Being promoted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing good work and it doesn’t mean you are worthy of promotion. Having the right and being right are not the same either. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.Īppearance is deceiving. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. In actuality, silence is strength-particularly early on in any journey. Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.
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What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Constantly train your intellect, for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.
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The best thing which we have in ourselves is good judgment. Be slow in deliberation, but be prompt to carry out your resolves. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.īe affable in your relations with those who approach you, and never haughty for the pride of the arrogant even slaves can hardly endure. One is girding yourself, the other is gaslighting. Ego is self-anointed, it swagger is artifice. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. What replaces ego is humility, yes-but rock-hard humility and confidence. When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. How are we supposed to reach, motivate, or lead other people if we can’t relate to their needs-because we’ve lost touch with our own? Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion. If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.
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Precisely what makes us so promising as thinkers, doers, creatives, and entrepreneurs, what drives us to the top of those fields, makes us vulnerable to this darker side of the psyche. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives insides you: your ego. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool.