The Career Wins You Forgot To Count

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.comYou know what you’ve lost. But can you name your wins?Most people in a career transition can recite their losses on demand. The VP title. The 401K contribution. The Friday happy hours with the work family. The satisfaction of knowing what the job is and how to do it.Ask them to name their wins? Awkward silence then a short, apologetic list they immediately start walking back. “I mean, it wasn’t that big a deal.” “Anyone could have done that.”This isn’t humility. It’s your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do.Your Brain Thinks It’s Helping - It’s NotYour brain tracks threats and losses with far more energy than it tracks wins. It’s called negativity bias and a lot has been written about it. Essentially, as humans we’re wired to look for what’s not working as a way to protect ourselves.During a career transition, exactly when you need a clear and accurate picture of your professional story, your brain is actively over-indexing on the negative. The losses stay top of mind while the wins get tucked into a bankers box and put into the back of a storage container.Over time, negative bias feels like the truth. And once it does, it starts calling the shots on every decision you make — what you apply for, how you talk about yourself, what you believe you’re capable of next.I learned this the hard way. And what made it worse is that my brain wasn’t the only thing working against me. I was also using the wrong measuring stick.Another Reason Your Wins Go MissingSeveral years ago, when I was pivoting out of independent film and TV producing, I went after three corporate opportunities, hard. Made it to the final round for all three. Got none of them.When I dug into why, the feedback was consistent: the candidates who were hired had more recent, measurable wins. Box office numbers. Emmy nominations. Projects that crossed the finish line in ways the industry recognized.Ouch. I knew how hard I’d been working. And I knew that a lot of the gap wasn’t about effort — it was about circumstance. COVID. The lockdowns. The writers’ and actors’ strikes. An industry that had slowed down so much, we could count the number of greenlit productions on one hand.Turns out my wins weren’t missing. They just didn’t fit the industry’s scoreboard.I’d spent years making sure the people on my projects felt respected. I knew this because they kept wanting to work together on new projects. I took great pride in responding to submissions when most people didn’t bother. Timely passes built relationships with agents, managers and other producers who understood that most of the time, the answer is no. Nobody was measuring those things that fell under the emotional intelligence category. They weren’t measurable in the same way the industry looks at ROI or KPIs. They were about humanity.I wasn’t winless. In fact, I was quite victorious. But me and the industry were using different measuring sticks so I felt less than.Finding The Wins Hiding In Your StoryIf your career story feels heavier on losses right now, here’s an exercise worth sitting with that includes the parts that haven’t made it onto your résumé yet.Start with the most obvious place: external recognition. Awards, nominations, acknowledgments — any moment where someone outside your own head said yes, this. Write them down without editing or qualifying.Then go a little deeper. What do people thank you for, come to you for, refer others to you for? This one matters more than it might seem. When something comes naturally to you, it stops feeling like a win — it just feels like any other day. But the fact that people consistently seek you out for it says a lot about you.Then ask yourself about the goals you hit without fireworks going off. The ones you set, achieved, and moved on from without a big victory dance. Those count too.Now here’s where it gets more interesting. We tend to define victory as coming in first, getting the public recognition, beating the competition. But that’s only one definition — and for many people, it’s not even the one that matters most.Think about a time you made a decision that honored your values, even when it went against what others expected. Or a time you went so far outside your comfort zone to make something happen that it surprised even you — even if the outcome wasn’t perfect, even if it wasn’t work-related at all. The stretch itself is a win. The integrity itself is a win. These moments are the most accurate picture of who you actually are.