Author Ryan Holiday defines ego as a sense of superiority that goes beyond mere confidence, distorting our perception so that we see other people as either subservient or oppositional. He argues that ego leads us to failure because it causes us to overestimate our own skills while underestimating threats and challenges. It can also lead to a host of adverse characteristics, such as addiction, depression, mania, and abuse, that can destroy a person’s career (and life).
Holiday emphasizes that you don’t need to be a full-blown “egomaniac” (a person completely obsessed with themselves) to suffer the effects of ego. Even slightly elevated levels of ego can hold you back from success and create difficulties in your life.
Holiday outlines three overall ways that ego can lead to failure: before success (by preventing you from achieving it), during success (by sabotaging the success you’ve earned), and after success (by preventing you from bouncing back from failure). The following sections explore each of these areas.
Stoic Philosophy Channels the Ego
To make his arguments, Holiday draws on the philosophies of Stoic thinkers, who advise that the only true happiness lies in virtue, and that all material goods should exist solely to help you live a virtuous life. While some Stoics urge you to resist all desires for worldly items, modern Stoics (including Holiday) don’t advocate that you give up all trappings of success (wealth, power, and so on), but rather, that you chase these things within a framework of a virtuous life.
While Holiday states that he advises you to give up all egotistical urges because even slight ones can derail you, throughout his book he seems to allow for people to follow their ego in some ways as long as they don’t allow their ego to take over. He thus seems to interpret Stoicism as a means to an end (success) rather than an end in itself (the rejection of worldly desires).
Although some readers have criticized Holiday for this interpretation, arguing that true Stoicism advocates for a more complete rejection of desires, his interpretation does seem to align with much contemporary Stoic thinking that sees Stoicism as a mindset that allows you to be freed from negative emotional urges that can derail your progress toward your goals.
Holiday argues that ego can prevent you from achieving your dreams by leading you to incorrect ways of thinking that prevent success. He maintains that to control your ego’s influence over your thoughts, you need to stop talking about yourself and stop thinking about yourself.
Holiday notes that ego often drives people to talk about and promote themselves. We see this kind of egotistical “talk” every day, as people post their thoughts, activities, and interactions with other people all over social media.
Holiday warns that this type of self-promoting talk can prevent you from achieving the very things you’re bragging about because talk replaces action, and action is what’s actually going to make you successful. Self-promoting talk keeps us from our goals by:
In addition to not talking about yourself, Holiday urges you to not think about yourself either. He cautions that ego can prompt self-aggrandizing thoughts, leading you to spend more time thinking about what you’ll do with success than on how you’ll achieve it. Holiday outlines three ways that egotistical thoughts can paralyze you:
Early Success Can Lead to Paralyzing Ego
We see these traits in our contemporary business world when eager young business people with solid connections and degrees from well-known universities find a measure of early success and then allow themselves to believe they are more important and more capable than they really are. Many promising entrepreneurs have run into trouble when, convinced of their superiority, they refused to listen to advice, spent their time dreaming of glory, and over-estimated their own abilities.
Holiday warns that ego can stop you from achieving your goals when it leads you to try to be somebody (earn the recognition that comes with doing a job the way others expect you to) rather than to do something (accomplish things that would elevate your profession or the world at large).
He cautions that at some point in your career, you’ll have the choice of prioritizing either recognition (being someone) or accomplishment (doing something). If you choose recognition, you’ll seek promotions, plum assignments, and the favor of your superiors. However, to earn these markers of success, you may have to compromise your values and turn your back on your friends. However, if you choose accomplishment, you might not get the plum assignments or the promotions, but you won’t feel the need to compromise your values or betray your friends to obtain superficial markers of success. You’ll contribute ideas to the world that will positively affect the lives of others: of people who follow behind you in your career or in life.
Can You Do Something Without Being Someone?
One factor that Holiday doesn’t address is the fact that people often can’t do great things unless they are in a position of influence, and getting to a position of influence might necessitate chasing a promotion or lofty title—and thus engaging in what Holiday might deem ego-driven goals.
However, Holiday’s interpretation of Stoicism doesn’t require that you have no self-interest. In fact, many Stoics would argue that if your self-interest serves a larger purpose and doesn’t prevent a larger good, then that self-interest is not only allowable but is also desirable.
Some modern Stoics point out that their view of self-interest is not so different from Adam Smith’s theories, where he advocates, not for greed, but for enlightened self-interest that in turn makes a better society for everyone (people working to better their own lives will create jobs and opportunities for others in the process). Such thinking alleges that the only real difference between Stoic philosophies and those underpinning capitalism are a matter of where they lie on the spectrum: Stoics would put the needs of the greater community slightly ahead of the needs of the individual (as does Holiday), while followers of Smith would do the opposite.
Holiday notes that your ego can interfere with your ability to achieve your goals by convincing you that you don’t need improvement, that you know everything you need to know, and that you can stop learning. However, the need to learn never actually ends. Even people who have mastered a skill and are at the top of their game can still learn ways to get better. Holiday suggests that to continue your journey as a lifelong student, you:
Schedule Your Learning
Unfortunately, even if you know the importance of learning, it can be hard to put the advice into practice when your day is already full of tasks, activities, and responsibilities. For this reason, many experts advise that you purposefully schedule time during your day to devote to learning. Robin Sharma advocates for this technique in his book The 5 AM Club, in which he notes that so few people actively become lifelong learners that you can easily set yourself above your competition by continually expanding your knowledge.
Holiday points out that popular belief holds that passion drives you toward your goals, and that passion is an essential element in achieving success. This belief is misguided. The truth is that passion is often the thing preventing you from achieving your goals.
He emphasizes that you do need to care about your project, but he maintains that passion goes beyond mere caring: Passion is unchecked enthusiasm in the service of some lofty, vague goal that blunts your critical thinking. When you are passionate about a project, you are blinded to the issues that might sabotage it. You ignore the objections that other people raise. You jump ahead too fast, before mastering the skills you need and before fully understanding all the elements of your project. Consequently, passion often ends up masking a weakness in a project—one that may very well sink it later when reality intrudes.
Good Passion Versus Bad Passion
Among those readers who criticized Holiday’s book, one of the most common objections regarded his advice to ignore your passion. Many readers voiced skepticism at the notion that a person can pursue a long-term goal through difficult times and over many years without some degree of passion driving them.
However, Holiday’s ideas on passion are consistent with Stoic thinking that differentiates between good passions (emotional responses based on accurate judgments about things that are important to your life) and bad passions (emotional responses based on mistaken judgments). In recognizing this difference, Stoics don’t advise rejecting all emotions (defined as mental responses that are not based in rationality), but only those that lead us to faulty thinking and unpleasant consequences.
Holiday points to three other things you should do in order to move past the urges of your ego:
In these next sections, we’ll take a look at how Holiday advises you to act after you’ve attained success. When you have success, you’ll have different challenges than you had when you were seeking success, and you’ll need a different set of skills and knowledge. If your ego doesn’t properly navigate these new requirements, you’ll have a difficult time holding onto the success you’ve earned.
Holiday notes that although a person might suppress her ego effectively while rising to success, once she’s attained success, her ego might take over. When she’s at the top, she becomes aware of her importance, her ego swells, and she starts behaving poorly. A person who loses control of her ego will most likely lose the success she’s achieved. To prevent this:
The “Hubris” Syndrome
Psychologists have identified a “hubris syndrome,” which describes a mindset that people can develop after being in power for some time, in which they:
View the world as a means of self-glorification
Conflate themselves with their organization
Have contempt for others
Lose contact with reality
Become impulsive
Feel morally justified in their actions, no matter how unethical, practical, or costly
Lose interest in the finer points of policy-making
Become vulnerable to manipulation by people who recognize their need for flattery and use it to influence their decisions
Hubris causes each of the above points that Holiday mentions: It makes you feel you know everything, it makes you greedy for more success in many different areas, and it convinces you that the skills that brought you to where you are are sufficient to keep you there.
Now that we’ve looked at how ego can get in the way of attaining and maintaining success, let’s look at how it can misguide you when you experience some form of defeat, as everyone must.
Failure will happen to each and every one of us in some form or another. You may be able to get through it and find success again, or it may defeat you for good. Whether or not your ego drives your reactions to setbacks will determine which outcome you realize.
Ego is especially dangerous in the defeat stage of success for two reasons:
However, a person who can meet failure with the proper attitude can turn it into eventual success. To do so, Holiday advises you to follow several strategies:
Develop a Growth Mindset
Although Holiday doesn’t use the terms “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset,” his theories correspond to these well-known concepts. These two mindsets describe a person’s attitude in response to failure, and psychologists have long noted that consistently, people who easily bounce back from failure do so because they’ve developed a growth mindset.
Carol S. Dweck discusses these in depth in her book Mindset. As she outlines it, a person with a growth mindset believes they can improve their natural abilities through hard work and practice. In contrast, a person with a fixed mindset believes their abilities are unchangeable, and that whatever skills and intelligence they were born with establish limits for the rest of their lives.
A fixed mindset corresponds with an egotistical reaction to defeat—it can prevent future success for the same reasons Holiday outlines above. Someone who egotistically sees failure as a direct reflection of their identity has a fixed mindset and will be more likely to give up and allow that failure to become permanent.
Fortunately, Dweck argues that even if you have a tendency toward a fixed mindset, you can develop a growth mindset that will equip you with a better attitude toward failure. Many of the techniques and strategies that Holiday advises for overcoming failure are different ways that you can learn to see failures as opportunities for future growth (through a growth mindset) rather than as dead ends (through a fixed mindset).
Holiday discusses one additional way that your ego can make it difficult to recover from failure—succumbing to blame and anger. He acknowledges that when failure trips you up, your ego wants to hate someone for it because that puts the blame for your suffering on someone else. Unfortunately, hatred does nothing to release you from your failures. On the contrary, hatred holds you to your failures longer.
The paradox of hatred is that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what you hope it will accomplish. It exposes your bad side, which makes people lose sympathy for whatever difficulties you’ve endured. It also fills you with stress and unpleasant thoughts, which can be debilitating.
Love, though, is transformational. Even when you feel it’s undeserved, finding a way to love someone who’s wronged you will allow you to get perspective on a situation and understand the forces at play that brought your failure about. You’ll resist placing blame on someone else and will be better able to see how you can emerge from your failure as a stronger person.
Tips for Moving On
In his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie discusses techniques for moving on after someone has wronged you. Like Holiday, he notes that holding a grudge will harm you more than it harms the other person because it places a limit on your happiness—you won’t feel happy if they are also feeling happy. It’s far better to let go of your anger so that you can move on.
Carnegie suggests three ways you can help yourself move on:
Forgive and forget: The fastest way to get over a hurt is to forgive the person and simply stop thinking about them. You’ll move on even faster if you can take it a step further and see some good that they did for you, and thank them for it.
Immerse yourself in a larger cause: When you’re involved in working toward a higher purpose, you're less sensitive to insults or wrongs because you’re thinking about something greater than yourself.
Imagine yourself in their shoes: We often blame other peoples’ shortcomings on negative personality characteristics, while blaming our own shortcomings on bad luck or circumstance. This is called attribution error. If you can get beyond this instinctive reaction, you can more clearly see what circumstances may have led the other person to act the way they did.
In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday defines ego as an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance that goes beyond mere confidence—it’s a sense of superiority that makes us see everyone around us as either subservient or oppositional. He notes that many successful people are famously egotistical, and he contends that as a result, society tends to think that ego is an important ingredient in success, as if ego leads to accomplishment. However, Holiday argues that ego leads far more often to failure, and that people find success only when they are able to control their egotistical impulses.
Holiday discusses the ways an unchecked ego can destroy your success at three different periods: first, as you’re striving for success, second, as you’re trying to maintain the success you’ve achieved, and third, when you’ve lost success and need to recover from failure. He offers insights into how to understand and counter your ego so it doesn’t stop you from living up to your potential.
To make his arguments, Holiday draws on the philosophies of Stoic thinkers, advising us to resist the urges of our emotions in order to maintain clarity of thinking. In our guide to his book, we’ll examine his theories through the lens of Stoicism, and we’ll compare them to other management theories that similarly aim to help you find success.
Ryan Holiday is a media strategist and bestselling author. After dropping out of college at age 19, he made a name for himself as a marketer with American Apparel and later founded a marketing agency advising corporations like Google and authors like Tony Robbins. During his marketing years, he was known for media stunts that drew attention to his clients in unusual or controversial ways—such as trying to manufacture boycotts of his clients’ products for publicity.
He has changed his focus during his career. His first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, aimed to expose deceitful marketing techniques, but with his third book, The Obstacle Is the Way, he started to focus on the philosophies of Stoicism, a school of thought concerned with ethics that he’d been introduced to in college. He’s since released several more books on how to incorporate Stoic philosophies into your life, all of which have become bestsellers.
Connect with Ryan Holiday:
Ego Is the Enemy was published in 2016 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin that focuses on business books.
It was Holiday’s fourth book. It followed up on and fleshed out further the Stoic ideas discussed in The Obstacle Is the Way, published two years earlier, which had been a surprise bestseller and put Holiday on the map for something other than marketing strategy.
Stoicism is a line of ethical philosophy that traces its origins back to the third century BC. It holds that humans can find happiness only in virtue, and that any other elements of life—health, money, power, simple pleasures—are neither good nor bad in themselves but should exist only to serve the pursuit of virtue. Stoics teach, therefore, that people should not desire pleasures or fear threats but should view them unemotionally as things that can help them live virtuously. Holiday was introduced to these ideas in college through the collected writings of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which are widely seen as foundational texts of the philosophy.
Stoicism fell out of favor as a system of ethics as Christianity took over, but it has experienced a revival starting in the late 20th century. While contemporary thinkers in the philosophy follow the overall original outlines of it, they disagree on some of the finer points—for example, as to the right way to view material goods and pleasures. While all Stoics agree that you should temper your desires and seek to live virtuous lives, some believe it’s acceptable to also hold desires for material things (as long as those desires don’t interfere with your virtue), while others recommend that you more strongly resist indulging in pleasures as it violates the Stoic belief in an unemotional attachment to anything outside of virtue.
Holiday seems to side with the former camp. He interprets Stoicism not just as a way of life but also as a means to an end. The end he envisions is a successful life, and he never advocates that you live a humble life and reject fame, wealth, and power. Instead, he advises that you chase these things with a cool head, because if you allow your ego to take over, you’ll lose everything. His theories can be seen as a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves: He’s not advocating that you live a life of abject humility, but rather, that you strike a balance that allows you the trappings of success without losing your head. This places him firmly in the company of contemporary Stoics.
Many of Holiday’s ideas overlap with ideas from other experts who offer insights on finding success. His advice is part of a contemporary cultural thread that advocates for putting other peoples’ needs in front of your own in order to achieve your ultimate aims and encourage you to seek meaningful success rather than the superficial or unstable success an ego desires. He now runs a website, dailystoic.com, filled with articles from contemporary Stoic thinkers and videos narrated by himself on Stoicism.
Holiday has commented in interviews that he views his book as timely because of the rise of internet-fueled self-promotion and so-called “self-esteem parenting,” both of which have brought about an “epidemic of ego.”
Ego Is the Enemy received generally positive reviews. It was featured in NPR’s list of Best Books of 2016, and Inc.’s 2016 list of Must-Read Business Books for the Summer. It also made it onto the bestseller lists of USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and Publishers Weekly.
Most readers posting reviews lauded the book for its clear insights, often saying it opened their eyes to the many dangers of ego and that it should be required reading for business leaders.
Those who posted negative reviews had a few common objections:
We will reference and discuss each of these objections as we encounter applicable examples in the text.
Some readers also questioned the sincerity of Holiday’s devotion to Stoicism, asking if he lives the life he advocates or simply uses Stoic messages for profit. They point out that while he advocates for an egoless life, he puts his face and name prominently on his books, markets them assertively, and has a well-stocked “store” page on his Stoic-themed website selling everything from autographed books to medallions with Stoic sayings. (Holiday responded to one reader on Goodreads explaining that he signs his work because it makes him accountable for its contents.)
In a related vein, some readers point out that Holiday seems to define success materially, as dependent on a successful career, while true Stoics might define success more as peace of mind.
Holiday uses many anecdotes to illustrate his examples, and while this is often a strength of the book—by showing how his ideas have played out in the real world, the reader gets a better understanding of how to incorporate them into their own lives—he sometimes leaves out the logical connections that definitively connect his examples to his ideas. Therefore, the book sometimes reads more like a collection of disconnected stories rather than an instructive text.
Further, because he sometimes glosses over the details of his anecdotes and provides no sources to back them up, the reader is occasionally left with a feeling of being asked to trust Holiday without solid reason.
For example, Holiday briefly references Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, noting that the general most likely entered the engagement brimming with confidence, only to endure great losses. He does not explore the issue in any more detail but instead implies that Napoleon’s ego was his undoing without mentioning any of the other factors that went into the failure (for example, Russia’s unexpectedly poor infrastructure and its unproductive farmland that left Napoleon’s troops unable to live off the land when their supplies ran out). It might be argued that Napoleon had merely followed a typical military strategy of the day that had repeatedly worked for him and was therefore a logical move (sending a large force into a localized region). Whether or not Napoleon had been advised otherwise and ignored that advice because of his ego is not something that Holiday discusses.
In other words, he sometimes refers to examples of failed leaders or business people who had large egos but doesn’t show a causal link that would demonstrate that their ego was the primary factor leading to their downfall.
However, despite the occasional weakness of Holiday’s illustrative examples, they generally demonstrate the concept he’s discussing, even if more context might reveal other analyses.
Holiday outlines three overall ways that ego can lead to failure:
Holiday devotes more space to the first part—how ego can stop you from achieving success—than the second and third. To make that first section more manageable, we’ve broken it into three parts and grouped his concepts according to advice on how to think, how to act, and how to interact.
Therefore, our guide follows five parts:
In examining his concepts, we’ll discuss how they align with or differ from the Stoic ideals he references, and we’ll compare and contrast them to similar ideas from other management and self-help advisors. We’ll build off his examples to flesh out his arguments, supplement with additional examples of our own, and discuss when his examples demonstrate nuances in his theories that he may not explicitly address.
In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday contends that ego is an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance that distorts our perception of the world so that we see ourselves as central figures and see everyone else as either subservient or oppositional.
Holiday notes that many successful people are famously egotistical—ambitious, self-important, and caught up in their own vision of the world. He says that as a result, society tends to think that ego is an important ingredient in success, as if ego leads to accomplishment. Holiday disagrees. The premise of his book is that ego leads far more often to failure, and that people find success only when they’re able to control their egotistical impulses.
Holiday argues that overall, ego leads us to failure because it causes us to overestimate our own skills while underestimating threats and challenges. It also prevents us from effectively connecting with people, which limits our ability to lead them or to inspire them to help us. Further, it can lead to a host of adverse characteristics, such as addiction, depression, mania, and abuse, which can destroy a person’s career (and life). He emphasizes that you don’t need to be a full-blown “egomaniac” (a person completely obsessed with themselves) to suffer the effects of ego, but that even slightly elevated levels of ego can hold you back from success and create difficulties in your life.
Holiday’s Definition of Ego
Holiday uses the term “ego” in the way it’s come to be known in our general popular culture and not as psychiatrists define the term.
Psychiatrists define the term as one of three pieces of the human psyche: the id, the superego, and the ego.
The id is the impulsive part of us that responds to basic desires, fears, and urges.
The superego is the opposite of the id—it counters the id’s urges with morals and societal expectations.
The ego is the part in the middle. It evaluates the input from the id and the superego and makes our decisions.
Psychiatrists consider a healthy psyche as one where the ego is firmly in control of both the id and the superego, so that a person is not ruled by either too many primitive impulses (from the id) or too many rules (from the superego, which leads to compulsive disorders).
In contrast, Holiday uses the term “ego” to mean the part of our psyche that is always and only looking out for ourselves—the part that is driven by primitive instincts of “me first” and is influenced by fears and desires. His use of the term corresponds most closely with the psychiatric term “id.” Therefore, while he argues that the ego should not drive our decisions, psychiatrists would say the ego should drive our decisions. However, the difference between the two arguments is only a difference in language. Both theories say that we should not let the more primitive, instinct-driven part of our psyche control our thoughts and actions.
Throughout our guide, we use the term “ego” in the way Holiday uses it, to mean the selfish part of our psyches, even when we refer to psychologists or their theories.
(Shortform note: Holiday credits the philosophies of Stoicism for the development of his thinking on ego. Stoicism advises that you quell your emotional urges of desire and fear so that you can approach life rationally. Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, Holiday defines these emotional urges as your ego. His advice on the subject then mirrors Stoicism—that you learn to control your ego (your emotional urges) so that you can approach life with a clear, rational outlook.)
Holiday argues that ego can prevent you from achieving your dreams by leading you to incorrect ways of thinking that prevent success. He contends that unfortunately, many of us are taught these incorrect ways of thinking starting in childhood: Our parents, teachers, and other adults teach us that having a high self-esteem is the first step to leading a happy and fulfilled life. Further, we’re taught that we’re entitled to have a big ego whether or not we’ve accomplished anything that would merit such confidence.
Unfortunately, these beliefs about confidence and ego are mistaken. Self-esteem must be based on true achievement for it to be a positive (and controlled) part of our lives. Confidence based on nothing but validation is imaginary and leads to an inflated ego that gets in the way of happiness and success.
Is Self-Esteem Harmful?
Psychologists have long noted the danger of raising your kids with constant self-esteem-building messages like “you’re so smart.” Some psychologists even argue that self-esteem—confidence in your worth or abilities—is inherently harmful to your psyche. They argue that self-esteem implies value comparisons: It defines you as either “better than” or “lesser than” other people, which puts you in a judgmental mindset. Further, if your sense of value is dependent on peoples’ opinions of you (including your own opinion of yourself), it’s not stable, but instead will rise and fall as peoples’ opinions change.
While Holiday agrees that confidence based on validation and opinion is unstable and dangerous, some psychologists go further to say that even confidence based on achievement is dangerous, because it’s predicated on your success, and liable to disappear if your achievements fail. It can also lead to negative traits like perfectionism and anxiety. Instead, these psychologists advise you to focus on self-acceptance, rather than self-esteem or confidence.
Holiday argues that to control your ego’s influence over your thoughts, you need to:
Holiday notes that ego often drives people to talk about and promote themselves. We see this kind of egotistical “talk” every day, as people post their thoughts, activities, and interactions with other people all over social media.
People do this because they naturally like validation from others, and because it’s fun to talk about goals. Therefore, people striving for a goal often post news and thoughts about it—writers, for example, are famous for tweeting their progress (or lack thereof) on their current novel.
Holiday warns that this type of self-promoting talk can prevent you from achieving the very things you’re bragging about because talk replaces action, and action is what’s actually going to make you successful. Self-promoting talk keeps us from our goals by:
The Stoic View on Self-Interest and Self-Promotion
Holiday bases his theories on Stoic philosophies, many of which were originally outlined in the letters of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (collected as Meditations). Aurelius argues:
Fame has no value because it’s just people knowing about you, and when those people who know about you die, your fame fades away and nothing meaningful is left. In the meantime, all fame does is make you feel better about yourself—again, creating nothing of value.
Material wealth has no value because materials can’t reach your soul—only characteristics like courage and discipline touch your soul.
Overall, Stoicism encourages you to be emotionally indifferent to the trappings of success like wealth, power, and fame. Therefore, some people argue that Stoicism doesn’t allow for the pursuit of things like wealth and fame, as these are emotion-driven desires, and it discourages self-promotion, as this is part of chasing the trappings of success.
However, Holiday approaches Stoicism as a means to an end. He believes, as many other Stoic thinkers believe, that the purpose of Stoicism is to help people live great lives through wisdom, and that Stoic philosophy doesn’t forbid personal gain as long as those gains don’t interfere with living an ethical life—or even better, as long as the gains help promote ethical living.
For example, if your ethical life involved becoming the CEO of an organization that makes a positive contribution to society, Stoics would argue that it is acceptable for you to chase that position even though it furthers your own self-interest, because it also is part of living an ethical life.
Therefore, Holiday seems to believe that Stoic ideals allow for people to desire things like wealth and fame as long as these are not overpowering desires. After all, many followers of Stoicism have risen to great heights of wealth and fame (including, of course, its most famous follower, Marcus Aurelius), and much of Holiday’s own success has come about because of self-promotion. Overall, then, while Holiday advocates tempering your ego in order to find success, he doesn’t advocate swearing off success, or the things that come with it, completely.
Holiday notes that there are a fixed number of hours in each day, and when you talk about working toward something instead of actually working toward it, you rob your goals of the time needed to achieve them and allot that time instead to nonproductive activities.
Sometimes, you might rationalize the time you spend on self-promotion by telling yourself that self-promotion is actually an important part of the process. Unfortunately, when you do this, you misunderstand the order of priority: Self-promotion is necessary, but only when you have something to promote. Self-promotion before you’ve achieved your goals is just procrastination. Instead of spending your limited time and energy on self-promotion, work quietly and diligently toward your goals—this is the only activity that will actually bring you success.
Controlling Your Ego Leads to Better Time Management
Management experts recognize time management as one of the most important elements of success—if you can’t complete a project, you won’t reach your goals. Further, if you can complete more in any given amount of time, you’ll reap more benefits: more money, more leisure time, and so on.
In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey explores different techniques for improving your time management skills. He notes that while time-management advice once centered around checklists and calendars, more recent thinking centers around prioritizing which tasks and activities will serve your long-term goals and eliminating any others from your daily schedule. This means you should focus more on managing your goals rather than managing your time—in Covey’s words, you should schedule your priorities rather than prioritize your schedule.
Through this lens, what Holiday is really doing is advising us to figure out what activities will move us toward success, to realize that self-promotion is not one of them, and to therefore eliminate it from our daily schedule.
Holiday points out that studies show self-promotion can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, self-promotion acts as a sort of visualization, which can be a powerful psychological tool: When you picture yourself and speak about yourself as if you were successful, you can convince your subconscious mind that you are successful, which can prompt you to act in successful ways.
On the other hand, too much visualization can actually have the opposite effect: After a certain point, your subconscious mind confuses visualization with actual progress. If you talk about, think about, and explain a project long enough, you begin to feel you’re closer to achieving it, even though you may not have taken any actual, measurable steps toward your goal. It feels like you’ve been productive if you’re spent five hours talking about something—but you haven’t, and you may not have any psychological energy left to take actual action.
Holiday cites the example of the writer Upton Sinclair, who decided to run for Governor of California in 1934. In an unusual method of self-promotion, Sinclair published a short book called I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. The book outlined—in the past tense—all the policies he’d enacted as governor, as if he were looking back on a successful, productive term. As noted by friends of his around that time, he then promptly lost all interest in the campaign. It was as if his own self-promotion had convinced him he’d done the hard parts, and there was no need to keep trying, and he lost the election by a significant margin.
Visualization Can’t Entirely Account for Sinclair’s Failure
Holiday’s discussion of Sinclair’s campaign ignores some aspects of the situation that might not support his theories. While it may certainly be true that Sinclair lost enthusiasm for his campaign after he published his book, his defeat was probably sealed by other factors.
Sinclair was a long-time member of the Socialist party. He changed his party membership to Democrat when he ran for governor in order to have a more mainstream appeal, but the ideas he set forth in his book were solidly socialist, and even communist. For example, he called for the government to take over private farms and movie studios and run them as worker-led co-ops. His plans were so radical that he didn’t garner the full support of his party, and even President Roosevelt refused to endorse him.
Additionally, it might be argued that Sinclair’s exercise in self-promotion and visualization was actually successful. Though his ideas were too extreme to propel him to an elected seat, some resonated with the public and are credited with influencing many New Deal policies. Given that Sinclair was a writer first and foremost, it’s even possible that his book fulfilled his true ambition of spreading influential ideas, and that his goal of becoming governor was outside the scope of the larger cause he was working for.
Regardless, the example does illustrate Holiday’s argument that too much visualization can destroy your energy for a project—even if, in this case, there were probably other, additional factors that brought about that outcome.
Negative Visualization May Be More Useful
Holiday’s theories that visualization can sap your energy levels are supported by science. Researchers examining the effects of visualization on goal achievement have found that when subjects used positive visualization techniques for a goal they wanted to accomplish, they lost energy for that goal and were less likely to achieve it. This effect held true even if the subjects were simply visualizing positive things that might happen in the coming week: After visualizing, they accomplished less during the week.
In contrast, subjects who either visualized negative things or thought about the possibility that they might not achieve their goal had higher energy and accomplished more afterward.
The researchers hypothesize that visualizing a positive outcome has a relaxing effect on the body (one way they measured their subjects’ reactions was by tracking their systolic blood pressure, a useful proxy for either relaxation or anxiety). For this reason, psychologists sometimes use positive visualization techniques to help anxious patients relax. However, if your goal is to accomplish something that requires energy and action, such relaxation techniques can be counterproductive.
Holiday proposes that to properly struggle with a task, you must pause and focus your attention on that problem completely. If you fill that pause with talk, you distract yourself—you deny yourself the opportunity to properly focus.
But if you allow for silence, your mind starts the true work of wrestling with the challenge you face. This is why people who achieve great things often don’t broadcast what they’re working toward until they’re well on their way. Holiday points to Bo Jackson, the baseball and football player, as an example. While at Auburn University, Jackson set for himself the goal of winning the Heisman Trophy and being the first pick in the NFL draft. He told no one but his girlfriend of these goals. His silence on the matter allowed him to focus on the goals themselves, and he went on to achieve them.
Silence Promotes Action
Research also backs up Holiday’s assertions here. Studies show that when people announce goals, they develop a premature sense of having accomplished them, and they’re less likely to actually follow through and achieve those goals. This is similar to the research that shows positive visualization saps psychological energy—talking about a goal is another way of visualizing it.
Allowing for silence is also similar to meditating, which brain scans show have measurable effects on a person’s ability to focus. Holiday doesn’t address meditation, but there’s a link between the benefits of silence and those of meditation: Cutting back on self-talk frees up time during your day when you can instead sit quietly and think. Whether you go so far as to meditate, the quietness and freedom from distractions will help with your focus.
An Objection to Holiday’s Example
While Holiday’s theory is sound, his example of Bo Jackson demonstrates an aspect of his book that some readers have criticized—Holiday leaves out so much context that he fails to draw a convincing connection between Jackson’s humility and his success. For example, he doesn’t explain how Jackson’s humility led to his success, nor does he discuss any other Heisman trophy winners or successful football players, many of whom may have openly discussed their ambitions. In other words, he shows correlation between Jackson’s humility and his success but he fails to draw a solid line of causation.
This logical flaw doesn’t nullify Holiday’s theories. But it does point to the fact that success is rarely an outcome of one character trait in particular, and is rarely divorced from other influences. For example, in her book Grit, Angela Duckworth proposes that grit—essentially, the personality trait of conscientiousness that relates to perseverance, hard work, and goal-setting—is more responsible for success than any other personal trait. Although she doesn’t discuss Bo Jackson in particular, Holiday’s description of Jackson’s work ethic (focusing on his goals without the distractions of ego) indicates that he had plenty of grit.
Again, this doesn’t mean that Holiday’s theories are incorrect—it’s possible that a combination of humility and grit led to Jackson’s success, and even that his lack of ego led him to be grittier. But it does show the limitations of his arguments as presented. Holiday’s tendency to direct his readers attention to certain aspects of his examples while ignoring others is a common technique among management and self-help books.
In addition to not talking about yourself, Holiday advises that you not think about yourself either. He cautions that ego can prompt self-aggrandizing thoughts, leading you to spend more time thinking about what you’ll do with success than on how you’ll achieve it. For example, you might spend hours imagining yourself giving an acceptance speech, or planning how you’d spend your wealth once you’ve earned it, instead of thinking about the challenges in front of you that will lead you to that success. Everyone indulges in these thoughts from time to time, but when they monopolize your time, they prevent you from thinking productively about your goals.
Holiday outlines three ways that egotistical thoughts can paralyze you:
Early Success Can Lead to Paralyzing Ego
In McClellan, Holiday picked an excellent example of someone whose outsized ego prevented him from operating effectively. McClellan was tapped by Union leaders because he’d fought in the Mexican-American War, he had a background in railroads (which leaders felt would be logistically useful), and he was friends with some powerful people. Largely because of his connections, he was promoted to lead the Union Army in 1861 even though he’d never actually led a battle up to that point.
Soon after his appointment (which he held for only four months due to his incompetence), he immediately began dreaming of military and political glory and power—in a letter he wrote to his wife, he claimed that if he’d wanted, he could become dictator “or anything else that might please me,” and he spoke of his hopes of winning medals and honors. He soon ran into conflicts with Abraham Lincoln and other leaders who asked him for details on his operations, accusing them of meddling—again allowing his ego to cloud his judgment.
We can see McClellan’s traits in our contemporary business world when eager young business people with solid connections and degrees from well-known universities find a measure of early success and then allow themselves to believe they are more important and more capable than they really are. Many promising entrepreneurs have run into trouble when, like McClellan, they refused to listen to advice, spent their time dreaming of glory, and over-estimated their own abilities.
Holiday draws a connection between ego and pride. He points to pride as a particular problem because it interferes with your perception of reality. Pride inflates accomplishments, so that you feel like you’re winning when you’re in fact only temporarily ahead. Because of this, pride is a type of fraud—it’s your ego lying to you about your situation. When you can’t see the world clearly because you’re blinded by a prideful vision of yourself, you again can’t effectively interact with the world and achieve success.
Successful people are those who learn to control their pride. For example, industrial tycoon John D. Rockefeller made a habit of reminding himself every night that just because he was off to a good start didn’t mean he was truly successful. He would challenge himself to not lose balance and to not be a fool, lest he lose his head—and then his fortune.
(Shortform note: Here, Holiday references a wealthy, powerful person (J.D. Rockefeller) as an example of someone with a Stoic mindset. If you interpret Stoic philosophy as the rejection of material wants, this might seem counterintuitive. However, Holiday’s overall point is that Stoic ideas are tools to help you manage your thoughts and behaviors so that your ego doesn’t sabotage your success—he isn’t advising that you renounce all desire for worldly goods, but rather, that you don’t let those desires consume you.)
Pride Drives Poor Decisions
There are many ways in which pride can blind you to reality and prompt you to make poor decisions and end up losing money. In his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel argues that pride is a common reason that investors make mistakes. For example, a trader might be proud if one of their stocks rises significantly in value and might decide to cash in that stock because they want to boast about such a good win. However, if doing so would incur capital gains taxes, then selling it might be a poor financial decision.
Malkiel also explores how pride blinds investors to reality by making them overconfident. This leads them to make mistakes like trading too frequently—investors who believe they can “beat the market” tend to trade more often and end up worse off because of it—and overvaluing stock that they’ve personally invested in, because they can’t see the possibility that they bet wrong.
Ego often drives people to talk about themselves in positive, self-promoting ways. But talk and action compete for the same finite resources: time and energy.
Think of a time when you spent an inordinate amount of energy on an ego-driven activity that didn’t advance your goals while convincing yourself that it did. (Perhaps you participated in online forums instead of working on your project, or planned what you would do with your success rather than doing the tasks needed to achieve it.) How did those activities delay your success?
How might your time have been better spent?
What might you tell yourself the next time you’re tempted to engage in such activities rather than work on your project? How can you redirect your ego so that you focus on what’s really important?
Now that we’ve discussed some ways that ego prevents you from thinking about yourself and the world properly, we’ll explore some ways ego can prevent you from doing the right things. We’ll also look at how you can correct these impulses so that your ego doesn’t get in the way of your dreams.
Holiday warns that ego can stop you from achieving your goals when it leads you to try to be somebody (earn the recognition that comes with doing a job the way others expect you to) rather than to do something (accomplish things that would elevate your profession or the world at large).
When you start your career, you typically envision accomplishing great things—leaving a mark and making a difference in the world. However, it’s easy to get distracted from your mission by things that give the appearance of success, such as a high number of Twitter followers or a lofty job title. People confuse these things with actual accomplishment, even though they don’t necessarily indicate competence (sometimes, for example, promotions go to people who check the right boxes—they’ve gone to the right business school or are members of a certain social club—rather than to people who have done things to earn them).
Holiday cautions that at some point in your career, you’ll have the choice of prioritizing either recognition or accomplishment. If you choose recognition, you’ll seek promotions, plum assignments, and the favor of your superiors. However, to earn these markers of success, you may have to compromise your values and turn your back on your friends.
However, if you choose accomplishment, you might not get the plum assignments or the promotions, but you won’t feel the need to compromise your values or betray your friends to obtain superficial markers of success. You’ll contribute ideas to the world that will positively affect the lives of others: of people who follow behind you in your career or in life.
Holiday references General George Marshall, a World War II officer, as an example of someone who did good work in part because he focused on his tasks and responsibilities instead of his title or legacy. Marshall was one of the most influential actors of the time (the Marshall Plan, detailing how US aid would help Europe recover from the war, was named after him). However, he was so adamant about not letting his ego drive his decisions that he didn’t even keep a diary during the war—he feared that if he did, he might start making decisions with an eye to posterity instead of based on what needed to be done in the moment.
He also twice put his career on the line to speak his mind to people in positions of power over him when he disagreed with them—disagreements significant enough that they made their way into history books. First, during World War I, he stood up for his direct superior by correcting a general who was excoriating him, leading many witnesses to predict his career was over. Second, during World War II, he openly disagreed with Roosevelt in a meeting about military maneuvers, again prompting witnesses to predict the end of his career. Both times, he did what he felt was important to do even if it meant he would personally be negatively affected.
Fortunately, in each instance, the superior with whom he disagreed recognized the value of hearing an honest opinion, and instead of discouraging Marshall, they started to seek him out for advice—Roosevelt even promoted him to Chief of Staff. This also speaks to the ability of those superiors to conquer their own egos, for had their egos been offended by Marshall’s remarks, the country might have been deprived of one of the clearest-minded military thinkers of the era.
Can You Do Something Without Being Someone?
One thing that Holiday doesn’t address is the fact that people sometimes can’t do great things unless they are in a position of influence, and getting to a position of influence might necessitate chasing a promotion or lofty title—and thus engaging in what Holiday might deem ego-driven goals. In other words, sometimes you need to be someone (with recognition) before you can do something (with accomplishments).
This debate recalls our earlier discussion of Holiday’s views on self-promotion through a Stoic lens. As we discussed, Holiday’s interpretation of Stoicism doesn’t require that you have no self-interest. In fact, many Stoics would argue that if your self-interest serves a larger purpose and doesn’t prevent a larger good, then that self-interest is not only allowable, but is also desirable.
Some Stoics point out that their view of self-interest is not so different from Adam Smith’s theories, where Smith advocates not for greed, but for enlightened self-interest that in turn makes a better society for everyone (people working to better their own lives will create jobs and opportunities for others in the process). These contemporary Stoics allege that the only real difference between Stoic philosophies and those underpinning capitalism are where they lie on the spectrum: Stoics would put the needs of the greater community slightly ahead of the needs of the individual (as does Holiday), while followers of Smith would do the opposite.
With this distinction in mind, the nuance in Holiday’s arguments in this section become clearer—he doesn’t advocate that you spend your career on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, but rather, that if you have the opportunity to reach for either a superficial marker of success (like a lofty title) or a meaningful contribution to society, you choose the latter.
Holiday’s discussion about Marshall’s career illustrates this unaddressed aspect of his argument. Holiday devotes a significant amount of text to Marshall (as many historians have—Marshall was widely recognized as a remarkable and selfless leader, who turned down the chance to lead the entire Allied forces and repeatedly refused to accept promotions), but still, despite his humility, Marshall was one of the most powerful men in the country, serving as Roosevelt’s right-hand man and directing much of the war’s movements. He would not have had such influence from a lower rank.
Holiday counters the popular belief that passion drives you toward your goals, and that passion is an essential element in achieving success. Instead, he says passion is often the thing preventing you from achieving your goals.
He emphasizes that you do need to care about your project, but he argues that passion goes beyond mere caring: Passion is unchecked enthusiasm in the service of some lofty, vague goal that blunts your critical thinking. When you’re passionate about a project, you’re blinded to the issues that might sabotage it. You ignore the objections that other people raise. You jump ahead too fast, before mastering the skills you need and before fully understanding all the elements of your project. Consequently, passion often ends up masking a weakness in a project—one that may very well sink it later when reality intrudes.
History is littered with examples of passionate people who rushed into a venture only to be defeated by the obstacles they’d ignored in their ardor. Holiday refers to the examples of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored the dangers their advisors raised about invading Iraq, pushed ahead with their invasion, and were met with harsh reality. Similarly, Holiday notes that the mountain climbers caught tragically in the fatal 1996 Everest climb were driven by passion to bypass preparation. In the business world, the inventors of the self-balancing scooter Segway ignored the lack of market demand and rushed ahead with their much-hyped project, only to be met with a half-hearted consumer reaction. Many entrepreneurial ventures meet the same fate.
In contrast, Holiday argues that people who don’t allow themselves to be carried away with enthusiasm achieve a lot. For example, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, widely considered one of the greatest basketball players in NBA history, was famously “dispassionate,” operating under the philosophy of stay in control and do your job. Similarly, Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the most influential female activists of the 20th century, once said, “I hardly think the word ‘passionate’ applies to me.”
Good Passions Versus Bad Passions
Among those readers who criticized Holiday’s book, one of the most common objections regarded his advice to ignore your passion. Many readers voiced skepticism at the notion that a person can pursue a long-term goal through difficult times and over many years without some degree of passion driving them.
However, Holiday’s ideas on passion are consistent with Stoic thinking that differentiates between good passions (emotional responses based on accurate judgments about things that are important to your life) and bad passions (emotional responses based on mistaken judgments). In recognizing this difference, Stoics don’t advise rejecting all emotions (defined as mental responses that are not based in rationality), but only those that lead us to faulty thinking and unpleasant consequences.
So, for example, a person who’s decided to pursue wealth might do so because of good passions, like a desire to contribute in a positive way to society or to better her children’s standards of living so they can be productive citizens. Stoics would argue that there is nothing wrong with this sort of passion. However, if her passion gets twisted by ego, so that she starts pursuing wealth because it makes her feel better than others and she damages relationships with people around her in the process, Stoics would say those are bad passions.
Holiday’s ideas correspond to these notions of good and bad passions—while he doesn’t use that terminology, his examples illustrate the difference. Bush, Rumsfeld, the Everest climbers, and the Segway designers succumbed to bad passions sparked by poor judgment that blinded them to the reality of their situations. In contrast, Eleanor Roosevelt and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar didn’t allow themselves to be swept up in emotional passion—but no one would ever suggest either was indifferent to their chosen careers. They were both driven by strong emotional commitment, but not by ego-influenced passion.
Holiday notes that enthusiasm can be good when it motivates you, but he insists that to temper it, you must balance enthusiasm with purpose and realism.
Holiday advises that to operate with purpose and realism:
Accountability and Realistic Goals Will Keep You on Track
In his book The Chimp Paradox, Steve Peters explores additional ways you can focus on realistic and purposeful steps to prevent your ego from sabotaging your success. Peters compares an ego to an inner chimpanzee that drives our decisions through a mixture of desire and fear. As he tells it, your inner chimp is always looking out for your own, selfish interests and seeks short-term, easy success. It can prevent you from earning success by aiming for a lofty goal and then distracting you from it or by making you readily give up on your goal if the going gets difficult.
Like Holiday, Peters advises that you approach any new project with a realistic strategy that ensures that you’re aiming for a reasonable goal and that you have the mental tools in place to stick with it. He suggests you spend time thinking through four aspects of your project in order to properly prepare you for the journey:
Realistic goals: Recognize the difference between dreams (unrealistic ambitions that your ego is drawn to) and goals (reasonable ambitions).
Accountability: To prevent your chimp (your ego) from abandoning a project when it loses its emotion-based inspiration, set up benchmarks of progress that will hold you on track, such as deadlines or checkpoints for steps along the way.
Ownership: When you feel like you’re responsible for a project because you’ve designed it in some significant way or it speaks to who you are as a person, your ego will see it as part of your identity and will work harder and longer for it.
Honesty about obstacles: Examine what you’ll need for your project (the basic essentials as well as the nice-to-haves) and size up what challenges you might face along the way that could derail you.
Holiday cautions that another way your ego will hold you back from achieving your goals is by discouraging you from doing the hard work necessary to accomplish them.
He argues that this is because your ego loves you just as you are now: It thinks you’re amazing and your ideas are brilliant. Very often, a person who enjoys thinking these thoughts will go no further than to have brilliant ideas, as the thoughts alone are satisfying enough, and she won’t bother working to bring those brilliant ideas to life. Unfortunately, no matter how brilliant her ideas, they alone won’t bring her success. Success comes not from genius, but from the sweat and labor you put into your genius.
Countless people have come up with amazing, innovative ideas but never worked hard to bring them alive, and consequently, none of those brilliant ideas saw the light of day. Holiday points to the example of the great painter Edgar Degas, who wanted to branch out from painting and express himself through poetry, but he was unable to write any despite having a head full of inspiration. A poet friend of his pointed out that it was not the ideas that made poetry, it was the words—that is to say, Degas could only produce poetry by actually sitting down and doing the work of writing it. He never did, though, and today we have no Degas poetry.
(Shortform note: Degas is far from alone in this failure—so many writers have come up with brilliant book ideas they never executed that it’s become a cliché.)
Inspiration Versus Perspiration
Holiday’s arguments echo the well-known adage “Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” Since being inspired is so much more enjoyable than perspiring, many people focus on thinking about their goals instead of working toward them.
A tendency to wallow in inspiration recalls Holiday’s earlier caution not to get caught up in self-promoting talk, either on social media or to your friends and family—when you promote yourself, you engage in a type of positive visualization, and ironically, positive visualization can sap you of the mental energy you need to complete a task.
In the same way, when you focus on inspiring thoughts and feelings, you get a feeling of satisfaction that may prove “enough” for you, and you may consequently lose the drive to actually accomplish something.
Holiday notes that your ego can interfere with your ability to achieve your goals by convincing you that you don’t need improvement, that you know everything you need to know, and that you can stop learning. However, the need to learn never actually ends. Even people who have mastered a skill and are at the top of their game can still learn ways to get better. To counter the false belief that you are beyond needing improvement and to open yourself to a life of learning:
Most importantly, resist the whisper of your ego telling you what a spectacular, innovative genius you are. Silence your ego and admit you need assistance.
Holiday points to Kirk Hammett, the guitarist for the blockbuster metal band Metallica, as an example of someone who suppressed his ego to become a lifelong learner. When Hammett was offered the job, Metallica was an up-and-coming group quickly making a name for themselves regionally. Hammett could have thought to himself, “I’ve made it—I’ve achieved success,” and spent the rest of his career coasting on his existing skills. However, he reacted differently; he decided he wasn’t as good a guitar player as he’d like to be, and he set about striving to correct that.
He found a teacher—Joe Satriani—and subjected himself to Satriani’s rigorous instruction. Satriani later explained what made Hammett a better student than other guitarists he taught was Hammett’s willingness to receive harsh, honest feedback, and to work diligently to correct what needed improving. In other words, Hammett was open to hearing what he was doing wrong when most people weren’t. That openness made all the difference; Hammett continued to improve as a guitarist and artist and helped drive Metallica to international superstardom.
Tempering Your Ego Rather Than Eliminating It
Again, Holiday uses an example of a rich and powerful person who may have had a large ego—which might be expected from a member of one of the most successful rock bands of all time. In fact, at some points, Hammett demonstrated an unchecked ego, including several periods during his career where he struggled with cocaine addiction (Holiday references drug use as a negative side effect of an ego).
However, it’s likely that Holiday’s larger point is not that Hammett needed to eliminate all aspects of his ego in order to become successful, but that he had to temper it so that it didn’t drive his decisions or get in the way of his progress. The periods where Hammett’s ego took over were periods that he regretted and fought through, eventually conquering those negative traits so that they didn’t derail him.
This points to a nuance of Holiday’s argument that he doesn’t explicitly spell out, but which is clearly present: He doesn’t argue that you should have no ego at all, nor does he argue that you shouldn’t crave superficial markers of success—he only argues that you should maintain a balance between no ego and too much ego so that you can stay focused on your goals.
Holiday notes that in today’s world, technology provides easy access to a world of learning, and advises that you take advantage of the wealth of training courses, books, and online instruction available.
Schedule Your Learning
Many business experts agree that learning can be the difference between success and failure, and that one of the traits that self-made millionaires consistently attribute to their success is their commitment to lifelong learning.
Unfortunately, even if you know the importance of learning, it can be hard to put the advice into practice when your day is already full of tasks, activities, and responsibilities. For this reason, many experts advise that you purposefully schedule time during your day to devote to learning. Robin Sharma advocates for this technique in his book The 5 AM Club, in which he notes that so few people actively become lifelong learners that you can easily set yourself above your competition by continually expanding your knowledge. He recommends that you create a “student hour” in your daily routine where you explore podcasts, books, articles, videos, or courses (online or in-person), noting that the more you learn, the more sophisticated your ideas and connections become, giving you a leg up in your profession.
As you strive for success, you’ll cross paths with many different people. Holiday discusses many ways that you can interact with others to help you further your progress toward your goals. He advises that you focus on keeping your ego under control as you navigate the world.
In your quest to become a lifelong student, Holiday advises you to look for unusual sources of instruction—you can pay teachers or mentors for their guidance, but don't ignore the wealth of free instruction that’s available on virtually every subject.
Seek Out a Mentor
Many management experts have echoed Holiday’s advice to seek out people from whom you can learn, and in particular, when possible, to seek out mentors. A mentor is an experienced professional who helps a more inexperienced person in their career, offering informal guidance on a range of issues and taking a special interest in helping the more junior person advance.
In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath explore what makes an effective mentor. They outline four things that a mentor should offer in order to push their mentee to best achieve their potential:
High standards: “I expect you to do well.”
Assurance: “I know that you can.”
Direction: “Here’s your next step.”
Support: “I’ll help you if you fail.”
The Heath brothers emphasize that a mentor must not protect their mentee from failure—the job of a mentor is to allow their mentee to fail and then to assist them afterward, so that they learn from that failure and it helps them grow.
In his book on networking, Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi discusses several ways you can look for mentors. These include:
Working through an official mentoring program, either at your work or through a professional association
Asking your parents or older relatives to put you in contact with an experienced professional
Approaching business owners or prominent professionals in your local area
To become an even better learner, Holiday advises you to become a teacher. This is because when you teach a skill or a piece of knowledge, you re-examine it from a different perspective and gain new insight. You must truly understand it from every angle in order to effectively communicate and explain it. For this reason, Holiday argues that Satriani benefited from his instruction of Hammett as much as Hammett did—through his lessons, Satriani honed his techniques and skills and went on to fill stadiums and sell millions of albums through his own music.
Learning by Teaching Is a Long-Acknowledged Tactic
Many educators and psychologists agree with Holiday that when students teach concepts, they absorb them better themselves. They not only can remember them better later but can also apply them to other situations, indicating that they understand them more deeply.
This phenomenon has been called the “protégé effect,” by which students’ memory and understanding is improved when they explain a concept to someone else, not only because they need to retrieve it from their mind but also because they need to make it clear enough that someone else understands it, too. It’s an extension of another well-known theory called the “testing effect,” which helps students retain information by requiring them to retrieve it from their memory.
Holiday advises you actively seek out three types of people to regularly engage with:
Each of these people will help you achieve success in different ways:
Hire Someone Better Than You
Some experts suggest not only interacting with people who are better than you in some way, but also hiring them if you have the opportunity.
Stacey Cunningham, president of the New York Stock Exchange, argues there are several reasons for hiring people with more skills than you:
They’re a source of information that can keep you learning new things. Not only does this make you a better performer, it also keeps your work interesting and exciting.
They can fire up your competitive drive, which can keep you motivated.
They can allow you the freedom to pursue higher challenges: If you can trust that your team members are competent, you’ll feel comfortable delegating responsibilities to them so that you can explore other avenues of growth (either for your company or for yourself—for example, taking a class or making yourself available for speeches).
Cunningham notes that while hiring someone better than you is counter-intuitive because it inherently offends your ego (which wants you to be the top dog) and challenges your need to be fully in control of your underlings, in the long run, it’s the wiser move because it strengthens the whole organization as well as your own leadership.
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, is an example of someone who lives this advice. As he explains in his book Creativity, Inc., he makes a habit of hiring people who are smarter than he is—not only because their innovations and productivity benefit the company, but also because by conquering his fear of people more qualified, he’s able to control his ego, which allows him to see people not as threats but as opportunities.
Holiday notes that because ego is not humble, it might prevent you from accepting a humble job in which your tasks are primarily designed to help another person while you yourself get little or no compensation or credit. An unpaid internship is a common example of this kind of position.
However, Holiday argues that these helper roles can be highly beneficial at the beginning of a career or a new project, when our skills and knowledge are undeveloped (or even outdated and wrong, if most of those skills and knowledge came from school books). Humble jobs are an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of an industry from a unique angle and increase skills that will propel you to success later.
Many successful business leaders started in internships or in lower-level positions that taught them many of the basics of the business. For example, Ursula Burns, Dennis Muilenburg, Mary Barra, and Steve Jobs, who served as CEOs of Xerox, Boeing, General Motors, and Apple, respectively, each started their careers as interns.
Holiday advises that to be an effective helper:
Be a Giver, Not a Taker
Another way to think about being a helper is that you should be a giver instead of a taker, a concept that Adam Grant fleshed out in his book Give and Take. Grant argues that people who give freely of their time, effort, knowledge, experience, and skills end up more successful than those who mainly try to reap the benefits of other peoples’ time, effort, and so on.
This holds true because in a socially connected world like ours, what goes around comes around. When you help someone else, they’ll want to help you in return later. Further, because it’s impossible to know who might be in a position to help us later in our careers, it’s best to offer help widely.
Further, these kinds of helper roles (especially in the form of internships) are increasingly recognized as an important step in a career. Surveys suggest that approximately 75% of college grads take on an internship at some point, and that many of these translate into full-time employment. Experts recommend that to make the most of an internship, you do many of the things that Holiday and Grant advise: seek information, help others whenever you can, ask lots of questions, and tackle jobs without being asked.
Holiday notes that sometimes you will be tempted to lose your temper—you’ll work for humiliating bosses, work beside vindictive colleagues, or interact with rude customers—but if you let your ego get the better of you and lose your temper, you can destroy your burgeoning career.
When you’re insulted or demeaned, your ego will want you to tell someone off or demand respect. Instead, do nothing. Holiday advises that you endure it, reminding yourself to keep your eye on the long game. Ignore this temporary difficulty. Brush it off, work harder, and stay in the game. You can’t succeed if you get kicked out of the game.
For example, if your manager constantly gives you a hard time for taking too long of a lunch break even when you hardly take a lunch break at all, remind yourself not to get distracted by such a small issue and to focus instead on learning what you can from the position so that you can eventually get a better position with a different manager.
Assertive Versus Aggressive
While Holiday seems to advocate that you react somewhat passively to others’ aggression, most psychiatrists advise you to react with assertiveness, which is the middle ground between aggression and passivity. Being assertive means standing up for yourself while being respectful of both your own needs and the other person’s. Being aggressive means putting your own needs ahead of another person’s, and often involves threats, rudeness, or disrespect. Sometimes people confuse assertiveness with aggression and out of fear of coming across aggressively, react passively instead. Unfortunately, allowing others to push you around often leads to stress, anxiety, and unhappiness.
Holiday’s point, though, is that sometimes you must be passive for a period of time until you gain enough influence that you no longer have to put up with bullying. Most importantly, you shouldn’t ever lose your temper, even if this means leaning toward passivity at times.
To become great, you need to find three types of people with whom you can interact on your journey to success:
Think of someone better than you at your current job or the job you dream of. How can you reach out to that person and ask for assistance? What exactly would you ask?
Think of someone who knows less than you do and who could use some advice and instruction. What advice does that person need most right now? How can you reach out to that person and offer to help?
Think of someone you work with who’s striving toward a goal similar to yours. How can you partner with that person to support and motivate each other?
In this section, we’ll take a look at how Holiday advises you to act after you’ve attained success. Holiday notes that although a person might suppress her ego effectively while rising to success, once she’s attained it, her ego might take over. When she’s at the top, she becomes aware of her importance, her ego swells, and she starts behaving poorly. A person who loses control of her ego will most likely lose the success she’s achieved. The following sections explore different ways this can happen, and how you can resist that fate.
In Part I, Holiday discussed the importance of becoming a lifelong student. Here, he discusses how important it is that you maintain that openness to learning. While striving for success, you might absorb whatever knowledge and lessons you can, but once you’re successful, you might start thinking you know everything. If so, you’ll likely ignore new information and consequently blind yourself to challenges, threats, and points of weakness.
Further, when you’ve achieved a measure of success, you’ll have different challenges than you had when you were seeking success, and you’ll need a different set of skills and knowledge. You need to learn new lessons to sustain your success or to bring it to the next level. For example, a salesperson promoted to manager must now learn to oversee other salespeople. A chef opening her own restaurant must now learn to run both food production and customer service.
New Learning Opportunities Keep You Relevant
Many management experts have noted the importance of seeking out new challenges and learning opportunities as you move through your career. This means actively pushing yourself outside your comfort zone even if you’ve reached a place of comfort where you feel like you’ve mastered your skills and are on top of your game. Experts advise that this is necessary because if you don’t constantly evolve, the world will move on without you.
Simon Sinek discusses this idea in his book The Infinite Game, where he advises that leaders with longevity are the ones who pursue new challenges even when they’re comfortably successful. For example, Nintendo originally found great success as a trading-card company, becoming one of the most profitable firms in Japan by the mid-20th century. The company could have continued to enjoy its position of power within its industry, but its president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, decided that it would have a stronger and longer-lasting profile if it took on new challenges. He thus steered the company towards toy-making and eventually, video games. If his ego had prompted him to just be happy with the success he’d already earned, he would have missed out on the opportunities of a changing world and Nintendo wouldn’t have become the iconic company it is today.
To illustrate how learning can help you maintain success, Holiday discusses the military successes of Genghis Khan, who sustained his empire by absorbing the technologies, political systems, arts, and innovations of each culture he invaded. His Mongol army valued learning so much that it traveled with translators and demanded to consult with doctors, astrologers, scribes, and advisers in each land it conquered. This allowed the army to, for example, adopt Turkish military strategies and Chinese technology for breaching walled cities. Further, Khan worked with royal families of conquered lands to maintain control where no other dynasties could. In doing so, he fused influences from all parts of the world and ended up with long-lasting influence on cultures, technologies, and political systems.
The Paradox of Genghis Khan’s Ego
By holding up Genghis Khan as an example of someone who gained success by controlling his ego, Holiday inadvertently points to a weakness in his own argument. Few people would argue that Khan lacked ego—historians estimate that he was responsible for the murder of around 40 million people, or 11% of the world’s population at the time, and a 2003 chromosome study found that around 1 in 200 men today is a descendent of Genghis Khan, indicating he engaged in widespread and frequent rape.
However, that ego didn’t stop him from becoming one of the most successful leaders in history whose influence is still felt in political systems and cultural profiles.
Holiday doesn’t address the more undesirable aspects of Genghis Khan’s ego, but instead focuses on the fact that he was willing to learn from others, arguing that this was the key to his great success.
While his openness to learning certainly helped his success, the discussion raises the question of whether or not Holiday’s theories can be adopted piecemeal—that is, can a person maintain success by embracing ego in some areas while controlling it in others? For example, can you embrace ego if it drives you to crush your opponents, as long as you suppress the ego that tells you to ignore advice?
By focusing on leaders whose humility is questionable, Holiday seems to allow for the existence of ego as long as it doesn’t interfere with your progress, as if there are two kinds of ego: that which interferes with success (bad ego) and that which fuels success (good ego).
Holiday warns that when you become successful, you may be presented with opportunities that were unavailable to you previously—ones that promise additional greatness in different ways. For example, a famous actor might have the opportunity to open a themed restaurant, promising culinary fame as well as theatrical fame.
Holiday cautions that when your ego tells you that you can have it all, it drives you to say yes to a hodge-podge of offers, each of which aspires to a different goal or priority. Unfortunately, if you start to pursue all these options, you end up spreading your energy and resources thinly, and you are less likely to accomplish any of your goals.
For example, many celebrities who’ve tried to cash in on their fame with a restaurant have failed. The restaurant business requires a completely different skill set than the movie or music industry, and celebrities such as Brittney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Speilberg, Stephen and William Baldwin, and many others have each been forced to close floundering eateries after finding that their fame didn’t translate into culinary success.
Holiday advises that instead of giving in to the temptation to chase fame, money, or other forms of success offered to you, you should keep an eye on what success means to you personally and remember why you started your career in the first place. In other words, stay focused on your true priorities.
Thus, when offered a new opportunity:
Narrow Your Focus to Stay on Track
Many management experts agree with Holiday’s advice to limit the number and types of goals you strive for. In his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt discusses the importance of narrowing your focus, arguing that when you try to achieve several, disparate goals, you divert your resources from your most critical goal and decrease the likelihood of success in any area.
Rumelt’s theories are aimed at corporations, and he advises that they narrow their goals in two ways:
Narrow their external goals: Focus exclusively on one or two ultimate goals.
Narrow their internal goals: Eliminate policies and objectives that don’t support their ultimate, external goal.
When we apply this advice to an individual rather than a corporation, it broadens Holiday’s advice of how to keep sight of your priorities:
Narrow your external goals: Focus exclusively on the one or two objectives that are most important to you.
Narrow your internal goals: Manage your time, effort, and money efficiently, eliminating tasks and projects that distract you from your ultimate, external goal.
In this way, you can align your internal priorities with your external ones, and lessen the chances that you’ll get distracted from your most important goal.
However, Don’t Habitually Ignore Opportunities
On the other end of the spectrum, if you routinely ignore opportunities outside of your comfort zone, you might end up locked into a narrow path and deprive yourself of growth. This means you must strike a balance between Holiday’s advice to continually learn new things and his advice to not lose sight of your priorities.
Clay Christensen discusses responding to new opportunities in his book How Will You Measure Your Life? He notes that anticipated opportunities are ones you set out to purposefully pursue, but unanticipated opportunities are ones that pop up as you implement your deliberate plan. Sometimes unanticipated opportunities compete too strongly for resources and will weaken progress toward your main project, but sometimes they show you a new way of operating that is better than your original plan. A strategy that emerges from an unanticipated opportunity is called an emergent strategy.
For example, if you rose to fame as a health-food blogger and were offered the opportunity to open a donut shop, you might consider combining the two ideas to make a healthy donut shop.
The key, for both Christensen and Holiday, is to judiciously evaluate new opportunities to determine if they can be worthwhile extensions of your current success or if they’re more likely to distract you from your ultimate goals.
Holiday notes that sometimes, the very traits that brought you success can, if unchecked, rob you of it. For example, to succeed, you ignored people who doubted you, but if you continue to ignore people who offer advice, you’ll miss warnings of legitimate threats. You were persistent, but if you are relentlessly persistent, you’ll chase opportunities that are destined to fail.
To avoid this trap, Holiday advises you look out for three feelings your ego might enhance:
Holiday contends you can avoid this fate by remembering that you don’t have a claim on anything that’s not already yours and by recognizing that you are not the center of the world.
The “Hubris” Syndrome
Psychologists have identified a “hubris syndrome,” which describes a mindset that people can develop after being in power for some time, in which they:
View the world as a means of self-glorification
Conflate themselves with their organization
Have contempt for others
Lose contact with reality
Become impulsive
Feel morally justified in her actions, no matter how unethical, practical, or costly
Lose interest in the finer points of policy-making
Become vulnerable to manipulation by people who recognize their need for flattery and use it to influence their decisions
Ken Lay, who led energy company and commodities trader Enron to the then-largest corporate bankruptcy in history, is an example of someone who let his ego and hubris guide his decisions.
In The Smartest Guys in the Room, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind discuss Lay’s ego-driven management style. After growing the company from a merger of small, regional energy companies into an international conglomerate worth $101 billion, he started displaying many of the signs of hubris syndrome listed above. He lost interest in the details of running the business and turned over operations to a set of questionably motivated underlings. He scared subordinates into silence, constantly pushed for growth without properly considering the consequences, and became obsessed with his public image as a savvy businessperson (which motivated him to lie about the business’s financial weaknesses).
Further, he remained convinced that his actions were morally justified, arguing to the end that he’d behaved no more poorly than many other companies and claiming Enron’s downfall was due to unscrupulous short-traders.
The hubris he exhibited showed the entitlement and overdeveloped sense of control that Holiday outlines as signs of an overactive ego, and led to the total loss of everything he’d achieved.
Relinquishing control doesn’t mean letting other people run your business or make your choices for you. Rather, it means properly delegating and focusing your efforts on big-picture issues.
However, your ego wants you to be the boss of everything. It feels good to make decisions, and you feel important when everyone relies on you to put out fires. Unfortunately, while the little things are fun to deal with, they’ll distract you from the big things, which are the important things that will determine your continued success (or lack thereof).
Further, if you can’t let go of the reins in your business, you’ll have a hard time steering it through trouble. If you obsessively micromanage small details, you’ll be unable to spot big-picture issues that arise.
Additionally, if you can’t delegate responsibilities, your employees are likely to resent your overbearing management style and are less likely to work as hard or be as effective as they could be if you allowed them to share responsibility.
Micromanagers Aren’t Leaders
James Kouzes and Barry Posner discuss the danger of trying to exert too much control in their book The Leadership Challenge. Like Holiday, they warn against the tendency to start micromanaging other peoples’ responsibilities, cautioning that doing so will limit you to the level of a supervisor or manager, and you’ll never rise to the level of a true leader. They argue that a leader is one who can stand back and trust her team, knowing that she’s hired capable people, trained them well, and given them the resources they need to succeed. By allowing other people to make decisions on their own, you’ll build a climate of trust that’s an essential element in a strong organization.
On the other hand, they warn that leaders who micromanage will end up with one of two extremes: either employees who resent them or employees who are dependent on them for decision-making. Neither outcome leads to a strong, independently functioning team.
Holiday argues that the best way to prevent your ego from destroying your success is to maintain a balance between too much and too little ambition, so that you’re moving neither too fast nor too slowly.
He notes that it’s difficult to maintain this balance. On the one hand, it’s easy to stay endlessly ambitious: Simply keep going at a relentless pace until you burn out or are stopped by outside forces. On the other hand, it’s easy to be complacent: Simply stop moving forward, until the world overtakes both you and your good fortune. But both of these paths will lead to ruin. It’s harder to find the middle ground, where you are ambitious but know when to hit pause, but this is the path you must find in order to maintain long-term success.
Finding the Ambition Middle Ground
Many management experts also note the importance of finding a balance between too much and too little ambition. Not only will too much ambition drive you to grow too quickly and sabotage the success you’ve earned, but it also rarely leads to happiness—studies consistently show that chasing success either makes you unhappy (if you fail) or only temporarily happy (if you succeed). On the other end of the spectrum, too little ambition doesn’t lead to happiness either, as it leaves you feeling demotivated, bored, and unfulfilled.
One of the most effective ways you can avoid either of these traps, experts advise, is to focus on the process of your progress, not the outcome. This means doing things you enjoy because you enjoy them, not because you’re hoping for a certain reward at the end.
Holiday contends that ego can destroy your happiness and then your success by focusing your attention on the material aspects of the here-and-now, which narrows your perspective so that you miss the truly important things that are happening beyond your peripheral vision. When you lose sight of the big picture, success feels empty and purposeless, and you’re more likely to abandon it.
Holiday maintains that this can happen when you forget that you are a small piece of an infinite puzzle that reaches not only outward into the universe but also reaches backward into time and forward into the future. However, when you remember how you fit into the world and into your place in time, you realize not only how small you are, but also how important you are, despite your tiny size.
Keeping these realizations in mind can keep you grounded and keep you focused on your purpose, making it easier for you to resist the urges of your egos to direct you toward the unimportant minutiae of life. Keeping your eye on the big picture can also help you prepare for when things go wrong, as they inevitably will.
Ego Gives You a Finite Mindset Rather Than an Infinite One
Other management experts also advise that you keep your ego in check so it doesn't blind you to your larger purpose in life. Simon Sinek discusses this in depth in his book The Infinite Game, where, like Holiday, he cautions that leaders who fall victim to the urges of their egos can lose sight of their priorities.
Sinek’s theory is that every interaction in life (and in business in particular) is part of either a finite game (in which one player loses while another one wins) or an infinite game (where all players aim to keep playing). He argues that people who view business as an infinite game are more successful and have more longevity.
He notes that your ego can make you view life as a finite game by compelling you to “beat” others and by distracting you with the superficial trappings of success. A person who gets lost in their ego will lose sight of their Just Cause: their overriding, larger purpose that drives their decisions. When that happens, they start making poor choices that ultimately lead them to lose the success they’ve achieved.
Like Holiday, Sinek advises that you keep your eye on your larger purpose—the big picture—in order to prevent your ego from taking over.
Holiday’s earlier example of George C. Marshall again provides an illustration of this concept in action, demonstrating how a person can navigate difficult situations by keeping an eye on the larger picture in order to prevent their ego from causing problems. When he assumed the role of Chief of Staff, Marshall felt that his responsibility to the American people was to maintain a frank and honest relationship with Roosevelt. To maintain that relationship, he overlooked small slights or disagreements so that he could focus his energy on what mattered. In his own words, “I swallowed the little things so that I could go to bat on the big ones.”
This characteristic also points to Holiday’s earlier advice that you shouldn’t lose your temper or allow your ego to get upset by inconsequential slights, but instead that you should be prepared to let insults and wrongs roll off your back so that you can keep working toward your larger goal.
While your ego wants you to be the boss of everything, managing properly means delegating and focusing your efforts on big-picture issues.
Think of a situation where you couldn’t stop yourself from micromanaging details. What responsibilities did you take on that you could have delegated to another person?
How did this create difficulties for you? For example, were you unable to attend to larger issues? Did the other people resent not being allowed to contribute effectively? Did you mess up the details because you were spread too thin?
What details of your current project could you delegate that would free you up to focus on more important issues?
Now that we’ve looked at how ego can get in the way of attaining and maintaining success, let’s look at how it can misguide you when you experience some form of defeat, as everyone must.
Failure will happen to each and every one of us in some form or another. You may be able to get through it and find success again, or it may defeat you for good. Whether or not your ego drives your reactions to setbacks will determine which outcome you realize.
Ego is especially dangerous in the defeat stage of success for two reasons:
However, a person who can meet failure with the proper attitude can turn it into eventual success. Simon Cowell, television personality and record producer, is an example of someone who faced multiple setbacks but powered through and remained successful because he figured out how to keep his ego in check.
Cowell entered the music industry by working in the mail room at EMI Music Publishing. In the early 1980s he branched out on his own and started a record company, which went bankrupt in 1989. He speaks of this experience as a defining moment: Through the 1980s, he had lived a lavish, ego-driven lifestyle where he spent too much money and partied too hard, but when his company failed, he lost almost everything he’d earned and had to move back in with his parents. He realized that he’d failed because he’d believed his own hype, and he resolved to do things differently from then on.
After that, he changed his attitude: Instead of chasing the trappings of success, he focused on doing the work. He became famous for his commitment to his career, his attention to detail, and his habit of seeking advice from people on a lower socio-economic level—taxi drivers and interns, for example—putting aside his ego that might otherwise prevent him from listening to such input.
By 2021, Cowell’s net worth had risen to $600 million and he’d become one of the most recognizable faces on television, intimately linked to the success of breakout shows including American Idol, the X Factor, and the “Got Talent” franchise. Had he let his failure defeat him or had he continued to seek superficial markers of success like fast cars, he likely would not have found such long-term success.
The following sections explore further how you can effectively manage your ego when handling failures so that you, too, can emerge from them stronger.
Develop a Growth Mindset
Although Holiday doesn’t use the terms “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset,” his theories correspond to these well-known concepts. These two mindsets describe a person’s attitude in response to failure, and psychologists have long noted that consistently, people who easily bounce back from failure do so because they’ve developed a growth mindset.
Carol S. Dweck discusses these in depth in her book Mindset. As she outlines it, a person with a growth mindset believes they can improve their natural abilities through hard work and practice. In contrast, a person with a fixed mindset believes their abilities are unchangeable, and that whatever skills and intelligence they were born with establish limits for the rest of their lives.
A person’s mindset profoundly impacts how they respond to difficulties. Someone with a growth mindset sees setbacks as learning opportunities, while someone with a fixed mindset sees setbacks as confirmation that they can’t achieve their goal. Studies have shown that these traits are present in us even as children—when kids are given increasingly hard puzzles to solve, some will keep trying to solve the puzzles even when they’re defeated by them, believing that they’re capable of solving them if they just keep trying. Others, though, will give up once they run into difficulties, believing that they’re simply not capable of solving them. The first type of child has a growth mindset and the second has a fixed mindset.
A fixed mindset corresponds with an egotistical reaction to defeat—it can prevent future success for the same reasons Holiday outlines above. Someone who egotistically sees failure as a direct reflection of their identity has a fixed mindset and will be more likely to give up and allow that failure to become permanent.
Fortunately, Dweck argues that even if you have a tendency toward a fixed mindset, you can develop a growth mindset that will equip you with a better attitude toward failure. Many of the techniques and strategies that Holiday advises for overcoming failure are different ways that you can learn to see failures as opportunities for future growth (through a growth mindset) rather than as dead ends (through a fixed mindset).
Holiday cautions that at some point, you’ll run into difficult times when things are not going well and it feels like life is on hold: dead time, when your efforts feel wasted and pointless, or when you’re suffering the consequences of bad decisions. This might be a period of unemployment, a stint laid up in the hospital, or even prison.
When stuck in a period like this, you have a choice: endure it as dead time, or turn it into alive time by using it to learn, grow, and prepare to be more productive after the dead time is over.
President Jimmy Carter is an example of someone who was thrown into dead time after his reelection loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and used it to forge a new path forward. Instead of letting his ego fill him with self-pity or anger, he kept sight of his priorities (helping spread global peace) and started reaching out to people who could assist him. He gathered a group of capable people who shared his vision and opened the Carter Center, through which he continued to mediate peaceful solutions to international conflicts and advance human rights around the world, efforts for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Because he turned his dead time into alive time, he was able to emerge from his defeat as a respected figure whose influence will be felt for generations.
How to Turn Dead Time Into Alive Time
Holiday got the phrases “alive time” and “dead time” from advice given to him by bestselling author Robert Greene, who penned, among others, The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature.
Greene introduced Holiday to these ideas when Holiday was stuck in an unfulfilling job, planning his next move. Greene advised him to spend the unproductive periods of his life learning and preparing for future productivity. Holiday then realized that the lower-level or dead-end jobs that we often take on at the beginning of our careers are, in fact, opportunities for us to grow (which also led him to his suggestion to “be a helper” earlier).
Greene’s book The 48 Laws of Power contains a number of suggestions that might help you make the most of dead time, including:
Law 22 suggests you surrender to failure so that you can regroup and come back stronger.
Law 23 advises you focus your efforts, deciding which priorities are most important to you.
Law 25 suggests you reinvent yourself, first by becoming hyper-aware of who you are and how you appear to others, and then by adjusting your behavior to better suit your circumstances.
Holiday notes that when you fail, you may hit “rock bottom,” where you’ve lost everything. During these times, you should reevaluate your life and your priorities.
When the world hands you failure, it tells you a truth. This might be something you already knew about yourself but didn’t want to admit (like that you rush into opportunities without evaluating the risks properly). Or it might be a truth about the world around us that you were denying (like that there’s just not enough demand for a product that you think is phenomenal).
Your ego may want to deny these hard truths. However, if your ego can’t admit, in a low moment, that your own deficiencies brought your troubles on you, you’ll be unable to learn from those troubles, grow, and prevent them from happening again.
Your Success Depends on Your Response to Failure
Many psychologists and business experts argue, as Holiday does, that how you respond to failure determines how it will affect you long term. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield boils it down to a formula: Event + Response = Outcome. This codifies the idea that how you respond to an event is as important as the event itself, and two different people can end up with very different results after having experienced the same setback if they respond differently.
Another management advisor, Ed Catmull, discusses how to embrace failure in his book Creativity, Inc. His main advice is to stop being afraid of failure, and recognize that failure isn’t inherently bad—it’s a consequence of innovative work. He urges people to normalize failure, and in fact, to expect it. That way, you’ll see it as merely a part of a larger process rather than an ending of the process.
Illustrating both of these principles, some CEOs who get fired end up heading another company, while others don’t. This is often determined in large part by how they react to getting fired (assuming, of course, that they weren’t dismissed for unethical reasons like stealing clients’ money). For example, after Jamie Dimon was fired as president of Citigroup, he didn’t allow his ego to dwell in anger or bitterness. Instead, he used his time wisely (turning dead time into alive time, in Holiday’s words)—he read widely, took up boxing to relieve his stress, and eventually reached out to the man who’d fired him to thank him for the good times they’d had together and to acknowledge the poor decisions he’d made that led to his dismissal.
In other words, he was able to put aside his own ego and face up to his mistakes. By reaching out and being willing to return to his industry in an honest way, he paved the path for his recovery—soon after his meeting, Dimon was appointed CEO of Bank One, brought the company to record profitability, and eventually merged it with JPMorgan Chase, ascending to the top role in the new conglomerate.
In contrast, other CEOs relieved of their command, including Ford’s Jacques Nasser, Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina, and Apple’s John Sculley, never again led a major company despite the fact that they were widely considered intelligent and capable leaders. None of them showed the willingness to reach out in an honest and open way or to make themselves available to their industry again in the way that Dimon did.
In a similar vein, Holiday advises that when you’re faced with great failure, you honestly assess the mistakes you made that got you there. He cautions that your ego wants to look only at what you did right, and therefore, makes it hard for you to look clearly at your own actions. However, if you’re unable to examine your mistakes, you’ll repeat those same errors and won’t emerge from your failures with renewed insight.
Further, he urges you to examine your mistakes even when they don’t trip you up; sometimes things might work out for you despite the fact that you made poor choices. In these situations, it’s tempting to ignore those poor choices and convince yourself that your success is well-earned, even though in truth you merely got lucky. But when things go well for you despite your mistakes, you need to honestly acknowledge the role luck played in your success, and work to correct your errors so they don’t trip you up next time—because luck will always run out.
Holiday points to the New England Patriots as an example of how you should examine your mistakes even when they work out well for you. In 2000, the Patriots picked Tom Brady as a back-up quarterback in the 6th round of the draft. When they discovered how valuable he actually was (leading them to a record nine Super Bowl appearances, six of them wins), they knew that their scouting processes needed improvement—having left him to the sixth round, they might easily have lost him to another team. Instead of ignoring their error because it worked out fine in the end, they set about examining and improving their operations so as to not let this kind of close call happen again.
Don’t Count on Luck
Holiday advises that you face your mistakes even when good luck causes them to work out, because success due to luck isn’t stable. In Fooled by Randomness, Nicholas Taleb also discusses this concept. Taleb cautions that a large part of a person’s success is often due to good fortune, but people tend to always attribute success to skill. This fallacy drives us to be blind to potential problems with a person's (or our own) strategy, leaving us vulnerable to bad fortune in the future and causing us to wrongly assess risk.
For example, if you have a habit of texting while driving but you haven’t had any accidents, you may attribute your clean driving record to skill. However, this attitude blinds you to the risks you take when you drive distractedly and leaves you more likely to have an accident in the future.
Further, if you were to almost get in an accident as you texted while driving, you would be wise to examine your mistakes then, even though those mistakes haven’t led you to disaster just yet.
This advice is another way to look at Holiday’s earlier advice to focus on effort, not outcome—in other words, focus on process instead of results. If you focus on outcome only, then you’ll operate with a mindset of “the ends justify the means,” and you’ll only pay attention to mistakes if they hurt you—otherwise, you’ll ignore your mistakes, attribute your success to skill rather than the luck that’s truly behind it, and continue making the same mistakes until they take away all your success.
Holiday’s examination of the New England Patriots illustrates this theme. The team held themselves to a higher standard than simply the outcome of their choices. They correctly saw true success as getting the process right, not just the results. People are able to do this when they don’t allow their ego to be satisfied with success at any cost, since success that comes from flawed processes will always prove temporary.
Holiday notes that because your ego likes recognition, it sometimes defines success based entirely on how much or how little recognition other people give you through honors, praise, awards, job titles, raises, and so on. But if you let your ego define success for you in this way, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, because you can’t control how the world receives, judges, or acts upon your work.
If you define success based on recognition, then when your work is received poorly (as it inevitably will be at some point), your ego will fill you with anger and bitterness. Worse, if your ego fears a poor reaction, you may not go to the trouble of working on a project in the first place. Your ego asks, why bother?
If you allow your ego to drive your decisions in this way, you’ll deny yourself the opportunity to turn things around when you experience failure. Instead, if you view recognition, rewards, and rejections as peripheral elements of success, you’ll continue to work on your important projects for the sake of putting them out into the world, even when they’re ignored or poorly received, simply because you feel the world needs them. Because you can only control your own actions, you should evaluate success through your actions alone, regardless of how your audience receives them: Focus on efforts, not outcomes.
Theories of Motivation
Management experts have long questioned what will most effectively motivate people to do their best work—in other words, how do people measure success and what do they truly want to be rewarded with?
Clay Christensen takes up the topic in his book How Will You Measure Your Life?, noting that while many jobs focus on incentives like job security, status, and compensation, these factors (what he terms hygiene factors) don’t make people feel properly fulfilled. Studies have shown that instead, so-called motivators are what truly make people happy: things like challenges, responsibilities, learning opportunities, and the chance to make a meaningful contribution to the world.
Importantly, Christensen echoes Holiday’s advice and notes that motivators are inherent in your work itself, while hygiene factors are peripheral to your work. When you focus on motivators, the work itself determines your happiness, instead of the outcome determining your happiness.
Holiday warns that sometimes your ego can amplify failures you endure by not allowing you to stop when you’re behind. This happens when you start seeing your work as an extension of your identity. When your ego interprets threats to your career as threats to your person—to your status, to your reputation, to your value in the eyes of others—it wants to fight this failure at all costs. It wants you to throw all your energy and resources at the challenge, never admit that you were wrong, and never accept defeat. It wants you to bet everything on an outlandish scheme or break the rules in a last-ditch attempt to fix your failures—even though these methods are very likely what got you into trouble in the first place and will probably only increase your difficulties.
This is called the sunk cost fallacy: When you’ve invested time, energy, and money into a project (sunk costs) and instead of admitting that those costs are irretrievable, you continue to throw good money after bad trying to make those costs mean something.
Sometimes the wiser decision is to cut your losses and move on to the next project. Everyone makes mistakes—for example, people misjudge market demand, expand businesses too quickly, invest in bad stocks, or aim for unrealistic goals. Then, their businesses fail, their stock portfolios dive, or they spend years chasing a too-lofty target they’re not cut out for (for example, aiming to be a rock star even if they have only mediocre musical ability).
To move past your losses so that they don’t define you for the rest of your career, you must control your ego, admit you messed up, and stop trying to fix these blunders. When faced with failure, determine honestly whether or not your errors are redeemable and ask yourself: Should I keep fighting for this? If I do, will I make it worse? Or should I let this go? If I do, can I emerge from this with my dignity intact, so that I can fight for something else another day?
Sunk Costs Trigger Our Emotions
Psychologists and economists have long noted the effects of the sunk costs fallacy on human behavior. People get emotionally attached to money, time, or effort they’ve spent and don’t want to feel it’s been wasted, so they’ll spend lots more money, time, and effort trying to either recover their initial expenditure or make it feel worthwhile.
The sunk costs fallacy is one reason gamblers continue to throw money on the table after they’ve experienced losses. It also explains why people stay in bad or unsatisfying relationships for too long (Meg Jay explores this tendency in her book The Defining Decade, pointing out that sunk costs have an especially strong hold over people who’ve chosen to move in together before getting engaged, because it becomes harder to extricate themselves from things like shared bills or pets).
It also explains why people won’t sell stock that’s on a downward trajectory, preferring to hold on to it hoping it will eventually regain its value, thereby justifying their decision to buy it in the first place as well as their decision to hold it while it sank. Nicholas Taleb explores this in Fooled by Randomness, where he outlines some of the many reasons people make poor investment choices. Overall, he argues that people let their emotions guide their decisions because we are primarily driven by our primitive brain and therefore respond most strongly to fear and desire. This dovetails with Holiday’s argument of why our egos drive us to make myopic decisions. Both authors advise that you become aware of your emotional knee-jerk reactions and temper them with rational thought.
Holiday discusses one additional way that your ego can make it difficult to recover from failure—succumbing to blame and anger. He acknowledges that when failure trips you up, your ego wants to hate someone for it because that puts the blame for your suffering on someone else. Unfortunately, hatred does nothing to release you from your failures. On the contrary, hatred holds you to your failures longer.
The paradox of hatred is that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what you hope it will accomplish. It exposes your bad side, which makes people lose sympathy for whatever difficulties you’ve endured. It also fills you with stress and unpleasant thoughts, which can be debilitating.
While it’s hard to “love your enemies,” the ability to do so is what separates great leaders from temporary ones. Hatred does more to destroy the one who is hating than the one who is hated because it’s debilitating—it will eat away at you with stress and unpleasant thoughts.
However, Holiday notes that love can be transformational. Even when you feel it’s undeserved, finding a way to love someone will allow you to get perspective on a situation and understand the forces at play that brought your failure about. You’ll resist placing blame on someone else and will be better able to see how you can emerge from your failure as a stronger person.
Tips for Moving On
In his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie discusses techniques for moving on after someone has wronged you. Like Holiday, he notes that holding a grudge will harm you more than it harms the other person because it places a limit on your happiness—you won’t feel happy if they are also feeling happy. It’s far better to let go of your anger so that you can move on.
Carnegie suggests three ways you can help yourself move on:
Forgive and forget: The fastest way to get over a hurt is to forgive the person and simply stop thinking about them. You’ll move on even faster if you can take it a step further and see some good that they did for you, and thank them for it.
Immerse yourself in a larger cause: When you’re involved in working toward a higher purpose, you're less sensitive to insults or wrongs because you’re thinking about something greater than yourself.
Imagine yourself in their shoes: We often blame other peoples’ shortcomings on negative personality characteristics, while blaming our own shortcomings on bad luck or circumstance. This is called attribution error. If you can get beyond this instinctive reaction, you can more clearly see what circumstances may have led the other person to act the way they did.
https://rubileandro.com/intro-favorite-stoicism-resources/
Sometimes your ego defines success based entirely on how much or how little others give you recognition, through honors, praise, awards, job titles, raises, and so on. If you let your ego define success for you in this way, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, because you can’t control how the world receives, judges, or acts upon your work.
Think of a time when you had an opportunity but passed it up because it didn’t meet a superficial marker of success. (Maybe you passed on an entry-level job in an industry you loved because it didn’t pay well, or you didn’t bother submitting to an art contest because the prize wasn’t prestigious enough.)
Imagine what might have happened had you moved forward with that opportunity instead of letting it go. What other opportunities might have come your way had you followed through? How might one thing have led to another?
Think of your current goal for your career or life. What’s something small you could do that would advance that goal but would earn you no immediate recognition? What opportunities might that lead to?
The paradox of hatred is that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what we hope it will accomplish. While we may feel hatred will demonstrate how wrongly we’ve been treated, it more often demonstrates how appropriate our failures are—how well-deserved.
Think of a situation that made you angry, in which you felt bitterness or hatred toward someone.
Write down what results those feelings brought about. Did they bring anything positive into your life? Did they rob you of something positive (for example, a good night’s sleep)?
How might you have viewed your situation from a different perspective—one in which your ego played a smaller role—to prevent such negative feelings from developing? How might you approach a similar situation in the future in a more positive way?