Success seeds failure, which in turn sows the seeds for success
Summary
- Successful things tend to eventually fail
Details
- Success often brings pride, which results in failure
- success brings growth, which changes the organization into a different animal which may no longer have the same competitive advantages
- success results in relaxation once a financial or other goal has been achieved
- some skills that lead to success do not necessarily remain relevant
- some success is based on luck, which eventually regresses to the mean
References
Quotes
Five big things tend to eat away at competitive advantages.
One is that being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back, with competitors in tow. Size is associated with success, success is associated with hubris, and hubris is the beginning of the end of success.
Another is that success tends to lead to growth, usually by design, but a big organization is a different animal than a small one, and strategies that lead to success at one size can be impossible at another. There is a long history of star investment fund managers from one decade underperforming in the next. Some of this is the unraveling of luck. But success also attracts capital, and a big investment fund isn’t as nimble as a small one. The career version of this is the Peter Principle: talented workers will keep getting promoted until they’re in over their head, when they fail.
A third is the irony that people often work hard to gain a competitive advantage for the intended purpose of not having to work so hard at some point in the future. Hard work is in pursuit of a goal, and once that goal is met the relaxation that feels so justified removes paranoia. This allows competitors and a changing world to creep in unnoticed.
A fourth is that a skill that’s valuable in one era may not extend to the next. You can work as hard and be as paranoid as you’ve always been, but if the world no longer values your skill, it’s a loss. Being a one-trick pony is common, because people and companies that are very good at one specific thing tend to be the highest paid during the boom.
The last is that some success is owed to being in the right place at the right time. The reversion to reality that unmasks good luck is often only obvious with hindsight, and is both humbling and tempting not to believe.
Related
- Successful business is collaborative, not competitive
- When dreaming, imagine success.When preparing, imagine failure.When acting, imagine success - James Clear
- Single most important factor in success is not intelligence
- The what-the-hell effect - A small failure can lead to a large failure
- Complex systems have multiple points of failure