I
am a fan of Ryan Holiday’s work. He have written many wonderful books:
Out
of the above books, I have read The Daily Stoic and I really enjoyed the
reading and a lot of life lessons learned from the book. I am on my path of lifelong
learning and in the journey, I will read other books as well from Ryan Holiday
with time.
The
below collection of quotes is from Ryan work only, the all credit goes to Ryan.
“Ego is an evil thing. Confidence is
important but ego is something false. Humility is the way to build confidence,
and ego is hugely dangerous in this sport, because if you’re running on ego you
aren’t running on good clean emotions or cause and effect. You bypass it to
support a false idea. It’s all garbage, the ego is garbage.” Frank
Shamrock
“Your
ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your
greatness, it is the death of your creativity.” Marina
Abramovic
“William
Burroughs always talks about the world is nothing but allies and enemies. And
it’s important to understand what things around you are the enemies and a lot
of the time your worst enemy is your ego.” John
Frusciante
“At any moment
in life you can convert to realism, which is not a belief system at all, but a
way of looking at the world. It means every circumstance, every individual is
different, and your task is to measure that difference, then take appropriate
action. Your eyes are fixed on the world, not on yourself or your ego.” Robert
Greene & 50 Cent
“You don’t make it far if you have a big ego. The guys that come in here with
huge egos get smashed until they learn. Verbal reasoning won’t work, that’s
where those guys live…you just gotta smash them until they get humble. And
build them back up, if they can stand it.” Greg Jackson
“Whenever the
world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The
cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don’t
take it all too seriously, that you don’t fill up on junk food.”Anne
Lamott
“Kill your
darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little
scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Stephen
King
“‘Your job is
to get on base,’ says my son’s baseball coach. Ego likes a line drive,
resulting in a double or triple, but, end of day, the goal of getting on base
eclipses the how of getting on base. Just get there.” Callie
Oettinger
“From my very
first real fighting experience in Thailand, I saw that the best fighters were
the most humble. But much like jiu-jitsu, you start to see it as a
‘chicken-and-egg’ problem. Is it that great fighters lose their ego? Or is it
that you cannot become great unless you
lose your ego? Your ego keeps you out of the zone? Guys who can naturally
control big egos do better?” Sam Sheridan
“Thus, a great
deal of time and energy in the world of the New England Patriots went into
selecting players who were at least partially immune to displays of ego and
self. This did not mean Bill Belichick was without ego—far from it. His ego was
exceptional, and it was reflected by his almost unique determination. He liked
being the best and wanted credit for being the best, a quiet kind of credit.
But his ego was about the doing; it was fused into a larger purpose, that of
his team winning. It was never about the narcissistic celebration of self that
television loved to amplify.” David Halberstam
“Perfectionism
is the ego’s wicked demand. It denies us the pleasure of process. Instead, we
are told by the ego that we must have instantaneous success— and our
perfectionism believes it, lock, stock and barrel.” Julia
Cameron
“[Bill Belichick] was a man for better or for worse, remarkably without
artifice. He had little gift or interest in modern public relations—if anything,
he seemed almost uniquely resistant to it for someone so much, however
involuntarily, in the public eye. He was about one thing only—coaching—and wary
of anything that detracted from hit, and in his mind, much of the modern media,
especially television, did precisely that—not just because it took up time that
could be better spent doing other things, like watching a bit of film for the
tenth or eleventh time and working with assistant coaches, but because it was
singularly dangerous, it fed egos, and swollen egos detracted from the essence
of football, which was the idea of team. Modern media created a Me-Me-Me world,
whereas he insisted on a We world.” David Halberstam
“I don’t want
to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an
insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty
years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.” Ayn
Rand
“[Level 5
leaders] are somewhat self-effacing individuals who deflect adulation, yet who
have an almost Stoic resolve to do absolutely whatever it takes to make the
company great, channeling their ego needs away from themselves and into the
larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no
ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their
ambition is first and foremost for the institution and its greatness, not for
themselves.” Jim
Collins
“Our job, as
souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the ego
to the Self. That’s it.” Steven Pressfield
“Resistance
seems to come from outside ourselves. We locale it in spouses, jobs, bosses,
kids. “Peripheral opponents,” as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los
Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from
within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy
within.” Steven Pressfield
“Leaders must
be willing to put the ship’s performance ahead of their egos.”Michael
Abrashoff
“The great corrupter of public men is the ego—corrupter because distracter.” Dean
Acheson
“Avoid having
your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes
with it.” Colin Powell
“There’s no
ego. Ego is the enemy, really. Being able to communicate in clear, concise
fashion and make decisions as quickly as you possibly can. Knowing that first
and foremost, we’re looking out for what’s best in the organization.” Seahawks
GM John Schneider
“Ego says ‘I
can do no wrong’, whereas confidence says ‘I can get this right.’ Confidence
says ‘I’m valuable’ while ego says ‘I’m invaluable.’” Todd
Henry
“The
challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume
their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the
common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to
do what they had not been able to do before.” Daniel
James Brown
“I believe
that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding
out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and
weaknesses are.” Ray Dalio
“Leaders must
free their subordinates to fulfill their talents to the utmost. However, most
obstacles that limit people’s potential are set in motion by the leader and are
rooted in his or her own fears, ego needs, and unproductive habits. When
leaders explore deep within their thoughts and feelings in order to understand
themselves, a transformation can take shape.” Michael
Abrashoff
“So here’s
what you do: You say, “I have no ego at all.” Let’s start that way. “I have no
ego, no cause to puff myself up.” Now let’s learn about the cosmic perspective.
Yeah, we’re on a planet that’s orbiting a star, and a star is an energy source
and it’s giving us energy, and we’re feeling this energy, and life is enabled
by this energy in this star. And by the way, there’s a hundred billion other
stars that have other planets. [..] So those who see the cosmic perspective as
a depressing outlook, they really need to reassess how they think about the
world. Because when I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also
big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is
connected to me.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Steve Jobs
had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn’t work. If you were
in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would
instantly change his mind. He didn’t hold on to an idea because he had once
believed it to be brilliant. His ego didn’t attach to the suggestions he made,
even as he threw his full weight behind them. When Steve saw Pixar’s directors
do the same, he recognized them as kindred spirits.” Ed
Catmull
“Fight your
own pride and ego and be open-minded and always learning new techniques, new
things from anyone.” Sam Sheridan
“Egotism sucks
us down like the law of gravity.” Cyril Connolly
“The
hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego
is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for
the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection.
In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing
off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious
about the coming crash!” Alan Watts
“But there is
another side [of ego] that can wreck a team or an organization. That is being
distracted by your own importance. It can come from your insecurity in working
with others. It can be the need to draw attention to yourself in the public
arena. It can be a feeling that others are a threat to your own territory.
These are all negative manifestations of ego, and if you are not alert to them,
you get diverted and your work becomes diffused. Ego in these cases makes
people insensitive to how they work with others and ends up interfering with
the real goal of any group efforts.” Bill Walsh Interview
“Proud people
breed sad sorrows for themselves.” Emily Brontë
“We’re all the
stars of our own movies, but cutting back on the number of Do you know who I
am? thoughts made my life
infinitely smoother. When you don’t dig in your heels and let your ego get into
entrenched positions from which you mount vigorous, often irrational defenses,
you can navigate tricky situations in a much more agile way. For me humility
was a relief, the opposite of humiliation.” Dan
Harris
“The most
striking features of the ego are three cognitive biases, which correspond
disturbingly to thought control and propaganda devices that are to be defining
characteristics of a totalitarian political system. The three biases are:
egocentricity (self perceived as more central to events than it is),
“beneffectance” (self perceived as selectively responsible for desired, but not
undesired, outcomes), and conservatism (resistance to cognitive change).” Tony
Greenwald, Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington
“But what
about the huge egos of guys like Michael Jordan, who needed control over the
court? Or Kobe Bryant? Their monstrous egos obviously don’t keep them out of
the zone—Jordan’s the defining athlete of the concept. I can imagine it’s
because they can compartmentalize and, in the moment, remove any trace of
self-consciousness from what they do. They control it, like they control everything
else. And they’re at peace with it, with taking the pressure shot.” Sam
Sheridan
“[Bill
Belichick] was completely dedicated to fighting off the virus caused by too
much ego, all too aware of what it could do to his dominating purpose — playing
championship-level team football. But a man like that, who was so driven to
win, and who excelled again and again at such a high level, was hardly without
ego. Instead, he had learned how to make his ego work for him, and to keep it
from being a negative force.” David Halberstam
“When ego is
gone, you wake up in the middle of the circle and now you’re a part of—not
apart from—Life, Good, God.” Chuck C.
“The egotist
does not stumble about, knocking things off his desk. He does not stammer or
drool. No, instead, he becomes more and more arrogant, and some people, not
knowing what is underneath such an attitude, mistake his arrogance for a sense
of power and self-confidence.” Harold Geneen
“My opponent
is my teacher. My ego is my enemy” Renzo Gracie
Thanks & Regards,
Mahesh
