Gunnen and its enemy
I have a Dutch word for the attitude behind wanting someone else to grow. Two books name what destroys it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote here about gunnen, the Dutch verb I use for mentoring. To gun someone something is to want it for them, without counting what it costs you. You can feel it for a student, a younger colleague, a friend, a child: anyone whose growth you care about more than your own part in it.
Several readers asked the same thing. If gunnen is the good attitude, what is its opposite, and why is the opposite so common? I did not have a clean answer. I had a word for the good thing and no nice word for the thing that ruins it.
Two books gave me the vocabulary. Neither is about mentoring. Both sit on the part of my shelf I reach for often.
The enemy has a name
Ryan Holiday’s Ego Is the Enemy (2016) makes one point and repeats it throughout a life. When you are trying to rise, ego makes you talk instead of work. When you have arrived, it makes you believe the story that other people tell about you. When you fail, it stops you from learning the one lesson the failure was offering.
The examples are everywhere once you see them. The beginner who needs everyone to know how clever the plan is, before anything has been built. The person at the top who has confused their reputation with their judgment. The teacher, the manager, the parent who cannot say “I was wrong about this,” and so lets someone they are guiding walk another year down a road that closed long ago.
That last one is mine. Early in my own PhD, I changed topic halfway, because the first line had dead-ended. It felt like failing. Looking back, it was the most useful thing I did. It taught me to value changing course over finishing a plan for its own sake. Holiday would name the refusal to change course for what it is. Not perseverance. Ego.
Seen this way, gunnen is simpler than I made it sound the first time. It is what wanting good for someone looks like once you take your own ego out of it. You stop needing their success to be partly yours. You stop needing to be the most important person in the room you helped build.
When ego hardens
Holiday treats ego as a visitor everyone lets in now and then. Thomas Erikson, in Surrounded by Narcissists (2022), describes what happens when the visitor never leaves.
His most useful page separates narcissism from ordinary confidence. A confident person has a realistic read on what they are good at, and can still admire what someone else is good at. The narcissist holds an unshakeable belief in their own superiority and needs a constant supply of admiration to keep it standing.
The full clinical version is rare. I have met it once or twice in thirty years (and we all know a few public figures with clear pathology). But it is not the everyday danger. The everyday danger is the milder pull underneath it: the need for the credit, the trouble hearing criticism, the quiet certainty that your judgment outranks the facts in front of you. Most of us carry some of it. The job is to notice it working.
It shows up as a preference dressed as a standard. You take over a task someone else was still learning and call it helping. You put your name on work that was mostly theirs and call it normal. You keep a decision routed through you longer than it needs to be and call it responsibility. None of this needs a personality disorder. It needs only that you like being central, and stop checking whether you still need to be.
I should say what kind of book this is. Erikson sells a popular, color-coded personality system that academic psychologists have criticized for thin evidence (but which has some merits, more later). Take the clinical claims lightly. But the line between confidence and narcissism is the one I keep, because it tells you that the enemy of gunnen is not the rare monster across the corridor. It is the ordinary appetite for the center, in me...
The part the books miss
Both books share a blind spot. They treat ego as a private failing, something one person can read a book and fix. For one relationship, that is often true. For a whole system, no.
Ego also gets built into how things are arranged: who gets the credit, who gets the platform, whose name goes first. I see it most clearly in my own field. Many of the researchers I work with are in the global South. The pattern is an old one: the data they collect travels to wealthier countries, and the recognition travels with it. Careers are built where the data lands, not where the work was done. Wanting good for them means more than keeping my own ego out of one conversation. It means giving up the advantage the system hands me by default. The test is not that they thank me. It is that their work no longer needs me at all.
A small practical test
If there is anyone whose growth you care about, someone you manage, teach, or raise, here is the test I use.
Think of the last time they brought you something unfinished. Did you point out where it was wrong and hand it back, or did you fix it yourself and call that helping? The first is gunnen: their own correction is what teaches. The second feels generous, and is mostly the appetite Holiday and Erikson describe, the kind that needs the result to carry your fingerprints.
There is a second half to this: how you build the conditions that make their own correction stick. That is a different book, and the next post.
I fail this test often enough to keep both books within reach and a lot to talk about...
Books: Holiday, R. (2016). Ego Is the Enemy. Portfolio/Penguin. Erikson, T. (2022). Surrounded by Narcissists. St. Martin’s Essentials (first published in Swedish as Omgiven av narcissister, 2021). I have no relationship to either author or publisher.