Ryan Holiday had achieved extraordinary success early on in his life. He became the director of marketing for ''American Apparel at the age of 21. He went on to be a best selling author of four four books by the age of 29.
With all this success, Ryan got to experience and witness the destruction of unchecked Ego in many of his employees and also within himself. In his book, he talks about when Ego appears in our life and how we can defeat it.
So what exactly is Ego? why is it a bad thing? And why does Ego have to be the enemy?
In his book, Ryan defines Ego as an ''unhealthy belief in our own importance''. Ego takes a look at our self-image and
turns it into an obsession.
It takes confidence and turns it into arrogance. It is like a disease where the infected puts 'ME' first.
Ego is the enemy because it sabotages our long term goals, and it distracts us from achieving Mastery in our craft. Ego is a threat to people's long term success.
Here are three ways you can notice Ego working against you:
1. Ego shows up when you aspire to do something great. When we start doing something prodcutive, Ego gets busy seeking out constant approval from others around us.
It's always asking us '' What are people thinking about me?'' It prefers talking about what you want to do, rather than actually doing it.
2. The second way Ego shows up in our lives is when we experience noteworthy success. This could be anything like, launching a successful business or winning a sports Championship. Our Ego leads us to believe that all our future endeavours are likely to be a success. Instead of remaining focused and building upon our previous success, we have the tendency to be over-confident in our abilities and take on too much.
3. The third way Ego shows up in our lives is when we experience failure or set-back. At this time Ego shows up just in time to save face and try to dodge responsibility.
In an effort to defend our Ego, we lose sight of what we worked for and try to blame it on someone or something.
In all the three phases, ego distracts you from focusing on your work and producing something you can be proud of. So if Ego is the enemy, how do we defeat it?
One way we can defeat Ego is using the ''Plus (+), Minus (-), Equal (=)'' method, which was coined by the great UFC fighter Frank Shamrock
Frank says
''For each fighter to be great, they need to have someone better to learn from (+), someone lesser they can
teach (-) and someone equal they can challenge themselves against(=)''.
For the first form of Ego which shows up when we are aspiring to something great, we need to find an equal(=), in order to challenge and defeat it. This means, we need to find another person with a similar ability to challange and grow. This way we have no time to obsess over public opinion as we will be busy trying to outperform our equal and not risk falling behind.
The second form of Ego that shows up when we are succeeding, needs a plus(+) or a person with more success to be look up to.When Ego starts generating stories of our greatness, we quickly need a dose of humility in order to remain focused on our ultimate goal.
Humility comes from remembering that there is always someone better and something bigger than us. Reflecting on someone bigger than yourself is necessary to quieten the Ego and avoid getting caught up in your own personal story of greatness, preventing you from taking on too much and being careless with your time and resources.
To combat the third form of Ego, that shows up when we fail, we need a minus(-).
A minus can be a person that we mentor or someone that we teach through a book or a blog. Having a minus forces you to look objectively at your failures and gather the lessons learnt to pass down.
When you have the responsibility to teach others, you spend less time complaining and more time looking for ways to improve.
So if you are in search of excellence and want to do work that you will be proud of one day, then know that Ego is the
enemy, that will show up to stop you and in order to fight back that ego day after day, you will need the plus, minus
and equal rule.
This was another breakdown. Let me know what you think about Ego and if you have any other ideas to combat them. Also let me know which book you would like me to breakdown next on our series.
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