Learn From Your Successes Instead of Making Excuses for Them

When you hear the word “excuse”, do you associate it with a failure or a success?

We’re told to learn from our failures or mistakes instead of making excuses for them. This is important advice. Turning a failure into a learning opportunity is a great way to grow and improve.

The most successful people take this advice to heart. Really successful people rarely make excuses for their failures; it’s their successes they make excuses for.

At 33 years old, after having a lot of successes in my career, I was leading a team of 150 infrastructure software engineers at Airbnb. I decided to take some time to reflect on how I got there. As I did this, I found myself making excuses for all the things that went well. For example: “I got in at the right time,” “I started off managing the most senior engineers at the company so I didn’t have to make the technical decisions alone,” “the only reason I was able to grow my team with excellent engineers so easily was because of Airbnb’s stellar recruiting brand.”

Then I asked myself what allowed me to be a successful leader at my last job. One key reason was that I built unique recruiting processes that pulled from overlooked talent sources (which was necessary because our startup didn’t have a high profile name). As it turns out, this was the exact opposite of one of my excuses for success at Airbnb!

At that point I realized that the real untapped gold was in mining my successes. I then analyzed the common threads that made me successful in each role. Among other things, I found that I was really good at cross-functional thinking outside of the function that I managed. I found that I reasoned from first principles, questioned the status quo, and then relentlessly kept my teams focused on the most important things in the face of potential distractions. I also realized that my most effective method of learning was via real-time conversations with people (as opposed to reading documents). All of these things that I did were useful regardless of the domain or conditions.

Understanding these common threads did several key things for me:

• Reduced energy-draining feelings of self-doubt

• Gave me the confidence to take on even more exciting roles

• Supplied the knowledge to know which roles I’d excel at

• Allowed me to figure out what kind of support I needed to complement my own unique skills

• Encouraged me to use my skills earlier when joining a new team (instead of assuming everyone else had those same skills or ways of thinking)

• Helped me come up to speed efficiently with new things by leveraging my learning style

Funny enough, very successful people have a lot of successes! So there is a huge untapped opportunity to learn from your successes as much as you learn from your failures.

Answering these questions will help you mine your past successes:

1) For each role or career phase, what are the key contributions you made that helped what you worked on be successful?

(The more you list, even if small, the better, since it will help you spot common threads. This should only include contributions you made, not factors like luck which are outside your control. You can also list key things you didn’t do like not re-orging a new team you started leading.)

2) What specific steps did you take to figure out how to make those contributions?

(Most people don’t ever consciously think about the answer to this question. It may seem hard at first, but you can do it. Getting clear on your unique process helps you replicate it in future situations even when the conditions are different.)

3) What are your unique strengths (including ones that come so naturally that you often forget you have them)?

(If it’s hard to identify these, ask a coworker or look at past performance reviews / 360 feedback.)

4) What are the top 5 insights you got from answering the previous questions?

5) How can you use these insights to guide your current work and career?