Nothing fails like success. And here’s a word I want you to think about: hypervigilance. I want you to be hypervigilant about the threat of reputational damage. I want you to be hypervigilant about you coasting versus growing as you become more and more successful personally, professionally, spiritually, financially. I want you to be even more humble. The thing about an expert is often the expert stops learning. The expert often thinks they know everything that is to be known in their field. And so here’s the contrarian move I want you to make. As you become more successful, I want you to become more humble. And when I say humble, I don’t just mean when dealing with other people. I’m suggesting that you become humble in terms of your appetite for growth, humble in your commitment to get up at 5AM and do your morning routine with discipline, consistency and rigor, humble when it comes to treating people really well, whether it’s a server in a restaurant, a cab driver. I mean, often we can tell someone’s character or the quality of their character by how they treat people who can’t help them. And so I want you to think about the titan’s decline and the fact that so many great companies at the peak of their success began the descent into obsolescence by thinking they knew what the future looked like and taking their customers for granted. It happens a lot in restaurants. You have a great restaurant, gets to the top, and then the owner stops showing up and the food is less fresh, and they make a fatal assumption. They make the assumption that the lines that are outside will always be out there. And the moment you do that, some young upstart comes in with a new concept or fresher food or better service or a better room and knocks you out of the game. And so one of the great threats of world-class really is this dissent into obsolescence. And in my methodology, I call it the titan’s decline. And the point I want you to remember is at the moment of your greatest success is the moment you are most vulnerable. And so at that moment, I want you to always be aware that the real key to legendary is longevity.
