خاتمه

EPILOGUE

There is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives. There is a recalcitrant South of our soul revolting against the North of our soul. And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

If you’re reading this right now, then you’ve made it through this book. I was afraid some people might not. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get here myself.

How do you feel? Tired? Confused? Free?

It is no easy task to go head-to-head with one’s ego. To accept first that ego may be there. Then to subject it to scrutiny and criticism. Most of us can’t handle uncomfortable self-examination. It’s easier to do just about anything else—in fact, some of the world’s most unbelievable accomplishments are undoubtedly a result of a desire to avoid facing the darkness of ego.

In any case, just by making it to this point you’ve struck a serious blow against it. It’s not all you’ll need to do, but it is a start.

My friend the philosopher and martial artist Daniele Bolelli once gave me a helpful metaphor. He explained that training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep.

The same is true for ego. You would be stunned at what kind of damage dust and dirt can do over time. And how quickly it accumulates and becomes utterly unmanageable.

A few days after being fired by the American Apparel board of directors, Dov Charney called me at 3 A.M. He was alternately despondent and angry—genuinely believing himself to be totally blameless for his situation. I asked him, “Dov, what are you going to do? Are you going to pull a Steve Jobs and start a new company? Are you going to make a comeback?” He got quiet and said to me with an earnestness I could feel through the phone and in my bones, “Ryan, Steve Jobs died.” To him, in this addled state, this failure, this blow was somehow the same as death. That was one of the last times we ever spoke. I watched with horror in the months that followed as he wreaked havoc on the company he had put everything into building.

It was a sad moment and one that has stayed with me.

But for the grace of God go I. But for the grace of God, that could be any of us.

We all experience success and failure in our own way. Struggling to write this book, I went through four hard-fought but rejected drafts of the proposal and dozens of drafts of the manuscript. On my earlier projects, I’m sure the strain would have broken me. Maybe I would have quit or tried to work with someone else. Maybe I would have dug in my heels to get my way and irreparably damaged the book.

At some point during the process, I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft, I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months later, those painful pages were dirt that nourished my yard, which I could walk with bare feet. It was a real and tangible connection to that larger immensity. I liked to remind myself that the same process is going to happen to me when I’m done, when I die and nature tears me up.

One of the most freeing realizations came to me while I was writing and thinking about the ideas in the pages you’ve just read. It occurred to me what a damaging delusion this notion that our lives are “grand monuments” set to last for all time really is. Any ambitious person knows that feeling—that you must do great things, that you must get your way, and that if you don’t that you’re a worthless failure and the world is conspiring against you. There is so much pressure that eventually we all break under it or are broken by it.

Of course, that is not true. Yes, we all have potential within us. We all have goals and accomplishments that we know we can achieve—whether it’s starting a company, finishing a creative work, making a run at a championship, or getting to the top of your respective field. These are worthy aims. A broken person will not get there.

The problem is when ego intrudes on these pursuits, corrupting them and undermining us as we set out to achieve and accomplish. Whispering lies as we embark on that journey and whispering lies as we succeed in it, and worse, whispering painful lies when we stumble along the way. Ego, like any drug, might be indulged at first in a misguided attempt to get an edge or to take one off. The problem is how quickly it becomes an end unto itself. Which is how one finds oneself in surreal moments like the one I experienced on the phone with Dov, or in any of the cautionary tales in this book.

In the course of my work and my life, I’ve found that most of the consequences of ego are not quite so calamitous. Many of the people in your life—and in our world—who have given over to their ego will not “get what they deserve” in the sense of karmic justice that we were taught to believe in as kids. I wish it were so simple.

Instead, the consequences are closer to the ending of one of my favorite books, What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, a novel whose famous character is based on the real lives of entertainment entrepreneurs like Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick. In the book, the narrator is called to the palatial mansion of a calculating, ruthless, egotistical Hollywood mogul whose precipitous rise he has followed with a mix of admiration and confusion and eventually disgust.

In this moment of vulnerability, the narrator catches a true glimpse into the man’s life—his lonely, empty marriage, his fear, his insecurity, his inability to be still even for a second. He realizes that the vengeance—the bad karma—he’d hoped for, for all the rules the man had broken, all the cheating ways he had gotten ahead, wasn’t coming. Because it was already there. As he writes, I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally overtake him.

That’s how ego manifests itself. And isn’t that what we’re desperately afraid of becoming?

I’ll reveal one last thing I hope will make this come full circle. I first read that passage when I was nineteen years old. It was reading assigned by a seasoned mentor who had found, as I would, early success in the entertainment business. The book was influential and informative for me, just as he’d known it would be.

Yet over the next few years, I worked myself into a nearly identical situation as the characters in the book. Not just summoned to the palatial home to watch the expected and unavoidable dissolution of a person I admired. But to find myself dangerously close to my own shortly thereafter.

I know the passage struck me because when I went to type it up for this epilogue, I found in my original copy pages covered in my own handwriting, written years before, detailing my reaction, right before I had set out into the world. Clearly I had understood Schulberg’s words intellectually, even emotionally—but I had made the wrong choices anyway. I had swept once and thought it was enough.

Ten years after first reading it and writing down my thoughts, I was ready once more. Those lessons came home to me in exactly the way I needed them to.

There’s a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience. This book started around the latter idea and to my surprise ended up with a painful amount of the former as well. I set out to study ego and came crashing into my own—and to those of the people I had long since looked up to.

It may be that you’ll need to experience some of that on your own too. Perhaps it is like Plutarch’s reflection that we don’t “so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience [we have] of things.” In any case, I want to conclude this book with the idea that has underpinned all of what you’ve just read. That it’s admirable to want to be better businessmen or businesswomen, better athletes, better conquerors. We should want to be better informed, better off financially . . . We should want, as I’ve said a few times in this book, to do great things. I know that I do.

But no less impressive an accomplishment: being better people, being happier people, being balanced people, being content people, being humble and selfless people. Or better yet, all of these traits together. And what is most obvious but most ignored is that perfecting the personal regularly leads to success as a professional, but rarely the other way around. Working to refine our habitual thoughts, working to clamp down on destructive impulses, these are not simply the moral requirements of any decent person. They will make us more successful; they will help us navigate the treacherous waters that ambition will require us to travel. And they are also their own reward.

So here you are, at the end of this book about ego, having seen as much as one can be shown about the problems of ego from other people’s experiences and my own.

What is left?

Your choices. What will you do with this information? Not just now, but going forward?

Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them. You will make mistakes in each of them.

You must sweep the floor every minute of every day. And then sweep again.