From Chapter 1 “Humility: The Root of Success” in Ingredients of Outliers
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
- Reading and learning about others reveals the degree and the scope of their accomplishments and how they’ve handled both success and failure.
- Count the number of times in a day you find yourself telling others about your accomplishments and then work on decreasing that number.
- Remind yourself that having a fragile ego ultimately prevents you from taking risks and that failing to take calculated risks leads to stagnation.
IN OTHER WORDS
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries
~Thomas Carlyle
Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.
~ Lord Chesterfield
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A self-made man? Yes, and worships his creator.
~ Henry Austin Clapp
A person all wrapped up in himself generally makes a pretty small package.
~ E. Joseph Cossman
The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.
~ Harold S. Geneen
You have an ego—a consciousness of being an individual. But that doesn’t mean that you are to worship yourself, to think constantly of yourself, and to live entirely for self.
~ Billy Graham
Egotism is the glue with which you get stuck on yourself.
~ Dan Post
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls your ego goes with it.”
~ Colin Powell
As long as you set yourself up as a little God to which you must be loyal, how can you hope to find inward peace?
~ A.W. Tozer
No man has learned the meaning of life until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellow men.
~ Beran Wolfe
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