What Got You Here Won't Get You There — And Neither Will Bad Advice
Published 29 days ago • 4 min read
Hey there,
If you've spent any time on LinkedIn or stayed awake during leadership development training, you've heard it:
"What got you here won't get you there."
It’s one of those phrases that’s somehow both helpful and a little dangerous.
Helpful because there’s truth in it. Dangerous because of how quickly that truth gets oversimplified.
And it tends to show up at the moment you’re questioning your next move as your business grows.
The statement comes from Marshall Goldsmith's 2007 book of the same name — a sharp, well-researched framework designed to help senior executives grow through self-awareness and reflection. The core idea is compelling: the behaviors that made you successful at one stage can become the very things holding you back at the next.
It's a good concept. The problem is how it's been applied.
WHERE IT GOES WRONG
What Got You Here Won't Get You There has become one of the most well-meaning and most misused phrases in business today.
Well-intentioned mentors, advisors, and investors reach for it constantly — sometimes to genuinely push a founder forward, but often for a reason that has a lot more to do with them than it does with you.
Here's what tends to happen: an advisor achieved their success through a specific path. That path worked for them. It validated their decisions, their risks, their worldview. And when they look at you and say "what got you here won't get you there," what they're often really saying is: follow the map I used.
It feels like guidance. It functions like ego.
The original intent of Goldsmith's work gets stripped out entirely. The book is not a call to simply change your behaviors — it is a call to self-awareness.
To look at what you're doing, understand what's working, understand what's driven by ego, and understand how those patterns land with the people around you. That nuance matters enormously.
When that nuance disappears, founders are left with a blunt instruction: abandon what you've built, because it won't scale. And that instruction — applied without context, without strategy, without understanding your specific destination — can do real damage.
Not because growth requires change—but because it often gets interpreted as a sign that what made the business work in the first place is now a liability.
THE REFRAME
So what should you actually do when someone drops this on you? Don't dismiss it. Use it to get clear.
Here are the two questions to ask when someone gives you this advice.
Question 1: Where is "there," exactly?
Before you do anything else, define your there — not theirs.
Do you want to run a team of 100?
Are you optimizing for an exit?
Do you want the work that comes with staying lean?
Picture what your life looks like three years from now. Ten years from now. Are you in the business or working on the business? If your 8-year-old child, niece, friend of the family explained your business to someone, what would they say? (I love this because you can’t talk about shareholder value or circular ecosystem. They boil it down for you).
More often than not, the person offering the advice has a completely different "there" than you do.
Make sure you know yours before you let their map redirect you.
Question 2: What actually got you here?
Now do the work. Was it a unique strength — a way of seeing problems, building relationships, a discipline others don't have? Was it a belief or conviction you were willing to bet on when no one else would? Was it expertise that gave you an edge that most people in your space don't have?
Whatever it is — remember this: you've already defied the odds.
Even getting to where you are today means you've outpaced thousands, maybe millions, of people who started with similar ideas and similar ambitions. Something about how you operate created that result. That’s not accidental—and it’s not something to discard without understanding it first.
Don't throw it away because someone else's framework says you should.
ADAPT. DON'T ABANDON.
This is where most versions of this advice go too far. The answer is not to abandon what got you here. The answer is to adapt it.
When your business is small, you have a luxury. You can find the customers who already think like you, who value what you value, who are drawn to exactly what you've built. Your conviction is your differentiator.
But as you scale, the math changes. Reaching a wider audience doesn't mean abandoning your core — it means finding the bridge between what matters deeply to you and what resonates with people who haven't found you yet.
So many founders I work with are so passionate about their product, their conviction, their perspective, that they genuinely can't imagine it reframed. That's not a weakness — that's the same energy that built the thing in the first place.
But learning to translate that passion into something a wider audience can access, without losing what made it matter — that's the real work. It's what allows a brand to reach mainstream impact while keeping its integrity intact.
TAKEAWAY
The next time someone tells you what got you here won't get you there — don't just take it on faith. Ask yourself those two questions. Know your "there." Understand your "here." Then approach every piece of advice, including this one, with strategic curiosity about how it connects to where you actually want to go.
The people giving you advice aren't always wrong. But they're not always talking about your business. Sometimes they're talking about their own.
What got you here is worth understanding. Where you’re going is worth deciding.
You've already defied the odds to get here. Don't plan the next chapter around someone else's playbook.
If this sparked something, you probably know a founder who needs it. Send it their way.
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