It is one thing to be successful, it is another thing to sustain success over the coming decades. Is that not a powerful idea? I mean, let’s go to the entertainment industry. It’s very hard to be a one hit wonder, let’s not knock a one hit wonder, but it’s even harder to become an iconic rock band or hip hop band.Let’s go to the arts. It is very hard to come up with your Sistine Chapel, got it. It is even harder to become a Michelangelo. Play the long game, aim for legendary. Don’t just say, “I want to be world-class in my dominant pursuit for a little window of time.” Say, “I want to have the guts and the grit and the acumen and the mindset and the capability and the commitment to create enduring success.”
And that’s why I say nothing fails like success. You look at the restaurant that is hot in your neighborhood right now, they’re on the path to obsolescence if they’re not really careful. Sure they went from a little neighborhood shop that made beautiful pasta, that had great servers, that had the owner on the floor shaking your hand, getting to know your name. Then they got written up in the magazines and then they got interviewed and then word of mouth spread like wildfire, and what happened? They became arrogant. You see, success can be so toxic and it happens, it is such a pull on every human being. It just plays with your mind and you literally shift from humility to arrogance. You shift from humility to arrogance, and once the arrogance sets in, in a mindset, it starts to populate every other person on the team, every other person in the culture, every other person in the community, and it is a very short fall from success to irrelevance.
