Complacency is the mortal enemy of growth and continued success. It is easy to take success for granted and presume that because we have been successful in the past, success will continue to be our friend in the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that you have to work harder the more successful you become—your competitors have learned from your success and are all out to beat you.

"From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will be all too late."

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress.

Achievement will continue at the same or a greater level only if you do not permit the infection of success to take hold of you and your organization. The symptom of that infection is called complacency. Contentment with past accomplishments or acceptance of the status quo can derail an organization quickly. In sports or business, getting to the top is difficult. One of the reasons staying there is so rare is because the infection sets in.

She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture.

Self complacency is fatal to progress.

Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.

The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success.

It is a dangerous thing to be satisfied with ourselves.

The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own.

The age which we live in is not suited to idle complacency or to pleasant dreams of past greatness.

"Just doing as well as you did last time is not good enough. I think of it as the "Try to get what you can" mentality. It doesn't require you to stretch, to grow. I don't believe in that."

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.