Success Is Making Those Who Believed In You Look Brilliant

Dharmesh Shah
ThinkGrowth.org
Published in
3 min readMar 17, 2016

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About 8 years ago, culture wasn’t really a thing at HubSpot. The company was almost two years old. We were doing the things that many startups do: Building product, attracting customers, working to help them succeed, recruiting, raising capital, etc. In fact, we were doing a lot of all those things. One thing we were decidedly not doing a lot of was talking about culture. The only real discussion around culture I can recall with my co-founder Brian Halligan in those early days was: “Let’s make this a place we both want to work.” That was it.

Around that time, Brian was schooled a bit on the importance of culture by some of his CEO peers (he was part of a CEO group). He later came to one of our founders’ dinners with this new-found insight and said (and I paraphrase): “Hey Dharmesh, I’ve heard this culture thing is important. Why don’t you talk about it at the next company meeting…”

I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant or what to say about it. But, I agreed because Brian doesn’t really ask me for much.

Below is a photo from that HubSpot company meeting. It was a combination two year anniversary celebration party and company meeting held at…a bowling alley. But, because we’re geeky and weird, we picked a bowling alley that just happened to have a projector and a screen so we could have a short company meeting before the bowling.

HubSpot company meeting in 2008. I was 15 pounds lighter.

At that meeting, I had a crude slide that talked about how I thought about success. I had come up with it in a late-night frenzy (the same frenzy I go through before every speaking gig).

I didn’t know it at the time, but that idea would turn out to be very useful — and oddly popular.

Success is making those who believed in you look brilliant.

It’s something I’ve believed in for as long as I can remember. And, it fits our overall inbound philosophy at HubSpot:

I put the idea in HubSpot’s Culture Code deck. Because confessedly (which is totally a word), I kind of like it in there. It fits Hubspot’s overall inbound philosophy. Be more human and helpful in the way you market and sell. And also, I will pretty much do anything to spread the culture code deck. It’s one of my obsessions.

On the flip side, one thing I was not responsible for is having the quote ponderously wind up on a wall in one of the new HubSpot offices in Cambridge. I promise that was not my doing. Even I am not that egocentric.

Candidly, that wall makes me a bit uncomfortable every time I walk by it (and my desk is right around the corner). But, nobody at HubSpot asked me whether they could embarrass me by putting my quote on a wall. Guess that whole “give people autonomy” thing cuts both ways.

Back to the definition of success…

I’ve always known that success isn’t binary. It’s not like: “You know, I accomplished this thing. Before that moment, I was not successful, but right after it, I was.” That’s not how it works. Because accomplishments are milestones. True success, the most gratifying kind, is the aggregate of all the pride and joy that others that believed in you feel as you do the amazing things you do.

Because I’m strange (and often procrastinating), I ran an informal experiment to see whether people are generally more positive or negative. I did this by spreading this other quote:

There is a profound joy in surprising those who underestimated you.

It’s basically a subtle, bizarro-world version of the original. I wanted to see which one got more uptake. I was happy to see that the positive version of the quote got much more traction than the somewhat negative one. Yay for humanity!

By the way, I’m curious: What’s your definition of success?

If you’ve got a great one, perhaps I can talk the HubSpot team into replacing my quote with yours on that wall at HubSpot…

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