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You think you’re doing what you’re supposed to. Society rewards you for it. But then you watch your future wife walk out the door because you aren’t the person you used to be.
When I, like everyone else, was called to answer the most critical questions a person can ask themselves in life: Who do I want to be? And: What path will I take? (Quod vitae sectabor iter.)
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. —RICHARD FEYNMAN
for people with ambitions, talents, drives, and potential to fulfill, ego comes with the territory.
The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.
The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility—that’s ego.
Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy,
ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.
Lucretius put it a few thousand years ago, the proverbial “sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady.”
One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as “a conscious separation from.” From what? Everything.
performance artist Marina Abramović puts it directly: “If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”
We intuit a causal relationship that isn’t there. We assume the symptoms of success are the same as success itself—and in our naiveté, confuse the by-product with the cause.
At any given time in life, people find themselves at one of three stages. We’re aspiring to something—trying to make a dent in the universe. We have achieved success—perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Or we have failed—recently or continually.
Quaker William Penn observed, “Buildings that lie so exposed to the weather need a good foundation.”
Your ego is not some power you’re forced to satiate at every turn. It can be managed. It can be directed.
It was their sense of reality and awareness—one that the author and strategist Robert Greene once said we must take to like a spider in its web—that was at the core of their great art, great writing, great design, great business, great marketing, and great leadership.
He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. —ADAM SMITH
Isocrates described as “noble maxims.” They were, as he put it, “precepts for the years to come.”
“no adornment so becomes you as modesty, justice, and self-control; for these are the virtues by which, as all men are agreed, the character of the young is held in restraint.” “Practice self-control,”
“for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.”
He felt he had an honest appreciation for his own abilities and that this role best suited him. Imagine that—an ambitious person turning down a chance to advance in responsibilities because he actually wanted to be ready for them. Is that really so crazy?
Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. —LAO TZU
she did what a lot of us do when we’re scared or overwhelmed by a project: she did everything but focus on it.
Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.”
So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
“Never give reasons for what you think or do until you must. Maybe, after a while, a better reason will pop into your head.”
The poet Hesiod had this in mind when he said, “A man’s best treasure is a thrifty tongue.”
Talking and doing fight for the same resources.
After spending so much time thinking, explaining, and talking about a task, we start to feel that we’ve gotten closer to achieving it.
The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
Plug that hole—that one, right in the middle of your face—that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens. Watch how much better you get.
“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” Boyd said to him. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” Using his hands to illustrate, Boyd marked off these two directions. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd paused, to make the alternative clear. “Or,” he said, “you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for
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not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision.”
“To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either.
Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.
PRIDE, POWER, GREED.
Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.
This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.
“A man is worked upon by what he works on,” Frederick Douglass once said.
Let No Man’s Ghost Come Back to Say My Training Let Me Down. —SIGN IN THE NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT TRAINING ACADEMY
The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.
We don’t like thinking that someone is better than us. Or that we have a lot left to learn. We want to be done. We want to be ready.
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.
plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
“False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust.”
This begins by accepting that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge, and then seeking them out and knocking down the illusions you have about yourself.
To become great and to stay great, they must all know what came before, what is going on now, and what comes next. They must internalize the fundamentals of their domain and what surrounds them, without ossifying or becoming stuck in time. They must be always learning. We must all become our own teachers, tutors, and critics.
