Can your ego be your own worst enemy?

Well considering we spend the most time with ourselves, hands down.

As to how that manifests is your personal weight. Learning to use your faults as strengths is a nice trick.

Yes, ego can be your worst enemy. One should be humble and polite if he wants to achieve success.

Yes, it is one of the worst & negative point of person. It is because sometime we lose very important person or thing in our life, who never came back in any case.

Many religions and philosophical systems encourage or demand that one subdue or even destroy the ego to advance one’s maturity.
I think destroy is a hit harsh, a healthy ego is necessary as a base for the personality, and also necessary for the courage to defend oneself.
But keeping the ego in its place is vital to allowing the mind and heart to make their most rewarding contributions to guiding you in life.

You could say that there would be no enemies at all without ego.

First, a clarification: Ego isn’t only an over-inflated opinion of oneself. It’s the story that everyone carries around about who they are, what they stand for, what they like and dislike, their aspirations, how they relate to everyone else…like a private Facebook page for your own personal consumption.

People tend to invest a lot in this story. It gives a sense of how you fit into the world, what’s important, and where you’re heading. People come to rely on their story as a kind of map or guidebook. It has some limited usefulness in this way.

But the universe really doesn’t care about your story. Reality unfolds in its own way, unconcerned with how you’ve mapped things out. We constantly find that our story is at odds with reality. When that happens, we’re more likely to find fault with reality than with our story, because we have so much riding on the accuracy of our story. So we overlook or discount evidence that conflicts with the story, or struggle to bring reality in line with the story.

That makes life harder than it needs to be. This over-investment in the story creates enemies: aspects of reality that threaten the precious coherence of the story. Change—an inevitable aspect of reality—becomes an enemy, because it constantly erodes the accuracy of your story. Your story often comes into conflict with the stories of others, and that too creates enemies.

You can’t really live a life of active engagement in the world without an ego. The story has some use. But things become a lot easier when you remember that your story is just a story, not reality itself. When conflicts between the story and reality arise, as they must, you can then more easily let go of the story, or update it, without so much agonizing. You may even ind that you can occasionally set the story aside entirely, if only for a moment. “Enemies” stop feeling like enemies.

I agree with that. Sometimes those of us with ‘perfectionist’ tendencies tend to expect the same of others and fail to understand that mistakes can be made and you can move past them.

When I read this question, it imediately reminded me of how people “screw” themselves and everyone around them during a divorce. You know, the ones that need to “win”, whether it is best for them and for the children, or not. The messy, horrible custody battles that are fueled by ego and not by the practicality of work schedules and child care.