I Am Ego, Great Destroyer: How Ego Sinks Companies
[ALIGNED] series, post VI (EXTRICATE)
I Am Ego, Great Destroyer
[ALIGNED], post VI
By Mike Brcic,
Chief Explorer, Wayfinders
This is post 6 of the [ALIGNED] series, with tips, tools and wisdom to help you build an Aligned Company (resilient, self-managing, and purpose-driven) and Aligned Life (lived in line with your values, purpose and ideals).
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I Am Ego, Great Destroyer
How Ego Sinks Companies
<< PREVIOUS: Stillness, an Entrepreneurial Superpower
“Basically, I think you need two things to get by in this world: a sense of humor and the ability to laugh when your ego is destroyed.” - Arlo Guthrie
I’ve always been pretty good at managing stress.
Perhaps it’s my international disposition, or perhaps it’s something I’ve earned after over 20 years of riding the rollercoaster of entrepreneurial life.
By the spring of 2017, however, the strain of the previous year was pushing me over the brink. In addition to my company’s* core business of operating weeklong mountain bike adventures around the globe, with over 50 staff to manage, I now had 45 new ostensible ’staff’ - members/affiliates of our new Getaways program - scattered around the globe, who were also paying customers expecting momentous things as a result of their investments.
(*I sold this company in Feb. 2019)
These were workaday people, working regular jobs, who had bought into my promise of earning a living from riding their mountain bikes. To them, the dream loomed large and I was the one who would bring it to them.
I still hadn’t fully solved the insurance question; operating mountain bike tours is a risky undertaking and I knew many of our affiliates would want and need the security of liability insurance. I also knew that most of them wouldn’t have a clue about how to navigate this complex world, so I’d taken it upon myself to find insurance partners in order to make the process easier and cheaper for them.
I’d known this would be a challenging task, yet I’d still underestimated just how challenging. The insurance industry, despite trading in the currency of risk, is risk-averse; this was a unique and complex program that no insurance agent had ever encountered and simply explaining it to them was a laborious undertaking, let alone securing coverage.
To make matters worse, I’d naively assumed I could work with one company to offer coverage to all of our affiliates around the world. I quickly discovered that insurance doesn’t work that way and not only did I need to secure a different partner for each country, in some cases I needed different partners for different states or provinces.
I’d already contacted over 40 insurance companies around the world and was getting a lot of doors slammed in my face. To paraphrase a typical exchange with these agents:
Me after dealing with insurance agents for months
My initial email or phone call: "This is what we’re trying to do. Can you help us find an insurer?"
Agent: “What? Can you please explain that again?”
Me: “We’re going to let total amateurs around the world take people mountain biking on their local trails, with minimal training, using our brand and software."
Agent: "That’s crazy. Do you know how risky that is? Are you nuts? No one will cover this."
Me: “Please?"
Agent: “No."
Me: “Pretty please?"
By the spring of 2017, through sheer will and persistence, I’d managed to find two partners who could offer discounted and expedited coverage to most of our affiliates in Canada and the USA.
Repeating the above process for insurers in dozens of other countries by then looked so daunting (I don’t speak Malay!) that I gave up on finding partners outside of North America and I decided to drop the insurance requirement for affiliates outside of North America. I simply wasn’t prepared to repeat this Herculean effort - an effort that had yielded coverage for exactly two of the 150 countries we were planning to operate in - ever again.
While I was agonizing over insurance and lamenting my failure in this arena (a failure of planning more than of effort), other storm clouds began gathering on the horizon.
I’d already spent most of the money I’d raised from investors the previous summer and we were facing yet another cash crunch. It became quickly apparent that I hadn’t raised enough cash to properly launch this program, and the effort and time and energy that it had required of me had come at the expense of the core business of the company.
It was during these trying months that the question of ‘Why?' began to creep in to my consciousness.
I reflected on the past year, a year in which I’d spent the majority of it doing things I hated: raising money from skeptical investors, writing technical spec sheets for developers, filling out lengthy insurance questionnaires.
I began to wonder what had driven me to this point.
I knew that launching anything worthwhile into the world required sacrifice and a healthy measure of hardship, and I thought I was prepared for it, but as ‘success’ loomed (remember, we’d brought on 45 affiliates in a few short months and had more than doubled the number of countries we were operating in - exactly what I had planned) the shine of the trophy I’d been seeking became less and less burnished.
Questions, heretofore absent or at least silent, began to populate my thoughts.
There was a lot of thinking and more than a little self-doubt during this time
Why was I doing this?
Would achieving the goal make me happier?
More fulfilled?
A better person?
As I was struggling with these questions, two gifts came into my life that shone a bright light onto them, and forced me to start coming up with answers.
One of Ryan’s best books - and one of my favourites.
The first was a short yet powerful book called Ego is the Enemy.
This pithy book by Ryan Holiday hit me like a brick. As I turned the pages, I saw myself in each paragraph, each word. I came to realize, with every passing page, how much my ego had been driving the bus and calling the shots.
The second gift was a workshop I attended at an event called Mastermind Talks in Carmel, California, put on by my friend Jayson Gaignard.
The session, on ‘clarity’, was led by a man named Philip McKernan (McKernan holds transformational retreats in various locations around the world. He also has one of the best business taglines I’ve ever read: “90% of people die with regret. I work with the other 10%.)
Philip’s workshop was short, only an hour, but it too hit me like a brick.
It involved a ruthless examination of our lives via self-questioning, and one of the questions he asked the room was "Where do you seek validation?” As I reflected on the answer, I realized that so many of my entrepreneurial goals were, in effect, a desperate quest for validation.
I’d been on a mad quest to scale my business, never once pausing to reflect on whether biggering and biggering, like the protagonist in Dr. Seuss’ seminal book The Lorax, was really what I needed or wanted.
Over the ensuing weeks, I began to reflect on and cross-examine my goals.
I’d set a BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal, from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ book Built To Last) of operating in 150 countries by 2021, yet I’d never stopped to ask why that was meaningful or even desirable.
Would that make me happy?
Would it make the company better?
Would it make a positive impact on the world?
The answers might very well have been yes, but I’d never bothered to ask the questions.
I’d also never stopped to consider the cost.
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Expanding to 150 countries was a monumental goal (for reference, there are 198 countries in the world - 195 member states and 2 observer states in the United Nations, plus Taiwan, which meets the requirements for independent country status). Although it seems laughable now, I was somewhat hell-bent on world domination, Dr. Evil-style.
I may have gotten a little too into world domination
No other travel company in the world - even the billion-dollar behemoths - operates in that many countries. Achieving that goal would require of me a colossal effort and, consequently, a colossal sacrifice. Yet I hadn’t ever paused to consider what those sacrifices might be and whether I was prepared to pay them.
Of course, the biggest sacrifice would be my time: I would need to devote the bulk of my waking hours, Elon Musk-style, to achieving this goal. And with that sacrifice of time would come a bigger sacrifice: my relationships to the most important people in my life.
I would be sacrificing, at the altar of ‘success’, my relationships with my wife, my children, my closest friends, and other important people in my life.
Yet I’d somehow convinced myself that those sacrifices wouldn’t need to paid, that I could achieve this crazy goal without them. Perhaps I’d convinced myself that I was superhuman or super-intelligent and could achieve the impossible with only moderate levels of effort.
After a year of doggedly pursuing the goal, it was becoming clear that I wasn’t superhuman or even super-intelligent and that I and the people around me were suffering as a result.
I reflected on some of the other goals I’d set for myself. Would getting on the cover of Entrepreneur (another goal I’d documented) really make me happy? Would achieving triple-digit growth? Would flying halfway around the world to speak on a stage for 40 minutes?
I went down the deep rabbit hole of self-examination, and self-doubt.
And as I pondered these questions, I began to realize that these were not my goals - they were my ego's. They were a child's anguished cry for validation.
My hungry little ego, hungry for acceptance and validation, was desperately seeking attention. It had convinced me that these vain attempts at recognition would deliver me the fulfilment and happiness I was seeking.
The more I pondered and the more I self-examined, the more detached I became from these goals and the less excited I became about them.
What really brings me joy and fulfilment.
As the weeks passed, I reflected on the things that brought and had brought me joy:
My family.
My wife.
My children.
Reading with my daughters, throwing a baseball with my son.
Being a role model for them.
Laughing and adventuring with my friends.
Playing my guitar.
Writing music and playing with my band.
None of these things were compatible with the ego-driven goals I had previously set for myself. They didn’t meet traditional markers of success.
Setting crazy growth targets invariably led to more stress and more headaches (and less profit - more on that later).
Pursuing a speaking career meant more time away from these joy-inducing moments.
Like a fish suddenly aware of the water it swims in (if one were to imagine a fish suddenly aware of water), I began to observe the entrepreneurial environment I was deeply immersed in.
And the water began to stink.
<< PREVIOUS: Stillness, an Entrepreneurial Superpower
>> NEXT: The Importance Of Personal Values
PRESCRIPTION: GET ALIGNED
This is the first of the ‘prescriptions’ that will go along with subsequent posts, with tips and tools to help you build a structure that will allow yourself to remove yourself from your company.
The first step in earning more freedom from your company is to get aligned on what your goals are for it. If you’re putting in 80-hour weeks because your goal is to create the next Tesla, then you will probably need to continue putting in more 80-hour weeks.
(Note: even if you are incredibly aligned with your mission, and you want to change the world for all the noblest reasons, you can still follow the prescriptions in this series to make yourself and your company more effective, and gain crucial hours of your freedom in the process. Plus, unless you’re Elon Musk working 80-hour weeks is generally just a recipe for burnout.)
OK. Grab a pen and paper (or computer and notetaking app).
Ask yourself the following questions and give yourself the time and space to answer them honestly.
What are my goals for this company? In 1 year? 3 years? 10 years?
Why are those goals important? (Answer this as frankly as possible).
Why is that important? (For instance, if your goal is to create a $100MM company that is at the top of its industry, and you said that’s important because it will give you a sense of financial security, then ask yourself why financial security is so important).
If you need to... ask why again until you peel back the onion and arrive at some sort of truth that resonates with you. Is your company the only way to achieve the answer to these questions?\
Take the time to properly reflect on and answer these questions. Then revisit your answers a day or two later. What comes up?
WHAT’S NEXT?
Read the next post in the series, The Importance Of Personal Values
Subscribe to the Wayfinding mailing list to get notified when it’s released (and get simple and effective tools to help you build an Aligned company)
Check out the Table of Contents for previous posts in the [ALIGNED] series you may have missed.
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