🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
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🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself… and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman
We’re quick to spot when someone else is kidding themselves. Our own blind spots? Those hide in plain sight… dressed up as confidence, protected by ego, invisible precisely because they’re ours.
Feynman’s line isn’t a warning about other people. It’s an invitation to hold our own certainty a little more loosely… and to build the kind of team where someone who loves us enough to say “are you sure?” is treated as a gift on our journey of growth, not a threat.
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Here’s a puzzle that took me years to learn. Wait… who am I kidding? I’m still learning it.
Annie Duke, former professional poker player, decision scientist, and author of Thinking in Bets, spent years at tables full of players who had every condition psychology says you need in order to learn. Stimulus. Response. Fast feedback. Followed by real reward or pain, because they were either winning or losing money.
Open any Psych 101 textbook, and it tells you that’s the recipe. Feedback that’s quick, frequent, and tied to consequences is how humans learn.
And yet she watched these players stall for decades. Same mistakes, same losses, no growth. The feedback was all there… and it wasn’t landing.
So what breaks the loop?
Not a lack of feedback. It’s what the feedback costs us. When a loss traces back to luck, we shrug it off easily. But when it traces back to our own decision, it lands as a threat… a little attack on the story we tell about being smart and capable. So we protect ourselves. We hand the loss to bad luck and keep our self-image intact. The pain that was supposed to teach us is exactly what makes us look away.
Here’s the part that has stuck with me long after I closed the book. The way out isn’t more discipline or thicker skin. It’s a shift in what you’re protecting.
From being right… to being accurate.
A leader who needs to be right has something to defend in every conversation. A leader chasing accuracy has nothing to defend… so dissent becomes useful, uncertainty becomes honest, and their own misses become information instead of indictments. That one move changes everything downstream. Two places it shows up:
🎲 Stop judging decisions by how they turned out. Duke calls this “resulting.” Picture Pete Carroll’s goal-line pass call at the end of the 2015 Super Bowl… intercepted, and instantly branded one of the worst calls in football history. But catch that same ball, and he’s a genius who outsmarted everyone. Same decision. Only the outcome changed. We do this constantly, and here’s why it matters for your team… when you evaluate people by only outcomes, you quietly teach them to make safe, unremarkable bets. Nobody risks the bold call when they’ll be judged only on whether the ball happened to land.
🤔 Say “I’m not sure” more. We confuse confidence with certainty… we think a good leader has to sound sure. But naming your uncertainty, even putting a rough number on it (“I’m about 70% on this”), does the opposite of what we fear. It doesn’t make you look weak. It makes you more believable, and most importantly, it opens the room. Certainty from a leader acts like a closed door… people stop offering what they know. Uncertainty is the invitation back in.
None of this happens alone, though. And that’s where we’re headed next…
🎧 Listen to Annie discuss her work here: The Knowledge Project – Annie Duke: Get Better By Being Wrong
🎯 A Dose of Action
Annie didn’t learn to think this way by white-knuckling it solo. She had a group… a handful of players who’d made one deal with each other: we’re here to get it right, not to be right. When someone showed up with a hard-luck story, the group didn’t nod along and swap sympathy, which they deemed a waste of time. Rather, they asked the harder question… “So what could you have done differently?”
Curiosity over confirmation.
That’s the work this week. Not a solo resolution you’ll forget by Thursday… a shift you practice out loud, with other people. Start where you are:
🔍 Catch yourself in the act. (you)
The next time a good outcome makes you feel like a rockstar, or a bad one makes you feel unlucky… just notice it. You don’t have to fix anything yet. Naming the reflex is the whole first rep. Bonus round: put a number on a belief this week. “I’m about 70% on this.” Watch how quickly that makes you curious about the other 30.
🤝 Judge the decision, not the dice. (your team)
Next time you debrief something that went sideways, ask one question before anyone reaches for blame… “Given what we knew then, was this a good call?” Then the braver version: ask it when something goes right, too. Winning can hide mistakes even better than losing.
🌱 Find your people. Make the deal. (your culture)
You don’t need a perfect group… you need one or two others who’d rather be growing than comfortable. Say it out loud: “Can we help each other think? You call my blind spots, I’ll watch yours.” That’s not a big program or a new initiative. It’s one vulnerable conversation… and it’s exactly how a culture of belief gets built, one elevating connection at a time.
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
PS: A masterclass in knowing when to stop… 🦛🦛😂
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