Your Greatest Advantage is the One Everyone Calls a Weakness

If you’re hitting a ceiling you can’t explain, or you’ve reached the thing you were chasing, and it landed flatter than you expected, you’re not imagining it.

I’ve spent twenty years coaching thousands of people in exactly that spot. Executives, founders, athletes, parents, people carrying more than anyone knows. And I kept running into the same thing I couldn’t explain.

The ones with the most impact weren’t the most talented in the room. They weren’t the most driven. Something else was going on, and for a long time I didn’t have a name for it.

Then I found it, and it was the last word I expected.

It was humility

I know. It sounds like the opposite of an advantage. Most people hear it and think small, quiet, self-erasing. Nobody sets a goal to become humbler.

But that’s not what I was seeing. I saw people who could hear hard feedback without flinching and adjust while everyone else got defensive. People who read a room accurately because they weren’t busy managing their own image. People who pulled talent toward them and got teams that followed instead of complied.

They weren’t succeeding despite being humble. They were succeeding partly because of it.

So I spent the next several years chasing it down

I went looking for research and expected to find almost none. Instead there’s twenty years of it, from universities all over the world, all landing in the same place.

Humility tracks with better decisions, stronger relationships, faster recovery from setbacks, and more effective leadership. It’s one of the most reliable findings almost nobody talks about.

Then I went to the people doing the work. I sat down with Angela Duckworth, who wrote Grit, and she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: interest without purpose is like running a two-engine machine on one engine. Her survey of more than 16,000 people found the more someone was motivated to serve others, the more grit they had. The hardest-working people aren’t the most self-focused. It’s the reverse.

Then I started collecting the stories. A $700 million ballplayer who still fills water cups for his teammates and why that was trained into him on purpose. The twenty questions that predict a child’s resilience better than almost anything else, and why most of them are about grandparents. A NASA scientist who mapped the moon by throwing out an assumption everyone else was defending. A hedge fund and an NBA franchise that turned around when someone finally looked at the situation honestly. A 3,000-year-old battle that makes more sense once you understand what the underdog knew about himself.

And I had to look at my own life, which was the harder part

I’d spent my career believing the next level came from more. Work harder, learn more, build more. The pattern I kept finding in everyone else turned out to be the thing I was missing myself.

What you get out of Humble Power

A different answer to why you’re capped.

If you’re working harder than everyone around you and the results have stopped moving, if you’re leading people who do what you ask but don’t follow you, this book offers a reason that isn’t effort and isn’t talent.

You’ll come away seeing your own situation more accurately, which is where every real change starts. You’ll have a practical way to get there, because every chapter ends with something to do rather than something to admire. And you’ll stop treating humility as a virtue you’re supposed to perform and start using it as the multiplier it is.

“He’s one of the highest performing leaders I’ve ever met, and yet across thousands of interactions, he doesn’t talk about that. He asks about you. He listens. He wants you to win. I tell you all this because Ethan would likely not.”

–Brendon Burchard, from the foreword

One more thing

I’m not the expert on this. I’m the student. We tend to teach what we most need to learn, and this one is still a work in progress for me. I have a wife and eight kids, so I get plenty of chances to practice.

What I can tell you is that the next level you’re looking for probably doesn’t require more talent, more intelligence, or another strategy.

It may just require discovering your humble power. Let me show you how.