Audiobook Summary and Review by StoryShots
The two most dangerous words to say after receiving feedback are "but" and "however."
You made partner.
You made VP.
Colleagues still avoid you in the hallway.
by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, who spent decades coaching leaders at firms such as Goldman Sachs and GE and watching brilliant people sabotage themselves.
Most people assume the habits that built their career are the same habits that will keep building it.
Wrong.
Many high achievers are not successful because of their sharpest behaviors.
They are successful in spite of them.
A talented executive interrupts meetings to correct small details, and everyone nods because he is brilliant.
Nobody mentions that the same habit is quietly costing him his team's loyalty.
The more you win, the more you credit your behavior for the win, even when talent and timing did the real work.
You are probably repeating a habit right now that colleagues resent, and no one has told you, because you are too successful to be corrected.
Success breeds confusion between behavior that helped and behavior that was merely tolerated.
Twenty specific habits quietly wreck careers.
Winning arguments that do not matter.
Adding your two cents to every idea.
Punishing whoever brings bad news.
Most executives carry one or two of these, which sounds manageable until you realize you cannot see your own.
A structured feedback process gathers honest input from bosses, peers, and subordinates about which habits actually hold you back.
It sounds simple: ask people what to stop doing.
Collecting feedback and actually changing are entirely different problems.
Plenty of executives hear the same critique for years and change nothing.
Getting told the truth is not the hard part.
Something else determines whether that truth ever becomes different behavior.
Knowing your flaw and fixing your flaw turn out to be almost unrelated skills.
Here is the answer, and it is almost embarrassingly simple: apologize.
Not a long, justified, contextualized apology.
Just: I'm sorry.
I'll try to do better.
Then stop talking.
This single move marks the moment behavioral change actually begins, because it closes the gap between what you intended and what people experienced, instantly, without asking anyone to trust a future promise.
A two-sentence apology can repair years of damage, yet almost no successful person ever says it.
Apology is where behavioral change begins.
If this changed how you think about the habits quietly limiting your career, someone in your life could probably use this summary too.
This summary of What Got You Here Won't Get You There traces one argument: success convinces you your habits are assets, honest feedback exposes which ones are not, and a genuine apology converts that awareness into trust.
Marshall Goldsmith built this framework by coaching over a hundred CEOs, and the full version covers the complete seven-step change process, all twenty habits in detail, and feedforward, a method for asking colleagues for future advice instead of past judgment.
You will also get the four success beliefs that quietly resist change, and why goal obsession functions as a twenty-first habit all its own.
Anyone managing a team, or anyone suspecting their own success has a ceiling, needs this one.
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