Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Ego Is the Enemy:
“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.”
“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”
“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”
“Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.”
“Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”
“When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes—but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.”
“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”
“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”
“You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.”
“Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.”
“ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”
“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s”
“We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative—one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time.”
“I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The”
“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.”
“Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. —RICHARD FEYNMAN”
“As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
“It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
“You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not rawtalent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.”
“What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. —GOETHE”
“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.”
“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.”
“One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”
“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.”
“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”
“Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have “gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity”
