My Ego, The Bastard

How ambition almost got the better of me

Feb 18, 2022

It was Malta in the final days of summer, 2017. I was miserable, knackered and didn’t want to be there. To make matters worse, when I got to my hotel room, desperate for a shower and a kip, it stunk of piss.

I got on the blower to reception. “Sorry to bother you but my room stinks of piss. Can I get a different one?”

“What kind of room do you want Mr Delaney?”

“Ideally one that doesn’t stink of piss, please.”

They said they’d see what they could do. I waited twenty minutes and, having heard nothing back from my hosts, I checked out and found somewhere round the corner that was slightly less disgusting.

Looking back on that depressing trip I realise that the hotel room stank of piss for a reason.

I shouldn’t have been in Malta and the universe knew it. The universe made sure I wound up in that piss-stinking room as a means of telling me: ‘Get the fuck out of there Sam. Jump on a plane home. This is not what you should be doing with your life.’

The universe was, as always, dead right.

I was in Malta for work. Work that I had no interest in. Work that was truly toxic - not just for me but for society at large.

I was with some colleagues pitching for business to a gambling company. The sort of gambling company that operates out of Malta for tax reasons. The sort of gambling company that wanted to seduce customers with entertaining content that might trick them into thinking that having a flutter on their socially destructive apps was just a bit of harmless fun.

Awful people in crappy suits refer to this sort of thing as ‘content marketing.’ It was a field I had stumbled into by mistake, having started my own entertainment company a few years previously to make fun TV and radio shows. I just wanted to earn a living by making the sort of daft stuff I liked to watch or listen to. But a couple of years down the line, here I was selling myself out to a bunch of legalised drug pushers.

Granted, I knew less about the evils of the gambling industry then than I do now. Through meeting former gambling addicts and interviewing some of them for The Reset, I have gained insight to the insidious and malignant ways these companies actually cultivate and nurture addiction - and how that addiction wrecks (and sometimes actually ends) thousands of lives in the UK every year.

Back then I didn’t know the stats. But I can’t really use ignorance as my defence. I mean, we all know there’s something a bit iffy about these outfits, don’t we? I’m not judging anyone who likes a flutter. But I am judging myself for actually getting into bed with an industry that has pretty prominent red flags all over it.

On reflection, I can see what was happening in my life at that time. I had got sober in 2015 and, over the next two years, as if the universe was rewarding me, my business had sky-rocketed. The work didn’t seem to stop coming in. And most of it was great fun - work I enjoyed doing and felt proud of.

But soon other jobs started coming my way that I should have known instinctively were a bad fit. My eldest brother once taught me a helpful system for selecting what jobs to work on. He said you should only ever pick a job if it ticked at least two out of these three boxes: 1. Is it a laugh? 2. Will it further my career? 3 Is the money decent? It had always worked for me before. I’d go as far as to say it is a failsafe system. But in 2017 my ego had taken over and I had stopped using it. I was only focussing on the thrird box. Money had become a dangerous preoccupation.

The Maltese job wasn’t aligned with what was right for me mentally, physically or spiritually. To put it bluntly, the money was great but it was a shit job that would make me feel like a cunt about myself. On top of that, it necessitated me flying off to Malta to give a presentation to people I didn’t like about a subject I didn’t care about. This was everything I had tried to avoid in my career. I was listening to the wrong people and living up to all the wrong expectations. My head had been turned.

We got that business, and the company made some money from it, but within six months everything was collapsing. Not just the company but me too. Mentally and physically I was fucked. By 2018 I was begging the doctor to up my medication, asking my therapist if she would see me three times a week, talking to my wife every day about how I just couldn’t cope any more. I now realise that my mini-breakdown had to happen. I was in the wrong game and I had to get out.

I had burnt out. The very simple cause of this was that I had said yes to everyone and everything for too long. Maybe I thought that my sobriety had given me a superpower that allowed me to fit more than 24 hours into a single day. But really, I had just had my head turned by success, growth and money as an end in itself. I had forgotten what I really wanted out of my life.

Four years on and I am still sober, by the grace of God. But I have managed to wrestle my ego into submission and live a life that is (almost) free from mad ego-driven ambition and a need to bend to the desire of others. I listen to myself now; I don’t conform to other people expectations of me. I say no to people and to stuff all the time and, every time I do, I feel the tiny buzz of liberation.

The last few years have not only been the happiest of my life but some of the most lucrative too. It’s almost as if the moment I took my foot off the gas, scaled down my ego and started to focus on the simple day-to-day stuff that brings me joy and satisfaction, everything else started falling into place.

Thanks universe - you’re an absolute fucking diamond.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@CharitySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/gambling-addiction/

The Reset by Sam Delaney

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