When I was starting out as a marketer in the web2 world, my first company told me that it's all about having an edge. As weird as it may have appeared in the beginning, I realised that they really weren't joking. Most 'technical' things a marketer knows at the industry-age of 30, he knows at the industry-age of 2.
What separates marketers?
I've actually been on the asking end of these questions myself. However, I've always been met with vague advices by my seniors. Turns out, the vague advices were right but not because they were carefully worded.
Nobody knows why they are the way they are
People have a clue.
That's it.
Nobody knows exactly how they got where they got. If they did, they would be able to recreate it again and again. The nature of systems necessitates some form of randomness. You can't recreate events down to the minutest detail simply from your volition.
On a macro scale, this means that all your promotions and achievements had luck involved. So did every failure.
Why am I rambling about chances?
The best marketers I know credited their success and failures to themselves rather than chance. This is of course, wrong if you think about it hard enough.
The Adonis way
My way?
Credit the failure to yourself, credit the success to you + 69 other factors. That helps with humility and preserves a line of action too.
Get the marginal edge.
Most people are alike. It's the soft skills and beliefs like these that count.