72 hours.

Hi Reader

A few weeks ago I told a sports-tech start-up founder something he didn't want to hear about how he was showing up in his sales meetings. It was something specific enough that he couldn't easily deflect it; I'd mulled it over for a fortnight before saying anything.

He listened & nodded in the right places. Asked one or two clarifying questions and thanked me for my honesty. All good, I thought.

Then he went into his next prospect meeting and did exactly the same thing.

I know because I sat there and watched.

There's a specific shared tell that separates the founders & business leaders who will keep improving from the ones who've quietly & gradually stopped.

No, not intelligence.

Not diligence either.

And certainly not their stated appetite for feedback.

It’s what they actually do in the 72 hours after feedback sinks in.

Charlie Munger, who spent 70+ years watching this up close, put it this way.

"I constantly see people rise in life who were not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up. And boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you."

Learning machines. Let’s think about that specific mechanism.

Most of what passes for learning in the founder world is information consumption e.g. the podcast on the commute, the book(s) on the shelf, the workshop on the calendar. Munger is pointing at something else entirely: the daily act of noticing what you got wrong yesterday and doing something about it today. It feels to me like one is a habit of collection but the more rewarding is a habit of correction.

Adam Grant, in Think Again, shares what makes that possible.

"Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses."

Most founders & business leaders treat humility as weakness. Grant is telling you it's a technology. A pair of glasses, if you will, changes nothing about your intelligence when you put them on; only what you can see.

The founder I mentioned at the top wasn't lacking intelligence. He'd read the books, knew the frameworks, attended courses etc. In fact, he could probably quote Grant's chapter on rethinking in the same meeting where he refused to rethink!

What he was missing was the specific act Grant is describing. The willingness to hold, in the 72 hours after feedback landed, the possibility that the person giving it might have seen something he couldn't.

Simply out of practical acceptance that he does not have full sight of the room he's operating in.

That's the practice in a nutshell; not voracious book consumption or more workshop attendance or the branded Linkedin language of a growth mindset.

The specific act, repeatedly, of taking off the glasses that flatter you and putting on the ones that actually correct.

Most founders & business leaders will tell you they never stop learning.

But in reality most will do exactly the same thing this Monday that cost them last Monday.

The gap between those two things is where the last few years of your commercial performance actually happened.

www.paulclarke.ie

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