EGO IS THE ENEMY

BONUS QUOTES
I
t’s funny. The Obstacle Is The Way is a book about Stoicism, but
I only use the word “stoicism” a handful of times. In Ego Is The
Enemy, I use the word “ego” more often, but almost none of the
quotes or sources I rely on specifically mention ego. As I finished the
book, I realized I had a number of absolutely spot on quotes about
ego and ego-management that I’d not managed to find a home for
(for more info on how I research and collect ideas, read about my
notecard system here). One of the wonderful things about this era of
publishing is that I can still share all of that research with you. Below
are some of my favorite quotes about ego—as well the awesome books
from which they came. Perhaps you can find a better home for them
than I can, in your own writing, on social media, or better yet, use
them in your real life.

Enjoy!
“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 The Fighter’s Mind

“Leaders must be willing to put the ship’s performance ahead of

their egos.” Michael Abrashoff It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques
from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

“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 Interview in The Economist

“Fight your own pride and ego and be open-minded and

always learning new techniques, new things from anyone.” Sam
Sheridan A Fighter’s Heart

‘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 (Source)

“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 The 50th Law

”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 The Fighter’s Mind
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your
egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Stephen
King On Writing

‘’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 on Steve Pressfield’s blog
(Getting on Base and the Long Game post from on Steve’s blog)

“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 The Fighter’s Mind

‘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 The Education of a Coach

‘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 (Source)
“[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 The Education of a Coach

“[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 (Source)

“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
(Source)

”Pat Riley, when he was coach of the Lakers, had a term for all
those off-court forces, like fame and ego (not to mention crazed
fans, the press, agents, sponsors, and ex-wives), that worked
against the players’ chances for on-court success. He called these
forces “peripheral opponents.”Resistance is not a peripheral
opponent. It does not arise from rivals, bosses, spouses, children,
terrorists, lobbyists, or political adversaries. It comes from us.
Resistance will still be with you. The enemy is inside you.” Steven
Pressfield & Seth Godin Do The Work
“The great corrupter of public men is the ego—corrupter
because distracter.” Dean Acheson Fragments of my Fleece

“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your
position falls, your ego goes with it.” Colin Powell It Worked for
Me: In Life and Leadership

“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 (Source)

“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 (Source)

“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 The Boys in the Boat

“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
(Source)

“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
It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the
Navy
“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 (Source)

“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 Creativity Inc.

“Egotism sucks us down like the law of gravity.” Cyril Connolly

The Unquiet Grave

“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 The Book: On the
Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“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 (Source)

“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 10% Happier

“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 (Source)

“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 The Fighter’s Mind
“[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
The Education of a Coach

“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. A New Pair of Glasses

“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 Managing

‘My opponent is my teacher. My ego is my enemy” Renzo Gracie

(Source)