Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how realism and self-honesty are the antidotes to ego, hubris, and delusion. And the key thing in life is that you don’t want ego, hubris, and delusion in your life. Having these three things will sabotage one’s success. Having too much of these traits will cause people not to ask for help, think they are too good for help, and will cause them to be slower in accomplishing a task, or just avoid having the difficult conversation that is required for growth.
By accepting these negative traits, it really just causing someone not to grow and make the situation worse than it actually needs to be. It can even have huge negative consequences. In 1986, Nasa wanted to launch space shuttle challenger into space and the management staff didn’t want to hurt their ego by delaying the launch even though people on the line were saying that things weren’t 100 percent certain. Then hubris got in the way and management confidently said that things will be okay. They were in a delusion that allows the space shuttle to launch on January 28th and 73 seconds after liftoff, it exploded due to a faulty O-ring that was not tested in cold temperatures.
Seven people died in this launch and it was because management didn’t have realism and self-honesty about the situation. And this is what was needed to prevent people from dying and losing a space shuttle. On a daily basis, ego, hubris, and delusion cause people to make mistakes, but the cost is a successful life.
I’ve seen ego, hubris, and delusion when people do financial planning. They want to retire at 42, but they are not doing anything to help them reach that goal. Or they are for certain that there are tax loopholes that they can do so that they can reach millionaire status with less work. If someone wants to become a millionaire from their 9-5, the simple formula is to make a lot of money and save a lot of money. If you make $40k a year and saving $20k of that amount, then you probably won’t have a lot of extra money for things depending on the city you live in. If you’re a software engineer making $200k and then you’re saving $100k a year, then you probably have a lot of money to still live a good life. But saving 10% is probably not going to make you a millionaire in a decade, but in 40 years, it can help.
So you have to be real about your situation and see what you’re willing to do to make your dreams a reality. And to me, this is much more freeing because instead of wishing something to happen, you can take ownership of the situation and do something about it. For myself, I work a lot and I could let me my ego hold me back saying that I deserve to do certain things because I work hard, but the world isn’t fair, and I need to focus on the right things and then do the work if I want to make my goals become a reality.
One of the ways that I embrace reality is that I journal every day, and I ask myself what is it going to take to reach my goals and how I’m feeling. By writing down my thoughts, it allows me to analyze my thoughts and see if I’m looking at the situation in the right way. I’ve read a lot of books, and ego, hubris, and delusion have been the cause of a lot of fallen empires. You can be on top of the world, but then you can go straight into the poor house because of a bad decision caused by ego, hubris, and delusion.
Nick Denton, the CEO of Gawker had a lot of ego, hubris, and delusion when he was involved in his lawsuit with Hulk Hogan, but he didn’t realize that Peter Thiel was apart of the lawsuit and was funding the case for Hulk Hogan. So when the case was over, it caused Gawker and Nick Denton to go into bankruptcy. To be real with oneself, you can’t have an ego, hubris, or delusion. I would say it’s okay to be confident, but don’t be delusional about the entire situation.
It can cause someone to bite off more than they can chew and they end up choking and no one is going to be there to help out because that person burnt all the bridges. The real growth comes getting out of these boxes and accepting the truth and having the right perception and this is just going to prevent a lot of problems. It’s probably going to be uncomfortable to accept the truth about the situation, but the comfortable feeling is only temporary and the fall is going to be huge.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, realism and self-honesty are the antidotes to ego, hubris, and delusion. So it is recommended that you write in a journal about your goals, the situation you’re in, and how you’re feeling about the situation. Like in a previous podcast, more times than not, we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality. And if we want to avoid all the negative things that are associated with ego, hubris, and delusion, then we need to be real about the situation and have self-honesty. Right now, we’re dealing with covid and a lot of people are hurting, there is no denying this, but ego, hubris, and delusion, will make the situation worse. It can cause people not to do the work necessary to make their situation better because it’s under the assumption that the entire economy is down, but even if 30 million people are out of work, there are still 120 million people still working. Being truthful and seeing the world how it is, can be really freeing and it can cause us to start the process of making the situation better. It’s going to be work, but the sooner you do the work, the sooner you can improve the situation. So do the work and have the right perception about the situation and things should start getting better and if your downfalls won’t be as drastic.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
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