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I often meet people who lean on achievement inflation without much specificity. One phrase that illustrates this: “I built that team from scratch.”
In my experience, when someone says this, it reveals more about how they see themselves than what actually happened. It often glosses over the messy, collaborative reality of building anything, focusing more on outcomes (“I built it”) than on the real creative or business problems they solved.
It usually signals two things:
A lack of humility — overstating ownership of a group effort.
A lack of precision — skipping the actual work and problem-solving that mattered.
The best executives are specific: they talk about the gaps they saw, the needs they met, and the challenges they overcame — not just the result.