EntreLeadership - #193: Ryan Holiday—Battling Ego

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

It’s an enemy we all face—wrecking careers, impeding learning, and running companies into the ground. This week’s guest, entrepreneur and best-selling author Ryan Holiday, joins us to discuss how to keep your ego in check in this age of “It’s all about me.” This is a must-listen for anyone who wants to succeed. Also on tap, EntreLeadership Vice President Daniel Tardy stops by to share tips on getting more things done in less time. entreleadership.com/podcast Summit Event Leadership Growth Assessment Tool Infusionsoft's "Automation Guide" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. We are broadcasting from the Music City, and this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. We're so thrilled to have you joining the conversation. Our feature conversation of this episode is with Ryan Holliday. He's a multi-bestselling author. We're going to focus our conversation around my favorite book of his.

It's called Ego is the enemy. And then Daniel Tarty, who is our vice president of all things, Entre leadership is going to stop by and give us more research on the ground research as our team is talking to you folks every day, a pain point on productivity. That and so much more. All right, folks, always good to have Daniel Tarty back in with us. And this is something I've really enjoyed, and I know our listeners are as well. And what we're really doing is going, okay, what are you and your team on the front lines of

Montre leadership, helping real men and women lead businesses. What are you hearing? What are their pain points? And this particular one we're going to talk about today is also consistent with our survey. As you know, last year, we did a podcast survey. We had nearly 2,500 listeners respond, which is a fantastic response. And one of the questions we asked Daniel was, what topic do you want to hear more? And one of the top three was personal productivity, productivity in the business. And so when you showed up this morning, said, okay, hey, this is one of the pain points we're going to discuss. Wow, hit the bullseye. So this idea of folks want to be more productive. That's a big word, but what I think we really

hear a lot is how do I get more done with less time? And the difference between businesses that make it and leaders who are successful and the ones who are not, clearly we know this, but it's not that they have more time in their day. You know, we all get 24 hours. So you kind of go, all right, how do I become more productive in the same amount of time with the same amount of resources that another guy maybe is not as productive? Or I look at somebody out there who's killing me in the marketplace. I'm going, how did they do that? And a lot of it can comes down to time management and productivity

and putting systems and processes in place that allow us to scale our business and lead at a new level. So how are we helping folks with that time-worn question? How do I manage my time better? Well, what we realized in doing this for years is there's three, different levels of time management. There's the level one is what I call it. It's just basic productivity, time management, stop doing the things that aren't important, stop doing the things that even if they're urgent, they don't necessarily pay the bills long term. I mean, it's kind of like your 101 time management stuff of just quit wasting time. But very quickly, you can get to a point

where you're spending the majority of your time doing things that are important, are urgent, and then you're still capped out. Let me ask you a quick follow up. How do you handle this problem. I think every leader faces this. We also face this in our personal life. Someone else's urgency is not your urgency. So they come to you and it is seriously urgent to them. But you're sitting there going, want to be respectful? I appreciate that it's urgent to you. But in reality, it's not urgent to Daniel Tarty. Well, it's important. And you've got to be careful about how you communicate to people when you tell them know that you're not going to be available for that particular thing just because it's urgent for them in that moment. The young Daniel Tarty, who is immature

and kind of crude about this stuff would just tell them to jump at a lake. And that's not good. But we don't want that. As I've learned about communication and diplomacy, there are ways to help people understand. There's boundaries on my time. And the best way that I can serve them is to say no in this moment and really try to point them to another resource where they're still getting a solution. But maybe I'm not that solution in that particular scenario.

That's really freeing, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Once you really figure that out. It's hard to do, though, because you want to be liked as a leader. You want your people to feel like you're accessible. but at the same time, if you're constantly reacting to the fires with the team or whatever's going on in the business, you're never going to get the real meaningful stuff done that only you can do as a leader. So it's a constant tension that I think leaders deal with.

So yeah, that's key. I mean, level one, you got to go, all right, I got to spend time doing things that are important and I got to quit wasting time. The Facebook alerts and the Instagram alerts and all these kind of trivial things, what can we eliminate from our life so that we can have more time to be productive. But then you're going to get maxed out again. And you've got to go to the next level, which is level two leadership, level two productivity. And that's really where you start to kind of think about systems and processes that will automate things that need to be done, but don't necessarily require you to personally do those things manually all the time.

You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. I mean, I hear this all the time from small business folks, and I'm not the expert that you guys are, but I preach process. Because if you can get process, right, then you can scale up. Then you can really focus on what I think you refer to as that level three. Yeah, so processes are huge. And of course, there's software that can help automate things. There's standard operating procedures.

That sounds kind of corporate. It makes me, you know, Twitch a little bit. But the reality is the more that you can make a process simple and repeatable, the team can start to come in and take on those things that maybe you were doing yourself before. And if you can do those things in a way that frees you up where there's still accountability, there's still checks and balances, you know, putting dashboards in place to see the right financial KPIs, you know, putting systems immediately. meetings in place so that you got the right level of accountability, but those conversations

live in this one hour meeting each week instead of just whenever it comes up on somebody's mind and they just feel right then. They got a rush in your office and interrupt you and go, hey, you got a minute. And really, you don't and you shouldn't. But if you don't have a place to batch those things to like a weekly meeting series, then there's never a good way for those things to get done, right? So, you know, I think of it this way. There's two E-word. I think people, if they can get it and what you're talking about, if people can be effective, you know this. You guys are coaching businesses that are being effective, but they're not. being their most effective. So efficiencies. So when you're an efficient team, you can be your most

effective. That's the key. Or else you're very, very frustrated. You can be effective, but the more efficient you are. Now you've got max effectiveness. And that leads to this opportunity for a leader. You talk about it. It's that level three. You have the right people, the right processes. Now, what can you do? Well, as a leader, you got to go, what is the highest level of contribution I can make? And it's not making copies. Although you should never be above that. You should always be willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. I love making copies, by the way. I do it for Eric all the time. Yeah. Well, there are just things that are kind of go for level things that have to get done. And you can never get too cool to do those things as a leader because you're going to, you're just going to come off the

wrong way with your team. And, you know, we should all have a servant heart. But as a leader, there's some things that you've got to be the one that goes to the top of the mountain and looks out across the valley and says, this is the battlefield. This is the thing we're doing in the marketplace and if we don't pivot now, we're going to die. How would you know that if you don't get up from a different vantage point and look across the land as a leader and then come down and communicate with the team about the changes that we're going to make and do the change management stuff? And, you know, there are things that if you're not doing that kind of thing as a leader, you're just going to shrivel up in your business.

And so when you can put systems in place and when you can automate and delegate concepts, it really gets a team of people doing this level one and level two stuff so that you can do the things that only a leader can do. And that's level three productivity. That's maximum contribution kind of stuff right there. And that is freedom. It's really a freeing feeling for a leader who gets to that level three because they're like, wait a second. I really can do what Daniel's talking about. I can look down and see what's going on and then I'm only doing what I'm supposed to do and hopefully if they're positioned well as the leader doing only things that they're good at. You've done a great job as you've grown in your leadership. You've got other leaders that you are

putting things on that aren't necessarily your strengths. That helps. Having great leaders is a key part of this, but let me tell you what's really hard about it. It's never convenient. No. You will never be caught up. You will never have all of your level one, level two things done. It will never be convenient to shut down on a Friday and take your leadership team and do an offsite that's just talking about core values or strategy or principles or the things that are the more important but not necessarily urgent type activities. But if you don't do that, what's going to happen? You're going to chronically stay in this tyranny, the urgent type of chaotic, responsive, reactive system all the time, and eventually businesses like that fail because you just can't sustain that forever. You know what I'm

saying? Yeah, absolutely. I've seen it a lot. Now, some things that the leader begins to do when they get, let's kind of go beyond this. Give us a vision of what it looks like or some things that leaders can do at what you're saying is this level three productivity. Well, in essence, it's what my leader talks about a lot and it's transitioning from getting paid for what you do to getting paid for what you know. And that's a big thought. Because you can do a lot of things as a leader and probably what got you in business and got you good at the thing that you're doing is being a fantastic doer, being a go-getter, being a utility player, being all in all the time, go, go, go.

But at some point, if you don't transition into doing things that are based on what you know, knowing how to make wise decisions when the stakes are high, no and when to go all in on a marketing campaign versus when to shift the budget towards something that's more effective. Those insights and perspectives don't just happen by muslin up and doing more work and putting in more hours. It comes from thinking differently. And to think differently, you have to take time away from the business, get above the business and work on it instead of working in it all the time. So what's a great suggestion to get on the business? Well, Kim, this is why we put on events and conferences. And as a student of this stuff, as a leader myself, I go to other events and conferences and we're not the only game in town by any

means we think ours are fantastic. But the reason that we do live events is to get leaders out of their element so they can work on their business instead of working in it all the time, get away from the tyranny of the urgent, and get up above it all so that they can have more perspective and start really getting paid for what they know. By getting new information, new knowledge, you can then go back and instead of just grinding it out with kind of a halfway optimized process, you can come in an overhaul an entire system that starts putting new revenue to the bottom line in a way that you never had before. And you can, hire the help that you need to do the things that you used to do so that as a leader,

you're spending more time doing what you love, less time in the trenches, fighting fires all the time, and you get to have more fun in business. That's what it's all about. I want our listeners to understand why we've expanded our event offering, because obviously we tell them about our events. We're never going to stop telling you that you need to think about our events. Obviously, for years, it was the Entree Leadership One Day, and then, of course, Entree Leadership Master Series, which is a much deeper dive multi-day event.

And then a couple years ago, we launched the summit. We're heading into our third one, May 21 through 24 in Orlando. We've been telling them a lot about it. We're going to remind them again here. But why a third offering? So we do events differently than a lot of people do. And there are plenty of great conferences. We're not here to poo-poo the competition.

But what we are very committed to is making sure that the information we teach at our events is practical. And it's being taught from people who have done something. You know, Dave started this business on a card table in his living room. And today we've got 600 employees and a major national brand. is our playbook. It's not theory. It's not hype. It's not rah-rah. It is nuts and bolts, wisdom and knowledge of how to go back and affect change instantly when you go home. And we only pick people to come in and speak at this event that we believe have those same values and who actually have the street cred that have done something with their business,

with their life, in a way that we can go, we want people to hear from them because we want to hear from them. Can we take our whole leadership team to this summit event because it's the event that we engineered and designed as a, what would we like? What would we want to experience as a leadership team so that we can go to the next level? And so that's what's really fun is our whole leadership team is there. And when we get a bunch of small business owners and leaders in the room with us, man, we're all downloading this stuff together. And we're all going back and making a big difference in our business right away. Yeah, it is interesting. I was talking to some of the team recently in the office at the Entry Leadership space. And I was just asking about the attendees.

I host this event. We're going to be doing a lot of great fun things this year, as we always do. And I found out that there's a large group attendee. You know, what I mean by that is you've got leaders that are now bringing of several people. Some groups as large as 20, 25, 30 people. And that is a little bit of a differentiator. And that's what's cool about this event. It's not just for the top leadership. It really is for key people, if I could say that, including leadership.

Of course. If you bring your team, and here's the thing, you know, we talk about familiarity breeds contempt. Well, guess what? as the leader when you're talking to your team all the time about what to do and what not to do, you just become familiar. No matter how good of a leader you are, they start to kind of tune you out. Like I've heard that a thousand times. But if you will expose your team to other events, other speakers, other content that's not just you as the leader,

beating them up all the time. I deal with this. My team rolls their eyes when I walk in sometimes. I'm giving one more speech about this thing and they go, oh, we've heard this before. That's okay. That's normal. It doesn't mean they don't respect me. It just means they're used to it.

And so we've got to disrupt the environment and go, let's all go to a conference. We're sending our marketers to a conference this weekend in San Diego, and I don't want them to hear from me about marketing. I want them to hear from our friends over at Digital Marketer and get all that information because it's new perspective, it's new ideas. And so you've got to invest in your success. You also have to invest in your team success and bring them with you to conferences like this so that you guys can dialogue and process this together after you hear this great lesson from whoever it is. Well, if you've been a long time listening to the podcast, you heard Pat Lentzioni in our last conversation say, look, as a leader, you've got to say things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until they get it. And that's why we're doing this about the summit. We want you to get it.

Because it's a great event. Robert Hershevik from Shark Tank, Simon Seneca, John Maxwell, Lou Holtz, Pat Lynchione, Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan, Christy Wright. I get to host the event. It's big, big fun. I've just been told by the team that we're doing some crazy fun, super exclusive things for the live audience. And we're going to let some of you, a lot of you, let's be honest, kind of tune in from Facebook. That's all I'm going to tell you.

It's all I'm allowed to tell you. I've got a shock collar on, will the engineer. They got a shot collar, they'll shock me if I say anything more. But it's going to be really, really fun. May 21 through 24, Summit 17 is one phrase that really does pay. Summit 17, if you text that to 33444, we're going to give you $300 off. $300 for you of a podcast listener. Summit 17, it's one word, text it to 33444.

You'll get a link back. The team will take care of you. You'll be in good hands. You can ask any question that you could possibly imagine. The event's going to sell out. We're already tracking towards that. It's at the gorgeous JW Marriott. And maybe you podcast listeners, if you come in your big podcast,

maybe Eric the producer and I will get in the lazy river with you. And we'll just link up and we'll float down and have a great conversation. I don't know. It could happen. It could happen. I don't know. We're not going to guarantee that, but it could happen. I'd like to witness that.

That sounds like a lot of fun. What we'll do is we'll take the GoPro. And, uh, here we go. There it is. And we'll just have a fun float. It's the lazy river. We'll have some business leadership conversation as we float down. So there you go.

Hey, we should tell them the JW Marriott actually is sold out in hotel rooms, but we've got some overflow properties. I mean, this thing, we don't kid around like when it fills up. It fills up. So we've got a few tickets left for the conference. Be sure that you can still jump in and get on those. And then our team will kind of set you up with here's a hotel right next door that you can get plugged in.

Right. Now I'm not at the motel 6, am I? Can we confirm that I'm at the JW? Oh, boy. I don't like where this is going. Okay, hey, it's always good to have you in here, David. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun.

I appreciate it. What do we got coming up? Some other pain points maybe we might be thinking about. You got something for us? Well, I got to tell you, we love talking to our podcast listeners and real businesses in the marketplace. So email us. If you want to get on the phone with us and our team go, this is what we're dealing with.

Please talk about this more. I'd love to take that phone call. I'd love to hear from you guys, and then we'll bring that back in and talk about it next time we're on. Here's how you sign up for that. It's a simple email communique. Can you say that? I don't know.

I'm feeling very crazy today. That's kind of hipster. It kind of is. Just email us. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com. See you soon, buddy. All right, folks, Daniel and I were talking about productivity and how big of a pain point it is.

So if you're talking about fixing pain around productivity, you have to put a lot of time and effort into another P word. Process. You show me any organization that has pain points around productivity, efficiency in the office. I'm going to show you an organization. that needs to fix their processes. It's that simple. Sometimes that's the only issue. But sometimes it isn't.

But process, process, process. You figure out your process, you're going to be more productive. And our friends at a diffusion soft, this is what they specialize in. That's why we work with them. These folks are helping small businesses win every day by taking processes and they're automating them for you and they're helping you win. So the tool this month is the Small Business Office Automation Guide. This is awesome.

This is like going to see the Wizard of Oz. Now, some of you out there have no idea what the Wizard of Oz is. You can look that up later and the analogy will make sense. For the rest of you, you know what I'm talking about. You can hear the music in the background. When you get a guide to say, hey, how can we automate operations and processes in our office? Why wouldn't you jump on that? Interesting stat.

Listen to this. According to Alternative Board, entrepreneurs are saying that they spend 68% of their time managing daily tasks. in their business instead of working on the business strategy and goals. That's heartbreaking. I mean, collectively right now I can hear people's foreheads hitting the wall because you're going, I'm in that 68%. So Infusionsoft is going to help you.

It's a free ebook. It's going to help you automate things like data entry, billing, extremely necessary paperwork, appointments, follow-up, employee hiring, training. that's just a sample of the things that you can automate to make you more efficient. If you're in that 68%, you need this. If you don't think you're in that 68%, guess what? You're probably wrong. You need this anyway.

So here's what you do. It's a free ebook. Go to infusionsoft.com slash office dash automation. I know that's a little long, so check this out. Infusionsoft.com slash office dash automation. and if you're like me, you checked out at Dash Automation, just go to this episode's show notes and click on the link. This is a must get.

Get on it. Folks, I'm going to tell you this. Ryan Holiday is brilliant. This book, Ego is the Enemy, is a must read for anybody who wants to do anything that matters. That's all of you. That's why you listen to this podcast. So I went back, and I just wanted to look up the dictionary definition of ego.

But I do think it's the context that's important when you think about a title like ego is the enemy, and then you dive into this book. And very simply put, the definition is it is a sense of self-importance, a sense of yourself identity. So ego in and of itself, right? The definition, the concept, the function of the brain that we refer to as ego, there's nothing wrong with ego. But if ego gets out of balance, man, it is true.

tragic. And on the inside front cover of Ryan's book, Ego is the Enemy, he writes this, and I'm going to read it to you because it sets you up beautifully for our conversation. And here's what he writes. Ego is the most common enemy that we all face. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults, and so future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. Wow, think about that. I mean, those are the three phases that all of us are going to walk through. Sometimes we straddle them. Right? Those early moments in career, or let's just take that a little bit further, early moments in your new business, early moments in a new venture, early moments in new learning seasons. Then there's the success.

And then failure. We're all going to walk through that. Certainly entrepreneurs are going to face that almost on a cyclical basis. So really getting an understanding of how ego is our enemy, how to keep it in check in those important seasons of our life is wildly important. You need to really focus in on this conversation and get this book. You're going to be better. I promise you for this. Here is my conversation.

with Ryan Holiday. It's wrecked the careers of promising young geniuses. It's evaporated great fortunes and run companies into the ground. It's made adversity unbearable and turned struggle into shame. Its name, ego, and it is the enemy of ambition of success of resilience. It is an internal opponent warned against by every great philosopher in our most lasting stories and countless works of art in every culture and every age. Ryan Holiday in the book entitled, Ego is the Enemy, you fight to destroy it. It is a haunting book

for anybody that has a heartbeat to do anything that matters. This is must reading. It's from the back of the book I just read. And Ryan, let's just start there. What a great statement. Why this book? I read a lot. I read a lot of self-help books. I love them. I love philosophy, history. but what I found is that almost every great work is sort of telling you how awesome you are, how you can do more, you can be amazing. And I think that's important, but one of the ironies is most of the people that pick up those books don't need to hear that again. They need to be warned against ego, against arrogance, against overconfidence, these sort of things.

And, you know, I've seen that in my own career. I was the director of marketing in American Apparel for a long time. I watched a company that was once worth over a billion dollars, you know, go literally to zero. I watched the founder lose something like half a billion dollars, his own personal wealth. So I've seen what that unchecked ego can do. And so I wanted to write a book about that because I felt like it really hadn't been done before. So good. Now, before we go further into the book, I've got to ask you, I'm a big history nut as well.

So from philosophers, great men and women from history, who comes to mind as somebody who was able to keep their ego in check? Well, philosophically, the wisest man who ever lived is widely known as Socrates, right? He's, you know, the wise man of Athens. And he's considered wise because he knows what he doesn't know or he knows that he knows nothing. So what I think you actually find with some of the wisest people have ever lived, even in some cases, the most powerful people. And what you find beneath that power and beneath that position is a sort of an intellectual humility, right? There's a line from epictal, Titus, he says, you know, one cannot learn that, which they think they already know. I think you find this in heavyweight champions, you find this in billionaires, you find this in great artists. If you believe that you're amazing, that you're the best there ever was, it actually prevents you from growing. It prevents you from getting better, and it prevents you from getting to that wisdom in the first place. If you think you know everything, by definition, you do not go on a journey to learn more. And so that's what I'm talking about in the book. And I think that's what

Oracle was saying about Socrates. He knows what he doesn't know or he knows how little he knows, and that's what makes him smarter than all the people who think they know everything. That's right. It's so true. We all know this. The great achievers in life are learners. They just never stop learning. You address that in the third chapter, become a student. All right, now, folks, this is a fantastic little book. And what Ryan does here is he has three main sections, aspire, success, and failure. And what's fun about this, Ryan, is that in each three sections, there's three chapters that wrap the section up. They're all entitled for everything that comes next. Ego is the enemy. It's fantastic stuff. So folks, what I'm going to do is, you know,

I like to do this. I'm going to pull out a couple chapters that really jumped out to me. It's an incredible read. You need to digest the whole thing. But I'm going to pull a few things out, and I want to start with follow the canvas strategy. This is a great little idea. I want you to unpack this. Yeah. So that idea came from my own sort of unusual journey to success. I dropped out of college at basically 20 years old. I was an apprentice for a great writer named Robert Green, wrote a book called A 48 Laws of Power. Then I started a very low-level position at a talent agency, and then another low position at American Apparel. And what I find in those positions, the way to be successful is, you know, not to do what you see in the movies, which is to be this brilliant whiz kid

or to play the office politics, but it's to actually find where you can contribute in an area that no one else is contributing and not care about credit, right? If you can make yourself indispensable to the organization or particularly to one person in the organization, that's what I've found is a great strategy. So I think, you know, in this social media age, it's all about telling everyone what we know. It's about branding ourselves. It's about doing all this public-facing stuff. And we forget, you know, someone like Bill Belichick, right, the coach of the New England Patriots, arguably the greatest coach in the history of football. He takes his first job with the Baltimore Colts working for free. And he's like an unpaid assistant. He gets really good at breaking

down film. And as he breaks down this film and he finds his little insights, he's going to each different coach and saying, hey, what about this? Hey, I found this. And he's giving them these insights. And so you can imagine he starts to get paid very soon and he works his way up through the ranks and then eventually is, you know, the Bill Belichick, we know him today. But it's so hard, you know, there's this movement today against unpaid internships, people, you know, hey, I went to Harvard, I shouldn't start at the bottom. But, you know, that is actually the best way not only to learn to suppress the ego, but it's the best way to make yourself, I think, indispensable to an organization. Yeah, a couple things I want to point out and then let you comment on it, Ryan.

Two things that you just suggested in that answer that I want you to comment on for our audience. It's really, really huge. Number one, Ryan Holiday dropped out of school with it. There's this huge pressure on families and kids to go get a four-year degree. As you know this, Ryan, it is creating a unbelievable mountain of debt for our collective young people in America. They feel like, oh, I've got to go get a four-year degree to be successful. And to your point, they think they need a really high-paying job or they deserve it when they get out. Second thing is, on the Bill Belichick example, not only did he start for free and work his way up, but he was an abject failure in his first head coaching job with the Cleveland Browns. He was terrible.

I want you to comment on both of those things. I think with college, college is a good default option, but you have to know why you're going to college, what you're trying to learn there. It's a very expensive place to find yourself. You know what I mean? Oh, it is. As soon as it became clear to me that I wanted to be a writer, what I worked towards was finding a writer I could work for who could show me how this job really works. And I remember when he offered me this job, I was sort of sitting there and, you know, I told my parents I wanted to drop out. They were very upset about it. But I, I remember thinking, I'm going to graduate in two years.

It was a little less than that, but I'm going to graduate. And on graduation day, if I had this job offer in hand, would I consider college's success? And the answer was yes. So why would I pay an extra two years unnecessarily to get that when I could always go back to school after if that didn't work out? So you've got to know what you're trying to do so you can either get the most out of college or you can avoid racking up debt unnecessarily. And then, yeah, I think with Belichick, he takes his job for free. And he sees, you know, who knows why it didn't work in Cleveland. It could have been management.

It could have been a number of things. It could have just been he wasn't ready and it was a great educational experience for him. But I think that's what the Canvas strategy is all about is learning what you can, seeing everything as an opportunity to add to your repertoire, your experience, and to carry that forward with you. Ideally, you want to be learning on, you know, we pay to go to college. I'd rather get a job where I'm not getting paid a ton, but I am learning a ton. they're paying me to get an education.

That's how I want to think about it. All right, folks, before we move out of Follow the Canvas Strategy, that chapter, there's a challenge on page 53 at the bottom of the page. I'm going to read it and let Ryan speak about it. But this in my mind is not only for us, but parents, grandparents, teachers. If you have any kind of influence over young people, not just ourselves, we need to be reiterating this message on a daily basis. This is so good.

Here's the three things that you say, Ryan, are great when we're starting out. Number one, you're not as good or as important as you think you are. Number two, you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted. And three, most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong. Now, that's heresy to some people, but I think those are three solid points. Well, look, you're 21 years old. You just left college. You just graduated.

That's the extent of your life experience. So all this information that you've gotten, however good it is, you already put a disproportionate amount of importance on it, and you're disproportionately proud of that accomplishment because it's your only one to date. So there's often, it's not actually, you know what, it's not just college. I talk to a lot of college coaches, because my books have become popular in sports and professional sports, and professional sports coaches, whether it in the NFL or NBA, they tell me this too. The problem with athletes coming into the pros and coming into colleges, up until that point, they were the best in their group at what they did, and now they're in a group with people who are just.

just as good as them. And they kind of need to, they need that wake-up call to go, hey, I've got to grow or die here. I can't continue to be who I was and expect to get the same level of results because I'm now performing in a much more difficult league. And if you can't take that adjustment, if you're not humble enough to accept, oh, there's still a lot left for me to do. I got to get better. You're going to get left behind very quickly. All right. We're going to skip ahead. The next chapter I want to focus on is get out of your own head. This is so good. I got to lead in with the quote that Ryan gives at the top of the chapter. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. That is by

Alan Watts. What are you challenging us here? Because we all tend to live inside of our head at the wrong times. And boy, this is a great message. What do you want us to take away from this? Well, I think this is a problem particularly endemic to creative people, to ambitious people, the smart people. Look, there's a certain part of the population that's just sitting on their couch right now and they're not thinking about anything. But then, you know, the people who are listening to this podcast who care about self-education, about pushing themselves, you are the kind of person who thinks about things. And that asset can also become a liability if you're overthinking things, right? If you are obsessed with how great you are, if you're obsessed with what you're, you're you're trying to accomplish. If you're obsessed about how you planned it out in your head, these cause a lot of problems for people. A great example of this is like Kanye West, right? Super brilliant performer, incredibly talented artist. But, you know, he says things like, I'm the next Steve Jobs or, you know, I'm the greatest there ever was. And this is what, I imagine it's that same voice that tells him to get up on stage at the Grammys in,

interrupt Taylor Swift or to say something offensive or poorly thought out. So what happens, I think, and I'm guilty of this myself, is that our mind is our greatest weapon, but it's also our greatest liability in that it can get carried away with itself. It can get obsessed with itself, or it can get caught in these patterns. And you want to break out from that, definitely. And that's what Alan Watts is saying. It's like, you can't live in your head all the time because your head has to exist in reality, and that's other people, that's the physical world, that's all these other things that you don't control.

And I just want people to make sure they're being. realistic and aware of what's going on around them, not caught up in their own head. Yeah, I want to do a follow-up here because I'm the same way. Sometimes I can over-analyze the stew out of something. And then finally, I'll have enough bravery. Or maybe it's just, you know, a cry out to my wife who has a great sense of just understanding when I'm overthinking something. And she can bring me back to reality.

Curious, Ryan, what do you do when you feel like I am way inside my head? This is like foosball, non-stop, got to get out. How do you get some reality or perspective? I'll give you a really good example of this actually. I was swimming the other day and there was this business thing that I've been struggling with, a sort of an interaction with a person, they did something and I was sort of upset by it. And I was planning out like, I'm going to say this. And then I'm thinking, well, they'll probably say this. And I mapped it out like 20 back and force in my head. It ruined my whole workout. I spent the whole hour thinking about it. And then as I got out of the pool, it occurred to me that this person probably hasn't put one. ounce of thought into this whole thing. I just spent an hour obsessing about how we're going to do this and then there's this and how they're probably thinking that. And then it occurred to me that I'm the only one doing this and that if I let it go, if I lived more in the present moment, if I just watched where this thing went and I wasn't so paranoid about what it might mean and all this,

that not only would I be happier, the situation might just resolve itself. So it's sort of reminding yourself, hey, you know, is there actually another person on the other? side of this or is this all in my head? Am I making this into something because that's my brain, that's my muscle sort of doing what it likes to do? Or is there actually something here? And I think you find often that there isn't. Yeah. That's rich. The folks, the sound you heard faintly in your ears were my toes being stepped on. That was, boy, that is truth. That's transparent. This is the man right here. The guy who wrote this, he's in the pool. By the way, that's not good because the only thing you can hear, you know what I mean? Your ears are plugged up and it's totally hear your thoughts. That's good.

All right. So much in this book. I'm skipping ahead. Let's go to meditate on the immensity. One of my favorite chapters. Again, I'm going to allow you to set this thought up and then I'll follow up. Well, it's actually my favorite chapter in the book too. It's easy to think that we live at the greatest time in history, that we live in the most important time in history, that everything that's going on right now really matters. And of course it does. But, But there's a certain ego and self-centeredness to that. And what I want people to do, I think one of the most effective antidotes to ego, is to go out into nature. You know, if you're standing in Yosemite or Yellowstone or you're staring out at the ocean on a beach at night,

it's very hard to feel like you're the center of the universe because it's so obvious that you're not. You're not even the most important thing in the universe. You barely even matter in this enormous universe. So I think, as a lover of history, I'm sure you would agree, you know, you pick up a biography of a president from 100 years ago, it helps you relax maybe about the current political situation because you realize things have always been contentious. And we've always thought that we were at the end of the world or that so-and-so was evil or horrible. And so it helps you relax and it helps you take some of your, you know, we only know what we're thinking inside our own bodies.

And by experimenting with another viewpoint or another perspective, it can counteract that a little bit. Yeah, it's so good. And you're right about that. But here's the other thing that you point out in this chapter. Once we get that we're this infinitesimal speck, and I once heard a speaker say that, he was talking about space. He was doing a talk on space and humility and comparing just the vastness of the universe as you touched on. And we essentially as humans are this infinitesimal spec in the greater universe. And when we get that, it does take pressure off. But it also allows us when we can, this idea of meditation, it doesn't have to be this monk type style thing. But the idea of just thinking. thinking and getting out there, you point out that it allows us to get drawn naturally to the big questions, which is, who am I? Maybe even more importantly, what am I doing? Why am I doing it? And understanding that you are a small part, but you do have a distinct role, that's a big part of this process as well. Yeah, I think so. So look, you're standing on a beach and you're looking at the ocean, it makes you feel small. But it also drowns out all the trivial noise of everyday life

and lets you ask yourself, what am I doing here? Is what I'm doing mattering? How can it matter more? You know, I work a lot. I get stressed out. I really do think that my books are important and I love them. And I live on a farm outside Austin and the other day. And this is a thought I have a lot.

You know, I looked out and I saw these pet donkeys. And these donkeys were just standing there in the yard, just staring. And it occurred to me, you know, it seemed funny. It's like, what are you doing? You're standing there. And then it occurred to me that it's being a donkey. Like, its job is just to be alive. It has no, it doesn't have to go to work.

It doesn't have to pay taxes. You know, it doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be alive. And then, you know, it's sort of a reminder that, oh, wait, that's my job, too. Like, I, none of these things that I think are so important really are important. My job is to be, you know, good person, is to fulfill my obligations as a human being. it's not to move these numbers around or arrange these words in a certain way. So I think it's very humbling, but then also clarifying at the same time.

Yeah, that's a great statement. I'm going to follow up on that. But at first I've got to say this, living in Nashville has a lot of benefits. I just recently learned, Ryan, that donkeys are really good at protecting other animals from coyotes. Apparently they... That's why I have them. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah.

So the jackasses get a bad name, but even jackasses have some type of role in this world. So that's very encouraging for you. Jackasses out there. Look for your coyotes. Yep. Now you don't get that kind of wisdom anywhere else, do you, Ryan? I mean, I just dropped a bomb on these people. I hope they can recover from that homespun wisdom.

But here we go. I want to follow up to what you just said. And this is, again, page 141, an enormously, I think, valuable two sentences. And you write, creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world. revolves around you. So in a book entitled, Ego is the Enemy, that's a great thought. I think one of the tracks that I get into as a writer is like, I'll be thinking about something, I'll be working on it, and maybe it's not going as well as I would like it to be.

You know, your instinct is to work harder and harder to make it work, when in reality, oftentimes the solution is to step away, right? It's to go exercise, it's to go for a walk, it's to hang out with friends, or it's just to read. You know, one of the hardest parts about being a writer is realizing one of the best things you can do is not be writing because that's how you learn and discover what you want to write about. And I think this is true for a lot of things. You can't force these things with sheer will the way that maybe your ego wants you to. Even with your career, you think it's like, I got to be meeting people and doing an amazing job. I have to, all these things when actually probably your greatest asset is time. You know, it's showing up every

day, putting in the work and being patient. You know, that's a less ego-driven strategy. And in And in fact, you kind of need to be in control of your ego to be able to be patient. All right. We're going to jump ahead. Page 195, maintain your own scorecard is the name of the chapter. What's the challenge? Well, the challenge is to have your own definition of success. You know, Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men, most successful investors who ever

lives, says, look, you've got to live by an inner scorecard, not an outer scorecard. And that's true, right? He could do all the research on a given company or a stock. make a bet, and then, you know, the company could go bankrupt or there could be a natural disaster that damages a company or the CEO could die. A number of things could happen that would on paper make it seem like that was not successful. But if instead you're motivated, was this a sound investment based on the information that I had at the time, it is successful. Again, working with coaches and athletes, what's so refreshing about sports is you have to come to terms with the fact that you could

do everything right and lose. Right? In the course of an 82 game basketball season, a team that's at 500 is going to lose 40 games, right? So losing 40 times is humbling. And I think for the rest of us who don't do that, you don't have such a clear definition of success and failure at a job or as an author or as an entrepreneur, you can feel like because something didn't make money or it didn't get the critical reception that you

wanted that it's a failure. and that is a recipe for unhappiness. You have now decided that somebody else gets to decide whether you were successful or not. And I think you want to get away from that if you can. All right. I want to ask you about stoicism. I recently interviewed Tim Ferriss. He's made stoicism somewhat popular.

Obviously, you're a student of it as well. And I want to ask you to talk to our audience of business leaders, personal growth junkies, people that are going for it. Give us something practical that you use from stoicism and how it can help her audience. Leo's Eni is a book, I would say it's based on stoicism. It's not actual stoic philosophy. It's based on it. The definition of stoic philosophy is, you know, it's this ancient philosophy from Greek and Roman times. You know, it had practitioners like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, but my sort of definition of stoicism, and I think this is a very practical exercise. And it's one you hear Marcus Aurelius tell himself over and over again in his

famous journal. But he says, basically, you don't control what happens to you in life. You control how you respond. And again, this isn't a philosophy that tells you about all these complicated metaphysics or it's, you know, these complicated exercises that, you know, make you question whether reality exists or not or whatever. It's just really practical. And so it's saying, look, you don't control what other people do, but you control how you respond to that. You don't control the weather, but you control what you do with the weather. You know, you control the plans you make around it. You don't control if someone insults you, but you control whether you let that hurt your feelings or not. And so this exercise, I think, is incredibly empowering.

And it's the one thing in a way that's true in every situation, right? You don't control when you die, but you control how you live your life. You don't control where you are born, but you control where you decide to end up, right? All these things ultimately are within your power if you decide to let them. and it says, hey, don't spend your time complaining, whining, trying to change the things that you can't change, focus entirely on what you do, which is your response. Okay, I want to ask you this. I went through the book a little bit. Now I'm kind of popcorned some things as I was preparing those things I wanted to just get you to weigh in on.

And I want you to talk about what you've learned, obviously you've written this book, Ego is the Enemy. You've studied on this topic. You're working on it in your own life. for those who maybe have a little bit naturally larger ego. Is this a myth? Is anyone's ego larger than another? What's driving that? And just curious for you to just want to theorize on that from your own thoughts on the way to get a true mirror.

I think it has to start with what is my ego? What's my default ego? Is that? Well, look, I hope this doesn't come across as like I wrote this book about ego because I don't have one and I'm telling people not to have. one. It's that I think actually the more ambitious you are, the more you're trying to accomplish, the more there's going to be a little ego there. You've got to have, if you think you can do these crazy things, like think about how crazy it is to want to be president, right? Like to think there's the most powerful man in the world and that you deserve to be that person. In a way,

that that's all ego. But we also know that being egotistical while you're in office is a recipe for being really bad at that job. And I think that's true for. all things, right? To think that at 20 years old, as a college dropout, that I could write books, there's a little ego there. But when I'm sitting alone at my computer trying to write, if my ego is telling me that this is the greatest thing that's ever been made, that I'm God's gift to humanity, that the world is going to receive this work rapturously, I am doing that work a massive disservice. And so that's why I think ego is so bad. And I think that one of the ways you manage ego is all things are a balance, right? Aristotle has this concept of the golden mean, where he says that

basically all virtues are a midpoint between two vices. So he's saying that courage, for example, is halfway between cowardice, on the one hand, and recklessness on the other hand. It's right there in the middle. And so what I think we're saying is it's not that being confident is bad, it's that being egotistical is bad, just as having crippling self-doubt or feeling like you're a loser and that you can't do anything, that's bad too. So what we're trying to get is somewhere in the middle where we've got an honest, accurate understanding of what our strengths are,

but we're not blind to our weaknesses either. And we're careful and we have clarity around that. That's what we're trying to accomplish. That's really good. I'm sitting here thinking through this and I'm thinking in terms of my 11-year-old, how do you break this down? Yeah.

And I'm going to test this on you. Healthy ego is when belief is the fuel versus assumption. I don't assume I'm the best. I don't assume, I believe, is that helpful? Is that a good exercise? I think that's great. Look, I like running as well. Just because I think that I can run a thousand miles doesn't mean that I can run them.

But the fact that, hey, I ran five miles yesterday, I can reasonably extrapolate from that. Hey, I could probably do 10. It would be harder. And I might be challenged by this. But I think that I can do it because I know that I've put in the training. I know that I don't quit easily. You know, I know that I have the motivation, these things. So I think a way to put it about ego might be that if you don't believe you can do something,

you probably can't do it. Right. But just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean you can do it. And often ego is the latter part where it's just, of course I can do this. And we really haven't thought about what it entails. And that's why we're actually going to be less likely to be able to do it. You know, what you just said makes me ask a question, and this is it. Have we created a false, a synthetic ego?

among our kids in 2017 when it's always like, Johnny, you can do whatever you want. And we pound that message into these kids. And they may not even have a giant ego, but they've been told their whole life they can do whatever they want to do. And I love basketball. I'm 5'9 white guy who can't jump.

And no matter how much I practice, Ryan, you know this. I'll never be able to dunk the ball on a 10-foot goal. I got a lower to 8.5 around my kids. That's the only way it's happening. Or a trampoline. Are we creating a synthetic false ego among our young people? Well, I think the impulse of encouraging is great. I think what matters is how you do it. So Carol Dwork has this amazing book called Mindset. She focuses on what she calls the

growth mindset. So your kid does well, and I just had a kid, so I think about this a lot. Your kid does well on a test. Do you say you did well because you're so smart? Or do you say you did well because you worked really hard? So the first one, to me, that's ego. That's like, you did well because you're inherently intrinsically amazing. And the other one says, you did good because you'd put in the time, you put in the effort, you studied, you know, you took it seriously. And those are things that you can scale, that you can grow. You can't beat, if you think that you did well because you're just biologically awesome, you're never going to challenge yourself either because you just think you have it. You don't realize that it's part

of the work that you did. So I think making that distinction is the difference between real earned confidence and that synthetic ego that you're talking about. That's really good. All right, I want to go back. I made a note. You said something to the top of our conversation about your time at American Apparel. And you kind of referenced a pretty big fall. Without, you know, again, we're not looking, this is not, you know, National Enquirer leadership podcast. Give us a sense because we have a lot of people out there who are listening in that are running businesses.

Some several hundred employees, some, you know, 10 to 15. There, something happened there and you referenced it. And again, this speaks to ego because you touched on it. Give us the warning sign. What happened in that situation that we can learn from? Well, clearly it was a lot of factors. Some of them were market-based. Some of them were personality.

Some were leadership. But I'll say one thing that struck me is sort of, I feel like I kind of made myself a student of that story and that trajectory quite a bit. One thing that always struck me is that on its face, the company is an insane idea, right? It's like, hey, we're going to make our own clothes in America. We're going to pay people a reasonable wage.

we're not going to do branding, we're going to do our own advertising, we're going to do all this stuff. And everyone said it was crazy and then it worked, right? And to a degree, that's kind of entrepreneurship is like everyone says you shouldn't do something, you do that thing, and then you're successful. So that's great. That's inspiring and motivational. But the problem is you want to make sure that you don't take from that the wrong lesson. This is what we were just saying about story. Did you take from that that, hey, we're playing with fire a little bit here, that we challenged expectations, that it was an uphill battle, that we got through it because we were creative and we did the work and all this stuff. Or do you say, nobody else knows what they're talking about,

I'm a genius, right? And I think there was a little bit of that in American Apparel. It's like, when you get so used to bucking every single convention, you lose track of where the line is, what you should do and what you shouldn't do, what's reasonable, what's unreasonable, what the analysts and the investors are advising versus what you want to do. And so you want to to make sure that, like, look, sometimes when everyone tells you that you're wrong, they're wrong. But often when everyone says that, hey, that's a really bad idea, they're right and you should listen to them. And so I think that what ego can lose is the ability to discern good advice from bad advice, conservatism from being a hater. Not everyone who tells you not to do something is a

hater. Sometimes they really are looking out for you. Well, that's true. Now, we've talked a lot about our conversation, obviously, around the book is centered around this, things we need to watch out for, things we need to do, perspective, we need to have. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on inner circle in helping with this, because I've got some guys around me, thankfully, that it just doesn't matter, no matter what impressive thing I get to be a part of or whatever, if I start to have a big head, I will immediately shrink around them because I know they'll hammer me. They love me. They're some of my closest friends. I think that's a huge, huge thing. Do you agree? And if so, what does your inner circle look like?

And how do you, because you've had stunning success, how do you guard against that using friends? Well, thank you. You absolutely have to have a network of people who are willing to challenge you, and we're willing to push you to be better, who are willing to tell you when something you're working on is not up to the level that your other work is. I think that's very important. I wrote an article a few years ago where I said, you know, I hate this idea that like being married or being in a relationship is like holds you back from success. I think it's the opposite. I think having been with my now wife for 10 years, she's been through all of it with me. And she's my sounding board.

She's the person that I get advice from. She's the one who tells me, you know, you're being an idiot here. You know, this isn't a big deal or whatever. So I think that's really important. And there's another thing that I like, I think it's a quote from Hemingway. He was talking to F. Scott Fitzgerald about reviews. And he says, basically, if you read the good reviews, you've got to read the bad reviews, too. So you can't just let the stuff you like go to your head.

You also have to go out there and actively seek out that criticism. Another way to think about it is like, if you're the smartest person in the room, in most of the rooms that you're in, you're not challenging yourself. You're not staying in that student mindset. And you're going to start to naturally feel like you're the smartest person around because it's true. And so I think you want your inner circle to be filled ideally with people who are better than you, not just. people who are dependent on you. Let me do a follow up there because I agree with everything you just said. Although in the back of my mind I got Seth Godin in my head, who I think we interviewed a year

or so ago and he was talking about this idea of not reading your negative reviews. So I'm going to put that back to you not to create, you know, I just think this is healthy conversation because on one hand, I think you have to make sure that, as you said, we can't be the smartest person in the room. We can't just believe all the good reviews. But if we've got a good circle of friends around us who keep us grounded as you were talking about. What is the benefit of reading this vicious review? Because I kind of agree with Seth as well, meaning I'd rather have truth tellers around me and not rely on reviews, positive or

negative. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think that was Hemingway's point. He was saying don't read the reviews at all. But if you're going to read these good ones that puff you up, you've got to seek out the other one. So I try not to read reviews, period. But what I do value is the feedback from people who have done things that I admire or respect or I want, not just from my inner circle, but from my more immediate surrounding circle, I want to know from people, like, let's say with my books, that somebody who's done real things in their life read the book and they say, hey, this stands up, this jives with my experience. That's what I'm looking for feedback from people that I respect good or bad, as opposed to say, how many copies did it sell

as a measure of success because it could sell a lot of copies but be totally wrong. Whereas if it's worked for an NFL coach who's won a Super Bowl, I think, you know what, I probably got at least something right. Yeah. You touched on something that's working. No question about it. Yeah. That has to be rewarding when you get champions of sport going, hey, this is some good stuff right here. That has to feel good. It's definitely rewarding, but I think it goes also to the point that we're talking about here, which is that doesn't change me as a person. You know, doesn't make me, I think you want to remember, hey, that's the work. That says something about the work. It's like you driving a really nice car. It doesn't say anything about you. Just like if

that car got repossessed and you were driving a less nice car, that wouldn't say anything about you as a person. So you want to make sure, you know, what if my next book is way ahead of its time and everyone hates it, but in a hundred years, everyone loves it? Does that mean the book was a failure? of course not. So I have to remind myself that it actually almost none of this stuff matters. What matters is, did it meet your own internal standards? And that goes to the inner outer scorecard conversation. All right, I've got to ask before I let you go. What are you thinking about, dreaming about? If you can't tell us, we get it. But I love to ask this question, what are you challenged by? Or you've got a project you're working on that we can be thinking about and anticipating.

So the big thing I'm focused on right now, other than the philosophy stuff, is like, I'm reacting very strongly against, you know, everyone trying to make something that's popular right now. Like, right, I want to be on the bestseller list. I want to be on the top of the app store or the podcast list or whatever. I'm focused on so many of the things that I like are old. They're 50 years old or 100 years old or 10 years old. How do you make work that stands the test of time perennially relevant? That's, to me, the ultimate standard that I've been thinking about a lot right now. Oh, I love that. This is the law of John Boyd. I just made it up. That's chapter 3. two, I believe in the book, to be or to do. You really talk about that in a big way. I didn't think about that connection, but that's exactly what he's saying. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, really great. I can't leave our listeners hanging, Ryan. We got to go there. John Boyd, I'd never heard of him. And this guy, one of the most influential, I don't know if you'd call it strategist when it comes to certainly aerial attacks. You got to tell that story real quick, because to be or to do, this was the first time in the book when I was like, ouch. Well, so John Boyd was a fighter pilot, one of the greatest fighter pilots who ever lived, and then he went on to work at progressively higher positions inside the U.S. military, eventually at the Pentagon. And he was known mostly as a sort of a groomer of young men who have then gone on to be very successful inside politics and the military in the defense department. And he would give them this speech.

He would say, look, you've got a lot of potential. People admire you. People think you're going to have a choice at a certain point. He says, to be or to do. And what he meant by that was, are you going to be powerful and important and fancy and make a lot of money or, you know, be in the media a lot? Or are you going to make a real difference? Are you going to do the unpopular things that need to be done? Are you going to work behind the scenes?

Are you going to have real impact with your work? And he's like, so to be or to do, what matters to you? And I think that's something we always want to ask ourselves. Am I doing this because I think it's going to get me more Twitter followers or am I going to do this because I think it's going to help more people? Am I doing this because I can buy a nicer house, or am I doing this because it's what I truly care about and what I think matters? And that's that question that I think we can ask ourselves on a daily basis even. Yeah, so good. Folks, you could tell, I love the book.

And, Ryan, I got to tell you, I have on my list now are to read everything you've written previous to this. This was the first book of yours that I read. I love it. If I get near Austin, I might just harass you. Maybe two or three emails. I'll stop at that. You can come see the donkeys. I'll show you how.

how they protect cattle. So that really is true. I kind of threw that out there, and you verified it instantly. That's good. I mean, that's why I have them. So we have a few cows and stuff, and our neighbors got a donkey, and then all of a sudden all the coyotes started showing up at our place, so we had to get one, keep kicking them further out into the country.

I got to ask you this. Is it a thing where they sense the coyotes and they go after them? No, it's more like they don't like anything running around, so, like, we can't let our dog near the donkeys because the donkeys won't. They're just really possessive and they're very friendly and nice, but they just don't like anything nearby them. They're very attuned to threats, like a guard dog, basically. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's so great. It's very cool. Donkeys get a bad name. They get a bad name, right? We always talk about thoroughbreds versus donkeys. Donkeys are very valuable. They are. They're actually very cheap, too. I think we got this one on Craigslist for $100.

Now, folks, this is why you come to the Entry Leadership podcast to learn nuggets like that. $100 will get you a great donkey and protect the rest of your livestock. So there you go. Exactly. Let me tell you that, folks. I'm going to tell you that. Ryan is a great thinker. This book, I think, is must read.

I'm going to go get the rest of them. We'll have him back on to further dive into stuff. Ego is the enemy is the book. He is Ryan Holiday to learn anything and everything about him. Ryan Holiday.net. And he's on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Ryan Holiday. so check him out. Ryan, listen, I could literally talk to you for several hours, but that would be

inefficient for both of us. I really have learned a lot from this, and I know our audience has. We appreciate you hanging out with us. Thank you so much for having me. All right, folks, the Entrate Leadership Team has a new tool for the month of April. They're calling it our Leadership Growth Assessment, specifically focusing in on helping you develop the leaders within your team. Now, just a quick note. Hopefully you as the leader know how important it is that you continue to grow and developing yourself so that you can develop the leaders around you and then they do the same. You want to be reproducing yourself. They need to be reproducing themselves. And here's the thing. And I know this to be true. This is without debate, you cannot grow until you know where you

need to grow. You can try to grow and try to develop, but the reality is, is if you're not specific and focused in on areas where you need to grow, then you're really essentially being inefficient and sometimes wasting your time. So this is going to help your team figure out where they need to grow. So a few things that this download is going to give you. Descriptions of the four characteristics you need to look for in leaders and potential leaders. They're going to give you ways to develop those leaders once you decide who they are and who you need to be developing.

and then an assessment to help you communicate and get on the same page on where they need to grow. Again, this is huge. When they know and they receive it and believe it, then growth is going to happen a lot more effectively. So this is a very effective tool. You're going to love this and it's free. Two ways to get it. You can text the phrase, leader growth. There's no space there.

It's just leader growth. You can text that to 3-3-444. That's 33444, or you can get the link to the resource in this episode. Show Notes at entreleadership.com slash podcast. Before I let you go, I love to ask one question. You know, it was the title of my first book. So here's the question for you. You're ready?

Here it goes. You answered however you want to. And if you want to, you can even tell us, email us at podcast at ontreleadership.com. Here's the question. Where do I need to get my ego back in check? Broad, simple, easy. Be honest with yourself. Talk to some people about it that you know and trust. People that are working alongside of you, trust me. They know they have an answer.

Where does my ego need to get back in check? Big thanks to Ryan Holiday for spending time with us. And Eric, the producer and I, when we signed off, we said, hey, we want you back. And we want you back soon. There's lots for this guy to talk about, so he'll be coming back. We appreciate his time. Big thanks to Daniel Tarty for coming in and telling us what he and the team are hearing and seeing out on the street as they talk to and help the Entree Leadership Tribe. On behalf of Eric the producer, Engineer Will Rutter, and the entire Entree leadership team, thank you for listening.

We'll talk with you again very soon.