One of my businesses was doing well. For the first time, I genuinely believed I understood how business worked. I had a partner who’d invested alongside me, and we were aiming to scale fast. I was confident. I was growing. I was certain. Certainty, it turns out, is exactly where ego resist learning the hardest.
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Then came our first real cashflow crunch. Two months in, my partner stepped back. He had a family depending on him and was their sole earner — his first responsibility was always going to be theirs, not mine.
I wasn’t prepared for a lonely battle. I didn’t know how to handle something I’d never planned for, because I’d been certain we could weather a few rough patches together. I was certain the business would fulfil both our dreams. What I hadn’t understood was that our dreams had never actually aligned — I was ready to struggle for this, and he, reasonably, was not.
Why Ego Resist Learning
Looking back, one of the harder discoveries from that stretch was that my greatest obstacle was never ignorance. It was certainty. I was certain about people. Certain about the future. Certain about the present, as if it couldn’t be read any other way than mine. Whenever I believed I’d already “make it,” feedback stopped reaching me, and I lost track of what was actually happening around me.
I can see now that I spent that period protecting my identity and my ideas. Being wrong felt unbearable because I’d quietly tied my knowledge to my self-worth. Reality had no interest in protecting that. It simply revealed what was true, which is exactly why feedback so often hurts. Ego doesn’t resist knowledge — it resists correction.
From Certainty to Intellectual Humility
My certainty had made me rigid, and that rigidity slowed my response to circumstances that were already changing under me. Some businesses came through that same rough period as winners. Almost all of them shared one trait: a willingness to stay humble enough to accept uncertainty and change course.
I started to understand humility differently — not as thinking less of myself, but as accepting that reality was under no obligation to agree with me. That shift is what researchers call intellectual humility: recognising your own beliefs might be wrong.
I became more interested in understanding than in being right. I stopped wanting to be known as an entrepreneur and started becoming, more simply, an observer who wanted to know more.
It was around this time that a verse I’d read years earlier, without ever needing it, finally made sense to me.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्तेमा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥
Karmanyevadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,
Ma Karmaphalaheturbhurma Te Sangostvakarmani
“You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the results of your activities. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”
My duty was never to chase success. My duty was to understand reality, act, receive feedback, refine my understanding, and act again — without needing to constantly check whether success had arrived yet. I hadn’t merely failed. I had found a better direction for whatever I did next.
I began to understand that failure was one of the most necessary ingredients of learning — the test result I could actually use to sharpen my understanding. I stopped seeing myself only as the one doing the acting, and started seeing myself, at the same time, as the one observing my own actions. Learning began to move faster. Asking questions got easier. So did receiving feedback. So, eventually, did failing.
Perhaps ego isn’t really the opposite of knowledge. Ego resist learning only for as long as certainty feels safer than curiosity. Perhaps it’s the opposite of inquiry — and once I saw that, I understood why the fear of failure had always felt so much larger than the fear of simply not knowing.
— Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice.