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Complacency is a smug satisfaction with things as they are

• Complacency:  A feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements.  Oxford Dictionary
• Complacency:  A feeling of calm satisfaction with your own abilities or situation that prevents you from trying harder.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Complacency:  A feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.  Dictionary.com
• Complacency: A feeling of being satisfied with how things are and not wanting to try to make them better. Merriam Webster
• The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the “self-sat-isfied man. Jose Ortega y Gasset
• Proactiveness,  Apathy and indifference,  Boredom,  Security

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Success can lead to complacency …

• Complacency is almost always the product of success or perceived success. John P. Kotter
• Don’t let your success of today lay you into complacency for tomorrow. For that is the worst form of failure. Og Mandino
• I didn’t want to settle or become complacent after winning a major, I wanted to stay hungry. It’s easy to do. It’s easy to win a big tournament and kind of get a little lazy, so it’s been a good motivator for me to work a little harder. Webb Simpson
• I think it’s dangerous to think that you’re successful, because then you become complacent. Tommy Hilfiger
• I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure. Og Mandino
• Men set themselves a goal, and having attained it, are satisfied and grow paunches. In their complacency, they forget that their only future is now death. Edgard Varese
• Sometimes success needs interruption to regain focus and shake off complacency. Lennox Lewis
• Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. Andy Grove
• Success is one of the worst enemies of success, because success tends to breed complacency and lack of humility. Charles Koch
• Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency. David Myers
• To a winner, complacency and overconfidence can be destructive. To losers, desperation and despondency are just as harmful. Bill Walsh
• … a relentless focus on the outward markers of success can lead to complacency. It can make you lazy. Barack Obama
• Success

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… although some disagree

• The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self- complacent is erroneous. On the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Somerset Maugham

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Excessive contentment can lead to complacency

• He who is content with what has been done is an obstacle in the path of progress. Helen Keller
• If happiness in self-content is placed, The wise are wretched, and fools only blessed. William Congreve
• It’s not a very big step from contentment to complacency. Simone de Beauvoir
• To be content with the world as it is is to be dead. Dorothee Solle
• Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a drain in the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things it as they might be. “Good enough” becomes days today’s watchword and tomorrow standard. Alex and Brett Harris
• Contentment

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Vanity can lead to complacency

• Pride differs in many things from vanity, and by gradations that never blend, although they may be somewhat indistinguishable. Pride may perhaps be termed a too high opinion of ourselves founded on the overrating of certain qualities that we do actually possess; whereas vanity is more easily satisfied, and can extract a feeling of self-complacency from qualifications that are imaginary. Charles Caleb Colton
• Pride looks back upon its past deeds, and calculating with nicety what it has done, it commits itself to rest; whereas humility looks to that which is before, and discovering how much ground remains to be trodden, it is active and vigilant. Having gained one height, pride looks down with complacency on that which is beneath it; humility looks up to a higher and yet higher elevation. The one keeps us on this earth, which is congenial to its nature; the other directs our eye, and tends to lift us up to heaven. James McCosh
• Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds — a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. Albert Camus
• Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death. Hugh Laurie
• Vanity,  Arrogance

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Familiarity can lead to complacency

• Familiarity breeds complacency. Rick Warren

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Comparison with others can lead to complacency

• To take the measure of oneself by reference to one’s colleagues leads to envy or complacency rather than constructive self-examination. Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.
• Comparison

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Complacency leads to failure

• Don’t let your success of today lay you into complacency for tomorrow. For that is the worst form of failure. Og Mandino
• I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure. Og Mandino
• Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. Andy Grove
• Those who take bold chances don’t think failure is the opposite of success. They believe complacency is.
• If you associate yourself with peer pressure or complacency, you’re destined for failure. Kevin Gates
• Any form of complacency is the kiss of death for any professional. Joan Rivers
• Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall. Jeremy Gutsche
• Failure

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Complacency saps energy

• Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a drain in the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things it as they might be. “Good enough” becomes days today’s watchword and tomorrow standard. Alex and Brett Harris
• Fatigue,  Energy

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Complacency stands in the way of progress

• We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present. Thomas Edison
• Complacency is the enemy of progress. David Stutman
• Progress

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Complacency causes us to live below our potential

• The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities. Benjamin E. Mays
• Potential

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Complacency leads to mediocrity

• Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique. Don Meyer
• We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire. Caryll Houselander
• Complacency is the last hurdle standing between any team and its potential greatness. Pat Riley
• Excellence

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Complacency stands in the way of learning, causing ignorance

• Arrogant people are non-learners. They invest their energies in maintaining a cosy feeling of complacency, and complacency is the biggest single enemy to the process of continuously learning from experience. Arrogant people are exactly the sort of people who are destined to have one year’s experience 20 times rather than 20 years’ worth of experience. Peter Honey
• Complacency is the enemy of study. Mao Zedong
• Self-complacency is the companion of ignorance. Solomon Schechter
• The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency. Robert Quillen
• Learning,  Ignorance

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Complacency leads to laziness and inaction

• Listen to Mr. Complacency long enough and he’ll convince you that what you really, really need is a nap. Alex and Brett Harris
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It’s an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms. Colin Powell
• Laziness

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Complacency tries nothing new, simply repeating itself

• The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition – the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs. Martin Filler
• A man’s work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe. Eugence O’Neill
• Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice…it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous… J. Michael Straczynski

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Complacency does nothing when it should stand up against what is wrong

• Complacency makes one as guilty as those who destroy the Earth. Tom Brown, Jr.
• If we sit by and become complacent and put our heads in the sand, we’re complicit. Shelley Morrison
• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. Albert Einstein
• Yet, in the face of evil, to sit silent is an even greater evil. Complacency is ever the enabler of darkest deeds. Robert Fanney

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Complacency is an enemy of freedom

• The surest and most insidious enemy of freedom is not dictatorship, but complacency. Natalie Angier
• Freedom

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Complacency is an enemy of spiritual growth

• Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Many people find spiritual growth possible only when times are hard; prosperity tends to promote complacency. Max Anders
• Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfilment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfilment. John O’Donohue
• Tantra and adventure are very, very connected. Perhaps the greatest enemy for one who’s journeying along the spiritual path is complacency. Frederick Lenz
• I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself. Sir Hugh Walpol
• Spirituality

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Effective leadership

• Of all the things a leader should fear, complacency heads the list. John C. Maxwell
• It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that’s what leadership is. Rosabeth Moss Kanter
• Leadership

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Times of trial and calamity

• History and experience and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion. Gerald R. Ford
• Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways. Pico Iyer

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Stretching one’s comfort zone

• I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy. Trent Reznor
• We have a normal. As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal. Robin Sharma
• In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. John Kenneth Galbraith
• Stretch your comfort zone

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Having strong ideals and values

• Longing for the ideal while criticizing the real is evidence of immaturity. On the other hand, settling for the real without striving for the ideal is complacency. Maturity is living with the tension. Rick Warren
• Don’t let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth – don’t let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency. Aesop
• Ideals,  Values

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Having an inspiring vision

• Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is. Victoria Safford
• Inspiration,  Vision

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Healthy nervousness

• You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don’t, if you walk out onstage complacent, that’s not a good thing. Joan Jett
• When you stop being nervous is when you should retire. I’m always a little nervous for anything I do because when complacency sets in, that’s when I feel it’s time to move on to something else. Chris Jericho

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Self esteem

• Self-esteem is not the same as being self centred, self-absorbed or selfish. Self-esteem is also not complacency or overconfidence, both of which and set us up for failure. Self-esteem is a strong motivator to work hard. Self-esteem is related to mental health and happiness. Glenn R. Schiraldi
• Self-esteem

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Having a conviction

• Once you have tasted conviction, you can’t bear to keep swallowing complacency. Ann Voskamp

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Having a sense of urgency

• A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent. John P. Kotter
• We have only two modes – complacency and panic. James R. Schlesinger

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Taking action

• There is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It’s an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms. Colin Powell
• Action

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Making mistakes

• Sometimes mistakes are the best thing that can happen, because they might lift you…out of your complacency, and open your mind up to a whole other area that you wouldn’t have gone to intentionally. Bobby McFerrin
• Mistakes,  Failure

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Competition

• It is said that it is far more difficult to hold and maintain leadership (liberty) than it is to attain it. Success is a ruthless competitor for it flatters and nourishes our weaknesses and lulls us into complacency. We bask in the sunshine of accomplishment and lose the spirit of humility which helps us visualize all the factors which have contributed to our success. We are apt to forget that we are only one of a team, that in unity there is strength and that we are strong only as long as each unit in our organization functions with precision. Samuel J. Tilden
• Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. Nancy Pearcey
• Competition

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