Celebrating Wins vs. Realizing Missed Opportunities
Your mindset is a huge part of building towards personal success. Celebrating wins is important, but was your win the biggest win that it could have been? When you delivered on a project, sold a customer, or published a paper — did you do well simply because your expectations weren’t high enough or did you really knock it out of the park?
Let’s lock in on an example from my professional life:
I worked with a customer for nearly two years on a significant sales opportunity. We did a lot of great work, helped this customer realize the potential of our solution, and ultimately they made a significant investment in our technology. This is great - everyone celebrated! The account team got praise for our work, the team all congratulated one another. It was a good moment.
Even though we had a big win, I couldn’t help but focus a little bit on the even more significant win that we didn’t get. In this particular case, we actually had to guide the customer against maximizing their usage of our solution in some instances. It was the right decision for the customer and for the company, but if we start to consider these sorts of missed opportunities within our wins…how much are we really leaving behind?
Your first reaction to this might be “Wow, why can’t you be happy simply celebrating your big win?”
I absolutely was. And it’s important to celebrate your wins. Celebrating a win helps to keep you pushing forward into the next chance to grow…but once you’ve done the round of high fives, it’s time to take stock of your win. Was it everything that it could be? Are there things you can do next time to make a home run a grand slam? Are there things that got lost in this win that can make the next win that much bigger? In order, the answers here are: Probably not. Probably. Definitely. Let’s dig in…
When things are rough, it can be important to accept every win for exactly what it was. You might need to hit pause on the growth mindset and accept your win as a win. Thinking more about focusing on what you can control - how you react to a win is something you can absolutely control. The macro factors of the economy or a customer’s budget, not so much. Take those wins and celebrate them for a minute before you get back to solving hard problems.
In my teenage years, I played on sports teams that excelled and others that… well, didn’t. I had a season where my team won three out of fifty games. Yep, that’s a 94% losing percentage. Not fun. We lost a LOT in a lot of different ways…but when we won it was a huge celebration. We celebrated those wins. Nothing else mattered for a little while even though at the end of the day we knew we were going to continue to lose a lot of games. Things just weren’t clicking. We worked hard, but it just didn’t seem to matter.
On the flip side, just because you’re winning doesn’t mean you’re meeting your potential. In sports betting, there are a lot of ways to bet, but the favorite often has to win by a certain margin for a win to result in a winning bet. Why not take this mindset with you into work?
Yes, I’m advocating that there’s actually strength in a bookie’s mindset: “Sure, you picked the winner…but the odds were in your favor, so did you really win or did you just not lose? Picking a winner by a certain margin is the real test of winning.” Sometimes, not losing is good enough. Let me tell you, not losing those three games felt like we were winning championships every time…but we just weren’t losing. For teams playing against us, it was often a challenge by coaches to win by a certain margin.
For example, I had a friend playing on a really strong team against us that year in our State tournament, and before the game he and I were chatting. He told me that his coach challenged the team that “a win by less than 10 is not a win at all, and I’ll consider it a loss.” Turns out, they only beat us by 8 and their coach punished them for not meeting his challenge. They’d won by a very decided margin, but their coach wasn’t satisfied with that. They went on to finish second place in Nationals that year.
Taking that mindset back to my work situation, we had identified ways to make our big win ten times as big, which wasn’t without its own challenges…but at the end of the day, we didn’t win by 10. We did a lot of great work, we wound up winning a pretty good win, but we didn’t win to the level that we could have. How would anyone that wasn’t on those calls know that this wasn’t just a huge win that we should all be excited about?
I took the approach to document the challenges, the potential we missed out on, and starting to create a case to solve these sorts of problems as an organization. It fits within our core value proposition, but it’s an extremely hard problem to solve. Hard problems often don’t have solutions that can be solved in a week, month, or quarter - and without a real business justification it’s unlikely that anyone can really take them on. If you find yourself focusing on the missed opportunities within your wins, that’s okay. You simply need to make it actionable.
When an executive sees “we won a huge deal” or “we saved a huge amount of money” - they’ll take that win at face value. They’ll ask questions about how you got to the win. They’re not likely to ask if your big win could have been even bigger. If you’ve celebrated the win, but know it could have been a significantly bigger win then it’s your responsibility to be able to articulate why. Winning is great, but it’s even better when you can obliterate your target. Don’t simply settle for a win.
Winning today doesn’t mean you can’t expand that win even further at the next opportunity. It’s important to take the momentum from those wins into your articulation of the missed opportunity. Highlight what went well to craft the story, and use that to drive the importance of what was missed. Owning the results will help you to own your personal success.
