Let's be honest. There are about 1001 different ways you can screw up your career and relegate yourself to just being average.  If you look at successful people they have a lot of things in common.  In my opinion the most crucial trait you must have to be successful is how you deal with problems.

Leaders don't complain, leaders identify the problem and seek a solution.  Complaining about things will do 3 things that are extremely damaging to you.  First, complaining wastes time, your time is valuable, and if you can't see that you'll never go anywhere.  Secondly, complaining about a problem only distracts you from solving the problem, often times making things worse.  Lastly, complaining could potentially label you as the whiner in your team, which discredits any amount of knowledge you may have in an area.

This whole post comes from sitting in a meeting the other day and having someone complain and complain about something.  I'm not going to share exactly what he/she was complaining about, but it had to do with adopting a new product.  This person hates the new product for whatever valid/invalid reason and whined about it, over and over.  What will the outcome be? Probably pigeon holing yourself into projects that don't use the new product and stagnating in old projects.

Instead, this person's approach could have been offering help to the team in implementing it in a way that minimizes the products downsides.  If you have experience in something, whether you like it or not, offer your help.  You've already learned how not use it, pass on that information and become the person who saved your team a bunch of time.

At the end of the day, both approaches will cost you the same amount of time. The latter however, will take you places.