How to Not Let Success Get to Your Head and Be Egoistic

If you’re an egoistic person, there’s a high chance that you will ever see the light of success. Because it eats away your ability to comprehend your mistakes the same way as termites would eat wood. 

Ego is normally fed when you’re acknowledged for your achievements and accomplishments. Now I am not saying that you should stop every other person who is trying to compliment you on your achievements. It all comes down to the fact of how effectively you can handle these compliments.

Ask yourself, are you using these acknowledgments and achievements to boost your confidence? If you’re then you’re on the right path. But, in case you aren’t, then you are surely using it to fuel your ego. 

When somebody becomes successful, they usually react in the following two ways. 

They either build up their confidence and hone their skills to develop better abilities. 

OR 

They fuel their ego which goes out of control and seeks approval from others.  

It all depends on you how you let success effect you. Do you want to learn how not to let success get to your head? Time to harness the power of ultimate success by learning to overcome your own ego. 

Find Ways to Stay Humble in Your Interactions

Zig Ziglar once said, 

“Humility will open more doors than arrogance ever will.”

How do you feel or what is the most common feeling that you have when you achieve success? 

You simply want to cancel out all the external noises. Hence, you opt-in isolation and that’s actually where the ego starts to set in. You become self-absorbed in your own mental narrative thinking that you’re some kind of a perfectionist. However, what you fail to realize is that the very same sense of perfectionism is feeding your ego. Being humble becomes a weakness, and you become devoid of humility. Having humility as a part of one’s personality is not a bad thing. One of the major misconceptions is that being humble can significantly lower one person’s self-esteem. But in fact, humility only neutralizes negative emotions and motivates positivity. It makes the person not think of themselves above others and neither does it allow them to place themselves below others. 

It builds up self-confidence and let them accept the fact that everyone equally makes a contribution. 

As Ryan Holiday states in his book, “The Obstacle is the Way” 

“When a person removes the ego from his personality, the only thing left is the real him/her.”

How to Stay Humble? If you ever feel like giving unsought advice to others, give alternative solutions to problems, compel to show there isn’t anybody smarter than you are, take a moment and think about it. There’s a supreme power who created us, an ultimate being who bestows us with the blessing of mind and knowledge. Just as everything comes our way a blessing, so does the element of success. What if he chose somebody else the next time? So your hard-earned success isn’t after all your own to cherish upon now, is it? Being humble is a great way to address self-worth and fuel positive emotions. Be thankful for what you have and fuel your motivation to achieve great things in life without the ego. 

Connect Yourself with the Higher Purpose

Ask yourself why achieving success is important? Believe it or not, it’s often our ego that compels us to take that first step out of the door. We have a wish to save the world or at least some part of it. And we often create a mission where we vow ourselves to do things for the betterment of society and achieve greatness. However, while chasing greatness, we can often run out of gas in the middle of the road. At times as such, we feel like we are trapped in a never-ending cycle of work and ambition. 

This never-ending work cycle eventually makes us feel that we are not connected to a higher purpose. It makes us feel sad and depressed. We start feeling devoid of motivation, concentration, and an emptiness automatically sits inside us. As a result, we start deviating from our original purpose and find egoistic reasons to self-satisfy. These egoistic reasons are what takes us through a down-spiral. In 2004, when Steve Jobs was attending the graduation class at Stanford, stated: 

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

The best way to overcome this impending feeling of doom is by questioning yourself these few things, 

• Who am I and what am I doing with my life? 
• Where am I going with the goals that I have set in life? 
• What is my role and how am I fulfilling my role in life? 

By answering these questions and reminding yourself of the answers every day will give you all the positive motivation that you need. And you need to make sure that you don’t let things such as ego stem inside you. Whenever you face the uncertainty of becoming a victim of these feelings, try to distract yourself. One of the ways of doing so is to go ou into the wilderness and explore nature. It will help you vent out all the negative energy, the false sense of pompousness and all that you ever feared. 

It’s Not Necessary that You Always Win

If the ego is fed to your inner will to strive & live better, then it can fuel far greater motivation than ever. 

Renowned psychologist Michael Maccoby, in his book “The Gamesman” talks about people who feed their ego with positivity. 

“They are cooperative but competitive; detached and playful but compulsively driven to succeed. Their main goal is to be known as a winner and their deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” 

There’s no denying the fact that successful people are driven with an inner motivation and a deep desire to win. And this desire often drives them into achieving all their goals and objectives constantly. If you have a winning mindset then make sure that it doesn’t feed your ego. When your ego is not in your control, you let others define your worth and that’s one of the things which can make insecurity. 

And that usually creates a problem in enabling you to achieve your goals and objectives.

One way to stop feeding your ego is not to chase winning so desperately. Take it easy. Life has its ups and downs, just go with the flow. It’s a roller coaster ride, and you might as well enjoy it with all its highs and lows. So what if you failed, there’s always a second chance to go get it again. 

Be Grateful for Everything You Have

Whether we address it or not, but our soul is appreciative of what we have and whole-heartedly embraces the gifts life bestows upon it. Apparently, instead of gratifying the ultimate being who bestows his blessings upon us, we occasionally seek external gratification to satiate our own ego. 

Sadly, our ego is something that will never gain the satisfaction it seeks. 

The ego is devised in such a manner that it will always try to seek happiness creating an endless cycle. The need/desire/want to achieve it all and more and more and more and more is never enough.

It’s how the human being is designed. However, if we awaken our understanding of how life is difficult for many others out there things can be different. Just realizing the fact that some are simply struggling for a meal while others can’t even get access to pure drinking water is enough to be grateful for the simple blessings we have. Being grateful for what you’ve is a great way of killing that negative narrative that stems inside and feeds ego with all the negativities you don’t want.

Create a list of all the things that you can come up with that you appreciate. And feel how amazed and wonderful life is. Thank the Creator for what you’ve and the blessings he bestows upon you every day. 

Time to Live by Putting Ego Aside

When was the last time you felt like your ego is out of control? If people are trying to seek your attention or want you to mentor them, don’t craft an egoistic response to put them down. Instead, be polite. Give them a thing or two, show a tendency to care and they will eventually gratify you. It will automatically feed you with mindfulness. If you will involve yourself with the egoistic min set, things wouldn’t go in your favor and you just might end up making all the wrong decisions hurting yourself.  

Is that what you seek from life? I believe not. Start becoming less egoistic and more gratifying.