Success Quote by Leigh Steinberg

Self-help culture loves to sell your flaws as quirky outliers; Leigh Steinberg yanks you back to a more bruising, useful truth: your shortcomings are not special. Coming from a sports agent and businessman, the line reads less like a moral maxim than a negotiating note scribbled in the margin of a contract. It’s a warning against the two most expensive habits in business and relationships: projection and exceptionalism.

The intent is pragmatic. If you assume other people are more rational, more disciplined, or more principled than you are under pressure, you misprice risk. You overtrust. You build systems that depend on saintly behavior. Steinberg is effectively saying: design for the fumble. Expect the same vanity, avoidance, insecurity, and self-justification you recognize in yourself to show up across the table, in the boardroom, or on your own team.

The subtext has a sly bite. It flatters you with self-awareness, then undercuts any smugness that self-awareness might produce. Yes, you know your blind spots. No, that doesn’t make you immune to them, and it doesn’t make others less likely to have theirs. The line also smuggles in a kind of compassion: if your weaknesses feel inevitable, other people’s probably do, too. That reframes conflict from “they’re uniquely terrible” to “they’re predictably human,” which is often the difference between escalation and resolution.

In Steinberg’s world - where money, ego, and performance collide - this is realism as ethics: not cynicism, but due diligence.