Ego and Arrogance

I retweeted this:

and proceeded to talk a little bit about it in a thread but really wanted to elaborate in a longer format.

The Use Case for Ego

On the whole, I think most people should be proud of and stand by their work. It seems to result in more respect, more jobs, more networking, more connections, more collaboration, more everything useful for a career and a body of work.

It is very difficult to do.

For two reasons:

• Artists know more than anyone that their work has flaws, and we can see them glaringly obvious in a way that most viewers / participants probably don't notice or care about (or might even like). So we get into things like imposter syndrome when the internal confidence doesn't match the perceived outcome level of attention or respect we get.

• The accusation / insult most effectively hurled at anyone who thinks of themselves as an honest humble earnest person is to be called arrogant or narcissistic or egoist or similar. It is a kryptonite deeper than any other to people of our disposition and perhaps generally more liberal leanings.

While we read books like Ego is the Enemy the truth is, ego is a useful act and a tool in these games.

In the same way that rappers or rockstars sort of have to be grandiose in order to play the celebrity characters they play, wrestlers don't actually hate each other and dramatic celebrities don't actually gossip - all of these games are played out for entertainment, that's what their role in the game is.

If those people wanted to play those roles and weren't those things, they probably wouldn't get to the top. Or they'd find different tops to get to: maybe these are your Dave Grohl and Keanu Reeves quiet types.

Of course Logan Paul is a known internet name. Of course Frank Gehry and Philippe Starck are known designer names. They're playing that particular game. They get those jobs because of it, not in spite of it.

Are they truly egotistical? Maybe. I'm sure a lot of ego-reputation types are well-deserved. But I do think that a lot of them are characters, and a lot of them are even smart for playing those characters if their goals were to become those figureheads (which isn't even a morally bad goal, in my opinion).

Our Position in the Spectrum

So we get to choose a bit for ourselves. Not everyone wants to play those roles, not everyone even needs to, depending on types of jobs or goals.

But I do think we should be as fair to ourselves as possible.

This requires a lot of objective self-awareness which is hard in itself, but the real goal is to find our level of deserved confidence and then play a tiny bit higher than that in order to bite off a bit more each time to continue growing upward and getting better at our craft (and career, life, etc).

• Wildly high ego per skill ends up being cringey (true arrogance, "I was studying the blade" teens, etc)

• Wildly low ego per skill leaves a lot on the table (apologizing, downplaying your work, etc)

• Exactly even ego per skill means you'll keep doing that exact same work forever.

• Playing it up a tiny bit means throwing yourself into ever bigger ponds as you continue upward.

We can see that most people swing wildly low because there's an assumption that zero ego = best ego, that avoiding the accusations of arrogance or cringiness should come first above your own career and work and self-worth. That humbleness as a virtue inherently means taking less money, doing smaller work and faking being happy about that. It's the puritanical burden to shoulder, right?

So back up to the very first retweet: category four is the provisional ego thing, when we use it as a temporary tool to get noticed and stand tall, but not so much that we're wildly high on ourselves.

The truth is, no matter what, you'll probably get called out for something.

I'm not sure 'arrogant' is nearly as big of an insult as the people who wield it and honestly, I think it's pretty telling about the people who wield it too often. If you can't win the universal public perception thing, you might as well lean in and step up and do better work with cooler people on bigger projects.

At the end of my life I think I'd rather be called out for striving than for fumbling.

I think I'd rather aim for #4 and get insultingly placed in #1 than I would just living in #2 the entire time.

Also, I would argue that Grohl and Reeves are in that fourth category, even as we revere them for their humbleness - really we're just comparing them to the similar types of celebrities playing in that first slot.

This relativity brings us to the main conclusion:

What Ego Isn't

This is permission to start valuing your work and yourself for what it is worth + perhaps slightly more.

This is not permission to be an egomaniac sociopath to the people around you, to be bossy or rude or cruel to those below you.

You can be confident in yourself and not some unreasonable bag of dicks. You can be wealthy and famous and powerful and still polite to your server. You can have ego and be kind. You can take yourself seriously and valuably and hold your head high, spine straight, and not be a jerk.

You can be humble without constantly self-fumbling your work and sloughing off compliments.

And yes, sometimes you can lay on that ego charm layer and go for broke. Sometimes you need to.

What we don't want is to get lost in the character. What we don't want is to think that drama will increase returns to unrelated social currencies or start conflating it into a permanent state of perpetual ego.

We want to ride the careful line between enough and too much: narcissism isn't when you think highly of yourself, it's when you think too highly of yourself. When you jump from that fourth category to first.

So be fair, be self-honest, and take it from me if no one else: you're almost certainly more valuable than you give yourself credit for right now. Stand up for that once in a while, eh?

"Do no harm, but take no shit."