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The Greatest Enemy of Success - Ego is the Enemy

2021-08-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

On reaching 2 million subscribers, Ali revisits Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy in three parts: pupil (a beginner mindset, lifelong learning), process (keep ambitions to yourself, negative visualisation, do rather than be, keep your head down and do the work) and perseverance (the effort is enough, journey before destination).

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — 2 million subscribers and why he rereads Ego Is the Enemy at milestones

  • ★★ Ali's YouTube channel has just reached 2 million subscribers. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali finds Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy a helpful book to revisit at milestones such as 2 million subscribers, when congratulations make it easy to let success go to your head. — 00:00:00 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★ Ali first read Ego Is the Enemy a few years ago and has been rereading its summary on Shortform. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali groups the lessons of Ego Is the Enemy that apply most to him into three parts: pupil, process and perseverance. — 00:01:03
  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson from Ego Is the Enemy for keeping ego in check is to embrace the beginner mindset, as he did when he started his YouTube channel as a complete beginner. — 00:01:03

00:01:14 — Pupil: embrace the beginner mindset and be a lifelong learner

  • ★★ To stay a beginner at 2 million subscribers, Ali asks what he can learn from friends such as Thomas Frank, Matt D'Avella and LegalEagle, who grew with fewer videos, and from Part-Time YouTuber Academy students' channels. — 00:02:09 · Thomas Frank, Matt D'Avella, Part-Time YouTuber Academy

  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday writes in Ego Is the Enemy that the pretence of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it stops us getting better. — 00:02:38 · Ryan Holiday

    “the pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice because it prevents us from getting any better.”

  • ★★ Ali's second lesson from Ego Is the Enemy against ego and pride is to be a lifelong learner, finding the holes in your own abilities. — 00:02:38

  • ★★ Ali has a team of about 12 people and is hiring another eight. — 00:02:38
  • ★★ Seeing holes in his ability to be a good manager and leader of his growing team, Ali actively seeks out books, coaches and mentors to help. — 00:03:16
  • ★★ Ali says success makes it easy to think you know what you are doing, but none of us does: we are all making it up as we go along, so we can always improve. (overstated) — 00:03:16

00:03:37 — Process: keep ambitions internal, negative visualisation, do something rather than be someone, head down and do the work

  • ★★ Ali's second part, process: to combat ego and pride, focus on the process and the journey rather than the destination. — 00:03:44 · journey before destination
  • ★★ Against self-help that urges visualising and sharing your goals, Ali says there is a decent amount of evidence that sharing your ambitions and goals with others prevents you from achieving them in some contexts. — 00:04:28
  • ★★ Ali retells, from Ego Is the Enemy, how Upton Sinclair, wanting to become a mayor (as Ali recalls it), wrote a whole book in the past tense about what he would do in office, after which his drive to do it went down the drain. (hedged) — 00:04:28
  • ★★ Ali says talking about our goals makes the brain feel they are already done, lowering our drive; for him, the more he plans a new course, piece of writing or video, the less likely he is to do it. — 00:05:00
  • ★★★ Ali tries to keep his ambitions internal: he has goals, but tries not to share them openly with other people. — 00:05:35
  • ★★ Ali's team is hiring about 10 new people and may get a real office in London with studios. — 00:06:01 · London
  • ★ Looking at the studios of MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, Ali got carried away imagining his own, until a point from the summary of Ego Is the Enemy made him stop. — 00:06:01
  • ★ Ali promises more in a future video on hiring about 10 new people for his team. — 00:06:01
  • ★★ Citing Shortform's notes on Ego Is the Enemy, Ali says positively visualising success can reduce stress and anxiety, but negative visualisation has much more evidence for actually getting things done. (hedged) — 00:06:31
  • ★★★ Ali is practising negative visualisation: imagining what he would do if his business or YouTube channel failed, his courses stopped getting students or his content became irrelevant. — 00:06:31
  • ★★ Ali hopes negative visualisation will make him more prepared if failure comes, so it is less devastating, and push him to take his YouTube channel more seriously. (hedged) — 00:07:10
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday advises in Ego Is the Enemy keeping our goals and ambitions to ourselves for the most part and not being overly keen on visualising success. — 00:07:10 · stoicism, Ryan Holiday
  • ★★★ Following Ego Is the Enemy's "do something rather than be someone", Ali frames goals as doing: not being a bestselling author but writing a book he is proud of, two videos a week rather than being a YouTuber, starting a business rather than being an entrepreneur. — 00:08:33
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday advises in Ego Is the Enemy keeping your head down and doing the work to combat the ego: self-promotion has value once you have something to promote. — 00:08:33 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ A few months before this video Ali had a phone call with Ryan Holiday to ask how to make the book he is writing a bestseller. — 00:09:02 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday told Ali that asking how to make his book a bestseller was the wrong approach: write a really good book first, then turn to self-promotion and marketing. — 00:09:02 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ For roughly the first nine months of his YouTube channel Ali put his head down and did the work instead of seeking collaborations with bigger YouTubers he knew, and he has still done few such collaborations. — 00:09:31
  • ★★★ Ali still thinks the way to grow on YouTube is to put your head down and do the work: collaborations, friendships and a network follow, while chasing a collab with a big YouTuber first skips the work. — 00:10:00

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella (quoted): Matt D'Avella famously says: be so good that you can ignore the algorithm. — 00:10:22 · Matt D'Avella

    “be so good that you can ignore the algorithm.”

  • ★★ Ali asks how his YouTube channel and businesses can get so good that they need not worry about promotion or collaborations, and says he is making this video as advice to himself on growing the channel, the business and writing his book. — 00:10:22

00:10:58 — Perseverance: the effort is enough, journey before destination

  • ★★ Ali says success can lead to failure, because the perfectionism it brings holds us back from taking risks, experimenting and growing. — 00:11:20
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): In the Ego Is the Enemy chapter "the effort is enough", Ryan Holiday says our barometer for success should be our own effort rather than its results. — 00:11:20 · Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ali prefers goals fully within his control: writing a book he is proud of and making two videos a week are; the book reaching the New York Times bestseller list or a video's views are not. — 00:11:46
  • ★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday tells how John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces was turned down by publishers and Toole took his own life; his mother got the book published and it won the Pulitzer Prize. — 00:12:14 · Ryan Holiday

  • ★★★ Ryan Holiday (quoted): Ryan Holiday concludes in Ego Is the Enemy that externals must not decide whether something was worth it, since the world is indifferent to what we want: doing the work is enough. — 00:12:56 · Ryan Holiday

    “Doing the work is enough.”

  • ★★★ Ali says he should base his self-esteem on doing the work and putting it out there, not on how others receive it; subscriber counts, views and money are externals focused on the destination. — 00:12:56

  • ★★★ Following Brandon Sanderson's "journey before destination" from The Stormlight Archive, Ali says the more we think about the journey and the less we fixate on the destination, the more we combat ego and the likelier a happy, fulfilled life. — 00:13:36 · Brandon Sanderson, The Stormlight Archive, journey before destination

00:13:56 — Books on Stoicism, Skillshare classes and a pointer to his video on Mindset

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Ego Is the Enemy · Ryan Holiday

Also: People: Brandon Sanderson · Carol Dweck · Derren Brown · James Clear · John Kennedy Toole · Marques Brownlee · Matt D'Avella · Thomas Frank · Upton Sinclair

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: A Confederacy of Dunces · Atomic Habits · Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine · Mindset · The Stormlight Archive

Organizations: LegalEagle · Linus Tech Tips · The New York Times

Concepts: beginner mindset · journey before destination · lifelong learning · negative visualisation · stoicism

Places: London

Products: Shortform

Replies to

  • refers to · The Mindset Shift That Changed My Life (original, 2021, not in this wiki)

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