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Ego
There’s a wonderful Bill Walsh quote about ego. He says, “Ego is when self-confidence becomes arrogance. Self-assertiveness becomes reckless abandon,” and so forth. He’s saying it’s sort of past the point of any reasonable utility. Confidence is great, arrogance is not great.
Or Sero Connolly saying ego, like cancer, is sort of an over-assertion of cells. And that’s what I see ego is. It’s great to believe in yourself, the problem is when your belief in yourself is not based on anything real. And so that’s the enemy of trying to do basically anything that requires interacting with other people. If you’re a creative and you’re not able to take feedback because your ego is either so strong, or you’re not able to take feedback because you don’t care what anyone thinks, your work’s not going to get any better.
If you don’t care about your audience, you don’t understand who they are and what’s going on in their life because you lack empathy, which is another symptom of ego, your work is going to suffer. If you can’t work with other people because you’re selfish and you have to be the center of attention at all times, you’re not going to have a team around you. So it basically makes anything that we’re trying to do harder than it already is.
A Fatal Flaw
When it comes to business leaders, I think one of the problems with ego is that in the short term, it might seem like a good thing. Being fueled by anger, or a need to prove something, or a sense of superiority might help you get over some of the initial burdens or difficulties of, say, starting a company. When people are telling you you’re never going to be able to make it, that it’s too hard, that what you’re doing is impossible, ego can be somewhat of a coping mechanism.
And so when we’re young, Steven Pressfield calls that there’s the resistance between us and every creative project. Ego might help us get over that in the short term, but the problem is we’ve learned a really bad lesson.
So let’s say you’re a business leader, you started some company. And everyone said it was a horrible idea and you shouldn’t do it, and you didn’t listen to them, and then you were successful anyway. Well, what’s so dangerous about that is, you’ve now learned the lesson that you should never listen to other people. And that feedback is irrelevant, or the people who are trying to criticize you or tell you that you might be wrong, that they’re trying to hold you back rather than help you.
So what you tend to see is that ego is good in the short term, but in the long term it creates the opportunity for many problems. These sort of fatal flaws are built, then, inside the company. And eventually at a moment of crisis, or at a moment of difficulty, all of that comes back.
So what I think you’re better off building is a sense of awareness, the ability to hear other people parse through what’s constructive criticism and what’s not constructive, or what’s helpful and what’s not helpful, or what’s true and what’s not true. And be able to incorporate that into what you’re doing, to always be learning and improving. That’s better than having this sense of self that’s so strong, it’s almost like a wall around you.
A Timeless Problem
Ego is this timeless thing throughout history. Even if they weren’t using the word for it, you can’t read a Greek tragedy without seeing the hero struggle against his own ego, and hubris, and see how it’s the source of his or her own problems. And so we’ve always known that ego is a problem, particularly in ambitious or powerful people. But I think it’s interesting that those people never lived in a world of social media. It’s exacerbating these tendencies that we already have.
And I don’t totally know what the solution is, other than avoiding it as much as possible. In science, they talk about the publication bias. That scientific journals only publish interesting experiments, and they only tend to publish ones that have conclusive results. And that somewhat limits from our view the mundaneness and the chaos of everyday science. You don’t post a photo when nothing has happened, and you don’t post a message when you don’t have an opinion.
So it creates this oppressive environment, where you think everyone is doing things all the time, and all those things are amazing, and everyone is certain about everything. And I think you have to remind yourself that that’s just not the case.