How to Keep Your Ego in Check
Memory works in strange ways. 50 years later, I still remember what my first-grade teacher told me at the end of the school year.
“You’re brilliant, truly one of a kind. I’ve never had a student like you in 34 years of teaching. But your ego — it’s too big. You need to keep it in check.”
At the time, I just shrugged it off. I preferred to focus on the first part of my teacher’s sentence. But a year later, she came back to me.
“I know I’m not your teacher anymore, but I talked with Miss Kim, and she’s scared of you. She told me your ego is an Attila for the others. You need to keep it in check. I told you so already.”
Well, you can tell what you want about my ego, but when someone tells me the same thing two times, I listen. I analyze, deconstruct, and act on it if necessary.
Aged seven, pretentious as fuck, I realized my ego did need to be kept in check. Of all the tricks I tried during my life, the following ones are my top 4. May they be of help.
Read the dictionary
Can you imagine I’ve been reading the dictionary before going to bed for fifty years now? It sounds a bit crazy, but it’s a fantastic exercise.
I got the habit from my father. He was a teacher of comparative literature at the American University of Poland. He loved words, so he loved dictionaries. He even wrote a few himself. Before going to bed, he always read at least one definition. It was hard to believe for me that this man who knew almost everything still had words to learn.
Reading the dictionary is a lesson in humility. It shows you how little you know.
Use Couchsurfing
Couchsurfing is like AirBnB but for free. Sharing is at the core of the couch surfers community.
You can host or guest. I recommend doing both. The conditions vary from a camping mattress on the floor of a tiny studio to a separate guest room in a luxury condo. Seriously. I’ve done both and everything in between.
While being a guest in “difficult” material conditions is a reminder that you’re like any other individual on the planet, except that luckier because you can travel, hosting is the best ego checking tool one can imagine.
Guests always have life experiences to share. Talking with them, you realize how much our lives are different and yet parallel. They suffer, they love, they play like you and me.
We are all the same; one big human ego.
Learn foreign languages
There’s nothing more frustrating than looking stupid because you can’t express yourself. You have all the arguments in your head, you know they’re convincing, but you can’t use them because you don’t have the vocabulary.
SO FRUSTRATING.
No se lo digas a mi madre, pero no limpié mi habitación esta mañana. Además, no le digas a Jordan Peterson.
Play with children
This might be the most efficient trick I ever tried to keep my ego in check. Children are pretty fun to play with, but they’re so self-centered that you can’t help but realize how ridiculous it is to let your ego drive your life.
The ego acts as a magnet for frustration and anger.
Do you know how vexed a child can get when they lose playing board games? Have you ever tried to make them believe the win was in their grasp, only to ruin their chances at the last minute? It’s enlightening.
I play chess with children and let them think they’re going to win. I see their ego grow and grow with pride. I can almost see their feet floating in the air. Their whole body straightens, pulled by the pride-inflated ego balloon. And then, I play my trump move, and it’s checkmate in three.
Their reaction is fascinating.
Adults don’t get played at chess so easily. I recommend The Settlers of Catan instead.
Recap for memory
Our egos drive us forward, but they also prevent us from seeing the road. Here’s how to keep them in check:
- Remind yourself that you don’t know much: read the dictionary, learn a new language
- Remind yourself of the others: travel, meet, talk with strangers.
- Remind yourself that life is a game: be silly in the eyes of others and destroy them at chess.
Thanks to Kausik Datta for the inspiration. This is his story: