Your ego is dangerous. It stands to jeopardise your progress, tarnish your relationships and amplify your arrogance. Why do you think Ryan Holiday titled his book Ego is the Enemy? Because ego is the enemy.
What do I mean by ego? I mean your sense of self-importance - that entitled voice deep inside you that pipes up from time-to-time to tell you how great and wonderful you are.
Your ego is the part of you that tells you that your work is good enough and that you don’t need to focusing on improving. It tells you that you deserve higher rates for your services, more views on your articles and more respect for your content.
In essence, your ego does everything it can to halt your advancements and keep you rooted to the spot creatively, reminding you that you’re good enough as you are.
Many of us let our ego run the show when we’re on the way up in our industry. And, consequently, many of us fail early at the hands of our precious sense of self-importance. As Holiday puts it,
“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room – until you change that with results.”
We all start from the same place. The bottom. To get to the top requires tremendous amounts of patience, hard work and acceptance of failure.
Instead of letting your ego run the show, be guided by humility. Forget the results. Forget what people think. Give everything to your craft and you will succeed.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash