My Biggest Mistake Was Behaving Like an Ostrich
Looking back, my biggest professional mistake was behaving like an ostrich when I should have been a lion. In business, and especially in a volatile , being an ostrich will get you killed. This is how to avoid that fate.
“God himself could not sink this ship,” Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic supposedly said, brushing off warnings about ice in the area. Just hours later, after hitting an iceberg, First Officer Murdoch reportedly told a steward, “I believe she is gone, Hardy.”
Yet, despite the ship flooding and sinking, a strange sense of normalcy took hold on deck. Survivors recalled seeing people playing cards and one man calmly playing the violin, as if they were in a living room. Another passenger, Ellen Bird, noted how some people just glanced out the window at the chaos and sat back down, planning to go back to bed. William Carter, who barely escaped on one of the last lifeboats, said he tried to get George Widener to join him, but Widener simply replied, “I think I’d rather take my chances.”
As a result, the few lifeboats available left partially empty. It wasn’t until the final minutes, as the decks were almost completely submerged, that widespread panic erupted. Officers had to draw guns and fire warning shots to control the crowds swarming the last boats. In the end, nearly 70% of the 2,240 people on board died.
With hindsight, it’s easy to call these passengers foolish. But their response points to a deeply human behavior called “the ostrich effect.”
The Ostrich Effect
When an ostrich senses danger, it buries its head in the sand, hoping the threat will just go away. We do the same thing. We’re hard-wired to avoid discomfort, so when faced with difficult information, we bury our heads, too.
We don’t check our bank accounts after a spending spree. We put off difficult conversations. We delay that doctor’s appointment to avoid potentially bad news.
A report from the UK bank TSB found that people in debt lose a collective £55 million a month simply by not facing their finances. Another study showed that investors eagerly check their portfolios when the market is up but avoid looking when it’s down. Even more telling, researchers found that women who heard a colleague was diagnosed with breast cancer were almost 10% less likely to get a free screening themselves.
As psychiatrist George Vaillant explains, this denial can sometimes help us cope, but it can also create a dangerous self-deception that warps reality. In the world of entrepreneurship, that self-deception is often the line between success and failure.
Why This Behavior Sinks Businesses
The ostrich effect is a death sentence for any business. Research firm Leadership IQ surveyed over 1,000 board members from companies that had fired their CEO and found that denial was at the heart of their failures:
- 23% were fired for “denying reality.”
- 31% for “mismanaging change.”
- 27% for “tolerating low-performing staff.”
- 22% for “inaction.”
These are all symptoms of the ostrich effect. The person with the fewest blind spots usually wins. Your or achieves better outcomes when its leaders operate as close to reality as possible. The stories of Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and MySpace show us that the companies who think they’re invincible are often the first to bury their heads in the face of change.
I sat down with author Nir Eyal, who has spent years studying human behavior. He told me something that stuck: “People think they’re motivated by seeking pleasure; they’re wrong, they’re motivated by avoiding discomfort.” He explained that our response to uncomfortable feelings determines whether we take productive action or just distract ourselves. Any successful owner knows this feeling well.
My own career regrets aren’t bad decisions I made; they’re the uncomfortable but necessary decisions I make. The person I knew I should have fired, the tough conversation I avoided with a client, the warning I delayed giving the board. These failures in came from fear and anxiety.
This avoidance pattern also poisons relationships. When you keep having the same argument over and over, you’re having the wrong conversation. You’re avoiding the real, uncomfortable issue. Pain is unavoidable, but the pain we create by trying to avoid pain avoidable.
How Avoidance Spreads
Unresolved issues don’t just sit there quietly. They become toxic and contagious. A former White House staffer once said you could always tell when President Kennedy and the First Lady were fighting by watching their personal staff. When the hairdressers and drivers were arguing, it was a sign of conflict at the top.
This story shows that when we bury our heads, the conflict moves. It infects our employees, our children, and our own well-being. It causes collateral damage every day it goes unaddressed, which is a disaster when you're and can't afford inefficiency.
Five years ago, I knew I had to find a way to stop my own ostrich-like behavior. I developed a four-step approach to face discomfort head-on, because you can’t reach your potential without getting better at handling bad news and inconvenient truths.
Step 1: Pause and Acknowledge
The first step is to simply pause and admit that something isn’t right. This usually happens when you notice a negative emotion just won’t go away. Without this pause, you can’t create the space to move forward.
Step 2: Review Yourself
Next, inspect your feelings and behaviors. This helps you start to articulate what you’ve only sensed—that something is off, a need is unmet, or a fear is in control. At this stage, you know a crime has been committed, but you haven’t identified the culprit yet.
Step 3: Speak Your Truth
Now, share what you’ve found. Do it without blame and with a focus on your own responsibility. This is the moment you shift from having the wrong conversations to the right one. The silence that fuels the ostrich effect is broken when you finally say what has been left unspoken.
Step 4: Seek the Truth
Finally, you have to humbly seek the truth. This means listening to understand, not just to win an argument. You have to act like a partner trying to solve a problem, not an opponent looking for victory. When you hear the truth, the discomfort might tempt you to bury your head again. That’s when you return to step one and repeat the process.
Don't Choose an Uncomfortable Future
Avoiding difficult realities is a losing strategy in your professional and personal life. Anyone managing a or a growing must learn this. The key to long-term success is getting better at accepting uncomfortable truths as quickly as possible, which is essential when .
When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.
