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No matter where you are in life, or where you aspire to be, you’ll find yourself facing a common enemy every step of the way. Your ego.

Your ego is the voice in the back of your head that says “don’t worry about working hard, that’s for those other guys who aren’t as talented” if you’re on top it’s the voice that tells you you’re better than everyone else, and if you’ve failed it’s the voice that tells you you’re worthless and can’t recover and no one has ever been worse than you.

We all have ego in a sense, and we need to continuously try and “sweep the floor” with it. What this means is you can’t clean your house once and it’s clean forever, you need to continuously do it. The same goes for destroying our ego. It always is coming back at you. If you defeat it once, it’s not gone forever. You need to take efforts every day to eliminate it.

The book is split into three parts, Aspiration, Success, and Failure, with lessons from historical figures and cautionary tales in each part.

Here’s some of the top lessons I got from each part:

Aspiration:
Talk Talk Talk

When we decide to go on a new diet, what’s the first thing we do? Go on Facebook and tell everyone about it.
What getting props and support for setting out to do something before we even do it does is it gives your mind that little treat of validation it needs to not do anything. Your ego says you’ve already done it, because why else would people be giving you recognition for it? The truth is that we need to stop talking and start doing. Stop telling people we’re going to do something, realize if anything is going to get done, you need to do it, sit down, shut up, and do your work.

To Be Or To Do

Whenever you embark on a new journey, ask yourself: are you doing it to be somebody, or are you doing it to do something? In other words, do you only want to do something for recognition and validation, or do you actually want to make the world a better place?

Impressing people is vastly different from being impressive.

Success

Once we’ve made it to the top, or have it in our sites, and have people giving us props as big successes that made it, it’s easy for us to start thinking, oh right, I’m the greatest, I’m a God, and stop doing what we were doing to make it this far to begin with.

Failure

No one is successful forever. The one constant in the world is change and transformation. You can get absorbed in your failure, or you can use it as a springboard to bounce back to even greater success. Your ego will be what decides.

Alive Time or Dead Time

When Malcolm X was arrested for larceny and sentenced to 8-10 years in prison, he had a lot more time on his hands. He could use this time as alive time or dead time. To make it dead time, he could have came up with lists of everyone he needed to get revenge on, could have learned how to be a better criminal, could have fashioned elaborate stories on how he was a victim. Malcolm X didn’t do this. If he did, you would never have heard of him.
Malcolm X instead transformed his prison sentence into alive time and he used it to become an absorber of knowledge. Reading books teaching him about different religions, politics, and world leaders. Malcolm X turned what could have been a chance to become a more hardened criminal into time that helped him become one of the most influential African Americans in history.

The Effort Is Enough

As the Bhagavad Gita states, you have a right to your actions, not to the fruits of your actions. Your job is just to do your work, do it well, and let it be. Recognition, rewards, rejection, failure, those are just extras. By-products of the work. All we need to do is handle the process and the work, and let everything else take care of itself.

No matter what our next steps in life are, one thing is for sure, we will encounter our ego. You cannot eliminate it permanently. You can’t attack it once and then be done forever. This is a fight we need to have every day. We need to continuously ‘sweep the floor’ in order to reduce our egos power on our life.


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