This matters now more than ever. An entire industry — consulting — is being hollowed out. The superlative knowledge that once commanded premium rates is becoming commodity. Language models can now replicate what took consultants years to learn. Not perfectly. Well enough to be cheap. And when an entire category of professional knowledge turns commodity, the game changes overnight. The executives who trained yesterday will not train tomorrow. The ones who do train today will win.
Why training does not stop
Anders Ericsson, who has spent thirty years on expertise, makes a simple claim: «In pretty much any area of human endeavour, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.»
The phrase is deceptive. It sounds like motivation. It is actually a threat. There is no finish line. There is no moment at which you can close the training manual and rest. Max Verstappen does not know this because he senses it. An average executive does not know it because he has never been tested.
This is where it gets uncomfortable. Carol Dweck, a psychologist who studies why some people continue to grow while others fossilise, observed something that should alarm every executive: once people think they have made it, they rewrite their own history. «The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.» People with the opposite mindset — and they are the majority — experience reaching the top as permission to stop.
The self-deception machine
David Dunning and Justin Kruger studied a phenomenon that is almost comical in its precision: people who stop learning lose the ability to know they have stopped. «It is one of the essential features of incompetence that the person so inflicted is incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.» Scientific American
In their research, people in the bottom quartile estimated their performance in the 62nd percentile. They were operating at the 12th. They had no idea. Not because they were stupid, but because they had no feedback mechanism. A Formula 1 driver knows his lap time to the millisecond. An executive knows that the board said «excellent work.» These are not equivalent.
What Dunning discovered is structural: strip away the measurement system and you strip away the ability to self-correct. The executive who stopped training ten years ago genuinely believes he is still improving. He has no evidence otherwise.
What power does to thinking
Dacher Keltner spent two decades studying what happens to people once they reach power. His findings are not gentle. «People at the top of the social hierarchy — CEOs of private companies and public institutions — behave as if their brains are deeply traumatized. The longer they are «at the helm», the worse their risk assessment is.»
But here is the deeper point: «By misunderstanding the behaviours that helped us to gain power in the first place we set ourselves up to fall from power.» The humility, the learning, the willingness to be wrong — these are what got you to the top. Once there, you think they are no longer necessary. You are, in this moment, wrong. And you have arranged your life so nobody will tell you so.
The recruiting trap
An executive who believes himself exceptional but has stopped training will not hire anyone better than himself. This is not a character flaw. It is rational self-preservation. Someone better would be a mirror, a daily reminder that you are not exceptional. So you hire «solid.» You hire «capable.» You hire people who will not make you uncomfortable.
This is how average executive teams perpetuate themselves. They confirm their own adequacy. Meanwhile, the companies genuinely trying to win are four levels above them, staffed by people who know the only thing worse than hiring someone better than you is failing to.
Bugatti and the cost of rest
Bugatti understood hypercar culture better than almost anyone. For decades, the brand rested on deserved reputation. The model worked. Margins were fat. The market rewarded heritage.
Rimac did something else. The company treated every design decision as a problem to solve, not a tradition to preserve. When the industry shifted toward electrification, Bugatti had spent years assuming the shift would not matter. Rimac had spent years assuming it would.
This is not about one company being smarter than another. It is about one training and one resting.
What comes next
The uncomfortable truth sits here: exceptionalism is not a destination. It is a daily practice. It requires leaving comfort even after you have already won. It requires surrounding yourself with people better than you. It requires asking «What did I do wrong?» instead of «What did I do right?»
Most executives will not do this. They trained to get to the top. They think the training is finished.
The rare ones who stay exceptional know better. They never stop being the student. They hire people who scare them. They ask the hard questions. And they do this not because they are noble, but because they know what happens if they do not.
Bugatti knows now. The question is whether the executives running companies today will learn the same lesson before someone younger, hungrier and still-training decides to teach it.
