What Got You Here Won't Get You There Helped Us Get Here
There's a strange kind of trap that only shows up after you've already succeeded. You build a set of habits that deliver results. Then those same habits start quietly working against you. That's the entire premise of Marshall Goldsmith's What Got You Here Won't Get You There, and it's a premise worth sitting with regardless of what industry you're in or what "next level" looks like for you.
Goldsmith's core argument is simple but uncomfortable: successful people tend to believe their habits caused their success. In reality, plenty of high performers succeed despite certain habits, not because of them. The problem is that success reinforces the belief. If a behavior was present when you won, you assume it's part of the formula. So you keep doing it, long after it stops serving you.
The book gets specific about what these habits actually look like. A few worth naming: winning too much, or turning every conversation, even trivial ones, into something you have to win. Adding too much value, or jumping in to improve someone else's idea before they've even finished presenting it. Needing to tell the world how smart you are, or reflexively demonstrating your own intelligence in ways that shrink the room instead of growing it. None of these is a dramatic flaw. They're small, habitual, and often invisible to the person doing them, which is exactly what makes them so hard to shake.
One of the more useful ideas in the book is a tool Goldsmith calls "feedforward." Instead of asking people for feedback on what you did wrong, you ask them for suggestions on what you could do differently going forward. It sounds like a small shift in language, but it changes the entire dynamic. Feedback tends to put people on the defensive because it's about the past, which can't be changed. Feedforward is forward-looking by design, which makes it easier to hear and easier to actually use.
That distinction lands squarely in territory we think about often. Growth rarely comes from getting better at what already works. It comes from being willing to sit in the discomfort of hearing that something isn't working anymore, and doing something about it anyway. Whether that's a habit, a process, or an entire approach to client work, the willingness to question what got you here is often the thing that determines whether you actually get there.
This book earns its spot on our reading list not because it hands you a new framework to master, but because it asks a harder question: what are you doing right now, simply because it worked before, that might be quietly capping what comes next?
If you're in the middle of your own reinvention, or overdue for one, this is a short, sharp read worth the afternoon.
