Are You Your Worst Enemy?

Sep 21

Ego is the enemy

Ego is easy to recognize in other people. We see the person who needs to be the smartest in the room, who always has an answer, who needs credit, or who can't handle being challenged. We recognize the person who has become successful enough that they no longer seem interested in learning. It is much harder to recognize those same tendencies in ourselves.

Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy explores ego across aspiration, success, and failure, making the case that ego can become an obstacle regardless of where we are in our careers. But ego isn't always obvious. It doesn't require arrogance, a title, or an inflated sense of importance. Sometimes it looks a lot more familiar: defending an idea because it was ours, talking when we should be listening, feeling slighted when we aren't included, wanting people to know what we contributed, explaining away a failure before considering our role in it, or resisting information that threatens something we already believe.

The challenge isn't eliminating confidence, ambition, or conviction. We need those things. The challenge is recognizing when they quietly become something else. Sometimes the person most capable of getting in our way is ourselves.

The traits that got you here

You probably don't end up working in high-performance environments by accident. These environments attract people who want to be good at what they do. Really good. You want to compete. You want to improve. You want to work with the best. And ultimately, you want to win.

Getting there usually requires some combination of ambition, confidence, sacrifice, persistence, and an almost unreasonable belief that you can become better than you are today. You worked hard. You pursued opportunities. You developed expertise. You probably said yes when other people said no. Somewhere along the way, you also had to believe that you belonged in rooms you hadn't been in before.

Those aren't character flaws. You need confidence to operate in high-performance environments. You need conviction to make difficult decisions. You need enough belief in your expertise to speak up when something doesn't look right, even when the room disagrees with you.

The challenge is that some of the same qualities that help us get there can eventually become the qualities that get in our way. Confidence can become certainty. Conviction can become stubbornness. Ambition can become comparison. Expertise can become identity. High standards can become an inability to accept another way of doing something. Competitiveness can turn every disagreement into something that needs to be won.

The answer isn't to become less ambitious, less confident, or less competitive. It's learning how to keep the edge without letting the edge control you.

That balance can become harder as you become more successful. The more experience you accumulate, the more evidence you have that your instincts are good. The more people seek your opinion, the easier it becomes to assume they should listen. The more responsibility you earn, the easier it becomes to confuse influence with importance. That's where ego can quietly begin to work against the very thing you're trying to accomplish.

High performance isn't an individual pursuit carried out alongside other people. You might have gotten here because of what you were willing to do, but you won't accomplish much here by yourself. The challenge is maintaining the ambition that got you into the room while developing the humility required to function once you're in it.

Keep the confidence, but lose the need for it to always be validated.

Keep the conviction, but lose the need to always be right.

Keep the competitiveness, but remember what you're actually trying to win.

Stay a student

The more expertise we develop, the easier it becomes to believe we have fewer things left to learn. That's backwards. Expertise should give us a greater appreciation for complexity. It should expose us to more questions, more uncertainty, and more perspectives that challenge what we thought we knew.

Ego can turn experience into certainty. We stop asking questions because we think we're supposed to have answers. We become less interested in perspectives outside our discipline. We begin interpreting disagreement as evidence that someone else doesn't understand the problem.

Holiday's idea of remaining a student matters here. Being a student doesn't mean lacking confidence in what you know. It means remaining interested in what you don't. It means sitting in a room with people from different backgrounds and disciplines and genuinely believing they might see something you don't.

Your expertise gives you a lens.

Ego convinces you that your lens is the view.

The people around you have their own lenses. That's part of the reason high-performance teams bring together people with different expertise in the first place. The goal isn't simply to get your voice into the conversation. It's to leave the conversation understanding the problem better than when you entered it. Your expertise should give you a voice, but it shouldn't prevent you from hearing everyone else's.

Who are you trying to impress?

There is a difference between having expertise and needing people to know you have expertise. That line can become surprisingly blurry.

We overcomplicate explanations when simple ones would work. We contribute to conversations because we want to demonstrate what we know. We talk about what we're going to do instead of doing it. We correct details that don't materially change the outcome. Sometimes we aren't actually trying to move the conversation forward. We're trying to establish our position within it.

Holiday's advice to talk less and do more is useful precisely because the work eventually speaks for itself. Solve problems. Follow through. Make someone else's job easier. Be prepared. Bring information when it matters. Do the work that nobody notices. Not every contribution needs an audience.

A useful self-audit is to ask:

Am I saying this because it helps, or because I want people to know that I know it?

Not every thought needs to be shared, every disagreement corrected, or every contribution seen. Sometimes the most useful person in the room isn't the one who says the most. It's the person who understands when they actually have something worth adding.

Do I need to be right?

Dale Carnegie wrote, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.”

That includes us.

We like to think our positions are products of logic, evidence, and experience. Often they are. But our ideas can also become attached to our identities. Someone challenges the idea and it begins to feel like they're challenging us. So we defend it.

We construct the rebuttal while the other person is still speaking. We search for evidence that supports what we already believe. We explain why conflicting information doesn't apply. At some point, we may stop defending the idea because it is good and start defending it because it is ours.

This matters when working with people because you can be technically correct and practically useless. Teams don't operate on information alone; they operate through people. Those people have experiences that shape how they interpret information. They have relationships, responsibilities, incentives, fears, and pressures that you may not see. They have pride in their work and ideas they have invested in. And, like you, they have an ego.

That doesn't mean abandoning logic or lowering the standard of evidence. It means recognizing that how you communicate an idea can determine whether the idea ever has an opportunity to matter. You can win the argument and lose the person. You can prove someone wrong and make them less willing to collaborate with you the next time. You can have the best information in the room and deliver it in a way that ensures nobody wants to hear it.

Adam Grant's Think Again offers a useful counter to this by encouraging us to approach our beliefs more like a scientist. Treat them as hypotheses to test rather than territory to defend. Have strong opinions. Bring evidence. Advocate for what you believe and challenge the room when it matters. But maintain a loose enough grip that better information can change your mind.

Strong opinions, loose grip.

You can’t receive with closed hands. Changing your mind isn't evidence that you didn't know what you were doing. Sometimes it's evidence that you're paying attention.

Care more about getting it right than being right.

Do you need the credit?

Someone else gets recognized for something you helped create. Your recommendation becomes part of a larger plan and nobody knows where it originated. You do important work behind the scenes and someone else gets the attention.

How does that make you feel?

It's easy to talk about teamwork when our contribution is visible. The harder test is whether we're still satisfied when the outcome is good and nobody knows how much we contributed to it.

That doesn't mean recognition doesn't matter. People deserve credit for their work, and healthy organizations should recognize meaningful contributions. But there is a difference between appreciating recognition and needing recognition to validate the work.

This can become especially challenging as we become more successful. We start thinking in terms of my rehab, my program, my monitoring system, my athlete. We begin attaching ownership to our contributions. But in a genuinely integrated environment, ownership should sometimes become difficult to identify. One person's idea gets challenged by someone else. Another person modifies it. Someone adds context nobody had considered. Eventually, the original idea becomes something better.

That's the point.

Contribution doesn't require ownership. You can support a plan you didn't design. You can contribute an idea someone else improves. You can allow someone else to get the credit. You can do important work nobody ever sees.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is leave your logo off it.

Audit yourself first

Ego becomes particularly visible when things go wrong. Notice where your mind goes first:

They didn't listen.

They didn't follow the plan.

We didn't have enough time.

That wasn't what I recommended.

I said this would happen.

Sometimes those explanations are completely legitimate. But failure gives ego a powerful incentive to protect our existing image of ourselves. Complex environments make this particularly easy. There are always other people, competing priorities, limited resources, time constraints, and imperfect information. There will almost always be something outside ourselves we can point toward.

That's why self-auditing matters.

Before evaluating everyone else's contribution, evaluate your own. What assumptions did I make? What did I miss? What information did I discount because it didn't fit my thinking? Did I communicate clearly? Did I actually listen? Did I advocate strongly enough when it mattered? Did I continue advocating when I should have started listening?

Perhaps the most useful question is: What would I do differently if I had to make the same decision again with the information I had at the time?

That distinction matters because self-auditing isn't self-blame. Hindsight makes it easy to criticize a decision using information that wasn't available when the decision was made. The goal is to evaluate the quality of our process, not punish ourselves for failing to predict the future.

There is a difference between taking responsibility for everything and taking responsibility for your contribution to everything.

Failure can be one of our best teachers, but only if we are willing to learn from it. Sometimes the intervention doesn't work. Sometimes the metric we thought mattered doesn't. Sometimes someone else sees something we completely missed. Sometimes we were simply wrong. Those moments expose the limits of our models and our expertise.

The question is whether we use that information to update our thinking or use our ego to explain it away.

Ego audits everyone else. Humility starts with yourself.

It’s not about you

Maybe that's ultimately the most useful reminder.

It's not about suppressing ambition, pretending expertise doesn't matter, refusing recognition, or never advocating for your ideas. Humility certainly isn't making yourself smaller so everyone else can feel bigger. It's about loosening the connection between what you do and who you believe you are.

Your idea can be wrong without you being incompetent. Someone else can know more than you without diminishing your expertise. Someone else can receive credit without diminishing your contribution. You can change your mind without losing credibility. You can fail without becoming a failure. And you can succeed without believing that success makes you more important than the people around you.

Ego makes all of those things harder because it turns ordinary professional experiences into threats to our identity. It turns our attention inward: Did they listen to me? Did I get credit? Was I right? Do they respect my expertise? Do they know how much I contributed?

Sometimes we need to redirect that attention. What am I missing? What can I learn? How can I help? What does the team need? What are we actually trying to accomplish?

Stay a student. Do the work. Listen. Change your mind. Let someone else get the credit. Audit yourself first. Keep the confidence, the ambition, and the competitiveness. Just remember what you're actually trying to win.

The goal isn't to think less of yourself. It's to spend a little less time thinking about yourself.

Because sometimes the greatest obstacle standing between who we are and who we're capable of becoming isn't someone else.

It's us.

Are you your worst enemy?

“In a war of ego, the loser always wins.”

- Sun Tzu

Inspired by:

Ryan Holiday. Ego Is the Enemy. Portfolio; 2016.
Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster; 1936.
Adam Grant. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking; 2021.
Amy C. Edmondson. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley; 2018.

TOMMY OTLEY

Physical therapist, sport scientist, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of rehabilitation and performance.

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