What arrogance actually sounds like
My ego cost me a promotion. I said that part already. Now let me tell you what the ego actually looked like, because “ego” is too clean a word for what I was doing.
This was at Apple. I was good at my job and I knew it. The problem is that knowing it turned into needing everyone else to know it too.
Here’s what that looks like up close. In meetings, I’d be the guy who already had the answer before the question finished. Someone would start to explain their approach, and I’d cut in with why mine was better. I wasn’t listening to understand. I was listening to win. I treated every discussion like a thing to be right about instead of a thing to be solved.
I thought I was being decisive. Confident. The strong technical voice in the room. What I was actually being was exhausting.
The moment it broke for me was the promotion I didn’t get. I had the resume for it. The work was there. The numbers were there. And it went to someone else, and the feedback I got was not about my engineering. My engineering was never the question. It was about the way I made people feel when they worked with me. I made them smaller so I could feel bigger. And leadership noticed, even when I thought I was hiding it behind competence.
That stung in a way I wasn’t ready for. Because I’d been telling myself that results were the only thing that mattered, and here were the results, and they weren’t enough. The thing standing between me and the next level was me.
I had to sit with a hard distinction after that. The difference between confidence and arrogance.
Confidence is believing in yourself. Arrogance is only believing in yourself.
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That one word, only, is the whole thing. Confidence has room in it for other people to be right. Arrogance doesn’t. Confidence says I know my work is good and so is yours, let’s go. Arrogance says I’m the smartest one here so everyone else should fall in line. I had been calling myself confident for years while behaving like the second one.
So I rebuilt. Not overnight, and not perfectly. But deliberately.
The first thing I changed was the simplest and the hardest. I started asking questions in meetings instead of delivering verdicts. Real questions. What’s the thinking behind that. What am I missing here. Walk me through it. And then I’d actually wait for the answer instead of loading my next point while they talked.
The second thing I learned is that being right and being effective are not the same thing. I could win the argument and lose the room. I’d done it a hundred times. A good idea that nobody wants to execute is worth less than a decent idea the whole team is bought into. The engineer in me hated that for a while. The leader in me needed to learn it.
The third thing took the longest. I had to get comfortable with other people getting the credit. When you stop needing to be the smartest person in the room, you free everyone in the room to actually be smart. The work got better. My teams got better. And the irony is that I got further by trying to take up less space.
This runs straight through how I work now. When a borrower walks me through their deal, I’m not waiting to show them I know more. I’m trying to understand what they’re actually building. My engineering background means I usually do see things they don’t, but the second I lead with that to feel superior, I’ve lost them. Confidence lets me bring 20 years of building experience to the table and still listen. Arrogance would have me talking over the very people I’m supposed to serve.
The promotion I lost taught me more than the ones I got. The ones I got told me I was good at the work. The one I lost told me the work was never the whole job.
Confidence built the business. Arrogance would have capped it years ago.
I’d rather believe in myself and leave room for everyone else. That’s the version of me worth working with.
—Jon