Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary former CEO, famously wrote a book called “Only the paranoid survive.” The line that summarized his approach was – Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. In sum, he advised us all to not believe our own hype.
The contrast between Andy Grove’s advice and Intel’s recent troubles thanks to poor decisions in the past couple decades is telling. Intel’s management focused on the short-term growth in their stock price in the 2010s and sadly ignored strategic options that required hard decisions that would set them up for the next decade.
They believed their own hype.
It can easily happen to all of us. It is a very natural and normal thing – the default option if you will. We acquire competence at something, then get lots of compliments for it and likely experience an increase in our status and wealth and the hype around us, and then start falling for that story.
It happens on a small scale all around us. I’ve met so many people over the years who couldn’t stop thinking about and talking about themselves as the best things since sliced bread. They had done well in a job or two at a “big brand” company. And, in their version of the story, they were instrumental to its success. Some of those stories might well be true. But it was evident they had begun believing in their own hype.
It happens on a large scale too. Elon Musk will likely go down in history as a legendary entrepreneur. But there’s a visible difference between the Tesla and SpaceX version of the early 2010s and the Twitter/X version in the early 2020s. In some ways, I guess it was admirable that he resisted believing in his own hype for so long.
And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read about a high potential teenage “wonderkid” in <insert your favorite sport or field> – to then never hear of them ever again.
All our actions have consequences (i.e., “Karma”). And the simple truth is that our actions when we believe in our own hype aren’t optimal. They don’t represent our best judgment. And Karma has a way of catching up with all of us in time. It just doesn’t happen in a predictable timescale.
Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful poem “If” has a collection of lines that drive home this idea.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
They all get at the same idea. Things are neither as great or as bad as they seem. If we’re experiencing a great run, wonderful. If we aren’t, that’s fine too. In reality, we rarely control outcomes. We just get to pick a direction and focus on the process. Assuming we’ve picked a reasonable direction and are open to change, a good process will lead to good outcomes in the long run.
When we do that, we’ll realize it was never about the outcomes anyway… and that we did our best work when we learned to stay grounded by refusing to believe in our own hype.
A Learning a Day 