Ego is The Enemy Full Audiobook | Ryan Holiday

Tim ferriss presents ego is the enemy written by ryan holliday narrated by ryan holiday [Music] do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you could his life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours Worried otherwise he never would have been able to find those words the words of rainier maria rilke the painful prologue this is not a book about me but since this is a book about ego i'm going to address a question that i'd be a hypocrite not to

have thought about who the hell am i to write it my story is not particularly important for the lessons that follow but i want to tell it briefly here at the beginning In order to provide some context for i have experienced ego at each of its stages in my short life aspiration success failure and back again and back again when i was 19 years old sensing some astounding and life-changing opportunities i dropped out of college mentors vied for my attention groomed me as their protege seen as going places i was the kid success came quickly

After i became the youngest executive at a beverly hills talent management agency i helped sign and work with a number of huge rock bands i advised on books that went on to sell millions of copies and invent their own literary genres around the time i turned 21 i came on as a strategist for american apparel then one of the hottest fashion brands in the world soon i was the director of marketing by 25 i'd published my first book which Was an immediate and controversial bestseller with my face prominently on the cover a studio optioned the

rights to create a television show about my life in the next few years i accumulated many of the trappings of success influence a platform press resources money even a little notoriety later i built a successful company on the back of those assets where i worked with well-known well-paying clients and Did the kind of work that got me invited to speak at conferences and fancy events with success comes the temptation to tell oneself a story to round off the edges to cut out your lucky breaks and add a certain mythology to it all you know that

arcing narrative of herculean struggle for greatness against all odds sleeping on the floor being disowned by my parents suffering from my ambition it's the type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your Identity and your accomplishments become your worth but a story like this is never honest or helpful in my retelling to you just now i left a lot out conveniently omitted were the stresses and temptations the stomach turning drops and the mistakes all the mistakes were left on the cutting room floor in favor of the highlight reel they are the times i would

rather not discuss a public evisceration by someone I looked up to which so crushed me at the time that i was later taken to the emergency room the day i lost my nerve walked into my boss's office and told him i couldn't cut it it was going back to school and meant it the ephemeral nature of best sellerdom and how short it actually was a week the book signing that one person showed up at the company i founded tearing itself to pieces and having to rebuild it twice These are just some of the moments that

get nicely edited out this fuller picture itself is still only a fraction of a life but at least it hits more of the important notes at least the important ones for this book ambition achievement and adversity i'm not someone who believes in epiphanies there is no one moment that changes a person there are many during a period of about six months in 2014 It seemed those moments were all happening in succession first american apparel where i did much of my best work teetered on the edge of bankruptcy hundreds of millions of dollars in debt a

shell of its former self its founder who i deeply admired since i was a young man was unceremoniously fired by his own hand-picked board of directors and down to sleeping on a friend's couch then the talent agency where i made my Bones was in similar shape sued preemptorly by clients to whom it owed a lot of money another mentor of mine seemingly unraveled around the same time taking our relationship with him these were the people i had shaped my life around the people i looked up to and trained under their stability financially emotionally psychologically was

not just something i took for granted it was central to my existence And self-worth and yet there they were imploding right in front of me one right after another the wheels were coming off or so it felt to go from wanting to be like someone your whole life to realizing you never want to be like him is a kind of whiplash that you can't prepare for nor was i exempt from this dissolution myself just when i could least afford it problems i had neglected in my own life Began to emerge despite my successes i found

myself back in the city i had started in stressed and overworked having handed much of my hard-earned freedom away because i couldn't say no to money and the thrill of a good crisis i was wound so tight that the slightest disruption sent me into a sputtering inconsolable rage my work which had always come easy became labored my faith in myself and Other people collapsed my quality of life did too i remember arriving at my house one day after weeks on the road and having an intense panic attack because the wi-fi wasn't working if i don't

send these emails if i don't send these emails if i don't send these emails if i don't send these emails you think you're doing what you're supposed to society rewards you for it and then you watch your future wife walk Out the door because you aren't the person you used to be how does something like this happen can you really go from feeling like you're standing on the shoulders of giants one day and then next you're prying yourself out of the rubble of multiple implosions trying to pick up the pieces from the ruins one benefit

however was that it forced me to come to terms with the fact that i Was a workaholic not an o he just works too much kind of way or in the just relax and play it off since but more if he doesn't start going to meetings and get clean he will die an early death i realize 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 result was a sort of treadmill of pain and frustration and i needed to figure out why unless i wanted to break in an equally tragic fashion for a long time as a researcher and writer i have studied history and business like anything that evolves people seen over long enough timeline universal Issues begin to emerge these are the topics i had long been fascinated with foremost among them was ego i was not unfamiliar with ego

and its effects in fact i had been researching this book for nearly a year before the events i have just recounted for you but my painful experiences in this period brought the notions i was studying and to focus in ways that i could never have previously understood it allowed me to See the ill effects of ego played out not just in myself or across the pages of history but in friends and clients and colleagues some at the highest levels of many industries ego has cost the people i admire hundreds of millions of dollars and like

sisyphus rolled them back from their goals just as they've achieved them i have now at least peeked over that precipice myself a few months after my own realization i Had the phrase ego is the enemy tattooed on my right forearm where the words came from i don't know probably from a book i read long long ago but they were immediately a source of great solace and direction on my left arm of similarly muddled attribution it says the obstacle is the way it's these two phases that i look at now every single day and use them

to guide The decisions in my life i can't help but see them when i swim when i meditate when i write when i get out of the shower in the morning and both prepare me admonish me to choose the right course in essentially any situation i might face i wrote this book not because i have attained some wisdom that i feel qualified to preach but because it's the book i wish existed at critical turning points in my own life When i like everyone else was called to answer the most critical questions a person can ask

themselves who do i want to be and what path will i take in latin cuvad vecte sectabor and because i found these questions to be timeless and universal except for this note i've tried to rely on philosophy and historical examples in this book instead of my personal life while the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses Who remade the world in their image with sheer almost irrational force i found that if you go looking you'll find that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn who has skewed

the spotlight and put their higher goals above their desires for recognition engaging with and retelling these stories has been my method of learning and absorbing them like my other books this one is deeply Influenced by stoic philosophy and indeed all the great classical thinkers i borrow heavily from them all in my writing just as i have leaned on them my entire life if there is anything here that helps you in this book it is because of them and not me the orator demosthenes once said that virtue begins with understanding and is fulfilled by courage we

must begin by seeing ourselves and The world in a new way for the first time then we must fight to be different and fight to stay different that's the hard part i'm not saying that you should repress or crush every ounce of ego in your life or that doing so is even possible these are just reminders moral stories to encourage are better impulses in aristotle's famous ethics he uses the analogy of a warped piece of wood to describe human nature In order to eliminate warping or curvature a skilled woodworker slowly applies pressure in the opposite

direction essentially bending it straight of course a couple thousand years later kant snorted out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing can be made straight well we might not ever be straight but we can strive for straighter it's always nice to be made to feel Special or empowered or inspired but that's not the aim of this book instead i have tried to arrange these pages so that you might end in the same place that i did when i finished writing it that is you'll think less of yourself i hope you will be less invested in

the story you tell about your own specialness and as a result you will be liberated to accomplish the world changing work you've set out to achieve [Music] Introduction the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool richard feynman maybe you're young and brimming with ambition maybe you're young and you're struggling maybe you've made that first couple million signed your first deal been selected to some elite group or maybe you've already accomplished enough to Last a lifetime maybe you're stunned to find out how empty it is at

the top maybe you're charged with leading others through a crisis maybe you just got fired maybe you just hit rock bottom wherever you are whatever you're doing your worst enemy already lives inside you your ego not me you think no one would ever call me an egomaniac perhaps you've always thought of Yourself as a pretty balanced person but for people with ambitions talents drives and 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 side of the psyche now this is not a book about ego in the freudian sense freud was fond of explaining the ego by Way of analogy our ego was a rider on a horse with our unconscious drives representing the animal while the ego tried to direct them modern psychologists on the other hand used the word egotist to refer to someone dangerously focused on themselves and with disregard for anyone else all of these definitions are true enough but of little value outside a clinical setting the ego we see most commonly goes by a

More casual definition an unhealthy belief in our own importance arrogance self-centered ambition that's the definition this book will use it's that petulant child inside every person the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else the need to be better than more than recognized for far past any reasonable utility that's ego it's the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of Confidence and talent it's when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us when as the football coach

bill walsh explained self-confidence becomes arrogance assertiveness becomes obstinacy and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon this is the ego as the writer cyril connolly warned that sucks us down like The law of gravity in this way 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 is a magnet for enemies and errors it is sela and charybdis most of us aren't egomaniacs but ego

is there at the root of almost every Conceivable problem and obstacle from why we can't win to why we need to win all the time and at the expense of others from why we don't seem to have what we want to why having what we want doesn't seem to make us feel any better we don't usually see it this way we think that something else is to blame for our problems most often other people we are as the poet lucretius put it a Few thousand years ago the proverbial sick man ignorant of the cause of

his malady especially for successful people who can't see what ego prevents them from doing because all they can see is what they've already done with every ambition and goal we have big or small ego is there undermining us on the very journey we've put everything into pursuing the pioneering ceo harold genon compared egoism to alcoholism He said the egotist does not stumble about knocking things off his desk he does not stammer or drool no instead he becomes more and more arrogant and some people not knowing what is underneath such an attitude mistake his arrogance for

a sense of power and self-confidence you could say that they start to mistake that about themselves too not realizing the disease they've contracted or that they're killing Themselves with it if ego was the voice that tells us we're better than we really are we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us one of the early members of alcoholics anonymous defined ego as a conscious separation from from what everything the ways this separation manifests Itself negatively are immense we can't work with other people if we put

up walls we can't improve the world if we don't understand it or ourselves we can't take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources we can't recognize opportunities or create them if instead of seeing what is in front of us we live inside our own fantasy without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others What we have is not confidence but delusion how are we supposed to reach motivate or lead other people if we can't relate to their needs because we've lost touch with our own the

performance artist marina abramovic puts it directly if you start believing in your own greatness it is the death of your creativity just one thing keeps ego around comfort pursuing great work whether it is in Sports or art or business is often terrifying ego sues that fear it's a salve to that insecurity replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption ego tells us what we want to hear when we want to hear it but it is a short-term fix with a long-term consequence ego was always there now it's emboldened now more

than ever our culture fans the Flames of ego it's never been easier to talk to puff ourselves up we can brag about our goals to millions of our fans or followers things only rock stars or cult leaders used to have we can follow and interact with our idols on twitter we can read books and sites and watch ted talks drink from a fire hose of inspiration and validation like never before there's an app for that We can name ourselves ceo of our exists only on paper company we can announce big news on social media and

let the congratulations roll in we can publish articles about ourselves in outlets that used to be sources of objective journalism some of us do this more than others but it's only a matter of degree besides the changes in technology we're told to believe in our own uniqueness above all else we're told to think big Live big to be memorable and dare greatly we think that success requires a bold vision or some sweeping plan after all that's what the founders of this company or that championship team supposedly had but did they did they really we see

risk taking swagger and successful people in the media and eager for our own success try to reverse engineer the right attitude the right Pose we intuit a causal relationship that isn't there we assume the symptoms of success are the same as success itself and in our naivete confuse the byproduct with the cause sure ego has worked for some many of history's most famous men and women were notoriously egotistical but so were many of its greatest failures far more of them in fact but here we are With a culture that urges us to roll the dice

to make the gamble ignoring the stakes wherever you go ego is too at any given time in life people find themselves in one of three stages we are aspiring to something trying to make a dent in the universe we have achieved success perhaps a little perhaps a lot or we have failed recently or continually most of us are in these stages in a Fluid sense we're aspiring until we succeed we succeed until we fail or until we aspire to more and after we fail we can begin to aspire or succeed again ego is the enemy

every step along this way in a sense ego is the enemy of building of maintaining and of recovering when things come fast and easy this might be fine but in times of change of Difficulty and therefore the three parts that this book is organized into aspire success failure the aim of that structure is simple to help you suppress ego early before bad habits take hold to replace the temptations of ego with humility and discipline when we experience success and to cultivate strength and fortitude so that when fate turns against you You're not wrecked by failure

in short it will help us to be humble in our aspirations gracious in our success resilient in our failures that is not to say you are not unique and that you don't have something amazing to contribute in your short time on this planet this is not to say that there is not room to push past creative boundaries to invent to feel inspired or to aim for Truly ambitious change or innovation on the contrary in order to properly do these things and take these risks we need balance as the quaker william penn observed buildings that lie

so exposed to the weather need a good foundation so what now this audio book that you're listening to is based around one optimistic assumption that your ego is not some power you're forced to satiate at every Turn it can be managed it can be directed in this book we will look at individuals like william tecumseh sherman catherine graham jackie robinson eleanor roosevelt bill walsh benjamin franklin belisarius angela merkel and george c marshall could they have accomplished what they accomplished saving faltering companies advancing the art of war integrating baseball revolutionizing football offense standing up to tyranny

bravely Bearing misfortune if ego had left them ungrounded or self-absorbed it was their sense of reality and awareness one that the author and strategist robert greene once said that we must take to like a spider in its web that was at the core of their great art great writing great design great business great marketing and great leadership what we find when we study these individuals is that they were grounded Circumspect and unflinchingly real not that any of them were holy without ego but they knew how to suppress it channel it subsume it when it counted

they were great yet humble wait but so and so had a huge ego and was successful but what about steve jobs what about kanye west we can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers but no one is truly successful because they are delusional self-absorbed or Disconnected even if these traits are correlated or associated with certain well-known individuals so are a few others addiction abuse of themselves and others depression mania in fact what we see when we study these people is that they did their best work in the moments when they fought back

against these impulses disorders and flaws only when free of ego and baggage can Anyone perform to their utmost for this reason we're also going to look at individuals like howard hughes the persian king xerxes john delorean alexander the great and at the many cautionary tales of others who lost their grip on reality and in the process made it clear what a gamble ego can be we'll look at the costly lessons they learned and at the price they paid in misery and self-destruction we'll look at how often even the most Successful people can vacillate between humility

and ego and the problems this causes 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 was stolen confidence is earned ego is self-anointed its swagger is artifice One is girding yourself and the other gaslighting it's the difference between potent and poisonous as you'll hear in the pages that follow that self-confidence took an unassuming and underestimated general and turned him into america's foremost warrior and strategist during the civil war ego took a

different general from the heights of power and influence after that same war and drove him to destitution and ignominy One took a quiet sober german scientist and made her not just a new kind of leader but a force for peace the other took two different but equally brilliant and bold engineering minds of the 20th century and built them up in a whirlwind of hype and celebrity before dashing their hopes against the rocks of failure bankruptcy scandal and insanity one guided one of the worst teams in nfl history to the super bowl in three seasons and

then on to be one of the Most dominant dynasties in the game meanwhile countless other coaches politicians entrepreneurs and writers have overcome similar odds only to succumb to the more inevitable probability of handing the top spot right back to someone else some learn humility some choose ego some are prepared for the vicissitudes of fate both positive and negative others are not which will you choose who will you be You're listening to this book because you sense that you'll need to answer this question eventually consciously or not well here we are let's get to it [Music]

part one aspire here we are setting out to do something we have a goal a calling a new beginning every great journey begins here yet far too many of us never reach our Intended destination ego more often than not is the culprit we build ourselves up with fantastical stories we pretend we have it all figured out we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out and we have no idea why these are the symptoms of ego for which humility and reality are the cure to whatever you aspire ego is your enemy he

is a bold surgeon they say whose hand Does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct adam smith sometime around the year 374 bc i socrates one of the most well-known teachers in rhetoricians in athens wrote a letter to a young man named Demonicus i socrates had been a friend of the boy's recently deceased father and wanted to pass on to him some advice on

how to follow his father's example the advice ranged from practical to moral all communicated in what as socrates described as noble maxims they were as he put it precepts for the years to come like many of us demonicus was ambitious Which is why i socrates wrote to him because the path of ambition can be dangerous i socrates began by informing the young man that no adornment so becomes you as modesty justice and self-control for these are the virtues by which as all men are agreed the character of the young is held in restraint practice self-control

he said warning demonicus not to fall under the sway of temper pleasure and pain And of horror flatterers as you would deceivers for both if trusted injure those who trust them he wanted him to be affable in your relations with those who approach you and never haughty for the pride of the arrogant even slaves can hardly endure and be slow in deliberation but be prompt to carry out your resolves and the best thing which we have in ourselves is good judgment constantly train your intellect he told Him for the greatest thing in the smallest compass

is a sound mind in a human body some of his advice might sound familiar because it made its way over the next two thousand years to william shakespeare who often warned about ego run amok in fact in hamlet using this very letter as his model shakespeare puts isocrates's words in the mouth of his character polonius in his speech to his Son laertes the speech if you happen to have heard it wraps up with this little verse this above all to thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day thou canst

not then be false to any man farewell my blessing sees in this in thee as it happened shakespeare's words also made their way to a young united states military officer named william tecumseh sherman who would go on to become Perhaps this country's greatest general and strategic thinker he may never have heard of isocrates but he loved the play and often quoted this very speech like demonicus sherman's father died when he was very young like demonicus he was taken under the wing of a wise older man in this case thomas ewing a soon-to-be u.s senator and

friend of sherman's father who Adopted the young boy and raised him as his own what's interesting about sherman is that despite his connected father almost no one would have predicted much more than regional accomplishments least of all that he would one day need to take the unprecedented step of refusing the presidency of the united states unlike a napoleon who bursts upon the scene from nowhere and disappears in failure just as quickly Sherman's ascent was a slow and gradual one he spent his early years at west point and then in the army for his first few

years in service sherman traversed nearly the entire united states on horseback slowly learning with each posting as the rumblings of civil war broke out sherman made his way east to volunteer his services and he was shortly put to use at the battle of bull run A rather disastrous union defeat benefiting from a dire shortage of leadership sherman was promoted to brigadier general and was summoned to meet with president lincoln and his top military advisor on several occasions sherman freely strategized and planned with the president but at the end of his trip he made one strange

request he'd accept his new promotion only with the assurance that he'd not Have to assume superior command would lincoln give him his word on that with every other general asking for as much rank and power as possible lincoln happily agreed at this point in time sherman felt more comfortable as a number two he felt he had an honest appreciation for his own abilities and that this role best suited him imagine that an ambitious person turning down a chance to advance in Responsibilities because he actually wanted to be ready for them is that really so crazy

not that sherman was always the perfect model of restraint and order early in the war tasked with defending the state of kentucky with insufficient troops his mania and tendency to doubt himself combined in a wicked way ranting and raving about being undersupplied unable to get out of his own head Paranoid about enemy movements he broke form and spoke injudiciously to several newspaper reporters in the ensuing controversy he was temporarily recalled from his command it took weeks of rest for him to recover it was one of a few nearly catastrophic moments in his otherwise steadily ascendant

career it was after this brief stumble having learned from it that sherman truly made his mark For instance during the siege at fort donelson sherman technically held a senior rank to general ulysses s grant while the rest of lincoln's generals fought amongst themselves for personal power and recognition sherman waved his rank choosing to cheerfully support and reinforce grant instead of issuing orders this is your show sherman told them in a note accompanying a shipment of supplies Call on me for any assistance i can provide together they won one of the union's first victories in the

war building on his success sherman began to advocate for his famous march to the sea a strategically bold and audacious plan not born out of some creative genius but rather relying on the exact topography he'd scouted and studied as a young officer in what had then seemed like a pointless Backwater outpost but where sherman had once been cautious he was now confident but unlike so many others who possess great ambition he earned this opinion as he carved a path from chattanooga to atlanta and then atlanta to the sea he avoided traditional battle after traditional battle

any student of military history can see how the exact same invasion driven by ego instead of a strong sense of purpose would have had a Far different ending his realism allowed him to see a path through the south that others thought impossible his entire theory of maneuver warfare rested on deliberately avoiding frontal assaults or shows of strength in the form of pitched battles and ignoring criticism designed to bait a reaction he paid no notice and stuck to his plan by the end of the war sherman was one of the most famous men in america yet

he sought no public office and had no taste For politics and wished simply to do his job and then eventually retire dismissing the incessant praise and attention endemic to such success he wrote as a warning to his friend grant be natural in yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day one of sherman's biographers summarized the man in his unique accomplishments in a remarkable passage It is why he serves as our model in this phase of our ascent he wrote among men who rise to fame

and leadership two types are recognizable those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement to the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise and its fruits the more delicious yet to be tested cautiously with a Haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream in that doubt lies true modesty not the sham of insincere self-deprecation but the modesty of moderation in the greek sense it is poise not pose one must ask if your belief in yourself

is not dependent on actual achievement then what is it dependent on the answer too often when we are just setting out is nothing ego And this is why we so often see precipitous rises followed by calamitous falls so which type of person will you be like all of us sherman had to balance talent and ambition and intensity especially when he was young his victory in this struggle was largely why he was able to manage the life-altering success that eventually came his way this probably all sounds strange where i socrates and shakespeare wished Us to be

self-contained self-motivated and ruled by principle most of us have been trained to do the opposite our cultural values almost tried to make us dependent on validation entitled and ruled by our emotions for a generation parents and teachers have focused on building up everyone's self-esteem from there the themes of our gurus and public figures have almost exclusively Aimed at inspiring encouraging and assuring us that we can do whatever we set our minds to in reality this makes us weak yes you with all your talent and promise as a boy wonder or girl who's going places we

take it for granted that you have promise it's why you've landed in the prestigious university you now attend why you secured the funding you have for your business why you've been hired or Promoted why whatever opportunity you now have has fallen in your lap as irving berlin put it talent is only the starting point the question is will you be able to make the most of it or will you be your own worst enemy will you snuff out the flame that is just getting going what we see in sherman was a man deeply tied and

connected to reality he was a man who came from nothing and accomplished great things without ever Feeling like he was in some way entitled to the honors he received in fact he regularly and consistently deferred to others and was more than happy to contribute to a winning team even if it meant less credit or fame for himself it's sad to think that generations of young boys learned about pickett's glorious cavalry charge a confederate charge that failed But the model of sherman as a quiet unglamorous realist is forgotten or worse vilified 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 in this phase 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 raw talent skill or Even confidence but humility diligence and self-awareness for your work to have truth in it it must come from truth if you want to be more than a flash in the pan you must be prepared to focus on the long term we will learn that though we think big we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek because we'll be action and education focused and forego 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 with their aggression intensity self-absorption and endless self-promotion our competitors don't realize how they jeopardize their own efforts to say nothing of their sanity we will challenge the myth of the self-assured genius for whom doubt and Introspection is foreign as well as challenge the myth of the pained tortured artist who must sacrifice his health for his work where they are both divorced from reality and divorced from other people we will be deeply connected aware learning from it all facts are better than dreams as

churchill put it although we share with many others a vision for greatness we understand that Our path towards it is very different from theirs following sherman and i socrates we will understand that ego is our enemy on that journey so that when we do achieve our success it will not sink us but make us stronger [Music] talk talk talk those who know do not speak those who speak do not know lao tzu In his famous 1934 campaign for the governorship of california the author and activist upton sinclair took an unusual step before the election he

published a short book titled i governor of california and how i ended poverty in which he outlined in the past tense the brilliant policies he had enacted as governor the office he had not yet won it was an untraditional move from an Untraditional campaign intended to leverage sinclair's best asset as an author he knew he could communicate with the public in a way that others couldn't now sinclair's campaign was always a long shot and hardly in good shape when they published the book but observers at the time noticed immediately the effect it had not on

the voters but on sinclair himself As carrie mcwilliams later wrote about his friend's gubernatorial bid as it went south upton not only realized that he would be defeated but seems somehow to have lost interest in the campaign in that vivid imagination of his he had already acted out the part of i governor of california so why bother to enact it in real life the book was a best-seller the campaign of failure sinclair lost by something like a Quarter of a million votes a margin of more than 10 percentage points he was utterly decimated in what

was probably the first modern election it's clear what happened his talk got out ahead of his campaign and the will to bridge the gap collapsed most politicians don't write books like that but they get ahead of themselves just the same it's a temptation that exists for everyone for talk and hype to replace action The empty text box what's on your mind facebook asks compose a new tweet twitter beckons tumblr linkedin our inbox our iphones the comments section on the bottom of the article you just read blank spaces begging to be filled in with thoughts with

photos with stories with what we are going to do with what things should or could be like what we hope will happen technology asking prodding you Soliciting talk 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 at the beginning of any path we're excited and nervous so we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly there's a weak side to each of us that Like a

trade union isn't exactly malicious but at the end of the day still wants to get as much public credit and attention as it can for doing the least that side we call ego the writer and former gawker blogger emily gould a real-life hannah horvath if there ever was one realized this during her two-year struggle to get a novel published though she had a six-figure book deal She was stuck why she was too busy spending a lot of time on the internet that's why as she said in fact i can't really remember anything else i did

in 2010 i tumbled i tweeted and i scrolled this didn't earn me any money but it felt like work i justified my habits to myself in various ways i was building my brand blogging was a creative act even Curating by reblogging someone else's post was a creative act if you squinted it was the only creative thing i was doing in other words she did what a lot of us do when we're scared or overwhelmed by a project she did everything but focus on it the actual novel she was supposed to be working on stalled completely

for a year it's easier to talk about writing to do the exciting things related to art and Creativity in literature than to commit the act itself she's not the only one someone recently published a book called working on my novel filled with social media posts from writers who are clearly not working on their novels writing like so many creative acts is hard sitting there staring mad at yourself mad at the material because it doesn't seem good enough and you don't seem good enough In fact many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult whether it's coding

a new startup or mastering a craft but talking talking is always easy we seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness that being ignored is tantamount to death and for the ego this is true so we talk talk talk as though our life depends on it in actuality silence is strength particularly early on in any journey as the philosopher and as it happens a Hater of newspapers in their chatter kierkegaard warned mere gossip anticipates real talk and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it and that is what is

so insidious about talk anyone can talk about him or herself even a child knows how to gossip or 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 sherman had a good rule he tried to observe he said never give reasons for what you think or do until you must maybe after a while a better reason will pop into your head the baseball and football great

beau Jackson decided he had two things he wanted to accomplish as an athlete at auburn he would win the heisman trophy and be taken first in the nfl draft do you know who he told nobody but his girlfriend strategic flexibility is not the only benefit of silence while others chatter it is also psychology the poet he see odd had this in mind when he said a man's best treasure is a thrifty tongue talk depletes us Talking and doing fight for the same resources research shows that while goal visualization is important after a certain point our

mind begins to confuse it with actual progress the same goes for verbalization even talking aloud to ourselves while we work through difficult problems has been shown to significantly decrease insight and breakthroughs after spending so much time thinking Explaining and talking about a task we start to feel like we've gotten closer to achieving it or worse when things get tough we feel like we can toss the whole project aside because we've given it our best try although of course we haven't the more difficult the task the more uncertain the outcome the more costly talk will be

and the further we run from actual accountability it saps us of the energy desperately needed to conquer what stephen Pressfield calls the resistance the hurdle that stands between us and creative expression success requires a full 100 of our effort and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it a lot of us succumb to this temptation particularly when we feel overwhelmed or stressed or have a lot of work to do in our building phase resistance will be a constant source of discomfort talking listening to ourselves talk performing For an audience is almost

like therapy i just spent four hours talking about this doesn't that count for something the answer is no doing great work is a struggle it's draining it's demoralizing it's frightening not always but it can feel that way when we're in the middle of it we talk to fill the void and the uncertainty void marlon brando a quiet actor if there ever was one once said is Terrifying to most people it's almost as if we're assaulted by silence or confronted by it particularly if we've allowed our ego to lie to us over the years which is

so damaging for one reason the greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away the question is when faced with a particular challenge whether it is Researching in a new field starting a business producing a film securing a mentor advancing an important cause do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head on think about it a voice of a generation doesn't call itself that in fact when you think about it you realize just how little these voices seem to talk

it's a song it's a speech it's a book the volume of work may be light but what's inside it is concentrated and impactful They work quietly in the corner they turn their inner turmoil into product and eventually to stillness they ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act they don't talk much or mind the feeling that others out there in public and enjoying the limelight are somehow getting the better end of the deal they are not they are too busy working to do anything else and when they do talk it's earned the only relationship

between work and Chatter is that one kills the other let the others slap each other on the back while you're back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement plug that hole that one right in the middle of your face that can drain you of your vital life force watch what happens watch how much better you get [Music] to be or to do In this formative period the soul is unsoiled by warfare with the world it lies like a block of pure uncut parry and marble ready to be fashioned into what orison sweat

martin one of the most influential strategists and practitioners in modern warfare is someone most people have never heard of his name was john boyd he was a truly great fighter pilot but an even better teacher and thinker After flying in korea he became the lead instructor at the elite fighter weapons school at nellis air force base he was known as 42nd boyd meaning that he could defeat any opponent from any position in less than 40 seconds a few years later he was quietly summoned to the pentagon where his real work began in one sense the

fact that the average person might not have heard of john boyd is not unexpected he never published any Books and wrote only one academic paper only a few videos of him survive and he was rarely if ever quoted in the media despite nearly 30 years of impeccable service boyd wasn't promoted above the rank of colonel on the other hand his theories transformed maneuver warfare in almost every branch of the armed forces not just in his own lifetime but even more so after The f-15 and f-16 fighter jets which reinvented modern military aircraft were his pet

projects his primary influence was as an advisor through legendary briefings he taught and instructed nearly every major military thinker in a generation his input on war plans for operation desert shield came in a series of direct meetings with the secretary of defense not through public or official policy input His primary means of affecting change was through the collection of pupils who he mentored protected taught and inspired there are no military bases named after him no battleships he retired assuming that he'd be forgotten and without much more than a small apartment and a pension to his

name he almost certainly had more enemies than friends this unusual path what if it were deliberate what if it Made him more influential how crazy would that be in fact boyd was simply living out the exact lesson he tried to teach each promising young acolyte who came under his wing who he sensed had the potential to be something to be something different the rising stars he taught probably have a lot in common with us the speech boyd gave to a protege in 1973 makes this clear Sensing what he knew to be a critical inflection point

in the life of the young officer boyd called him in for a meeting like many high achievers the soldier was insecure and impressionable he wanted to be promoted and he wanted to do well he was a leaf that could be blown in any direction and boyd knew it so he heard a speech that day that boyd would give again and again until it became a tradition and a rite of passage For a generation of transformative military leaders what he said was tiger one day you will come to a fork in the road and you're going

to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go using his hands to illustrate boyd marked off these two directions if you go that way you can be somebody you will have to make compromises and You will have to turn your back on your friends but you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments then boyd paused to make the alternative clear or he said you can go that way and you can do something something for your country and for your air force

and for yourself if you decide you want to do something You may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors but you won't have to compromise yourself you will be true to your friends and to yourself and your work might make a difference to be somebody or to do something in life there is often a roll call that's when you will have to make a decision And then boyd concluded with words that would guide that young man and many of his peers

for the rest of their lives to be or to do he said which way will you go whatever we seek to do in life reality soon intrudes on our youthful idealism this reality comes in many names and many forms incentives commitments recognition and politics in every case they can quickly redirect us from doing to being from earning to Pretending ego aids in that deception every step of the way it's why boyd wanted young people to see that if we are not careful we can very easily find ourselves corrupted by the very occupation we wish to

serve how do you prevent derailment well often we fall in love with an image of what success looks like in boyd's world the number of stars on your shoulder or the nature of your Appointment or its location could easily be confused as a proxy for real accomplishment for other people it's their job title the business school they went to the number of assistants they have the location of their parking space the grants they earn their access to the ceo the size of their paycheck or the number of fans that they have appearances are deceiving though

having authority is not the same as Being an authority having the right and being right are not the same either being promoted doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good work and it doesn't mean you are worthy of promotion they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive so who are you with which side will you choose This is the roll call that life puts before us boyd had another exercise visiting with or speaking to groups of air force officers he would write on the chalkboard in big letters the

words duty honor and country then he would cross out those words and replace them with three others pride power greed his point was that many of the systems And structures in the military the ones that soldiers navigate in order to get ahead can corrupt the very values they set out to serve there's a quip from the historian will durant that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean that's the sad truth boyd was illustrating how positive virtues turn sour how many times have we seen this played out in our own short lives in sports in

Relationships or projects or people that we care deeply about this is what the ego does it crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn't a lot of people want to change the world and it's good that they do you want to be the best at what you do nobody wants to just be an empty suit but in practical terms which of the three words boyd wrote on that chalkboard are going to get you There which are you practicing now what's fueling you the choice that boyd puts in front of us comes down to

purpose what is your purpose what are you here to do because purpose helps you answer the question to be or to do quite easily if what matters is you your reputation your inclusion your personal ease of life your path is clear tell people what They want to hear seek attention over the quiet but important work say yes to promotions and generally follow the track that talented people take in the industry or field you've chosen pay your dues check the boxes put in your time and leave things essentially as they are chase your fame your salary

your title and enjoy them as they come a man is worked upon by what he works on frederick douglass once said he would know he'd been a slave and he Saw what it did to everyone involved including the slaveholders themselves once a free man he saw that the choices people made about their careers and their lives had the same effect what you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you the egocentric path requires as boy new many compromises if your purpose is something larger than you to

accomplish something to prove something to yourself then suddenly Everything becomes both easier and more difficult easier in the sense that you now know what it is you need to do and what is important to you the other choices wash away as they aren't really choices at all they're distractions it's about the doing not the recognition easier in the sense that you don't need to compromise harder because each opportunity no Matter how gratifying or rewarding must be evaluated along strict guidelines does this help me do what i have set out to do does this allow me

to do what i need to do am i being selfish or selfless in this course it is not who do i want to be in life but what is it that i want to accomplish in life setting aside selfish interest that asks what calling does it serve what principles govern my choices Do i want to be like everyone else or do i want to do something different in other words it's harder because everything can seem like a compromise although it's never too late the earlier you ask yourself these questions the better boyd undeniably changed and

improved his field in a way that almost no other theorists in sun tzu or von klauswitz he was known as genghis john for the way he never let obstacles or opponents stop Him from what he needed to do his choices were not without their costs he was also known as the ghetto colonel because of his frugal lifestyle he died with a drawer full of thousands of dollars and uncashed expense checks from private contractors which he equated with bribes that he never advanced above colonel was not his doing he was repeatedly held back for promotions he

was forgotten by history as a punishment for the work he Did think about this the next time you start to feel entitled the next time you conflate fame in the american dream think about how you might measure up to a great man like that think about this the next time you face that choice do i need this or is it really about ego are you ready to make the right decision or do the prizes still glitter off in the distance to be or to do Life is a constant roll call [Music] become a student let

no man's ghost come back to say my training let me down sign in the new york fire department training academy in april and the early 1980s a single day became one guitarist nightmare and became another's dream and dream job without notice members of the underground metal band metallica Assembled before a planned recording session in a decrepit warehouse in new york and informed their guitarist dave mustain he was being thrown out of the group with few words they handed him a bus ticket back to san francisco that same day a decent young guitarist kirk hammett barely

in his 20s and a member of a band called exodus was given the job thrown right into a new life he Performed his first show with the band a few days later one would assume that this was the moment hamet had been waiting for his whole life indeed it was though only known in small circles at the time metallica was a band that seemed destined to go places their music had already begun to push the boundaries of the genre of thrash metal and colt stardom had already begun Within a few short years it would be

one of the biggest bands in the world eventually selling more than 100 million albums it was around this time that kurt came to what must have been a humbling realization that despite his years of playing and being invited to join metallica he wasn't as good as he'd like to be at his home in san francisco he looked for a guitar teacher in other words Despite joining his dream group and quite literally turning professional kirk insisted that he needed more instruction that he was still a student the teacher he sought had a reputation for being a

teacher's teacher and for working with musical prodigies like steve vibe joe satriani the man hammett chose as his instructor would himself go on to be known as one of the best guitar players Of all time and sell more than 10 million records of his unique virtuosic music teaching outside of a small music shop in berkeley satriani's playing style made him an unusual choice for hammett but that was the point kirk wanted to learn what he didn't know to firm up his understanding of the fundamentals so that he might continue exploring this new genre of music

that he now had a chance to pursue satriani makes it clear Where hammett was lacking it wasn't talent certainly he said the main thing with kirk was he was a really good guitar player when he walked in the door he was already playing lead guitar he was already shredding he had a great right hand he knew most of his chords he just didn't learn how to play an environment where he learned all the names and how to connect everything together that didn't mean that their sessions Were some sort of fun study group in fact satriani

explained that what separated hamet from the others was his willingness to endure the type of instructions that they wouldn't he said he was a good student many of his friends and contemporaries would storm out complaining thinking i was too harsh of a teacher satriani's system was clear that there would be weekly lessons that these lessons must be learned and if they Weren't that hammett was wasting everyone's time and didn't bother to come back so for the next two years kirk did as satriani required returning every week for objective feedback judgment and drilling and technique and

musical theory for the instrument he would soon be playing in front of thousands then tens of thousands than literally hundreds of thousands of people even after that two-year study period he Would bring to satriani licks and rifts he'd been working on with the band and learned to pare down this instinct for more and hone his ability to do more with fewer notes and to focus on feeling those notes and expressing them accordingly each time he improved as a player and as an artist the power of being a student is not just that it is an

extended period of instruction It also places the ego and ambition in someone else's hands there's a sort of ego ceiling imposed one knows that he is not better than the master he apprentices under not even close you defer to them you subsume yourself you cannot fake or them and education can't be hacked there are no shortcuts besides hacking it every single day if you don't they drop you we don't like thinking that someone is Better than us or that we have a lot left to learn we want to be done we want to be ready

we are busy and overburdened for this reason updating your appraisal of your talents in a downward direction is one of the most difficult things to do in life but it is almost always a component of mastery the pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice because it prevents us from getting any better Studious self-assessment is the antidote the result no matter what your musical taste happened to be was that hammett would become one of the great metal guitarists in the world taking thrash metal from an underground movement into a thriving global musical genre not only

that but from those lessons satriani honed his own technique and became much better himself both the student and the teacher would go on to fill stadiums and remake the musical Landscape the mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion frank shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus minus and equal each fighter to become great he said needs to have someone better that they can learn from someone lesser who they can teach and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against the purpose of shamrock's formula is simple to get real and continuous

Feedback about what they know and what they don't know from every angle it purges out the ego that puffs us up the fear that makes us doubt ourselves and any laziness that might make us want to coast as shamrock observed false ideas about yourself destroy you for me i always stay a student that's what martial arts are about and you have to use that humility as a tool you put yourself beneath someone you trust This begins by accepting that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge and then seeking them

out and knocking down the illusions you have about yourself the need for a student mindset doesn't stop with fighting or music a scientist must know the core principles of science and the discoveries occurring on the cutting edge a philosopher must know deeply and also Know how little they know as socrates did a writer must be versed in the canon and read and be challenged by her contemporaries too a historian must know ancient and modern history as well as their specialty professional athletes have teams of coaches and even powerful politicians have advisors and mentors why to

become great and to stay great they Must all know what came before them what is going on now and what comes next they must internalize the fundamentals of their domain and what surrounds them without ossifying or becoming stuck in time they must always be learning we must all become our own teachers tutors and critics think about what hammett could have done and what we might have done in his position were we to suddenly find ourselves a rock star or a soon to be Rock star in our chosen field the temptation is to think i've made

it i've arrived they've tossed the other guy because he's not as good as i am they chose me because i have what it takes had he done that we'd probably never have heard of him or the band there are after all plenty of forgotten metal groups from the 1980s a true student is like a sponge absorbing what goes on around him filtering it latching on to what he can Hold a student is self-critical and self-motivated always trying to improve his understanding so he can move on to the next topic or the next challenge a real

student is also his own teacher and his own critic there is no room for ego there take fighting as an example again where self-awareness is particularly crucial because opponents are constantly looking to match strength against weakness if a fighter is not capable of learning And practicing every day if he is not relentlessly looking for areas of improvement examining his own shortcomings and finding new techniques to borrow from peers and opponents he will be broken down and destroyed it is not all that different for the rest of us are we not fighting for or against something

do you think that you are the only one who hopes to achieve your goal you can't possibly believe you're the only one reaching for that Brass ring it tends to surprise people how humble aspiring great seem to have been what do you mean they weren't aggressive entitled aware of their own greatness or their destiny the reality is that though they were confident the act of being an internal student kept these men and women humble it is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows epictetus says you can't learn if you think you already

Know you will not find the answers if you are too conceited and self-assured to ask the questions you cannot get better if you are convinced you are the best the art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life particularly harsh and critical feedback we not only need to take this harsh feedback but actively solicit it labor to seek out the negative precisely when our friends and family and brain Are telling us we're doing great the ego avoids such feedback at all costs however who wants to remand themselves to remedial training it thinks it

already knows how and who we are that is it thinks we are spectacular perfect genius truly innovative it dislikes reality and prefers its own assessment ego doesn't allow for proper incubation either to become what we ultimately hope To become often takes long periods of obscurity of sitting and wrestling with some topic or paradox humility is what keeps us there concerned that we don't know enough that we must continue to study ego rushes to the end rationalizes that patience is for losers wrongly seeing it as a weakness and assumes that we're good enough to give our

talents a go in the world As we sit down to proof our work as we make our first elevator pitch prepare to open our first shop as we stare out into the dress rehearsal audience ego is the enemy giving us wicked feedback disconnected from reality it's defensive precisely when we cannot afford to be defensive it blocks us from improving by telling us that we don't need to improve then we wonder why we don't get the results we want why others are better and why their success is more lasting Today books are cheaper than ever courses

are free access to teachers is no longer a barrier technology has done away with that there is no excuse for not getting your education and because the information we have before us is so vast there is no excuse for ever ending that process either our teachers in life are not only those that we pay as hamet paid satriani nor are they necessarily part of some training dojo like it is for shamrock Many of the best teachers are free they volunteer because like you they were once young and had the same goals as you many don't

even know that they are teaching they are simply exemplars or even historical figures whose lessons survive in books and essays but ego makes us so hard-headed and hostile to feedback that it drives them away or puts them beyond our reach it's why the old proverb says when the student is ready the teacher appears [Music] don't be passionate you seem to want that anime which spurs and excites most young men to please to shine to excel without that desire and the pains necessary to be considerable depend upon it you never can be so lord chesterfield passion

it's all about passion find your passion live passionately inspire the world with your passion People go to burning man to find passion to be around passion to rekindle their passion same goes for ted and the now enormous south by southwest and a thousand other events retreats and summits all fueled by what they claim to be life's most important force here's what those same people haven't told you your passion may be the very thing holding you back from power or influence or accomplishments because Just as often we fail with no because of passion early on in

her ascendant political career a visitor once spoke of eleanor roosevelt's passionate interest in a piece of social legislation the person had meant it as a compliment but eleanor's response is illustrative yes she did support the cause she said but i hardly think the word passionate applies to me as a genteel accomplished patient woman Born while the embers of the quiet victorian virtues were still warm roosevelt was above passion she had purpose she had direction she wasn't driven by passion but by reason george w bush dick cheney and donald rumsfeld on the other hand were passionate

about iraq christopher mccandless was bursting with passion as he headed into the wild so was robert falcon scott as he set out to explore the arctic bitten as he was With the pole mania as were many climbers of the tragic 1996 everest climb momentarily struck with what psychologists now call goal idiocy the inventor and the investors of the segway believe that they had a world-changing innovation on their hands and put everything into evangelizing it that all these talented smart individuals were fervent believers in what they sought to do was without dispute it's also clear that

they were Also unprepared and incapable of grasping the objections and real concerns of everyone else around them the same is true for countless entrepreneurs authors chefs business owners politicians and designers that you've never heard of and never will hear of because they sunk their own ships before they'd hardly left the harbor like every other dilettante they had passion and lacked something else To be clear i'm not talking about caring i'm talking about passion of a different sort unbridled enthusiasm our willingness to pounce on what's in front of us with the full measure of our zeal

the bundle of energy that our teachers and gurus have assured us is our most important asset it is that burning unquenchable desire to start or to achieve some vague ambitious and distant goal this seemingly innocuous motivation is So far from the right track it hurts remember zealot is just a nice way to say crazy person a young basketball player named louis alcindor jr who won three national championships with john wooden at ucla used one word to describe the style of his famous coach dispassionate as in not passionate wooden wasn't about rah-rah speeches or inspiration He

saw those extra emotions as a burden instead his philosophy was about being in control and doing her job and never being quote passion slave the player who learned that lesson from wooden would later change his name to one you remember kareem abdul-jabbar no one would describe eleanor roosevelt or john wooden or his notoriously quiet player kareem as apathetic they wouldn't have said that they were frenetic or zealous either Roosevelt one of the most powerful and influential female activists in history and certainly america's most important first lady was known primarily for her grace her poise and

her sense of direction wooden won 10 titles in 12 years including seven in a row because he developed a system for winning and worked with his players to follow it neither of them were driven by excitement nor were they bodies in Constant motion instead it took them years to become the person they became known as it was a process of accumulation in our endeavors we will face complex problems often in situations we've never faced before opportunities are not usually deep virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into but instead are obscured and dusted

over Blocked by various forms of resistance what is really called for in these circumstances is clarity deliberateness and methodological determination but too often we proceed like this a flash of inspiration i want to do the best and biggest blank ever be the youngest blank the only one to ever blank the firstest with the mostest the advice okay well here's what you need to do step by step to accomplish it The reality we hear what we want to hear we do what we feel like doing and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard we accomplish

very little or worse find ourselves in a mess we never anticipated because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people we forget that failure shared the same trait we don't conceive of the consequences until we look at their trajectory with The segway the inventor and investors wrongly assumed a demand much greater than ever existed with the run-up to the war in iraq its proponents ignored objections and negative feedback because they conflicted with what they so deeply needed to believe the tragic end to the into the wild story is the result of youthful

naivete and a lack of preparation with robert falcon scott it was overconfidence in zeal without consideration of the Possible dangers we imagine napoleon was brimming with passion as he contemplated the invasion of russia and only finally became free of it as he limped home with a fraction of the men he'd so confidently left with in many more examples we see the same mistakes over investing under investing acting before someone is really ready breaking things that require delicacy not so much malice as the drunkenness of passion Passion typically masks a weakness its breathlessness and impetuousness and

franticness are poor substitutes for discipline for mastery for strength and purpose and perseverance you need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good its effects are comical and then monstrous passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to Become and what their success will be like they might even be able to tell you specifically when they intend to achieve it and describe to you legitimate and sincere worries they have about the burdens of such accomplishments

they can tell you all the things they're going to do or have even begun but they cannot show you their progress because there rarely is any how can someone be busy and not accomplish something well that's the Passion paradox if the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results then passion is a form of mental retardation deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions the waste is often appalling in retrospect the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt dogs god bless

them are passionate as Numerous squirrels birds boxes blankets and toys can tell you they do not accomplish most of what they set out to do a dog has an advantage in all this a graciously short-term memory that keeps obey the creeping sense of futility and impotence reality for us humans on the other hand has no reason to be sensitive to the illusions we operate under eventually it will intrude What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism purpose you could say is like passion with boundaries realism is detachment and perspective when we are young

or when our cause is young we feel so intensely passion like our hormones run strongest in youth that it seems wrong to take it slow this is just our impatience this is our inability to see that burning ourselves out or blowing ourselves up isn't going To hurry the journey along passion is about i'm so passionate about blank purpose is two and four i must do blank i was put here to accomplish blank i'm willing to endure blank for the sake of this actually purpose de-emphasizes the i purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed

to pleasuring yourself more than purpose we also need realism Where do we start where do we go first what do we do right now how are we sure that what we are doing is moving us forward what are we benchmarking ourselves against great passions are maladies without hope as gertier once said which is why a deliberate purposeful person operates on a different level beyond the sway or the sickness they hire professionals and use them they ask Questions they ask what could go wrong they ask for examples they plan for contingencies then they are off to

the races usually they get started with small steps complete them and look for feedback on how the next set can be better they lock in gains and then they get better as they go often leveraging those gains to grow exponentially rather than arithmetically is an iterative approach less exciting Than manifestos epiphanies flying across the country to surprise someone or sending 4 000 words stream of consciousness emails in the middle of the night of course is it less glamorous and bold than going all in and maxing out your credit cards because you believe in yourself absolutely

same goes for the spreadsheets the meetings the trips the phone calls software tools and internal systems and Every how-to article ever written about them in the routines of famous people passion is form over function purpose is function function function the critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration not passion not naivete it would be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless leave passion for The amateurs make it about what you feel you must do and say not

what you care about and wish to be remember taliran's epigram for diplomats sir tu patro desel above all not too much zeal then you will do great things then you will stop being your old good intentioned but ineffective self [Music] follow the canvas strategy Great men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to command lord mayon in the roman system of art and science there existed a concept for which we have only a partial analog successful businessmen politicians or rich playboys would subsidize a number of writers thinkers artists

and performers more than just being paid to produce works of art these artists performed a Number of tasks in exchange for protection food and gifts one of the roles was that of an anthem bulo literally meaning one who clears the path and anthem bulo proceeded in front of his patron anywhere they traveled in rome making way communicating messages and generally making the patrons life easier the famous epigramist marshall fulfilled this role for many years serving for a Time under the patron mela a wealthy businessman and brother of the stoic philosopher and political advisor seneca born

without a rich family marshall also served under another businessman named petulius as a young writer he spent most of his day traveling from the home of one rich patron to another providing services paying his respects and receiving small token payments and favors in return here's the problem like most of us with Our internships and entry-level positions or later on publishers or bosses or clients marshall absolutely hated every minute of it he seemed to believe that this system somehow made him a slave aspiring to live like some country squire like the patrons he serviced marshall wanted

money in a state that was all his own there he dreamed he could finally Produce his works in peace and independence as a result his writing often drags with a hatred and bitterness about rome's upper crust from which he believed he was cruelly shunned to decide for all his impotent rage what marshall couldn't see was that it was his unique position as an outsider to society that gave him such a fascinating insight into roman culture that it survives to this day Instead of being pained by such a system what if he'd been able to come

to terms with it what if gasp he could have appreciated the opportunities it offered nope it seemed to eat him up inside instead it's a common attitude that transcends generations and societies the angry underappreciated genius is forced to do stuff she doesn't like for people she doesn't respect as she makes her way in The world how dare they force me to grovel like this the injustice the waste we see it in recent lawsuits in which interns sue their employers for pay we see it in kids more willing to live at home with their parents than

submit to something they're over qualified for we see it in an inability to meet anyone else on their terms and unwillingness to take a step back in order to potentially take several steps forward I will not let them get one over on me i'd rather we both have nothing instead it's worth taking a look at the supposed indignities of serving someone else because in reality not only is the apprentice model responsible for some of the greatest art in the history of the world everyone from michelangelo to leonardo da vinci to benjamin franklin has been forced

to navigate such a system but if you're going to be the big deal You think you're going to be isn't this a rather trivial imposition when someone first gets a job or joins a new organization he's often given this advice make other people look good and you will do well keep your head down they say and serve your boss naturally this is not what the kid who has chosen over all the other kids for the position wants to hear it's not what a harvard grad expects After all they got that degree precisely to avoid this

supposed indignity let's flip it around so it doesn't seem so demeaning it's not about kissing ass it's not about making someone look good it's about providing the support so that others can be good the better wording for this advice is then find canvases for other people to paint on be an antembuulo Clear the path for people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself when you're just starting out we can be sure of a few fundamental realities one you're not nearly as good or as important as you think you are two you

have an attitude that needs to be readjusted three most of what you think you know or most of what you learn in books or in school is out of date or wrong There's one fabulous way to work all of that out of your system attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously it's certainly more glamorous to pursue your own glory though hardly as effective obeisance is the way forward that's the other side of this attitude it reduces your ego at a critical time

In your career letting you absorb everything you can without the obstructions that block others vision and progress no one is endorsing sycophancy instead it's about seeing what goes on from the inside and looking for opportunities for someone other than yourself remember that anthem bulow means clearing the path finding the direction someone already intended to head and helping them pack Freeing them up to focus on their strengths in fact making things better rather than simply looking as if you are many people know of benjamin franklin's famous letters written under names like silence dogwood what a clever

young prodigy they think and miss the most impressive part entirely franklin wrote those letters submitted them by sliding them under the print shop door and received absolutely no credit for them Until much later in his life in fact it was his brother the owner who profited from their immense popularity regularly running them on the front page of his newspaper franklin was playing the long game though learning how public opinion worked generating awareness of what he believed in crafting his style and tone and wit it's a strategy he used time and again over in his career

once even publishing in his competitor's paper in order to undermine a third competitor For franklin saw the constant benefit in making other people look good and letting them take credit for your ideas bill belichick the four-time super bowl winning head coach of the new england patriots made his way up the ranks of the nfl by loving and mastering the one part of the job the coaches disliked at the time analyzing film his first job in professional football for the baltimore colts was one he volunteered to take Without pay and his insights which provided ammunition and

critical strategies for the game were attributed exclusively to the more senior coaches he thrived on what was considered grunt work asked for it and strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for he was like a sponge taking it all in listening to everything one coach said you gave him an assignment and he disappeared into a room and you didn't See him again until it was done and then he wanted to do more said another as you can guess belichick started getting paid very soon before that as a young

high school player he was so knowledgeable at the game that he functioned as sort of an assistant coach even while playing the game belichick's father himself an assistant football coach for navy taught him a critical lesson in football politics That if he wanted to give his coach feedback or question and decision he needed to do it in private and self-effacingly so as not to offend his superior he learned how to be a rising star without threatening or alienating anyone in other words he'd master the canvas strategy you can see how easily entitlement and a sense

of superiority the trappings of ego would have made the accomplishments Of either of these men impossible franklin never would have been published if he'd prioritize credit over creative expression indeed when his brother found out he literally beat him out of jealousy and anger belichick would have pissed off his coach and then probably been benched if he'd one-upped him in public he certainly wouldn't have taken his first job for free and he wouldn't have Sat through thousands of hours of film if he cared about status greatness comes from humble beginnings it comes from grunt work it

means that you're the least important person in the room and to change that with results there is an old saying say little do much what we really have to do is update and apply a version of that to our early approach Be lesser do more imagine if for every person you met you thought of some way to help them something you could do for them and you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you the cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound you would learn a great deal

by solving diverse problems you develop a reputation for being indispensable you'd have countless new relationships you'd have an enormous Bank of favors to call upon down the road that's what the canvas strategy is about helping yourself by helping others making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer term payoff whereas everyone else wants to get credit and be respected you could forget credit you can forget it so hard that you're glad when others get it instead of you that was your aim After all let others take their credit on credit while you

defer and earn interest on the principle the strategy part of it is the hardest it's easy to be bitter like marshall to hate even the thought of subservience to despise those who have more means more experience more status than you to tell yourself that every second not spent doing your work or working on yourself is a waste of your gift to Insist i will not be demeaned like this once we fight this emotional and egotistical impulse the canvas strategy is easy the iterations are endless maybe it's coming up with ideas to hand over to your

boss find people thinkers up and comers to introduce them to each other cross wires to create new sparks find what nobody else wants to do and do it find inefficiency and waste and redundancies Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away in other words discover opportunities to promote their creativity find outlets and people for collaboration and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus it's a rewarding and infinitely scalable power strategy consider each one an investment in relationships and in your Own development

the canvas strategy is there for you at any time there is no expiration date on it either it's one of the few that age does not limit on either side young or old you can start at any time before you have a job before you're hired and while you're doing something else or if you're starting something new or find yourself inside an organization without strong allies or support you may even find that there's no reason To ever stop doing it even once you've graduated to heading your own projects let it become natural and permanent let

others apply it to you while you're too busy applying it to those above you because if you pick up this mantle once you'll see what most people's egos prevent them from appreciating the person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction just as the canvas shapes the painting [Music] Restrain yourself i have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results or those who keep under the body are those who never grow excited or lose self-control but are always calm self-possessed patient and polite booker t washington people who knew jackie robinson as a young man

probably wouldn't have predicted that they'd one day see him become the first black player in major League baseball not that he wasn't talented or that the idea of eventually integrating white baseball was inconceivable it's that he wasn't exactly known for his restraint and poise as a teenager robinson ran with a small gang of friends who regularly found themselves in trouble with local police he challenged a fellow student to a fight at a junior college picnic for using a slur in a basketball game he Surreptitiously struck a hard-fouling white opponent with the ball so forcefully that

the kid bled everywhere he was arrested more than once for arguing with and challenging police who he felt had treated him unfairly before he started at ucla he spent the night in jail and had a gun drawn on him by an officer for nearly fighting a white man who'd insulted his friends and in addition to rumors of inciting protests against racism jackie robinson Effectively ended his career as a military officer at camp hood in 1944 when a bus driver attempted to force him to sit in the back in spite of laws that forbade segregation on

base buses by arguing and cursing at the driver and then directly challenging his commanding officer after the fracas jackie set in motion a series of events that eventually led to his court-martial despite being acquitted he was discharged shortly afterward It's not just understandable and human that he did this it was probably the right thing to do why should he let anyone else treat him that way no one should have to stand for that except sometimes they do are there not goals so important that we'd put up with anything to achieve them when branch ricky the

manager and owner of the brooklyn dodgers scouted jackie To potentially become the first black player in baseball he had one question do you have the guts i'm looking ricky told him for a ballplayer with the guts not to fight back in fact in their famous meeting ricky play-acted the abuse robinson was likely to experience if he accepted ricky's challenge a hotel clerk refusing him a room a rude waiter in a restaurant an opponent Shouting slurs this robinson assured him he was ready to handle there were plenty of players rick could have gone with he needed

one who wouldn't let his ego block him from seeing the bigger picture as he started in baseball's farm system then in the pros robinson faced more than just slights from service staff or reticent players there was an aggressive coordinated Campaign to libel boo provoke freeze out attack maim or even kill in his career he was hit by more than 72 pitches nearly had his achilles tendon taken out by players who aimed their spikes at him and that says nothing of the calls he was cheated out of and the breaks of the game that didn't go

his way yet jackie robinson held to this unwritten pact with ricky never giving In to explosive anger however deserved in fact in nine years in the league he never hit another player with his fist athletes seemed spoiled and hot-headed to us today but we have no concept of what the leagues were like then in 1956 ted williams one of the most revered and respected players in the history of the game was once caught spitting at his fans as a white player he could not only get Away with this he later told reporters i'm not a

bit sorry for what i did i was right and i'd spit again at the same people who booed me today nobody's gonna stop me from spitting for a black player this behavior would have been not only unthinkable but short-sighted beyond comprehension robinson had no such freedom it would have ended not only his career but set back his grand experiment for a generation Jackie's path called for him to put aside his ego and in some respects his basic sense of fairness and rights as a human being early in his career the manager of the philadelphia phillies

ben chapman was particularly brutal in his taunting during the game they're waiting for you in the jungles black boy healed over and over we don't want you here he said not only did jackie not respond despite As he later wrote wanting to grab one of those white sons of and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist a month later he agreed to take a friendly photo with chapman to help save the man's job the thought of touching posing was such an even 60 years removed almost turns the stomach robinson called it one of

the most difficult things he ever did but he was willing to because it was part of a Larger plan he understood that certain forces were trying to bait him to ruin him knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order to do it he shouldn't have had to but he did our own path whatever we aspire to will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we're willing to deal with our humiliations will pale in comparison to robinsons but it will still

be hard it Will still be tough to keep our self-control the fighter boss rootin sometimes writes the letter r on both his hands before fights for the word rusta which means relax in dutch getting angry getting emotional losing restraint is a recipe for failure in the ring you cannot as john steinbeck once wrote to his editor lose temper as a refuge from despair your egos will do you no favors here Whether you're struggling with a publisher with critics with enemies or capricious boss it doesn't matter that they don't understand or that you know better it's

too early for that it's too soon oh you went to college that doesn't mean the world is yours by right but it was the ivy league well people are still going to treat you poorly and they'll still yell at you you have a million dollars or a wall full of awards that Doesn't mean anything in the new field you're trying to tackle it doesn't matter how talented you are how great your connections are or how much money you have when you want to do something something big and important and meaningful you will be subjected to

treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage count on it in this scenario ego is the exact opposite of what is needed who can Afford to be jerked around by impulses or believe that you're god's gift to humanity are too important to put up with anything you don't like those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn't degrade you when others treat you poorly it degrades them up ahead there will be slights dismissals little use one-sided compromises you'll get yelled at you'll have to work behind the scenes to Salvage what should have been easy all

of this will make you angry this will make you want to fight back this will make you want to say i am better than this i deserve more of course you'll want to throw it in other people's faces worse you'll want to get in other people's faces people who don't deserve the respect recognition or rewards they are getting in fact these people will often get Perks instead of you when someone doesn't reckon you with the seriousness that you'd like the impulse is to correct them as we all wish to say do you know who i

am you want to remind them of what they've forgotten your ego screams for you to indulge it instead you must do nothing take it eat it until you're sick endure it quietly brush it off and work harder play the game ignore the noise For the love of god do not let it distract you restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one you will often be tempted you will probably even be overcome no one is perfect with it but try we must is a timeless fact of life that the up and coming must endure the

abuses of the entrenched robinson was 28 when he started playing with the dodgers and he'd already paid Plenty of dues in life as both a black man and a soldier still he was forced to do it again it's a sad fact of life that new talents are regularly missed and even when recognized often unappreciated the reasons always vary but it's part of the journey but you're not able to change the system until after you've made it in the meantime you have to find some way to make it suit your purposes Even if those purposes are

just extra time to develop properly to learn from others on their dime to build your base and establish yourself as robinson succeeded after he proved himself as the rookie of the year and as an mvp and as his spot on the dodgers was certain he began to more clearly assert himself and his boundaries as a player and as a man having carved out his space he felt that he could argue with empires he could Throw a shoulder if he needed to make a player back off or to send a message no matter how confident or

famous robinson became he never spent on fans he never did anything that undermined his legacy a class act from opening day until the end jackie robinson was not without passion he had a temper and frustrations like all of us do but he learned early that the tightrope He walked would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego honestly not many paths do [Music] get out of your own head 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

alan watts it is holden caulfield the self-absorbed Boy walking the streets of manhattan struggling to adjust to the world it is a young arturo bandini in los angeles alienating every person he meets as he tries to become a famous writer is the blue blood binks bowling in 1950s uptown new orleans trying to escape the everydayness of life these fictional characters all had something in common they couldn't get out of their own heads and jd salinger's the catcher in the rye Holden can't stay in school is petrified of growing up and wants desperately to get away

from it all and john fonte's ask the dust part of a series known as the bandini quartet this young writer doesn't experience the life he is living he sees it all across a page in a typewriter wondering if nearly every second of his life is a poem a play a story a news article with him as its main character and walker percy's the moviegoer his Protagonist binks is addicted to watching movies preferring an idealized version of life on the screen to his own uncomfortable enway it's always dangerous to psychoanalyze a writer based on his work

but these are famously autobiographical novels when we look at the writers lives the facts are clear jd salinger really did suffer from a sort of self-obsession and immaturity that made the world too much for him to Bear driving him from human contact and paralyzing his genius john fonte struggled to reconcile his enormous ego and insecurity with relative obscurity for most of his career eventually abandoning his novels for the golf course and hollywood bars only near death blind with diabetes was he finally able to get serious again the moviegoer walker percy's first book came only after

he'd conquered his Almost teenage indolence and existential crisis which lasted alarmingly into his 40s how much better could these writers have been had they managed to get through these troubles earlier how much easier would their lives have been it's an urgent question they pushed on to their readers with their cautionary characters because sadly this trait The inability to get out of one's head is not restricted to fiction 2 400 years ago plato spoke of the type of people who are guilty of feasting on their own thoughts it was apparently common enough even then to find

people who instead of finding out how something they desire might actually come about they pass that over so as to avoid tiring deliberations about what's possible They assume that what they desire is available and proceed to arrange the rest taking pleasure in thinking through everything they'll do when they have what they want thereby making their lazy souls even lazier feel people preferring to live in passionate fiction than an actual reality the civil war general george mcclellan is the perfect example of this archetype he was chosen to command the Union forces because he checked all of

the boxes of what a great general should be west point grad proven in battle a student of history of regal baron loved by his men why did he turn out to be quite possibly the worst union general even in a crowded field of incompetent and self-absorbed leaders because he could never get out of his own head he was in love with his vision Of himself as the head of a grand army he could prepare an army for battle like a professional but when it came to lead one into battle when rubber needed to meet the

road troubles arose he became laughably convinced that the enemy was growing larger and larger it wasn't at one point he actually had a three times advantage but he was convinced of constant threats and intrigues from his political allies There weren't any he was convinced that the only way to win the war was with the perfect plan and a single decisive campaign he was wrong he was so convinced of all of it that he froze and basically did nothing for months at a time mcclellan was constantly thinking about himself and how wonderful he was doing congratulating

himself for victories not yet won and more often for horrible defeats he had saved the cause from When anyone including his superiors questioned this comforting fiction he reacted like a petulant delusional vainglorious and selfish ass by itself that's insufferable but it meant another thing his personality made it almost impossible to do what he needed to do most win battles a historian who fought under mcclellan and antietam later summed it up his egotism is simply colossal there is no Other word for it we tend to think that ego equals confidence which is what we need to

be in charge in fact it can have the opposite effect in mcclellan's case it deprived him of the ability to lead it robbed him of the ability to think that he even needed to act and repeated opportunities he missed would have been laughable weren't not for the thousands and thousands of lives They cost the situation was made worse by the fact that two pious quiet southerners lee and stonewall jackson with a penchant for taking the initiative were able to embarrass him with inferior numbers and inferior resources which is what happens when leaders get stuck in

their own head can happen to us too the novelist anne lamott describes that eco story well if you're not careful she warns young Writers station kfkd k will play in your head 24 hours a day non-stop in stereo as she put it out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come an endless stream of self-aggrandizement the recitation of one's specialness of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing the lists of all the things

one doesn't do well of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime the doubt the assertion that everything one touches turns to that one doesn't do relationships well that one is in every way a fraud and capable of selfless love that one had no talent or insight and on and on and on anyone particularly the ambitious can Fall prey to this narration good and bad it is natural for any young ambitious person or simply someone whose ambition is young to get excited and swept up by their thoughts and feelings especially in

a world that tells us to keep and promote a personal brand we're required to tell stories in order to sell our work and our talents and after enough time we forget where the line is that separates our fictions from reality ultimately this disability will paralyze Us or it will become a wall between us and the information we need to do our jobs which is largely why mcclellan continually fell for flawed intelligence reports he ought to have known were wrong the idea that his task was relatively straightforward that he just needed to get started was almost

too easy and too obvious to someone who had thought so much about it all he's not that different from the rest of Us we are all full of anxieties doubts impotence pain and sometimes a little tinge of crazy we're like teenagers in this regard as the psychologist david elkind has famously researched adolescence is marked by a phenomenon known as the imaginary audience consider a 13 year old so embarrassed that he misses a week of class positive that the entire school is thinking and Murmuring about some tiny incident that in truth hardly anyone noticed or a

teenage girl who spends three hours in front of the mirror each morning as if she's about to go on stage they do this because they are convinced that their every move is being watched with wrapped attention by the rest of the world even as adults were susceptible to this fantasy during a harmless walk down the street We plug in some headphones and all of a sudden there's a soundtrack we flip up our jacket collar and consider briefly how cool we must look we replay that successful meeting that we're heading toward in our head the crowds

part as we pass were fearless warriors on our way to the top it's the opening credits montage it's a scene in a novel it feels good so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness And so we stay stuck inside our own heads instead of participating in the world around us that's ego baby what successful people do is curb such flights of fancy they ignore the temptations that might make them feel important or skew their perspective general george c marshall essentially the opposite of mcclellan even though they briefly held the same position

a few generations apart Refused to keep a diary during world war ii despite the requests of historians and friends he worried that it would turn his quiet reflective time into a sort of performance and self-deception that he might second-guess difficult decisions out of concern for his reputation and future readers and warp his thinking based on how they would look all of us are susceptible to these Obsessions of the mind whether we run a technology startup or we are working our way up the ranks of the corporate hierarchy or fallen madly in love the more creative

we are the easier it is to lose the thread that guides us our imagination in many senses an asset is dangerous when it runs wild we have to reign our perceptions in otherwise lost in the excitement how can we accurately predict the future or interpret events How can we stay hungry and aware how can we appreciate the present moment how can we be creative within the realm of practicality living clearly and presently takes courage don't live in the haze of the abstract live with the tangible and real even if especially if it's uncomfortable be part

of what's going on around you feast on it adjust for it there's no one to perform for There's just work to be done and lessons to be learned and all that is around us [Music] the danger of early pride a proud man is always looking down on things and people and of course as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you c s lewis at 18 a rather triumphant benjamin franklin returned to visit boston the city he'd run away from seven months before Full of pride and self-satisfaction he had

a new suit a watch and a pocketful of coins that he spread out and showed to everyone he ran into including his older brother whom he particularly hoped to impress all posturing by a boy who was not much more than an employee in a print shop in philadelphia in meeting with cotton mather one of the town's most respected figures in a former adversary franklin quickly Illustrated just how ridiculously inflated his young ego had become chatting with mather as they walked down a hallway mather suddenly admonished him stoop stoop too caught up in his performance franklin

walked right into a low ceiling beam mather's response was perfect let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high he said riley stoop young man stoop as you go through This world and you will miss many hard thumps christians believe that pride is a sin because it is a lie it convinces people that they are better than they are that they are better than god made them pride leads to arrogance and then away from humility and connection with their fellow man you don't have to be christian to see the

wisdom in this you need only to care about your career To understand that pride even in real accomplishments is a distraction and a deluder whom the gods wish to destroy cyril connolly famously said they first call promising twenty five hundred years before that the poet teognus wrote his friend the first thing chronos which gods bestow on one they would annihilate is pride yet we pick up this mantle on purpose 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 told by pride most dangerously this tends to happen either early in life or in the process when we're flushed with beginners conceit only later do you realize that a bump on the head was the least of what was risked Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one it smiles at our cleverness and genius as though what we've exhibited was merely a hint of what ought to come from the start it drives a wedge between the possessor and reality subtly and not so subtly changing her perceptions of

what something is and what something isn't it is these strong opinions only loosely secured by fact or accomplishment that Send us careening towards delusion or worse pride and ego say i am an entrepreneur because i struck out on my own i am going to win because i'm currently in the lead i am a writer because i publish something i am rich because i made some money i am special because i was chosen i am important because i think i should be at one time or another we all indulge this sort of gratifying label-making Yet every

culture seems to produce words of caution against it don't count your chickens before they hatch don't cook the sauce before catching the fish the way to cook a rabbit is to first catch a rabbit game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned punching above your weight is how you get injured pride goeth before the fall let's call that attitude what it is fraud If you're doing the work and putting in the time you won't need to cheat you won't need to overcompensate pride is a masterful encroacher john d rockefeller as a young man practiced a nightly

conversation with himself because you have got a start he'd say aloud or write in his diary you think you're quite a merchant look out or you will lose your head go steady early in his career he'd had some Success he'd gotten a good job he was saving money he had a few investments considering his father had been a drunken swindler this was no small feat rockefeller was on the right track understandably a sort of self-satisfaction with his accomplishments and trajectory he was heading in began to seep in in a moment of frustration he once shouted

at a bank officer who refused to Lend him money someday he said i'll be the richest man in the world let's count rockefeller as maybe the only man in the world to say that and then go on to become the richest man in the world but for every one of him there are a dozen more delusional who said the exact same thing and genuinely believed it and then came nowhere close in part because their pride worked Against them and made other people hate them too all this was why rockefeller knew he needed to reign himself

in and to privately manage his ego night after night he asked himself are you going to be a fool are you going to let this money puff you up however small it was keep your eyes open he admonished himself don't lose your balance as he later reflected i had a horror of The danger of arrogance what a pitiful thing it is when a man lets a little temporary success spoil him warp his judgment and he forgets what he is it creates a sort of myopic onanistic obsession that warps perspective reality truth and the world around

us the childlike little prince in saint xupery's famous story makes the same observation lamenting that vain men never hear anything but praise That's exactly why we can't afford to have it as our translator receiving feedback maintaining hunger and charting a proper course in life pride dulls these senses or in other cases it tunes up other negative parts of ourselves sensitivity a persecution complex the ability to make everything about us as the famous conqueror and warrior genghis khan groomed his sons and generals to succeed him later in life he Repeatedly warned them if you can't swallow

your pride you can't lead he told them that pride would be harder to subdue than a wild lion he liked the analogy of a mountain he would say even the tallest mountains have animals that when they stand on it are higher than the mountain we tend to be on guard against negativity against the people who are discouraging us from pursuing our callings or doubting the visions we have For ourselves this is certainly an obstacle to beware of though dealing with it is rather simple what we cultivate less is how to protect ourselves against the validation

and gratification that will quickly come our way if we show promise what we don't protect ourselves against are people and things that make us feel good or rather too good we must prepare for pride and kill it early or it will kill what we aspire to We must be on guard against that wild self-confidence and self-obsession as flannery o'connor once said the first product of self-knowledge is humility this is how we fight the ego by really knowing ourselves the question to ask when you feel pride is this what am i missing right now that a

more humble person might see what am i avoiding or running from with my bluster franticness or embellishments It is far better to ask and answer these questions now with the stakes still low than it will be later it's worth saying just because you're quiet doesn't mean that you are without pride privately thinking that you are better than others is still pride and it's still dangerous that on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin montane had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling it's a quote from the playwright menander and it ends With you

who think yourself to be someone we are still striving and it is the strivers who should be our peers not the proud and accomplished without this understanding pride takes our self-conception and puts it at odds with the reality of our station which is that we still have so far to go and that there is still so much to be done after hitting his head and hearing from mather franklin spent a lifetime Battling against his pride because he wanted to do much and understood that pride would make it harder which is why despite what would be

dizzying accomplishments in any era wealth fame power franklin never had to experience most of what he called misfortunes brought upon by people by carrying their heads too high at the end it isn't about deferring your pride because you don't deserve it yet it isn't don't boast about what hasn't Happened yet it's more directly don't boast there's nothing in it for you [Music] work work work the best plan is only good intentions unless it degenerates into work peter drucker the painter edward degas though best known for his beautiful impressionistic paintings of dancers toyed briefly with poetry

as a brilliant and creative mind the potential for great poems was all There he could see beauty he could find inspiration yet there are no great degap poems there is one famous conversation that might explain why the poet stefan mahlerme about his trouble writing i can't manage to say what i want and yet i'm full of ideas he said mahler may's response cuts to the bone it's not with ideas my dear daga that one makes verse it's with words or rather with work The distinction between a professional and a dilettante occurs right there when you

accept that having an idea is not enough that you must work until you are able to recreate your experience effectively in words on the page as the philosopher and writer paul valerie explained in 1938 a poet's function is not to experience the poetic state that is a private affair his function is to create it in others That is his job is to produce work to be both a craftsman and an artist to cultivate a product of labor in industry instead of just a product of the mind it is here where abstraction meets the road and

the real where we trade thinking and talking for working you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do with how henry ford put it the sculptor nina holton hit the same note in a landmark study on creativity That germ of an idea she said does not make a sculpture which stands up it just sits there so the next stage of course is the hard work the investor and serial entrepreneur ben horowitz put it more bluntly he said the hard thing isn't setting a big hairy audacious goal the hard thing is laying people off

when you miss the big goal 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 sure you get it you know that all things require work and that that work might be quite difficult but do you really understand do you have any idea just how much work there is going to be not work until you get your big break not work until you make a name for yourself but work work work forever and ever is it ten

thousand hours or twenty Thousand hours to mastery the answer is that it doesn't matter there is no end zone to think of a number is to live in a conditional future we're simply talking about a lot of hours that to get where we want to go isn't about brilliance but continual effort while that's not a terribly sexy idea it should be an encouraging one because it means that it's all within reach for all of us provided that we have the Constitution and the humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work by

this point you probably understand why the ego would bristle at this idea within reach it complains that means you're saying i don't have it now exactly right you don't no one does our ego wants the ideas and the fact that we aspire to do something about them to be enough once the hours we spend planning and attending conferences Or chatting with impressed friends to count towards the tally that success seems to require it wants to be paid well for its time it wants to do the fun stuff the stuff that gets attention credit or glory

that's the reality where we decide to put our energy decides what we'll ultimately accomplish as a young man bill clinton began a collection of note cards upon which he would write names and phone numbers of friends and Acquaintances who might be of service when he eventually entered politics each night before he ever had a reason to he would flip through the box make phone calls write letters or add notations about their interactions over the years this collection grew to ten thousand cards before it was eventually digitized it's what put him in the oval office and

continues to return dividends or think of darwin working for decades On his theory of evolution refraining from publishing it because it wasn't yet perfect hardly anyone knew what he was working on no one said hey charles it's okay that you're taking so long because what you're working on is just so important they didn't know he couldn't have known he just knew that it wasn't done yet and that it could be better and that that was enough to keep him going so do we sit down alone and struggle With our work work that may or may

not go anywhere that may be discouraging or painful do we love work making a living to do work not the other way around do we love practice the way great athletes do or do we chase short-term attention and validation whether that's indulging in the endless search for ideas or simply the distraction of talk and chatter Fock see focus do it if you're going to do it there's another apt latin expression motrium superbot opus the workmanship was better than the material the material we've been given genetically emotionally and financially that's where we begin we don't control

that we do control what we make of that material and whether we squander it as a young basketball player bill bradley would remind himself when you Are not practicing remember someone somewhere is practicing and when you meet him he will win the bible says something similar in its own way blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes you can lie to yourself saying that you put in the time or pretend that you're working but eventually someone will show up you will be tested and quite possibly found out Since bradley went on

to be an all-american a rhodes scholar then a two-time champion with the new york knicks and a u.s senator you get the sense that this sort of dedication will take you places so we must have it because there is no triumph without toil wouldn't it be great if work was as simple as opening a vein and letting the genius pour out or if you could walk into that meeting and spit brilliance Off the top of your head you could walk up to the canvas hurl your paint at it and modern art emerges right that's the

fantasy rather that is the lie back to another popular old trope fake it till you make it it's no surprise that such an idea has found increasing relevance in our noxiously nerf world when it is difficult to tell a real producer from an adept self-promoter of Course some people will roll the dice and manage to play the confidence game make it so you don't have to fake it that's the key can you imagine a doctor trying to get by with anything less or a quarterback or a bull rider more to the point would you want

them to so why would you try it otherwise every time you sit down to work remind yourself i am delaying gratification by doing this i am passing the marshmallow Test i am earning what my ambition burns for i am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego give yourself a little credit for this choice but not so much because you've got to get back to the task at hand practicing working improving work is finding ourselves alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors work is pushing through the pain in the

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 there is another old expression you know a work been by the chips they leave it's true to judge your progress properly just take a look at the [Music] floor for everything that comes next ego is the enemy tis a common proof that lowliness is young ambition's ladder shakespeare we know where we want to end

up success we want to matter wealth and recognition and reputation are nice too we want it all the problem is we're not sure that humility can get us there we are petrified as the reverend dr sam wells Put it that if we are humble we will end up subjugated trodden on embarrassed and irrelevant midway through his career if you'd asked our model sherman how he felt he probably would have described himself in almost exactly those terms he had not made much money he had won no great battles he had not seen his name in lights

or headlines he might have at that moment before the civil war Begun to question the path he'd chosen and whether those who follow it finished last this is the kind of thinking that creates the falsity and bargain that turns most clean ambition into shameless addiction in the early stages ego can be temporarily adaptive craziness can pass for audaciousness delusions can pass for confidence ignorance for courage But it's just kicking the cost down the road because no one ever said reflecting on the whole of someone's life man that monstrous ego sure was worth it the internal

debate about confidence calls to mind a well-known concept from the radio pioneer ira glass which could be called the taste talent gap he said quote all of us who do creative work we get into it because we have good taste But it's like there's a gap that for the first couple years you're making stuff what you're making isn't so good it's really not that great it's trying to be good it has ambition to be good but it's not quite that good but your taste the thing that got you into the game your taste is still

killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you it is in precisely this gap that ego can Seem comforting who wants to look at themselves and their work and find that it does not measure up and so here we might bluster our way through cover up hard truths with sheer force of personality and drive and passion or we can face our shortcomings honestly and put the time in we can let this humble us see clearly where we are talented and where we need

to improve and then put in the work to Bridge that gap and we can set upon positive habits that will last a lifetime if ego was tempting in sherman's time in this era we are like lance armstrong training for the 1999 tour de france we are barry bonds debating whether to walk into the balco clinic we flirt with arrogance and deceit and in the process grossly overstate the importance of winning at all cost everyone is juicing the ego says to us You should too there's no way to beat them without it we think of course

what is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with quiet confidence in spite of the distractions let others grasp at crutches it will be a lonely fight to be real to say i'm not going to take the edge off to say i'm going to be myself the best version of that self i am in this for the long game no matter how brutal it might be to do Not be for sherman it was precisely his choice that prepared him for the time his country and history most needed him and allowed him to navigate the

massive responsibilities that shortly came his way in this quiet crucible he'd forged a personality that was ambitious but patient innovative without being brash brave without being dangerous he was a Real leader you have a chance to do this yourself to play a different game to be utterly audacious in your aims because what comes next is going to test you in ways that you cannot begin to understand for ego is a wicked sister of success and you're about to experience what that means [Music] part two Success here we are at the top of the mountain we

worked hard to climb or at least the summit is in sight we now face new temptations and problems we breathe thinner air in an unforgiving environment why is success so ephemeral ego shortens it whether a collapse is dramatic or a slow erosion it's always possible and often unnecessary we stop learning we stop listening we lose our grasp on what Matters we become victims of ourselves in the competition sobriety open-mindedness organization and purpose these are the great stabilizers they balance out the ego and pride that comes with achievement and recognition to whatever success you have achieved

ego is the enemy two different characters are presented to our emulation the one of proud Ambition and ostentatious avidity the other of humble modesty and equitable justice two different models two different pictures are held out to us according to which we may fashion our own character and behavior the one more gaudy and glittering in its coloring the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline adam smith At a business meeting in january 1924 howard hughes senior a successful inventor and tool magmate stood up convulsed and died from a sudden heart attack at the

age of 54. his son a quiet reserved and sheltered boy of just 18 inherited three-fourths of the private company which held patents and leases critical to oil drilling worth nearly 1 million dollars various family members were bequeathed The remaining shares in a move of almost incomprehensible foresight the young hughes who many saw as a spoiled little boy made the decision to buy out his relatives and control the entire company himself against their objections and still legally considered a minor hughes leveraged his personal assets in nearly all the company's funds to purchase the stock and in

doing so consolidated ownership of a business that would Create billions of dollars of cash profit over the next century it was a bold move for a young man with essentially zero experience in business and it was with similar boldness that over his career he would create one of the most embarrassing wasteful and dishonest business track records in history in retrospect his years at the helm of the hughes empire resemble a deranged crime spree more than a capitalistic Enterprise one cannot argue whether hughes was gifted visionary or brilliant he just was literally a mechanical genius he

was also one of the best and bravest pilots in the pioneer days of aviation and as a businessman and a filmmaker he had the ability to predict wide sweeping changes that came to transform not just the industries he was involved in but in america itself Yet after filtering out his acumen from the legend glamour and self-promotion at which he was so adept only one image remains an egomaniac who evaporated hundreds of millions of dollars of his own wealth and met a miserable pathetic end not by accident not because he was beset by unforeseen circumstances or

competition but almost exclusively due to his own actions a quick rundown of his feats if you can Call them that provides a stark perspective after purchasing control of his father's tool company from his family hughes abandoned it almost immediately except to repeatedly siphon off its cash he left houston and never stepped foot in the company's headquarters again he moved to los angeles where he decided to become a film producer and celebrity trading stocks from his bedside he lost more than eight million dollars in the Market leading up to the depression his most well-known movie hell's

angels took three years to make lost 1.5 million dollars on a budget of 4.2 million dollars and nearly bankrupted the tool company in the process then not having learned a lesson the first time hughes lost another four million dollars on chrysler stock in the early 1930s he then put all this aside to enter the aviation business creating a defense Contractor called the hughes aircraft company despite some astounding personal achievements as an inventor hughes company was a total failure his two contracts during world war ii worth over 40 million dollars were massive failures at the expense

of the american taxpayer and himself the most notable the spruce goose which hughes called the hercules and which was one of the biggest planes ever made took More than five years to develop cost roughly 20 million dollars and flew just a single time for barely a mile only 70 feet above the water at his insistence and expense it then sat in an air-conditioned hangar in long beach for decades at the cost of one million dollars a year deciding to double down on the film business hughes purchased the movie studio rko and produced losses of over

22 million dollars and went from 2 000 Employees to fewer than 500 as he ran it into the ground over the next several years tiring of these businesses as he had of the tool company he forsook defense contracting and handed it off to executives to run where it slowly began to thrive because of his absence it would make sense to stop here to avoid belaboring the issue but that would risk skipping hughes's egregious tax fraud the plane crashes and fatal car accidents the millions he wasted on Private investigators lawyers contracts for starlets he refused to

let act property he never lived in the fact that the only thing that ever got him to behave responsibly was the threat of public exposure to paranoia racism and bullying the failed marriages the drug addiction and dozens of other ventures and businesses that he mismanaged that we have made a hero out of howard hughes a young joan didion wrote tells Us something interesting about ourselves she's absolutely right for howard hughes despite his reputation was quite possibly one of the worst businessmen of the 20th century usually a bad businessman fails and ceases to be in business

anymore making it hard to see what truly caused his failures but thanks the steady chain of profits from his father's company which he found too boring to interfere with hughes was Able to stay afloat allowing us to see the damage that his ego repeatedly wrought to himself as a person to the people around him to what he wanted to accomplish there's a scene from howard's slow descent into madness that bears illustrating his biographers have him sitting naked in his favorite white chair unwashed unkempt working around the clock to battle lawyers investigations Investors in an attempt

to save his empire and hide his shameful secrets one minute he would dictate some irrational multi-page memo about kleenex food preparation or how employees should not speak to him directly and then he would turn around and seize upon a genuinely brilliant strategy to outrun his creditors and enemies it was as if they observed his mind and his business were split in two parts It was as if they wrote ibm had deliberately established a pair of subsidiaries one to produce computers and profits the other to manufacture edsels and losses if someone was looking for a flesh

and blood metaphor for ego and destruction it would be hard to do better than this image of a man working furiously with one hand toward a goal and with the other working equally hard to undermine it Howard hughes like all of us was not completely crazy or completely sane his ego fueled and exacerbated by physical injuries mostly from plane and car crashes for which he was at fault and various addictions led him into a darkness that we can scarcely comprehend there were brief moments of lucidity when the sharp mind of hughes broke through times when

he made some of his best moves but as he progressed through life These moments became increasingly rare eventually ego killed howard hughes as much as the mania and trauma did if they were ever separate to begin with you can only see this if you want to see it it's more attractive and exciting to see the rebel billionaire the eccentric the world renown and the fame and think oh how i want that you do not howard hughes like so many wealthy people died in an asylum of his own making he felt little joy he enjoyed almost

nothing of What he had most importantly he wasted he wasted so much talent so much bravery and so much energy without virtue and training aristotle observed it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably we can learn from hughes because he was so publicly and visibly unable to bear his birthright properly his endless taste for the spotlight no matter how unflattering gives us an opportunity to see our own tendencies our own struggles With success and luck refracted back through his tumultuous life his enormous ego and its destructive path through hollywood through the defense

industry through wall street through the aviation industry gives us a look inside someone who is repeatedly failed by the impulses we all have of course he's far from the only person in history to follow such an arc will you follow his trajectory sometimes ego is suppressed on the Ascent sometimes an idea is so powerful or timing is so perfect or one is born into wealth or power that it can temporarily support or even compensate for a massive ego as success arrives like it does for a team that has just won a championship ego begins to

toy with our minds and weaken the will that made us win in the first place we know that empires always fall so we must think about why and why they always Seem to collapse from within harold genon was the ceo who more or less invented the concept of the modern international conglomerate through a series of acquisitions mergers and takeovers more than 350 in all he took a small company called itt from one million dollars in revenue in 1959 to nearly 17 billion in 1977 the year he retired some claimed that gina himself was an egotist

In any case he spoke candidly about the effects that ego had in his industry and warned executives against it the worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not as popularly supposed alcoholism it's egotism jeanine famously said in the mad men era of corporate america there was a major drinking problem but ego has the same roots insecurity fear a dislike for brutal objectivity As he said whether in middle management or top management unbridled personal egotism blinds a man to the realities around him more and more he comes to live in a world

of his own imagination and because he sincerely believes he can do no wrong he becomes a menace to the men and women who have to work under his direction here we have accomplished something after we give ourselves proper credit Ego wants us to think i'm special i'm better the rules don't apply to me man is pushed by drives viktor frankl observed but he is pulled by values ruled by or ruling which are you without the right values success is brief if we wish to do more than flash if we wish to last then it is

time to understand how to battle this new form of ego and what values and principles are required in order to beat it success is intoxicating yet to sustain It requires sobriety we cannot keep learning if we think we already know everything we cannot buy into myths we make ourselves or the noise or chatter of the outside world we must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe on top of all this we have to build an organization and a system around what we do one that is about the work and not about

us The verdict on hughes is in ego wrecked him a similar judgment awaits us all at some point over the course of your own career you will face the choices that he did that all people do whether you built your empire from nothing or inherited it whether your wealth is financial or merely a cultivated talent entropy is seeking to destroy it as you Listen to this can you handle success or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you [Music] always stay a student every man i meet is my master in some point

and in that i learn of him ralph waldo emerson the legend of genghis khan has echoed through history a barbarian conqueror fueled by bloodlust terrorizing the civilized world We have him and his mongol horde traveling across asia and europe insatiable stopping at nothing to plunder rape and kill not just the people who stood in their way but the cultures they had built then not unlike his nomadic band of warriors this terrible cloud simply disappeared from history because the mongols built nothing that could last like all reactionary emotional assessments this could not be more wrong For

not only was genghis khan one of the greatest military minds who ever lived he was a perpetual student whose stunning victories were often the result of his ability to absorb the best technologies practices and innovations from each new culture his empire touched in fact if there is one theme in his reign and in the several centuries of dynastic rule that followed it's this appropriation under genghis khan's direction the Mongols were as ruthless about stealing and absorbing the best of each culture they encountered as they were about the conquest itself though there were essentially no technological

inventions no beautiful buildings or even great mongol art with each battle and enemy their culture learned and absorbed something new genghis khan was not born a genius instead as one biographer put it his was a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning Experimental adaptation and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined and focused will he was the greatest conqueror of the world ever knew because he was more open to learning than any other conqueror has ever been khan's first powerful victories came from the reorganization of his military units splitting his soldiers into groups of ten this he

stole from the neighboring Turkic tribes and unknowingly converted the mongols to the decimal system soon enough their expanding empire brought them into contact with another technology that they'd never experienced before walled cities in the tanget raids khan first learned the ins and outs of war against fortified cities and the strategies critical to laying siege and quickly became an expert Later with help from chinese engineers he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines that could knock down city walls in his campaigns against the jerkid khan learned the importance of winning the hearts and minds by

working with the scholars and royal family of the lands he conquered khan was able to hold on and manage these territories in ways that most empires could not Afterwards in every country or city he held khan would call for the smartest astrologers scribes doctors thinkers and advisors anyone who could aid his troops and their efforts his troops traveled with interrogators and translators for precisely this purpose it was a habit that would survive his death while the mongols seemed dedicated almost solely to the art of war they put To good use every craftsman merchant scholar entertainer

cook and skilled worker they came in contact with the mongol empire was remarkable for its religious freedoms and most of all for its love of ideas and convergence of cultures it brought lemons to china for the first time and chinese noodles to the west it spread persian carpets german mining technology french metalworking and islam the canon which revolutionized warfare Was said to be the resulting fusion of chinese gunpowder muslim flamethrowers and european metal work it was mongol openness to learning and new ideas that brought them together as we first succeed we will find ourselves in

new situations facing new problems the freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics the salesman how to manage the founder how to delegate the writer how to edit others the comedian How to act the chef turned restaurateur how to run the other side of the house this is not a harmless conceit the physicist john wheeler who helped develop the hydrogen bomb once observed that as our island of knowledge grows so does the shore of our ignorance in other words each victory and advancement that made khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he'd never

encountered before it takes a special kind of humility to Grasp that you know less even as you know and grasp more and more it's worth remembering socrates wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing with accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do to pretend we already know everything knowledge puffs up that's the worry and the risk thinking that we're set and secure when in Reality understanding and mastery is a fluid continual process the nine-time grammy and pulitzer prize-winning jazz musician wynton marsalis once

advised a promising young musician on the mindset required in the lifelong study of music he said humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on it leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves you don't stand in your own Way do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble i believe there's one simple test because they consistently observe and listen the humble improve they don't assume i know the way no matter what you've done up to this point you better still be a student if you're not still learning

you're already dying it's not enough only to be a student at The beginning it's a position that one has to assume for life learn from everyone and everything from the people you beat from the people who beat you from the people who you dislike even from your supposed enemies at every step in every juncture in life there is the opportunity to learn and even if the lesson is purely remedial we must not let ego block us from hearing it again too often convinced of our own Intelligence we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that

we will never feel stupid and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know it obscures from view various weaknesses in our understanding until eventually it's too late to change course this is where the silent toll is taken each of us faces a threat as we pursue our craft like sirens on the rocks ego sings a soothing validating song which can lead to a wreck the second we let The ego tell us we've graduated learning grinds to a halt that's why frank shamrock said always stay a student as in it never ends the solution

is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about put yourself in rooms where you're the least knowledgeable person that uncomfortable feeling that defensiveness you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged what about Subjecting yourself to it deliberately change your mind change your surroundings an amateur is defensive the professional finds learning and even occasionally being shown up to be enjoyable they like being challenged and humble and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process most military cultures people in general seek to

impose values and control over what they encounter What made the mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively and if need be swap out a previous practice for a new one all great businesses start this way and then something happens take the theory of disruption which posits that at some point in time every industry will be disrupted by some trend or innovation that despite all the resources in the world the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to Why is this why can't businesses change and adapt a large part of it is because

they've lost the ability to learn they stopped being students the second this happens to you your knowledge becomes fragile the great manager and business thinker peter drucker says that it's not enough simply to want to learn as people progress they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education Otherwise we are dooming ourselves to a sort of self-imposed ignorance [Music] don't tell yourself a story myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling david marinus starting in 1979 football coach and general manager bill walsh took the

49ers from being the worst team in football and perhaps all of professional sports to a super bowl victory in just Three years it would have been tempting as he hoisted the lombardi trophy over his head to tell himself that the quickest turnaround in nfl history had been his plan all along it would have been tempting decades later when he assembled his memoirs to assume that narrative as well it's a sexy story that his takeover his turnaround and the transformation were assidiously scheduled That it all happened exactly as he wanted because he was just that good

and that talented no one would have faulted him if he said that yet he refused to indulge in those fantasies when people asked walsh whether he had a timetable for winning the super bowl do you know what his answer was the answer was always no Because when you take over a team that bad such ambitions would have been utterly delusional the year before he arrived the 49ers were 2 and 14. the organization was demoralized broken without draft picks and fully ensconced in a culture of losing his first season they lost another 14 games he nearly

resigned midway through his second year because he wasn't sure he could do it Yet 24 months from taking over and a little over a year from having almost quit there he was the super bowl champion genius how did it happen how is that not part of the plan the answer is that when bill walsh took control he wasn't focused on winning per se instead he implemented what he called his standard of performance that is What should be done when how at the most basic level and throughout the organization walsh had only one timetable and it

was all about instilling these standards he focused on seemingly trivial details players could not sit down on the practice field coaches had to wear a tie and tuck their shirts in everyone had to give maximum effort and commitment Sportsmanship was essential the locker room must be neat and clean there would be no smoking no fighting no profanity quarterbacks were told where and how to hold the ball linemen were drilled on 30 separate critical drills passing routes were monitored and graded down to the inch practices were scheduled to the minute it would be a mistake to

think this was about control the standard of performance was about instilling Excellence these seemingly simple but exacting standards mattered more than some grand vision or power trip in his eyes if the players take care of the details the score takes care of itself the winning would happen walsh was strong and confident enough to know that these standards would eventually contribute to victory he was also humble enough to know that when that victory would happen was not Something he could predict that it happened faster than for any coach in history well that was a fortuitous break

in the game it was not because of his grand vision in fact in his second season a coach complained to the owner that walsh was too caught up in minutia and had no goals to win walsh fired that coach for tattling we want so desperately to believe that those who have great empires set out to Build one why so we can indulge in the pleasurable planning of ours so we can take full credit for the good that happens and the riches and respect that come our way narrative is when you look back at an improbable

or unlikely path to your success and say i knew it all along instead of i hoped i worked i got some good breaks or even i thought this could happen of course you didn't really know it all Along or if you did it was more faith than knowledge but who wants to remember all the times you doubted yourself crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse it's also dangerous and untrue writing our own narrative leads to arrogance it turns our life into a story and turns us into caricatures while we still have

to live it as the author tobias wolfe writes in his novel old school these explanations and Stories get cobbled together later more or less sincerely and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration bill walsh understood that it was really the standard of performance the deceptively small things that was responsible for the team's transformation and victory but that's too boring for newspaper headlines that's why he ignored it when they Called him the genius to accept the title in the story wouldn't have been a

harmless personal gratification these narratives don't change the past but they do have the power to negatively impact our future his players shortly proved the risks inherent in letting the story go to their heads like most of us they wanted to believe that their unlikely victory occurred because they were special In the two seasons after the first super bowl the team failed terribly partly due to the dangerous confidence that accompanies these kinds of victories losing 12 of the next 22 games this is what happens when you prematurely credit yourself with powers you don't yet have control

of this is what happens when you start to think about what your rapid achievements say about you and begin to slack in the effort and Standards that initially fueled them only when the team returned wholeheartedly to the standard of performance did they win again three more super bowls and nine conference or division championships in a decade only when they stopped with the stories and focused on the task at hand did they begin to win like they had before here's the other part once you win everyone is gunning for you it's during your moment at the

top that you can Afford eco the least because the stakes are so much higher the margins for error are so much smaller if anything your ability to listen to hear feedback to improve and grow matter more now than ever before facts are better than stories and image the 20th century financier bernard baruch had a great line don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top this can't be done except by liars That is people's claims about what they're doing in the market are rarely to be trusted jeff bezos founder of amazon has

talked about this temptation he reminds himself that there was no aha moment for his billion dollar behemoth no matter what he might read in his own press clippings the founding of a company making money in the market or the formation of an idea is messy reducing it to a narrative retroactively creates a clarity that Never was and never will be there when we are aspiring we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other people's stories when we achieve our own we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we planned

there was no grand narrative you should remember you were there when it happened a few years ago one of the founders of google gave a talk in which he said the way he judges prospective companies and Entrepreneurs is by asking them if they're going to change the world which is fine except that's not how google started larry page and sergey brin were two stanford phd's working on their dissertations it's not how youtube started its founders weren't trying to reinvent tv they were trying to share funny video clips it's not how most true wealth was created

in fact investor paul graham who invested in Airbnb reddit dropbox and others working in the same city as bill walsh a few decades later explicitly warned startups against having bold sweeping visions early on of course as a capitalist he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world that's where the money is he wants them to have frighteningly ambitious ideas but explains the way to do really big Things seems to be to start with deceptively small things he's saying you don't make a frontal attack out of ego instead you start with a

small bet and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go his other famous piece of advice keep your identity small fits well here make it about the work and the principles behind it not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline napoleon had the words to destiny Engraved in the wedding ring he gave his wife destiny was what he'd always believed in it was how he justified his boldest most ambitious ideas it was also why he overreached time and time again until his real destiny was divorce exile defeat and infamy a great destiny seneca reminds

us is great slavery there's real danger in believing it when people use the word genius and it's even more dangerous when We let our hubris tell ourselves we are one the same goes for any label that comes along with a career are we suddenly a filmmaker writer investor entrepreneur or executive because we've accomplished one thing these labels put you at odds not just with reality but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place from that place we might think that Success in the future is just the natural next part of the

story when really it's rooted in work creativity persistence and luck certainly google's alienation from its own roots confusing vision and potential with scientific and technological prowess will cause it to stumble soon enough in fact the public failures of projects like google glass and google plus might be evidence of it already they are not alone too often artists who Think it was inspiration or pain that fueled their art create an image around it instead of hard work and sincere hustle will eventually find themselves at the bottom of a bottle or on the wrong end of a

needle the same goes for us whatever we do instead of pretending we are living some great story we must remain focused on the execution and on executing with excellence we must shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here Because that's the only thing that will keep us [Music] here what's important to you to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age robert louis stevenson at the end of the civil war ulysses s grant and his friend william tecumseh sherman were two of the most respected and important

men in america Essentially the dual architects of the union's victory a grateful country with a snap of its fingers said whatever you like as long as you live is yours with this freedom at their disposal sherman and grant took different paths sherman whose track we followed earlier abhorred politics and repeatedly declined entreaties to run for office i have all the rank i want he told them having seemingly mastered his ego he would later retired in new york city Where he lived in what was by all appearances happiness and contentment grant who had expressed almost no

prior interest in politics and in fact had succeeded as a general precisely because he didn't know how to play politics chose instead to pursue the highest office in the land the presidency elected by a landslide he then presided over one of the most corrupt contentious and least effective administrations in american history A genuinely good and loyal individual he was not cut out for the dirty world of washington and it made quick work of him he left office a maligned and controversial figure after two exhausting terms almost surprised by how poorly it had gone after the

presidency grant invested almost every penny he had to create a financial brokerage house with a controversial investor named ferdinand ward Ward a bernie madoff of his day turned it into a ponzi scheme and publicly bankrupted grant as sherman wrote with sympathy and understanding of his friend grant had aimed to rival the millionaires who would have given their all to have won any of his battles grant had accomplished so much but to him it wasn't enough he couldn't decide what was important what actually mattered to him That's how it seems to go we're never happy with

what we have we want what others have too we want to have more than everyone else we start out knowing what is important to us but once we've achieved it we lose sight of our priorities ego sways us and can ruin us compelled by a sense of honor to cover the debts of the firm grant took out a loan using his priceless war mementos as collateral Broken in mind spirit and body the last years of his life found him battling painful throat cancer and racing to finish his memoirs so that he might leave his family

with something to live on he made it just barely one shutters to think of the vital forces drained from this hero who died at just 63 in agony and defeat the straightforward honest man who just couldn't help himself who couldn't Manage to focus and ended up far outside the bounds of his ample genius what could he have done with those years instead how might america have looked otherwise how much more could he have done and accomplished not that he is unique in this regard all of us regularly say yes unthinkingly or out of vague attraction

or out of greed or vanity because we can't say no because we might miss out on something if we did We think that yes will let us accomplish more when in reality it prevents exactly what we seek all of us waste precious life doing things we don't like to prove ourselves to people we don't respect and to get things we don't want why do we do this what should be obvious by now ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small ego undermines greatness by deluding its Holder most of us

begin with a clear idea of what we want in life we know what's important to us the success we achieve especially if it comes earlier in abundance puts us in an unusual place because now all of a sudden we're in a new place and have trouble keeping our bearings the farther you travel down that path of accomplishment whatever it may be the more often you meet other successful People who make you feel insignificant it doesn't matter how well you're doing your ego and their accomplishments make you feel like nothing just as others make them feel

the same way it's a cycle that goes on ad infinitum while our brief time on earth or the small window of opportunity we have here does not so we unconsciously pick up the pace to keep up with others but what if other people are running for different reasons what if there is more than one race Going on that's what sherman was saying about grant there's a certain gift of the magi irony in how badly we chase what will not be truly pleasurable at the very least it won't last if only we could all stop for

a second let's be clear competitiveness is an important force in life it's what drives the market and is behind some of mankind's most impressive Accomplishments on an individual level however it's absolutely critical that you know who you are competing with and why that you have a clear sense of the space you're in only you know the race you're running that is unless your ego decides that the only way you have value is if you're better than have more than everyone everywhere More urgently each one of us has a unique potential and purpose that means we're

the only ones who can evaluate and set the terms of our lives far too often we look at other people and make their approval the standard we feel compelled to meet and as a result squander our very potential and purpose according to seneca the greek word eutemia is one we should think of often it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted By all the others that intersect it in other words it's not about beating the other guy it's not about having more than the others it's about

being what you are and being as good as possible at it without succumbing to all the things that draw you away from it it's about going where you set out to go about accomplishing the most you're capable of in what you choose that's it no more no less By the way eutemia means tranquility in english it's time to sit down and think about what's truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest without this success will not be pleasurable or nearly as complete as it could be or worse it won't last this

is especially true with money if you don't know how much you need the default easily becomes more And so without thinking critical energy is diverted from a person's calling and toward filling a bank account when you combine insecurity and ambition the plagiarist and disgraced journalist joe nolaire said when reflecting back on his fault you get an inability to say no to things ego rejects trade-offs why compromise ego wants it all ego tells you to cheat even though you love your spouse because you want what You have and what you don't have ego says that sure

even though you're just starting to get the hang of one thing why not jump right in the middle of another eventually you say yes to too much to something far beyond the pale we're like captain ahab chasing moby dick for reasons we don't even understand anymore maybe your priority actually is money or maybe it's family or maybe it's influence or change maybe it's building An organization that lasts or serves a purpose all of these are perfectly fine motivations but you do need to know you need to know what you don't want and what your choices

preclude because strategies are often mutually exclusive one cannot be an opera singer and a teen pop idol at the same time life requires trade-offs but ego can't allow it So why do you do what you do that's the question you need to answer stare at it until you can only then will you understand what matters and what doesn't only then can you say no can you opt out of stupid races that don't matter or even exist only then is it easy to ignore successful people because most of the time they aren't at least relative to

you and often even to themselves only then can you develop the quiet Confidence seneca talked about the more you have and do the harder maintaining fidelity to your purpose will be but the more critically you will need to everyone buys into the myth that if only they had that usually what someone else has they would be happy it may take getting burned a few times to realize the emptiness of this illusion we all occasionally find ourselves in The middle of some project or obligation and can't understand why we're there it will take courage and faith

to stop yourself find out why you're after what you're after ignore those who mess with your pace let them covet what you have not the other way around because that's independence [Music] entitlement control and paranoia One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important bertrand russell when xerxes the persian emperor crossed the hellespont during his invasion of greece the waters surged up and destroyed the bridges his engineers had spent days building so he threw chains into the river ordered it to be given 300 lashes and branded it

with hot irons As his men delivered his punishment they were ordered to harangue it you salt and bitter stream your master lays this punishment upon you for injuring him who never injured you oh and he cut off the heads of the men who built the bridges herodotus the great historian called the display presumptuous which is probably an understatement surely preposterous and delusional are more appropriate then again it was part of his Personality shortly before this xerxes had written a letter to a nearby mountain in which he needed to cut a canal you may be tall

and proud he wrote but don't you dare cause me any trouble otherwise i'll topple you into the sea how hilarious is that more important how pathetic xerxes delusional threats are unfortunately not a historical anomaly with success particularly power comes Some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions entitlement control and paranoia hopefully you won't find yourself so crazed that you start anthropomorphizing and inflicting retribution on inanimate objects that's pure recognizable crazy and thankfully rare what's more likely and more common is we begin to overestimate our own power then we lose perspective eventually we can end like

xerxes a Monstrous joke the strongest poison ever known the poet william blake wrote came from caesar's laurel crown success casts a spell over us the problem lies in the path that got us to success in the first place what we've accomplished often required feats of raw power and force of will both entrepreneurship and art require the creation of something where nothing Existed before wealth means beating the market and the odds athletic champions have proved their physical superiority over opponents achieving success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us it meant rejecting rejection

it required taking certain risks we could have given up at any time but we're here precisely because we didn't Persistence and courage in the face of ridiculous odds are partially irrational traits in some cases really irrational but when it works those tendencies can feel like they've been vindicated and why shouldn't they it's human to think that since it's been done once that the world was changed in some big or small way that there's now a magical power in our possession we're here because we're bigger stronger smarter That we make the reality we inhabit right before

he destroyed his own billion dollar company ty warner creator of beanie babies overrode the cautious objections of one of his employees and bragged i could put the tie heart on manure and they'd buy it he was wrong and the company not only catastrophically failed he later narrowly missed going to jail it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire a millionaire or just a kid Who snagged a good job early the complete and utter sense of certainty that got you here can become a liability if you're not careful the demands and dream you had for a better

life the ambition that fueled your effort these begin as earnest tribes but left unchecked become hubris and entitlement the same goes for the instinct to take charge now you're addicted to control driven to prove the doubt is wrong Welcome to the seeds of paranoia yes there are legitimate stresses and anguish that come with the responsibilities of your new life all the things you're managing the frustrating mistakes of people who should know better the endless creep of obligations no one prepares us for that which makes the feelings all the harder to deal with the promised land

was supposed to be nice not aggravating but you can't let The walls close in on you you've got to get yourself and your perceptions under control when arthur lee was sent to france and england to serve as one of america's diplomats during the revolutionary war instead of relishing the opportunity to work with his fellow diplomat silas dean and elder statesman benjamin franklin he raged and resented them and suspected them of disliking him finally franklin wrote him a letter one That we've probably all deserved to get at one point or another if you don't cure yourself

of this temper franklin advised it will end in insanity of which it is the symptomatic forerunner probably because he was in such command of his own temper franklin decided that writing the letter was cathartic enough he'd never sent it if you've ever listened to the oval office tapes of richard nixon you can Hear the same sickness and you wish someone could have sent him such a letter it's a harrowing insight into a man who's lost his grip not just on what he's legally allowed to do on what his job was to serve the people but

on reality itself he vacillates wildly from supreme confidence to dread and fear he talks over his subordinates and rejects information and feedback that Challenges what he wants to believe he lives in a bubble in which no one can say no not even his conscience there's a letter from general winfield scott to jefferson davis then the secretary of war for the united states davis belligerently pestered scott repeatedly about some trivial matter scott ignored it until finally forced to address it he wrote that he pitied davis compassion is always due he said to him to an enraged

imbecile who lays about Him in blows which only hurt himself ego is its own worst enemy it hurts the ones we love too our friends and families suffer for it so do our customers fans and clients a critic of napoleon nailed it when remarking he despises the nation whose applause he seeks he couldn't help but see the french people as pieces to be manipulated people he had to be better than people who unless they were totally Unconditionally supportive of him were against him a smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of

their power and reach entitlement assumes this is mine i've earned it at the same time entitlement nickels and dimes other people because it can't conceive of valuing another person's time as highly as its own it delivers tirades and pronouncements That exhaust the people who work for and with us who have no choice other than to go along it overstates our abilities to ourselves it renders generous judgment of our prospects and it creates ridiculous expectations control says it must be done my way even little things even inconsequential things it can be paralyzing perfectionism or a million

pointless battles fought merely For the sake of exerting its say it too exhausts people whose help we need particularly quiet people who don't object until we've pushed them to their breaking point we fight with the clerk at the airport the customer service representative on the telephone the agent who examines our claim to what end in reality we don't control the weather we don't control the market we don't Control other people and our efforts and energies in spite of this are pure waste paranoia thinks i can't trust anyone i'm in this totally by myself and for

myself it says i'm surrounded by fools it says focusing on my work my obligations myself is not enough i also have to be orchestrating various machinations behind the scenes to get them before they get me to get them back for the slights i perceive Everyone has had a boss a partner a parent like this all that strife anger chaos and conflict how did it go for them how did it end he who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears wrote seneca who was a political advisor witnessed a destructive paranoia at the highest levels the sad

feedback loop is that the relentless looking out for number one can encourage other people to undermine And fight us they see that behavior for what it is a mask for weakness insecurity and instability in its frenzy to protect itself paranoia creates the persecution it seeks to avoid making the owner a prisoner of its own delusions and chaos is this the freedom you envisioned when you dreamed of your success likely not so stop [Music] Managing yourself it is not enough to have great qualities we should also have the management of them in 1953 dwight d eisenhower

returned from his inaugural parade and entered the white house for the first time as president late in the evening as he walked into the executive mansion his chief usher handed eisenhower two letters marked confidential and secret that had been sent to him earlier in the Day eisenhower's reaction was swift never bring me a sealed envelope he said firmly that's what i have a staff for how snobbish right had the office really gone to his head already not at all eisenhower recognized the seemingly insignificant event for what it was a symptom of a disorganized dysfunctional organization

Not everything needed to run through him who's to say that the envelope was even important why hadn't anyone screened it as president his first priority in office was organizing the executive branch into a smooth functioning and order driven unit just like his military units had been not because he didn't want to work himself but because everyone had a job and he trusted and empowered them to do it As his chief of staff later put it the president does the most important things i do the next most important things the public image of eisenhower is of

the man playing golf in reality he was not someone who ever slacked off but the leisure time he did have was available because he ran a tight ship he knew that urgent and important were not synonyms his job was to set the priorities to think big picture and then Trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for most of us are not the president or even president of a company but in moving up the ladder in life the system and work habits that got us where we are won't necessarily keep us

there when we're aspiring our small time we can be idiosyncratic we can compensate for disorganization with hard work and a little luck that's not going to cut it in the majors In fact it will sink you if you can't grow up and organize we can contrast eisenhower's system in the white house with the infamous car company created by john delorean when he walked away from gm to produce his brand of futuristic cars a few decades removed from the company's spectacular implosion we can be forgiven for thinking the man was just ahead of his time in

fact his rise and fall is as timeless As story as there is power hungry narcissist undermines his own vision and loses millions of dollars of other people's money in the process delorean was convinced that the culture of order and discipline at gm had held brilliant creatives like himself down when he set out to found his company he deliberately did everything differently flouting conventional wisdom and business practices the result was not the free willing Creative sanctuary that delorean naively envisioned it was instead an overbearingly political dysfunctional and even corrupt organization that collapsed under its own weight

eventually resorting to criminality and fraud and losses of some 250 million dollars the delorean failed as both a car and as a company because it was mismanaged from top to bottom with an emphasis on the mismanagement at the top By the top that is delorean himself was the problem compared to eisenhower he worked constantly with very different results as one executive put it delorean had the ability to recognize a good opportunity but he didn't know how to make it happen another executive described his management style as chasing colored balloons he was constantly distracted and abandoning

one project for another He was a genius sadly that's rarely enough though probably not on purpose delorean created a culture in which ego ran free convinced that continued success was simply his by right he seemed to bristle at concepts like discipline organization or strategic planning employees were not given enough direction and that at other times overwhelmed with trivial instructions delorean couldn't delegate except to Lackeys whose blind loyalty was prized over competence or skill on top of all this he was often late or preoccupied executives were allowed to work on extracurricular activities on the company dime

encouraged specifically to chase side projects that benefited their boss at the expense of the company as ceo delorean often bent the truth to investors fellow officers and suppliers and this habit was contagious throughout The company like many people driven by a demon delorean's decisions were motivated by everything but what would have been efficient manageable or responsible instead of improving or fixing gm system it's as if he threw out order altogether what ensued was chaos in which no one ever followed the rules no one was accountable and very little got done the only reason it didn't

collapse immediately was that delorean was a Master of public relations a skill that held the whole story together until the first faulty cars came off the assembly line not surprisingly the cars were terrible they didn't work cost per unit was massively over budget they hadn't secured enough dealers they couldn't deliver cars to the ones they had the launch was a disaster delorean motor company never recovered it turns out that becoming a great Leader is difficult who knew delorean couldn't manage himself so he had trouble managing others and so he managed to fail both himself and

the dream management that's the reward for all your creativity and new ideas becoming the man yes in the end we all face becoming the adult supervision we originally rebelled against yet often we react petulantly and prefer To think now that i'm in charge things are going to be different think about eisenhower he was the damn president the most powerful man in the world he could have kicked back and done things how he liked if he was disorganized people would have had to just deal with it there have been plenty of those presidents before yet he

wasn't he understood that order and Responsibility were what the country needed and that this far outweighed his own concerns what was so sad about delorean is that like a lot of talented people his ideas were on point his car was an exciting innovation his model could have worked he had all the assets and the talent it was his ego and disorganization that resulted from it that prevented the ingredients from coming together just as they do for so many of us As you become successful in your own field your responsibilities may begin to change days become

less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions such as the nature of leadership this transition requires re-evaluating and updating your identity it requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job it means accepting that others might be More qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent or at least their time is better spent on them than yours yes it would be more fun to be constantly involved in every tiny matter and might make us feel important to be the

person called to put out fires the little things are endlessly engaging and often flattering while the big picture can be hard to discern it's not always fun but it is the job If you don't think big picture because you're too busy playing boss man who will of course there is no right system sometimes systems are better decentralized sometimes they are better on a strict hierarchy every project and goal deserves an approach fitted perfectly to what needs to be done maybe a creative relaxed environment makes the most sense for what you're Doing maybe you can run

your business remotely maybe it's better for everyone to see each other face to face what matters is that you learn how to manage yourself and others before your industry eats you alive micromanagers are egotists who can't manage others and they quickly get overloaded so do the charismatic visionaries who lose interest when it's time to execute worse yet are those who surround Themselves with yes men or sick offense who clean up their messes and create a bubble in which they can't even see how disconnected from reality they are responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity

and purpose first setting the top level goals and priorities of the organization in your life then enforcing and observing them to produce results and only results a fish stinks from the head is the Saying well you're the head now [Music] beware the disease of me if i am not for myself who will be for me if i am only for myself who am i hillel there were the great allied generals of world war ii patton bradley montgomery eisenhower macarthur zhukov and then there was george catlett Marshall jr although all of them served their countries and

fought and led bravely one stands apart today we see world war ii as a clear fight in which good aligns selflessly against evil the problem is that victory in the passage of time have obscured the all all-too-humanness of the people who were on the right side of that fight That is we forget the politics the backstabbing the spotlight coveting the posturing the greed and the ass covering among the allies while the other generals protected their turf fought with each other and eagerly aspired to their place in history that behavior was virtually absent in one man

general george marshall more impressively marshall quietly outpaced all of them with the magnitude Of his accomplishments what was his secret pat riley the famous coach and manager who led the los angeles lakers in the miami heat to multiple championships says that great teams tend to follow a trajectory when they start before they have won a team is innocent if the conditions are right they come together they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal This stage he calls the innocent climb after a team starts to win and media attention begins the

simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray players calculate their own importance chess swell frustrations emerge egos appear the innocent climb pat riley says is almost always followed by the disease of me it can strike any winning team in any Year at any moment and it does with alarming regularity it's shaq and kobe unable to play together it's jordan punching steve kerr horace grant and will perdue his own team members he punched people on his own team it's enron employees plunging california into darkness for personal profit it's leaks to the media from a

disgruntled executive hoping to scuttle a project he dislikes It's nagging and every other intimidation tactic for us it's beginning to think that we're better that we're special that our problems and experiences are so incredibly different from everyone else's that no one could possibly understand it's an attitude that has sunk far better people teams and causes than ours with general marshall who began his term as chief of staff of the us army on the Day germany invaded poland in 1939 and served through the entire war we see one of history's few exceptions to this trend marshall

somehow never caught the disease of me and in many ways often shamed it out of the people who did it begins with this balanced relationship to rank an obsession for most people in his line of work he was not a man who abstained from every public show of rancor status he Insisted that the president call him general marshall not george for example he'd earned it right but while other generals regularly lobbied for promotions general macarthur for example advanced over other officers in the pre-war years largely due to the aggressive efforts of his mother marshall actively

discouraged it when others began to push for marshall to be chief of staff he asked them to stop Because it makes me conspicuous in the army too conspicuous in fact he said later he discouraged an effort by the house to pass a bill awarding him the rank of field marshal not only because he thought the name field marshall marshall would sound ridiculous but because he didn't want to outrank or hurt his mentor general pershing who is near death and a constant source of advice and guidance can you imagine in all these cases his Sense of

honor meant turning down honors and often letting them go to other people like any normal human being he wanted them only the right way more important he knew that however nice they would have been to have he could do without them while perhaps others could not ego needs honors in order to be validated confidence on the other hand is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition Early on in our careers we may be able to make these sacrifices more easily we can drop out of a prestigious college to

start our own company or we can tolerate being looked over once in a while once we've made it the tendency is to switch to the mindset of getting what's mine now all of a sudden awards and recognition matter even though they weren't what got us here we need that money that title that media attention Not for the team or for the cause but for ourselves because we've earned it let's make one thing clear we never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else to think otherwise is

not only egotistical it's counterproductive marshall was tested on this to the extreme a job he trained his whole life for was up for grabs command of the troops on d-day essentially the largest Coordinated invasion the world had ever seen roosevelt let it be known that it was marshalls if you wanted it a general's place in history is assured by his feats in battle so even though marshall was needed in washington roosevelt wanted to give him the opportunity to take command marshall would have none of it the decision is yours mr president he said my wishes

have nothing to do with the Matter the role and the glory went to eisenhower instead it came to be that eisenhower was in fact the best man for that job he performed superbly and helped win the war would anything else have been worth the trade-off yet this is what we regularly refuse to do our ego precludes serving any larger mission we're part of what are we going to do Let someone get one over on us the writer cheryl strayed once told a young reader you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as

well not be an this is one of the most dangerous ironies of success it can make us someone we never wanted to be in the first place the disease of me can corrupt the most innocent climb there was a general who treated marshall poorly essentially banishing him to some Obscure postings in the middle of his career later marshall surpassed him and had his chance for revenge except he didn't take it because whatever the man's flaws marshall saw that he was still of use and that the country would be worse off without him what were the

thanks for this quiet suppression of ego just another job well done and not much more the word for that is one we don't use Much anymore magnanimous it was a good strategy too of course but mostly marshall was gracious forgiving and magnanimous because it was right according to observers as high up as president truman what separated marshall from nearly everyone else in the military and in politics is that quote never did george marshall think about himself there's another story of marshall sitting for one of the many official Portraits that was required of him after appearing

many times and patiently honoring the requests marshall was finally informed by the painter that he was finished and free to go marshall stood up and began to leave don't you want to see the painting the artist asked no thank you marshall said respectfully and left is that to say that managing your image isn't important of course not early in your career you'll notice that You jump on every opportunity to do so as you become more accomplished you'll realize that so much of it is a distraction from your work time spent with reporters with awards and

with marketing are time away from what you really care about who has time to look at a picture of himself what's the point as his wife later observed the people who saw george marshall as simply modest or quiet missed what was special about The man he had the same traits that everyone has ego self-interest pride dignity ambition but they were tempered by a sense of humility and selflessness she said it doesn't make you a bad person to want to be remembered to want to make it to the top to provide for yourself and your family

after all that's all part of the allure there is a balance soccer coach tony adams expresses it Well play for the name on the front of the jersey he says and they'll remember the name on the back when it comes to marshall the old idea that selflessness and integrity could be weakness or hold someone back are laughably disproven sure some people might have trouble telling you much about him but each and every one of them lives in a world he was largely responsible for shaping the Credit who cares [Music] meditate on the immensity a monk

is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all a vagrious ponticus in 1879 the preservationist and explorer john muir took his first trip to alaska as he explored the fjords and rocky landscape of alaska's now famous glacier bay a powerful feeling struck him all at once He'd always been in love with nature and here in the unique summer climate of the far north in this single moment it was as if the entire world was in sync as if he could see the entire ecosystem and the circle of life before

him his pulse began to pick up and as he said he and the group were warned and quickened into sympathy with everything taken back into the heart of nature from which we all came thankfully miron noticed and recorded in His journal the beautiful cohesion of the world around him which few have ever matched since as he said we feel the life and motion about us and the universal beauty the tides marching back and forth with weareless industry leaving the beautiful shores and swaying the purple dulce of the broad meadows of the sea where the fishes

are fed the wild streams in rose White with waterfalls ever in bloom and ever in song spreading their branches over a thousand mountains the vast forest is feeding on the drenching sunbeams every cell in a whirl of enjoyment misty flocks of insects stirring all the air the wild sheep and the goats on the grassy ridges above the woods bears in the berry tangles mink and beaver and otter far back on Many a river and lake indians and adventurers pursuing their lonely ways birds tending to their young everywhere everywhere beauty and life and glad rejoicing action

in this moment he was experiencing what the stokes would call sympatheia a connectedness with the cosmos the french philosopher pierre hedeau has referred to it as the oceanic feeling a sense of belonging to something larger Of realizing that human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity as he put it it is in these moments that we're not only free but drawn toward important questions who am i what am i doing what is my role in this world nothing draws us away from those questions like material success when we are always busy stressed put Upon

distracted reported to relied on apart from when we're wealthy and we're told we're important or powerful ego tells us that meaning comes from activity that being the center of attention is the only way to matter when we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us it's like a piece of our soul is gone like we've detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from whatever that Happens to be a craft a sport a brother or sisterhood a family ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world it stands in the way no

wonder we find success empty no wonder we're exhausted no wonder it feels like we're on a treadmill no wonder we lose touch with the energy that once fueled us here's an exercise Walk onto an ancient battlefield or a place of historical significance look at the statues and you can't help but see how similar the people look how little has changed since then since before and how it will be forever after here a great man once stood here another brave woman died here a cruel rich man lived in this palatial home it's the sense that others

have been here before you Generations of them in fact in those moments we have a sense of the immensity of the world ego is impossible because we realize if only fleetingly what emerson meant when he said that every man is a quotation from all his ancestors they are a part of us we are a part of a tradition embrace the power of this position and learn from it it is an exhilarating feeling to grasp this like the one that Muir felt in alaska yes we are small we are also a piece of this great universe

and a process the astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson has described this duality well it's possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos as he says when i look up in the universe i know i'm small but i'm also big i'm big because i'm connected to the universe and the universe is connected To me we just can't forget which is bigger and which has been here longer 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 is a matter of receptiveness and recognition this cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you by removing ego even temporarily we can access what's standing in relief by widening our perspective more comes into view It sat out disconnected from the past and from

the future most of us really are we forget that woolly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built we don't realize that cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom when british workers excavated the land in trafalgar square to build nelson's column and its famous stone lions in the Ground they found bones of actual lions who'd roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before someone recently calculated that it takes but a chain of six individuals who shook hands with one

another across the centuries to connect barack obama to george washington there's a video you can watch on youtube of a man on a cbs game show i've got a secret in 1956 in an episode that also happened to Feature a famous actress named lucille ball his secret he was in ford's theater when lincoln was assassinated the english government only recently paid off debts that incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the south sea bubble the napoleonic wars the empire's abolition of slavery in the irish potato famine meaning that in the 21st century there

was still a direct and daily connection to the 18th and 19th centuries As our power and talents grow we like to think that makes us special that we live in blessed unprecedented times this is compounded by the fact so many of the photos we see from even 50 years ago are still in black and white we seem to assume that the world was in black and white obviously it wasn't their sky was the same color as ours some places brighter than ours they bled the same way we did and their cheeks got flushed just like

Ours do we are just like them and always will be it's hard to be humble when you're as great as i am muhammad ali once said yeah okay that's why great people have to work even harder to fight against this headwind it's hard to be self-absorbed and convinced of your own greatness inside the solitude and quiet of a sensory deprivation tank It's hard to be anything but humble walking alone on a beach late at night with an endless black ocean crashing loudly against the ground next to you we have to actively seek out this cosmic

sympathy there's the famous blake poem that opens with to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour That's what we're after here that's the transcendental experience that makes our petty ego impossible feel unprotected against the elements or forces or surroundings remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you go and put yourself in touch with the infinite and end your conscious separation from the world reconcile yourself a bit

better with the realities of life Realize how much came before you and how only wisps of it remain let the feeling carry you as long as you can then when you start to feel better or bigger then go and do it again [Music] maintain your sobriety the height of cultivation runs to simplicity bruce lee angela merkel is the antithesis of Nearly every assumption we make about a head of state especially a german one she is plain she is modest she cares little for presentation or flash she gives no fiery speeches she has no interest in

expansion or domination mostly she is quiet and reserved chancellor angela merkel is sober when far too many leaders are intoxicated with ego with power with position this sobriety is precisely what has made her a wildly popular three-term leader And paradoxically a powerful sweeping force for freedom and peace in modern europe there's a story about merkel as a young girl at a swimming lesson she walked out on the diving board and stood there thinking about whether she should jump minutes ticked by more minutes finally just as the bell marking the end of the lesson began to

ring she jumped was she afraid or just cautious Many years later she would remind europe's leaders during a major crisis that fear is a bad advisor as a kid on that diving board she wanted to use every allotted second to make the right decision not driven by recklessness or fear in most cases we think that people become successful through sheer energy and enthusiasm we almost excuse ego because we think it's part and parcel of the personality Required to make it big maybe a bit of that overpoweringness is what got you where you are but let's

ask is it really sustainable for the next several decades can you really outwork and outrun everyone forever the answer is no the ego tells us we're invincible that we have unlimited force that will never dissipate but that can't be what greatness Requires energy without end merkel is the embodiment of aesop's fable about the tortoise she is slow and steady the historic night the berlin wall fell she was 35 she had one beer went to bed and showed up early for work the next day a few years later she had worked to become a respected but

obscure physicist only then did she enter politics in her 50s she became chancellor It was a diligent plotting path yet the rest of us want to get to the top as fast as humanly possible we have no patience for waiting we're high on getting high up in the ranks once we've made it we tend to think that ego and energy is the only way to stay there it's not when russian president vladimir putin once attempted to intimidate merkel by letting his large hunting dog barge into a meeting she is reportedly not a dog Lover she

didn't flinch and later joked about it as a result he was the one who looked foolish and insecure during her rise and especially during her time in power she has consistently maintained her equilibrium and clear-headedness regardless of the immediate stressors or stimuli in a similar position we might have sprung into bold action we might have gotten angry or drawn a line in the sand We have to stand up for ourselves right but do we so often this is just ego escalating tension more than dealing with it merkel is firm clear and patient she's willing to

compromise on everything except the principle at stake which far too many people lose sight of that is sobriety that is command of oneself she did not become the most powerful woman in the western world by accident More importantly she's maintained her perch for three terms the same formula the great philosopher king marcus aurelius knew this very well called to politics almost against his will he served the roman people in continually higher offices from his teens until his death there was almost always pressing business appeals to hear wars to fight laws to pass favors to grant

he strove to escape what he called Imperialization the stain of absolute power that had wrecked previous emperors to do that he wrote to himself he must fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you this is why one zen philosopher is supposed to have called out to himself every day master yes sir then he would add become sober yes sir he would conclude by saying do not be Deceived by others yes sir yes sir today we might add to that don't be deceived by recognition you have gotten or the amount of money in your

bank account we have to fight to stay sober despite the many different forces swirling around our ego the historian shelby foote observed that power doesn't so much corrupt that's too simple It fragments closes options mesmerizes that's what ego does it clouds the mind precisely when it needs to be clear sobriety is a counterbalance a hangover cure or better a prevention method other politicians are bold and charismatic but as merkel supposedly said you can't solve tasks with charisma she is rational she analyzes she makes it about the situation not about herself as people in power often

do her background in science is helpful Here surely politicians are often vain obsessing about their image merkel is too objective for that she cares about the results and little else a german writer observed in a tribute on her 50th birthday that unpretentiousness is merkel's main weapon david halberstram writing about patriots coach bill belichick observed that the man was not only in the state business he had contempt for sizzle you could say The same about merkel leaders like belichick and merkel know that stake is what wins games and moves nations forward sizzle on the other hand

makes it harder to make the right decisions how to interact with others who to promote which place to run what feedback to listen to where to come down on an issue churchill's europe required one type of leader today's interconnected world requires its own Because there's so much information to be sorted through so much competition so much change without a clear head all is lost we're not talking about abstinence from drugs or alcohol obviously but there certainly is an element of restraint to egoless sobriety an elimination of the unnecessary and the destructive no more obsessing about

your image treating people beneath you or above you with contempt Needing first class trappings in the star treatment raging fighting preening performing lording over condescending and marveling at your own awesomeness or self-anointed importance sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success especially if things keep getting better and better as james basford remarked it requires a strong constitution to withstand repeated attacks of prosperity Well that's where we are now there's an old line about how if you want to live happy live hidden it's true the problem is that means the rest of us are deprived

of really good examples we're lucky to see someone like merkel in the public eye because she is the representative of a very large silent majority as hard as it might be to believe from what we see in the media there are Actually some successful people with modest apartments like merkel they have normal private lives with their spouses her husband skipped her first inauguration they lack artifice they wear normal clothes 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 [Music] For what

often comes next ego is the enemy the evidence is in and you are the verdict and lamont here you are at the pinnacle what have you found just how tough and tricky it is to manage you thought it would get easier when you arrived instead it's even harder a different animal entirely What you found is that you must manage yourself in order to maintain your success the philosopher aristotle was not unfamiliar with the worlds of ego and power and empire his most famous pupil was alexander the great partially through aristotle's teachings the young man conquered

the entire known world alexander was brave and brilliant and Often generous and wise still it's clear that he ignored aristotle's most important lesson and that's partially why he died at age 32 far from home likely killed by his own men who had finally said enough it's not that he was wrong to have great ambitions alexander just never grasped aristotle's golden mean that is the middle ground aristotle repeatedly speaks of virtue And excellence as points along a spectrum courage for instance lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other generosity which we all admire

must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use where the line this golden mean is can be difficult to tell but without finding it we risk dangerous extremes this is why it is so hard to be Excellent as aristotle wrote in each case it is hard work to find the intermediate for instance not everyone but only one who knows finds the midpoint in a circle we can use the golden mean to navigate our ego and our desire to achieve endless ambition is easy anyone can put their foot down hard

on the gas complacency is easy too it's just a matter of taking that foot off the gas We must avoid what the business strategist jim collins terms the undisciplined pursuit of more as well as the complacency that comes with plaudits to borrow from aristotle again what's difficult is to apply the right amount of pressure at the right time in the right way for the right period of time in the right car going in the right direction if we don't do this the consequences can be dire There is a line from napoleon who like alexander died

miserably he said men of great ambition have sought happiness and have found fame what he means is that behind every goal is the drive to be happy and fulfilled but when egotism takes hold we lose track of our goal and end up somewhere we never intended emerson in his famous essay on napoleon takes pains to point out that just a few Years after his death europe was essentially exactly as it was before napoleon began his precipitous rise all that death that effort that greed those honors for what for basically nothing napoleon he wrote quickly faded

away just like the smoke from his artillery howard hughes despite his current reputation as some kind of bold maverick was not a happy man no matter how Awesome his life may seem from history or movies when he was near death one of his aides sought to reassure a suffering hughes what an incredible life you have led the aide said hugh shook his head and replied with the sad emphatic honesty of someone whose time has clearly come if you had ever swapped places in life with me he said i would be willing to bet that you

would Have demanded to swap back before the passage of the first week we do not have to follow in those footsteps we know what decisions we must make to avoid that ignominious even pathetic end protecting our sobriety eschewing greed and paranoia staying humble retaining our sense of purpose connecting to the larger world around us because even if we manage ourselves well prosperity holds no guarantees The world conspires against us in many ways and the laws of nature say that everything regresses toward the mean in sports the schedule gets harder after a winning season the bad

teams get better draft picks and the salary cap makes it tough to keep a team together in life taxes go up the more you make the more obligations society voice on you the media is harder on those it has Covered before rumors and gossip are the cost of renown he's a drunk she's gay he's a hypocrite she's a the crowd roots for the underdog and roots against the winners these are just the facts of life who can afford to add denial to all that instead of letting power make us delusional and instead of taking what

we have for granted we'd be better to spend our time Preparing for the shifts of fate that inevitably occur in life that is adversity difficulty failure who knows maybe a downturn is exactly what's coming next worse maybe you caused it just because you did something once doesn't mean you'll be able to do it successfully forever reversals and regressions are as much a part of the cycle of life as anything else But we can manage that too [Music] part three failure here we are experiencing the trials endemic to any journey perhaps we failed perhaps our goal

turned out to be harder to achieve than anticipated no one is permanently successful and not everyone finds success on the first attempt we all deal with setbacks along the way Ego not only leaves us unprepared for these circumstances it often contributed to their occurrence in the first place the way through the way to rise again requires a reorientation and increased self-awareness we don't need pity our own or anyone else's we need purpose poise and patience to whatever failure and challenges you will face ego is the enemy It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more

entirely with our joy than with our sorrow that we make parade of our riches and conceal our poverty nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to the view of the public and to feel that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer Adam smith for the first half of her life catherine graham saw pretty much everything go right her father eugene meyer was a financial genius who made a fortune in the stock market her mother was a

beautiful as well as brilliant socialite as a child catherine had the best of everything the best schools the best teachers big houses and servants to wait on her In 1933 her father bought the washington post then a struggling but important newspaper which he began to turn around the only child to express any serious interest in it catherine inherited the paper when she was older and handed over the management to her equally impressive husband phillip graham she was not another howard hughes who squandered her family's fortune she was not another rich kid who took The easy

road in life because she could but it was a cushy life no question about it she had been in her words content to be the tale of her husband's and parents kite then life took a turn phil graham's behavior became increasingly erratic he drank heavily he made reckless business decisions and bought things they couldn't afford he began having affairs he publicly humiliated his wife in front Of nearly everyone they knew rich people problems right it turns out that he had suffered a severe mental breakdown and as catherine attempted to nurse him back to health he'd

killed himself with a hunting rifle while she napped in the next room in 1963 at 46 years old catherine graham a mother of three with no work experience found herself in charge of the washington post company a vast Corporation with thousands of employees she was unprepared timid and naive though tragic these events were not exactly a cataclysmic failure graham was still rich still white still privileged still it was not what she thought her life had planned for her that's the point failure and adversity are relative and unique to each of us almost without exception this

is what Life does it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces sometimes once sometimes lots of times as the financial philosopher and economist george goodman once observed it is as if we are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air we know that at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through The terraced doors wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors those who leave early are saved but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time so everybody

keeps asking what time is it but none of the clocks have hands he was speaking of economic crises although he may as well have been talking about where all of us find ourselves not just once in our lifetimes But often things are going well perhaps we're aspiring to some big goal perhaps we're finally enjoying the fruits of our labors at any point fate can intervene if success is ego intoxication then failure can be a devastating ego blow turning slips into falls and little troubles into great unravelings but if ego is just a nasty side effect

of great success It can be fatal during failure we have many names for these problems sabotage unfairness adversity trials tragedy no matter the label it's a trial we don't like it and some of us are sunk by it others seem to be built to make it through in either case it's a trial each person must endure this fate is as much written for us as It was written five thousand years ago for the young king in gilgamesh he will face a battle he knows not he will ride a road he knows not that's what came

to katherine graham it turned out that taking over the paper was the first in a series of trying and wrenching events that lasted for nearly two decades thomas paine remarking about george washington once wrote that there is a natural firmness in some minds which Cannot be unlocked by trifles but which when unlocked discovers a cabinet of fortitude graham seems to have possessed a similar cabinet as she settled into her leadership position graham found that the paper's conservative board was a constant obstacle they were patronizing and risk-averse and had held the company back to succeed she

would have to develop her Own compass and not defer to others the way she always had it eventually became clear that she needed a new executive editor against the board's advice she replaced the well-liked good old boy with an unknown young upstart simple enough the next turn of the screw wasn't just as the company was filing to go public the post received a collection of stolen government documents that editors Asked graham if they could run despite a court order preventing their publication she consulted the company's lawyers she consulted the board all advised against it fearing

it could sink the ipo or tie the company up in lawsuits for years torn she decided to proceed and publish them a decision with essentially no precedent shortly thereafter the paper's investigation of a burglary at the Democratic national committee's headquarters relying on an anonymous source threatened to put the company permanently at odds with the white house and washington's powerful elite as well as jeopardizing the government licenses they needed for the tv stations the post owned at one point nixon loyalist and the attorney general of the united states john mitchell threatened that graham had so overreached

that her tit was going to Be caught in a big fat ringer another aide bragged that the white house was now thinking about how to screw the paper over put yourself in her shoes the most powerful office in the world explicitly strategizing how can we hurt the post the most on top of that the post stock price was less than stellar the market was poor in 1974 an investor began aggressively Buying up shares in the company the board was terrified could mean a hostile takeover graham was dispatched to deal with him the following year the

paper's printers union began a vicious protracted strike at one point union members wore shirts that said phil shot the wrong gram despite or perhaps because of these tactics she decided to fight the strike they fought back at four o'clock one morning came a Frantic call the union had sabotaged company machinery beaten up an innocent staffer and then set one of the printing presses on fire typically during printing strikes competitors will help fellow papers out with their printing but graham's competitors refused costing the post 300 000 a day in advertising revenue then a suite of major

investors began to sell their stock positions in the Washington post company ostensibly having lost their faith in its prospects graham pushed by the activist investor she'd met with earlier decided her best option was to spend an enormous amount of the company's money to buy back its own shares on the public markets a dangerous move that almost no one was doing at the time that's a list of exhausting problems to hear about let alone live through yet because of graham's perseverance it Shook out better than anyone could have possibly predicted the leaked documents that graham published

became known as the pentagon papers and were one of the most important stories in the history of journalism the paper's watergate reporting which so incensed the nixon white house changed american history and took down an entire administration it also won the paper a pulitzer prize The investor others had feared turned out to be a young warren buffett who became her business mentor and an enormous advocate and steward of the company his small investments in her family's company would one day become worth hundreds of millions of dollars she prevailed the negotiations with the union and the

strike eventually ended her main competitor in washington the one that had refused to come to her aid The star suddenly folded and was acquired by the post her stock buybacks made contrary not only to business wisdom but the judgment of the market made the company billions of dollars it turns out that the long hard slog she endured the mistakes she made the repeated failures crises and attacks were all leading somewhere if you'd invested one dollar in the post Ipo in 1971 it would be worth 89 by the time graham stepped down in 1993 compared to

14 for her industry and five dollars for the s p 500 it makes her not just one of the most successful female ceos of her generation and the first to run a fortune 500 company but one of the best ceos ever period for someone born with a silver spoon in her mouth the first decade and a half Was what you'd call a baptism of fire graham faced difficulty after difficulty difficulties that she wasn't really equipped to handle or so it seemed there were times when it probably felt like she should have just sold the damn

thing and enjoyed her massive wealth graham didn't cause her husband's suicide but it was left to her to carry on without him she didn't ask for watergate in the pentagon papers but it fell on her to Navigate their incendiary nature while others went on buying in merger sprees in the 80s she didn't she doubled down on herself and her own company despite the fact that it was treated as a weakling by wall street she could have taken the easy way a hundred times but did not at any given moment there is a chance of failure

or setbacks bill walsh says almost always your road to victory goes through a place called Failure in order to taste success again we've got to understand what led to this moment or these years of difficulty what went wrong and why we must deal with the situation in order to move past it we'll need to accept it and push through it graham was alone in most of this she was blindly feeling her way through the dark trying to figure out a tough situation she never expected to be in She's an example of how you can do

almost everything right and still find yourself in deep we think that failure only comes to egomaniacs who were begging for it nixon deserve to fail to graham the reality is that while yes often people set themselves up to crash good people fail or other people fail them all the time too people who have already been through a lot find themselves stuck with more Life isn't fair ego loves this notion the idea that something is fair or not psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events we do that when our

sense of self is fragile and dependent on life going our way all the time whether what you're going through is your fault or your problem doesn't matter because it's yours to deal with Right now graham's ego didn't cause her to fail but if she'd had one it certainly would have prevented her from succeeding ever again you could say that failure always arrives uninvited but through our ego far too many of us allow it to stick around what did graham need through all this not swagger not bluster she needed to be strong She needed confidence and

a willingness to endure a sense of right and wrong purpose it wasn't about her it was about preserving her family's legacy protecting the paper doing her job what about you will your ego betray you when things get difficult or can you proceed without it when we face difficulty particularly Public difficulty doubters scandals losses our friend the ego will show its true colors absorbing the negative feedback eco says i knew you couldn't do it why did you ever try it claims this isn't worth it this isn't fair this is somebody else's problem why don't you come

up with a good excuse and wash your hands of this it tells us we shouldn't have to put up with this it tells us that we're not the Problem that is it adds self-injury to every injury you experience to paraphrase epicurus the narcissistically inclined live in an unwalled city a fragile sense of self is constantly under threat illusions and accomplishments are not defenses not when you've got the special sensitive antennae trained to receive And create the signals that challenge your precarious balancing act it is a miserable way to live the year before walsh took over

the 49ers they went 2 and 14. his first year as head coach and general manager they went 2 and 14. can you imagine the disappointment all the changes all the work that went into that first year and to end up in the exact same spot as the incompetent coach Who preceded you that's how most of us would think and then we'd probably start blaming other people walsh said he realized he had to look for evidence elsewhere that it was turning around for him it was in how the games were being played the good decisions and

the changes that were being made inside the organization two seasons later they won the super Bowl and then several more after that at rock bottom those victories must have felt like a long way off which is why you have to be able to see past and through as gerter once observed the great failing is to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth a good metaphor might be the kind of stock buybacks that katherine graham made in the late 70s and 80s Stock buybacks are controversial they

usually come from a company that is stalled or whose growth is decelerating with buybacks a ceo is making a rather incredible statement she's saying the market is wrong it's valuing our company so incorrectly and clearly has so little idea where we are heading that we're going to spend the company's precious cash on a bet that they are wrong too often dishonest or egotistical ceos Buy back companies stock because they're delusional or because they want to artificially inflate the stock price conversely timid or weak ceos wouldn't even consider betting on themselves in graham's case she made

a value judgment with buffett's help she could see objectively that the market didn't appreciate the true worth of the company's assets she knew that the reputational hits the learning curve had all contributed to a suppressed stock Price which aside from reducing her personal wealth created a massive opportunity for the company over a short period she would buy nearly 40 percent of the company's shares at a fraction of what they'd later be worth the stock that katherine graham bought for approximately 20 a share would less than a decade later be worth more than three hundred what

both graham and walsh were doing was adhering to a set of internal Metrics that allowed them to evaluate and gauge their progress while everyone on the outside was too distracted by the supposed signs failure or weakness this is what guides us through difficulty you might not get into your first choice college you might not get picked for the project or you might get passed over for the promotion someone might outbid you for the job for your dream house for the opportunity you Feel everything depends on this might happen tomorrow it might happen 25 years from

now it could last for 2 minutes or 10 years we know that everyone experiences failure and adversity that we're all subject to the rules of gravity and averages what does that mean it means we'll face them too as plutarch finally expressed the future bears down upon each one of Us with all the hazards of the unknown the only way out is through humble and strong people don't have the same trouble with these troubles that egotists do there are fewer complaints and far less self-immolation instead there's a stoic even cheerful resilience pity isn't necessary their identity

isn't threatened they can get by without constant validation This is what we're aspiring to much more than mere success what matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us and how we make it through [Music] a live time or dead time live without wasted time the words of a parisian political slogan malcolm x was a criminal he wasn't malcolm x at the time they called him detroit red and he was a criminal Opportunist who did a little bit of everything he ran numbers he sold drugs he worked as a pimp then he

moved up to armed robbery he had his own burglary game which he ruled over with a combination of intimidation and boldness exploiting the fact that he did not seem afraid to kill or die then finally he was arrested for trying to fence an expensive watch he'd stolen he was carrying a gun at the time though to his credit he made no move to fight The officers who had trapped him in his apartment they found jewelry furs an arsenal of guns and all his burglary tools he got 10 years it was february 1946 he was barely

21 years old even accounting for the shameful american racism and whatever systemic legal injustices existed at the time malcolm x was guilty he deserved to go to jail who knows who else he would have hurt or Killed had he continued his escalating life of crime when your actions land you a lengthy prison sentence rightly tried and convicted something has gone wrong you've failed not only yourself but the basic standards of society and morality that was the case with malcolm so there he was in prison a number a body with roughly a decade to sit in

a cage he faced what robert greene a man who 60 Years later would find his wildly popular books banned in many federal prisons calls in a lifetime or dead time scenario how would the seven years ultimately play out what would malcolm do with his time according to green there are two types of time in our lives dead time when people are passive and waiting and a live time when people are learning acting and utilizing every second Every moment of failure every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control presents this choice a

lifetime dead time which will it be malcolm chose a live time he began to learn he explored religion he taught himself to be a reader by checking out a pencil in the dictionary from the prison library and not only consumed it from start to finish but copied it down longhand from cover to cover All these words he'd never known existed before were transferred to his brain as he said later from then until i left that prison in every free moment i had if i was not reading in the library i was reading in my bunk

he read history he read sociology he read about religion he read the classics he read philosophers like kant and spinoza later a reporter asked malcolm what's your alma mater his one-word answer books Prison was his college he transcended confinement through the pages he absorbed he reflected that months passed without his even thinking about being detained against his will he had as he said never been so truly free in his life most people know what malcolm x did after he got out of prison but they don't realize or understand how prison made that possible how a

mix of acceptance humility and Strength powered the transformation they also aren't aware of how common this is in history how many figures took seemingly terrible situations a prison sentence an exile a bear market or depression military conscription even being sent to a concentration camp and through their attitude and approach turned those circumstances into fuel for their unique greatness francis scott key wrote the poem that became the national anthem of the united States while trapped on a ship during a prisoner exchange of the war of 1812 victor frankel refined his psychologies of meaning and suffering during

his ordeal in three nazi concentration camps not that these opportunities always come in such serious situations the author ian fleming was on bed rest in her doctor's orders forbidden from using a typewriter they were worried he'd exert himself by writing another bond novel so he created chitty chitty Bang bang by hand instead walt disney made his decision to become a cartoonist while laid up after stepping on a rusty nail yes it would feel better in the moment to be angry to be aggrieved to be depressed or heartbroken when injustice or the capriciousness of fate are

inflicted on someone the normal reaction is to yell to fight back to resist you know the feeling i don't want this i Want blank i want it my way this is short-sighted think of what you've been putting off issues you've declined to deal with systemic problems that felt too overwhelming to address dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we've long needed to do as they say this moment is not your life but it is a moment in your life how will you use it Malcolm could have doubled down

on the life that brought him to prison dead time isn't only dead because of sloth or complacency he could have spent those years becoming a better criminal strengthening his contacts or planning his next score but it still would have been dead time he might have felt alive while doing it even as he was slowly killing himself as robert greene put it many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons Where we have nothing to do but think yet sadly prisons in their literal and figurative forms have produced far more degenerates losers and nerdwells inmates might

have had nothing to do but think it's just that what they chose to think about made them worse and not better that's what so many of us do when we fail or get ourselves in trouble lacking the ability to examine ourselves we reinvest our energy into exactly the Patterns of behavior that caused our problems to begin with it comes in many forms idly dreaming about the future plotting our revenge finding refuge and distraction refusing to consider that our choices are a reflection of our character we'd rather do basically anything else but what if we said

this is an opportunity for me i am using it for my purposes i will not Let this be dead time for me the dead time was when we were controlled by ego now now we can live who knows what you're currently doing hopefully it's not a prison term even if it might feel like it maybe you're sitting in remedial high school class maybe you're on hold maybe it's a trial separation maybe you're making smoothies while you save up money maybe you're stuck waiting out a contract or a tour of duty perhaps this Situation is totally

one of your own making or perhaps it's just bad luck in life we all get stuck with dead time its occurrence isn't in our control its use on the other hand is as booker t washington famously put it cast down your bucket where you are make use of what's around you don't let stubbornness make a bad situation worse [Music] the effort is enough What matters to an active man is to do the right thing whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him gerta belisarius is one of the greatest yet unknown military generals

in all of history his name has been so obscured and forgotten by history that he makes the underappreciated general marshall seem positively famous at least they named the marshall plan After george as rome's highest ranking commander under the byzantine emperor justinian belisarius saved western civilization on at least three occasions as rome collapsed and the seat of the empire moved to constantinople belisarius was the only bright light in a dark time for christianity he won brilliant victories at deira cartage naples sicily and constantinople with just a handful of bodyguards Against a crowd of tens of thousands

belisarius saved the throne when an uprising had grown so riotous that the emperor made plans to abdicate he reclaimed far-flung territories that had been lost for years despite being undermanned and deprived of resources he recaptured and defended rome for the first time since the barbarians had sacked and taken it all of this before he was 40. his thanks he was not given public Triumphs instead he was repeatedly placed under suspicion by the paranoid emperor he served justinian his victories and sacrifices were undone with foolish treaties and bad faith his personal historian procopius was corrupted by

justinian to tarnish the man's image and legacy later he was relieved of command his only remaining title was the deliberately humiliating commander of the royal stable Oh and at the end of his illustrious career belisarius was stripped of his wealth and according to the legend blinded and forced to beg in the streets to survive historians scholars and artists have lamented and argued about this treatment for centuries like all fair-minded people they're outraged at the stupidity the ungratefulness and the injustice that this great and unusual man was subjected to The one person we don't hear complaining

about any of this not at the time not at the end of his life not even in private letters belisarius himself ironically he probably could have taken the throne on numerous occasions though it appears he was never even tempted while the emperor justinian phil prayed all the vices of absolute power control paranoia selfishness greed we see hardly a trace of them in belisarius in his eyes he was just doing his job One he believed was his sacred duty he knew that he did it well he knew that what he had done was right that was

enough in life there will be times when we do everything right perhaps even perfectly yet the results will somehow be negative failure disrespect jealousy even a resounding yawn from the world depending on what motivates us this response can be crushing if ego holds sway we'll accept nothing less than full Appreciation a dangerous attitude because when someone works on a project whether it's a book or a business or otherwise at a certain point that thing leaves their hands and enters the realm of the world it is judged received and acted on by other people it stops

being something he controls and depends on them belisarius could win his battles he could lead his men He could determine his personal ethics he could not control whether his work was appreciated or whether it aroused suspicion he had no ability to control whether a powerful dictator would treat him well this reality rings essentially true for everyone in every kind of life what was so special about belisarius was that he accepted the bargain doing the right thing was enough serving his country his god doing his duty Faithfully was all that mattered any adversity could be endured

and any rewards were considered extra which is good because not only was he often not rewarded for the good he did he was punished that seems galling at first indignation is the reaction we'd have if it happened to us or someone we know what was his alternative should he have done the wrong thing instead we are all faced with the same challenge in the Pursuit of our own goals will we work hard for something that can be taken away from us will we invest time and energy if an outcome is not guaranteed with the right

motives we're willing to proceed with ego we're not we have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort other people's validations recognition rewards so what are we going to do not be kind not work hard not produce Because there is a chance it wouldn't be reciprocated come on think of all the activists who will find that they can only advance their cause so far the leaders who are assassinated before their work is done the inventors whose ideas languish ahead of their time according to society's main metrics these people were not rewarded for

their work Should they have not done it yet an ego every one of us has considered doing precisely that if that is your attitude how do you intend to endure tough times what if you're ahead of the times what if the market favors some bogus trend what if your boss or your clients don't understand it's far better when doing good work is sufficient in other words the less attached we are to outcomes the better When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect when the effort not the results good or bad

is enough with ego this is not nearly sufficient no we need to be recognized we need to be compensated especially problematic is the fact that often we get that we are praised we are paid we start to assume that the two things always go together the expectation hangover inevitably ensues There was an unusual encounter between alexander the great and the famous cynic philosopher diogenes allegedly alexander approached diogenes who was laying down enjoying the summer air stood over him and asked what he the most powerful man in the world might be able to do for this

notoriously poor man diogenes could have asked for anything what he requested was epic stop blocking my son even two thousand years later we can Feel exactly where in the solar plexus that must have hit alexander a man who always wanted to prove how important he was as the author robert louis stevenson later observed about this meeting it is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled arduous hilltops and when all is done find humanity indifferent to your achievement well get ready for it it will happen maybe your parents will never be Impressed maybe your

girlfriend won't care maybe the investor won't see the numbers maybe the audience won't clap but we have to be able to push through we can't let that be what motivates us belisarius had one last run he was found innocent of the charges and his honors restored just in time to save the empire as a white-haired old man except no life is not a fairy tale he was again wrongly suspected of plotting against the emperor in the famous Longfellow poem about our poor general at the end of his life he is impoverished and disabled yet he

concludes with great strength this too can bear i still am belisarius you will be unappreciated you will be sabotaged you will experience surprising failures your expectations will not be met you will lose you will fail how do you carry on then how do you take pride in yourself and Your work john wooden's advice to his player says it changed the definition of success as he put it success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable

of becoming ambition marcus aurelius reminded himself means tying your well-being to what other people say or do sanity means tying to your own actions Do your work do it well then let go and let god that's all there needs to be recognition and rewards those are just extra rejection that's on them not on us john kennedy tools great book a confederacy of dunces was universally turned down by publishers news that so broke his heart he later committed suicide in his car on an empty road in biloxi mississippi After his death his mother discovered the book

advocated on its behalf until it was published and eventually won a pulitzer prize think about that for a second what changed between those submissions nothing the book was the same it was equally great when tool had it in manuscript form and had fought with editors about it as it was when the book was published sold copies and won awards if only he could have realized this it Would have saved him so much heartbreak he couldn't but from his painful example we can at least see how arbitrary many of the breaks in life are this is

why we can't let externals determine whether something was worth it or not it's on us the world is after all indifferent to what we humans want if we persist in wanting in needing we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse doing the work is enough [Music] fight club moments if you shut up truth and bury it under the ground it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way emile zola there is hardly the space to list all the

successful people who have hit rock bottom The notion everyone experiences jarring perspective altering moments is almost a cliche that doesn't mean it isn't true jk rowling finds herself seven years after college with a failed marriage no job single parent kid she can barely feed and approaching homelessness a teenage charlie parker thinks he's tearing it up on stage right in the pocket with the rest of the crew Until joe jones throws a symbol at him and chases him away in humiliation a young lyndon johnson is beaten to a pulp by a hill country farm boy over

a girl finally shattering his picture of himself as of the walk there are many ways to hit bottom almost everyone does it in their own way at some point in the novel fight club the character jack's apartment is blown up all of his possessions every stick of Furniture which he pathetically loved were lost later it turns out that jack blew it up himself he had multiple personalities and tyler durden orchestrated the explosion to shock jack from the sad stupor he was afraid to do anything about the result was a journey into an entirely different and

rather dark part of his life in greek mythology characters often Experience catabasis or going down they're forced to retreat the experience of depression or in some cases literally descend into the underworld when they emerge it's with heightened knowledge and understanding today we'd call that hell and on occasion we all spend some time there we surround ourselves with with distractions with lies about what makes us happy and what's important we become People we shouldn't become and engage in destructive awful behaviors this unhealthy and ego derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent until catabasis forces us to

face it duras dura fragontour hard things are broken by hard things the bigger the ego the harder the fall it would be nice if it didn't have to be this way if we could nicely be nudged to correct our ways if a quiet admonishment was What it took to shoo away illusions if we could manage to circumvent ego on our own but it is just not so the reverend william a sutton observed some 120 years ago that we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations how much better it would be to spare ourselves these experiences

but sometimes it's the only way the blind can be made to see in fact many significant life changes Come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false we might call these fight club moments sometimes they are self-inflicted sometimes inflicted on us but whatever the cause they can be catalyst for changes we were petrified to make pick a time in your life or perhaps it's a moment you're experiencing now a boss's eviscerating critique of you in Front of the entire staff that sit down

with the person you loved the google alert that delivered the article you'd hoped would never be written the call from the creditor the news that threw you back in your chair speechless and dumbfounded it was in those moments when the break exposes something unseen before that you were forced to make eye contact with a thing called truth No longer could you hide or pretend such a moment raises many questions how do i make sense of this how do i move onward and upward is this the bottom or is there more to come someone told me

my problem so how do i fix them how did i let this happen how can it never happen again a look at history finds that these events seem to be defined by three traits One they almost always came at the hands of some outside force or person two they often involved things we already knew about ourselves but were too scared to admit three from the ruin came the opportunity for great progress and improvement does everyone take advantage of that opportunity of course not ego often causes the crash and then blocks us from improving was the

2008 financial crisis not a moment in which Everything was laid bare for many people the lack of accountability the over leveraged lifestyles the greed the dishonesty the trends that could not possibly continue for some this was a wake-up call others just a few years later are back exactly where they were for them it will be worse the next time hemingway had his own rock bottom realizations as a young man The understanding he took from them is expressed timelessly in his book a farewell to arms he wrote the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong

at the broken places but those that will not break it kills the world can show you the truth but no one can force you to accept it in 12-step groups almost all the steps are about suppressing the ego and clearing out the entitlements and Baggage and wreckage that has been accumulated so that you might see what's left when all of that is stripped away and the real you is left it's always so tempting to turn to that old friend denial which is your ego refusing to believe that which you don't like could be true psychologists

often say that threatened egotism is one of the most dangerous forces on earth the gang member whose honor is impugned The narcissist who is rejected the bully who was made to feel shame the impostor who was exposed the plagiarist or the embellisher whose story stops adding up these are not people who you want to be near when they are cornered nor is it a corner you want to back yourself into that's where you think how can these people talk to me this way who do they think they are i'll make them all pay sometimes because

we can't face what's Been said or what's been done we do the unthinkable in response to the unbearable we escalate this is ego in its purest and most toxic form look at lance armstrong he cheated but so did a lot of people it was when this cheating was made public and he was forced to see if only for a second that he was a cheater that things got really bad He insisted on denying it despite all the evidence he insisted on ruining other people's lives we're so afraid to lose our own esteem or god forbid

the esteem of others that we contemplate doing terrible things as the bible verse goes everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his works should be exposed big and small this is what we do getting hit with that spotlight doesn't Feel good whether we're talking about the exposure of ordinary self-deception or true evil but turning away only delays the reckoning for how long no one can say face the symptoms cure the disease ego makes it so hard it's easier to delay to double down to deliberately avoid seeing

the changes we need to make in our lives but change begins by hearing the criticism in the words of the people Around you even if those words are mean-spirited angry or hurtful it means weighing them discarding the ones that don't matter and reflecting on the ones that do in fight club the character has to fire bomb his own apartment to finally break through our expectations and exaggerations and lack of restraint made such moments inevitable ensuring that it would be painful Now it's here what will you make of it you can change or you can deny

vince lombardi said this once a team like men must be brought to its knees before it can rise again so yes hitting bottom is as brutal as it sounds but the feeling after is one of the most powerful perspectives in the world president obama described it as he neared the end of his tumultuous trying terms i've been in the barrel tumbling Down niagara falls and i emerged and i lived and that's such a liberating feeling if we could help it it would be better if we never suffered illusions at all it'd be better if we

never had to kneel or go over the edge that's what we spent so much time talking about so far in this book if that fight is lost we end up here in the end the only way you can appreciate your progress is to stand on The edge of the hole you dug for yourself look down inside it and smile fondly at the bloody claw prince that marked your journey up the walls [Music] draw the line it can ruin your life only if it ruins your character marcus aurelius delorean ran his car company into the ground

with a mix of outsized ambition Negligence narcissism greed and mismanagement as the bad news began to pile up and the picture was made clear and public how do you think he responded was it with resigned acceptance did he acknowledge the errors his disgruntled employees were speaking out about for the first time was he able to reflect even slightly on the mistakes and decisions that had brought him his investors and his employees so much Trouble of course not instead he put into motion a series of events that would end in a 60 million dollar drug deal

and his subsequent arrest that's right after his company began to fail failure almost exclusively tied to his unprofessional management style he figured the best way to save it all would be to secure financing through an Illegal shipment of 220 pounds of cocaine sure after his publicized and very embarrassing arrest delorean was eventually acquitted on the charges on the rather implausible argument of entrapment except he is on video holding up a baggie of cocaine saying with giddy excitement this stuff is as good as gold there's no question about who caused john delorean's disintegration There's also no

question about who made it so much worse the answer is him he found himself in a hole and kept digging until he made it all the way to hell if only he'd stop if at any point he'd said is this the person i want to be people make mistakes all the time they start companies they think they can manage they have grand and bold visions that were a little too grandiose This is all perfectly fine it's what being an entrepreneur or a creative or even a business executive is all about we take risks we mess

up the problem is when we get our identity tied up in our work we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person it's a fear of taking responsibility of admitting that we might have messed up it's the sunk cost fallacy and so we Throw good money and good life after bad and end up making everything so much worse let's say the walls feel like they're closing in it might feel as if you've been betrayed or your life's work is being stolen but these are not rational good emotions

that will lead to rational good actions ego asks why is this happening to me how do i save this and prove to everyone i'm as great as they think It's the animal fear of even the slightest sign of weakness you've seen this you've done this fighting desperately for something we're only making worse it is not a path to great things take steve jobs he was a hundred percent responsible for his firing from apple due to his later success apple's decision to fire him seems like an example of poor leadership but he was at the time

unmanageable His ego was unequivocally out of control if you were john scully and the ceo of apple you'd have fired that version of steve jobs too and been right to do so now steve jobs response to his firing was understandable he cried he fought when he lost he sold all but a single share of his stock in apple and swore never to think of the place again but then he started a new company and threw his whole life into it he tried to learn as best he could from the Management mistakes at the root of

his first failure he started another company after that too called pixar steve jobs the famous egomaniac who parked in handicapped parking spaces just because he could responded in this critical moment in a surprisingly humble way humble for ceos convinced of their own genius anyway he worked until he'd not only proven Himself again but significantly resolved the flaws that had caused his downfall to begin with it's not often that successful or powerful people are able to do this not when they experience heart-rending failure american apparel's founder jeff charney is an example after losses of some 300

million and numerous scandals the company offered him a choice Step aside as ceo and guide the company as a creative consultant for a large salary or be fired he rejected both options and picked something much worse after filing a lawsuit in protest he gambled his entire ownership in the company to initiate a hostile takeover with a hedge fund and insisted that his conduct be investigated and judged it was and he was not vindicated his personal life was splashed across The headlines and embarrassing details revealed the lawyer he chose to represent him in his lawsuits happened

to be the same one who'd already sued charney close to half a dozen times for sexual harassment and financial irregularities in the past charney had accused this man of shaking him down and making bogus legal claims now they were working together american apparel spent more than 10 Million dollars it didn't have to fight him off a judge issued a restraining order sales slumped finally the company began laying off factory workers and long-time employees the exact people he claimed to be fighting for just to stay afloat a year later they were bankrupt and he was out

of money too i was there i saw all of it it broke my heart it's like the disgraced statesman and General alcibiades in the peloponnesian war he fought first for his home country and greatest love athens then driven out for a drunken crime he may or may not have committed he defected to sparta athens sworn enemy then running afoul of the spartans he defected to persia the sworn enemy of both finally he was recalled to athens where his ambitious plans to invade sicily drove the athenians to their ultimate Ruin ego kills what we love sometimes

it comes close to killing us too it is interesting that alexander hamilton who of all the founding fathers met the most tragic and unnecessary end would have wise words on this topic but indeed he does if only he could have remembered his own advice before fighting his fatal duel act with fortitude and honor he wrote to A distraught friend in serious financial and legal trouble of the man's own making if you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication do not plunge deeper have the courage to make a full stop a full stop it's not that

these folks should have quit everything it's that a fighter who can't tap out or a boxer who can't recognize when it's time to retire gets Hurt seriously so you have to be able to see the bigger picture but when ego is in control who can let's say you failed and let's even say it was your fault happens and as they say sometimes happens in public it's not fun the questions remain are you going to make it worse are you going to emerge From this with your dignity and character intact are you going to live to

fight another day when a team looks like they're going to lose a game the coach doesn't call them all over and lie to them instead he or she reminds them who they are and what they're capable of and urges them to go back out there and embody that with winning our miracles off their mind A good team does its best to complete the game at the highest standard possible and share the playing time with other players who don't regularly play and sometimes they even come back and win most trouble is temporary unless you make that

not so recovery is not grand it's one step in front of the other unless your cure is more of the disease only ego thinks embarrassment or failure Are more than what they are history is full of people who suffered abject humiliations yet recovered to have long and impressive careers politicians who lost elections or lost offices due to indiscretions but came back to lead after time had passed actors whose movies bombed authors who got writer's block celebrities who made gaffes parents who made mistakes entrepreneurs with faltering companies executives who got fired Athletes who were cut people

who live too well at the top of the market all of these folks felt the hard edge of failure just like we have when we lose we have a choice are we going to make this a lose-lose situation for ourselves and everyone involved or will this be a lose and then when because you will lose in life it's a fact A doctor has to call time of death at some point they just do ego says we're the immovable object the unstoppable force this delusion causes the problems it meets failure and adversity with rule breaking betting

everything on some crazy scheme doubling down on behind the scenes machinations or unlikely hail mary's even though that's what got you to this pain point in the first place at any given time in the circle of life We may be aspiring succeeding or failing though right now we're failing with wisdom we understand that these positions are transitory not statements about your value as a human being 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 he who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man seneca once said alter that he who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of failure 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 [Music] maintain your own scorecard i never look

back except to find out about mistakes i only see danger in thinking back about things you are proud of elizabeth noel neumann on april 16 2000 the new england patriots drafted an extra quarterback Out of the university of michigan they'd scouted him thoroughly and had their eye on him for some time seeing that he was still available they took him it was the sixth round and the 199th pick of the draft the young quarterback's name was tom brady he was fourth string at the beginning of his rookie season by his second season he was a

starter new england won the super bowl that year brady was named mvp In terms of return on investment it's probably the single greatest draft pick in the history of football four super bowl rings out of six appearances 14 starting seasons 172 wins 428 touchdowns three super bowl mvps 58 000 yards 10 pro bowls and more division titles than any quarterback in history it's not even finished paying dividends brady may still have many more Seasons left in him so you'd think that the patriots front office would be ecstatic with how it turned out and indeed they

were they were also disappointed deeply so in themselves brady's surprising abilities meant that the patriots scouting reports were way off for all their evaluations of players they'd somehow missed or miscalculated all of his intangible attributes they'd let this gem wait until the sixth round Someone else could have drafted him more than that they didn't even know they were right about brady until injuries knocked out drew bledsoe their prize starter and forced them to realize his potential so even though their bets paid off the patriots honed in on the specific intelligence failure that could have prevented

the pick from happening in the first place not that they were nitpicking or Indulging in perfectionism they had higher standards of performance to adhere to for gear scott pioli director of personnel for the patriots kept a photo on his desk of dave stachelski a player the team had drafted in the fifth round but had never made it through training camp it was a reminder you're not as good as you think you don't have it all figured out Stay focused do better coach john wooden was very clear about this too the scoreboard was not the judge

of whether he or the team had achieved success that wasn't what constituted winning bo jackson wouldn't get impressed when he hit a home run or ran for a touchdown because he knew he hadn't done it perfect in fact he didn't ask for the ball after His first hit in major league baseball for that reason to him it was just a ground ball up the middle this is characteristic of how great people think it's not that they find failure in every success they just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be

objective success because of that they don't much care what other people think they care whether they meet their own standards And these standards are much much higher than everyone else's the patriots saw the brady pick as being more lucky than smart and though some people are fine giving themselves credit for luck they weren't no one would say that the patriots or any team in the nfl are without ego but in this instance instead of celebrating or congratulating themselves they put their heads back down and focused on how to get even better That's what makes humility

such a powerful force organizationally personally professionally this isn't necessarily fun by the way can feel like self-inflicted torture sometimes but it does force you to always keep going and always improve ego can't see both sides of the issue it can't get better because it only sees the validation remember vain men never hear anything But praise it can only see what's going well not what isn't it's why you might see egomaniacs with temporary leads but rarely lasting runs of it for us the scoreboard can't be the only scoreboard warren buffett has said the same thing making

a distinction between the inner score card and the external one 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 and win anyone can win but not everyone is the best possible version of themselves harsh yes the flip side of that is it means honestly being able to be proud and strong during the occasional defeat as Well when you take ego out of the equation other people's opinions and external markers don't matter as much that's

more difficult but ultimately a formula for resilience the economist and philosopher adam smith had a theory for how wise and good people evaluate their actions he said there are two different occasions upon which we examine our own conduct and endeavor to view it in the Light in which the impartial spectator would view it first when we are about to act and secondly after we have acted our views are apt to be very partial in both cases but they are apt to be most partial when it is of the most importance that they should be otherwise

when we are about to act the eagerness of passion will seldom allow us to consider what we are doing with the candor of an indifferent person when the Action is over indeed and the passions which prompted it have subsided we can enter more cruelly into the sentiments of the indifferent spectator this indifferent spectator is a sort of guide with which we can judge our behavior as opposed to the groundless applause that society so often gives out not that it's just about validation though think of all the people who excuse their behavior politicians powerful ceos and

The like as not technically illegal think of the times you've excused your own with no one will know this is the moral gray area that our ego loves to exploit holding your ego against the standard inner or indifferent or whatever you want to call it makes it less and less likely that excess or wrongdoing is going to be tolerated by you because it's not about what you can get away with it's about what you should or Shouldn't do it's a harder road at first but one that ultimately makes us less selfish and self-absorbed a person

who judges himself based on his own standards doesn't crave the spotlight the same way as someone who lets applause dictate success a person who can think long term doesn't pity herself during short-term setbacks a person who values the team can share credit and subsume his own interests in A way that most others can't reflecting on what went well or how amazing we are doesn't get us anywhere except maybe to where we are right now but we want to improve we want more we want to continue to improve ego blocks that so we subsume it and

smash it with continually higher standards not that we are endlessly pursuing more as if we are racked with greed but instead we're inching our way towards Real improvement with discipline rather than disposition [Music] always love and why should we feel anger at the world as if the world would notice euripides in 1939 a young prodigy named orson welles was given one of the most unheard of deals in hollywood history he could write act and direct in two films of his choosing for rko A major movie studio for his first picture he decided to tell the

story of a mysterious newspaper baron who became a prisoner of his enormous empire and lifestyle william randolph hurst the infamous media magnate decided that this movie was based on his life and more importantly that it did so offensively he then began and initially succeeded in an all-consuming campaign to destroy one of the greatest films of all time Here's what's so interesting about this first hearst most likely never even saw the film so he had no idea what was actually in it second it wasn't intended to be about him or at least solely about him as

far as we know the character charles foster kane was an amalgam of several historical figures including samuel insell and robert mccormick the movie was also inspired by two similar portraits of power by charlie chaplin And aldous huxley and it wasn't supposed to vilify but to humanize third hearst was one of the richest men in the world at the time and at 78 near the end of his life why would he spend so much time on something as inconsequential as a fictional movie by a first time director fourth it was his campaign to stop it that

secured the movie's place in popular lore and made it clear the Extent to which his drive to control and manipulate would go ironically he cemented his own legacy as a reviled american figure far more than any critic ever could have thus the paradox of hate and bitterness it accomplishes almost exactly the opposite of what we hope it does in the internet age we call this the streisand effect named after a similar attempt by the singer and actress barbara streisand who tried to legally Remove a photo of her home from the web her actions backfired and

far more people saw it than would have when she left the issue alone attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever the lengths that hearst went to were absurd he sent his most influential and powerful gossip columnist luella parsons to the studio to demand a screening Based on her feedback he decided that he would do everything in his power to block it from being made public he issued a directive that none of his newspapers were to make any mention of any rko film the company

producing citizen kane period more than a decade later this ban still applied to wells for all hearse papers hearst papers began exploring negative stories about wells in his private life his gossip columnist threatened to do The same to each of rko's board members hearst also made threats to the movie industry as a whole as a way of turning other studio heads against the picture an eight hundred thousand dollar offer was made for the rights of the film so that it might be burned or destroyed most theater chains were pressured into refusing to show it and

no ads for it were allowed in any hearst owned properties her sympathizers began reporting rumors About wells to various authorities and in 1941 j edgar hoover's fbi opened a file on him the result was that the movie failed commercially it took years for it to find its place in the culture only at great expense and with great exertion was hearst able to hold it back we all have stuff that pisses us off the more successful or powerful we are the more there will be that we think we Need to protect in terms of our legacy

image and influence if we're not careful however we can end up wasting an incredible amount of time trying to keep the world from displeasing or disrespecting us it is a sobering thought to consider for a moment all the needless death and needless waste inflicted over the eons by angry men or aggrieved women on other people on society and on themselves over what Reasons that can hardly be remembered you know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don't like love that's right love for the neighbor who won't turn down

the music for the parent that let you down for the bureaucrat who lost your paperwork for the group that rejects you for the critic who attacks you the former partner who stole your business Idea the or the bastard who cheated on you love because as the song lyrics go hate will get you every time okay maybe love is too much to ask for whatever it is that you've had done to you you could at the very least try to let it go you could try to shake your head and laugh about it otherwise the world

will witness another Example of a timeless and sad pattern rich powerful person becomes so isolated and delusional that when something happens contrary to his wishes he becomes consumed by it the same drive that made him great is suddenly a great weakness he turns a minor inconvenience into a massive sore the wound festers becomes infected and can even kill him this is what propelled nixon forward and then sadly downward Reflecting on his own exile he later acknowledged that his lifelong image of himself is a scrappy fighter battling a hostile world was his undoing he'd surrounded himself

with other such tough guys people forget that nixon was re-elected by a landslide after watergate broke he just couldn't help himself he kept fighting he persecuted reporters and he lashed out at everyone he felt had slighted or doubted him it's what Continued to feed the story and ultimately sank him like many such people he ended up doing more damage to himself than anyone else could the root of it was his hatefulness and his anger and even being the most powerful leader in the free world couldn't change it it doesn't need to be like that booker

t washington tells an anecdote told to him by frederick douglass about A time he was traveling and asked to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race a white supporter rushed up to him to apologize for this horrible offense i'm sorry mr douglas that you have been degraded in this manner the person said douglas 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 certainly this is an incredibly difficult attitude to maintain it's far easier to hate it's natural to lash out yet we find what defines great leaders like douglas is that instead of hating their enemies they feel a sort of pity and empathy for them think of barbara jordan at the 1992 democratic national convention proposing An agenda of love love love love think of martin luther king jr over and over again preaching that hate was a burden and love was freedom love was transformational hate

was debilitating in one of his most famous sermons he took it further he said we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or Individual life by looking at ourselves we must strip ourselves of the ego that protects and suffocates us because as he said hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life in your existence it is like eroding acid that eats away the best in the objective center of your life take inventory for a second what do

you dislike Whose name fills you with reversion and rage now ask have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything take an even wider inventory where has hatred and rage ever really gotten anyone especially because almost universally the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people their dishonesty their selfishness their laziness are hardly going to work out well for Them in the end their ego and short-sightedness contains its own punishment the question we must ask ourselves is are we going to be miserable just because other people are consider how orson welles responded

to the multi-decade campaign by hearst according to his own account he bumped into hearst in an elevator on the night of the movie's premiere the very one that hearst had deployed massive Resources to prevent and destroy do you know what he did he invited hearst to come when hearst declined wells joked that charles foster kane surely would have accepted it took a very long time for wells's genius in that movie to finally be acknowledged by the rest of the world no matter whales soldiered on making other movies and producing other fantastic art by all accounts

he lived a Fulfilling and happy life eventually citizen kane secured its place in the forefront of cinematic history 70 years after the movie's debut was finally played at hearst castle at san simeon which is now a state park the events he endured weren't exactly fair but at least he didn't let it ruin his life as well as his girlfriend of 20-plus years sat in his eulogy referring not just to hearse but to Every slight he ever received in his long career in a notoriously ruthless industry i promise you it didn't make him bitter in other

words he never became like hearst not everyone is capable of responding that way at various points in our lives we seem to have different capacities for forgiveness and understanding and even when some people are able to carry on They carry with them a needless load of resentment remember kirk hammett who suddenly became the guitarist in metallica the man they kicked out to make room for him dave mustain went on to form another band megadeth even amidst his own unbelievable success he was eaten up with rage and hatred over the way he'd been treated those many

years before it drove him to addiction and could have killed him It was 18 years until he was able to begin to process it and said it still felt like yesterday that he'd been hurt and rejected when you hear him tell it as he did once on camera to his former band mates it sounds like he ended up living under a bridge in reality the man sold millions of records produced great music and live the life of a rock star we've all felt this pain and to quote His lyrics smiled its black tooth grin this

obsession with the past was something that someone did or how things should have been as much as it hurts is ego embodied everyone else has moved on but you can't because you can't see anything but your own way you can't conceive of accepting that someone could hurt you deliberately or otherwise so you hate In failure or adversity it's so easy to hate hate defers blame it makes someone else responsible it's a distraction too we don't do much else when we're busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us does this

get us any closer to where we want to be no it just keeps us where we are or worse Arrests our development entirely if we are already successful as hearst was it tarnishes our legacy and turns sour what should be our golden years meanwhile love is right there egoless open positive vulnerable peaceful and productive [Music] for all that comes next ego is the enemy i don't like work no man does but i like what is in the work the chance to find yourself Joseph conrad in william manchester's epic biography of the life of winston churchill

the middle volume a third of the set is titled alone for a full eight years churchill stood more or less by himself against his short-sighted peers against the rising threat of fascism even among the west but eventually he triumphed again and faced adversity again and was vindicated again Catherine graham stood alone as she took over her family's newspaper empire her son donald graham must have felt similar pressure as he sought to preserve the company during the dramatic declines of the industry in the mid-2000s both made it through so can you there is no way around

it we will experience difficulty we will feel the touch of failure as benjamin franklin observed those who drink to the bottom of the cup must Expect to meet with some of the dregs but what if the dregs weren't so bad as harold genon put it people learn from their failures seldom do they learn anything from success it's why the old celtic saying tells us see much study much suffer much that is the path to wisdom what you face right now could should and can be such a path wisdom or ignorance Ego is the swing vote

aspiration leads to success and adversity success creates its own adversity and hopefully new ambitions and adversity leads to aspiration and more success it's an endless loop all of us exist on this continuum we occupy different places on it at various points in our lives but when we do fail it sucks no question Whatever is next for us we can be sure of one thing we'll want to avoid ego it makes all the steps hard but failure is the one it will make permanent unless we learn right here and right now from our mistakes unless we

use this moment as an opportunity to understand ourselves and our own mind better ego will seek out failure like true north All great men and women went through difficulties to get to where they are all of them made mistakes they found within those experiences some benefit even if it was simply the realization that they are not infallible and that things would not always go their way they found that self-awareness was the way out and through if they hadn't they wouldn't have gotten better and they wouldn't have been able to rise again Which is why we

have their mantra to guide us so that we can survive and thrive in every phase of our journey it is simple though as always never easy not to aspire or seek out of ego to have success without ego to push through failure with strength not ego [Music] epilogue there is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives There is a recalcitrant south of our soul revolting against the north of our soul and there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life martin luther king jr if you're listening

to this right now then you've made it through this book i was afraid some people might not to be perfectly honest i wasn't sure i'd ever get here myself How do you feel tired confused free it's no easy task to go head to head with one's ego to accept first that ego may be there then to subject it to scrutiny and criticism most of us can't handle uncomfortable self-examination it's easier to do just about anything else in fact some of the world's most unbelievable accomplishments are Undoubtedly a result of a desire to avoid facing the

darkness of ego in any case just by making it to this point you've struck a serious blow against it it's not all you need to do but it is a start my friend the philosopher and martial artist daniele bolelli once gave me a helpful metaphor he explained that training was like sweeping the floor Just because we've done it once doesn't mean the floor is clean forever every day the dust comes back every day we must sweep the same is true for ego you would be stunned at what kind of damage dust and dirt can do

over time and how quickly it accumulates and becomes utterly unmanageable a few days after being fired by the american apparel board of directors dove charney called me at 3 am He was alternately despondent and angry genuinely believing himself to be totally blameless for his situation i asked him what are you going to do are you going to pull a steve jobs and start a new company are you going to make a comeback he got quiet and said to me with an earnestness i could feel through the phone and in my bones ryan steve jobs died

to him in this adult state this failure This blow was somehow the same as death that was one of the last times we ever spoke i watched with horror in the months that followed as he wreaked havoc on the company he had put everything into building it was a sad moment and one that has stayed with me but for the grace of god go i but for the grace of god that could be any of us we all experience success in failure in Our own way struggling to write this book i went through four hard-fought

but rejected drafts of the proposal and dozens of drafts of the manuscript in my earlier projects i'm sure the strain would have broken me maybe i would have quit or tried to work with someone else maybe i would have dug in my heels to get my way and irreparably damaged the book At some point during the process i came up with a therapeutic device after each draft i would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost that kept in my garage a few months later those painful pages were dirt that nourished

my yard which i could walk on with bare feet it was a real intangible connection to that larger immensity i like to remind myself that the same process is going to happen to me when I'm done when i die and nature tears me up one of the most freeing realizations came to me while i was writing and thinking about the ideas and the pages you've just listened to it occurred to me what a damaging delusion this notion that our lives are grand monuments set to last for all time really is any ambitious person knows that

feeling that you must do great things that you Must get your way and that if you don't that you're a worthless failure and the world is conspiring against you there's so much pressure that eventually we all break under it or are broken by it of course that is not true yes we all have potential within us we all have goals and accomplishments that we know we can achieve whether it's starting a company finishing a creative work making a run at a championship or Getting to the top of your respective field these are worthy aims a

broken person will not get there the problem is when ego intrudes on these pursuits corrupting them and undermining us as we set out to achieve and accomplish whispering lies as we embark on that journey and whispering lies as we succeed in it and worse whispering painful lies when we stumble along the Way ego like any drug might be indulged at first in the misguided attempt to get an edge or to take one off the problem is how quickly it becomes an end unto itself which is how one finds themselves in surreal moments like the one

i experienced on the phone with dove or in any of the cautionary tales in this book in the course of my work and my life i found that most of the consequences of Ego are not quite so calamitous many of the people in your life and in our world who have given over to their ego will not get what they deserve in the sense of karmic justice that we're taught to believe in as kids i wish it were so simple instead the consequences are closer to the ending of one of my favorite books what makes

sammy run by bud schulberg a novel whose famous character is based on the real lives of entertainment Entrepreneurs like samuel goldwyn and david l selznick in the book the narrator is called to the palatial mansion of a calculating ruthless egotistical hollywood mogul whose precipitous rise he has followed with a mix of admiration and confusion and eventually discussed in this moment of vulnerability the narrator catches a true glimpse into the man's life his lonely empty marriage his fear his insecurity his inability to be Still even for a second he realizes that the vengeance the bad karma

he'd hoped for for all the rules the man had broken all the cheating ways he had gotten ahead wasn't coming because it was already there as he writes i had expected something conclusive and fatal and now i realize that what was coming to him was not a sudden payoff but a process A disease that he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague a cancer that was slowly eating him away the symptoms developing and intensifying success loneliness fear fear of all the bright young men the newer fresher sammy glicks that

would spring up to harass him to threaten him and finally overtake him that's how ego manifests itself and isn't that what we're desperately Afraid of becoming i'll reveal one last thing i hope will make this come full circle i first read that passage when i was 19 years old it was reading a sign by a seasoned mentor who had found as i would early success in the entertainment business the book was influential and informative for me just as he'd known it would be yet over the next few years i worked myself into a nearly identical

situation As the characters in the book not just summon to the palatial home to watch the expected and unavoidable dissolution of a person i admired but to find myself dangerously close to my own shortly thereafter i know the passage struck me because when i went to type it up for this epilogue i found in my original copy pages covered in my own handwriting written years before detailing my reaction right before i had Set out into the world clearly i had understood schulberg's words intellectually even emotionally but i had made the wrong choices anyway i had

swept once and thought it was enough ten years after first reading it and writing down my thoughts i was ready once more those lessons came home to me in exactly the way i needed them to there's a quote from bismarck that says In effect any fool can learn from experience the trick is to learn from other people's experience this book started around the latter idea and to my surprise ended with a painful amount of the former as well i set out to study ego and came crashing into my own and to those of the people

i had long since looked up to it may be that you'll need to experience Some of that on your own too perhaps it is like plutarch's reflection that we don't so much gain the knowledge of things by the words as words by the experience we have of things in any case i want to conclude this book with the idea that has underpinned all of what you've just heard that it's admirable to want to be better businessmen or business women better athletes better conquerors We should want to be better informed better off financially we should want

as i've said a few times in this audio book to do great things i know that i do but no less impressive in accomplishment being better people being happier people being balanced people being content people being humble and selfless people or better yet all of these traits Together and what is most obvious but most ignored is that perfecting the personal regularly leads to success as a professional but rarely the other way around working to refine our habitual thoughts working to clamp down on destructive impulses these are not simply the moral requirements of any decent person

they will make us more successful they will help us navigate the treacherous Waters that ambition will require us to travel and they are also their own reward so here you are at the end of this book about ego having seen as much as one can be shown about the problems of ego from other people's experiences in my own what is left your choices what will you do with this information not just now but going forward Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases aspiration success failure you

will battle the ego in each of them you will make mistakes in each of them you must sweep the floor every minute of every day and then sweep again [Music] you