Why your ego is (slowly) ruining your life

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Almost every single self-improvement YouTuber, self-improvement book, and motivational speaker will tell you how important it is to have confidence. Confidence in yourself, confidence in everything that you do. They'll also go on and on and on about how important it is to have high self-esteem and to feel sure about yourself, and to know that no matter what you set your mind to, you're capable of doing it.

Never accept less than what you think you're worth. Never stay in a job that you don't like. Don't keep doing things that you don't truly love. As a society, we just sort of accept this advice as if it's gospel, as if there is no downside to this radical self-assurance. But like any philosophy, I think it's unwise to not question it, and I think that this sort of blind optimism is worth questioning.

In fact, I think it's the very reason why so many people feel so stuck in life. One of the main downsides to this unconditional self-confidence in everything that you do is that it can quickly turn into an inflated sense of what we're capable of, which blinds us from correcting our weaknesses and changing paths if something's not working. That can really prevent us from improving our lives or making progress in any substantial way because there's a word for an inflated sense of self-confidence that is beyond the realm of reality: we call that ego.

You know, if your sense of your own capabilities and importance in life is bigger than reality itself, it's called having a big ego. Sometimes, having a big ego is really difficult to spot. I know for a fact it was in my own life. I've talked a lot on this channel about how when I went to university, it wasn't a filmmaking-specific university. So, in my intro-level film classes, I was the best filmmaker in the room—or so I thought.

But as soon as somebody in the class had a film that maybe they put more effort into than I did, I felt threatened by this, and I was in denial. I started looking for faults in their work, thinking there's no way that they know how to work a camera or have better cinematography than I do, and that blinded myself from my own weaknesses in my work. I was living in this sort of fantasy land where I'm this master filmmaker, even though I'm not even close to being that.

And I knew I wasn't, but my ego was blinding me from reality. It was blinding me from my weaknesses and things that I needed to work on, which prevented me from reaching the goal of actually becoming a masterful filmmaker, a goal which I'm nowhere near accomplishing. Your ego is kind of addicting; it tells you all the nice things that you want to hear. It tells you how good and special and talented you are, but it doesn't really help you improve.

You know, your ego is different from confidence because confidence stems from competence. As you get better at things, you develop a track record of being competent at that thing so that you know for a fact that you can pull this off; you're capable of doing this. That's confidence. You gain confidence through repetition and mastery. Your ego tells you that you're talented and special and you can do whatever you want to do, but it's not actually grounded in a track record of success.

I think one of the most common examples of people's ego getting in the way of their success is when they're working a job that they feel like they're better than. Maybe it's an entry-level position; maybe they're working at a fast food restaurant, flipping burgers, and they have an undergraduate degree and they're super educated in some field. Yet they still find themselves stuck in entry-level jobs. They start thinking to themselves, "What am I doing here? I'm better than this. I'm more educated than all of my peers; I deserve better."

A lot of the time, that's just your ego talking. It's blinding you from the reality that perhaps your resume isn't that impressive to the employers in the field that you want to go into. Perhaps you should accept the loss of time in whatever degree you got or whatever jobs you're working before. Take a slice of humble pie and figure out the best way forward from an objective perspective, no matter how unflattering that path might look on the surface level.

Our ego blinds us from reality, and if we can't accept reality, we can't improve it. In the book "Ego Is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday, he talks about how you can aspire to be either one of two things: you can aspire to be somebody, or you can aspire to do something. He argues that we live in a world filled with people trying to be somebody. In fact, you're kind of told that your whole life: go out there and be somebody.

So, naturally, people want to get their lucky break. They want to be recognized as special. They want to work their way up in the company so that they can eventually sit at the big desk with the big boys. If you're an artist, you really want to be recognized for your talent; you know, get your lucky break, become famous. Everybody wants to be an Instagram influencer, or a TikTok star, or a YouTuber. They want to have millions of people recognizing how special they are. They want to be somebody; they want to have influence.

That's the more tempting option. The other option is to aspire to do something, to get something done, to have a purpose or a mission—doing the best you can do in your craft. This type of person is a lot more concerned about action and education rather than validation and status. The person who aspires to do something in life is a lot more concerned with being useful rather than appearing to be useful or looking busy.

This is especially relevant for artists and creatives. If you're an influencer or a YouTuber, I think you really need to hear this as well. If your video, if your art, if your craft—whatever it is—is good enough, it's its own marketing. You know, if you double down and put in ten times more effort into your next video, if you put in ten times more effort into your next art piece, then the work will kind of speak for itself. There's a higher chance that it'll become extremely useful to people, and then the word-of-mouth effect will start to take place.

You know, every single time that I start to get caught up with how special I am for having almost a million subscribers and how I'm a big YouTuber and all my videos get lots of views, as soon as I start thinking that way, I start focusing on the wrong things. My videos start to suffer. You know, the actual quality of the videos and the message starts to suffer dramatically.

The best videos I've ever made, the ones I'm super proud of, are videos where I was just really concerned with telling the best story or getting my message across in the best way possible, in the most effective way possible. I treated the video in and of itself as the end goal, and whether or not that video blows up in the algorithm is kind of irrelevant because I became that much better as a filmmaker and a storyteller. My existing audience takes notice of that, and they really appreciate it.

When you offer that much value to people, and you're that useful to people, everything sort of comes into alignment. The views and the subscribers and the comments and the likes—they all kind of take care of themselves. So, I guess what I'm trying to get at with this video is, no matter what you're into, no matter what your profession or your hobby or your craft is, you need to take on the role of a student.

Every single person wants to be noticed and respected, but I think the path forward to dramatic progress in your life is the willingness to become a nobody until your results put you in a different category. You know, if you're applying for a job, how much better would it be if your resume was three times better than anyone else's? Not from a formatting perspective, not from you using fluffy language to describe yourself, but by you being three times more qualified, experienced, and educated than anybody else applying for that same job.

Stop caring so much about what other people think about you, how you appear in the world, and actually be someone who is useful to people—so useful that not having you in the room, or part of the team, or the company is such an immediate and dramatic detriment to everyone around you that they have no choice but to always have you around because you're that useful.

I guess if I was to distill this entire video down into just a couple of sentences, a little recap, it would be that no matter where you are in life, if you've experienced a lot of success and you're still unfulfilled, and you feel like you're kind of a house of cards waiting to fall down, or maybe you haven't experienced a lot of success in your life at all and you feel stuck—pay attention to your ego.

Pay attention to what this little sinister voice in the back of your head is telling you. Is it telling you you're too good for this? You're already the best, and you can't improve? Because that's all kind of [ __ ]. Strip away the ego. Try to view your position with a ruthless objectivity and honesty, and doing that will reveal a path forward. No matter how painful that path forward may seem, no matter how embarrassing it might look, see what happens if you take it, because going down that unflattering path may be the answer to all your problems.

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So, make sure you take advantage of that offer. Click the link in the description below, cop that 10% off, launch your website, make your presence known on the internet, and as usual, have a great time! If you liked this video, make sure you hit like because when you hit like, the algorithm blesses me and it shoves my bald head into other people's home pages, helping them out, which also helps me out, so it's a win-win for everybody.

If you're lurking here and this is the thousandth, perhaps even millionth time you've seen my head, make sure you not only hit subscribe but also hit the bell icon so that you don't miss future videos. It's kind of a crazy weekend; I don't want to get into details, but I really wanted to put in more effort to editing it and actually shooting some B-roll for this video. I wasn't able to, but I guess we can save it for the next video. There are two videos coming out in December. Thank you so much for watching, as usual, and we'll catch you in the next video!

Also, yeah, I'm going to shave this mustache off. It's not good.