It will play tricks on you, too.
“Success is dangerous.
It will teach you that you’re doing enough.
But doing enough to succeed, doesn’t equal the best you can do.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to smell the roses along the way, but ‘complacency kills’ isn’t just a cute saying.
It’s a fundamental fact of life.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
From athletics to business, success, while the goal and fun to attain, is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because while it’s obviously the objective, prolonged, hell even quick tastes of it can often lead to complacency.
Success allows us to justify.
“Well, I only had to put fourth this much effort and it yielded the result I wanted, so it’s good enough.”
There are people everywhere, every day doing the bare minimum required to attain base levels of success. And I’m not saying this is a bad thing either, because on the flip side of that coin there are millions of bumps chewing the fat, doing nothing, complaining about how their life is unfair.
I’m simply saying good is the enemy of great.
I view it in my own life every day.
I know the are corners I can skip. I know there are things I don’t have to do. I know what I can get away with, and nobody will know it, either. But if I constantly let the same stuff slide that everybody else let’s slide, am I any different than the base level players? I am not.
Therefore, I must make (small) decisions that may be seemingly unimportant to differentiate myself.
Look at it from an athletics perspective.
Let’s say you’re a pretty good athlete, maybe even better than most.
Let’s say there are things you can get away with: less practice, less training, less focus on health/recovery, etc. and still succeed.
Success is dangerous because while you may be able to get away with it in your own back yard, there are a world of athletes you don’t see who have the SAME (or better) natural abilities that you do, but they are willing to double down on what you overlook because your “success” tricked you.
This is why many athletes miss opportunities to play at the next level or wash out quickly when they get there. (1/3 of college athletes will quit before their senior year, many of them walking away from Scholarship MONEY.)
Doing enough and doing the best you can are two entirely different constructs and whether talking about business or athletics, if you want to excel to and through to the top, you must be willing to do what most assume they can overlook. (They can’t.)
