Never Let Them See You Sweat

April 14, 2025

The Last Lectures series is a Princeton tradition. Distinguished speakers are invited to campus to speak to the senior class in the weeks leading up to graduation. The first one I attended was Never Let Them See You Sweat, presented by the current CEO of Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KFPEC), Nawaf Al-Sabah.

I thought I learned more in this hour-long session than I have in my semester-long leadership development class this semester. Jotting down some key takeaways below.

Never Let Them See You Sweat

The overarching theme of Al-Sabah’s lecture: “Never let them see you sweat.” He took a gap year during his time at Princeton to help his family in Kuwait during the Gulf War. His father was the Ambassador to the U.S. at the time. Al-Sabah recalled his father being an emotional man at home. But in public, he was stoic and steel faced. He was only selectively vulnerable to the public. He was a leader his people wanted to look up to.

In times of stress, people want a leader who is confident and composed. People want to be put at ease. They want to know things will be okay. Even if the leader is unsure, they should never let it show. People don’t want to see their leader sweat.

Appealing to pathos isn’t inherently destructive, but it must be done with caution in positions of power. Recognizing the correct context to share vulnerabilities is crucial to keeping people calm under times of duress.

Al-Sabah said he likes to have at least one or two people in his inner-circle (for him, his CFO and General Counsel) who can give a quick wink if his emotions ever outwardly cross an appropriate threshold. No individual is perfect— not even the CEO. Having others who can keep the leader in check is crucial to having that leader maximize their potential.

Three Key Principles of Leadership

Know what you don’t know; never fake it.
Humility will open doors intelligence alone could never. Al-Sabah was a master of both international relations and law when he got to KFPEC, but he knew very little about the technology and economics behind the energy industry. Allowing himself to ask for help from people from trade schools, carrying skillsets wholly different from his own, allowed him to accelerate his learning. Remaining humble, identifying his weak points, and finding people best suited to fill in those gaps allowed him to learn, fast.

Act like the person you want to be.
In college, Al-Sabah looked up to U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Princeton Class of 1952, who preached “The Five P’s: Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.” Al-Sabah instilled this into his own leadership style. He recognized that the seemingly off-the-cuff, remarkable presentation skills of successful leaders like Baker was usually the result of hours of unseen preparation. Al-Sabah wanted to be this kind of charismatic speaker. So he started acting like the kind of person that would. I am not surprised by this— he was a charismatic and confident lecturer in front of our Princeton crowd. Al-Sabah’s prep helped develop the same swagger he saw in Baker as a speaker. Acting like the person you want to be is a straightforward way to inherit their most admirable tried-and-true qualities.

Don’t sweat your mistakes.
Everyone fails. Successful people fail a lot. Great leaders aren’t shaken up by mistakes. Enumerating the outcomes makes it logically clear why we shouldn’t sweat our mistakes: Some mistakes which seem awful to us aren’t even noticed by others. Don’t sweat these. If they are noticed by others, they’re often forgotten after some relatively short period of time. Don’t sweat these. Even if they are not forgotten for a long time, most people aren’t hyper fixated on that mistake for very long. Don’t sweat these. If this mistake is one which isn’t going away, and is truly a mistake which can’t be ignored, assess what can be done to remedy the mistake. If it is out of your control, there’s nothing to be done. Don’t sweat these. If the problem is within your control, execute and fix the mistake as a good leader would. Because you’re able to solve the issue, guess what? Don’t sweat!

Takeaways

A few shorter lessons Al-Sabah shared with the crowd:

• Maintain intergenerational ties. Catching up with the parents of his friends from high school is an extremely fulfilling part of his life to this day.
• Tell people happy birthday. An easy way to remind those in your network of your connection (and perhaps more importantly, a nice thing to do).
• On imposter syndrome: He’s never felt it. He’s acknowledged how much he has to learn at different stages of his career, but never doubted his own ability to get the job done.

This last point is one of major interest to me. I recently read on X that “no great founder ever had imposter syndrome… Jobs, Gates, Zuck, Elon… Not one of them.” I was skeptical. But then, I heard Al-Sabah, CEO of KFPEC, echo a similar sentiment. Hm. Maybe it could be true, then. All great founders/CEOs have such immense self-confidence that they never fear they lack what it takes.

This is scary news for myself— and, most humans, I’d imagine— because I feel imposter syndrome relatively frequently. It comes and goes in waves, and I have gotten better at managing my own. But it is still there, isn’t it? Maybe I am unfit to ever run a company. Maybe imposter syndrome automatically disqualifies me from ever being a founder.

Or maybe, I should keep it to myself. The same way Al-Sabah might keep it to himself. The same way Jobs and Gates and Zuck and Elon might keep it to themselves. After all, the one takeaway Al-Sabah wanted to impart on Princeton’s Class of 2025 was exactly that: never let them see you sweat.