Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

You don't need to be an egotistical asshole to be successful. Are there a lot of egotistical assholes who are successful? Sure.

But there's also quite a few catastrophic failures who were Caligula, Nero, Xerxes, Mussolini,

and then of course business and art, entertainment show us the truth of the old Greek saying that

whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make proud.

And so for the Stoics, the antidote to this was humility, was self-awareness, was introspection,

was reflection.

And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, not just the dangers of ego,

but timeless practices that help sweep it away, that help

you get clean and stay good.

My first squadron, there was a lot of jockeying for a position with the young pilots, the lieutenants,

the captains.

You're friends with everyone.

Yeah. Like, you trust that person

with your life, super tight-knit, but you're also very aware of how everyone's doing. You don't want to be made to look bad. And I think a lot of it is like you feel like you're really establishing your reputation in this career field. You're going to be in for a decade. Yeah. And you don't want to look incompetent. And for me, for a long time, I thought I was like, it was like too humble. Like I wasn't boisterous. I wasn't loud. I wasn't type A and I felt like I had a hard time fitting in in that culture. Yeah. But in hindsight, I realized that my ego is actually getting in the way because I saw asking questions, asking for help, letting people know I was

struggling with a concept in the airplane as weakness. Yeah. And I felt like I could not show

weakness in that environment. Yeah, there's an ego, people don't think about it this way, but there's

an ego even in that kind of imposter syndrome or that sort of wallflowerness where you just think people are thinking

about you way more than they are and that these things say more about you than they do.

And so, yeah, because you don't want to look stupid, you'll stay stupid or because you don't want to

ask for help, you don't get help, or you don't want to look like you

want it too badly so you don't get it. It's this weird thing where, yeah, the person who needs

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