I’m an MIT grad with 2 master’s degrees. A company I started tanked spectacularly and nearly bankrupted me. I was shocked. I hadn’t seen it coming and couldn’t believe it could happen to me. Bluntly, I hit rock bottom.
I realized that I needed to understand why… Learning from experiences was something that I’d developed growing up in an ‘education-first’ family (between my 2 sisters and our spouses, we have 14 master’s degrees), and as an immigrant in America.
I reached out to friends, classmates, peers, and asked, “Why did this happen to me?”
They gave me classic reasons – that I LACKED… the right technology, adequate capital, right team, right plan. But I had a hunch that something else caused my failure. I didn’t know what.
I spent 8 weeks thinking. In week 9, I noticed a pattern – they told me that I’d failed because I LACKED something – all the reasons were EXTERNAL to me.
I used INVERSION THINKING to get to the underlying truth, asking myself, “Did I fail because I HAD (not lacked) something?” AND “was that something WITHIN ME (not external to me)?” Did I fail because of WHO I WAS?
The answer was YES… I’d failed because I was ME (at that time). This single insight led to self-reflection and many harsh truths. I was BRUTALLY HONEST with myself. That day, I came up with 4 causes of my failure – my “truths” few others knew.
I called my friends again. I told them I’d used inversion thinking, and shared the causes for my failure. I then heard, “That’s an interesting way of looking at things. Let me tell you how else you screwed up!” The list grew. I call those reasons the ‘Silent Killers of Success’ – things within and around me that prevented my greater success – some caused the spectacular failure. Each one of us have a few “silent killers of success.” None of us are immune. Those ‘fatal’ weaknesses can prevent our greater success, or cause failures.
That was a turning point. I was unaware then that my real comeback was beginning. I got invited to speak at MIT, then Harvard…
I worked with psychologists and drew on personal experiences to develop an assessment that can help ANYBODY identify common ‘silent killers’ within themselves – like the ‘weakest links’ in a chain. Identify and mitigate them… or face disaster. If you don’t know what’s holding you back from greater successes, how can you ‘fix’ them and succeed?
Take the assessment and find out if you have one (or more) common ‘silent killers of success’ & start becoming more successful.
https://www.businessthinking.com/assessments/silent-killers-of-success-general
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