Ego Is the Enemy

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday In “Ego is the Enemy,” Holiday moves beyond the clinical definitions of ego and places the concept firmly in the realm of the practical. To be sure, the clinical and the practical in this case have some common ground. Modern psychologists define the ego as a critical part of identity construction, and further, an egotist as someone excessively focused on himself.

Synopsis

Holiday defines ego along those lines: “an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition…It’s when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us.” The idea that becoming untethered from reality is the primary symptom of an ego out of control is the thread that unites all three sections of this book. Holiday expands this idea throughout the three sections that form a continuum - Aspire, Success, and Failure - to show how this form of ego plagues everyone from the ambitious and striving, to the wildly successful and those who have been crushed by personal and professional defeat. In our own lives, we are always somewhere on that circle of aspiration, success and failure. To this end, Holiday goes right to the sources of practical wisdom: the primary sources of great practical wisdom – Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, and Martial to name a few - and the biographies of those who apply that wisdom to great effect or ignore it at their own peril.

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