Humility's Essential Whisper
If you could go back and do your career all over again, what would you do differently? Few questions, if any, can serve heaping helpings of humble pie by making us confront our less-than-triumphant moments.
Even one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time has his regrets and things he would “do over.”
“The big message I would want to have given myself is ‘Why are you so stupidly arrogant!?!’” Ray Dalio said in a May 7, 2019 “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit.
Dalio is best known as the founder of Bridgewater Associates, which manages $160 billion as the largest hedge fund in the world. In a series of candid responses on Reddit, Dalio described how his arrogance almost brought his company to an end early in his career.
“I was dead wrong… The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history,” he wrote in his bestselling book, “Principles.”
“My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong – and especially so publicly wrong – was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater.”
As a result of this massive mistake, the firm he had built from his apartment in 1975 lost all of its employees, and Dalio even had to borrow $4,000 from his father just to keep the sinking organization afloat.
However, this humbling experience also provided the necessary ingredients that led to Bridgewater’s resurrection and eventual long-term success.
“In retrospect, my crash [failure] was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it gave me the humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness. I learned a great fear of being wrong that shifted my mind-set from thinking ‘I’m right’ to asking myself ‘How do I know I’m right?’”
One of the strategies Dalio shared with Redditors was embracing the art of thoughtful disagreement, which offers the opportunity to be “worlds smarter and raise your chances of making better decisions” by being humble and considering the possibility of being wrong.
“I think the greatest tragedy of most individuals and most groups in dealing with most of their issues is that individuals are inappropriately attached to their own biased perspectives so that they don't properly stress-test their thinking through the art of thoughtful disagreement.”
The importance of humility is not just a product of the modern era, either.
The ancient Romans, one of the most formidable empires the world has ever seen, even had a specialized way of reminding victorious generals to be humble.
Whenever the empire’s military forces returned following a successful campaign, they were welcomed home with a “triumph,” a parade through Rome’s streets. During that parade, in many ways the pinnacle of the celebration of the commander’s achievements, one individual was given a special role, which was viewed as essential to the commander’s continued success.
What was this important role? To stand just behind the general and whisper into his ear, “Remember, thou art mortal.”
What a powerful reminder that, even when we might feel like we’re on top of the world, we nonetheless are no different than any of the other people who surround us, from the people we lead to those who are mere observers along the way.
When we choose to center others, not ourselves, in our leadership, we create the conditions for superior performance, from the battlefield to the corporate boardroom.
