Undermine

Nobody can undermine you like you can. Self-sabotage is the most effective kind of sabotage there is. A shocking amount of progress and success can be had just from figuring out where you’re shooting yourself in the foot and stopping.

Imagine driving somewhere, in big rush. You’re in a hurry, so you think: “The best thing to do is get out of my own car and push it, to add speed.”

There’s a… sort of logic there? Pushing something generally does make it move, after all. But you’d be completely wrecking yourself. You’d give up steering for physical effort, and you’d lose the ability to add mechanical effort as well. Everything you wanted to do was best accomplished by you being a force multiplier. By directing the efforts of powerful resources instead of being a far less powerful one yourself.

This is what people often do as leaders. They “get out and push” and the whole thing moves more slowly. They create bottlenecks, they let the whole thing start veering off the road, they get themselves disconnected from the process. It’s a mess.

Stay in the driver’s seat. Recognize when the panicked impulse to push is misguided, which is pretty much always. Don’t undermine yourself.