Are You a Work In Progress, or Is Your Success Routine?

It’s September 1962, and John F. Kennedy steps up to the podium at Rice University Stadium and pledges to land a man on the moon before the decade is out.?

He quite literally makes a moonshot.?

A lot of the people in the audience thought that Kennedy was out of his mind. Even some of the officials at NASA wondered if he was serious, as many of the prerequisites for a lunar landing hadn’t yet been developed.?

Despite the uncertainty, the United States’ space program jumped into the cosmic void, hoping it would learn to fly on the way.??

Fast forward to 1969, and the story ends with triumph—with Neil Armstrong taking the infamous ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

When?Ozan Varol , author of?Think Like a Rocket Scientist ,?joined me on the?Disrupt Yourself?podcast, he shared another space-travel-related tale. This one, however, was a cautionary case study from a chapter in his book called “Why Nothing Fails Like Success.”?

He shared that, in an overgeneralized sense, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters happened because NASA had a string of successes.?

Those successes led the most capable managers to develop tunnel vision. They assumed that if they simply followed the process that led to previous successes, they could do no wrong.?

Spaceflight had become routine, and NASA began to view itself as a finished product.?

And that’s when the disasters began.?

Falling into complacency is not just a risk for astronauts and rocket scientists. No, it is true for professional and organizational growth as well. When a once-challenging learning curve becomes routine, we too are in a danger zone—the final phase along the S Curve? called Mastery.?

In Mastery, we’ve learned all that we can learn along that curve. So, unless we jump to a new curve or add new elements to extend our curve and push us back into phase below—the Sweet Spot—we start to become complacent.

We stop growing.?

But growth doesn’t simply stop overnight, with an abundance of learning taking place today and none tomorrow. It’s a gradual process of learning and growth slowly decreasing. The stop can actually be missed if you’re not focused on it.?

So how do you know when you’re no longer a work in progress but are instead seeing your success as routine??

Ozan, a frequent self-disrupter, has identified two ways he knows when he’s starting to reach this stage:?

1. He thinks he’s made it (to whatever it might be). He calls himself an expert and begins making confident declarations without gathering all the facts. He isn’t pushing himself to learn anymore.?
2. He’s bored. Discomfort stops completely, and all of his days begin to resemble the ones that came before. He’s just cruising along, doing what he did yesterday.?

When we’ve reached Mastery, it’s comfortable. We know what we’re doing, and we rarely fail or make mistakes.?

We’re living smack in the middle of our comfort zone.?

But to stay engaged, to continue to grow, we need to identify and scale our next S Curve. We need to learn, leap, and repeat.?

Have you started to become too comfortable in your role? How can you tell?

How can you make your routine success become a work in progress?

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