tirtalks

[tirtalks]

A Glance of: Ego is The Enemy

The book Ego is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday is filled with cautionary tales of those who experienced ego at each of their stages in life: Aspiration, Success, and Failure.

This is not about ego in the Freudian sense, but the ego we most commonly see that goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for –that’s ego.

Ego is the enemy that separates us from every direct and honest connection to the world around us. That’s why this book comes to help us to be humble in our aspirations, gracious in our success, and resilient in our failures.

To whatever you aspire, ego is your enemy

Don’t Talk, Talk, Talk –Act!

The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.

So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep ourselves out of the conversation and exist without any need to be validated. The only relationship between work and chatter is the latter kills the other –particularly early on in any journey.

To Be or To Do?

If your purpose is something larger than you –to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself- then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult.

Easier in the sense that you know now what it is you need to do and what is important to you. The other choices washed away, as they aren’t really choices at all. It’s about the doing, not the recognition. It gets harder because each opportunity –no matter how gratifying or rewarding– must be evaluated along strict guidelines. Does this help me to do what I have set out to do? Does this allow me to do what I need to do? Am I being selfish or selfless?

To be or to do –life is a constant roll call.

Become A Student

The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly on harsh and critical feedback. The ego avoids such feedback at all costs, whatever, ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are. Ego dislikes reality and prefers its own assessment.

To become what we ultimately hope to become often takes long period of obscurity. Humility is what keeps us there, concerned that we don’t know enough and that we must continue to study. Become a student to place the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.

Don’t Be Passionate

It’s all about passion. Find your passion. Live passionately. Inspire the world with your passion. Because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people, we forget that failures shared the same trait.

Passion typically covered a weakness. Its breathlessness, impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for purpose and strength and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself. While the origins of passion may be earnest and good, the effects are comical and then monstrous.

The critical work that you want to do will require consideration to pursue the purpose. Not passion. Not naivety.

Follow the Canvas Strategy

The Canvas Strategy is about helping yourself by helping others. Making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer term pay-off. 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.

Once we fight this emotional and egoistical impulse, the canvas strategy is easy and the iterations are endless.

Restrain Yourself

Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with.

Up ahead there will be: Slights. Dismissals. One-sided compromises. You’ll get yelled. You’ll have to work behind the scenes to salvage what should have been easy. All this will make you angry and want to fight back. But don’t! Take it. Endure it. Quietly brush it off and work harder. Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one.You will often be tempted. No one is perfect with it, but we must try.

Honestly, many paths would tolerate only restraint and had no forgiveness for ego.

Get Out of Your Own Head

Our imagination is dangerous when it runs wild. We have to rein our perceptions in. Otherwise, lost in the excitement, how can we accurately predict the future or interpret events? How can we stay hungry and aware? How can we appreciate the present moment?

Living clearly and immediately taking courage. Don’t live in the haze of abstract, live with the tangible and real circumstances, even if it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.

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.

The Danger of Early Pride

Actually, pride –even in real accomplishments– is a distractions and a deluder. 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 process –when we’re flushed with beginner’s conceit. Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.

Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life. We are still striving, and it is the strivers that should be our peers –not the proud and the accomplished ones.

At the end, this isn’t about deferring pride because you don’t deserve it yet. It isn’t “Don’t boast about what hasn’t happened yet.” It is more directly “Don’t boast.” There’s nothing in it for you. 

Work, Work, Work

Fac, si facis. Do it if you’re going to do it.

Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first draft and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever praise others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever praise you may be getting. Because there is work to be done.

 To whatever success you have achieved, ego is your enemy

Always Stay a Student

As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. But, with accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.

No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. To be the humble version of you who don’t assume, “I know the way”. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.

Don’t Tell Yourself a Story

Whatever we do, instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution –and on executing with excellence. We must shun the false crown and continue working on what got us here.

Because that’s the only thing that will keep us here.

What’s Important to You?

This is how ego works: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what other people have too. We want to have more than anyone else. Ego sways and can ruins us. We started out knowing what’s important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities.

On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in. The more you have and do, the harder the maintaining fidelity to your purpose will be, but the more critically you will need to.

Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because that’s independence.

Entitlement, Control, and Paranoia

The problem lies in the path that got us to success in the first place. What we’ve accomplished often required feats of raw power and force of will. Achieving success involved ignoring the doubts and reservations of the people around us. There are legitimate stresses and anguish that come with the responsibilities of our new life. But, ego will always be the worst enemy. Ego sways and can ruins every single pieces of our life.

We don’t have any entitlement to overstate our abilities. In other way, we need to control ourselves to don’t ever force anything to be done our way –even little things, even inconsequential things. Learn to trust people so paranoia won’t get us down.

Once our path lead us to success, we have to regularly remind ourselves of the limits of our power and reach: entitlement, control, and paranoia.

Managing Yourself

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. Responsibilities requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose.

It is not enough to have great qualities and abilities to do everything in our own field, we should also have the management of them.

Beware The Disease of Me

The Disease of Me begins once we think that we’re better, that we’re special, that our problems and experiences are so incredibly different from everyone else’s that no one could possibly understand. It’s an attitude that has sunk far better people, teams, and causes than ours.

Let’s make one thing clear: we never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else. To think otherwise is not only egoistical, it’s counterproductive.

Meditate on The Immensity

At least once in a lifetime, we would experience what the Stoics would call sympatheia –a connectedness with the cosmos. A sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing that “human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity.”

When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone. No wonder we find success empty when we’re exhausted. In that moment, ego stands in the way. By removing the ego –even temporarily– we can access what’s left standing in relief. By widening our perspective, more comes into view.

Feel unprotected against the elements or forces or surroundings. Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life. Realize how much events came before you, and how only wisps of it remain.

Let the feeling carry you as long as you can. Then when you start to feel better or bigger than usual, go and do it again.

Maintain Your Sobriety

In most cases, we think that people become successful through sheer energy and enthusiasm. We almost excuse ego because we think it’s a part and parcel of the personality required to “make it big.” Maybe a bit of that overpower is what got you where you are. But, we have to stay sober and control our ego.

Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out the success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.

 To whatever failure and challenges you will face, ego is your enemy

Alive Time or Dead Time

According to Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time. Which will it be?

Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we have always needed to do. Think of what you have been putting off. Issues you declined to deal with, systemic problems that felt too overwhelming to address.

In life, we all get stuck with dead time. Its occurrence isn’t in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is.

The Effort is Enough

In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative: failure, disrespect, jealousy, or even a resounding yawn from the world.

Depending on what motivates us, the response can be crushing. If ego predominates, we’ll accept nothing less than a full appreciation. With the right motives we can still pursue our success. With ego, we’re not.

Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.” That’s all there needs to be. Recognition and rewards –those are just extra. Rejection, that’s on them, not on us. Doing the work is enough.

Fight Club Moments

We surround ourselves with distractions, with lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engaged in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent. 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. But change begins by hearing the criticism and the words of the people around you. Even if those words are mean spirited, angry, or hurtful. It means weighing them, discarding the ones that don’t matter, and reflecting on the ones that do.

Draw The Line

People make mistakes all the time. We take risks. We messed up. We fight desperately and only making it worse. Ego kills what we love. Sometime, it comes close to killing us too

Let’s say you’ve failed and let’s even say it was your fault. Things happened and trouble is in anywhere. But most of them is temporary, unless you make them not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step ahead of the other. The only real failure is abandoning your principles.

Maintain Your Own Scorecard

This is the characteristic of how great people think. They don’t really care much about what other people thin, they only care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else’s. A person who judges himself based on his own standard doesn’t crave the spotlight the same way as someone who lets applause dictate success.

Reflecting on what went well or how amazing we are doesn’t get us anywhere, except maybe to where we are right now. But we want to go further, we want more, and we want to continue to improve.

Always Love

We all have stuff that pissed us off. The more successful or powerful we are, the more protection we will need in terms of our legacy, image, and influence. There is only one best response to an attack or a slight of something you don’t like: love. Because hate will get you every time.

In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too. Does this get us any closer to where we want to be? No. It just keeps us where we are –or worse.

Meanwhile, love is right there. Egoless, open, positive, vulnerable, peaceful, and productive.

Epilogue

Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of those three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them. You will make mistakes in each of them. You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.

[tirtalks]

Pandemi: Egoisme dan Empati

Ada yang berbeda dari tahun-tahun sebelumnya. Mungkin ini cara Tuhan menunjukkan kalau satu-satunya yang kita punya hanya diri sendiri dan satu-satunya yang memiliki kita adalah Dia.

Ada yang berbeda dari tahun-tahun sebelumnya. Satu-satunya yang dapat dilakukan adalah tidak melakukan apa-apa. Tidak perlu saling menemui dan bertukar senyum, tidak perlu saling berkunjung dan bertukar cerita, tidak perlu menjadi yang paling peduli dan berusaha mengubah dunia.

Di saat seperti ini, sepertinya kita diberi waktu untuk saling mengenal wajah masing-masing bahkan tanpa saling bersitatap, untuk mengetahui apa kita bahkan mengenal diri sendiri. Konon, kita akan menjadi lebih baik setelah menghadapi berbagai kesulitan. Bukankah ini kesempatannya?

Eliminate what doesn’t help you evolve. Sepertinya akan lebih baik jika kita menganggap ini waktu yang diberikan agar kita bisa bekerja untuk diri sendiri, memutus hubungan apapun dengan hal-hal yang tidak membuat kita merasa nyaman, dengan hal-hal yang tidak membuat kita menjadi versi lebih baik.

Banyak dari kita menghabiskan waktu dan tenaga berpura-pura menjadi orang yang berkapabilitas menentukan baik dan buruk, berpura-pura menjadi orang yang berwenang menetapkan aturan, berpura-pura menjadi yang paling pandai di antara yang pandir. Kenapa tidak kembali saja pada diri sendiri? Melakukan yang harus dilakukan dan membiarkan pihak lain melakukan yang harus mereka lakukan.

What if we change the small habits? How you spend your mornings, what you read and what you watch, who has access to you, whatsoever. Work on yourself and vibe alone for awhile.

Jika tidak begitu, kita akan menjadi pandir paling bodoh, menjadi pembangkang yang merasa paling benar dengan kepala panas padahal senyatanya kita berada di bawah telunjuk dan budak paling setia egoisme.

Pandemi ini sudah menggagalkan banyak rencana, menghilangkan banyak kesempatan, menggugurkan banyak nyawa. Sebuah kekalahan telak jika ini juga berhasil menjadikan kita manusia bernyawa yang tidak hidup. Setelah ini berlalu, kita harus masih punya harga diri dan empati.

(ditulis setelah melihat banyak yang lebih memprioritaskan baju baru di hari lebaran daripada keselamatan)