How Success Can Make Us Blind
In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are making their way home from Troy to Ithaca. What should have been a few weeks at sea turns into a ten-year journey.
Why couldn’t Odysseus just leave?
He was cursed after blinding Polyphemus, a cyclops and son of Poseidon, who had trapped Odysseus and his men in his cave and devoured several of them before Odysseus blinded him to escape.
As they sailed away, Odysseus proudly shouted his own name, revealing that it was he who had blinded the cyclops.
This let Polyphemus call on his father, Poseidon, to curse Odysseus.
Poseidon then doomed Odysseus to years of wandering and hardship.
Hubris
In modern times, we see leaders sabotage their reputations by refusing to listen to feedback. We see traders who earn a lot, feel invincible, and then gamble all their money back to zero a few days later.
What’s behind this kind of invincible thinking is a concept called hubris.
Hubris is a state of being where a person feels a deep sense of conceit after an early success. When they act on that emotion, it leads to behaviors like recklessness and violence. It gets worse when they aren’t held accountable.
The term traces back to Ancient Greek tragedy, where hubris meant defying the gods through excessive pride.
What tends to accelerate it:
Prolonged unchecked power
Isolation from dissenting voices
An inner circle that reinforces rather than challenges the person’s self-image.
Unlike clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder, hubris is often situational. Once the position of power is removed, or a catastrophic failure occurs, the person often snaps back to reality.
It’s also worth distinguishing hubris from confidence.
Confidence stays open to correction. People with hubris keeps reinforcing their stance even as the evidence turns against them. They stop registering other people’s judgment as relevant at all.
The problem with Hubris
The problem with hubris is that you develop a distorted sense of power. No one can be right except you.
This creates problems in the long run.
We see it in countless business cases where founders make mistakes that wreck their company’s reputation and finances. It happens in relationships too, where one person believes they’re better than the other and starts treating them poorly.
How to Catch Ourselves
Hubris starts creeping in when we stop taking feedback. When we notice a feeling of superiority (it happens, no shame!). That’s the moment to take a step back and check our egos.
The antidote to hubris is having a beginner’s mindset.
A beginner knows the strength of their current skillset yet stays open to learning more. They are aware it took more than an individual effort to get this far.
Odysseus made it home after he paid his dues and surrendered to the gods.
Quoting one of my favorite lines from Lao Zi,
To be proud with honour and wealth Is to cause one’s own downfall. withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven’s Way.
-Tao De Ching, Chapter 09