By Blanche Sheppard
I had no idea who billionaire Barry Diller was until I read a recent article about his adoption of deliberate forgetfulness as a business concept. He mentioned that remembering all of your successes prevents you from future advancements, which seems so counterintuitive. Don’t past victories bolster your confidence so that you can go out and achieve more? Barry Diller argues instead that if you can brush away your wins, forcing yourself to start again from a humble place, you can continue to succeed in new and exciting ways.
The research of Mark Easterby-Smith and Marjorie Lyles supports Barry Diller’s concepts. Their article in the Journal of Management Inquiry is an oft-cited example for how “forgetting, in the right circumstances, can be beneficial for companies.” I would highly recommend reading “In Praise of Organizational Forgetting” to see if you should stop taking all those Ginko supplements and instead apply yourself to forgetting your past successes.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241654929_In_Praise_of_Organizational_Forgetting
