What Is the Ego?
The ego is a persons sense of their own importance and self-worth. Everyone has an ego and it’s a part of our identity. Ego only turns into a problem when it becomes too big. A person with a big ego has an inflated view of their self-importance. Basically they think they are more important, more valuable and better than everyone else. They think too highly of themselves.
Some common signs of having a big ego are:
- You think that you are too good to do some tasks. You think that these tasks are under you and a person like you should not need to do them. You start to look down on things and others.
- You think you are better than other people so you are not be willing to work with them.
- You don’t want admit that you are wrong since you think this damages your self-worth and reputation.
A person with a big ego is living in their own fantasy where they think they are better and more important than they actually are.
About This Book
A person will be in one of three stages at anytime during their life:
- Aspire: We set goals we want to achieve and then work on them.
- Success: We have succeeded in achieving our goals.
- Failure: We have worked on something but failed for whatever reason.
This book is divided into three parts, one for each stage. Our ego will affect us differently depending on what stage we are in. Without exception, our ego will negatively affect us if not controlled. This book will share advice on how to handle our ego in different situations.
The main suggestion for each stage is this:
- Humble in your aspirations: take control and suppress your ego early on before you develop bad habits.
- Gracious in you success: be humble and disciplined so you don’t allow your ego to run wild when you succeed.
- Resilient in your failures: develop strength, discipline and the right mindset so you don’t get wrecked by failure.
Aspire
The majority of people have goals in life. Yet, most people does not reach them. Ego is probably a big reason for this where humility, reality and self-control is the cure. The situation is often that we gain a little bit of success and then we start to tell ourselves different stories, start to fantasize things and start to think that we have it all figured out.
Talk Less Do More
It’s common that talk, fantasizing and planning replaces doing the work. It’s much easier to do things related to the important work than actually doing the important work. When there is a big project it’s common to focus on things related to the project and not on the actual project itself. You do many different things except working on the project.
Research shows that goal visualization is important. But after a certain amount of doing it our mind confuses it with actual progress. The same goes for talking and explaining to others about what we need to do. We feel like we are making progress just because we are spending time and energy on task related to our goal but the reality is that no meaningful progress is being made.
The solution is simple, talk less and do more. Even better is to be silent and let your results speak for themselves.
To Do Or To Be
When a person start to find a little bit of success, it’s easy to lose oneself to external things like status, rank and fame. You stop focusing on the work and more on the external things. There is a chance that our values and priorities gets corrupted as we succeed.
In the beginning your priority was to become good at something or accomplish some goal but once you find some success your priority can change to getting more fame and money. This could be a good thing. But more often then not it’s a bad thing which can lead to regret later.
The solution is to remind yourself of what your goal and purpose is. When you are offered things, ask yourself if you need it or is it just a distraction. Does it help you accomplish your goals? Is this who you want to be in life?
Become a Student
Have a students mentality and be willing to learn from others. Understand that there are many things you don’t know and still need to learn. Also accept feedback and don’t take it personally. Instead learn from your failures.
Don’t Be Passionate
Some people might think that having passion is enough to accomplish ones goals but that is just not true. A passionate person without discipline is just a dreamer who does nothing. These people can often tell you what they are going to do in the future but they can’t show you their progress because there isn’t any. You need to pair passion with discipline and hard work for it to be of any use.
Follow The Canvas Strategy
It basically means that you should help others who are more successful than you with their tasks or goals and in doing so you will find different opportunities for yourself. You want to provide support so that others can be good and look good. One of the reasons for this is because you then can observe and learn from them. You also get into situations and places you normally wouldn’t have if you just focused on yourself. You also become better at solving problems and handling different situations.
It can be seen as you are helping yourself by helping others. You need to set aside you ego and be willing to do the work no one else want to do. Don’t look for credit or to be respected, instead let others take it. Don’t be jealous of people who have more then you. Instead trade short-term gratification for long-term payoff. Help others enough and you will become indispensable to them.
Restrain Yourself
It doesn’t matter who you are, you will be treated unfairly in life. The solution to make it less bothersome is to just expect it and be prepared for it. It can be that you are being treated in a bad way and feel like you deserve better (most of the times this is caused by ego). When this happens its important to not act on your emotions because that is bad for your reputation and can be difficult to recover from.
Don’t get too excited or lose control of yourself when you win or lose in life. Instead, remain calm and polite.
Get Out of Your Own Head
This chapter is about that we should not day dream and fantasize about different situations and futures. Most of the time it’s just a waste of time. Many people are completely stuck in their own head day dreaming their life away. The solution is to catch ourselves and become more aware of when we start to fantasize too much. Try to experience real things instead of just thinking.
The Danger of Early Pride
Pride tells a person that they are better then they actually are. Pride leads to arrogance and takes away humility. Pride dulls our mind and it decreases our ability to learn new things, work and interact with others because we start to think to highly of ourselves. Pride takes a small accomplishment and makes it feel like a big one. Don’t think that a small success right now is a sign of a guaranteed successful future.
Pride is usually created when we get validation and attention from others. We need to be aware of it and be prepared for it in order to not be negatively affected by it.
Privately thinking to yourself that you are better than others is a sign of ego. Boasting about things only makes the ego bigger.
Do The Work
To get anything done you will have to work. Work is what turns thoughts into reality. Be prepared that there is going to be a lot of work and don’t think there is an easy way around it. Understand that you will not get any validation, rewards and attention from others for a lot of the work you do.
Success
This second part of the book talks about how our ego can negatively affects us once we have achieved some kind of success. An uncontrolled ego leads to a very short time of success.
Always Stay A Student
Once we get some success in life it’s easy to become over confident in ourselves and we start to believe that we can do no wrong. Because unlike before we now actually have results to back us that we are good at what we do. We stop to learn and improve and start to think that we know it all and this is the start of the decline. If you are not learning, then you are dying.
The solution to this is to always stay a student. Understand that there is always something you can learn from someone. Stay humble and be openminded. Observe and listen to what other says.
It’s not enough to want to learn. You also need to find out what the best way for you to learn is.
Don’t Tell Yourself A Story
When others asks us how we accomplished our goals it’s easy to start lying and making up things just to make ourselves look better. It can for example be that we make it sound more difficult then it actually was. Or it can be that we had everything under control and it worked out just like we planned.
When a person succeeds, it’s usually the result of hard work and persistence and not talent.
What Is Important To You?
We start out knowing what’s important to us and our priorities. But once we have achieved our goals we start to compare with others and want more. We then start to do things we normally wouldn’t do and then waste a lot of our life doing things we don’t like. Comparing yourself to others can make you feel like what you accomplished is nothing.
The solution is to remind yourself of your priorities and your why. Know what your path is and stay away from distractions. It’s not about beating the other guy or having more the others. It’s about being as good as possible at what’s important to you. You should know how to say no and what things to say no to.
Don’t fall for the “If only I had that, then I will be happy” trap. You should know when enough is enough and don’t fall for uncontrolled pursuit for more. Don’t chase things without good intention.
Managing Yourself
Micromanaging others is almost never a good idea, its exhausting for the other person and shows a lack of trust in them.
Follow a schedule and have a structure in your life. Know the things you should do and limit your time on activities that are a waste of time. Don’t expect to succeed if you do the wrong things.
Don’t pursue your own interest at the cost of everyone else.
Meditate On The Immensity
The book recommends that we should think about the whole world more. This is to help us realize that we are not that special and just a small part of this world. It’s to help us get some perspective. An exercise we can do is to go to a place and think of all the people that has walked there before and will walk after. Also think how it is for other people who live in a different place of the world.
Maintain Your Sobriety
Being sober here means that you are not affected by your accomplishment, power, status and rank. You maintain you integrity.
Failure
Failure and setbacks happens to everyone. Almost always, the road to success goes though failure. Every failure is a trial where the test is to see how we respond. We can’t hide or run away from a failure because eventually it will catch up to us. Instead we must deal with it and accept it in order to move past it. It doesn’t matter if it was your fault, because it’s yours to deal with now. This part of the book explains how to deal with failure and setbacks in a good way. Our ego can make a small failure into a big failure if not controlled.
Before you succeed again, you need to reflect and think about what caused the failure in order to prevent it from happening again. Maybe it was a bad decision you made (then ask why did you make that bad decision, maybe it was because you acted on your emotions and didn’t think clear) or maybe it was the result of some bad habit you have had for years. We will get the same results and problems if we don’t figure out what caused them.
Alive Time Or Dead Time
There are two types of time in our lives: alive time and dead time. Alive time is when we are taking action, learning and using our time for intentionally. Like there is a good reason behind why we are spending our time doing something. Dead time is when we are passive, waiting and doing nothing useful. You wanna turn dead time into alive time. You wanna minimize dead time.
Taking breaks and doing unproductive things can also be seen as alive time, as long as there is good intention behind it. But you need to be honest with yourself and don’t come up with excuses in why you need to do something. If you need to look for an excuse to explain why something is alive time, then it’s probably dead time.
The Effort Is Enough
You should accept and be ok with the outcome as long as you tried your best and focused on the things that’s within your control. Many people however will not even try to do their best if a reward is not guaranteed (this can for example be money, fame and validation). Doing good work should be enough for you, the feeling that you tried your best should be enough. The less attached you are to an outcome the better.
Facing The Truth
If you hide away from reality and truth you will just later have to deal with a much bigger problem. You need to be willing to look at your own life and be honest about the flaws you have. Then fix them in order to avoid problems later in life. Many people are not willing to do this so the only way for them to fix things and improve is through failure.
No cheater want to be hit by the spotlight and get caught. So the best way to avoid this possibility is to not do things you don’t want others to find out about.
Draw The Line
Be willing to admit when you have messed up. Otherwise you will just dig yourself an even deeper hole that will be more difficult to get out of. Have the courage to make a full stop before a bad situation becomes worse.
Our ego makes us afraid to be wrong because it will look like we are stupid and weak. But if you are wrong then the right thing to do is to admit that you are wrong. You don’t wanna fight for something you know is wrong just to prove to others that you were right this time (if you are wrong it will eventually catch up with you).
Avoid Lose-lose situations. Don’t think things like: “if I lose then they also have to lose” or “if I lose then no one else is gaining anything”. That’s the ego speaking.
Maintain Your Own Scoreboard
Hold yourself to high standards and try to be the best version of yourself. Your full potential, the best version you are capable of, that’s what you should measure yourself against.
Don’t Or Look For Revenge
It’s easy to hate during failure and adversity. Hate puts the blame on others. It makes them responsible and not us. It’s also a big distraction because no useful work gets done. We will be busy thinking about how to get revenge and how they treated us unfairly and wrong. This is of course a bad approach because it keeps us where we are and no progress or improvement is being made.
So don’t be stuck in the past because someone treated you unfairly or badly. Don’t look for revenge, it’s just a waste of time.
Other Notes About Ego
- We must accept and understand that when a person speaks, they do so with the belief that they are providing us with information that they believe is relevant. It is then afterwards up to us to decide if this information is useful.
- Leave ego at the door.
- Ego is the voice that will tell us that we are better than we actually are.
- No successful person has said that having a big ego was worth it.
- Most of the time, people with big egos does not like to admit that they are wrong (since this damages their self worth).
- When telling stories, a person with a big ego will often exaggerate and try to make it sound more impressive than what actually happened. This is because it makes them feel more special. You don’t wanna tell stories about how special you are. This is probably also be a sign of insecurity.
- Only when a person is free of ego can they perform at their best.
- Replace ego with humility and confidence. Confidence is earned from repeatedly doing challenging things.
- People with big egos also enjoy explaining and say things to people that might hurt them. It can be that they say more than is needed and they do it because it makes them feel better and superior to others.
- People with big egos also enjoy proving other wrong and make other feel bad. This is becuase it validates them and give them prof that they are superior.
