On every team there’s one person who everyone looks to save the day when the chips are down. At least, on every good team there’s one. You don’t get there by vote. You get there by performance, and everyone knows who you are, and how important you are to the team’s success.
There are a lot of benefits to being “that guy.”
They are almost always the highest paid. They get all the perks. They get the most respect. Everyone looks up to them. For some reason even “luck” seems to know who they are, and falls their way a large part of the time.
Exactly how can you get there – what did they do?
Obviously it takes time, but what area should you focus on the most? How do you develop that “give me the ball” attitude? By screwing up a lot. By recruiting the wrong kind of people. By making a bad career move. By messing up a project. Mistake after mistake. And learning from each and every one.
The guy who succeeds is the guy who may have screwed up the most, but he is also the one who corrected it the fastest. He doesn’t keep screwing up for five or ten years. He figures out where he went wrong very quickly, corrects the problem, makes the adjustment, and keeps going. He is smart enough to learn from his mistakes and he persists in going after his goals.
