7 Success Killers Even Top Leaders Miss

Last Saturday, at South by Southwest, I attended Carey Nieuwhof’s 7 “Success Killers Even Top Leader Miss”session.These are my notes.

I enjoyed the presentation and the relevance of this for me is tremendous. If you’re a leader, an entrepreneur, watch out for these things.

What does it take to be a leader? He thought all it took was skill and knowledge, talent or ability – but these are not everything. I thought like this too.

Blind spots, they can get you.

Here are the 7 success killers, in sequence as presented by Carey Niewhof.

1. Cynicism
   • Puts a cap in leadership
   • Range from optimistic, realist, cynic
   • Cynicism starts not because you don’t care but because you do
   • Knowledge is the root of cynicism 
   • Hard to make new friends
   • The antidote to cynicism is to hope again, to believe again, I gotta trust again, open heart again
   • Daily hack: just be curious – the more you’re curious the less you become cynic
2. Compromise
   • Competency gets you in the room
   • Character keeps you in the room
   • Children POV on funerals—did Dad value me? Nothing to do with career metrics, nothing to do with legacy
   • If people in your team cannot stand being same room with you, that’s a different story
   • Integrity 
   • Compromise is the gap between who you and what you can be
   • Work twice as hard on your character as you do on your competency
3. Disconnection
   • Solitude is a gift
   • Isolation is a curse
   • Hurry is the enemy of intimacy
   • There’s a trade off: if you want to connect to the people around you, then you need to slow down
   • Love has a speed and it’s slower than you are
   • Speed of culture, speed of everything—we need to slow down
4. Irrelevance
   • That’s not a challenge probably for people attending SXSW
   • The gap between how quickly things change and how quickly you change is called irrelevance
   • The older your company is, the more irrelevant it is
   • “This smells like 2006”
   • The older you get, the harder you have to work at it
   • Antidote to irrelevance is change
   • Steve Jobs didn’t ask BlackBerry permission to remove keyboard
   • Culture never asks permission to change, it just changes
   • Relevance is permission to speak into the culture
   • Unimplemented change becomes regret
   • People change when the pain associated with status quo is greater than pain of change
   • In your company, keep the level of discontent with status quo high
5. Pride
   • It’s not just the narcissists
   • Pride at its heart is an obsession with self 
   • Only humility will get you out of what pride got you into
   • Humiliation is involuntary humility 
   • If you have a sober view of yourself, it’s good
   • Humble is a habit
   • How to practice humble? Push other people into the spotlight
6. Burnout
   • Like falling off a cliff
   • Getting out of bed in morning but boy is it difficult
   • Lost passion in life – couldn’t sleep it off
   • You can’t live this way anymore
   • Low level burnout—life still functions but there’s no joy in it
   • Cure: find a new normal
   • Get counseling, get coaching 
   • Activities 10x, energy level 10x
   • Live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow 
   • Eat better, sleep better
   • Get a lot better at saying no
7. Emptiness
   • Being grateful doesn’t make you feeling full
   • A tale of two kingdoms. The “kingdom of me”, then there is the “kingdom beyond you”
   • There is no end to sad discontent of focusing only on you
   • Life devoted to self usually leaves you alone
   • Antidote: process of giving your life away, you find it

You can find and subscribe to Carey Nieuwhof’s podcast at:

https://careynieuwhof.com/mypodcast/