When your ego serves you

We've all had an experience where someone saw the same event we did but remembered it differently. They emphasised certain details and not others. They sensed one intention where we sensed another. And more often than not, we think we're right. When someone suggests otherwise, our first instinct is to defend our version.

That certainty seems harmless when it's about how an event unfolded. But the same certainty follows us into far bigger questions, like which career to pursue or what a good life looks like, and there it can cost us years.

It rests on an assumption most of us never question.

That we see reality as it is.

We don't.

We never see reality directly

If you think about it, our brain sits in a dark box, our skull, without ever interacting with the external world directly. All it receives are electrical impulses via our cranial and peripheral nerves.

What we see is a story our brain constructs from those signals, using the mental models we hold to explain them as best it can. It is an explanation of reality, not reality itself.

Therein lies the opportunity. Like all models, our mental models are fallible. And anything fallible can be improved.

Consider the models weather forecasters use. Most of the time, their predictions are reliable. But sometimes the forecast says sun, then boom, it starts raining. The model is useful, but a model of the weather is not the weather itself. Forecasts improve because forecasters accept that their models contain errors and keep refining them.

The same applies to our mental models. Only when we accept that they may be wrong or incomplete can we improve them. This is why we call them misconcepts, as a constant reminder that they are provisional.

This principle that all knowledge is fallible comes from Critical Rationalism, the theory of knowledge pioneered by Karl Popper and developed further by David Deutsch. It posits that no explanation is ever final or free from error, however well established.

But explanations can be improved through conjecture and criticism. We generate creative guesses about how the world works (called conjectures), subject them to criticism, and improve them based on what criticism and real-world feedback reveal. This process of error-correction is how knowledge grows, whether it's a scientific theory or one of our own misconcepts.

Because our misconcepts shape both how we make sense of the world (our internal experience) and the decisions and actions we take within it (which leads to our external results), improving our misconcepts tends to improve what we experience and what we achieve.

But error-correction has a cost. To improve a misconcept, you first have to acknowledge where you were wrong, and being wrong runs straight into something we all have but like to pretend we don't, our ego.

Everyone has an ego

The word "ego" carries a negative connotation. We treat it as an enemy to tame or get rid of. We say things like "he has a big ego," and mean it as an insult.

But everyone has an ego.

Our ego is simply our sense of self, and it is tightly intertwined with our sense of self-worth. Because we all want to feel worthy, we protect and pursue whatever our ego rests on. That shapes much of our behaviour and what we optimise for.

By default, we tend to base it on whatever our environment rewards, which for many of us has meant external validation. First come the grades, then the credentials, the titles, the status, the wealth. It's a default script we follow without ever consciously choosing it.

Succeeding at it only raises the stakes. Because when your sense of self rests on looking smart and having it figured out, every mistake feels like a threat to who you are. You start optimising for looking right over getting better. Success also makes the script harder to question. The applause and admiration act as a reinforcing feedback loop, convincing you that you're on the right track.

You can't get rid of your ego. But you can choose where you derive it from.

Ego from good iterations

Because every misconcept contains errors, an ego based on being right, or rather looking right, makes error-correction a threat. Ironically, it keeps you from improving, since it drives you to avoid the real-world feedback that might prove you wrong.

Our proposal is to base your ego on good iterations instead.

An iteration is the error-correction loop applied to your own life.

You hold a misconcept about how something works, which leads you to expect a certain outcome. That might be how a decision will play out, or how something will make you feel. You act on it, and reality responds. Then you compare what actually happened with what you expected, and update the misconcept.

An iteration is good when you actually complete the loop. That means taking action so reality can give you feedback, then updating your misconcept based on that feedback, even when the update is uncomfortable.

By repeating these cycles, your misconcepts come to reflect reality more closely, and what you expect starts matching what actually happens. That raises the probability of experiencing and achieving what you actually want.

If your ego is based on good iterations, feedback stops being something to fear, because feedback is what you're after. You become far less afraid of trying new things, and mistakes and failure become information to improve your misconcepts.

This is the difference between ego from good iterations and ego from external validation. When your ego depends on external validation, you optimise for whatever earns you more social credits and the feeling of being approved of, which doesn't necessarily align with what you actually want in life. When your ego depends on good iterations, you optimise for getting what you actually want, assuming the goals are ones you've chosen yourself.

If this is the logical choice, it's fair to ask why so few of us make it. The short answer is that making the shift is painful.

Making the shift

Even if it makes sense to derive your ego from good iterations, applying it in practice is a whole other thing, because default misconcepts, the ones that run automatically, lag behind deliberate misconcepts, the ones you access through conscious effort. You may know rationally that growth requires discomfort, but your automatic reaction may still be to avoid it.

Nonetheless, we can start making decisions using our deliberate misconcepts before our defaults have caught up. That makes it a painful journey at times. Deliberately, you've decided to base your ego on good iterations, so being wrong is useful. By default, it still rests on external validation, so being wrong feels like a threat.

Those feelings are real, and pretending otherwise doesn't help. What helps is seeing them for what they are. Here we can learn from psychologist Kristin Neff's work on self-compassion, which involves treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a friend when facing pain and suffering.

One of the core components of Neff's framework is common humanity, recognising that suffering, imperfection and making mistakes are part of the shared human experience. As social animals, we are all wired to seek the approval of those around us, which is why defaults like wanting to impress others, please them or keep up with them form so easily in the first place. Recognising this reminds you that you are not alone, and that it is normal to feel what you feel. From there, it becomes easier to sit with the emotions without letting them consume you.

As you do, you can start to change your relationship with them, seeing them as a sign you've stepped outside your comfort zone and are challenging yourself to improve. That makes pain a positive signal. And over time, even your default reaction shifts, from treating this kind of pain as something to avoid to seeing it as an opportunity.

That shift is what lets you keep acting on deliberate misconcepts while you wait for your defaults to catch up. And in our experience, they do.

In our early twenties, we decided that financial independence mattered to us. That meant delaying gratification and investing most of our earnings. Deliberately, we knew that once our basic needs were met, living well didn't mean ever more stuff and experiences. We understood the hedonic treadmill and how marketing shapes what we think we want. So living more simply shouldn't have felt like much of a sacrifice.

But years of conditioning meant our defaults were still anchored in the idea that more meant better and that success looked a certain way. While others around us travelled, ate out and went on holidays, we wondered if we were missing out. We questioned if we were making the right choices. Others questioned them too, and their judgement stung because part of us still wanted their approval (ahem, yet another default that needed shifting).

The pain was real. It took a few years for the feeling of missing out and the fear of judgement to fade. Today it is gone, because our default misconcept of what living well looks like has caught up with what we knew deliberately all along.

Taking action on deliberate misconcepts, despite what our defaults made us feel, helped us reach financial independence by 30. But the bigger reward is a default set of misconcepts that lets us be more content and at peace, because we have clarity on what living well means to us, and it doesn't require the level of consumption we were taught to desire nor the approval of others.

The pain was temporary. The peace that came from shifting our defaults has stayed.

Choosing where your ego comes from

If your ego rests on external validation, every time reality shows you where you're wrong feels like a threat, and you'll be tempted to defend the old model. It feels better in the moment. But every time you do, you trade a little of the life you want for comfort now. Over enough years, those small trades add up to a life that isn't what you really wanted.

If your ego rests on good iterations, that same moment is exactly what you've been looking for. It's reality showing you how to get closer to your version of a good life.

You will always have an ego. But you get to choose where it comes from. So choose one that turns being wrong into progress.