Home > Work > Ego Is the Enemy
161 " 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. "
― Ryan Holiday , Ego Is the Enemy
162 " The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. "
163 " 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. "
164 " People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s "
165 " 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. "
166 " 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. "
167 " I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The "
168 " What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. —GOETHE "
169 " 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. "
170 " Booker T. Washington tells an anecdote told to him by Frederick Douglass, about a time he was traveling and was asked to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race. A white supporter rushed up to apologize for this horrible offense. “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,” the person said. Douglass would have none of that. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t hurt. He replied with great fervor: “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me. "
171 " It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing. "
172 " The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other. Let "
173 " The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. "
174 " 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. "
175 " It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them. —LA ROCHEFOUCAULD I "
176 " Ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small. "
177 " We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers. "
178 " realized that the same drive and compulsion that had made me successful so early came with a price—as it had for so many others. It wasn’t so much the amount of work but the outsized role it had taken in my sense of self. I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The "
179 " Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego. "
180 " False ideas about yourself destroy you. For "