What I’m Reading: Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

Holiday’s book fell into my lap via a recommendation during the freelancer’s workshop I’ve spent the last month or so working on. This book will force you to make some hard confrontations with yourself. Approach with ease, Holiday’s insights and methods can be brutal and overwhelming at times. That all said every time I put the book down, I walk away considering myself and how I can better rid ego from my interactions. If you are interested in the ideas of stoicism and enjoy books like The War of Art, I can’t recommend this book enough.

What I’m Re-discovering: Bouldering

I’ve never been any good at it, but something about the act of climbing rocks and solving “problems” is an endless source of enjoyment. Not to mention the extreme sense of accomplishment that comes with discovering a level of fitness or flexibility you never knew you had. This love of mine started about two and a half years ago, just at the end of my freshman year. For lots of reasons not worth going over I took about a year off. But now coming back to it, I find myself obsessed all over again. In some ways, I’m better at it now, in other ways worse.

A Quote I Love: “Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.” – Tim Kreider

I’ve recently fallen in love with Kreider’s work. I’ve just finished his collection of essays We Learn Nothing. He has quickly become my favorite writer (a reckoning I’m still considering the implications of).

The quote speaks for itself, but there’s something beautiful in the way Kreider reminds us that people genuinely aren’t out to get us.