What Got You Here Won't Get You There

This leadership book was recommended during a leadership training session. As a generic recommendation rather than a personalized one, it holds value depending on your prior literature knowledge. Many concepts weren't particularly enlightening because I was already familiar with them, and some points didn't resonate with where I'm at in my career and growth journey.

Core Premise

The book addresses a common misconception: believing that the factors characterizing your current success will continue to work as a static formula in the future. It highlights behaviors and beliefs that high performers use to support continued growth and shows how to get unstuck when you recognize limiting behaviors in your work.

Key Value: If you feel stuck in your career and your manager cannot identify where you're lacking, this book provides introspection tools. It requires significant effort to see these patterns in yourself, but it can serve as inspiration and reference for areas needing focus.

Extreme Scenarios as Learning Tools

The author uses extreme behavioral examples to highlight how certain traits affect leadership and organizational dynamics. This approach reminded me of "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink, where common leadership traits are demonstrated in life-or-death scenarios. When behaviors are pushed to extremes, their effects on people and leadership style become evident. This approach helps getting the point across.

For example, the lack of awareness about how you inadvertently dismiss ideas can make you a poor leader, but building that awareness is essential for progress.

Chapter Highlights

Success Delusion (Chapter 3)

The idea that extremely successful people believe their methods are universally applicable because of their proven record is flawed. While having a blueprint from years of experience provides a good starting point, problems arise when this blueprint becomes static. You get stuck in your ways and cannot see how to move forward because you're convinced your methods work in every scenario.

Personal Note: This was harder to relate to as I find to have the opposite problem. Instead of having Success Delusion I'm more inclined to impostor syndrome which I leverage to continue staying focused on my growth.

Building Awareness

The 20 habits serve as a diagnostic tool to identify areas of poor performance you might not realize. Most improvement failures stem from lack of awareness rather than inability to change. Some leaders the author worked with simply lacked awareness of their poor performance and how to change, while others had awareness but didn't know how to act on it.

Self-reflection on shortcomings and areas of poor performance is the crucial first step. 360 feedback can help mitigate that and surface weak areas that you haven't thought about (or were a blind spot).

Feed Forward Mechanism

This was the most valuable takeaway from the book. Instead of asking generic questions like "how can I do better?" the feed forward approach involves asking others for two specific actions you can take right now to improve something you need to work on.

This creates beneficial dynamics:

• Your improvement becomes supported by others
• It builds camaraderie in boss-report relationships
• It benefits both parties since you're addressing behaviors that directly affect them
• People most affected by your behaviors help you improve

Listening

Active listening is something most people do poorly. The importance of making someone the most important thing in the room while they're talking creates powerful impressions. In larger organizations where leadership positions have limited crossover, dismissive leaders who don't pay attention leave poor impressions and become people you don't want to work with in the future.

Good leaders listen actively, pay attention, take notes, and accept feedback. Beyond these familiar concepts, you can leverage relationships with people around you to improve and grow through feedback activities.

Life Values and Relationships

Important reflection: Understanding what truly provides the greatest value in your growth, life, and career is essential. A ruthless pursuit of specific goals can damage more important values and generally miss the bigger picture.

Marshall repeatedly highlights the importance of relationships with co-workers and loved ones, and how your behaviors affect them. A compelling example is the pursuit of money and wealth: obsession with this goal often means spending less time with or paying insufficient attention to loved ones. Ironically, these are the very people you're trying to help and support through your financial pursuit.

Research supports this: Happiness in life is more tightly coupled with relationships (friends and family) than with career success or money. This explains why the book emphasizes how habits and goal pursuit affect people you care about.

Conclusion: The 80s Reflection

The final chapter echoes ideas from Shane Parrish's "Clear Thinking." It presents a thought experiment: imagine yourself in your 80s, in the last decade of your life, looking back. Reflect on what you would think about your life, things you did and didn't do, then determine how to change things now based on those insights.

Key insight on regrets: When pursuing something in life, the main question is "Did I even try?" If you spend your whole life dreaming of writing a book but never attempt it, that's different from trying hard, writing 50,000 words, and not succeeding. Trying and not succeeding isn't failure. That's a much better place to be than never attempting something you wanted to do.

Overall Assessment

The book contains good ideas and will help some people more than others. Despite not finding it particularly enlightening overall, I extracted valuable frameworks I intend to apply in my life and career growth. Building continuous awareness remains key for a better life in general.