Try writing a book — not your first, not your second or third, but your fourth — and hand it into your publisher, only to spend the next year in revisions. As Ryan Holiday would tell you, it’s the sort of exercise that can put even the biggest ego to the test.
The ironies of this sometimes-painful editing process was not lost on Holiday, formerly the marketing director at American Apparel, given his book is titled Ego Is The Enemy. Far from a traditional self-help tome, Holiday (who also wrote Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions Of A Media Manipulator and The Obstacle Is The Way) says his No. 1 goal is that those reading it will “think less of themselves” and they embrace a philosophy founded in humility that goes back to the Stoics.
“You see these immensely successful people and despite how successful they were, there was a humility,” Holiday told Marketing in a telephone interview prior to the book’s release. “If you think about yourself less, that lets you think about the work — as well as the audience or the customer or clients.”
Of course, anyone could point to a number of examples — including U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump or even the late Steve Jobs — as examples of people who took their ego straight to the top.
Holiday, however, predicted that Trump would only see the benefits of using his ego as a tool in the short term, and that Jobs’ only triumphed at Apple after his ego took a beating.
“We would have fired Steve Jobs too because he was unmanageable. He was a menace around the office,” he said. “It was only in being fired that Steve Jobs left and learned the lessons that allowed him to come back. That’s not a justification of ego, but a warning of how precarious a position our egos can put us in.”
These moments, whether they are career setbacks or personal heartbreaks, relate to the ancient Greek concept of “catabasis” or decline, Holiday adds.
“It’s the moment the hero is forced to experience some catastrophic crisis that makes them who they are,” he said. “If the world is going to give us feedback, ideally we don’t have our fingers in our ears. That’s the dangerous part of ego. It makes us deaf to these sort of quiet signs.”
Holiday was writing the book as his former employer, American Apparel, went through bankruptcy proceedings and the forced ouster of its controversial CEO, and he suggested the firm’s roller-coaster ride only reinforced Ego Is The Enemy’s message.
“There was no wake-up call like American Apparel or Dov Charney,” he said. “That’s the reason the company’s in the place it’s in. Ego turned a dangerous situation into a fatal situation.”
Though the consequences for other brands may be less dire, Holiday said they should be wary of how ego pervades their workplace and their leadership style.
“I think the danger of the ego in the marketing world is they are convinced that people care a lot more about their product than they actually do,” he said. “I feel like as a marketing consultant, 50% of my job is chipping away at this sort of entitled assumption that consumers are riveted by your brand of dog food.”
Advertising, of course, often appeals to individual egos, and brands may want to examine their role in shaping societal attitudes, Holiday added.
“If you’re sitting there as a customer and think that purchasing something is going to say something about you as a person, you’re in a dangerous place as a human being. So much of the misery of our culture is based on that idea. There’s no question a lot of advertising exploits that.”
