Month: May 2019

Continual Effort

Posted on by jabittan
At the moment I am recovering from an ankle injury from a few weeks back. I was out for a run one morning and was not looking very closely at where I was going, and there was a rock on the sidewalk that I did not see and I sprained my ankle when I stepped on it. This last weekend was the first time I had run in two weeks. I am slowly getting back to 100%, but it has required each day that I do a lot of small things that all build up to improve the physical fitness and strength of my ankle. I would prefer only needing to ice one time and I would love if the one trip to a physical therapist’s office had solved all my problems, but as anyone who has had an injury knows, the body needs time to heal and continual effort, thought, and care are required to make sure injuries recover and the body is as strong as before.

 

It is a frustrating inconvenience to slowly recover from a physical injury, but we all know it will take time and understand that we won’t be back to full health overnight or with the snap of a finger. But for some reason, this understanding is hard to extend beyond physical recovery from an injury to other areas of our life. Somewhere deep down we recognize that becoming really great at something is going to require a lot of work over a long period of time, but we often don’t have the patience to put forth the effort to truly become a master. We want an instant success, just like I want an instantly healed ankle.

 

Whether it is getting in shape, becoming a good chess player, becoming a good writer, or excelling in our career, there is only one answer: continual focused effort. Author Ryan Holiday writes about it in his book The Ego is the Enemy, “to get where we want to go isn’t about brilliance, but continual effort.” It is not one shining moment that will bring us success, but rather a thousand small moments of effort and preparation that will bring about our one shining moment. The brilliance and the flash are ultimately less important and less valuable than the work and the habits we build that make the impressive moments possible.

 

This feels like a real drag and it feels terrible to be working hard at something and then see another person apparently achieve the success we want out of no-where, but if we can control our own ego we can control the way these moments make us feel. In his book, Holiday continues, “While that’s not a terribly sexy idea, it should be an encouraging one. Because it means it’s all within reach-for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work.” Winning a body building competition, having an exciting career opportunity, or cultivating a beautiful garden is something that is possible for all of us, but we must recognize it is not something we will achieve in just one day, one week, or even in one year. Through continual effort and focused application of our time and energy we can get to where we want to be, but we must recognize when we are hoping for a brilliant ego-boosting flash, and instead channel our attention back to the effort and habits that will sustain us for success in the long run. Just as I can’t push my ankle to suddenly be healthy (or I’ll fall in disastrous ruin), we can’t push our goals to suddenly be achieved. We must put forward the continual effort to prepare for the moment we seek.

Blind Spots From Pride

Posted on by jabittan
“The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?”  This quote comes from Ryan Holiday and his book Ego is the Enemy. In the quote, Holiday is encouraging us to have enough self awareness to recognize the times when we are acting out of pride and when we are thinking so highly of ourselves that we do not clearly see our own shortcomings and the areas where we need to improve. Developing an awareness of our pride and being able to look at ourselves clearly is a powerful skill to cultivate to better connect with others and to learn and grow as we work toward our goals.

 

Feeling proud of ourselves is comfortable. After a good workout, when we receive praise at work, and when we buy that shiny new thing we have had our eye on for a while, our pride steps in and tells us how amazing, hard working, and smart we are. People applaud our good outcome on a project, give our gym post a like, or turn heads as we drive down the street and this makes us feel validated and as though we are doing all the right things. Unfortunately, none of this truly matters and if we start to believe that all of these things define us and are what make us a great person, then we are building a false foundation to stand on. Our pride takes over and we begin to tell ourselves how amazing we are because of the praise and attention we have received.

 

The danger here is that we become blind to what really matters. Focused on ourselves, we likely allow our relationships with others to wither, we likely miss the new market trends and opportunities, and we likely fail to recognize other areas in our life where we can improve ourselves to prepare for future challenges. Believing we are great sets us up to fail by making us overconfident in our own abilities. It takes away the focus on improvement and growth that tells us that we must put in extra effort on the small details and must cultivate strong habits that help us grow each day.

 

As Holiday writes in his book, being more humble about our successes, our abilities, and who we are will allow us to better engage in the important things in the world. When we recognize that we don’t know everything, don’t have all the skills necessary to stay at the top of the mountain in a changing landscape, and don’t have innate abilities that will never fail, we are more likely to treat those around us with more kindness and compassion and we are more likely to be comfortable with the daily work that helps us overcome the obstacles we face. Humility builds a self-awareness and an accurate sense of our strengths. Through this humble self-awareness, we can take a more measured approach to ourselves, our goals, and the actions we take each day.

Pride and Ego

Posted on by jabittan
Ryan Holiday describes pride in his book Ego is the Enemy as a force that “takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.” It is the piece of us that ascribes our success to some essential character of ourselves and hyper-inflates that piece around us. It is the sense that we are inherently something  special because of our qualities and accomplishments.

 

Holiday explains the problem with pride by writing, “Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride. Most dangerously, this tends to happen either early in life or in the – when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit. Only later do  you realize that bump on the head was the least of what was risked.”

 

Some days I am proud of my writing. Some days I am proud that I just ate a simple and healthy lunch or that I did at least some type of exercise at the gym. These are minor accomplishments that build on each other over time to lead to positive lifestyles and that is something I can find very comforting and take pride in. To me, it seems that the problem with pride is when we take these small things, and begin to boast and brag about them as though they set us apart from the rest of humanity. When we intentionally post a picture of us snacking on apple slices with peanut butter because we know we have friends who are currently at a bar. When we use seven hashtags in our gym post about how a fit life is somehow morally superior than sleeping in and having waffles. And when we complain about how hard it was for us to publish a blog post 7 days in a row, we are taking the small things that can make life meaningful and elevating them (along with our ego and pride) to a level they don’t deserve.

 

Holiday presents pride to us as something that distorts reality in the same way that many other elements of our ego do. It creates situations where your actions become the most important thing about you and about the category of people you belong to. Other people can only fit in with you if they also do these small and meaningless things that you take pride in. Pride says that someone can’t really be a baker if they don’t use specific cookware, that someone can’t really be a runner if they don’t have a new GPS watch and post to Strava, someone can’t really be smart unless they have graduated from the right college or gotten an advanced degree. Pride is a way of creating barriers between us and other people. It gives us a reason to believe we are special, and that as a result we can self-segregate into groups of people similar to ourselves and distance ourselves from the undeserving “others”.

 

None of these outcomes of pride are healthy, which is why there are so many warnings to avoid pride and remain humble. We can be proud of the small actions that drive our life in the right direction, but we should be aware of when we are bragging about those small actions and when we are trying to use those as justification to suggest that we deserve more than what we have or more than another person. We must do our best to include other people in our positive lifestyles and remember that we can only do what we do and be who we are with the support of an entire society, so our pride must also include a sense of community and belonging with everyone who supports us in our lives.

Performances

Posted on by jabittan
Much of our life, especially if we spend a good amount of time engaging with social media, can feel like a performance of some kind. We have performance evaluations at work, we want to get that photo just right before we post it, and there are mirrors and people everywhere at the gym so it often feels like everyone is watching you for every squat that you do. In addition, we watch movies about great historical figures, read their diaries years after their death, and celebrate those who started small but ended up big. All of this creates a feeling that we are living for others and that they care what we do and what we are up to, so we better put forward something to entertain, impress, and display our complex skills and thoughts to everyone else.

 

In reality, however, almost no one is really aware of what we are doing from one moment to the next, and almost no one really is interested in what we think about all day long, and no one is going to dig back through our lives to write a book or direct a movie about our us. Spending time in this performance takes a lot of our energy that we could direct toward things that help our community and family members, but instead channels it into vain and self indulging activities to try to impress people we don’t really spend a lot of time with. As Ryan Holiday writes in his book Ego is the Enemy, “There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.”

 

When we are in performance mode, we can certainly get a lot of work done and certainly do a lot of learning. The difference however, between actively engaging with the world out of curiosity and a desire to have a meaningful life and engaging with the world to boost ones status, is that one approach clouds your judgement with fears and thoughts about other people. It may not be possible to completely ignore what others think, and it may not be healthy to do so, but we should recognize that there are social impulses and drivers of our behavior and place those in the back seat, not the driver’s seat of our life. When we want to impress others, we never truly live and we risk pursuing things that appear to give life meaning rather than the things that we like and are interested in. As a result, we put more effort into the appearance of learning, working hard, and being interesting than we actually put into the things themselves. This leaves us in a place where we feel like a fraud and are fearful that people will find out that we are not who we look like in our performance of life. The advice from Holiday is to put the ego in the back seat (or maybe the trunk or even strapped down in a trailer behind us) and to focus on the things that interest us and are the most valuable to us. From this point we can meaningfully engage with the things we are motivated by and do great work, connect with our loved ones in an honest and open manner, and see the world and people around us in an objective and non threatening way.

The Narration Inside Our Heads

Posted on by jabittan
We spend so much time inside our heads, thinking about ourselves and what we are doing, feeling, and thinking, that it is easy to imagine that everyone is watching us and thinking about us. We get so caught up in our thoughts about ourselves that we forget that other people probably aren’t paying any attention to us. Most people are probably thinking of themselves the way we are thinking about ourselves. This is a phenomenon that psychologist David Elkind refers to as the Imaginary Audience and author Ryan Holiday writes about it in his book Ego is the Enemy.

 

We constantly have a narrative about the world playing inside our head. We tell ourselves amazing things about who we are, emphasizing the positive traits we see and like in ourselves and comparing ourselves to others in a way that makes us look amazing. At the same time, however, we are likely to have a piece of ourselves that is overly self-critical, telling ourselves that we are not good enough, that we need to prove that we belong, and scaring us into believing that one mistake will reveal to the world that we are not actually as amazing as we make it look. In his book Holiday describes this phenomenon with a quote from the novelist Anne Lamott who describes this part of our ego as if it were a radio station playing in our head 24/7.

 

What is helpful from Holiday’s writing is how he breaks down what is really talking place in a tangled mess inside our mind. Describing all of these thoughts and complex emotions he writes, “Anyone-particularly the ambitious-can fall prey to this narration, good and bad. It is natural for any young, ambitious person (or simply someone whose ambition is young) to get excited and swept up by their thoughts and feelings. Especially in a world that tells us to keep and promote a “personal brand.” We’re required to tell stories in order to sell our work and our talents, and after enough time, forget where the line that separates our fictions from reality.”

 

Our ego buys into the narrative that runs in our mind without question. It loves the thoughts of greatness that we tell ourselves about who we are, but it is constantly acting in fear of losing those stories. Becoming more self-aware and learning that we do not need to constantly build our ego allows us to begin to step back and see the narration inside our heads for what it really is, an incomplete perspective and view of our place in the world. If we can recognize that the stories we tell ourselves are just stories, then we open up the possibilities for us to engage with the world on our own terms, without fear, without a need for self validation, and without the need to be someone that we think will impress everyone else. This allows us to take the small steps and actions that make us feel good and help us to actually accomplish things that matter and make a difference in the world.

The Ego Drives the Wrong Outcome

Posted on by jabittan
The idea in Ryan Holiday’s book, Ego is the Enemy, shows up over and over again in children’s movies. We frequently see main characters who have incredible ambition but are not patient enough to learn from the wise elders of the show. They set off with confidence that they can be great, take on the mighty challenge, and achieve some impressive feat only to fail and return to gain knowledge and insight from the wise leader whose advice they previously ignored. The message is to be confident in yourself, to push yourself, but also to be patient and learn from those who have come before you. In other words, the message is to control your ego.

 

We see this all the time in children’s movies, but in our own lives, that message often seems forgotten as we plunge into AP classes in high school, 20 credits our first semester of college, and into a new career with an eye toward the corner office. We set out to be recognized in each of these areas, driven by our ego, with the advice of our elders falling on deaf ears unless that advice is really just someone telling us that we are great and will get into a great school, will get a great job, and will make boatloads of cash. Our ego takes over and the focus is not on doing great work and learning, but on getting something so we can show off.

 

What is worse, when we are under-prepared for challenges that we face in this situation, we tend to let the ego drive us forward as if it is our will that will push us where we want to go. As Holiday put it, “We tend to think that ego equals confidence, which is what we need to be in charge. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.” We face challenges and want to look strong and prepared for what we face. We want others to be impressed as we handle these difficulties without breaking a sweat. We try to be a leader by inflating our ego and standing tall in front of our desk with our arms crossed, the cliche magazine cover image of a CEO.

 

How we actually reach our goals and become successful is a different picture. We learn from grunt work. We set stretch goals and challenge ourselves, but within reasonable bounds that we know will force us to grow. This is completely different from setting goals that we know will impress other people. Trying to be the leader through sheer ego will make us look small and put us on a path toward isolation. Becoming a leader through experience and a willingness to learn from others will actually make us great, but it is something we can only do if we can control the ego and allow ourselves to learn from others. It all requires self-awareness and a dose of humility to put our ego aside and learn from the wise people in our lives and to take on our ambitious challenges when we are ready.

Self Degrading

Posted on by jabittan
I’m writing this in the afternoon which is rare for me, but I have an extra twenty minutes and thought I would draft up another post. I’m still writing about Ryan Holiday’s book The Ego is the Enemy, and the quote that I am at is quite fitting for my day. This afternoon, as I was leaving work, I turned right onto a street as a car was approaching. In my recollection, the car was a ways back and I had plenty of space, but the driver was going a little faster than the speed limit. I didn’t pay any attention to them until I reached a red light a block away. The person had a scowl on their face and was clearly yelling at me from their vehicle. I made an apologetic face and gesture, but I’m not sure it really helped. At the time I thought about how much power she was giving me over herself to allow her emotions to be so wrought by an action that I undertook without her in mind. It made no difference to me and my life that she had chosen to be so upset, and it was a great act of self-divulgence for her to allow some random person to have such control over her emotional state.
The quote I have from Holiday’s book that fits my afternoon well is, “Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.” I don’t want to write about my afternoon and only critique this woman, after all I don’t know what else happened in her day that may have put her on edge and I don’t know if she was in a hurry to get to a seriously ill or injured loved one and didn’t want any slow drivers pulling out in front of her.
But this quote pulls me back to the reaction I had thanks to the fact that lessons from Holiday, Colin Wright, and Marcus Aurelius have resonated with me so strongly. I did not feel insulted when the lady in the other car was visibly upset and yelling at me. I felt that I could say, “I apologize, I did not intend to cut you off or drive slow in front of you and I recognize that I am not a Nascar champion and sometimes my driving is not the best of all time.” What ultimately happened in the situation this afternoon was that I was able to remain calm and collected to see a situation objectively while another person acted in a way that we would not want to see in our children.
Holiday’s message is that attacking another person, belittling them, and attempting to make them smaller or in some way inferior only reveals our own shortcomings. We never know what another person sees, experiences, and perceives, and as a result we can never truly understand them or the forces acting on them. We must give people the benefit of the doubt while standing by our principles. When we allow our ego to take control of the situation, to yell, scream, and fight for our honor, what we really do is show how insecure we are, how little we think about the world and our relation to other people in the world, and how self-centered we truly are. Recognizing our ego and our desire to lash out at the world helps us to have more civil relationships with those who would seek to do us harm or injure us, and in many situations, a more controlled and meter reaction can help the world move forward with less stress, less vitriol, and more positivity.

Helping Yourself by Helping Others

Posted on by jabittan
In The Ego is the Enemy, author Colin Wright encourages us to get beyond our own selfish thoughts and desires. He encourages us to be aware of our ego and the times that our ego kicks in to run the show and determine what we do. The Ego, Holiday writes, seeks things for our own self-interest, and puts us in situations where it actually becomes harder to achieve what we want or to live the life that we want. Rather than pursuing our ego, Holiday suggests that we work toward or goals by helping others first. He suggest that we practice humility and put in the grunt work, tackling projects that are small and seem unimportant but will help us learn and grow over time.

 

He writes, “Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road.”

 

Helping others in this way truly does help ourselves. It puts our short term self-interests aside as we assist other people and show that we care about them. People want help and are more likely to give you opportunities to grow when what you are doing is serving them rather than serving yourself. To pursue this type of strategy, you have to accept that your work may be kept in the background and that other people may get more credit than you for the work you do or the ideas you produce. Holiday encourages us to be confident that this approach will still lead to long term success even if it feels we are being overlooked in the short run.

 

This strategy aims toward is positive results in the world, your company, or in your family. What matters most is that you are part of a successful team and that the world is made better with your actions. Where we can be confident is that in the long run we will be recognized as the source of the great ideas, or as the person who put in the hard work to keep things moving in a positive direction. But even if we are not, we still benefit in the long run by a rising tide that lifts us with the other people in our company, family, or group. Pursuing success and helping others become the best versions of themselves will ultimately help us more and create more cohesion among the groups we belong to than will our selfish attention seeking ego.