Seek Other Perspectives to Stay Grounded
There is a dangerous moment in every big opportunity. It’s the moment you fall in love with it.
I was once up for a role with a small company led by absolute titans of industry. The kind of names that make you sit up straighter when they appear in your inbox. Leaders I had admired for years. I was excited, energized, and if I’m honest, a little star struck. It felt like proximity to greatness. It felt like validation. I wanted it badly.
And that was the problem.
When you want something badly enough, your brain quietly turns into a marketing department. It sells you upside, highlights prestige, and builds a beautiful story about what this could mean. It edits out the risk. It softens the downsides. It assumes momentum equals inevitability. You stop analyzing and start rationalizing.
That’s the blind spot.
The blind spot isn’t incompetence or ego. It isn’t a lack of experience. In fact, it often shows up precisely because you are experienced. You trust your instincts. You’ve built pattern recognition. You believe you can see around corners. But no one is immune from desire, and desire narrows your field of vision.
As the interview process continued, the adrenaline began to fade. Emotions normalized. That’s when I did something simple but powerful. I stepped back and looked at the numbers. I looked at the structure. I zoomed out and asked myself what this business actually represented inside their broader ecosystem.
And I realized something uncomfortable. This “rocket ship” wasn’t the main event for these leaders. It was a side business, one of several portfolio bets. If market conditions shifted, if priorities changed, if something shinier demanded attention, this would likely be the first thing to get deprioritized. I wasn’t joining a singular mission. I was joining an optional one.
Then, in the middle of the interview process, it happened. Growth was paused. Strategy pivoted. Resources were redirected.
The exact risk I had started to sense became reality.
Had I taken the job quickly, driven by excitement and prestige, I almost certainly would have been a casualty of that shift. The opportunity itself didn’t change. My perspective did.
That experience reinforced something I’ve learned over and over again in business and in life. The most dangerous blind spots are emotional ones. It’s how badly we want something to work. It’s the identity boost we attach to it. It’s the narrative we start rehearsing before anything is even signed.
This is why outside perspective matters. This is why you run the numbers again after the excitement fades. This is why you ask someone who isn’t impressed by the names involved to poke holes in your thinking. Not to kill momentum, but to protect yourself from your own bias.
Some of the best decisions I’ve made in my career weren’t bold leaps. They were disciplined pauses. Moments where I forced myself to ask, “What am I not seeing?” and then listened carefully to the answer.
Lesson 36 is simple but not easy. Before you say yes, before you fall in love with the story, before prestige clouds your judgment, assume the blind spot is you. Then go looking for it.
Clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder inside your own head.
It comes from stepping back long enough to see yourself clearly.