Ego is better understood as a narrative we return to for safety rather than as a personality trait.
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In three decades of building a company and now advising other leaders, I have sat through countless conversations about strategy, culture, and burnout. What I rarely hear mentioned is the mechanism that underpins most of these problems. That mechanism is ego.
Unfortunately, many people hear the word ego and picture arrogance—the executive who cannot stop talking about himself. But that is not the definition I use, and it is not the one that has held up under scrutiny in my own life.
Ego, as I understand it now, is a running narrative built from every fear you have felt and every story you have told yourself about what you must achieve in order to feel safe. It is not a personality trait. It behaves more like software, installed by your formative experiences, running quietly behind almost every decision you make.
A Wild Horse, Not a Villain
I think of ego as a wild horse rather than an enemy to defeat. Tamed, a wild horse carries you faster and farther than you could travel alone. Left to run loose, the same animal will throw you and trample whatever stands in its path.
Ego works the same way. It gave me the drive to build a company from nothing. It also earned me a reputation, in the early years, for firing people on impulse and chasing prospective clients so relentlessly that one finally told me never to call him again.
The part that took me longest to understand is that ego cannot survive in the present moment. It needs the past to replay or the future to worry about, just as a photo album only means something when you look back through it.
Watch your own mind for a single day and notice how rarely it rests on what is actually happening in front of you, compared with what already happened or what might happen next.
From Master to Servant
Eliminating ego is neither possible nor useful. Ego, kept in its proper place, plans your calendar and protects you from real danger. The goal is a demotion, not an execution. You want consciousness running your life, with ego reporting to it rather than the other way around.
Forbes senior contributor Nell Derick Debevoise described a version of this same reframe in her profile of my work for this publication, writing that the real question was never whether I was overconfident or too ambitious. It was how much of what I did all day came from genuine intelligence responding to the moment, and how much came from automatic responses installed decades earlier in situations that no longer applied.
Writer Henna Geronimo, covering neuroplasticity for the recovery resource Roots Through Recovery, makes a related point in her own words. She points out that the same brain mechanisms that allow old, protective patterns to calcify are the ones that allow us to loosen them, given enough consistent attention.
Ego will always show up for work. Whether it runs the meeting or takes notes quietly in the back of the room is still, every single day, a choice.
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