The Success Scar — How Old Wins Trap You In Outdated Models
By: Greg Chasson, PhD, ABPP
Greg Chasson, PhD, ABPP, is a speaker, esteemed psychologist, and Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. He’s the author of the award-winning and best-selling book, Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a Challenge for Management. Discover more about Dr. Chasson at www.gregchasson.com.
I had prepared 37 slides.
The class was only 75 minutes long.
It was my first semester teaching at Illinois Tech.
A graduate seminar. The kind of class where students are smart enough to catch you off guard and bold enough to call you out when you fumble.
So I built a fortress of preparation. Graphs, citations, even a color-coded timeline of cognitive-behavioral theory.
But ten minutes in, I noticed the students weren’t following the slides. They were following me.
Not my slides. Me.
In that moment, I stopped clinging to the structure.
The result? The lecture actually started to breathe.
That day, I learned something strange.
Old wins don’t always scale. Sometimes, they become cages.
The Mental Model That Got You Here
High performers tend to collect mental models like badges of honor.
- You find a system that works
- It delivers results
- You repeat it
- It becomes your identity
But here’s the catch:
That system was built by a past version of you. A version that might no longer exist.
It’s like trying to win a chess game by replaying your last victory move-for-move against an entirely different opponent.
Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen can vouch for this.
The Scar of Success
I call this the Success Scar.
It’s when high performers become so attached to the process that created their early wins that they start mistaking it for the only way forward.
- What’s the outcome?
- Blind spots that block innovation
- Rigidity in moments that require adaptation
- Internal conflict when what used to work… no longer does
This isn’t just poetic. It’s cognitive science.
I’d go back to the article I read a while back in Frontiers in Psychology.
Experts who overly rely on automated expertise struggle more with novel problem-solving than novices do. Their success, in essence, dulls their flexibility.
Maybe that’s why we love mechanical living and systems.
Why We Cling to Broken Systems
Because they’re familiar.
Because they gave us confidence when we didn’t have any.
Because, at some point, they worked.
But mastery means knowing when to update the model.
Not out of shame.
But out of respect for how far you’ve come.
I struggled with this for a very long time, and this (along with many other reasons I mentioned over the last few newsletters) is why I birthed my book on perfectionism, Flawed.
The Book Most People Find Too Late
Inside Flawed, we’ve had this conversation in so many forms.
- A young, emerging star who burns out and never reaches their tremendous promise, all because they couldn’t adjust to new systems and abandon ones that no longer worked.
- A supervisor who loses their job because they cannot flexibly apply new systems when leading.
- A worker who couldn’t move past process paralysis because they struggled to prioritize using new systems.
The book isn’t focused on getting better on a surface level.
It’s more about tweaks and a change of worldview that help you get unstuck.
So let me ask you…
What “win” are you still loyal to, even though it no longer serves you?
Personally, I can name a dozen.
To learn more about Dr. Chasson work, to purchase his book or follow him visit his webpage: https://www.gregchasson.com/. This blog was shared with permission from Dr. Chasson. He will be a featured speaker at our 2026 Perinatal Leadership Forum.
The material presented in this blog represents the opinion of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of Synova Associates. Synova Associates does not endorse any specific products or organizations but strives to connect its industry partners with leaders interested in product/educational innovation.
