An amateur built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

An amateur built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

Phew. I can’t stop thinking about that line.

Noah built the ark with faith, vision, and conviction—anchored in nothing more than a willingness to show up and figure it out. The Titanic? That was the product of world-class engineering, high design, and top-tier confidence. The unsinkable still sank.

I stood in my laundry room tonight, folding yet another load, and kept chewing on this idea. Something about it wouldn’t let go. It’s one of those lines that rattles around in your brain for a while before settling into something deeper.

It got me thinking about leadership—the kind that gets forged over time, through wins, mistakes, ego checks, and quiet course corrections.

Because the longer you do something, the easier it becomes to move on muscle memory. You know how to run the meeting, close the deal, write the strategy, mediate the issue (or avoid it entirely). You build systems and scripts that work—until they don’t.

That’s what’s so haunting about the Titanic. It didn’t sink because the professionals didn’t know enough. It sank because they thought they knew everything.

And that’s where the iceberg lives.

Not always in the big glaring issues, but in the undercurrent of assumptions. In the confidence that becomes routine. In the pride that starts to edge out curiosity. The Titanic didn’t lack resources—it lacked the humility to slow down and reassess.

And if I’m being honest, I’ve felt that in my own leadership. I can bulldoze through conflict because it feels faster. I can pitch big ideas that land well—until they don’t. I can move quickly and miss subtle cues that something isn’t quite right, not because I’m not paying attention, but because I think I’ve seen this all before.

But experience doesn’t make you immune to risk. Sometimes, it blinds you to it.

The ark floated because someone kept listening. The Titanic sank because no one believed they needed to.

As leaders—especially experienced ones—we owe it to our teams and ourselves to keep asking the hard questions:

• What am I not seeing?

• Where have I stopped listening?

• What’s beneath the surface that could change everything if I’d just take a moment to notice?

Because the moment you think you’re too good to miss the iceberg… is the moment you’re most likely to hit it.