43. Be Clear About Your Role in the Outcome - The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People

President Kennedy was fond of a quote from Confucius: “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.” We tend to take credit for successes while spreading the blame for failure on the shortcomings of others.

We need to be clear about our own role in the outcome, whatever it is. If we overstate our own role in a success, we will be ill prepared to repeat the things that actually produced the success. Similarly, if we ignore our own role in an unsuccessful effort, we will fail to think about and learn from our own mistakes.

It is comforting to think about everything that goes right as being a product of our personal abilities and everything that goes wrong as being the fault of others. But it is not useful to us because it will not help us produce future successes.

Many people consider Paul Baran the “father of the Internet.” Paul was an engineer for the Rand Corporation in the 1960s and played a major role in conceiving of the packet switching process that became central to the development of the Internet.

Paul, who emigrated to the United States from Poland when he was a small child, tried to sell his conception of the Internet to major communication companies. They were uniformly uninterested. He recalls executives dismissing him immediately. “Imagine them listening to this young guy and saying, ‘Listen, now, squirt . . .’”

Paul did not give up on himself or his idea and instead realized that what he needed was not a different product or sales pitch but a different audience.

He found his audience when he presented his ideas to the U.S. military, where the potential for what he was offering was appreciated.

Paul is quick to share the credit for his efforts. “The Internet represents the work of thousands of people. Each of us had a little piece.” And thirty years after he helped get the Internet off the ground, he’s still dreaming up big ideas that turn into profitable operations: “I start these companies, then I find somebody smarter than myself to run them, and I get the hell out of the way.”

When people are asked to attribute successes and failures, to explain how things happened, they are seven times as likely to focus on the significance of their efforts when describing a success as they are when describing a failure. This tendency is 19 percent greater among less experienced workers, who take more credit for successes and dish out more blame for failures—and learn nothing in the process.

Moeller and Koeller 2000