Only five?
In reality, it’s probably been about 500. And while I don’t want to sound like I’m completely incompetent, I think it is important to acknowledge that mistakes shape us much more than successes.
Compared to mistakes, successes are easy. You work hard, get a little bit of luck, and then sit back and bask in the glow while everyone tells you how great you are. Mistakes, on the other hand, involve soul-searching, reflection, and self-awareness – qualities that don’t always come naturally to most people.
So with that being said, let’s dive-in and rip my career to shreds (or at least touch on a few things that I’ve been guilty of over the years)…
1.Chasing Money
It’s easy to think this is a tired cliche often repeated by those who have money to people who want more of it. I’ve heard it a few times in my career and my conclusion was always this – I quite like money and I have no problem with chasing it thank you very much.
But on reflection, I’ve come to realize that when somebody dangles a giant check in your face like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, it can take your career in a direction you could never have fully imagined.
Money tends to distort our judgment – sort of like a frequency jammer for our brains. We might go to a company that we’re not that excited about because a job pays well. Perhaps we move to a different role within the same organization that seems slightly ill-defined and chaotic because we’ll get a salary bump.
Then, before you know it, you’ve spent all your new disposable income on a bunch of things you don’t actually need and after 2-3 months the wads-of-cash glow starts to wear off.
Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill and it can apply to all areas of life.
A career is a marathon, not a sprint. And while it will inevitably take twists and turns over the years, try and think about the bigger picture of where you want to go rather than about the vacation to Jamaica you’ll now be able to afford in three months.
Obviously money is important – to a point. But if it’s the main compass you rely on, don’t be surprised if you end up blindly walking into a prickly hedge.
2. Focusing Too Heavily on Fixing Your Weaknesses
We can only be good at so many things.
Each of us is a random tapestry of genes that have been smushed together by chance – and that chaotic smudge can only do so many things so well.
Some companies are obsessed with development. Every year individuals are asked to list out all the things they can improve on and then sign-up for courses and seminars and workshops to help them sharpen-up.
But I’m a firm believer that it’s more important to play to your strengths. If there are things that you’re good at, focus your time on becoming great at them. Then hire people around you who are good at the things you’re not.
That’s the art of self-awareness, which as I mentioned above is a difficult concept for many of us to grasp.
I’m not suggesting we should never try and improve or completely abandon all attempts to develop certain skills. That would be ridiculous. And in some roles – where teams are small – you may have to do different things across many different areas, because of limited resources.
But ultimately there are some things that we’ll only ever reach basic competency in, no matter how many hours we dedicate to studying and seminar-ing.
So know who you are, know what you’re good at, and remember that having weaknesses isn’t a sign of failure – it’s just a sign of being human.
3. Knowing Your Job Too Well
This must be a typo, right?
Well, not really. I understand that knowing your job well assumes you’ve reached a high-level of competency. It wouldn’t be great if you went to a doctor or a dentist and you felt they didn’t know their job better-than-well.
But in business, I’m not convinced it’s the best thing for your career.
Once you get to a point where you know exactly what you’re doing and can almost do it with your eyes closed, you can guarantee that the cloud of complacency will not be far behind. The tendency to stop learning and remain in your comfort zone starts to creep-up like a poisonous vine.
This is particularly true as you get more senior in an organization. When you fully transition into management your focus shifts to team leadership, decision making, financial/budget oversight, and other administrative tasks.
While needing to display a different set of skills as you move up the ladder is to be expected, this transition can disconnect your brain from new developments and changes in the industry you work in. You may become an expert in navigating your company’s culture and administrative machine, but lose touch with everything else. And it’s often the “everything else” that keeps you sharp and up-to-date on new trends and innovations.
So while all of us should clearly strive for competency, look for ways to introduce new things into your job that take you out of your comfort zone or require a different way of thinking. It’s something vitally important to ensure that you continue developing as your career progresses.
4. Micro-managing
This is something I used to be guilty of earlier in my career.
A combination of insecurity and over-confidence (I used to do this task before I was promoted, so of course I know better) clouded my judgement like a lingering fog.
This may sounds like the sort of cliche you’d hear at a meditation retreat, but as our careers progress it’s vitally important that we get comfortable with letting go. The only way you can build psychological safety with your team is if they understand that a sense of genuine trust exists between you and them.
If you’ve done a good job recruiting and developing, you shouldn’t need to micro-manage anybody. Your team should have the hard skills to do what’s needed. In fact in many respects they should be telling you what to do, because they’re subject-matter experts and you might have been (once)…but maybe aren’t anymore.
So set the goals, empower your team to achieve them, provide the necessary guardrails, and focus on removing obstacles so that they can do their best work.
5. Understanding the Difference Between Your Reputation and Your Achievements
Achievements have an expiration date, but reputation is for life.
And that’s something that took me a while to untangle, because I often thought the two were one and the same thing.
Your reputation is how you show-up to work. Are you creative, collaborative, reliable, easy to work with? It’s based on elements of your character and demeanor that are consistent throughout good times and bad.
Your reputation accumulates over time and should be fairly consistent. If you talk to 10 people, will they all broadly say the same thing about you?
Fundamentally it’s about how you make people feel.
Some people call this “your personal brand”, but in my jargon-free land it’s simply how people view you as a colleague/boss/team member.
Achievements are different, although in fairly subtle ways.
There’s no doubt that your achievements can feed-in to your reputation. If you have a consistent track record of delivering results, that certainly factors in to who you are.
But achievements can also expire. In fact I’d go as far to say that basking in the glow of success is temporary – and within months or years it can count for nothing.
You see industries change, leaders change, priorities change. And as this natural state of change takes hold, your former glories start to mean less and less. People forget, misremember, or simply don’t care anymore about some of the things you did 12-18 months ago.
A mistake that’s easy to make – and one I’ve made at various points in my career – is to think that past achievements carry more weight than they really do.
So work hard on developing a character and a reputation that people remember – and work even harder on forgetting past success and focusing on new victories to come.