EGO IS THE ENEMY, RYAN HOLIDAY

On today’s episode of booked and reviewed , we dive into, ‘ Ego is the Enemy,’ by Ryan Holiday. The genre is self-help that seeks to work on our inner selves. This read is appropriate for everyone who is a dreamer , as it will equip us to be grounded in our pursuit and hunger for success. In the introduction, Ryan Holiday hit me with some sentences that stuck with me. This is what he says ,’ Perhaps, you’ve always thought of yourself as a pretty balanced person. But for people with ambitions, talents, drives and a 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 of the psyche. ‘

When I picked this book, I wanted to understand what ego means and how it deters our success . Because I understood that whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising , in the famous words of Cyril Connolly. Ego, is an unhealthy belief in our own importance. It is that feeling that pushes us to choose getting our way over anything or anyone else. This is a push to superiority and certainty exceeding the bounds of confidence and talent.

According to Ryan Holiday there is a difference between ego and confidence. I feel that it is important at this point to highlight that ; while ego is stolen, confidence is earned. Confidence is potent and girding while ego is self-annointed, swagger and gaslighting.

We are caught in a specific cycle in the pursuit of our goals we are either, aspiring, succeeding or failing. At whatever stage we are in life, ego is our greatest enemy. This book aims at enlightening us on being humble in our aspiration stage, gracious as we succeed ,finally resilient in our failures. As this book is written for the doers and achievers, any doer is exposed and like any building that is exposed to the weather, we need a good foundation and that is how to manage and direct our ego.

Let us start with the aspiring stage. Here we have just set out to do big things; we are dreamers and beginners. You would expect that here we are devoid of any ego, but that is false. Here ego manifests in our fantasy, pretense to have figured it out, and a push to want public attention while doing very little. While we are aspiring , we only beat ego when we practice modesty and self-control. Ego is an enemy to any dreamer because it robs us the desire to become a student. Because we mask in fake mastery , a dangerous vice that wards us off getting better. At any stage in life being a life-long learner is recommended as it keeps us humble. If ego is our driving force we can’t get past the aspiring stage since it blocks and deters any chance to improve ourselves. This stage is where humility is built, since ego is a wicked sister to success, if we don’t learn to restrain ourselves at this level, then we are bound to sink very fast in the face of success.

The next level is success; here all the work is paying off, the mountain we climbed suddenly, feels like a very tiny hill. While the aspiring stage feels so heavy, the success stage presents fresh challenges and for this reason, it is often quite short-lived. At the in this phase for our emulation ; the first category are those who are of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity. While the other one is of those that are of humble modesty, and equitable justice. This is how ego becomes our enemy in our success stage, it erases the process of becoming from our minds, it makes us forget our why and now that we have completed our climb we stop doing all the things that made us become. At this point ego starts to sound like , ‘ I am special and better. The rules don’t apply to me.’ Before we know it, we have lost the sobriety that we require to sustain our success. There are many ways to keep ego at bay even as we succeed, but the one that I took home was always stay a student. This is because at the face of success, we will encounter different challenges that arise in the new situation. Stay a student because humility allows those who are truly humble to continue improving they will consequently not drawn in self-imposed ignorance.

The final layer is failure; here we might be clearly failing or coming to the realisation that our goal is actually harder than we first imagined. At the face of failure, we do not need pity, but a way to rise again, majorly self-awareness. Unlike when we are having our moments of shine, in failure, our ego faces a blow. Ego is the enemy here because it whispers that we can hide or avoid our failure. However, failure is inevitable and to deal with the blow in our ego we need to sit in it and accept it, this is the only way through it. We all encounter failure and setbacks, the reason why it is important to stay humble it is because, humility allows us to stay resilient and cheerful even, because as long as we are not ego-driven, we are not caught in an unending chase for validation.

While failure in inevitable Ryan Holiday reminds us that this is moment of our life and this moment is not our life. He suggests that , when we fail we should not wait for the moment to pass, but access the road we travelled on our way to failure, to avoid re-investing our energy in the same path.

The book, covers ego as an enemy in each area and season or era of our lives. One thing we must agree is that whether we are aspiring, succeeding or failing ego is the enemy. The author says.’ For everything that comes next, ego is the enemy. He maintains humility to be the cheat -code because there is no day, our ego regardless of who we are will ever hold an importance or even a candle to our life’s journey. Life, is an endless loop, whereby we start by aspiring that births success, this success could either birth new problems or new ambitions and our adversity births new levels of aspiration. Therefore, here is what we need to do; not to aspire or seek out of ego, to have success without ego, finally, push through failure with strength not ego. Remember, whatever comes next , ego is the enemy.

I’ll end by asking you, in what level has ego been your worst enemy; where you aspiring or failing ? Do think you can handle success ? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you? To be well -equipped for all the phases of life I highly recommend , ‘ Ego is the Enemy,’ by Ryan Holiday.