The Struggle to Fold Your Cards

At the tail end of my dairy nutrition career, I also worked for a company that advised dairy farms on commodity markets. We helped producers hedge their grain costs — corn, soybean meal, and many byproducts used to feed their cows — to protect their margins when prices fluctuated.

The goal was never to buy at the absolute bottom. That’s a fantasy. The goal was to buy at a price you could build a business around. Lock in your cost, know your margin, stay in the game.

The farmers who got hurt weren’t reckless. They were hopeful. They’d watch the price drop or spike, tell themselves it would come back to a reasonable price, and wait. Meanwhile, the feed bill kept coming. The cows didn’t care what the market was doing.

Hope is not a strategy. Not in grain markets. Not in business. Not in leadership.

Knowing — really knowing your numbers, your limits, your walk-away point — isn’t pessimism. It’s what keeps you profitable. It’s what keeps you in business at all.

The dangerous leader isn’t the one who folds. It’s the one who hopes their way through a decision they already know the answer to.

The Things We Hide — Moment

The hardest words I’ve ever had to say as a leader aren’t “I need help.”

They’re “I was wrong.”

And even harder than that: “I quit.”

Not because I’m stubborn — but because somewhere along the way I built my value on never being the one who folded. The person who would outwork, outpush, outintense others.

If I quit something, what does that say about my judgment for starting it? If I admitted I was wrong, what did that mean about every other decision I’d made?

Sebastien calls this the ego trap. And it’s more dangerous than it sounds.

When ego – protecting or establishing one’s value – is your primary scorecard, losing becomes an existential threat. Being wrong isn’t feedback. It’s a verdict on your worth.

Sebastien told me about Dr. Daniel Zimet, a sports psychologist and 40-time national handball champion. He sat Sebastien down and told him the story of the best match he ever played. The detail, the emotion — he remembered every point.

Then came the twist.

He lost the match.

Most people would never call a loss their peak performance. But for Dr. Zimet, that match revealed something: he’d reached a level of play he hadn’t thought possible. The score was incidental. The mastery was real.

That’s the difference between mastery and ego.

Ego asks: Did I win?

Mastery asks: Did I grow?

For years, my scoreboard ran on ego. I held on to things — approaches, roles, strategies — long past the point of usefulness, because letting go felt like admitting failure. It was conceding my value was less than my ego insisted.

The thing we hide isn’t stubbornness. It’s the insecurity underneath the stubbornness.

The belief that if we admit we were wrong, we’ll lose the only thing we’ve been sure of: that we were the ones who knew.

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Podcast

Sebastien Page is the Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price and the author of The Psychology of Leadership — a book born from being stressed at work and then stressed about being stressed. A trained researcher and 25-year veteran of money management, Sebastien brings the rigor of behavioral science to the very human challenge of leading under uncertainty.

Here are three key focus points from my conversation with Sebastien that every leader needs to sit with:

1. Knowing When to Fold Is the Real Leadership Skill

We celebrate persistence. We tell stories about the entrepreneur who refused to quit. What we don’t account for is survivorship bias — we only see the ones who held on and won. We don’t count the ones who held on and lost everything. Sebastien pointed to Everest: there’s a 4% chance of dying on the mountain, yet the world record holder has summited over 30 times. What’s the differentiator? They know when to turn around. The best companies — Amazon being the example — launch dozens of initiatives and ruthlessly cut the ones that don’t gain traction. The ability to fold, stop the losses, and reinvest isn’t weakness. It’s one of the hardest skills to develop, and the leaders who have it make better decisions across every domain.

1. Shift Your Scorecard from Ego to Mastery

There’s a clear difference between ego-oriented and mastery-oriented performance. The ego player measures themselves against outcomes — wins, losses, handicap, and quarterly numbers. The mastery player measures themselves against growth. When Sebastien talks about what energizes him at work, it isn’t a great trade. It’s finding a better research process. Improving how the team thinks together. That’s not separate from results — it’s the foundation for results that actually last. As a leader, the question isn’t just “Did we hit the number?” It’s “Did we get better at how we do what we do?” Build that culture, and the numbers follow.

1. Rest Is Part of the Performance Equation

Sebastien was invited to speak to an MIT class — elite students, most of them already Wall Street veterans. He showed up with career advice. He threw out his notes. Every student in the room looked exhausted. So he talked about sleep, exercise, and diet — and how they interact. Sleep better, and you regulate your appetite. Eat better, and you have energy to move. Move more, you sleep better. The loop compounds. He also pointed to Simone Biles — after the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, she pulled back, paced herself, and famously watched Netflix on Sundays. She came back in 2023 and won four gold medals. Rest isn’t recovery from performance. Rest is part of performance.

Pull Up A Chair — The IDL Summit, May 7–8, Spokane

Here’s what nobody talks about when they talk about decision-making under pressure:

The higher you climb, the less you can show that you don’t know. The questions get bigger. The uncertainty gets heavier. And you carry it alone — behind a facade that looks like confidence but feels, on the inside, like you’re one bad decision away from being found out.

That isolation isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when you’ve never been in a room where the people around you are willing to say it out loud, too.

That’s the room we’re building.

The IDL Summit on May 7–8 in Spokane, WA, is 120 leaders telling the truth — about ego, identity, the decisions they’re second-guessing, and what it actually takes to lead from the inside out. Not perform it. Lead it.

Nikki Barua, Dr. Abbie Maronó, Joe Delagrave, and I. Four perspectives. Two days. One room where nothing gets hidden.

General Admission is $499.

VIP is $1,999 and includes a private dinner with the speakers.

Seats are limited to 120.

Get your tickets: idlsummit.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.