To succeed on the job, you first have to land that job. Aside from your skills and qualifications, most interviewers look for an attitude they like in a candidate. A study published in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology suggests that the best way to do that is by emphasizing not what you’ve accomplished, but how you accomplished it.

In a series of experiments in the United States and the Netherlands, subjects participated in a mock job interview. “Candidates” were told to talk positively about themselves, but receivers found themselves more interested in the efforts and struggles the candidates had to deal with, rather than the final results they achieved.