What Got You Good Could Be Keeping You From Great
What Got You Good Could Be Keeping You From Great
Plus: How To Avoid The Silent Saboteur Of Your Performance
May 10, 2026
“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
\- Eric Hoffer
I had dinner last week with a friend who is a senior tech executive. Someone whose work has always put him at the frontier of change.
Inevitably we spoke about AI and the way it is going to disrupt so much - the fact that in his world it already is and how elsewhere we’re primarily talking about how and when, not if. Business models, entire categories of roles, graduate openings… the evidence is spreading fast.
Our conversation came just days after Brian Glaser, Chief Learning Officer at Google had spoken at the Institute of Coaching conference in Boston on ‘Unlocking Human Potential in the Ai Era’.
Glaser cut straight to the chase: leaders are exhausted from their efforts trying to apply the old rules of business to the new reality of constant uncertainty.
He’s right.
If you want to succeed in this era you need to start by accepting that what made you so good could be what’s keeping you from going on to be great.
THE SCIENCE
Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist who pioneered much of our modern understanding of neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change), has spent decades showing us how the brain physically rewires itself based on what we repeatedly do and think. Every skill you've mastered has created deeply encoded neural pathways that ensure you can act with speed, efficiency and accuracy.
However, researchers have identified what they call cognitive entrenchment: the more expert someone becomes in a domain, the harder it becomes to consider solutions that fall outside their existing mental framework. Your brain has been optimised to stop looking.
But here’s the good news: neuroplasticity doesn't switch off with age or experience, so you can still rewire your brain, but you do need to be intentional about it.
It’s about reframing - when your brain sends those signals of discomfort, that’s not a warning that you should default back to your old ways, it’s signaling growth - positive change is happening as you forge those new pathways. It’s like hacking a new path through an unexplored jungle. It’s hard. But the easy path at some point becomes a dead end, leaving you exhausted and with no clear path ahead.
You need to embrace being an explorer and be brave enough to walk away from the illusory safety of expertise.
THE PROOF
The leaders and elite ‘explorers’ who've navigated genuine turbulence share a common characteristic regardless of their field. They understood that adopting an adaptive mindset is critical.
Great artists, great founders, great scientists - all of them willing to embrace change rather than fight it.
Muhammad Ali is remembered as the greatest, but most people forget that he spent three and a half years away from boxing in his prime, stripped of his title for refusing to serve in Vietnam. When he returned he had to completely reinvent his fighting style. The incredible handspeed and footwork he'd built his identity around was diminished. So he intentionally changed his style, best exemplified by his legendary ‘rope-a-dope’ performance against George Foreman. He didn't try to hold on to what he had. He adapted.
Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 at the age of 62. But the prize isn't the story, it's just a data point in the process. Arnold's entire career is testament to the power of experimentation and adaptation. Other scientists were trying to engineer proteins by designing them from scratch, working out every detail in advance. An approach that kept hitting walls because proteins are so complex that even the most brilliant minds couldn't reliably predict how they would behave. The experts knew the theory. They just couldn't crack the problem.
Arnold took a completely different path. She introduced random mutations into genes, tested which versions performed best, then repeated the process generation after generation. Essentially breeding proteins the way humans breed animals, but in a lab, at speed. The explorer's approach applied to science itself. The result changed her field entirely.
Satya Nadella inherited a Microsoft defined by a culture of knowing. His diagnosis was precise: the company was full of fixed mindset ‘know-it-alls’, and it was holding the company back. His prescription was equally precise - replace it with a culture of ‘learn-it-alls’. He put Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset at the centre of Microsoft's leadership model and held firm on it. Under his tenure, Microsoft's market cap grew from around $300 billion to over $3 trillion. The reinvention wasn't just technological, it was psychological.
THE APPLICATION
So what do you do with that knowledge?
Professor Phanish Puranam at INSEAD, where I studied executive coaching, sends out a strong message to any business leader about the era we’re entering - lose understanding, he warns, and you lose judgement. Lose judgement, and you lose your place in the loop entirely.
That’s where I want to help you. I feel full of conviction writing this, because this is my field of expertise. I am an explorer of human potential.
So here's what I would encourage you to do:
Intentionally seek deliberate discomfort \- this is true for any facet of your life in which you wish to grow. In the context of AI, that might mean spending time with the technology itself, to gain a fuller understanding of what it can and can't do. Don’t outsource that curiosity to someone else.
Think like a scientist \- Arnold didn't know which mutations would work, but she embraced experimenting because she knew action would give her fresh data to work with. Treat your own development the same way and approach it like a series of experiments rather than through the reductive lens of success or failure. This matters more in the context of AI than anywhere else. The technology is evolving so rapidly that trying to master any specific tool or platform is a losing game. The meta-skill of mastering the ability to learn quickly, adapt and move on, is the one worth investing in. Experiments give you that framework.
Separate your identity from your expertise. This is the hard one. If your sense of self is tied to being the person who knows, then not knowing becomes a threat. In an era where AI can replicate many of the skills you've spent years mastering, clinging to them as your identity isn't just limiting, it's a dangerous drag that will hold you back just when you need to accelerate.
Rishad Tobaccowala, for my money one of the most enlightened business thinkers of our era, talks about how all of us have the capacity to be “resurrection engines”. I love that framing as it captures something critical - you have to be active and commit to forward motion.
My tech executive friend is a perfect example of this. He isn't sitting around debating when AI will change his world. It already has. He's already actively building new skills and creating pathways for the years ahead. Not speculating. Not waiting. He’s taking agency over his own future.
That's the explorer mindset in action.
30 years ago, I was a sub-editor on a newspaper in the UK. I was an expert at that skill. That role is as good as extinct now.
Don't calcify. Keep moving.
J.
🔥 LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. There couldn’t have been a better time to read this thought-provoking article about applying the sunk cost fallacy to evaluate your life. This quote says it all for me: “Change is not the opposite of commitment. It is, in most cases, the fullest expression of it.”_
2. Change is hard. It requires focus and it requires commitment. That’s why I strongly recommend listening to author David Epstein share his evidence-based insights and techniques for overcoming the world of distraction we have to navigate every day.
Share this with a fellow leader - we’re stronger together.
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