Ego is such a loaded word. We’ve all met people with inflated egos. They are often accused of being egotistical, big headed, or self important. But when it comes down to it, all us humans have egos. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t ever get offended, take things personally, or be competitive. Ego has driven some of the biggest manias in human history! I’ve come to believe that, unless you have a physiological reason for it, ego may be a primary driver of alcoholism and addiction.
In his book Ego Is The Enemy, Ryan Holiday delves into why and how ego can be both your greatest asset and ultimately your biggest liability. As an asset, ego drives you to succeed in a competitive world. Alternatively, it can, at the same time, become the undercurrent that drags you down and becomes your eventual undoing.
One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as ‘a conscious separation from.’ From what? Everything.
– Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy
Ryan Holiday divides Ego Is The Enemy into three distinct sections:
- Aspire
- Success
- Failure
For as he states, “it will help us to be:
- Humble in our aspirations
- Gracious in our success
- Resilient in our failures”
Of course, these positive outcomes are only possible if you let go of your ego. Otherwise, ego will over-inflate your aspirations, rob you of your success, and cause failure to overwhelm you. So what to do? I’ve found that RAIN helps me create distance from my ego so that I can make better decisions. After six months of daily meditation, my ego has chilled out considerably.
…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.
– Ryan Holiday
1. Talk Robs Us of Action
It’s instructive to reflect back on all your big plans and tally up how many you actually accomplished. They say ‘talk is cheap’, and who wouldn’t agree, but did you know that the more you talk about anything, the less likely you are to actually do something about it?
Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
– Ernest Hemingway
That’s because many of your aspirations and dreams are incredibly difficult to achieve. Whether your dreams involve starting a new business, authoring a book, launching a new product, or getting your PhD, action is hard, but simply talking about your dreams is incredibly easy.
It turns out that talking and doing conflict with each other. I used to always think that if I talked about something enough, I’d eventually talk myself into doing it. Boy was I wrong. In fact, the more I talked about it, the less inclined I was to actually do it. It was as if talking about it was enough. Well, research shows that is exactly the problem.
All Talk No Action
If you talk about something enough, your brain begins to confuse this chatter with actual progress. We feel that the act of talking is propelling us toward our goal, but this is wrong. Talking saps you of precious energy that would otherwise be better applied toward ‘doing the thing’.
The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
– Ryan Holiday
After learning about the relationship between talking and doing, I’ve significantly reduced my chatter concerning projects I’m working on. For example, I never talk about this blog. If someone asks me what I’m doing for fun, I mention that ‘I blog’. If that press for more details, I offer a brief overview and if they’re interested, I send them a link. Then I change topics. I’ve learned ‘doing’ energy is far too valuable to waste by talking .
2. Ego Is Drunk Driving Your Passion
What are you passionate about?
I’ve always been told to find something I’m passionate about and pursue it vigorously. I’ve shared this same age old advice with my kids, usually along with something about ‘if you do this, the rewards will come, eventually’. But is this good advice?
Ego Is The Enemy makes a clear distinction between passion and purpose, direction, or reason. Passion is something you are about while Purpose is “to and for.” For example, your purpose is to _______ OR you’re doing this for someone else or some greater cause.
In other words, purpose implies pursuit of something outside of yourself while passion denotes seeking pleasure for yourself, e.g. satisfying your ego. It’s easy to see how these concepts can be confused for synonyms since they appear to be closely related.
Yet, once you pivot from passion to purpose, you will get nowhere without the additions of reason and direction. These added elements let you know where to start, how to progress, and, more importantly, provide that benchmarks against which you measure success.
Life Requires a Designated Driver
Purpose is like having a designated driver who knows the way home and can get you there safely as opposed to the passionate drunk driver who speeds, blows stop signs, and only asks for directions after he’s wrapped your car around a telephone pole.
I’ve learned to be dispassionate about this blog. That doesn’t mean I don’t care, I care deeply, but not because I’m passionate about it. I put in a lot of thought and planning because the purpose of this blog is to share my sobriety journey with as many people as possible. I hope that what I am learning will help them in some way or guide them toward the help they need.
3. Restrain Yourself & Get Ego Out of Your Head
DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!?!? Have you ever heard somebody demand this of some poor waiter or customer service agent before then insisting on speaking with their manager? It’s so off-putting, except when you do it or think it. That’s ego for ya.
Restraint is a very difficult skill to master. No one likes to be embarrassed, put down, or slighted. But more often than not, whatever slight you perceive was likely not meant to be taken personally. But ego always sees to it that you do. And even if it was meant that way, who cares?
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
– Ryan Holiday
Do you really want to be compelled to action by your impulses? Do you really think you’re too important to put up with things you don’t like? We all like to think we’re important, that we deserve more, that we are ‘better than this’. But the fact is, that’s your ego talking. You and I are no better than anyone else. Period.
Worse, ego and feelings of self importance conspire to trap you inside your own head. At some point you forget where the line is that separates your personal fictions and fantasies from reality. This is especially true in your own curated social media illusion where you are compelled to let the world know that you are living your ‘best life’. The truth is you’re performing for an imaginary audience that’s far too wrapped up in its own collective ego to give a damn about what you’re doing. But, hey, they’ll feed your ego and throw you a like every now and again hoping you’ll reciprocate.
The Power of RAIN
For me, once again RAIN rides to the rescue. It allows me to create space between impulse and action and subdues any egotistical desire to create and share some fantasy world in order to trick my ego into feeling better about itself. These days I rarely compare myself to others or want what they have. And when I do spend time inside my head, it’s because I’m meditating. I’m actively practicing to silence the ego and its minion voices of addiction and obsession that cloud my mind.
4. Dialing in What’s Important to You
Why is it you’re never happy with what you have and want what your friends, neighbors, and relatives have too? Why is it that once you finally acquire that thing you’ve always wanted, the feeling of satisfaction is fleeting or even hollow?
All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get thing’s we don’t want.
– Ryan Holiday
Our ego demands that we are better than and have more than everyone else. Our society has a phrase to describe this phenomenon: Keeping Up with The Jones. Who are the Jones? It doesn’t really matter as long as you have more than they do or at least kill yourself trying. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying: “You can rest when your dead.” But do you really want to kill yourself every single day for something you don’t care about? For something that lacks purpose? Fulfillment?
So many of us are frantically racing on a hedonic treadmill. We exist for little other purpose than to makes ends meet and fill our bank accounts. As Mr. Holiday states, “We’re like Captain Ahab, chasing Moby Dick, for reasons we don’t even understand anymore.”
I know this has been true for me through the majority of my life. Especially when I was starting out. It still is to some extent, but I am actively working to change my own reality for the purpose of helping others cope with alcoholism, addiction, and the excessive gray area drinking that often leads to these afflictions in the first place. How? By sharing my own experiences and the resources I have discovered on my personal journey. This is what is truly important and fulfilling to me.
Maybe someday I’ll be able to make a living at it, but for now, I’m focused on the doing rather than the end result.
5. Alive Time or Dead Time?
…there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice…
– Ryan Holiday paraphrasing Robert Greene
I saved the best for last. I reread this chapter a couple of times and as I did, I thought about, and later meditated on, the alive and dead times in my life. There were jobs I had that were driven by such a profound sense of purpose that I leapt out of bed every morning (slight exaggeration, but you get what I’m saying) in anticipation of the day. There were others, we’ve all had them, where Friday couldn’t come soon enough after a Monday that arrived too early.
Then there is all the time, energy, and headspace I’ve wasted drinking and smoking pot, death scrolling social media and the 24/7 news cycle, binge watching some long forgotten series, or playing video games. These dead times generally coincided with a listlessness or general lack of purpose.
Meditation and mindfulness brought me out of the fog of addiction and gave me a purpose: to share all that I’ve learned and am learning with any and everyone who is suffering from alcoholism or addiction, is concerned about run away gray area drinking, or is simply sober curious.
Today, I feel alive all the time. So much so that I have to diligently schedule my days in order to get everything done. I’m active and alive, but not restless. I suppose this is because I have purpose and direction rather than unbridled passion. Whatever the reason, I feel fortunate and grateful to be making the most of my alive time and will make every effort to resuscitate any dead time I encounter in the future.
Final Thoughts on Ego Is The Enemy
Ryan Holiday covers so much more in Ego Is The Enemy than I can possibly hope to cover here, and I learned many more lesson than the five or six I discuss in this blog. Like, for instance, how ego causes us to let compliments go to our heads and insults to tear at our soul.
This is the second book by Ryan Holiday I’ve read of late. I read Ego Is The Enemy right on the heels of Stillness Is The Key. Next up is Obstacle Is The Way which I plan to read after I finish Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. I bought all of these books after they were recommended by a friend.
So far they have been well worth the ‘alive time’ I’ve invested in them. I hope you will enjoy them as well.
