What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.

If you are looking for a book to provide you with habits that will help you to unlock your potential and get to your “A” game, What Got You Here Won't Get You There will be the book. It is based on the assumption that there are a handful of workplace habits that often hinder successful people from making the next big leap forward in their career. 

The author, Marshall Goldsmith, provides a list of those habits and helps us put in place ways we can overcome them so that we can make our next big move in whatever we are planning to do with our lives. It really does not matter what your goals are as the nuggets from the book are applicable on all the spheres of life. It is an excellent book to help us open our eyes to the habits that are hampering our career success or that which we want to work on for our overall personal growth. 

The book provides insights on how to fix bad behaviors and acquire new good ones. It also provides a road map to help us succeed in our endeavors both at the individual or organization level. This book provides a fantastic learning opportunity as Goldsmith tries to convey his ideas in the book. The ideas are put in a simple way to help us understand. It is worthwhile to note that the ideas may seem difficult to absorb and even more difficult to adhere to due to the commitment and motivation required. This is normal as we are human hence the need for us to have the desire to make the needle move by acting and implementing the takeaways from the book. 

I currently practice a couple of the ideas shared in the book just to affirm that it is possible. This is also helping to adhere to my mantra of moving away from NATO (No Action Talk Only). Goldsmith uses the term ‘gems’ to describe the takeaways and confirms them as the factors which are required to help you and I reach our desired level in our professions or our dreams.

I particularly like the 20 habits section of the book as it provides the habit of winning the career lottery. It is good to note that the habits presented are common sense things. The only problem is that common sense is not always a common practice hence the need for the habits to be brought up again into our lives.

My biggest takeaways from this book are:

1. How we are perceived by those who we spend most of our time with holds immense transformative value and is often overlooked. We need to ask for feedback for self-improvement no matter how hard the feedback is.
2. We need to figure out things that annoy others. There are many things we do that annoy other people and if we stopped such, we would improve our relationship with them for the betterment of our results and improvement of our perception by them.
3. We need to involve the people we spend most time with into our transformational journey. They will guide and put effort on our process for better results.