I was raised Catholic, I am still Catholic, and I will remain Catholic forever. Growing up, we heard the Beatitudes constantly, at Mass and at catechism. Blessed are the meek. So here is something that took me years to notice: Jesus was not a timid man.
The Receipts from Scripture
Start at the wedding at Cana. The wine runs out, his mother tells him, and his first answer is "Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come" (John 2:4). I will be fair and give you the receipt that complicates my point: the Church's own footnote on that verse calls "Woman" a normal, polite form of address. Still, a son who answers his mother's request by referencing his own timeline knows exactly who he is.
Rewind to age twelve. He stays behind in Jerusalem without telling Mary and Joseph, and after three days of frantic searching they find him in the temple. He offers no apology. He asks why they were looking for him and whether they didn't know he had to be in his Father's house (Luke 2:49). That is a twelve-year-old telling his worried parents they should have known better.
On the boat, with the storm about to swamp them, the disciples wake him in terror. He scolds them for their little faith first (Matthew 8:26), and only then calms the wind.
In the same chapter of John, he braids a whip out of cords, drives the money changers out of the temple, and overturns their tables. He formed no committee on temple reform. When the chief priests later demand to know by what authority he acts, he answers their question with a question and then declines to tell them (Mark 11:27-33).
His teaching carries the same certainty. He commands love for enemies (Matthew 5:44) and declares himself the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6) with no hedging at all. When a man calls him "good teacher," he fires back: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone" (Mark 10:18). Read that alongside the rest of the Gospel and he is asking whether the man understands who he is talking to.
So supreme confidence and greatness sit comfortably together, even in the tradition that gave us the Beatitudes. Jesus knew his mission and let no social nicety slow him down. The meek may inherit the earth. The arrogant and the greedy tend to shape it first.
Arrogance Is a Performance Enhancer
Let me give you the research, because this goes well beyond my reading of the Gospels.
In 2012, Cameron Anderson and his colleagues at Berkeley ran six studies on overconfidence and found that people who believed they were better than others earned higher social status in their groups, even when that belief was unjustified. Overconfidence produced behavior that made people look competent. A 2013 follow-up went further: groups kept viewing overconfident members positively even after learning their real ability. People follow certainty. The leader who says "follow me, I know the way" collects followers faster than the one who suggests figuring it out together.
Entrepreneurs live on this. Colin Camerer and Dan Lovallo showed in a 1999 experiment that overconfidence in one's own relative skill drives people into competitive markets, and their paper cites a brutal figure from U.S. census data: 61.5 percent of new manufacturing entrants exited within five years. Every founder has seen numbers like that and started anyway. On October 20, 2021, Ayomide and I decided to incorporate a company that predicts aircraft part failures, with no aerospace degree between us. A reasonable person would have run the numbers and stayed home. We are still here.
Steve Jobs said it plainly in a 1995 oral history interview: about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from failed ones is pure perseverance. He was naming perseverance fueled by passion, and arrogance is what lets you persevere when every rational signal says quit. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company lost $1.04 billion that fiscal year and was, in his words, 90 days from insolvency. He cut the lineup down to four computers, and a year later Apple turned a $309 million profit. His famous sign-off at Stanford in 2005, "Stay hungry, stay foolish," was borrowed from the back cover of the final Whole Earth Catalog, and he said he had always wished it for himself.
Napoleon is the obvious case, though the famous quotes attributed to him mostly lack a primary source, so I will let his record speak. He came from Corsica, a man of roughly 5 foot 7 in modern units; the "short" legend comes from confusing French inches with English ones. At Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, his 68,000 troops defeated almost 90,000 Russians and Austrians. He expected to win, and he arranged the battlefield so that he would.
In 1905, a 26-year-old patent clerk named Albert Einstein wrote to his friend Conrad Habicht promising four papers and describing the first as "very revolutionary." He was right. On February 25, 1964, a 22-year-old Cassius Clay walked into Miami Beach Convention Hall as a 7-1 underdog against Sonny Liston, won when Liston failed to answer the bell for the seventh round, and chanted "I am the greatest" until the reporters wrote it down.
The Strategic Power of Greed
Greed simplifies decisions. When you know you want more, every choice runs through one filter: does this get me more of what I want? Expand into the market if it grows profit. Buy the company if it adds value. Build the technology if it gives you an edge. The greedy operator wastes no time agonizing.
Venture capital is greed institutionalized, and that is a compliment. Investors chasing 100x returns fund moonshots that conservative capital would never touch. Even Oliver Twist asked for more, though in fairness he was starving, which is the most honest form of greed there is.
Look at the COVID vaccine. Pfizer declined Operation Warp Speed funding for development, partnered with BioNTech, and put its own capital at risk. The U.S. government committed nearly $2 billion up front to buy 100 million doses, and in 2021 the vaccine brought Pfizer roughly $37 billion in revenue. The receipt that complicates it: BioNTech received German government money to scale up. Even so, the profit motive helped put a vaccine into arms in under a year.
The Gekko Problem
In Wall Street (1987), Gordon Gekko stands before the Teldar Paper shareholders and delivers the line everyone remembers: "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." The argument underneath the slogan is sharper than people give it credit for. Gekko's real charge is that executives who own almost none of the company are spending shareholder money on themselves, and that an owner with his own capital at risk will enforce accountability they never will. That part of the speech holds up.
Now the uncomfortable part, because I never write these essays to flatter anyone. Oliver Stone wrote Gekko as the villain, and the film ends with Bud Fox wearing a wire and Gekko headed for prison. Napoleon died in exile on Saint Helena. Arrogance and greed are engines, and an engine with no guidance system will fly you straight into a mountain at full throttle. For me, the guidance system is my faith, and at the company it is the customer.
Unapologetic Ambition
Hesitation loses. The corporate raiders, founders, and generals who rewrote history dismissed doubt and wanted everything, and the rest of us live in the world they built.
So embrace your arrogance. Cultivate your greed. Then point both at something worth building and answer for what you build. The world has plenty of humble people with modest ambitions. It needs more people who believe they are exceptional and want everything, because those are the people who build everything.
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