Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you live untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.
With success comes the temptation to tell oneself a story, to round off the edges, to cut out your lucky breaks and add a certain mythology to it all. You know, that arcing narrative of Herculean struggle for greatness against all odds: sleeping on the floor, being disowned by my parents, suffering for my ambition. It’s a type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth.
Conveniently omitted were the stresses and temptations; the stomach-turning drops and the mistakes — all the mistakes — were left on the cutting-room floor in favor of the highlight reel.
Another mentor of mine seemingly unraveled around the same time, taking our relationship with him.
These were the people I had shaped my life around. The people I looked up to and trained under. Their stability — financially, emotionally, psychologically — was not just something I took for granted, it was central to my existence and self-worth. And yet, there they were, imploding right in front of me, one after another.
You think you’re doing what you’re supposed to. Society rewards you for it. But then you watch your future wife walk out the door because you aren’t the person you used to be.
Virtue begins with understanding and is fulfilled by courage.
But 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.
The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Self-centered ambition. That’s the definition this book will use. It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or 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.
It’s when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us. When self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.
In this way, ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors.
If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us. We can’t take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can’t recognize opportunities — or create them — if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy. Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion.
Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.
Practice self-control, temper, pleasure, and pain. And abhor flatterers as you would deceivers; for both, if trusted, injure those who trust them.
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 ensuring controversy, he was temporarily recalled from his command.
Dismissing the incessant praise and attention endemic to such success, he wrote as a warning to his friend Grant, “Be natural and yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.”
At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly. 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.
In other words, 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.
Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard. Sitting there, staring, mad at yourself, mad at the material because it doesn’t seem good enough and you don’t seem good enough. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult. But talking, talking is always easy.
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 4 hours talking about this. Doesn’t that count for something? The answer is no.
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. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. Void is terrifying to most people. 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.
If your purpose is something larger than you — to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself — then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult. Easier in the sense that you know now what it is you need to do and what is important to you. The other “choices” wash away, as they aren’t really choices at all. They’re distractions. Easier in the sense that you don’t need to compromise. Harder because each opportunity — no matter how gratifying or rewarding — must be evaluated along strict guidelines: Does this help me do what I have set out to do? Does this allow me to do what I need to do? Am I being selfish or selfless?
We don’t like thinking that someone is better than us. Or that we have a lot left to learn. We want to be done. We want to be ready. We’re busy and overburdened. For this reason, updating your appraisal of your talents in a downward direction is one of the most difficult things to do in life — but it is almost always a component of mastery. The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
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. If 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. “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool.”
Ego doesn’t allow for proper incubation either. To become what we ultimately hope to become often takes long period of obscurity, of sitting and wrestling with some topic or paradox. Humility is what keeps us there, concerned that we don’t know enough and that we must continue to study. Ego rushes to the end, rationalizes that patience is for losers (wrongly seeing it as a weakness), and assumes that we’re good enough to give our talents a go in the world.
A dog has an advantage in all this: a gracious short short-term memory that keeps at bay the creeping sense of futility and impotence.
Passion is about (I am so passionate about __ ). Purpose is to and for. (I must do __. I was put here to accomplish __. I am willing to endure __ for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasize the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
It’s a common attitude that transcends generations and societies. The angry, unappreciated genius is forced to do stuff she doesn’t like, for people she doesn’t respect, as she makes her way in the world. How dare they force me to grovel like this! The injustice! The waste!
We see it in recent lawsuits in which interns sue their employers fro pay. We see it in an inability to meet anyone else on their terms, an unwillingness to take a step back in order to potentially take several steps forward. I will not let them get one over on me. I’d rather we both ave nothing instead.
When someone gets his first job or joins a new organization, he’s often given this advice: Make other people look good and you will do well. Keep your head down, they say, and serve your boss. Naturally, this is not what the kid who was chosen over all the other kids for the position wants to hear. It’s not what a Harvard grad expects — after all, they got that degree precisely to avoid this supposed indignity.
Let’s flip it around so it doesn’t seem so demeaning: It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create the path for yourself.
When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re 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.
It’s easy to be bitter. To hate even the thought of subservience. To despite those who have more means, more experience, or more status than you. To tell yourself that every second not spent doing your work, or working on yourself, is a waste of your gift. To insist, I will not be demeaned like this.
I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who “keep under the body”; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.
You have a $1M or a wall full of award? That doesn’t mean anything in the new field you’re trying to tackle.
When someone doesn’t reckon you with the seriousness that you’d like, the impulse is to correct them. You want to remind them of what they’ve forgotten; your ego screams for you to indulge it.
But you’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it. In the meantime, you’ll have to find some way to make it suit your purposes — even if those purposes are just extra time to develop properly, to learn from others on their dime, to build your base and establish yourself.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.
Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationship well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one had no talent or insight, and on and on and on.
Adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known now as the “imaginary audience.” Considering a 13-year-old so embarrassed that he misses a week of class, positive that the entire school is thinking and murmuring about some tiny incident that in truth hardly anyone noticed. Or a teenage girl who spends 3 hours in front of the mirror each morning, as if she’s about to go on stage. They do this because they’re convinced that their every move is being watched with rapt attention by the rest of the world.
General Marshall refused to keep a diary during WW2 despite the requests of historians and friends. He worried that it would turn his quiet, reflective time into a sort of performance and self-deception. That he might second-guess difficult decisions out of concern for his reputation and future readers and warp his thinking based on how they would look.
There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. The first thing, Kurnos, which gods bestow on one they would annihilate, is pride.
Are you going to be a fool? Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don’t lose the balance.
I had a horror of the danger of arrogance. What a pitiful thing it is when a man lets a little temporary success spoil him, warp his judgment, and he forgets what he is. Vain men never hear anything but praise.
As the famous conqueror and warrior Genghis Khan groomed his sons and generals to succeed him later in life, he repeatedly warned them, “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He told them that pride would be harder to subdue than a wild lion.
The distinction between a professional and a dilettante occurs right there — when you accept that having an idea is not enough; that you must work until you are able to recreate your experience effectively in words on the page. “A poet’s function is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.”
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.
That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work.
The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
By this point, you probably understand why the ego would bristle at this idea. Within reach? it complains. That means you’re saying I don’t have it now. Exactly right. You don’t. No one does.
As a young man, Bill Clinton began a collection of note cards upon which he would write names and phone numbers of friends and acquaintances who might be of service when he eventually entered politics. Each night, before he ever had a reason to, he would flip through the box, make phone calls, write letters, or add notations about their interactions.
When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.
Craziness can pass for audaciousness. Delusions can pass for confidence, ignorance for courage. But it’s just kicking the costs down the road.
Yet, after filtering out his acumen from the legend, glamor, and self-promotion at which he was so adept, only one image remains: an egomaniac who evaporated hundreds of millions of dollars of his own wealth and met a miserable, pathetic end.
As success arrives, like it does for a team that has just won a championship, ego begins to toy with our minds and weaken the will tha made us win in the first place. We know that empires always fall, so we must think about why — and why they seem to always collapse from within.
In the Mad Men era, there was a major drinking problem, but ego has the same root — insecurity, fear, a dislike for brutal objectivity. “Whether in middle management or top management, unbridled personal egotism blinds a man to the realities around him; more and more he comes to live in a world of his own imagination; and because he sincerely believes he can do no wrong, he becomes a menace to the men and women who have to work under his direction.”
Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.
Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world.
In other words, each victory and advancement that made Khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he’d never encountered before. It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more.
An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.
He focused on seemingly trivial details: Players could not sit down on the practice field. Coaches had to wear a tie and tuck their shirts in. Everyone had to give maximum effort and commitment. Sportsmanship was essential. The locker room must be neat and clean. There would be no smoking, no fighting, no profanity. Passing routes were monitored and graded down to the inch. Practices were scheduled to the minute.
It would be a mistake to think this was about control. The Standard of Performance was about instilling excellence. These seemingly simple but exacting standards mattered more than some grand vision or power trip. In his eyes, if the players take care of the details, “the score takes care of itself.”
Once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during your moment at the top that you can afford ego the least — because the stakes are so much higher, the margins for error are so much smaller. If anything, your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever before.
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.
A critic of Napoleon nailed it when remarking: “He despises the nation whose applause he seeks.” He couldn’t help but see the French people as pieces to be manipulated, people he had to be better than, people who, unless they were totally, unconditionally supportive of him, were against him.
As president, his first priority in office was organizing the executive branch into a smooth, functioning, and order-driven unit, just like his military units had been — not because he didn’t want to work himself, but because everyone had a job and he trusted and empowered them to do it. As his chief of staff later put it, “The president does the most important things. I do the next most important things.”
After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear.
We can tolerate being looked over once in a while. Once we’ve “made it,” the tendency is to switch to the mindset of “getting what’s mine.”
Play for the name on the front of the jersey, and they’ll remember the name on the back.
When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we’ve detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from, whatever that happens to be (a craft, a sport, a brotherhood or sisterhood, a family). Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way.
No wonder we find success empty. No wonder we’re exhausted. No wonder it feels like we’re on a treadmill. No wonder we lose touch with the energy that once fueled us.
Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.
Angela Merkel is sober, when far too many leaders are intoxicated — with ego, with power, with position.
When Putin once attempted to intimidate Merkel by letting his large hunting dog barge into a meeting, she didn’t flinch and later joked about it.
She did not become the most powerful woman in the Western world by accident. More importantly, she’s maintained her perch for 3 terms with the same formula.
“Power doesn’t so much corrupt. It fragments, closes options, mesmerized.” That’s what ego does. It clouds the mind precisely when it needs to be clear.
It requires a strong constitution to withstand repeated attacks of prosperity.
Endless ambition is easy; anyone can put their foot down hard on the gas. Complacency is easy too; it’s just a matter of taking that foot off the gas. We must avoid what the Jim Collins terms the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” as well as the complacency that comes with that plaudits.
The crowd roots for the underdog, and roots against the winners.
Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.
It is as if we are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking — what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands.
At any given moment, there is a chance of failure or setbacks. Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called “failure.” In order to taste success again, we’ve got to understand what led to this moment (or these years) of difficulty, what went wrong and why. We must deal with the situation in order to move past it. We’ll need to accept it and to push through it.
With buybacks, a CEO is making a rather incredible statement. She’s saying: The market is wrong. It’s valuing our company so incorrectly, and clearly has so little idea where we are heading, that we’re going to spend the company’s precious cash on a bet that they’re wrong.
Many a serious thinker has been produced in prison where we have nothing to do but think.
If that is your attitude, how do you intend to endure tough times? What if you’re ahead of the times? What if the market favors some bogus trend? What if your boss or your clients don’t understand?
Ambition means tying your wellbeing to what other people say or do. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
The world is, after all, indifferent to what we humans want. If we persist in wanting, in needing, we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse.
There is hardly the space to list all the successful people who have hit rock bottom.
In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasis — or “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.
We cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations. How much better it would be to spare ourselves these experiences, but sometimes it’s the only way the blind can be made to see.
It was in those moments — when the break exposes something unseen before — that you were forced to make eye contact with a thing called Truth. No longer you could hide or pretend.
Psychologists often say that threatened egotism is one of the most dangerous forces on earth. The gang member whose “honor” is impugned. The narcissist who is rejected. The bully who is made to feel shame. The impostor who is exposed. The plagiarist or the embellisher whose story stops adding up.
Ego asks: Why is this happening to me? How do I save this and prove to everyone I’m as great as they think? It’s the animal fear of even the slightest sign of weakness.
He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man. He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.
There’s a distinction between the inner scoreboard and the external one. 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. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.
I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.