Overheard: People with attitude never improve

Interesting chat with creative Lance Dooley today - talking about a few ad folks who seem to have tremendous potential but have taken no steps to reach it because they approach everything with either blame or disdain. Rather than leveraging the resources of the agency to improve their skills, they're just increasingly put off by every project, interaction, client, etc.

Lance's take: People with that kind of attitude will never improve their skills because it gives them a Teflon coating that says, "it wasn't my fault."

He went on to say:  I once saw an interview with Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and John Elway and they said the reason they became the best ever in their respective fields is because they always blamed themselves. That people that exercise "blame-shifting" were people that would never improve their game.

Something to think about ... there's a little bit of "that guy" in most of us.

Comments

[Krista]

Thanks for the article. I hear there appeared new rapidshare search engines( http://www.rapidsharemix.com ) . I'd like to learn more about them

[Danopoly]

I grew up Catholic and I blame myself for everything. And how Zen it would be to blame oneself for a lack of success.

[Clyde Smith]

I say blame advergirl!

[Matt]

makes a lot of sense. I think people don't improve their skills because of pure laziness as well - like spending the day posting on blogs. er, wait a minute!!

[Andrew Hovells]

This is one of the most useful bits of advice I've heard in a while, far too many agency people manage to blame each other instead of learning from their mistakes.
Is it a case of winning at war by becoming war?