What got you here won't get you there and vice-versa

This book is so informative that if somebody tries to make a proper summary will end up occupying the whole first page of the blog. I don’t want to do that so I’ll focus on two or three issues which I found most interesting.

1- “One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption: I am successful. I behave this way. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way!. The challenge is to make them see that sometimes they are successful in spite of this behavior.”

So true unfortunately! And it happens almost to everybody in almost every aspect of their lives. Why? Because people are (predictably) irrational when it comes to analysis IMHO. Most of us can’t always see the difference between “Cause-Effect and Correlation. Behaving in a certain way may be correlated to your achievement but not necessarily be the cause to it. That simple!

2- “Confidential 360-degree feedback is the best way for successful people to identify what they need to improve in their relationships at work.”

Feedback is ALWAYS important and the more of it you get the better it is. However the person who gets feedback has to be really careful in selecting and evaluating each one properly. Especially if you take it from every direction there might be opinions strongly clashing and contradicting each other. If the person doesn’t have the skills to evaluate some of them differently and filter out some others, he/she runs the risk of drowning in feedback. “Too much water drowns the miller” (From one of Tatiana’s posts)

3- An excessive need to be "me"

This was definitely one of the expressions I liked the most in this book. I was one of the people who used this expression a lot in first place. However, extensive readings about what shaped behavior, made me realize that the resultant of circumstantial factors and the ways I interpreted them made up who I was. When I was introduced to the first law of performance “As people see the world so they behave” everything became crystal clear in my mind and I quit using and believing in that phrase once and forever.

S.K.

(Saimir Kamberi)