A reminder for all the Successful People

Photo by ju li on Unsplash

You are not successful.

I don’t mean this with any slander or malice. You’re not. Neither am I if it makes you feel any better. Nobody is. It’s a simple fact that we’ve all largely forgotten — or perhaps willfully ignored. Success isn’t a state. It’s not some intrinsic attribute of a person. It’s not some lordly title that you gain for the rest of your days.

Success is an event which happens, and then passes into history. You have been successful. You probably will be successful again. But you as an entity are not inherently successful.

This is the flip side of the Fundamental Attribution Error.

In leadership we usually talk about the “others” side of the fallacy: the one where people ascribe the failure of others to some flaw in their character or some inherent inferiority when circumstances and environment and sheer misfortune play a larger role. That’s understandable since leaders’ job is to shape the environment around them. Our job is to coach people up rather than write them off the first time that they show any inadequacies.

Both sides of the fallacy are a danger though. When we ascribe our success — or the success of others — to some innate talent alone then we minimize the value of a healthy environment and leadership itself. When we discount the effect of our…