not credit yourselves when you got lucky
• Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, remain focused on executing with excellence
• To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. On an individual level, it is absolutely critical that you know WHO you are competing with and WHY. Have a clear sense of the space you are in. Why do you do what you do? That is the question you need to answer. STARE at it until you can. Only then you will understand what matters and what does not

Failure

• There is this concept of ‘Alive time’ or ‘Dead time’. Try to use every minute as ‘Alive time’ in one way or another. When you are forced into ‘Dead time’ (say an assignment/gig that you are not greatly impressed with but have to anyways do — however giving you some free time), think of what you have been putting off, issues that you declined to deal with. Revive the dead time.
• Even when we do everything right, results may sometime be negative or a big yawn. When you have a ‘Do something’ goal, this would not matter much.
• When you have failed, avoid these thoughts: Why is this happening to me? How do I see this and prove to everyone I am as great as they think
• If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make the full stop
• Most trouble is temporary.. unless you make that not so. “He who fears failure will never do anything worthy of a successful man” (Seneca originally said one thing — Ryan changed it to another — I have further changed it haha). If your reputation cannot absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.

Summary:

There were not too many aha moments per se. It turned out to be yet another ‘popular’ self help book, may be on the likes of the Deepak Chopras and Robin Sharmas than something like a Meditations or Antidote.

The style of writing is of course new age — more with Mark Manson (minus the expletives) and Steve Pavlina, than the refined writing of old age writers.

Note: I really do not mean that DC & RS are bad, just that they dumb down insights to suit a section of audience, that I fancy to be not part of. (I have been rapped in the knuckle enough to not think low of such DC, RS self help books by a Prof of mine, particularly when I criticised the ‘Feel the fear & do it anyway’ — after which I have changed my perspectives).

Further, there are too many references to things that only an American might understand well — Civil War History in particular. Sigh, I wonder when authors realize they have an international audience. Nonetheless, I learnt a thing or two about American history.

It definitely has pieces of wisdom (like even the DC and RS books have) so if you get a chance to rent it, do read. This is not a ‘must have in bookshelf’ thing for me. No wonder JustBooks had it.