It’s a balancing act.
The only way to make progress is to do shit. You have to put in the work, do the time. I live my entire life on this principle, optimizing most of my hours to try and be the best I can be.
The tricky thing is, the ego feeds on this mania. The honest ambitious and willingness to try, as good and productive as it can be, also feeds our feeling of being great. We feel like hard working, accomplished people when we work hard and accomplish things.
Enjoying the fruits of your labor is good, and knowing you are making a contribution is good. Ego is bad, and it’s hard to keep it separate from the other things.
The Audacity to Try
It takes tremendous courage to try, and few of us truly have it. We bolster our ambitions with whatever encouragement we can find. Self-help gurus, morning routines, drugs, burning the midnight oil, and more.
The ego helps to fuel the fire at first. Believing you are great, or at least can be great, can create the ridiculous ambition you need to aim “too high” and find a good goal.
In most other ways, the ego hinders me. It makes me want to claim more credit, to be more fancy, to hold back on the truth in favor of looking good. The ego can feed off of past success, achieved through mindful means, and tear us back into the world of vanity. We’re never safe, never.
When we shed ownership of ideas and prefer real progress over social clout, we become our better selves. We become more productive, more creative, and more impactful.
We shed the ego and find major progress. We become proud, the ego returns, and we harness it to drive us to bigger, more ambitious goals. Then we must slowly shed the ego, check ourselves, adjust our goals, and move calmly forward.
An Endless Cycle of Dualistic Progress
It’s the hamster wheel of progress. Both real and imagined, both worth it and not. Meaningful and meaningless, entropy and magnetism in an awkward dance.
The ego lurks around the corner. I’ll probably never get rid of it, and I don’t know if I want to… but I hope I can keep moving through the cycle, a little more smoothly with time. To grab a breath of fresh air when the ego isn’t looking.
