Collapse from Within

In the book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday includes a quote from Aristotle about success, ” Without virtue and training it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably.” Holiday includes this quote in a section of the book about Howard Hughes, the aviator, genius, and businessman who did some incredible things with his fortune, but ultimately crashed in a wasteland of his own ego. Hughes, Holiday explains, received a great deal of sustainable wealth as an inheritance from his father’s business and channeled that wealth into movie projects, a giant wooden plane that only flew once, and many other ventures that sometimes succeeded but more often failed to take flight.

About Hughes directly Holiday writes, “Howard Hughes, like so many wealthy people, died in an asylum of his own making. He felt little joy. He enjoyed almost nothing of what he had. Most importantly, he wasted. He wasted so much talent, so much bravery. so much energy.”  A common story arc that we have likely seen play out in real life as well as in movies or books is of someone achieving success and forgetting to keep doing the things that brought them success to begin with. The drive to be great can become overwhelmed by thoughts about how smart, how hard working, and how much better than everyone else the successful person had to be in order to reach the goal they sought after. When that happens, it is easy to forget the habits that drove success and clear thinking is replaced by ego. The ego begins to tell us that we don’t need to work hard, that we should seek attention and praise for who we are and what we have accomplished, and it begins to cloud our judgement and lead us to believe that we will be successful no matter what we do.

Holiday also writes, “We know that empires always fall, so we must think about why–and why they seem to always collapse from within.” Howard Hughes collapsed from within. He received so much wealth that he could spend it on whatever caught his eye and he could pursue goals that in hindsight seem laughable. He could whip up a storm of enthusiasm about flawed projects and use his wealth to suggest that he would succeed, as if the wealth accumulation of the past had any bearing on his future success and insightful thinking. In our own lives, we must recognize what parts of us threaten success when we achieve it. If we fail to be aware of things we pursue on purely egotistical grounds, then we too risk collapsing from within. On the other hand, however, if we recognize the pull of the ego, we can push back and remain humble, helping us make clear decisions and continue to work toward goals that truly matter once we have started to feel real success in our lives.