It’s easy to look at history and learn the wrong lesson. You see Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar and can’t help but connect their enormous ego to their incredible successes. Or you watch Elizabeth Holmes escape consequences for her frauds and Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, get rewarded with a golden parachute and think: the upside of ego is enormous and the downside is pretty minimal. You look at a Steve Jobs or a Kanye West and it’s understandable to think that ego is an asset.
This is a mistake. Correlation and causation are not the same thing.
As William Manchester would write of Douglas MacArthur, it’s not that MacArthur’s ego contributed to his success, it’s that “his gifts were so great that he repeatedly triumphed in spite of himself.” Kyrie Irving is not a great athlete because he has an ego. It’s that his talent as a basketball player was great enough for three teams to absorb his ego in order to utilize those talents… and even then this turned out to be a costlier bargain than they thought.
The Stoics believed that ego was the enemy of real greatness. When Marcus Aurelius looked back at the emperors who preceded him, he didn’t think: “Oh, Tiberius and Hadrian got away with big egos, so can I.” Instead, what he saw was what could have been. How much more they could have accomplished, how much grander and more meaningful their legacy would have been had it been infused with more temperance, wisdom, justice, and courage. And that’s how we should look at an Adam Neumann or a Steve Jobs or a Kanye West, too—not as rationalizations for our own egos, but as cautionary tales. They could have done more, been better people, and avoided many of their most painful failures.
Remember today that ego is not making you better. At best, it is a drag on your talents—a tax people are only willing to pay for a short time. At worst, it is a ticking time bomb that will take you and the people who work with you down in flames.
Beware.
P.S. This was originally sent on May 18, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
