Most leaders prepare obsessively for difficulty but almost never prepare for success. The 4th-century Buddhist philosopher Asanga, in his Mahāyānasaṃgraha, identified something he called 'the subtle pride of the accomplished' — not arrogance exactly, but a quiet hardening that occurs when a person stops being a student of their own experience and starts becoming a curator of it. The danger isn't that success corrupts you through excess; it's that it insulates you. You stop receiving feedback the way a beginner does — openly, with full skin contact — and start filtering it through what you already know works. Coupled with what organizational psychologist Karl Weick called 'enactment' — the way leaders gradually construct an environment that reflects their own assumptions back at them — this creates a sealed loop. The remedy isn't humility as a performance. It's deliberately seeking out the person in the room whose reality doesn't yet confirm yours, and treating their friction as data rather than resistance.

Who in your life currently offers you friction that you've been quietly reclassifying as 'not understanding the full picture'?

Drawing from Yogācāra Buddhism — Asanga (Mahāyānasaṃgraha, c. 4th century CE) combined with Karl Weick (The Social Psychology of Organizing, 1969)