Tough love

My first boss was a tough SOB. I was a student worker in a bank and thought I was the bees knees.

One day, he discovered I had done something outside of the protocol described for the task because I thought I had a better, faster way.

He looked at me and said:

"You are intellectually arrogant (I thought I was smarter than others) and it is causing you a disabling ignorance (I was blind to what I could not know)."

A lot of big words, but the essence was this: You might be incredibly smart, but there are people and systems that are smarter than you, collectively or individually. So, stop thinking you know everything.

Ever since then, I retort to someone challenging a process with: there is probably a reason this is done this way.

If we understand that reason we can modify it, if we don't, we don't (yet).

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