A 3-Step Process to Create Your Unique Success Matrix

Do you learn more from your successes or from your failures?

One question that often comes up for debate around the topic of year-end reviews is where the best lessons come from.

As you reflect back on the past year to distill the wisdom from your experiences, is it better to focus on your successes or your failures?

Some people encourage failing fast and hard, insisting that failure is the best teacher.

Other people minimize the role of failure in being a good teacher for future success. They focus on celebrating the wins and riding the momentum of success.

So which is it?

My answer is: it’s neither, and both.

Life teaches us through patterns.

A 3-Step Process to Create Your Unique Success Matrix

As you reflect back on your year, your success or disappointments are only a starting point.

Once you have a list of some key wins and key disappointments or failures from the year, pick one from each category.

Then, engage in this three-step process:

• Step 1: List all factors and conditions that contributed to the success.
• Step 2: List all factors and conditions that contributed to the failure.
• Step 3: Compare the two lists to establish your matrix

What Factors to Consider

Whether it was closing a big deal, writing a book, hitting a big PR in the gym, buying a house, landing a new job, or simply getting out of bed every morning, there are various factors that helped you accomplish that win you want to celebrate.

The trail to success is long, and various elements along the way set you up to win.

Similarly, nothing fails in one shot. The path to failure is lined with its own conditions, or lack of the conditions present with your successes.

What type of conditions or factors are you looking for?

Nothing is too small, but it helps to start with the obvious:

• Skills you had or practiced — or skills you lacked or didn’t practice
• Natural strengths or talents you brought to the project
• Resources: financial, emotional, space, time, or energy invested or allocated to the project
• Support from other people
• Pieces that you put in place earlier that helped you achieve that win, or that you didn’t put in place that led to the failure
• Other people who contributed their resources
• How emotionally invested you were in the project or the outcome

Also look at the less-obvious:

• Time of day
• Time of year
• Your energy levels
• Your enthusiasm/interest
• Your level of confidence around the project, your skills, or the process
• Your level of certainty about what you needed to do
• The energy you brought to the tasks as you performed them

Establish Your Matrix

Once you have your two lists, compare them. You will likely find that certain factors that played into your big win were lacking in the big disappointment.

The information you distill from this exercise can help you create a matrix for what you need for a successful outcome.

The principle of patterns means that you don’t need to do this with every win or disappointment. Life is fractals: any one win or disappointment will likely be representative of the others.

That said, if you do this exercise periodically it can help reinforce what factors are necessary for your success, and what factors contribute to your failures. Sometimes you might get new insights, which you can add to your matrix.

How to Use This to Plan Your Year Ahead

The purpose of doing this exercise, or a year-end review in general, isn’t just to have the list of contributing factors.

This matrix is your unique blueprint for what helps you achieve success.

Once you have the matrix, you can use it as you plan your coming year to ensure that you put in place the factors you need for your success.