The work my ego hates

Hello again my friend,

This is the "Behind the Work" section of the newsletter, where every two weeks I write about the personal forces behind commercial success: ego, discipline, politics, ambition, and the quieter things that shape how people actually work.

Nobody sits around thinking, "my ego is holding me back." The whole concept is kind of a giant cookie that crumbles. You almost don’t want to get into it because it’s a mess before you even get a bite in. We leave it so that we sort of generalize “business” plus “ego” equals that stereotype we see on T.V. But, I’m not really sure that’s it.

I had this too. I wasn’t walking around admitting I had an ego problem. I was just quietly avoiding work that was probably good for me because it threatened how I wanted to see myself. Especially at this stage of my career.

It usually sounds much more reasonable than ego.

It sounds like:

And sometimes, sure, those things are true. I often feel like I’ve paid way more dues than a some of the people with a ‘C’ in their title, but that’s the thing isn’t it? It’s not always bad and awful. It’s just easy to write it off as “ego” = the stereotypes and not really diving in.

Personally, sorting a lot of this out in my head was very helpful. I’m not going to have all the answers, but getting this can help make the most of tough situations and better prioritize next moves. That’s really the goal here - sharing my thoughts on this in a way that hopefully helps you find more clarity looking forward into the next year or so.

At the root of it, people are not protecting their time. They are protecting their status like it's some fragile antique.

It can look a lot like ambition, confidence, high standards, and self-respect. But underneath it, a person is quietly talking themselves out of the work that would actually make them useful. Previously for “meetings,” that were above everyone else’s pay-grades as a common example.

And side-note, that status-protecting usually shows more weakness than the work ever would.

It’s a shitty feeling to look back and realize you lost because you felt too good for something good for you. With today’s newsletter, it’s in the context of work and career.

Let's lock in.

My first job out of university taught me this before I had the language for it.

This was before AI. Back then, taking great meeting minutes and writing strong follow-ups was a human skill. Most people hated doing it. It felt boring, administrative, and easy to dismiss as secretary work.

So I did it. Because no one else did and we really needed them.

I took detailed meeting minutes. I wrote clear follow-ups for clients. I wrote internal recaps for our team. I made sure people knew what was discussed, what was decided, who owned what, and what needed to happen next.

It sounds small, but it made me useful quickly. Clients trusted me because I made them feel understood. My team trusted me because I created clarity. Leadership trusted me because I turned messy conversations into action instead of letting everything disappear after the call ended.

That one boring thing helped set me up to get promoted three times in 14 months. Meeting minutes were not glamorous. But this thing that no one wanted to do was useful and valuable. Even if other people felt like it was low-value, the fact that nobody wanted to do it and everyone benefited when it was done well proves the point.

The funny thing is that ego could have easily talked me out of it. If it wasn’t my first corporate and I had 10 years of experience already, I don’t know if I would’ve defaulted to being the note-taker. I like to think I wouldn’t have had an ego, but I might’ve. I’m lucky I learned the lesson early.

This is where I’ve seen people get hit the hardest.

Some work is low-status and low-value. It does not teach you much, does not get you closer to customers, does not create leverage, and does not get promotions. It just turns you into the person everyone dumps things on. That work is a trap.

We often split “promotable work” and “non-promotable” work to mark the difference, regardless of how ‘prestigious’ it is. It sounds so bad to say, but organizing the Christmas party often doesn’t lead to promotion, where (at least back then), being the bottom of the ladder minute taker could.

Some work is low-status and extremely valuable. It puts you close to customers, close to problems, close to revenue, close to decisions, or close to the people who actually know what is going on.

The work might not look impressive. It might not sound good in a job title. It might not make you feel powerful in the moment. But it gives you proximity, and proximity is one of the most underrated advantages in a career. I’d sit with multi-billionaire real-estate developers my first year out of school because our team needed me to write everything for these clients. A month later, I’m shaking hands with them at the next real-estate conference things saying hello.

I get wanting to be seen as strategic, or ‘high-level’ and all that. But it’s been 12 years since then and the one thing I’ve seen in my career is that committing to valuable work most execs think is ‘beneath’ them, or a year or so, really works.

The most classic example is being close to the customer. A lot of executives I’ve seen are not interested, even though it’s so important. But, it’s not just about attitude or ego, being close to the people you directly impact (positively) is connected to better outcomes.

Adam Grant ran a field experiment with university fundraisers where one group spent 10 minutes with a student who had benefited from the scholarships they were raising money for. A month later, that group spent 142% more time on the phone and raised 171% more money than they had before. The other groups did not see the same change (because they didn’t take that 10min with a beneficiary).

That is what proximity does. It turns "users" from a category in a dashboard into actual people. It makes the pain harder to ignore. It makes the work matter in a way that is difficult to fake.

There is also research on feedback orientation. A 2023 meta-analysis looked at 46 samples and 12,478 workers and found that people more receptive to feedback were positively related to job satisfaction, work performance, and feedback seeking.

Again, this tracks. The people who grow fastest are rarely the ones who protect their ego from every uncomfortable signal. They are usually the people who can hear the hard thing, not spiral, and get better.

Naturally, if there is no further up to go, it makes sense that people default to protecting their status because it feels like protecting what they have, since the only direction left for them is to go down. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s important to see what motivates the other side too.

I do not want this to turn into some corny "say yes to everything" advice. That is not what I mean.

There is a real difference between valuable unglamorous work and being used as the office dumping ground. I do not just mean the obvious stuff like organizing the office Christmas party. I mean any work that helps the organization but does not really help the person advance.

Linda Babcock and her coauthors studied what they call low-promotability tasks. In one experiment, women were 50% more likely to volunteer for a low-promotability task than men. People were also 12 percentage points more likely to ask women to volunteer. In university data, female faculty were 2.7 times more likely than male faculty to volunteer for a committee.

That matters because not all helpful work builds leverage.

Some work teaches you. Some work gives you access to customers, executives, product decisions, revenue, or trust. That is promotable work, even if it looks unglamorous from the outside. Other work just makes you the reliable person everyone quietly underpays with praise.

You need to know the difference. The question is not, "Is this work glamorous?" The better question is, "What does this work get me closer to?"

If it gets you closer to customers, revenue, product decisions, leadership, trust, or hard feedback, it might be worth doing even if your ego hates it.

If it only gets you closer to everyone else's leftover chores, say no faster.

Humility is not letting people waste your time. Humility is being willing to do useful work before it looks impressive.

The older I get, the more I think ego is one of the most expensive things in business.

I have seen a lot of great business owners do well in their 20s and 30s, then lose a lot because their egos got to them in their 40s. They stopped listening. They stopped doing the work that made them good. They started believing the success was proof they were always right.

I do not think I have ever seen someone lose what they had because they were too humble.

Sure, maybe some humble people do not grow as quickly as they could. Maybe they miss chances because they are too cautious, too polite, or too slow to claim what they deserve. That happens.

But in business, part of the challenge is staying in the game long enough. And the humble ones tend to stay in it longest.

You see the opposite in a lot of famous business stories. I do not want to flatten every downfall into one simple moral lesson, because these stories are complicated. There is usually pressure, money, incentives, weak governance, and plenty of other things involved.

But ego is often somewhere in the room.

We have all seen the big examples. Adam Neumann and WeWork. Travis Kalanick and Uber. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Those stories are famous for a reason, but they are not the part I find most useful here. They are too big, too public, and too extreme for most of us to learn from directly.

The more interesting example to me is Steve Jobs. He was pushed out of Apple in 1985, later said getting fired was one of the best things that happened to him, and eventually returned to build one of the greatest business comebacks ever.

I like that example because the lesson is not "never have ego." Jobs clearly had plenty. The lesson is whether reality can still reach you.

That is the real tax of ego.

It makes feedback feel like disrespect. It makes boring work feel beneath you. It makes warnings sound like negativity. It makes you confuse past success with permanent correctness.

And once reality can no longer reach you, the decline has usually already started.

If I were earlier in my career, I would be less obsessed with whether a role looked impressive and more obsessed with what it would teach me.

Those questions matter more than I realized when I was younger.

I would also think more seriously about what all that effort was teaching me outside of the company. If I was willing to put that much energy into someone else's business, what could I start learning, building, or testing on the side with the same level of care?

That does not mean every ambitious person needs to quit and start a company tomorrow. But it does mean the work that makes you valuable inside a company can also become the work that gives you the confidence to build something of your own.

Ego makes us avoid anything that looks small. But sometimes the small-looking work is where the business is most honest. It shows you what customers need, what teammates avoid, what leaders care about, and what actually moves the company forward.

So if you are early in your career, or trying to break into something new, do not automatically run from the work that looks beneath you.

The goal is not to be humble for the sake of being humble. It is to stay close enough to reality that you can keep getting better.

Because in work, business, and life, ego usually takes reality from you before it takes anything else. And once you lose reality, the other losses are usually already on the way.

Thanks as always for reading.