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

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.

"Only the paranoid survive." But they aren't a happy bunch.

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.

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.

because complacency, or worse, arrogance, is a parent of poverty.

Self complacency is fatal to progress.

In his classic book Only the Paranoid Survive,

Harry Dresden: Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren't ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile — and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

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

I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, "I want to know where I'll die so I'll never go there." We want to see what has caused businesses to go bad. The biggest thing that kills them is complacency. ... The danger would always be that you rest on your laurels.

We have come to the point of believing complacency to be a virtue. Yet complacency is the biggest form of cowardice. The worst thing we can do to our children is to teach them to remain quiet. In ancient Greece, during periods of crisis and division, citizens who would not take a position were fined. We tell our young people to be irresponsible, to stay off the pitch, instead of teaching them that we all need to be on the pitch and to fight. When you deny yourself the right of participation and choice, you’re denying your freedom.