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Identify the real roots of success
One of the reasons I think studying ego is so important is that we often confuse causation and correlation when it comes to ego. So we’ll look at a Steve Jobs. And it’s undeniable that he had a big ego. And so we’ll sometimes use that to excuse things that he did while he was CEO. Or we’ll think, oh, Steve Jobs had this huge ego, so I can have a huge ego and be successful. I think the reality is, someone like Steve Jobs is successful because he’s a profoundly talented person who put in his hours.
He’s got a sense of what users want. He’s got a sense of what the technology needs to be. He’s got a really strong design aesthetic.
I think it’s important to look at the flaws of some of these leaders, to where they made egotistical decisions. So look at a moment in someone like Steve Jobs’s life where he’s fired by the board of directors at Apple, and if we had been in their position, we almost certainly would’ve done the same thing because he’d become unmanageable. Not only had he become unmanageable and sort of a cancer in the office, but he wasn’t even delivering the results either. So the fact that Steve Jobs comes back later and is successful is not an excuse or a justification for the behavior that came before it.
So I think what you want to do is look at the fact that a lot of these really talented, great CEOs had a weakness. Had this problem where they were occasionally making decisions out of ego, and in fact this is the root of a lot of their mistakes.
And I think we want to make sure that, you’re some kid and you’re starting a startup in the Silicon Valley right now, that you don’t think it’s the turtleneck and the attitude that made Steve Jobs what he was, but actually the technical proficiency and the vision that he had, and that we’re emulating the right traits.
One of the things that happens with successful people is that they start to tell themselves a story about who they are and where they’re going. And so, because they’ve been successful in the past, they feel that they’re entitled to be successful in the future. Their last project was a success, so this one is going to be a success.
We sort of get this sense that we’re on this path, we have this destiny to do things, and therefore all the pieces are going to line up for us in the future. And then we’re surprised, or we’re upset, or we lash out when it’s not the case.
Embrace “Fight Club” moments
I think we all have these moments in our lives where, what we think about ourselves, or what we think about the world is sort of laid bare. And we realize that there was a lot of projection involved in that assessment, there was a lot of wishful thinking, and we have to, we sort of come face-to-face with truth. And you could argue that Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple was one of those moments. Not initially so. Initially, he fights against it with all he can. He sells all his Apple stock, he starts another company.
But eventually, he begins to work on a lot of the problems that had led to his dismissal from Apple. He needed some sort of moment in his life where he had to accept that he was the source of his own problems and that it cost him something.
I think you see this in other people as well. It wasn’t enough just to get feedback or nudges here and there from people in their lives about flaws that they needed to address, it really needed to cost them something in a major way.
I called them Fight Club moments because if you remember in the novel and also in the movie Fight Club, the narrator, his life is so miserable. But he can’t face it, he can’t see it, that he has to develop this alter ego who blows up his apartment and forces him to go on this journey. It’s also something we see in Greek literature as well. But I think we need those moments when we’re so far gone with things that the only way we can face the truth is to have it sort of shoved in our face.