One

One: self-importance requires energy. If you think overly highly of yourself, you have to operate a transmitter and a radar simultaneously. On the one hand, you're broadcasting your self-image out into the world; on the other, you're per-manently registering how your environment responds. Save yourself the effort. Switch off your transmitter and your radar, and focus on your work. In concrete terms, this means don't be vain, don't name-drop, and don't brag about your amazing successes. I don't care if you've just had a private audience with the Pope-be pleased about it, sure, but don't put up the photo-graphs in your apartment. If you're a millionaire, don't donate money so you can have buildings, professorships or football stadiums named after you. It's affected.

— from Fuel (Energy)

In the book

The second drain is the ego, which is astonishingly expensive to run. Self-importance requires constant energy: if you think too highly of yourself, you must operate a transmitter and a radar at once — broadcasting your image and anxiously scanning for how it lands — and that machinery runs day and night. If you find yourself forever spending fuel on how you are seen, your pride forever needing defense, you are flying with a leak you have not yet found. — Fuel (Energy)

And one last poison rides along with all the others: self-importance, which is exhausting to maintain. Think too highly of yourself and you must run a transmitter and a radar at once — forever broadcasting your image and anxiously scanning how it lands. [Name here a trait you inherited and had to spend years learning to master — the inclination handed to you, and what it cost to take the controls back from it.] — Who Is Flying (Self, Nature & Nurture)

There is an inverse correlation between ego and a good life — the less you stand upon your own importance, the better your life tends to go. Self-importance is also simply exhausting: if you think too highly of yourself you have to run a transmitter and a radar at the same time, broadcasting your image out into the world while anxiously tracking how the world responds. Switch both off, and you free up enormous energy for the work itself. — The Relationship With Yourself (Traits/Reflection)

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