Avoid the Trap of Complacency

Ancient empires start off young and vigorous, but when they achieve success, they grow complacent and stagnant. They eventually grow weak and collapse. The same thing happens to people. The moment that you think you are actually good at something is the moment that you stop growing and improving. It is a cycle of vigor and complacency.

When learning or working towards a goal, there will be a lot of effort in the beginning to get started. However, once progress is made, you can start to become complacent - this often occurs towards the end of the middle stage of the learning curve. As habits become more automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback and fall into mindless repetition. Bad habits can form and you stop thinking about how you can improve, letting small errors slide. You become complacent and end up repeating what you have done previously. Habits create the foundation for mastery. However, they can also lead to the downside of habits - the tyranny of habit.

Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time, so you can continue to refine and improve. It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill—right when things are starting to feel automatic and you are becoming comfortable—that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.

Once one habit is mastered, you need to return to the effortful part of the work and begin building the next habit. Deliberate practice is required to improve. There should be a constant interplay between established habits - which are required for mastery and creativity - and being on the edge of you ability, just past your comfort zone. You need to introduce chaos (being out of your comfort zone) to avoid too much order (the tyranny of habit), and balance between the two.

Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. Your whole life, therefore, must be treated as a kind of apprenticeship to which you continually apply your learning skills.

References

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

The Daily Laws by Robert Greene