Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

How do you manage your own ego with the success you get?

You know, you've had success in multiple areas of your career, from a to an author to a business leader to an executive coach and leadership coach

Because I've seen over and over again through my own experiences if you want to open yourself up for a massive downfall just let your ego get out of control

Really if you want to do let that happen. Yeah, let your ego get out of control so every? If you want to let that happen, yeah, let your ego get out of control. So every single day, for me, it starts ground zero. I've got to go forward with an open mind, with a humble mind, looking at the world. You know, it's classic. Like when I get asked a question, I don't think to myself, oh, I know the answer to this. And I get asked questions all the time.

Yeah. And generally, when I hear a question, 99% of those questions that I hear, I've heard in some form before.

Sure. But I don't go, I've heard this before. I know the answer. I say, okay, well, let me, let me hear this. What detail is this person talking about what angle is this person

coming at it from what can i learn from this question how can i assess this question everything that i

look at i try and look at from a humble perspective and if you don't do that it's going to be a problem

you're asking me questions about my beliefs it's like hey here's my beliefs i'm humble and i'm listening

and my mind is open and this is what i've seen and this is what I can tell you about it. Sure, sure. I'm not sitting here jumping up and down saying you should believe this or you should believe that. I'm saying you should stay humble. You should keep an open mind about what's going on in the world. So it's a mindset every morning you wake up with an open mind. Yeah and I don't want to get

in this whole like morning routine where I go and look in the mirror and say be humble. No, I don't do that. Like I'm not, that's not me. But I'm just saying that the way I go about my business and my life is to say, say to myself, okay, well, I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about this, you know? I mean, even the book that I wrote follow on to extreme ownership,

huh? The book is called The Dicotomy of Leadership. The dichotomy of leadership is like, you can't be extreme in one direction or the other. If you're in a leadership position, you can't talk all the time, right? Obviously, as a boss, you need to communicate, you need to talk to your people But if you talk too much guess what happens?

People stop listening to you. You're putting out too much information. They don't know what's important and what's not. So that's bad

You can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough and now no one knows what's going on. No one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced and that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. But probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself, you know what, I'm, there's another side to this is I used to tell the young SEAL officers that you have to be aggressive. You've got to be default aggressive, that's how you've got to be. Because when something's going on, you've got to be aggressive to get that problem solved. And if you're not being aggressive,

then you're hesitating, well, then you can get killed. And as that's extreme, that's an extreme style. Yes, that's the problem with it. And so the question is, can you be too aggressive? yes absolutely you can hey there's a machine gun nest over there let's attack it so you charge up the hill

and everyone dies yeah you've you've been too aggressive so what you have to Yes. Absolutely. You can, hey, there's a machine with a nest over there. Let's attack it.

So you charge up the hill and everyone dies. You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. So even as I had these kind of mantras, like default aggressive, can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. Can you be too passive? Absolutely.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Well, now we're not making any progress.

Now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay, so that's bad. So where do you want to be? You want to be balanced. Even the idea of extreme ownership, can you take too much ownership? Yes. Yes, you can. Really? Yes, you can. I thought you said you need to take ownership of everything. Two different things.

Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the route I want you to use to get to the target. here's the method I want you to use

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