Description

Complacency Kills Achievement

Complacency: a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements.

But before complacency can make you its host, you first need to adopt one inimical habit — stave off on self-reflection. Since complacency requires you to have an uncritical satisfaction with your achievements, the first step towards this state would be to stop reflecting on your experiences.

Then either one of these mindsets follow:

• Bias towards instant gratification: one can suck at self-reflection and still be ambitious. Complacency is a state of ignorance towards your laziness/fear to validate the fact that you are not maximizing your potential, which often resembles hedonism.
• Fear of change: this one happened to Kodak. They were afraid of risking their film sales to focus on developing digital cameras, which led to their bankruptcy. Fear of risking what you have for something that could provide you with more happiness can also prompt you to tap into that ignorance and become complacent.

Does this sound familiar? If it does, you’re about to find this article very relatable. If not, still stick around; we’re about to delve into the effects this mindset has on your life so that you can be more aware of its adverse effects.

How Complacency Affects Your Life

For the sake of organization, I’ll split this section up into three categories — personal life, career, and relationships.

Personal

• You stop growing as a person. This is the main reason why I hate complacency so much. Since you’re not reflecting on your goals and experiences, your self-growth falters, which can lead to unhappiness since you repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
• Your good habits deteriorate. These include exercising, eating healthy, meditating, etc. Your shift in thinking from “I want to get better” to “this is good enough” prompts you to let go of your good habits as you start believing they are unnecessary. Neglecting virtuous habits is not only be detrimental to your self-growth, but also your health.
• You don’t set goals anymore. What for? You already have everything you want, right? Just like with good habits, as you become increasingly self-satisfied, you stop striving for better and settle with what you have.
• You settle for less than optimal. As complacency makes you increasingly ignorant, you begin compromising for scenarios that you may not desire to salvage your lifestyle.

Career

• You stop getting promoted. Uncritical satisfaction can pollute your work and decrease its quality, and therefore prevent you from getting promoted.
• Your ideas are trash. Innovation stems from a desire to improve a situation. If you’re satisfied with the way everything is, you become less creative and innovative.
• Your business starts failing. Just like with Kodak, it’s easy to neglect certain aspects of the market or negative reviews of your product until competitors take the lead.

Relationships

• You get into disagreements over the same topics. This one relates to the lack of self-reflection. Since you’re no longer committed to improving yourself or your relationships, conflicts break out more often and falter until they break.
• You’re not meeting anyone new. If you’re generally someone who makes friends effortlessly but notice that you haven’t made any new connections lately, it may be because you’re becoming complacent.

Hopefully, by now, you have a sense of how detrimental this mindset can be if you want to reach your optimal self. If you can identify some of these qualities in yourself, worry not! I’ll get into tips on how to defeat it.

How to Overcome/Avoid Complacency

I won’t say it’s easy to get past this mindset — especially if you’ve struggled with it for a while. Still, by tweaking your habits little by little, you can make your journey go along more smoothly.

Here are the four main ways you can overcome complacency.

1. Find Your “Why”

The easiest way to get back on a productive track is to know why you’re trying so hard in the first place. It’s not always easy to be sure of what your motivation is, but you can get started by taking a few minutes to reflect on your motives. Keep asking yourself, “why do I want to do this?” until you can’t ask it anymore.

Even if you don’t get to the core of the problem in the first try, you’ll at least still have a more definite trajectory than before. Do this exercise whenever you feel like you’re losing momentum again.

2. Make self-reflection a priority

Set aside 10–15 minutes each day to reflect on what you did that day and whether you are content with the way your life is playing out. Ask yourself what you can improve on and how you can keep aiming high to avoid falling back on complacency.

Make it a point to set action items after your reflection so that you follow through with your plans rather than making your progress a fantasy. Writing them down and asking people to keep you accountable helps if you know you’ll have a hard time following through with it.

3. Construct Principles for Your Life

This one was inspired by a book I’m reading called “Principles” by Ray Dalio, the co-founder and previous CEO of Bridgewater Associates.

In his book, he explains that building principles for your life make your actions more efficient since they provide you with a systematic guide to success.

In this case, the purpose of the principles would be to prevent you from falling back on negative habits or patterns of thinking. For example, if you notice that your day is more unproductive if you start it by checking social media, construct a principle like “read an article on Medium instead of checking Instagram when you wake up” and stick with it. Remember — it’s easier to abide by your standards 100% of the time than 98%.

Make sure your principles are specific and relevant. Revisit them often and make adjustments if necessary — the primary quality principles should have is that they work. Two principles I recommend to combat complacency is:

1. Come up with one new way to improve your life every day.
2. Make weekly goals that align with your “why.”

4. Build Discipline

I consider discipline to be one of the most valuable virtues one can develop; if you can conquer your mind, you can conquer anything. However, discipline is especially useful in this scenario since it will help with stepping away from a bias towards instant gratification and following through with your principles.

Some ways to build discipline are:

• Build a new habit you’re uncomfortable with, like limiting your sugar intake to 25 grams or taking a cold shower every day
• Daily meditation
• Embrace discomfort. If you’re uncomfortable, it means you’re growing. Acknowledge it and embrace it.
• Focus on your fundamental needs first (sleeping, eating healthy, and exercising). It’s easier to have discipline when you’re functioning optimally.
• If you fail, forgive yourself and move forward. Guilt-tripping yourself may only prompt you to give up.

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