When was the last time you said “I don’t know” in a room full of people who expected you to have the answer? Not as a performance of modesty. Not in a self-deprecating way. As a genuine admission — followed by action.
I say it often. It is one of the most valuable habits I built as a growth lead — and it mattered even more once I moved into engineering, where the system tells you plainly when you were wrong.
In the fast-paced startup ecosystems of Abu Dhabi and the wider MENA region, founders and operators are expected to have answers — always, immediately, convincingly. But here’s what I’ve learned building go-to-market strategies and then systems in the Gulf: the people who pretend to know everything are usually the ones who get stuck. The ones who admit gaps — and then move quickly to close them — are the ones who actually scale.
Ego Is the Enemy of Growth
This is not a new idea. But living it is harder than talking about it.
In practice, intellectual humility means sitting in a room at ADFW or GITEX, listening to someone challenge your entire GTM thesis, and instead of defending — actually considering that they might be right.
It means telling your team: “I was wrong about this channel strategy, let’s pivot.”
It means asking investors questions that reveal what you don’t know, rather than performing expertise you haven’t earned.
When I started in growth marketing, I thought the job was about having the best ideas. Now I understand it’s about creating the conditions where the best ideas can surface — from anyone, anywhere. That requires killing your ego on a daily basis.
The Filter That Keeps You on Track
Intellectual humility is not the same as self-doubt. If you agree with every piece of feedback, you lose direction. If you question every decision, you never ship.
Over time, I’ve developed a two-question filter for when someone challenges my approach — whether it’s a system design, a partnership strategy, or a market entry plan:
Question 1: Is this a perspective that genuinely exists and deserves testing?
If yes — listen, adapt, experiment. Run a small test. Let the data decide.
Question 2: Or is this pulling me away from a path I’ve already validated?
If yes — thank them, stay the course. Not every opinion requires a pivot.
The hard part is telling the difference in real time. I’m still learning — especially when it comes to the second question. But the practice itself is what matters. The filter gets sharper with use.
Why This Matters for Building in the UAE
The UAE business environment is unique. You’re operating across cultures, languages, and regulatory frameworks simultaneously. What works in a European growth playbook often fails in the GCC. What scales in Silicon Valley can be completely irrelevant in Abu Dhabi’s ADGM ecosystem.
The only way to navigate this: stay genuinely curious.
Treat every conversation — with a Hub71 founder, an operator from a market I don’t know yet, a DeepTech investor — as a chance to update your mental model of how things work here. That requires admitting, every single day, that your model is incomplete. That you don’t have all the answers. That the person across the table might see something you’ve missed.
The moment you stop learning in a market this dynamic is the moment you start losing. And the fastest way to stop learning is to convince yourself you already know enough.