Ego is the enemy pdf download

But this will only render our failure. Perform various things that give you experience. When you have the power and experience to overcome the hurdles, you will be strong. This is our Ego. When we keep on learning, we get to know that technology is evolving every day. It makes us realize that we need to learn more every time. We should know our passion, live it and strive to achieve. But passion is not enough to achieve the goal.

We need to have a purpose. It will benefit us in reality. Realism binds us to decide where we need to go. It helps us in move forward. When we join a new company, people always suggest letting others look good. Here they want you to let people go high so that you can occupy their positions.

When following this strategy you get all support and patting from your subordinates. They will also create a path for you. When we want to achieve a big goal, there will be obstacles, struggles, opinion differences, and criticism. In this situation, you have to deal it with calmly. If your ego comes in between then you will be in trouble. You should bear everything till the last breath of your tolerance.

Your ego should be subsided to your purpose. When you are in the middle of purpose, you have to ignore all your obsessions. Whatever be your problem, you have to ignore it. You should live in present and not with the burden of your life. You need to be clear and precise about actions. Living in past will only provide you depression. This will be a disaster for your health also. So shut the close of the fuss in your mind and work.

When we achieve small goals our mind is filled with pride. This pride makes us feel great about our achievements. We start believing that we can do anything. We have done something big. It is not all that different for the rest of us. Are we not fighting for or against something? Do you think you are the only one who hopes to achieve your goal?

It tends to surprise people how humble aspiring greats seem to have been. The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback.

The ego avoids such feedback at all costs, however. Who wants to remand themselves to remedial training? It thinks it already knows how and who we are—that is, it thinks we are spectacular, perfect, genius, truly innovative. It dislikes reality and prefers its own assessment. To become what we ultimately hope to become often takes long periods of obscurity, of sitting and wrestling with some topic or paradox.

As we sit down to proof our work, as we make our first elevator pitch, prepare to open our first shop, as we stare out into the dress rehearsal audience, ego is the enemy—giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. 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. Our teachers in life are not only those we pay, as Hammett paid Satriani.

Nor are they necessarily part of some training dojo, like it is for Shamrock. Many of the best teachers are free. They volunteer because, like you, they once were young and had the same goals you do. But ego makes us so hardheaded and hostile to feedback that it drives them away or puts them beyond our reach. Without the desire and the pains necessary to be considerable, depend upon it, you never can be so.

Find your passion. Live passionately. Inspire the world with your passion. People go to Burning Man to find passion, to be around passion, to rekindle their passion. Because just as often, we fail with—no, because of— passion. The person had meant it as a compliment. She had purpose. She had direction. George W. The inventor and investors of the Segway believed they had a world-changing innovation on their hands and put everything into evangelizing it.

That all of these talented, smart individuals were fervent believers in what they sought to do is without dispute. Like every other dilettante, they had passion and lacked something else. It is that burning, unquenchable desire to start or to achieve some vague, ambitious, and distant goal. This seemingly innocuous motivation is so far from the right track it hurts.

He saw those extra emotions as a burden. No one would describe Eleanor Roosevelt or John Wooden or his notoriously quiet player Kareem as apathetic. Wooden won ten titles in twelve years, including seven in a row, because he developed a system for winning and worked with his players to follow it. Neither of them were driven by excitement, nor were they bodies in constant motion.

Instead, it took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation. Opportunities are not usually deep, virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into, but instead are obscured, dusted over, blocked by various forms of resistance. What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination. But too often, we proceed like this. The reality: We hear what we want to hear.

We do what we feel like doing, and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard, we accomplish very little. Or worse, find ourselves in a mess we never anticipated. Because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people, we forget that failures shared the same trait.

With the Segway, the inventor and investors wrongly assumed a demand much greater than ever existed. With the run-up to the war in Iraq, its proponents ignored objections and negative feedback because they conflicted with what they so deeply needed to believe. With Robert Falcon Scott, it was overconfidence and zeal without consideration of the real dangers.

In many more examples we see the same mistakes: overinvesting, underinvesting, acting before someone is really ready, breaking things that required delicacy—not so much malice as the drunkenness of passion. Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous.

Passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be like—they might even be able to tell you specifically when they intend to achieve it or describe to you legitimate and sincere worries they have about the burdens of such accomplishments. Because there rarely is any. How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything?

If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation—deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt. Dogs, god bless them, are passionate.

As numerous squirrels, birds, boxes, blankets, and toys can tell you, they do not accomplish most of what they set out to do. A dog has an advantage in all this: a graciously short short-term memory that keeps at bay the creeping sense of futility and impotence. Reality for us humans, on the other hand, has no reason to be sensitive to the illusions we operate under. Eventually it will intrude. What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism.

Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective. When we are young, or when our cause is young, we feel so intensely—passion like our hormones runs strongest in youth—that it seems wrong to take it slow. This is just our impatience. Passion is about.

Purpose is to and for. Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself. More than purpose, we also need realism. Where do we start? What do we do first? What do we do right now? What are we benchmarking ourselves against? Which is why a deliberate, purposeful person operates on a different level, beyond the sway or the sickness. They hire professionals and use them. They ask questions, they ask what could go wrong, they ask for examples.

They plan for contingencies. Then they are off to the races. Usually they get started with small steps, complete them, and look for feedback on how the next set can be better.

They lock in gains, and then get better as they go, often leveraging those gains to grow exponentially rather than arithmetically. Is an iterative approach less exciting than manifestos, epiphanies, flying across the country to surprise someone, or sending four- thousand-word stream-of-consciousness e-mails in the middle of the night?

Of course. Is it less glamorous and bold than going all in and maxing out your credit cards because you believe in yourself? Same goes for the spreadsheets, the meetings, the trips, the phone calls, software, tools, and internal systems—and every how- to article ever written about them and the routines of famous people. Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function. The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration.

Not passion. 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. Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-intentioned, but ineffective self.

Successful businessmen, politicians, or rich playboys would subsidize a number of writers, thinkers, artists, and performers. More than just being paid to produce works of art, these artists performed a number of tasks in exchange for protection, food, and gifts. The famous epigrammist Martial fulfilled this role for many years, serving for a time under the patron Mela, a wealthy businessman and brother of the Stoic philosopher and political adviser Seneca.

Born without a rich family, Martial also served under another businessman named Petilius. As a young writer, he spent most of his day traveling from the home of one rich patron to another, providing services, paying his respects, and receiving small token payments and favors in return. He seemed to believe that this system somehow made him a slave.

Aspiring to live like some country squire, like the patrons he serviced, Martial wanted money and an estate that was all his own. There, he dreamed, he could finally produce his works in peace and independence. What if—gasp—he could have appreciated the opportunities it offered? It seemed to eat him up inside instead. 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 for 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. 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. 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. Obeisance is the way forward. No one is endorsing sycophancy. Remember that anteambulo means clearing the path—finding the direction someone already intended to head and helping them pack, freeing them up to focus on their strengths.

In fact, making things better rather than simply looking as if you are. What a clever young prodigy, they think, and miss the most impressive part entirely: Franklin wrote those letters, submitted them by sliding them under the print-shop door, and received absolutely no credit for them until much later in his life.

Franklin was playing the long game, though—learning how public opinion worked, generating awareness of what he believed in, crafting his style and tone and wit. Bill Belichick, the four-time Super Bowl—winning head coach of the New England Patriots, made his way up the ranks of the NFL by loving and mastering the one part of the job that coaches disliked at the time: analyzing film.

His first job in professional football, for the Baltimore Colts, was one he volunteered to take without pay—and his insights, which provided ammunition and critical strategies for the game, were attributed exclusively to the more senior coaches. He thrived on what was considered grunt work, asked for it and strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for.

As you can guess, Belichick started getting paid very soon. Before that, as a young high school player, he was so knowledgeable about the game that he functioned as a sort of assistant coach even while playing the game. He learned how to be a rising star without threatening or alienating anyone. In other words, he had mastered the canvas strategy.

You can see how easily entitlement and a sense of superiority the trappings of ego would have made the accomplishments of either of these men impossible. Belichick would have pissed off his coach and then probably been benched if he had one-upped him in public.

Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. Be lesser, do more. Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you.

Making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer-term payoff. Let the others take their credit on credit, while you defer and earn interest on the principal. The strategy part of it is the hardest. To hate even the thought of subservience. To despise 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. Once we fight this emotional and egotistical impulse, the canvas strategy is easy. The iterations are endless. Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce them to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks.

Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away In other words, discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus. It is a rewarding and infinitely scalable power strategy.

Consider each one an investment in relationships and in your own development. The canvas strategy is there for you at any time. There is no expiration date on it either. As a teenager, Robinson ran with a small gang of friends who regularly found themselves in trouble with local police. He challenged a fellow student to a fight at a junior college picnic for using a slur. In a basketball game, he surreptitiously struck a hard-fouling white opponent with the ball so forcefully that the kid bled everywhere.

He was arrested more than once for arguing with and challenging police, who he felt treated him unfairly. And in addition to rumors of inciting protests against racism, Jackie Robinson effectively ended his career as a military officer at Camp Hood in when a bus driver attempted to force him to sit in the back in spite of laws that forbade segregation on base buses. By arguing and cursing at the driver and then directly challenging his commanding officer after the fracas, Jackie set in motion a series of events that led to a court-martial.

Despite being acquitted, he was discharged shortly afterward. Why should he let anyone else treat him that way? No one should have to stand for that. Except sometimes they do. When Branch Rickey, the manager and owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, scouted Jackie to potentially become the first black player in baseball, he had one question: Do you have the guts?

This, Robinson assured him, he was ready to handle. There were plenty of players Rickey could have gone with. There was an aggressive, coordinated campaign to libel, boo, provoke, freeze out, attack, maim, or even kill.

Yet Jackie Robinson held to his unwritten pact with Rickey, never giving into explosive anger—however deserved. In fact, in nine years in the league, he never hit another player with his fist. Athletes seem spoiled and hotheaded to us today, but we have no concept of what the leagues were like then. In , Ted Williams, one of the most revered and respected players in the history of the game, was once caught spitting at his fans. Robinson had no such freedom—it would have ended not only his career, but set back his grand experiment for a generation.

Early in his career, the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, was particularly brutal in his taunting during a game. The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even sixty years removed, almost turns the stomach. Robinson called it one of the most difficult things he ever did, but he was willing to because it was part of a larger plan. He understood that certain forces were trying to bait him, to ruin him.

Knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order do it. Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with. It will still be tough to keep our self-control. Getting angry, getting emotional, losing restraint is a recipe for failure in the ring.

Oh, you went to college? But it was the Ivy League? Well, people are still going to treat you poorly, and they will still yell at you. You have a million dollars or a wall full of awards? When you want to do something— something big and important and meaningful—you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it. In this scenario, ego is the absolute opposite of what is needed. Up ahead there will be: Slights. Little fuck yous.

One- sided compromises. All this will make you angry. This will make you want to fight back. This will make you want to say: I am better than this. I deserve more. In fact, those people will often get perks instead of you. As we all wish to say: Do you know who I am?!

Instead, you must do nothing. Take it. 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.

You will often be tempted, you will probably even be overcome. No one is perfect with it, but try we must. It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched. Still, he was forced to do it again. As Robinson succeeded, after he had proved himself as the Rookie of the Year and as an MVP, and as his spot on the Dodgers was certain, he began to more clearly assert himself and his boundaries as a player and as a man.

Having carved out his space, he felt that he could argue with umpires, he could throw his shoulder if he needed to make a player back off or to send a message. No matter how confident and famous Robinson became, he never spit on fans. He never did anything that undermined his legacy. A class act from opening day until the end, Jackie Robinson was not without passion. He had a temper and frustrations like all of us do. But he learned early that the tightrope he walked would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego.

Honestly, not many paths do. It is a young Arturo Bandini in Los Angeles, alienating every person he meets as he tries to become a famous writer.

Salinger really did suffer from a sort of self-obsession and immaturity that made the world too much for him to bear, driving him from human contact and paralyzing his genius. John Fante struggled to reconcile his enormous ego and insecurity with relative obscurity for most of his career, eventually abandoning his novels for the golf course and Hollywood bars.

Only near death, blind with diabetes, was he finally able to get serious again. How much better could these writers have been had they managed to get through these troubles earlier? How much easier would their lives have been? He was chosen to command the Union forces because he checked all the boxes of what a great general should be: West Point grad, proven in battle, a student of history, of regal bearing, loved by his men.

Why did he turn out to be quite possibly the worst Union general, even in a crowded field of incompetent and self-absorbed leaders? Because he could never get out of his own head. He was in love with his vision of himself as the head of a grand army. He could prepare an army for battle like a professional, but when it came to lead one into battle, when the rubber needed to meet the road, troubles arose. He was convinced that the only way to win the war was with the perfect plan and a single decisive campaign he was wrong.

He was so convinced of all of it that he froze and basically did nothing. McClellan was constantly thinking about himself and how wonderful he was doing—congratulating himself for victories not yet won, and more often, horrible defeats he had saved the cause from.

When anyone—including his superiors—questioned this comforting fiction, he reacted like a petulant, delusional, vainglorious, and selfish ass. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.

It robbed him of the ability to think that he even needed to act. The repeated opportunities he missed would be laughable were it not for the thousands and thousands of lives they cost. The situation was made worse by the fact that two pious, quiet Southerners—Lee and Stonewall Jackson—with a penchant for taking the initiative were able to embarrass him with inferior numbers and inferior resources. Which is what happens when leaders get stuck in their own heads.

It can happen to us too. The novelist Anne Lamott describes that ego story well. Anyone—particularly the ambitious—can fall prey to this narration, good and bad. 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.

Ultimately this disability will paralyze us. Or it will become a wall between us and the information we need to do our jobs—which is largely why McClellan continually fell for flawed intelligence reports he ought to have known were wrong.

The idea that his task was relatively straightforward, that he just needed to get started, was almost too easy and too obvious to someone who had thought so much about it all.

We flip up our jacket collar and consider briefly how cool we must look. The crowds part as we pass. It feels good—so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness—and so we stay stuck inside our heads instead of participating in the world around us. What successful people do is curb such flights of fancy. They ignore the temptations that might make them feel important or skew their perspective.

General George C. Marshall—essentially the opposite of McClellan even though they briefly held the same position a few generations apart—refused to keep a diary during World War II despite the requests of historians and friends. 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. All of us are susceptible to these obsessions of the mind—whether we run a technology startup or are working our way up the ranks of the corporate hierarchy or have fallen madly in love.

The more creative we are, the easier it is to lose the thread that guides us. Our imagination—in many senses an asset—is dangerous when it runs wild. We have to rein our perceptions in. Otherwise, lost in the excitement, how can we accurately predict the future or interpret events?

How can we stay hungry and aware? How can we appreciate the present moment? How can we be creative within the realm of practicality? Living clearly and presently takes courage. Feast on it, adjust for it. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us. Full of pride and self-satisfaction, he had a new suit, a watch, and a pocketful of coins that he spread out and showed to everyone he ran into—including his older brother, whom he particularly hoped to impress.

All posturing by a boy who was not much more than an employee in a print shop in Philadelphia. Pride leads to arrogance and then away from humility and connection with their fellow man. You need only to care about your career to understand that pride—even in real accomplishments—is a distraction and a deluder.

Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.

Only later do you realize that that bump on the head was the least of what was risked. Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one. It is these strong opinions, only loosely secured by fact or accomplishment, that send us careering toward delusion or worse.

Pride and ego say: I am an entrepreneur because I struck out on my own. I am going to win because I am currently in the lead. I am a writer because I published something. I am rich because I made some money. I am special because I was chosen. I am important because I think I should be. At one time or another, we all indulge this sort of gratifying label making. Yet every culture seems to produce words of caution against it. The way to cook a rabbit is first to catch a rabbit. Game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned.

Punching above your weight is how you get injured. Pride goeth before the fall. Pride is a masterful encroacher. John D. Rockefeller, as a young man, practiced a nightly conversation with himself. He was saving money.

He had a few investments. Considering his father had been a drunken swindler, this was no small feat. Rockefeller was on the right track. Understandably, a sort of self- satisfaction with his accomplishments—and the trajectory he was heading in—began to seep in.

But for every one of him, there are a dozen more delusional assholes who said the exact same thing and genuinely believed it, and then came nowhere close—in part because their pride worked against them, and made other people hate them too.

All of this was why Rockefeller knew he needed to rein himself in and to privately manage his ego. Are you going to let this money puff you up? 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! Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life. Pride dulls these senses. Or in other cases, it tunes up other negative parts of ourselves: sensitivity, a persecution complex, the ability to make everything about us.

He liked the analogy of a mountain. This is certainly an obstacle to beware of, though dealing with it is rather simple. What we cultivate less is how to protect ourselves against the validation and gratification that will quickly come our way if we show promise. We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to. We must be on guard against that wild self- confidence and self-obsession. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves.

The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments? It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later. Without this understanding, pride takes our self-conception and puts it at odds with the reality of our station, which is that we still have so far to go, that there is still so much to be done.

After hitting his head and hearing from Mather, Franklin spent a lifetime battling against his pride, because he wanted to do much and understood that pride would made it much harder. As a brilliant and creative mind, the potential for great poems was all there—he could see beauty, he could find inspiration.

Yet there are no great Degas poems. There is one famous conversation that might explain why. 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.

His function is to create it in others. To be both a craftsman and an artist. To cultivate a product of labor and industry instead of just a product of the mind. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

You know that all things require work and that work might be quite difficult. But do you really understand? Do you have any idea just how much work there is going to be? Not work until you get your big break, not work until you make a name for yourself, but work, work, work, forever and ever.

Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. By this point, you probably understand why the ego would bristle at this idea. Within reach?! Exactly right. 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. Kanye is convinced he can succeed here, but he is not. He is letting his ego carry from one accomplishment to the other. Talent, skill, and confidence are not rare. Humility, diligence, and self-awareness are. When let the ego subdue, you will fall into traps of accomplishment. Research shows that goal visualization is important, but at a certain point, our brains start to confuse it with actual progress.

Ego actively prevents us from getting better. We know about unknown unknowns, we know about known unknowns, we know about known knowns. What people often leave out, are the unknown-knowns. These are our assumptions.

Our stereotypes. Our biases. This is our most dangerous vice. The ego completely ignores this. How will we turn anything upside down, if we cannot question our assumptions? Holiday describes the dangers of passion. There is a survival bias present in the world of passion, where we see all the successes that come from it, but not the order of magnitude of failures that lie behind each success.

They are invisible. It surfaces when that succeeds, but never when it fails.