Every spiritual guru and stoic will tell you your ego is in the way.
They will paint the ego as this thing to “strip” away from your being.

You don’t need to do that.

Your ego is your friend, and your ego is meant to protect you, not hurt you. Your ego is the reason you can compete in this world. Your ego is the reason you try at anything in life and why you care enough to do it well.

You need your ego to succeed.

Where it becomes a problem is when you believe everything that it tells you.

To illustrate this, I’d like to introduce you to a gentleman named Floyd Mayweather Jr.

If you don’t know who he is, Floyd Mayweather Jr. is a famous retired boxer from the United States, considered one of the best ever. Mayweather is known for his unbeatable defense, speed, and smart fighting style. He never lost a fight in his career, ending with a perfect record of 50 wins. Hi nickname was “Money,” because he made huge amounts of money from his fights and is, finically, the most successful boxer of all time.

He’s won world titles in five different weight classes, proving his skill across various divisions. Outside the ring, he’s known for his flashy and often divisive, personality.

This “flashy” personality is what made him such a big draw. He was perceived as someone who is very arrogant because he always talked bad about his opponents, and just about everyone else who opposed him.

It would be really easy to analyze his behavior and think of him as having a big ego. A lot of what he did was strategic to get attention, but truth be told, he believed what he said. Now, if most of us started thinking of ourselves as the greatest ever, it would probably hinder us. Because we would let our ego let us believe that.

The difference in how Floyd treated his ego, compared to most, is twofold:

On one end, his ego was developed through a list of references. He had decades’ worth of work ethic and wins to back the ego that he earned. The confidence he had wasn’t grabbed from thin air, it was built off of hard work.

On the other end, his ego is so big that he did everything possible to protect it. To make sure what he says remains true, and his ego never gets hurt. How did he do this? He had a legendary work ethic.

In fact, his entire mantra was “Hard work, Dedication.”

He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, and anytime he was at a promotional “party,” he would run home in his boots. He protected his ego at all costs, and it benefited him.

He made sure he put in the effort to maintain the narrative his ego was feeding him, but he never let it make him comfortable enough in that narrative to not feel like he has to back it up.

As the old saying goes: “Don’t let your mouth write checks that your ass can’t cash.”

If we had absolutely no ego, we would not strive for anything.

The ego is not your enemy, it’s your mode of transportation.

It’s like a wild horse, and if you let the beast loose into the populace untamed, it will cause damage, hurt people, and hurt itself.

Work to learn to tame it, to control it, and to channel it. Like the horse, you will go much further and much faster with it than on your own two feet.