25 Ways To Kill The Toxic Ego That Will Ruin Your Life
The artist Marina Abramović has said that the moment we
begin to believe in our own greatness, that we kill our ability to be truly
creative. What she is talking about is ego — the way that
self-absorption ruins the very thing it celebrates.
So how do we keep this toxic ego
and selfishness at bay? How do we prevent ego from “sucking us down like the
law of gravity?” The primary answer is simple: awareness. But
after that, it’s a matter of hard work.
In the course of researching Ego is the
Enemy I was exposed to
many strategies for combatting our arrogant and selfish impulses. Here are 25
proven exercises from successful men and women throughout history that will
help you stay sober, clear-headed, creative and humble. They work if you work
them.
1. Adopt the beginner’s mindset. “It is impossible to learn
that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. When we let ego tell us
that we have arrived and figured it all out, it prevents us from
learning. Pick up a bookon a subject you know next to nothing about. Walk
through a library or a bookstore — remind yourself how much
you don’t know.
2. Focus on the effort — not the outcome. With any creative endeavour at some point what we
made leaves our hands. We can’t let what happens after that point have any
sway over us. We need to remember famous coach John Wooden’s advice: “Success
is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you
made the effort to do your best to become the best that you
are capable of becoming.” Doing your best is what matters. Focus on that.
External rewards are just extra.
3. Choose purpose over
passion. Passion runs hot and burns out, while people with purpose — think of it as passion
combined with reason — are more dedicated and have control over their
direction. Christopher McCandless was passionate when he went “into the wild”
but it didn’t work well, right? The inventor of the Segway was passionate. Better to have clear-headed
purpose.
4. Shun the comfort of talking and
face the work. “Void,” Marlon
Brando once said, “is terrifying to most people.” We talk endlessly on social
media getting validation and attention with fake internet points avoiding the
uncertainty of doing the difficult and frightening work required of any creative
endeavour. As creatives we need to shut up and get to work. To face the void — despite the pain of
doing so.
5. Kill your pride before you lose
your head. “Whom the gods
wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly wrote, “they first call promising.” You cannot
let early pride lead you astray. You must remind yourself every day how much
work is left to be done, not how much you have done. You must remember that humility
is the antidote to pride.
6. Stop telling yourself a story — there is no grand narrative. When you achieve any sort of
success you might think that success in the future is just the natural and
expected next part of the story. This is a straightforward path to failure — by getting too cocky
and overconfident. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, reminds himself that
there was “no aha moment” for his
billion-dollar behemoth, no matter what he might read in his own press
clippings. Focus on the present moment, not the story.
7. Learn to manage (yourself and
others). John DeLorean was
a brilliant engineer but a poor manager (of people and himself). One executive
described his management style as “chasing colored balloons” — he was constantly
distracted and abandoning one project for another. It’s just not enough to be smart or right or a genius. It’s
gratifying to be the micromanaging egotistical boss at the center of everything — but that’s not how
organizations grow and succeed. That’s not how you can grow as a person either.
8. Know what matters to you and
ruthlessly say no to everything else. Pursue what the philosopher Seneca refers to as euthymia — the tranquility
of knowing what you are after and not being distracted by
others. We accomplish this by having an honest conversation with ourselves and
understanding our priorities. And rejecting all the rest. Learning how to say
no. First, by saying no to ego which wants it all.
9. Forget credit and recognition. Before Bill Belichick became
the four-time Super Bowl–winning head coach of the New England Patriots, he
made his way up the ranks of the NFL by doing grunt work and making his
superiors look good without getting any credit. When we are starting out in our
pursuits we need to make an effort to trade short-term gratification for a
long-term payoff. Submit under people who are already successful and learn and
absorb everything you can. Forget credit.
10. Connect with nature and the
universe at large. Going
into nature is a powerful feeling and we need to tap into it as often as
possible. Nothing draws us away from it more than material success. Go out
there and reconnect with the world. Realize how small you are in relation to
everything else. It’s what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot has referred to
as the “oceanic feeling.” There is no ego standing beneath the giant redwoods
or on the edge of a cliff or next to the crashing waves of the ocean.
11. Choose alive time over dead
time. According to author
Robert Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive
and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing
every second. During failure, ego picks dead time. It fights back: I
don’t want this. I want ______. I want it my way. It indulges in being
angry, aggrieved, heartbroken. Don’t let it — choose alive time
instead.
12. Get out of your own head. Writer Anne Lamott knows the
dangers of the soundtrack we can play in our heads: “The endless stream of
self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open
and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.”
That’s what you could be hearing right now. Cut through that haze with courage
and live with the tangible and real, no matter how uncomfortable.
13. Let go of control. The poisonous need to control
everything and micromanage is usually revealed with success. Ego starts saying:
it all must be done my way — even little things,
even inconsequential things. The solution is straightforward. A smart man or
woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach. It’s
simple, but not easy.
14. Place the mission and purpose
above you. During World War II,
General George Marshall, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for the Marshall Plan,
was practically offered the command of the troops on D-Day. Yet he told
President Roosevelt: “The decision is yours, Mr. President; my wishes have
nothing to do with the matter.” It came to be that Eisenhower led the invasion
and performed with excellence. Marshall put the mission and purpose above
himself — an act of selflessness we need to remind ourselves of.
15. When you find yourself in a
hole — stop digging. “Act with fortitude and honor,” Alexander Hamilton wrote
to a distraught friend in serious trouble of the man’s own making. “If you
cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have
the courage to make a full stop.” Our ego screams and rattles when it is
wounded. We will then do anything to get out of trouble. Stop.
Don’t make things worse. Don’t dig yourself further. Make a plan.
16. Don’t be deceived by
recognition, money and success — stay sober.Success, money and power can intoxicate. What is
required in those moments is sobriety and a refusal to indulge. One look at
Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful women on the planet is revealing. She
is plain and modest — one writer said that unpretentiousness is Merkel’s main weapon — unlike most world
leaders intoxicated with position. Leave self-absorption and obsessing over
one’s image for the egotists.
17. Leave your entitlement at the
door. Right before he
destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies,
overrode the objections of one of his employees and bragged, “I could put the
Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!” You can see how this manifestation of
ego can lead you to success — and how it can lead to
downright failure.
18. Choose love. Martin Luther King understood that
hate is like an “eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center
of your life.” Hatred is when ego turns a minor insult into a massive sore and
it lashes out. But pause and ask: has hatred and lashing out ever helped anyone
with anything? Don’t let it eat at you — choose love. Yes, love.
See how much better you feel.
19. Pursue mastery in your chosen
craft. When you are pursuing a craft you realize that the better you get, the humbler
you are. Because you understand there’s always something you can learn and you
are inherently humbled by this fascinating craft or career you’re after. It is
hard to get a big head or become egotistical when you’ve decided on that path.
20. Keep an inner scorecard. Just because you won doesn’t mean
you deservedto. We need to forget other people’s validation and
external markers of success. Warren Buffett has advised keeping an inner
scorecard versus the external one. Your potential, the absolute best
you’re capable of — that’s the metric to
measure yourself against.
21. Paranoia creates things to be
paranoid about. “He who indulges empty
fears earns himself real fears,” wrote Seneca, who as a political adviser
witnessed destructive paranoia at the highest levels. If you let ego think that
everyone is out to get you you will seem weak…and then people will really try
to take advantage of you. Be strong, confident and forgiving.
22. Always stay a student. Put yourself in rooms where you’re
the least knowledgeable person. Observe and learn. That uncomfortable feeling,
that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are
challenged? Do it deliberately. Let it humble you. Remember how the
physicist John Wheeler put it, “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the
shore of our ignorance.”
23. No one can degrade you — they degrade themselves. Ego is sensitive about slights,
insults and not getting their due. This is a waste of time. After Frederick
Douglass was asked to ride in a baggage car because of his race, someone rushed
to apologize for this mistreatment. Frederick’s reply? “They cannot degrade
Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the
one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are
inflicting it upon me.”
24. Stop playing the image game — focus on a higher purpose. One of the best strategists
of the last century, John Boyd, would ask the promising young acolytes under
him: “To be or to do? Which way will you go?” That is, will you choose to fall
in love with the image of how success looks like or will you
focus on a higher purpose? Will you pick obsessing over your title, number of
fans, size of paycheck or on real, tangible accomplishment? You know which way
ego wants to go.
25. Focus on the effort — not the results. This is so important it is appearing twice. If you
can accept that you control only the effort that goes in and not the results which come out, you will be mastering your
ego. All work leaves our hands at some point. Ego wants to control everything — but it cannot control
other people or their reactions. Focus on your end of the equation, leave them
to theirs. Remember Goethe’s line: “What matters to an active man is to do the right thing;
whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him.”
https://medium.com/thrive-global/25-ways-to-kill-the-toxic-ego-that-will-ruin-your-life-32a0bd2c0932
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