How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Your Ego

If your reward in getting something done and creating something is attention, right? If what you want is attention, which is what drives most people these days in the era of social media, then your sense of gratification comes from other people. And that's very ephemeral. You can never make that solid. This question is sort of directed at me, but it has a general lesson to it is, how do I avoid becoming egotistical when I get so much praise, I guess, for my book? And this praise, mind you, is not like something that public. I get emails from my audience that are very gratifying to me, saying how much the book has helped them. But it's not praise about me personally, about who I am. But the reason why my ego doesn't drive me, I mean, I have an ego. And for me to say I don't would be absurd. I have an ego, and it's definitely there. And success has probably ballooned that ego. But the reason it doesn't get out of control is, is not a good one, I'm afraid. So it probably stems from my childhood, where, I mean, I had a good childhood, but I never ever felt like what I was doing was enough. I never felt like I was actually gratifying my parents. I never felt like that they were satisfied with what I was doing. There was always a sense of unneed, right? I was never like praised that much for anything. And so it kind of created this level of insecurity in me, where I have to keep trying, I have to keep trying again and again and again to please people, to get what they want, to do what is satisfying to them. Oftentimes in life, a negative quality that you have from childhood can be transformed into something positive, if you know how to do it and turn into something productive. I wrote about that a lot in The Laws of Human Nature. And so whenever I have done anything in my life, I always have this feeling like, man, that wasn't very good, Robert. That's actually kind of really stupid what you wrote. It's really actually quite boring. It's actually just a piece of ----. You know, there's nothing to get excited about. It's not the best thing in the world because it's always pushing me, pushing me harder and harder and harder, probably led to my stroke. And I should be able to relax and sit back and go, you've written seven books, they've been successful. Can't you just rest on that? Can't you just feel happy about that? And I do feel happy, but I'm also driven to write my eighth book and to make it better than all the others. And so if I didn't have that, I would become very complacent. And I've noticed this with a lot of writers. They write their first book or their second book, and it's successful. And they keep repackaging it, the same format, the same idea into book two, three, four, and five, and six. They don't want to have to put in the effort. The success has gone to their mind. They're more interested in success than in thinking, than in actually creating new ideas. And I get very bored to talk about something that we just talked about. I get very bored when things aren't constantly moving and changing in my brain. So I'm not allowing myself to ever feel happy about the work I do. When I write a chapter, the first draft is just awful. It's butt-awful. I wouldn't want anybody to see it. And I work on it again, and the second version is awful, but a little less awful. By the time I reach the fifth version, it's okay. I think it's okay. So I'm very hard on myself, and that is a break on my ego. And it would be good if I could let up a little bit on that and relax and realize what I've accomplished in life. But to answer your question, what's the larger lesson in life? If your reward in getting something done, in creating something, is attention, right? If what you want is attention, which is what drives most people these days in the era of social media, then your sense of gratification comes from other people, okay? And that's very ephemeral. You can never make that solid. And it builds up your ego. It makes you feel, wow, I'm fantastic. I'm amazing. I've got all this attention. I've got five million followers. I'm an influencer, et cetera, okay? But it's very ephemeral. It's not anything solid. It's going to leave you, and it's going to make you depressed in four or five years when some younger influencer comes along with a bigger audience, and you're kind of forgotten because it's not coming from inside. It's coming from outside. So the way to get out of it is to be inner-driven. You want to create something for yourself. You want to leave something lasting. You want to have some kind of legacy. You're inner-driven. And when you're inner-driven, then it's not about your ego. It's not about attention. It's about creating something great for the world, contributing to humanity. That's kind of the lesson that I have here for that.