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In 2010, I applied to graduate school believing I had done enough to earn a spot. I had worked hard, prepared carefully, and imagined the next stage of my life often enough that it had begun to feel like it was already mine. The rejection letters arrived anyway. Two programs placed me on waiting lists, one at number thirteen and the other at thirty-six, numbers that have stayed in my memory far longer than several important birthdays have. Each update carried the possibility that someone ahead of me might choose another school and move me closer to the life I wanted. I checked, waited, calculated, and tried to behave like a person who was handling uncertainty with ease. Inside, a storm of envy and comparison was raging. As hard as I tried not to, I found myself measuring my worth against a list created by strangers.
I read Ryan Holiday’s ‘Ego Is the Enemy’ years later, when those applications had become but a distant memory. Holiday examines the way ego interferes with ambition, learning, achievement, and the experience of failure. The book draws from Stoic philosophy and the lives of historical figures whose desire for status or recognition began influencing their judgment.
Before reading the book, I associated ego with loud, arrogant people, who were desperate for attention and notoriety.
My own ego had learned to control my life in a quiet, less obvious kind of way.
Here are 6 hard truths I learned from the book:
My ego rarely announced that I was better than everyone else. It appeared through comparison, embarrassment, and the fear that my life was moving too slowly. Someone else’s success could make my own progress feel smaller, even when their path had nothing to do with mine. I would see an announcement about a promotion, marriage, book deal, or growing business and begin reviewing my life as though we had entered the same race without discussing the rules.
Social media gives this habit endless content. We watch people display the chapter where something finally worked and compare it with the unfinished middle of our own story. Their visible success becomes proof that we are failing, or not doing enough. Nothing has been taken from our lives, yet the afternoon suddenly feels heavier.
Ego is still present because the attention remains fixed on the self.
How am I being seen? Where do I rank? What does their success reveal about me?
I have seen this in my writing on substack. An essay may begin with a question I care about, then another writer’s numbers enter my mind. Their growth, reach, or subscriber count starts influencing the way I judge my own work. The page becomes crowded with people who were never invited into the room.
What are they doing that I’m not? How should I write this to get more engagement?
Writing gives me plenty of opportunities to confuse the value of the work with the reaction it receives. A thoughtful response can make an essay feel more meaningful than it did while I was writing it. A weaker response can drain the life from something I believed in prior to hitting the submit button. The words remain the same. My relationship with them changes once the numbers arrive.
Some attention to the reader belongs in the craft. I care whether an opening earns interest and whether an idea connects with a problem people recognize. Trouble begins when recognition becomes the emotional wage for the work.
Then the work starts changing to protect that wage.
A successful essay creates pressure to reproduce its shape. A popular subject becomes difficult to leave. I begin wondering which idea will travel before I have decided whether I have anything honest to say about it. The audience slowly moves from the other side of the page into my chair, with ten different voices whispering criticism into my ears.
Holiday writes about people becoming absorbed in the image of doing important work while losing contact with the patience and humility the work requires. Ego enjoys the identity surrounding the craft. The daily, often boring practice beneath it offers fewer social media worthy moments.
The distinction became clearer when I returned to my graduate-school rejections.
For years, I assumed the deepest pain came from losing the opportunity. Reading Holiday’s book led me toward another part of the experience. Those waiting lists had been carrying a responsibility I had never admitted giving them.
I wanted an admissions committee to settle a question that had followed me for years.
I wanted them to decide whether I was someone worth respecting.
Acceptance would have placed an official seal on my effort. It would have confirmed that I was intelligent enough, disciplined enough, and moving in a direction other people could recognize as meaningful. The program represented work I wanted to pursue, though it had also become an argument about who I was becoming.
That explains why the rejection felt larger than the application.
A committee had made a decision based on limited places and whatever information appeared in my file. I allowed that decision to spread into areas it had never examined. It began commenting on my potential, my timeline, and the value of the years I had already invested.
Ego had turned an outcome into a verdict.
There is a pleasant feeling that comes from explaining a plan. The idea sounds more substantial once other people hear it. Their encouragement gives the future a faint glow, and for a little while it feels as though something has already been accomplished.
I have experienced this with writing projects that lived beautifully in conversation and poorly on the page.
I could describe the theme, the structure, and why readers would care. The project became part of how I saw myself before enough work existed to support that identity. Each conversation gave me a small portion of the satisfaction that finishing might have produced, which made returning to the plain document feel strangely dull.
Holiday discusses the distance between appearing productive and sitting with the unremarkable labour behind worthwhile work. Ego prefers the visible identity. Practice often takes place without witnesses.
This has made me more careful with plans that are still fragile. I sometimes keep them close until enough work has been completed for the idea to survive without applause.
The silence leaves me with the part that matters:
Do I still want to make this when nobody is impressed that I intend to?
After more than a decade in health care, I have enough experience to recognize familiar patterns. Experience allows me to ask better questions and notice details that once escaped me. It also gives me a large collection of past cases that can be used to defend an early conclusion.
A patient may describe a response that challenges my first assessment. Part of me still wants the original plan to work because I created it with confidence and explained it as though the path ahead were reasonably clear. The information becomes harder to hear once it touches my identity as a capable clinician.
The student in me stays curious longer.
That part asks what changed, what I missed, and whether the case has moved beyond the explanation I first gave it. Holiday’s book returns often to the danger of believing that achievement has placed someone beyond correction. Success can make old knowledge feel complete while the world continues providing new information.
Writing creates a similar problem. Publishing my thoughts gives them a finished appearance. Some ideas later change as I read more or live through experiences that complicate what I once believed.
I have become less interested in defending every earlier version of myself.
He was only working with what he knew.
Failure has a way of making the entire world feel involved.
A rejected application becomes something everyone will notice. A relationship ending begins attracting imaginary conversations. A poorly performing article feels publicly embarrassing, even though most people have already moved with their day.
Ego enlarges the audience.
During the graduate-school applications, I spent considerable energy thinking about how the rejection looked. People knew I had applied. Some had encouraged me. I imagined having to explain what happened, as though every conversation would become a press conference with challenging questions to which I had incomplete answers.
The shame kept me focused on my image when my life required a decision.
I could apply again. I could strengthen parts of the application. I could reconsider the route. Those possibilities remained available, though they became harder to see while I was busy experiencing the rejection.
Failure had given me information about one attempt.
Ego wrote a biography from it.
I eventually entered the profession and spent years treating patients. The acceptance that once felt capable of proving so much became one administrative step near the beginning of a much longer education.
It opened a door. It could never determine the clinician I would become.
The work that followed happened was very unsexy, to say the least. I listened to people whose symptoms challenged my assumptions. I changed plans that looked sensible on paper. I made errors, read more, asked colleagues questions, and learned that competence often feels less impressive from the inside because much of it involves recognizing where certainty has run out.
Writing has taught me the same thing.
A growing audience can show that the publication connects with people. It cannot tell me whether a sentence is honest or whether I have hidden a weak idea beneath polished language. Praise feels good. It becomes dangerous once it is asked to provide a stable sense of worth.
I still care about outcomes. Rejection stings, and recognition can brighten an entire day. ‘Ego Is the Enemy’ helped me notice the extra meaning I attach to those experiences and the weight they begin carrying once identity enters the arrangement.
“Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is “fair” or not. Psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events. We do that when our sense of self is fragile and dependent on life going our way all the time…You can say that failure always arrives uninvited, but through our ego, far too many of us allow it to stick around.” —Ryan Holiday
The numbers thirteen and thirty-six no longer feel like measurements of my value.
They remind me how easily an external result can become responsible for answering an internal question.
These days, another question interests me more:
Would this work still matter to me if nobody could use it to decide who I am?
With love,
Scott
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