Ego is our biggest enemy.
It can prevent us from learning and developing our talents. It can blind us to our own faults, and so much more. Just if we could understand the enemy and make attempts to tame it.
Ego is our biggest enemy. Early in our careers, it can prevent us from learning and developing our talents. When we taste success, ego can blind us to our own faults, alienate us from others and lead to our downfall. In failure, ego is devastating and makes recovery all the more difficult.
It is only by identifying our ego, speaking to its desires and systematically disarming it that we can create our best work. Organized into bite-sized observations featuring characters and narratives that illustrate themes and life lessons designed to resonate, uplift and inspire.
After having read the book page by page, I, hereby, list down 32 earnest lessons from this awesome book.
These are the examples that stuck with me.
These learnings are worded and appended in a way that makes it easier for most of us to understand and absorb.
If you are interested in reading about such learning from other all-time best-selling books, you may click here.
For now, if you wish to know about 'Ego is the Enemy', and what I learned from it, here you go...
1/ What replaces Ego is humility yes but rock-hard humility and confidence.
2/ Talking is always very easy. We seem to think that silence is sign a weakness; so we talk and talk as if our life depends on it. In reality, silent is strength. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Everybody can talk; so, what is rare is the ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation. Man's best treasure is a thrifty tongue.
3/ Success requires a full hundred percent for effort and talk filters part of the effort away before we can even use it.
4/ When faced with a particular challenge which you will anyway face in any creative and challenging work, do you seek the respite of talk, or do you face the challenge head on?
5/ The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other. Plug that hole - that one right in the middle of your face that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens and how much better you get.
6/ The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of learning, it also places the ego in someone else's hands. There is a sort of ego ceiling imposed. One knows that he or she is not better than the master - not even close. You cannot fake them in education. And education cannot be hacked; that there is no shortcut besides hacking it every single day. So, having a master or a mentor in your life will keep your ego in check.
7/ The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice because it prevents us from getting any better. Self-assessment is the antidote.
8/ Adopt the plus minus and equal strategy. Each one of us must have someone better that we can learn from, someone lesser whom we can teach, and someone equal whom we can challenge ourselves against.
9/ Passion is about your purpose. It is about accomplishing something that's outside of you. Realism is one step ahead of passion. It's about understanding what needs to be done, how do we start, how to we move ahead, how do we track and monitor. We need more realism than passion.
10/ Greatness comes from humble beginnings, it comes from grand work. It means you are the least important person in the room until the results show up.
11/ It doesn't degrade us when others treat us poorly.
12/ When someone insults you, work harder. Play the game, ignore the noise but for God's sake do not let it distract you. Being restrained is difficult but a critical skill. Restrained does not mean the absence of passion.
13/ Pride plants instrument that we need in order to succeed.
14/ Receive feedback, maintain hunger and chart a proper course in life.
15/ Hard work is going to get us there, not our ideas. Drop your ego, roll up your sleeves and get down to work, endlessly.
16/ In success, we stop learning, we stop listening. These are the things which made us successful in the first place. We can't keep learning if you think we already know everything.
17/ Ego prevents us to think. It makes us believe that we are special, we are better, the rules don't apply to us.
18/ Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety.
19/ As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance. It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less even as you try to grasp more and more. With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more then we actually do, to pretend that we already know everything. Knowledge puffs us up.
20/ We want so desperately to believe that those who created great empires set out to build one, so that we can create a narrative The fact is that we never know what's going to happen in the future. We never really plan for big things. They just happen on the way. We just get started. Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It is dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance.
21/ We set standards of performance, instill excellence in our team. These simple but exacting standards matter more than the Grand Vision. If you take care of the details, the goal takes care of itself. The winning happens of its own.
22/ We must resist the temptation to reverse engineer success and create a story out of it. When we achieve our own success, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we planned. You should remember that you were there when it all happened - that's it.
23/ Success is always rooted in work. Creativity, persistence and luck - these are the things which made you successful earlier and will also make you successful later. Don't get egoistic about your success.
24/ We are never happy with what we have. We want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we have achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us and can ruin us.
25/ All of us waste our precious life doing things which we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, and to get things we don't want. Why do we do this? Ego leads to envy and rots the bones of people big and small. Ego undermines greatness by deluding its holder.
26/ Ego needs honors and awards in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.
27/ Material success distract us from this reality like nothing else. Whenever you start to feel bigger and successful, look up and see how small a part of the Universe you are.
28/ Most successful people are the people you have never heard of. They wanted that way. It keeps them sober and focus on the jobs.
29/ We cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.
30/ We take risk. We mess up. The problem starts when we get our identity tied up with our work, we feel that any kind of failure is about us as a person and that's what makes the matters worse.
31/ Shit happens. If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place.
32/ Great people hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don't much care what other people think. Rather, they care whether they meet their own standards, and the standards are much higher than everyone else.
Hope these 32 earnest lessons will help shape up your thought process to some extent and help you appreciate life much better.
Then, you can read the crux of some of the best-selling books ever written.
If you are interested in reading about such learning from other all-time best-selling books, you may click here.
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Great learnings Manoj... Thank-you for sharing...🙏
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