Here is a topic that makes people split into two camps almost from the beginning.

How many musicians I know who have overinflated egos, some of whom, sadly, are oblivious of their exaggerated condition of self importance that exceeds the realities of life. There are those who know they have a big ego, but are equally, and in some cases even more insufferable as them who are oblivious. Both are equally difficult to deal with professionally.

Let me clear the air here, though. Ego is important. We all have an ego, which is our perception of ourselves, our opinion of our worth and importance. Most of us have our egos in managable size, knowing that egotism is something we understand to be a delicate balancing act.

I have an ego. On stage, I am the best player in the building - even knowing I am not when it is indeed the case a better player is there. However, when I'm on stage, the audience wants to see a performance. They want to be entertained. If I am not confident in my abilities, my capacity to deliver the goods, I will be in trouble. And the audience will "sense" the lack of confidence because I will be telegraphing it in my body language, my delivery, my performance instrumentally and vocally. Even the between song "patter" will send the message that I am not altogether sure of myself.

But once I step off stage, that persona, that "person", retreats. The performance is over, the stage ego is done and gets put away with the guitars. Off stage I am a regular human being, a normal guy. I try to be humble in the face of the compliments and simply thank people for their support and that I am flattered and happy they enjoy the music I create and perform. I will sign autographs. I will chat with fans. I will be who I really am: a man blessed with talent and ability to make people forget about the hardships in life, or that what I do enriches their lives. Whatever the case, I am continually amazed that people want to come hear me perform.

People who know they have a big ego, yet continue to operate insufferably, generally believe they deserve to behave this way. They've earned the right to their behaviour, having suffered through the meat grinder of the "system" that weeds out the weak and incapable. Of course, we "little people" have to put up with this because we should be "honoured" to be in their brilliant presence, to be allowed to commune with these enlightened beings.

Those who are oblivious to their condition, that they have "evolved" a big ego, and so became insufferable in slow, progressive degrees, are of no less a mind than the self aware egotists. They have come to believe that they, too, deserve to be so inclined. They, too, have gone through the meat grinder and survived to carry on, inflated ego and all.

I mentioned compliments earlier. It is, in part, these compliments that fuel ego. We all want to be told we are good at what we do. We want to be given positive assurance that we are valuable. This is normal. An ego is a good thing when kept in proper perspective. We are happy with the occasional compliment, even content because people are acknowledging that what we do, who we are, has value to them. It is when we let the compliments - especially as performers, actors, celebrities, people in the public eye - become more important than they truly are.

Compliments are a measure of our ability, our accomplishment. We should never put so much importance upon them as "necessary" in our lives. Desired, yes. Encouraging, of course. But if we need to be complimented as a form of validation we cannot live without, then we run into trouble.

Then there is the self aware, self perpetuated ego. This is the person who, after much study and effort, attains a level of ability that is generally viewed as expert. They come to the game with the preconceived notion that they are already great - people just haven't discovered how great they are yet...but they will.

To me, this personality is the most insufferable of all because they haven't earned anything, let alone respect, by going through the meat grinder. They have yet to face any real challenges to their claims of self importance. They may actually be very good at what they do. But it is for others to determine just how well it is they do it.

I may believe myself to be a good musician. And I may very well be a good musician. But the validation of that belief comes from outside myself, not from within. If I self evaluate, it has to be honest and dispassionate, as objective as I am able to be about my abilities, my talent. A person who comes to the game already believing themselves to be the next Big Thing, or whatever they conceive themselves to be, has little to no objectivity about themselves. Everything they see and hear from outside themselves will be filtered into two views: 1) complimentary people are simply tools used to add to the validation of what they already think they know about themselves; 2) critical people simply don't understand the greatness that stands before them, but who will eventually come around to their way of thinking.

We could go deeper into this, but you get the idea.

The creative efforts of egotistical people may indeed be amazing. We can't deny that someone like Prince does have creative genius. But even his creativity wore out after a number of years, and claims of having over 500 songs in the "can" that he could pull out were not exactly realized. The fact is, his attitude about his own creative genius was, and may still be, vastly overstated. I guarantee that most of those 500 songs were not great. I can say this because I understand the creative process from the inside.

In the creative process, we distill our work. What I mean is that we weed out the bad stuff. Reasonable people with their ego in check recognise early on that an idea is not so great, or needs to be worked on more to become a possibility - not a guarantee - of being good enough to let others hear. I have tons of ideas, musically, that are bad to so-so. Some may eventually become the basis of a song I'll use, but only after being reworked, rearranged and changed. Even then, the song may not fly.

I, too, could make the claim of 500 songs. But realistically, only a handful are already worthwhile; still another couple hundred are good ideas... and the rest, well, they're just ideas that were a means to another end that were used in other songs that did work.

The large ego doesn't have such filters. The big ego tends to believe just about everything they do is worthwhile. "Why would people be fauning all over me if it weren't true?" That position all by itself proves the point I'm trying to make. People who cling to the rich, the famous, the celebrity, are there for one reason: themselves. The arrogant and egotistical may not actually understand that. These people are there to "serve" them in whatever their need. And they deserve that kind of adoration and adulation... and attention from subordinates.

Because the egotistical entity believes all they touch turns to gold, they cannot or will not see that their creative efforts eventually fail them and then become just so much retread and even stolen ideas with a little twist and turn to make it "different".

So, why does the egotistical entity's well run dry? What happens that this becomes the case?

The answer is simpler than you think: They stop trying.

Because this person believes they are great, that all they create is amazing, they have no critical eye or ear to look at their own work with any sense of objectivity or critical assessment. They stop looking for what's wrong with their work and only see that it is brilliant and deserving of attention.

There is a rumoured story about Jimi Hendrix relating a story to an interviewer. I haven't been able to verify this story, but I remember hearing it in 1970 around the time of his death. It goes like this:

One night Jimi hit the stage and people were screaming and responding to everything he did with applause and more screaming. So he decided to try something. He said he began to play really badly - on purpose - screwing up everything he played, just enough to make it not so obvious what he was doing. People continued to respond as though he were playing brilliantly and flawlessly. He said it was a great disappointment to experience this. He saw that people didn't seem to care what he played, just that they were there for the experience of seeing Jimi in person. They seemed less interested in his music than his persona.

For as many stories as there are about Hendrix, most of them being pure fiction, this story has a bit of an aire of truth to it. Hendrix was not particularly egotistical as rock stars go. In interviews you could hear the humility, even disbelief at times, that people idolized him as they did.

While creativity is not a spigot we can turn on and off, always to expect something brilliant to flow out when we turn it on, it is something we have to work at. Granted, some of us work harder than others. But without that struggle, truly great works will not emerge. I don't care who you are or what you think of your own abilities. If it is easy now, and everything actually seems good, eventually you will find that spigot is not flowing so freely all the time. Eventually, you will find yourself struggling. And if you're honest with yourself, employing that critical eye toward your work, justifying why it is good, not merely accepting that it is, then you will begin to enter into the real crucible of the creative effort.

And that crucible has no place for egotism that is not balanced and humble. True creativity is not a birthright or deserved except that it is earned through real concerted effort and hard work - all with the task of justifying why it is good, not simply being assumed to be good just because it was you who created it.