Ego is different from egotism. See my post (Ayn Rand) 18.
Ego says achieve. Ego says excel. Ego say carry more weight than you can.
Atlas shrugged...
My daughter went with the, “cool dad” argument a few days ago.
Ego says, I’m not that dad.
I was thinking of ‘Ego’ in more-or-less the Jungian sense.
(I think that Rand was dangerously full of sheer Ego. There has to be a balance, and I don’t think that Rand ever achieved it. It’s sad, because she was so mentally brilliant. But she was stunted in a lot of other ways.)