5 Ways That Ego Holds Us Back And Unlocking Human Potential

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1:20Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:09We would like to welcome the Grand Rapids Economic Club. They have a number of members joining us today. We'd like to thank you for our continuing partnership. Today we are bringing you Ryan Holliday. If you are not familiar with his work, it certainly prepares you for all times, but certainly times like these. From his work, The Daily Stoic, to what he's going to talk about today, Ego is the Enemy. My personal favorite is Stillness is the Key. I think it is the Guide to Life. I've given it to all of my kids and he teaches us how to settle our minds and that is so so important with that i give you ryan holiday

3:00thank you so much it's uh it's good to be here with you guys or not be there with you guys i'd say that uh you know i'd rather be there in person but uh it's pretty nice not having to get on a plane. So not the worst thing in the world. For today's talk, we were sort of kicking around this idea of unlocking one's potential, sort of individually, professionally, and sort of thinking about what is the biggest impediment to doing that, right? What prevents us from realizing our potential? Obviously, it's different for each person, but I would argue that for the vast majority of us, the things that are getting in our way are not, it's not our business competition.

3:45It's not our opponents. It's not our enemies. It's not bad luck, right? It's not the market. It's not even the pandemic. It's not a lack of opportunities that I would argue that the biggest obstacle that we face as human beings, as professionals, as a country, the biggest obstacle is ego right most uh empires collapse from within for good reason you know i wish that ego wasn't a problem of our time but of course it is it's a great line from cyril connelly the uh the british writer he says ego sucks us down like the law of gravity and uh it'd be nice if there was an example you know what if there was some sort of prominent leader uh president if you will, who sort of embodied the costs of ego that sort of showed us the, almost on a Shakespearean scale, how ego gets us into trouble and makes difficult things difficult.

4:43But I think we all intuitively know that ego is a problem. I would say that even if we are not individually egomaniacs, right, even if we don't have an ego problem, it doesn't mean that ego is not a problem. Of course it is, right? I don't think any of you have ever been in a situation and honestly thought to yourself, you know what would solve this for me is ego, right? You guys have never been at one of your events and thought, you know what would really improve the culture of this room is if we brought some bigger egos into YPO, right? We understand intuitively, instinctually that ego is this sort of toxic force, this thing that tears groups and teams and organizations and communities apart.

5:31And we all have that within us. I think one of the hard parts about judging other people for our egos or for their egos is knowing that deep down, you know, if we were in that position, we might be doing the exact same thing. that ego is this force that's very much alive in all of us, but that it's not a thing that makes anything better. And what I thought I'd do is I'd go through sort of five ways that ego holds us back, sort of five ways that we kind of can replace ego if we're aware of this force inside of us. And then I'd love to just talk sort of specifics with all of you. But I think the first way that ego gets in our way is this expression from Epictetus.

6:12He's one of the early Stoic philosophers. He says, remember, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And so I think where ego is so problematic is that there's this part of ego that thinks that we know everything that there is to know. And in a sense, that ego is correct. Because when you think you know everything, you're right. It becomes impossible for you to learn anything more. And actually, when you look at the true greats, what you see is a real humility, right? Right. Socrates. Why is Socrates considered the wisest man who ever lived? Socrates is known to be wise because Socrates, as they say, knows what he doesn't know.

6:53Emerson has a great line. He says, every man is better than me at something. And in that I learned from him. Really, you see that the best are humble because they're truly students of the game. They're students of life. They're students of their fellow human beings. and they're always looking for how they can get better and for what there is left to learn. And when you become a student of something, when you become a student of the game, of your space, of your profession, of just sort of human potential, you're naturally humbled by all that you learn that there is left to learn. There's an expression by a great physicist, John Wheeler, who says that as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance.

7:36So the converse of it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know is when you realize how little you know, when you're actively curious about learning more, when you become a student, there becomes an infinite amount for you to learn. Right. So everything you learn is is even exposing you to things that you didn't know you didn't know about. If you think about where you were at the beginning of your career, you thought, hey, I need to learn X to get to this place. And you thought you understood what that place was about, but you realized that you didn't even have a sense of all the things that those people were doing.

8:13And so we want to become this place where we become a perpetual student of what we do, not just because if we're not a student, we're stuck. We become a student because of the self-fulfilling prophecy. It's an effective truth. the more curious we are, the more we focus on what we don't know, the more there is for us to know, and the better that we can get. The second area is that I think ego makes you a bad manager. It doesn't just make you a bad manager and that you're unpleasant to deal with. It doesn't make you just a bad manager and that you think you know everything that there is to know.

8:44In the book, I talk a lot about John DeLorean, who I think is this sort of fascinating guy because he's brilliant. He's an innovator. Basically, everything that Elon Musk is doing today, John DeLorean was trying to do a generation before him, almost 50 years ago now. And the problem for John DeLorean was his ego. He was not just a micromanager. A subordinate once described his management style as chasing colored balloons. He always wanted to be doing the sexy thing, the exciting thing, which tended to be a lot of the marketing, which tended to be a lot of the public facing stuff, which tended to be the stuff that made him look important or special and not the boring nuts and bolts of managing a difficult company.

9:31He was convinced that GM was stodgy and boring and conservative. Really what GM was, was a well-managed company, right? He didn't like the controls and the constraints, and he wanted to have a management style that was all about him, that was all centered on kind of a cult of personality. There's something funny about micromanagers, which is that a micromanager is really an egotist at heart. You make yourself the center of things because you can't stand other people being important. I've seen this time and time again at companies I've worked at or consulted at. The egotistical CEO is often the most insecure CEO, and he or she is paranoid, afraid of talented other people, and afraid of delegating because they're worried about being irrelevant.

10:21And so at the core of DeLorean's dysfunction was DeLorean. He made himself central. What great leaders do is they have relatively few direct reports. They have systems. They have structures. They have controls. It's not as fun. and it's not as sexy, there's something exciting about putting out fires, about always being in crisis mode, about being the center of everything, about there being drama. But this, while it feeds the ego, does not make for a successful, efficient, effective company. Micromanagers are what we're trying to avoid. And we're also trying to avoid focusing on the wrong things.

10:59So what a humble leader does is they focus on systems. They focus on process. They focus on culture. You know, Famously, we have that expression, a servant leader. It's not about them at all. It's about the customers. It's about the client. It's about the mission. It's not about feeding their identity. Some of the best CEOs, Warren Buffett talks about some of his favorite CEOs of all time. And most of them are people you've never heard of, right? Even some of the ones you have, like when you hear the name Catherine Graham, she inherits the Washington Post. You don't think Catherine Graham, one of the great CEOs of all time, but in fact, she was.

11:36People knew her as this sort of elegant society hostess, but really she was quietly turning the Washington Post into one of the most effective and profitable companies in the world.

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12:54Go to HelloFresh.com slash Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. And I would say that most of the great CEOs don't want you to know who they are. They don't want to be in the press and they don't want to be the center of things. They want to have a company that's profitable and efficient and effective and quite frankly, that can operate without them, which sort of leads to the next place that ego is so problematic.

13:35What ego does is it makes you believe your own bullshit. And that was really a huge problem for someone like DeLorean. DeLorean famously, after he leaves GM, collaborates on a book titled On a Clear Day, you can see General Motors or on a clear day, we can see General Motors. Of course, he wasn't even in the ballpark of General Motors. He'd started one company that had launched one car brand. And when that car came out, it was a disaster. He was so focused on the marketing and on the attention, on the chasing the colored balloons, on creating this mythos of him as a person, that what he wasn't doing is operating the company.

14:13And what he wasn't doing is looking at the nuts and bolts of the business and looking in the mirror honestly and effectively. Look, marketing is essential, right? Steve Jobs, one of the great marketers, one of the great storytellers of all time. But I kind of get this sense that as egotistical as Steve Jobs was, when he would go up on stage and tell this compelling story about how this latest Apple product was the greatest thing ever invented and was going to change the world, I think privately, just minutes before he had been criticizing every little thing on this product about how it wasn't good enough, about how it needed to get better, about what he wanted to do next, right?

14:53Kanye West, famously an egomaniac, but there's no way that he is that egomaniacal in the studio when he's making the music or it wouldn't be good, right? You can't believe your own crap and be great at what you do. I think, you know, we're experiencing, you know, we talked about this earlier, the idea you can't learn what you think you already know. What do these conspiracy theories that have run amok, whether it's anti-maskers or QAnon, what are these people convinced they've done? That they've done their own research and discovered some fantastical secret or, you know, brilliant explanation for the world that, of course, is actually nonsense.

15:33But what it's convinced them of is that they're smarter and wiser and that they've discovered something that other people haven't discovered. You could argue this is the exact same thing that's happening with this GameStop bubble that we're in the middle of. The hedge funds thought they knew better than everyone that they discovered some secret thing. And just like all the people piling on from the internet think that they've discovered some secret thing. We gotta remember, what does a con exploit? A con exploits the sense of superiority of the other person. There's a great expression, you can't con an honest man, right?

16:08What a con does is catch someone who thinks that they're smarter than everyone else, that they've discovered the secret, that the person being conned usually thinks they're pulling something over on someone else. So what ego does is it makes us really vulnerable in that we think that we're better. We think that we're God's gift to humanity, that we're the greatest ever, that we're unbeatable. Think about every heavyweight champion that walked into the ring thinking that they were unbeatable and they were beaten by someone who, instead of thinking they were unbeatable, spent a lot of time focusing on protecting their own vulnerabilities and zeroing in on the weaknesses of their opponents.

16:51Right. We see this in CEOs and leaders who don't want to listen to experts or don't want to listen to advice because it conflicts with their intuitive sense. Dr. Fauci just talked about this, his encounters with Trump, where, you know, Fauci would come in with some long research report based on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Trump would go, you know, but my friend from from New Jersey just called and he said that this works really well. And Fauci was asked, what do you think Trump was doing? He said, I think Trump really believed that this thing that he just heard about, he said that Trump was so used to trusting his gut that he believed that his gut and years of scientific experience and data were evenly matched.

17:42Right. And so this is where ego is so problematic. Right. On the one hand, as entrepreneurs, we got where we got by not listening to the people who told us it was impossible, who told us it was a bad idea, who told us that it was too risky, that it would never work. Right. We wouldn't be successful if we weren't willing to push the envelope to take risks to trust our gut. But now the problem is we can take a really bad lesson from that, which is never listen to experts, always reject the evidence, always lean into risk. Sometimes when people tell you you're about to drive over a cliff, they're not haters.

18:21They're not trying to pull you down. They're trying to save your life. Right. I got to imagine that there were people that said, hey, John DeLorean, I know you think that this 30 million dollar cocaine deal is going to save the company, but it's a really, really, really bad idea and it's not going to work out well. But when we think we know better, we prevent ourselves from seeing what's obviously in front of us. And we fall prey to that magical thinking. We fall prey to those delusions. And then also, you know, there's a great expression from Seneca. He puts this in one of his plays, which is, I think, largely based on Nero, who he worked for.

19:01So Seneca would add some real experience with these sort of crazy egotistical leaders. But he says, one who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears. So the other thing that ego does is it kind of, it's convinced everyone's out to get you. Everyone's trying plotting against you. You know, there's that sort of paranoid, only the paranoid survived. Well, that sort of crazy instability often generates precisely the things that we're so worried about and that we fear and are afraid of. The fourth part of ego, the fourth sort of negative part of ego, the exact opposite of what we're just talking about, which is that complacency.

19:36You know, if you think you're the greatest, if you think you're God's gift to humanity, if you think you're flawless and perfect, you know, what you're not doing is working on improving and working on getting better. And, uh, you know, Bill Bradley famously says, when you are not practicing somewhere, uh, in, in, in some other gym, your opponent is practicing. And when you meet that opponent, they will beat you. And so as, as we want to think about where ego really holds us back, it's not only you can't learn that, which you think you already know, but you can't improve that which you think is perfect.

20:11So if you're celebrating how fast your company is growing, if you're celebrating the killer year that your company just had, if you're patting yourself on the back for what a great leader you are. Ironically, if you're thinking about how humble you are, what you're actually doing is letting ego creep in and prevent you from getting better. One of the things you learn as a writer is your last book will never write the next one, that you're starting from zero every time. Jeff Bezos famously says, it's day one over here, right? Every day you're starting from scratch. The past is irrelevant, the Stoics would say.

20:48It's done. It's over. But you're starting at zero today. There's always room for improvement. I would say there's always room to get better. And not only is this a way to stay humble, But by believing that, it creates the opportunity to get better. Now, is there a downside to this a little bit? If you're never satisfied, if you're never happy, if there's never enough, you're not going to enjoy, you're not going to celebrate the wins. And I think we could have a long discussion about how one sort of gets that balance. But the point is, the more you focus on what you have left to do, where you have to get better, the more likely you are to continue to get better and not become complacent.

21:29And then just remembering that, you know, the second you are getting complacent, there is somebody who would kill for your position, right? We talked about prize fighters. It's like for every fat and satisfied heavyweight champion, there is a young kid coming from nothing who would do anything to take that belt from them. And that mismatch is what creates the upsets, right? Springsteen says you got to stay hungry or they'll be carving you up all night. That's the idea, right? It's those who get complacent, those who think they're invincible, that they have a monopoly, that they own it. Those are the ones who get their lunch sheet.

22:25Which leads kind of into the final part, the idea of how ego also makes you fragile. I think we think that ego is sort of a form of confidence, right? We go, oh, but isn't a little bit of ego important? I say, no, there's a big difference between ego and confidence. Ego is stolen. Ego is made up. Ego is delusional. Confidence is earned. The problem with ego is that it can feel, it can look like confidence, especially early on, right? If you don't believe you can do something, you're very unlikely to do it. But just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean you can do it. But let's say that your belief gets you somewhere.

23:05You reach for something that shouldn't have been possible. You pull it off. Well, fantastic. But now you learn this lesson that ego is a good thing. And eventually that ego is going to make you either complacent or make you overreach. And now you experience some sort of failure or adversity, which is inevitable, right? No one bats 100. We always struggle. We always experience setbacks. And then what? I was the director of marketing at American Apparel, and Doug Charney basically ran the company into the ground. There was a bunch of factors, ego being a big one. But ultimately, he's fired by the board of directors.

23:41Now, the board of directors presents him a set of choices. They say, Doug, look, you're obviously an integral part of the history of the company. You formed the company. We want your advice. We don't want this to be acrimonious. And they said, we'll pay you a million dollars a year to step down as CEO, be retained as an advisor. you'll keep all your stock in the company, which is at that point, something like 55%. And we'll bring in a bunch of experts, people who you weren't able to work with. We'll bring them in. We'll turn the company around. You'll be a very rich man. You will be seen as the great leader of the company who got us this far.

24:14And who knows, maybe you come back in the future. The idea of being seen as a failure, being seen as a loser, having to give up control, was so ego-shattering to Dubb that he decided instead to mount a hostile takeover, file so many lawsuits, and so actively campaign to get control back of the company that he ends up driving it into double bankruptcy. He not only loses all of his shares, not only gives up the$1 million salary that he would have had, but ends up owing the hedge fund that he partnered with$20 million on the other side of it. So we went from, you know, shares that were at one point probably worth$600 or$700 million to being in the whole$20 million, right?

24:59This is what ego does. Ego can't lose because if ego is part of your identity on the way up, look at how amazing I am. Look at what I've accomplished. Look at how special I am. Look at what this says about me as a human. Well, think about how fragile you then are when you inevitably fail or are embarrassed or are criticized, right? You saw this again in the election. I don't think these are, I hope this doesn't come across as political. I'm talking merely on personality level. Trump says at one of his last rallies, can you imagine losing to this guy? And though he did lose to this guy, his identity was so caught up in winning that it was actually easier for him to spin a fantastic tale that he'd won in a sacred landslide and it have been stolen from him than to face the fact that, hey, maybe he made mistakes and maybe he screwed up.

25:52And that maybe if you learn from those things, he could run again in four years and win. Right. So what ego does is it prevents us from from doing the only the only worthwhile thing that there is to do when we fail, which is to learn from that failure, to grow from it and to be improved by it. But ego can't do that because the pain of loss, the pain of being seen as a failure is like death. And I remember I asked Dov right after he got fired, I said, Dov, what are you going to do? I said, are you going to plot a comeback like Steve Jobs? And I remember this like two in the morning on the phone and he just said, Ryan, Steve Jobs died.

26:32And I just said, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, like to him, all he could think about it failure and death were like the same thing to him it just the idea that it was possible to come back was incomprehensible to him because all he could feel was the pain and the embarrassment of that loss and he ended up you know taking a bad situation and making it worse and worse and worse and worse um you know i'm i'm writing about this now in my in my book right in the book that i'm working on. Lyndon Johnson knows that Vietnam is a war that can't be won. So why doesn't he detangle America from it?

27:10Why doesn't he's not even going to run for re-election? Why doesn't he solve this problem? Well, he didn't want to be seen as a coward, right? His idea, how that would affect his ego, how it would affect how other people saw him, it made it inconceivable that he would do this difficult thing. We all regress towards the mean. We all experience setbacks and failures. And so if your identity is tied up in what you do, if you have ego instead of confidence, confidence says, here's who I am. Here's what's intrinsically mine. I don't identify with things that are outside my control that are not me as a human being.

27:47I identify with, you know, how fancy my plane is, or, you know, you know, how much money I make or how much press I get, or how big my house is, those things can be taken away. Those things can be jeopardized. And if your ego is tied up in those things, you'll be devastated and you won't be able to bounce back. Humble people are able to learn from their failures. Confident people are able to grow and learn from their failures. Egotistical people are ultimately destroyed by failures and setbacks and criticism. They're very fragile. So those are the five things. I thought I'd conclude with one more thing that I think helps me put some ego in perspective.

28:22It's a deeply stoic exercise. I carry this coin in my pocket, just says a memento mori on it. And on the back from Marcus Aurelius, he says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. So Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world. And when you read meditations, what is he talking about over and over again? How short life is, how unimportant he is, how quickly he's going to be forgotten after he dies. He says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and they're both buried in the same ground. The same thing happens to both. He says, what good is posthumous fame?

28:59You're not going to be around for it. He's reminding himself that these things don't say anything about you as a person. And that if you, if you start to get too high on your own supply, you're taking life too seriously and you're lying to yourself. The philosopher Bertrand Russell has a line that I remind myself of when I start to get stressed, when I feel that ego creeping up, when I get really, you know, he says, the belief that your work is terribly, terribly important is the first sign of an impending nervous collapse. And so having some humility about what you do, about your place in the world, to me is a sign of healthy, well-adjusted maturity, realizing that, you know, this is not a grand monument to yourself.

29:46We're all playing the game of life and business. And obviously, you want to be a winner at it. Obviously, you want things to go your way. But none of this changes really anything. And, and, you know, none of us know how, how long we're going to be here for. And so to take it too seriously to let it go to your head is, is quite silly. You know, I live out in the country in Texas. And, you know, none of my neighbors know that I'm a writer. I think that helps keep me saying, spending time out in nature, you can't be outside, you can't walk in your guys's case, down a snowy street, you know, on a on a on a nice evening, and and and just feel that sort of quietude and that calmness, and not be taken down a peg or two, right?

30:31The walk I take each morning helps center me helps remind me of what I'm what's important. To me, it's the opposite of whatever the ego boost you get every time you check your email or log into social media. We remind ourselves memento mori that we're mortal, not just because life is short, but because it's important. The impetus for that phrase, the idea of memento mori, the Romans would chant it to a triumphant general as he walked through the streets of Rome after his biggest victories. Memento mori, remember you are man, remember you are mortal. You're not special. The rules still apply to you.

31:08Gravity still applies to you. And that idea from Cyril Connolly that we opened with still applies to you. You know, nothing sucks us down quite like gravity as ego. Humility is important. And it's not just important for some sort of religious or moral reasons. To me, it's a business strategy. Egotistical people might be successful in the short term, but on a long enough timeline, they're all brought back down to earth. and I think generally we would want to not crash too hard. So that to me is why ego is the enemy. That's why I've been talking about it for all these years. I actually have it tattooed on my arm here.

31:49It's a reminder. I want to see it constantly through the day, through my life as a reminder. Look, ego does not make this better. Ego is not the ingredient for this difficult problem. Humility, confidence, connectedness, reality. These are what we need. This is what makes us better. And that to me is why ego is the enemy.

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