Success changes people, and rarely for the better. In Ryan Holiday’s “Ego is the Enemy,” he identifies three toxic mindsets that successful people almost inevitably develop: entitlement, control, and paranoia. These aren’t character flaws—they’re natural psychological responses to achievement that ego amplifies into destructive forces.
The cruel irony is that these same traits often helped us succeed initially. The confidence that we could beat the odds, the drive to control outcomes, the vigilance against threats—all served us well on the way up. But what works in pursuit of success becomes dangerous after achieving it. Understanding this transformation might be the difference between sustained excellence and spectacular implosion.
The Ancient Warning
Holiday opens with the story of Xerxes, the Persian emperor who crossed the Hellespont during his invasion of Greece. When the waters destroyed the bridges his engineers had built, Xerxes ordered the river be given three hundred lashes with chains and branded with hot irons. His men were commanded to harangue the water: “You salt and bitter stream, your master lays this punishment upon you for injuring him, who never injured you.”
Oh, and he beheaded the engineers who built the bridges.
Herodotus, the ancient historian, called this “presumptuous”—probably an understatement. “Delusional” and “preposterous” seem more appropriate. Yet this wasn’t an isolated madness. Shortly before, Xerxes had written a letter to a mountain, warning it not to cause him trouble, “Otherwise, I’ll topple you into the sea.”
How did a powerful ruler become so detached from reality? The same way countless leaders, entrepreneurs, and successful people have before and since: through the toxic combination of entitlement, control, and paranoia that success breeds.
Poison #1: Entitlement
Entitlement is perhaps the most insidious of success’s three poisons because it feels like it’s earned. We worked hard, beat the odds, and achieved something significant. Don’t we deserve recognition, deference, and special treatment?
Holiday argues that this logic, though seemingly reasonable, is actually ego’s most dangerous deception. Entitlement begins as legitimate confidence in our abilities and evolves into expectations that reality owes us something.
The path to achievement often requires ignoring doubts, rejecting rejection, and persisting when others quit. These are partially irrational behaviors—we had to believe in ourselves despite overwhelming evidence we might fail. When success vindicates that belief, it’s natural to think: “See? I was right to believe. I have special power or insight that others lack.”
This is where entitlement takes root. What was once adaptive confidence metastasizes into the belief that we’re somehow exempt from the normal rules, constraints, and consequences that govern other people’s lives.
The Ty Warner Delusion
Holiday recounts the spectacular fall of Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies. Just before destroying his billion-dollar company, Warner overrode cautious objections from employees with the boast: “I could put the Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!”
He was catastrophically wrong. The company failed, and Warner narrowly avoided prison.
This is entitlement’s signature move: the belief that our past success grants us magical powers that override market reality, consumer behavior, and basic logic. Warner believed he’d transcended normal business constraints. His ego convinced him that his touch alone, regardless of product quality or market conditions, guaranteed success.
The tragedy is that Warner was probably right about his past achievements—he had created something remarkable with Beanie Babies. But success doesn’t transfer automatically to new endeavors. Each situation must be approached with fresh analysis and genuine effort, not entitled assumption that past magic will repeat itself.
Poison #2: Control
The second poison that success introduces is an addiction to control. Getting to success required taking charge, making things happen, and refusing to accept circumstances as unchangeable. We learned that persistence and force of will could overcome obstacles.
But Holiday warns that this lesson becomes dangerous when overgeneralized. Not everything responds to willpower. Some circumstances genuinely are beyond our control. Some outcomes depend on factors we can’t influence.
Success makes this truth harder to accept because we have recent evidence that we could control outcomes that seemed impossible. We beat the market, built something from nothing, or achieved what others said couldn’t be done. Our ego concludes: “I make the reality I inhabit.”
This belief is intoxicating and partly true—until it isn’t. The same force of will that created success can become obstinate insistence when circumstances change. We try to control things that can’t be controlled, waste energy on unchangeable factors, and resist accepting realities that don’t align with our vision.
The Franklin Letter to Arthur Lee
When Arthur Lee was sent to France and England as an American diplomat during the Revolutionary War, instead of collaborating with fellow diplomats Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin, he raged and resented them, convinced they disliked him and were undermining his work.
Franklin eventually wrote him a letter that Holiday highlights as a masterclass in addressing control addiction:
“If you do not cure yourself of this temper, wherever you go, you will never be happy, nor can you make any one else so.”
Franklin’s wisdom cuts to the core issue: Lee was trying to control how others perceived and treated him. This is perhaps the most futile form of control-seeking—attempting to manage others’ thoughts and feelings. Yet success often inflates our sense that we should be able to control even these fundamentally uncontrollable aspects of life.
The more successful we become, the more accustomed we grow to having influence and getting our way. When we encounter situations or people we can’t control, ego interprets this as a threat rather than simple reality.
Poison #3: Paranoia
The third poison, paranoia, grows from the same roots as the first two. We fought hard to succeed, overcame doubters, and proved skeptics wrong. This often involved correctly perceiving threats and obstacles that others missed or dismissed.
But success amplifies this vigilance into paranoia. Holiday explains that the instincts that helped us succeed—scanning for threats, questioning others’ motives, maintaining competitive intensity—don’t naturally turn off after we’ve won. Instead, they often intensify.
Successful people commonly develop the sense that others are envious, that competitors are conspiring, that allies might betray them, and that any moment of relaxation leaves them vulnerable. These fears aren’t entirely baseless—success does attract envy and competition—but ego warps reasonable caution into destructive paranoia.
The paranoid mindset interprets every setback as sabotage, every criticism as attack, and every competitor’s success as threat. It creates enemies where none exist and damages relationships with allies by treating them as potential adversaries.
The Combined Effect: The Disease of Me
Holiday references Pat Riley’s concept of “the disease of me”—the self-absorption that destroys successful teams and organizations. When entitlement, control, and paranoia combine, they create a toxic self-focus that erodes the very foundations that enabled success.
The person who once worked collaboratively becomes impossible to work with. The leader who once inspired loyalty becomes suspicious of everyone. The entrepreneur who once adapted quickly becomes rigidly attached to their vision regardless of changing circumstances.
This isn’t gradual deterioration—it’s often shockingly rapid. Organizations that functioned well suddenly become dysfunctional. Leaders who were effective become obstacles. Success that seemed solid evaporates as the three poisons do their work.
Why Success Creates These Poisons
Holiday emphasizes understanding why success generates these specific toxins. It’s not random or limited to bad people—it’s a predictable psychological response to achievement.
Changed Circumstances: Success alters your environment. You go from having to prove yourself to being expected to perform. From fighting for recognition to defending position. From pushing for opportunities to protecting what you’ve gained.
Confirmation Bias: Success provides evidence that your approach works, which makes you less receptive to contrary information or alternative methods. What was once hypothesis becomes doctrine.
Increased Stakes: More success means more to lose, which naturally increases anxiety and protective behaviors. The fear of losing what you’ve built can become paralyzing.
Social Dynamics: Success changes how people treat you—more deference, less honest feedback, fewer challenges to your ideas. This social environment actively reinforces the three poisons by removing natural checks on ego.
Responsibility Overload: Success often comes with crushing responsibilities—people depending on you, payrolls to meet, expectations to fulfill. This pressure can push you toward entitled thinking (“I deserve better”), control seeking (“I must manage everything”), and paranoia (“I can’t trust anyone”).
The Antidotes
Holiday doesn’t just diagnose the problem—he prescribes specific antidotes to each poison:
For Entitlement: Regularly confront the role of luck, timing, and others’ contributions in your success. Practice gratitude not as platitude but as realistic assessment of how much you benefited from factors beyond your control.
For Control: Learn to distinguish between what you can influence and what you cannot. Pour energy into the former, accept the latter. Develop comfort with uncertainty and outcomes that don’t depend on your will.
For Paranoia: Build genuine trust in selected relationships. Recognize that treating everyone as potential threat becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Focus on what you can build rather than what others might take.
The Larger Warning
What makes these three poisons particularly dangerous is that they typically hit people who are otherwise capable and well-meaning. This isn’t about villains or obviously flawed individuals—it’s about how success warps perspective in predictable ways.
Holiday’s warning extends beyond individual psychology to organizational culture. When leaders develop these traits, they infect entire companies, teams, and movements. The entitled leader creates entitled employees. The controlling boss breeds learned helplessness. The paranoid CEO generates organizational dysfunction.
Understanding these dynamics becomes crucial not just for personal success but for building lasting institutions and maintaining healthy relationships throughout the inevitable ups and downs of any ambitious career.
Staying Grounded
The ultimate antidote Holiday suggests is maintaining connection to reality and larger perspective. This requires deliberate effort because success naturally insulates us from both.
Seek Honest Feedback: Actively cultivate relationships with people who will tell you uncomfortable truths. Make it safe for them to do so.
Remember Your Origins: Regularly reconnect with where you came from and who you were before success. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s maintaining perspective on how much you’ve received versus how much you’ve earned.
Focus on Contribution: Orient yourself toward what you’re adding to the world rather than what you’re owed or what you’ve achieved. This shift from entitlement to contribution changes everything.
Accept What You Can’t Control: Practice distinguishing between problems you can solve and circumstances you must accept. This isn’t fatalism—it’s wisdom about where to direct your energy.
Trust Selectively but Genuinely: Paranoia is exhausting and lonely. Build real relationships based on actual trust rather than suspicion. This requires vulnerability but provides something far more valuable than perfect security.
The Choice Success Presents
Holiday frames the three poisons as a choice point that success inevitably creates. We can either let these natural psychological responses to achievement run unchecked, or we can recognize and actively counter them.
This isn’t about eliminating all entitled thoughts, controlling impulses, or suspicious instincts. It’s about not letting ego amplify these natural responses into destructive forces that undermine everything we’ve built.
The most successful people aren’t those who never feel entitled, never seek control, or never experience paranoia. They’re those who recognize these tendencies in themselves and work to counteract them before they metastasize into career-ending or organization-destroying problems.
Success is a test, and the test is whether we can handle it without letting it handle us. The three poisons are predictable. The question is whether we’ll be ready for them.
Source: “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday – A crucial guide for anyone navigating the psychological challenges that success inevitably brings.
