How Your Ego Is Ruining your Life

QUOTE OF THE DAY

EGO IS THE ENEMY

506 Words | 1 Min 50 Sec Read

Ego is the enemy.

The author, Ryan Holiday, has achieved some pretty impressive success in his lifetime, from becoming the director of marketing at American Apparel at just 21 to writing multiple best-selling books.

With all of this success, he’s been able to witness firsthand the destruction of unchecked ego; in fact, he sees ego as such a threat to his potential success that he even got it tattooed on himself as a reminder.

‘Ego is the enemy’.

So what does ego mean, and why is it a threat to your potential success?

He defines ego as ‘an unhealthy belief in our own importance’.

It takes the concern of self-image and turns it into obsession.
It takes confidence and turns it into arrogance.

He says that ego is the enemy because it sabotages our long-term goals and distracts us from achieving mastery in our craft.

So, what does the threat of ego actually look like?

Ego shows up when you aspire to do something great.

Your ego is the voice in your head that asks, ‘What are people thinking about me?’ It's the ultimate cause of procrastination because it makes you rather talk about what you’re doing than actually doing it.

And as you can imagine, letting this part of you take over will halt any progress you’ve made.

Ego shows up when you experience success.

When we get a taste of victory, whether it's launching a successful business or winning a competition, our ego leads us to believe that all our future endeavours are likely to be successful.

So instead of remaining focused and building upon our previous success, our ego gives us the tendency to become overconfident in our abilities and take on too much.

Ego shows up when we experience failure or setbacks.

You’ll notice that people with prominent egos seem allergic to any kind of fault or blame; they dodge any and every sense of responsibility that they can.

The reason for this is that if we admit defeat or failure, it’s a direct slap in the face to our ego, and we are no longer as important as we believed to be.

If ego is the enemy, how do we defeat it?

One way is to use the +-= method.

For each person to be great, they need to have:

• Someone better than them that they can learn from.

• Someone lesser that they can teach or mentor

• Someone who is equal in that they can challenge themselves.

Here’s how it works:

Having someone equal to you that you can use to challenge yourself leaves no room to obsess over public opinion because if you do, you’re guaranteed to fall behind.

Having someone greater than you that you can learn from is a humbling experience because it’s difficult to stroke your ego if you know you can be better and there’s room to improve.

Having someone less than you means you have to look objectively at your failures in order to teach others instead of just ignoring the failures as a whole.

TAKEAWAYS:

1. Drop the Ego. Take an outward view of yourself in any situation where your it may flare up and think about what you now know about ego.

2. Find a Mentor, Find an equal and find a mentee.

BOOK OF THE WEEK ⤵️

The Book of the week is ‘Ego Is The Enemy’ by Ryan Holiday. A book that shows us how and why ego is such a powerful internal opponent and that we can only create our best work when we identify, acknowledge and disarm its dangers. Read it HERE

CREATOR OF THE WEEK ⤵️

The creator of the week is @mikeyposada, he makes incredible story-based content with the sole goal of helping you live the good life by unlocking the secrets to help you do so. Check him out.

LESSON OF THE DAY ⤵️

Smart people achieve less than dumb people because they aren't stuck in their heads over-analyzing the risk of an opportunity until it passes them, leaving them no choice but to stay in their same comfortable situation.

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