How To Balance Ego With Striving | LinkedIn Talk

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2:03Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. so in 2017 i gave a talk at linkedin i was talking about the ideas in ego is the enemy seems utterly insane to me that that talk was seven years ago but i guess it was i've been doing this a long time i wonder what i would change if i was doing this talk again i mean i think i'm better if i'm like putting my ego aside i think every time you do a talk you get a little bit better. People ask about stage fright, whatever. You get less scared because you've done it more times. But every time I talk about the material, I discover something new.

3:25Certainly, I've learned a lot. I've had my ego humbled in many ways. But I do think the ideas in this talk hold up pretty well, which is why I wanted to bring it to you. So we're bringing this one out of the vault. This is me talking Ego is the Enemy, part of a leadership speaker series that LinkedIn was doing back in the day. LinkedIn's been an awesome sponsor of the podcast over the years as well. And I think there's some good lessons in here. One of the things I talk about is Howard Hughes, who I think we have some modern day analogs. When I was writing that, I was thinking mostly about Doug Charney, the founder of American Apparel, talking about Howard Hughes as a way to talk about Doug and what I'd learned and seen there.

4:05Because I'd written the book in 2014 and 2015 as American Apparel was imploding. but it's funny, I'm going back to those very ideas right now because I'm writing about another entrepreneur. I don't know if I should say yet, who's had a similar arc for the wisdom book, which is the one I'm working on now. Justice, right thing right now. Good Values, Good Character and Good Deeds is coming out in June. You can pre-order that now. That's the third book in the Stoic Virtue series. The fourth will be coming out whenever I finish this thing. It's just funny how it comes full circle now for seven plus years.

4:42I've been thinking about these ideas. I didn't even know I was doing the Virtue series then, but some of the ideas I was researching and talking about then have ended up being in the Justice book. They're going to be in the Wisdom book. And this is just what I do. And so I'm excited to bring this one out to the vault. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks to LinkedIn for having me. Talk soon.

5:13Thank you. How's everyone doing? Good? All right. Well, we'll just get into it. So typically I start my talks with this question, right, which is who the hell is this person? Rochelle did a very nice job introducing me, but I sort of go through it. But so this is me in college. I was 19. I dropped out to work for an author. I really wanted to be a writer. That was my dream. And I sort of thought the way that you become a writer is you study under a writer. So I worked for Robert Greene, who wrote The 48 Laws of Power. I worked on a number of his books with him, sort of learning the craft of what writing is.

5:50And then through Robert, I came on as a strategist at a company called American Apparel, which is at the time one of the biggest fashion companies in the world. By the time I was maybe 21 or 22, I was a director of marketing. And then I wrote my first book while I was there, sort of an expose of the media system, just to sort of show you maybe how ego can go to an author's head, right? This is the picture of me in college, and it somehow becomes the cover of the book, which makes me look much cooler than I actually look. You know, the pen becomes a cigarette, and then there's a monster, I guess, and all these things.

6:25So anyway, so I wrote my first book. It does really well. It's got my face on the cover, things are going well. I read another book a few years later, which also did well. And then I'm still at American Apparel, and the wheels start to come off a little bit, both for me and for the company. This is probably the nicest headline that you could find about Dove and American Apparel, an abrupt fall from grace. It ends up he's fired by the board of directors. There's a hostile takeover. It fails. There's a lot of controversial media about it. The company ends up going bankrupt twice. The 10 ,000 employees that work there no longer have jobs.

7:05It's sadly kind of a timeless story, right? Really high-flying, successful company suddenly isn't so high-flying and successful anymore. Lots of people, again, historically this happens, right? You've got John DeLorean, brilliant engineer, inventor. You might have seen the car in Back to the Future. He actually tries to invent the Tesla model of disrupting the major car makers. He makes, on paper, a great car, but actually the DeLorean would be the worst possible car you could own. Not only does he run the company in the ground, but then, at its lowest point, he thinks he can refund the company with a$50 million cocaine deal.

7:49It's actually an FBI sting. It does not end well, as you can imagine. Of course, you've got Richard Nixon. He wins re-election in a landslide. He can't stop attacking what he sort of refers to as his enemies. He ends up overreaching. My favorite part is just how big his head is. It almost looks like he's photoshopped onto his body. Howard Hughes, another sort of brilliant strategic mind and inventor, sort of a courageous, bold aviator. But actually, Hughes Aircraft is one of the worst-run companies in history. He makes so much money because of some of the patents and sort of monopolies that he has that he's able to fail over and over and over again.

8:31We sort of see in Howard Hughes a trajectory of what ego can do. I'll sort of present this one without comment, but maybe we're seeing some of the same, that we're seeing maybe history repeat itself again. So anyway, this is the sort of timeless problem of ego. As you become more successful, as you start to achieve the things that you're setting out to achieve, we often become our own worst enemy. Cyril Connolly, one of my favorite writers, he has this line. He says, ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. And so what I wanted to talk about today is the way that that happens and, of course, how maybe we can resist this gravitational pull so we don't fail so catastrophically.

9:12These are some notes. I was actually at American Apparel when all this sort of stuff was happening. And I remember I was in the parking lot with my editor and we were talking on the phone and it sort of came to me this phrase, the idea that ego is the enemy. And not only is it the enemy, but that wherever we happen to be in life, and I would say that we're in sort of one of three phases at any given point, we're either aspiring to do something, we're achieving success in some way, or we're experiencing failure and adversity. And so the idea is that ego is the enemy of each one of these phases.

9:40And so a book starts as an idea, and then it becomes sort of a, you sort of backfill in all the material. So this is the breakthrough in the book. So we're aspiring, we're succeeding, or we're failing. So we're at one of these three phases, and we're sort of going back and forth between them all the time. We succeed at something, and then we aspire to do something more. We fail at something, and then we have to aspire again, right? Right. We succeeded something and then we we we we bring failure to that or we experience adversity because of something we've done. And it goes on and on and on. And so we'll start with aspiring.

10:17I think the first way you sort of combat ego when you is early on. Right. Ideally, you want to nip this sort of stuff in the bud. You want to prevent ego from taking root too early. And I think part of the way that you do that is by taking what they call in the martial arts the beginner's mind, or the student mindset. The story I tell to illustrate this is the story of a heavy metal guitarist. This is him here, Kirk Hammett. He's in a band called Exodus. They're an okay metal band. And then he's chosen to replace, actually they're a San Francisco heavy metal band at the time, he's chosen to replace a guy named Dave Mustaine in a band called Metallica.

10:54Metallica's still an underground band at the time. They're definitely going places. This is like being drafted, let's say maybe into the minor leagues at the time. We've got a very clear path to the majors. And what does he do? Does he celebrate? Does he go out and buy a nice car? Does he party? No, what he does is he hires a guitar teacher. He hires a musician in Berkeley named Joe Satriani, who himself would go on to be one of the greatest guitar players of all time. And they work for almost two years. Even though he's a professional musician, he has a guitar teacher. And what Satriani would say is that him, it was pretty good, but what he'd never really learned how to do was connect everything together.

11:33So it was this sort of process of he would get homework, he would have to go work on the homework, and he would have to come back having practiced those lessons each and every week. Satriani actually says to him, like, look, if you don't do the work, don't bother coming back. And so here we have someone submitting to this sort of master-apprentice model or submitting to the student mindset at early on enough in his career that it's preventing ego from taking hold. And this is what you do. Working for Robert Greene, it's a similar thing for me. There's nothing I could do that would ever really impress Robert in any major way because he'd already done all this before.

12:09So at best, you're getting a sort of good job. And then you've got to go, it's this sort of measuring yourself against someone who's so far in advance of you that it's inherently humbling and it's preventing ego from coming through. Epictetus is saying, look, it's impossible for a person to learn that which they think they already know. So one of the problems early on in a career or in a job or in a trajectory is we think we're really good. And as a result of this, that's about as good as we end up becoming. So when you think you know everything, in some ways you're right because you don't learn anything more.

12:45Socrates, right, is considered to be very wise because he knew what he didn't know. So this is the idea. You take the student mindset, you're perpetually a student. It's preventing ego from taking hold. The mixed martial arts pioneer Frank Shamrock, his training system is actually based on this idea. He calls it plus minus equal. So you want to train under someone who's much, much better than you. You want to challenge yourself against someone who's as good as you. And then you're also passing these lessons on to someone who's not as good as you. And it's sort of the interplay of all these different angles of the same material that inherently humbles you.

13:20And Emerson is saying, look, in every person that you meet, there's something that you can learn from them. And so focusing on this, right, not on how much you know, not on how good you are, this keeps you humble, this keeps you learning, and it's sort of perpetually teaching you things. the physicist John Wheeler, he says, as our knowledge of, as our island of knowledge grows, so too does the shoreline of ignorance. And so the point is, as you're learning more and more, what you're actually exposing yourself to is all the things that you didn't know that you didn't even know. And so this student mindset, you can keep it going all the time, and ego can never really take hold.

13:58And Ben Franklin early in his career sort of illustrates this idea. He runs away at 18 from Philadelphia, goes to Boston, and he comes home from Boston, and he thinks he's basically the shit, right? He thinks he's the best. He's made a little money for the first time in his life. It's even embarrassing a couple hundred years later. He would carry the coins that he'd earned in Boston around, and he would show them to people. So he's really proud of what he's done. And he comes back to Philadelphia and he sees his family. And he's talking to his brother and doing the same thing. And his brother's just sort of shaking his head.

14:41This is really embarrassing and mortifying. And then Franklin goes on and he meets with Cotton Mather, who's one of the most prominent citizens in the town. And they're walking along this hallway. And Franklin's sort of really high on himself. He's really excited. He's sort of so caught up in this performance that he doesn't hear Mather when Mather says to him, you know, stoop. And then he says, stoop again. And Franklin keeps walking. And then he runs right into a ceiling beam. Ceiling beam. He just hits his head really hard. And what Mather says to him, I think, encapsulates why ego is so dangerous at this early part in a career.

15:16He's saying, look, if you don't hold your head up so high, if you stoop from time to time, you'll save yourself a lot of painful bumps on the head. And so the point is, you can start to, early on, when you sort of deserve it least, is when you start to feel really full of yourself. I went to this good school. They chose me to work at this great company. I'm making all this money. I'm doing this that my parents never could have done. I'm doing this more than any of my friends could ever do. And then what you do is you run smack into something that you weren't looking out for, right? You're so high on yourself that you bump into something.

15:51and so in Christianity of course we have the idea that pride goeth before the fall and the idea is that if you're looking down on other people you're not seeing what's above or around you this is a famous Carvaccio painting this is actually David slaying Goliath and what you can't see and I don't have a pointer here but actually engraved on the hilt of the sword is a Latin acronym for the saying humility kills pride and so the idea is that if you think that you're the best if you think that you're invincible If you think you've got it, someone that you're not paying attention to is going to come and hit you with a stone and then cut your head off is the idea.

16:27Not to get too morbid. So the idea is that humility kills pride. And the earlier you kill it, the better that you are. Theognos, so this is obviously a theme that goes back even before the Bible. The first thing, kernos, which gods bestow on those, they would annihilate is pride. Cyril Connolly, again, he says, whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. So it's at this point when you think that you're the hot shit that you are actually preventing and sort of stilting your growth at this early period. And that's what you don't want to do. And then, of course, so let's say you do conquer ego in some way early on in your career.

17:05Or let's say you're so talented that it almost doesn't matter, right? People put up with your shit because you're so great. You know, you're chugging away. Well, what happens then is ego becomes a new problem while you have success. It immediately endangers that which you have achieved. So Pat Riley, the basketball coach, he calls this the disease of me. People don't really understand that in World War II, you know, we think there's all these great generals. We don't realize, sort of gets lost in history, the way that all these really sort of powerful alpha males were constantly jockeying for power with each other.

17:41There's sort of one general who doesn't do this. This is George Marshall. Truman would say never did Marshall think about himself. He's sort of the sort of trademark humble soldier. And he does quite a bit. He's the opposite of what you might compare sort of MacArthur to, who I think coincidentally is Trump's favorite general. But MacArthur was this sort of meticulously manages his image. You know, he's always smoking this ridiculous corncob pipe that he thinks makes him look like a soldier. He's actively managing his public relations. He loves to do these big, bold moves. And he's constantly jockeying for power.

18:25But Marshall really does none of this. Famously, Marshall actually turns down the opportunity to command the troops at D-Day. FDR says to him, look, you haven't had a chance. This is yours if you want it. And he says, look, don't take my feelings into account. Sort of do what's best for the team. And so you'd think that this sort of making these decisions throughout your career to be constantly sort of turning down honors, to be turning down rank, sort of not jockeying for power. MacArthur actually treats Marshall pretty horribly early on in Marshall's career. He sort of banishes him to some obscure posting.

19:01This is the disease of me, right? As Riley is saying, it can strike any winning team in any year at any moment. But so MacArthur really treats Marshall quite terribly. And then at some point during the Second World War, the tables turn, and now Marshall is MacArthur's boss. So what does he do? Does he take his revenge? Does he sort of try to get even? Or does he think, actually, MacArthur might be a flawed person, he might be a complete asshole, but he's what we need right now in this very specific instance. So he sort of turns this down as well. He turns down this opportunity as well. Famously, what I love about my favorite Marshall story is he's forced to sit for this official portrait at one point.

19:40And he sits for several days for this painting. And the artist says, OK, you're good to go. And he just gets up and leaves. And the artist says, don't you want to see the painting? And he says, no, I don't need to. Basically, he just wanted to get back to work. He had no interest in seeing a picture of himself. And so he does all this. And so you might think, of course, that this sort of constant spurting of attention, of recognition, is going to hurt you over the course of your career. But in fact, it doesn't. Oh, this is a, sorry, I forgot this. This is Cheryl Strayed. You're becoming who you're going to be, and so you might as well not be an asshole.

20:14But, and I know this is one of Reed's favorite quotes, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If I'm only for myself, who am I? But when you actually look at what Marshall's able to accomplish, it has no effect in the long term. This sort of constant spurning of ego has no negative effects over the long term. He's chief of staff of the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He's the secretary of state. He's the envoy to China during the Truman administration. He's the president of the American Red Cross and the secretary of defense. So his tombstone, I think, says it all. So instead of focusing on what's going to get him attention, instead of focusing on accumulating power, he's focused on doing the work, right?

20:54He's focused on, there's John Boyd, who's one of my favorite military strategists. He had this speech. He would say, to be or to do? Do you want to be an important person or do you want to do important things? And that's what Marshall is choosing over and over again. He's choosing to do important things at the cost of recognition, at the cost of his own ego. But in the end, it adds up in a much more impressive way to all these other people. And it doesn't matter that most people don't recognize his name, right? You might think that that's sort of a downside. But of course, Marshall's not alive, so this is not a complaint of his.

21:29What matters is the legacy that he left behind, the things that he did, were so much more impressive than the other people who sort of felt like they needed to get what's theirs. I think one of the problems is we know that humility is where we want to end up, but we don't think it's going to get us where we want to go. We think we need, like, in the beginning or the middle of our career, we've got to sort of get what's ours. We've got to give in to this disease of me. But in fact, in the long run, this actually diverts us from where we want to go. And I think what you do then, instead of measuring yourself by these external measures, you use what's called the inner scorecard.

22:05Warren Buffett, you know, he says it's very important to live your life by an inner scorecard, not an outer scorecard. And clearly, again, in someone like Buffett's case, it adds up in the end to actually an incredible amount of accomplishments. But he's thinking long term. He's thinking almost like in value investing. But he's thinking about this in his own life. So instead of measuring yourself by what other people think, you're measuring yourself by how you think. And part of the way that this suppresses ego, especially when you become increasingly successful, is that you don't see yourself how other people see.

22:37You see all the things that you could or should be doing better, not all the things that you've done well. So you take the New England Patriots. This is Tom Brady's draft card from 2000. He's taken in the sixth round, the 199th pick in the NFL draft. He doesn't really look like Tom Brady now either. He's probably in better shape today than he was then. But considering what Tom Brady goes on to do, he's probably the best draft pick in the history of football, maybe even the best draft pick in the history of sports. I mean, to take a guy that's going to win four Super Bowls, I think three Super Bowl MVPs, he's thrown for 60 ,000 yards, he's built one of the greatest franchises in the NFL.

23:18To do all this as a sixth-round pick, he originally joins the Patriots as their third-string quarterback. So to do all this is incredibly impressive. And so you'd think he might be super proud of himself, and you'd think that the organization, the Patriots, would be very pleased with this sort of massive steal that they got away with, that they picked Tom Brady in the sixth round. You'd think this says how awesome they are. But in fact, they actually see it as a disappointment, right? Because what they see is that they let Tom Brady go all the way to the sixth round. So they remember who they picked in the fifth round, which is this guy, Dave Stichelski, who I'm sure is a very nice guy, but he doesn't even make it out of training camp.

24:00And in fact, the director of personnel for the Patriots, He actually keeps a picture when he was with the Patriots. He's now moved on. But he would actually keep a picture of Stichelski on his desk as a reminder of how narrowly, you know, he went into the 2000 draft convinced that Dave Stichelski was much better than Tom Brady and that he was worth waiting and he was worth getting around earlier than Tom Brady. And the Patriots also think about this, that, you know, if Brady hadn't proven himself in training camp, he wouldn't have been the second string quarterback. So he manages through hard work and effort to go one level higher.

24:40But then if Drew Bledsoe hadn't gotten hurt, they might not have ever known what they picked. So this is a reminder that what they're actually finding is the failure inside their success. So they're looking at success and not saying, look how awesome we are, look how amazing we are. They're saying, look at how narrowly we avoided missing the greatest draft pick in sports. Elizabeth Noel Newman, she's a great sculptor, she's saying, I never look back except to find out about mistakes. I only see danger in looking back at things that you're proud of. This is a page from The Little Prince. He says, vain men never hear anything but praise.

25:15So this is the problem with ego, is that ego doesn't look at a situation and say, look at how easily this could have gone the other way. Look at what we did wrong, it only sees the good things that it says about you. And so this is very dangerous, of course, not because it changes the past, but because it has the ability to change the future. I hope it doesn't look like I'm coming to LinkedIn to trash Google. I gave this, a version of this thing at Google. But Google is a great example of some, obviously a very successful company, but an example of how this way of thinking can be problematic and how ego can sort of lead you astray, right?

25:51So Larry Page gave a talk at a conference a number of years ago, and he's saying, look, my metric is that when I'm looking at a company or project, I go, does this have the potential to change the world? This seems very inspiring and seems awesome. Of course, Google has changed the world, so this might seem like the metric to measure themselves against. But of course, that's actually not how Google was successful. Google starts as a graduate thesis. It's just two guys trying to finish this paper so they can get a good grade. that somehow becomes Google, right? So they had no idea that it was going to be this multi-billion dollar search engine.

26:23They just thought it was a paper. YouTube, of course, not only didn't set out to disrupt television, it started as a dating site. So this is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. For some reason, the founder thought that a video of him with some elephants would make him attractive. So the point is, you can very easily tell yourself a story about your success that imbues it with a certain amount of certainty and awesomeness and genius and vision that wasn't actually there. And then what this does is it affects how you look at opportunities in the future and how you look at yourself in what you're doing.

27:05So, of course, Google Glass starts out as this ambitious, world-changing project, and they take it so seriously, they invest in so much, that it actually creates a backlash. and then you're looking, I compare this to say Snapchat, which launches the same product, but kind of as like a fun joke. And so the difference between starting small and starting as this ambitious world-changing thing can actually, I think, cause problems. Paul Graham has a great line. He's saying the way to do really big things is to start with deceptively small things. And I think that's the way that you look at. Ego says, I'm setting out to change the world.

27:39I'm gonna be on the cover of all these magazines. I'm gonna be a billionaire. I'm gonna do all this stuff. But I think what a more humble approach is is to start with the smallest possible thing that you could start with, sort of follow the process. You're sort of checking the boxes off one by one. And you want it to go in a good direction, obviously, and it can go in a good direction. But you're not giving yourself credit for this sort of genius and vision in advance. And that helps you do the deceptively small things much better than if you see them as deceptively insignificant small things.

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31:13And then so let's say you do launch Google Glass and it fails. Well, now you're at the third phase, right? This is failure. And you're having to look at why you failed, why you're experiencing difficulty. You're having to rebuild in some way. Things turned out to be harder than they were. So this is the next phase. I guess we call this the final phase. I think one of the hard parts is, you know, we tend to, if we tell ourselves that our success says something about us as a person, the problem then is that when we go through something negative, we think that says something about us as a person.

31:47And of course, all of these are just in different states, as the Stoics would say. These are just different places that we occupy along a spectrum. So, right, transformation is a big thing here at LinkedIn. The Greeks and the philosophers, they would think about this a lot. they would say that sort of all of life is fluid, that we're constantly going through these different phases. There's the paradox called the ship of Theseus. And basically what it's saying is you take this great ship from this Athenian general, and it was a warship, and they preserve it as a sort of a monument to this great naval captain.

32:25But over time, they replace it board by board. So one board goes bad, and they replace it. They replace the mask. They replace the icon. They repaint it. So over the centuries, the entire ship is replaced board by board. And so the question then is, is this the same ship? Or is it a totally new or different ship? There's an argument you can make. Given the staggered terms, let's say, in the U.S. Senate, is it actually the same Senate today that it was when America was founded 200 years ago? Right? is a process that's being replaced member by member, but there is no official point where everything is changed.

33:07Where does the changeover happen? So it's not that you're a success because you're successful and a failure because you're a failure, but you're in this constant state of process. Marcus Aurelius is saying, meditate often on the swiftness with which all exists and coming into existence. and that everything is constantly shifting and never stands still. Heraclitus, Marcus Aurelius' famous philosopher, would say, no man steps in the same river twice because he's not the same man and it is not the same river. So this is the idea that it's this fluid place. And so success doesn't say you're awesome.

33:46Failure doesn't say you're awesome. It just is what it is. We're just constantly fluidly transforming from one thing into another. and we won't be in that thing for very long and we won't be in the next thing for very long. This is a famous Roman. He's saying, holding great honors and powers did not exalt my spirits, nor did evil depress them. So at one point he's given a triumph in front of the Roman people and then he's exiled by the Roman people and then brought again back to Rome and he triumphs again. So this idea is that none of this says anything about us. It's just a place that we happen to be.

34:19And then you want to think this way because things are going to change and things are going to go, quote unquote, badly a lot. This is a picture of Thomas Edison's factory in the early 1900s. He sat down for dinner with his family. A man rushes in and actually tells him, hey, look, the factory is up in flames. He rushes to the scene and he finds his life work literally on fire. Two interesting facts. So one, Edison was famous for his experiments with cement and he built these buildings out of cement. and because he thought the cement was fireproof, he didn't have insurance. So he's literally watching everything he's worked for sort of disappear.

34:58And then because he kept all these weird chemicals in the building, it's actually a really strange, surreal fire. It's all these different colors. So he comes to the scene and he finds his son. His son is standing there. His son is shell-shocked. Sort of, what are we going to do? You know, this is horrible. And Edison says famously, he says, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. So he hasn't gone insane, although it might seem that way. He's not happy, really, that his work is going up in flames. But he is enjoying this sort of strange moment, right?

35:33And what he says to a reporter the next day is like, look, I've been through stuff like this before. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui. Basically, it invigorates him. He takes a million-dollar loan from Henry Ford. And within about six weeks, the factory is partially back up and running. By the end of the year, it's sort of fully operational again. And he does quite well that year as well. And it sort of is the final act of Thomas Edison. It's this thing that sort of gets him out of his complacency and sort of puts him back on a path. He was a builder. He loved building things.

36:04And so it actually gives him something to dedicate himself to. But the idea with the Stoics, they call this amor fati, sort of a love of everything that happens, even the bad things, because they prevent their own opportunities in their own way. And then, you know, it's not just accepting the things that happen. It's not just accepting the failures, but loving what they might teach us, what they might sort of put us towards. And if you can do that, if you can see that as this sort of constant transformation, you're actually quite invincible because it means nothing really bad can ever happen to you.

36:39You're always going to be able to move forward. You're always going to be able to say, hey, at least this doesn't make life boring or at least this gives me something. to throw myself into. And then I think the last part about failure, this is the important lesson that I have to think about as a writer, as a creative person as well, is that you're going to put a lot of effort and work into a project. And at a certain point, it leaves your hands, it goes out into the world, and you no longer control how other people are going to react to that, right? So one of my favorite novels, I think it's probably the funniest novel of all time, is this book, A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.

37:12It's so funny that Jim Belushi and Will Ferrell and I believe Ben Stiller have all tried to make it into a movie but couldn't. And anyway, so John Kennedy Toole, he writes this book, he submits it to Simon & Schuster, who is his publisher, and they said, this book is no good, we're not going to publish this. His agent doesn't believe in it, so he's profoundly rejected, and he's so depressed by this rejection, to go to the quote we were just talking about earlier. He's so upset by this rejection that he ends up committing suicide. He commits suicide on a lonely road in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attaches a car hose or a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and he dies.

37:51And his mother is distraught. A few years later, she finds this manuscript in a drawer in his desk and she reads it and she knows this was his life's work. And she submits it to an editor at Louisiana, or I think it was Loyola Mary Mountain, Orleans. This is Walker Percy, who himself is a great writer. Percy immediately recognizes it as the work of genius that it is. He has it published. And the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year. So this is my point that there really is no good or bad. It's just sort of this external situation. So the same book that was rejected by these publishers, who they said it was terrible, he dies.

38:31So he doesn't edit it. He does nothing to it. That same book is then heralded as the greatest novel ever, and it wins the Pulitzer Prize. So the idea is you have to be, in some ways, indifferent to these external judgments. This is where the inner scorecard comes in, because there's all these things that you don't control. And if you take other people's judgments as the barometer of success for you, for this thing you threw yourself into, you've now taken your happiness or your sense of self and given it to these people. And let's be honest, a lot of these people are really dumb and really short-sighted.

39:05If you think about all the great authors and artists and inventors and thinkers who were rejected, but really were just way ahead of their time, it sort of gives you a sense of why you can't let these sort of external measurements decide if something is good or not. Marcus Aurelius is saying, I love this, he's like, look, we love ourselves more than other people, but we care about other people's opinions about us more than our own. And so if you can flip that, if you can go, I have my own sort of measurements, I have my own criteria for success or, you know, quality or, you know, anything, then you're going to be much freer.

39:45You're going to be much more in control of your own destiny. Goethe is saying, what matters to the active man is that they do the right thing, whether the right thing comes to passion, not bother him. Essentially, let's not focus on whether this ends up having the exact effect that we wanted, but by our own criteria of was it successful. I'll give you an example with my own book. So I put out these two books. They sell objectively enough copies to land on the New York Times bestseller list, but then mysteriously the week arrives and they're not there. And it turns out that it's actually a problem with how they were submitted.

40:19There's something in publishing called the BISAC. So basically they don't show up because somebody put the wrong, check the wrong box on a form, and the books don't show up. So am I going to tell myself that the book is a failure because it doesn't hit this arbitrary, this external scorecard, or am I going to be happy that I did the right thing, I did the right book, you know, I made the right decisions? How am I going to do that? Am I going to see the thing that I worked on for two years as a failure because someone else said it didn't meet, you know, a random set of criteria? Of course not. That would be insane.

40:56And so you see this, though. A lot of people, they go, you know, was this not, this wasn't number one, so it's a failure. You're letting other people determine whether you're happy with something that otherwise, you know, before it came out, you thought was great. You thought it was the best that you could do. So you want to measure it by this internal scorecard and not the external one. And then this is Robert Louis Stevenson. It's a sore thing to have labored along and scaled arduous hilltops. And then when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. But this is going to happen all the time, right?

41:25You've got to get used to this. This is part of life. What matters is that you're not indifferent to what you've accomplished. What matters is that you know that what you did was the best that you could have done at that moment. This is a much better measurement of success or failure. John Wooden, you know, success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction and knowing that you made the effort to do your best and to become the best that you were capable of becoming. So he would say, look, obviously he won a lot as a basketball coach, maybe more than almost any other coach.

41:54But he would say it wasn't the box score at the end of a game that determined whether it was a good game or not. It was, did they execute the plan that they'd set out to execute? Did they play the game the way they'd practiced to play the game? This is something entirely in your control and everything else is outside of it. So look, those are the three areas, right? Success, aspiration, and failure. I thought I would give one more sort of last thing that I think is, I think, the ultimate way to combat ego at all these phases. It's sort of a constant reminder, which is sort of focusing on the immensity of the world around you.

42:31It's very easy to feel like you're the center of the universe if all you're doing is thinking about yourself. This is Glacier Bay in Alaska. John Muir visits in the late 1800s, and he writes this very long paragraph. It's in the book, so I won't try to read it. But he's in the middle of Glacier Bay, and basically what he experiences in this moment is what the philosophers call the infinitesimal point of the immensity. He's feeling the oceanic feeling of connection to all the things that are happening around him, right? How the waves are interacting with the seaweed and the plankton and the whales and the animals on the hills and the sun.

43:11And all of these things are in this sort of this vast ecosystem of which him as a human being in a boat is a tiny part of. And he feels in this moment all the obsessions and worldly cares sort of fall away. The reason he helps us create our national parks is to encourage this feeling, to encourage people to go out into nature and feel small and big at the same time. So this is Sedona I took a picture of. It was very hard to feel self-important looking out over this view, right? This is my donkey in Austin. Austin is called the City of the Violet Crown. That's the Violet Crown. But, you know, sort of standing there looking at this donkey, he's not concerned with what's going on.

43:57He has no criteria for what a good day is or a bad day. He has no obligations to speak of, right, other than existing. His job is to be a donkey. And as long as he does that, it's a good day, right? But humans, we sort of subject ourselves to all this pressure. And of course, ego comes into play then. Here's Buddy with a picture of the book. Also humbling, right, to have your pet eat something that you spent many years working on. This is a line from Seneca. I won't embarrass myself with translation. But basically, the world itself is a huge temple of all the gods. The world is a church. if you think about it this way, and it can humble us and make us aware of the things that are bigger than us.

44:41There's a park in Texas called Dinosaur National Monument, I believe. You can stand in this footprint in a creek bed that a dinosaur made 110 million years ago. So it's very hard to feel self-important there if you're experiencing the vastness of history, which we can barely comprehend. There was a cool thing on Reddit a few years ago. So I think the vastness of history is interesting, but then also shortness of history. So they did the math and they said, and there's some photographic evidence of this in historical documentation, but how many individuals who shook hands with each other does it take to connect Obama and George Washington?

45:20You'd think it'd be like 20, 25 people. It's six. Six human lives overlapped long enough, and if Queen Elizabeth meets Trump at some point, it'll add another generation. But the idea is that history is much shorter than we think it is. And that all these things that we think are so important are really just, you know, a tiny second that don't really matter. This is a crazy video you can watch. I know I don't have much time left, but it's a show called I've Got a Secret. It was a game show in the 50s. Here's this old man. He's on the show. The guest that day is Lucille Ball. And they're guessing his secret.

45:54And he starts, he's like, you know, it was scary. She asked if it was historically important. And he says, yes, she goes on and on. And it turns out the man's secret is that he saw John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln as a five-year-old. So it's crazy to think, you know, we think that the civil war was so long ago, but in fact, there was a guy who saw Lincoln get assassinated and then was on a game show with the host or with the star of I Love Lucy. And you can now watch this on YouTube, which as we know, started as a dating site. So The absurdity of all this is a little humbling. It's hard to feel self-important when you're thinking about these things.

46:33It's also not about making you feel insignificant, but also realizing the connectedness of all these things around us. Neil deGrasse Tyson, when you look up at the universe, you feel small, but you also feel big because you're a part of this thing. Not a big part, not the center of it by any means, but you are a part of it. When I'm talking about ego, and I'll close with this. I'm not trying to tear anyone down. I'm not trying to make you feel horrible or nothing. What I'm trying to do is show that if you can suppress ego, if you can knock this out of the equation, what it actually opens you up to do, it liberates you to accomplish the big things that you're trying to accomplish.

47:10It's like if it's already hard enough to change the world or start a big company or to write a book or a symphony or whatever you're trying to do, what you don't want is your ego there tagging along trying to make it harder than it already was going to be. So that's the idea. It's not to knock anyone down a peg, but it's to liberate them from ego, which is our enemy, which prevents us from doing the thing that we're trying to do. And so that's it for me. This is Ego is the Enemy, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

47:50Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

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