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. As the philosopher (and as it happens, a hater of newspapers and their chatter) Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.”
Well, often we fall in love with an image of what success looks like. In Boyd’s world, the number of stars on your shoulder or the nature of your appointment or its location could easily be confused as a proxy for real accomplishment. For other people, it’s their job title, the business school they went to, the number of assistants they have
the location of their parking space, the grants they earn, their access to the CEO, the size of their paycheck, or the number of fans they have.
Appearances are deceiving.
Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.
The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
“To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
Boyd had another exercise. Visiting with or speaking to groups of Air Force officers, he’d write on the chalkboard in big letters the words: DUTY,
HONOR, COUNTRY. Then he would cross those words out and replace them with three others: PRIDE, POWER, GREED.
This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.
The choice that Boyd puts in front of us comes down to purpose. What is your purpose? What are you here to do? Because purpose helps you answer the question “To be or to do?“ quite easily. 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.
Chase your fame, your salary, your title, and enjoy them as they come.
Boyd, He was forgotten by history as a punishment for the work he did.
Think about this the next time you start to feel entitled, the next time you conflate fame and the American Dream. Think about how you might measure up to a great man like that.
To be or to do—life is a constant roll call.
Become a student
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.
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
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.
Professional athletes have teams of coaches, and even powerful politicians have advisers and mentors.
Why? To become great and to stay great, they must all know what came before, what is going on now, and what comes next.
They must be always learning. We must all become our own teachers, tutors, and critics.
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 selfmotivated, 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.
You can’t learn if you think you already know. You will not find the answers if you’re too conceited and self-assured to ask the questions. You cannot get better if you’re convinced you are the best.
EGO - It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.
Today, books are cheaper than ever. Courses are free. Access to teachers is no longer a barrier—technology has done away with that. There is no excuse for not getting your education, and because the information we have before us is so vast, there is no excuse for ever ending that process either.
It’s why the old proverb says, “When student is ready, the teacher appears.”
Passion
“Great passions are maladies without hope,” as Goethe once said.
They can tell you all the things they’re going to do, or have even begun, but they cannot show you their progress. Because there rarely is any.
How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that’s the passion paradox.
What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
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 deemphasizes the I.
Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead—humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be.
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.
FOLLOW THE CANVAS STRATEGY
Great men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to command.
—LORD MAHON
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 a path for yourself.
There is an old saying, “Say little, do much.” What we really ought to do is update and apply a version of that to our early approach. Be lesser, do more.
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work.
It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
It is natural for any young, ambitious person (or simply someone whose ambition is young) to get excited and swept up by their thoughts and feelings. Especially in a world that tells us to keep and promote a “personal brand.” We’re required to tell stories in order to sell our work and our talents, and after enough time, forget where the line is that separates our fictions from reality.
When someone doesn’t reckon you with the seriousness that you’d like, the impulse is to correct them. (As we all wish to say: Do you know who I am?!) You want to remind them of what they’ve forgotten; your ego screams for you to indulge it.
Instead, you must do nothing. Take it. Eat it until you’re sick. Endure it.
Quietly brush it off and work harder. Play the game. Ignore the noise; for the love of God, do not let it distract you. Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one.
As the psychologist David Elkind has famously researched, adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known now as the “imaginary audience.”
Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.
THE DANGER OF EARLY PRIDE
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.
—C. S. LEWIS
Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.
Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride. Most dangerously, this tends to happen either early in life or in the process—when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit.
“The first product of selfknowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor once said. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves.
It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous.
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.
“you who think yourself to be someone.”
WORK, WORK, WORK
The best plan is only good intentions unless it degenerates into work.
—PETER DRUCKER
Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We’re simply talking about a lot of hours—that to get where we want to go isn’t about brilliance, but continual effort.
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do,” was how Henry Ford put it.
“When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.”
Fac, si facis. (Do it if you’re going to do it.)
Back to another popular old trope: Fake it ’til you make it.
Make it so you don’t have to fake it—that’s they key.
“I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be.” To do, not be.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors.
Sobriety, open-mindedness, organization, and purpose—these are the great stabilizers. They balance out the ego and pride that comes with achievement and recognition.
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 that made us win in the first place.
Here we are having accomplished something. After we give ourselves proper credit, ego wants us to think, I’m special. I’m better. The rules don’t apply to me.
“Man is pushed by drives,” Viktor Frankl observed. “But he is pulled by values.” Ruled by or ruling? Which are you? Without the right values,
success is brief.
Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?
ALWAYS STAY A STUDENT
Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student.
If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.
It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything.
The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person.
DON’T TELL YOURSELF A STORY
Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.
—DAVID MARANISS
“Standard of Performance.” That is: What should be done. When. How.
Facts are better than stories and image.
“The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”
WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO YOU?
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us.
All of us regularly say yes unthinkingly, or out of vague attraction, or out of greed or vanity. Because we can’t say no—because we might miss out on something if we did. We think “yes” will let us accomplish more, when in reality it prevents exactly what we seek. All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want.
Only you know the race you’re running. That is, unless your ego decides the only way you have value is if you’re better than, have more than,
everyone everywhere. More urgently, each one of us has a unique potential and purpose; that means that we’re the only ones who can evaluate and set the terms of our lives.
It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest. Without this, success will not be pleasurable, or nearly as complete as it could be. Or worse, it won’t last.
Find out why you’re after what you’re after.
Entitlement & Paranoia
Success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us. It meant rejecting rejection.
Ego is its own worst enemy. It hurts the ones we love too. Our families and friends suffer for it. So do our customers, fans, and clients.
MANAGING YOURSELF
It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them.
—LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity.
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.”
It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.
If you don’t think big picture—because you’re too busy playing “boss man”—who will?
What matters is that you learn how to manage yourself and others, before your industry eats you alive.
A fish stinks from the head, is the saying. Well, you’re the head now.
BEWARE THE DISEASE OF ME
If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?
—HILLEL
For us, it’s beginning to think that we’re better, that we’re special, that our problems and experiences are so incredibly different from everyone else’s that no one could possibly understand. It’s an attitude that has sunk far better people, teams, and causes than ours.
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.
MEDITATE ON THE IMMENSITY
A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.
—EVAGRIUS PONTICUS
It is in these moments that we’re not only free but drawn toward important questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in this world?
Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.
When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone.
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.
As he says, “When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big.
Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to.
As our power or talents grow, we like to think that makes us special—that we live in blessed, unprecedented times.
“It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am,” Muhammad Ali once said.
Yet the rest of us want to get to the top as fast as humanly possible. We have no patience for waiting. We’re high on getting high up the ranks. Once we’ve made it, we tend to think that ego and energy is the only way to stay there. It’s not.
MAINTAIN YOUR SOBRIETY
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.
—BRUCE LEE
behind every goal is the drive to be happy and fulfilled—but when egotism takes hold, we lose track of our goal and end up somewhere we never intended.
FAILURE
At any given moment, there is the chance of failure or setbacks. Bill Walsh says, “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.
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.
This is what guides us through difficulty.
What about you? Will your ego betray you when things get difficult? Or can you proceed without it?
ALIVE TIME OR DEAD TIME?
Vivre sans temps mort. (Live without wasted time.) —PARISIAN POLITICAL SLOGAN
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. Dead time.
As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life.
How will you use it?
Yes, it would feel much better in the moment to be angry, to be aggrieved,
to be depressed or heartbroken. When injustice or the capriciousness of fate are inflicted on someone, the normal reaction is to yell, to fight back, to resist. You know the feeling: I don’t want this. I want ______. I want it my way. This is shortsighted.
“Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons,” as Robert Greene put it, “where we have nothing to do but think.”
it’s just that what they chose to think about made them worse and not better.
But what if we said: This is an opportunity for me. I am using it for my purposes. I will not let this be dead time for me.
The dead time was when we were controlled by ego. Now—now we can live
In life, we all get stuck with dead time. Its occurrence isn’t in our control.
Its use, on the other hand, is.
Make use of what’s around you. Don’t let stubbornness make a bad situation worse.
THE EFFORT IS ENOUGH
What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him.
—GOETHE
In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative: failure, disrespect,
jealousy, or even a resounding yawn from the world.
Which is good, because not only was he often not rewarded for the good he did, he was punished for it.
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?
It’s 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.
Well, get ready for it. It will happen. Maybe your parents will never be impressed. Maybe your girlfriend won’t care. Maybe the investor won’t see the numbers. Maybe the audience won’t clap. But we have to be able to push through. We can’t let that be what motivates us.
You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail.
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 selfsatisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
Recognition and rewards—those are just extra. Rejection, that’s on them,
not on us.
Doing the work is enough.
Fight Club moments
Pick a time in your life (or perhaps it’s a moment you’re experiencing now). A boss’s eviscerating critique of you in front of the entire staff. That sit-down with the person you loved.
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 could you hide or pretend.
Until katabasis forces us to face it.
Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things.
The bigger the ego the harder the fall.
A look at history finds that these events seem to be defined by three traits:
- They almost always came at the hands of some outside force or person.
- They often involved things we already knew about ourselves, but were too scared to admit.
- From the ruin came the opportunity for great progress and improvement.
you might see what’s left when all of that is stripped away and the real you is left.
is it a corner you would want to back yourself into. That’s where you get: How can these people talk to me this way? Who do they think they are? I’ll make them all pay.
How did I let this happen? How can it never happen again?
turning away only delays the reckoning. For how long, no one can say.
Face the symptoms. Cure the disease. Ego makes it so hard—it’s easier to delay, to double down, to deliberately avoid seeing the changes we need to make in our lives.
But change begins by hearing the criticism and the words of the people around you.
Our expectations and exaggerations and lack of restraint made such moments inevitable, ensuring that it would be painful. Now it’s here, what will you make of it?
You can change, or you can deny.
DRAW THE LINE
It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
People make mistakes all the time. They start companies they think they can manage. They have grand and bold visions
This is all perfectly fine; it’s what being an entrepreneur or a creative or even a business executive is about.
We take risks. We mess up.
The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person. It’s a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. It’s the sunk cost fallacy
Ego asks: Why is this happening to me? How do I save this and prove to everyone I’m as great as they think?
Most trouble is temporary … unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease.
“If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make a full stop.”
Ego kills what we love. Sometimes, it comes close to killing us too.
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?
At any given time in the circle of life, we may be aspiring, succeeding, or failing—though right now we’re failing. With wisdom, we understand that these positions are transitory
When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason —the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase.
You must get back to first principles and best practices.
“He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man,” Seneca once said.
The only real failure is abandoning your principles.
MAINTAIN YOUR OWN SCORECARD
I never look back, except to find out about mistakes … I only see danger in thinking back about things you are proud of.
—ELISABETH NOELLE-NEUMANN
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.
Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win.
Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.
It was a reminder:
You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.
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.
Think of the times that you’ve excused your own with “no one will know.” This is the moral gray area that our ego loves to exploit.
It’s a harder road at first, but one that ultimately makes us less selfish and self-absorbed.
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. A person who can think long term doesn’t pity herself during short-term setbacks.
ALWAYS LOVE
And why should we feel anger at the world?
As if the world would notice!
—EURIPIDES
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.)
We all have stuff that pisses us off. The more successful or powerful we are, the more there will be that we think we need to protect in terms of our legacy, image, and influence. If we’re not careful, however, we can end up wasting an incredible amount of time trying to keep the world from displeasing or disrespecting us.
You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don’t like? Love. That’s right, love. For the neighbor who won’t turn down the music. For the parent that let you down. For the bureaucrat who lost your paperwork. For the group that rejects you.
“We begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.”
Because, as the song lyrics go, “hate will get you every time.” Okay, maybe love is too much to ask for whatever it is that you’ve had done to you. You could at the very least try to let it go. You could try to shake your head and laugh about it.
Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment.
The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?
At various points in our lives, we seem to have different capacities for forgiveness and understanding.
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
Does this get us any closer to where we want to be? No. It just keeps us where we are—or worse, arrests our development entirely.
FOR EVERYTHING THAT COMES NEXT, EGO IS THE ENEMY …
I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.
—JOSEPH CONRAD
Whatever is next for us, we can be sure of one thing we’ll want to avoid.
Ego. It makes all the steps hard, but failure is the one it will make permanent. Unless we learn, right here and right now, from our mistakes.
Unless we use this moment as an opportunity to understand ourselves and our own mind better, ego will seek out failure like true north.
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 no way around it: We will experience difficulty. We will feel the touch of failure. 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.”
Many of the people in your life—and in our world—who have given over to their ego will not “get what they deserve” in the sense of karmic justice that we were taught to believe in as kids. I wish it were so simple.
It is no easy task to go head-to-head with one’s ego. To accept first that ego may be there. Then to subject it to scrutiny and criticism. Most of us can’t handle uncomfortable self-examination. It’s easier to do just about anything else
He explained that training was like sweeping the floor.
Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever.
Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep.
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 may be that you’ll need to experience some of that on your own too.
Perhaps 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.”
What is left?
Your choices. What will you do with this information? Not just now, but going forward?
Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them.
You will make mistakes in each of them.
You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.