UNUM, the insurance company, ran an ad some years ago showing a powerful grizzly bear in the middle of a roaring stream, with his neck extended to the limit, jaws wide open, teeth flaring. The bear was about to clamp on to an unsuspecting airborne salmon jumping upstream. The headline read: YOU PROBABLY FEEL LIKE THE BEAR. WE'D LIKE TO SUGGEST YOU'RE THE SALMON.

The ad was designed to sell disability insurance, but it struck me as a powerful statement about how all of us in the workplace delude ourselves about our achievements, our status, and our contributions. We

• Overestimate our contribution to a project
• Take credit, partial or complete, for successes that truly belong to others
• Have an elevated opinion of our professional skills and our standing among our peers
• Conveniently ignore the costly failures and time-consuming deadends we have created
• Exaggerate our projects' impact on net profits because we discount the real and hidden costs built into them (the costs are someone else's problems; the success is ours)

All of these delusions are a direct result of success, not failure. That's because we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, and, in a mental leap that's easy to justify, we think that our past success is predictive of great things in the future.