# Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Ryan Holiday]] - Full Title: Ego Is the Enemy - Category: #books ## Highlights >[!quote] > Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against. (Location 621) - Note: Applicable to how social and professional circles provide the necessary pushback for personal growth as well >[!quote] > “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. You can’t learn if you think you already know. You will not find the answers if you’re too conceited and self-assured to ask the questions. You cannot get better if you’re convinced you are the best. (Location 648) >[!quote] > Passion is about. (I am so passionate about ______.) Purpose is to and for. (I must do ______. I was put here to accomplish ______. I am willing to endure ______ for the sake of this.) Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself. (Location 738) >[!quote] > It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead— humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you must do and say, not what you care about and wish to be. Remember Talleyrand’s epigram for diplomats, “Surtout, pas trop de zèle” (“ Above all, not too much zeal”). Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-intentioned, but ineffective self. (Location 752) >[!quote] > “If you are not careful,” she warns young writers, “station KFKD (K-Fucked) will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.” (Location 976) >[!quote] > It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.” (Location 1078) >[!quote] > “Whether in middle management or top management, unbridled personal egotism blinds a man to the realities around him; more and more he comes to live in a world of his own imagination; and because he sincerely believes he can do no wrong, he becomes a menace to the men and women who have to work under his direction,” he wrote in his memoirs. (Location 1275) >[!quote] > “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” (Location 1323) >[!quote] > Ego is its own worst enemy. It hurts the ones we love too. Our families and friends suffer for it. So do our customers, fans, and clients. (Location 1562) >[!quote] > As one executive put it, DeLorean “had the ability to recognize a good opportunity but he didn’t know how to make it happen.” (Location 1615)