Question: Someone told me that arrogance and complacency are one in the same. How does one avoid falling into this trap?

Answer: Here’s my challenge to you and everyone – entrepreneur or not. What are you doing today that makes you better than you were yesterday? This is a beautifully simple calculus. Take a look at your life. Do you have a purposeful intent to improve yourself every single day that you walk on this planet? Do we want to waste one precious day of our lives failing to do so?

Purposeful intent is the key to continual improvement. To get started, make an appointment with yourself to catalog the various aspects of your life that you would like to improve – personally and professionally. This needs to be a substantive process driven by a sufficient dose of introspection and reflection. Then spend a moment when you get out of bed each morning and identify at least one thing you will do to move the improvement needle in those key areas you contemplated.  

Do you feel as though you are at the top of your game? Are you a success in your business? You can do better. Are you successful at being a parent? You can do better. Consider this sports metaphor. Suppose we participate on a football team that has an undefeated season and wins the national championship. We might assume that we have reached the mountaintop. But, did we win every game by keeping the other team from scoring a single point? Probably not. So, we can do better. If we actually did accomplish a shutout against every team, did we score a touchdown on every single play we ran during every game of the season? If not, we can do better. You see, there’s always another step we can take to be better and do better.

When we settle for what we have achieved we may become a victim of our own success. We all know that whether in sports or business, teams that rest on their laurels eventually lose. The same is true with life. As long as we sincerely aspire to always do better, our success will continue for improvement is the mortal enemy of complacency. Thus, we’ll remain undefeated if we maintain an attitude of “I can always do better.”

This blog is being written in tandem with my book, “An Entrepreneur’s Words to Live By,” available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle (My Book), as well as being available in all of the other major eBook formats.