Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

Self awareness is key for CEOs, Mark MacLeod - The startup CEO show

23 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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Mark MacLeod argues that self-awareness is the single most important trait for CEOs, enabling faster scaling and repeated role transformation. He illustrates this with an anecdote about Toby from Shopify, who has reinvented himself multiple times across a 20-year tenure and attributes that adaptability to deep self-awareness.

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Self awareness is the number one thing that I look for in CEOs. It's the number one thing that will help you scale faster than your business. Again, I come back to Toby from Shopify here, right? Toby had a great saying from the earliest days, which is like, I need to re qualify for my job every year, right? He works, he's 20 years now at the same company. He doesn't draw a paycheck, but if he did, it would come from the same bank account that existed 20 years ago. But it's not the same job and he's had to transform himself many, many times over. And the thing that's enabled him to do this is his deep self awareness.