Taming the Ego | Overcoming the Enemy Within

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2:00Welcome 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. end. 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.

2:40Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I have tattooed on my right arm, this little phrase, ego is the enemy, this reminder that when you feel that voice inside you creeping up, the one that makes you feel entitled, the one that makes you feel superior, the one that makes you aghast that anyone would try to be telling you what to do, that sort of little childlike voice, that's ego. I was just going through this, I was submitting some edits on a project and I have this experience every time I get notes back on something where you're like, what is this? That resistance that I feel, I always recognize that as a pretty salient example of ego.

3:25And the first part of me is frustrated by them. And then if I let that sit for a bit, if I give it some space, I go, okay, I'm not being attacked here. Actually, this person is trying to make the book better. Some of these notes are right. Some of them are not right. And so what I actually need here is confidence. Like if I'm insecure or I don't have a sense of who I am or what I'm trying to do, I'll just take all the notes and not all of them are good. If I'm being egotistical, I'll reject all the notes. But if I'm coming at it from the right place, I'll be able to separate those two. So ego is the enemy because it makes these sort of delicate balance situations tough.

4:03So anyways, I did a talk about ego and how ego is the enemy back in November of 2023 to the agency Global Forum. It was here in Austin on the Barton Creek, where I believe now I have officially done talks in every single room in this hotel, which is always fun. It was to a group of real estate agents. And we're talking about ego, how it affects us personally and professionally, and how we combat it by remaining a student. Can we prepare for uncertainty in change? And that key distinction between ego and confidence. And there's a bunch of other Stoic lessons in here, so I thought I would bring you that.

4:41If you haven't read Ego is the Enemy, it's the second Stoicism book that I did. I'm really proud of it. I think it's good. And you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com. We've got signed copies here at the Painted Porch. And also, we've got a cool Ego is the Enemy medallion. If you want a reminder, a bunch of sports teams have passed them out over the years. That's always been cool to see. So without further ado, here's me talking in Austin about why ego is the enemy.

5:12Thank you. It's wonderful to be here with all of you. They wanted me to talk about ego with all of you today, which seems crazy to me because there's absolutely no egos in the real estate business, as we all know. uh certainly certainly none certainly none definitely none no the reason we're going to talk about ego is that in in life in in this business and in fact all businesses you don't really get beaten by your competitors it's not the regulatory changes that have to keep you up at night or the rules or the weather or the economy or the market conditions these aren't the things that are going to do the wheel and the serious damage.

5:58And in fact, the big concern isn't an external threat at all, right? The biggest threat is inside this room, and I would argue it's actually inside each and every person in this room. And that thing is ego. Ego sucks us down like the law of gravity, the great Cyril Connolly said. So I would actually argue that ego is the bigger problem, the bigger your ambitions are. If you're just sitting on the couch, if you're not going anywhere, I guess you don't need to worry that much about this form of gravity. But if you're trying to soar, if you're trying to do special and big things, then ego is going to be a real problem, right?

6:32So ego is the enemy. That's the theme of what I want to talk to you all about today. That's the warning that I want to give you. And I've seen it firsthand. I was the director of marketing in a company called American Apparel. It's the biggest fashion company, biggest fashion manufacturer in the United States, one of the fastest growing retailers in the history of the world. 250 stores in 20 countries and 12 ,000 employees that had almost a billion dollars a year in sales. And it doesn't exist anymore, right? The founder drove it into bankruptcy twice. He lost everything. Look at someone like Kanye West, right?

7:05Billions of dollars evaporated. You look at someone like Sam Brinkman-Fried, billions of dollars more evaporated. Elon Musk turns$44 billion into a lot less than$44 billion. Again, it's not that egotistical people are never successful. It's that ego costs egotistical people a lot, right? This is Marcus Aurelius. I'll show you why he's wearing a mask in a second. Marcus Aurelius writes his famous book. He writes this book called Meditations. He's writing these private notes to himself as he's dealing with a pretty difficult job as the emperor of Rome. And he faces a pandemic, not unlike the one that we just faced.

7:44And he wrote this line to himself that he was talking about the way that people react to pandemics or plagues or any kind of crises. I think he's also talking about ego here when he says that an infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague. One threatens your life. One destroys your character. Ego is this thing that gets inside us. It worms its way into who we are and what we do. It makes us worse at what we do, right? So let's start with a definition. I'm not talking about the Freudian ego. I'm not talking even the psychologist concept of ego. I'm talking about that colloquial ego, the one we all know it when we see it.

8:21I will say the one that's much easier to see in other people than ourselves. I wrote this book, Ego is the Enemy, several years ago. I've heard from lots of people all over the world about it. The number one question I get is, what can I do about my boss's ego, right? It's never, what can I do about my own ego? We see where it costs other people, right? We see how unappealing, how unattractive, how unconstructive it is. But then when it comes to ourselves, we egotistically often think that we lack it, right? But ego is this thing. It makes everything about us, right? Makes us better than other people, right?

8:59It overreaches, it neglects, alienates, takes unnecessary risks, it creates unnecessary problems, right? It makes you worse, makes you do worse, makes you feel worse, right? We often mistake ego for confidence. I'll talk more about this later, but I think if you've ever been up close with an egotistical person, you often find how profoundly insecure they are. It seems like they're having fun, and then you realize that having probably the least amount of fun. So what I wanted to talk about are some ways that we combat ego, the ways we push it away, antidotes to ego, because that's what it is. It's a constant process, right?

9:42We start off humble, usually, hopefully. And then as we become successful, ego creeps in and we have to sort of constantly be pushing it away. And I think one of the best ways we do this is we adopt a student mindset. The more we remain students of what we do, of the world, the less room there is for you to go. So we stay a student, right? A student knows how much they have left to learn and therefore is always learning. Someone who feels like they've mastered things or is the expert doesn't. And if you've ever met a really, really smart person, really, really wise person, what you're often struck by is the humility that's there.

10:19I interviewed this great MMA fighter. his name was Frank Shamrock, one of the early champions of mixed martial arts. And he would talk about how you have to have this student mindset. You have to stay hungry. He says, you know, you walk into any jujitsu gym and the person with the highest ranking belt is usually going to be the nicest, the kindest, the most curious, the most open-minded, right? It's the white belts that you have to worry about, he was saying. But one of his systems that he designs his training schools around is this system he calls plus minus equal. He says you want to be training under someone much, much better than you.

10:54You want to be passing lessons of things you've learned on to someone not as far along as you. And then you want to be challenging yourself against an equally matched peer group. I love that idea. The physicist John Wheeler would talk about how actually the more you learn, he says, as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. This is why being a student is such a humbling experience because yes, you're vacuuming up, absorbing all this knowledge, you're getting smarter, but you're also being exposed constantly to all the things you don't know. This is why Socrates was considered so wise.

11:31He's aware of his own ignorance. And even think of what the Socratic method is. The Socratic method was Socrates going around asking questions, right? Not telling people what he knew, asking them what they knew, and then checking it against what he thought he might know. So what comes from this, his wisdom is rooted fundamentally in his awareness of his ignorance. Now let's go back to Sam Bankman Freed, who is now facing a very lengthy prison sentence. This is, I think, a revealing quote. He says, I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say that no book is ever worth reading, but I actually believe something pretty close to that.

12:09And then he said, actually, I think if you wrote a book, you fucked up because it could have been a six paragraph blog post. Now, this hit me pretty hard, as you can imagine. But it ties into a very stoic idea. And again, I think we can contrast this quote with his current predicament, facing something like 100 years in prison. But Epictetus, one of the great stoics, he would say, remember it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. This is the problem with ego, right? If you think you know, if you think you know a lot, you're frozen in place. You can't learn. So humility, it feels like a weaker position, but it's actually a stronger position.

12:54This sense that you know more than every author who's ever lived apparently, or that you You think every concept can be boiled down into six paragraphs, right? This is a position that prevents you from learning, whereas a hungrier position, a position that's open, a position that begins from the premise of ignorance or humility, can get better. So reading is this magical thing. I know it seems so basic, like we should read, of course we should read. But reading is magical if you think about it. The most wise people who ever lived and some of the stupidest people who ever lived. The most successful people who ever lived and the least successful people who ever lived.

13:35Their stories, the lessons of their lives are in these books, right? You were talking about an investment. You can get years of experience from someone for like 15 bucks. You can get it for$2 used on Amazon, right? You can learn from the experiences of others what you would have had to learn very painfully by your own experience, right? There's a cliche, a person who doesn't read has no advantage over a person who cannot read. You are both the same. This is General James Mattis, a modern Stoic, he's our Secretary of Defense, four-star general in the Marines. and in fact he was notorious for bringing this huge library with him on his 40 years of deployments all over the world he would say if you haven't read hundreds of books about what you do about life about many many different topics he says you are functionally illiterate right i think that's a great term right that's what this quote is about right a person who doesn't read has no advantage over someone who cannot read they're both illiterate right one is functionally illiterate and one is literally illiterate.

14:40And the idea is, if you aren't absorbing all of this knowledge, if you think you already know it or you think it's irrelevant or you just have the egotistical idea that I'll figure it out on my own, I'll figure it out as I go, what you're going to do is you're going to learn very painfully what could be learned from the experiences of others. And if there's people that work for you, if there's clients, you have family members, the people around you also have to bear the costs of that decision as Sam Bankman-Fried's family and friends and colleagues and investors soon found out. So let's think about this idea.

15:13Where are we functionally illiterate? What do we not know enough about? Whether it's negotiation, human psychology, finance, the economy, history, demographics. There are topics I'm functionally illiterate in. There's topics you're functionally illiterate in. But this doesn't have to be destiny. This doesn't have to always persist. We can change this. We can decide to become literate in things that we don't know. And this has the benefit not only of teaching us, but also exposing us to what we don't know and thus humbling us. Tolstoy would say, I don't understand why anyone would want to live without communicating with the people who are the wisest people who have ever lived.

15:54And that's what learning is. when I pick up Mark Ceruleus' meditations for the first time, I'm having a communion with someone who's been dead for 2 ,000 years. Someone who existed in a different time, in a different place, had different resources, had different experiences, had literally incomprehensible experiences to be the most powerful person in the world. And yet I can communicate with them. And again, this book was like$9 as a paperback. Why would I not avail myself of this experience? And so who is mentoring us and tutoring us on this educational practice as well. This is General Fox Connor, who meets a young military officer when they're both stationed in Panama between the wars.

16:35This man's name was Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower would talk about after meeting this man, thus began a three-year graduate school in military affairs and humanities. Fox Connor basically gives him a reading list, a book after another, and he quizzes him. They had this sort of book club, this mastermind between them that sets Eisenhower up to be Eisenhower. And so who are the people that have gone before you? What books shaped them? Are you reading them? Are you communicating with them? So it's a great question. You meet someone you admire, someone who's more successful than you, what books got you here?

17:06What books changed your life? Even if you only read those books, that would change your life. And I think this process, of course, I'm not just talking about being the student of books, but also of people. So we take Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not born to be emperor. Marcus Aurelius is chosen to be emperor. He shows promise as a young kid, but he's too young. And so the emperor Hadrian selects an intermediary. He adopts a man named Antoninus Pius, who in turn adopts Marcus Aurelius, setting in motion what's supposed to be an education process that humbles and also prepares Marcus for this incredibly difficult job.

17:44And so as he does this, he probably expects Antoninus to live for three or four years. That's what life expectancy would have been for an old man at that time. Well, as it happens, Antoninus lives for another two decades. You might imagine that Marcus chafes under this. Imagine you're going to replace someone, you're going to inherit someone's business, you're going to take over for them when they retire, and you think it's going to be a couple months and it lasts for two decades. That would be a little frustrating, except for what Marcus actually sees it as is not as a threat, but as an incredible opportunity.

18:15He gets two decades of on-the-job experience where he gets to watch and observe and learn. Ultimately, he doesn't have to make the hard decisions. Ultimately, the responsibility doesn't fall on him. And he takes to this. And in turn, Antoninus takes to it too. Remember the plus, minus, equal. Antoninus is probably getting better by teaching Marcus, by having to be a good example for Marcus. And so for 20 years, they undergo this incredible process that again historically is without precedent right we know what the ascendant or aspiring prince is supposed to do to the royal who won't get out of the way everyone's seen game of thrones or uh you know any show about this ever right we know what's supposed to happen and we can contrast this with another example because just a couple generations before a young boy named Nero was paired with a Stoic teacher named Seneca.

19:09And what I showed you before were some AI images capturing what that might have looked like. Well, this is what it looked like. Here's a young Nero totally uninterested in the wisdom that the older Seneca could teach him, right? It's that great expression, you can lead a force to water, but you can't make them drink, right? Ego is what makes us not want to drink it. It's what makes us not interested, what makes us tune out, what makes us think, what do they have to teach me? It says, you know, you can't learn that, which you think you already know. My mentor was this great writer named Robert Greed, who I worked for for many, many, many years, right?

19:46Robert taught me how to write, taught me how to think, taught me how to read, opened doors for me. I did all sorts of tasks for him that were not always fun, that were often boring and tedious. I read things that didn't make sense to me, that weren't interesting to me, but they opened my mind, they changed me and I used those things to that day. So as I wrap up this section on learning, I'll give you one of my favorite quotes from Emerson. He said, everyone we meet is better than us in something and that we can learn from them. So again, you have this attitude, not that I'm so great that I know everything, but in fact that I'm not that great, that I have a lot left to learn and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy too, right?

20:26And not learn that which you think you already know, everyone is better than me at something right which one of those makes you better that's the question so i also want to talk about hype because of course hype and marketing is important marketing matters i did write three marketing books so i wouldn't tell you that marketing doesn't matter i would just say the problem is i think sometimes we get into certain domains certain businesses we do certain things not because they grow the business because we like them. I wonder how many of you got into real estate because you like seeing yourself on business cards and ads, buses maybe, benches.

21:04It's flattering. It's exciting too. This is one of my favorite satire pieces. It's about a bank CEO who's stepping away from banking to focus on pens. The idea is we sometimes get caught up in the vanity, the glamour, the fun, the gratification of building our brands, right? So it is important. You have to build a brand. You have to stand out. But are we doing it because we actually have a clear sense of the ROI of this effort or that effort? Or is it that it's beating the ego? It's puffing us up, right? And that's why ego is so dangerous, right? Advertising, marketing is ultimately about that, about ROI.

21:45But if you have this mechanism in there that's also weighing, but how does it make me feel? Does it make me seem important? Is it good for my name or whatever, right? You're not as objective as you could be, right? Ego blinds us. It makes us do the things that are fun and interesting as opposed to the things that are maybe less fun, but actually move the needle. In The Little Prince, if you guys remember this as a kid or maybe you've read it to your own kids, he has this great line. He says, vain men never hear anything but praise. And so if your relationship to marketing and hype and branding, it's all about you, you're going to miss the fact that fundamentally the only reason you're doing those things are men.

22:33That's what social media does, right? It's this massive ego meeting algorithm. That's what the smartest people in the world spend a lot of time trying to get you to do, right? The same people that designed the casinos and took the clocks out and the windows out. These are the people that make these platforms feel very gratifying and in other times feel very horrible to trigger and tweak the ego so we spend more time on them. They distract us more. Again, marketing is really important. Steve Jobs, brilliant marketer. I imagine him getting up on a stage like this and pitching the latest Apple products.

23:11He's telling the world this is the greatest thing that's ever existed. This will revolutionize everything. This is why you have to be so excited for iPad 3.62, whatever, right? Like this is why this software, he's a hype man as leaders and marketers have to be. And he was one of the best of all time. But I think what we often forget when we see that image is backstage, Steamjobs, the inventor, Steamjobs, the designer, is probably ruthlessly shitting on that same project about how it could be better, how it's not good enough, right? You have to have that tension. So you're building the brand, you're liking your public profile.

23:51This is great. You have to do all that stuff. But at the same time, you also have to be ruthlessly focused on how you're getting better on where you're not good enough or else the hype gets to you. This is Elizabeth Noel Newman. She's a great sculptor. And she was saying that she never likes to look back except to find out about mistakes, right? Because that pride can make you lazy and make you entitled.

24:21Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin, and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

25:06We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

25:48Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

25:57One of the rules in writing is that your last book won't write your next one. It doesn't matter how many copies my last book sold. It doesn't matter where it is on the bestseller list. It doesn't change the fact that I got to start with a blank page and that I have to start from zero again. And that's really hard. Just as your last sale doesn't make your next one and your last media hit doesn't help you get your next one. You're always starting from scratch. and the inherent humbling nature of that is really important. The hype doesn't help anything, right? The marketing isn't who you are or what you do.

26:31What you do, what you have to be, the Stokes would say, is like the rock that the waves crash over is eventually the sea fall still around. Think of this metaphor all the time. Hype comes, criticism comes, right? If you're identifying with it on the way up, you're going to identify with it on the way down. If you let it crash over you and you focus on what you're actually supposed to be doing, right? The work, delivering value for the customers, for your team, for your community, right? Getting smarter, getting better. You focus on those things which are in your control. You tune out the hype.

27:06You let the marketing be the marketing. You don't let it say anything about you. This is how we keep ego from putting this in its sway. Because eventually, right? What does go up must come down. Many, many years ago, a great economist described this beautiful ball. He said, where the champagne is sparkling in every glass, soft laughter fills the summer air. He says, but we all know at some moment that black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors, weaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. He says, those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid that no one wants to leave while there is still time.

27:47So everyone keeps asking, what time is it? none of the clocks have hands. He's describing economic crashes, right? We have the boom time. We know we're in a bubble. We know it's been good for a long time. We know it's going to change, right? Does any of this sound familiar? But we keep going. It extends a little bit longer. We hope we are exempt and inevitably, invariably, we are not, right? What must go up, what goes up, must come down. We say these things to ourselves, this is ego. It's different this time. The good times are here to stay. This bull market is different. It's going to last forever.

28:26No. Bull markets, bear markets, they all happen. Good times, bad times, they come. The one thing you can't say, the one thing the Stoic says we have to cultivate is a sense of that. Seneca says the one thing a leader cannot say is, I did not think that would happen, right? Or I did not think that would happen to me. It is going to happen. It can happen. You have to have the awareness. You have to have this humility that you are not exempt. And it's not just that it could happen. It's that it's going to happen. And what are you going to do when it happens, right? It could happen to you. And what are you going to do when it happens?

29:04The Stoics would admit that positive visualization is important. If you don't see yourself doing something, you're not going to be able to do it in life. but that positive visualization becomes ego the stoics would say if it's not counterbalanced with a negative visualization premeditatio memorum was the latin expression the idea of envisioning those worst case scenarios those disasters preparing for them having contingencies having plans then it says rehearse them in your mind war exile torture shipwreck all of this should be before our eyes. And it's good that he said this because all these things happened to him.

29:41We have to be prepared. But when we're prepared, when we think about them, when we can conceive what we don't want to happen, we can be prepared for it to happen, right? The law of attraction, oh, you don't want to think about it because you could attract it. Look, it doesn't care about whether you thought about it or not. It's going to happen. You have to be prepared for it. And the Stoics would say, by thinking about it, you take away some of its power over you. During the pandemic, HEB was a great example of this. HEB had run contingency plans, had run war games for scenarios like a global pandemic.

30:14And so their supply chain was able to deal with the shocks that it felt in ways that other companies that were less pessimistic had not been able to. Right. And so that's why we practice these things. We prepare for them so we take away their power over them. It's not that we're being pessimistic. It's not that we're being negative necessarily. It's that we're being prepared. And we want to be prepared so that in that moment we know what to do so we're not overwhelmed by it. This is obviously what they train special forces operators in, police officers, firefighters, etc. People who are trained in high-stress, high-stakes situations do better in them.

30:52But we don't want to think about those things. We want things to be good. We want them to keep going. Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronauts, would say that astronauts are not braver than other people. They're just meticulously prepared. And he says the reason they're meticulously prepared is that there's in a dangerous situation, if you don't know what you're doing, you're just confidently pressing buttons or whatever, you're going to make a mistake. You're not going to do what you can do to make it better. He says it's worth remembering, too, that there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also.

31:24I think it's a nice definition of ego, right? That's what ego tends to do. It takes a problem that is real. It's maybe not even your fault. And it digs that hole deeper, right? It makes the situation scarier, worse, right? It incriminates, it blames, it struggles, right? It makes a hard situation worse. So when we're talking about like disasters, preparing another Latin expression, right? Everyone here knows what a postmortem is, right? A postmortem is after the crash, after the problem, We go, how did we get it wrong? What can we learn from this? This is all great. But it'd be better if we did a pre-mortem, if we were thinking about, if we have this humility to think in advance, what could happen?

32:04What's that worst case scenario? And then what might we do to prevent such a thing from happening? What might we do to prepare for such a thing? What reserves do we need to have in store if something like that would happen? so the one thing we know about the future is that it is uncertain right the one thing we know for certain is that the future is uncertain and so we have to be prepared for this right technological disruption change of all kind is coming it's the one fact of life look at someone like queen elizabeth 70 years her life she experiences such an incredible amount of change before she died last year, the majority of countries on earth did not exist when she was born, right?

32:57That's how much change happens in the course of her reign, right? It's an incredible trajectory of the modern human world. And she is there, right? You know, you look at pictures of like a president, like how much they age in the four years they're in office. Well, here's hers. It's a lot. It's a lot to stay graded something for a long time. Let me see that. One of her secretaries would say, though, what was so great about the queen was that she was quiet, right? She said she's been brilliant in her quietness, in a very noisy world where people are constantly expressing themselves and overreacting.

33:33What the queen has done is the opposite. And I do think that's very impressive, and it's an underrated skill. And sometimes you need a contrast just to highlight what an impressive skill that is. So let's contrast quietness here. Some people can't wake up and not step in it. Some people wake up every day and choose violence, choose drama, choose chaos, choose making it all about them. And then some people don't do that. And which one is a more sustainable way of living? Which one is a less egotistical way of living? The queen would say that change is constant and managing it is a discipline. I think that's the right way to think about it.

34:10She's saying that you don't fight it, you have to embrace change. And her motto, the motto of the royal household, which is as traditional as a household, as an institution, as a thing could get, right? Their motto is, if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change, right? If you want to stay in business, if you want to last, if you want to stick around, you also have to constantly be changing and reinventing yourself. And so one of the problems with ego is it's very fragile, right? It's very rigid, wants things to stay the way they are, but it feels like it has the strength, it has the entitlement that it can keep them this way, it can keep the world out, right?

34:54It can insist on doing it the way that it wants it to do, rather than being open and accepting and fluid. The 48 Laws of Power, the great book by my mentor Robert Crean, the final law, after all these instructions on what to do in this situation and that situation, the final law is assume formlessness, right? The ability to adapt and adjust to any and all circumstances, right? This is a critical part. And so amidst the chaos and change and difficulty that is inevitably ahead, right, that's inevitably happening right now all around us, we have to be able to cultivate a kind of stillness. And I see stillness as the opposite of ego in many ways.

35:33There's a word for stillness in almost every religious and philosophical tradition, right? Equanimity and poise and tranquility and peace, right? Stillness is that one of those other words, life ego, that we know it when we see it. We know it when we feel it. When we see it in someone, when we see someone embody it, there's an attraction to them, right? There's a power in that stillness, right? The queen has it. Great leaders have it. Maybe your grandparents have it, right? kids don't usually have it. As Taylor Swift would say, you need to calm down. You need to calm down, right? Whatever the world's throwing at you, you need to calm down.

36:09That's what Chris Hadfield is saying too, right? You need that even keel. You need to be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around. I know stoicism has this reputation as emotionlessness, but it's really not that. It's just being less emotional, particularly in high-stakes situations. I try to build my day around that kind of even keel. I try to get up early, right, before it's too noisy, before I'm behind the eight ball, before I got a bunch of stuff to do. I get up early. I take my kids for a walk. I go, this is my donkey. His name is Buddy. Got him on Craigslist for$100.

36:46But this is pretty much what he does all day. He just stands there. And it's the energy that I try to take a little bit back with me after I see him. Sometimes he comes and sees me. But when I'm doing stuff on my ranch, when I'm outside, when I'm journaling, when I am not on the phone, one of my rules is I don't touch my phone for the first 30 minutes to one hour that I'm awake. don't want to get sucked into the email inbox cultivate a little space to be still to be intentional to focus on what I want to focus on for the day to think about how I want the day to go think about what I want to do today not what other people are throwing at me not what social media is throwing at me not what the news is throwing at me you think about the time you spend on your devices you think about the ego that's coming at you see what other people are doing as he was saying seeing how other people are running their races or worse how other people are pretending to run and win their races, right?

37:45You tune that out and you focus on what you can do, what's important to you, what progress you can make there, right? Again, ignore the noise. And remembering that this calm is contagious. It ripples through your family, ripples through your life, ripples through your business, ripples through your clients. Great coaches are calm. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was once asked to describe the great John Wooden in word and he said dispassionate right we think passion is so important find your passion be passionate and passion's great but dispassionateness right command control calmness is also real attribute compared to the late bobby knight um or tom is oh anytime you find yourself screaming at a teenager you're probably fucked up um the stoic motto was that you want to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy, right?

38:40The calm light of mild philosophy, good news, bad news, huge success, huge mistakes, all of it in the calm light, mild philosophy. The Stokes would say that the greatest empire, right? And Mark Surilis and Seneca are talking about this as people who did rule over huge empires, real estate empires, global empires, right? They said the greatest empire is command of oneself, right? That the greatest empire was between our ears. And as people fight to own this piece of real estate, outbid each other to have that piece of real estate, fight wars to control this bit of territory or that bit of territory, how many of us seed or neglect that empire here, the greatest empire, which is ourselves?

39:31General Mattis again And we talk about how the biggest problem for leaders in the information age is that they're just reacting. There's not enough space and solitude. They're too caught up in the minutia, the immediacy of every moment. And this deprives them of the perspective they need to succeed. They're lacking that calm light of the mild philosophy. One of my favorite ways to get centered to get some of this stillness, if you've ever been to the Dinosaur State Park in Dallas, it's incredible. You can walk out in this little river and step in a footprint left by a dinosaur 110 million years ago.

40:07And it shrinks everything down in a minute. You realize how infinitesimal and small and tiny you are in comparison to everything that's ever been and everything that will come after. Right? You can center yourself. And then you can hopefully say no is another, I think, important way to battle. You can say no to things that aren't essential, that don't matter. that seem seductive and important, but are actually quite trivial, right? Each of us can only do so much. We have, our appetites are bigger than our stomachs, so to speak. I remember a couple of years ago before the pandemic, I was on this workout streak.

40:44I was working out every day. I was pushing myself. I started not feeling good. I was pushing through it. I was pushing through it and pushing through it. Finally, I went to the doctor. I wasn't feeling well. And I had Monos, the entrepreneur Brad, And Brad Feld would write it back to me. He said, mono equals Orion, warm self out. And he was right. And the irony was I had not wanted to miss a day. I had not wanted to rest and ended up having to take a forced break of many months. It took me a long time to recover. I had so worn myself down. And so the desire to overwork, to overcommit, to do more than we're capable of doing, it seems like we're getting ahead in some way, but we pay for it later.

41:28We pay for it later. Seneca would say that we lay waste to our life, not aware of what we're losing, how much pointless grief we give ourselves, how little is left to us. and we have to realize that we can't do things in excess, right? Some things we shouldn't do at all. We have to realize that everything we say yes to means saying no to something else. And everything we say no to is also the converse that means saying yes to things, right? This is one of my favorite tweets of all time. Could the meeting be a Zoom? Could the Zoom be a phone call? Could the phone call be an email? Could it be a text?

42:05Could it be nothing? Yeah, it could probably be nothing. Mark Surrealis' question, along these lines. He says, ask yourself in everything you do and say, is this essential? He says, because most of what we do is not essential. And he says, when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. So family, right? Self-development, thinking big picture, planning, strategy, right? The essential things, we do them better. Seneca had this concept of euthymia, which I think is really important. He said, euthymia is the sense of the path that you're on, sense of the path that you're on.

42:47And he said, you have to have the sense of the path you're on and not get distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He said, especially from those who are hopelessly lost. So it's not just that you're racing the people going the same direction as you, but what do you do when you see someone go this way or that way, or you have no idea if they're doubling back, if they're wandering in circles, right? It's not just keeping the pace, but knowing the direction you're heading in and having the confidence, the sense of self to stick to that, right? That's what Euthymia is. And this takes an immense amount of discipline.

43:27And then the final thing I want to talk about is the idea of selflessness, which we might argue is the opposite of ego in many ways. Kyrie Irving, let's just say I'm not a fan. First, he destroys the Cleveland Cavaliers, which he apparently never wanted LeBron James to be on in the first place. Imagine not wanting to play with LeBron James. So he tears that team apart after three back-to-back trips to the finals. then he goes to Boston he tears that team apart then he says the earth is flat then he goes to Brooklyn tears maybe the greatest team ever assembled apart and look I'm not we don't need to get into COVID so then we get the COVID nonsense and then he goes to Dallas and look I'm not an expert on sports I'm just going to predict it's not going to work out in Dallas that's the thing about ego it's selfish and it cannot play well with others, right?

44:28And a friend of mine once told me, he's a coach in the NFL, he said, ego is the leading cause of unemployment in the NFL. And I'd argue it's the leading cause of unemployment and failure in most industries, right? Because most things are team sports. This is John Snyder, who's the GM of the Seahawks. He was once asked how he and Pete Carroll have worked together so long, so successfully without conflict, without trouble. They've gone through these different eras, different teams. People have counted them out. They've come back. And he said, it's because there's no ego. He says, ego is the enemy.

45:01And it's true. They have worked out a credible, collaborative relationship where they both understand, which is not a controversial premise, but that they're both more successful if they help the other one be successful, right? That it's a team. And so when we realize, and ego makes us so hard to do, that it's not all about us, that everything in life is a team sport, that it's about who we help get ahead, how we help others succeed, and how this comes back to us. This is the great George Marshall, great generals in American history. But George Marshall is a great general not because of what he personally does on the battlefield.

45:38He's a great general because of the generals he helped put onto the battlefield. His whole career, he kept a little black book. That little black book, he wrote down the names of other generals that he wanted to help succeed. And as it happened, many of these generals went on to be more successful than he was. It focused on the we versus the me. And one of those generals is Eisenhower. I guess I lost a slide here. Eisenhower gets the command of Normandy over Marshall, Marshall's recommendation. He ultimately puts his protege over himself for the most important job posting of all time, a job that propels his protege to the presidency after him.

46:22Now you might go, oh, it didn't work out for Marshall. But I think when we look at Marshall's tombstone, we can go, it worked out pretty well for Marshall also. Chief of Staff of the US Army, Secretary of State, President of the Red Cross, Secretary of Defense. And most people have heard of Marshall because of the Marshall Plan. Do you know why it's called the Marshall Plan? Because Truman wasn't a very popular president. And Truman, who had the idea for the Marshall Plan, knew that if he wanted Congress to pass it, he had to name it after someone that everyone saw as unselfish and decent and good and always honest.

46:58And so ultimately Marshall's reputation as a selfless guy, a guy who put other people's interests ahead of his own, helps him bring about the most significant act of geopolitical decision making of the 20th century into effect, right? His selflessness comes around. It allows him to do these things. And so at the end of your career, I would argue that you're not just going to be thinking about the sales that you've made or how much money you've made or the business you've built, right? You're going to be thinking about people, your people, your family, your friends, and the people who worked for you, what they went on to do, right?

47:36Greg Popovich is one of the most winning coaches in the history of sports. He also has the greatest coaching tree in the history of sports. One sports writer said, Greg Popovich doesn't have a coaching tree. He has a coaching forest, right? And you look at these coaches, what they've gone on to do in the NBA, in the WNBA, in the Olympics, in business. I was at an event for the Spurs not long ago, and they were talking to them about this very idea, talking about the coaching tree. And they said, actually, our coaching tree is more impressive than people think. Because in our eyes, we think of what our social media interns have gone on to do and the social media that they now run at other teams, what our business executives have gone on to do, right?

48:18What our secretaries and administrative people have gone on to do. They see themselves as a talent factory. They're not trying to hold everyone close, trying to keep them inside. They want to help people be successful and they know invariably, inevitably, it comes back to them. Right? There's a track here in Austin that the football player Hollywood Henderson paid for and he put this little sign up for it and he said, leave this place better and you found it. Right? Which to me is a great capsulation of the meaning of life. So as we wrap up here, I want to make a distinction between confidence and ego, because I think people go, yeah, ego is a problem.

48:55I get it. But don't you need a little bit of ego? And I think when they say that, what they mean is confidence, right? You have to believe in yourself. At the same time, just because you believe in yourself doesn't mean you're going to be able to do it. you have to have a sense of your capacity and that has to be based in something real. And I actually think one of the great stories in the Western tradition, the story of David and Goliath is a story about this, right? Story in David and Goliath is not just about a little guy beating a big guy. First off, it's a story of a big guy thinking that he's unbeatable.

49:27That's the story of ego. And then it's about that big guy putting out a challenge who can beat me one-on-one and person after person declines that challenge. People stronger, people more experienced, people better armed than David. David is a shepherd. He hears the challenge, he volunteers, and they laugh at him. But he says, I've done scary things before. David says, I've fought off bears and wolves. I've protected my flock. He says, I think I can do it. And so they try, they put on the suit and armor of a soldier and he has the self-awareness to go, I'm too small for this. I can't maneuver in this.

50:06So what does David do? He takes off the armor. He goes down to the river and he grabs new stones. Then he runs at Goliath with his sling, with his sling, which is a weapon, which is technology, which is his strength against Goliath's weakness. He hits Goliath as Goliath is laughing at him, right? Goliath is felled and And then famously, David cuts off Goliath's head with Goliath's own sword. And this is the famous Carvaccio painting here. You can see engraved in the sword is a Latin acronym, H-O-C-S, which stood for humility kills pride. I'd argue it's confidence, right? David has confidence. Goliath has ego.

50:54and when confidence comes up against ego, ego is revealed to be fragile and weak and a paper tiger. And confidence, that rock-hard confidence is what you need. So as I leave you today, I'm not trying to tear you down. I'm not trying to tell you you're not special and awesome. You're all special and awesome. You know this. But I'm trying to say you need humility and confidence. You need a sense of what's great about you and you need a sense of what your weaknesses are, what you can improve, what you don't yet know, right? You need to seek out people who are better than you, who can teach you. Calm yourself down, get in that right headspace so you're acting out of confidence, not out of ego, and that's how you can do what you're meant to do.

51:39So this isn't, again, making you small. It's about making you stronger, smarter, more resilient, more community-minded, more attuned, more adaptable. Ultimately, when I say that ego is the enemy, It's about making you better at what you do because what you do is important. That's Ego is the Enemy. Thank you all very much.

52:09Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

52:23You