How Ego changes with Knowledge and Brilliance
Ego is a person’s sense of self-importance, and is widely seen as having a negative connotation. Everyone, including those who explicitly state I have no Ego show egotistical tendencies which show up in their interactions with colleagues and personal relationships. While it’s impossible tell precisely what one really thinks of themselves, ego manifests externally through words, actions, and body language. Based on many years of observing people and their ego, I’ve drawn a graph of how, for a specific topic or domain, one’s ego might vary with increasing knowledge and brilliance. It’s a part humorous and part serious take on the matter.
You think you are on a rocket ship, but in reality you are just floating a slow boat in a vast ocean. Your ego is driven by the rocket ship, but your reality is governed by the mild ebbs and flows of the ocean tides.
Why is this graph important?
- It helps to be self-aware as we conduct business with others.
- It helps to put ourselves in others’ shoes and engage with them according to our best guesses at where they are on the ego graph.
What are the phases in this graph?
The Ego = f(Knowledge) graph captures how ego might evolve for individuals as their knowledge grows. Is this ‘median’ ego or ‘mean’ ego or some other statistic? I dunno. Who cares. It’s a conceptual graph. With that out of the way, assuming we are talking about a specific person developing knowledge in a specific domain, if we were to segment this continuous function into distinct phases, we could perhaps list out 5 phases as follows:
Phase #1: Baseline Ego | Indifference
This is where you start, for any new task or domain. Say you’ve never played Poker, and are about to start learning. Knowing nothing about the game, you’re probably indifferent to it, and therefore have a flat level of ego akin to your so-called ‘baseline’ ego. It’s not going to be the same for everyone — it’ll depend on your past experience with similar learning tasks. Zero gradient, not particularly interesting, at best inching up or down with time, to track the evolution of your overall ego. Let’s keep going.
Phase #2: Oh Shoot I know Nothing!
As you start to learn this new domain, especially a domain that’s not similar to other things you know well, you realize that there’s way too much to learn in limited time, but there’s way too little you know relative to others who’ve been pursuing this domain for long. Your ego quickly precipitates, though not nearly all the way to zero. You feel like giving up, even.
Phase #3: My knowledge grows every day! So proud!
As you start ramping up and learning the domain, assuming you have a growth mentality, you learn a little each day, and your knowledge grows more-or-less monotonically (exact shape varies individually). You think you are on a rocket ship, but in reality you are just floating a slow boat in a vast ocean. With that, your ego also grows monotonically. You become louder and more assertive, you start to disagree more often, and also start to take less help and advice from others. In the worst case, you become obnoxious, much loathed by your peers. Tending toward Sheldon Cooper.
My guess is most people get stuck somewhere on this monotonic curve. They never get to phase 4.
Phase #4: Wait a minute!
And just like that, you reach a phase of confusion — you know a lot and can do a lot, but you meet others that know a lot more than you, and yet doubt their own knowledge more often than you do. A rude awakening of sorts, leading to a weird sensation over some period of time. You just don’t know how to immediately react to it. For example, you’ve gotten pretty good at playing Chess, but realize that there are so many chess players much better than you. This state of confusion and self-discovery lasts for only a little bit, during which time your ego stays more-or-less flat.
Phase #5: Indeed I know nothing.
Aha! Finally the moment of enlightenment! You have realized that you don’t know much. Moreover, you can’t know much. Once again, your ego starts to precipitate — there is no place for ego when you have realized through deep introspection that you are very soon going to hit the limits of knowledge. The more you know about the domain, the more you develop a clear realization (as opposed to the confusing phase #4) that there’s just way too much out there that you will never get to by end-of-life, such as:
- How many different species live in Earth’s deepest seas?
- How vast of an expanse is the universe, and where will we go next?
- How far back in time can you reconstruct how life was like?
- Are quarks and leptons the smallest? Or are there smaller things?
- Or, closer to home, can one develop the perfect Chess algorithm?
Like I said before, the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know and can’t know much. And your ego keeps dropping, ultimately converging to zero. But low ego doesn’t mean low confidence, low energy, or low enthusiasm, or even low self respect. It’s not going to be easy. But in my opinion, this is the most effective steady state all the way to the end.
What can you do about all this?
Self awareness of what stage of ego you are in relative to your knowledge trajectory can be super useful especially if you are at risk of overestimating your potential. Likewise, someone else in that state could get a reality check from you if you detect similar patterns. For example, in phase #1, the ego drop intially can be painful, but don’t let the drop in self esteem affect you to the extent that you give up too quickly. Similarly, in stage #3, keep up the spirit of learning, but be aware that you will likely prematurely grow an ego over your growing knowledge, and that could manifest via obnoxious behaviors. You think you are on a rocket ship, but in reality you are just floating a slow boat in a vast ocean. It’s flat and it’s sea level. Your goal is to get to stage 5 as soon as you can. At best, there is an illusion of rapid progress. Likewise, be aware of how others in this phase might treat you and help them get to stage 5 faster.
That’s it. Those are the 5 phases. Don’t hate me if you don’t agree, and don’t take it too seriously. It really is part humor, fully unscientific, and an utterly personal take.
