[Books] Ego Is the Enemy

Why do I read this book?

有件事情很讽刺：张一鸣在诸多不利因素的环境下创建了比肩甚至超越Meta的公司，却非常的谦逊低调；我啥也还没achieve，ego却非常大。我最近意识到，我的ego是隐藏在我人生诸多失败之下的重要因素，还会阻碍我取得更大的成功，我想fix一下这个问题，所以找了这本书来读。

出自于本能，人本身就有自恋倾向，现代社会放大了这一点（网上各种自恋狂），而湾区的自恋狂浓度更甚，在这样的大环境、小环境下，导致我大大的ego并没有那么突兀，所以到现在才意识到这个问题。

“for people with ambitions, talents, drives, and potential to fulfill, ego comes with the territory. Precisely what makes us so promising as thinkers, doers, creatives, and entrepreneurs, what drives us to the top of those fields, makes us vulnerable to this darker side of the psyche.”

越是有野心、有才华、有能力、甚至是有成就的人，就越容易有ego。你看有多少曾经风光无限的人因为ego下场很惨。

“The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.”

Ego就是：对自我在社会中的认知与客观事实不符

If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.

One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as “a conscious separation from.” From what? Everything.

The ways this separation manifests itself negatively are immense: We can’t work with other people if we’ve put up walls. We can’t improve the world if we don’t understand it or ourselves. We can’t take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can’t recognize opportunities—or create them—if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy. Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion. How are we supposed to reach, motivate, or lead other people if we can’t relate to their needs—because we’ve lost touch with our own?

The performance artist Marina Abramović puts it directly: “If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”

Ego让我们活在自己的梦里，就像中了月读

“We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers.”

面对自己身上的缺点，我们总是在找那么一两个拥有相似缺点的成功人士，然后告诉自己，这个问题也没什么大不了嘛，照样可以成功。可是事实是，没有人成功是因为自己身上的缺点，只学缺点不学优点是在自欺欺人。况且，有一些人只是outliers，大部分成功的人并没有这个缺点。给个analogy，就像是大部分优秀的人都经历过非常不错的学校，但是总有那么几个学校不好的也非常优秀，但是你不能因此就说学校完全不重要，恰恰相反，从统计学的角度来讲，好的学校仍然更有可能让你更优秀。

“We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey.“

除非有benefit，不然最好把嘴闭上

“They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into product—and eventually to stillness. They ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act.”

很多人太着急了（包括我），总是想着seek recognition even before real success，这样是走不远的。把精力都放在实现目标上，而不是上蹿下跳找优越感/存在感。

“Because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people, we forget that failures shared the same trait.”

激情对利益的正向影响，并没有西方典型成功人士说的那么大。与其说他们是因为激情而成功，不如说他们是因为运气而成功，因为他们有激情的地方，恰好可以成功。

“Don’t be Passionate”

“Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance.”

“How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that’s the passion paradox. If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation—deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt.”

非常新颖的看法，非常好的比喻

下面这一章看得我羞愧脸红到脖子，跟站在我面前骂我也差不多了

“We see it in an inability to meet anyone else on their terms, an unwillingness to take a step back in order to potentially take several steps forward. I will not let them get one over on me. I’d rather we both have nothing instead.”

“When someone gets his first job or joins a new organization, he’s often given this advice: Make other people look good and you will do well. Keep your head down, they say, and serve your boss. Naturally, this is not what the kid who was chosen over all the other kids for the position wants to hear. It’s not what a Harvard grad expects—after all, they got that degree precisely to avoid this supposed indignity.

Let’s flip it around so it doesn’t seem so demeaning: It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself. When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong. There’s one fabulous way to work all that out of your system: attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously. It’s certainly more glamorous to pursue your own glory—though hardly as effective. Obeisance is the way forward. That’s the other effect of this attitude: it reduces your ego at a critical time in your career, letting you absorb everything you can without the obstructions that block others’ vision and progress.”

“You can see how easily entitlement and a sense of superiority (the trappings of ego) would have made the accomplishments of either of these men impossible.”

“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.”

“Be lesser, do more. 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.

That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others. Making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer-term payoff. Whereas everyone else wants to get credit and be “respected,” you can forget credit. You can forget it so hard that you’re glad when others get it instead of you—that was your aim, after all. Let the

others take their credit on credit, while you defer and earn interest on the principal.”

“To tell yourself that every second not spent doing your work, or working on yourself, is a waste of your gift.”

“Because if you pick up this mantle once, you’ll see what most people’s egos prevent them from appreciating: the person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.”

he had one question: Do you have the guts? “I’m looking,” Rickey told him, “for a ball player with the guts not to fight back.”

我过去总以为fight back是勇敢的表现，现在我才明白，有些情况not to fight back才是勇敢的表现

“you’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it. In the meantime, you’ll have to find some way to make it suit your purposes”

在我成为somebody之前，我应该在规则中make it happen，而不是尝试改变system

“Christians believe that pride is a sin because it is a lie—it convinces people that they are better than they are, that they are better than God made them. Pride leads to arrogance and then away from humility and connection with their fellow man.”

“Punching above your weight is how you get injured.”

“I had a horror of the danger of arrogance. What a pitiful thing it is when a man lets a little temporary success spoil him, warp his judgment, and he forgets what he is!”

取得了一点成绩就arrogant的人是走不远的

Our ego wants the ideas and the fact that we aspire to do something about them to be enough. Wants the hours we spend planning and attending conferences or chatting with impressed friends to count toward the tally that success seems to require. It wants to be paid well for its time and it wants to do the fun stuff—the stuff that gets attention, credit, or glory.

对成功的冲动、无效的社交、那些光鲜亮丽的gory和attention，没有一样可以帮助我们取得成功。唯一能帮我们取得成功的，只有work

Back to another popular old trope: Fake it ’til you make it. It’s no surprise that such an idea has found increasing relevance in our noxiously bullshit, Nerf world.

Fake it until make it本质上是一种bluff strategy，而bluff strategy并不适合高频率使用

Why is success so ephemeral? Ego shortens it.

这就是为什么凭运气带来的成功，最后会凭实力失败，因为运气带来的成功带来巨大的ego，让当事人对自己有着错误的认知，而错误的认知会带来失败。

“Yet, after filtering out his acumen from the legend, glamour, and self-promotion at which he was so adept, only one image remains: an egomaniac who evaporated hundreds of millions of dollars of his own wealth and met a miserable, pathetic end.”

“You can only see this if you want to see it. It’s more attractive and exciting to see the rebel billionaire, the eccentric, the world renown, and the fame, and think: Oh, how I want that. You do not. 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, and so much energy.”

从另一个角度结构了The Aviator的原型Howard Hughes人生

“Here we are having accomplished something. After we give ourselves proper credit, ego wants us to think, I’m special. I’m better. The rules don’t apply to me.”

“Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world. We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do—one that is about the work and not about us.”

“Ego rejects trade-offs. Why compromise? Ego wants it all.”

Ego makes people believe they deserve everything, causing them to lose sight of what truly matters and ultimately leading them to failure.

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

始终保持清醒，你的工作没那么重要

Achieving success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us. It meant rejecting rejection. It required taking certain risks. We could have given up at any time, but we’re here precisely because we didn’t. Persistence and courage in the face of ridiculous odds are partially irrational traits—in some cases really irrational. When it works, those tendencies can feel like they’ve been vindicated.

And why shouldn’t they? It’s human to think that since it’s been done once—that the world was changed in some big or small way—that there is now a magical power in our possession. We’re here because we’re bigger, stronger, smarter. That we make the reality we inhabit.

Right before he destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, overrode the cautious objections of one of his employees and bragged, “I could put the Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!” He was wrong. And the company not only catastrophically failed, he later narrowly missed going to jail.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire, a millionaire, or just a kid who snagged a good job early. The complete and utter sense of certainty that got you here can become a liability if you’re not careful. The demands and dream you had for a better life? The ambition that fueled your effort? These begin as earnest drives but left unchecked become hubris and entitlement. The same goes for the instinct to take charge; now you’re addicted to control. Driven to prove the doubters wrong? Welcome to the seeds of paranoia.

越是出类拔萃的成功，越容易滋长ego

Entitlement assumes: This is mine. I’ve earned it. At the same time, entitlement nickels and dimes other people because it can’t conceive of valuing another person’s time as highly as its own. Control says, It all must be done my way—even little things, even inconsequential things. It can become paralyzing perfectionism, or a million pointless battles fought merely for the sake of exerting its say. It too exhausts people whose help we need, particularly quiet people who don’t object until we’ve pushed them to their breaking point. We fight with the clerk at the airport, the customer service representative on the telephone, the agent who examines our claim. To what end? In reality, we don’t control the weather, we don’t control the market, we don’t control other people, and our efforts and energies in spite of this are pure waste.

micromanage、斤斤计较，这都是ego大的表现

“The public image of Eisenhower is of the man playing golf. In reality, he was not someone who ever slacked off, but the leisure time he did have was available because he ran a tight ship. He knew that urgent and important were not synonyms. His job was to set the priorities, to think big picture, and then trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for.”

“As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership.”

Immensity

偶尔接触一下浩瀚的东西，比如自然、宇宙，可以让我们感受自身的渺小，减少ego

“In most cases, we think that people become successful through sheer energy and enthusiasm. We almost excuse ego because we think it’s part and parcel of the personality required to “make it big.” Maybe a bit of that overpoweringness is what got you where you are. But let’s ask: Is it really sustainable for the next several decades? Can you really outwork and outrun everyone forever?”

“Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other.”

万事万物达到最优解，都要掌握一个度

“If success is ego intoxication, then failure can be a devastating ego blow—turning slips into falls and little troubles into great unravelings. If ego is often just a nasty side effect of great success, it can be fatal during failure.”

“The bigger the ego the harder the fall.”

In fact, many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false. We might call these “Fight Club moments.” Sometimes they are self-inflicted, sometimes inflicted on us, but whatever the cause they can be catalysts for changes we were petrified to make.

我也有自己的fight club moment

“It was in those moments—when the break exposes something unseen before—that you were forced to make eye contact with a thing called Truth. No longer could you hide or pretend.”

“I never look back, except to find out about mistakes”

Ego can’t see both sides of the issue. It can’t get better because it only sees the validation. Remember, “Vain men never hear anything but praise.” It can only see what’s going well, not what isn’t. It’s why you might see egomaniacs with temporary leads, but rarely lasting runs of it.

Tom Brady的选秀故事很好，不要把luck的credit给自己

“In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.”