Ryan Holiday's career advice says to check your ego and do what needs to be done.
This seems half-right. Since ego-expression is culturally dependent, it seems better to rather boil it all down to just the problem of doing anything. In that, each of us needs:
A sense of where we are at and which concerns are pressing.
Shows like Alone and The Bear present cases where situational and temporal awareness matter, and then highlight the difference between getting it right and what happens otherwise. The real difficulty is to keep getting it right, over and over again, day-after-day.... In the chess world, Kasparov talks about marshalling this wherewhithal during simultaneous exhibitions in Into the Night: "gradually apply pressure ... and they collapse eventually ... if you have stamina"
Nowadays the lives of knowledge workers do not usually involve such attacks. Rather, the main problems are multi-month or -year and within those time-frames stamina has been replaced with facilitating, such as Tarantino describing his writing habits:
I started writing during the day time. I get up, so you know, it's 10:30, or 11:00 o'clock, or 11:30, and I sit down to write. Like a normal workday, I would sit down and I would write until 4, 5, 6, or 7. Somewhere around there, I would stop. And then, I have a pool, and I keep it heated, so it's nice, so I go into it and just kind of float around in the warm water and think about everything I've just written, how I can make it better, and what else can happen before the scene is over, and then a lot of shit would come to me, literally a lot of, a lot of things would come to me. Then I'd get out and make little notes on that, but not do it, and that would be my work for tomorrow.
Not too long ago, career advice would have been grounded in human perfectibility, and to that end the four cardinal virtues: fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence, ie. being able to see things through, making sure people are treated correctly, being in control of oneself, and providing for what may come.
Missing from that list is an implied background of Christian theology, where the onslaughts do not cease, temptations surround, and everything can go away at any moment.1 That acute awareness of immanent time pressure has recently seen a good ecumenical reboot with the phrase `sense of urgency' which has been gaining traction (witness The Bear above), where the crux becomes properly situating everything in space and time.
