“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
You’ve probably heard this quote before that means you won’t be learning, growing, or stretching yourself if you’re consistently the smartest, most knowledgeable, or most accomplished person in your room.
If you have a true desire to level up, deliberately stepping into discomfort by surrounding yourself with those who know more than you is the best way to do so.
I’ve been doing some group coaching and Enneagram work with a tech company juggernaut who’s name I cannot mention.
They are literally solving the world’s problems like advancing robotics for the future of agriculture, self-driving cars, climate change, and sensor technology to track physical goods with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in the world.
I’m one of the facilitators for their prestigious year-long leadership program for 24 of their top talents.
While the feedback on my work has been generally positive, having some of the world’s smartest and best scientists, researchers, and engineers poke holes in what I say and do was hard…yet also incredibly rewarding.
They wanted more theory, more research, more esoteric facts, more data, more analysis, more history…none of which are my strongpoints.
I’m going back in a few weeks to do it all over again with a new cohort equipped with the feedback from the first cohort.
I’m excited to be able to implement some of the feedback because it will uplevel me.
I have taken the time to dive deeper into my work and learn more about what I don’t know. Even though I have been coaching for over a decade, I know there is still so much more to learn.
Something my main point of contact who hired me and believes in me said something that really stood out to me.
She said, “It costs [this company] a lot of time and money to have these 24 people in this room. They are literally some of the world’s best talents. When you deliver something, it must be so incredible that they feel it was worth their time to not be at work solving the world’s problems.”
Wow.
That will stay with me for a long time.
May all of our work be so outstanding that the world’s top talent in their fields stop in their tracks and be “Damn, that was well worth my time.”
If you want to be a world-class leader in what you do, no matter what it is, you must deliberately step into the discomfort of having those who know more than you challenge you in the spirit of learning and growth.
If you truly want to level up, you must put yourself in situations where you step away from being the smartest person in the room to feeling like the dumbest person in the room.
When was the last time you felt like the dumbest person in the room?
I encourage you to do it again.
Then celebrate yourself…as you’re well on your way to creating your next level of success.
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