Which translator? Presented in a page-per-day format, this daily resource combines all-new translations done by Stephen Hanselman of the greatest passages from the great Stoics including several lesser-known philosophers like Zeno, Cleanthes, and Musonius Rufus with helpful commentary.
Aimed at the high-octane, action-oriented doers of our wired world, this book brings new daily rituals and new perspectives to produce balanced action, insight, effectiveness, and serenity.
Stoicism is an ancient philosophy. It asserts that virtue meaning self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom is happiness. But why should we bother fighting ego in an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion? Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes,. Ego Is The Enemy starts off with a strong testament: The type of people who tend to succeed early, tend to be the same kind of people who are in danger of ego taking the predominant voice in their actions.
As your body of accomplishments grows, your ego may follow, installing itself in you as arrogance. Arrogance is often confused with power and self-confidence, both by the person and by the people around them.
Ego is a soothing voice. Pursuing great work, in arts, business or sports is a terrifying endeavor. Ego will justify not doing so, reminding us of our past great accomplishments. Replacing our uncertainty with self-absorption. It will tell us exactly what we want to hear when we want to hear it. This is extremely dangerous. Instead of sitting with our heads down, and getting work done, the ego will lead us in the direction of the work that is more public.
More easily recognized. It will take all the short-term leaps it can. But what does ego know? The ego was built by accomplishments that predated the strong ego. Instead, it provides us with a great recipe for how to ruin it. Arguably one of the most competitive, chaotic industries in the world. Some of us do this more than others. But did they? Did they really? We see risk-taking swagger and successful people in the media, and eager for our own successes, try to reverse engineer the right attitude, the right pose.
Sure, ego has worked for some. But so were many of its greatest failures. Far more of them, in fact. But here we are with a culture that urges us to roll the dice.
To make the gamble, ignoring the stakes. At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. We have achieved success—perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Or we have failed—recently or continually. Ego is the enemy every step along this way. In a sense, ego is the enemy of building, of maintaining, and of recovering.
When things come fast and easy, this might be fine. But in times of change, of difficulty. And therefore, the three parts that this book is organized into: Aspire. This is not to say that there is not room to push past creative boundaries, to invent, to feel inspired, or to aim for truly ambitious change and innovation.
On the contrary, in order to properly do these things and take these risks we need balance. It can be managed. It can be directed. Could they have accomplished what they accomplished— saving faltering companies, advancing the art of war, integrating baseball, revolutionizing football offense, standing up to tyranny, bravely bearing misfortune—if ego had left them ungrounded and self- absorbed?
It was their sense of reality and awareness—one that the author and strategist Robert Greene once said we must take to like a spider in its web—that was at the core of their great art, great writing, great design, great business, great marketing, and great leadership. What we find when we study these individuals is that they were grounded, circumspect, and unflinchingly real. Not that any of them were wholly without ego. But they knew how to suppress it, channel it, subsume it when it counted.
They were great yet humble. Wait, but so-and-so had a huge ego and was successful. But what about Steve Jobs? What about Kanye West? We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers. But no one is truly successful because they are delusional, self-absorbed, or disconnected. Even if these traits are correlated or associated with certain well-known individuals, so are a few others: addiction, abuse of themselves and others , depression, mania. In fact, what we see when we study these people is that they did their best work in the moments when they fought back against these impulses, disorders, and flaws.
Only when free of ego and baggage can anyone perform to their utmost. What replaces ego is humility, yes—but rock-hard humility and confidence.
Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. Ego took a different general from the heights of power and influence after that same war and drove him to destitution and ignominy. One took a quiet, sober German scientist and made her not just a new kind of leader but a force for peace. The other took two different but equally brilliant and bold engineering minds of the twentieth century and built them up in a whirlwind of hype and celebrity before dashing their hopes against the rocks of failure, bankruptcy, scandal, and insanity.
One guided one of the worst teams in NFL history to the Super Bowl in three seasons, and then on to be one of most dominant dynasties in the game. Meanwhile, countless other coaches, politicians, entrepreneurs, and writers have overcome similar odds— only to succumb to the more inevitable probability of handing the top spot right back to someone else.
Some learn humility. Some choose ego. Some are prepared for the vicissitudes of fate, both positive and negative. Others are not. Which will you choose? Who will you be? Well, here we are. We have a goal, a calling, a new beginning. Every great journey begins here—yet far too many of us never reach our intended destination. Ego more often than not is the culprit. We build ourselves up with fantastical stories, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why.
These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and reality are the cure. He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self- delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Because it made its way over the next two thousand years to William Shakespeare, who often warned about ego run amok. The speech, if you happen to have heard it, wraps up with this little verse.
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. My blessing season this in thee! He may never have heard of Isocrates, but he loved the play and often quoted this very speech. Like Demonicus, he was taken under the wing of a wise, older man, in this case Thomas Ewing, a soon-to-be U. He spent his early years at West Point, and then in the army.
For his first few years in service, Sherman traversed nearly the entire United States on horseback, slowly learning with each posting. As the rumblings of Civil War broke out, Sherman made his way east to volunteer his services and he was shortly put to use at the Battle of Bull Run, a rather disastrous Union defeat.
Benefiting from a dire shortage of leadership, Sherman was promoted to brigadier general and was summoned to meet with President Lincoln and his top military adviser. Would Lincoln give him his word on that? With every other general asking for as much rank and power as possible, Lincoln happily agreed. At this point in time, Sherman felt more comfortable as a number two. He felt he had an honest appreciation for his own abilities and that this role best suited him. Imagine that—an ambitious person turning down a chance to advance in responsibilities because he actually wanted to be ready for them.
Is that really so crazy? Not that Sherman was always the perfect model of restraint and order. Early in the war, tasked with defending the state of Kentucky with insufficient troops, his mania and tendency to doubt himself combined in a wicked way. Ranting and raving about being undersupplied, unable to get out of his own head, paranoid about enemy movements, he broke form and spoke injudiciously to several newspaper reporters.
In the ensuing controversy, he was temporarily recalled from his command. It took weeks of rest for him to recover. It was one of a few nearly catastrophic moments in his otherwise steadily ascendant career. It was after this brief stumble—having learned from it—that Sherman truly made his mark. Building on his successes, Sherman began to advocate for his famous march to the sea—a strategically bold and audacious plan, not born out of some creative genius but rather relying on the exact topography he had scouted and studied as a young officer in what had then seemed like a pointless backwater outpost.
Where Sherman had once been cautious, he was now confident. But unlike so many others who possess great ambition, he earned this opinion. As he carved a path from Chattanooga to Atlanta and then Atlanta to the sea, he avoided traditional battle after traditional battle.
Any student of military history can see how the exact same invasion, driven by ego instead of a strong sense of purpose, would have had a far different ending. His realism allowed him to see a path through the South that others thought impossible. His entire theory of maneuver warfare rested on deliberately avoiding frontal assaults or shows of strength in the form of pitched battles, and ignoring criticism designed to bait a reaction. He paid no notice and stuck to his plan.
By the end of the war, Sherman was one of the most famous men in America, and yet he sought no public office, had no taste for politics, and wished simply to do his job and then eventually retire. It is why he serves as our model in this phase of our ascent.
Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream.
It is poise, not pose. One must ask: if your belief in yourself is not dependent on actual achievement, then what is it dependent on? The answer, too often when we are just setting out, is nothing. And this is why we so often see precipitous rises followed by calamitous falls. So which type of person will you be? Like all of us, Sherman had to balance talent and ambition and intensity, especially when he was young. His victory in this struggle was largely why he was able to manage the life-altering success that eventually came his way.
This probably all sounds strange. Where Isocrates and Shakespeare wished us to be self-contained, self-motivated, and ruled by principle, most of us have been trained to do the opposite. From there, the themes of our gurus and public figures have been almost exclusively aimed at inspiring, encouraging, and assuring us that we can do whatever we set our minds to. In reality, this makes us weak.
We take it for granted that you have promise. Or will you be your own worst enemy? Will you snuff out the flame that is just getting going? What we see in Sherman was a man deeply tied and connected to reality.
He was a man who came from nothing and accomplished great things, without ever feeling that he was in someway entitled to the honors he received. In fact, he regularly and consistently deferred to others and was more than happy to contribute to a winning team, even if it meant less credit or fame for himself.
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. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. Any and every narcissist can do that.
What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness. For your work to have truth in it, it must come from truth.
If you want to be more than a flash in the pan, you must be prepared to focus on the long term. We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative—one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time. We will challenge the myth of the self-assured genius for whom doubt and introspection is foreign, as well as challenge the myth of pained, tortured artist who must sacrifice his health for his work.
Facts are better than dreams, as Churchill put it. Although we share with many others a vision for greatness, we understand that our path toward it is very different from theirs. Following Sherman and Isocrates, we understand that ego is our enemy on that journey, so that when we do achieve our success, it will not sink us but make us stronger.
Those who speak do not know. Before the election, he published a short book titled I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty, in which he outlined, in the past tense, the brilliant policies he had enacted as governor. But observers at the time noticed immediately the effect it had—not on the voters, but on Sinclair himself.
Sinclair lost by something like a quarter of a million votes a margin of more than 10 percentage points ; he was utterly decimated in what was probably the first modern election.
Our inbox, our iPhones, the comments section on the bottom of the article you just read. Blank spaces, begging to be filled in with thoughts, with photos, with stories. Technology, asking you, prodding you, soliciting talk. Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly. That side we call ego.
The writer and former Gawker blogger Emily Gould—a real-life Hannah Horvath if there ever was one—realized this during her two- year struggle to get a novel published. Though she had a six-figure book deal, she was stuck. I tumbld, I tweeted, and I scrolled. I justified my habits to myself in various ways.
I was building my brand. It was also the only creative thing I was doing. 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. Someone recently published a book called Working On My Novel, filled with social media posts from writers who are clearly not working on their novels.
Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard. But talking, talking is always easy. We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. That being ignored is tantamount to death and for the ego, this is true. So we talk, talk, talk as though our life depends on it. In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey.
Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. 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. Sherman had a good rule he tried to observe. Do you know who he told? Nobody but his girlfriend. Strategic flexibility is not the only benefit of silence while others chatter.
It is also psychology. 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.
Even talking aloud to ourselves while we work through difficult problems has been shown to significantly decrease insight and breakthroughs. The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability. Success requires a full percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it. A lot of us succumb to this temptation—particularly when we feel overwhelmed or stressed or have a lot of work to do.
In our building phase, resistance will be a constant source of discomfort. Talking— listening to ourselves talk, performing for an audience—is almost like therapy. I just spent four hours talking about this. The answer is no. Doing great work is a struggle. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.
Which is so damaging for one reason: the greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away. The question is, when faced with your particular challenge—whether it is researching in a new field, starting a business, producing a film, securing a mentor, advancing an important cause—do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head-on?
In fact, when you think about it, you realize just how little these voices seem to talk. They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into product—and eventually to stillness. They ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act. They are not. The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other. Plug that hole—that one, right in the middle of your face—that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens.
Watch how much better you get. In this formative period, the soul is unsoiled by warfare with the world. It lies, like a block of pure, uncut Parian marble, ready to be fashioned into—what? His name was John Boyd. He was a truly great fighter pilot, but an even better teacher and thinker. A few years later he was quietly summoned to the Pentagon, where his real work began. In one sense, the fact that the average person might not have heard of John Boyd is not unexpected.
He never published any books and he wrote only one academic paper. Only a few videos of him survive and he was rarely, if ever, quoted in the media. On the other hand, his theories transformed maneuver warfare in almost every branch of the armed forces, not just in his own lifetime but even more so after.
The F and F fighter jets, which reinvented modern military aircraft, were his pet projects. His primary influence was as an adviser; through legendary briefings he taught and instructed nearly every major military thinker in a generation. His input on the war plans for Operation Desert Shield came in a series of direct meetings with the secretary of defense, not through public or official policy input. His primary means of effecting change was through the collection of pupils he mentored, protected, taught, and inspired.
There are no military bases named after him. No battleships. He almost certainly had more enemies than friends. This unusual path—What if it were deliberate? What if it made him more influential? How crazy would that be? In fact, Boyd was simply living the exact lesson he tried to teach each promising young acolyte who came under his wing, who he sensed had the potential to be something—to be something different.
The rising stars he taught probably have a lot in common with us. Sensing what he knew to be a critical inflection point in the life of the young officer, Boyd called him in for a meeting. Like many high achievers, the soldier was insecure and impressionable. He wanted to be promoted, and he wanted to do well. He was a leaf that could be blown in any direction and Boyd knew it. So he heard a speech that day that Boyd would give again and again, until it became a tradition and a rite of passage for a generation of transformative military leaders.
You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.
If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. Which way will you go?
This reality comes in many names and forms: incentives, commitments, recognition, and politics. In every case, they can quickly redirect us from doing to being. From earning to pretending.
Ego aids in that deception every step of the way. How do you prevent derailment? Well, often we fall in love with an image of what success looks like. Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.
Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive. So who are you with? Which side will you choose? This is the roll call that life puts before us. Boyd had another exercise. His point was that many of the systems and structures in the military—the ones that soldiers navigate in order to get ahead—can corrupt the very values they set out to serve. How many times have we seen this played out in our own short lives—in sports, in relationships, or projects or people that we care deeply about?
This is what the ego does. You want to be the best at what you do. Nobody wants to just be an empty suit. But in practical terms, which of the three words Boyd wrote on the chalkboard are going to get you there? Which are you practicing now? The choice that Boyd puts in front of us comes down to purpose. What is your purpose? What are you here to do? If what matters is you—your reputation, your inclusion, your personal ease of life—your path is clear: Tell people what they want to hear.
Seek attention over the quiet but important work. Pay your dues, check the boxes, put in your time, and leave things essentially as they are. Chase your fame, your salary, your title, and enjoy them as they come. He would know. Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well. But why should we bother fighting ego in an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion?
Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes,. Ego Is The Enemy starts off with a strong testament: The type of people who tend to succeed early, tend to be the same kind of people who are in danger of ego taking the predominant voice in their actions.
As your body of accomplishments grows, your ego may follow, installing itself in you as arrogance. Arrogance is often confused with power and self-confidence, both by the person and by the people around them. Ego is a soothing voice. Pursuing great work, in arts, business or sports is a terrifying endeavor. Ego will justify not doing so, reminding us of our past great accomplishments. Replacing our uncertainty with self-absorption. It will tell us exactly what we want to hear when we want to hear it.
This is extremely dangerous. Instead of sitting with our heads down, and getting work done, the ego will lead us in the direction of the work that is more public. More easily recognized. It will take all the short-term leaps it can.
But what does ego know? The ego was built by accomplishments that predated the strong ego. Instead, it provides us with a great recipe for how to ruin it. Arguably one of the most competitive, chaotic industries in the world.
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