Success Quote by Bruce Perens

The joke lands because it performs the very ego it denies, then yanks it away mid-brag. “It’s not about ego. Really.” is the classic credibility plea: the speaker knows you’re already suspicious, so he tries to preempt the eye-roll. But the punchline admits the opposite. The sentence breaks at “my awesome...” and trails off into “oh, never mind,” a self-interruption that functions like a wink: I could list the trophies, but I’m too modest (or too self-aware) to finish the thought.

That ellipsis is doing heavy lifting. It’s the sound of a public figure catching himself in the act of self-mythmaking. Perens, a businessman best known in tech and open-source circles, is operating in a culture that prizes humility as a kind of social currency. In those communities, overt self-promotion reads as corporate, grubby, untrustworthy. So he uses humor as a reputational hack: he acknowledges ambition and status without triggering the audience’s anti-ego immune response.

The subtext is also defensive. People who have to insist “it’s not about ego” are usually responding to an accusation: you’re doing this for credit, for attention, for legacy. By turning that accusation into a gag, he reframes the conversation. You can’t pin vanity on someone who’s already made fun of his own vanity.

It’s a small, sharp example of how modern credibility gets built: not by being above ego, but by being fluent in the performance of pretending you are.